X tax makes big time [updated]

David Brooks writes about the X tax in today's NY Times: "Let's Talk About X." This is not an unfamiliar topic to readers of this blog, and more info can be found here and here.

UPDATE 12:26 PM: Not surprisingly, Brooks' piece is getting comments to the effect that it's unfair and unprogressive to tax wage income but not investment income. Brooks mentions in passing that the X tax includes a tax on business cash flow; not mentioned, and easily overlooked, is that this feature is crucial to making the X tax a progressive tax (along with its progressive wage brackets). The people who own big stakes in business are, for all intents and purposes, the rich. Having said that, I note that there are various ways to do a progressive consumption tax, some of which don't have the "optics" problem of giving an inaccurate perception of being a windfall for the rich.

GOP civil war(s) watch

Interesting additions to the what-now-GOP discussion: "Can This Party Be Saved?" by Mike Murphy. And: "In Republican Civil War, Both Sides Are Hopeless," by Josh Barro. I don't think anything is hopeless, but as noted on Twitter I do think Barro's critique of Murphy makes an important point: the GOP has to change its economic policies--get away from the knee-jerk tight-money, low-tax position--no less than moderate its social-cultural conservatism. It has to do both.

Also of note: Huntsman now disavowing his ill-considered rejection of a hypothetical 10-1 spending cut/tax hike deal. Good.

Last Lion update

I've started The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, which I'd been eager to read, but this being a busy time and it being a long book, I haven't gotten past the London Blitz. So for now I'll just note an interesting NY Times Magazine article about its unusual making, and a notably inane and self-indulgent WSJ review (about which more here).

Random & misc.

Various items of interest:

James Bond as heroic but not glamorous.

New York City's least violent day in recent memory.

"I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords." This Ronald Bailey piece has a bit of a retro feel; I recall reading lots of futuristic doomsday stuff in the '90s, and that it tapered off as real-world troubles intensified thereafter.

UPDATED:  While we're being random, there's a good exhibit of children's book art at the Society of Illustrators until Dec. 22. Includes this video:

Watch Strega Nona on PBS. See more from WENH.

Hamas' kids

I was puzzled as to why people on Twitter were being so hard on Thomas Friedman for his latest column, which advocates Arne Duncan be appointed secretary of state. Could it be knee-jerk resistance against an unorthodox idea? Then I read the awful column. This sentence should be long remembered as an example of naivete as a profound, self-imposed debility:

For instance, it would be very helpful to have a secretary of state who can start a negotiating session with Hamas leaders (if we ever talk with them) by asking: “Do you know how far behind your kids are?”

Me: If only they knew.

Overdramatizing

Speaking of cocoons, as I just was, here's an attempt to pierce a left-wing one from the inside: "Hold Your Applause, the GOP Isn't Dead Yet," by "Mobuto Sese Seko" at Gawker. Amusing excerpt:

If you consume a steady diet of Politico, theHuffington Post, Slate, Think Progress, DailyKos, Wonkette, Media Matters, etc., you could be forgiven for thinking that the Republican Party is essentially a dead beast, speared through the skull and nearly vivisected, flailing its broken carcass against the earth via residual brain-stem shock and somehow also managing to devour itself. 

It's a fascinating narrative to push. Internecine party struggle and a broken ideological system contains far more innate drama than describing the 2012 election as a miscalculation or a temporary fuckup. That's just situational setback, but a party rotten at the core and at war with itself is real heady ontological shit. You can write a dozen pages in the New Yorker or Harper's about it. You can meet your Atlantic blog quota for two weeks with meat like that.

