Jackalope Pursuivant

I so called that!

Barack Obama has a way of drawing from his followers the most absurd imputations of divine power and calling. On October 29th of last year, I posted about an article wherein Sting suggested that Obama had been divinely sent to straighten the world out.

I developed an outlandish conspiracy theory that evolved into a prediction:

Ridiculous conspiracy theory: There is a conspiracy afoot to make Obama look like the Antichrist, by outlandishly imputing divinity to him. Taking these grotesque displays of slavish devotion (converting Sunday School songs into paeans to Obama, to be performed in public schools?) into consideration, Christian believers will be more inclined to at least consider the idea that Obama is the Antichrist of the Revelation of John.

Subsequently, poll results will show that a surprising number of American Christians are willing to allow the possibility. (This is actually a sign that the poll respondents are able to apply basic logic. One could only answer such a poll in the negative if one was certain that the negative was true. That is, an absence of relevant evidence results in a default positive answer. One who takes the New Testament seriously would be hard-pressed to conclusively eliminate any powerful person, whatever their political tastes.) Left-wing blogs, followed closely by MSNBC hosts and the New York Times editorial page, will mis-report this possibility as settled belief, thereby collectively marginalizing the country's entire religious population.

A current sampling of headlines culled from Google News:

"Poll asks if President Obama maybe the anti-Christ"

"Health Care's Ugly Losers Blame Antichrist"

"Almost a quarter of Republicans think Obama 'may be the Antichrist' as 14 states sue over healthcare reforms"

I claim 100% accuracy for my prediction. I nailed it. (No Nostradamus action needed--The media is just that easy to predict.) But what I didn't expect was for the ridiculous conspiracy to pick up a little credence as well. No, not that there's a master plan to make Republicans give discrediting poll answers--but certainly that someone ran this poll, at this moment, in order to wedge voters away from the Republicans at a critical moment.

And also, it seems, to sell books. The Washington Examiner has the lowdown on exactly how phony this poll is, and why and by whom it was commissioned. But this statement alone should be enough to tell the story: "The poll was done among those who sign up for questionairres [sic] in exchange for cash and gifts."

The Case of the Missing Squadron

The 30th Bombardment Squadron was missing. I had found its sister squadrons, the 28th and 93d. Both are active now, the former flying B-1s, and the latter flying the B-52, although the 93d had somehow managed to get transferred to the Reserve somewhere in the middle.

These three squadrons had made up the core of the 19th Bombardment Group, and later the 19th Bombardment Wing, from the disaster at Clark Field in the Philippines, right through the Korean War, and into the Cold War. They had all flown the succession of heavy bombers, from the B-17, through the B-29 and the B-47, to the B-52. At some point, each had been inactivated.

But the 30th was never reactivated. Or at least not that I could find. This seemed odd for a unit that dated back to the Great War, sharing in the 19th Bombardment Group's whopping nine Distinguished Unit Citations.

The solution came unexpectedly. I'd like to credit my superior research skills--but I can't even remember what I was looking for when I stumbled across it.

You see, units go through various changes over the decades--new names, new stations, new aircraft. A wing, like mine, can go through multiple missions, too. We're on our fourth, airlift, after reconnaissance, bombardment, and aerial refueling. As a rule, there's only one wing with a given number, but there can be many squadrons with the same number. For example, there is a 1st Airlift Squadron, and a 1st Fighter Squadron. As a result, squadrons don't usually change their numbers, or their missions. A bomber squadron usually stays a bomber squadron. The troop carrier squadrons of WWII became airlift squadrons--much the same thing.

But in the case of the 30th, both had happened. The unit had been renamed entirely, and had been given a completely different mission. Completely different.

The 30th Bombardment Squadron, veteran unit of WWII, Korea, and the Cold War, was now the USAF Demonstration Squadron--better known as the Thunderbirds.

If this sounds weird to you, you're right. In what sense could the Thunderbirds be descended from a bomber squadron? Well, pretty much only in the technical sense. The TBirds were created 6 years after the 30th Bombardment Squadron was inactivated, and for the next 20-odd years, they were just that. But at some point in 1985, somebody decided that the TBirds needed a combat pedigree, and used an organizational action called consolidation to, well, shanghai one.

