Consider The Source

One of These is Very Much NOT Like the Others

2012-03-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

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Whoops - he did it again. Obama, speaking before AIPAC this morning, used a closed-end, zero sum policy formulation that puts the US squarely in a corner, with events in control of US actions rather than the US in control of those events:

“I do not have a policy of containment. I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

Although to be fair, this still leaves the US policy toward the Iranian nuclear program short of the Israeli position. The US has stated that it will not tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapon, while the Israelis regularly state that they will not allow Iran to develop the capability to build a nuclear weapon. But even so, it is foolhardy for the leader of a nation to put that nation in a position where, when confronted with a specific event, he has no options but to take a particular action or lose all credibility. Indeed, when the US President says "all options are on the table", as he repeatedly does, he is being dishonest. The option of living alongside a nuclear-armed Iran has been clearly taken off the table.

But here's the question. Why Iran? Some might say it is because they are our enemies, and they would threaten us. But there was no real thought of going to war to stop North Korea from building nuclear weapons. Some might say it is because we cannot allow the risk of an "Islamic Bomb", as religious sympathies might place it in the hands of terrorists. But we stood by passively as Pakistan not only developed an advanced nuclear capability, but provided expertise to other programs all around the world. And there are, of course, those who would say it is about oil. Iran has lots of oil. But Iran is not withholding her oil from the West - indeed, there are sanctions in place predicated on the strategy of preventing Iran from selling her oil in order to cause economic collapse. Iran would be more than happy to provide crude oil to any buyer. Does anyone actually believe for a minute that the US would go to war against Saudi Arabia if the Kingdom was to initiate a nuclear weapons program? Of course not. It is simply not a viable policy for a nation, no matter how powerful militarily, to take another nation's resources by force of arms.

There are also, it must be said, those who say that Iran is different in another way. They say the Iranian leadership is mad, that they would happily embrace the destruction of their entire, ancient nation to simply bring nuclear fire to Israel. To this stupid, bigoted, self-serving argument there is no response. I cannot provide empirical evidence that the Iranian leadership wants to continue to lead, and wants to continue to have a nation and a population they can lead. I can only insist that anyone who disagrees with me on this issue bring rational, well-founded arguments to bear. And to refuse to engage with delusional war-mongers.

It is quite interesting, if you think about it, that the nation that represents the most real and profound threat to the United States, both militarily and economically, is Israel. No matter what constitutes stated US Policy, Israel can turn it all on its head with a unilateral air attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel is far too weak militarily to accomplish much more than to start a regional conflagration - the US would have to step in almost immediately to suppress the Iranian military response, keep the Strait of Hormuz open to Gulf shipping and attempt to complete the destruction of the Iranian nuclear facilities. So in a matter of weeks Israel will have caused the US to become an active participant in a major war, and as the price of crude oil soars, she will also be directly responsible for crushing the nascent global economic recovery and driving the US and European economies into deep recession.

And it's worth mentioning when people point out that this will be primarily an air war, that it will very likely be necessary for the US, probably the Marines, to occupy over a thousand square miles of Iran centered on Bandar-e-Abbas to try to suppress the missile and small boat attacks on Gulf shipping that would be used to close the Strait.

And, finally, at the end of it all, after all the death and destruction, ruined lives and stunted futures, will we at least have destroyed Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon? Of course not. We will have destroyed stuff. Stuff the Iranians built. Stuff they will be uniquely energized and motivated to build again. We might have bought time - very, very expensive time - or just as likely, we might have provided the impetus for the Iranian leadership to do something they might otherwise never have chosen to do.

And this - at least implicitly - provides an answer to the question "Why Iran?" That answer is "Israel". Because the radical right-wing extremists currently constituting the political leadership in Israel find it not just politically expedient, but politically necessary to have a major external enemy that constitutes an existential threat to tiny, vulnerable Israel. Because the political survival of the Likudniks is impossible without the Iranian threat. Because Netanyahu can't control the religious extremists driving the settlements, and he can't provide economic answers to his population when they demand them, and he can't prevent the rising tide of global opprobrium for the brutal apartheid state he is building in the occupied territories. Simply put, Likud NEEDS the Iranian threat. But at some point the Iranian response and the increasing pressure of their own rhetoric might very well force the Israelis into an ultimately self-destructive act of war.

And once again today, the American President readily and voluntarily signed us up to go along on that one way trip.
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Dangerously Naive - Americans Piss Me Off

2012-02-25T13:13:00.001-08:00

Think of the things America has not experienced. Ever.

Aerial Bombardment.
If you tried to make a list of the nations our bombers, fighters and drones have attacked in the hundred years that there has even been such a thing as military air power, you would quickly find it to be an almost impossible task. The list is so long it's mind boggling. And when you add to the list all the other nations that have endured aerial bombardment by other nations (or even their own feckless government), and you will find that virtually all societies, in just the last several generations, know that particular terror. But we, alone among modern nations, have never experienced air attacks on our soil.

Foreign Invasion/Occupation.
Europe is the poster child for this horrific experience, but one cannot forget that throughout Asia, the sub-Continent, Africa and Latin America it has been a regular experience, with all the brutality and slaughter that comes directly from an enforced occupation.

Nuclear Coercion.
This is simple. We were the first to develop nuclear weapons. To this day still the only nation to use them in anger. We have been threatening the entire world with apocalyptic destruction for sixty years, and have NEVER, not for one second, known the feeling of being defenseless before a nuclear threat. Oh, we have feared our own holocaust - but only with the knowledge that any attacker would be signing their own death warrant.

Insurgency.
Yes. The Civil War was an insurgency. But how many nations have suffered the slow bleeding of a low level internal conflict, and the brutality of draconian police measures that always result, just in the last fifty years? Yes, the Civil War was horrific, but with modern weapons and modern technology, insurgency is easier, more lethal and requires fewer committed rebels. 1865 was so long ago as to be meaningless.

* * *

Now think of the torments we routinely inflict on other nations, without hesitation or even consideration of what precisely it might be that gives us the RIGHT, whether these actions are those of the global "Good Guy" or whether the actions make us a rogue nation and the single greatest threat to peace in the world today. Try to come up with a functional definition of the term "Terrorism" that excludes anti-tank missiles launched from stealthy drones into houses and cars in unsuspecting civilian neighborhoods. Go ahead. I'll wait.

If Venezuela had nuclear missiles and the US did not, can you imagine any scenario where the US didn't throw out the IAEA inspectors, abrogate the NPT and go for broke to build a nuclear deterrent? How can we expect the Iranians, or for that matter the Syrians, Saudis or Egyptians to stand confronted by a nuclear armed Israel when we KNOW we would not be willing to do the same thing ourselves? Wouldn't it be more aligned with our professed values to pressure Israel to give up their illegal weapons then to try and prevent other nations legally developing their own nuclear capabilities? Wouldn't it actually reduce the likelihood of a nuclear attack if there was a more balanced nuclear presence in the region?

Where is the value in loudly and publicly declaring China our next great adversary? Do we really NEED a great adversary all the time? Isn't it possible to have a world where the great powers do not divide themselves into warring coalitions, but rather compete to increase trade, wealth and global quality of life? Why is that so incomprehensible? How might China, in her role as grand adversary, go about harming the US without destroying herself in the process? Wars are destructive for trade - they reduce global demand, divert resources from commerce to war-making, and they reduce access to all manner of raw materials. And if the fear is that China will use force to re-take possession of Taiwan, that's just silly. They want Taiwan intact, with all its wealth, not an economic and human basket case of smoldering ruins and shattered infrastructure. And the Chinese know that it is inevitable, a matter of time only, before Taiwan chooses to rejoin the mainland all on its own. There is no other path for them, and even now, this is becoming clear.

All around the world, we are seeing the rapidly eroding utility of military force. The US invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan were very brief, overwhelming military victories followed by long, grinding, bloody debacles. Nothing was gained in either case, and a great deal was lost. Not the least of which was a global perception of US military superiority. Every nation now understands, from China to Syria to Sudan, that the US can defeat their military, but that won't achieve their aims, and they can be bled out in a long insurgency. The US, on the other hand, is still locked in a World War II mindset, building huge, heavy tank brigades and powerful air forces to defeat - who, exactly? There are exactly two kinds of warfare possible in the modern era, and we are seeing them both. Most common is the war between a government and it's people - a rebellion as we see in Syria and before that, Libya, or a civil war as in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Typically these sorts of insurgencies pit a much better armed and funded government against a smaller, weaker foe, and they are fought in a series of ambushes, bomb blasts, kidnapping, assassinations, torture and executions. They last for years or decades, because there is no clear cut way for them to end - no path to anything that might be described as "victory". The other kind of war is the kind the US is fighting all over the world. No matter what you believe about the morality of drone strikes and special operations raids, there is very little doubt about their efficacy. They are merely an extension of the tactics of terrorism - designed to create fear to achieve primarily political ends. There have always been elite fighters in every culture, and much of the advanced technology used in drones is software, and therefore available to any nation, so this kind of warfare will soon become commonplace around the world, and make no mistake, it will be used against the US.

All apropos of nothing I suppose, and unlikely to lead to anything revelatory, but I think, when you get past our indoctrination and the fog of lies about American Exceptionalism and "False Equivalence", there's something important here to be learned about who we are. We are an optimistic and inventive people, certainly, but that optimism, coupled with a geographic location rich in resources and virtually invulnerable to military attack, seems to have lead to a kind of a cruel nationalism, an inward-focused hubris that allows us to forgive virtually any criminal act, as long as it was committed by Americans. Where all cultures have a great capacity for ethnic hatred, and all religions are steeped in a particularly irrational loathing of "unbelievers", Americans, with their unique history, couple a kind of hyper-tribalism with a dangerous belief that violence is a perfectly appropriate approach to conflict resolution.

It is nothing short of astonishing that we, as a people, are not hated and feared much more than we are...

Dis-Interested

2012-02-21T17:22:00.001-08:00

So Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is upset with US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey. What, you might wonder, could the titular head of the US Military have possibly done to enrage the number one user of American Military hardware and technology? Well, he had the unmitigated gall to go on TeeVee and take the position that it would not be "wise" for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran "at this time". An outrage, I know. What else did he say? "...we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor." I know - how DARE he?

So what did PM Netanyahu and his DM Barak have to say about this gross provocation?

“We made it clear to Donilon that all those statements and briefings only served the Iranians,” a senior Israeli official said. “The Iranians see there’s controversy between the United States and Israel, and that the Americans object to a military act. That reduces the pressure on them.”

Here's the thing, though. There are three distinct actors in this little drama. There is the Israeli government, the Iranian government, and the United States government. General Dempsey is a decorated officer in the United States Army. Now, whose interest do you suppose he seeks to serve? If you guessed the US, you win. At some point, regardless of how the US aligns itself with Israel and against Iran, Dempsey's number one concern has to be America and serving her best interests.

Now it seems to me that there are only two possible interpretations here. Either Netanyahu sees the world in such starkly binary terms that every single act, every word spoken and every statement issued, anywhere in the world by anyone must be defined in terms of either being in Israel's interests or in Iran's. Or, the other possible interpretation, that Netanyahu sees America's interests as being aligned more closely with Iran than with Israel, and therefore, if an American speaks out in support of American interests, he is, however unintentionally, simultaneously speaking in support of Iranian interests.

Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter either way. This kind of rhetoric is offensive, and the fact that we Americans send billions of our tax dollars to Israel instead of hiring teachers and firefighters, or building roads and schools should necessitate a more thoughtful and respectful consideration from the Israeli leadership. I am personally offended that they take all that money as if it was their birthright, and are unwilling to do ANYTHING for the US in return. They are the spoiled child, always expecting more, and never willing to do anything to deserve it. Obama should demand an apology from both Bibi and Barak, but it being an election year, I suppose I'd be very surprised if it even got mentioned. Which is why it will happen again...

The De-Evolution of Governance -- Fear of a Sustainable Future

2012-02-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

In simple terms, nation states all over the world are facing the same problem - quality of governance. Sure, it manifests itself in different ways - in the US it's a horrific imbalance of wealth and a grossly underfunded government, in Europe it's monetary integration without fiscal or political (or cultural, for that matter) integration. In China it's the constant rumblings of a restive population. It's the competing demands of ethnic, sectarian and tribal factions, it's national borders that don't reflect national populations, it's authoritarian rule, cronyism, corruption and brutality. But at the core, it all goes to one key problem. In the obscene, self-reinforcing scramble for personal wealth, the entire world has abandoned sustainable policies and long-term solutions for short-term patches, last minute acts of political and economic desperation and a general unwillingness to invest in the future. Government has ceased to be about governance, and has become strictly another path to wealth an individual might choose - another entrepreneurial option for hucksters and psychopathic risk-takers. Where politics were once a means to an end, the way one might achieve power, contribute to the success and esteem of his nation, perhaps grow to become a statesman, now it is an end unto itself. Election campaign morphs smoothly and instantly into re-election campaign, and there is never a good time to make compromises, let alone sacrifices, to achieve a stable, sustainable future for the generations to come.

Inability to act on Climate Change, on Education, on Infrastructure, on sustainable government funding is not a passing challenge. It is not due to "gridlock" or some kind of temporary status quo that will be erased with the next election, or in the next Congress. Because as problematic as these issues are, they are not the problem - they are merely symptoms. The problem is systemic - the result of massive global corruption, where absolutely NONE of the wealth of these already obscenely rich individuals can be put at risk, certainly not for "the greater good". The systems of governance have been modified to serve the needs of the wealthy, and the individuals elected or promoted in those systems are beholden to them, serving essentially at their whim. The Faustian agreement is mostly implicit, but do not assume it will not be made explicit when necessary. The politicians are free to pursue their own empires, and they are free to impose whatever ideological or sectarian torments upon their constituencies they wish, but the flow of wealth to the wealthy must not be impeded in any way, and any and all necessary government resources will be brought to bear whenever that wealth is threatened.

When people rend their garments over the bank bailouts, even as the homeowners are left at their mercy, with nothing to protect them from utter destitution, they only reflect obsolete thinking. This is not a bug, this is a carefully designed feature. Government no longer exists to serve the people - its only purpose is to serve the wealthy, and to preserve the wealth. When those same people shake their heads in disbelief as schools and infrastructure crumble while we build trillion dollar aircraft carriers to impose our will on other, mostly tiny and powerless nations, it is not because the people or the nation are at risk. It is because the wealth is at risk - economies dependent on the massive daily flow of inexpensive energy require that there be no limit to the squander of national and generational wealth, just to ensure that energy continues to flow. Dynastic families with billionaire grandchildren still demand lower taxes - the crumbling roads, declining dams and collapsing bridges are not their concern. Wealth provides its own solutions, and the people who need the infrastructure have nothing to offer their now heartless and disinterested government to build it for them. Increasingly, the people exist to work long hours in service jobs in order to provide the capital for the engine that drives the worlds largest economy - what we call "consumer spending".

So how does a world comprised no longer of people and their nations, but rather of owners and commodities play out? What might the end game look like? For the near term, we have entered a period of crisis management. Governments will no longer act until faced with imminent catastrophe, and even then will only take the minimum steps to mitigate disaster, while doing anything necessary to preserve the wealth of the ownership class. We saw this in the Financial collapse in '08, we're seeing it again in the Euro crisis right now. We'll see it when an economic or geopolitical crisis reduces the supply of crude oil to below the level of demand. We'll see it when nations are faced with default, and the banks and investors are confronted with the requirement that they "take a haircut". It is unquestionable that we have entered a period where no significant action can be taken until it is in response to an existential crisis, so we will drift from crisis to crisis until confronted with one we are too late or too small to allay, and then big bad things will start to happen. In the meantime, of course, the rising cost and declining quality of education will impact our ability to create a modern, competitive workforce, and our unwillingness to even maintain, let alone update, our infrastructure and physical plant will lead to a series of tragedies and events that will point the way to decline. And all of these crises and events will ripple around our globally connected world, creating unintended consequences and black swans.

Of course, the outcome is violence. In a perfect storm of economic collapse, ideological and sectarian hatred and intolerance, ineffective governance, starvation, drought, storms and fear, people will rise up, and unlike anytime in history, the world is awash in terribly lethal weapons. It was pointed out to me long ago that people will suffer any indignity, any brutality on their own, but when they no longer can see a better future for their children they become willing to fight, and to die, to change that. And that is the course we're on. How many people can look forward to a bright, safe, fulfilling future for their children? Is it merely a coincidence that those same people are the ones now well served by their governments? Do they not see that their future is just as grim as ours, for not only will their wealth not survive the coming turmoil, but most of them will not, either?

The Syria Thing

2012-02-12T11:03:00.000-08:00

Homs, besieged and under relentless artillery fire

Bashar al-Assad's Syria represents a horrific problem for the international community. Syria is nothing like Libya, and any kind of direct intervention, for a variety of reasons, is extremely difficult, if not impossible. And yet.

Certainly the international community in a modern, civilized, educated world has some responsibility to try to stop a dictator from slaughtering his citizens. Sovereignty simply cannot mean that an individual, political party, organization or cult can use the conventions of international borders to commit the unfettered industrial scale murder of vast swaths of his population. But at the same time, any military intervention is fraught with risk, and there is no value in any process that leads to further destabilization, a regional war, more killing and more destruction.

The politics of it are what make it so hard. al-Assad is not going to back down - for him it truly is an existential struggle. There is no place for him and his Baath party cronies except either as the autocratic rulers of Syria, in a cell in The Hague or in a grave. His father murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people (well, Syrians, but (mostly) not Allawites) to stay in power, and any dictator today, well aware of the fate of those such as Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein will see no future in compromise. So diplomacy, negotiations, even brutal economic sanctions are unlikely to alter the path. A dictator in al-Assad's position today must either completely and utterly crush the revolt or eventually he will be deposed, and he will die.

Direct intervention is not possible at all without a UN Mandate, and the willing participation of the regional organizations like the Arab League and the GCC. And as long as Russia is willing to provide cover for the Syrian leadership in the UN Security Council then there can be no mandate, and European nations, having seen firsthand what international miltary adventures without UN support look like in Iraq, will not be willing to participate. And the US has, rightly, had her fill of unilateral "cowboy" actions that lacked international support. Even with a UN Resolution, there are real, practical questions about what can be accomplished, and what the indirect and unintended consequences of any military action might be.

