The Dish

A reality check:

According to classified briefings on legislation that would lower visa restrictions on Israeli citizens, Jerusalem’s efforts to steal U.S. secrets under the cover of trade missions and joint defense technology contracts have “crossed red lines.” Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and unseemly, counterspies have told members of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, going far beyond activities by other close allies, such as Germany, France, the U.K. and Japan. A congressional staffer familiar with a briefing last January called the testimony “very sobering … alarming … even terrifying.” Another staffer called it “damaging.”

The Israelis have responded forcefully to this – by denying that they spy at all and – surprise! – by accusing the writer, Jeff Stein, of being an anti-Semite. Stein responded today with more reporting, including this gem from a source at a congressional briefing on Israeli spying in 2013:

“I was in this briefing — there were several,” … a former congressional aide told Newsweek. “The one I was in had senior staffers from foreign affairs, the full committee, the subcommittee … from judiciary, Republicans and Democrats, senior leadership staff. I don’t think there was anyone in there who didn’t work for a member that wasn’t ardently and publicly pro-Israel,” he said. “And afterwards, we were saying, ‘No way. You’ve got to be fucking kidding.’” The evidence of Israeli spying was overwhelming, he said. Visa waivers was off the table. “The voices in the room,” the aide recalled, were, “‘There’s just no way that this is possible.’”

Oh yes there is.

German Lopez highlights it:

About 80 to 90 percent of Obamacare enrollees are paying their insurance premiums, major health insurers testified before Congress on Wednesday. The insurers’ testimony undercut a report from House Republicans that found only 67 percent of enrollees on Obamacare’s federal exchanges had paid their premiums. Insurers only start coverage after they have received a first month’s premium payment from an enrollee, making the percent paid an important metric to gauge how many people will actually gain coverage.

House Republicans’ report, insurers explained, got that metric wrong.

Allahpundit wonders why the House Republicans rushed to issue that 67 percent number:

Theory one: Stupidity. If and when the final payment numbers are released and it’s confirmed that 10-20 percent of new enrollees, a.k.a. 800,000 to 1.6 million people, will be tossed from the rolls, the White House now has some handy spin. “Once again Republicans underestimated ObamaCare,” they’ll say. “They thought we’d top out at 67 percent payment and we made it to 80 percent. Another victory!” Always a bad idea to lower expectations for your opponent. Theory two: Cynicism. Maybe the committee suspects (correctly) that most people don’t follow the news consistently but get it in bits and pieces at irregular times, especially when it comes to a subject as complex and long-running as ObamaCare. As such, they may have decided to float the 67 percent figure knowing/assuming it was bogus but confident that some low-information voters would notice it and conclude that O-Care was underperforming in yet another metric. Some of those voters will miss today’s news and the White House crowing to come about the correct figure and remain convinced that fully a third of new enrollees haven’t paid.

Suderman puts a negative spin on the new numbers:

The House GOP report was too early, ignored deadline issues, and turned out to be problematic as a result. But based on insurer testimony, the administration’s much-touted total of 8 million sign-ups is likely to be reduced by a million or more when converted into paid enrollments. In other words, the administration’s figures were too rosy by quite a bit—just not as much as House Republicans suggested.

Cohn frames the story very differently:

“What you have here is very solid first year enrollment, no matter how you slice it,” Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health, told Bloomberg’s Alex Wayne.

If an account of Wednesday’s hearings by The Hill‘s Elise Viebeck is accurate—I didn’t see them—the testimony from insurers didn’t sit too well with members of the House majority. “Republicans were visibly exasperated,” Viebeck reported, “as insurers failed to confirm certain assumptions about Obamacare.” Republicans have had plenty of chances to embarrass Democrats over Obamcare and, given the law’s very real shortcomings, they’ll be sure to have plenty more. But on Wednesday, it seems, Republicans mostly succeeded in embarrassing themselves.

Many readers are protesting along these lines:

Did you actually listen to the context of what they were discussing? If you don’t have the time to actually listen to a few minutes worth of what you’re passing on as “The Closed Mind of Neil DeGrasse Tyson“, then you probably don’t have the time think about the meaning of the word “meaning”.

