ShrinkWrapped

King Canute was a Piker

One of my favorite econobloggers has done the near impossible; he has read more than half of the "'American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009'' and finds it is not only 1201 pages long but filled with impossibilities, fantasies, and nonsense masquerading as legislative wisdom. 

Read Congress' Folly...; you will be enlightened.  A brief excerpt to whet your appetite:

Further down the road: Peak Demand Reduction Programs using a "Smart Grid", which I read as basically saying that rather than providing energy for peak demand use, the grid will react to peak demands by ... reducing peak demand. Sorry, I really did try to figure that one out, but all that is talked about is reducing peak demand. Not how, except by inference by cutting power to users.

In other words, what are now called brownouts.

Read it all and savor the madness of our legislators, a body of men and women who strive to prove King Canute wrong...

Environmental Luddites

There is a predictable arc of environmental progress that should be evident to all who pay attention with an open mind.  Advances in Medicine, Sanitation, and Nutrition lead to burgeoning populations.  When those people are poor they do not care about the environment but care about their own survival needs.  As a result, people in developing countries tend to ignore the environment.  However, once they have attained a level of existence which obviates the need to worry quite so much about subsistence, they invariably begin to pay attention to the environment in which they and their children reside.  As the society becomes wealthier, there is more and more marginal income available to direct toward the repair and preservation of the environment.  This is the stage that the West has already reached and which the new Core states are approaching. 

The Climate Change alarmists not only appear to not understand this developmental progression but insist upon statist interventions that will not only halt the progression but will actually cause the environmental progress to regress while impoverishing millions, perhaps billions, in our deeply connected world.

Consider Cap and Trade, an enormous energy tax which will make everything from food to transportation more expensive for everyone while, at it proponent's most optimistic best case scenario, will mitigate the presumed AGW by ~0.5 degrees. 

Michael Anissimov, in an effort to address the misguided demands of the environmentalists, makes the argument:

Dismiss Gaianism

One of the many useful terms that George has popularized is "Gainism" -- "reverential desperatism and misanthropism that is now the all too familiar opium promoted by the deep ecologists." I love the environment, but I think that the insipid SWPL, New York Times-inspired environmentalism held so dear by the farmers market crowd is the wrong way to go about helping our planet.

The reason why is that individual conservation is ultimately a losing game and improving our industrial manufacturing, energy, and agricultural processes are the only ways to avoid spewing garbage all over our pristine verdant globe. The global population is doubling about every 40 years, and any conservation efforts undertaken by the First World (less than a third of humanity) are ultimately dwarfed by exponential population increase worldwide....

The way to be a good environmentalist is to talk about and invest in strategies that impact the environment less whatever people believe -- I'd rather have a planet of people who don't explicitly care about the environment but have little impact on it due to the structure of their society than people who profess care but still drive cars and take airplanes everywhere. For manufacturing, that means investing in molecular manufacturing, synthetic biology, renewable building materials, new materials in general, and other potential routes to cheap, low-waste manufacturing, not buying endless trendy electronic gadgets that deposit heavy metals into our landfills.

Our modern, technological civilization is like the shark in Annie Hall, it must keep moving or it will die. 

The "Diversity" Delusion

One of my first Supervisors in Psychiatry training was a world renowned expert on Schizophrenia.  When he interviewed a Paranoid Schizophrenic, not only was he adept at elucidating the details of their delusional system but even more impressively, he was able to show how the delusion contaminated the patient's thinking and impaired multiple aspects of their relationship to reality, often in ways that were not immediately obvious.  The Paranoid Schizophrenic could often seem quite rational.  The brightest among them would arrive in the office with reams of paper, filled with their writings which purported to document the extent of the conspiracy that was afoot.  At times it could be quite difficult to differentiate a plausible conspiracy from a paranoid delusion.  It often required finding those areas in which their preoccupation overtly damaged their sense of reality before we could ascertain with any confidence that the patient was delusional.

The salient point that my Professor made over and over again was the way in which the delusion and the thought disorder of the Schizophrenic affected all areas of functioning, especially, but not limited to, their cognitive functioning.

In the past I have described Political Correctness as a societal thought disorder, in which we mouth statements and profess beliefs that are overtly disconnected from reality.  The concept of "diversity" is a piece of PC-thought that cannot be reality tested because any questioning of the belief is proof of racism and bigotry and therefore beyond the pale of polite conversation.  The infection of "diversity" is damaging to every institution which becomes contaminated by it:

Diversity Guidance I Can Believe In...

I was reading the June 26th edition of Rhumb Lines about diversity and really liked the key messages contained. Lets think critically about what this says one key message at a time.

1.    Leaders who embrace diversity and differing viewpoints and seek talent that embodies a broad range of life experiences ensure naval readiness today and tomorrow.

2.    The Navy must reflect the face of the nation. Further, we want an officer corps that is reflective of the enlisted force it leads.

3.    Obtaining talent from diverse populations across the U.S. strengthens the force and ensures forward progress.

The first key message doesn't match the last two, and the last two are exactly how the CNO describes diversity. I think the first key message should be the only key message, but sadly it is rhetoric that does not reflect reality, while the Navy is completely guilty of failing on the last two primarily because the promotion system that deals with an abundance of talented officers really only sucks the same soda through a thin straw.

