The Daily Mail:

"They think that I was like this evil torturer. ... I wasn't,'' she says. "People don't realize I was just in a photo for a split second in time.''

I understand: Happens to me all the time. Why, I was on my way to the cafeteria the other day and just happened to step into a few dozen photos of naked civilians posed in a degrading erotic fashion. Like her, I couldn't help mugging it up for the camera, smiling, laughing, and pointing gleefully at their private parts. Happens to the best of us.

While admitting she made some bad decisions, England says it wasn't her place to question the "softening-up'' treatments sanctioned long before she arrived. "We were just pawns,'' said England, who's appealing her conviction and has her next hearing in July. "People were just playing us.''

They were interrogators? Then why did they have no provable associations whatsoever with the actual groups doing interrogations? And if she was set up, then why was she (and others) under investigation long before the public found out? Weird kind of set up, no? And why weren't all the actual interrogators at Gitmo and elsewhere similarly hung out to dry as "pawns"?

(I suppose Dick Cheney also forced her to have an on-the-job affair with Grainer? All part of the "softening up" process, no doubt.)

A jury of five Army officers, however, rejected England's claims that she was only following orders and trying to please the father of her child, former Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., who's currently imprisoned for his role.

Christopher Graveline, the lead prosecutor at her trial and now an assistant federal prosecutor in Michigan, said England and the other defendants are free to present their side to the media.

"But they presented the same facts to the jury, and the jury rejected them,'' he said.

England was convicted of conspiracy, mistreating detainees and committing an indecent act, one of 11 soldiers found guilty of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib....

The detainees in the photos involving England, for example, were not suspected terrorists, Graveline says, but some of the thousands of "Iraqi-on-Iraqi criminals'' at the massive prison. None of the men in the England photos was ever interrogated.

"The idea that she and her colleagues were working somehow for military intelligence is not supported by fact,'' he says.

Ach, what are facts when there's a narrative to pursue?

I've been hearing from the media about "right wing" seemingly-facsist groups in Europe, and have wondered, numerous times, if they're really rather more left-wing then right wing. Michael Moynihan at Reason lets that particular cat out of the bag. Just as suspected:

In a post yesterday, [Matthew] Yglesias "explains" British politics to his readers and offers this bit of shock at the two BNP seats: "The rise of the BNP is all the more shocking for the fact that UK voters already have a 'mainstream' far-right option available to them in the form of the UK Independence Party, so it's hard to rationalize BNP support as simply a sign of disgruntlement with the establishment options." This is misinformed nonsense. After being tipped by Spectator blogger Alex Massie, Yglesias acknowledges what has long been known to observers of British politics: the BNP siphons off Labour voters, not voters from UKIP. The coal mining town of Barnsley, where the BNP received 17 percent of the vote and is the birthplace of thuggish union leader Arthur Scargill, is a traditional Labour stronghold. So why would these voters be interested in UKIP, a Euroskeptic party that is the exact opposite of the BNP on economic issues? Yesterday I quoted MEP Dan Hannan's description of the BNP manifesto: ""[I]t wants nationalisation, subsidy, higher taxes, protectionism and (sotto voce) the abolition of the monarchy." Watch this video of BNP leader Nick Griffin announcing that his first speech before the EU parliament would address the scourge of "privatization."

Higher taxes? Nationalization? Opposing international free trade? Oddest "right wing" British group I've ever heard of. But what can one expect from a media which has also been calling die-hard Stalinists in Russia "the right"?

Telegraph, via Mark Steyn:

Canterbury is sufficiently gay, council inspectors rule

Whew! That's a relief!

A government watchdog decided that Canterbury in Kent does enough to promote homosexual culture, rejecting a complaint by local activists.

Who knew that the government had a duty to "promote homosexual culture"? And are there any other cultures government has a duty promote (British, for example?) or is just that one?

As part of the investigation, the council had to prove its inclusiveness by giving details of "touring plays and musicals, for example, which would be of interest to the LGBT community".

But did they ensure each were sufficiently fabulous? And what if these plays and musicals were of more interest to the B than the T? Or does the G get it all? And do they have a similar quota for checking to ensure the Muslim community has enough musicals? (Jihad! The musical!) Or would there be some other kind of stereotypical standard for them?

Chairman Andrew Brettell lodged a formal complaint with the Local Government Ombudsman claiming his initial letter to the council in November fell on deaf ears. Mr Brettell, in his 60s, said last month: "We do not believe the council want a thriving LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community in our city. The impression I get is that the council just doesn't want to know. "

Because, to quote George Stephanopoulos, we don't just want a government that cares, we want a government which can make people care.

When "Jane Galt" first appeared in the wake of 9/11, I found her a refreshing and interesting libertarian voice. But, increasingly, I just don't "get" her. She's a libertarian. Alright. Who supported... Barack Obama? Huh? Because libertarians are classical fans of large government and coercive social programs? Or because McCain was such a stalwart social conservative that he was threatening to install surveillance cameras in her bedroom?

Here she is, agreeing with leftist Ezra Klein, bold added:

Like you, Ezra, I have been struggling with what the word "right" means. If it is simply "who I happen to like," then I concur with you: Obama is the right man for his party, and McCain is the wrong one. Obama is not only personally inspiring, but he also seems to have a deep understanding of the value of markets and transparency; he aims to fix outcomes, not tinker with the process. McCain, on the other hand, shows little respect for spontaneous free order or suspicion of expanded state power; he seems to think that the main problem with the government is that the wrong people are pulling the strings.

While I agree McCain was hardly excellent in comparison, which part of Obama's entire campaign did she miss? Won't tinker with the process? Huh? Transferring money from Joe the Plumber to give it to the next guy in line wasn't "tinkering with the process"? (And how could one "fix outcomes" without fundamentally affecting the process?)

(And never mind the bits about transparency nor understanding the value of markets.)

Quite the prophetess, there, Megan.

Yet it wasn't her support of Obama, but rather this post ("Rethinking the Kindle") which caused me to lose every last shred of respect for her. After complaining that Amazon's Kindle won't allow her unlimited downloads of books she's "purchased", she then notes (bold added, again):

We were thinking of becoming a two-Kindle family. Now I'm rethinking the one I've got. I'm a total supporter of hard DRM. But if I have to wipe my Kindle, or upgrade to a new one, I don't want to find out I have to buy all my books again.

