ShrinkWrapped

I am grateful to Thomas L. Friedman  because he supplies a significant function and gives good value.  For anyone desirous of understanding the most conventional of elite conventional wisdom, Tom Friedman is one of the go-to writers.  His column today is a compendium of conventional wisdom, of the kind that  holds up poorly under any kind of scrutiny but has the virtue of adhering to the liberal party line.  His offering today is that special breed of snark that presumes to understand the motivations and beliefs of those who disagree with him:

What They Really Believe

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

In almost every sentence there is nonsense.  As just a few instances, it is not a belief that "the globe  has been cooling lately", it is a conclusion based on the best data we have accrued about the global climate and temperature over the last 10 years.  The reasons for the cooling in the last ten years are not well understood (though the decreased output of the sun must be considered high on the list)  but only those impervious to changing data can insist that AGW is a fact in the face of contrary evidence.  His logic is more impressive when he declares that those of us who think we should be utilizing our own energy resources to the fullest in order to ease the transition to cleaner, more environmentally friendly energy, prefer the world continue to be dependent on oil controlled by our enemies rather than on clean power.  Somehow wanting to extract more American energy (with all that means for high paying jobs, increased tax revenues, and decreasing our dependence on unstable, unfriendly regimes) means we want the world to continue to be dependent on others for their energy.  Where Thomas Friedman also fails is in noting that thus far there exist no alternative, clean energies that can scale properly to replace petroleum based products as sources of energy.  Germany, a bastion of wind power, has found the need to build coal fired electric plants in order to make up the shortfall when the wind doesn't blow; as a result their power generation is more inefficient and costly than if they had just built the plants in the first place and concentrated the money spent on windmills for already extant technology that could manage the coal fired plants' pollution. 

Finally, Friedman manages to confuse himself within his own article.  He insists that once a Carbon tax raises the price of energy alternative energy will flourish (although the technology is not yet mature and none of it is now scalable.)  He then proceeds to allege:

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

I'm confused.  If I believe we should drill, that means I want us to continue to be dependent on petro-dictators?  Who ever said the new Middle Class wouldn't want to live like us?  If the demand on oil increases, so will the price and supply will follow and as alternative energy gets cheaper and matures, the markets will naturally migrate to cheaper energy.  Why would we want a tax now that will damage the economy and make the natural maturation of technology slow down?  Wouldn't that condemn billions to continued poverty or a return to poverty?  Am I missing something here or do those who espouse the conventional wisdom not know what they are talking about?

As luck would have it, we have two recent examples that show that neither logic nor mathematics are strengths of the elite conventional wisdom doyens; the first features Al Gore on the Conan Program, via the magic of Youtube:

Video: The Goracle on geothermal temperatures

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

Where Gore is off by several orders of magnitude on the earth's interior temperature, John Kerry performs a marvelous, analogous transformation for our greenhouse gases, claiming that the emissions have increased in the last 8 years 4 times faster than in the 1990s; the facts?

Video: Kerry was against correct data after he was for it

 The Institute for Energy Research catches John Kerry using hyperbolically wrong numbers on carbon emissions in the US as a means to use the Chicken Little approach to passing legislation:

...

According to the government’s own numbers, CO2 emissions didn’t increase even by a factor of 1 during that period.  In an eighteen-year period (1990-2008), the total growth of CO2 emissions was only 15.9% from energy production and 30% from the energy-use sectors.  Moreover, the rate of growth year-on-year has slowed in both instances.  In 2008, CO2 emissions dropped 2.8% in energy production and 2.1% in energy use, likely as a result of the recession.  In 2006, though, while the economy remained overheated, CO2 emissions dropped 1.45% in energy production and 2.22% in energy use.

I don't mean to focus on the conventional wisdom of AGW, but these two examples were just too tempting.  They are, in fact, perfect exemplars of the tendency of the elites to ignore actual facts when it might interfere with their desired beliefs.  Barry Rubin places this tendency in its historical context, in a must-read posting today:

In Search of Déjà vu: For Intellectuals, Political Correctness is Twenty-First Century Communism

We are all searching, in this bizarre era we inhabit, for a healthy sense of déjà vu. By this I mean, we seek precedents for some of the strange things that Political Correctness forces onto people and current political debates bring into play.

Unfortunately, the virtually sole candidate brought up play in such matters is summarized by the word “fascism.” But the extremities of Nazi Germany generally don’t fit well with the relatively mild forms of mischief gotten up to in Western democratic states. Actually, the best parallel I can think of is the way that the Communist party and its fellow travelers tried to impose a cultural line on intellectual life, a process at its peak in the United States and in Britain during the 1930s, while continuingfor many decades longer in countries like France and Italy.

The experience described below by George Orwell in 1937 is a wonderful example of how history is repeating itself. I want to add quickly that I am not speaking here of subservience to a foreign state (the USSR) or even the kind of discipline exercised on party members, but how it permeated into the broader cultural, media, and intellectual scene.

To sum up the three themes:

--There is a party line which should be followed by everyone, even if they aren't in the party.

--Those who don’t follow it will be called all sorts of awful names which even horrifies the victim since these insults have nothing to do with what he was trying to do or say. In those days, it was fascist or Trotskyist; today it is racist, neo-conservative, or Islamophobic.

--The line is justified because not following it is said to lead to terrible results (historically, the triumph of fascism and big business; today, the triumph of racism, Islamophobia, and big business). Another reason is that telling the truth would help the enemy, in those days, fascism or capitalism, in these days, Republicans, George W. Bush, or various reactionary, Christian fundamentalist, or fuddy-duddy forces.