I would love to see the Navy "embrace diversity and differing viewpoints" but sadly, that isn't reality. The reality is, the way the Navy expects to call itself a diverse officer corps is to align minorities and women into the the right jobs that insure promotions. That is exactly what ADM Roughead told the Current Strategy Forum, nearly verbatim.

Galhran mistakenly believes that diversity means diversity of thinking and mind; in America today diversity merely describes the most superficial aspects of our being, our appearance.  In fact, because "diversity" is in conflict with reality (you cannot have an effective quota based on diversity of identity groups and maintain merit as the primary metric) the effects of the Navy search for diversity is to homogenize thinking and develop a corps differentiated only by race (artificial and real), gender, (and eventually, sexual orientation) rather than by thinking.  This is how an irrational idea contaminates thinking.

Today the Supreme Court is issuing their ruling on the Ricci case, one of the more blatant examples of the mischief that "diversity" insists upon. 

[Apparently, reality has begun to reassert itself.]

Consider Steve Sailor's comments on the case:

A Dangerous Health Care Misunderstanding

In his health care infomercial, Barack Obama repeated a comment that has become part of the accepted, underlying assumptions of the health care debate, that as much as 30% of health care spending is worthless and wasteful.  If we could save that 30%, universal health care would pay for itself.  Michael Kinsley, in the process of highlighting the key flaw in the discussion, repeats the meme:

Health Care Faces the 'R' Word

The Obama administration believes that health care can be made cheaper without any reduction in quality. It has evidence to back this up. According to the famous Dartmouth studies, health care costs two or three times as much per person in some places in America as it does in others, with no measurable difference in results. Atul Gawande's deservedly admired recent essay in the New Yorker makes a similar point. So in theory it's easy: Just figure out how the cheap places do it and apply this knowledge to bring down the cost in the pricier places.

But that doesn't mean rationing will be easy to avoid. Statistics on life expectancy or infant mortality are averages. The easiest way to raise your averages -- maybe even the best way, if we're being honest -- is to concentrate on the general level of care and not to squander a lot on long-odds cases. But if the long-odds case is you or a family member, you may well feel differently. [Emphasis mine-SW]

...

Less care doesn't necessarily mean worse care. The administration is investing great hopes (and $1.1 billion of stimulus money) in "comparative effectiveness research." Because we don't collect and compare in any systematic way the vast piles of data we have about individual patients and their treatment, we know astonishingly little about which treatments work and which are a waste of money. [Emphasis mine-SW]  The administration is touting the figure of 30 percent of all health-care costs as spending that may accomplish nothing.

I suspect that what a billion-plus dollars' worth of research will find is that perhaps 30 percent of what we spend on health care is almost entirely worthless, or just barely better than a much cheaper alternative. Or it might be better and no one knows for sure. Denying someone these treatments or tests is rationing.

Micheal Kinsley does an excellent job illuminating the meaning of rationing in health care but, as with so many commentators, misses an essential point about how Medical knowledge increases and care evolves.

When a new drug or procedure is approved for use in humans it has typically spent many years being tested in the laboratory, on animals, and finally on a select group of patients for short term trials.  Only at that point, and after $1.4 billion dollars (in the case of new drugs) is the medication approved for use by an uncontrolled population of patients of varying degrees of illness, varying degrees of associated conditions, and varied genetic and constitutional endowments.  It is only at that point that a true naturalistic, long term study begins.  Generally, the first patients who receive such treatments are those who are long odds cases, for whom the usual treatments are likely to be ineffective.  Later, as the procedure is found to be reasonably safe, the individual calculation of risks versus benefits are made by thousands, then millions, of patient-family-Doctor triads and the experiment expands.  Only after millions of doses of the medication (or thousands to hundreds of thousands of iterations of the treatment) do the results begin to arrive, as the signal is teased out from the noise.

For example, not too many years ago, after something on the order of a million Cardiac Artery Bypass Graft Surgeries, did the data become clear enough to enable Cardiologists to begin to construct a rubric by which to determine which patients would best be treated by the surgery versus those who would do just as well with diet, exercise, and various combinations of medications.  Today, there are many fewer CABG surgeries than there were ten years ago.  Or consider Breast Cancer.  Our best understanding of breast Cancer twenty years ago suggested that it could be cured if caught early by a radical mastectomy in which the woman's breast, lymph nodes, and underlying muscle tissue were sacrificed.  This was a horrendous surgery that had long term implications for the woman's psychological health and only after many, many years, and millions of cases, did we learn that for a great many Breast Cancers, a more limited procedure, often without the need for any mutilation, followed by radiation and/or chemotherapy, offered the same or better survival rates.  Now we understand Breast Cancer as a systemic disease with contributions from the immune system, genetics, etc.

The point is that at any given moment, our knowledge of best treatments for any individual is limited and constantly evolving.  The "best practices" today may well be superseded or even contradicted by new "best practices" as our knowledge grows.

Further, Medicine is at a revolutionary moment:

 We are in the earliest stages of Individualized Medicine.  We can already identify specific tumor markers and genes that indicate specific treatments.  One day this will be true for every tumor; today it is true for a small fraction of cancers.  Before we arrive at a time where an individual's cancer treatment sis inexpensive and routine, we must first pass through a time when an individual's cancer treatment is extraordinarily time intensive, expensive, and anything but routine.

