Month: February 2010

Ryan Avent tackles automotive innovation a second time:

Even the smallest cars on the American market weigh a ton (a Mini clocks in at around 2,500 pounds, if I’m not mistaken). Even the smallest cars are two-seaters, and even the smallest engines can deliver top speeds near 100 mph. For many typical journeys, that’s just a lot more than what a driver needs. What about the potential for something weighing just a few hundred pounds, battery-powered with a range under 40 miles, perhaps a one-seater with room for groceries, and with a typical cruising speed of between 20 and 30 mph?

Something like that could eventually retail for the price of a computer, would be far cheaper to run than a car, would be much more energy efficient, and would handle the basic job of getting a lot of people where they need to be. Imagine a future in which you hop in this vehicle which takes you the four miles to the nearest Metro station, drops you off, then travels to the grocery store to pick up the order you placed on your computer before you left, and finally returns to your home and plugs itself in.

Firenze, Italy, 4.57 pm

Nancy A. Youssef reports from Amman:

As it turned out, none of the two dozen or so [US troops] who met with Mullen at Marine House in the Jordanian capital Tuesday had any questions on the 17-year-old policy that bars gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military — or Mullen’s public advocacy of its repeal. […] After Tuesday’s question-and-answer session, Mullen told McClatchy that although he’s held three town hall sessions with troops since his testimony, not a single service member has asked him about the issue.

Andy Towle gathers more DADT news.

My head would explode. Here's the background from a PR release:

MasterCard has been the proud sponsor of The BRIT Awards for 12 years and to celebrate 30 years of the BRITs and thank music fans across the country for their passion and support, MasterCard devised the ultimate Priceless experience – a once in a life time opportunity for a member of the British public to win a BRIT Award winner playing live in their very own living room.

Lorraine Sands, a Project Manager from Twickenham won the prize. ‘When I opened the front door and saw Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe standing on my doorstep I thought I must be hallucinating! I’ve been a massive Pet Shop Boys fan for over twenty years and to have them play a gig right in my front room, for just me and my closest friends, was too good to be true!"

You can view the entire performance in an urban living room here. (And, yes I know this is self-parody, but what else is a blog for if not a bit of self-parody every now and again?)

… Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are …

– T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday.

I just learned a pretty staggering fact. If the Tories win the next election in Britain by just a one vote majority, there will likely be 15 openly gay Conservative MPs in the next Parliament. Last night I met Nick Herbert, an openly gay and married MP who will likely take over the environment portfolio in Cameron's cabinet if he is elected. Can you imagine a married gay couple in any cabinet in the US, Democrat or Republican? For a little icing on the cake, they, along with heterosexual couples, will now be allowed to get married in the august rooms of the closet cases, like Larry Craig, are just sad shells of human beings, or being hounded out by homophobic primary campaigns, like Charlie Crist. Heck, the British Tories are far ahead of gay inclusion than the American Democrats – and support military service and full legal equality in relationships. And they sure have more courage in making the case.

Remind me why I moved to the land of the free? To lose freedoms? To watch conservatism calcify into anti-gay bigotry as one of its binding principles? To see a newly elected and allegedly moderate governor of Virginia actually rescind previous protections for gay people employed by state government – so that the gay people who work for their own government must live in constant fear of being fired solely for being gay?

The GOP is going backward so fast it's giving this Tory whiplash.

And at noon today, I'll be debating Maggie Gallagher on why conservatives should be inclusive of gay people. I'll do so after Nick Herbert explains why the British Tories believe that including gay people in the British Conservative Party, supporting their commitments to one another, and celebrating their service to their country in the military are essentially conservative ideas and are integral to the Tory plans to win the coming British election.

"There is no deeper pathos in the spiritual life of man than the cruelty of righteous people. If any one idea dominates the teachings of Jesus, it is his opposition to the self-righteousness of the righteous. The parable spoken unto "certain which trusted in themselves that they are righteous, and despised others" made the most morally disciplined group of the day, his Pharisees, the object of his criticism. In fact, Jesus seems to have been in perpetual conflict with the good people of his day and ironically justified his consorting with the bad people by the remark that not those who are whole, but those who are sick, are in need of a physician…

The criticism which Jesus levelled at good people had both a religious and moral connotation. They were proud in the sight of God and they were merciless and unforgiving to their fellow-men. Their pride is the basis of their lack of mercy. The unmerciful servant, in Jesus' parable is unforgiving to his fellow-servant in spite of the mercy which he had received from his master.

