On NBC's De-Hiring of Ronna McDaniel

It's worth remembering that the last time a major US political party was destroyed and replaced by a new one, there was a civil war.

Political re-alignments happen all the time.  I assert that the Democrats and Republicans of 1965 are closer to the Republicans and Democrats of 2024, respectively.  That process was well underway before MAGA reared its ugly head.  It was evolutionary, not revolutionary.  Similar processes have occurred many times throughout the history of both parties.

What's happening today isn't quite a revolution, but it's getting awfully close.  As someone with grandchildren whom I'd like to see grow up in a peaceful society, I don't want a revolution.  At the same time, it's clear that the US two-party democracy can't continue when one of the two parties has lost its freakin' mind.  So finding a way to soft-land Republican insanity and nudge its adherents back onto a track where they can actually participate in governing is essential.

Now:  It's abundantly clear that Trump's MAGA ideology has seized all of the levers of power in the GOP.  As a result, it should be unsurprising that Ronna McDaniel, as the RNC chairwoman, spouted a lot of MAGA nonsense during her tenure, up to and including asserting that the 2020 election was illegitimate.  There's a good case to be made that hiring an election-denier in any sort of journalistic capacity, even one providing commentary only, can't be tolerated.

But when you hire former political operatives as commentators, there's an unspoken assumption that you won't hold everything the operative did against the credibility of the commentator.  Without a little bit of forgiveness, or at least a wink and a nod to the unsavory business of politics as it's fought in the trenches, there's simply no path to bring people who actually understand the business of politics into the business of journalism.  That's likely a mistake, since insights into how politics is actually conducted are pretty useful.

So hiring or firing McDaniel is kind of a toss-up so far.

But we also have to consider the desirability of GOP rehabilitation.  Maybe that's a little premature, given that there's a life-or-death struggle going on to ensure that Trump is defeated, discredited, and removed from public life, either via shunning or incarceration.  But what comes immediately after that (hoped for) defeat is important, and requires planning now, so that the consequent implosion of the GOP doesn't trigger systemic threats in the opposite direction.

Ronna McDaniel is Mitt Romney's niece.  I'd be pretty surprised if, behind the scenes, she's anything other than a vanilla-flavored, ca. 2012 Republican.  As a commentator who knows the bowels of the MAGA GOP intimately but who's presumably sane, she'd be a real asset to any news organization that aspires to be anything other than a single-party mouthpiece.

Firing her from NBC does two things:

1) It reinforces the (correct) perception that MSNBC is nothing more than a Democratic Party propaganda outlet.

2) It signals to all Republicans that the other side has no intention of forgiving them for what they allowed to happen to their party.

The first of these is regrettable.  The second is outright dangerous.

The most tragic thing to come from Trumpism is the banishment of any sort of intelligent conservative argument from public discourse.  Until those ideas are allowed re-emerge and act as a counterweight to a liberalism that isn't quite as batshit crazy as MAGA, but is seriously off-track and out of step with the American public, governance is going to be impossible.

Republican rehabilitation is going to be a rancorous affair on both sides, but failure to do it is going to be a national security problem.  I'm pretty sure that some kind of truth and reconciliation process includes letting Ronna McDaniel say what she really thinks, get slapped around for it, and slowly get moved to a position where she can articulate something that's actually useful.

I hope somebody else takes a chance on her.  I also hope that they give her a really hard time.

Gasify. Decarbonize. Mitigate. Restore.

The Biden Administration plans to strengthen regulations controlling methane emissions from oil and gas wells, pipelines, and refinery infrastructure.  This is a good action.  It reduces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions very cheaply and quickly.  The costs to the oil and gas industry--and therefore to the consumer--are tiny.

It fits in well with what I think should be the global strategy for managing climate change as well as we can, as cheaply as we can.  If climate change can't be managed cheaply, then it won't be managed.  We'll regret that, but there's simply no way to force half the planet to forgo the benefits of an industrial economy to mitigate something that hasn't really happened yet.  Humans are vulnerable to Boiling Frog Syndrome.

If you go back far enough in this blog, you'll probably find me expressing skepticism that climate change is a problem that needed to be addressed immediately.  I'm now convinced.  There's enough data that the medium-to-worst-case predictions from the IPCC are correct.  We need to act.

The question is how to act.  I believe that there are four overlapping phases of climate action:

Gasify.  The lowest-hanging fruit for reducing GHG is to replace coal with gas.  Coal is still the largest worldwide source of energy production, and it's by far the most greenhouse gas-intensive source of energy.  Getting rid of it is essential. 

Retrofitting coal-fired electricity generation with gas is incredibly cheap, and gas emits less than half the CO2 of coal.  Replacing all coal-fired generation with gas would reduce US emissions by half a billion metric tonnes of CO2.  I don't know what the worldwide number for coal emissions is, but I'd be surprised if replacing coal with gas didn't reduce world GHG emissions by at least 20%.

But this only helps if the natural gas infrastructure doesn't leak.  If methane leaks into the atmosphere, it has 80x the warming potential of CO2.  So a thorough inventory of leaking infrastructure and regulations requiring the leaks to be fixed are essential.

This isn't hard.  Big methane leaks can be detected by satellite.  Smaller leaks require some labor and detector infrastructure, but a small amount of labor yields a large amount of detection.  Then you have to fix the leaks, but that's mostly to the producer or distributor's advantage.  It's as close to a policy no-brainer as we'll get.

The time horizon on gasification could be as short as a decade.  That would require beating up on the coal industry pretty aggressively, but even modest incentives for gas conversion should crater demand for coal even more than has already happened.

Outside the US, this will be harder, because the regulatory landscape is rockier, and the gas distribution infrastructure is less mature.  It'll be a tough sell to convince developing countries to install pipelines that should only be used for 10-20 years, then eliminated.  That seems like an area where the developing world can provide some policy help.  But first, the developing world need to understand that short-term reliance on gas does the whole world a giant favor.  I can't say that I'm sanguine for this happening, but it'll give us a decent amount of breathing room if it does.

Decarbonize.  Ten years ago, I would've told you that nuclear power was going to be cheaper than renewables.  For existing nukes, that is still overwhelmingly true, and we should be doing everything we can to extend licenses on existing plants. Only an idiot would shut one down if it can still operate safely. But, sadly, the cost of new nuclear (greater than $5500/kW in overnight costs in the US), and the management of that construction, is so bad that the carrying costs during construction make them uneconomical.

The knock against renewables is that they're intermittent, and the cost of storing their overproduction to even out the periods of underproduction makes the levelized cost of a mostly-renewable grid higher than a fossil grid, and quite a bit higher than a gas-dominant grid.  

That's still true, but it probably won't be in five years.  The levelized cost of storage is plummeting, not only because battery costs are plummeting, but because the market is starting to adjust to the idea of a grid with massive overproduction at some times of the day.  This makes the business case for things like green hydrogen (and green methane--more on this in a moment) start to look rosy.

Then the big barrier to the roll-out of renewables will be permitting costs, NIMBY and environmental delays, and grid upgrades (which come with their own permitting costs and NIMBY/environmental delays.)

Decarbonization requires more than just producing a decarbonized grid.  There are still industrial applications that require massive amounts of process heat (e.g. metals production, concrete, ceramics), and of course there's transportation, where electric vehicles are dropping in cost but still nowhere near competitive with internal combustion.  And there's space heating.

There's a massive infrastructure of piping for carrying gasoline, fuel oil, aviation fuels, and, most importantly, natural gas.  Replacing that infrastructure will take decades, and doing it much quicker will be unaffordable (cf. Boiling Frog Syndrome, above).

But we can stop pulling new fossil fuels out of the ground, and replace them with green synfuels.

You can make hydrogen by electrolyzing water.  It's not particularly efficient, but if you have terawatts of excess solar capacity that costs almost nothing, you don't particularly care how efficient it is.  And once you have the hydrogen, you can use it as a primary fuel, for turning turbines to make electricity when renewables aren't available, or as a feedstock to make carbon-based fuels.  Pull CO2 from the atmosphere, run it and hydrogen over a catalyst, and you get green methane (no fossil fuels involved) through the Sabatier process, which has been in use since the late nineteenth century.  And with methane, you can use additional incredibly cheap energy to convert it to alkanes for transportation fuels and petrochemicals.

Note that this doesn't reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because you're going to burn the green methane to make things go.  But it doesn't increase it either.  It's carbon-neutral.

This is all a bigger deal than gasification, but it's the road to zero net carbon emissions.  It'll take 20-40 years to do this.  There are substantial policy problems, with two standing out:

First, the fossil fuel industry will hate this, and will resist it with their substantial political clout.  This will be further complicated by the fact that we need their cooperation to get the gasification effort to work.  That's not straightforward, but it does have a political divide-and-conquer play built in:  get the oil and gas people to gang up on the coal people and wipe them out.  But that devil's bargain needs to be made explicit in policy: Oil and gas gets a brief reprieve to beat up on coal, but they're expected to manage their portfolio of assets so they're in the synfuel business in 20-40 years, and their assets in the ground stay there, pretty much forever.

Second, we simply can't afford the NIMBYism any longer.  The people who don't want giant solar and wind farms down the street are going to have to get over themselves.  Some people are going to have to live with high-voltage transmission lines on or near their property.  And all the environmental crap and litigiousness associated with building ridiculously cheap intermittent capacity--the kind that can be used by the synfuel business, as well as any other set of applications that require lots of energy but don't particularly care when it arrives--needs to be eliminated.  This requires legislative courage and leadership.