What kind of bizarro libertarian is "a total supporter of hard DRM"? I mean, I could see supporting intellectual property laws, with fair use modifications. I could see agreeing companies should be able to encrypt any way they'd like — and hackers should be able try to decrypt anything they'd like, provided they don't pirate intellectual property. I can even understand those who say that IP laws have been more trouble than help, and should be dropped entirely.

But DRM? Where the government spends its time and effort making sure that people can't do whatever they'd like to hardware they've purchased? Where the government spends its time and effort trying to stop Joe Hacker from decrypting a block of data? (Hey, let's let people sell meth and heroin — but don't let a guy load De-CSS into his own Linux box to watch his own DVDs?)

Megan, the "libertarian" thinks that's consistent with minimal government?

And regarding the Kindle, I don't weep for her: she's shocked — shocked, I say! — to discover that companies would try to limit her use of controlled materials via DRM. That's been true of every single DRM system out there, so far. But for Megan, who has a column in the Atlantic where she advises so many others on how to understand the world, this is apparently some kind of huge revelation.

What is with people these days?

I increasingly feel I've slid into a parallel universe.

I remember the screams when Congressional Republicans (and many Democrats) voted to reform bankruptcy law — in ways that, from what little I heard, struck me as generally reasonable. But what about this?

Many dads have lost their jobs or suffered significant drops in income. Because it is difficult for fathers to get their child support orders modified downward, many decent, loving fathers are being jailed because they can't keep up with their child support obligations.

Ed O'Donnell, chairman of the New Jersey State Bar Association's Family Law Executive Committee, says that it "usually requires in excess of six months before a judge will say, '[The job loss] is possibly a real change in circumstances'... Six months is a long time, when you're desperate."

This problem is creating many outrageous, well-documented injustices.

For example, in one case highlighted by the Boston Globe, a divorced father who worked in the real estate industry had been paying $6,000 a month in child support, plus additional expenses such as health insurance and tuition. When the real estate industry crashed, he fell behind and, with an application for a downward modification still pending, was handcuffed in court and jailed for 30 days.

Nobody should ever do time in jail for debt. Except for fathers.

For a period of time, as a teenager, I had fairly bad acne and, at one point, was looking into Accutane — touted then as a sort of "miracle drug" in that category. I remember a physician likening the mechanism which produced acne as being a sort of light bulb; Accutane, he explained, "snuffed out that light bulb."

This sounded a bit disturbing, in light of how little we know about the body: "Isn't it possible we might need that?" (I mean, let's remember how thalidomide and lobotomies worked out.) I didn't see it as a religious question in any sense, but somehow this prompted the good doctor to launch a speech about creationism, and how evolution supposedly implied that there were many parts of our bodies which served no useful purpose at all — the appendix, for example.

I was, as they say, nonplussed. Was it somehow a point of religious dogma to assume we hadn't yet discovered every function for every element in the body? Was it a tenant of some faith that we probably shouldn't "snuff out" elements of our biochemistry before we fully understood what they were doing? But apparently someone had a strong need to turn a simple question from an acne-ridden teenager into a religious lecture! (And secularists allege Christians run around pushing their faith on people at inappropriate moments?)

I was reminded of this recently, as I've been reading a bit about "Junk DNA" — segments of the genome which don't seem to code for anything in particular. As with my doctor, this topic once seemed to have an almost religious import for Richard Dawkins:

It consists of multiple copies of multiple copies of junk, 'tandem repeats', and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn't seem to be used in the body itself. Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.

Science entirely aside, this is a bizarre theological argument. If the mere existence of something which didn't immediately appear useful disproved God's existence, then why wait for the discovery of junk DNA? Why not point to the nearest pebble, which, at least in itself, the world could undoubtedly live without? The ancients looked to the sky and understood, in religious awe, they were a very, very tiny part of creation. Dawkins could have pointed out that those stars were strong evidence for God's non-existence, given that they apparently could have lived their lives just fine without most or all of them.

Me: "Why is there lint in my dryer?"
Dawkins: "It's further proof of God's nonexistence, since it serves no obvious purpose!"
Me: "Um, since it just answered a major theological question, wouldn't that mean it just served a very important purpose?"
Dawkins: "Shut up."

Sticking, for another moment, to the theological, one of the weird things about certain atheists is that they seem to know exactly what God must be like in order to exist. (Given that God doesn't, they believe, exist, this is a very strange conviction indeed — to know so intimately something which has never been.) In Dawkins' case, God apparently must not exist as long as unanswered questions do. The Greeks wondered what purpose the brain served, given that the liver was the seat of intelligence and the soul. Well, it proved God didn't exist, because, after all, why would an intelligent creator have put a completely useless mass of spongy grey matter in our skull?

Getting back to the science: Time has not been kind to my doctor, nor, for that matter, to Dawkins on this point. Accutane turned out to have a rather long laundry list of debilitating — and often permanent — side effects (as one might expect when "snuffing out" some bodily function), and is only now given under "close medical supervision." We've also learned that the seemingly useless tonsils and appendix both play an important role in immune system development. And that "junk" DNA?

Researchers the world over are confirming that non-coding DNA holds critical clues to a vast range of diseases; breast cancer, HIV, Crohns disease, Alzheimer's, heart disease, ovarian and skin cancer... the list is growing daily. A leading figure in world genetics, Prof. John Mattick, recently claimed that, "the failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology."

Nope, nothing useful there.

If creationists were supposed to spend a lot of time pondering why God would allow huge swaths of "junk DNA" (when it was felt to be such) then shouldn't, conversely, atheists — or at least Richard Dawkins — be spending a lot of time admitting this must be — by his rules, anyway — evidence for God? Or does he prefer to live in the realm of non-falsifiable beliefs? (Code in my world for "non-science".) The latter, apparently, given his conspicuous absence of a public mea culpa on this point.

Of course, the idea was idiotic in the first place. Wouldn't there be an evolutionary disadvantage in carrying around organs like the appendix and tonsils which, it was felt, had no use? Since these sometimes must be removed to save lives: if they provided no larger compensating benefit, wouldn't a version of the creature lacking them have a distinct evolutionary advantage? And even storing and replicating mere "junk DNA" takes energy: wouldn't cells reproduce faster and cheaper without it, also conferring an evolutionary advantage? These would seem rather obvious arguments in retrospect. And yet....

