A Modest Proposal

Most people know of Senator John McCain’s diagnosis with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.  I have just a couple of thoughts I’d like to add.

First, obviously, best wishes to Senator McCain and his family. This is a very tough diagnosis, as we all know.  The next several months and years will demand an enormous amount of McCain and all those close to him, and I wish them well in that fight.

Second:  John McCain is receiving the best of care, as he should, and as I would wish anyone in his position could expect.  That health care comes to him through his job as an employee of the federal government.

The immediate context, of course, is that this particular federal employee is one of those Republican senators who was, by all accounts prepared to vote yes on a bill that would have pulled federally mandated and supported health care from tens of millions of his fellow citizens.

The larger context is that John McCain has throughout his life relied on the United States government for his medical care — from birth to now.  He was the son of a serving naval officer, then a cadet at the Naval Academy, then a serving officer himself, then briefly a veteran in private life.

Then, within a year of his retiring from the armed forces, elected as a member of the House of Representatives.  Four years later he won his Senate seat, to which he has been re-elected five times, which brings us to the present day.

A whole life, all 80+ years of it, and John McCain has never for a moment had to wonder what he would do if he became sick, or if his wife or his kids fell ill.  For the first half of his life, he had access to a single-payer system; as a member of Congress, he received his health benefits through the same benefit package available to federal workers; since the passage of the ACA, members and their staffs have access to on-exchange subsidized plans.

And that’s great!  John McCain should have had secure, guaranteed and persistent care.  The injuries he suffered in Vietnam and during his imprisonment there should never have been eligible to be pre-existing conditions. He should have been, as he was, free of the choice-crippling necessity of working a secure gig to ensure access to insurance, thus enabling him to pursue his life of military and public service.

The kicker though: so should we all.  The health-care life John McCain has led is the one that’s right not just for him and his family, but for all Americans.  I won’t rehash here the moral and the practical reasons why — we’ve done that before, David can do it better, and we will be back at that by nightfall at the latest.  All I want to do here is to make a modest proposal.

The Democrats should come to the next round of manouvering on health care legislation with a plan that repairs ACA’s current weak points and lays out a path to full coverage.  And they should name it after one of the great exemplars of the power of guaranteed health care to liberate Americans into lives of daring and service.

Here’s to the John Sidney McCain III Universal Health Care Act of 2017!

Image: Doris Zinkelson,  No 115 British General Hospital, Ostend – Unloading Wounded, 1945

Last Thoughts Before Canvassing (2): Unargued Assertion About Science and the Election

One last thought about the stakes for science (and society) in this election.  I am going to be spending essentially all my waking hours between now and 8 p.m. tomorrow electioneering, so I’m not going to come up with a long supporting argument for this statement, but beyond all the specifics of policy claims and budget promises, there is a fundamental difference between a McCain/Palin led GOP and the Obama/Biden approach that I and a fusion physicist buddy of mine were just talking about this morning.

For McCain or at least the GOP base, science is instrumental, and divisible.  It is conceivable within the science-world view of much, though not all of the GOP electorate to say that molecular medicine is fine, but evolution is not — so we’ll have the one and not the other, thank you very much.

I have been planning for a long time to write a much more considered essay about why this is false — drawing in part on wonderful parallels from Chinese history that I can draw out of filial respect for my Chinese historian father.

But for now, I’ll simply state the obvious:  evolutionary ideas are not merely the context of modern biology, they are essential to process of reasoning that runs through that field.  The same is true across discipline after discipline; the geology that locates oil is the geology that creates the climatological and evolutionary history of the planet through deep time, and vice versa…and so on.

All of which to say is that a political movement that owes any debt of power to those who want the technology, the goodies, without the intellectual machinery needed to advance the inquiry wants something for nothing.

Science is the cultural value that we all think it is, I believe; it is part of the reward of being human that we get to ask and answer great questions.  But it is also, and historically speaking, first, the means by which we advance human wealth and well being.  One side in this election lacks the commitment to fundamental science that the other retains.

That’s an assertion more than an evidence-defended argument in this post, I know.  I’m assuming a certain amount of shared knowledge of, for example, the Palin wing of the GOP and its blithe disdain for the way science actually works.  John McCain may not agree — but he has harnessed his hopes to the energy and ambition of that wing of the GOP.  So forgive me here if I just assert my conclusions here.  I’ll write a more reasoned argument in their defense the next time this kind of thing flares up.  Whoever wins, America being America, I’m sure there won’t be long to wait.