Government run health care will destroy, or at best indefinitely delay, the advent of Individualized medicine.  If the guiding principle behind the cost savings of Government Health care is "to concentrate on the general level of care and not to squander a lot on long-odds cases" and "comparative effectiveness research"  we will be effectively enshrining the status quo as the gold standard of affordable medical care. How could we expect an insurance plan that has an overriding interest in minimizing costs to pay for a new treatment that is unproven and much more expensive than the current "best practice"?  Even if there are some patients who will benefit, it usually (as above) takes a long time, and millions of cases, before significant outcome improvements can be conclusively shown to exist.  This is a prescription for stagnation in Medicine.

Barack Obama (and the Congress) are certainly hypocritical; none of them would agree to accept the kinds of plebeian health care insurance they would foist upon the rest of us.  Their gold plated health insurance allows them to receive state of the art health care,  However, even they will suffer when potentially like extending and life saving treatments are simply never developed because the expense of development can never recoup the investment.

Unfortunately such "opportunity costs" are hard to describe in brief commercials and op-ed pieces.  Health Care as a Right is so much simpler and easier to support.  Sacrificing the future for present votes and power has never been a dififcult calculation for politicians, in any event.

Politicians, Affairs, and Narcissism

Politicians are self-selected for narcissistic traits.  Anyone who runs for election and is willing to put him or herself under the kinds of scrutiny to which we favor our politicians, can be assumed to have more than the usual need for approval and power.   Successful politicians find their narcissistic traits reinforced by the kinds of celebrity that their success engenders.  Suddenly finding that others genuflect before them because of their position (and because of the favors they wish to receive) as opposed to any particular inherent value of the person, tends to create an expectation, and reinforce the desire for, approval in all situations.  This can put rather intense stress on a marriage.

In a marriage, even one that starts off with more than the usual idealization, there is a tendency over time to see more and more of one's spouse.  As time goes on their genuine humanity, which includes all of their shortcomings and flaws, become more and more evident.  In a mature relationship, one recognizes that the same process of de-idealization is taking place within the spouse and the original, intense infatuation ("falling in love") slowly becomes replaced by a shared history and a deeper, more intimate loving relationship.  Unfortunately, when one party to a relationship achieves great success and has their narcissistic traits reinforced, the pressure on the marriage can become impossible to bear.  A Governor, for example, is unlikely to receive worshipful adoration from his wife of 20 years.  At the same time he will have many opportunities to be showered with the adoration of a new, idealized woman. 

Many years ago, an analytic patient entered treatment because of conflicts over an affair.  He did not want to break up his family but complained bitterly about his wife's disinterest after her first pregnancy.  His girlfriend, perhaps not as beautiful as his wife, nonetheless treated him like an Adonis.  She would do anything for him.  Any fantasy he could imagine she was willing to indulge.  That was proof that she loved him more than his wife did.  The affair came to a bad end when she had the temerity to become pregnant by her husband; this was a profound betrayal of him!

There are two important additional aspects of this that are worth noting.

First, those who exhibit narcissistic traits, whether due to a Narcissistic Character structure or the kinds of Acquired Narcissistic Character of celebrity, tend to disconnect cause and effect.  Because their unconscious grandiosity is being reinforced and gratified at so many turns, they do not recognize how harmful their behavior is to themselves and others.  Their lack of empathy (or inhibited empathy) makes it impossible for them to consider how their behavior effects their family.  As well, their grandiosity blinds them to the possibility (likelihood for politicians) that their behavior will lead to their ruin.

Second, there is a kind of acquired Psychology of the Exception that occurs by which the person justifies his behavior.  For my patient, he felt that he was less favored in his family growing up.  Although he had achieved the most success, financially and academically, of any of this siblings, he was convinced that his mother found him unattractive and lacking.  He buried these feelings and thoughts deeply but his resulting sense of defectiveness gave him a ready rationalization for his untoward behaviors.  He transferred his maternal feelings toward his wife (ie, he convinced himself that his wife no longer cared for him) and in response, rationalized his affair as an acceptable response to her indifference. 

(In reality, as occurs with many young mothers, the partial transfer of her affections to the newborn who needs her in reality, often is experienced as a betrayal by the young husband who feels estranged from his wife's affections.  Understanding that her exhaustion and relative decrease in libido are expectable reactions to a newborn and not signs of alienated affection, can be helpful for the young couple.  Many less mature marriages and relationships run into trouble during and after a first pregnany.  Many men have affairs at that time and among that segment of the population most notable for their lack of stability, many relationships fail when the baby-daddy confuses his baby-mama's investment in her infant's infantile needs with an abandonment of his infantile needs.)

In his treatment we learned a great deal about this construct.  He was the second of six children, all born within an 8 year span.  His mother's indifference was certainly more related to her being overwhelmed by the needs of six young children (and a demanding husband) rather than any disaffection with her second born son, yet he harbored deep resentments and hurt from his early life.  His disappointment in his mother and ungratified neediness led to bitter feelings and anger toward women in his life.  His affair, among other things, was an attack on his wife and his behavior with his girlfriend often included sexual behavior that conveyed his unconscious disdain and hostility. 