Just as Einstein spent years trying to expunge "inflation" from his general theory of relativity because he (and so many of his peers) intensely disliked the implications of such — when, in fact, it pointed accurately toward the big bang — so also Dawkins and others inadvertantly did their best to keep us from discovering one of the most interesting aspects of the human genome. It is said that belief in "design" isn't scientific because it produces no testable conclusions. Really? Then shouldn't Dawkin's assertions to the contrary have been equally untestable? And, once falsified, shouldn't it have been admitted, then, that had most of his community either kept their religion out of their research — or started from the opposite view — that we would be further ahead, scientifically, than we are today?

Since (as Mickey Kaus notes) this study would undoubtedly have gotten a lot more media attention if it had found the exact opposite: Education Week — NCLB Found to Raise Scores Across Spectrum.

VDH:

Iran, remember, has no such reluctance about meddling. It endorsed Bush in the 2004 presidential race — to the delight of the Kerry campaign. For six years, it has tried to murder Americans in Iraq and destabilize the Iraqi democracy. It has killed Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and done its best to thwart democratic government in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Iraq. How odd that Iranian theocrats have no worries about violently overthrowing democracy abroad, while we are terrified of supporting democracy by words alone.

Can you remember a bad piece of furniture you had in college? What if it followed you around for the rest of your life? Or what if you had to dress now like you did when you were younger? Tattoos are like that: once acquired, you're kind of stuck with them. Thanks to the miracle of the tattoo pen, a drunken or ill-considered impulse can almost instantly become your lifelong companion.

According to the Daily Mail, Kimberly, left, says she got 56 star tattoos instead of 3 by mistake. The tattoo artist says nonsense: she asked for it, knew what she wanted, but blamed him when her family freaked out at the results.

Though they're often completely convinced they are, kids aren't very smart. They do all sorts of things which will appear stupid in retrospect, when they're older. (Sometimes, only several hours older.) This poor girl, because of a bad decision (either to fall asleep with a man who spoke a different language was tattooing her, or to ask for what she got) will go through her entire life as a freak. Yeah, I know, people shouldn't judge, etc. But nothing screams "White trash!" and/or "Poor judgment!" like a face full of ink. No amount of political activity and protected-category-ism for the modified and inked will negate that unfortunate first impression.

It's enough to tempt even this small-government conservative to favor a law requiring a waiting period before "getting ink done." Ten years, I think, should allow ample time for consideration.

Daily Mail:

[James Wright] quotes [Hendrix's manager Michael] Jeffery as saying: 'I was in London the night of Jimi's death and together with some old friends ...we went round to Monika's hotel room, got a handful of pills and stuffed them into his mouth ...then poured a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe....' John Bannister, the surgeon who tried to revive Hendrix at hospital, said he was convinced he had drowned in red wine. Yet Hendrix had very little alcohol in his bloodstream.

Either way: what a tragedy.

Famed Science Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once noted that "any technology which is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic." For example, the first Native Americans to come in contact with Europeans probably thought their weapons a kind of enchantment. Thus, in the world of science fiction, this notion implies that advanced civilizations might have abilities which would seem almost "magical" from our perspective — time travel, teleportation, mental communication, honest government, functioning socialism, etc.

I've been watching the reboot of Doctor Who lately, and have encountered (and finally clearly understood) a new way this rule can be applied. Growing up, the few episodes of Doctor Who I saw (Tom Baker, mostly) seemed to be straight Sci-Fi: Doctor Who traveled in time, worked with a robot dog (and some carefully chosen eye candy), and generally battled beings which were part organic, part machine (Cybermen, Daleks, etc). While an element of that remains, a good fraction of newer episodes run Arthur Clarke's rule backwards: They present what appears to be nothing more than traditional occultic or supernatural tales, told in the usual way, and yet pretend — with little more than superficial hand-waving — that they're really telling a "science" or "science fiction" story.

For example, in "The Unquiet Dead", Doctor and companion find themselves in Charles Dickens' neighborhood, where zombies are being raised from the dead by spirits which can be contacted through a seance using the help of a maid with clairvoyant powers. The spirits ask to possess human bodies and do so — to malevolent effect.

This could be any traditional religious story about the dangers of contacting demons and allowing them power over humanity. But here it's science because the "demons" or "spirits" are really a race called the "Gelth", who are using a "rift in spacetime" to contact them, from another part of the galaxy. Why should a seance be the means of such contact? Do spacetime rifts respond especially the conditions of a seance — a darkened room, people joining hands? Can maids open such rifts by their permission? (Erm, um, it's because of some kind of "science" you wouldn't understand! Really!)

Later, in "Tooth and Claw" Queen Victoria, Doctor, and companion are menaced by a werewolf. The werewolf is really a human "possessed" by an alien intelligence, his change triggered by moonlight. The Doctor "figures out" (he read the script, apparently) that if a werewolf is created by moonlight, he can be killed by lots of moonlight.

Once again: What is so special about sunlight reflected off moon rocks that it could kill an "alien-possessed" human, when regular sunlight couldn't? How does an alien "possess" a human mind and body, anyway? And why, as mentioned in the episode, should the creature only be killed by silver bullets, not bullets made of other similarly weighty metals? Yet again, it's surely some kind of "science" that is much too complicated for us primitive 20th century humans to understand.

The list of such episodes runs on and on: In "Fear Her", an alien "possesses" a little girl and makes things happen by forcing her to draw pictures. (Why draw pictures? Why not just do each act directly?) In "The Satan Pit", a small group confronts what appears to be Satan. (The Doctor says his claim of existing before the universe is absurd — but then himself offers such a claim in a future episode.) In "The Shakespeare Code", three "witches" make things happen by incanting spells. (Why should mere sounds in the air have such effects? The Doctor explains by saying something poetic, but which makes no sense.) These witches can weaken you by naming your "real name" — an idea borrowed directly from popular demonology.

Such motifs and devices even show up in the more apparently "Sci-Fi" episodes: In "The Christmas Invasion", just as a voodoo practitioner can control others with a sample of hair, aliens somehow control the minds of humans by having a sample of a drop of blood. (Those with the same blood type are affected. As if you had a sample of a blond hair, and were thus only able to control the minds of blond-haired people.) In "The Idiot's Lantern", an energy-based alien exploits the coronation of Queen Elisabeth II to steal people's souls — and faces! (reminiscent of some primitive people's beliefs about mirrors and photos — and why not take their arms, or even buttocks?) — stealing them via (and storing them in) television sets. (Why not radios, which were far more popular? Or even auto starters, electric blenders, and washing machines?)