--The punishments are not torture, prison, and execution but ridicule, denial of a teaching job or tenure, or just not getting your book or articles published.

Please do yourself a favor and read Barry's whole article.  Our current climate is a near perfect imagining of "liberal fascism" where for the good of all of us, an enlightened few who know what is true,  must use all means at their disposal to enforce proper thinking in order to "save the planet", redress inequality, undo racism, colonialism, sexism, and any other -ism that captures their fancy.  AGW has been declared beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry for quite some time and the international consensus, that the West must pay for their assaults on the planet (while simultaneously enriching elites, impoverishing the most vulnerable, and beggaring the Western Middle Classes) is unassailable.  Rational discourse and true science, ie gathering data, testing hypotheses, and allowing conclusions to arise from the weight of the evidence, our wonderful and rich inheritance from the enlightenment, is an impediment to all that is good and must be jettisoned.

So, an appreciation for Thomas Friedman, who puts the conventional into conventional wisdom.

PS Here is some data that is bad news for the liberal elites:  Capitalism works miracles!

I am grateful to Thomas L. Friedman  because he supplies a significant function and gives good value.  For anyone desirous of understanding the most conventional of elite conventional wisdom, Tom Friedman is one of the go-to writers.  His column today is a compendium of conventional wisdom, of the kind that  holds up poorly under any kind of scrutiny but has the virtue of adhering to the liberal party line.  His offering today is that special breed of snark that presumes to understand the motivations and beliefs of those who disagree with him:

What They Really Believe

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

In almost every sentence there is nonsense.  As just a few instances, it is not a belief that "the globe  has been cooling lately", it is a conclusion based on the best data we have accrued about the global climate and temperature over the last 10 years.  The reasons for the cooling in the last ten years are not well understood (though the decreased output of the sun must be considered high on the list)  but only those impervious to changing data can insist that AGW is a fact in the face of contrary evidence.  His logic is more impressive when he declares that those of us who think we should be utilizing our own energy resources to the fullest in order to ease the transition to cleaner, more environmentally friendly energy, prefer the world continue to be dependent on oil controlled by our enemies rather than on clean power.  Somehow wanting to extract more American energy (with all that means for high paying jobs, increased tax revenues, and decreasing our dependence on unstable, unfriendly regimes) means we want the world to continue to be dependent on others for their energy.  Where Thomas Friedman also fails is in noting that thus far there exist no alternative, clean energies that can scale properly to replace petroleum based products as sources of energy.  Germany, a bastion of wind power, has found the need to build coal fired electric plants in order to make up the shortfall when the wind doesn't blow; as a result their power generation is more inefficient and costly than if they had just built the plants in the first place and concentrated the money spent on windmills for already extant technology that could manage the coal fired plants' pollution. 

Finally, Friedman manages to confuse himself within his own article.  He insists that once a Carbon tax raises the price of energy alternative energy will flourish (although the technology is not yet mature and none of it is now scalable.)  He then proceeds to allege:

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

I'm confused.  If I believe we should drill, that means I want us to continue to be dependent on petro-dictators?  Who ever said the new Middle Class wouldn't want to live like us?  If the demand on oil increases, so will the price and supply will follow and as alternative energy gets cheaper and matures, the markets will naturally migrate to cheaper energy.  Why would we want a tax now that will damage the economy and make the natural maturation of technology slow down?  Wouldn't that condemn billions to continued poverty or a return to poverty?  Am I missing something here or do those who espouse the conventional wisdom not know what they are talking about?

As luck would have it, we have two recent examples that show that neither logic nor mathematics are strengths of the elite conventional wisdom doyens; the first features Al Gore on the Conan Program, via the magic of Youtube:

Video: The Goracle on geothermal temperatures

Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

Where Gore is off by several orders of magnitude on the earth's interior temperature, John Kerry performs a marvelous, analogous transformation for our greenhouse gases, claiming that the emissions have increased in the last 8 years 4 times faster than in the 1990s; the facts?

Video: Kerry was against correct data after he was for it

 The Institute for Energy Research catches John Kerry using hyperbolically wrong numbers on carbon emissions in the US as a means to use the Chicken Little approach to passing legislation:

...

According to the government’s own numbers, CO2 emissions didn’t increase even by a factor of 1 during that period.  In an eighteen-year period (1990-2008), the total growth of CO2 emissions was only 15.9% from energy production and 30% from the energy-use sectors.  Moreover, the rate of growth year-on-year has slowed in both instances.  In 2008, CO2 emissions dropped 2.8% in energy production and 2.1% in energy use, likely as a result of the recession.  In 2006, though, while the economy remained overheated, CO2 emissions dropped 1.45% in energy production and 2.22% in energy use.

I don't mean to focus on the conventional wisdom of AGW, but these two examples were just too tempting.  They are, in fact, perfect exemplars of the tendency of the elites to ignore actual facts when it might interfere with their desired beliefs.  Barry Rubin places this tendency in its historical context, in a must-read posting today:

In Search of Déjà vu: For Intellectuals, Political Correctness is Twenty-First Century Communism

We are all searching, in this bizarre era we inhabit, for a healthy sense of déjà vu. By this I mean, we seek precedents for some of the strange things that Political Correctness forces onto people and current political debates bring into play.

Unfortunately, the virtually sole candidate brought up play in such matters is summarized by the word “fascism.” But the extremities of Nazi Germany generally don’t fit well with the relatively mild forms of mischief gotten up to in Western democratic states. Actually, the best parallel I can think of is the way that the Communist party and its fellow travelers tried to impose a cultural line on intellectual life, a process at its peak in the United States and in Britain during the 1930s, while continuingfor many decades longer in countries like France and Italy.