No problem there, eh?

If all of this goes well, humanity will have performed one of the greatest feats in history: for the first time since the industrial revolution, the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere will return to pre-industrial levels.

But the ones already there will remain.  And that'll eventually destroy civilization.  I believe that we're already past the point of no return.  It may take 50-100 years for things to unravel, but they will eventually.  2ºC warming, which is likely, even with fairly aggressive action, is too much stress for a civilization as complex as ours to withstand.  Do you think our politics are messed up now?  Just wait until we have another ¾ of a ºC baked into the system and see where we are.  There are going to be a lot more have-nots than haves, and they're not going to sit by idly and watch the lives they know disappear.

Mitigate.  The Paris agreement and the IPCC are all trying to get to carbon neutrality by 2040.  They'll fail.  And even if they could do so, the carbon in the atmosphere will produce significant economic hardship, which will result in mass migrations from the global south to the north, which will foment even more unrest than we've seen already.  And that can end civilization just as effectively as massive crop failures and temperatures so high that large chunks of the Earth become uninhabitable.

Typically, when we talk about climate mitigation, most people think of building dikes and flood-control systems, engineering crops that can withstand new climates, and otherwise learning to adapt to a bad situation.  All of those things are fine, but they won't be sufficient.

We need to invest in geoengineering.

Unlike adaptation, geoengineering makes the world artificially cooler than it would be if left to naturally warm with the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It's an imperfect band-aid, largely for three reasons:

1. It's a political and diplomatic heavy lift.  There will be winners and losers to geoengineering, and at some point we'll have to run roughshod over the losers without them starting a war.  I believe that's doable, but we should be under no illusions about how hard it will be.
2. It doesn't change the chemistry.  Bad stuff other than simple warming happens when there's lots of carbon in the atmosphere.  The most serious is ocean acidification.  But that takes a long time.
3. Once you start, you can't stop.  Failure for the world to continue to maintain geoengineering once it starts will cause the dreaded "termination shock", where we get no time to adjust to a step-function in global temperatures.

Nonetheless, there are fairly simple things we can do to bring down temperatures in the face of otherwise-overwhelming forcing functions.  These need to be investigated and experimented with now, so they can be deployed with confidence in 20-50 years.  And we'll probably need to maintain them for 100-200 years.

But not forever.  Bad things happen between now and forever.  If we wait long enough, there will be a termination shock, and it'll kill a stressed civilization.

Restore. So, eventually, we need to take the carbon we've put into the atmosphere over the last 200 years out of it, and fix it into limestone, where it can't come bubbling up out of old oil and gas wells, or rot away to produce methane, or otherwise sneak back into the atmosphere when we're in one of our periods when we're too stupid to keep our eyes on the ball.

This is a problem we don't know how to solve.  There are some proposals.  Some of them might be quite cheap, but in my view they're long-shots.

We should count on the problem only being tractable through the expenditure of massive amounts of energy.

The world generated 29 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022.  Let's double that for process and space heating and call it 60GWh.  As the rest of the world industrializes and becomes used to first-world living standards, we should count on that tripling in the next 50 years.  Call it 200GWh.  But that's without any estimate for how much energy will be needed to pull out the CO2.

We've put 1.1 teratonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began.  The thermodynamic requirement for removing CO2 comes out to about 250kWh/t.  We might be able to do better than that with artificial weathering and other geoengineering techniques, but let's use this as a worst case and plan to remove all 1.1Tt by brute force.  That'll require 2.75 x 10^17Wh of energy.  (For those of you playing along at home, that's 275 petawatt-hours of energy.)  If we amortize that over 200 years, that requires increasing yearly world energy consumption by a factor of roughly 7000.

That's sobering.

Is it physically possible to produce that much energy?  Sure.  It requires science fiction, but not magical science fiction:  solar power satellites beaming energy from space, fusion reactors, terrestrial solar panels with deployed costs of pennies per megawatt, geothermal energy available anywhere on Earth, supplied by shafts that cost a few hundred dollars per kilometer to drill and stabilize.

All of this is within the capability of a Kardashev Type I civilization.  If we don't destroy our civilization, either through a climate catastrophe or another of the existential threats we face, this is eminently doable in the next 200 years.  But that's the kind of timescale we're looking at before we can put the climate crisis behind us.

Putting it all together:

You'll note that I've been extremely vague about costs.  That's largely because they're unknowable.  However, I'll rephrase what I said at the beginning:  If people notice that the costs of climate mitigation affect them, they'll resist it.  On the other hand, it'll be very hard for them to attribute the costs of climate change to any one event in their lives that causes them loss.  It's irrational, but people are irrational about lots of things.

The thing that can save us is technology.  One of the reasons why I used to be a climate skeptic was that it didn't really matter, because there was a hierarchy of things that had to happen to care one way or another:

1. Is climate change happening?  (The answer to this has been "yes" for quite a while.)
2. Is it caused by human activity?  ("Yes" for not quite as long, but long enough.)
3. How bad is it? (I don't believe we really had a definitive answer to this until about 10-15 years ago.)
4. Is there anything we can do about it?

It's this last item where the answer was "no" until very recently.  Renewables costs were still too high, battery tech was kinda in limbo, and we didn't have a good idea of what a renewables-dominated electric grid looked like.

I'm still not sure that we've gotten over the "what can we do?" hurdle.  We can sprinkle photovoltaics all over the place pretty cheaply, but can't create instant infrastructure out of them, and the developing world wants the benefits of industrial society now.  If they can't get those benefits using renewables or some other non-emitting energy source, they'll use coal, gas, and oil.

So there are scaling problems with the technology we have, even though the cost curve looks good.  And the mitigation technologies are going to be insanely complicated to sell, and they're basically a problem in global collective action, which is, to say the least, an immature technology.

Through all of this, however, should be one overarching goal:  Make energy as cheap and plentiful as possible.  Only the profligate expenditure of energy can save us.  With enough of it, all problems are solvable.

How Do You Pick a Jury to Prosecute Trump?

I would very much like to see Trump taken off the table.  Having him in federal prison would do nicely.  Not as nicely as if he would do us the favor of dying in an overtly non-suspicious way, but well enough.  So from a naive standpoint, throwing the book at him would be very handy.

But if the DoJ is going to prosecute Trump, it has to win.  Having him acquitted is considerably more catastrophic than declining to prosecute him in the first place.  So here's what I think is the key question:

How do you pick a jury?

I would assume that "how did you vote" is probably a no-no as a voir dire question.  Could you ask jurors if they're Republicans, Democrats, or independents?  Could you restrict the jury pool only to independents?

And even if you could, how would you be able to tell if you hadn't empaneled a hard-core MAGA Trumpkin who was nominally independent?  It only takes one for a hung jury--which is as bad as an acquittal, from a political and public policy standpoint.

It would be fine to screen thousands of jurors if you could find a genuinely impartial one.  But I have grave doubts that there is a (legally acceptable) set of screening questions you could ask to be certain of your screening.

That makes the risks of prosecution huge.  It may make prosecuting him at all a non-starter.

Abundance As a Public Policy

 Read this.  It's important.

A Nation of Assholes

Old fuddy-duddy conservatives (the fussy, boring kind, rather than the racist, authoritarian kind) have long harped on the necessity for members of a free society to govern their own passions.  Either free people do this for themselves or somebody has to step in and do it for them.  Allowing everybody simply to indulge whatever anti-social whim that pops into their heads simply doesn't work.

That governing, self-guided or otherwise imposed, is called civilization, and it's a genuinely good thing.  This should not be in dispute by either side, even in this horrific period of national life.

But a whole bunch of people seem to need a quick refresher on a few points of public etiquette that collectively produce this "civilization" thing:

Physical confrontation is for life-or-death situations.  If you're living your life by the credo, "Punch back twice as hard," you're not being heroic; you're being an asshole.

If you think that destroying other people's property is justified because you feel aggrieved, you're mistaken.  You're also an asshole.

Bullying people you've never met in real life is barbaric.  Barbarians are assholes.

If you don't really care about ideas in public life but you care passionately about power, you're not engaged in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger justification of your ends over your means, because you don't have ends.  You're just being a thug, and thugs are assholes.

Modesty is a virtue most of the time.  If you insist on constantly jumping up and down, shouting, "Lookit me! Lookit me!" you're not promoting your brand; you're being an asshole.

On the rare occasions when you thrust your opinions upon others, it really helps if they're well informed, concisely delivered, and part of a dialogue where you listen to your interlocutor's response, rather than just steamrolling the other person with nonsense.  If you don't do this, you're not only a poor debater but also a poor conversationalist;  in short; you're an asshole.

And above all:  Rejoicing in others' pain and discomfort is a fleeting joy, and it's notoriously bad karma, because others will be happy to rejoice in your pain and discomfort in short order.  That's because nobody roots for the success of an asshole.

This all used to be stuff that your mother would teach you.  It was reinforced by your teachers, and your friends' parents, and pretty much every adult who influenced you.  The vast majority of kids emulated the adults--as they still do--and grew up to be decent.  It didn't work for everybody, but the decent-people-to-assholes ratio was high.