None of this makes much sense. Nor does it seem that the writers are even trying most the time, to offer up much of a pretense. Just tell a story about a ghost, demon, vampire, werewolf, voodoo charm, or witch, and add a quick quip, somewhere in the episode, stating "This is science!" and thus it shall be!

Certainly, others have toyed with such ambiguity before: Clive Barker blurs the line in his Hellraiser series (is it hell, or another dimension? — though the series is considered more horror than SF); CS Lewis told a religious story in SF garb in the Perelandra series (though Lewis's fictional words are typically considered fantasy); the "witches" in Madeline L'Engle's books were actually distant stars, presenting themselves in human form. (Though they never did anything very "witchy" — mostly, they served as interplanetary tourguides and taxi drivers.)

But what's surprising here is Doctor Who's turn: from straight SF to half-'n'-half occult stories, dressed up in materialistic, science fiction-y garb. These spiritualistic or occultic motifs aren't secondary to the story (as, say, the (non-)"witches" in L'Engle's works), more often they're the main focus.

I've always viewed materialism (atheism, ardent agnosticism) as a transitional form; scraping people off traditional religions, promising them "science" and "progress" (and that they're somehow "brighter" than the rest of that ilk) but often ultimately deposits many adherents in far stranger territory — New Age, occultic beliefs, contact with aliens, getting guidance from crystals, Gaia-worship, Marxism, etc. Consider Houdini, who spent the first part of his life debunking seances, and the last part of his life paying for them. Or Arthur Conan Doyle, who rose to fame on the cooly logical persona of Sherlock Holmes, but ultimately founded the London Psychic Society. Or (today) Sam Harris, the New Atheist who excoriates Christians but advocates Zazen-style meditation.

As Chesterton remarked (paraphrased:) when people stop believing in God, they don't end up believing in nothing — they end up believing in anything. Materialism doesn't ultimately satisfy the human hunger for transcendent meaning and spirituality. So we dress up Buddhism, Hinduism, or eighteenth century penny-dreadful spiritualism as "science" or "science fiction" to try to fill some of the gaps, put some of the richness back into our lives, and send a few chills up our bored materialistic spines.

But, beyond entertainment, those who adopt such a stance (and I've encountered it more often than I might have imagined otherwise) it's both bad science and bad religion — moreso since it doesn't even admit as much. Their belief in and longing for magic — being as advanced as they are — is just a form of science which has yet to be discovered.

Part 31 of a potentially endless series...

Why do they hate us abroad? In part, because a dedicated group of fellow Americans, and other members of the international left, run a relentless campaign in foreign newspapers convincing readers that America is one undoubtedly one of the most vicious, evil, and vile forces in the world.

Today's example, a guy named Gaither Stewart (the picture is worth a thousand words) who hails from North Carolina and makes his money telling Europeans and Russians just how evil his homeland is. In Pravda:

From my vantage point I experience forms of Americanism chiefly in the context of the hegemonic tendencies, bullying globalization, arrogance, militarism and imperialism of the United States of America. One glaring, arrogant example is the construction of yet another US military base in the ancient city of Vicenza in north Italy, where (anachronistically) American soldiers in military dress jog over the cobbled streets of the city center, as if it were wartime, as if it were theirs, past cathedrals and Palladium architecture, weaving and dodging among startled women and children. This military display is a form of the Americanism become anti-Americanism in Europe.

Germany complains that we're evil for closing a military base there, and now we're evil because a few of our soldiers jogged through Vincenza? (And somehow I doubt they did it full military dress, as implied.) Oppression through jogging. When will the hegemony end?

What is it, this American morality? This righteousness? Is it our religious roots in the fable of the Puritan settlers, those super religious people who in their hardships were bigots, perhaps also practitioners of incest and racists soon morphing into dogmatic chauvinists who early-on labeled their dissidents and different-thinkers witches and demons.

The Puritans practiced incest! Did you know that? News to me. These Puritans also were apparently more racist than anyone else at the time, despite, historically, the fact they were leaders in the abolitionist movement. And never mind that those doing the accusing in the Witch Trials were, in fact, dabblers in the occult themselves. But forget history -- I'm sure the good Russian readers of Pravda are eating this up.

Pre-Americanism! The same Americanism initiated then which today fosters the rights of the rich to become richer, the strong to trample the weak and the contempt for and the crushing of anything smacking of the social in our land, real trade unions and, heaven forbid, universal health care.

Wow! That is evil! They allow ... can you believe it ... capitalism! — where poor and regular people can become wealthy, and wealthy people sometimes get even wealthier. Oh no! (This never happens in Russia, apparently.) And we fail to have nice, strong unions like those in France and Italy — which can shut down the state on a whim to demand higher wages. And — can you believe the atrocity? — we don't have (completely) socialized medicine! (Much of it is, but there are still some holdouts.)

Incredible! The evils!

Meanwhile, out in the empire, as long as it is distant, the Puritan legacy instills blindness to the use of cluster bombs from the stratosphere and hidden torture in places with foreign names like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib ... and while our neighbors in Haiti eat dirt, literally?

Again, never mind that Italy (and Russia, of course) regularly use far harsher tactics than those found in Gitmo. And that, far from turning a "blind eye", the US military had already discovered, shut down, and was prosecuting those involved at Abu Ghraib long before the press got involved.

It's all the fault of those Christianist Pilgrims!

And of course, Haiti has far more influence from France than the US, being a former French colony. But, being a European nation, no French responsibility is discernible! Nor does the author care to note that Cuba, which has fully embraced his socialist ideals, is far nearer to the US -- and far poorer! No: poverty, in his narrative, is not caused by a lack of economic opportunity, but by American citizens having too much patriotism.

Surely there must be another point of view? Something to redeem this awful nation, Amerikkka?