Another goes after Damon Linker:

Rather than calling Linker’s hatchet-job a “must-read”, go and listen to what Neil DeGrasse Tyson actually said. Linker completely misrepresents him.

Yes, I did listen to the context and now I have listened to much more of it. Tyson reeks of scientism and rank condescension to philosophy and to philosophy’s role in humanity’s understanding of itself and the whole. The more I listened the more the philistinism deepened, the more the sophomoric cliches about philosophy proliferated – you “can’t cross a street”, for Pete’s sake, if you’re concerned with the ultimate questions! I’ve heard freshmen with sharper insights at 3am. Most troubling to me is the notion that all human thinking must somehow have some “productive” end or is worthless. One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is our self-consciousness, and all the questions that raises. But Tyson “doesn’t have time for that.” Another reader elaborates on the dissent:

I’ve listened to the clip, and I call bullshit on Linker’s hyperventilation over Tyson’s comments. Tyson was pretty clearly talking about the diminishing practical returns on philosophical debate, and he has a great goddamned point that many a liberal arts major should consider.

At what point does a person’s philosophizing cease to provide positive societal value, and become, in essence intellectual masturbation? At what point would society as a whole benefit from focusing more on the practicalities of modern science versus the arcane twaddle of modern philosophy? Tyson clearly believes that recent “discoveries” in philosophy are more masturbatory than helpful, and that we should focus our energies more productively.

Were his comments glib? Sure. (Although, Tyson and his fellow podcasters had just finished riffing on comparisons between Newton’s development of calculus and reality programming on TMZ, so the tongue-in-cheek nature of his comments is hardly out of line.) But that comment does not make Tyson “every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman.” It makes him a sarcastic SOB who thinks the world would have been better off if your six years of philosophy study at Whitman College had been spent studying electrical engineering at MIT. And its hard to argue that he is wrong.

Actually, it’s very easy to argue that he is wrong. If humanity had always had that perspective the very concepts of math and science would not exist. Another reader:

Tyson was referring to thinking big in the sophomoric, pseudo-intellectual way of someone taking their first philosophy class as an undergraduate. “What if we’re all brains in vats, man?” “What if I am all that exists?” “All of life is chemical reactions, so how do I know what is even real?”

These are all totally unanswerable questions that don’t lead anywhere. They don’t further knowledge in any meaningful sense. They just lead you into a cul de sac of admiring your own cleverness. It’s like the old bit from Gilbert and Sullivan: “If this young man expresses himself / In terms too deep for me, / Why, what a very singularly deep young man / This deep young man must be.”

Another who listened to the podcast:

It is my understanding that for philosophy to be effective, it needs to be rooted in logic. Which is why listeners need to start their assessment of Tyson’s point back to to at least 15:00, where Dr. Tyson states:

I don’t have a problem with these philosophical questions, just give me a way to test it. Math is about getting finite answers to infinite regressions. It it is measurable whether you like it or not. If you are distracted by your questions, you are being productive and not contributing to the real world.

As in, why is a pound a pound? What does the answer to that contribute to anything? Linker starts his rant on the Giordano Bruno overblown kerfuffle, to which I say, “What’s your point”? I find it laughable that Linker equates Tyson’s comments as derogatory to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, as the latter references Aristotle in Cosmos as one of the great thinkers and that many of his ideas were proven once the logic and results of calculus was applied. In short, Damon Linker is quite thin-skinned.

I’d say my readers are. Look: I understand why DeGrasse Tyson is so popular (I’m not engaging in our long twilight struggle as to who will win the final battle for the most appearances on Colbert) and I’m a big believer in better and wider understanding of science. But when he responds to first order questions of meaning by demanding how he can test them, he is simply engaging in an irrelevance. The ways to test one school of thought is not the same as for another. Tyson is asserting that only science’s methods are valid as a search for truth. My view is that it is one way of seeking a particular truth – but that humanity, over the millennia, has developed others, just as relevant to the human condition, but with different forms of logic and understanding. In glibly dismissing any such claims, Tyson is, I believe, in this podcast, as Damon describes him.