The experience described below by George Orwell in 1937 is a wonderful example of how history is repeating itself. I want to add quickly that I am not speaking here of subservience to a foreign state (the USSR) or even the kind of discipline exercised on party members, but how it permeated into the broader cultural, media, and intellectual scene.

To sum up the three themes:

--There is a party line which should be followed by everyone, even if they aren't in the party.

--Those who don’t follow it will be called all sorts of awful names which even horrifies the victim since these insults have nothing to do with what he was trying to do or say. In those days, it was fascist or Trotskyist; today it is racist, neo-conservative, or Islamophobic.

--The line is justified because not following it is said to lead to terrible results (historically, the triumph of fascism and big business; today, the triumph of racism, Islamophobia, and big business). Another reason is that telling the truth would help the enemy, in those days, fascism or capitalism, in these days, Republicans, George W. Bush, or various reactionary, Christian fundamentalist, or fuddy-duddy forces.

--The punishments are not torture, prison, and execution but ridicule, denial of a teaching job or tenure, or just not getting your book or articles published.

Please do yourself a favor and read Barry's whole article.  Our current climate is a near perfect imagining of "liberal fascism" where for the good of all of us, an enlightened few who know what is true,  must use all means at their disposal to enforce proper thinking in order to "save the planet", redress inequality, undo racism, colonialism, sexism, and any other -ism that captures their fancy.  AGW has been declared beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry for quite some time and the international consensus, that the West must pay for their assaults on the planet (while simultaneously enriching elites, impoverishing the most vulnerable, and beggaring the Western Middle Classes) is unassailable.  Rational discourse and true science, ie gathering data, testing hypotheses, and allowing conclusions to arise from the weight of the evidence, our wonderful and rich inheritance from the enlightenment, is an impediment to all that is good and must be jettisoned.

So, an appreciation for Thomas Friedman, who puts the conventional into conventional wisdom.

President Obama's "kinder and gentler" foreign policies have been roundly assailed by foreign policy hawks and increasingly questioned by those most predisposed to favor his exertions.  This past weekend David Broder, dean of the Washington liberal press corps, used the "d" word (dithering) in regards to Obama's lack of action on Afghanistan.  At times it appears to be most salient to think of Obama's foreign policies as reflecting his longstanding disinclination to make difficult decisions, a hallmark of his tenure in the Illinois House and the US Senate, where his most frequent vote was "present."  Most commentators decry Obama's approach and suggest that we are all in greater danger because of his characteristic style of (non)managing crises.  Ralph Peters is a representative of this point of view:

Bam's Muslim-world muddle

Half a year ago in Cairo, President Obama addressed the Muslim world. Global leftists lauded the speech as heralding instant change in the Middle East.

The Obama-adoring pundits were right. Change came. But it's all bad.

Instead of listening to the extravagant claims of our leftward-plunging media about how profoundly that speech affected Muslims, let's look at what's actually happened since Obama praised Islam and trashed America:

Peters has good arguments that Obama's approaches to the Muslim world have increased tension and conflict from Yemen to Iraq.  He suggests that the Muslim world's response to Obama also must be thought of as including Texas, a complicated line of connected dots but defensible.  However, nothing in Peters's exegesis is definitive.  For example, it is quite likely that there would be no movement forward for Israel and the Palestinians, no matter what Obama did; progress cannot come until the protagonists are ready, and not a moment sooner.  Further, Afghanistan was faring poorly under the Bush administration's policies, there was never any guarantee of Iraq remaining stable, and Iran was well on its way to destabilizing the neighborhood and obtaining a bomb even with President Bush manning our foreign policy rudder.  Finally, Pakistan was a meta-stable construct before Obama and remains the same now. 

As an alternative, Tom Barnett, despite his concerns that Obama's protectionism could undermine the entire globalization enterprise, suggests repeatedly that Obama understands the importance of co-opting other great and near great powers into buying into the construction and maintenance of the global order.  He often blogs on signs that countries like China and Brazil are becoming more mature powers and doing their part to enhance and support globalization.  Although his arguments tend to be thinly supported (beyond his assurances that larger forces will be determinative, demographics, debt, economic prowess, etc) nonetheless his past record suggests that his ideas are worth careful consideration. 

So, given that I disagree with Obama's approach, what would be a fair metric or metrics by which to measure the success or failure of his policies?

Post-9/11, the greatest worry was that al Qaeda would someday come into possession of a nuclear weapon and we would lose a city.  President Bush and Vice-President Cheney were quite proud of their record in not allowing any further terrorist attacks.  (Some of this was verbal legerdemain, since the Beltway shooter claimed to be motivated by Islam, just as Major Hasan has claimed, and in both cases it has been in the administration's interest to deny the atrocities were terrorism.)  This much is incontrovertible: It is clear that President Bush, and thus far, President Obama, have not presided over a major terrorist attack on the order of 9/11 since that unhappy day.

And this is where the arguments become speculative and uncertain.  There are several potential disasters germinating in the world that could well derail globalization, prolonging the current quasi-depression indefinitely and leading to an upsurge in wars and terror.  The most important metric by which to measure Obama's success or failure would be in how many of these disasters come about.

This is not an exhaustive list:

1) Iran gains a nuclear capability and uses its new abilities to foment instability and unrest, spread its influence and threaten its neighbors.  For a description of the possibilities, consider Armageddon Time.

2) In response to developments regarding Iran's approach to the bomb, Israel, considering itself to face an existential threat (despite the reassurances of the Obama administration that Iran is amenable to containment via MAD) attacks Iran, leading to a widening war in the Middle East as Iran's proxies and allies attack Iran's enemies.  To paraphrase Tom Lehrer's discussion of Werner van Braun, "Once the rockets are up, who knows where they'll come down"*; escalation at that point would be extremely likely and outcomes extremely unpredictable.