Sometimes kids had absent parents or grew up within a poor social network, and they had serious disadvantages.  A larger-than-average number of them grew up to be assholes.  But by and large, civilization mattered.  Culture mattered. It didn't have to be the culture of a particular race or identity; all that was necessary was that each culture acknowledged that we owed each other a modicum of respect, and if we couldn't muster the respect, we could fake it.

I don't wish to whitewash the past.  A lot of bad stuff occurred in the past, and much of it was baked into the culture.  It produced vast inequities and pain.  In some cases, the cover of good manners and civilized behavior in the most visible parts of the public allowed people to perpetrate truly barbaric acts just off the public stage.  That stuff needed--needs--to be eliminated.  But you don't tear everything down because it isn't perfect.  You recognize the good stuff and cultivate it, and you work on identifying the bad stuff and fixing it.  If you think that everything about your society is evil, you probably live a fairly miserable existence.  That kind of misery can turn you into an asshole.

We have become a nation of assholes.

This has been a long time coming.  Maybe it's an inevitable consequence of growing up in a society where things are easy, and easiness breeds decadence.  Maybe it's because, while the bedrock civilizational parts of a culture are essential, there's a lot of other ugly stuff around the edges.  If you're uncomfortable with the ugly stuff, it's easy to forget about the essential stuff.  But if you stop paying attention to it, it's a perishable skill if you don't practice it.

As usual, I'm not sure how we restore the essential parts of the formula.  Fuddy-duddy conservatism doesn't help any more, because we failed to conserve the important stuff.  It's gone.  What we need is some very selective restoration.  Normally, restoration and reaction are kissin' cousins, but that presupposes that conservation has done its job and prevented the civilizational baby from being thrown out with the antiquated bathwater during the march of progress.  Progress without conservation leads to disaster.  Conservation without progress leads to stagnation.  We seem to have had both of these pathologies, simultaneously.  

Finding our way back may require more skill and patience than we know how to muster.  But we have to try, and we have to do it pretty soon or we'll find out that civilization may be annoying but it sure beats the alternative.  In the alternative, everbody's an asshole.

The Public Debate On Social Networks We Aren't Having

Trump's recent de-platforming is of course controversial and has stirred up the usual furious "Is not! Is so!" yammering by one side shouting past the other, and vice versa.  FWIW, I'm glad Trump got de-platformed, at least for a while, but I'm pretty squeamish about allowing private companies with natural monopolies to wield this amount of power over public discourse.  I think I favor some kind of public utilities model, or at least a set of public regulations that codify what behavior will result in a user's ejection, and some kind of public appeal process.

That's an important discussion, but it's not the one I want to have today.

The interaction that users have with their social platforms represents the first large-scale experiment in the symbiosis between humans and AIs with a specific objective function.  The results are simply horrible, but there may be reason to be encouraged.

All social platform AIs have essentially the same objective function:  maximize engagement.  The more minutes a user spends interacting with it, the more data can be harvested, and the more valuable that user's digital persona becomes to advertisers.  To do this, the AI, which is a fairly straightforward machine learning system, recognizes patterns in what motivates a user to interact more strongly (i.e. longer, faster, with more posting, etc.), compares those patterns to those of other users with strong interactions, and feeds the user the same sort of content.

It works really well.  But the process is completely amoral, because the objective function is amoral.  The unanticipated consequence of this amorality is that the machine learning system optimizes for content that generates strong emotions because they generate the largest degree of engagement.  Unfortunately, for a particular type of person, the strongest emotion is rage, or self-righteousness, or some other emotion that leads to craziness and danger.

In the course of maximizing engagement for these people, the AI has essentially become the perfect vehicle to send them down the rabbit hole, spiraling tighter and tighter into a community of like-minded crazies who, because they've also been led down the same hole by the same AI, reinforce each other with progressively crazier and crazier ideas.  It's perfect for driving engagement levels even higher.

But it's terrible for the people in the hole, and it's even more terrible for civil society.  In the Olden Times (ca. 2010), people with these predilections were strongly discouraged by their friends, neighbors, and civic leaders.  But now those people don't have friends, neighbors, and leaders outside of the rabbit hole.

So the platform makes lots of money at the expense of civility.

There's a fairly famous thought experiment concerning poor choice of AI objective function.  In it, we give a super-intelligent AI the objective function to maximize the production of paperclips.  It starts out optimizing manufacturing and supply chains.  Then it goes looking for more iron supplies because it needs more steel, and it ignores the environmental damage--that's not part of the objective function.  Then it goes looking for more power for manufacturing and notices that people are consuming a lot of power that could otherwise go toward paperclip production, so it eliminates the people.  It ends with the AI spreading out over the galaxy, converting entire solar systems to paperclips.  Mind you, the AI is extremely smart.  But it still has a purpose, and it uses its intelligence in service to that purpose.

Compared to a super-intelligent AI, the social platforms' AIs are dumber than stumps.  But they've still managed to worm their ways into our behavior to an unprecedented degree.  If there were ever a better illustration of how a poor choice of objective function can have disastrous consequences, this one gives the paperclip AI a run for its money.

Up at the top, I mentioned that there might be something encouraging here:  You can change an objective function.  If, instead of "maximize engagement", you can choose "maximize engagement without allowing users to fall down a rabbit hole".  This is slightly more complex from a machine learning standpoint, but well within the state of the art.  In doing so, there's a possibility that a lot of the insanity might abate.

Note, however, that this objective function does not maximize revenue for the social platforms.  I think it doesn't do huge damage to their bottom lines, but if you gently guide people away from armed insurrection--or quilting fanaticism, or an unhealthy obsession with cat videos, or whatever--then you can still push maximum engagement across a sufficiently broad set of interests to mitigate the worst effects and still have a fine business model.  Who knows?  The platforms might even discover that by broadening the interests of their users, they found new advertising niches that could be more lucrative.  After all, there's only so much camo gear and 5.56mm ammunition you can sell.

If you're getting a creepy-crawly feeling that's whispering "miiiiiiiind controooolll" in the back of your head: good.  It's not a slam-dunk to engineer this sort of thing so that it's neutral about people's... enthusiasms.  But we're already seeing the results of a different, brute-force kind of mind control.  Doing better than that seems like it ought to be pretty easy.

Thoughts On 1/6

Well, we're in deep trouble.

This post is going to be a mess, because I'm having a huge amount of trouble wrapping my head around this.  So maybe I ought to start with a bunch of things that I'm pretty sure are true:

1. Most people are not evil.  They're not saints.  They'll see things they know are wrong and turn a blind eye to them because it's easy.  They'll find themselves in situations where it's easier (or more profitable) to do something a little bit corrupt.  But only about 5% of the population could be diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder.
2. Most people aren't stupid.  Intelligence is normally distributed, and there's no particular geographic variance in the distribution.
3. A lot of people are ignorant.  They've had bad educations.  They lack critical thinking skills.  They don't read.  They don't know how to do research.  The American education system is a scandal, and has deteriorated to the point where it's a national security threat.
4. There's a point at which violent action against the government is justified.  There is not broad agreement on where that point is.
5. You can't have a functioning society when at least 40% of the country thinks that the other 40% of the country is evil, and vice versa.  (Note that, per assertion #1, each side is objectively wrong about at least 88% of the people that they hate.)
6. To be human is to be tribal.  To be tribal is to hate, or at least profoundly mistrust, other tribes.  Societies that don't acknowledge this are doomed.  At the same time, the goal of a good society is to make the notion of the tribe inclusive enough to give people good high-level reasons to think of themselves as one tribe, while in the absence of the society they would hate each other for lower-level reasons.
7. To be human is to be intuitive, and intuition can lead you to believe some really weird stuff.  The antidote to this tendency is training in how to reason.  That's hard.  (See #3.)

That's pretty much all I'm sure of that's relevant.

It seems that we need answers--solutions--to three huge questions:

1. When is violence against the government warranted?
2. What is the antidote for our hyper-acute tendency to believe weird stuff we saw on the internet?
3. How do we rebuild the American tribe?

Let's take 'em one at a time:

Violence Against the Government

Many of you will think that the first of these is a ridiculous thing to be debated, but it should be obvious to you now that many of your fellow citizens not only disagree but think that the threshold justifying violence has been breached. The apparent last straw for most of them seems to be that they sincerely believe that the presidential election was stolen.

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that it wasn't stolen (that's a topic for huge question #2).  Instead, let's ask a simple question:  Is stealing an election grounds for violence?

We have lots of examples of stolen elections in any number of countries in which I am pleased not to live.  But in most of those countries, stolen elections are merely a symptom, not a cause, of an extremely bad government.

I would agree that governments in Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, etc. are bad enough that a moral case can be made for attempting their violent overthrow.  I'm not sure it's the best tactic, but I'm not on the ground and can't make a judgement.  These places are far gone, but the lack of free and fair elections is the least of their problems.

We have a few recent examples of places that were well on their way to needing violent corrections, and in those places an obviously rigged election seems to have been the last straw.  However, in those places peaceful demonstrations seem to have been much more successful in backing governments away from the edge than violent ones.

The United States is not currently Syria or Venezuela.  If an election were stolen, it's highly likely that peaceful demonstrations would be more effective than violence.  What we saw at the Capitol was violent.  As such it is more likely to make things worse than better.

