Happy New Wars!!

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Travel the world, meet new people
and kill them

Well, another year behind us and none of the conflicts from the last year are resolved.  The violence and brutality continues in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Mexico, Congo, Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia and all the other local hot spots that most Americans couldn't find on a map.  But fear not, even as these endless conflicts take lives and ruin even more lives, we can expect a host of new violence in 2013.

The big one is Iran.  The economic pressure from the sanctions is increasing, and the Iranians are going to have to try to formulate a strategy to get out from under the most onerous of them.  And virtually any strategy is going to involve raising the stakes, and that will always carry a risk of uncontrolled escalation.   Israel has also invented an imaginary red line determined by the amount of 20% enriched Uranium the Iranians stockpile.  Never mind that this is FAR from weapons grade, Netanyahu has drawn this line, which is expected to be reached, or crossed, in June.  Now, as I have said before, I don't believe Bibi and his advisers actually WANT to launch an attack on Iran.  They are much better off politically and diplomatically with Iran as their own personal boogeyman, that designated 'existential threat' used to justify otherwise intolerable political, military and economic policies.  But things are getting very real for the Iranian regime, and with all the rhetoric a conflict seems almost inevitable.

Another big one is Iraq.  Iraq is both imploding and exploding in a variety of ways.  PM Malkiki's heavy handed political consolidation, including the elimination of Vice President Hashimi and the marginalization of the other Sunnis in the government has resulted in intense friction with other groups. There is a standoff with the Kurds over oil contracts and the status of Kirkuk, and a budding alliance between the Iraqi Kurds, the Syrian opposition and even, most surprisingly, Turkey.  In the meantime, the institutionalized mis-treatment of the Sunni population has brought tens of thousands into the street in protests this week, closing the main road north.  The last time there was a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiite government, it took the might of the entire US armed forces to put it down.  If Maliki finds himself fighting not one, but two civil wars, one in Anbar and one in Kurdistan, he's in for a rough time.  But it will be bloody, and like everything else in that blighted land, carries the risk of regional escalation.

Then of course there's Mali.  The Tuareg separatists took the northern half of the country for their homeland, and the Jihadi wackaloons took it from them.  Now they're doing what Jihadi wackaloons always do with their own country, running around beheading and stoning and mutilating people, destroying historic statuary and basically making everybody around them miserable.  So behind French demands, the UN has authorized a force gathered from regional African states to invade Northern Mali and return it to the control of the Government in Bamako.  Of course, the fact that the government in Bamako has changed four times in the last year is problematic to this undertaking, as is the questionable willingness of Mali's neighbors to contribute troops, but sometime this year we can expect to see a decent little local war in the Sahara.

Then there's  a couple of long-shots, not really likely to become shooting wars in 2013, but worth noting because of their massive potential global consequences.  First is a few disputed uninhabited rocky islands in the East and South China Seas, rich in resources and variously claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and the Philippines.  China is the dominant military power in the region, but under a variety of treaties, agreements and commitments  the United States is almost certain to get involved if things turn hot.  It's interesting that much of the Chinese military developments of the last decade seem specifically designed to control those bodies of water, especially to keep the American Carrier Groups out.  Then there's the real black swan event, the eruption of a revolution or civil war in China.  China is a huge, virtually ungovernable nation with a wildly diverse population, a vast interior full of poor, restless people and tremendous corruption preserving a terribly un-equal system.  The current national government is opaque and inefficient, not at all suited to the demands of governing the largest nation on earth in the 21st century.  It is a veritable certainty that China will explode at some point - the question is whether that will happen in 2013.  While it seems unlikely, we've seen in the events of the Arab Spring that these things can go from isolated demonstrations to full-blown revolution with startling velocity.

Beyond that, there are a lot of hot spots that, while not necessarily poised for imminent warfare, bear watching closely this year.  They include Mexico, Venezuela after the passing of Chavez, Nigeria and our old friend Egypt, which may only be getting started on the path to chaos.  There is also the crisis that hasn't begun, the near-certainty of somebody doing something stupid in some corner of the world, with larger nations rushing in to stake their claim on their fair share of the killing.  We live in a time of endless warfare, and when no conflicts ever end, the violence only grows and spreads.
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Downloading Death

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Cody Wilson - He wants to kill you

Meet Cody Wilson.  Cody's probably insane, but he's leading an under-the-radar movement that might just make everything we thought about a dystopian future of endless warfare downright optimistic.  You see, Cody thinks going to the store and buying a gun, even in America, is a process with too much friction.  He wants to see true universal firearms availability - so he started a company, Defense Distributed, to produce an open-source downloadable gun.  That's right, downloadable.  The idea is that there will be a variety of tested, verified designs hosted on his site in the appropriate format to load directly into a 3D printer.  Anytime you need a gun, you download the one you want, print it and start killing.  No pesky transaction records, and your only cost is the printer and the ammunition.  We truly live in amazing times.

Now, we're not quite all the way there yet.  While any high-end 3D printer is capable of producing a device with the complexity and tolerances of a gun, the materials used are typically plastics and light ceramics that are not nearly robust enough to survive the heat and pressure associated with modern ammunition.  The record for service life, as far as anyone knows, is a .223 rifle Cody produced that fired six rounds before becoming unusable.  Even so, the writing is on the wall.  It's not a technology problem any more, merely one of material science, and that happens to be one of the areas Americans have historically excelled in.

So the interesting question is not if this is possible or how it works or how much it costs.  Like aerial robotic murder and cyber-destruction of real physical installations and intrusive remote surveillance, this is another example of an evolutionary technology that has profound implications on the world of the near and medium-term future.  What will a world be like where guns are instantly available as a single-use disposable item, when anybody can produce a deadly weapon without any human intervention or regulation, when any dispute can become a gunfight with one mouse click?  Nations with restrictive firearms laws will have no choice but try to regulate ammunition, and nations with liberal firearms laws will find those policies resulting in yet another dimension of madness and bloodshed.

If I may get slightly technical here, consider the now infamous AR-15.  The AR is comprised of two main parts groups called the upper and lower receiver groups.  The upper receiver group contains the barrel and is not considered a firearm, so it is not legally controlled.  Anyone can order them over the Internet and own them.  The "gun" is the lower receiver, which contains the action, trigger group and chamber.  This is worth mentioning because it may be much easier to print a lower receiver only, and then it is a simple matter of mating it to an upper with the regular steel barrel.  There is, of course, no reason why that downloadable lower receiver can't have a selector for full auto fire - that's nothing but a different mechanical arrangement.

I don't know about you, but I look into the future I see a place of violence and death.  Just as ethnic, sectarian, tribal and class hatreds become the primary drivers of human interaction and greed and inequality leads inevitably to hunger and hopelessness, we have a series of powerful, deadly technologies becoming available to anyone, many of them inexpensive and simple to produce.  With intelligent, autonomous drones bringing sudden death from the skies and printable guns supplying neighborhood-level uprisings, it's very hard to imagine how one might ever feel safe in this world we are creating.
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It's the Debt Ceiling, Stupid

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Well, the same concept, just not nearly
as rational this time

Are you tired of hearing about the Fiscal Cliff?  Good.  You should be.  The fiscal cliff is a sideshow, a self - imposed artificial crisis created by too many politicians trying to make deficit spending into some kind of existential threat in order to accomplish the goals of their individual economic and social agendas.  Let's be clear here - the debt does not represent any sort of near term threat.  It is largely money owed by Americans to other Americans, and because of the very low Treasury yields of the last few years the cost to service the debt is actually falling, even as the debt is high by historical standards.  A nation with its own currency, whose debts are denominated in that currency, simply cannot be "broke".  It is not possible for the very government that prints the currency in the first place to "run out of money".

The interesting thing about the fiscal cliff is that it is strictly a problem in Keynesian economics.  If you refused to believe that stimulus spending could help the economy grow, there is no basis for you to then claim that austerity will cause the economy to contract.  To believe either one is to believe both, and it is by that hypocrisy (along with the one where the debt is the biggest crisis we have ever faced but raising taxes isn't an allowable solution) that we can clearly recognize the malicious intentions behind the fear mongering of the fiscal cliff.