Because they were never active at the same time, the two could be retroactively merged into one. This is not to say they should have been merged into one. The story is so convoluted, and the merger so artificial, that the TBirds could only sow confusion by highlighting their 30th Bombardment history. But my wing, which just stumbled into a bizarre connection with the Thunderbirds, is rather enjoying the oddity of it.

Economic Armageddon is at hand

The moment of crisis is upon us. Sell your goods, your homes, your children. Hoard gold, food, and ammunition. Don't wait another minute!

CNN caption:

"V.P. Biden confident the economy is improving"

Ridiculous theory:

"Sting says President Barack Obama is the best person to handle the world's 'mess'"

"Sting isn't a religious man, but he says President Barack Obama might be a divine answer to the world's problems.

In many ways, he's sent from God," he joked in an interview, "because the world's a mess."

But Sting is serious in his belief that Obama is the best leader to navigate the world's problems. In an interview on Wednesday, the former Police frontman said that he spent some time with Obama and "found him to be very genuine, very present, clearly super-smart, and exactly what we need in the world."

"I can't think of any be better qualified because of his background, his education, particularly in regard to Islam," he said.

Ridiculous conspiracy theory: There is a conspiracy afoot to make Obama look like the Antichrist, by outlandishly imputing divinity to him. Taking these grotesque displays of slavish devotion (converting Sunday School songs into paeans to Obama, to be performed in public schools?) into consideration, Christian believers will be more inclined to at least consider the idea that Obama is the Antichrist of the Revelation of John.

Subsequently, poll results will show that a surprising number of American Christians are willing to allow the possibility. (This is actually a sign that the poll respondents are able to apply basic logic. One could only answer such a poll in the negative if one was certain that the negative was true. That is, an absence of relevant evidence results in a default positive answer. One who takes the New Testament seriously would be hard-pressed to conclusively eliminate any powerful person, whatever their political tastes.) Left-wing blogs, followed closely by MSNBC hosts and the New York Times editorial page, will mis-report this possibility as settled belief, thereby collectively marginalizing the country's entire religious population.

An absurd conspiracy theory, yes. But the latter paragraph describes a rhetorical trick of poll interpretation--I predict that one to come true in the next 3 years. The smart money is somewhere in the first 10 months of 2012.

Er... woo pig?

So, Arkansas.

On 1 June of this year, I have been in 45 American states. As we rolled across the southern reaches of Indiana on a grand continent-crosser, the call came in: a job, indeed a dream-job, in Arkansas.

Of the 45 states I had been in, Arkansas was not one. Had the call come in only hours earlier, we would have made a beeline for Little Rock, but it was too late--we had to continue on our trip.

So when the movers came two months later and we drove away for the last time from our comfortable home on a dirt road in a bad neighborhood of California, we leapt off into the unknown. I'm an Arizona desert lad, and my wife is a mountain girl from high in the Rockies. I had never lived east of the Continental Divide for more than 3 months at a time, and she had never done so at all. (Come to think on it, I still haven't. Not until early December, at any rate.) The South was terra icognita.

Indeed, I was not convinced that Arkansas existed at all. If it existed, why hadn't I been there? In fact, why hadn't anyone been there? I could hardly find a person who could report having been there since the 1970's, we drove thousands of miles without seeing an Arkansas license plate, and we never could find anyone at all who was actually from there. Arkansas, we soon found, was not on the way to or from anywhere. They charge so much for plane tickets from the West Coast to Little Rock that I can't believe anyone makes the trip. What were they hiding out there?

Well, a lot of green, for a start. And fire ants. (Nasty little creatures. How I hate them.)

There are bad drivers everywhere in this world. Some are worse than others. Arkansans are generally polite and well-mannered on the roads. But Arkansans have a special habit all their own: they are, in my estimation, the world's worst mergers. Between the missus and I we see, several times a week, a car wander into traffic oblivious to the prevailing speed. One memorable incident came on a rainy Sunday shortly after we arrived, when a car pulled onto the freeway from a dead stop on the shoulder. I was boxed in by a barreling 18-wheeler on my left, the road was slick, and I had no anti-lock brakes. We came within a few dozen feet of a lesson in airbag deployment. That's only the worst case in a long list.