So if, at least for now, we must rule out direct intervention in Syria - and let's be perfectly clear: we must - and yet, even still, we feel that to do nothing would not only compound the crimes, it would be a crime in itself - just what CAN the international community do?

What about a No Fly Zone?
Both sides learn from history, and al-Assad has learned well the lessons of Libya. First, he doesn't need air power to suppress the rebellion. Oh sure, make no mistake, he'd LOVE to use the terrifying power of random death from the skies, but the risks and costs just don't justify the benefits. If he used his air against Homs and the Damascus suburbs, that would give the international community an excuse to push for a No Fly Zone, much as they did with Gadhafi. And he must always be aware that Israel is ALWAYS looking for an opportunity to engage, and if he starts flying fighter bombers and dropping bombs and a few of those jets stray a bit too close to the border they'll get knocked down. Problems he does not need at this point. And the bottom line for the Syrian regime is that suppressing this rebellion is dirty, close, eyeball range murder. It calls for tanks, machine guns and snipers. It calls for detention and torture. The idea is to make the rebels stop rebelling - and that means inflicting maximum pain on them, their families and their tribe. As long as he doesn't actually NEED his air power, he won't make that mistake.

Sanctions?
Sanctions just don't matter. There is no option for Bashar al-Assad. He's in a win or die struggle, and anybody in the Western community who doesn't understand this is bound to miscalculate. Sanctions won't end the slaughter. They won't even slow it down. The regime knows they're losing revenue, but they're fighting to keep their lives. They'll let the whole country starve before they'll negotiate in good faith. See North Korea.

Arm the Rebels?
This seems a reasonable course of action when first examined. Some kind of active support that challenges the regime, sends a message the the international community is not going to stand passively by and allow these crimes, and maybe hastens the fall of the dictator.

The argument against arming the rebels is that injecting a large number of arms into a particular region is destabilizing, and will contribute to violence and instability in the post-conflict future. I suspect there is some truth to this, but for the most part it seems to be a correlation without causation. In the aftermath of war, the population is predisposed to violence because they are inured to it. Indeed, all of the societal barriers to violence, killing and destruction have already been stripped away, and people will use any available weapons because that is what they have come to believe is necessary and proper. So the presence of weapons might well enable post-conflict violence, but it seems unlikely they are actually a primary driver of it. And the fact is we're faced with a slaughter TODAY, and the balance of power is fully in the favor of the regime.

The larger question is whether the rebels actually NEED arms. The number of actual rebel fighters isn't clear, and the core of the Free Syria Army seems to be military professionals who brought their weapons with them. What's needed militarily is a way to stop the armor and artillery, to bring a halt to the shelling of civilian neighborhoods and end the indiscriminate slaughter. And that's either tanks or air power, and there is no hope of either as things stand today.

Carve out a "Safe Zone"?
It would be nice if there was a place where Syrian refugees and those targeted by the regime could go to be safe and begin to form the basis for an opposition leadership. But I am skeptical about the chances for this for a couple reasons. First, whether done under the auspices of the Arab League or the UN, it would still constitute an invasion of Syria, probably from Turkey, and the international soldiers on the ground would not be peacekeepers, but would very quickly find themselves in heavy combat. Second, the Internally Displaced People that would be protected in this safe zone would have to find a way to get there, and the al-Assad loyalists would make that a very bloody, very dangerous trip. And third, remember Srebrenica. The UN promised the Bosnians they would be protected there, so they came, and when they did the Serbs murdered them by the thousands in the worst genocide in Europe since the Second World War. The UN troops? They stood by and did nothing, or they fled. You cannot promise a safe zone if you're not committed to doing whatever is necessary to protect those to whom you promised sanctuary.

I'm the first to admit I don't know what should be done. But civilized nations have GOT to be willing to spend some treasure and take some risks to stop this kind of horror. It is brutally dishonest to call it an "Internal Syrian Affair" and do nothing while thousands are killed, wounded and tortured. In a way, Bashar al-Assad may be making it somewhat easier by ratcheting up the violence, brutality and suffering to the point where even his most stout defenders may be forced to turn away, and that might open up some options for the West to intervene. The open question is how many have to die before that comes to pass?

Abortion, Planned Parenthood and a Big Bucket of Reality

2012-02-05T13:07:00.000-08:00

Every now and then some event happens that brings the Great American Abortion Argument to the forefront, forcing all manner of news and opinion outlets to spill billions of pixels and gallons of ink rehashing not just the event, but the argument itself. One side claims to be all about women's health, and their rights to privacy and choice. The other side claims the mantle of morality, closing their eyes to any other consideration and demanding that an abortion be treated no differently than an armed convenience store robbery that ends in bloodshed and tragedy. Despite the fact that the realities surrounding abortion are obvious, the elephant in the room that ensures that those opposed to legal abortion will never win the argument, we never actually see those realities discussed in the open.

Sure, women have a right to make their own decisions about their bodies and their health care. They have the right to make private decisions with their physician and have those medical treatments and procedures deemed proper and necessary by them, without the interference of a government agency or private organization. But these are all second-order arguments. They completely bypass, even ignore, the extant realities surrounding abortion in America. Similarly, those opposed to legal abortion couch their arguments in morality and legalese. But that's not what they mean - not by a long shot. These people who call themselves "Right to Life" are very often the same people out cheering in support of the Death Penalty - a distinction they can only meet with a child's hand-waving "it's not the same thing". The perfectly transparent truth, however, is that these are religious fundamentalists, what we used to call religious fanatics before we discovered that, suitably exercised, these extremists could suddenly take lives in industrial quantities. And like all religions fundamentalists, it is not enough for them to follow their ridiculous teachings, but they will always try to impose the same dogma on everyone, regardless of how inappropriate it might be.

So what are these 'Realities' I keep speaking of? Well, there are several of them. We know them all, just as we know who all the players in this endless contest really are, but we don't see them printed nor hear them spoken anywhere near as often as we should.

1. Abortion is legal
You might have heard about it. Roe v. Wade. It is legal for women to seek an abortion, and it is legal for doctors to perform the procedure. It is, in that sense, no different from plastic surgery or a hip replacement. If a woman, in consultation with her doctor, chooses to abort her pregnancy, it is the unequivocal law of the land that she may. So there is no reason why there should be any limitation on insurance coverage or clinical operations. We have done a dreadful job of separating the secular LAW from the religious doctrine - there should be no discussion in a nation of laws, not men. If they can pass laws to limit access to abortion that are constitutional, I won't like it, but I'll live with it. Because that's how our system works. This is the reason it is especially egregious when Democratic lawmakers and political leaders accept these entirely artificial limitations. They only need one argument - "I've sworn to uphold the law, and legal abortions are the law. Come back and see me when you change that". To do otherwise is putting politics before the law, and although we've come to see that happen regularly, it continues to be fundamentally wrong.

2. Abortion is good for society
This is the key point, and it's the one you simply NEVER hear. When a young woman is forced to carry her unwanted child to term, she to a large extent defines her life in terms of limits and constraints. She probably won't finish her education, she probably won't rise up the corporate ladder to a position of authority, she probably won't create or invent or lead. We as a society simply lose the benefits we might have otherwise accrued. Economists call this Opportunity Costs - the things you won't have because of a decision made to do something else. The Iraq war, above all else, represented an opportunity cost - a trillion dollars that could have done so much good here at home. Why are there so many educated, successful, powerful women in business, academia and government today? There are many reasons, but you can bet that a significant number of them are where they are because they had access to an abortion when they needed it.

3. Any alternative to legal abortion is barbaric.
And here, of course, is the pragmatic concern. You'll occasionally hear mention, usually in the context of sloganeering, of "Coat Hangers". But this is an area worth considering as part of the public debate. First, there can be no doubt that, given some amount of wealth, the law would never be an actual impediment to an abortion. So we're really only talking about women of more limited resources, who may not have access not only to safe abortion services, but good advice and healthy guidance. The net outcome is that there are still a very large number of abortions, but in a much larger number of cases the woman dies too. Explain this Right to Life to me again? I think I'm missing something.

But a conversation about alternatives has to go deeper than that. It has to speak to methodology. How is this ban on legal abortion enforced? Do we send doctors to prison? Or if we believe that might needlessly deplete our pool of physicians, do we send young women to prison? For how long? So now society pays to incarcerate a woman for making a decision about her own reproductive health? It's interesting that the "Small Government Conservatives" seem to be on board with this plan.

Once again, this is another deeply frustrating issue to me, because it masquerades as so many things it is not. All it is, simply and transparently, is yet another intrusion of "Big God" into our lives. Where the law should be secular, it is prevented from being so by the equivalent of a rabble of sixteenth century peasants, threatening our system of governance with torches and pitchforks. Just as the Marriage Equality argument should be entirely secular - it's only about marriage licenses issued by government and the laws governing the rights of married couples, and churches would not ever be required to participate if they chose not to - the abortion argument should be strictly limited to legal and economic rights and restrictions. And to the extent that we would be expected to follow a law banning abortion, so should the Christianists be expected to live under a legal construct where abortion is the law of the land...

Exuberance of the Truly Irrational Sort

2012-02-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

My goodness, but the valley is all aflutter over the Facebook IPO. And while the discussion has occasionally bumped up against asking the right questions, it seems to shy away at the last moment out of fear of allowing reality to intrude on our own little fantasy financial juggernaut.

Let's start with this - what makes Facebook special? Is it a truly innovative technology? Actually, the only thing Facebook has had to invent is a way to scale up to a system of this magnitude and keep it available to pretty much everyone. Otherwise, the tools, technologies and protocols they are using are solidly in the mainstream. For that matter, the things this system allows people to do - chat, email, share pictures, videos and web pages, publish information about themselves and find like-minded people - all that has been done before, in many cases in a better, more usable fashion. Again, just not at this scale. Is it revenues? Not even close. Facebook's revenues have mostly seemed like an afterthought, and any way you measure them - per user, a percentage of cost - they have been, and continue to be small beans. And that brings us to the more salient point.

Facebook is special not for what it does, but for what it has. It has been the first site without an underlying purpose (search, commerce, etc.) to develop such an enormous active user base. It will be the first site with a billion users. As a social media site, that's an incredible level of sustained success. But as one of the most valuable brands in America, if not the world, they have yet to succeed at all. In fact, you could say that on the basis of their costs and their revenues to date, they have been a massive failure, a giant hole into which investors have thrown millions of dollars. In order to justify such a ridiculous market capitalization, they will have to figure out how, not to just monetize that user base, but to scale that monetization to the level they scaled the site during its growth years.

How might they do that? Well, they can't do it directly. Remember when we said they didn't have any real new technology of their own? That means that those users can jump ship any time they see a better option. There is no technological impediment to building Facebook 2.0. Now, Google+ has struggled, it's true, but primarily because of the chicken-egg dilemma. People don't want to use a social media site unless all their friends, and all their potential friends, and enough other people to provide a content rich ecosystem are on there too. And they had no compelling reason to leave Facebook. If given one, there's not much real stickiness keeping them there, provided the people and the content move with them. And remember, the whole world is moving to the Web. Facebook might be the first site to a billion users - somebody had to be first - but it's simply apparent that they won't be the last.

I suppose I could be wrong, but I sure don't think advertising is the answer. There is just a radical difference between search advertising, where a significant portion of the users are actively looking for some product or service, and placing "targeted" ads where people hang out with their friends, in hopes that they not only notice them, but act on them. The returns would appear to be somewhat limited.

In short, Facebook's path to monetization would seem to be limited to advertising revenue and those profits to be gained by selling user information. The one seems grossly inadequate to support the entire edifice, and the other is fraught with danger. The users, in both their volume and their activity, provide all the value Facebook has. Anything that might cause the users to move in significant numbers to a different but equivalent (perhaps even superior) platform would be their death knell.

It's true that having access to a billion people, about whom a wide array of specific things are known, is an unprecedented opportunity. But when it comes to the valuation of the Facebook brand, and it's concomitant value to its shareholders, the key question is whether there is a way to convert that access into profits without destroying the brand in the process. My guess is that in five years we'll see a much smaller Facebook with a much smaller market capitalization, competing among a number of top level competitors for those users, still struggling for profitability.

The Ballad Of Joseph Ozment

2012-01-29T14:09:00.000-08:00

We Americans are a vengeful people. We like to see people punished for their wrongdoing, and we like that punishment to be excessive, completely out of proportion to the crime. So when the crime is heinous enough, we'd really prefer that punishment be biblical in proportion, and when we can't or won't just kill the offender, the preferred term of punishment is forever. Because we can't figure out how to do eternal, and we don't really trust God to stick to his guns on these matters - you know, every now and then he goes all squishy with the "love" and the "mercy" and those other distinctly non-christian ideals that sound so...well, Liberal.

Now there's some complexity to all this punishment stuff. We have tribal considerations, wherein if the American to be punished is part of the portion of America we identify as "us", then there might be some room for discussion. Bear in mind that we're holding a whole bunch of people in a prison outside of US borders indefinitely and without charge, in utter and blatant violation of much of our founding documents and core values, but this is nothing to worry about - they are, to a man, Muslims. So no harm, no foul. But we also have class considerations. At a certain level of wealth and influence, we prefer mild punishment, or even no punishment at all. From war crimes to massive economic fraud to profiteering and outright theft of Government cash and property, we clearly understand that prosecution would take the form of a partisan witch-hunt, which, it turns out, is un-American. Bet you didn't see that one coming.

So when you take a matter as fraught as punishment, and you try to balance it with the ultimate whuppin' stick of justice, the executive pardon, you end up with controversy. And perhaps that's a good thing - executive clemency is one of the few areas where we grant our political leadership the power of Kings. We give them full arbitrary, unfettered and unquestionable power to pardon convicted felons, to expunge their records, to set them free. It's hard to imagine a power more subject to abuse and corruption. But even before we are venal and greedy, we are Americans, and we have in our very hearts a deep skepticism about bringing an end to someone's punishment. Sure, we'll let them out of prison at the end of their term (forget about parole, though - that's a weak-kneed concept from a time when we were less "conservative" in ideology, a time when an American could feel free to act out of some other motivation than hate or greed), but still we clamor to deny them jobs, housing, education, even the vote. They can never be allowed to live a "normal life", the kind we live as our birthright, because if they were allowed for one second to forget that they are a criminal and not a real contributing citizen like we are then the whole edifice will certainly come crashing down around us.

All of which brings us to that great benevolent southern dictator ~~Boss Hogg~~ Haley Barbour, who, in typical southern Republican style did something good and important and even courageous and still managed to cover it in the stench of corrupt politics and class prerogative. Barbour granted over 200 pardons, and despite the fact that most had already served their sentences and were no longer incarcerated, it has become politically and ideologically difficult to issue clemency any longer, and by so doing we have the opportunity to once again have a real conversation about the use and value of clemency, and the corrosive nature of endless punishment. Of course, in many of these cases those receiving the pardons were white, from wealthy or politically connected families, and in a number of cases worked as "trustys" in the Governor's mansion and Barbour knew them quite well.

It is one of these trustys that we are focused on today. After Joseph Ozment received his pardon, he got in a car with his grandmother and left. And despite the fact that he is in every way, in the words of the Governor "a free man", with no official criminal history and no law enforcement wants or warrants, he is the subject of a large, multi-state manhunt. Why? A judge has ordered that Ozment appear before him in court, and he has chosen not to. An open question is whether a judge can order anyone arbitrarily to appear before him when there is not an associated case or prosecution.

Ozment killed a grocery store clerk in an armed robbery in 1994. Predictably, the victim's family is outraged at his pardon and release. This is every bit as predictable as it is problematic. When the American criminal justice system began letting the aggrieved and victimized be part of the process, the scales tilted a little bit more from the side of Justice to the side of Vengence. Of course the victims and their families harbor ill-will against the accused - but can justice truly be blind when she carries the scars of the crime and the resultant hatred for those accused, whether guilty or not?

So today Joseph Ozment - a man wanted for no crime, guilty of no crime and finally free to live his life thanks to an act of Government mercy - is on the run. Hunkered down, weighing his options, trying to decide whether it's better to surrender and become the football in a political and ideological game with its attendant racial, class and theological ramifications, or to cling to the knowledge that he's not doing anything wrong, he was granted his freedom and he will now live free until someone finds a way to stop him.

We need a lot of things in this country today, a lot of little decisions that might lead us back to something recognizable as America. Among all those things we need a lot less incarceration and lot more clemency. So however it came to pass, I celebrate Joseph Ozment's freedom today, and implore him: RUN, JOE, RUN!!

The Hokey Pokey

2011-10-15T15:40:00.000-07:00

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The US is going to deploy about 100 troops to Uganda to help in the pursuit of the Lords Resistance Army and it’s certifiably insane leader, Joseph Kony.

This is an unequivocal good thing. Kony is the worst kind of small bore war criminal, a local madman who kidnaps and indoctrinates children, using them to intimidate, murder, mutilate and rape the local rural populations throughout multiple Central African nations. Almost unbelievably brutal, his forces stay on the move, stealing what they need, committing horrific crimes in the process.

Sure, the US is an economic basket case, with flat GDP growth, near 20% real unemployment, increasing poverty and crumbling infrastructure, but we have a tremendous amount of military capability sitting idle, and this is one of those opportunities where the US can apply some of those military resources to try to solve a real-world humanitarian problem without causing additional unforeseen geopolitical problems.

A company of Rangers with some associated air and intelligence assets doesn’t even constitute a rounding error on the budget, and yet that tiny injection of twenty first century combat power changes the calculation for the entire region, and might offer the best chance for a blighted people to finally rid themselves of this madman.

Even in present circumstances, the US is the most economically and militarily powerful nation in the world. There is much good the US could do, from disease control to agriculture to education, but there is a tremendous lack of political will for projects like that, not only in the global south, but even here in America there are hard and fast limits to our willingness to direct public resources at these sorts of problems. Oddly, however, the US has always been willing to deploy military resources regardless of cost - as long as the solution required highly professional and technologically advanced killing, we were at the head of the line of volunteers. Many times, those projects benefited despots, or resulted in such an unimaginable slaughter as to render the accomplishment of the original goal Pyrrhic.

Within these odd and arbitrary constraints, perhaps humanitarian military intervention is the best we can do. If we helped with clean water and schools and roads and digital communications it would be a better thing, but with our dysfunctional political system controlled by authoritarians and racists, perhaps the best we can do is agree on who the bad guys are, and then kill them.