Luckily my patient was neither famous nor extremely wealthy, which limited his opportunities for unrealistic narcissistic supplies from the environment.  Too many of our politicians do not have such advantages.  As a result, many will continue to be unsatisfied with real (ie, flawed) relationships, and will continue looking for adoration from beautiful young prostitutes (who offer their faux adoration for a hefty price), adoring young interns, and exotic foreign beauties.  The price they pay for their successes varies but can be exorbitant.  They risk losing their families, their self-respect, and their legacies.  If it weren't so tawdry it would be the stuff of Greek Tragedy.

Sacrificing for One's Religion

[Update: Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?, by Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin, discusses an excellent example of what happens when religious belief meets scientific data that disproves its pseudo-scientific premises; read the whole thing and keep in mind that what is happening in Australia could happen here, too.]

We all have blind spots, parts of reality that we simply do not allow ourselves to see.  Very often our blind spots are obvious to other people who do not have the emotional investment in our blindness that we do.  Tom Friedman today writes an article of such penetrating insight that his blind spot, roughly the size of Texas, is all the more remarkable for how obvious it is.  He starts his argument with an excellent, though banal, observation:

The Green Revolution(s)

There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran. 

Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices. So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.

He goes on to show how the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union occured when the Saudis used their control of the oil spigot to drive the price of oil down to levels so low that the Soviets could no longer afford their inefficiencies.  Clearly, Tom Friedman understands the relationship between drilling for oil and price.  Yet, nowhere in the article does he mention the possibility of drilling for more oil and gas in the United States!  Instead, he proposes we magically find solutions to our energy needs in technologies that either do not yet exist or have already been to shown to be incapable of scaling up to the size necessary to replace more than a small fraction of our energy needs.  (eg, wind) 

Narcissism and Paranoia: Part I

Narcissism and paranoia occur on different developmental axes yet they are intimately related to each other.  Narcissistic pathology can, and often does, exist without paranoia while paranoia usually includes narcissistic pathology as part of its substrate.  Cultures that reflect an overabundance of narcissistic pathology or paranoia are quite problematic and understanding the relationship between the two pathologies can be very helpful.

The posts in this series were originally published in 2005; I am repeating them now with some alterations.  The original of this post can be found here.

Narcissism, as defined at Dictionary.com:

1.Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See Synonyms at conceit.
2.A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3.Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
4.The attribute of the human psyche characterized by admiration of oneself but within normal limits.

Narcissism, a greatly overused word,  is typically understood to include excessive self-regard, inflated self esteem, and lack of empathy for others.  The first three definitions all refer to pathological narcissism.  The last definition is vague and fairly banal; in reality, healthy narcissism is a prerequisite for healthy relationships and functioning in the world.   I would like to more carefully craft a description of narcissism, and show how pathological narcissism can merge into sociopathy and paranoia.  This has significant importance in our politics because, as I have pointed out elsewhere in slightly different language, Democratic systems are the best ways we have found to manage conflicting narcissistic needs. 

Closely related to narcissism is self esteem, another concept which is often invoked and even more often, poorly understood.  In general when one has a healthy narcissistic investment in one's self, one also usually has decent self esteem, and the ability to weather various injuries to one's image of oneself.  When you read the following, you should try to keep in mind that only part of what I am describing is conscious to the person; much of what makes us who we are is out of our awareness most of the time (and some of it can never be accessed.)

To better understand narcissism, you need to better understand  the development of self esteem and a related concept of the "ego ideal."  Early in life we take the various images we have developed of ourselves (our self representations, in Psychoanalytic terms) and merge them to form a relatively stable, and usually only moderately distorted, sense of who we are and how we fit into the world around us.  If we had the good fortune to be raised by a "good enough" mother (D.W. Winnicott, again) part of our core self representation will be of the adored child, the "apple of the mother's eye" as Kohut once so elegantly put it.  Many other self representations are added through the years, some positive, some negative, until we form a  relatively stable, relatively realistic, core sense of who we are and what kind of person we want to be.  One of Kohut's contributions was to show how the child's nascent sense of himself developed primarily in relation to the mother's sense of the child and how failures of attunement by the mother left the child at high risk for narcissistic disorders.  In other words, how a mother looks at her child, especially her unconscious wishes and fears, are the most important influences on the child's developing self concept.  A mother who experiences her two year old as demanding or defiant or a brat, rather than appreciating (not without some difficulty; 2 year olds have their reputation for a reason) her child's need for and push for independence, will one day discover they have a poorly behaved, impulse ridden, needy child on her hands.

[Please note, I am fully aware that I am generalizing here.  Many fathers, grandparents, siblings, and others, can have a salutary effect on the child's developing self esteem.  Many children, despite what we might think of as poor parenting, find a teacher, or an older sibling, or relative, who values something within them, and allows the child to flourish.  You might think of my use of "mother" as a shorthand to include other nurturing  objects, as well as the primary care taker.]