Truly, though, it is not their fault. I know from years in visitor service that environment has a way of influencing behavior. Arkansas's roads were designed by drunk illiterates. Their understanding of traffic flow resembles the parakeet's understanding of economics. Arkansas is blessed with more insanely-designed intersections than I have ever seen in so compact an area. They exacerbate the problem by refusing to put signs up--they just paint small white arrows on the pavement. Usually, the arrows are not visible from where you need them, and often they are hidden under backed-up traffic right until the moment you enter the intersection and discover that your lane is turn-only. Successful navigation requires that you memorize whether it is the right or left lane that has been arbitrarily designated the through lane at each entrance to each intersection. Rapid, wild lane changes are a necessary evil.

I'm not in Arkansas right now. I'm in Alabama for training. College football, goes the cliché, is the state religion here. Auburn or Alabama--the locals are supposed to declare for one denomination or the other in their childhood. Arkansas is different; it's a theocracy. You're a Razorback, or you're a heretic.

Now, I never went in for college football. I hated ASU, the soulless diploma mill, even as I went there. Norwich, my graduate school, is more a hockey than a football school, and they don't exactly carry New England Division III hockey outside the region. The passion with which Arkansans devote themselves to Razorbacks fandom is astonishing. If I were to describe the sheer variety, not to mention ubiquity, of merchandise, I think the reader would take it for exaggeration. On game days, the population dresses in red.

But in all, I quite like the place. The humidity, though certainly uncomfortable at its worst, is usually not that oppressive. It is a real delight to have a whole range of shopping options close at hand, rather than the 90-minute drive we had in CA. I quite like having a paved road in front of my house. And there is a whole region of new highways and back roads to explore.

More to come, I'm sure.

First as tragedy, then as farce

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been a rogues gallery of international-level confidence men. It was a tragedy when they gave it to Arafat. It was a joke when Carter and Gore won. President Obama, 9 months into his presidency, with precisely no accomplishments except tripling the deficit to no effect? It leads one to pity the poor, pathetic Norwegians who can't seem to help being conned.

Hoplophobia on 5 Dollars a Day

Now this just straddles the line between goofy and sad, from the AP via Fox News:

PHOENIX — Travel icon Arthur Frommer says he won't be spending his tourism dollars at the Grand Canyon, or anywhere else in Arizona, because the state's laws allow people he described as "thugs" and "extremists" to openly carry firearms.

The author of budget-travel guides said on his blog Wednesday that he was "shocked beyond measure" by reports that protesters openly carried guns and rifles outside a Phoenix building where President Barack Obama spoke on Monday.

Frommer says he won't personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons as a means of political protest.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon says he spoke with Frommer Thursday and invited him to visit the city to clear up any possible misconceptions about safety.

There are a whopping six states which don't allow some degree of open carry. Even California and Illinois allow it in rural areas. Obviously Frommer, like a lot of people, didn't know about this. And yet, remarkably, it never affected him before now. No doubt, he has been to Arizona in the past, when open carry was perfectly legal, and yet he never objected before. Only now, at this moment, did Mr. Frommer become concerned that people, somewhere, might have guns hanging outside their waistbands, rather than inside.

Perhaps we should pay closer to the operative part of Mr. Frommer's statement:

I will not personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons onto the sidewalks and as a means of political protest. I not only believe such practices are a threat to the future of our democracy, but I am firmly convinced that they would also endanger my own personal safety there.

The AP clipped that quote. It's clear from the whole quote that Mr. Frommer's objection isn't just to civilians carrying "loaded weapons as a means of political protest," but to open carry of any sort.

Then there is Mr. Frommer's misinterpretation of the nature of the protest. I can't speak for the intentions of any individual, but I know something about the mindset of these kinds of protesters. They were wearing and carrying guns for two reasons:

First, because they could, and because they believe that a right, unexercised for fear of reprisal, is an illusion. There is a growing, and very grass roots, movement towards normalizing firearms possession in public. I sympathize.;

Second, and I think more relevant in this case, because carrying weapons openly is a mark of free, responsible Americans. Free, in the sense that their actions are not limited according to their rulers' caprice, or indeed by another man's prejudices (like those of Arthur Frommer). Responsible in its literal sense, meaning that they are subject to the consequences of their actions. It's a way of saying, "Here I am, a free adult American citizen, who is perfectly capable of contracting for my own medical care, and living or dying by the result."