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Also today, there have been credible reports that the Obama administration has abandoned it’s bizarre attempts to keep an American military force in Iraq after the December 31st deadline specified in the SOFA. In spite of an endless stream of promises during and after the campaign to end the US involvement in Iraq, Obama has in the last year sought a deal to keep some number of troops, probably a Brigade Combat Team, renamed as a Training Unit, in country after the new year. The thing is, Prime Minister al-Maliki could agree to allow the troops to stay in spite of the SOFA (and as long as they actually then DID remain to protect him and his Cabinet from retaliation), but in order for them to continue to operate with complete immunity from the Iraqi criminal justice system as the US Command insists, there would have to be a vote in Parliament for which Maliki readily admits he does not have the votes.

So either the Obama administration is finally acknowledging reality, or they are trying a last-ditch hardball tactic to attempt to frighten the Iraqis into backing down and asking for a continued US presence. There are a lot of factions in postwar Iraq, and some of them depend quite heavily on the US military to enforce their positions and protect their lives. Many would like to see the US military continue to operate in Iraq, but it is politically unwise (except for the Kurds) to say so out loud.

The invasion of Iraq was a monumental blunder for the US, one we will be paying for in a variety of ways for many years to come. But it's important to remember that the Iraqis paid a much higher price for our blunder, and will be trying to recover from it for the better part of a century. There is nothing to be gained by staying, no fences will be mended and no interest served beyond the desperate grip on power that those who played along now find growing tenuous. It's well past time to cut the cord...
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Gee, Y'Think?

2011-10-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

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Right out there for the whole world to see. There was the Clinton Impeachment. Then there was Bush v. Gore. Then there were the battles over judicial nominees. Filibusters, Recess Appointments and Budget Reconciliation The ugly battles over Health Care Reform (remember the "Cornhusker Kickback"?). The year-end negotiations (that looked unpleasantly like extortion) to trade extensions to the Bush tax-cuts for the wealthy for a few months more Unemployment Insurance. Finally to non-stop talk of defunding and even shutting down government, leading to the debt ceiling debacle.

Anybody who has been able to find a basis for a belief in an effective, functioning American system of governance in the last decade has clearly not been paying attention. It was a system, designed before the invention of the telegraph to intentionally be ponderous and heavily biased against change. From the founding documents to the bicameral legislature to the three co-equal branches, the American political system of governance has always functioned only sporadically, and even then on the basis of a set of norms and gentleman's agreements that had no power behind them. Can you imagine a functioning parliamentary system that depends on Unanimous Consent for it's most basic operational functions?

And yet, we pretended. Our politicians pretended, our pundits pretended, our journalists and historians and political scientists and economists all pretended that everything was working just the way it was intended, and that while we were perhaps seeing a particularly virulent outbreak of partisanship, there was nothing inherently wrong with the system itself - when you talk about Washington DC, when you talk about Congress and the Senate and the President you were talking about America, a sacrosanct set of institutions that made this country the BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!!

Sure, there was a kerfuffle in 2005 over the Filibuster, then being wielded by a Democratic minority, with Bill Frist threatening to go Nuclear to put an end to those Democratic filibusters, and there have been a few half-hearted discussions around Congressional reform, but it's almost impossible to imagine anything coming of it - it's like asking third graders to police the playground. And I assure you, when the Republican Senators talk about how close they came to what would have amounted to unilateral disarmament in '05, they shudder and promise sheepishly NEVER AGAIN.

And yet, suddenly, today we find the Internet all abuzz over a speech given by former military/intelligence honcho Bob Gates two weeks ago in Philadelphia, where, in the finest tradition of young men in the presence of dishabille emperors, he called attention to the somewhat desultory functioning of America's governing institutions:

"I do believe that we are now in uncharted waters when it comes to the dysfunction in our political system--and it is no longer a joking matter...It appears that as a result of several long-building, polarizing trends in American politics and culture, we have lost the ability to execute even the basic functions of government much less solve the most difficult and divisive problems facing the country. Thus, I am more concerned than I have ever been about the state of American governance."

Now, Robert Gates is the consummate DC insider, an impeccably credentialed Republican who has served at the head of a number of gigantic American bureaucracies, so you have to realize just what a Cassandra-like cry of impending disaster this really is - and you can't be overly disappointed that he didn't come out and name names (and parties). The truth is there to be seen, between his carefully chosen lines, and even for those who reserve all blame for the Democratic party and the godless liberals and socialists they empower with their misguided policies, there is no longer room to pretend the system continues to function on any level.

It's not the tea party, or budget policy, or levels of taxation or government spending that is why we are doomed, any more than it is Medicare or Social Security or the Affordable Care Act. It is a system of governance designed for a different time, governing a smaller, more homogeneous nation in a time of horse and sail, one that is simply unable to meet the demands and challenges of the twenty first century, and one that continues to be exploited by small, venal, greedy men and women who stand to gain more wealth and power through a strategic failure of governance than they ever would have were they to act in the interests of their constituents.

This system that cannot govern, that cannot be repaired by those who busily exploit its every failing, that is readily co-opted but cannot be used to solve real problems, this is ultimately why we need Occupy Wall Street and similar movements. Their focus at this point is on the banks and financial "Masters of the Universe" who are using creative new methods to make certain that more and more of the available wealth in the world accrues to them, and them alone, but ultimately, when their message can no longer be ignored and, without legitimacy, their opponents have lost every fight, when their movement seeks to implement the justice they will have spilled blood to regain, they will discover that nothing can be implemented, that lone rump wholly-owned corrupt politicians can block them every step of the way, and they will discover at long last what this fight was really about.

So just as it is a straight line from Tahrir Square to the Wall Street protests, so is it then to Bob Gates. This coal mine has a canary, and while the message is subdued and somewhat cryptic, it is the very first crack in the wall that protects dysfunction in the name of democracy, and hides from change behind the bastions of the status quo. It's hard to predict what America will look like with a new system of government, but it increasingly looks as if we're going to have the opportunity to find out.
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The Message is the Message

2011-10-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

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This guy could kick your ass

So on one of the dozen or so interchangeable Sunday morning Republican TeeVee talkfests, one of the pundits got around to asking the ubiquitous John McCain (R-Dementia) about the debate audience lustily booing that gay soldier in Afghanistan. As a side note, I think it's worth mentioning that exactly none of them would have booed if that dude was actually in the building - he looked like he could kick the entire Republican Party's ass. But anyway, the exchange went like this:

SCHIEFFER: Do you think that the Republican candidates should have spoken up at that debate about [the booing]?
MCCAIN: Yeah, I do. But a lot of times when you’re in a debate you think about what you’re going to say, what the question is going to be. It’s hard to react sometimes. But I’m sure…I would bet that every Republican on that stage did not agree with that kind of behavior.

OK. But here's the thing. My first thought when I read that was "Horseshit. EVERY Republican on the stage agreed with that sentiment, whether or not they felt it was politically worthwhile to denounce it." Because a political movement has no choice but to own their key messaging. Sure, there can be ideological elements on which a given candidate can take a heterodox position, but a certain sort of tribal hatred has been such a core plank of the Republican platform, a key underpinning on which their entire worldview is constructed for so long that is has literally become part of the Party DNA. Whether it's hatred and intolerance for Gays, African-Americans, Women, Muslims or Hispanics, these kind of divisive tribal politics have exemplified the Republican message at least since Reagan.

So you wind up with a condition where a Huntsman or even a Romney can, with at least some credibility, accept the science on Global Warming or that an individual mandate exists to protect the interest of private insurers and is therefore part of a free-market belief system, but to allow a path to tolerance for Gay Americans, like a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens, is simply impossible. To question the tribal structure of the Republican constituency is to open the door just a crack to the possibility that their definition of "Real American" might be artificially narrow. And without a broad strategy of demonization, they would be left only with issues, which is distinctly unfavorable territory for them.

There's Crazy and then There's...

2011-09-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

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There are today three levels of crazy represented by the American Political Right and it’s mainstream political organization, the Republican Party. In order of increasing derangement, they can be summarized thussly:

1. Denial of scientific findings, norms of behavior, established facts and methodologies, false victimhood and perceived bias

2. Belief in outright impossibilities, a few examples being “Expansionary Austerity” or increasing government revenues by reducing taxation or thirty years of offering only tax cuts and reduced regulation as the preferred solution to every domestic political and economic problem faced by the US

3. Bitten-by-a-Bat, spittle - spewing paranoid schizophrenic sweating and trembling ought to be medicated mental illness.

We’ve been fortunate that the vast majority of the outbreak of insanity and delusion that has subsumed a significant portion of the American population in recent years has been mostly limited to the first two types. But political movements are a big tent, and there’s always a few who come by their crazy in the old fashioned way.

Yesterday we got two classic examples of that third level of crazed delusion. When these dark fantasies go this far over the edge of reason, it simply has to be assumed that they are not manipulative fear mongering, but an actual glimpse inside the mind of a madman (and, in this case, a madwoman too).

You’re probably familiar with Wayne LaPierre. He’s the obsessive extremist Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association. Under LaPierre, the NRA doesn’t merely support the 2nd Amendment right to firearms ownership, but espouses a particularly virulent kind of unrestricted right to own any weapon up to and including field artillery and tactical air power. But for people like Wayne LaPierre, and by that I mean people who probably should be institutionalized for their mental and emotional disorders, it’s not enough to affirmatively support those specific rights granted to Americans under the 2nd Amendment. Because he can see people all around, notably ‘liberals’, ‘leftists’ and ‘communists’, constantly plotting to abrogate those rights, confiscate the guns and put good American firearms owners and enthusiasts in concentration camps. Sometimes these plots are somewhat harder to see than others, but when that’s the case then Mr. LaPierre will help you see just exactly what you’re up against.

As you’ve probably noticed, even with a Democratic President, the gun lobby has been pretty much unchallenged, not just in the realm of effective, reasonable controls on the availability and accessibility of increasingly lethal firearms, even to the most vulnerable inner-city children, but in pushing the envelope of what might be deemed prudent handgun and concealed carry regulations to the point of absurdity. Do we really need to pass a law allowing handguns to be carried in BARS?

But where you and I see utter political capitulation, our steadfast Executive Vice President sees connivance afoot:

LAPIERRE: They’ll say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone…In public, the president will remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the old Clinton ban, that he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws…The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment. But it’s a big fat stinking lie!…It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment in our country…Before the president was even sworn into office, they met and they hatched a conspiracy of public deception to try to guarantee his re-election in 2012.

That’s right! By doing nothing other than mildly enabling the gun lobby, that socialist President has tipped his hand. His nefarious plan becomes clear, starkly defined in his apparent unwillingness to take even the minimal political risk of addressing the issue.

Besides the deeply paranoid quality of this kind of analysis, it can also be useful in virtually any other political argument. Because if the utter lack of political action on an issue is a sure sign of an extreme agenda, than there is virtually no limit to the things we can expect out of President Obama’s second term. We can certainly expect him to construct those concentration camps on the moon, because, as we have seen, he can go before the voters and say his administration has done nothing to advance the cause of further manned travel to the moon. QED.

Of course, there are also our regular standbys for blithering insanity, people we can count on to regularly spew something so bizarre and unexpected that we find ourselves transfixed in a kind of awe. Not just that there are some poor souls who have these kind of mental delusions, but at their ability to acquire an audience eager to accept their demented ramblings and, in most cases, tremble in fear at the risks contained in such hallucinatory threats.

And so, once again, I give you Congresswoman Michele Bachman (R-Some Other Planet), who apparently once read that there was another superpower that challenged the US for global hegemony. To the extent that she is aware that there is no more Soviet Union, she is certain that just about any other nation on earth could fill those godless shoes, and if you don’t have a sufficiently scary nation, there’s always small political parties halfway around the world.

BACHMANN: "There are reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you are 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don't want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah
could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. This would be foolish."

Well, in Congresswoman Bachmann’s defense, Hezbollah HAS been known to shoot missiles. Little bitty ones. From Lebanon. Where they are part of the coalition government. It always fascinates me when I see a lunatic construct like this and, inevitably, the issue of why Hezbollah would want to put missiles in Cuba is left unaddressed. Obviously, the underlying assumption is that they just hate us Americans so damn much they want to find a way to, you know, kill us. In this case, it requires the further logical leap that even now, in 2011, the Castro regime hates us Americans so much to allow a political party dedicated to armed resistance against Israel to threaten the US with missiles because, well, ok, it’s complicated.

If you wonder at the gross unfairness of it all, why they get the likes of Michele Bachmann and Wayne LaPierre and Ron Paul while the best we can do is Dennis Kucinich and the guy from New York now out of politics and spending quality time with his penis, I think it’s a very simple matter of looking at the question from the other side. In most cases, people like us, the well - known reality based community, would be deeply uncomfortable having an unhinged lunatic arguing for our political agenda on the basis of paranoid hallucinations. But across that aisle, there is that stubborn thirty-odd percent who actively seek out the mentally unstable and embrace them without hesitation.

Sure, under present circumstances it probably means an accelerated implosion for the grand American experiment, but at least we’re guaranteed a few laughs on our way down...

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Shooting Bears*

2011-09-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

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I don't come here today with the specific intention of transforming 'Consider the Source' into the default go-to Bear Blog, but this story appeals to me on a number of levels, from its "Rain on your Wedding Day" characteristics to its contribution to the whole "Hunting is TOO a sport" argument to the always piquant reminder that while there are those that say alcohol and firearms don't mix, the truly toxic combination is incompetence and firearms.

First of all, we can't help but notice that, as is so often the case, at the very root of the sequence of catastrophic events that followed was a simple case of target mis-identification. It's Black Bear season. Blacks are smaller than Grizzlies, and if you are hunting a specific species, one of the key skills one would expect you to have mastered before loading weapons and pulling on camos is the ability to identify that species in the wild. That just doesn't seem like raising the bar unreasonably. But even so, if you are on a Black Bear hunt and you DO shoot a Grizzly in error, there are a number of compelling reasons to do nothing but run away immediately - think of it as the Venn Diagram of bad outcomes. First, the only thing more dangerous in the American wilderness than a Grizzly Bear is a wounded Grizzly Bear. If you are going back-country in Montana, this is one of the primary things you should be aware of, along with the terrain and the weather. But if that's not enough, Grizzly Bears are endangered. It is illegal to shoot them. Now, sure, anything can happen, but let's recognize the demands of pragmatism here, and agree that if you DO shoot a Grizz in error the thing to NOT do is allow yourself to be associated with that shooting by the nice men at Fish and Game.

But OK, let's all assume that even after the shot went downrange there is complete consensus that it's a wounded Black Bear that we're tracking. A wounded Black Bear is not a Care Bear, or even that obnoxious little Charmin Bear that lacks the skills to wipe himself after he, trite though it may be, shits in the woods. If you are going to approach a wounded bear, even if you think it's dead, you do so with extreme caution, with a clear view from a significant distance. If you go into dense cover after a wounded bear, it will very likely kill you. The right answer in this case would have been to go back to camp and track the bear tomorrow, after it has bled out.

Finally, if a bear is chewing on your friend and you are going to attempt to discourage it from further dining adventures with a firearm, take a moment to consider your tactical approach. On the range a very common exercise involves shooting a target in close spatial or temporal proximity to a "no-shoot", that is, a target that represents a friendly or innocent bystander. Essentially, what you're working with is seventh grade geometry, or, for those of us who mis-spent our youth, shooting pool. Angles and vectors. You set up your shot in such a manner that a large portion of the target is exposed as opposed to a small portion of your friend. Your goal is not so much to immediately kill the bear as it is to encourage him to have something else for lunch. You err on the side of a clean miss rather than a dirty one, and you shoot chunks off the bear rather than looking for a heart/lung/liver shot.

Hey, I'm all about your right to arm bears, but sometimes that very common insouciant American arrogance just strikes me as a cautionary tale. One of those 'teachable moments', like when you have ten thousand spoons, and all you need is a .300 Win Mag.

* This amuses me because this was my mom's euphemism for farting. I never heard another human being on the planet use it in that fashion, and to this day it cracks me up with it's eloquent non sequitur...

Update: Oooopppppsss. Just discovered that the incomperable Bouffant has already covered the nuts and the bolts. Think of this as Op Ed.
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Apropos of Nothing

2011-09-23T17:04:00.000-07:00

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In recognition of the coming of Autumn, I give you...

Bears With Pumpkins!

Fleeting Moments

2011-09-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

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I had a roommate and friend back in 1980. He sold cocaine to enhance his income. Geoff didn’t particularly like cocaine, which made him unusually well suited to sell it, as he absorbed very little if any of his profits. We worked at a lumber yard, toiling for hourly income, a paycheck on Friday. Geoff was fearless, he spent big, dressed well and never thought about tomorrow. I was more cautious - I knew there was that particular week when rent came due. One of those early lessons in resource management. While I spent my paycheck carefully, Geoff invested his.

Geoff’s dealer lived in the hills above Mill Valley. It was a small collection of people, family, friends, hangers on, I never got the chance to grasp who was part of the house and who was part of the marketplace. But I can tell you this. To this day, I have never known a place so filled with peace. We’d go up there on Fridays after work. It was a dirt road off a rutted asphalt track, the kind you know if you know Mill Valley, but this one was even deeper in the tall trees on Tamalpais' flank. The house was always, in my experience, under construction. There was the smell of framing lumber and drywall compound, doors framed without their constituent parts, or with prehung doors leaning next to their designated opening. Geoff and his dealer would disappear to the back of the house to do their business, but everyone treated me with kindness and dignity. They all had tasks (I always wondered who designated and delegated the work, but it never seemed to matter that much), and I always tried to get them to let me help out. Paper cups of rich Napa Valley red wine and 2x4 Douglas Fir.

Later, Geoff and his dealer would reappear, and his dealer, the predictably big, bearded blond with long hair and a denim shirt, would take a moment to offer me a hit of the purest China white heroin, the kind of thousand dollar per gram indulgence he and I both knew was eternally out of reach to me. And then I’d walk out on the half-finished redwood deck, with the evening fog already dripping off the overhanging trees, the sweet smell of the framing lumber twisting together with the crackle of the woodstoves smoke.

It was a moment, a mere tick of the clock, but I remember it to this day. I often wonder what ever happened to those people. I hope it all worked out, but of course I fear for them. The chances are they’re dead or in prison, that house either torn down and rebuilt or finished and occupied by the kind of clean fingernails financial professional who will never understand what it felt like when it was full of love and promise.