In the meantime, please forgive the pure, “this is what I thought on my summer vacation” nature of this post, and vote. Vote early, and in case you had any residual doubt about this blog’s stance:  Vote for Obama/Biden.

Last thoughts before canvassing (1): Out of the Mouths of Babes…

Dropping my kid off at school he said to me, taking pity on my quivering state of feckless anxiety, that he wished kids could vote tomorrow, because then he would get all of his Lego Star Wars guys to vote for Obama.

That would rank as the only redeeming thought to come out of a truly all encompassing Sith/Jedi obsession, but I’ll take what I would get.

PS:  As  my niece notes, it is a fact that Darth Vader just endorsed McCain.  Just sayin…

John McCain’s Potemkin Candidacy — a science-ish perspective.

Matthew Yglesiashas a a post today that crystallized my sense of the idiocy upon which McCain has based his candidacy.

Yglesias writes that the formerly respected economist Douglas Holz-Eakin continued his pattern of inadvertent truth-telling about McCain’s lack of actual policy plans, this time in the area of support for college education.  DHE admits that the sum total of the McCain effort here will be…begging:

As president, Mr. McCain would take a bully pulpit approach to student aid, aides say. Rather than propose any new federal money, he would jawbone and publicly try to coax colleges to slow their rate of tuition increases using the federal tax exemptions they receive as leverage.

Also, we learn that support for Pell grants, the major federal support for low-income college goers, will be limited to saying that it would be nice if they were more valuable, without any money actually going to that goal.

What I realized reading this is that this is McCain’s entire approach to policy.  He wishes for things.  He promises “plans” that do not, on closer inspection, exist.  He clicks his heels and hopes for magic.

This is another way of saying that from a point of view shaped by thinking about and reporting on science, McCain’s candidacy is based not on any rational approach to problem framing and problem solution, but on magical thinking.

Let me give just a couple of examples.  McCain has, from the start of the financial crisis, railed against greed and corruption on Wall St. and has promised “to put a stop to it.”  But look through his website for any actual set of policy proposals that will actually alter the regulatory framework of American financial markets, and please, write me if you find anything that says what McCain would do to achieve these ends.  I’ve looked and looked and looked some more, and haven’t found anything.

Same thing with the War on Terror.  McCain says he knows how to get Osama bin Laden, but strangely hasn’t managed to get the message over to the Pentagon.

Same thing with his response to the housing crisis:  a promise not to let those who profited off the mortgage business get rich off the bailout, and a proposal that would offer only “deserving families” who could afford a new, 30 year mortgage on the balance owed a crack at a new loan — which by his own admission would benefit no more than 400,000 of the estimated 2.5 million foreclosures that could occur this year alone (740,000 were already in some stage of foreclosure by July.)

It goest on.  I’ve already blogged more than once about an approach to climate change that seems to depend on increasing the incentives for the use of more fossil fuels.  An approach to balancing the budget that increases the deficit and so on.

Compare all this with what it takes to do science.  The form of a scientific paper is often misleading, presenting a much smoother picture of the transformation of an idea into a result, but still, it provides a useful idealization of what it takes to accomplish something.

You have to know what you are trying to do, come up with a set of procedures that you and your peers will agree addresses the problem you’ve stated, perform the experiment, and report and interpret the results.

McCain’s approach is much more like that famous S. Harris cartoon, in which one savant has covered a blackboard with a thicket of math to cover steps 1 and 3 — but at the crucial middle stage we read “a miracle occurs.”  His colleague, looking over the scribblings says only “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”

I don’t know about  you, but I’m too tired right now to be polite — I’ve just come back from my third trip to canvas in New Hampshire this week, and I’m waking up in the dark of every night muttering the names of swing states.  So let me just say that we’ve had eight years of a combination of thuggery and magical thinking and I don’t want one minute more.

McCain lacks the intellectual rigor for the job he seeks.  No one who has tackled a real problem and knows what it takes should tolerate the kind of contempt his campaign has demonstrated for the hard thinking it takes to lead.

Clear enough?