In ancient Rome, magistrates were preceded by fasces, physical symbols of their authority. In much the same way, an American citizen carrying a firearm is carrying a physical symbol of his inherent liberty. This, I think, was the symbolism intended by the chaps at the Arizona event.

Mr. Frommer misses this interpretation, and I'm not surprised. He is experiencing a condition called hoplophobia--an irrational fear of arms. He specifically raised the question of his own safety, and the safety of other travelers, in places where firearms can be worn openly. (In my entire life, 25 years of which were spent in Arizona, I've seen it done no more than twice.) And this is how we know his fear is irrational. Can anyone think of a scenario where one of the vanishingly small number of Arizonans openly carrying a firearm might take it upon himself or herself to open fire on an 80-year-old travel editor? Can anyone tally the rate, preferably expressed in incidents-per-million, at which innocent tourists were gunned down by open-carrying Arizonans?

Writes Frommer:

According to the Phoenix, Arizona, police, people with guns including assault rifles do not need permits in Arizona, but can simply carry such weapons with them, openly and brazenly, when they gather to protest a speaker at a public event. The police also acknowledge that about a dozen people carrying guns, including one with an AR-15 assault rifle, milled about outside the event at which President Obama spoke.

I won't dwell on the distinction between "in a public event," "at a public event," and where the protesters in question were. The protesters weren't inside the security cordon, or threatening the president or any attendees, which is reasonable. (Wise is another question.) I don't think any reasonable person has an objection to security restrictions around the president. (That is, so long as the president goes places where such restrictions are fairly justifiable. If the president were to attend a gun show, on the other hand, I think such restrictions would suddenly become very hard to justify.)

But I must say, I'm amused by Mr. Frommer's rhetorical flourishes. "Openly and brazenly"? I don't suppose it would be possible to open carry secretly and meekly. Really, though, it's the "milling about" outside the event. It really brings to mind union thugs "milling about" outside a factory, ready to beat up scabs, doesn't it? If you're "milling about" outside an event like this, surely you're intent on violence; the milling proves it! The lack of actual violence at the event is a mere technicality. The mere visibility of the guns is more violent any actual violence could really be, isn't it?

--

It's worth saying, from reading Frommer's blog post, that he's a cautious guy. He didn't come out of the dock blaring for a boycott, and he said he wanted to learn more about Arizona's gun laws. That's a more measured statement than I would expect from a lot of people, and I salute him for it.

Fun with alternative headlines:

It is sadly common to find that news articles cannot substantiate their own headlines. Here is an example from the AP: "Gun law complaints trail Obama during park tours"

More accurate alternatives:

"Associated Press publishes Brady Campaign press release"

"Editor-in-Chief of Backpacker magazine calls act of Congress 'political'; Nation stunned at accusation of politics in the legislature"

"Natl. Parks Conservation Assn. executive declares Obama friend to parks based on no concrete evidence at all"

(10-gallon hat tip to The Westerner.)

Rats

A chance to yell at Saddam Hussein's useful fool Mike Thompson and I missed it...

Why Godwin's Law?

Godwin's Law is arguably the First Law of the Internet. Dating back to 1990, it actually (barely) predates the World Wide Web itself. Godwin's Law goes like this:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Usenet, if you aren't familiar with it, is a system of more-or-less comprehensive Internet discussion groups that predates the World Wide Web. Discussions in these groups are threaded, so that conversations on a given topic maintain a certain amount of cohesion; they may branch off onto other subjects according to their own bizarre logic, but the process by which a conversation ranged from 16th-century orthography to the No Child Left Behind Act, can usually be discerned by working backwards through the thread.

Godwin's Law has applicability to any other forum of human discourse that follows a progressive (in its adjectival, lower-case sense), threaded pattern. Typically, it only appears when a subject is controversial, but to fully grasp the impact of Godwin's Law, one must recognize how willingly people will divert a conversation into a controversial subject for the fun of it. For example, I can think of a few readers of this blog who, no doubt, can speak with authority on the application of Godwin's Law to discussions of Disney.