A quick aside here:  I'm sure that there were many peaceful protesters at the Capitol.  Similarly, I'm sure that there were violent incidents fomented by protesters in Kiev and Tahrir Square.  Even more to the point, we know that there were violent incidents during the BLM protests.  So it's important to recognize that the line between peaceful and violent is fuzzy.  For me, the BLM protests were largely peaceful, but I admit that's a judgement call and it's a debatable topic.  However, there's no question that the overall character of the Capitol "protest" was violent.

Crazy Stuff

Of course, we wouldn't have to make judgement calls about peaceful vs. violent if a whole bunch of people hadn't believed something that was full-blown batshit crazy.  I'm not going to litigate the overwhelming likelihood that the election was honest, because then I'd be writing a 20,000 word post instead of a simple 3000 word one.

People aren't evil.  They're not stupid.  But they are ignorant.  Even worse, they're untrained in how to approach novel situations.  I'm not going to hold myself up as a paragon of Reason in the face of new, scary stuff, but I do know how to do at least informal research.  I know to check sources.  On my better days, I can entertain the idea that some of my beliefs and assumptions are wrong, even though I'll fight to preserve them right up until the moment when they're no longer tenable.

A first-order explanation for why things have gone so wrong is that ordinary people have suddenly had massive loads of information shoved down their throats via social media, and conspiracy theories are a simple way of making sense of the confusion.  A conspiracy theory has a narrative.  The outline of the story is simple and compelling, while the ramifications make it feel complex enough to mimic the complexity of the real world.

I don't know how to make this stop.  Tens of millions of words by deeper thinkers and better writers than I have been devoted to this.  However, I do have a few unorganized thoughts on a few parts of the solution:

1. Censorship won't work.  First, attempts to censor will make a weak conspiracy theory suddenly seem to be absolute Truth.  If somebody doesn't want you to see it, then there must be a Reason, right?  Riiiiiiiight???  I'm overjoyed that Twitter took away Trump's car keys, but that's mostly because we have to survive the next few months.  (And of course there's the little fact that I hate him.  Hate him.  I wish him ill. More than any person I've ever encountered.  The hatred is exhausting and I can't seem to make myself stop, even for my own good.)
2. A necessary condition for rooting out pockets of craziness is that we be able to see that they're forming.  To do that, everybody needs to be able to see the graph of the social network in as much detail as the social media companies can.  This will take money out of their pockets.  It will be hard to draft the legislation in a way that's simple enough for third parties to be able to monitor things and bulletproof enough to be enforceable.  Nonetheless, it needs to be done.
3. It's bad for people to interact with an AI whose sole objective function is to make them interact with it more.  This needs to be illegal.  Again, this is hard, because the reductio ad absurdum version of this argument is that all social media must be boring, and that won't work.  A modest, half-baked suggestion:  If you can make an AI that can recognize the best way to maximize a user's engagement, you can make an AI that can recognize when that user is falling down an unhealthy rabbit hole, and make him stop.  Again, it's tricky codifying things like "unhealthy" and "rabbit hole".  It's even trickier figuring out how to prove that an AI conforms to the definitions and is operating correctly, especially since even its creators don't know exactly what it's doing or how it's doing it.
4. AI-driven social media is an existential threat to American society, and likely an existential threat to humanity in general.  No, this isn't a "killer AIs are going to kill us all" rant; it's a "human behavior augmented by AIs is unstable" rant.  We are like the Krell in Forbidden Planet, and our own Monsters from the Id are already roaming the earth, unchecked.  We should listen to the AI alarmists a lot more, and we should be tackling codifying the rules for what is and isn't acceptable, ASAP.
5. I always roll my eyes when somebody suggests that if we only had a better educational system, everything would be fine.  First, you get the benefits of better education twenty years in the future and at this rate that will produce a generation of highly educated young adults who can contemplate the rubble that their parents left them.  But we do need to work hard to give adults the tools needed to grapple with the firehose of information that's been installed in them.  I'd start with the fifty-year-olds and work my way down, so we can meet the Gen Z+'s (Gen AA?) in the middle.  It seems to me that there are abundant opportunities for tools that can manage information, determine its primary sources, and gently point out when something is full-blown batshit crazy.  I devoutly hope the people who try to produce these tools live in Omaha, rather than Menlo Park, or the target audience won't use them.

I'm... not sanguine that any of the stuff above is going to make a difference in the short term.  It's all vitally necessary but, like education, it's going to take a long time to get right.  That's not a reason to do nothing, but ultimately, I think our survival depends less on adapting technology to the humans and more on adapting the humans to their culture--or possibly vice versa.

Healing the American Tribe

It's important to understand where the bad craziness is coming from and how to make it stop--eventually.  But we're going to have to rely on older, more time-tested methods if we're to survive the next year, or five years, or even ten years.

We need a culture war armistice.

Now:  As a moderate conservative, six years ago I was comfortable describing myself as economically conservative and socially liberal, under the clearly incorrect assumption that a live-and-let-live culture would work itself out, and the best way to assist it in doing so was to ensure that it wasn't burdened with economic turmoil.

I was wrong, both on the culture and on the economics.

I'm going to leave the economics for another day, other than to say that the Trumpism doesn't care about any of the things that economic conservatives care about, and that seems to have freed large chunks of the Democratic Party to think up ways that they can spend us into a debt spiral even faster than the Republicans can.  A lot of those ways are responsible for the "Socialism!!!!!!" panic attack that's instilled in the current GOP.  The lack of self-awareness on both sides is... sobering.

The much more serious problem is that both sides have become cultural nihilists.

On the left, with have this weird, identity politics crossed with intersectionality death cult.  On the right, we have this hollow edifice of buzzwords to which the GOP still pays lip service, but the parts that cared about real families and real civics has been eaten by demagogic termites.  The religious stuff is still lurking in there, but it seems more like Democrat-style identity politics than real faith these days.

Both sides are nuts. 

I don't know how to restore any of this.  I'm a kinda-old white guy, so my observations on how to fix American culture are going to seem... quaint?  Still, I'm 2000 words into this, so let's let'r rip:

1. I've said this before in this blog, but I'll say it again:  Just because identity politics is more effective than ideological or interest-based politics doesn't mean that it's a good idea.  It is tailor-made for polarization, because its foundations rest on the idea that one group is denying the other group (or groups) the stuff that they're entitled to, and the only way to fix it is to drag down the bad group.  Then the remaining groups can apply this process recursively until things look more like Bosnia than the United States.
2. I like living in a tolerant society.  There's a lot of stuff that I'll tolerate that I'd rather not have to deal with very much, though.  There's a fine line here, because sometimes my not dealing with it is intolerant, or at least denies others rights that are easy for me to wield but hard for them to acquire, much less wield.  That said, we're bumping up against those pesky limits to human nature:  push people too hard, too fast, and they react negatively.  You make more progress with a gradual improvement than a storm-the-barricades revolution, followed by 20 years of reactionaries working to undo what really hadn't been done in the first place.  Patience.
3. Respect is a huge deal.  I'm a mostly urban person, and I don't get the cultural things that the rural people are upset about.  I wouldn't want to live with them.  But I don't look down on them, and I respect that they probably find the stuff that's important to me to be pretty silly.  I want to make this very clear, though:  If Tribe Blue insists that Tribe Red is living the wrong way, Tribe Red is going to become increasingly angry.  Angry people are more susceptible to craziness, and craziness makes them think that things like ransacking the Capitol is an act of patriotism rather than the single biggest blow to the foundations of the American Experiment in the last 150 years.

All three of these things are more conservative than they are liberal.  But they're a much more classical conservatism than Trumpism is.  The prescription for the Red Tribe is therefore that they need to take a breath and figure out what it means to practice what they preach, because the cartoon version really isn't cutting it.

The prescription for the Blue Tribe is more complicated, because there's no reason why they should be forced to backtrack on stuff like police reforms and working to reframe the conversation about racism in America.  But all of those gains will be lost if they're framed in an us-vs-them rhetoric.  As I said, I'm an old white guy, and I won't even pretend to understand the rage and despair that's been bubbling under the surface without me seeing it.  But at the same time, if this is a zero-sum game where my position in society has to be sacrificed so that others can take its place, I'll be on the other side of that one.  There's a positive-sum solution to this stuff, but it requires more nuance and patience than have been shown recently.

And for god's sake, show some respect.  This is asking a lot, especially this week, when the worst that the Red Tribe has to offer has been on horrifying display.  But there's no solution to this horrible situation we've gotten our selves into without an act of faith or two.

Explaining My Shame

The following is not an excuse; it's an explanation.

Back in the 80's I was young and a pretty vanilla-flavored Reagan Republican.  Even then, you could hear the dog whistle to the right-wing crazies and racists, but it was faint, and they were effectively suppressed from having any power in the party.  Meanwhile, the Democrats were still recovering from having gone full-blown batshit crazy in the 60's and early 70's.  (Nixon played dirty, but he probably didn't need to.)

In the 90's I was disillusioned with the whole system.  I wasn't super happy with Clinton, but Bush was unexciting and Dole was a nonentity.

By the end of the 90's the dog whistle was a lot louder, but I could still justify voting for conservative policies, even if the unsavory types were starting to ooze out of the cracks.  I voted for Obama in 2008 because McCain clearly didn't know what he was doing, but for Romney in 2012.  By this point, I couldn't in good conscience call myself a Republican, because the crazies were, if not actively driving the bus, at least whispering instructions to the driver.  Still, I was right of center, and when push came to shove I voted more Republican than not.