There is no cliff - at some point Congress will agree to reset tax and spending policy and they will do so retroactively.  There will be some short-term shrieks of panic and false outrage as markets overreact to the change to "the baseline", but at the end of the day it is just an opportunity for grandstanding and the making of grand pronouncements and dire threats, which is what our political leadership today substitutes for actual governance.  So, nothing to worry about, right?

Whoa.  That, it turns out, is hardly the case.  The fiscal cliff is an artificial problem, but we have a different, self-inflicted problem that is very, frighteningly real.  It's called the Debt Ceiling.  Think about this.  Congress is responsible for "the purse", that is, all spending and revenue collection.  The fact that congress has historically found it difficult to carry out this role responsibly has led to a number of problems, one of which is deficit spending.  So, in an attempt to impose the very discipline the legislators were unable to demonstrate willingly, they passed a law putting a hard cap on the amount of debt the United States could legally carry.  For years, this was seen as an opportunity for the minority party to rail against "spending" before the limit was raised.  It really served no purpose but to create the conditions for a few scolding speeches.  It wasn't like anybody would seriously force the United States government to default on its debt, right?

Then came Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the tea party and the intellectual decline of the Republican Party.  And suddenly, the very same political caucus that brought us the Bush tax cuts, two unfunded wars and Medicare Part B was holding the entire American economy hostage in order to drive very deep spending cuts, claiming a new found fear of large deficits.  At a time of political and economic weakness, the President capitulated, but severe economic damage was done nonetheless.

This time will be different.  The President realizes that by agreeing to negotiate with a gun to the head of the American economy he created a monster, one that will perpetually reappear on a regular basis unless the entire hostage-taking construct is eliminated.  He cannot allow a weaponized debt ceiling to remain intact, no matter what the consequences.  The Republicans in the House are dangerously ignorant of real-world economics, and the hatred their constituency feels for Obama will drive them to new levels of intransigence.  It is on this matter of raising the debt ceiling that they believe they have leverage over the President, and both sides see this as the defining fight of a generation.  Neither can afford to lose.

Interestingly, the President has a number of technocratic solutions he could fall back on if the standoff became uncomfortable - from invoking the 14th amendment to authorizing the Treasury to mint several trillion dollars in platinum coins (this is by far my favored solution).  But even before that, the federal government can keep paying it's debts as they come due and continue sending out social security checks, while paying defense contractors, government employees and other vendors with IOUs.  This would certainly create a widespread demand that a solution be found, with everyone from CEOs to FBI agents to Park Rangers demanding immediate action.

It's hard to see how it's all going to play out, but it's going to be very loud, very messy and quite probably destructive to lives and families.  It's completely pointless, as there is no reason to even consider deficit reduction at this time, and the political and ideological reasons for pretending otherwise are vile.  But it's the real action in town.  Forget the fiscal cliff - that's just the opening band, some locals with day jobs.  The main act will take the stage sometime around March 1st.  And that's when the real bleeding starts.
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Stand There, Don't Just Do Something

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Or at least start thinking about it pretty soon

In the aftermath of the gruesome slaughter of 20 children in Newtown Connecticut, the latest in a string of mass killings by gun-wielding madmen in the United States, a not-so proud tradition that can be traced directly back to Charles Whitman in the midst of the bloody sixties, there is suddenly a new-found American conversation around some sort of firearms regulation.  This is an unalloyed good, necessary and long overdue.  The combination of greed and delusional ideology has been successful in silencing the discussion for too long, and if anything good is to come out such a horrific tragedy, it would be something that reduced the likelihood of another, similar tragedy in the future.  At this point, however, another, similar tragedy, indeed many of them, is a certainty.

Now, this will be a short post, because it will merely serve, once again, to recap what I've been saying, shouting and ranting for years.  We'll start with the reality.  The things people want to do are wrong, and even those things won't happen this time around.

Ok, mikey, why are they "wrong"?  America has a gun violence problem.  Last year we had over 12,000 murders, over ten thousand of those committed with firearms.  Less than four hundred of those were committed with rifles.  America does not have a rifle problem.  America has a handgun problem.  Rifles are expensive and cannot be concealed.  You cannot wander around town with a rifle.  You can't go in a bar, or a restaurant, or knock on your estranged wife's door with a rifle.  You cannot lose your temper, get drunk, get high, get angry and pull out your rifle.  Yes, the events of last Friday were another high profile event featuring a rifle.  But can we really say we are addressing our gun violence problem if all our efforts are focused on banning SOME rifles?  That would be like seeking to address traffic fatalities by banning trains.

The other thing you keep hearing about is banning high capacity magazines.  OK, fine, go ahead and spend some of your political opportunity doing this.  It won't actually hurt anything, but you have to understand how pointless and valueless it is in reducing gun murders.  First, reloading an automatic is easy and fast. Seung-Hui Cho fired hundreds of rounds in the process of shooting fifty people with his pistols.  Adam Lanza notoriously used thirty round magazines, but nobody seems to mention that even with that, he reloaded four or five times at least.  Changing mags is fast and easy because it's designed to be fast and easy.  You can kill an awful lot of people with ten round mags - you might say "ahh, but not as many" and that may be true, but you haven't really addressed the gun violence problem.  The key problem with magazine capacity regulations is enforceability.  Magazines are not guns.  They are not complex, machined to tight tolerances or hard to design or manufacture.  They are aluminum or plastic boxes with a spring inside.  They will be made in places where it is legal to do so, or they will be made in garages and barns.  They will be sold on the internet, or there will be kits to expand the capacity of legal magazines sold on the internet.  And law enforcement will wink at it all, because they will have no way to interdict this commerce.

Some people even say that we should ban semi-auto firearms.  I have no idea how you could do that - I'd love to see a sample bill, because to my knowledge nobody's ever tried to actually write one, but if you believe you could get such a ban on a concept that can executed an infinite number of ways past the Supreme Court, you're delusional.

Here's the answer.  Lots of people think it's illegal to own a machine gun in the United States.  Actually, it's not.  It's perfectly legal to own a machine gun - Charleton Heston famously owned hundreds of them.  Machine gun ownership is regulated under the National Firearms Act, or Title II, originally passed in 1934.  The NFA is an excellent model for regulating all firearms, particularly handguns.  It does not make it illegal to purchase a gun - it is entirely compatible with the 2nd Amendment.  It merely makes it difficult, time consuming and expensive.  It makes the owner accountable for his behavior, at the risk of losing his rights.  Something along those lines, although probably watered down to some extent, coupled with changes to tax and product liability policy will make it much more expensive to produce, distribute, purchase and own firearms.  And we know precisely how markets work - more expensive commodities are scarce commodities, and if our current problem is rooted in the easy availability of firearms, scarcity is how it must be solved.

All that said, we're not there yet.  The politics for some firearms regulation have improved, but they still represent the losing side of the argument.  In the November election, the NRA spent 24 million dollars supporting their candidates, the Brady Center spend less than six thousand.  The NRA has over 4 million members.  They have political power, and they are highly adept at deploying it.  Because of the way the American population is distributed, the Republicans have a firm grip on the House of Representatives, and will happily protect their deeply ideological rural constituency and their NRA paymasters until such time as it becomes simply politically untenable for them to continue to do so.
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The Light's Better Out Here*

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Oh.  It's also helpful if the MVP plays for your team

One of the things that endlessly fascinates me is the human tendency to abjectly refuse to learn even the most obvious lessons.  I was reminded of this oh-so predictable trait watching the almost mindless machinations of Major League Baseball since the end of the World Series.  While there has been a certain rationality beginning to appear in free agent signings, it has manifested itself more in years than in dollars.  That is to say teams are spending as much money as ever, if not more, on players they deem to be stars and superstars, they are just committing to them for shorter contracts.  Age and injury history are being factored in in a way they haven't been recently - see the hesitancy to sign Josh Hamilton to a long-term contract and the Giants unwillingness to pay Brian Wilson until they know if he can ever pitch again.