[The idea that MAD worked is plausible, yet we must always keep in mind that MAD came  close to catastrophic failure on several occasions.  The margin of error for MAD is extremely thin and countries that already threaten first use of nuclear weapons are less likely to survive MAD than those who eschew such options.  See 7 Close Calls in the Nuclear Age and the saga of Stanislav Petrov for the close calls we know about.]

3) In our haste to exit Af-Pak, we release the pressure, the Pakistanis back off from their attacks on the Taliban, and Pakistan spirals into chaos, eventually leading to an Islamist takeover, which draws the attention of its neighbor, India, which has its own memories of Mumbai to motivate it. 

In one sense the clearest metric to score Obama's stewardship would be the increase or decrease in armed conflict around the Middle East (and the world.) 

A second metric would be a measure of the retreat of globalization and the attendant damage to our economic recovery attendant on a major upsurge in terror or a large scale, successful terror attack.

The third and most significant metric would be the loss of a city to a nuclear explosion.  Please note that this could be the result of terror or state on state violence.  If a nuclear weapon is used in the next 3 years, President Obama will have become the greatest failure in the history of the American Presidency. 

Here then are my three metrics for evaluating President Obama's foreign policy.  If his instincts are correct, the world will be a safer and calmer place when he leaves office than it was when he entered.

Finally, history is full of unexpected and unanticipated events.  To a large extent 9/11 was unanticipated by the vast majority of people; another 9/11 type event would not be a surprise since we have been warned.  Unknown unknowns remain among the most dangerous possibilities and were one to occur, we would then have an additional metric by which to measure Obama's performance.

*Once the rockets are up,

Who cares vere ze come down,

That's not my department.

Says Werner van Braun.

Since the terror attack at Fort Hood there has been a great deal of teeth gnashing and brow furrowing in the media and among military and government officials trying to make sense of what the President, in his speech, deemed incomprehensible.  When a person commits an incomprehensible act it is commonplace to wonder if he were psychotic, ie out of touch with reality.  NPR asks the question explicitly:

Walter Reed Officials Asked: Was Hasan Psychotic?

Starting in the spring of 2008, key officials from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences held a series of meetings and conversations, in part about Maj. Nidal Hasan, the man accused of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others last week during a shooting spree at Fort Hood. One of the questions they pondered: Was Hasan psychotic?

"Put it this way," says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."

...

Both fellow students and faculty were deeply troubled by Hasan's behavior — which they variously called disconnected, aloof, paranoid, belligerent, and schizoid. The officials say he antagonized some students and faculty by espousing what they perceived to be extremist Islamic views. His supervisors at Walter Reed had even reprimanded him for telling at least one patient that "Islam can save your soul."

...

But psychiatrists and officials who are familiar with the conversations, which continued into the spring of 2009, say they took a remarkable turn: Is it possible, some mused, that Hasan was mentally unstable and unfit to be an Army psychiatrist?

...

One official involved in the conversations had reportedly told colleagues that he worried that if Hasan deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak secret military information to Islamic extremists. Another official reportedly wondered aloud to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of committing fratricide, like the Muslim U.S. Army sergeant who, in 2003, killed two fellow soldiers and injured 14 others by setting off grenades at a base in Kuwait.

I quoted liberally from the NPR article because it suggests some of the terrible difficulties we have in comprehending what is in reality not incomprehensible, and the ways in which our mental set, weltanschauung, inhibits our ability to understand and deal with Jihadi behavior.

The usual definition of psychosis is "a mental disorder characterized by symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations, that indicate impaired contact with reality."  Since there is thus far no evidence that Hasan suffered from hallucinations (hearing voices), his psychosis would need to depend upon the existence of delusions, defined as "Psychiatry. a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact: a paranoid delusion."

There is an obvious limitation with this definition of delusion.  After all, to a non-believer, most religious dogma and mythology would be considered delusional.  what must be added to the definition is that the "fixed, false belief" be idiosyncratic; in other words, the particular belief is not part of a shared system of thought.  As an example, if a single person in 1985 became convinced that human activity was warming the earth irreversibly and would lead to the destruction of the biosphere (in the absence of any scientific data) we would have had no trouble considering him to be out of touch with reality, as understood at the time.  Today we might dispute the scientific data, remain convinced that most people who support AGW do not have a scientific grasp of the data, and that proposing to destroy our economy to "save the planet" is pernicious nonsense; however, it is clear that enough people share the belief system that it does not represent a delusion.  A person who believed in AGW because G-d told him the planet would be destroyed because of man's sins would be psychotic; a person who believed in AGW because AL Gore told him the planet would be destroyed because of man's sins would not be psychotic.  (Please don't take this as another argument about AGW; that has been discussed innumerable times here and elsewhere; eventually, the data will be determinative.)

The problem for all of those wondering about Major Hasan is that they are restricted by their own frame.  In a vacuum, an American who believes that the United States is waging war on Islam, that the West, especially the Jews and Americans, conspire to keep the Muslim world in despair, and that murdering unarmed American soldiers is an assured way to gain entrance to Paradise as a Jihad martyr, would be considered to have lost contact with reality.  Unfortunately for a Muslim int he Ummah these "delusional" ideas are shared by a significant portion of their coreligionists.  If major Hasan is delusional and psychotic then so are members and supporters of al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Wahhabi and Deobandi Islam, and a host of other sects and groups.  The only way Major Hasan could be considered mentally disordered based on his belief structure would be were there to be an idiosyncratic component.  For example, if he were to believe that he is the embodiment of Mohammed, we would be correct to think of him as psychotically deluded, just as we characterize the multitude of psychotic patients through the ages who were convinced they were Jesus Christ.