Beware the cocoon

Victor Davis Hanson has a top-10 list of lessons from the election. I think #9 is the most important one for conservatives:

9. Beware the Cocoon If one read the Drudge Report, looked at Rasmussen polls, listened to O’Reilly and Hannity on Fox News, and hit the radio talk shows, then it was natural to think that Romney would win with 300 electoral votes. But we all must realize that the country, while center-right, is subjected to a left-center daily barrage.  Next time, we must channel surf NBC and CBS, check on the Huffington Post, follow the left-wing polls, and study Reuters to see what the opposition is doing, planning, and thinking — and react accordingly.  The right-wing media is serving as an alternative to the bias of the mainstream news, but also as a sort of religious outlet where the depressed and pessimistic can find some shred of hope in a bleak world — understandable but not always empirical.  I thought Romney might win by one point given the RCP poll averages, but I wanted to believe, but just could not, what Dick Morris preached in the evenings. We think the first-time-sex-is-like-voting-for-Obama ad stupid; and the black garbage collector’s whine that Romney did not come out for coffee and chat on each delivery silly. Most voters, however, apparently found them “compelling.” Take in a Castor Oil’s dose of Chris Matthews or Andrea Mitchell for 30 seconds to learn why.

Me: Before I get on my high horse about this, I want to acknowledge that my own electoral forecasting was not much different from Hanson's. I thought Romney might win by a small margin, and never believed in a Romney landslide. In retrospect, I still think I had something of a point in predicting, well before the debates, that the debates would help Romney, but I was also overly beholden to my own analysis, such that I resisted abandoning it when the evidence mounted that the debates had not helped Romney enough to actually win the election. And watching conservatives forecast a landslide bolstered my resistance. So I'm not immune to cocooning, even though I try quite hard to get information from a broad range of sources.

Having said all that, it's worth emphasizing that conservatives (and libertarians and center-right people like myself) can, should and must immerse themselves in varied and opposing points of view. The right is not alone in having an echo chamber, but it may be unique in the imperviousness of the walls. There was a time, a few decades ago, when it could credibly be said (as I recall, John Podhoretz did say) that conservatives speak liberal as well as their own language; subsequently, the right became monolingual.

On a brighter note, the fact that we're hearing things like "Beware the cocoon" from rock-ribbed conservatives like Victor Davis Hanson is a sign that things are changing, for the better, already.

Book note: Meat by Alexei Bayer

I've received an advance copy of Meat, a novel by Alexei Bayer. I've been a friend and colleague of Alex's since 1990, including co-authoring columns and a book chapter for Mental Floss magazine, and editing his columns for Research magazine. Quicksilber readers get an advance view of the Meat blurb I am providing for possible use:

Alexei Bayer grew up in Russia in the Khrushchev years, when one could buy a small "improved" bar of soap for the same price at which one previously got a large bar, otherwise identical. As an economist, he has retained a sharp lookout against ideological distortions of economic reality. As a storyteller, he has stayed attuned to the human dramas and absurdities arising from such distortions. In Meat, he uses these perspectives to bring us a vivid picture of early 1960s life in a real "red state."

Political friendships

Interesting reading: "Revenge of the Reality-Based Community," by Bruce Bartlett. I'm struck by how similar this story of disaffection from the conservative movement is to things Norman Podhoretz wrote a few decades ago about spearheading the neoconservative break from left-liberalism. Here's Bartlett:

At this point, I lost every last friend I had on the right. Some have been known to pass me in silence at the supermarket or even to cross the street when they see me coming. People who were as close to me as brothers and sisters have disowned me.

I think they believe they are just disciplining me, hoping I will admit error and ask for forgiveness. They clearly don’t know me very well. My attitude is that anyone who puts politics above friendship is not someone I care to have in my life.

Me: Of course, this reflects poorly on the state of the conservative movement today, just as Podhoretz's long-ago ostracism was an indicator of the insularity of the leftists he had known. But the deeper lesson is, there's more to life than politics. In fact, that's something conservatives used to emphasize.

Drone news

Matt Welch: "A reminder to most Democrats who spent 2002-08 telling us that abuse of executive power was at or near the top of the nation's most urgent moral concerns: You just didn't mean it."

Science misc.

Some links of interest, all having something or another to do with science and technology:

A wonderful photo of a man, landscape and galaxy.

An interesting piece by John Horgan on evolution, creationism and his students.

An absorbing, and sobering, article in The New Atlantis about Albert Speer.