Life is a slog, a slow trudge into an increasingly drab and uninteresting future. But there are moments, brief moments that often mean nothing, yet nonetheless capture everything we ever hoped to be in one fleeting moment that cannot be forgotten. Just a few magic, timeless interludes when we understood what we wanted, even as we understood how unlikely it was we’d ever actually have a chance to find it. We live nigh a hundred years, and if we’re lucky, we’ll know an hour or two of true happiness, of peace, of belonging. Looking back, I feel like the world was trying to teach me something there in that house, to guide me in a particular direction, to make me understand that there were things worth taking a risk to persue. And typically, I stood back and observed, I cataloged the moment and went looking for another sensation.
...

Fourteen Months

2011-09-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

...

The President has announced his 'Jobs Plan'. It's essentially a half a trillion dollars in fiscal stimulus, divided about evenly between government spending and tax cuts. On the spending side, the plan is well targeted, providing infrastructure spending along with aid to state and local governments and an extension of the federal unemployment benefits that will expire in December. That's all good, although the amount of spending is quite meager in comparison with the output gap it is intended to (at least partially) fill. As to the tax cuts, out here where real people live, the only tax cuts that have ANY value are those, like payroll tax cuts, that result in larger paychecks. Everything else simply disappears into the background noise of bills, debts and living expenses.

So, in general, good policy, delivered in deeply insufficient volume. But there is policy, and there is politics, and it's the politics here where it all goes pear shaped. In the current composition of the American Congress, with all its veto points, delays and friction, this bill would require a non-trivial amount of Republican support to pass. And the Republicans are very good at keeping their voting bloc together. There is some minimal possibility that Obama's plan would pass the Senate, although even that is unlikely, and there is simply no hope whatsoever that it will pass the House. It's true that Obama, and for that matter the Democratic party, will have the opportunity to exploit the political fallout from the Republican party's ideological intransigence, but that merely serves to point out the sickening reality.

It's not a policy argument. It's purely a political argument, with every player doing nothing more than positioning for November, 2012. That's fourteen months from now. With 26 million people unable to find full time work. With the economy in recession again, whether or not the economists of record are willing to assign it that official designation. And it's worse than that. Because even if you assume the best possible electoral outcome in the upcoming General Election (whatever that best case scenario might look like to you), it will still be another 90 days at least before the new office - holders are sworn in, the new bills are written and passed, and then more time before implementation. So the BEST we can hope for is something close to TWO YEARS of this - the toxic status quo, helpless in the face of any crisis, unable and even worse, unwilling to even begin to seriously address the overwhelming systemic problems facing the United States.

This is plainly outrageous, and ought to be utterly unacceptable to the American people, no matter what their ideological stripe. Our highest elected officials are essentially going to take a couple years off from governance, the job we hired them to do, to run a campaign. We're going to sit here, mired in an economic recession, teetering on the brink of a depression, and watch them do nothing but strut and preen, trying to gain some minimal political advantage in an election well over a year away. Certainly, there has always been a fairly strong bias to the status quo in American governance - the system was built from the ground up to be resistant to change - but here we're acknowledging a very serious set of problems and agreeing that we'll do absolutely nothing about them for a couple more years. At least.

Because there's the rest of this problem. The jockeying is for the only political advantage that can matter in a system so thoroughly broken as ours. The way our system has been co-opted by the wealthy and powerful, the only way to assure accomplishing your ideological objectives is to occupy the executive while simultaneously holding a veto-proof majority in both houses. In a very real sense, we have learned over the last few years that it really doesn't matter who wins the Presidency - without a large enough majority in Congress, the President's governing agenda is stillborn. If, at the end of this long, corrupt campaign cycle we end up with another divided government, toxically focused only on derailing the other party's agenda and concentrated wholly on the next election, it's hard to imagine how this nation as currently conceived can survive...
...

Small (Air)Craft Advisories

2011-09-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

…

The frighteningly totalitarian sounding Homeland Security Department has issued a nationwide warning that al Quaeda terrorists might be plotting to use small airplanes to...do something bad to us. Or something. Now, they readily admit they have no “specific or actionable intelligence” that these plots are taking place, but they couldn't see any reason why that should prevent them from demanding that all Americans across the country, all 300 million of us, cower in terror before another nonexistent small-bore plot to harm a few people.

How many Americans will die at the hands of drunk drivers this long holiday weekend? Why should we not fear that, as those horrific deaths and maimings will actually happen? Instead, we are breathlessly warned about a bizarre itty-bitty version of the 9/11 attacks, starring a small single engine airplane and a couple hundred pounds of fertilizer. Frankly, if any American has both the imagination and the mental and emotional bandwidth to actually find it within their capacity to work up any real concern over a plot like that, they probably should find something to do. Like watch TeeVee. Or take a nap.

Think about this. They’re hyping a threat they have no reason to believe is taking place, and that threatens approximately the same number of American lives as a particularly bad house fire. Who actually believes this serves the public good in some way? If it was a serious threat, it would be pointless, because there’s nothing an individual can do to mitigate his or her risk. Stay out of buildings that small planes fly over? Sorry, I don’t have access to Dick Cheney’s bunker. It’s the kind of mindless cowering in fear of big, bad al Quaeda that the American government has been doing since before the first tower fell ten years ago, and it benefits no one as much as it does al Quaeda themselves.

Of course, we know why they make these ridiculous announcements. Fear of the political exposure if something bad happens over the Labor Day or 9/11 weekends - this way they could say they were on top of the threats. Sadly, it continues to be the political calculation that they take less political fallout for stupid, pointless fear-mongering like this than they would if they had been silent before an attack. It’s simple, and stupid, and endless.

Imagine how much healthier our society would be if the amount of day-to-day thought we American citizens put into international terrorism was proportional to the amount we actually suffer from it. If our national law enforcement organizations worked quietly with international counter-terror community to disrupt plots and prevent violence, without undue fanfare or visibility. If the face we presented to the world was one of fearless confidence, going about our business undeterred by the feverish machinations of extremists and madmen.

That would be what a victory in the “War on Terror” might begin to look like.
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Count me Out

2011-08-31T11:33:00.000-07:00

...

Two Sundays hence, in a frantic paroxysm of that particularly garish nationalism we Americans like to identify as "Patriotism", coupled with our endless capacity for angry victimhood, the entire country will come together in an outpouring of overwrought emotion, jingoistic bigotry and tribal hatred to once again revel in our one and only homeland experience of the horror and brutality of warfare.

For a few hours that bright summer morning ten years ago, we endured a bloody attack by a foreign enemy, not in any meaningful way dissimilar to the kinds of raids, invasions, incursions and "security operations" regularly experienced by the largest percentage of the human population, endlessly and repeatedly, for thousands of years. For us, it happened once in 200 years. We lost some buildings, something just over three thousand lives, and our collective minds that morning. In many other places in the world, they call that a pretty good month.

It’s hard to even begin to grasp the worst outcome of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but there is little doubt now, with the perspective of a decade lived in their shadow, that the least of them is the death and destruction suffered at the hands of Mohammed Atta and his gang of murderers. But I think we can make a fairly clear judgement now that, of all the misguided reactions, widespread destruction and abject cowardice Americans have demonstrated in the face of what, to much of the world’s population, was nothing more than just another violent convulsion of a world ruled by madmen with powerful weapons, our utter capitulation in the face of a single al Quaeda provocation is by far the worst.

In spite of the horrors and loss of that day, all the very worst damage to America and everything it means to be an American has been entirely self-inflicted. Indeed, the outcome could not have been worse if it were none other than Osama bin Laden himself directing the American response. The pointless destruction and bloodletting of a virtually random military response. An opportunistic and manipulative political response that played on its own citizens' fear and anger. A collective willingness to run away from all the best American values in a pathetic cowardly demand that our government KEEP US SAFE! A government, for that matter, that seemed only too eager to embrace the worst instincts of police states since Torquemada. None of this even to mention the trillions of dollars wasted destroying Iraq, propping up dictators, creating the appallingly named Homeland Security infrastructure - the loss of those funds now especially scandalous in our current dismal economic straights. Virtually every step of the way we had a chance to act thoughtfully and effectively, and every time we quickly and with minimal deliberation decided to follow bin Laden’s playbook. That is the original sin, the root cause underlying our shame.

Was 9/11 a tragedy of the first order? Certainly, to the extent that thousands of innocent lives taken in a tantrum of hubris and hate are all tragic. But every response, any act of commemoration at this point seems simultaneously petty and excessive. With trillions of dollars wasted, more than a hundred thousand humans dead, millions more lives ruined and entire cities destroyed with no ‘victory’ to show for any of it, it’s very hard to understand what it is we’re marking. We showed the world our fear and tribal bigotry, we unleashed a massive war machine on many more innocent civilians than were in New York and Washington that day, we ran away from our unique American values in sobbing terror - our response to that tragedy was to kill, to torture, to imprison, to destroy, and most of all, to cower is mindless fear. And for all that, the overarching message you’ll see repeated not just Sunday but over and over through the week? Pride.

We’ll stand up and say how proud we are to be Americans, and how special a people we must be to have survived this dreadful attack. At no time will we notice that a woman in Darfur, or a child in Kandahar, or an old man in the Congo, along with millions of others, has stoically and courageously withstood orders of magnitude more. We’ll beat our chests and tell each other how we beat back the existential threat of Islamic terrorism, for you see, as Americans we are bred to believe that violence is a perfectly reasonable and effective way to solve disagreements. We’ll exchange breathless “where were you that day?” stories and never notice that for almost ALL of us, not only were we nowhere near the attacks, but we have suffered not the slightest from them.

Well, not me. I’d like to mourn the dead, I suppose, but their loss seems somehow distant and even trivial at this point. And today, every thought of that September morning a decade ago merely evokes disgust and loathing. For the perpetrators, certainly, but also for the ugly, venal, manipulative, stupid and misguided who found a way to turn a spasm of tribal hatred and political violence into an unspeakable, global human tragedy unmatched in recent history. There’s nothing to mark, nothing to ‘honor’, nothing to commemorate, just a dark decade wherein we came to see the outline of our own decline and fall. There is much to mourn, for much has been lost. But as for 9/11? You can count me out...
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The Internet is Annoying Me

2011-08-28T10:38:00.000-07:00

...

You would think that the Internet would, at this point, merely be a digital representation of society at large. It is, after all, comprised of the same people you interact with at work, at the grocery store, at Home Depot and the local Thai eatery. And yet the Internet is filled to overflowing with ignorance, mindless idiocy, conspiracy theories, thoughtless tribal partisanship, magical thinking, easily debunked beliefs and assumptions and Cubs fans. It is deeply ironic that the very medium that provides access to the collected knowledge and wisdom of mankind should also be populated by so many whose lack of knowledge, illogic and utter inability to think critically makes one despair for the public schools system.

You see this in any discussion on any topic on the Web - there are always people who simultaneously hold strong opinions and minimal expertise. There are others who are deeply invested in a single topic, point or position, and refuse to allow any discussion to drift away from their well cared for pet peeve. I have no doubt that you will find the same kind of belligerent idiocy on knitting and furniture making forums that you find in science, firearms or literature threads, but there is one area that stands above all others for the mindless anger and tribal partisanship of it's denizens - politics. Public policy, economics, international affairs - here it seems that for every couple of thoughtful, well-meaning people who have put in the time and effort to educate themselves and understand both the primary issues and the second - order questions that arise, from unintended consequences to ethical considerations, there is a snarling hater, a bloviating oaf or a Rah Rah cheerleader to whom "our" side represents goodness and light and can do no wrong and "their" side, an abyss of evil and foul intentions that must never be given a drop of credit. And despite their willful, even joyful parade of ignorance and blinkered vision, there is no point, absolutely zero, in confronting them. With the inexplicable exception of Bruce Bartlett, nobody on the Internet ever changed their mind about anything.

These tireless characters can take many forms, and even shift between them at will. But there are a few that I find particularly trying:

1. Conspiracy Theorists
I've always been fascinated by people, and man, there are a LOT of them, who will tell you of dark plots and deeply - held secrets, so foul and dangerous that people have disappeared just for discussing them. But they never seem to notice the odd contradiction that THEY know all about these world-changing secrets and, in fact, anyone who doesn't is a "sheep", falling for 'their' patently ridiculous cover stories. If you ask them how they know these things that are supposed to be the well-kept secrets of governments, they will, at best, refer you to a website, often one that lists links to other websites - none of the operators of which, sadly, have yet disappeared.

2. Motivation Matters
When someone tells me that Barack Obama is helping the terrorists, or that the Department of the Interior is in league with the Muslim Brotherhood to implement Shari'a law in the US, or that various political, judicial, government and military leaders are working with our enemies to bring down the United States, or that lifelong Climate scientists are actively involved in a far-reaching hoax, I tend to ask them "why". What is their motivation? Why would someone who has risen to a leadership position in America be working to destroy it all? Why is a Cabinet secretary from the Midwest so invested in Islamic law? Why would ANYONE assist terrorists? Why would someone put their career, their family, their community, their reputation and their nation at risk? Now there might actually BE reasons, from money to blackmail, but if you can't provide a plausible explanation for this kind of massive betrayal you're just a crank.

3. Repeaters
These are truly a blight on my bandwidth. People who are too lazy and/or stupid to form their own arguments, they arrive at nebulous, ill formed and often incoherent conclusions and merely repeat other people's arguments to support them. Talking points, quotes, historical anecdotes, they typically are not familiar with their own arguments, and often do not even understand them. They are usually seen falling victim to some kind of correlation/causality fallacy, which, when it's pointed out to them, only confuses them more, or they are caught depending upon a historical event that never happened, or using a famous individual's words stripped of context so they appear to be saying precisely the opposite of what was originally intended.

4. Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
You know the ones. They haven't learned a single new thing since high school. They don't read, and critical thinking skills have never been part of their repertoire. They know only one thing: Which "side" they're on. That leads them to a simple, black and white conclusion in every event. You can usually identify them on the Internet for their use of less-than-clever slurs, such as Demoncraps or Rethuglicans. To them it's no different than Cardinals/Phillies or Patriots/Colts. There is nothing "our" team can do wrong except lose, and there is no possibility that "their" team can mean well, or do good. And if one of 'our' guys does something that DOES disappoint them, well, that's easily explained - deep down, he was one of 'their' guys all along. It is the simplistic case of our tribe good/their tribe bad, and while this is often a wingnut position I am often disappointed by how many self-identified "liberals" do precisely the same thing.

Seriously. If you want to have an intelligent and productive discussion about anything, at least take the time and put in the effort to understand it at some reasonable level. At the very least read through the
Wikipedia treatment on a given topic or event before invoking it as some kind of persuasive touchstone, OK?

Thanks
...

Alas, the World Just Isn't That Interesting a Place

2011-08-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

...

Just stop it. No. There are no "aliens" here. They aren't visiting us in their cool little spaceships, they aren't abducting hillbillies and subjecting them to all sorts of proctological research, and most importantly, they haven't come here for our resources, our planet, or lunch. They are not here.

How can I be so sure?

Look. We've been suspending our disbelief for so long now, from the guys who went to the moon with a cannon to Flash Gordon to Captain Kirk to Battle:Los Angeles that we've forgotten the salient point in all this. That is, if in between unlearning evolution and basic climate modeling, we ever actually understood it at all. But it's simply this. The Galaxy is a VERY big place, the stars are VERY far apart, and it would take decades or even centuries to go from one to another. It would require a HUGE craft that could support a giant crew for generations, growing food and synthesizing an atmosphere and water and all the things a good sized city needs throughout it's entire life.

If you assume a civilization built this craft, powered it with massively redundant nuclear ion propulsion and plenty of fuel, along with all the systems it would need to support and maintain itself and it's crew, and assume that it was advanced enough to achieve a cruising speed of 0.5C (one half the speed of light) then to reach a star only 100 Light Years away would take well in excess of 200 years. What would be the point? It wouldn't be to increase their knowledge - half a millennium at least just to return the knowledge gained from the first mission to the home world? I suspect that civilization would find better, more immediate uses for those resources.

As much as we love the ideas of interstellar travel and meeting new species, we have allowed our imaginings to blind us to the indisputable fact that FTL travel is impossible. You might not want that to be true, but just as learning that Santa Claus is your mom and dad, Jesus didn't have blue eyes and Glocks are much cooler to look at than they are to shoot, there is no getting around it. Here's a little math problem for you: At the speed of light, mass becomes infinite. Try to work out how much energy it would take to move an infinite mass. Extra credit if you don't use crayons.

An interesting special case might be in star clusters. Probably not in Globulars, which tend to be old, metal-poor stars that wouldn't likely give rise to intelligent life, even without considering the UV, gamma rays and radiation resulting from having so many stars in such close proximity. But in a galactic cluster, a few hundred stars all the same approximate age within a few light years of each other might give rise to at least one spacefaring civilization, perhaps more, and might develop quite a robust multi-stellar community, replete with trade, wars and shifting alliances. One can at least hope.

While I don't expect an abrupt end to the "Star Wars" kind of fantasy we have all come to love, I'd like to see these realities come into the discussion whenever people see bright lights in the sky, and from the standpoint of science fiction, it might be interesting if someone actually approached the genre within the constraints of the actual physical laws of the universe. I'd read that book.

Oh. While we're on the subject. In a vacuum, outside the gravity well, changes in velocity are linear. That is, spacecraft can't turn the way aerodynamic vehicles can within the atmosphere. They can accelerate, and they can change their attitude and accelerate again. That is, they would have to rotate 180° and fire their engines again to decelerate. So in a space opera, when you see the spaceships in "dogfights", let's be clear - that's utterly impossible. Rather, an engagement between two spacecraft in deep space would very likely be a single pass, with a very high closing speed and one shot, likely with a vectored thrust missile as directed energy weapons require larger power generation capacity than these smaller spacecraft would have. Interestingly, this was the same air combat tactics adopted by the American airmen in the Pacific early in WWII. The Wildcat and Lightning pilots couldn't turn with the Zeroes, so they tried to get above them and dive through the formations at maximum speed, inflicting what damage they could, then continued their max-speed dive down to the deck. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I hope I haven't ruined your enjoyment of the next Aliens vs. Humans movie that comes along - that certainly wasn't my intention. I guess I just don't have enough to think about these days, and I wanted to talk about something other than Barack, Rick and Irene.

Carry on...
...

I Has An Orb Weaver

2011-08-26T11:21:00.000-07:00

...