Image:  The Flying Monkeys by W. W. Denslow from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, also known as The Wizard of Oz, a 1900 children’s novel by L. Frank Baum.  Source: Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

The Science Vote: An Entirely Unsurprising Endorsement by Your Faithful Blogger

The past week or so have seen a number of significant endorsements for Barack Obama coming from moderate Republicans (endangered, yes — perhaps less than a hundred breeding pairs in the wild), and in a few cases, genuinely much further right than those, (see Adelman, Kenneth, self described as not a neo-con, but a con-con.)

Adelman’s endorsement and that of the big dog on the block, Colin Powell, both emphasized the larger question of the qualities of the two men running for President over policy specifics. Adelman even allowed that he disagreed with Obama more than McCain on a point by point basis, but that he nonetheless will vote for Obama “primarily for two reasons, those of temperament and of judgment” — as evidenced by McCain’s erratic lurching during the onset of the financial meltdown and his choice of Sarah Palin respectively.

Those are reasons a national security voter would seize upon, and I agree that they are, or ought to be, sufficient to secure Obama an unprecedented unanimous vote next Tuesday.

But it occurs to me that in my discussions of McCain’s disqualifications for the office he seeks from the point of view of what would be best for American science, I’ve tended to focus on process, on political nuts and bolts, to the partial exclusion of the kind of overarching “quality of his mind” arguments that the Powell and Adelman endorsements emphasized.  See especially this post for what I mean, this, and this besides if you are a glutton for punishment.

So it’s a fact that in all likelihood McCain will gut science spending, and pick winners and loser for reasons outside the judgment of professionals as to the promising areas of pursuit (think of it as executive department earmarks) is amply supported by the evidence.

But the deeper danger for US science research and education that a McCain and Palin adminstration lies with their catastrophic failure to understand what is required to do science in the first place.  They lack the understanding, the breadth of knowledge and experience, the judgment to be stewards of the single national endeavour that matters most to our longterm security and  prosperity.

Why do I say so?  Because that conclusion seems to me by far the most reasonable interpretation of the statements made by Sen. McCain and Governor Palin, both recently and over much longer time frames.

These statements are by now familiar to most folks likely to be reading this blog, so I won’t go into my usual logorrhea here.  But the highlights bear remembering.

John McCain repeatedly, and Sarah Palin very recently confirmed that they do not understand the connection between specific inquiries and broader research programs.  McCain has made a habit of decrying research into bear DNA.  Palin, more catastrophically, recently made insufficiently ridiculed remarks about “fruit fly research in Paris France,” adding “I kid you not.”*

Kidding she wasn’t; celebratory in her ignorance she was.  Not to belabor the point, but if you like the prospects of modern gene-centered research in particular and molecular biology in general, you have to do a ton of research just like the two maligned projects.

Elect Palin and McCain if you want put perhaps the single most fruitful research area in all of current science into the category of things you laugh at because they sound wierd.  This is a case where the two candidates demonstrate that they lack  ability to understand and interpret the connections between particulars and the bigger picture.  I can’t think of a worse attribute in potential Presidents.

Then there is the ability to hold contradictory ideas in one’s head without noticing.  There are too many examples of this to list.  Some of them, I think, merely expedient willed ignorance — think of McCain’s hopelessly impossible budget proposals, with its freeze that isn’t a freeze, a promised end to the AMT, renewed tax cuts for the wealthiest, increases in military spending, stimulus and financial bailout to add to the half-trillion dollar current deficit and a promise to balance the budget in four or eight, or four, or eight years or wherever Douglas Holz-Eakin has left his abacus rightnow.

But others are either truly cynical — lies told to gain political power, again, not a qualification for the office such behavior is intended to secure — or signs of real intellectual blindness.

A simple and obvious case is McCain’s attempt to suggest that he is at once serious about controlling climate disruption and increasing fossil fuel use — see e.g. the gas tax holiday, still promised on his website, and drill, baby drill.  The two categories are incompatible.  You can’t control human impacts on climate unless you create incentives to cut carbon use — that is to say, make the price of fossil fuels go up.  McCain has said he supports a cap-and-trade mechanism to do just that (though one of the posts linked above describes just how hollow a promise that is), but such a mechanism is meaningless in the face of determination to expand the availability and drop the price of fossil fuels.  You can’t do one and have the other.