The conundrum for all the sages in the media and our government remains how to determine that Major Hasan was a lone psycho rather than a Jihadi.  We may well be treated to an interesting juxtaposition as Khaled Sheik Mohamed, during his trial, espouses the same motivating "delusions" as major Hasan at his trial.  The reporting in the MSM should be fascinating.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the midst of a reasonable post suggesting there are multiple pathways we might take to improve our healthcare system and taking issue with a letter insisting Jews should support the current healthcare plan in the Congress and attack Senator Joe Lieberman for his opposition,  tossed off an aside that requires some remonstrance:

I don't agree with Lieberman at all -- I would like to see the profit motive completely removed from health care in this country -- but I don't think Lieberman is betraying his religion by taking the position he takes.   

This morning, Jefferey Goldberg posted a response from a reader taking issue with his wish:

Removing the Profit Motive from Health Care

(sic) spent years publicizing the work of brilliant scientists and physicians at two Ivy League medical centers. They are incentivized both by an altruistic desire to eradicate disease and by the prospect of seeing some financial reward for their labors, even when it is postponed for years while they toil in their laboratories, working for subsistence wages, until, with luck, they have a breakthrough or discovery. When a new drug, or treatment, or scientific technique does come to market, it's also a great boon for the university where the work is likely to have taken place, when they start to see an income stream from licensing their patent.  Take a look at any university with a large scientific research enterprise, and then look at their budget.  It's likely they are reaping significant revenue from intellectual property.  So it's a pillar of our educational establishment. These discoveries don't come out of a vacuum; scientists are just like anyone else, with families to support and expenses to be paid.

The letter writer adds that Doctors also have an interest in supporting their families and paying their bills.  Once upon a time, when in college, I was a confirmed liberal/leftist and accepted without question that the profit motive was immoral and unethical.  The finest organizations were non-profits run by altruistic people who lived on a pittance, supported primarily by the warm feeling engendered by helping those less fortunate and by the approval of all right-minded people.  It was axiomatic that liberals were good (better) people and that those who worked at places like NPR eschewed the profit motive as beneath them. (Imagine my shock and surprise to learn several years ago that so many NPR "talents" made incomes well into the high 6 figures.) Corporations were evil in direct proportion to their profitability.  It is easy to be a liberal when you are not supporting yourself, paying your own taxes and bills, and enjoying all the comforts that our society has to offer.

With entry into adulthood, things change.  First of all, "non-profit" is a meaningless term.  Any viable organization (except the government, of course, which can simply print money ... for a time) needs to bring in as much money as it spends or it will soon fail to be a functional entity.  Everything in excess of expenses therefore is profit.  Non-profits convince the gullible that they are not motivated by profits, by which they mean some surfeit of profit above what they deem reasonable.  They do this by offering their services for less than their competitors.  They manage this neat trick by either getting (evil) corporations and/or wealthy individuals (no longer evil capitalists once they donate money to liberal causes) to subsidize their services or getting the government (ie, the taxpayers who pay a percentage of their profit for the privilege of living in this country)  to subsidize their services.  Others who engage in non-profit activities are able to do so because they were lucky enough to have wealthy parents, or have found a wealthy spouse, who enable them to offer their services at below market rates while subsidizing the life style to which they have become accustomed.

There are only a limited number of ways to see the "profit motive completely removed from health care in this country"or any human activity, for that matter.  We could expect, or compel, all the scientists and healthcare professionals in this country to donate some fraction of their income to others by essentially working for below market wages.  Doctors and researchers who currently spend 50-70 hours a week on research and/or patient care would then donate their time, energy, and services for compensation deemed fair by those who would adjudicate what profit actually means in this setting.  (Should a Neurosurgeon clear $100,000 after expenses?  $200,000? $500,000? More? Should the developer of a new drug that saves 50,000 lives a year be compensated with $100,000?  $200,000? $500,000? More?)

People like Jeffery Goldberg misunderstand a fundamental about how the world operates when they dream of a world without a profit motive.  Please note, I am a great admirer of Jeffrey Goldberg's writing.  Though I often disagree with his point of view, I thoroughly enjoy his writing, which often is very incisive and well reasonsed.  He is entitled to Imagine a world where healthcare is offered without any desire for profit, yet he does not apply the same desire to himself and his field of endeavor.  He often exhorts his readers to purchase a subscription to the Atlantic.  Presumably if more people pay to read the magazine he writes for, he will be able to have a more assured income and gain a raise in his compensation.  At what point does his compensation become excessive?  Who should determine what constitutes profit and how much profit is acceptable?

It is unseemly to be greedy.  It is also, for many liberals, a difficult to digest fact that some people are endowed with greater abilities than others and that society, via the market, rewards some people, occasionally exorbitantly (and who wants to define exorbitantly?)  while rewarding others far less than they feel they deserve.  Yet, up until this time, there is no better way to discover value than through markets.  And the reason markets function is that people want to, in fact need to, earn a profit.  Profit, ultimately, is simply any excess over subsistence.  Without a profit motive we would still be living in caves, in a more egalitarian Hobbesian world where we would have no worries about healthcare profits.

Thank you to all our Veterans, without whom our Freedoms would not exist.

I want to especially thank my Father, who served in WWII and the Korean Conflict (USAF), my Oldest Son, a USAF Veteran, now in the Ga. Air National Guard, continuing to work on ways to protect our Nation and its people, and to my Middle Son, a future Veteran currently in the USN.

