The Dish

A testy exchange between two writers I admire tremendously. The animosity is fueled by smaller differences than exist in many of the debates on the war in Iraq. But in this war, and its disastrous implementation in Iraq, it is very hard not to become angry, and to be angriest at those from whom we expected better and with whom we otherwise have much in common. What is admirable about both men, even in their ill temper, is that they understand the stakes of the last few years, and take them seriously. I’d rather observe the anger that comes from that than the indifference, complacency and smugness of so many others.

New York, New York, 10.23 am.

Another nightmare of paranoia: a scientist sent to the slammer for two years for mailing something he shouldn’t have.

The Ron-Paul-Is-A-Closet-Nazi meme continues. It seems to me that there are a lot of reasons to oppose Ron Paul. Jamie Kirchick’s vision of US foreign policy is one of them. But to say that a single $500 contribution from a neo-Nazi crackpot is somehow "keeping company" with fascists is absurd. Michael Goldfarb asks:

Andrew, are you not troubled at all by the creeps who’ve signed on to the Paul campaign, or the fact that he is so completely unperturbed by their support that he has yet to distance himself in any way from it? Maybe not–Sullivan’s "simple message" to Ron Paul supporters: "You’re welcome here." That includes the Nazis, or no?

There are plenty of reasons to be perturbed when loons and hate-mongers support a candidacy. But this game of guilt-by-association can be played endlessly. I tend to place greater emphasis on loons and hate-mongers that candidates actively seek out. Pat Robertson is a loon and an anti-Semite and a vicious homophobe who blamed Americans for 9/11. Giuliani didn’t receive some unsolicited money from him; he actually stood on a platform and embraced him. Why one standard for Paul and another for Giuliani? If Obama embraced Louis Farrakhan as a supporter, you think Goldfarb and Kirchick would be silent? They’d have a cow because it’s unthinkable. But naked bigotry is more than thinkable in today’s GOP: it’s integral to it. What’s the difference between Farrakhan and Robertson? I can’t see any. Maybe Goldfarb and Kirchick can spell it out.

Giuliani also promoted and endorsed a seriously mobbed up man to be head of the DHS; he fully embraces and employs a priest credibly accused of sex abuse of a minor (and refuses to distance himself from him); and actively endorses torture as a foreign policy weapon. Jamie Kirchick actually supports Giuliani for president – but is hyper-ventilating about a $500 check that Paul hasn’t even decided what to do with! There you have the massive double-standards on the neocon right.

Here’s an idea: when Giuliani disowns his abusing priest, his mafia-consigliere and his anti-Semitic nutcase, Ron Paul should send back the $500. Deal?

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)

I was wrong, misled by a left-wing blogger. Greenwald sets me right:

He only introduced those flag-burning amendments in order to dare his colleagues who wanted to pass a law banning flag burning to do it that way — i.e., the constitutional way. When introducing his amendments, he delivered an eloquent and impassioned speech on the floor of the House explaining why he considered anti-flag-burning measures to be "very unnecessary and very dangerous."

Here’s Kirchick-bait: Paul expresses admiration for Hagel and Kucinich.

I love this detail:

She said the "head of publicity for the campaign," a man whose name she could not recall, had no factual disputes with the story. But, she added, a Clinton intern spoke to her to say the campaign requests she "not talk about" the story to any more media outlets and that if she did she should inform a staffer.

Just as I loved this:

Mo Elliethee, spokesman for Clinton, told Fox that Clinton staffer Chris Hayler talked with Mitchell before the event because the two knew each other from previous Democratic activities… Update #2: Geoffrey Mitchell just called Major to state he had absolutely no previous relationship with Clinton staffer Chris Hayler.

And this:

A Clinton campaign staffer called on Esterday at the restaurant Thursday after the story aired. The staff member apologized to her and gave her a $20 bill, according to Esterday. The Clinton campaign confirmed that visit.

It wouldn’t be a Clinton campaign without some heavies with ready cash around, would it?

