Pun Salad

I was impressed by David Director Friedman's recent essay, Trump as Fargroup, because he managed to specify just about exactly my feelings about the presidential candidates and the campaign:

Me too, David.

Also of note:

• Also hitting uncomfortably close to home. The early AM contributor to Instapundit, Sarah Hoyt, is a little too red-meat for my taste, but she pointed to this post from the blog Professor Ornery Dragon, which makes a useful distinction between Arguing vs. Venting Emotions.

  Screaming your emotions at somebody is NOT arguing. How many times have you found yourself in an argument or discussion and realized that either the other person, or you, are arguing/commenting from a place of fact-free, analysis-free, and logic-free emotion? I know I’ve done it, and I catch myself doing it still (less often, but it creeps in there). You’d think I’d know better by now, but emotions can overtake before you really realize what’s going on. Emotions are also the strings activists and politicians pull or pluck to get you to fall in line with their side of the issue.

  A straight-forward example can be found in those ads the ASPCA used to run showing big-eyed puppies with mange or in a cage, or anything like that, with a caption asking you to donate to save the puppies. Or those ads with kids in third world countries with no shoes, please donate so this poor child can have shoes (my response was always “you’re standing right next to that child! Buy him/her some fucking shoes!”) Those are emotion-based “arguments” for why you should donate money and support a particular cause. The unstated implication of those ads is if you don’t donate, YOU are responsible for the death of this puppy or the sores on this child’s feet, you heartless cretin.

  I get it. This is why I try to live by the Costello Algorithm: "Don't be disgusted, try to be amused".

  But the thing is: I probably wouldn't notice if I were just venting. And I'd probably trot out some self-serving excuse for it.

  So, anyway, apologies in advance. And also apologies in retreat. Drop me a line if you think I've strayed.

• It's erotic! No, wait, she said "exotic". Megan McArdle says Harris has an exotic plan to tax the rich. But it’s not enough. And that plan is a hefty (25%) tax on unrealized capital gains for filers judged to have a high net worth.

  The good news is that Harris understands she needs to raise more revenue. Our national debt now stands at 99 percent of gross domestic product, and this year’s budget deficit is projected to be 7 percent of GDP, almost $2 trillion. Those numbers are of course projected to rise as more baby boomers retire and start tapping Social Security and Medicare. So unless politicians find some spending they’re willing to cut (other than the 0.3 percent of GDP we spent on foreign aid last year), we’re going to need to hike taxes on the rich significantly to put our national books in some sort of order. And the rich can spare the money more easily than the middle class.

  The bad news is that Harris, like Biden, has pledged not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year. That is simply not enough to fund our existing commitments and an expansive Democratic agenda.

  Megan makes the green-eyeshade "not enough" commentary. But also points out the nightmarish features:

  The cascading strictures introduced by the pledge are perhaps why Democrats are being forced into desperation moves such as taxing unrealized capital gains. These taxes have a lot of problems: They distort investment decisions, as wealth shifts toward hard-to-value assets such as art and privately held companies; they could impede capital formation; and they are an administrative nightmare for an IRS that doesn’t currently have the expertise to figure out exactly how much your mansion appreciated last year. Worst of all, these taxes don’t even raise that much money: $500 billion over 10 years, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Moreover, some of that simply reflects tax payments shifted forward, rather than a long-term revenue increase, since taxing gains now lessens the taxes paid when the assets are sold.

  MM also notes that the European countries that tried something like this mostly gave up. It is mainly a sop to the folks in perpetual fury about the "rich".

• Another bad idea. Eric Boehm also does the green-eyeshade thing, and notes: Kamala Harris' Plan to Hike Corporate Income Taxes Would Fall on All Americans.

  In her acceptance speech at last week's Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris promised to deliver "a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans."

  Her campaign has yet to flesh out the details of that idea, but what little is known about Harris' tax proposals suggests that middle-class families will face a tax hike in a Harris administration—albeit an indirect one.