When I asked a friend and writer colleague in heartland America what he understands by Americanism, he stunned me and overwhelmed me with the following:

"From birth I have been immersed, enculterated, inculcated, and surrounded by the myriad toxic components of the 'American Dream' or 'Americanism.' There are some admirable aspects to 'America' but by and large we live in a spiritual/psychological sewer." He then listed two dozen aspects of Americanism, which I repeat here: narcissism, greed, hyper-individualism, consumerism, capitalism, corporatism, faux democracy, media whoredom, asphyxiation of the Left, Christian fundamentalism, Mammon worship, moral retardation, militarism, imperialism, celebrity worship, wars on drugs and terrorism, prison industrial complex, mean-spiritedness, self-absorption, American exceptionalism, bullying, anti-intellectualism and the abandonment of many uninsured and homeless in the wealthiest nation on earth.

What a terrible list of sins! We "asphyxiate the left" -- presumably by questioning their beliefs in articles like this one. We're guilty of "greed", never mind that Americans give more, per capita, than anyone else on earth. We're guilty both of a lack of spiritual values ("Mammon worship"!) and -- at the very same time -- "Christian fundamentalism"! Unlike the British, we worship celebrities! Unlike the French, we're "mean spirited"! (Gosh, North Carolina must have been an awful place!) We're guilty both of "corporatism" (in which the state directs corporations) and "capitalism" (where the corporations are presumably left unrestrained). And, like every nation on the planet (Italy certainly included), there are still homeless people here.

And, richest of ironies, we're accused — before the Russians no less — of "faux democracy." Because, you know, our elections are just a rigged sham — whereas Putin was elected fair and square.

I'm sure we're also too tall and much too short, too fat, and too thin, too outspoken, and much too quiet! Really now, is there any sin of which we're not guilty?

The article rambles on this style, deploying one Marxist trope after another -- Americans have a "false consciousness", we're guilty of "imperialism", and, despite the fact that probably the majority of us work relatively cushy jobs, with limited hours, in air-conditioned offices (where a number of us -- you know who you are -- spend much of the day sending IMs and "tweets"), American capitalism is utterly "savage and vicious." (I presume he was once forced to actually work to earn money?) And American democracy is a "sham" because we don't elect enough representatives of the far left. Like our dear author.

And that's only installment 1. Part 2 can be found here!

I can understand why Pravda would run this -- it's a lot safer to criticize and incite readers to hate the US than their own president Putin. We're not going to feed their editors Polonium-laced sushi. But as for Mr. Stewart's — his dishonesty on so many historical and contemporary points is rather less excusable.

Why do they hate us?

They hate us, in no small part, because our own leftists, angered that they and their compatriots are not in (sufficient) power, pour our their bitterness and disdain in one poison pen letter after another in the foreign press. They present themselves as experts on, and representatives of, the US — condemning their inferior fellow citizens en masse because their native land hasn't yet been remade after their own image. If they can't possess it for themselves, then they'd rather see it destroyed — if not actually, then at least verbally, in effigy, before the whole world.

Interesting Wired article.

On one hand, his alleged justification:

But to Tobias, pissing off The Man isn't the point, not entirely. Nor is it, entirely, to make himself famous or rich — not that he's allergic to either outcome. The point, he says, is to "make [stuff] better." Tobias thinks of himself as a humble public servant. When he attacks the Kryptonite bike lock or the Club (or those in-room safes at Holiday Inn or Caesars Palace), he's not a bad guy — he's just Ralph Nader with a slim jim, protecting consumers by exposing locks, safes, and security systems that aren't actually locked, safe, or secure. [....]

Tobias shrug[s] off [...] concerns, along with the hate mail. Scaring citizens to attention is part of his educational program. "Do you really think ignorance will keep you safe?" he asks. "Is it even an option?"

On the other hand, when a lock came to market which avoided many of the vulnerabilities Tobias had already exposed:

Tobias saw potential in Bluzmanis — and a possible partner. By July 2006, the two were meeting regularly in the back of a Miami locksmith shop, hunting for the Medeco's vulnerabilities... The lock-cracking quest took on the intensity of a recurring fever dream as night after night they employed paper clips, needle-nose pliers, a plane sander, safe-deposit key blanks, plastic sheets, lock-picking tools, tension wrenches, and lots and lots of paper. They divided the Medeco3 mechanism into a series of problems, then devised theories to attack each in order.

It appears the guy's deluded or dishonest about his own motivations — and thus, most likely, impact. I understand the theory: there are a bunch of bad guys out there who can open your locks in some simple way, and we're just ignorant. Expose the vulnerability, get the public scared, they demand upgrades, and ta-da, we're living in a safer world.

Except the world doesn't work like that, and, apparently, neither does Tobias. Look at his work on the Medeco3 lock: here's a lock which, as far as we know, is actually fairly secure — tellingly, even Tobias apparently didn't know of any obvious vulnerabilities. So it wasn't the case that there were a bunch of thieves who were already cracking them, and lock purchasers were just blithely unaware of the real, existing risk.

Instead, Tobias set out to work really hard to figure out how to crack it. And, when he finally (meaning it was far from obvious) figures out how, he notifies the company, and demands they publicly admit the vulnerability. Unsurprisingly -- for reasons both good (they don't want to alert thieves) and bad (disappointed customers, shame) they don't want to go public with the information.

So what does Tobias do in response? I'm sure you've guessed by now...

Tobias wrote another encyclopedic manual, called Open in Thirty Seconds, and in 261 excruciatingly detailed pages, he and Bluzmanis explained exactly how they exploited the Medeco vulnerabilities — and exactly how you could exploit them, too. They spelled out not only picking and bumping attacks but other Medeco3 hacks as well and crowned the work with a cheeky introduction "thanking" Clyde Roberson of Medeco for "making this possible."

Let's review: This is, by Tobias's own admission, the best lock in the world. Tobias is one of the smartest and most obsessed locksmiths on the planet. He certainly is not representative of your typical, or even high-level, criminal. (Much less given that he had to work with another exceptionally brilliant locksmith, for months, on this particular problem.)

So now what are all Medeco lock-owners supposed to do? Upgrade? To what? While he's exposing Medeco to shame, he's also exposing the rest of us to very real risks which did not exist before he published the information. He's not protecting us from the bad guys, he's arming the bad guys against the rest of us.

The same goes even for more mundane situations like bump-keyed locks. Imagine some woman lives in an apartment with a vulnerable lock. Her place can be entered quickly and easily. She could be raped, or her valuables, or identity, stolen. So what: she's raising a kid on her own, working the night shift, and supposed to also be petitioning the landlord — who's a giant company — for better locks? To what avail? Are they likely to upgrade all their locks? Fat chance. And even if they, did, to what? A Medeco lock?