But beyond that it's business as usual, even though business as usual can be seen, in the light of repeated history, as a failure.  The Yankees outspent every franchise for decades, and yet have won only one World Series in a dozen years.  Last year the Marlins made a huge off-season splash, and finished last in their division with an abysmal 93 losses.  The Rangers built an offensive juggernaut and went to the World Series two consecutive years, without success.  Now we see teams from Toronto, Cleveland and even the woeful Kansas City Royals desperately trying to make a push into the playoffs.  And none of that even mentions the platinum-and-private-jet shopping spree of the Los Angeles Dodgers, expected to field a payroll of over $230 million dollars next spring.

Now this is understandable, at least in part, because the new structure has one third of all teams qualifying for the playoffs.  The theory goes that all you have to do is get to the dance, and from there any team can get hot and be the first to win eleven (or perhaps twelve) games and bring home the trophy.  But is it true?  Recent history says it most certainly is not, that a collection of superstars doesn't make a team and a team built to win over the long, grueling 162 game season is poorly adapted to win in the playoffs.

Much could be learned from the recent success of the San Francisco Giants.  The first key is the stadium.  A winning team needs to play in a stadium with a signifcant, repeatable bias.  That would either be a small, hitter - friendly park or a cavernous building that favors the pitchers.  Then the management must be relentless in building a team that is complimentary to that specific park.  Creating the conditions for a lopsided home record is the most controllable factor available to the team, and the teams that do it will have a measurable advantage.  In addition, though it was obscured by a couple decades of widespread steroid use, offense wins games, but it does not win championships.  There are always a few teams with mashers all up and down their lineups, intimidating hitters in every position, but they seldom win it all.  Why?  Because an overemphasis on hitting, especially power, results in a team deficient in defensive skills, and often means a neglected pitching staff, especially the bullpen.

And those two factors have once again become prominently necessary for a deep run in the playoffs.  The Giants have been offensively challenged in recent years, but with their defense and bullpen they have a ridiculous record of winning games in which they score more than three runs.  And in the post-season, a best-of-five and two best-of-seven series, it is all about pitching.  Being able to keep the other team from scoring - allowing your team to be in every game late, when the weaker bullpen will very often give up the winning rally - is the formula for success.

So the formula is clear, even as it continues to be ignored or poorly implemented:

✔Build a team that is complimentary with your home park

✔Do what it takes to get a very GOOD catcher - this is the hallmark of most successful teams

✔Build around pitching.  Develop a starting staff that can all give you 180+ innings, and put extra emphasis on the bullpen.  Being able to put up zeroes for the last four innings will win more games than any other factor.

✔Pay attention to defense.  Infielders who don't make a lot of errors and outfielders who can run down balls in the gap and make strong throws will quietly win a lot of games in the course of the long season.  If the difference is between a .245 hitter and a .285 hitter, go with the healthier, better defensive player every time.

✔Coaches matter.  Without Bochy and Righetti the Giants might not have had nearly the same success.

✔Chemistry.  Over a long season, when hardships mount, little injuries nag, travel is endless and emotions ride a roller coaster, it's important to let the players create a sustainable environment.  Don't worry too much if some of them seem wacky or serious or quiet, but do whatever you can to encourage them to bond with one another.  There will come a point in the season when that bond is all they have left, and if it's strong, it can be enough.

* Refers to the drunk crawling around in the gutter - when asked by the policemen why he was doing so, he says he is looking for his keys.  "Well, where did you see them last", they ask.  "In the bar" he responds, pointing at an establishment down the street.  Why isn't he looking for his keys in the bar?  "The light's better out here", is the response.
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The First Rule of Climate Change

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Still can't get a taxi

Contrary to what you might read in the American media, there's no real argument about the existence of global climate change due to carbon pollution from human burning of fossil fuels.  But that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of uncertainty around the topic.  Increasingly, scientists are discovering that their models have tended to underestimate the rate of planetary warming, and the timing of the more severe consequences.  And the reason for that is starting to be clear - the reports tended to describe the various changes to the atmosphere and the climate from carbon pollution as discrete issues.  Warming oceans, melting permafrost, major storms, droughts, acidification of the sea, deforestation, disappearance of glaciers etc.  What we are beginning to realize, much to our horror, is that all these events are tightly bound in a planetary system of feedback loops that serves to accelerate the process, even if we were to somehow manage to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions today.

Here's the key realization: Only one thing can slow climate change - reduction in greenhouse gas pollution.  Everything else contributes to climate change.  Everything.  Melting ice and permafrost releases trapped carbon dioxide while reducing ocean salinity.  Warming oceans release trapped methane, and if you think carbon dioxide has been fun, wait 'til you get a load of methane in the atmosphere.  Droughts and other changes to the climate make existing agricultural land unusable, so farms move north, clearing trees to plant their fields.  As the temperature warms, insects and parasites move into areas where the trees have no defenses against them, and vast numbers die off.  The reduction of forests both eliminates the carbon capture function of plant life, but the dead trees themselves give off greenhouse gasses as they decompose.  Switching to electric cars sounds great, but if they run on electricity generated by burning fossil fuels, they continue to emit greenhouse gasses.

You hear a lot about conservation, and on the whole conservation is an unalloyed good.  But we must be careful not to delude ourselves - the biggest strides in the reduction in energy usage happen in the more technologically advanced nations, where better insulated, more efficient buildings, mass transit and more energy efficient urban communities are actually options.  In the rest of the world, people still burn firewood, burn coal in vast quantities and clear forests to create new farms.  Every geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, solar and wind electricity generating plant reduces greenhouse pollution, but to what real effect when processes we have put in motion, most of which we only dimly understand, are already increasing the rate at which the planet warms?  It's interesting that the dire predictions we used to hear for 2100 are no longer at the top of climate science's concerns, but rather we hear dates like 2050 and even 2030.  And we've already seen Katrina, the great Russian heat wave and superstorm Sandy.

Remember, people have built-in, intrinsic characteristics that make them dangerous.  The ugliest results of global warming won't be the rise in the seas or the droughts or the disease, it will be the savagery with which the human populations fight each other for survival.  Resource wars, responses to disease and pandemics, the slaughter of displaced refugees, the food riots - nothing nature can be induced to do to us rises to the level of butchery we will rush to perpetrate on each other.  Just wait until an entire nuclear armed nation is starving, or severely short on drinking water - at that point we'll begin to see what humans are genuinely capable of.
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Mali Hatchet Job

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In Gao, a young man's fancy turns to Jihad

The Tuaregs are a nomadic Berber people who have roamed the North African Sahara desert for centuries.  At the end of the colonial period in the 1960s, those with local power played a game of independence musical chairs and divided North Africa into separate independent nations from Niger and Mali, across Algeria and Morocco to Libya.  You'll notice there is no Ténéré and no Azawad, which is what the Tuaregs call their homeland in Niger and Mali.  Right from the beginning, the Tuareg people have been fighting for their own independence, each uprising successively crushed by the armed forces of Mali and Niger, ultimately leading to a peace agreement in 2004.

Meanwhile, arbitrary national borders and social and ecological pressures were making a nomadic lifestyle increasingly difficult, and many Tuaregs tried to find arable land to farm.  But without a nation in the interior Sahara farming is an iffy proposition at best, and in the face of tribal bigotry and government oppression many of them found a willing sponsor and employer - Muammar Qaddafi.  Libya's leader paid them and armed them, and they served as his private mercenary army, willing to act across borders and directly against Gaddafi's own people as his whims demanded.  But ultimately Qaddafi was deposed and his Tuareg militias took their money and their weapons and returned to their homelands in northern Mali.  There, they joined the Tuareg rebels already fighting to establish an independent homeland, and in the vast, lightly populated Saharan wilderness they were enough to tip the balance in their people's favor.   The political pressure from losing a fight with separatist rebels led to a coup that toppled the elected government, even if the military later appointed an interim "acting" civilian President.

But even without significant military pressure from the Malian government, the Tuareg hold on the North was destined to be short-lived.  The independent Tuareg governing body, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), despite being a secular nationalist political organization, had partnered with the extreme Muslim fundamentalist organization Ansar Dine in order to raise a sufficiently large and capable rebel army.  Throughout the spring they consolidated their hold on Northern Mali, but the ideological tensions were already causing a major rift in their coalition.  In late June the rebel union shattered, resulting in the battle of Gao.  Ansar Dine joined forces with the local al-Qaeda affiliate, AQIM and an umbrella group calling itself The Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa and drove the MNLA out of the city.  By June 28th the Islamist groups held Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal, essentially controlling all of the Northern half of Mali.