  Nearly all Americans would face a higher federal tax burden if Harris followed through on President Joe Biden's proposal to raise the corporate income tax to 28 percent from 21 percent. The New York Times reported this weekend that Harris' campaign has signaled that she supports Biden's plan for $5 trillion in tax hikes—including an $1.3 trillion increase of the corporate income tax.

  The tax is indirect, reflected in increased prices. Which the Harris Administration will undoubtedly blame on "greed".

  It is greed. It's Kamala's greed.

Recently on the book blog:

Mary Roach is a journalist who takes her own (as near as I can tell) unique angle on science and technical subjects: concentrating on the gross, disgusting, horrible, edgy, pretty close to dirty, details.

Reader, if you're sensitive to such things, she's also put out Packing for Mars for Kids. Amazon says it's OK for ages 8-12. And also much shorter, 144 pages.

Mary—and I call her Mary, because if she's gonna talk dirty to me, I'm gonna use her first name—doesn't really do a lot of Mars-specific stuff here, despite the title. She interviews a handful of actual astronauts, but she's also interested in the army of mostly-unsung scientists, engineers, and medical personnel involved in getting the astronauts up, keeping them alive in a strange, often hostile, environment, and bringing them back safely. There's a lot of history, going back to the V-2 flights. (Didja know: "In May 1947, a V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground headed south instead of north, missing downtown Juarez, Mexico, by 3 miles.")

Weightlessness has always been an issue, with a lot of uncertainty about its short-term and long-term effects, and continuing health issues. (Not to mention vomiting.) Mary gets to take a ride on the "Vomit Comet", and reports on the pluses and minuses.

What are the psychological issues about being cooped up in a relatively small space with your co-workers? Experiments in this area are not without amusement, although usually not to the experimental subjects.

There's a lot of information about space pooping and peeing, and what happens when such things, um, get out of control. Urine collection involves a condom-like, um, attachment. But: "No one is excluded from the astronaut corps based on penis size." (Did that factoid get included in the "for kids" edition?)

And, at the (literal) other end, space nutrition. And booze? Beer is a no-no, or anything with bubbles for that matter; bubbles don't work well in zero-g. They tried cream sherry, and the reviews were poor.

And there's a chapter about sex in space. With a diverting aside about how dolphins, um, do it in their buoyant environment. And I learned something about guy dolphins that involves the word "prehensile".

Mary keeps things light, with only one exception. In her research about how astronauts might "bail out" of a damaged spacecraft, naturally the Columbia disaster is discussed. And as Mary interviews one of the researchers involved, she realizes he's the widower of one of those astronauts. That's a very somber note.

I've read a number of space books over the past few years, and this is a very valuable entry, simply due to Mary's down-to-earth honesty and relentless curiousity.

Superficial me, I was unimpressed with the lackluster cover art. Which is maybe why I waited so long to read this 2017 novel by Derek B. Miller. Ah, but what's between the covers is just fantastic.

The opening scene is 1991 Iraq. Saddam has been driven out of Kuwait, but remains in power. And is ruthlessly hanging onto power by sending out troops to ruthlessly suppress any possible Shiite sources of opposition. And murder their wives and children, just to be sure.

American policy is to not get involved (further), so Arwood Hobbes, US Army machine gunner has little to do at Checkpoint Zulu, 240 kilometers inside Iraq, just outside the town of Samawah. Which has had the temerity to overthrow their Sunni government. Arwood meets British newspaper journalist Thomas Benton, and (sort of) goads him into entering Samawah to report on the locals. Unfortunately, hell picks that time to be unleashed. Benton and Hobbes attempt to save a girl (wearing green) from the carnage, but tragically fail.

And then, twenty-two years later, Hobbes notices the girl in green again. In Syria. Under mortar attack. He contacts Benton and they inject themselves into that carnage, and things threaten to unfold tragically once more.

There's a lot going on here, and I've only skimmed the surface. Miller has a vast and detailed knowledge of the various forces and ethnicities in the Middle East, and also knows how NGOs and the UN play their roles.

Miller's also an expert at mixing horrible violence and offbeat humor. Sometimes on the same page. Seems like a difficult thing to bring off, but it worked for me.

This (sigh) means I've read all Miller's novels. Hope another one will drop soon.