Though the dawn may be coming soon
There still may be some time...
Fly me away - to the bright side of the moon
And leave tomorrow behind
Ooohh Orb Weaver...

I hate spiders. In fact, it's safe to conclude that anything that wants to bite, poison or beat me up is going to be something I emphatically dislike. So when this guy showed up outside my dining room window a few weeks ago, I made a brief, attention-span limited and somewhat desultory attempt to kill him (her?). But there was no good way to get there without taking off the window screen, and I find that half the time, when you do that, you end up with a damaged or ill-fitting window screen. And since the toxic creepy-crawly was actually outside, it seemed the rules or at least the guidelines of human-arachnid warfare mitigated against the use chemical weapons. So I stepped back, flummoxed.

Alright, I decided, as long as you stay out there, we'll see if we can coexist in peace. As the days passed, I began to notice his routine, and his behaviors. I noticed that if I tapped on the window, he'd start frantically jiggling the various structural components of the web, I suppose in some spider-based attempt to locate the presumptive insectoid snackage. I watched him with some regularity (I do not have a job, and money is quite tight, so it's not like I was sacrificing a tremendous amount of productive activity in order to monitor the life and times of my fast-growing araneidae friend), but I never got to see him (I'm presuming the male because he looks tough - I don't know if there's a way to actually determine his gender, and besides, c'mon, who freaking CARES?) actually bite anything. Mores the pity, that would have been cool. Unless it was me.

Objects in Window May be Creepier than they Appear

So the other day, inspired by the cool butterfly, bee and bird pictures along with the charming commentary at Thunder's place, I decided to provide my newfound spider buddy a bit of immortality of his own. First things first. I needed to know what he was, in somewhat more exacting detail than "scary looking". But then, that's what the Internet's for, right? So I found this page. It seemed to describe him physically and got his behaviors down precisely, including his bizarre propensity to hang upside down in the center of his web. What the hell, is he some kind of Kiwi or something?

Next, for some photographs. On the upside, he lives on a glass sheet, so getting good pics is fairly simple. On the downside, I only get pictures of his nether regions, as, due to the effectively 2-dimensional arrangement of his domicile, I've never actually even seen the top of him. For all I know, he could be paisley and psychedelic. But the Orb Weaver web page probably would have mentioned that, so I won't dwell on it. Much. Anyway, I got a few pretty good shots of his striped spindly legs and creepy mouthparts, which I am delighted share with you.

Enjoy!

Update: In the couple days since I took the pictures and got around to posting them, he has left. I can only assume that he's had significant trouble with paparazzi before, and when I broke out the camera he knew it was time to mosey along. Can you mosey in base eight? Kind of a pity, I was getting used to him, and when you've lived alone as long as I have, you don't find it at all bizarre to spend an hour or so talking to a spider. They're good listeners! Vaya con dios, mi amigo...
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Steve Jobs and the Future of Consumer Technology

2011-08-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

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Steve Jobs resigned. At least he turned over his CEO duties to Tim Cook. He's still there, still in charge. And people everywhere are buzzing with two questions. First, why now. I think that's an easy one, and everybody knows it. They just are loathe to say it. I'm not - I'm nobody, so it's easy for me. He has an expiration date. His docs have told him the clock is running, and even given him a number of options for how long it has to run. So he pulls the trigger on the transition strategy, occupies the Chairman position to cement the business strategy and moves up the publication of his biography to make sure he has control of his legacy. For a Cancer and transplant survivor beginning to show his age, this doesn't seem to be a great leap.

The second question concerns the future of Apple in a post-Jobs world. But when people ask this question, they're not asking about Apple, not really. For Apple defines the arc and trajectory of consumer technology, and consumer technology defines this century, from culture to lifestyle, from creation to consumption, from books and music to movies and teevee, how we gather information, entertain ourselves, work, date and learn What Apple does, and what Apple doesn't do, will be seen as describing and defining the way digital content is created, distributed and consumed in the twenty first century. Apple's plans are usually regarded as a great mystery, an untold future as well analyzed by prophesy as by analysis, a fuzzy portal to a black box behind the legendary Jobs Distortion Field. But is this really the case?

MP3 players, SmartPhones and Tablets were well known long before Apple defined their final form. We were not shocked by the capabilities of the iPod, just it's size and the way it worked. We had digital music, Jobs just gave us the right way to consume it. Likewise iTunes. We'd known for years we would eventually be buying our music this way. Jobs was the one with the power, wealth and vision to create it. The iPhone didn't signify any great technological breakthrough - it was really nothing more that what RIM SHOULD have done with the BlackBerry, the handheld digital communications device updated with readily available technologies. But Jobs did it better than they might have, with bulletproof software and a genuinely usable interface. And Tablets? Tablets have been around in various forms for literally decades. What Apple did was wait until all the pieces of technology were ready for prime time, from displays to processors to batteries and all the little bits that make them so broadly useful, like GPS and accelerometers. Then, when they knew they could produce something people would want to buy, they took the iPad to market. Again, no real breakthrough, just good design and a finely honed sense of market demand.

In that light, we shouldn't have trouble discerning what the future of digital consumer technology might look like. It is increasingly evolving to an "always connected" model with minimal demands for local storage. That leads to a complete transition to the "streaming" consumption model, where we have access, either paid or free, to books, music, movies and teevee shows. We have a pretty good idea of what the devices we consume this media will look like - HDTV, Notebook computers, tablet computers and SmartPhones - So the battle comes down to efficiently and effectively delivering that content, and delivering the broadest variety. That essentially leaves the market to a few Datacenter powerhouses with the resources to fight that battle: Apple, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Comcast, those sorts of players.

There's really nothing new to deliver, and no new way to consume it, so the breakthroughs will have to come from the other end of the wire - mostly invisible, except that they'll be easier, faster and, perhaps, cheaper. The extent to which these content delivery services are actually cheaper will be entirely dependent upon the existence of real competition - and the barriers to entry are gigantic.

One area where there IS substantial space for innovation and development is in content development. As we naively complained decades ago, there were "a thousand channels and nothing on". Now there are infinite channels - and millions of consumers beginning to see the value in paying for content. Sometimes. Under some circumstances. There might be a number of new form factors that people will want. Short non-fiction e-books, 10-20,000 words. Episodic series in the 10 to 15 minute-per-episode range, whether animated, CGI or real actors. Participatory entertainment, with HD Webcams and real-time networks. The system supports a myriad different ways to inform and entertain, and people will find new ones they like. Whether they represent a viable market remains to be seen.

What we can recognize at this point was the perfect timing of Steve Jobs. Just as the technologies became available, he oversaw the infrastructure buildout, from the consumer consumption devices to the global marketplace to the delivery mechanisms. Apple may continue to dominate this market, but there are challenges ahead for Cook and the people at post-Jobs Apple. The consumer hardware is in a purely evolutionary mode, with the rest of the industry starting to catch up with Apple in both hardware and software. And we learned something critical over the weekend, when people rushed out to buy a Tablet they had already rejected merely because it reached a critical price point - the storied $99. Apple has to know that they cannot maintain market dominance if they are confronted with a significant price disadvantage - and you can bet that this phenomena did not go un-noticed by some of the larger global manufacturers of consumer electronics. Also, the next big steps in the evolution of these technologies will not be at the consumer end, but will be in the datacenter, and with the telcos and ISP that provide the access. And these backend technologies have not traditionally been Apple's strength, although the Cupertino braintrust has not shirked their recognition of this reality, building one of the largest state-of-the-art datacenters in the world in North Carolina.

My guess is Apple will do just fine in the Post Jobs environment. They are a mature company, steeped in the Jobs ethos of building excellent products and controlling every bit of the user experience. They have a passionate base of consumers who are the opposite of price sensitive, and they still enjoy a one to two year hardware development advantage over the competition, even as the software gap (between iOS and Android) closes rapidly. For everything I've always found annoying about Jobs and Apple, we as consumers are better off for what they built, even if we don't own a single Apple product. And that should be enough legacy for anyone...
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God - Bad Designer, Poor Manager, Pathetic Motivator

2011-08-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

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I suppose it was predictable, just as the sun follows the rain, as diarrhea follows Mi Puebla's deep fried goat burrito, today we have the professionally stupid invoking God's punishment to explain the Washington earthquake. This time it's Worldnet Daily's Joseph Farrah, also known as the Man With MY Mustache, saying “Occasionally God really does shake things up as a sign to us of the consequences of disobedience and indifference to our Creator...”

Let's just quietly sneak past Farrah's unabashed belief that he understands the actions and motivations of the creator of the universe. Let's even duck behind the hedge in order to avoid his hubristic expectation that the people will unquestioningly accept him as God's interlocutor. OK, now let's just sit down on the curb here with a lemonade and think this through.

God's, like, omnipotent, right? I mean, he can make anything happen. Hell, he made the whole universe 'happen', right? So if he wants humans to act a certain way, why doesn't he just MAKE them? Just control their behavior so that they do things exactly the way HE wants them to. Mission accomplished n shit, right? Now I don't pretend to understand the motivations of the people who collectively pretend to understand God's motivations (go back and read that again, I dareya), but I suspect their answer to the "God's just a big bully" hypothesis would go something like "Something something Free Will Yadda yadda". I dunno, I think it's kind of quaint that he sets up these rules restricting his own superpowers, probably to make the game more interesting because he's been around forever and most of that time he didn't even have a universe, let alone a Teddy Bear, and he's BORED! So I guess the rules say he can coerce people with death and destruction, but he can't actually get in their heads and drive. OK. I'm not sure where it says that in the New Testament, but what the hell - I'm in.

But because we've all grown up steeped in the tradition of a vengeful old-testament Yahweh, we let a lot of this rubbish go by without considering how deeply weird and twisted these loonies believe their master of the universe to be. I mean, think about it. He makes the universe. Eventually he makes some intelligent bipeds on planet Earth. He makes them clever social creatures, with agile minds and a propensity to explore. He endows them with free will and some sense of right and wrong and sends them on their way. But then they DO things. Things that bug him, that piss him off, that get right under his all powerful skin. "Dammit", he thinks. "Why are they doing that? I don't WANT them to do that." Now, he has a whole universe to tend to, he's a busy, busy supreme being, but those annoying homo sapiens just keep irritating him. So he keeps coming back and trying to make them change their wicked ways, but he always plays by the rules of the game. So he wipes out New Orleans. Hey, the little bastards LIKED New Orleans. Surely THAT'LL get 'em back on the straight n narrow. But sure enough, they kept up all that stuff that just makes God CRAZY, so he came back by yesterday and gave Washington DC a good shaking - just a warning, you see, to go back to living the way he WANTS you to. Then it was a quick hop over to let Joseph Farrah know what he was doing and why, and it was back to that pesky universe.

There's a lesson here. Actually a couple, but we'll go with the cautionary tale at this point: "Create a universe and you'll never have a moment's rest".
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When Despots Fall - Libya Edition

2011-08-21T13:19:00.000-07:00

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We appear to have reached the endgame in Libya. With Tripoli cut off, much of the loyalist forces have stopped fighting, allowing the residents of Tripoli to take to the streets, supported by clandestine weapons shipments and reinforcements from the rebels outside the city. It's really only a matter of time, and blood, before the fight is over and we can begin to see the shape the new Libyan government will take.

I readily confess that I take a certain pleasure in watching the end of the Gadhafi regime. He was one of the great megalomaniacal autocrats of the twentieth century, a thorn in the side of the West going back beyond Reagan, a leader who took the seat of power at the point of a gun, and will only relinquish it the same way. From the bombing of the La Belle in Berlin and the resultant US air strikes to that icon of tragedy, to the crumpled cockpit of PanAm 103 lying broken in the verdant fields of Lockerbie, he has always been dangerously willing to translate rhetoric and oil wealth into action in a long, incoherent asymmetric war with the US and her allies. And despite the bombings, the sanctions and the decisive losses in occasional air battles over the Gulf of Sirte, he relentlessly demanded a position on the world stage all out of proportion to his actual status - and more often than not he received it. But ultimately, the actions taken by the leader of a single-party police state to suppress dissent and hold onto power erode his support among the people, creating a cycle of increasingly brutal suppression and a more radicalized population. The ultimate result is very often rebellion or civil war.

Of course, we cannot know at this point how this will all play out. Libya is another one of those artificial constructs, a nation with borders drawn by arrogant colonialists without regard to Tribal realities. It remains to be seen whether the competing demands of Tribal politics, ethnic antipathy and religious intolerance can be set aside to allow the establishment of some sort of national identity without the coercive control of a traditional "strongman". But one fact is, even now, hard to overlook. For perhaps the first time, the international community came together to provide the appropriate level of military intervention to prevent a wholesale slaughter of innocents and level the playing field just enough for the people to have a fighting chance to win their freedom. This was done with extremely limited military force, with no ground troops, no occupation and no coalition casualties. The fact that the world can now have confidence that it can honestly, fairly and decisively intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster should give pause to any despot considering massacres as a method to hold onto power.

Well, why not Syria, you ask. How can this formula apply to Gadhafi and not Bashar al Assad? The answer is simple - sadly so. International intervention can be compared to a medical procedure, and "First do no harm" is a critical guiding principle. If intervention has the likelihood of starting a regional war, a scenario where it would create far more suffering than it might alleviate, that is a situation in which it cannot be used. One of the necessary keys to international military intervention, then, is it can really only be used against the more isolated of regimes - those with powerful or local allies (or both) are mostly inoculated against the world community acting against them.

But we should remember Rwanda, and Srebrenica, and we should point to Libya and resolve that we never need let it happen again...
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A Terrible Love of War

2011-08-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

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Waste is a slippery concept. One man's waste is another man's art, another man's life's work, and yet another man's sustenance. What we see as waste might actually be fulfillment, or comeuppance, or just another narrative chapter. If risk is the price tag for reward, then the ultimate price should come with the ultimate reward - but in an odd twist, here the rewards are earned up front, collected throughout a career filled with immeasurable highs and unspeakable lows, and the price is collected last, savagely erasing all the days of effort and nights of terror, all the moments, forever.

30 Americans died at once on Friday, simultaneously, in a pointless war in a valueless place for a meaningless goal, and some might call it a tragedy, and cry out to mourn our national loss. But to do so would be a failure of understanding, an inability to grasp what, precisely, has been lost, the banal conflation of what and why. These men were, even in the midst of this most cynical of political gamesmanship, not wasted. Indeed, it is not possible to waste lives such as this. There are professional soldiers, certainly, but these were not that - not really. These were professional warriors, men as there have always been, less committed to the ideal or even the goal than they are simply to the fight, men who have been to war and want nothing more than to go back. Men for whom the fight is the point, and are therefore willing to do anything it takes for another chance to fight other men to the death.

Mourning them would serve no purpose, indeed it would obscure rather that clarify the way this story ended. This was the outcome that was always there, the thing against which they measured themselves and their comrades every time they fought, at once the likeliest result and the one so often repeatedly avoided.

On an individual level this was not really a tragedy, and certainly not a waste. It was, in a very real sense, just another day at the office, the consequences unusual only in number, otherwise no different than a severed finger at the lumberyard or the terminal deceleration of an avid parachutist having a very bad day. These guys were doing exactly what they wanted to do, what they LOVED to do, and every single last one of them had taken human lives, weighed culpability against responsibility, considered and accepted their accountability and, having seen it and smelled it and tasted both the warm flow and the red mist, opted to return once again to that place where lives are traded, the exchange rate measured in lead.

To be clear, one should not feel compelled to honor them either. They represent the part of human evolution that has, to this point at least, failed. They are killers, not by training or by temperament, but at some deeper, vocational level. Everywhere throughout history you will find similar men in prisons and graveyards, the same drive fueling a different path, but always with similar outcomes. They have always been amongst us, and they have always been co-opted and recruited by those with wealth and power to serve whatever cause ordered. They were crusaders and assassins, outlaws and pirates, the tip of the spear and the last line of defense.

Afghanistan is a waste, a waste of resources, a waste of lives, a waste of geopolitical credibility and diplomatic leverage. Most of the lives lost there are wasted, and most of the lives spent there are wasted too. America's involvement in Afghanistan fully ten years after the attacks of September 11th is a permanent toxic stain on what remains of her tattered honor, calling simultaneously into question both American political integrity and military capacity. But for these men, Afghanistan was exactly where they wanted to be, for exactly the reasons we saw play out. The fact that we'll bury these Sailors all at the same time means they died doing what they wanted to do more than anything in the world, and regardless of how you might feel about that, for them it was no tragedy...
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Zombies, Aliens and Robots - Killing in the Name Of...

2011-07-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

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In the American world of entertainment, nothing beats violence. Well, technically sex does, but while you'd NEVER allow your precocious pre-teen to watch to attractive people make love, you all happily share a bowl of popcorn on the couch watching heroes unleash heavy firepower on their designated villains. And those villains are often killers and rapists, pedophiles and madmen, serial killers and terrorists - the lowest, most vile scum of the earth. This is necessary, as we Americans don't like any moral ambiguity in the vicious bloodletting of our popular culture.

But when you think about it, some stories are about, well, stories. They include gunfights, car chases and brutal hand to hand combat in order to make them more interesting, more exciting if you will. But they are still, at the core, a story about policemen or soldiers or even frightened citizens doing the right thing, or at least doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Other stories, though, are somewhat less high-minded than even that. They are about killing, the chatter of the assault rifle, the bangbangbang of a handgun in rapid fire, the cycling of the action, the clink of spent brass on asphalt, the cries of the mortally wounded. In a straight line from Rambo to the Terminator to Falling Skies we sit impatiently through the brief homages to storytelling so we can get back to the gunfire and casualties.

But oddly, and somewhat surprisingly, we Americans find we have, at least collectively, a certain moral squeamishness when it comes to the massacre of large numbers of our fellow human beings for the purposes of entertainment. Oh sure, we're more than happy with a final shootout between that detestable villain and the cops, or even a a denouement in the form of a serious firefight as might be found at the climax of "LA Confidential" or Season One of "Justified", but for our day-in and day-out viewing pleasure, as something we might enjoy after dinner on a school night, a large body count is something we have decided to claim we cannot abide.