And promoting such policies, as McCain did just today in Florida, means, just to repeat it, that he is either lying when he promises one outcome or the other, or he simply cannot process the fact that the two policy goals are incompatible.  You choose which explanation you like.  It doesn’t matter.  No such person can be trusted to make sensible decisions about the future of science (or much else for that matter) for the United States.

Again: the point I am trying to make is not that McCain and Palin have articulated bad policies for American science, though they have, but that the way they think, their poor judgment about technical and scientific matters, their lack of capacity to grasp how the actual daily work of science proceeds matter more.  Their willingness to ridicule specific bits of research they don’t understand exacerbates the problem by diminishing the value our culture as whole places on inquiry and discovery.

The bottom line:  a President McCain or, should the plausible succession occur, a President Palin, do not possess the qualities required to nurture the future of American science. Their ascendancy would rob the enterprise of both the hard cash and the oxygen of cultural approbation it needs to survive.

On the other hand, if you care about the ability of the United States to retain its narrowing pre-eminence in scientific and technical research, you would do far, far better to vote for Senator Barack Obama and his Vice Presidential partner, Senator Joseph Biden.

*I don’t mean to say that Governor Palin wasn’t ridiculed for her fruit fly idiocy.  It’s just that she wasn’t derided enough.

Image:  Joseph Wright, “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump,” 1768.  Source:  The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202.

No, really, tell me what you think — Why I Love Charles Barkley Edition.

Sir Charles announces his intention to run for governor of Alabama in 2014.  Along the way, he discusses the issue of sociological rankings of his own and nearby states thusly:

“When asked if he was serious, the former Philadelphia 76er said, “I am, I can’t screw up Alabama.”

He added that his native state could only improve. “We are number 48 in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren’t going anywhere,” Barkley said. (h/t T-N C)

Now if only another famous politician would take note:  this is how you do straight talk, my man.

(Now if we could only suspend geography and perhaps partisan affiliation (I really don’t know) and get Basketball Jesus to run against Sir Charles.  The depth, breadth and sheer outrageous quality of the trash talk would threaten to end the universe as we know it.)

Socialists for McCain!

Outsourced to Barbara Ehrenreich.  Money quote:

After months of studying the candidates’ economic plans, we have determined that one of them, and only one, can be relied on to complete the destruction of capitalism. With high hopes and great confidence, the Socialist International Conspiracy endorses John McCain!

Read the whole column.  It’s funny enough to make you go….hmmmmmm.

Image:  Poster depicted a Hero of the Soviet Union, 1952.  The caption reads “Day after day, life becomes even happier!”

All the John McCains I Thought I Knew Are Dead.

There is a video that kind of came and went in the flurry of last week’s election noise, the wardrobe that cost three times the median income for a US family and all that.  It’s a French interview with the then young John McCain as a POW.

He’s clearly still hurting — a lot — from his injuries and he struggles to express himself a lot of the time.  He can muster up a little humor:  prisoner’s food “isn’t Paris” and more sense of loss and lonliness.  The passage at the end of the video where he tries to come up with a message for his wife would move anyone with a pulse, even as committed a partisan and McCain ’08 loather as myself.

Watching it, having just turned fifty myself, with, as President Clinton said, the awareness that I now have more yesterdays than tomorrows, and watching my own eight year old son, I was reminded of these lines from a poem I read just a few days ago.

Children vanish.

Adults — specters

of dead children.

(From “Children, Always Dying” by Aaron Zeitlin, translated from the Yiddish by Richard J. Fein in his upcoming collection With Everything We’ve Got:  A personal anthology of Yiddish poetry.)

I do not wish John McCain well at all in his current endeavor.  He has run a scurrilous, disgraceful campaign, putting the country at risk not just with his meretricious selection of Gov. Palin as his running mate, but in the way he has surrendered his candidacy to worst impulses of his party in recent weeks.  He lacks the temperament, the judgment, and even, this blog has argued, the right kind of experience to lead the United States.

But, but, but….

…he was a child once, a young man.  He suffered, and he had then a clarity, brutally enforced, about what does and does not matter.  While I fear for the country for McCain’s actions over the last few months, what saddens me most about his campaign is not the damage he is doing to the rest of us, but  the destruction his pursuit of this prize has done to that younger McCain.

That man died in the birthing of the catastrophically diminished one that we now see.