(An aside:  The Massachusetts governor version of Romney is pretty much my dream candidate.  It's a shame that the only thing he couldn't manage was a presidential campaign, and it's a shame that that version didn't run.)

Which brings us to Trump.

I was just as shocked--and horrified--as anyone that Trump beat Hillary.  I didn't see it coming, and reckoning with the fact that that many people would vote for him under any circumstances was sobering, to say the least.  Still, I thought that the lesson to learn was that there were a whole bunch of desperate people who weren't being listened to.  The backup lesson was that they were furiously angry for being actively hated by half the country, and lashing out was poor form but possibly understandable.  At this point, I was still willing to entertain the idea that I could vote for decent conservatives at some point in the future, after the insanity had abated.  I still considered myself a right-leaning independent.

That the 2020 election was as close as it was has really shaken my faith in humanity.  That so many people were willing to vote for the Worst Person in the World after seeing him oozing along the national and international stage for 4 years is simply incomprehensible.  Still, in the days following the election, even with Trump doing his full-up Pennywise the Clown act, I thought that we were still mostly dealing with people who had voted for policies they liked, and were willing to extend the deal they'd made with the Devil to get them.  At this point, I'd pretty much resolved never to vote for any officeholder who had ever supported Trump, but I still thought that eventually the insanity would break.

Well, that's out the window now.  When three quarters of Republicans think that an obviously normal election was somehow fixed because their guy didn't win, and are willing to engage in extra-legal means to reverse the outcome, we're no longer dealing with fringe insanity.  Instead, we're dealing with insanity as the very core of the GOP.

I am deeply ashamed that I voted for these guys, ever.  I am deeply ashamed that I didn't see the seed of the rotting tree that they would become.  I will never vote for another candidate with an (R) next to his or her name.

I am a Democrat.

I can't say I'm happy about this, because I still think that moderate conservative policies are better than liberal policies, and the Democrats are pretty far left of center these days.  But the policies simply don't matter when you're dealing with crazy people.  Yes, the Democrats have crazy people as well, but they're so much better managed than the Republican managed their crazies that there's no longer basis for comparison.

Of course, that's what I thought of the Republicans in the 80's.  The difference is that I'm reasonably confident that I'll be dead before the craziness gets bad enough on the Left to have to weigh it against whatever happens next on the Right.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to believe that there's an explanation for why the Right went nuts.  So far, I can't find it.  I really want to find it, because it means that there might be rational people with whom reasonable discussions can occur.  And without reason, I'm very frightened that the nation will be a howling wasteland for quite a while.

I'm sorry.

How Can the Worst Person in the World Get Almost Half the Vote?

 It's going to be hard for the modest majority who voted for Biden to forgive the substantial minority who voted for Trump.  It is also essential that they find some way of doing so.

By far the most common sentiment I've heard from Biden voters is that they simply don't understand how anybody can vote for the Worst Person in the World.  The prevailing theory seems to be that half the country has gone full-blown batshit crazy.  That's a theory with dark implications, because you don't reason or negotiate with crazy people; you defeat and contain them.  Needless to say, the Trump side will resist that.  This is a fine recipe for at least a cold civil war, with more than an outside chance at a hot one.

So it'd be nice to have an alternate theory.  I think I have one.

First, because I live in Texas, and have children who live in Georgia and Florida, I'm exposed to Trump people.  Most of them aren't crazy. They are, by and large, perfectly decent, intelligent citizens.  So I'm forced to the conclusion that they've made rational decisions.  That doesn't mean that I agree with those decisions, but they shouldn't be dismissed as illegitimate.

People judge political leaders, either explicitly or implicitly, based on their own priorities and how well the candidate performs with respect to those priorities.  I and most of Biden voters have put an extremely high priority on the president not being the Worst Person in the World.  As a moderate conservative, if Trump had been semi-normal, I would have still had trouble with a lot of his accomplishments (or lack thereof), but I am, in principle, in favor of a government that's as small as possible but no smaller, with only essential regulations, and with a fairly conservative view of the law.  That these policies were implemented by an incompetent, in a fashion that provided minimum benefit for maximum pain, causes me to score Trump below average on them.  But I suspect that I would have scored potential Biden policies even lower.  But I didn't even consider any of this when I voted, because Trump's loathsome and alarming character meant that he was instantly disqualified.  Similarly, I voted almost straight Democratic, because people who enable the Worst Person in the World also score low enough on the character scale not to be trusted.

But reasonable people can disagree about the importance of character.

We've had plenty of presidents with less than sterling personalities.  None of them (including Nixon) have been nearly as bad as Trump, but that's a matter of degree, not kind.  It is a rational decision to rank character lower than policy in your own personal presidential calculus.

I think that this is what 60% of Trump World did.  They knew they were making a deal with the Devil, and they decided that it was worth it.  We may view that as an incredibly bad decision, but it's not an irrational one.  We have a fine process for working through opposing views on decisions: it's called participating in a democratic republic.  That process is still there.  It's been battered and bruised, but it can heal.  The political operators in it can decide to allow their norms to revert closer to the mean, and things will be... if not okay, at least better.

But it leaves two big questions.

First, what do we do with the 40% of TrumpWorld that really isn't rational?  That's roughly 20% of the country.  That's... unfortunate.  But we've always had 20%-30% of the country that was pretty much crazy, arrayed in varying proportions on the two extremes of the political spectrum, and we've done okay until recently.  My first approximation to an answer to the problem posed by those people is that we try to understand the reality behind what makes them crazy, address it as best as possible, and treat them with respect, even if we don't feel that they've completely earned it.

The more troubling question is this:  How could we have gotten to a point where 30% of the country could make the moral calculation that Trump's policy ends justified his loathsome means?  How could so many people discount character as an important quality in a president?

And there, I don't have a good answer.  The best one I have is that this is what happens when you stop valuing a common culture that has at least a few unquestioned norms.

This is of course a fairly mainstream conservative argument.  After all, the root of conservatism is to conserve.  When we stop valuing cultural traditions, they wither.  When they wither, the vacuum they leave behind is going to be filled by something.  That "something" is a lot more chaotic than what it replaced.

Sometimes that chaos is necessary.  There's always been a balance in America between forcing diverse cultures into the American consensus and embracing the diversity of those cultures (and appropriating the bejeezus out of the interesting parts to make the consensus culture better).  There's no question that the knob has been turned much farther to the left for the past sixty years than it was before that.  There are good reasons to have done that, but there are also good reasons to think that you can only force change like this so quickly before things either crumble or there's a terrific backlash.  In our case, both of those things are happening.

I'll go out on an absolutist limb and state that that's bad.

But there is a balance to this.  Full-blown reaction won't work, but neither will cramming cultural chaos down the throats of a near-majority that hates it.  That balance can be negotiated.  But it requires acknowledging that the two poles requiring balance are both legitimate, and then capitalizing on the good will that comes from acknowledging that legitimacy.

The Supreme Court Appointment Is Not the Hill the Democrats Should Die On

There is no greater priority than getting Trump out of office.  Yes, it's a bummer that SCOTUS is going to be seriously out of balance.  (Truth in advertising:  I'm what used to be called a moderate conservative, so this bothers me less than it will a lot of you.)  But there's ultimately nothing to be done, unless at least four Republicans are sufficiently bothered by the prospect of establishing precedents and then blowing through them the very next time the issue comes up, or at least if they think that moderating can give them more swing votes than it loses from the base.  (Hint:  they probably won't think that.)

If Trump and McConnell want to ram this through, they can.  The Democrats can probably drag it out past the election with procedural tricks if they want to, but that's about it.

They should absolutely not drag it out.  That's an excellent way to lose the election.

I know it's like letting a particularly repulsive parasite run around inside your head, but think like Trump for a moment:  How many juicy reality TV episodes is a scorched earth nomination fight worth to him?  Now:  How many episodes is an expedited confirmation process worth?

Given that, barring a miracle, all of the possible outcomes result in RBG's seat being filled by a conservative, let's go through the sub-outcomes.  There are really only two of them:

1. Democrats fight and successfully delay the confirmation until after the election.  In this case, Trump will incessantly tweet about how DISRUPTIVE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS WANT TO PACK THE SUPREME COURT AND WILL USE ANY MEANS NECESSARY TO DO SO.  This instantly converts all of the "I like the outcomes we get from Trump in power but he's too loathsome for me to bother to go vote" fence-sitters into people willing to brave going to the polls in a pandemic, pull the lever for Trump, and then throw up in the bushes while dousing themselves in hand-sanitizer.  (Whether the hand-sanitizer is for coronavirus or for their souls is an open question.)  Then, win or lose, Trump gets his nominee confirmed.  Personally, I'd much rather we enjoyed the "lose" option there.
2. Democrats go limp, call the question themselves, vote against the nominee, lose, and put the issue behind them.  Trump TV is left with a bunch of boring episodes right before the election, and the fence-sitters decide to stay home, secure in the knowledge that they've gotten maximum value out of a one-term Trump, and can weather the Biden storm as a result.