Yes, some locks will be upgraded if he makes the information more public. But it's also true that more people will know how to break the lock. What's the numerical trade-off there? And, more importantly, who is protected first? The rich and powerful. Who is left exposed longest? The poor and weak.

And what of his motives? Yes, I know, Tobias is shocked and enraged that Medeco didn't take him seriously. (He may know locks, but he seems to know very little about human nature.)

Sitting across from Tobias at dinner, protecting my food from flying spittle, I don't really need to ask if he's pissed off. But I do anyway. "What?" he shrieks, alarming the waiter. "Of course I'm pissed off! Everybody should be pissed off! It's not about me. It's about what these locks protect..."

Yet it clearly isn't about "what those locks protect." He himself admitted they were the best in the world. There's nothing for exposed customers to upgrade to. In such a situation, by publicly revealing the exploit, he showed he's not at all concerned about what those locks protecting. Not. One. Iota.

The irony here is that while Tobias is furious that Medeco was thinking only of themselves, he himself apparently has the exact same blind spot.

I want to be clear: I'm not against white-hat cracking, if handled the right way. Richard Feynman, for example, used to pick the file cabinet locks at Oak Ridge -- and then notify the administration. But when they didn't fix the problem, he didn't publish a manual on it, and notify the public (and thus our enemies) of our reliance upon vulnerable file cabinets to store nuclear secrets.

AP (ultimately):

The Associated Press has learned the Obama administration is in talks with the remote South Pacific island nation of Palau to resettle some or all of 17 Chinese Muslims now held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. . . The officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the delicacy of the negotiations. They said the U.S. is prepared to give Palau up to $200 million in aid to accept the Uighurs.

Geez. That's a heck of a lot of money to pay, per terrorist, to generate the good feeling that you're no longer storing them in Gitmo — by moving them to a nearly identical (or worse?) facility somewhere else. The sad part is that most people can't hope to earn anywhere near that much in their entire lifetime.

Daylight savings time disrupts humans' natural circadian rhythm

When people living in many parts of the world move their clocks forward one hour in the spring in observance of daylight saving time (DST), their bodies' internal, daily rhythms don't adjust with them, reports a new study appearing online on October 25th in Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The finding suggests that this regular time change — practiced by a quarter of the human population — represents a significant seasonal disruption, raising the possibility that DST may have unintended effects on other aspects of human physiology, according to the researchers.

Okay, can we stop this already?

According to Richard Lloyd Parry, writing in The London Times, North Korea wouldn't be any trouble at all if weren't for former President George W. Bush! Kim Jong Il was, apparently, not a bad guy until "Dubya turned [him] into a monster"!

Politics entirely aside, and fresh on the heels of remarks about the British problem with "irony" -- would you take political advice from a guy who writes like this?

Barack Obama has made it clear that, in principal, he will talk to anyone. But in eight years North Korea has become a different regime...

Yup. The author -- and apparently all the much-ballyhood multiple layers of checks above him, never heard (as most of us did in the second or third grade) that "the principal is your pal", and has no idea of the difference between one's abstract guiding moral rules ("principles") and the main person in charge of something ("principal").

(Oh, don't get me wrong -- I'm sure many Americans would make such a mistake too. But many of them are driving taxis, working with computers, or serving food -- not offering foreign policy advice and/or editing a newspaper.)

That aside, this is a an example of raw propaganda, attempting to convince the reader (no doubt effectively, from what I'm seeing) that history, as it was, never happened.

During the Clinton administration, we almost came to war -- real, actual war -- with Kim Jong Il. Much to Clinton's ire (initially), Jimmy Carter inserted himself into the situation, and brokered a "peace" agreement, whereby N Korea promised to be good (the agreement had no effective means of enforcement), shut down his nuclear development program, and in return we'd give him lots of money, food, and -- let us recall -- nuclear technology. Most of us predicted, at the time, that Kim Jong Il would continue to cheat, and that giving him nuclear technology and piles of money would only accelerate his program.

In short: Take a dictator who's interested in developing nukes, leave him alone, give him cash and nuclear technology, and ... he'll develop nukes! That would seem a rather obvious sequence of cause and effect, no?

The present Korean crisis is a by-product of the complex of instincts, prejudices and vested interests best identified by a single name: George W. Bush.

Ah, no, apparently. Kim Jong Il's nuclear program was apparently caused by George W Bush's 'prejudices'! Who knew?

At the tail end of the Clinton presidency, Kim Jong Il received a cordial visit from none less than the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. So one can imagine his confusion when Mr Bush came to power. The new Administration was not just cool towards North Korea, but grossly insulting to an extent rare even between countries at war.

Yes, Ms Albright even gave the Dear Leader a basketball. So was absolutely clear, despite what later evidence demonstrated, that they must have completely abandoned all nuclear weapons research and development. The basketball cannot lie.

Mr Kim, according to Mr Bush, was a "pygmy", and "a spoilt child". "I loathe Kim Jong Il," he told the journalist Bob Woodward, who described the President "waving his finger in the air".

This private conversation, recorded by Bob Woodward (the same Woodward who had CIA head Ben Casey giving him dramatic deathbed revelations) -- and published only a few years ago in State of Denial -- is what caused Kim Jong Il to resume his quest for nuclear weapons many years before that? Never mind evidence he'd been "cheating" all along, through the Clinton and early Bush administrations.

North Korea was lumped in with Iraq and Iran as the third member of the Axis of Evil. In 2003 Iraq was invaded. What North Korean dictator with his wits about him would fail to conclude that he might be next?

So if the US actually invading Iraq is what allegedly forced North Korea to develop nukes, then why were they also pursuing them in the first place, a decade before Bush took office? The narrative makes no sense: the problem (which came first) is supposed to have been caused by the reaction to it (which came later).

The risible Six-Party Talks, a round table intended to save the US from having to deal directly with the North, served only to distract attention from the staggering thing that was unfolding. In his final two years, finally sensing what they had allowed to happen, Mr Bush's people executed a panicky U-turn and engaged in direct talks. Far too late.