If you value your Freedom, thank a Veteran today.

If you want to help concretely, visit Soldier's Angels and donate your money and/or your time.

There is a split in the commentary on the Fort Hood killer.  Many of the Mainstream Media reports, as well as statements from official sources, emphasize how troubled the shooter was by his upcoming deployment.  Rather fanciful theories promulgated by non-Mental Health Professionals as well as by non-clinical Media Psychologists suggest he suffered from Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder; this is a nonsensical formulation but the kind of thing we have come to expect from media purveyors of psycho-babble.  It has a certain resonance for non professionals and (mis)uses words associated with Psychoanalysis to gain a pseudo-authenticity.  The goal of such obfuscatory commentary is to minimize the risk that the killers actions will in any way be associated with his religious beliefs.

On the other side of the divide are a host of Commentators who are outraged at the official response (more of a non-response) to the obvious.  Since few such commentators are in positions of influence on the MSM or the government, their outrage is relatively impotent.  And that may be a window into the psychology of the Politically Correct approach.

Under the PC administration, all utterances must be filtered by the thought police. It is at such times that humorists and satirists often get closest to the reality:

Placing Blame

This is what hacks me off about liberals. It's not their romanticizing socialism; though that's problem enough. But worse is their assumption that everyone outside their tribe is an idiot. Right now Obama and the tingle-leg media are spinning that a man who yelled 'Allahu akbar' before shooting was a victim of pre-traumatic stress disorder. Why? Well because they expect us Neanderthals to start killing brown people in retaliation.

Bill Bennett approaches the same point from a slightly different angle:

Why are chiefs of staff of the army saying things like: “I think we have to be very careful....Our diversity not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,”?

You connect those dots and you will have your answer. I’m used to this kind of talk in a university—perhaps a university that outlaws ROTC. I’m surprised to find this kind of talk and attitude from on high at institutions ROTC trains under and for, namely one of the last “hard places” in America.

I well recall the 2006 Nickle Mines Amish School massacre of 6 children. And I recall Jay Nordlinger saying: “This is what we would have thought would have been one of the last safe places in America.”  He was wrong—we would have thought a place like Ft. Hood a safe place in America, safe from our own U.S. military hosting an officer-terrorist (that’s what we shall call him, an officer-terrorist). I also would have thought the Army would have been one of the last, or one of the first, hard places in America as defined by Michael Barone (“the part of American life subject to competition and accountability where the military trains under live fire—as opposed to a soft America that seeks to instill self-esteem. Hard America plays for keeps.”).

Well if we want to be safe, if we want to defeat the jihadist threat, we’d better reinforce hard America—and, sad to say, starting with our military leadership.

I have written in the past [PC & Defects in Reality Testing] that PC-thinking is a thought disorder which impairs the ability to recognize and effectively deal with reality.  The major purveyors of PC-thought, Academia, the MSM, liberal and Compassionate Conservatives, cowardly politicians of all stripes, adopt PC-thought as a way to diminish rational, protective aggression.

[This is a complicated construct.  Clearly the far left, from which PC arose, does not eschew aggression.  They consciously use the demonization of aggression to disarm traditional liberal democracies, who they correctly identify as their greatest enemies.  The soft left/liberals who have adopted PC-thought out of a desire to do and be "good" are unaware of how they facilitate violence.  It is this group that may be eventually amenable to enlightenment.]

PC-thought disarms those who are forced to adhere to its tenets.  In PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part I I reviewed the process by which a child develops their sense of reality and explained how the ability to accurately assess reality is impaired by child abuse: [Emphasis added-SW]

In the typical case of parental child abuse, the abuse is traumatic in and of itself, but is given a spacial resonance by virtue of the perpetrator being one of the people the child most loves, trusts, and depends on. For an abused child, they are handed an impossible developmental task: The person they need so much has caused them terrible pain and distress. In the case of overt sexual abuse, it is even worse because of the violation of the child's bodily integrity. (It is common to see in survivors of childhood sexual abuse, ongoing fantasies of horrible internal objects/introjects, which are constantly threatening to emerge and attack them and people they love; sometimes this is "normalized" into fear of illness, genetic disorders, cancer lurking within.) Further, the abuser is often contrite (and often was intoxicated at the time of the transgression); the abuser will bind the child to maintaining their "special" secret, tell the child it was all the child's fault or the outgrowth of the abuser's great love for the child, or act as if the abuse never happened. In all these situations, the child can not, no matter how intelligent and how hard he struggles, make sense out of a reality which calls love hate and hate love. The only way to understand how the loved one could hurt them so much is to imagine that they did something wrong (often a minor transgression or an imagined transgression) and deserve or provoked the punishment or abuse. The adult who survives such abuse will tend to have difficulties in recognizing danger signs in new relationships. Many abused adult women will minimize their abuse by saying that their boyfriend or husband hit them because they love them so much. Furthermore, during the inter-abuse interval, the abuse is excused and/or seen as an aberration, most often caused by some mistake that the victim has done. "He really loves me but when he drinks he gets angry." or "He really loves me and works hard and I should have had dinner on the table the way he likes." Notice how the structure of these reactions is parallel to the child who can only explain the abuse by imagining he provoked it or "daddy didn't really mean it."

The abused child grows up to be an adult who in specific circumstances has a defect in their sense of reality. They are literally unable to see that the person they are becoming involved with has serious flaws which threaten to repeat the abuse they lived through as a child. They may know on an intellectual basis that a man with a bad temper who yells at them during the early stages of their courtship is a poor choice for a mate, but emotionally, they are blind to the danger they face and use defenses such as rationalization and denial to avoid knowing. This is not done consciously but has the effect of preventing them from protecting themselves from an abuser.