The West African regional nations, along with Europe, reacted with shock and fear.  The west had learned a hard lesson about allowing extreme religious fundamentalists the security and autonomy of their own sovereign nation, and the regional governments feared the strength of the Islamist movement, seeing it as a threat to their own nations independence.  There is a strong and building consensus that a coalition of West African soldiers supported by western financing and logistics should attack Northern Mali and remove the Islamist fighters.  France, as the nation with the strongest colonial-era ties to the West African region is leading the charge, but there is significant consensus from ECOWAS, NATO and the US.

It's a small bit of desert the size of Texas in the middle of nowhere, indeed, over the years Timbuktu has become synonymous with a mysterious and distant place, but it's important because it is a critical harbinger of things to come.  The MOJWA is a bunch of crazed, messianic theocrats of the worst kind, who have already executed hostages, implemented the requirement that women be veiled, the stoning of adulterers and the mutilation of thieves.  They have destroyed ancient historical artifacts out of a violent allegiance to a savage god.  It's probably a very good idea to cripple their movement and deny them a place from which to build on their capabilities.  But make no mistake, this won't end with their removal from Mali - not the Turaegs struggle for a homeland, and not the Islamists desire for iron-fisted Theocratic governance.  From a modern standpoint, a commitment to a fantastic mythology that describes a world we know to be impossible is nonsensical, but when that commitment leads to murder and brutality the world is going to have take action.

But just as when despots slaughter their citizens in order to retain power, it's far beyond time for the world community to form some kind of consensus for action.  As these events arise, they are dealt with on an ad hoc basis, as if every one were something entirely new, and history and experience, however recent, had nothing to teach us.  The fighting will go on - from resource shortages to sectarian disagreements to independence movements to ethnic cleansing.  In recent times, human conflict tends to be smaller and, in pure numbers less bloody, but much more protracted in nature.  Wars start, but they never end, and peace is never the outcome.  Just as we Americans have to come to terms with our own nation's taste for and exposure to endless war, we are entering a phase of human history where there are no longer discrete conflicts, just an endless series of battles in an open-ended global war.  Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, Bosnia, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Georgia, Chechnya, Israel...The number of places in which there is no foreseeable end to the fighting and bleeding grows, because once it gets started, the fighting doesn't ever come to an end.
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The Satellite Game

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Sohae Launch Facility.
Is everything in North Korea in the middle of nowhere?

Later this month, North Korea is expected to make yet another attempt to launch a weather satellite into earth orbit.  This is considered problematic because it is the key to building and deploying an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.  An ICBM launch is essentially a sub-orbital spaceflight - you cannot deliver a weapon over extremely long distances until you can successfully launch a multi-stage rocket into space.  So even though the nature of the specific launch is peaceful and even laudatory, it is quite cliear that in North Korea's hyper-militarized society the reason for doing it is weapons development.

Now, this will be the fifth attempt by the Hermit Kingdom to launch a payload into orbit - previously they are a perfect 0 for 4.  The reason for this is two-fold.  First, an impoverished nation that cannot afford to feed its people or develop its infrastructure is unlikely to have access to the kinds of resources necessary for a project as complex and demanding as spaceflight.  Second, and much more importantly, launching a satellite into space truly is rocket science, and to do rocket science you need rocket scientists, along with mathematicians, metalurgists, materials scientists, engineers and a capacity for very high precision manufacturing.  North Korea has none of the domestic educational institutions necessary, and won't allow their young people to be educated abroad, on the (highly reasonable) expectation that they would never come back.

Which leaves Pyongyang with two options, neither of which is particularly optimal.  First, they can try to buy the requisite technology from abroad, but the number of nations that have the requisite technology remains quite limited, and very few of them would want to see North Korea improve their offensive and strategic capabilities.  In fact, North Korea seems to be the rogue missile technology exporter of choice, marketing their short-range missile technology to Iran and throughout Africa.  Their other option is to take their forty-plus year old Soviet missile technology and try to scale it up to build a multi-stage rocket capable of reaching orbit.  Unfortunately for them, there are a lot of pesky details in this process that nobody will tell them, and the only way to learn them is by trial and error.  And a trial and error based space program is a likely ticket to an 0 for 4 record of success.

Of course, at some point the very likely will succeed in launching a satellite into orbit, accompanied by much crowing and their own special brand of hackneyed propaganda.  It will also come with endless breathless hand-wringing and rending of garments from western experts, crying out that they are now (along with al-Qaeda, Iran and Hamas) the greatest threat to freedom and liberty since smallpox.  Lost in all the hue and cry will be any mention that a successful launch rate of 1 for 5 (or 1 for 6 or 1 for 10 - whatever it actually turns out to be) does not bode well for a nation trying to launch a nuclear first strike, that there are still very large questions about the quality of their weapons design (their nuclear tests to date have mostly been seen as a "Big Fizzle") and the fact that they have a long way to go to build a nuclear warhead small enough to launch on a missile.  But we don't do reason here, we do threat-hyping, because perceived threats are what keeps the defense dollars pouring in.

A more reasonable concern is of a another failure, but one of a particularly ill-fated variety.  If their erstwhile spacecraft once again fails to reach orbit and falls out of the sky in large chunks, there is every reason to wonder if it will fall on anyone we care about, such as Japan.  Much of the anti-ballistic missile capability being brought into the theater is actually there in case there is a need to try to scatter the ballistic wreckage on its way down.

Even with all that said, North Korea serves as the poster child for all unpopular and "rogue" nations.  They don't have long range missiles, and they don't have much of an air force or a blue water navy, but they've got a couple of nukes, and nobody seriously threatens to attack them anymore.  The blueprint is clear - if the international pressure becomes too intense, kick out the IAEA inspectors and go balls to the wall to produce a couple devices.  It won't end the sanctions, but it'll back off the war mongers.
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What Do Republicans Actually Want?

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I thought you said you WANTED to cut the deficit

We used to know the answer to that.  They wanted to protect the wealth of the richest Americans and the profits of the largest corporations.  They wanted to reduce spending that went primarily to the poor and minorities and redistribute that money to the rich.  And specifically, they wanted to roll back the guarantees of the New Deal.  Since Ronald Reagan promised apocalyptically in the sixties that adopting Medicare would destroy the United States of America, programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and even Planned Parenthood and NPR were seen by the American Political Right as stealing money from people like them and giving it, Soviet Communism-Style to people who were lazy, shiftless criminals.  The Republicans have been unrelentingly clear on their opposition to these kinds of government financed social spending programs, culminating in the odious GW Bush's ham-fisted attempt to pass a Social Security privatization scheme.

Then along came President Barack Obama, the ear-splitting summer of 2009 and the Affordable Care Act.  Suddenly there was another social spending program that benefited people who weren't even white men, and the Republicans predictably deployed in a phalanx of opposition, not just to the plan itself, which was modeled on the basic Republican-preferred structure of universal coverage through private insurance and a mandate to sufficiently broaden the risk pool, but to the very idea that society should protect people who couldn't protect themselves.  In their frenetic desperation to create an aura of fear and uncertainty around what was a very pedestrian proposal, the Republicans did something nobody would have predicted, something that has increasing ramifications in the American political discourse today:  They took the position that the ACA was destroying Medicare, and attempted to present themselves as the guarantors of that very social spending program they had invested so many years in trying to eliminate outright.

The cognitive dissonance of a major conservative political party demanding NO cuts to Medicare, not even on the provider side, while their budgetary agenda still demanded "Entitlement Reforms" and their thought leaders came up with yet another plan to privatize and ultimately eliminate both Medicare and Medicaid only got louder in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election.  This left them in the difficult position of a Presidential campaign that could not offer any specifics about its proposed governing agenda.  Even to people predisposed to vote for a more conservative candidate, this abject refusal to provide information about their policy plans left voters ultimately heeding a fully internalized caveat emptor worldview they had learned since childhood.