Actually the "risible six-party talks" happened because the left was criticizing the approach taken before that -- direct talks. It was folly, they said, that we should talk to Kim Jong Il without involving the other regional powers. Then, when Bush aligned his policy with that particular "wisdom", his critics simply switched views: "Four legs good, two legs better!" Oh sorry -- that was Animal Farm (no different, really, though).

... a covert nuclear programme would have taken years to come to fruition. As it turned out, Mr Kim was able to do it at speed, in full view, because the leader of the free world was too proud and stubborn to sit down and talk.

But North Korea did have a covert nuclear program, and was able to run it for decades. And Mr Parry himself admits that nothing short of an invasion would have halted the program, so it's no clear why he fingers the lack of direct talks as the crucial misstep.

But this is the way of the world, isn't it? Through newspapers and television, the left demands (and gets) its way: First, Carter's agreement, then ineffective UN inspections, then multiparty talks, etc. Each time, the right says: this ineffective, this will result in North Korea having nukes. Then, when each leftist program fails, right on schedule, it becomes their opponent's fault.

The peace agreement was scuttled not because Kim Jong Il was found to be cheating, but only because Bush had expressed dislike of a genocidal dictator (our leaders must only praise men like Kim Jong Il). Whereas Bush has been criticized for his allegedly unilateralism, now he's an idiot because he involved our regional allies in important talks, quite in line with what critics like Mr Parry were demanding. The decision to take a dictator's word that wouldn't cheat on an agreement -- and the decision to hand him nuclear technology -- played no role whatsoever. And the solution -- though rendered almost impossible now, because a non-leftist was once elected in the US -- would be even more talks, to take Kim Jong Il at his word yet some more.

Like most Americans, I'm a bit of an Anglophile. The "special relationship", James Bond, Monty Python, Yes Minister (and much of the BBC telecomedy tableau), the pomp and circumstance of the Royals, the accents -- love it all.

But I'm sad to say I'm being rapidly disabused of a particular impression I'd had since boyhood: that Brits are, on the whole, quite a bit more knowledgeable or intelligent, or at least have better character than Americans. Of course, I've always suspected this was probably wrong, on the basis that IQ doesn't hang around any particular nation, etc. But still, I like my idealistic vision of the UK.

The first chink in the wall was an (Oxford, I think it was) linguist who stated that Americans and Brits diverged linguistically mostly because the British accent changed. Hmmm. Then came increased exposure to the BBC, where I started to notice many stupid little linguistic mistakes -- like saying someone was being "pressurized" where the reporter mean "pressured" or "coerced". Not pretty. Then my more recent observation that Brits seemed to have trouble handling acronyms lately.

Today, Rachel Lucas drives another nail in that coffin by complaining about the widespread British confusion about "irony" -- the misunderstanding of which is also an ongoing pet gripe of mine. Apparently, they often say Americans don't do "irony". (Huh?)

First, and might I note, ironically, it seems her contacts are using it only to mean "sarcasm", a small subset of ironic expression -- a bit like saying "beverages" every time one means coffee, specifically. If you heard someone speaking this way, you wouldn't get the idea they were as much of an expert on said "beverages" as some who varied their usage to connote nuance. As Rachel notes about a tongue-in-cheek (there, I'm doing it again!) Amazon review, called only "ironic" by the BBC: "Wouldn't you be quicker to call it smartass, or simple mockery?"

RL's other observations roughly parallel criticisms which appeared six years ago in the Grauniad:

... we think Canadian Alanis Morissette is American, and she proved some time ago, with her song Ironic, that she didn't know what irony meant (this is so ironic - first, because we think we're the more sophisticated and yet don't know the difference between America and Canada, second because America sees Canada as such a tedious sleeping partner, and yet Canada is subversively sending idiots into the global marketplace with American accents. Of course, I'm being ironic. Canadian accents are not the same as American ones!)

In fact, this is absolute moonshine, since the consummate and well-documented superiority of US telly over British telly is largely due to their superior grasp of irony (as well as the fact that they have more cash)...

Lucas:

I was reading some anti-American comment thread on a British blog a few weeks ago. I did not bookmark it but if you don't believe me, Christ whatever, I will slog through and find the link if it's the last thing I do in my life, but the point is this: more than one British/European person said "Americans don't do irony because they are stupid" and used Alanis Morissette as an example.

Beautiful, isn't it?

I was going to end there, but let me toss up one final observation: I think I know, a bit, why this is happening (besides the Alanis thing). One of the reasons Americans come across as stupid (and "un-ironic", as well) is because our media frequently portrays us this way, and the viewer automatically (and unconsciously) assumes the vantage point and sympathies of the writer and producer.

Consider The Simpsons (or any of dozen of comedies featuring stupid white American father figures): The producers depict Homer as dim and simplistic, without any sense of irony, utterly unable to laugh at himself -- a prototypical American male! A foreign viewer might deduce (on this faulty basis): "This is what Americans are like! Stupid, and unable to laugh at themselves." Of course, he or she knows it's an exaggeration, but assumes there's a kernel of truth to that view.

Yet the greater irony is that The Simpsons is being produced by Americans (meaning the British viewer is absorbing a uniquely American ironic presentation of itself), and is also wildly popular in the US (showing that Americans savor the ironic content of the show every bit as much as British viewers). Worse: American viewers are laughing at a funhouse-mirror presentation of themselves, aware it's not remotely accurate, while British viewers are laughing at someone else, and apparently earnestly absorbing (and parroting!) the mistaken impression there's some great cultural truth lurking in there. Who is taking themselves more seriously? Which behavior is ultimately more ironic?

Sublime, isn't it?

Eric at Classical Values laments that it's almost impossible to have have an adult discussion of whether we want socialism, as the very mention of the word has become illegitimate.

Ah, so what else is new? The same thing has happened with Communism (even actual Communists could not be called that), Fascism (the left accuses the right of it reflexively, yet is somehow shocked when people try to examine the historical movement), etc. I suppose domination of the universities and media has something to do with it, but I'm continually surprised at the extent to which the left manages to control and frame (and even circumvent) the most important debates we should have as a nation.

So, to blunder in where angels fear to tread: Socialism a system where the government owns the means of production, and social justice is used as a justification for policies which are intended to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

When asked, during the debates, what if increasing taxes decreased federal tax receipts, Obama responded that the rich needed to be taxed more highly than today as an issue of "fairness." He said essentially the same thing to Joe the Plumber. And certainly, it's simple enough to note that, despite his insistence to the contrary (words), his administration seems very interested in controlling the means of production of a very important American product.