Clearly, there are a great many influences on the developing self representations, but for a start we are considering the impact of the mother.  From the various self representations the child develops his ego ideal.  The ego ideal is the collection of abilities, traits, strengths and weaknesses, that make up the person who the child wishes he could be.  This will include identifications with various important people in the child's world (including fantasies of people, but that takes us farther afield) and can include famous people as well.  Many adolescents and pre-adolescents long to be like their favorite athlete or movie star (though what they want to be like is their fantasy of the person based on the celebrity's carefully crafted persona.  Despite the celebrity culture in this country, most people give up their longing to be someone else well before they reach adulthood.) 

An example of an "ego ideal" and its vicissitudes would be someone who, as a child, wishes to be a heroic "White Knight." This "ego ideal" might include images of oneself being kind and loving, brave and steadfast, honest and chivalrous, a hero who fights injustice,  protects the meek, and rescues fair maidens.  A healthy outcome of such wishes and fantasies about oneself might be to become a fireman, or join the military, or become a Psychiatrist who helps people overcome their own difficulties (sorry about that; a little irony is useful at times).  A less healthy outcome could be a man who can only become involved with a woman who has a drug problem, because then he can "save" her and gratify his rescue fantasies.    When our hypothesized "White Knight" succeeds in ways which allow him to feel he is close to his "ego ideal", he feels that he has returned to his position as "the apple of his mother's eye", he is on top of the world.  When he finds himself distant from his "ego ideal", he loses the glow of his mother's love and approval (now internalized) and his self esteem plummets.

In the healthy person, by adulthood, the ego ideal has been tempered by reality and includes a realistic assessment of one's abilities and attributes.  (Many a "great" third grade athlete recognizes, by high school, that his two left feet render him a better bet for college than for pro sports, and is able to negotiate the metamorphosis, without too much emotional pain, of his ego ideal to more closely approximate reality.)  The healthy person sees himself as lovable, likable, able to like and love others, able to do good and useful work, and adding some benefit to the community.  It is worth noting that this definition of health is very much culturally determined.  There are cultures in which such traits as described are of relatively little significance.  In some cultures, selfless devotion to an ideology, the submerging of one's identity to the cause, is held up as a culturally acceptable ego ideal.  These are issues that will be further elucidated.

The Obama Effect

The MSM infatuation with Barack Obama is rapidly descending from farce into tragedy.  A free press is one of the most crucial elements of any democracy and ours is failing miserably at its job of holding the powerful accountable.  While there have been some reasonably well considered defenses of Barack Obama's diffidence toward the Iranian Mullahs (though even his most committed defenders must admit that reiterating our invitation to Iranian diplomats to join us for our traditional July 4^th celebrations transgresses good taste at a minimum), Helene Cooper's discernment of a stealth Obama effect in Iran is quite remarkable in its inanity:

Exploring Iran’s Unrest and the Obama Factor

WASHINGTON — Could there be something to all the talk of an Obama effect, after all? A stealth effect, perhaps?

As the silent protests in Tehran dominated television screens around the world last week, a peculiar debate in Washington erupted. On one side, a handful of supporters of President Bush said Iranian protesters had taken to the streets because they were emboldened by President Bush’s pro-democracy stance, and the example of Shiite democracy he set up in Iraq. On the other side, some of President Obama’s backers countered that the mere election of Barack Obama in the United States had galvanized reformers in Iran to demand change.

Consider Caroline Glick unpersuaded: 

But as Cooper sees it, the protesters owe their ability to oppose the regime that just stole their votes and has trampled their basic human rights for 30 years to Obama and the so-called "Obama effect." Offering no evidence for her thesis, and ignoring a public record filled with evidence to the contrary, Cooper claims that it is due to Obama's willingness to accept the legitimacy of Iran's clerical tyranny that the protesters feel emboldened to oppose their regime. If it hadn't been for Obama, and his embrace of appeasement as his central guiding principle for contending with the likes of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, as far as Cooper is concerned, the people on the streets would never have come out to protest.

Please read all of her article since her focus is on the failure of the American Media to do its job and the dire consequences of such dereliction of duty.  However, in her conclusion I wonder if she doesn't approach an understanding of the real Obama effect:

Obama and his media flacks would have us believe that by speaking of American values and by distinguishing friend from foe, former president George W. Bush raised the hackles of the world against America. Perhaps there is some truth to this assertion. Perhaps there isn't.

What they fail to consider is that by genuflecting to tyrants, Obama has made the US an international laughingstock. Far from sharing their adulation of Obama and his cool demeanor, most of the nations of the world believe that the US has abandoned its leadership role. And unlike the US media, they realize that America has no understudy.

Unfortunately, unless the Obama effect wears off soon, by the time the American people become aware of this fact it may be too late to make a difference.

Is there a reverse Obama effect at work?

It is always difficult, perhaps impossible, to assign percentages to all the contributions to events.  Perhaps the example of Iraqi and Afghan democracy added 15% to the popular discontent.  Perhaps the price of gas in Tehran and the unemployment rate added 22%.  Add in 18% from the feelings of betrayal, with a vote offered by the Mullahs and then withdrawn.  How about an additional 15% because of the high handed and humiliating way in which the wishes of the people were denied.  That gives us 70% of the cause for the uprising.  The exercise illustrates its futility and lack of seriousness.  Theories of human action are a very long way from being able to predict events, even retrospectively.  Which leaves us with impressionistic, intuitive reactions and with the words of the participants.

