Why Iran is going to get the bomb and what we should do about it

Conservatives and neoconservatives have been beating the war drums about Iran getting the bomb.  They would like us to either attack Iran or support an Israeli attack on Iran.  Bibi Netanyahu has been trying to chump President Obama about it.

Iran will get the bomb because the computational requirements for simulating nuclear explosions keeps getting cheaper.  Many of the experiments conducted by the orignal bomb makers were chemistry and physics experiments, done with real materials.  Much of that work can now be simulated, reducing the requirements for doing hard science experiments.  The basic gaming PC, with a good GPU has a tremendous amount of floating point computational power.  It can be used to manipulate particles in a video game or in a simulation of the first microsecond of a nuclear explosion.

Iran is going to get the bomb.  That is a certainty.

We should seek ways of engagement with the Iranian people that bypass the mullahs.  There is a tremendous amount of goodwill for America among the Iranian people.  We would lose that if we attacked.

Note to Will Cain

You wanted to know about lies in that clip in which you appeared:

1) Amy Holmes mentions that he is from a swing district.  Cook has it at +1 R. She didn’t mention the benefits of incumbency, as if a seated Congressman and a challenger start from the same position.

2) Your schtick about being a leader is hollow.  You talk about “doing the unpopular” when Ryan was acting as a handmaiden for the most reactionary conservative political elements of our society.

3) Jedediah Bila says that he really wants to fix things.  His political views were formed at the age of 20 and he has attempted to make the world conform to them.  This is not someone who is interested in fixing things.  This is someone who is saying “Do it my way”.    She goes on to say that he is known as a doer, not a talker.  The reverse is true.  Ryan has done virtually nothing in congress for over 13 years.  He has authored two pieces of legislation which became law, one of those a bill to name a post office.  With the authorship of the Ryan budget, he is most widely known as a talker.

4)  Buck Sexton gets to the point that Ryan actually has a vision for America.  The Romney campaign has come out and said that they would not be pushing the Ryan budget.  So what is Buck shilling for?

You added “Listen more carefully.” to your tweet.  Were your feelings hurt by my saying that people were lying?

Let us both understand something.  What you do is political theater.  It is not truth telling.  You and your colleagues attempt to set a narrative, identify protagonist and antagonists, establish motivations, identify plot points and climaxes.  It is theater.  It is an entertainment industry, very much like sports announcing.  There is very little about what you do that is deep or incisive.  It is all about the superficial, the things of the moment.  You could actually be providing commentary for a fashion show.  There is very little difference.

I did a Google search for your name and I find no writings of any gravity.  You are a white guy in a suit who is treated as a moveable prop, brought out onto a set to say predictable things at predictable times.

I don’t know anything about you and your life story.  Perhaps if we met, I would think you a reasonable fellow.  My education is in the engineering field, but it was my good fortune to have gone to a school which required breadth as well as depth.  As an engineer, it is my job to determine truth in measurable ways.  I see political talkers like you who act as if they are purveyors of truth, but mostly what you do is axiomatically spout things which are too easily disprovable.

This is not about you as a person, but about you, and everyone like you, as a political actor.  You go out on stage and say your lines, attempt to influence people and their votes.  I just re-watched Ken Burns “The Civil War” and was so moved by the words of Sullivan Ballou which close the first episode.  This was a real man who died from being shot by real bullets fired by real guns.  Many of the people who were political actors and incited this civil war paid no price for their words.  The lack of responsibility and culpability are just about the only lasting marks left by the political actors.

I will not insult you by offering advice.  You have chosen this path and you seem comfortable in it.  

Big Brother update

I got an email from Google+ suggesting that I add certain people to my circles.  One of the people was someone I have followed on Twitter.  I have never exchanged email with this person.  How the hell does Google know about this person?

Bottom line: I don’t need your help Google.  Butt the hell out of my private life.

