Face Of The Day

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Japanese post-graduate student Kosuke Nakamura shows off the robot baby named Noby (short for 'nine-month-old baby'), that is 71 cm in height and weighs 7.9kg, at a laboratory at the Tokyo University on June 15, 2010. The baby robot has two cameras and two microphones on its head and is also equipped with some 600 touch sensors in the artificial skin of his body. The robot is designed to simulate the behaviour and growth of a real infant, an invention it is hoped will help researchers better understand human development. By Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images.

Iran – A Year Later, Ctd

Joe Klein reads Reuel Marc Gerecht's latest op-ed:

I do believe that Gerecht overstates the capacity of the Green Movement to succeed in toppling the current, odious regime. To win, the reformers will have to find an alliance with the quietist members of the religious community; the bazaaris, whose businesses are being hurt by Iran's increasing commercial isolation (not just the sanctions, but the unilateral decision by an increasing number of international corporations not to do business with this regime); and some of the more moderate "principleist" conservatives, who will be favored candidates in the next election.

Larison piles on. And the Leveretts dust off their old song and dance.

What Would Libertarians Do About The Gulf?

Edward Glaeser wants to know:

Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer.

Even more problematically, the libertarian’s solution requires us to place great trust in part of the public sector: the court system. At times, judges have been bribed; any courtroom can be influenced by the best lawyers that money can buy.

This strikes me as a critique of extreme libertarianism (which, alas, tends to crowd out other variants). I believe in strong and aggressive government regulation of this kind of thing. So that companies like BP do not walk into disasters like this one.

Hewitt Award Nominee, Ctd

Larison picks up on this Totten-Hanson exchange:

What is remarkable about the interview is that Totten and Hanson simply feed off one another and reinforce each other’s nonsense. There is not one probing or challenging question for Hanson in the entire interview. Totten does not object when Hanson says, “We’re only 65 years from the Holocaust. Europe is still anti-Semitic, and Israel is on its own except for the United States.” This sort of blanket condemnation of an entire continent for rank prejudice is as sloppy and false as it gets, and it gets dropped into the conversation as if Hanson were discussing the weather.

Neoconservatism’s Marxist Roots Are Showing

A reader writes:

Kristol's ideology reminds me a lot of Marxism. It's a theory that works only in an ideal world that doesn't actually exist. In Kristol's world, the US can muster the political will and economic might to build an enormous army akin to what we fielded in World War Two. He believes we can march that army into the heart of the middle east and impose our will on a country like Iran; that doing so would have no long term negative ramifications for our economy; and that any negative consequences to our standing in the world could be ignored because we are the all powerful hegemon.  Of course none of that is true. 

Whether Iran counter-attacked or not, the consequences for our country would be almost entirely negative if we attacked them.  There's no realistic scheme under which we could unleash the kind of overwhelming force Kristol suggests.  So our limited efforts would only secure the power of those currently in charge in Tehran and they would crush any straggling remnants of the green revolution. It would give an excuse to other nations to ease up on sanctions in the interests of making money from trade with Iran.  It would provide the justification for Iran to go really nuclear in the future and the means by which to do it.

This is true and familiar. The first generation of neocons were ex-leftists and the pattern of thought is identical. What's staggering to me is that this ideology has become even more rigid after the most obvious refutation of its delusions one can imagine. Iraq and Afghanistan were to be models of the power of military might to coerce change; they would prove that under the surface all humans were interchangeable and all culture and history would surrender to a particular version of individual liberty that was, for the neocons, a fact about humanity. The sublime popularity of the American model was self-evident; the impact of culture, of religion, of history were no matches for the "march of freedom".

As you watch Iraq today veer between a reprise of brutal sectarian warfare and a political class utterly uninterested in actual democracy, only a blind man or a fool can still believe what Kristol and others (including me) said before the war. As you observe Afghanistan returning to its entropic state, and the obvious delusions engaged in by the president just a few months ago, how on earth can you be still instinctively wedded to the notion of ever-increasing US military enmeshment in failed states, let alone a completely unpredictable and potentially catastrophic attack on Iran? Only ideologues or cynics can sustain this kind of insanity against this mountain of empirical evidence. 

Kristol, I suspect, is both: an ideologue and a cynic. Which is why his candidate is Sarah Palin. And why she will be her party's nominee in 2012.

The Use Of A Child, Ctd

A reader writes:

I still think that the most likely explanation is that Sarah Palin simply lied about the story of Trig's birth.  My private speculation: she went to that event in Dallas and then flew home for a planned induction, for the reasons outlined in your other reader's comments, that being, DS children have a lot of potential health risks and for optimal health and should be born in as controlled an environment as possible.  All of this would have been contained in a medical record, so of course, the record could never be released. 

She simply made up the story about being in labor along the way.

It's not like anyone could or would know for sure.  Women have contractions beginning as early four months into a totally normal pregnancy.  If you have been pregnant a few times you know exactly what works to bring on those kinds of "benign" contractions. 

Remember, she made this up well before she was a VP nominee, so of course she can't admit to having lied about something as seemingly inconsequential as the timing of labor anymore than she could admit something as outrageous as Bristol being the real mom.  It would be too emblematic of the extremely unpleasant truth about her character. 

I don't know, but this seems perfectly plausible to me, and slightly more plausible than that she never had the baby at all. Another writes:

Thank you from deep in my gut for taking Lisa Miller to the mat over her shocking lack of respect and interest in truth.  I don't even mean journalistic interest in truth, I mean basic human right-from-wrong-something's-funny-here-gee I wonder…interest in truth.  She is an intellectual slacker and there are many like her out there – the reason that Palin gets a pass day after day on the greatest of her lies, Trig, and countless lesser ones.  Palin's as dangerous as an oil spill now because of this collapse of curiosity and integrity.  Thank you, thank you taking your stand.

What has driven me nuts is that almost no real person I know takes what Palin has said about this at face value, and yet it is the avowed policy of the MSM to take this story at face value and never inquire into it. Newsweek has gone even further, publishing as fact without any independent confirmation, not only the gist of the story but the details Palin added in her insane book. If Miller had simply noted the power of this story as mythology, she would be on very solid, even important ground. But simply accepting every detail of this indisputable fabulist as fact is not journalism.

I should add that Lisa Miller's point that "leftists" don't understand Palin's power does not apply to the Dish. I am not a leftist and have long believed that Palin is immensely powerful and the apotheosis of her party at this moment in time. My question is simply an empirical one: is her account even faintly plausible or true? Only MSM journalists and gaga fundies seem to take the whole fantastic story on faith.

Yes: Newsweek is for sale. Ever wonder why?