In an interview with John Roberts of CNN, an Iranian protester had this to say to the international community:

Mohammad: Excuse me, sir. I have a message for the international community. Would you please let me tell it?

Roberts: Yes, go ahead.

Mohammad: Americans, European Union, international community, this government is not definitely — is definitely not elected by the majority of Iranians. So it’s illegal. Do not recognize it. Stop trading with them. Impose much more sanctions against them. My message…to the international community, especially I’m addressing President Obama directly – how can a government that doesn’t recognize its people’s rights and represses them brutally and mercilessly have nuclear activities? This government is a huge threat to global peace. Will a wise man give a sharp dagger to an insane person? We need your help international community. Don’t leave us alone.

Chetry: Mohammad, what do you think the international community should do besides sanctions?

Mohammad: Actually, this regime is really dependent on importing gasoline. More than 85% of Iran’s gasoline is imported from foreign countries. I think international communities must sanction exporting gasoline to Iran and that might shut down the government.

The Iranian protesters, the Israelis, the Europeans, the Iraqis may all be in the process of recognizing an unintended Obama effect.  Perhaps the Obama effect emerges from the apparent abdication of international responsibility that seems to be an ideological conviction of the Obama administration.  If Obama truly believes that most of the world's ills have been the result of American transgressions, that America is the cause of all the problems of the Middle East and the primary cause of the enmity of our enemies, then a passive, noninterventionist foreign policy is the likely outcome.  As people and governments around the world realize that their futures will not be shaped or insured by an imperfect Pax Americana, the light of realization will dawn on many people, the oppressed and the vulnerable as well as the thug and the tyrant, that they are on their own.  The United States will not use its considerable international heft to make tyrants uncomfortable.  We will make no distinctions between those with the guns and truncheons and those whose only weapons are the green ribbons on their fingers. 

It has always been true that if Iran were to throw off the yoke of the Mullahs, it would be because the Iranian people became willing enough, or desperate enough, to face the bullets unarmed.  The West can only offer marginal assistance, though sometimes that is enough.  Now, the message for anyone threatened by thugs and tyrants must be that you are on your own.  That can either empower the Iranians or lead to greater despair.  That is the Obama effect.

Update: apparently the White House is suggesting, sotto voce, that Obama's Cairo speech has inspired the young in Iran.  Perhaps Helene Coopers' article was a trial balloon to see how such a meme would fare.  Ed Morrissey is not amused:

White House: Cairo speech inspired the Iran uprising

This is the most despicable, self-serving, and arrogant spin I’ve seen yet from this White House, and that’s saying something.  Obama gave a speech, and suddenly the people of Iran discovered that they’re being ruled by tyrants?  Never mind that two weeks passed between the speech and the uprising, and that the very obvious trigger for the unrest was the incompetent manner in which the mullahs rigged the election for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Never mind the fact that this President took a full week to even sound like a watered-down Nicolas Sarkozy, let alone the leader of the free world.

Read the whole thing.

Further Thoughts on Anti-Semitism

On Friday, Jeffery Goldberg published a letter written to him and asked a serious question:

What makes people think like this? I'm not asking rhetorically. I really want to know. What makes people blame Jews for everything that goes wrong in the world?

To the jew Goldberg,

Hi. I was just reading your Goldblog piece on those who insist that the world economy is controlled by Jews, and that Tim Geithner is a Jew. As a matter of fact I was one who googled 'Geithner Jew' to see if he was one, and I'll admit to a suspicion that he was Jewish even after discovering that he wasn't. This is partly because Wikipedia had Geithner listed as Jewish before changing its listing; and partly because there is a trend for the financial positions in the United States government to be weighted towards the Jewish side - which makes a supposition that Geithner might be Jewish perfectly natural. I am semi-literate, I believe, with a degree in English literature from Oxford University. [Emphasis mine-SW] I believe that the world economy is constantly extremely involved with the position of Jews. For example, the current recession is not unrelated to the pretence that nothing needed to be addressed in the world order after September 11 (which was an attack upon Jews). The Jews have this secret (even from themselves) which they don't want people to know about, which is that they are using America and Americans to keep them masters of Arabia. Instead of publicly mentioning or privately recognising this secret and its relation to the deaths of 3000 innocent Americans, simple-minded George Bush and his team of oil crooks embarked on an aggressive consolidation of previous policy, in collusion with the interests of zionists, which implicitly encouraged economic growth at home based on misconceived premises, growth which is now being reversed. The point I am making is that this economic growth and now recession was based on an misconceived philosophy that significantly related to the interests of Jews. I suspect this recession would not have been so possible were it not necessary for the business of Jews to be suppressed from the thoughts of humankind! In fact the recession and other world issues have a lot to do with Jews and their publicly unrecognised issues. It is regrettable that we aren't able to talk about it openly and in a mature fashion (or an immature one for that matter). Even more regrettable, perhaps, that those who are not in a position to understand may now start to take it out on innocent Jewish people.

I have reproduced the letter in its entirety and hope that Jeffrey Goldberg understands that it was necessary to impart the full flavor of the author's "learned" anti-Semitism.  Since Jeffrey Goldberg asked a question that seems to warrant a Psychoanalytic explanation (and recognizing that a Psychoanalytic explanation can never be a complete explanation) I thought I would give it my attention.