Forgiving love is a possibility only for those who know that they are not good, who feel themselves in need of a divine mercy, who live in a dimension deeper and higher than that of moral idealism, feel themselves as well as their fellow men convicted of sin by a holy God and know that the difference between the good man and the bad man are insignificant in his sight. St. Paul expresses the logic of this religious feeling in the words:

"With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of your or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not thereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord."

When life is lived in this dimension the chasms which divide men are bridged not directly, not by resolving the conflicts on the historical levels, but by the sense of an ultimate unity in, and common dependence upon, the realm of transcendence.

For this reason the the religious ideal of forgiveness is more profound and more difficult than the rational virtue of tolerance," – Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, ch. 8, "Love as Forgiveness".

Peter Suderman points to new polling that shows 57% of Americans want Congress to start over on HCR:

Of course, it's not clear what sort of revised and resubmitted reform plan Americans would support. As Philip Klein says, the public favors all sorts of health care benefits but isn't interested in any of the usual ways—higher taxes, changes to Medicare—to pay for them. You could make the Weisbergian point that this desire for benefits without cost is childish, or you could say that it's basically sensible—a reasonable willingness to reckon with the cost of benefits that might otherwise sound great.

But either way, I think it shows one major reason why health care shouldn't be a centrally managed, consensus project, but instead should be left to individuals who can make their own decisions about what they're willing to pay for and what they're not.

And what if they can't afford anything because they have a pre-existing condition?

Or simply cannot afford vast jumps in premiums? Or get dropped from coverage because of some random event or suddenly discovered previous medical episode? Or lose their job and have no way to buy any insurance? I've been persuaded by the evidence in an era of astonishing medical possibility and cost that it is extremely hard to ensure that this area of the economy can work without immense cruelty and soaring costs, at this point, unless we come to some kind of collective agreement on at least basic care. And when we have already decided that no truly sick person will be turned away from an emergency ward anyway, haven't we essentially socialized this already, but in the worst, most inefficient and cruelest way possible?

It would be nice to infer all sorts of sophisticated libertarian things from this polling data, but one suspects that all this just shows that most Americans are utterly immature or woefully under-informed or simply so used to being told, from Reagan on, that they can have their cake and eat it – with a cheerful cherry on top – that adult self-government seems immensely difficult for them to wrap their emotions around.

First Hiatt fired the only opinion writer who really held Cheney to account for war crimes, Dan Froomkin. Then he hires a mediocre writer, and proud Catholic-for-torture, and Cheney's former speech-writer, Marc Thiessen, for a weekly column. So it's perhaps no surprise that Bart Gellman, the best journalist on Cheney in the country, whose series of pieces which became The Angler is the definitive expose of the paranoid incompetent who was veep under Bush … has now moved after twenty years to Time magazine.

Watching this paper die a sad a sordid death as it gathers a gaggle of neocon sycophants and has-beens around a proud war criminal like Cheney is truly depressing.

Carl Zimmer highlights a new report:

The acidification of the ocean today is bigger and faster than anything geologists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. Indeed, its speed and strength — Ridgwell estimate that current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago — may spell doom for many marine species, particularly ones that live in the deep ocean. 

This is the beginning of Lent. As a Catholic, one of the things I'll be repenting for is living in a civilization that treats this astonishing planet as something to be used rather than conserved. That the Christianist right, most markedly in its older generations, is more often than not allied with the destruction of God's creation or moronic denial of the severe stress it is under is one more example of how detached from Christianity so many of them have become. And that people who call themselves "conservative" seem to have such contempt for actual conservation is also a sign of how far the right has lost its soul.

But keep those snow day global warming chuckles coming, Mr Ailes. You'll wring out a few more ratings.

(Hat tip: Dreher)