Various solutions to this problem have been sought. The original approach while having been around in one form or another for decades, reached its pinnacle of performance in the TeeVee series "The A Team". Thousands of rounds expended on full auto, along with grenades and explosives, helicopter gunships on hot runs over the battlefield, with M-16s and Uzis spewing endless streams of hot brass - and yet, in the end, there were no casualties, no gruesome scenes of bodies frozen awkwardly in death, no screaming, bloodsoaked wounded, no tragic collateral damage from the massive volumes of randomly sprayed small arms fire. This tradition of the firefight as performance art lives on even today with shows like "Burn Notice" where the majority of gunfights are staged for the benefit of frightening or fooling the bad guys - although it must be mentioned that when Michael Westin finds himself in a corner, he can and will take lives hard and fast, a redeeming characteristic of a show that often seems to be unsure if it aspires to be merely a cartoon or something much darker.

But the winning solution to this problem, this demand for large scale violence without the messy moral conundrums often associated with mass murder, has now become mainstream. It's a simple fix really - just have the humans fight...well...NOT humans. Aliens, robots, the undead, it turns out there are a surprising number of things that can fill in admirably for what would otherwise be a human enemy, and then can be gleefully killed in very large numbers, in various brutal ways, over and over again without causing the slightest ethical twinge. Terminators, artificial digital humans in The Matrix, Cylons, aliens from "War of the Worlds" to "Falling Skies", our producers and purveyors of cinematic entertainment can find an endless stream of near-humans for our benighted species to kill in large numbers, with every kind of weapon from Alice's Kukris to "Predator's" minigun.

It's possible that this observation helps us learn something important about human beings, or at least that particularly pampered and hate-filled sub-species known as Americans. When confronted with the reality that our preferred form of entertainment was horrific, brutal and inhuman, we recoiled from the necessity that we seek other less nihilistic, more enlightened forms of entertainment, and instead dug deep into our creativity to create creatures that could stand in for other human beings when the time came for slaughter. As intelligent and capable as we are as a species, we are still primitive, tribal, violent and warlike, and will actively resist allowing evolution to complete the process of making us into something more than we are today...
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Debt Ceiling Tea Leaves

2011-07-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

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Nobody knows what's going on. The President wants a grand bargain, Boehner wants a smaller deal with no new revenues, the Tea Partiers want to turn America into an agricultural backwater with nuclear weapons and the so-called Gang of 6 unveiled a proposal that everybody wants to talk about and nobody would actually vote for. So how do regular folks, you and me, get some kind of handle on this whole Debt Ceiling kerfuffle and what it might mean to us? Well, let's forget about the process and think in terms of outcomes. There are, ultimately, only three possible ways that this all ends.

1. Some kind of stroke-of-midnight deal is made, either with a deficit reduction package attached or just a clean increase in the debt ceiling, before the August 2nd econopocalypse.

2. August 2nd arrives, the market freaks out, everyone panics and comes to their senses and they raise the debt ceiling almost immediately - say, within a week of the freakout, whenever it actually happens.

3. The deadline comes and goes, the markets freak out, perhaps blow up, and STILL the US House of Representatives is unable to pass a new debt ceiling bill. The standoff lasts for a month, perhaps several, with the US and the world adjusting to a 'new normal' where US government spending is cut nearly in half, interest rates spike, freezing up credit markets and the dollar collapses relative to other currencies.

There you have it - pretty much the whole universe of possibilities for the next 60-90 days.

The first outcome would, obviously, be the best by far. It would establish that we are governed by partisan fools, but not madmen. There would be some economic fallout, but nothing close to catastrophic. The long term negative effect will be to firmly establish apocalyptic brinkmanship as part of our political process, ensuring that others will again take the entire system hostage and threaten to blow it all up. Eventually, someone will. But at least it wouldn't be now.

The second has real costs - to a lot of individuals who need their pension income, their health benefits, their housing assistance. The economic costs would be significant - most debt instruments, from US Treasuries to Municipal bonds to credit cards would carry a higher interest rate for the foreseeable future, an artifact of the higher 'risk premium' that would be built into US debt going forward.

The third seems unlikely at this point. The conventional wisdom is that the powerful financial interests have influence over the Republican party, and can somehow coerce them into accepting the kind of compromise they have repeatedly rejected to this point. But it remains an open question whether those same traditional Republican constituencies have that level of influence with the radical right-wing true believers in Congress, along with those more fearful of a Primary challenge from the right than the of the threats of the traditional funding base.

But unlikely though it may be, it cannot be ruled out at this point. It would be a historical event, changing nearly everything in one or two mid-summer months in 2011. Think of it as a sliding scale of economic disaster - the longer the House Republicans resist a compromise deal, the worse both the short term and long term outcomes will be for all of us.

Recession? Depression? "Contagion" leading to the collapse of the Eurozone? Plummeting global trade numbers, falling GDP in China leading to unrest, falling energy and commodity prices leading a brutal deflationary cycle, US unemployment over 20%? When you think about what a bloc of elected representatives are willing to put at risk in order to advance an unpopular ideological agenda, you are forced to confront just how badly broken our system has become. It makes a certain sense, though, as a system carefully designed in the late eighteenth century would be expected to lack the flexibility and adaptability to adjust to twenty first century changes in technology and society...
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Revolving Door Revolves

2011-07-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

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Casey Anthony walked free today, having served the sentence imposed upon her by the court. Of course, there are people from Sarasota to Seattle who feel she somehow avoided the judgement she was due, and champion some poor hero, one lacking in both broad awareness and personal morality, to hunt her down and inflict upon her the physical harm they just know she must have coming.

Now, mind you, I can't speak directly to this issue, as I paid no attention to the events up to and including the trial. I first became aware of this case when Ms. Anthony's acquittal gave birth to a vast, simultaneous outpouring of bile and hatred. And once again, I was forced to confront one of the most important facts of American public policy. You will occasionally hear that Americans are apathetic about their freedoms, but that really isn't the case at all. Americans, for the most part, HATE their freedoms, are revolted by any manifestation of basic democratic liberty, and regularly state their unequivocal desire to roll back the most fundamental constitutional guarantees. It is no wonder at all that obscenities like the ironically named Patriot Act and the 4th Amendment shredding Wiretap Bill are passed with minimal objection, that organizations like the ACLU and FEC are so roundly reviled and that calls for vengeance vastly outnumber calls for mercy even in the twentyfirst century.

It is certainly true that the key to empathy is to imagine yourself in the other person's shoes, that it was YOU on trial for your life, and then to imagine the outcome for which you would be so desperately hopeful. But it really doesn't require empathy, indeed, simple self interest should require the same exercise. Because if you DID find yourself incarcerated, on trial in a case where you were generally accepted to be guilty, and therefore as evil and inhuman a monster as could be imagined, unfit to be allowed to live among other people ever again, unfit, even, to live at all, your only hope would be within the system - a system so fair, so protective of the rights of the accused, so structured so as to place the burden of proof on your accusers that you might be able to convince a jury of your peers to set you free. But in general, American people do seem to be inherently optimistic, to the point of irrationality, and widely assume that such things only happen to other, 'bad' people who are obviously guilty and so clearly should be punished.

So the prosecutor was unable to provide sufficient evidence to convince the jury to convict, and they did exactly what they are supposed to do in such cases - a finding of not guilty. The result of the conviction on lesser charges was a sentence to time served, the appropriate paperwork was processed and today she walks out the door a free woman. Except, not really. After years of having her picture splashed across the internet, with a huge population of crazed, understimulated citizens taking up their pitchforks and torches and crying out for her head, she will have to spend many years in hiding, carefully avoiding the kind of public situation that could put her within reach of that most unstable of psychopaths - an American with a feeling of victimization. I wish her the best, but I wonder if there's much chance that this story ends well.

In the meantime, the prison doors swung open to accept their latest evildoer, that master of ideologically driven tabloid snoopery, Rebekah Brooks, late of the News Corp executive suite. Just as obviously guilty, but without the baggage that's unavoidable when there's a dead baby in the mix. This one, however, will have more pre-verdict tempestuousness, with the observers drawn to their chosen side by political ideology, with international intrigue and the personal lives of celebrities and royalty, with money and power, sex and lies, cybercrime and media spin, we'll be watching the evolution of Rebekah's story for years, played out against a backdrop of the shifting media and political fortunes, all as fodder for endless cable news and Internet debate. Honestly, we're all secretly grateful that as one story ended, this new narrative is at hand to fill our pathetic lives. It's all we might have asked for...
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Rick Perry's God Must Have a LOT of Altoids

2011-07-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

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Texas has a lot of problems. Budget shortfall, hundred year drought, armies of unemployed and uninsured, and an angry, fearful, restive population seeking respite in various manifestations of bigotry and tribal hatred. But fear not, Texas citizenry. Your Governor, the esteemed Rick Perry has a plan.
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...the governor stated that property rights, government regulation and a "legal system that's run amok" were threatening the American way of life and "it's time to just hand it over to God and say 'God, you're gonna have to fix this.' "

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So we learn from this a great deal about Rick Perry - his decisiveness, his willingness to take responsibility and accept accountability, his creative hands-on approach to his State's overwhelming problems - but we actually learn a great deal more about Rick Perry's God.

Apparently, as I interpret this, the God Rick Perry worships has a plan for Texas, and that plan includes drought, disease, pestilence, poverty and war. But in spite of the fact that his God has made these decisions about Texas, Governor Perry is pretty certain he can get God to completely change his mind about all of it, and in a 180 degree pivot change Texas from a crumbling hellhole to an earthly paradise. I guess God wasn't terribly invested in his plan in the first place, and was willing to go in an entirely different direction as soon as his complaint department phone lights up.

Now, I don't mean to sound flip here, but this particular manifestation of the creator of the universe isn't terribly impressive. Indecisive, wishy-washy, easily influenced, one wonders how he gets through the checkout line at Piggly Wiggly with all those impulse items stacked along his route. "Oh look! Altoids GUM!!" I mean, what's the point of a deity raining pestilence and suffering on his people if he can be expected to back down as soon as the people start to complain? Man, I don't know what Testament we're on here in 2011 but we've come a long way from Old Testament Yahweh. This God is like the kids of the Mafia Dons, raised in suburban wealth and comfort, and unable to summon the intestinal fortitude to do the Godly thing when called upon.

Of course, it could be that I understood the nature of Rick Perry's God perfectly well, and it is the Governor who has blundered badly. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to sit back and watch Rick Perry and his throngs of followers implore, beseech and otherwise formally request that God take them off the shit list, and soon. Then we'll see what happens. If the skies open up with a cleansing rain, the crops leap from the soil and all around is wealth and happiness, then I guess maybe I'll think about opening up my own negotiations with the big guy. At least for a Ferrari 308. Always wanted one of those. But if things continue to go badly pear shaped for Texas, it will merely reinforce my longstanding opinion that asking for help from imaginary super beings and mythical creatures is a wholly ineffective approach to problem solving or governance...
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Blue on Black

2011-07-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

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So the world stands transfixed by this utterly gratuitous argument the US government is having over the debt ceiling legislation. Now bear in mind how truly bizarre the parameters of this argument are. What we're talking about is Congress refusing to pass a bill authorizing the Executive to make payments that are, in every single case, already authorized and appropriated by bills passed in Congress and signed by the President. To put it in blunt terms, Congress is refusing to allow the Government to follow the legal orders of Congress.

And the damage is already done. Oh, it can get worse - much worse. But throughout the world, where governments and finance professionals are used to seeing and dealing with Sovereign Debt Crises that result quite naturally when a government no longer can raise the funds to pay its debts, those same observers stand dumbfounded as the US, with massive resources and no lack of funds prepares to voluntarily default on its obligations out of nothing more than political chaos. The reason there haven't been greater consequences to this point is simply that nobody can truly believe that any nation, let alone the largest economy in the world, could possibly be that stupid.

Ostensibly, the argument is about deficit spending. The Republicans have taken the position that we must address our long-term deficits NOW, or the results will be nothing short of cataclysmic. However, the reason this is plainly disingenuous and manipulative is that they refuse to allow any increase in government revenues - revealing their actual agenda clearly, for all to see. Tragically, the Democratic President, in the midst of a financial crisis, with double digit unemployment, zero inflation, crumbling infrastructure and a rising output gap, has decided for the most venal reasons of political expediency to adopt precisely the Republican frame. Indeed, it has become apparent that he wants to make much deeper and more draconian cuts to US Government spending than even the Republicans in Congress are willing to specify, and is more than willing to exploit the Repbulican's salted earth campaign to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthiest fraction of people and corporations to accomplish that goal.

OK. So one way or another, Americans are going to see massive cuts in precisely the kind of spending that holds communities together. From health and nutrition to education and infrastructure, these deep cuts ripple down from the Federal level to the States, and from there to the counties and municipalities, at each level taking their toll on the people, the very individuals who created the government to represent them in the first place. The cuts seem inevitable, as does the unnecessary suffering as people are hungry, fire departments are slower to respond, children are incarcerated and bridges collapse.

But it is all just pointless and meaningless, which makes it even more the tragedy. Why? American government runs on money. Not just campaign money, or lobbyist money. The very act of governance has become exclusively about money - determining who gets it, and how much. From the military, the FBI and the FAA down to local grants to build roads and bridges. Reducing that flow of funds, with the concomitant reduction in recipients, will lead, necessarily to a reduction in governance. Whether from Washington, the Statehouse or the City Council, power is exercised through the distribution of funds. A deficit reduction bill isn't even a budget - it's just a set of guidelines as to how money will be distributed over a ten year window. Laws can be changed, caps raised, restrictions abolished and special cases defended. The next Congress, and the one after that, will respond to the demands of those portions of their constituency they deem important. And when this round of cuts begin to bite, and bad things happen, people die and crime increases and victims of disaster are left to fend for themselves, when all the consequences, foreseen and utterly unanticipated, begin to manifest, there will be no hesitation among those in power to take the only action available, to appropriate funds. As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The reason the US government depends on deficit spending is that Americans refuse to take a realistic approach to the cost of government services. Make no mistake. When people say they want to cut spending, they are most explicitly NOT saying they want to cut services. They just don't want to pay for them. So you find yourself in a situation where government revenues are less than 15% of GDP and government is spending 21% of GDP. Neither of those numbers are "right" or "wrong" - whatever level of service the people demand should be delivered, and sufficient revenue should be collected in order to do so.

Ultimately, revenues will be raised and spending increased once again. When the maintenance of personal and political power depends upon increasing spending, spending will be increased. These things have always been cyclical, but with the most right-wing, corporate friendly government in recent history occupying all branches of government, the execution will be very extreme, and the volatility of the cycle very likely unprecedented...
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Bits and Pieces

2011-07-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

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Pornography and Power:
Michelle Bachmann signed a pledge from an outfit called the Family Leader. Now this bigoted, un - American pledge has a number of ugly provisions, but one of the more problematic of them is that she will seek an unconditional ban on Pornography. This is a very bad thing on a number of different levels.

First, political candidates should be disqualified for signing pledges. It puts them in a position where they are promising to never consider new information or conditions, but to hew to a previously determined belief structure no matter what might happen in the future. We certainly do not need a head of state who is constrained by a set of political promises made to special interest groups during the campaign. I suppose, in this context, it's actually a good thing that politicians have traditionally been willing to abandon campaign promises at the first hint of political expediency.

Second, again, these are people whose core ideology is to reduce the cost, size and footprint of the federal government. But here once again, we find them embarrassingly willing to spend taxpayer dollars to enlist the overwhelming power of American governance to restrict specific liberties that they find objectionable. I know it has gotten painfully redundant to point out the repeated hypocrisy of the American Political Right, but at some point it just seems like their constituency should demand some basic level of consistency in their agenda and message.

But the real problem here is actually a larger one, and one that crosses political and philosophical belief systems. As much as Americans like to invoke the constitution and the American form of liberal democracy, it seems that a very large percentage of them, indeed, a majority even, do not have even a first grader's understanding of how it functions. In most liberal democracies, the head of state is mostly a figurehead, with very little actual power. Now, in the US system, where the head of state is also the head of government, the President actually has more power than most of his international peers, and over the last quarter century has accrued even more than he is entitled to. But in the end, the President can only set the agenda. He cannot change the constitution, create a federal statute or appropriate funds. Certainly, in international affairs he retains greater flexibility of action, but when it comes to domestic legislation, he is ultimately powerless.

Just as GW Bush was unable to privatize Social Security, and just as Obama is unable to allocate further expansionary fiscal policy, a putative President Bachmann would be unable to create new laws regarding the production and distribution of adult media. This is a particularly difficult area, due to the First Amendment concerns it raises, and has been an argument between legislators and the Judiciary for decades, if not longer.

But this is something that politicians understand intimately, and the people never seem to truly grasp. If you want to influence policy, the President is an ineffective vehicle with which to do so. Lobbyists and political professionals have understood since the dawn of representative government that you influence policy by achieving legislative and judicial majorities. As long as the people think they are electing a monarch instead of a President, they will always be disappointed by his inability to effect real policy changes - and these sorts of pledges that ask a Presidential candidate to promise to implement policy change that is beyond her legal purview will only continue to raise unrealistic expectations.

The Debt Ceiling Negotiations
Now that the destructive reality of this massive self-inflicted wound is starting to sink in, let's not let history and events obfuscate the fundamental blunder. This should NEVER have become a negotiation at all. Ask yourself, why is it the policy of the United States to refuse to negotiate with hostage takers? The President could have said, from the very beginning, "I will not negotiate economic policy under threat of the destruction of the economy". Everyone would have understood what he was saying, and after an appropriate amount of bluster and name-calling, the congress would have voted to raise the debt limit like they always do. But by accepting the premise that an increase in the debt ceiling was an outcome preferred by only his party, and accepting further that his party would be expected to give something up in exchange for the votes to pass the increase, Obama created a whole new paradigm in the American political process. We now accept as a viable option in major legislative negotiation for one side to threaten to just burn down the entire house if they don't get their way.

One can't help but hearken back to the end of the odious GW Bush years, when it appeared that the Republican response to that debacle of governance would be to simply decide he was just too far to the left, and to push ideologically extreme right wing 'conservatives' into the party mainstream. I remember how we shook our heads and concluded that they ultimately just couldn't do that, as it would destroy their viability as a national party. Alas, as it turned out, both things could be true, but the unanticipated outcome would be that they would becomme a kind of political suicide bomber, willing to take the country down with them when they failed.

South Sudan
Congratulations. Now stand by for the horrific tragedy. It is, once again, the same lesson, still unlearned. A nation without some strong and stable institutions of governance cannot be governed, and will not survive. Giving everyone a ballot in war and dictator ravaged Iraq resulted only in the Tyranny of the Majority, and an authoritarian kleptocratic despot, because there was no superstructure of independent governance to build on. Places like Afghanistan and Somalia have never been functional nations, because they are not nations in any fundamental way except in an atlas. They are completely artificial constructs, with groups of unrelated, often hostile people forced to claim the same nationalist identity - and again, there is simply no basis for developing the institutions of governance. Not only is democracy impossible, but even some sort of benign dictatorship cannot be achieved.