The image above is of a mouse-brain. The edges of art and science can blur in the hands of innovators:

Previous techniques for highlighting neurons used at most two colors. One common approach developed in 1873 by an Italian physician and still used today, called the Golgi method, stains neurons in their entirety but only affects a few brain cells at a time.

In contrast, Brainbow allows researchers to tag several hundred neurons at once with roughly 90 distinct colors. The resulting images , which resemble abstract color paintings, are both beautiful and informative. They look like they could hang in a modern art museum and are among the most detailed images of neuronal connections ever made.

More on the technique here.

Jon Cohn is one of the more intellectually honest supporters of universal healthcare and so I’m not surprised that he has grasped one nettle that some left-liberals refuse to even acknowledge: any shift to a centralized system where government has far more leverage and control will mean a decline in pharmaceutical and medical innovation. I think you can make an honest case that it’s morally better to provide more healthcare to more people now rather than maintain recent levels of pharmaceutical research. But Jonathan insists that everything depends on how the new system would work. If you have the right experts, he claims, you won’t have a slowdown in medical research:

The ideal would be to come up with some way of achieving the best of both worlds–paying for innovation when it yields actual benefits, but without neglecting less glitzy, potentially more beneficial forms of health care. And that is precisely what the leading proposals for universal health care seek to do. All of them would establish independent advisory boards, staffed by leading medical experts, to help decide whether proposed new treatments actually provide clinical value. The fact that Barack Obama’s plan includes such a provision is particularly telling, since one of the plan’s architects is David Cutler– the economist constantly promoting the value of innovation.

Convinced? Me neither.

There’s the usual liberal complaint that the private sector rewards short-term profits and that the government would be so much wiser in in its healthcare investments than the private sector. Yeah, right. Jon at least concedes the nightmare that is the British NHS, but doesn’t address the fact that so many of the new drugs that France doles out to its patients come from the US free market system, a system that Cohn would essentially stymie. But the real money quote is this:

The goal is to reduce our spending moderately and carefully; the savings, most likely, would materialize over time.

And why should we reduce spending at all if we don’t want to and the market reflects it? At some point, there really is an unbridgeable issue here. I don’t see why the government should have any real say on how much a free people wants to spend on health. I don’t think there is some "optimal" balance here, solely devisable by smart people who "promote the value of innovation" on government boards. We have a classic trade-off: between the innovation and choice of the private sector – and a "rational", government-based system that ensures that politics and not markets decide what our healthcare should be. I don’t doubt this trade-off is coming. In a democratic society, the impulse to redistribute wealth and goods according to the wants of the majority – and a majority that’s getting older – is politically irresistible. But the quality will suffer – as will the innovation. If we haven’t learned that by now, we’re ineducable. No special board of experts has ever saved us from this; and none ever will.

How an online video game gave a blogger an Aha! moment with respect to terror tactics. Money quote:

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I’m only making it easier for them to shoot me — and thus I’m marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I’ll whip out a sticky plasma grenade — and throw it at them. Because I’ve run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I’ll die — but he’ll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone "from beyond the grave.")

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber — or a kamikaze pilot.

It’s not just that I’m willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It’s that I’m exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.

A list of proposals in the Congress from a leftist critic. MoJo comments here. Worth reading the whole list. The flag burning grand-standing is truly saddening. I’m not surprised by the pro-life stuff or the radical libertarianism stuff. I don’t buy all of it – but in the context of the GOP’s complete surrender to big government, big borrowing, occupy-and-be-damned statism, I think it’s a breath of fresh air. Kevin Hayden comments:

Granted, being for a quick troop withdrawal, against torture and against wiretapping immunity gives him appeal the rest of the Republican presidential candidates lack. But his positions on all the issues Dave has highlighted should help end the romanticism about his possibilities. If he sounds saner than the other republicans, I won’t try to disabuse you that notion. After all, none of them deserve ten percent support of the American electorate.

The sad fact is, the GOP is the weakest I’ve ever seen it. If the party wants to survive, it had better get a sense of where the middle is, because most of it teeters on the edge of suicidal extremism.