Future debacle alert

This year's electoral successes carry some risks for the Democrats. One is the risk of deluding them into thinking that people actually like them, as opposed to disliking the Republicans. Another is the risk of thinking that people who do like them now will continue to do so months, years, even decades from now. For an astute note of skepticism about current Democratic triumphalism, see David Freedlander's "Democrats See a Future of Electoral Dominance But History Says Otherwise."

Via Meadia footsteps

There's a post-Thanksgiving profusion of interesting material at Walter Russell Mead's blog Via Meadia, on subjects as diverse as a 19th century asteroid near-miss, developments in Gaza and Egypt, and Andrew Sullivan's apoplecticism. As I've ramped up blogging somewhat lately (and ramped down Twitter), I've viewed Via Meadia as something of a model of the substantive yet eclectic blogging I aspire to (though I believe Mead has some staffers to help, unlike some).

Book note: Antifragile [updated]

A few years ago, I reviewed Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan for the New York Post. I was not much enthused. Part of my problem was with the author's tone, which I found smug and self-absorbed. Another negative was that I thought the book had little useful advice on what to do in light of its picture of a world in which unexpected events can change things drastically. I haven't yet read Taleb's new book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder but it looks like it addresses that question in much greater detail, and I can say that intuitively the concept of "antifragility" appeals to me greatly.

UPDATE 11/25: An amusing meeting with the man.

Post-nasty

Recommended: "The Nasty GOP?" by Jim Geraghty, National Review. This piece makes clear that tone and substance are interrelated; improve one and you will tend to improve the other.

'Epidemic of open-mindedness'

Recommended reading: "The Conservative Future," by David Brooks. Has an interesting taxonomy of factions, although some people might feel they straddle the categories (e.g., "Lower-Middle Reformists" and "Soft Libertarians"). If you want some epistemic closure, read the comments.

Carbon tax politics

"We would never propose a carbon tax, and have no intention of proposing one." -- Jay Carney, White House spokesman, Nov. 15.

Chris Mooney here argues that's a good thing, that the Obama administration's focus in the near term should be on regulatory efforts that don't require legislation, and that carbon pricing should be pushed off into the future. This strikes me as an example of the kind of stubborn partisan cohesiveness Mooney rightly decries when conservatives do it. At a moment when a carbon tax is gaining momentum, the idea that Obama should push it off (till when?) is very hard to reconcile with the urgency of the issue. Surely, the re-elected president can push regulatory efforts while also working on a carbon pricing solution that, as it happens, is also relevant to the imminent fiscal cliff. And when exactly would Obama have more political capital than he does in the aftermath of winning 332 electoral votes? Never.

UPDATE 1:17 PM: Via Instapundit, more evidence that the people who voted for Obama because of climate concerns have been had.

Rubio's answer rewrite

In keeping with my tradition of unsolicited speechwriting on behalf of GOP politicians, I'm going to suggest what Rubio should have said in response to GQ's question about the age of the Earth. First, here's the actual exchange:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is? 

Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

Now here's how I wish it had gone:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is? 

Preferred Answer: I'm not a scientist, man, but I happen to know that the answer, as determined by geologists and astronomers, is approximately 4.5 billion years. I suspect that if you know that answer, GQ, it's because you looked it up shortly before the interview in order to formulate your gotcha question. I recognize the politics of this can be sensitive, because there are various views in theology as to the age of the Earth, including differences about how to understand the 7 days or eras discussed in the Bible. Science doesn't provide all the answers people seek as to the ultimate meaning of the universe, but it does provide the basis for much of the gross domestic product and economic growth of the United States. So you'll never hear me denying or disparaging scientific evidence, but the bigger question is why you don't pester potential Democratic candidates with such non-sequiturs. It's one of the great mysteries.

Debacle

I can't remember an op-ed generating such an avalanche of derision as Lucian K. Truscott IV's piece on Petraeus, "A Phony Hero for a Phony War." See here, here, here and here. Retreat!

PhACT talk

Many thanks to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT) for having me lecture yesterday on antiscience tendencies on right and left. Possibly one of the attendees will do a writeup on the lecture for PhACT's newsletter, in which case I'll share that here. Meanwhile, here's my cover slide.