Republicans like to say that the primary driver of the "fiscal crisis" represented by the budget deficit is "Entitlement Spending", primarily Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with a number of small-bore social spending programs like Food Stamps tossed in for good measure.  But this is an artificial construct, because all dollars are the same.  It would be just as easy to characterize America's massive military spending as the primary driver of the debt - indeed, you could eliminate most of the annual deficit and still be able to defend the US from attack.  A nation, like any community, must reach some kind of consensus around what services they expect to be provided by the community as a whole, and then it's merely a matter of agreeing on how the population will contribute the necessary funds.  Deficits don't happen by accident, some act of an angry fiscal god.  Congress appropriates funds for spending programs and passes bills that raise the revenue for those appropriations.  If they lack the discipline or courage to legislate as much revenue as they do spending, they will have a budget deficit, but it is ridiculous for them to cry out in anguish over a problem they created and only they can solve.

Faced with the unworkable combination of a deeply unpopular core policy agenda and a deep political commitment to both sides of their key economic issue, the Republicans are left in the awkward position of being utterly unable to specify their policy preference.  On taxes, they keep saying they prefer revenue increases generated by eliminating deductions, but have never been able to say which deductions they would target.  They keep demanding some kind of vague, non-specific "Entitlement Reform" but seem unable to formulate a proposal.  They have been shrieking for years about the impending calamity that is the budget deficit, but are resolutely unwilling to support any proposal that actually reduces deficit spending over the medium term.  Until they are prepared to articulate their vision for financing the federal government, any and all demands for "serious, bipartisan negotiations" on the budget should be seen for exactly what the are - the helpless bleating of a dysfunctional political organization...
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The Meaning of Life

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Curiosity scoops up an alien civilization

This weeks mostly uninformed speculation about the discovery of Organic Compounds by the Mars Science Laboratory has got me thinking about extraterrestrial life.  For eons, and increasingly since Arthur C.  Clarke challenged us to think more clearly about it in "Childhood's End", it has been received wisdom that the discovery of any life anywhere that was not planet earth would be the most profound discovery of human civilization, changing forever our perception of the universe and our place in it.

But is that really the case?  First, we are challenged by what we are trying to detect, and how we are able to try to detect it.  This weeks frantic mass-media response to a particular Curiosity scientist's excitement over the current soil analysis research reminded me of nothing so much as the year long tug-o-war over ALH84001, the Martian meteorite that might or might not have evidence of fossilized microbes less than 100 nanometers in size, and which shows evidence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which may or may not be biogenic in origin and may or may not be the result of contact with the earth's atmosphere.  The assumption that Curiosity might have discovered organic molecules on Mars was predictably greeted with mass media questions that boiled down to "have we discovered life on Mars?"  Their difficulty, as always, is to try and understand the nuance of the "necessary but not sufficient" condition.  Life would require organic compounds, but organic compounds do not require life.

So we are confronted by the challenge of determining the threshold for declaring some discovery an actual extra-terrestrial life form.  What we are seeking isn't even just cellular, microbial life on another planet, but very likely long-extinct cellular microbial life.  So perhaps this would be a good moment to take a giant step back and re-think the entire endeavor in a top-down fashion.

Given what we know from studying earth, life seems universally common and almost cartoonishly robust.  In spite of eons of periodic global disasters and mass extinction events, life always rebounded to cover the planet, from ice sheet to tropics, from the ocean depths to the mountain tops.  With that understanding of life, it seems inevitable that we will eventually determine these simple microbial life forms also have existed on other planets and moons in our Solar System.  And from that relatively safe assumption we can comfortably conclude that the universe literally teems with life, some small fraction of it evolving into a diverse ecosystem that includes larger, more complex creatures and even, in some cases, intelligent species.  And therein lies the key question.

If and when we discover some single cell nano-bacteria fossil on Mars or a simple algae drifting in the oceans of Europa, will this really be the profound, civilization-shaking discovery conventional wisdom has come to expect it to be?  Or will it be simply affirming something we already, on some level, know to be true?  Will it be a discovery that 'changes everything' or one that is scientifically interesting but ultimately meaningless in the way we perceive the universe?  Indeed, I think as we become more capable of exploring our own Solar System even as we come to grips with the fact that we will never visit planets orbiting other stars, it's a very good time to recalibrate our expectations in this realm.  In the case of the extra-terrestrial creatures we're likely to meet, the introductions will be mediated by an electron microscope, and it may very well be mummies we're meeting rather than living creatures.

Me, I'd begin to get excited by something like a fish, and I'd be positively bowled over by something of the size and intelligence of a dog.  But there's really no world within our reach that can support that kind of complex evolutionary development.  Bacteria?  I think that's a foregone conclusion, on any planet or moon that exists within the temperature and energy thresholds that might possibly support it.  All this hyperventilating over the possibility of organic precursors to life on Mars is simply setting us up for another giant misunderstanding-fueled anticlimax, like the Y2K outcome but orders of magnitude worse.  The profound moment of discover will come not from a space probe at all, but from the receipt of radio frequency signals from an intelligent culture's equivalent of Television.  That will be simultaneously wildly exciting and deeply frustrating, because we will know they are there without being able to talk to them.  But we won't learn anything important about ourselves from extraterrestrial bacteria...
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Magnificent Censorship

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OK, mostly it's just "Dallas" with camels

America, unsurprisingly, has not bothered to look up from "American Idol" long enough to notice, but around the world over 150 million viewers are captured every week by the steamy heroic adventures of the Sultan in "Magnificent Century".   Now in its third season, the series is a Turkish prime-time soap opera based on the life of Suleiman the Magnificent, the great sixteenth century Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.  It turns out, however, that for all its global popularity, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is most assuredly not a fan.  He took the opportunity to make that clear while attending the opening of a brand new airport in Kutahya Province, railing against the portrayal of the Sultan guzzling wine and rockin' his harem, even going so far as to take his complaints to the Judiciary. “We alerted the authorities,” he said ominously. “We wait for a judicial decision on it. Those who toy with these values should be taught a lesson within the remit of law.”

Now, I have on multiple occasions taken the opportunity to be complimentary in regards to PM Erdogan, for his modern views and his willingness to take an independent position even when it was not the expedient choice.  I still think his response to the Mavi Marmara atrocity was an example for leaders around the world.  But in the interest of honesty, he is also capable of showing some of the authoritarian intolerance that often characterizes Muslim - led governments.  Nations have to understand that a functional democracy is much more than just free elections and some kind of separation-of-powers arrangement.  Democracy is at its core a liberal endeavor, one that requires a tolerance of diversity, not only of people but of voices and speech and lifestyles.  This is one of the fatal flaws of a Theocracy, even in a highly homogeneous population - people want to choose their moral strictures, not have them imposed upon them by force of law.

This sort of tension arises in a Democratic society when a group within that society with rigid views on social behaviors gains some level of political power or influence, and politicians begin pandering to their prejudices in order to leverage that power.  We see that play out in a larger sense in Muslim nations, but it is prevalent in the United States, and can be seen in any nation with a significant fundamentalist or provincial population.  How different is Erdogan's outrage, really, than the almost comical national consternation over a "wardrobe malfunction" during a football game halftime show?

The growth of Muslim Fundamentalist political power in Arab nations, particularly those transitioning from long decades of single-party rule to some sort of democratic political system is a real risk to their growth and success as nations.  It is completely understandable, because during those years of authoritarian rule where the government used the secret police to crush any vestige of political opposition, the only venue for that opposition to organize was the mosque.  It fell to the Imams and Mullahs to challenge the political status quo, because to imprison, torture and murder them had disproportionate negative outcomes for the regime.  Now, in the post-revolutionary chaos of the Arab-Spring, it is these fundamentalist organizations that have the organizational and financial capability to govern.  Sadly, however, their approach to governance is not wholly dissimilar from that of the despot they replaced, as they seek complete legislative control and freedom from independent judicial oversight.  Again, when people go from the battlefield to the ballot box without seeing the establishment of democratic institutions and the rule of law, they do not live in a democracy so much as under the tyranny of the majority.