The survivor of abuse is left with the choice of accepting the reality of their own perceptions (Mommy/Daddy was an evil abusive monstrous person) or denying their own perceptions in order to preserve the image of the "loving" parent.  In a similar vein, PC-thought offers us the choice of believing the evidence of our own eyes, which risks our careers, social ostracism, and public shame or denying our own senses in order to remain a member in good standing of our community.  From PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part II: [Emphasis added-SW]

Yesterday I described how childhood abuse creates an impossible contradiction for a child. He is faced with the choice of believing what an authority, who they love and depend on, tells him is reality ("I am doing this because I love you and its for your own good") versus his own immature perceptions of reality (this feels abusive and is hateful.) The resolution often requires the child to split his awareness of parts of reality and this "vertical splitting of the ego" becomes a stable structure throughout his life. Political Correctness creates the same kind of discontinuity in our conscious appreciation of reality.

Political Correctness has its roots in Post-Modernism and Deconstruction. I am hardly an expert in this area but it seems that the Deconstructionists took a small piece of reality, that all of us construct our sense of reality through our own subjectivity, and made it the primary determinant of reality, ie since we are all subjective, there can be no such thing as objective reality. In other words, the world of consensus reality is a construct and if we change how we view the world, we will change the construct.[Among the other evil offspring of this philosophy, we would have to include moral relativism and other (rationalized) excuses for inaction in the face of evil.]

The Child Abuser forces a splitting in the consciousness of the child as a way to protect himself from the danger of aggressive retaliation.  The child is forced into a passive, helpless, hopeless position from which there is no escape and no way to protect herself.  (The healthier/safer child, in response to the assault, mobilizes enough aggression to report the attack to an adult, through whose agency the child is able to retaliate and subsequently protect herself from the abuser in the future.)  The PC-thought police force a split in the consciousness of society for a similar purpose.  Any aggressive response to the assault is treated as if it is inappropriate and shameful.  The aggressive responders are labeled as racist, one of the definitive ways in which PC destroys those who resist, and all focus is placed on the various victims of the assault, which consciously includes the perpetrator, making him (relatively) immune to opprobrium.  Since this is on a societal basis, those protected include the radical Muslim Imams and spokesmen whose vile utterances are simply ignored by society's perceptual apparatus, the MSM(if we don't see it or hear it, it doesn't exist); those identified as victims include not just the direct victims of the shootings, but all soldiers.  Becoming a victim is a way to emphasize passivity and derail aggression.  Note the conclusion from Bill Bennett's post this morning:

President Obama is going to Ft. Hood today for a memorial service there. We will all be sorrowful and our hearts and minds and souls will be with everyone at Ft. Hood. My worry about these services now is that they are a) not angry enough and b) that they are the end and not the beginning. Ever since the week after 9/11/2001, anger has eluded memorial services (with the exception of Paul Wellstone’s memorial—that, somehow, was a moment of anger for the left). It is an American thing to pray, to be sorrowful, and then to be angry and fight. [Emphasis mien-SW]  I hope we still have the stuff for the last two parts.

Passivity in mourning is a regressive state.  Recall the 9^th "major symptom of large group regression" from Terror and Societal Regression:

9) Reactivation of a "chosen trauma" whereby a large group unconsciously "chooses" to make a shared mental representation of an event that caused it terrible losses, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization....Slobodan Milosevic exemplified this phenomenon in his reactivation of the shared memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the Serbian hero, Prince Lazar, was killed.

Since 9/11 American group mourning has become a stylized choreography in which anger at the perpetrators of our trauma is minimized and our loss, our passivity, our helplessness, and our hopelessness in the face of murderous enemies are emphasized.  Rather than join in the public (faux) mourning that President Obama will preside over, let us allow the families their private mourning and rather dedicate ourselves to fighting the twin axis of Islamist terror and PC-thought.

In the analytic setting, patients enter with multiple complex transference reactions which are activated by predictable stimuli and which serve as the core of their weltanschauung or worldview.  Since these transference reactions and the related worldview are intimately interwoven through the character, they are quite difficult to alter.  The inertiai quality of the meta-stable, maladaptive transference (along with other attributes of the character, such as the person's typical defensive style) are why Freud coined the term resistance* to explain the puzzling reality that when patients were shown their maladaptive patterns they continued to persist in repeating them.  Often, the process of interpretation turns into a marathon where little by little the neurotic construct is chipped away.  The analyst points out where and how the patient's maladaptive patterns appear, including most usefully within the treatment; sometimes the resolution occurs slowly as the particular character structure fades away but occasionally there is a dramatic moment of insight.  An example:

Mr. P was a brilliant Ph.D. candidate who entered treatment after his Ph.D. committee chair told him he was risking failure if he did not become more actively involved in his work.  In the first few weeks of his treatment we learned that he was the only son of a successful, highly competitive Academic, and a brittle, alternately distant and intrusive "hausfrau."  His father was absent for long periods of time and during those times his mother turned to him for comfort and solace, often in ways which made the young boy acutely uncomfortable, though he never knew just what made him so uncomfortable.  When his father was around, his mother ignored him and catered to his father.  His father was quite competitive with his young son, whose genius was identified quite early in his schooling.  As a boy my patient could never quite do well enough to escape comparisons with his father, who had always done something equivalent but more difficult. 

