Lewis: quitting the physics club

The New Neo Posted on by

Professor Harold Lewis has resigned from the American Physical Society in protest over AGW and how it has been treated by the organization. Lewis—who has been a member of the Society for sixty-seven years—doesn’t pull his punches:

The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’éªtre of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

Lewis is an elderly man who has had a long and distinguished career, mostly in the field of nuclear physics. One would imagine he has the capacity to understand the science involved a little better than a few journalists and politicians such as Al Gore. But one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that what he is arguing against here is an anti-scientific attitude that refuses to entertain valid threats to its belief system, and that such a stance on the part of scientists is antithetical to the spirit of scientific inquiry itself.

Individual mandate’s constitutionality upheld in district court

The New Neo Posted on by

District Court Judge George C. Steeh has upheld the government’s right to force people to buy health insurance or face a hefty fine. But, as Randy Barnett writes at Volokh, this is just the first step on a long road that will probably (although not certainly) end with the Supreme Court. Barnett also makes some predictions:

First, that some, perhaps all, federal district judges considering these challenges would uphold the statute was foreseeable. When these challenges were brought, no one believed that all constitutional challenges would be upheld by every district court judges who would consider them. Few believed that any district court judge would have the fortitude to strike down the mandate, regardless of how the Supreme Court might ultimately rule. Heck, many doubt that the Supreme Court has the fortitude to strike down so major a piece of legislation…

[A future] circuit split [would make] a Supreme Court decision far more likely. Indeed, because one circuit would have had to strike down the Act, a circuit split guarantees a Supreme Court decision doesn’t it? However, given the high profile of this Act among the American people, I think it would be hard for the Court to duck the issue even if the Courts of Appeals all uphold the act. If the act continues to be unpopular, would that not be widely perceived by the public as an abrogation of the Court’s responsibility? Indeed, would the Justices not reasonably fear that it would undermine the popular legitimacy of the “Supreme” Court to refuse to decide so highly publicized a constitutional controversy about which so much depends?

Judge Steeh ruled essentially that Congress can do whatever it wants as long as there is some connection to commerce. This seems to be an excessively steep and slippery slope. According to Steeh’s ruling, the individual mandate:

…qualifies as an example of “activities that substantially affect interstate commerce”—the standard that the U.S. Supreme Court set for Congress’ compliance with the Commerce Clause, the New York Times reports (Sack, New York Times, 10/7).

“Far from inactivity, by choosing to forgo insurance, plaintiffs are making an economic decision to try to pay for health care services later, out of pocket, rather than now through the purchase of insurance, collectively shifting billions of dollars, $43 billion in 2008, onto other market participants,” Steeh wrote.

I am hard-pressed to think of a personal economic decision that doesn’t affect interstate commerce, according to this ruling. That’s some penumbra.

[NOTE: More here and here.]

Obama the continually likable

The New Neo Posted on by

I missed this poll when it first came out about two weeks ago, indicating that, although only 38% of respondents say that Obama should be re-elected, 65% still view him favorably “as a person.”

My question is: why? I confess I am puzzled by this continuing “hate the sin, love the sinner” attitude towards Obama.

Perhaps Americans don’t want to be called racist, and have learned that any criticism of Obama automatically opens them up to that charge. Some may continue to have a favorable impression of Obama as a person because they are thinking of his family life, which seems fine. I have no problem imagining that he’s an exemplary father, or an attentive and faithful husband, or a great owner of companion animal (otherwise known as “pet”) Bo.

But that’s his private life, which is not the primary way I evaluate any president “as a person.” It is, after all, unknown because it is private. It is an indication of character, to be sure—especially when flawed, such as Clinton’s behavior as a husband. But still, it’s not enough, not nearly enough, to give a POTUS a favorable personal rating in my book.

And I will hereby go on record as saying that I, for one, have never had a favorable view of Obama as a person. I would not want to have a beer with him, even if I drank beer. I find him humorless, cold, sneaky, prevaricating, whiny, blaming, narcissistic, insular, and cutthroat. And if ever I had been inclined to like him, my exposure early on to the story of what he did to Alice Palmer, one of his first political mentors, would have disabused me of that notion.

