Problems with a preventive attack.|Gen X to the rescuse? | Government waste in space.| Unsubsidized individual insurance is going away. | Anti-discrimination law's role in Google firing.

August 12, 2017
Threatening a military attack in order to prevent North Korea from reaching a particular technological milestone is a strategy fraught with a lot of problems. Gen-Xers can save America by being less shy about their values. Nonsensical government: NASA is spending money both to achieve a mission to Mars and to prevent one. Under Obamacare, unsubsidized individual insurance is going away. Google fired an engineer for expressing a different opinion about diversity, but give anti-discrimination law an assist.
A preventive attack on North Korea would be problematic. Bruce Klingner: "[A] U.S. military attack against production or test facilities of North Korea's nuclear or missile programs would be an offensive action that could trigger an all-out war with a nuclear-armed North Korea. Pyongyang already has the ability to target South Korea and Japan with nuclear weapons and also has a million-man army poised just across the DMZ from South Korea. Without moving any military units, Pyongyang could unleash a devastating artillery attack on Seoul. […] "Some experts advocate preemptive attack to prevent North Korea from completing the development of a nuclear ICBM that can threaten the U.S. However, they have not identified what technological milestone they would use military force to prevent, nor have they identified how the U.S. would know Pyongyang was on the verge of progressing beyond that milestone. This shortage of concrete information yields a number of pressing questions, including: "Given the opacity of North Korea, how likely is it that the U.S. Intelligence Community could provide comprehensive, actionable information in sufficient time to enable U.S. prior action? "What targets would need to be included to ensure that the capability is prevented—only missile test facilities or also missile and nuclear weapons research, production, and storage facilities? "Would military missile units also be included? "What mitigating actions would be taken to prevent a North Korean military response, including a potentially cataclysmic attack on Seoul? "How would China respond to an attack on its ally?" Klinger recommends that the United States "reserve a preemptive attack for a situation in which the Intelligence Community has strong evidence of imminent strategic nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies." He continues: "Allies and opponents alike should be aware that the U.S. is willing and able to use the means necessary to defend its national interests. However, the U.S. need not needlessly precipitate a conflict." [Internal citations omitted.] [The Heritage Foundation]   Gen X to the rescue? Matthew Hennessey writes that Gen X's roots in the analog world make it perfectly suited to counterbalance the influence of millennials on our culture: "Markedly less patriotic than boomers and Gen Xers, millennials see nothing special about being American and recoil at the notion of US exceptionalism. A 2016 Gallup poll found that socialism was more popular than capitalism among those under 30. "Nearly 70 percent of millennial survey respondents said they'd be comfortable voting for a socialist candidate. […] Perhaps most troubling, millennials have displayed an indifference to the bedrock American principle of free speech. A 2015 Pew study found 40 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 34 felt the federal government ought to censor potentially offensive statements about minority groups. […] "Given the acquiescence of millennials to the all-online world, Gen X has a formidable responsibility to keep faith with reality. They are the last analog generation. Raised in a pre-revolutionary moment technologically, they are children of books, handshakes, body language and eye contact. They learned — even if they didn't always appreciate them — the virtues of patience, self-control and delayed gratification. They knew what it meant to be out of contact with someone they loved. Some of them — too few — learned how to fix an engine or wire a light fixture. Most remember how quiet things used to be; how easy it was to be alone. […] "So what can Gen X do to help save America? It can begin by reasserting the relevance of the flesh-and- blood world that formed it. On an individual level, this means putting the iPhone down, turning off the computer and taking a book out of the library or visiting a museum. It means talking to your friends face-to-face more instead of mostly texting or e-mailing them. On a societal level, it means pushing back against those who blithely accept that technology can be the solution to all our social and political problems. It means adopting a healthy skepticism of millennials' efforts to disrupt every industry with technology and an ethos of 'sharing.' It means fighting for your privacy. "If Gen X doesn't get its act together — and fast — it will have the rug pulled out from under just as it's on the verge of realizing its potential. That would be a shame, for a society that desperately needs a counterbalance to the millennial rush to a digital world." [The Manhattan Institute]   Government makes everything more expensive, space edition. Robert Zubrin reports on another great episode of government waste: "NASA's planetary protection program serves no function but to cripple the space program at a cost to the taxpayers of billions of dollars. "The program calls for protecting Mars and Earth from 'contaminating' each other, but there is not one shred of evidence to support the notion that life of any kind, let alone pathogens of macrofauna or macroflora, or free-living microbes with superior adaptation to the terrestrial environment than native species, exists on the Martian surface. […] "Now, as a result of their demands, in 1998 Jet Propulsion Lab adopted a mission protocol for the Mars Sample Return stating that if signal confirming sample confinement was lost from a returning sample craft, the return vehicle would be directed to bypass the Earth. "Think about that. We have already spent three decades planning a Mars Sample Return mission, and it is likely we'll spend at least another. Before it's done, several billion dollars will be spent in an effort to get a sample from Mars. The planetary protection office has greatly increased the cost and risk, and delayed the schedule of the Mars Sample