The Democrats can fund-raise on this issue.  They can jinn up their base and most of the swing voters.  But that's going to happen no matter what.  What they need to be doing is finding ways to make the soft Trumpkins (i.e., the ones who have trouble voting for the Worst Person in the World, even to further their deeply held beliefs) want to stay home.

Another thing the Democrats can do to blow their own feet off:  Threaten to pack the court, or add four more states, or otherwise drink the whole pitcher of Norm-Shattering Kool-Aid.  Note that the argument that "we're just doing what you guys did" has absolutely zero impact on anything, and the Trumpkins will be perfectly happy to be outraged at the radical erosion of societal norms.  As a rule, people aren't good at self-awareness on things like this.

Moral of the story:  In the immortal words of your former leader, "Don't do stupid shit."

Some things the Democrats can do, which will actually help them:

1. Ask pointed questions of the nominee on their opinions with respect to election law.  Try to pin them down as much as possible, to establish predicates for the inevitable court cases that come out of the impending clusterfuck.
2. Ask them if they will recuse themselves from any election disputes.
3. Actually push to expedite the process.  McConnell is the furthest thing from a fool that there is, and will almost certainly understand the value of dragging his feet on confirmation until after the election.  If the Democrats can catch him slow-rolling in opposition to them trying to expedite the process, they can use that as a powerful bludgeon in the elections.

Finally, one last issue:  When I tried this argument out on my wife, her instant reaction was, "But then Trump's nominee will be there to help him rig the election!"  That's possible, and it's one of the reasons why a good chunk of the Democrats' committee time ought to be spent hemming the nominee in as much as possible.  But the important thing to remember is that this is going to happen, unless four Republicans grow a backbone.  Better to have it happen on the most favorable electoral terms possible, rather than getting sucked into yet another game of Lucy-with-the-football with Trump.

Please don't be stupid.

Ideology vs. Competence

I have to admit that when Trump says that a Biden Administration could usher in massively radical and destructive changes, I believe that to be at least 80% true. I believe that the only thing that's keeping the Democratic Party apparat from letting its freak flag fly is the knowledge that it'll lose the election if it isn't a little circumspect. 

It doesn't matter to me. 

I'd be overjoyed if we could have an election about ideology, policy, and the blocking and tackling of enacting a political agenda. But the job of president is about 85% responding to crises, and providing the leadership needed for the American people to deal with them. Trump can't do it. He's not intellectually or morally up to the job. His character is deficient. He's untrustworthy and corrupt. 

So the ideology and politics have to take a back seat to the urgent need to have a grownup in charge. Biden is far from my first choice for president, but he'll do. Trump won't. 

I'm feeling my chest tighten as the polls do the same thing. By and large, I don't get too hysterical when my side doesn't win in an election. But this time is different. We're in real peril. Please vote. I know it'll be a pain in the ass and for some of you will involve literally risking your lives. But voting is the lesser risk to doing nothing. And if you're not worried about yourself, think of your children. Think of your grandchildren. They have to grow up in the country we leave them.

Using Starships as Habs on Mars

This is another one of those placeholder posts.  In this case, here's a little cartoon about how to modify and install Starship crew and cargo spacecraft as early living spaces on Mars.

If You're Still Thinking of Voting for Trump...

...then at least read this.

Can you really vote for somebody whose negligence caused at least 83,000 avoidable deaths?

You Need a Reusable Starship, But You Might Need an Expendable One Even More

Hans Koenigsmann says in an interview with Der Spiegel that SpaceX is still shooting for an orbital flight of Starship in 2020.  I'm not holding my breath on that one, but it did occur to me that maybe we've got the order of development for Starship all wrong.

If you assume that the first orbital test of Starship will be with a vehicle that's already done successful suborbital entry, descent, and landing, then the end of the year is going to be hard to make.  But what if the first Starships are expendable?  Indeed, what if expendable Starships are about as common as reusable ones?  Then maybe Koenigsmann isn't as crazy as he sounds.

What follows below is to some extent an update to the post I did last year about how to use Starship without subjecting crews to its risks during launch and EDL.  But there are some key differences.  First, we now know that SpaceX is part of the Human Landing System contracts, which means that NASA's going to use a variant of Starship (among other vendors) for the actual Moon landing.

More importantly, however, the economics change pretty radically if you allow for the possibility of expendable Starships and their close cousins, Starships that never return to Earth.

The Police

I'm quite conservative when it comes to law-and-order.  Even as a not-completely-crazy libertarian, I believe that the freedom to make a life for yourself is enhanced if you have a somewhat neutral third party between you and people who'd like to prey upon you.  Policing, within well-defined limits (which do not included domestic military operations!!!!!), is essential.

But it's time to acknowledge that something has gone seriously wrong.

According to the Washington Post's database on police shootings in America, blacks are killed at a rate that's roughly 2.3 times that of whites.  By some other measures, the rate is nearly 5 times that of whites.  No matter how you measure it, something bad is happening.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the deaths are only part of the problem, and that there's a pervasive pattern of harassment and humiliation that swamps the killings.  But we need to be careful here, because this is exactly the sort of situation where human beings' heuristics for drawing conclusions from small amounts of data can get us into trouble.  Unfortunately, there's very little data to be had.  That doesn't appear to be accidental¹, and it's suspicious enough to make us trust our anecdotal priors even more.  I'm going to accept the idea that the police are acting in a manner where at least the result is racist.

Why is this?

My white guy impression is that most police are decent people.  Decent people know that racism is bad, and likely don't self-identify as racists.  And yet, as a group, they're engaging in behaviors that are effectively racist.

Hypotheses for what's going on have to fall into one of two broad categories:

1. There are a substantial number of police who are racist, whether they believe they are or not.
2. Something about police organizations either requires or provides strong incentives for their members to engage in behaviors that have racist effects.

As a practical matter, there's not much to be done if hypothesis #1 is what's driving things.  We're not going to disband police forces.  Fewer things will dispel concerns about racism faster than widespread disorder.  Over the long haul, it'd be nice not to hire racist cops.  That seems like a worthwhile organizational goal, and one for which future cohorts of police should be screened.  But this is no solution for either the short or medium term.

So let's drill down on hypothesis #2, where something about the practice of policing causes racist outcomes.  Let's moot some behaviors that might lead to institutional racism:

1. Police are taught how to be intimidating.  Unless you want almost as many cops as civilians, this is an occupational necessity.  Perhaps, however, the intimidation tool is relied upon too heavily.  I would think that that was a doctrinal thing that could be changed, although it's also a training thing, meaning that most good cops internalized the behavior back in the police academy.  Now that they're older, it'll be hard to retrain.
2. Intimidation is easier if you're aggressive.  If aggression is necessary to succeed, then there's selection pressure in police forces to be aggressive.  Some aggressive people are thoughtful and careful to manage their aggression.  But a lot of them are just assholes.  Not necessarily racist assholes, but assholes nonetheless. As support for this hypothesis, note that spouses of police officers experience domestic violence at roughly four times the national rate.
3. Police are taught to be very conservative when it comes to preserving their own lives and, even more important, the lives and well-being of their partners and fellow officers.  This is just Paramilitary Training 101.  But it leads to "Blue Wall" kinds of solidarity, which aren't necessarily in the public interest.
4. Police are taught not to let people committing crimes get away.  It's hard to deter lawlessness unless its consequences are certain when it's observed.  This is a fine policy until somebody winds up getting shot while fleeing or beaten for resisting arrest.  After that, there's a lot of second-guessing.
5. Police need an SOP to make hard decisions.  The trick to making as few bad decisions as possible is to rely on training and procedures whenever possible.
6. There's a natural tendency to confuse bad areas with bad people.  Residents of high-crime areas lose the benefit of the doubt.
7. Arms races between the cops and the criminals need to be won decisively by the cops.  In a society where guns bounce around like the particles in a gas, having better weapons and tactics is the only way to avoid getting killed.

All of these factors make perfect sense if your goal is to have an "effective" police force.  Perceived effectiveness is always important in government, because ineffectiveness makes the news, and news kills the careers of people it touches in most cases.

And we, the public, want an effective police force.  We want to be able to feel safe.  We don't want to deal with the debilitating effects of criminality on our lives and businesses.  I don't see any solution to the problem of institutional racism that results in more crime being tolerated.

This is a huge problem, because the deterrence of crime is wrapped up in aggressive policing.  You need police to make it difficult for criminals to operate, which requires some degree of harassment.  You need to deter street gangs, which requires harassing some assemblies of people in areas with a gang presence, and a lot of those areas don't have a lot of white people in them.  So if we want crime to stay low, at least some of this institutional behavior has to be tolerated and likely even encouraged.

That said, one way to get low crime with less intimidation and harassment is through surveillance.  The privacy issues associated with pervasive surveillance make a lot of people queasy (including me), but if I have to change the mix between public surveillance, crime deterrence, and fewer racist institutional behaviors, I'm OK sacrificing some privacy for less racism.  I'm not OK sacrificing public safety for less racism.  That seems like an awfully good way to get the public at large to be OK with institutional racism, which is not a step in the right direction.

But if we the public are going to rely more on surveillance and less on intimidation, it makes perfect sense for the police themselves to give up any right to privacy on the job.  From the time they clock in to the time they go off-duty, body cams need to be universal and on.  If the tradeoff is that cops don't get to have personal lives at all on duty, that seems like a small price to pay.