In theory, controversial subjects are best resolved through a dialectical process of argument and counterargument, arriving at a conclusion. Threaded discussions are the perfect medium for this kind of debate, because they allow a topic to be broken up into component parts, and each part to be addressed individually. This should serve to simplify and clarify complicated debates.

In practice, few people (anywhere) have the discipline, patience, or intellectual honesty to carry such a debate to its conclusion. Fewer still combine these traits with sufficient subject-matter expertise to be useful in such a debate. (Kevin at The Smallest Minority keeps coming to mind. He combines an extraordinary knowledge of gun control case law, with Sisyphean patience.) Given the incredibly rare chance that you will manage to find one, it is vanishingly unlikely that you will ever be able to range that person in debate against an equal opponent who can also carry the debate to its conclusion. This is why we don't settle the grand controversies of our time through rational debate--because it never works.

But we try. Oh, how we try. And in the end, as Godwin showed, the Nazis keep coming up.

Why?

I propose that there are two factors at work here:

1. The general public possesses a limited knowledge of history. World War II is one of the most widely-recognized historical reference points. On the whole, I expect more Americans to know something about World War II than they do about almost any other political, diplomatic, intellectual, economic, cultural, or legal history topic. No doubt, this observation could be measured through testing, though I would doubt the validity of almost any such test.
2. The one thing that everyone knows about Germany in WWII is that the Nazis were the bad guys, and thoroughly evil. This is agreed and accepted everywhere. There is no other wartime country so thoroughly vilified so long after the fact. Even the Empire of Japan has been partially rehabilitated through reference to European colonialism and racism, and the "victimization" of having been nuked twice. But it is hard to rehabilitate the reputation of Nazi Germany, what with the whole Holocaust. And this is what makes the Nazis a unique tool for debate--our civilization cannot agree on any other unmitigated bad guys.

Most people lack the tools to argue something on the basis of moral philosophy. But arguing by historical comparison is relatively easy. (If you want it done really thoroughly, it helps to be a bona fide historian. I'm available for historical consulting at reasonable rates!) This is why Godwin's Law holds true. Argument by historical comparison is easy, but World War II is one of the few historical reference points common to most debaters and audience members in the modern Anglosphere. Moreover, Nazi Germany is the only political movement/nation-state/society that is commonly agreed to be evil.

There is a corollary to Godwin's Law, that holds that any party invoking Nazis or Hitler in an argument loses automatically, and thereby ends the argument. This is not because comparisons to the Nazis are necessarily invalid (though some certainly are), but because the tactic is so ubiquitous that it has grown noxious and lost all impact.

When we take the whole of American political discourse as a single unit, it has some of the characteristics of an especially chaotic threaded Usenet discussion. Godwin's Law, naturally, applies.

Throughout Bush the Younger's presidency, we were treated to the lesser form of Godwin's Law--the Reductio ad Hitlerum. This is not so much a historical analogy as an attempt at guilt by association. Bush was breezily associated with Hitler, most commonly through Bush=Hitler protest signs, and the formulation "Bushitler." This is a manifestation of Godwin's Law, but a lesser one.

What we are seeing now is a greater manifestation of Godwin's Law. In particular, the Speaker of the House of Representative suggested that protesters at town hall meetings were themselves Nazis. In fact, there had been a swastika in evidence at an early town hall meeting protest, but it had been crossed out--that is, the sign carrier was suggesting that the proposed medical industry reforms in Congress were analogous to Nazi programs. This amounted to a rhetorical error on the sign-carrier's part, although not a substantive one, as I will discuss later. The Speaker of the House's response was both a rhetorical and a substantive error.

The protester was making the argument that government rationing of medical treatments inevitably trends towards eugenics. By putting a crossed-out swastika on a sign, she was indicating that she opposed this. I agree with her. Government rationing of medical treatments does inevitably trend towards eugenics, and I am likewise opposed to it.