What’s not to like about liberals

There are times when I think that I have a lot in common with liberals.  And then I stumble across something like this and I am reminded that there are people who call themselves ‘liberal’ who have a self-serving agenda that has nothing to do with liberalism.

“The Stranger”, a ‘liberal’ bastion in Seattle made Shaun Scott a nominee for it’s Genius Award for a film about Seattle.  The narration in the film asserts that the “Mercer Girls” brought by Asa Mercer to Seattle were employed primarily as prostitutes.  Why?  Scott has an issue with ‘muscular Christianity’ and it is all part of some large cabal.  Contrary to Scott’s assertions, the Mercer Girls were not prostitutes and many of them were school teachers.

For me, liberalism is more about just telling the damned truth, no matter what the consequences.

Decoding Keynes

On twitter, I follow some people who espouse ideas that are diametrically opposed to mine in an attempt to learn why they believe those things.  I often try to engage them via twitter, but it is an awful medium for actual exposition.  It is great for invective though.  Sometimes, my attempts at engagement are mistaken for heckling and I get blocked.  Such are the hazards.

I follow one woman, @elizcrum, who seems to be employed in media in some way.  She posted a link to an writer at the New York Post in which the writer attempted to savage Paul Krugman.  I say ‘attempted’, because it isn’t clear that savaging actually happens if the subject is unaware of it.  I’m thinking of Shelby Foote’s description of Jefferson Davis’ fulminations against Abraham Lincoln as that of Jeremiah and Sennacherib. 

The article was a hit list of Krugman’s supposed failings.  I don’t know if they are failings or not, because context was missing.  The writer is not without suspected bias, as the New York Post swings on the Rupert Murdoch/Roger Ailes axis.

I highlighted one quote from the article, “Krugman’s Keynesian faith is at best an unproven theory” and labeled it #False.  The writer asserts that Krugman’s work as an Nobel Prize winning economist is a matter of faith, a belief in things not provable.  And that he uses the expression, “unproven theory”, leads me to believe that he does not understand the meaning of the word, “theory”.  I also asked her when we would see the benefits of “trickledown” economics.

She responded by saying she objected to Keynesianism because it “renders spending money that one doesn’t have (which we all once believed was wrong) morally neutral.”  This is a complex argument and she was undoubtedly hampered by Twitter’s limit of 140 characters in making it.  I responded by saying that if “objection is on moral grounds, is feeding the poor morally suspect?”  She responded by saying that we should feed those who cannot afford food, but that the $16T national debt was not caused by food stamp programs.

Looking at the national budget as a moral issue is fraught with problems, and I don’t think I can do the issue justice in this space.  I’ll instead jump to my conclusion: I think that when people start talking about the budget in moral terms, they have a conclusion in mind and are looking only for evidence to support their position, as opposed to evidence that might render them wrong.

In this regard, they are acting only like most people normally act.  It is a well established fact that people are drawn to things that substantiate their ideas and self-image and there is no reason to think that a moral argument about budget would be any different.

But is the Keynesian argument amoral and is that a bad thing?  First, let’s define ‘keynesian’.  The term has taken a beating, including one by President Nixon.  The thrust of Keynes position was that we live in a consumption based economy.  When consumption stops, production slows down and depression sets in.  The proper role of the government in that case is to consume, when private enterprise is reluctant to consume.  The hope is that the debt-driven consumption will be compensated by revenue streams generated by a restarted economy.

Is this amoral?  Yes.  My first response, which I deleted, was to ask sarcastically if loaning money was immoral.  Like I said, Twitter is good for invective.  I think she is trying to frame the question as if we are stealing from our children.  Yes, that would be immoral.  The unwillingness and political cowardice shown by legislators to cut revenues and increase spending during the Bush years was immoral.  Borrowing against the future is not immoral.  It is sometimes necessary.  Failing to repay it is immoral.

One of my favorite graphs shows the national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product.

You can see it here.

The issue isn’t the size of the debt, but our ability to pay it back.