Here’s the tale of Obama and Alice Palmer again, in case you missed it the first, second, or third time around. Most of America did—unfortunately. Do a survey of your friends, just for fun, and asked them whether they have ever heard of Alice Palmer and what Obama did to her in 1996, when he was cutting his political teeth (to coin a phrase). My guess is that—unless they happen to live in Chicago, or are political junkies—virtually all of them will draw a blank.

Pity. Because it’s an anecdote from Obama’s life that’s especially revealing about his character. Not a very likable guy, to say the least.

[NOTE: If any on the left read this piece, no doubt the predictable, empty, and repetitive charges of “racist!” will be brought out once again.]

[ADDENDUM: In a related matter, David Paul Kuhn wonders whether Obama can regroup after the election and win back the center:

Obama must win back independents to win reelection. The more interesting question is, therefore, how can Obama retake the electoral middle ground?…Clinton returned home. Not to the place called Hope. He returned to the moderation of the New Democrat platform. He took up Republican causes and took on Democratic sacred cows. The president who pushed healthcare reform and gays in the military was gone. This Clinton was fighting for a balanced budget and welfare reform. He was once more the centrist-reformist.

Kuhn goes on to write that Obama will have a more difficult time of it because his pre-presidency persona was a great deal more vague than Clinton’s. And this is true; Clinton had a moderate track record as governor of Arkansas, whereas Obama only has some moderate rhetoric during the campaign. Clinton had been a leader of the New Democrats, who represented a counterforce to the liberal drift of the Democratic Party of the time. Obama had been (albeit briefly) one of the most liberal senators in Congress.

The significance of this is that Obama, unlike Clinton, is seen by many as a liar and betrayer in his public life. Clinton was actually both in his private life—which bled over into public life when he said “I did not have sex with that woman.” But the people he betrayed were his wife and daughter. Obama is perceived as a public and political liar and betrayer by those very moderates and Independents who voted for him and whom he must woo again in order to be re-elected. Unless their memory is shorter than I think it is, this is likely to cause some trouble for him in any attempt to convince them in 2012 that he’s changed his errant ways.]

Obama meltdown?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “physics guy” asks:

As has been predicted by others: when do we see the full-blown BHO in total meltdown?

I don’t pretend to have the inside track on this, so my answer is just a hunch, but this is it: never

I see Obama as very emotionally controlled. Yes, intermittent signs of trouble and stress leak out, especially in his ad lib remarks or attempts at humor. But a meltdown is not in the cards.

Narcissists such as Obama (and many other presidents and politicians, although he is one of the most extreme examples) tend to be very well-defended. After all, that’s one of the basic points of narcissism—to defend the ego against threats—and it is usually very successful in doing just that.

This is especially true when, as is the case with Obama, a person has attained heights of power undreamed of by ordinary men and women. That person’s narcissism has been rewarded and reinforced time and again. When there’s a rough patch in the road, it’s the fault of others. Blaming may increase, but not self-blame, which seems foreign to Obama’s nature.

Obama has the added advantage of the insulation of the presidency. He moves in a bubble of admirers and sycophants. In this he is not unique; it’s true of most presidents, unless they have the foresight (and the strength of character) to make sure there are critics and outsiders in their entourage. Obama has surrounded himself with an unusually insular group and is unlikely to hear much true criticism from them.

No, between his iron emotional control and his group of advisers, don’t expect any kind of meltdown from him. Interesting also that Obama plans to be away quite a bit after the November elections (see this and this), perhaps the better to distract himself with more important things than what has happened to his Congressional majority. And, if Victor Davis Hanson is correct, he will weather the post-election storm quite nicely.

Investigating Dobbs

The New Neo Posted on by

Lou Dobbs has raised the ire of the left because he’s against illegal immigration, and has criticized firms that hire illegals. Now the intrepid Nation has mounted a year-long investigation to turn up illegals in Dobbs’s past, and they have struck pay dirt.

This is what investigative journalism on the left has come down to. Any you ready? Hope you’re sitting down.