South Sudan has every problem any nation can have, all at once. Grinding poverty. Tribal animosity. Ethnic and sectarian divisions. Decades of war and hate. Resource wealth. No infrastructure, no economy, no system for education. Who thinks 7000 angry, desultory and heavily armed UN 'Peacekeepers' will do anything to change the obvious and oft - repeated calculation?
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Mick Was Wrong

2011-06-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

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You can't always get what you want -- Mick Jagger

First, let's recognize that the arc of history has not been particularly tolerant of those who would demand the state limit the rights of certain groups out of tribal fear and hatred. In any society where the people have a voice, it just becomes increasingly difficult to defend institutionalized bigotry. Over and over again, we get to know individuals and discover, yet again, that those we have been told are 'the others' are really no different than we are, and find that, once fear and hatred are no longer operative justifications for systematic discrimination, the remaining arguments become impossible to take seriously, for once they no longer have the twin pillars of tribal fear and hatred to prop them up, they are revealed for what they are - nothing more than transparent lies and playground taunts.

So congratulations to New York. I will drink to your courage, and your people, now just a little bit freer than they were yesterday. But it's worthwhile to think about this struggle in context. Why has it taken so long? What keeps this kind of statutory inequality from collapsing in a smoldering heap under the weight of it's own contradictions and transparently pointless hatred? And the answer is there to be seen by all - the toxic, primitive mythologies of organized religion in our culture. The grossly undemocratic, one would have to say un-American contributors of sectarian fear and divisiveness that indoctrinate children with patently false tales of mass murder and ancient blood feuds, imaginary creatures preaching a deadly kind of hypocrisy and unbelievable tales of ridiculous heroes, cartoonish villains and impossible events.

When you think about it, it is religion that unabashedly supports every discriminatory instinct, every tribal taboo and every base motivation a society can use to dominate, segregate and discriminate against any kind of measurable difference. Women are always targeted by religion - indeed, it is every bit as accurate to say that men universally use mythology to exercise unjust power over women, even down to their most personal and intimate decisions. Non-believers are a threat. They are always to be victimized. But beyond all that, religions rigidly enforce a kind of broad conformity among their followers, allowing them to categorize 'others' by appearance, styles of dress, behavior, relationships or any otherwise inconsequential pattern of diversity. A clear mark of any organized religion is that no matter how large it grows, there are always more people it hates than there are those it accepts.

And this is where we find ourselves today. An enlightened population, at least by historical standards, being forced to fight for basic human rights against nothing other than the forces of superstition and mythology. The kind of shamans and witches we should have left behind at least a hundred years ago. It is only churches that have the mindbending audacity to stand up in AMERICA and demand they be given special dispensation to discriminate. The presumption that they should be allowed to single out certain groups for unequal treatment and still insist they be taken seriously as Americans is beyond incoherence - it flies in the face of basic American values and needs to be called out for precisely what it is.

It is unclear to me why, at this point in history, when science has come so far in explaining everything from disease and genetics to the weather and the universe, we still allow these bastions of superstition and the supernatural to invoke the same old fears we overcame centuries ago to dominate the political conversation. If it is true that my right to throw a punch ends where your nose begins, then their right to worship supernatural deities and mythological just-so stories should just as well end where it begins to impact my ability to live my life in freedom. And along with the decision to raise a child, I can think of no more intrusive an act of discrimination than to determine I may not marry the person I love.

Because, while it is true that religion has long played a role in marriage, in that churches, within certain carefully proscribed legal parameters could perform marriages that were recognized as legal civil marriages, that's not the argument we're having here. We're talking strictly about the legal part of marriage, the rights, privileges and obligations, the legal and economic impact of marriage, and the application of laws to married couples. And while you certainly COULD choose to get married in a church, you have always had the option of a strictly secular marriage that carried with it exactly the same weight as a church wedding in the eyes of the state. To put it simply, while religion may care about marriage, marriage does not care about religion.

So it is unclear to me why we even offer religion a seat at the table in this discussion. We certainly don't when discussing other strictly legal matters. And churches are fantasy houses built on mythology - they can include whatever odd and undemocratic strictures in their dogma they wish, but there is NO reason why those should ever apply to people who choose not to follow that dogma.

Now, of course, the other challenge to marriage equality is political, and that represents a two-pronged problem of its own. First, politicians are imbued with the same bigotry, fear, misogyny as those they represent, so a primitive, superstitious, tribal electorate will most often choose a primitive, superstitious and tribal congressional representative. And certainly politicians are just as subject to the corrosive influence of religious indoctrination as anyone else. But it is also true that successful politicians must have a gift for holding up a finger and detecting shifts in the political winds, which is an important part of what we saw in New York.

So, the barriers are falling - the writing is well and truly on the wall now. As we watch the end of another generational fight to become the society we have claimed to be for centuries play out, it only makes it clearer how far we still have to go, and how much we have lost in the process. But with every passing day it becomes clearer - we have reached a point where we have to let go of superstition and myth. We have come to a place where these things serve no valuable purpose, but are holding us back. We do not need religion to understand philosophy, ethics or morality. But when religion and science collide, it is the stories without basis in fact that must give way. And even more importantly, when it is those very religions that serve as the engines of hatred and discrimination, when they fuel anger and violence rather than offer succor and peace, then they must be discarded, having served their purpose, they are now a toxic parasite on the body politic...
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Primitive Radio Gods, Duke Nukem and a Moment in Time

2011-06-21T17:10:00.000-07:00

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I was just sitting down by the pool. Had the square iPod on shuffle. The rectangular iPod was charging. So pretty soon it decides to play Primitive Radio Gods primitive radio hit "Standing outside Mother Teresa while the mob tries to jack Mt. St. Helens" or whatever it was called. I actually like that song. But every time I hear it, it takes me right back to the summer of 1996, my Summer of Duke Nukem.

Duke's been in the news lately, for a new release that's a decade late and still not ready for prime time. But for me, the muscle bound foul mouthed nutball holds a special place in history. See, I've never been good at video games. And since I always lose, quickly and without honor, I've never developed an interest in them. In my UNIX days I always died in "Hunt the Wumpus" and later, when video games were fixtures in bars, built into tables under a sheet of dark glass, ready to swallow a mint's worth of quarters on top of the bar bill, I was Space Invaders fodder of the worst kind. I often thought it would be better to just light money on fire - that might at least last a few minutes.

But I was in a very small, niche business - building packages for software distributions. If you had a piece of software and wanted ten thousand duplicated, labeled, retail boxed packages with manuals and coupons, I was your man. And there wasn't a lot of us, and we all knew each other. So one of the side bennies was you didn't pay for software. Any software - somebody would always pull one off the production line, mark it a 'QA Fail' and fedex it off for your amusement. And so it came to pass that in the early summer of '96 I found in my hands a copy of 'Duke Nukem 3D'. I had a homebuilt overclocked 386 machine and full-on VGA graphics, so even against my better judgement I decided "why not? If not me, who? If not now..." ahh, fuck it - I never had a prayer.

But here's the thing - this post isn't about Duke Nukem, or video games. Oh no, we're going much farther down the rabbit hole than that. Because in those brave, pioneering days, you'll recall, we climbed on the Internet with an analog modem, many if not most of us connecting through AOL, and it would take a minute or more to download a decent hi-res porn jpeg. We were still two or three years from MP3s and Napster, and video? Hah, don't be silly - when some visionary talked about watching videos over the Internet, we smiled, nodded, and muttered something skeptical about their intellectual or perhaps psychological development.

So in a way, the incremental improvements in technology were more appreciated then, because we had a sense that doing these things was HARD, and on the rare occasion that they were done WELL, well that was cause for much rejoicing. I had a thing called DMX. It was a music service delivered by the cable company, and it had its own set-top box and remote, and cost its own $9.95 a month. And to this day, I look back on it as the best music service I've ever had, perhaps the best music service imaginable. Of course, there were reasons for that that did not include the music service itself, although it was reliable, the quality was excellent and there were dozens of different genre-based channels to choose from. The coolest technological feature was that there was a little two-line LCD screen on the remote, and you could query the box and it would tell you the artist and song playing, and give you a brief synopsis of their history. Which was important, because incredibly interesting new things were happening in music every week at that time, and if you only had mainstream FM radio, you were going to miss most of them.

And that, at long last, is the point. Those very few years, post Nirvana and Pre Eminem were something special. It's as if they put something in the water - not only did the bands drink it and find new things to say and new ways to say them, but the labels drank it too and kept signing new bands with new sounds and there wasn't anything to hold it together as a genre, it was just an explosion of auditory exploration and musical poetry so they called it 'Alternative', although nobody quite knew what it was an alternative TO and nobody quite knew how all these different themes and sounds fit together as a cohesive whole, but it was so magical and so exciting that you literally got out of bed in the morning thinking "I wonder what I'll hear today that I've never heard before in my life"?

There were the big boys - Alice and Soundgarden and Punkins and Bush, Gavin doing something interesting with basic metal for the first time in a long time, there was a whole new look at what punk was supposed to sound like, Offspring and Rancid and even Greenday, when every new track off 'Dookie' was a revelation. Everclear and No Doubt and even Dave Grohl, proving lightening CAN strike twice. There was spinoffs like Belly and DHC getting a chance to soar, there were little noticed flashes of brilliance, from Self and Geraldine Fibbers to Heather Nova to Dada (remember 'California Gold'?) to Catherine Wheel, Liz Phair and the Goo Goo Dolls, Gin Blossoms to Mazzie Starr, Social Distortion to Imperial Drag, Letters to Cleo to Godsmack.

It was that moment when they played the Primitive Radio Gods on DMX while I struggled and hacked and restarted my way through Duke Nukem 3D. And yes, I finished it, although I DID have to use some cheats to get through a couple parts, and it took me a ridiculous amount of time, hours piled on hours, but never wasted, for there was always music playing, and, at least for a time, the music was magical.
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The Adult in the Room

2011-06-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

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Historically, tipping points aren't really that unusual. They come with regularity, several times a century, sometimes several times a decade. Just in the last few decades, we've seen the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the cold war, the rise of the Internet and 9/11 and the resultant violent upheavals that are still playing out in Capitols from Islamabad to Madrid.

So it's not necessarily overwrought to observe that what we're seeing in the Middle East, Arabia and North Africa this spring and summer, reflected as it is in the global financial crisis and its attendant reshuffling of political power, is a defining moment in international relations. The long overhang of authoritarian dictatorships, propped up by opposing powers to act as proxies has continued almost as a reflex, without any underlying logic. And finally, millions of people had the ability to look at the world around them and wonder why they faced such a grim and hopeless future, and they had a method for organizing themselves and presenting a genuine threat to the sclerotic despots that have simply stayed too long at the dance.

The outcome of the various "Arab Spring" national movements is entirely dependent upon how invested those in the second and third levels of power in the survival of the existing power structure. When the military in Tunisia and Egypt were simply unwilling to slaughter their own people in great enough numbers to quash the rebellion, the "Presidents for Life" quickly found retirement an attractive option. In Libya, Gaddhafi had nothing to lose. A murderer, war criminal and sponsor of international terrorism for forty years, there is no place he might seek a comfortable exile. And to cling to power, he has lavished wealth upon those in his inner circle, leaving them to choose a democratic future fraught with the potential for a tremendous loss of wealth and status and a civil war in which they still hold many, if not most, of the cards.

Bahrain is different, a glaring manifestation of the festering sore of sectarian hatred and intolerance that will prevent real integration of Muslim nations from Persia up through Arabia for the foreseeable future. In Sunni ruled Muslim nations, the Shi'a are hated and feared, and there is very likely no amount of political or economic pressure that can cause them to live in peace with their co-religionist neighbors.

Which brings us to Syria. This is the big dog, the 800 pound gorilla of the Arab Spring. And Bashar al-Assad has a pedigree in these matters. In 1982 his father slaughtered tens of thousands of his own citizens in Hama to put down a Sunni rebellion. He KNOWS how to deal with a rabble. Except there are a number of things that have changed since 1982, and the risks of mass murder are very much higher than they were back then. There is the Internet, with it's citizen journalists. There is a world less willing to tolerate heads of state who cling to power by means of murder and intimidation. There are organizations, from al Jazeera to the UN to NonGovs who cannot be silenced by al-Assad's intimidation. But most of all, there is Turkey, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan has shown himself to be smart, independent and courageous. He was not willing to allow Israel to intimidate him into silence or inaction, and he stood up and said what the world knew to be true and was too cowed by American power to say themselves - that the Blockade of Gaza was a criminal act, collective punishment of the worst kind, and must not be allowed to go unchallenged. Turkey had a long, productive military and commercial relationship with Israel, but Erdoğan's government didn't feel that they needed that relationship as much as they needed to speak truth and honor their values. Once upon a time there were some Americans, in times of earlier challenge, who would clearly understand this position.

Turkey, under Erdoğan has been willing to use its regional political, economic and military power to make a difference, following their own agenda rather than that of the US, Russia, China or even NATO. But at the same time, as a NATO member, Turkey has a certain freedom of movement denied to others in the region, because there is, within the treaty, an obligation to mutual defense that leaves Turkey invulnerable to many coercive threats.

Now, by an accident of geography, the Syrian bloodletting is happening on the Turkish border. Syrian Army tanks, gunships and artillery are even now leveling cities and murdering hundreds, if not thousands of their own citizens. Members of the Mukhabarat are going from door to door with lists, summarily executing those whose names are known, or others who they mistake for a name on a list. Thousands of refugees have scrambled across the border, where the well organized Turkish Red Crescent has set up camps and made sure they had food, water and medical treatment. But thousands of other Syrians, guilty of nothing more than living in a blighted place, and perhaps being unhappy with a distant and unresponsive government, are trapped on the other side of the frontier, wondering if they will see a refugee camp or a Syrian machine gun first.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. The Turkish Prime Minister has made a number of statements around the possibility of moving Turkish troops across the border to set up a buffer zone to protect Syrian citizens from the Syrian army. This would be, obviously, a tremendously courageous move, fraught though it would certainly be with risk. Any move across the border, however temporary and humanitarian in nature, would constitute an invasion and would certainly invite a Syrian military reaction. But, on the other hand, President al-Assad has quite a bit on his plate, and he may be willing to suffer a small loss of face to avoid a border conflict with the immensely more powerful Turkish military.

But either way, what we're seeing is something important. The rise of a regional political, economic and military power headed by a genuine statesman. The world has suffered, not from the rise of technocratic governance, and not even so much from the rise of ideologically driven governments, but from finger-in-the-wind governance. We've watched one nation after another, sadly led by the United States, set aside any cast-in-stone values in preference for pragmatism, safety and political calculation. There just doesn't seem to be any brave, unflinching statesmen operating on the world stage today. Except, maybe, for one. Except for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the only adult in the room...
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The Debt Ceiling

2011-06-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

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The big question that needs to be asked is why do we even HAVE a debt ceiling in the first place? Under the US Constitution and the Separation of Powers, congress controls the purse strings. That is, every dollar that the Federal Government spends is specifically appropriated in legislation. Which makes debt ceiling legislation doubly ludicrous. First, it is congress that 'spent' more money than they had - that money has to be borrowed, so it really seems that the approval for borrowing the necessary funds is implicit in the appropriation itself. Second, since congress sets the debt limit, it's a little like the man who leaves his wallet in the car when he goes in the mall so he won't spend any money. If he decides to buy something, he merely has to walk back to his car to get it. Likewise, the only entity that can spend money is congress, so imposing a debt limit that they can raise upon themselves is the most pointless kind of charade.

So the debt limit is clearly political grandstanding at it's most worthless and egregious, but we're stuck with it now. Much like the draconian "Three Strikes" laws, everyone can privately recognize that it's been disastrous, but the political vulnerabilities inherent in coming out for reform or repeal eliminate any hope of a more logical approach to policy.

Historically, when it came time to raise the debt limit, the process was a well rehearsed, carefully choreographed dance. The party in power would propose to raise the debt limit, whereupon the minority party would take political advantage of the situation to bludgeon their political opponents for being "reckless deficit spenders" who were destroying the promise of America for ensuing generations. And then, when the time came, they would vote to raise the debt limit. Because there really is no way to run a modern five trillion dollar Federal Government without the credit markets. For that matter, there has never been any reason NOT to raise the debt ceiling, as the United States has plenty of capacity to generate the funds necessary to pay all its debts.

There is only one reason why a sovereign default would be a bad thing - interest rates. All debt instruments are priced according to the current market return plus a "risk premium". This is why Greek debt is so much more costly than German or American debt - in order to take on that higher level of risk, the creditors insist on a much higher return. Safe debt = cheap debt.

Now, everyone knows that this is a special case. The US is not going to default because she is broke - indeed, no one questions our ability to pay. It is purely and merely a political gridlock problem, where ideological and partisan political differences within the US government have become so polarized and so acrimonious that the political system itself actually created a debt crisis. So on the one hand, US bondholders don't doubt that they will be paid in full upon maturity, but on the other hand there is no reason to believe that Washington is going to get its political house in order anytime soon. So based upon an expectation of further political rather than economic dysfunction, as soon as there is a default US debt will be saddled with its own risk premium. And suddenly, that category down there in the lower right, Debt Service, begins to get larger every year, like another war or another deficit funded tax cut on the wealthy, eating dollars that might otherwise be spent making American's lives better:

Now it's still very much an open question what will happen in this debt ceiling fight. Once again, the Republicans have put themselves in an impossible position. Their business, corporate and wealthy investor class base want them to raise the debt ceiling before a default begins to have significant effects on corporate profits. They're more than happy with the demagoguery, but when the time comes, they expect their employees in the congress to put their ideology in their pocket and, once again, make certain the the torrent of corporate revenues continues to flow unabated. But this year there is a large contingent of Republicans who danced with the devil - the so-called tea parties - who don't care what they say or what happens necessarily, they only insist that Obama be resisted in all things. Obama and the Democrats say the debt ceiling MUST be raised or bad things will happen - they must be lying. The people who make up the core of the tea parties are not educated or sophisticated people. Instead they are wholly indoctrinated, believing the President of the United States has, as a singular goal, the destruction of the very nation he leads, and that, as Communists, Muslims and/or Homosexuals, the Democrats are lying about everything. And to these people, ANY vote to raise the debt ceiling, regardless of concessions from the Administration, will be considered a betrayal.