Professor John Ray has attempted, on a number of occasions, to shed some illumination on the problem of anti-Semitism.  In his words, he is a friend to Jews and to Israel but is properly cautious whenever he ventures into a critique of Jews, who have a tendency to be appropriately paranoid; historically Jewish paranoia has usually been rewarded (even as the paranoid tends to create the conditions he most fears, ie a self-fulfilling prophecy.)  John Ray wonders if the Jewish drive for success is politically wise:

Another small meditation on antisemitism

I can't help myself, can I? I can't leave Die Judenfrage alone. I can never quite free myself from the dangerous delusion that my goodwill towards Israel in particular and Jews generally should permit me to speak freely about why I think Jews have the horrendous problems that they do have.

There has been much said about Ashkenazi IQ and I think that there is no doubt about a substantial Ashkenazi advantage in that regard. Much less noted is something that I think is equally important: High Ashkenazi drive. By that I mean motivation to "succeed" in various ways. And the combination of high drive and high IQ does put Ashkenazim into society's prestigious positions with great frequency -- a frequency which enraged Hitler and has enraged many others before and since.

It would be easy to say that the drive to succeed and grow rich is a natural response to persecution: Because of their horrendous past, Jews feel a need to "make up" for that past somehow or protect themselves in the event of a new Pogrom. And I think there must be an element of that. But I think, for what it is worth, that there is a genetic component too. There is plenty of evidence that personality is strongly inherited genetically so that is a fairly safe conclusion. The environmental influences that selected for high IQ could well have selected for high drive too. Jews should be brimming over with energy, and I think many are, from what I see.

There are two points here.  First, as has been confirmed over and over again, Ashkenazi Jews tend to be smart.  They are especially smart in fields that require manipulating large data streams (science, technology, medicine, finance) and language (law, politics.)  The origins of Ashkenazi intelligence and speculations about the selective pressures that encouraged the evolution of high intelligence are irrelevant at the moment, but the fact of higher Ashkenazi intelligence means that the resentment that is so common a part of the human condition is very easily directed at an easily identifiable group.  Envy and resentment have always been problems without easy solutions.  People who stand out are as often resented as admired, and the line between the two can easily shift and reverse polarity when situations warrant.  When I reached Middle School (which was fairly evenly split between Jewish, Italian, and Irish) everyone appreciated that >90% of the students in the Honors classes were Jewish,  Not surprisingly this led to resentment, even among those who had not been raised to believe there were no differences between groups; this was pre-victim culture and prior to the pedagogical and ideological insistence that all people were not only created equal but that unequal outcomes could only be attributed to one or another -ism.  Jewish success in academia stands out and thereby facilitates anti-Semitism.

The second point that John ray brings up is that the Jewish pursuit of success, combined with their intellectual gifts, means that Jews, when allowed, become powerful and visible members of the elite. 

These two points are not sufficient to explain anti-Semitism but they certainly offer far more data than necessary for those inclined to see the Jew as part or whole of the "invisible they" who control the world.  Which leads to the next point.  An unpredictable world is a source of intolerable anxiety.  At the core of our character is our infantile mind.  To the infant the world is a terrifying place, filled with danger.  As I noted in Political Deification:

We are better equipped than our distant cave dwelling ancestors to understand the world, but on an individual level, we remain surrounded by monsters and magic.  Fate can separate us from our loved ones in an instant and we have no mommy or daddy who will hug us and tell us everything will be all right (which our children  might believe; even if someone tries to reassure us, we can not even comfort ourselves with the reassurance because we know better.)  The only way we can keep our irrational (and sometimes rational) fears from destabilizing our minds is to find something more powerful than ourselves to believe in; we need God, and in the absence of God, we will invent the equivalent to protect us.

Random chaos is terrifying to the insecure and vulnerable human.  Our ancestors invented (or discovered for those who prefer) G-d in order to help deal with an unforgiving and unpredictable world.  The Jews, the inventors of Monotheism, brought G-d to life and have been inseparably identified with Him, in all his apparent capriciousness, ever since.  That ancient identification survives today, when those who consider themselves pious followers of Allah insist that the Jew is the cause of all that is bad in the world.  If the Jew causes all evil, destroying the Jew will please G-d and usher in Paradise on Earth.  The alternative, that G-d allows or causes disaster, creates contradictions that have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to dispel.  For most people, it is so very much easier to find a scapegoat upon whom to direct blame and rage.  The Jew has served admirably, assisted by his successful accumulation of wealth by virtue of his drive and intellect; he is the perfect scapegoat.  Attack the Jew and get rid of evil while enriching yourself; its win-win!

Further, the misunderstood concept of "the chosen people" has caused a great deal of mischief through the years.  For those who came after and were not among the "chosen" the idea that they had arrived at the final, perfect word of G-d, must be accompanied with some anxiety that they just might be wrong.  A demanding G-d whose words are perfect does not lend Himself to error.  Generally the more overtly certain (fanatical) a fundamentalist is that his Word is the only Word, the more intense his hatred of the non-believer must be; the very existence of the Jew in his own state is an affront to Allah, just as in the Middle Ages, Jews were so often considered anathema.