Dobbs has two large estates with horse farms, one in New Jersey and one in West Palm Beach. For both, he hired firms to deal with the groundskeeping and the care of the horses. The Nation has found five undocumented (and pseudonymous) illegals who say they worked for these contractors on Dobbs’s estates, and that he and/or his daughter (who rides some of the horses) didn’t realize it, although they should have:

When I asked whether the Dobbs family knew that undocumented workers were caring for their horses, Gomez responded by saying that at least in the case of Hillary Dobbs, “I believe she knew.” The stable owner knew “that some people didn’t have papers,” Gomez said, and had even taken precautions to keep the workers away from the immigration agents who often patrol the areas around horse shows. Gomez said it was hard to believe that Dobbs’s daughter, who was in close contact with these undocumented workers almost every weekend, could have been unaware of their status…

I also asked Missy Clark, the owner of North Run Farm, the stable in Warren, Vermont, where the Dobbs Group horses are housed, whether Dobbs or his daughter had ever inquired about the immigration status of the workers caring for Hillary’s horses. She said, “They’re very well aware that the people taking care of the horses are 100 percent legal,” and said she’d given the Dobbs family assurances to that effect.

This is the latest line of attack at those who would fight against illegal immigration, is was already obvious from the Gloria Allred/Meg Whitman flap. It goes this way: illegals are everywhere. That’s part of the reason the problem is so serious; it has reached critical mass. So anyone who hires household or other types of service help through an agency—be it cleaning, groundskeeping, horse tending, care of the elderly and/or infirm, catering, you name it—is almost undoubtedly going to be at risk for dealing with workers who are “undocumented.” This will be true whether the hirer knows it or not, and no precautions will protect him or her from the charges of hiring illegals, as Meg Whitman has recently learned. And this despite the fact that it is the agency’s duty to check these things, and that agencies usually assure the hirer that all standards for legality are met, and that the illegals themselves lie through their teeth and often present false documents.

The beauty of it is that those on the left who embrace illegal immigration are off the hook, but those who oppose illegals, such as Whitman and Dobbs, need only have dealt with an agency that was slipshod in its work to be accused of blatant hypocrisy. And it doesn’t hurt the left’s cause either that, as part of the case made against Dobbs/Whitman-type offenders, they are revealed as (gasp!) the nefarious Rich.

[NOTE: What is a person like Dobbs to do, short of handing over his estate to the People and spreading the wealth around? He could hire several investigators to research the papers of every single worker who entered his employ though an agency, but I’m not at all sure that’s not illegal itself. Couldn’t the workers claim that they had already given documentation to the agency, and that Dobbs has no right to discriminate against them, and no right to their papers? Or I suppose he could have tried to hire people himself rather than using agencies at all. But this would be incredibly time-consuming, and would open him up to making errors in checking their papers. After all, this is the sort of risk that using a bonded agency is supposed to help avoid—the agency is assumed to have done the checking, as it claims. Lastly, if Dobbs had tried to hire Americans born and bred, not only would they apparently have been very hard to find in the horse care industry, but it would have opened him up to charges of discriminating against Hispanics.]

Obama to McDonald’s: never mind

The New Neo Posted on by

McDonald’s got its waiver for mini-med plans.

It’s a good idea, and no doubt was expedited because of the huge swarm of negative publicity attendant on the original story. But, as Ed Morrisey of Hot Air points out:

Dictating percentages for administration costs in insurance plans isn’t the job of the federal government anyway, but more to the point, that issue is obviously not determinative in value to the consumer ”” as these waivers proved. This shows what happens when people with no experience in an industry decide that they can construct it better than the market has structured itself.

The proper action would have been to repeal at least this portion of the law in order to give a level playing field to everyone. By granting a few dozen waivers at the outset, though, the White House has amplified the uncertainty and arbitrariness in ObamaCare even further. At least insurers and employers had a figure that they could use for planning. Now there is no standard at all, except for whatever Kathleen Sebelius decides she likes ”” and whom she wants to favor.

Left and right, Britain and here

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter Simon Weaver, transplanted Brit, writes:

Not everyone believes Obama is a Marxist. Coming from England he seems pretty right wing to me. The most radical left wing thing he has done since coming into office was merely suggesting a public option during the healthcare debate, and he quickly caved when he saw he was never going to get it through. My dad is a life-long conservative, but if the conservative party said they would abolish the national health service he would not vote for them. I’d like to think that not all conservatives are such trenchant ideologs.

Simon’s comment reflects a basic truth, which is this: the American revolution didn’t end when the peace treaties were signed. Despite their continuing ties of history, language, tradition, culture, and law, Britain and the USA have been diverging even in recent years, particularly since World War II, when war-weary Britain took a sharp turn left and America did not.