Return, by requiring that it be done with multiple spacecraft and in-space rendezvous in order the 'break the chain of contact with Mars.' "If not for them, using the 2,200-pound landing capability demonstrated on the Curiosity mission, we could land a fully-fueled two-stage Mars Ascent Vehicle with a Spirit-sized rover, capable of gathering samples and sending them in a capsule directly back to Earth. Such a mission could be readily accomplished with a single Atlas V launch. Instead, the agency has turned the mission into a long-term, multi-launch, multi-spacecraft vision to satisfy its charlatans. […] "Even worse, there can be no guarantee a human Mars mission won't crash, spreading Earth microbes all over the Martian landscape. If so, so long as the Planetary Protection office exists there can be no human missions to Mars – not by NASA, SpaceX or any other American organization. "NASA is currently spending around $10 billion per year on a human spaceflight program whose supposed objective is a human mission to Mars. At the same time, it is funding a department whose purpose requires it to prevent such a mission from ever happening." [Reason]   Under Obamacare, unsubsidized individual insurance is going away. Doug Badger: "Despite $146 billion in federal subsidies to low-income households and well-capitalized insurers, 2.6 million fewer people had individual policies in March 2017 than in March 2016, a drop of nearly 15 percent. "The most precipitous decline has occurred among people who pay their own premiums without government help. The number of those with unsubsidized coverage fell by nearly one-fourth between March 2016 and March 2017, from 11 million to less than 9 million. There are now nearly 3 million fewer people with unsubsidized individual coverage than in 2013, the year before the government began doling out Obamacare premium subsidies. If the current trend persists through December, the individual market as a whole will insure fewer people this year than it did in 2014. "And the decline isn't limited to the individual market. There were 3.6 million fewer people with job-based coverage in December 2016 than in December 2013. While 8.4 million people received Obamacare premium subsidies last year, private coverage increased on net by only 1.7 million between December 2013 and December 2016. […] "Obamacare is insuring more poor people and uninsuring millions of middle-income people. That suits the Democratic party and many congressional Republicans just fine. They measure social progress in the number of people receiving government assistance. Those struggling to pay their own way evoke little sympathy. Lawmakers of both parties, whose consciences were lacerated by CBO's theory that millions would 'lose' coverage under the GOP's 'repeal and replace' legislation (most of those 'losses' the result of people voluntarily dropping insurance once the individual mandate was repealed) are unmoved that millions actually have lost coverage under the law they fought to preserve. "Legislators do, however, grieve over insurance-company losses. The NEJM editorial urged Congress to 'bolster insurers' confidence' through a 'permanent reinsurance program' — a new entitlement to corporate welfare. "It is a familiar story: Corporations get bailouts, the poor get benefits, and those in between get the bill. Government will tax people to subsidize insurance companies whose product they themselves can't afford." [National Review]   Was diversity firing Google's or the government's doing? The more you look into something, the more likely you are to find out that the government is behind it. And that turns out to be true of the firing of James Damore for being nonconformist on diversity. Damore was a Google engineer who wrote a memo that challenged the company's diversity programs. The memo circulated internally and eventually leaked outside of Google. Then he was fired for the views expressed in the memo. That news launched a bazillion discussions in social media about tolerance of unpopular opinions. Of course, the First Amendment protects you only from government sanctions against expression. Private companies are free to set whatever limits on expression they want. But is that really what's going on at Google? As Walter Olson explains, the government has incentivized companies to take sides in these kinds of debates: "Legal or HR departments will counsel an employer that allowing certain instances or categories of bad speech to go undisciplined might be an offense under Title VII anti-discrimination law, or evidence of one. "Some enforcement of these laws is done directly by federal agencies, but most of it takes the form of civil lawsuits by disgruntled workers or class action lawyers. "Litigation is costly and hazardous to employers. Companies will expend significant effort to avoid it or to reduce its risk. "Taking steps against tasteless cartoons, or loose talk, such as the discussion of whether there are any psychological or behavioral differences between the sexes in the now famous Google memo, is perceived as cheaper and safer than facing a lawsuit later. […] "[A]s a way of evading responsibility system-wide it's kind of brilliant. Those who write laws can blame private actors' decisions. The private actors in turn can feel as if their hands were tied given the legal reality they might face. Olson goes on to note that the system is not content neutral toward controversial speech: "By 1997, when I wrote my book [The Excuse Factory], there were already dozens of reported cases in which liability claims cited anti-feminist statements, such as generalizations, stereotypes and loaded language about females. "The speech of this sort that got employers into legal hot water was 'frequently not at all obscene but often highly political and analytic in content.' "Meanwhile, a search then found not a single case in which the reverse type of statement — generalizations, stereotypes, or loaded language unfriendly toward males — had been ruled to contribute to a hostile environment." [Cato Institute] And regarding the controversy itself, if we are all alike, then who cares about diversity? The Venn diagram above is from Mark Perry. Perry also samples the reactions to the Google memo that Quillete Magazine obtained from four scientists. It seems that psychologists and neuroscientists agree that there are indeed sex-based differences in how the human brain works. [American Enterprise Institute]
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