When a government panel sits down to write the formulas and rules by which therapies are distributed, they have limited options. They can randomize availability. In the United Kingdom this is called the Postcode Lottery. (The availability of certain therapies sometimes depends on your address.) Or they can ration according to some more rational system. The United Kingdom, trying to move away from the Postcode Lottery, created an organization dubbed the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (acronymed NICE), to make cost-benefit decisions based on quality of life, life expectancy, and cost. Someone has to lose out, and under this system it is generally the elderly.

But in practice, being a vast self-reinforcing bureaucracy, care is often distributed according to a system that is random by virtue of being ineffective. Mark Steyn offers a good example in an NRO article today:

I had an elderly British visitor this month who’s had a recurring problem with her left hand. At one point it swelled up alarmingly and so we took her to the emergency room. They did a CT scan, X-rays, blood samples, the works. In two hours at a small, rural, undistinguished, no-frills hospital in northern New Hampshire, this lady got more tests than she’s had in the last decade in Britain — even though she goes to see her doctor once a month. He listens sympathetically, tells her old age often involves adjusting to the loss of mobility, and then advises her to take the British version of Tylenol and rest up. Anything else would use up those valuable resources. So, in two hours in New Hampshire, she got tested and diagnosed (with gout) and prescribed something to deal with it. It’s the difference between health “care” (i.e., going to the doctor’s every month to no purpose) and health treatment — and on the latter America is the best in the world.

In Britain, nobody was denying Mr. Steyn's guest care based on her post code, age, or condition. They simply weren't testing, diagnosing, and treating the problem.

I believe, because I know something about how the American polity works, that under such a system we would see resources diverted according to all manner of political influences. We would find raging debates about whether one interest group was more deserving of better care; whether one race, owing to past neglect, deserved superior care now. And inevitably, over time as the public clamors for improved service (or even marginally fairer service) without increased cost, the government starts to look at places to save money, like the long-term expense of caring for the disabled. Sarah Palin was widely called selfish for not aborting a baby with Down Syndrome. (I searched to confirm that this wasn't just a right-wing meme. It's not. Here's a particularly nasty example from an Objectivist, and another one from a Salon.com blogger. There are thousands more. I don't recommend actually reading them if you have blood pressure problems, but they're there for evidence's sake.)

There is evidently a strong and vocal contingent in our society that considers it grossly immoral to not abort a baby with a disability. Being realistic, there is 0% chance that the United States would impose forced abortions in the case of fetally-identified Down Syndrome. But I could believe that the state might declare that if you do not abort a baby as recommended by government formula, the child is cut off from some or all government-funded medical care, and perhaps other government entitlements, like education. (Of course, the family doesn't exactly get a refund on all the taxes paid for health care to which they are no longer entitled.) It's only fair, right? Why should we let your selfish decision burden everybody else? Whether through hard coercion or soft, the end-result is eugenicist.

I said that the protester's anti-swastika sign was a rhetorical mistake. It was not necessary for her to carry the argument all the way to its natural conclusion, in the most comprehensive eugenics program ever carried out--there are strong arguments against Obamacare short of reference to the Nazis, and the subject cannot be effectively broached in sign form.

But the point remains that there is a eugenicist impulse out there. We breed domesticated animals for desired traits, like loyalty in a golden retriever or mass on a cow. The same system can be applied to humans. It is both perfectly logical, and perfectly inhuman. It is a monstrous disease common to progressives who realize that their plans for a perfect society are fatally flawed because humans are imperfect. When you give government complete control over medicine, you forge a powerful tool. It may take a decade, or a century, before the wrong people get a grip on the handle. But eventually, it will be used to a terrible end.

Without the Nazi example, that argument might seem terribly overblown. Who could believe that government might use its powers over medicine to murder the disabled, if we didn't have the example of a 20th-century nation doing precisely that to 200,000 victims?

If we forge that tool, if we wed political power and control over medicine, I think that soft eugenics are inevitable. They make too much logical sense to the kind of people who will end up with that power.

Godwin's Law exists because the Nazis are familiar to everyone, and because they are universally agreed to be evil. But it does not give us license to ignore the lessons of National Socialism where they are most relevant.

See also: Nazis for Me, but Not for Thee.

UPDATE: Oh yes, mustn't forget carbon impact...