Beyond this, there are some gimmes out there:

1. Training practices need to change to de-emphasize intimidation and aggression.
2. Retraining for experienced cops needs to be a priority.  This isn't going to be hugely effective, but it's hard to hold someone accountable for doing their job the way they were trained to do it without at least giving them a chance to know that the rules have changed.
3. Standard operating procedures need to be heavily revisited, and escalation rules need to have higher thresholds, even if it comes at the expense of officer safety and apprehension statistics.
4. Maybe we need to trade the size of police forces for more professionalism and pay a more technocratic kind of police more.  A lot of the reforms I'm talking about here make the job more dangerous.  If you don't compensate people for that danger, you wind up attracting the wrong kinds of people.
5. If you increase the professionalism of your police force, then your hiring practices have to reflect it.  You need to dial down the aggression criteria substantially.  As I said above, this isn't a solution for anything in the short term, but a commitment to changing the mix sends a signal to both the public and the members of the force.
6. Complaints by the public and domestic violence charges need to be given much more weight in considering promotions and disciplinary action.  I'm reluctant to use the words "zero tolerance" here, because that inevitably leads to complaints becoming a personal weapon wielded by people who just don't like you.  But aggressive, impartial investigation of such complaints needs to be increased, and even a hint of substantiation needs to be career-limiting, if not career-ending.
7. I can't see a way of reducing the esprit de corps of police forces, and the attendant natural impulse to protect fellow officers from discipline, without completely demoralizing your force.  But body cams are a huge deal here.  They are no doubt also demoralizing, but that's why professionalizing the force isn't a terrible idea.  Note to the public:  You need to be willing to pay for this!!!!
8. Getting good intelligence (cf. "surveillance") to street cops is essential if you want to reduce the number of stops and harassment of innocent people.
9. Rules of engagement on escaping suspects need to be revisited.
10. I have no clue how to avoid the continued militarization of the police.  You simply can't let cops go up against heavily armed suspects without enough firepower to counter them.  Other countries have ways of limiting the quantities and lethality of guns in the society, but the United States doesn't.  Absent a repeal of the Second Amendment, it's not happening.  I don't think there's even a decent debate to be had on this topic.  Guns are a fact of life.  It would be nice to put an upper bound on lethality at some point, but then it'll take a couple of generations for the arsenals to decay enough to make a difference.

All of this stuff is hard and almost certainly fraught with unintended consequences.  But we seem to have reached a tipping point where this needs to be a national priority.  When that happens, the key to success is not to retreat when something doesn't work; the institutions need to keep trying.  We members of the public need to reward administrations that fail and fix things more than those that retreat to the status quo ante.  That's not something that the media is set up to allow us to do right now.  Perhaps they ought to be thinking about some reforms as well.

---

¹That this is so heavily politicized is deplorable.  On the right, there's all kinds of dodging and weaving going on to avoid getting officer-involved injuries and deaths into the uniform crime statistics in any meaningful way.  On the left, as I was googling some stuff related to the the ethnicity of gangs, I was surprised to discover that statistics pretty much vanish starting in about 2012.  Apparently, people are only fans of data when it doesn't gore the oxen of their constituents.

It's Time For an Act of Faith

I see from Wikipedia that the aphorism "May you live in interesting times" is not a translation of a Chinese curse.  But it's still an excellent curse.  And the times have gotten awfully interesting.

There is a nihilist wing in the Republican Party.  It's deadly serious about tearing down the federal government.  Some of these nihilists are libertarians¹ who believe that if you degrade government to the point where it no longer functions, something will magically spring up to take its place and all will be rainbows and unicorns.  These people are idiots.  However, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they mean well, even if they're agents of ruination.  When they see what they've wrought, they may be capable of learning a lesson.  We'll call this group the "stupid" wing of the GOP.

There is another group of nihilists, however.  These people have read The Dictator's Handbook way too carefully, and believe that they can cement power in perpetuity if they can scare the public badly enough that they're willing to hand over their agency to somebody who promises to make the bad stuff stop.  Then they can do whatever they want, for whatever purposes they see fit.  Let's refer to this group as the "evil" wing of the GOP.²

Mind you, I don't think that Trump believes he's in either of these two nihilist camps.  Even a stupid nihilist has to have the ability to think about what he believes is best for society, and Trump simply isn't mentally equipped to do that.  However, he is sociopathically self-interested, which makes him a fellow traveller with the authoritarians.  In either case, he's perfectly willing to let both groups of nihilists use the executive branch as their own personal Port-a-Potty.

Both groups have the same basic formula:  First, hollow out the bureaucracy to the point where it's dangerously incompetent.  Then, degrade all norms  and customs to the point where nobody will believe a single thing that any representative of the federal government says.  Then, wait for... something to happen to bring the whole thing down.

Well, something happened.

If the stupid nihilists predominate, I'd expect that they're starting to realize that they've had a failure of imagination, and that plagues, economic collapse, and public disorder aren't what they had in mind.  In that case, some non-trivial percentage of them will reluctantly realize that Trump has to go and we'll get a slightly more competent administration, which will spend most of its political capital trying the repair the damage.  Then we'll see where we are.  This isn't a good outcome, but it's probably the least bad outcome.

I've spent most of the last three and half years assuming that "stupid" was at the wheel, with "evil" doing a bit of back-seat driving.  The rioting of the last few days is making me question that.

In any sane world, a president who's directly responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of the citizens he's sworn to protect, and presides over the utter ruination of the economy, gets voted out of office.  Based on recent polling, it appears that that's where we are right now.

But the one thing that can derail that is fear.  It does appear that the "evil" faction has figured out that they can generate any amount of chaos that they want, simply by turning fanning the (literal) flames caused by the social unrest that's sweeping in as everybody loses their minds from the dislocations caused by the pandemic and its massive unemployment.

And this is why we need an act of faith on the part of Trump's opposition.

Folks, the right wing has you figured out.  Every time you take to the streets, however peacefully, they're going to be there to discredit you and make you look like destructive anarchists.  If you go after voting reforms, they're going to make it look like you're suborning fraud.  The right has finally read Alinsky, and they know what they're doing better than you know it yourself.  They took everything you learned about how to wield identity as a political nuclear weapon and used it to form a white identity that dwarfs any coalition you can put together.  They're good at this stuff.

If you want to win--and if you don't win, there's a very good chance that the evil wing is going to prevail--then you have to believe in the American people.  Don't try to inflame them.  Don't appeal to their outrage.  Don't pit them against each other.

You're going to have to have faith in the American electorate.  I have to admit that the reservoirs of stupidity in the country are much deeper than I could have imagined, but history shows that Americans are pretty good at knowing when they're about to go over a cliff, at which time they briefly come to their senses.

Make your case--it's a slam-dunk.  Make it so thoroughly that it removes the possibility of stealing the election. Get out the vote--it'll be hard, so you have to convince people of the stakes, and then be competent politicians. Watch the polls.  And then, when you win (assuming you do), understand that your power stems from a sense that things have gone horribly wrong, not from some mandate to drive your enemies insane.

But most of all, in the immortal words of a president who I thought was pretty mediocre but now looks simply awesome in comparison, don't do stupid shit.  Don't protest.  Nobody cares about your protests.  Organize.  Behave yourselves.  The more you lower the temperature on the rage stew, the more likely cooler heads will prevail.  If they do, you win.  If they don't, you lose.

Please don't lose.

---

¹I consider myself to be a libertarian. However, I don't believe in magic. I do believe that freedom and prosperity will flourish if they're given a fairly basic but functional infrastructure on which to build. Things like law enforcement (of not too many laws), public health, defense, and an executor of a foreign policy more nuanced than what a third grader could dream up are pretty handy.

²There are of course non-nihilist conservatives out there.  I'm pretty sure that they won't be voting for Trump--unless his opposition is so feckless that they think he's the lesser of two evils.

Lunar Starship Cargo Deck and Airlock Concepts

I need a clean place to put a diagram I did for another thread, and this is as good a place as any.  I'll fill this out later.

Modern Monetary Theory and Covid-19

Looks like Covid-19 is going to force us to perform a real-world experiment about whether MMT has any basis in reality.  The amount of debt we're about to incur is going to be staggering.

Gavin Newsom For President

I am not a Democrat.  I used to be a Republican before they became too loathsome to associate myself with.  I'm a center-right kinda guy, so politically I'm pretty lonely these days.  But my number one priority in the election is to get rid of that horrible, horrible man, so I'm a Democrat this year.  I'll vote for whomever is nominated.

Except for maybe Bernie Sanders.  I'm not convinced that Bernie isn't worse than Trump.  And, since it seems that Sanders is well on his way to becoming the nominee, that's a problem.

At this point, I'd much prefer a brokered convention to one of the declared nominees.  So my strategy for voting in the upcoming Texas primary is pretty simple:  Vote for whoever can peel the most delegates away from Bernie.  I haven't decided who that is yet, but my guess is that I'll just look at the most recent polls and vote for whoever has the most support besides Sanders.

Now let's assume that my strategy, writ large, is successful, and Sanders comes to the convention with fewer than half the delegates.  That almost certainly means he won't be the nominee, which is good.  So who should be the nominee?