In Erdogan's case, however, he does not have such freedom to act unilaterally.  Turkey has a long post-Ottoman history of being an uncompromisingly secular society, officially tolerating all religions alongside no religion, with the military as the key institution safeguarding against a slide into Muslim theocracy.  The Prime Minister has sought, with some success, to change that balance, prosecuting hundreds of officers for plotting coups in order to cow the military into accepting changes driven by the civilian government.  But no one doubts that there are absolute limits to how many basic freedoms they're willing to see sacrificed on the altar of religious zealotry.
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I'm Not a Scientist, Man

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Got all the bacteria, forgot the dinosaurs

Marco Rubio recently became the the next in a long line of politicians so cowed by the morons in their constituency that they are perfectly willing to become morons too.  As has been documented endlessly, when an interviewer with GQ asked him about the age of the earth, his response was "I'm not a scientist, man" and that questions like that are one of life's "great mysteries".  Now obviously, there is no mystery whatsoever about the age of the earth, or, for that matter, the age of the sun, the age of the galaxy or even the age of the universe.  Rubio and his ilk on the right think their problem is that there are people who won't vote for them if they acknowledge the amazing depth of accumulated scientific knowledge.  But his real problem is that a politician depending upon meeting the expectations of his electorate for ignorance and closed-mindedness for his election cannot then suddenly start to analyze information and use it to govern effectively.  He has locked himself in an information vacuum, forever afraid to recognize new discoveries at pain of alienating his voters.

But the thing that caught my eye was his attempt to justify his claim to basic scientific ignorance - the statement that he is not a scientist.  How does that apply?  If only scientists can know things, why would we have books in the library?  Why would we teach science class in school?  Indeed, how could we even create new scientists in the first place if they had to actually BE a scientist to understand the world around them?  Scientists discover things.  They learn things.  They figure things out.  Then they tell the world about those things, and the world takes that new knowledge and combines it with the earlier knowledge and it becomes understanding.  And understanding is available to anyone.  I couldn't do the necessary math to explain the fundamentals, say, of CP Symmetry Violation, but I am perfectly capable of understanding both what it is and what it means to the Standard Model.  And I'm not a scientist, man.

This is important to me because of a similar construct I run into quite often, even among otherwise scientifically literate and open minded people.  Particularly when discussing the implications of known physical laws, they often respond by saying "hey, we don't know everything, some day it might be possible to...".  At which point they wander off into a never-never land of science fiction, fantasy and imaginary jargon.  But here's the thing - we don't NEED to know everything to know some things.  And the things we know are not isolated factoids floating in a dark sea of ignorance, they are related to other things and have implications in the universe.  The things we know about matter lets us understand things we cannot directly observe about gravity, and the things we learned from relativity and quantum mechanics allow us to understand not only what is possible in the universe, but what is not.

Science and the scientific method does a very good job of questioning its own conclusions, and requiring proof that can be repeatedly demonstrated.  Researchers had seen the Higgs Boson many times before they were willing to announce its discovery.  When there is a broad scientific consensus that something is true about the world around us, it usually is.  And it is not that knowledge alone, but the conclusions we can draw from it that are important.
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The Self Defense Dodge (Updated)

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I don't think they were launching rockets
from the laundry room

Historical convention, common sense and even the United Nations charter accept the premise that a nation always has the right to defend itself against attack, invasion and aggression.  No rational or thoughtful person would truly question a nation's right to defend itself.  So what's behind this refrain, constantly repeated by Israel and the United States, reiterating Israel's right to self defense?  Well, sadly it's as obscene as it is obvious.  Israel has evolved to such a level of military dominance in the region that they are utterly unconstrained in their actions toward anyone they see as their opponents.  So when they respond to minor acts of armed resistance by committing repeated, horrific war crimes, attacks against civilian population centers and journalists, collective punishment and extra-judicial executions, their supporters find themselves in a terrific bind.  These actions by any other nation would draw instant international condemnation, but Israel often gets a pass from many in the international community, led by the United States.

So these supporters can't come out and say "in this case we actually DO support the bombing of hospitals and apartment buildings", so instead they simply repeat the meaningless platitude that Israel has the right to defend itself.  But let's think about this self-defense we are so mindlessly defending.  Because people have an inherent bias toward fairness, one of the things that most catches our attention in Gaza is the lack of proportionality.  Over the years, Palestinian rocket fire has killed about a dozen Israelis.  Now, this is not to be condoned, certainly, and a response intended to stop the rocket fire and defend against that threat is perfectly reasonable.  What exactly bombing apartment buildings in Gaza City has to do with stopping the rockets, or any other definition of self-defense, however tortured, goes unexplained.  Israel kills hundreds of Palestinians for every Israeli killed, and yet insists this is not an act of collective punishment, but merely self-defense.  An occupied, stateless people not permitted to grow their own crops, fish their own waters or export their own goods is the aggressor  and a modern, rich, nuclear armed country cries out they are the victim of this aggression.  It is impossible to believe the Israeli and American governments believe this construct - the open question is whether they think anyone else does.

One of the most interesting facets of this latest round in Gaza's endless torment is the role of Egypt, their immediate southern neighbor.  It is no longer under the dynastic control of the brutal kleptocrat Hosni Mubarak, but rather in a state of cautious balance between the longstanding military leadership and the newly elected moderate Islamist President Morsi.  Under the new government, there has been unequivocal condemnation of Israel's politically motivated slaughter of innocents, but the Generals have limited Egypt's actions in support of the Palestinians out of concern for their "global credibility" and, of course, their desire for continued US aid.  But one wonders if this isn't the end of the decades - old status quo, that with the 'Arab Spring', the increasing democratization of the middle east and north Africa, the peoples voices being heard rather than suppressed by greedy and authoritarian governments; it might be that "global credibility" will soon require speaking out against atrocities and war crimes committed in the name of political power.  It might be that in the eyes of the world, the US and Israel will find themselves viewed in the same light as Syria's Assad and Iran's Khameini.  It may soon be the case that universal disgust at the horrors inflicted on a stateless and helpless people will lead to international opprobrium and isolation, and political expediency will drive nations from a longstanding policy of looking away to more direct support for the people being slaughtered.

And that would be a welcome change.

Update:
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spoken out against the Israeli attacks on Gaza, calling them "ethnic cleansing" and emphasizing that they could in no way be deemed self-defense.  He referred to Israel as a "Terrorist State", and in discussing the refusal of the United Nations to act to reign in Israel war crimes, had this to say:

"It is against them today, tomorrow it will be us, keep that in mind. If we are going to die, let's go down with decency. Keep that in mind too."

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Who I Am, What I Am, What I Believe In...

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At some point, ideology becomes stupidity

Once again, the Republicans find themselves struggling with the hard tyranny of facts and reality.  They believed that their political constituency could constitute a national majority, and they believed this national majority was immutable.  They believed they could exclude vast swaths of the American population, using hatred to energize their tribal contingent, and contempt to convince others that the economics of compassion and community had somehow become dangerous.  They spit bile at entire groups that might otherwise have been persuadable, and repeatedly sought to criminalize basic human liberties while crying out in panic that it was their opposition that was a threat to freedom.  Unsurprisingly, at least to anyone who didn't live in the right-wing media bubble, these policies were unable to generate a national consensus.

So now they find themselves confronting their own political mortality, forced to recognize that while Americans can be herded like frightened sheep, they also, at some point, can recognize a political and economic threat to their well-being and that of their families.  They are beginning to acknowledge that their policies are so cruel and so destructive that they actually alienated more voters than they convinced.  They clearly have come to recognize that you cannot conceal this vicious policy agenda by refusing to provide specifics, as anyone who has ever bought a used car can see through that tactic without difficulty.  And they are beginning to accept that they are going to have to reduce the hatred and vitriol in their message, at least toward a few select groups they have previously demonized, in order to expand their base of political support.

There is no doubt that strictly from a political standpoint, they can do this.  They could moderate some of their hardline social and economic stances and successfully expand their base of voters.  They face strategic challenges in that effort, but tactically the way forward is fairly clear.  But it raises one gigantic question - to what extent do they actually believe in these policies, as opposed to supporting them for technical or political reasons alone?  A very good example is the evangelical protestant community - they have already demonstrated their commitment to ideology over their desire to do what is necessary to win elections.  In both 2010 and 2012 they sacrificed significant opportunities to gain additional Senate seats by nominating unelectably extreme candidates.  It seems fairly obvious - if you truly believe you will suffer eternal torment for a given vote, it's not likely that you will cast that vote even if it is in your political best interests to do so.