Here’s the video for those that missed it:

Dominoes

The political blogosphere (and the chattering classes generally) are still agog at Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama – not just the fact of it, but its devastating argument.

Now, via George Packer, I learn that of all people, Kenneth Adelman has opted for Obama over McCain.  As Packer says:

Ken Adelman is a lifelong conservative Republican. Campaigned for Goldwater, was hired by Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon, was assistant to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld under Ford, served as Reagan’s director of arms control, and joined the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld’s second go-round at the Pentagon, in 2001. Adelman’s friendship with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their wives goes back to the sixties, and he introduced Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in.

And yet, Adelman, hawk to the core who has never pulled the lever for a Democrat for President, has told Packer he will vote for Obama.  Go over there to read what made Adelman decide to do so.  The short form:  McCain’s temperament as revealed by his flailing during the financial crisis, and his judgement, as captured in his choice of Palin, pushed Adelman over the edge.

Once the dominoes start to fall — where do they go from here?

The Real McCain: Mark Salter/Andrew Sullivan edition

Andrew Sullivan takes (in my mind, justified) umbrage* at Mark Slater’s complaints about his coverage of Senator McCain.

But the more interesting passage in Salter’s ululation before Jeffrey Goldberg comes just before the offending (to Andrew) remarks.  Salter claims:

“I think the media is driven by a need to see this history happen. And I think they’ve rationalized it, they think they’re on the level with McCain, that he’s not the old McCain. But he is the old McCain. He just doesn’t know what happened to the old press corps… “

I actually think Salter has a point here, just not the one he thinks he has.

John McCain has long claimed a special list of attributes: he is experienced — which is to say knowledgeable in a particularly useful real-world way; he has the capacity to command; he gets things done; and above all, he is consistent, true to himself, moral.

The record, long before this campaign, shows otherwise.  He did not have a strong command resume as an officer; he was reckless at critical moments as a flier (multiple plane crashes and the rest).

His judgment on critical real world issues has often been demonstrably poor:  not just Iraq, but his recent performance in the financial crisis has revealed what appears to be a characteristic lurching from reaction to reaction, exactly the opposite of the reasoned analysis experience is supposed to inform. He has an incredibly thin record of legislative accomplishment for a three decade-member of congress and so on.

And above all, his claim of righteousness, of a quality of purity of thought and deed and heart that exceeds that of mortal congressfolk is a self-deluding fantasy.  You don’t have to look to the current campaign to see this.   You don’t have to look back to the Keating Five.

No, the most devastating single news report of this campaign cycle is to me the one the New York Times released documenting McCain’s routine corruption over many years as the lead Senator regulating — and picking winners and losers — at the very funky intersection between Washington politics and Indian gaming.  Go back and read it, and you will see a perfect illustration of an ordinarily unprincipled man, bowing to personal connections and enriching his friends through the arbitrary exercise of an essentially unchecked little trove of power.

All this is to say that McCain now is the same as he has ever been — just as Salter says; the only problem is the man he was is the man he is — an entitled, ambitious guy who thinks it his due to be President.  The only question from the beginning of this campaign was whether or not the press would notice that this emperor has no clothes.

And here again, Salter’s right.  The press has changed, even though McCain has not. The old press corps were willing enablers of the McCain fantasy.  Two things then happened:  Obama’s formidably disciplined campaign worked hard to put before the press their alternate view of McCain’s “reality,” and McCain himself — not a seraph, not an angel of Lord of Sedona — chose to run a campaign that would pit his virtue against the anti-American moral squalor of the elite press.

Marc Ambinder wondered at the time if calling out the press with 60 days to go to the election was a good idea.  It was not; it finally liberated an increasingly large number of observers from their fixation on the shadows on the wall of the cave.

So here’s to Mark Salter.  Articulating the problem is the first step to recovery, my man.

*what a glorious word, derived from the Latin umbra, meaning shade or shadow, working its way through medieval French to a first usage in English in 1426, as a more or less direct translation of the Latin.  250 years later, its journey through the minds of native speakers has transformed it to the point where it takes on its modern meaning, referring to the suspicion or feeling of having been slighted — first documented in 1680.  Having just spent the last two years writing about the late seventeeth century, I do understand just how useful such a meaning would have been in a society blessed with polemicists like Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe.

Image:  Men inspecting the first air crash near Toronto, 1911.  Source:  Wikimedia Commons.