Bloomberg is a possibility, but he has all the personality of a piece of wet cardboard, and the Democratic base views him with extreme distaste.  You need a moderate to attract people like me, but you need someone who's leaning at the progressive side of moderate to keep the base in line.  Buttigieg and Klobuchar kinda fill the bill.  Biden fills the bill, but I think he's too damaged to win.  Warren?  Pretty far out there.

But there is somebody out there who has pretty good progressive-but-not-insane credentials, has tons of charisma, lots of executive experience, and is young enough to stir things up.  That would be the current, one-year-into-his-first-term governor of California, Gavin Newsom.

Newsom is way too green to actually run for president yet, but he has enough experience in San Francisco and California to generate some excitement, and a clean enough paper trail that he can't be drowned in oppo research.  He's feisty, speaks well, and is just the right amount of ambitious.  If the convention offered him the nomination, he'd take it.

And Trump wouldn't know what hit him.

I'm not a huge Newsom fan.  I think his policies are busy turning California into a place where only the super-rich and super-poor feel comfortable.  But that is pretty much where the Democratic Party is headed, if you leave out the Bernie Bros.  I can live with that if it means we don't have to deal with Trump any more.

White Identity Politics, White Supremacy, and White Nationalism

Identity is the nuclear weapon of political strategy.

The two parties have used different strategies throughout their histories to cobble together winning coalitions.  Republicans from Reagan through W. Bush often led with ideological pitches, promoting limited government, but the party insiders usually concentrated on business interest groups, promising particular policies that were friendly to the contributors.  Republicans were always happy to tolerate the occasional racist dogwhistle, but it was always in the background of the ideological and interest stuff.  At no time did they ever appeal to a white identity group, because whites simply didn't think of themselves in those terms.

Identity politics has been a staple of the Democrats for much longer.  A coalition of African- and Latino-American identities were locked into the party structure about the same time that Reagan pretty much collapsed the Democratic ideological infrastructure, and rapidly became a major base for any successful strategy.  Democrats also played interest politics behind the scenes, but identity was a starting point for any successful campaign.

Then things changed.

Before I go on, I need to define "identity politics" in more detail.  We all know the term, but it seems that no two people have exactly the same definition for it.  Here's my stab at it.

Identity politics transcends the more traditional interest politics.  With interest groups, the basic coin of the realm is policy:  a group wants something done for them, and they'll vote for the party that's most likely to do it for them.  But the cohesion of an interest group usually stops at the thing they agree they all want.  An individual may be a part of multiple interest groups, and balance those interests to get the best overall deal.  Interest groups may have members, but the allegiance of those members is fluid.

But when you're a member of an identity group, the identity reigns supreme.  There may be a slate of policies that benefit the identity, but ultimately the appeal is about power, not interest.  An identity group sees itself through the lens of its disempowerment and/or oppression.  The answer to that disempowerment isn't a policy.  Instead, it's the acquisition, maintenance, and wielding of political power.

So, unlike the interest pitch, which is essentially "vote for us and we'll do the thing you want", the identity pitch is more like "vote for us and we'll give you a seat at the table, where you can make your own policies instead of relying on us to make them for you".  But the price for the power that could accrue to the identity was that its members had to subordinate all of their interests to it; picking policies a la carte simply wouldn't fly.  It was all or nothing.

Identity politics is about power, plain and simple.

2008 was the first watershed moment, where the Democrats realized how potent the identity strategy was.  Nominating an African American said "we'll give you a seat at the table" better than anything else could.  The traditional black and latino identity groups were rapidly supplemented with women, the LGBT community, and the beginnings of a specific "millennial" identity.  It was dynamite.

It also caught the Republicans flat-footed.  Not only had the financial crisis largely discredited their ideological underpinnings, but it was clear that they'd brought a knife to a gun fight.  They got crushed, and they then had eight long years to think about exactly how they got crushed.

In retrospect, in 2016, somebody like Trump was almost inevitable.  After spending lots of time wondering how they could counter the potent weapon of identity, the answer should have been obvious:  they needed to get their own identity group.  They just didn't see one that was readily available.

But Trump did.  White people aren't used to thinking of themselves as disempowered and oppressed, but Trump was able to sell them on it, and it's been the animating force in the GOP ever since.  And, once he'd managed to forge a white identity group, his group was bigger than any of the groups the Democrats could put together.  He'd brought a nuke to a gun fight, and he was perfectly happy to set it off.

To be sure, many whites were and are horrified at the idea of a white identity.  Whites have traditionally had a sort of noblesse oblige mandate to operate under what they viewed as an "American" identity, which could be slowly leavened with little bits and snatches of the best cultural elements from any ethnicity or nationality.  Many whites still believe in that.  (I still believe in that.)  But Trump built a coalition of whites who were sufficiently downtrodden and frightened to buy the into the standard identity playbook.  And it worked.

So this brings us to the first difficult question:  Is the "American" identity racist?

Full disclosure:  I am a 61-year-old white man, of upper middle class means.  I believe strongly in the "American" identity.  I believe that there is a unique American culture.  I believe that it has remained vibrant for almost 300 years by using what is now called "cultural appropriation" very effectively.  I don't view my identity as white, but I do view myself as American.

That said, I acknowledge that I'm a member of the in-group.  I've never had to fight to preserve my status.  When my culture is leavened with the best bits of other cultures, its impact on me is negligible.  In contrast, when someone of another identity shucks off his/her old identity in favor of the American one, the impact is wrenching.

Now let's look at this issue from its power dynamics.  Members of the "American" identity have been in the enviable position of picking and choosing which cultural widgets to appropriate.  It gives them the ability to think about policy and politics in terms of something other than raw power.  Other identities don't have that luxury.  They are dependent on the noblesse oblige of largely white, largely middle-to-upper class Americans.

But the alternative to the in-group granting power to various out-group identities is a dynamic where everybody views things only in terms of raw power, and that devolves into the Hobbesian "war of all against all" in short order.  So my answer to whether an American identity is racist or not is that it's the wrong question.  The right question is, "Is the dominance of a white-mediated American identity something that can be inclusive enough and just enough to beat the alternative of an identity free-for-all?"  I'd answer "yes" to that question, but it's not a slam-dunk, and it definitely requires obedience to the noblesse oblige ethos to be successful.

Meanwhile, the genie of a "white" identity is out of the bottle, thanks to Trump and his... uh... innovative political strategy.  Which brings us to the second set of difficult questions:  Is there any difference between "white identity politics" and "white supremacy" and/or "white nationalism"?

Remember:  Identity politics is fundamentally about the acquisition, maintenance, and wielding of power for the identity group.  And a "white" identity, unlike the "American" identity, must operate on an equal footing with all the other identity groups.  In short, it must acquire, maintain, and wield power, largely at the expense of other identity groups.

That sounds a lot like white supremacy to me.

"White nationalism" is a similar story, but here we need to distinguish between "white nationalism" and "American nationalism".  Nationalism is a term that's had pretty tough sledding for the last half century or so.  That said, I'm usually proud of being an American, I believe in American exceptionalism, and, as I said above, I believe in an American identity.  All of those things have at least a peripheral relationship to vanilla-flavored nationalism.  If you corner me, I'll throw a bunch of caveats in front of my answer, but I'm by and large an "American nationalist".  (I'm also a huge fan of win-win foreign policy, but when push comes to shove, I know which side I'm on.)

The considerably more problematic definition of nationalism is one that advocates for a homeland for a particular ethnic group.  Ordinarily, I'd scoff at that being applicable to anything with "American" as an adjective in front of it.  However, in light of the recent "send her back" rhetoric, it needs to said:  If your definition of nationalism is based on your race, then white nationalism and white supremacy are pretty much the same thing.   And since we've demonstrated that white identity politics and white supremacy are the same thing, the same goes for white nationalism.  QED.

So this is really, really bad.  Which brings us to our final, and most difficult, question:  How do we fix it?

If identity is truly the nuclear weapon of political strategy, then some of the language of nuclear diplomacy might be helpful.  Two terms:  "No first use" and "arms limitation".

Since identity has already be used, we're kind of in the post-Hiroshima era of identity politics.  It's been used against an unsuspecting enemy with great success, but everybody has a nuke now, and the next exchange is going to be ugly.  Going forward, both sides need to back off.

This is likely to be a bitter pill to swallow for the Democrats, who thought they had a sustainable asymmetric advantage here.  But it turns out that they don't and, furthermore, simply because of demographics, the Republicans have an H-bomb instead of a fairly modest fission device.  If the Democrats continue to use the same tactics, there will be significant leakage of voters from the "American identity" camp to the "white" one.  That doesn't end well.

Still, we're not going to do away with identity politics completely--nor should we.  Like it or not, there really are groups that are significantly disempowered, and for whom the acquisition of power is a completely reasonable political defense.

And this may be where "arms limitation" comes into the picture.  Getting ourselves out of this horrible dynamic will require that all parties understand that there have to be bright lines circumscribing the use of identity.  The natural progression of the current trend ruins everything, and ultimately degrades our most precious asset:  the American identity.

I'd like to say that I'm sanguine about being able to de-escalate this, but I'm not. Still, this seems the only way to get the friggin' genie to go back into the friggin' bottle.  Perhaps a recognition that white identity politics = white supremacy = white nationalism will start to peel away some of the Trumpkin fellow travellers.  It's one thing to accept his horribleness to enact some parts of the conservative agenda.  It's quite another to destroy the culture that you're purporting to save.