So the challenge facing the national Republican Party is fairly straightforward.  No matter what policy you might point to, there are at least some people who think it is the only policy that matters - these "single-issue" voters are true believers in their own right, and exist all across the political spectrum.  But a large-scale political operation has to mostly ignore them in their broader calculation, because for every single-issue voter on one side of a given issue, there is  another on the other side.  Your candidate will get those that agree with him or her, and you can't persuade the others with favorable positions on other issues.  But beyond those, the party management will have to determine on what issues a larger portion of their electorate will allow them to bend, and try to calculate if a move to the left on a certain subset of policies will actually gain them the votes they need to once again be competitive.

And of course, if it turns out that the party's ideological commitment to tribal hatred and the upward redistribution of wealth is too strong to be overcome, they will see more and more of their more moderate electorate becoming "independents" and supporting the Democratic candidate, rendering them ever more irrelevant in the future...
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...and the Agony of Defeat

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I feel your pain.
And it feels just like hope

We over here on the political left have been having quite a bit of fun watching the Republicans agonize over a fairly decisive if not overwhelming electoral defeat.  There was indeed something deeply satisfying in watching their smug certainty, even in the face of very clear evidence to the contrary, that they would finally be rid of this anti-American Chicago thug.  After all, everyone they talked to hated Barack Obama virulently, nobody they knew in their American Legion Hall or church congregation would vote for him - what possible chance would he have with the electorate at large?  And to see that certainty wiped away, so quickly and so completely that the denial many of thought would last for weeks actually lasted less than an hour.  There could be no cries of "voter fraud" or "stolen election" this time, as one by one the contested swing states all slipped away.  Seldom have I ever personally encountered the word "Schadenfreude" more often in the course of a single week.

And it really only gets better, as the national Republican party begins to come to terms with something we've all known was coming for years.  Every four years the population gets a little younger and a little browner and there just is no longer enough angry old white people to make a successful national political constituency.  So now we're hearing anguished cries from virtually all corners of the American Political Right that they have to find a way to soften their message and become more diverse and inclusive.  And I smile and think "good luck with that".

Now the hard political fact is that they COULD do this.  They could easily reduce their absolutist commitment to the wealthiest Americans and Corporations while still remaining friendlier to them than many Democrats.  They could back away from their commitments to social issues, from abortion and women's rights to gay rights and Church/State separation.  They could even moderate their positions on labor and immigration.  Sure, various factions of their coalition, primarily evangelical protestants and bigots, would scream bloody murder, but it's not like they're going to vote Democratic any time soon.  And while they might stamp their collective feet and threaten to create a third party, we can ask anyone from Ross Perot to Jill Stein how that's going to turn out for them - after a single election cycle they'll have their constituency back in place as if nothing ever happened.

But while these things are politically possible - the Democratic party has proven it time and again over the years by treating their left-wing base with contempt and still getting their votes, because people like me, while we would LOVE to see a more progressive President, are never going to facilitate the election of a bloated plutocrat like Mitt Romney or a reactionary fascist tool like John McCain - the Republican party has one specific reason why it cannot moderate its messaging.  The House of Representatives.

You see, there are three tiers of elections for national office.  There is a national election for President.  There are statewide elections for Senators.  And there are much smaller, district-level elections for Congresspeople.  Obviously, the national electorate includes the broadest set of political opinions, and includes a significant number of people who are ideologically left of center, or at least left of the Overton Window.  At the statewide level, the electorate tends to be more partisan, with some states much more blue overall, like California and Massachusetts and New York, and others, more rural and less densely populated much more red.  But a congressional district is a different kind of thing.  A large metropolitan area may include three districts, while vast agricultural and rural portions of a state might have fifteen.  The way America's population is distributed, and particularly the broad differences in diversity, tolerance, education and religious conviction between the big cities and the great hinterlands, essentially creates a condition where the median congressional district is significantly more Conservative than a larger sampling would be.  In a large percentage of these districts, the people demand an extreme-far right ideology in their representatives - this is the home turf of the "tea party".

So in order to start to back away from their more extreme wing in order to begin to appeal to Latinos, to educated Americans and to people who care about the environment and the poor, the national Republican party would have to repudiate the policies of their own Congressional caucus, which would lead to an incoherent and chaotic political message that could never get out of its own way long enough to win an election.  The party is, in essence, being held hostage by a political base that can never again be large enough to win national office, and yet their message is one of bigotry and exclusion.  It's a genuine challenge to which there is no easy solution - for which we can thank our lucky stars.
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Balk Like an Egyptian

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Don't make Israel Angry.  You wouldn't like
her when she's angry...

Setting aside for a moment the humanitarian and legal contexts, as a pure matter of regional military and geopolitical effectiveness, Israel has done a very good job of securing her borders against access from any of her neighbors.  Because of Israeli belligerence, willingness to kill people in large numbers for vague reasons and oppression of the Palestinian people, the surrounding nations might be willing to at least look the other way if attackers sought to cross their frontier into Israel.  But as a practical matter, it has become just about impossible to do so.  In the north, the Lebanese border is strongly defended, and the Lebanese government itself is utterly cowed by repeated attacks and invasions from Israel over the years.  To the east, Syria and Israel have maintained a cautious truce in order to avoid a larger war, and much of Israel is buffered from direct exposure to the Syrian border by the occupied West Bank.  Southeast is the long border with Jordan, from the Dead Sea to Eilat in the far south.  This is another border secured by unrelenting militarization and decades of intimidation.  King Abdullah has maintained the policies of his father, recognizing that virtually every regional war between Arab states and Israel will be fought, at least partially, in Jordan.

Which leaves the Sinai, Israel's southern border.  Under agreements negotiated with Hosni Mubarak, who it seems had a much greater love of fabulous wealth than he did for his nation or people, the Egyptian military was banned from operating in that part of Egypt, leaving Israel in complete control of the border.  Except, of course, for the very large implications of tiny little Gaza.  Israel maintains an iron-clad embargo on the Gaza Strip, carefully keeping the population in a constant state of food-insecurity, preventing the import of construction materials to rebuild the towns and cities Israel has destroyed in wars and attacks over the years, and refusing to allow people in Gaza to export their manufactured goods, thus keeping the population mostly un- and under-employed and in poverty.  This blockade and embargo even extends to international humanitarian donations - it's hard to imagine how harsh the Western reaction would be to any other occupying nation that prevented the delivery of humanitarian aid.

But this absolute impenetrable embargo of the Gazan people has a critical weakness.  Gaza is not entirely surrounded by Israel - there is a tiny, five-mile border with Egypt, typically referred to as the "Rafah Crossing" after the name the little Egyptian town of the same name.  Under Mubarak, the Egyptians had an agreement with Israel to keep the crossing closed in support of the Israeli embargo.  This allowed Israel complete control over the lives of the people of Gaza, while Egyptian government officials could profit immensely from an institutionalized smuggling economy built up over the years in Rafah.  Since the fall of the Mubarak regime, the Egyptians, particularly the Morsi government, has made a variety of noises about opening the crossing, and have partially done so to varying extents.  But still, the people of Gaza are unemployed, hungry and living in wretched conditions, mostly because power in Egypt is still in the hands of the Generals, and the Generals are much friendlier to the Likud government than the civilian government might be.

What could change this status quo in Gaza?  Turn on your television set. The Israelis have begun bombing Gaza City and assassinating Hamas leadership figures.  If the Palestinians choose to respond, Israel can reliably be expected to slaughter them in large numbers, destroying more of their cities, their utilities, their hospitals and refugee camps.  And in response to yet another humanitarian disaster, I would expect we will see the floodgates open.  Humanitarian agencies and NGOs might be allowed, even encouraged to set up shop in Rafah, and food and medicine and concrete and money might start flowing in, and goods might begin to find their way out and to markets.  Certainly, one should not be naive - the weapons trade will thrive in this chaotic boom-town too, but the weapons trade thrives where people make war.  Make peace and the arms brokers will find other buyers elsewhere, it's just not any more complicated than that.