Update from a reader:

I want to respond to your reader who claimed that “the world would have been better off if your six years of philosophy study at Whitman College had been spent studying electrical engineering at MIT.” I’m a senior web developer working on very large, complicated site builds. My undergrad degree focussed on oil painting, and my postgrad degree is an MFA in creative writing. A good friend of mine, one of the most talented network architects in the NY area (who is likely responsible for your NY readers being able to access your blog reliably), has an undergrad degree in philosophy and no formal training in his field. An informal poll of my colleagues reveals that almost none of them have an engineering or comp sci degree. As much as I appreciate your reader’s advice on our educational choices, I think we’re doing fine for ourselves. The dirty secret of engineering is that experience matters more than education, and knowing how to think and solve problems trumps all.

A new study finds that kids who are bullied are more likely to bring a weapon, such a gun, a knife, or a club, to school with them. German Lopez compiles the findings into the chart seen above:

The results aren’t very surprising, given years of warnings from anti-bullying advocates. As Mother Jones points out, StopBullying.gov previously indicated that 12 of 15 school shootings in the 1990s involved perpetrators with a history of being bullied. It’s worth mentioning, however, that the data shows correlation, not causation. It’s possible, for example, that people who carry weapons are more likely to fall into conflicts that lead to bullying. In those circumstances, weapons might not be carried for protection as much as aggression.

The data also doesn’t exclude other risk factors, such as mental illness or easy access to guns, from playing a role in school shootings. It’s unexplained in the study, for instance, how these students obtained weapons in the first place.

Scott Shackford fears that this finding will be used to justify more oppressive school policies:

Researchers estimate based on the poll that 200,000 teens being bullied are bringing weapons to school. … But if all these students are carrying weapons and yet there aren’t hundreds of thousands of incidences of school violence by bullying victims every day, what is the actual extent of the problem versus the fearmongering? Schools already have their terrible zero tolerance rules that have resulted in all sorts of twisted outcomes for stupid reasons. It’s easy to imagine misguided, indifferent school administrators responding to the study by exposing the bullied students to increased scrutiny, all in the guise of protecting student safety. That could have the additional impact of causing students to be even less likely to report harassment.

Interesting POV- I still say when in Rome whore like the Romans whore RT@Digiday: Andrew Sullivan on native ads: http://t.co/EvC3FnyQrn”

— A Martin (@AMartinTweetss) May 8, 2014

That’s what I did yesterday when Digiday called me up to ask about sponsored content. The resulting interview is here. Money quote:

Brian Braiker: Digiday runs sponsored content.

AS: You’re whoring yourself as well, but at least you’re covering the whoring! They’ve fired all their brothel reporters and started hiring them as brothel greeters.

Or something like that. I can get worked up after a tall, wet cappuccino.

Update from a reader:

As someone who does a lot of development of large media sites (my company specializes in this), I’m responsible for the technical implementation of many of these sponsored content schemes.

I agree with you. These publications are trashing their own credibility, and they will suffer in the long term.

That being said, I’m of a generation that doesn’t see the media as an institution in the same light that you do, so to me these are just businesses that are paying my company to torpedo their long-term viability. Which now that I think about it is pretty much what every media company we work with is doing in a number of different ways. There’s a real stink of desperation coming off of all of these guys, and they’re often very unpleasant to work with, as their stress and panic inevitably rolls downhill onto me. (It’s better than working for startups though, at least some of these companies still manage to make money.)

I’m happy to keep getting my news from you, and I’m also happy to pay for it. I think the patronage model is a better, more honest approach for both journalism and art (I refuse to refer to it as “content”), and your blog is proof that it can work. I don’t ever need to worry about you selling me stuff. If you ever have any questions about the nuts and bolts of how Google watches everything you do and then tells anyone who will pay, I’d be happy to answer them.

A reader agrees with me:

Yes, the left is blind on this issue. As an environmental engineer, I’m always puzzled by the reaction of so-called environmentalists who immediately reject nuclear. But the right isn’t any better. Neither political party will implement reprocessing. One, because they reject nuclear in general, and both, because terrorists.