By the time Mr. P entered treatment, he had an interesting adult history.  He had had a series of unhappy romances, which often failed when he found himself unable to commit.  He had initially planned on going to Medical School but for unclear reasons did so poorly in Organic Chemistry that he had to change his plans.  He was curiously reluctant to explore why and how he had failed Organic Chemistry, the key course in a pre-med curriculum. 

It was during the second year of his treatment that the salient events took place.  It had become clear that Mr. P was intensely competitive with me, though he denied it at every turn.  His competitiveness was revealed by his characteristic response to almost any comment I offered.  For example, when I noted that his current relationship was on the way to failing because his was once again finding it difficult to fully commit himself to the young woman in question, he responded, "you are right of course, but you should know that just because she seems right for me that doesn't mean you know everything about her.  In fact, I think she isn't as attractive as I once thought."  In other words, whatever my interpretation, it was never on target but always was met with a "yes, but" revealing the limitations of my knowledge and understanding.

As time went on I became convinced that Mr. P, for reason of which he was completely unaware, was committed to failing.  Despite all his anguish when he fell short of his conscious goals, he always managed to do just enough to undermine his incipient success.  I began to point this out.  When I would notice him setting himself up, I would mention that if he, for example, blew off the graduate seminar he was scheduled for it would increase the likelihood of his failing.  He gave me inumerable opportunities for such interpretations.  Finally, after several months of this, as events were approaching a crescendo in his school, and after a more than usually trivial "yes, but" I commented that it seemed to me that he was now committed to failing at his therapy.  If he managed to destroy my words to him with his typical "but" he would render me powerless to help him work out his problems and guarantee failure.  He would fail with me and fail in graduate school.  He was atypically silent for quite some time and then spoke in a quite, quavering voice, "I have been committed to failing my whole life.  If I fail here I will have nothing and will never have anything.'  This was the first time Mr. P had ever shown emotion in the office.  It was a profound moment, which he later called the beginning of his analysis.

This began the core of Mr. P's work in therapy.  We were able to do a great deal of work in understanding the roots of his self-destruction and ultimately he was able to gain his Ph.D., find a reasonably healthy relationship, and move ahead with his life. 

In my conception of the process whereby Mr. P gained greater mental freedom and unshackled himself from the unconscious strictures that had crippled him, I thought of the maladaptive structure "commitment to failure" as akin to the camel in the fable.  Each interpretation by itself was too small to slow or stop the camel, but eventually, as enough straws were piled onto the camel's back, the dysfunctional pattern, the neural network if you will, suddenly collapsed; a period of disorganization ensued and a new, more stable, healthier structure was able to emerge from underneath to take its place.

In my example the camel is a dysfunctional structure.  However the same sudden collapse of current structures can occur in a more disturbing direction.  An inadequate human being, blessed with decent intelligence, offered all that this nation has to offer, continually falls upward in a politically correct environment.  Yet even while he is falling upward he is constantly adding straws to his camel's back.  In his case the camel is a pseudo-normal persona; this false self becomes increasingly burdened with the straw of radical, hate filled, Islam, until the false self collapses and his true self emerges, ready to perform his Islamic duty and become a hero to the Ummah. 

There is one more place where such a collapse of a meta-stable construct is going to occur.  Each Muslim terror attack is an interpretation, a straw on the back of the multicultural "diversity" camel.  When the executive function prefers to redouble its resistance and defenses against reality, the pressure form underneath builds with each additional straw. 

[I am not implying that I know which face of the terrorist is his "real" self versus his "false" self (a complex question to begin with, in terms of all the integrated selves that make up who we are).  That is for the Forensic Psychiatrists to determine.  The available evidence suggests he does indeed see himself as a (radical) Muslim first, not an American.]

Sadly when meta-stable structures collapse there is no way to predict in advance what new structure will take its place.  Americans have weathered many difficult crises in our almost 250 years.  We have come close to collapse on more than one occasion and have come to the worst on one occasion.  I continue to believe in the common sense and reservoir of reason in the body politic and that the most likely outcome of the collapse of the PC structure will be a wave election next year and a new President in 2012.  Unfortunately as long as our elites continue to behave in ways removed from reality, insisting we should be more concerned with fantasized Islamophobia than with the murder of our brave young military men and women, anger will percolate below the surface, intensifying with each additional straw.

*This is not a technically correct definition of resistance but captures the process elements better, for my purposes.

On several occasions I have tried to send an e-mail to my Congressman, John Hall.  For some reason the e-mail never goes through.  I am not conspiracy minded and would never imagine he would not want to hear from one of his constituents, but it does raise questions.  I decided to post my e-mail here:

Dear Congressman:

In re: your e-mail about all the wonders of the healthcare bill.  You have no idea how many unexpected and bad consequences will flow from this bill.  No government program ever saves money (we already can see that a Senator has inserted the requirement that Christian Scientist healing be covered in their version of the bill; what else is there in the thousands of pages of arcana that no Congressman has read?)  The government option will crowd out private insurance, the bill has provisions that will damage innovation, and there will a Doctor shortage as smart young people realize that their incomes will be significantly limited and they will have terrible trouble paying off their $200,000 in Medical School loans.  For what its worth, I am a Physician in my 50s and my daughter is in her last year of Medical School.  The Medical profession will be devastated by provisions in this bill, starting with the cuts in Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement that are required to try to keep the cost manageable.  Of course the cuts will probably be overturned, which means the cost will far exceed current projections.

And one more thing:  I am a life long Democrat.  Voters just tossed Andy Spano (and John Corzine) and if you continue to push a bill the voters do not want, I will donate to your opponent in 2010 and do everything I can to retire you from your job.

I decided to call his office this morning and told the nice young man who answered the contents of my e-mail; perhaps John hall will listen, though I am doubtful.