Israel's collective punishment of the people in Gaza was never sustainable, and it was always a matter of some fascination to speculate on what might bring it to an end.  There is a rich irony that we may see it end in the very near future, not as a result of international demands or political negotiations, but as yet another unintended consequence of Israel's intransigence and brutality...

UPDATE:
Bending to popular pressure, Egyptian President Morsi has recalled the Egyptian Ambassador from Israel.  Morsi's political operation released a statement, saying "...“the occupation state must realize that the changes that took place in the region, especially in Egypt, will not let the Palestinian people fall at the mercy of the Israeli aggression as was the case before.”  There are already demands among both Islamist and Secular Egyptians that Morsi open the Rafah Crossing to unrestricted traffic and break the embargo once and for all.
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Serious Problems, Syria's Solutions?

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No.  These people do NOT like each other

The bloody civil war in Syria seems to be entering a new phase.  It started out as a political disagreement with a sectarian component and became a revolution, and as the people rushed to choose a side it became a protracted civil war.  But now so much blood has been spilled, and so many people have been horrifically affected that it is shattering into a factional free-for-all that will create divisions and hatred between and among the various political, ideological, ethnic and sectarian population groups that will take decades to heal, if they ever do at all.

Meanwhile, as refugees abandon their lives and homes and stream to the relative safety and desperate poverty of camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, the world comes together in an orgy of finger-pointing, racing to blame one another for all the things that are not being done to help.

But it's odd that in the global firestorm of blame and counter-argument there is so little specificity.  What is it, exactly, that "we" should do?  For that matter, just precisely who are the "we" that are supposed to actually, you know, do it?  Fund the refugees?  Arm the rebels?  Enforce a no-fly zone?  The fact is, that there are precisely two resources the global community can bring to bear on the disintegration of Syria - Money and Violence.  There doesn't actually seem to be a desperate lack of funds - the logistical challenges of using them to deliver effective relief in the region, coupled with the inevitable local corruption, seems to be absorbing the charitable resources to the point of saturation.  Meanwhile, the entire area is awash in weapons, and while the rebels probably do need some specialized gear, particularly anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles and encrypted communications, they are not struggling to bring effective firepower to bear on the hardcore remnants of the Syrian armed forces.

That leaves violence.  The world could pick a side, presumably the rebels at this point, and provide them with an overwhelming military advantage.  The loyalists would quickly read the Libyan writing on the wall and the regime would collapse, much the same as it is doing now, only somewhat faster.  The real problem happens then.  There is no credible, competent leadership to step in and fill the void, there is vast distrust, ideological and sectarian disagreements and outright ethnic hatred among the factions that would find themselves on the "winning" side.  The only functional governing institutions would be those that were in place when the revolution started, and they would be considered untrustworthy, and many will even be prosecuted and executed.

As an interesting historical aside, peace only truly came to Lebanon after the Syrian army occupied it and enforced the peace with an iron fist.  Very likely the same would be true of a post Assad Syria, but who will be the guarantor of such a peace-at-gunpoint solution?  In another world, it might be Iran, but any aggressive move by Iran across her borders would quickly draw a massive military response.

Like Iraq and Afghanistan after foreign invasion, like Libya, Sudan and Somalia after civil war, like the decades-long futile search for peace in Northern Ireland and the ongoing, seemingly endless nationalist and sectarian hatred in the Balkans, these things truly have no end.  There is no agreement, no national consensus to end the fighting and re-build a nation.  There is only factions, one strong enough at any time to take power, the others continuing to use violence to try to gain that power for themselves.  As long as there are tribes and religions, money and weapons, nations torn apart by violence will struggle mightily to find a way to put themselves back together again.  And it doesn't help that these "nations" are just a set of arbitrary boundaries drawn by white colonists with no sense of the diversity of the populations. Afghanistan, for example, can never have a national consensus because it is a nation in name only, a group of incompatible tribal regions being told to see itself as a single people, and that is simply unrealistic.

Just as we have seen over the years from Ireland to Bosnia, religious identification is often predicated on hatred of other sects, and one of the things that gods and godlets from Zeus to Mohamed to Yaweh agree on is that it is good, and necessary, to kill the apostates - in large numbers and without mercy.  In Syria it is no different, with the Shiites and Christians aligning themselves with the Alawites out of fear of the Sunnis and their fundamentalist allies.  How can peace come until these various religious sects can agree to work together to build a nation?

The more you think about it, the less there is that the world can do in Syria.  The best we can offer at this point is to provide enough firepower to reduce the Assad government's ability to bomb and shell entire neighborhoods and slaughter non-combatants in large numbers, and make sure there is enough food and medicine available to the nations hosting the refugees.  And at that point stay out of it and hope that, at some point, humanity triumphs over hatred.
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Strategic Ignoring - The Republicans and the Voice of the People

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I'm sorry.  Is there something about this
confuses you?

The Debt Ceiling fight was in the summer of 2011.  Since then, for eighteen months, the Obama Administration AND the Obama Re-Election Campaign have been relentlessly demanding higher taxes on the the wealthiest Americans.  Not crippling levels of taxation, but rather a combination of higher marginal rates on income taxes along with higher rates on investment income, and a reduction in the kinds of bizarre loopholes put in place by wealthy special interests, such as the Carried Interest Deduction.

Unlike the Romney Campaign, that was very careful to avoid making specific proposals, President Obama has been very clear, at every opportunity, and in every policy proposal.  One of the best approaches to begin to address the deficit and fund basic government services at the national and state level, they said, was nothing more than a simple roll-back of the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans.  All by itself it wouldn't solve the deficit problem, but it would begin to make the income tax code more progressive, and it would give the government some resources to begin to address desperate problems in local education, law enforcement and infrastructure.

The Republican party made it very clear, from the very beginning, that tax increases on millionaires and billionaires were a non-starter.  They would go to the mats, shut down government and take the US to the brink of default before they would allow the government to raise the highest marginal tax rate by four percent.  Four a year and a half, the two parties have stood nose to nose, fighting a desperate ideological struggle for a tiny portion of the wealth of America's richest citizens.  Interestingly, many of those wealthiest citizens stood up and agreed they should be taxed at a higher rate, but the elected Republicans weren't going to risk their standing with the investment bankers and hedge fund managers to allow that sort of discussion.  There was to be no compromise on this issue - it would be a fight to the death.

And a fight to the death it was.  The Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, a perfect standard bearer for the top 1%, a rich plutocrat so out of touch with the reality of life in America he couldn't identify a donut by name.  And in a long, agonizing contest of lies in the service of the rich, media complicity and angry denunciations of basic community responsibility, this was really the core argument of a political season gone out of control.  Month after month the campaign spending piled up as the Republicans sought to portray Obama as a a Socialist, crippling capitalism and job creation even as they themselves sought to cripple unions and send manufacturing jobs to lower wage nations.

And finally, thankfully, last night it ended.  Decisively.  It's not like people didn't understand what they were choosing.  Obama wants to raise taxes on the wealthiest to close the deficit and give the American government some financial resources to fund the programs already approved by Congress.  Romney demanded that the American people give up their government services, and live or die on their own so that the richest Americans might be just a little bit richer.  It was a very clear argument, and a very clear outcome.  The American people chose the Obama vision of a nation that serves its entire population over the Romney vision of a nation that exists to serve only ten percent of it's population and does not care about the lives and families of the poor and middle class.

So if our political system was truly functional, the government would recognize that the people have chosen, and the two sides would sit down together to craft a new budget and tax policy based on the stated preference of the American people.  It is, after all, government of the people, by the people and for the people - is it not?  Well, sadly, it is not.  The Republicans in Congress have already doubled down on their resistance to any tax increases on the wealthy.  Of course, ALL the Bush tax cuts expire on January 1st, so Obama will come to work with a new Congress and a new reality, but that's not really the point here.  The point is once again to point out, to DEMAND people see with clear eyes, that the Republicans do NOT represent their populations - their constituency is ONLY the wealthy, and they protect those interests at the expense of what's best for our nation, and this can no longer be doubted.  We had an election.  They lost.  And yet, like good soldiers in a losing cause, they keep serving their masters...
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