We as a nation do not reprocess our fuel, thus we have massive amounts of fuel that must be stored. The Yucca Mountain depository was inadequate by the time it was built, with more spent fuel than capacity. In the 1970s, reprocessing was banned out of fear of terrorists getting their hands on plutonium. There are downsides to reprocessing – namely the process does create some very toxic waste streams (much more so than normal spent fuel) and potentially weapons-grade plutonium. However, France has reprocessed for decades and we’ve figured out techniques to avoid weapons grade fuel.

People don’t understand nuclear power and are needlessly scared of it because of Chernobyl and poor education on the topic (even in college). Having worked in refineries, coal plants, hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants, I would rather live inside a nuclear plant than within 10 miles of the others.

From an attorney who focuses on energy policy:

The basic thrust of your point is well-taken: environmentalists must be strategic about how we deal with nuclear energy, and forcing the immediate closure of nuclear plants is a counterproductive strategy, especially in parts of the country (such as the Northeast) where resources are already stretched to capacity and grid reliability is a pressing issue.

However, there are two things that you miss in your post.

First, increased reliance on nuclear energy would do essentially nothing to disentangle us from the Middle East. That part of the world supplies us with, of course, a significant amount of oil. But in the US, oil is consumed primarily for vehicle fuel, for industrial uses (i.e., plastics), and for home and industrial heating (among various other things); only a tiny fraction of it is user for electricity generation. In fact, only about 1 percent of our current electricity derives from burning oil at power plants, and no new oil-fired units are predicted in the near future. Nuclear fission, on the other hand, has only really only one major civilian application: generating electricity. (Of course, there are also various military uses for it, including weapons material and powering large ships and submarines.) There simply isn’t much overlap between oil and nuclear, and shifting our dispatch significantly to electricity generated from nuclear plants won’t help us much extricate ourselves from the Middle East.

Second, there’s economics. Let’s put aside for a moment all the other problems related with nuclear, such as safety, localized health impacts (which are  highly uncertain), proliferation risks, and the perpetual problem of waste storage and disposal. Nuclear electricity generation is, at the heart of it, just a damn expensive way to boil water. Even disregarding the generous public subsidies that nuclear energy enjoys, its overall cost per megawatt-hour is still more than that of various renewable energy sources, such as onshore wind and geothermal, and is comparable with that of solar (both rooftop solar and larger-scale generation). Moreover, the cost of solar is diminishing rapidly, and can be expected to do so on into the future; nuclear, not so much. Yes, many of these sources receive subsidies as well, but the rapid cost-saving innovations that are occurring as we speak more than justify that from an economic standpoint (to say nothing of the environmental benefits).

In short, while nuclear power plays a role in our current generation mix, it’s not the long-term solution to our electricity needs. Increasing our reliance on renewables and maximizing our opportunities for energy efficiency are.

Another reader speculates:

While I agree that there are many in the environmental movement who are on the wrong side of nuclear power, I think your previous post is too quick to label it as an ideological issue. Rather, I think it’s generational. I know that I and many others in my age range (born in the mid-’80s) are pretty agnostic when it comes to nuclear power. Our parents, however, lived through Three-Mile Island, through Chernobyl, or May 1953, when Chicago was pummeled with rain carrying radioactive dust. These were serious errors caused by either a lack of understanding or a lack of thorough oversight in nuclear power. My generation has never lived through these. The closest we have is Fukushima, and it’s hard to relate to a place that is that far away.

Another is less blasé about the dangers:

Just as you need to calculate the health and environmental effects into the electric cost of fossil fuel plants, you have to calculate the cost not only of waste disposal, safety, and security precautions, but the risk – however low – of having to evacuate and abandon an area in case of an incident like Fukushima and Chernobyl. What do you figure the cost per kilowatt hour at Fukushima was after adding in the still ongoing and fraught cleanup process there?

Every few decades nature seems to remind us that it is very hard to engineer a structure to account for every possibility. I am all for an everything-is-on-the-table approach to combat global warming and don’t discount the possibility that we will need to build more nuclear power production. But the burden is certainly on the industry and the government to convince the public that our existing plants are safe, nuclear waste is being responsibly taken care of, and future plants are prepared as they can be for “unpredictable” events.