So, while I can understand people saying otherwise (as Eric notes, how socialist does one have to be to be called "socialist"?) I also think it's fair to point out Obama seems very interested in socialism, by whatever name we'd care to call it.

It should also be noted that fascism is a system of government which incorporates socialist elements. Obama's interaction with private companies strikes me as lot closer to fascism's (corporatism) than that of, say, Sweden. In Nazi Germany, if you complied with the regime's demands, you could rake in a healthy profit. If not, well, your company suddenly had a new CEO.

Please note: I'm not saying Obama is a Nazi. Not at all. But one should be aware of similarities as well as differences, and the left should be urged to make the case as why it's not going introduce some of the same problems, not simply reflexively dismiss all such similarities, regardless of how legitimate, as beyond consideration. Just as the right constantly has to explain why it's policies aren't "fascist", so should the left, especially given fascism's actual historical proximity to the progressive movement.

One of the odd things about Why Mommy is a Democrat (a book to help the devout pass along their faith to their children) was -- from the samples, and apparently from other reviewers -- that there's no father-figure anywhere in sight. Perhaps Mommy is a Democrat because Mommy's married to the state?

The frames are pretty hilarious too, unintentionally sealing the case that Democrats (or at least those attracted to this book) view the government as essentially a giant Mommy. "Democrats make sure we share all our toys, just like Mommy does." Because, you know, we shouldn't give citizens any more say in the use of their "toys" than infants have.

(I want a ride on Barack Obama's jet! Or even Laurie Davids'. Democrats, where are you?)

So when I noticed that there was now a companion volume (Why Daddy is a Democrat) I assumed we'd finally get to see a little positive Daddy-action. Maybe Daddy will keep them safe, like Mommy and the Democrats did? Maybe Daddy would force everyone to obey all the rules (unless you're a treasury nominee), just like Mommy and the Democrats did?

No. Apparently not. Daddy's main job apparently is to pay taxes -- not one single sample shows "Daddy" (a bear, apparently) doing anything.

(Probably good, since male bears have been known to eat their own children.)

Democrats give police officers and firefighters the tools they need to do their jobs.

Because, you know, Republicans are so notoriously anti-law-enforcement. (Leave those right wingers unsupervised, and they first thing they'd cut would be the fire department!) (Oh -- and no picture of Daddy bear.)

Democrats make sure schools have great teachers.

They do? Then why do they consistently oppose merit pay? Or competition? Perhaps they're making sure private schools have great teachers, by forcing the good ones out of public schools?

(And yet again, no picture of Daddy bear.)

Sometimes the Earth feels a little sick.

You know, like "We're all going to die ANY MINUTE NOW!!!!!" sick.

Democrats make it feel better

Apparently, all the earth needed was a pair of eyeglasses and a baseball cap!

(Oh, and still no picture of Daddy bear!)

Well, it's a mystery why Daddy is a Democrat. It's a party apparently filled with people who think he serves no useful role in the world, or even their party -- other than being somewhere off-frame paying for all the wonderful initiatives Democrats are shown doing. He doesn't even get mentioned in the text, as Mommy did, incessantly.

And if you thought that was exciting, just wait until you read:

Mama Voted for Obama!

Why? Because Mamma was sooo smart that she was successfully able to pick Obama out of a lineup featuring apes, chinchillas, lamas, aarvarks, birds, and Japan-stomping monsters! I tell you, that Mommy is one brilliant lady.

(You get the feeling the author doesn't think very highly of Mommy, either.)

And still no picture of Daddy bear!

Via the Times, a profile of one the nation's biggest venture capital firms -- they're pushing hard for tight controls on CO2, and investing millions in the scheme, hoping to many times as much back.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, is betting that such a cap-and-trade law or carbon tax will open the door for a new kind of software company.

Since 2007, it has been quietly incubating Hara, a start-up that on Monday will start selling software to help businesses measure and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

"This is not 'greenwash.' It's dollars to the bottom line," said John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, which invested $6 million in Hara.

Mr. Doerr, who has been a strong advocate for legislation that puts a price on carbon, says software like Hara's will be vital to making it work. "We can pass all the laws we want, but if we don't track, manage, verify and achieve the goals, we're going to be lost, and we're only going to be doing that with information technology," he said.

Amit Chatterjee, the founder and chief executive of Hara, says the name comes from the Sanskrit for "green." He previously ran a group at SAP, the software giant, that helps businesses navigate accounting regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley

Just another "right wing" "capitalist" venture. Where "capitalism" apparently means working to increase the power of the state in order to tap into the resulting stream of new taxation revenues. Powerful interests are lined up, willing to decimate the US economy (leading to an increased death toll), as long as there's a buck in it for them, that they'll be praised as "good guys", and end up on top.

A reasonable response is to ask why the affected corporations -- surely greater in number -- don't fight back?

First, there's an asymmetry of power: If you stand to gain $10,000 by taxing 1,000 people or corporations $10 each, you're more likely to spent a lot of time interfacing with the politicians than each of the people you expect to tax. They're not going to want to go out of their way to stop the bill to save only $10. Or even $100. Or even $1000, in many cases. This is especially true if they don't understand what you're doing or are even being told it's for their "good".

Second, the taxed corporations aren't really the ones who will bear the primary burden of the tax. That's you, actually, not them. If CO2 taxes add $90 to the price of each clothes dryer, the tax is passed along to you. Maytag and Whirlpool won't decide to take less profits (indeed, they'd go out of business if they did), so they simply increase the price of their products to reflect the added tax. Their competitive situation, relative to each other, remains unaltered.

And most of the people who will pay those taxes don't even understand what "cap and trade" is, or are unaware of what it will do to them. Mostly, they probably think it's a good thing, and will somehow save people's lives, or the lives of polar bears, because that's the media and public schools communicate.

If taxes become too burdensome, those taxed will demand that "the rich" (somebody else, that is) pay still more of them, even though they themselves supported the politician who generated the tax. And the rich will flee, or stop bothering to become as rich. And the taxes will dry up, and increasingly be moved down to the upper middle class, and then the middle class, and so on.

In the end, we're all much poorer -- but more equal!