This is by no means an exhaustive consideration of anti-Semitism, yet it does go a ways to explain the letter to Jeffrey Goldberg form someone who is obviously intelligent and considers himself thoughtful.  In the face of anxiety and great stress, people and societies regress to more primitive mental states.  In such states, unconscious envy and resentment can easily fuel belief inc conspiracy theories which alleviate anxiety.  ("The world is falling apart!" becomes replaced by "They are trying to destroy our way of life!"  The danger has a name and a face - the Jew - and is no longer superhuman and beyond approach.)  Our "sophisticated" Brit, the product of a two thousand year old culture has incorporated all the ancient tropes about the Jews, marinated in his envy of their success and visibility on the world stage, and come upon a plausible explanation for his anxieties.  The protean nature of anti-Semitism reveals that its roots remain deep in the unconscious, festering amidst anxiety, envy, and hatred.  At the opportune moment, of severe stress and regression, the paranoid solution appears and the internal contradictions and anxiety can be externalized and disavowed.  If we didn't have the Jew to blame, our  Oxford intelligentsia would need to invent him.

On Risk and Responsibility

It is accepted as a matter of course on the Left that the federal government is better suited to running large segments of the economy because it is disinterested in profit and therefore more likely to make decisions for the good of "the people."  Historically, this is nonsense; after all, corruption thrives in situations where the government has control over the economy.  However, even if we believe that the Obama administration, by dint of their superior ethics and morals, will be more careful in their management of the economy, there is a fundamental aspect of human nature that condemns them (and us) to failure in terms of risk management.  The problem derives from how risks are assessed and determined and how such risks are managed.

The Left is fond of disparaging the profit motive.  Corporations are not to be trusted since they depend on profit, whereas government is more trustworthy since they have no such base interest.   (Which raises the question of how so many of our public servants and their friends become so wealthy while preforming such public service but that is apparently no longer a concern of the traditional watchdogs of the government.)  What this confuses is the difference between intentions and outcomes.

Since government officials, including elected officials, intend to help the people in a disinterested way (without any possible conflict of interest since their goal is wholly to make the peoples' lot improved) they must be more moral actors than those business people whose goal is to make a profit.  However, the salient pivot point occurs when outcomes are poor.  Almost everyone has a tendency to attempt to avoid responsibility for bad outcomes.  We are highly adept at finding ways to deny or diminish our responsibility for bad results.  We start this process at a young age.  (I got a "C" because the teacher doesn't like me.  I failed the test because the teacher is a bad teacher and no one likes her.)  The beauty of the government is that our elected officials can simply declare that they were innocent of any wrong doing and can write the laws in ways which support their claims.  This is at work in the disaster over the sub-prime housing meltdown in which government policies and mandates were as much involved as Wall Street greed yet thus far there has been minimal responsibility taken by such luminaries as Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.  (Not to mention they also share a remarkable lack of humility.  One would think that those who were up to their eyeballs in the sub-prime mess would at least have the decency to keep silent and stay out of the spotlight.)

While the bureaucracy has perfected ways to avoid responsibility for any and all decisions, it is the exact opposite in the free market.  In the market, a poor outcome leads to the loss of money.  There are few things more salutary for assigning responsibility than losing money.  If I give my money to someone claiming he will make me a fortune and he absconds with the money or invests it poorly (or not at all, a la Bernie Madoff) I may feel like I am a completely innocent victim and may feel that I deserve recompense but the markets are unforgiving and that money is gone.  Whether I like it or not, I am forced to take responsibility for my decisions in the most basic way.  On the other hand, if a government bureaucrat or an elected politician loses a billion dollars of tax payer money, he can, often in league with his ideological allies in the press, hide the "error", blame it on others, and avoid responsibility for his actions if he is a skillful enough politician or bureaucrat.  The responsibility evaporates and the taxpayers are left holding the bag, out their billion dollars.

By now there is really no excuse for most people being so ignorant of such basic realities, but our education system and people's inherent limitations (of curiosity, intellect, mathematical or other illiteracy) have left us with a large population of voters who do not understand where money comes from (it does not grow on trees or arise magically de novo in the bank accounts of the wealthy) and have no other metric by which to assign responsibility for untoward events. 

In a brief conversation this morning, a very liberal social worker expressed disdain for the company which was supplying free medication to one of her patients.  The patient has Bipolar Disorder and has found stability only with a pair of very expensive brand name medicines not yet available as generics (ie, still on patent.)  When I remarked that it costs well in excess of a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market and that the companies would stop doing so if there was no profit to be made, she sneered and remarked that she didn't feel bad for the drug companies.  The reality, that if we beggar the drug companies we will forfeit the innovations and advances in medicine that promise to enhance our lives and extend our longevity, is simply inconceivable to her.  The bureaucrats who increase regulation and thereby increase costs of new medical advances (whether drugs or other innovations) will never be identified, let alone held responsible for increasing sickness and death in the name of preventing bad effects of innovation.  The politicians who increase taxes on the wealthy, including rich corporations, will rarely be held responsible for the lost growth and the inhibition of progress that their policies engender.  Since they have the best of intentions and few understand basic economics, we will all end up poorer for trading our chaotic freedoms for an illusory safety from risk.