Despite a short-lived revival of conservatism—of the Thatcher variety—during the Reagan era, Britain’s right remains way to the left of this country’s. So in that sense Simon is absolutely correct in his second sentence (although not grammatically: dangling participle, man!), “Coming from England [Obama] seems pretty right-wing to me.” But the left-right continuum is scaled quite differently here.

As for Obama’s “merely suggesting” a public option and then caving, that is technically the case, as well. But that’s Obama’s very clever modus operandi: to make sure his fingerprints are not on the HCR bill by offering “suggestions” and leaving it up to Congress to do whatever it can manage to get away with, the lefter the better. Anyone who really studies the bill can see that its long-term goal (and, by extension, Obama’s) is to force down other forms of health insurance and to ultimately drive everyone into the exchanges.

But let’s leave the public option aside for a moment and deal with another question: is his stance on the public option really the most left-wing thing Obama has done as president? No. There is almost nothing the man has done since coming to office that hasn’t been remarkably left wing, despite the fact that the left isn’t happy with him and wants more.

Some of Obama’s most consistently left-wing positions have not been policies per se but rather attitudes expressed repeatedly in speeches. He has adopted a consistently anti-business, anti-capitalist position, fomenting class warfare (common in Britain, I would imagine, but less widespread here in the past) and hatred of the rich. He has come perilously close to nationalizing industries. He is a union man extraordinaire. One of the most astoundingly leftist acts he has performed was his running roughshod over the first creditors’ rights in the Chrysler bailout and putting his favored unions before them, in abrogation of contract law.

His foreign policy has been an interesting amalgam of leftist positions (come down hard on Israel; Bush administration practiced torture; will talk with anyone, even Ahmadinejad) and seemingly more conservative stances such as fighting in Afghanistan. But even when taking the latter position he gives it a twist from the left that betrays his true feelings: he announces a troop building and at the same time announces the withdrawal, and in so doing practically negates the former. His attitude towards leftist Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his henchman in Honduras was one of Obama’s most shameful and transparently leftist acts, although few remember it at this point because so much has happened to spin our heads since (see this for background).

But let us return to Simon—in this case Simon’s dad. Simon writes:

My dad is a life-long conservative, but if the conservative party said they would abolish the national health service he would not vote for them.

This points out, once again, the difference between what passes for “conservative” in Britain and what the term means here. It also illustrates how entitlements, once ingrained in a population, are very difficult if not impossible to eradicate, because people become dependent on them—and don’t think for a moment that Obama and Pelosi and Reid are not well aware of that. In fact, they bank on it, and it was part of their calculation for extreme haste in passing HCR.

But there’s another point that Simon doesn’t mention but that is vital, and this concerns the different histories of health insurance in this country and in Britain. The latter’s national health service was established after World War II (and designed even before that) as part of a planned cradle-to-grave postwar welfare state. That’s well over sixty years ago, long enough for many generations to have grown very accustomed to it. What’s more, the system was preceded by one that was very piecemeal and highly inadequate, in contrast to ours, which is somewhat flawed but mostly liked by the majority of Americans:

[T]here were no real losers in the Britain of 1948 [when their system was first set up]. Only a tiny handful of very rich people had any experience of great medical care””and they were rich enough to pay higher taxes AND private insurance premiums. Everyone else got roughly the same medical care; but now the middle class got it for nothing as most of the poor had done before. Nobody lost””not for another fifteen years when the quality of medical care began to decline noticeably. And by then they were hooked. By contrast almost every insured American is a potential loser under Obamacare. And some of those considered to be winners””i.e., the currently non-insured””will feel like losers if they are forced to insure and then remain inconveniently healthy.

So comparing the British public’s response to national health care to our own attitude to Obamacare is comparing apples to oranges.

Simon closes with the idea that he hopes not all conservatives are ideologues. But what is conservativism if not an ideology? If a person—conservative or libertarian, socialist or communist—compromises his/her positions because a particular bill happens to be of personal benefit in a particular instance, I can’t say I’d applaud or admire that person. If, on the other hand, that person is voting against his/her own belief system because he/she believes the vote will benefit society as a whole, then it may be time to revisit the underpinnings of that belief system and even to change it.

I don’t praise rigid, unthinking ideologues. But I have no respect for those who compromise their principles in order to get a personal benefit. Political ideology is not—or at least, it should not be—a belief system founded on faith. It should be based on reasoning and logic, and ought to be able to stand up to the facts and empirical evidence of life and history.