That being the case, there is a large contingent of Republican legislators who will not vote to raise the limit under any circumstances. Depending upon their actual numbers, at some point Boehner may have to enlist the support of the Democrats in order to successfully capitulate to his corporate paymasters. If that point comes, we can be certain that there will be negative effects, not only on the American economy, but on the global economy as well. With growing violence in the middle east, the teetering Greek and Spanish economies and out of control inflation in China, it's only going to take one small shock to send us all back into a major economic depression. And, of course, we find ourselves being led down this path by a political movement so blinded by ideology they managed to convince themselves that the American people only wanted a Medicare program if they could pay for it.

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Incentives, The Agency Problem and the Decline of America

2011-06-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

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✔ Anti-Virus and Computer Security firms receive a very large ongoing revenue stream for protecting computers and networks from viruses, malware and hackers. And yet, it goes without saying that this vast river of wealth would quickly dry up if the threats were eliminated, or effectively prevented.

✔ Pakistan receives a large subsidy from the US to fight the threat posed by Islamic militants inside that country. But if the Pakistanis were to fight these groups TOO effectively, there would no longer be a compelling reason for the US to provide aid at these levels.

✔ The US military budget is by far the largest in the world. This trillion dollar expenditure supports thousands of quasi-independent fiefdoms, bureaucracies and internal organizations and partnerships. But they are all dedicated, in one way or another, to fighting wars. So the only way for any given military-industrial bureaucracy to guarantee its survival year-over-year is to find wars to fight. What we might see as a "Peace Dividend" they see as an existential threat - for these organizations, peace is something to be avoided.

Banks, insurance companies, governments. Everywhere we look, we find ourselves trying to solve one problem, only to be confronted by an agency dilemma. Certainly we're guilty of not thinking creatively enough when making these sorts of arrangements, but we've also seen an evolution of the profit motive - it is precisely through these kind of skewed incentives that rent-seekers produce most of their profits. When you demonstrate that you are willing to pay someone to solve a problem on your behalf, it is not in that contractor's best interest to solve that problem quickly, or permanently. This is not a new discovery. The whole point of incentives in the first place is overcome this basic conflict of interest. But the incentives need to be designed carefully, with safeguards in place to encourage genuine solutions, and not prolonged payments.

If, for example, we told the Pakistanis that were were going to withhold aid until certain counter-terror benchmarks were met, they might tell us to pound sand. But it would align their interests more closely with ours, and like all contracts, if the incentives, milestones and payments were generous enough and appropriate to the demands, an agreement would at least be within reach. And I submit that would be better than paying the Pakistani government billions to essentially pretend to be doing what we ask them to do, all the while making certain the "problem" remains critical enough to require further incentive payments in the future.

The US military is a particularly egregious example. Inherently, large organizations strive to become larger, increasing their staffing, budgets and scope of responsibility. It used to be that this tendency was, in the case of the military, effectively checked by the oversight of the political leadership. The military leadership might have wanted their organization to grow, but they lacked the power to create the necessary conditions. Wars were declared, managed and ended by the political leadership, leaving the military powerless to effect anything but the outcome of the fighting itself. But the surest way for a military organization to grow is for there to be 'threats' and wars, and today we leave the management of both entirely up to the judgement of the military leadership themselves. Our political leaders tell us that wars can only end "when the Generals tell us" they can. Is it any wonder, really, that we find ourselves embroiled in multiple conflicts around the globe, lasting a decade or more?

Certainly, nobody is going to solve the age-old agency dilemma any time soon. But it does seem as if it has been allowed to get worse - these kinds of skewed incentives acting as a sort of integral corruption, allowing rent-seekers to capture funds that would otherwise be put to productive use. And there is no doubt whatsoever that these agreements could be restructured to reward actual solutions instead of becoming the permanent institutions they are now.

But negotiations in the new century have become more about manipulations, leveraging the power of inequality, an imbalance of wealth, of information, of legal power and precedent. When one thinks about the growing mis-alignment of incentives, it's hard to look past the Patent Office. Patents used to be a straightforward quid pro quo. The patent award gave the developer of a new product a period of legally protected exclusivity to make certain he or she was amply rewarded for their invention, at which point the patent would expire so that the price of that product would be driven down by competition. But years of political intervention, big money lobbying and questionable judicial decisions have turned what should be a straightforward application of governance into a dysfunctional labyrinth of rent seekers and unproductive motivations. Now patents, and their bastard cousins in copyright law, actually serve to reduce innovation, raising the barriers to new products and new solutions, and the wealth generated by the incumbent rent-seekers is invested back into the political system to raise those barriers even higher.

The point isn't to call attention to a specific problem - the problem is well known, and it's only due to its massive scope that it's at all difficult to see. The point is about how deeply rooted and intertwined our political and economic problems have become, and how destructive our institutions. When you look at how the very systems and processes that have been developed to manage incentives and control the agency dilemma have been co-opted and manipulated to produce exactly the kind of counterproductive incentives they were created to prevent, you begin to realize the scale of any meaningful fix. Root and branch, every nexus of government and industry would have to be torn out, and re-built from the ground up to serve society and community once again. The fact that these institutions have become so powerful, and so good at protecting their own entrenched interests serves only to guarantee that there can be no fix until the entire system collapses under its own greed.

The end, when it comes, will be harsh, and extremely ugly. There IS a tipping point. The top 1% of the American people receive 25% of the income today. One would think that, in itself, would be unacceptable, but all we can say for certain is that it IS unsustainable. Eventually the people will realize they have become serfs, and it will occur to them that they are oddly well-armed serfs, and their resentment and envy and greed and fear and bigotry will boil over in a great paroxysm of destruction and bloodletting. And new governments will arise, with new compacts with their populations, and great fanfare. And the cycle will begin anew...
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Humanitarian Military Intervention - Peace Through Superior Firepower?

2011-06-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

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Liberal Interventionism. I know. The very words produce an abject rejection, leave us recoiling in horror at the thought of another wasteful and ultimately pointless slaughter in the name of some loosely defined and incompletely supported set of 'values'. But here's a thought. Perhaps, just perhaps, the outcomes of international military humanitarian intervention have failed not on concept, but on execution. You know, like the Zune™.

Perhaps it really is, ultimately, simple and obvious. Perhaps confronting violence with more violence cannot lead to peace, just as common sense tells us it doesn't reduce violence. Perhaps there is no place for the force of arms in modern international diplomacy, and if the community of nations cannot prevent a thuggish despot from killing and oppressing his neighbors or his own people by persuasion and negotiation, they should not attempt to do so by coercion. Perhaps.

But I remain, frankly, unconvinced. Just because we've seen major powers and the international organizations they form to implement extra-national diplomacy misuse their military power, using international laws and treaties, along with explanations of humanitarian intentions to justify the imposition of a specific agenda by force, or even to provide political and diplomatic cover for aggressive warfare. And certainly there have been other cases, where the intent was good but the execution got caught up in political and military struggles to assert power that led to disasters like Somalia. But the idealist in me continues to insist that with reasonably pure motives and a limited set of goals, the international community can come together to protect a helpless population from dictators, warlords and criminals for whom their lives are worth, at most, the cost of a bullet.

First, let's be clear. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were in no way humanitarian interventions. They were essentially unilateral aggressive wars fought out of choice for entirely political reasons. Korea and Gulf War I were arguably fought for good reasons, but Korea was mismanaged into a years long bloodbath where millions lost their lives and livelihoods, and while Gulf War I was perhaps the best example of how to fight a twenty-first century war, the aftermath descended into political acrimony, economic manipulation, murderous sanctions and thus became a festering regional open sore, driving political factions to increasingly brutal and radical positions for reasons that literally had nothing to do with Iraq itself.

Somalia was a poor choice for humanitarian intervention, because there was no political or even tribal or religious infrastructure to facilitate the delivery of food and medicine. Remember, the intervention in Somalia was not originally intended to be a fight, but rather a mechanism to bring about a temporary end to the bloodshed and the delivery of desperately needed aid. But it was the armed forces that were tapped to provide the relief services, and militaries tend to be uncomfortable with missions that do not primarily involve breaking things and hurting people, so the mission slowly and inevitably evolved into a combat role, and all hope of a good outcome was gone in a 24 hour paroxysm of bloodletting.

Bosnia was a good example of what humanitarian intervention could have been. But confusion, uncertainty, incompetence and outright cowardice left the good people promised a safe haven in Srebrenica occupying mass graves, and everything after that, despite a surprisingly good marketing campaign, turned forever to ashes.

So far, I think it is completely fair to see Libya as a success. A strictly interpreted no-fly zone would have been the worst combination of intervention and ineffectiveness, but working as both the strategic and tactical air force for the Rebels has leveled the playing field and allowed the Rebels time to organize while the Gaddhafi loyalists could read the writing on the wall and decide to change sides. There is no doubt that had the world not intervened, Gaddhafi's air, armor, heavy weapons and superior firepower would have quickly doomed the rebellion, and the fall of Misrata and later Benghazi would have been horrific, brutal massacres of the first order. So the intervention in Libya has met the key criterion for humanitarian military intervention - the minimal force required to change the combat dynamic so the bad guy loses, while being prepared to kill members of either side in sufficient numbers if they threaten non combatants. It certainly remains to be seen what the outcome and disengagement will look like, but so far it's pretty easy to see Libya as a successful operation.

I would have been prepared to support intervention in Rwanda and Sudan, but it seems that industrial scale murder and rape of civilians is necessary, but not sufficient to cause the international community, particularly the US and Europe, to act. In a cynical moment, one might observe that in order to qualify for humanitarian intervention, a nation either needs to be populated by white Europeans, or have significant natural resources, particularly oil reserves. This may or may not be exclusively true, as the sample size is necessarily small, but it obviously must be considered at least a contributing factor. But one Ranger Battalion with sufficient air mobility could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Rwanda, and al-Bashir could have been coerced to moderate his behavior and control the paramilitaries by holding some of his more treasured assets at risk.

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Mac Defender - Old Lessons, Still Unlearned

2011-06-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

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I use generic PCs and Linux because they are cheap. I have (almost) nothing against Apple's OSX or even Microsoft's Windows except for their cost. Now the truth is I would prefer Ubuntu, SUSE or Fedora anyway, because of the small footprint, flexible configuration and willingness to abandon legacy technology that makes the commercial OSs so huge and clumsy. But all in all, it's really just an economic and personal preference decision.

But one of the most odious things about Windows is the hordes of clamoring, shambling malware always pawing at the doors and windows like a legion of the undead, requiring an unacceptable amount of time and money to hold mostly at bay. I've had not one, but two computers slowly die, groaning under the weight of too much malevolent and greedy software, installed dishonestly or even surreptitiously. It's an unpleasant and somewhat creepy feeling to know that there are constant probes and attacks coming in just under the surface, all manner of unsavory and straight-up criminal attempts to steal or break your stuff.

Now, there are two ways to protect an OS from software with bad intentions. First, you can harden the OS. This may seem obvious, but it requires users to understand and explicitly approve any software installation at all, and unbelievably, users seem to be resistant to this minimal effort to control their computing environment. Second, an OS can develop an ecosystem of for-profit companies that provide subscription-based protection against MOST viruses and malware. It is important to bear in mind that these companies would be out of business in a year if Operating System vendors actually DID ship a secure, hardened OS, so one has to be suspicious of the symbiotic profit relationship between these industry segments and wonder just how high a priority the elimination of these sorts of threats might actually be. In fact, we already know that they have the capability to detect and defeat threats heuristically, but insist upon the older, less capable 'pattern matching' approach. Why? Well, could it be that pattern matching requires continual updates that lends itself well to a subscription based approach that creates a recurring revenue stream, where software intelligence that could detect and disable a threat based on its behaviors would be a one-time purchase at best?

But as for the Mac, OSX and iOS, there is no real technological impediment to creating the same kind of horrific miasma of infections, rootkits and malware as we see on Windows. Sure, it might be a little harder to write these packages for the Mac, and it might require a little more in the way of social engineering to convince people to install them, but that's nothing that can't be overcome with relative ease. No, the real reason that the focus has been on Windows has been the overwhelmingly larger numbers of potential targets in the field. But Apple has been having a LOT of success, not just with the iPod and iPhone, but with their computers too, and that makes them a more 'interesting' target. And importantly, this is a user base that has zero experience dealing with the kind of high-threat environment that is the every day user experience using Windows.

Which brings us to Mac Defender and the seemingly out-of-proportion buzz around what would, in the Windows world, be an unremarkable and garden variety attempt to extract credit card information from a particularly gullible user. It seems to me that it signals a widening of the fetid swamp that surrounds commercial operating systems. At least one group of MalWare authors decided that there are enough Macs in the field at this point that they now represent a viable and potentially profitable target. And although the Mac Defender infection is a clumsy and easily avoided one, you can be certain that its success in penetrating and disrupting the Mac user community has been noted, and will be quickly exploited by both the MalWare development and Anti-Virus communities. Think of it as nothing more than a proof of concept, with more toxic and destructive keyloggers and rootkits, along with a new marketing message to drive the adoption of commercial anti-virus software to follow.

In short, Mac users can now expect to have to spend more time and money fending off the multitude of exploits, attacks and probes that have been a constant in the Microsoft world for decades. In that respect their life will become more like Windows users, and their experience with the online universe will be more adversarial, and much less pleasant. The snake is loose in the garden and nothing will ever be the same again.
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Grim Fairy Tales - Economic Growth and the Future of the US Economy

2011-06-04T10:23:00.000-07:00

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American GDP is something north of fourteen trillion dollars. Currently, GDP growth is anemic at best, so while it is not actually negative, it's not as if we're seeing any kind of healthy increase, even as 150,000 people join the workforce every month and the real unemployment rate is over 15%. But to read even the most pessimistic pundits, there is an odd, yet profound sense of certainty that the American economy will get back on trend at SOME point - the debate is really around when, and whether that process can be expedited. But no one expresses any doubt that by 2015, or 2018, or even 2021, America will be back to having a booming economy with a healthy unemployment rate under 5% and GDP growth in the 4-5% range. It's true. Go see if you can find anyone postulating American GDP declining over the next ten years. I'll wait.

But what you'll notice is that none of these prognosticators explain where the growth might come from. The growth is taken as a given, as if it is impossible to conceive of an America in decline. I submit we're already there.

The American economy in the 21st century is predicated on two mutually supporting platforms. The people, increasingly, work in service type jobs, and three quarters of GDP is consumer spending. So the expectation, assuming someone is not postulating the imminent return of full-scale manufacturing employment to the US, is that there will be enough service jobs that pay enough money to support consumer spending that exceeds that which we saw in the peak of the housing and household credit bubble. But that seems mathematically impossible. Wages are flat, or falling. Unions have collapsed, benefits and pensions are dying, people are expected to contribute to their own retirement (or what? Well, that certainly remains to be seen. But two words come to mind. Cat. Food.). Energy, food and commodity prices are rising, a trend that cannot be expected to slow, and there is a kind of callous sense of heartless disinterest in the suffering due to economic hardships in our communities. Public sector employment is declining steeply, the manufacturing and construction sectors are smoldering wreckage, and any job that can be outsourced to a place with cheap labor costs continues to vanish.

We can invent things. But with the depressed economy, spending on R&D in the public, private and academic sectors is low and falling. And when we DO invent something, the billions of dollars generated by building it go to offshore factories. Even nominally 'good' trends can serve to reduce American economic activity. For example, software is an area where America is strong, and yet virtually all the interesting innovations, from Web Services to Big Data Analysis to Core Operating Systems are happening in the Free Open Source community. Sure, having access to Linux and Android and Tomcat and Hadoop can drive both innovation and employment, but it's hard to miss the fact that none of these immensely popular and necessary tools are being produced and sold by companies that employ people.

And when you look at sectors that do have some healthy growth, the picture only gets darker. So-called 'Homeland Security' and 'Defense' spending account for a significant measure of US employment, but what is the multiplier effect of building a nuclear submarine, a secret radar system or drone aircraft? These contracts provide jobs, but they do nothing to contribute to further economic growth beyond the retail consumer spending of those employed. The prison system is similar - providing a lot of low-wage jobs in local communities at an immense economic and social cost. In our narrow-minded quest to incarcerate vast segments of our poor and disenfranchised population in order to make our cities safe for more retail service jobs, we create a cancer that eats away at our society from below.

Most of the talk is around a "Green Industries" segment, but have you noticed that nobody can really tell you what that means? First, any 'Green' or renewable energy technology will necessarily remain a niche technology as long as fossil fuels can maintain their artificial price advantage. If we priced fossil fuels correctly, taking into account the negative externalities such as pollution and Global Climate Change, gasoline would approach $10 a gallon and there would be a real market for alternative transportation solutions, not to mention the sudden availability of R&D dollars for alternative energy generation solutions. In fact, if we were to price fossil fuels and their carbon emissions correctly, Global Climate Change would very rapidly cease to be a problem. People sometimes talk about a "Marshall Plan" for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and this is precisely what that would look like. Unfortunately, it simply is not going to happen.

But more to the point, is there something we call 'Green Industries' that genuinely could make a major contribution to American GDP growth? What would it be? Can we really make enough solar panels, windmills, fuel cells and weatherstripping to replace even a fraction of the depleted manufacturing base? I sure don't see how.

So here we are, on a treadmill headed slowly downward. Unemployment is high, wages are flat, household debt is high. So consumer spending is down. As a result, the private sector seeks to avoid high employment and capital spending. There is an immense and real need for infrastructure spending - roads, rail, sewage, smart grid, bridge maintenance - but in this political environment, fueled as it is by deep economic fears, there is no appetite for government spending, even when the Fed can borrow money literally at no cost.

So I'm stumped. I recognize that few foresaw the massive technology driven growth of the 90s and early aughts, but at least there was an understanding that technology would contribute in some fairly large way to GDP. Now? Now technology consumption is a huge piece of American spending, but it's all imported. The hundreds of billions of dollars generated by manufacturing our electronic devices goes to the GDP of developing nations. And there's nothing to be done about that. It was a race to the bottom, and we lost.

In the area around Vail, Colorado, there was over the last couple decades a great influx of wealth. People of means wanted to live there, wanted a cabin there, wanted to vacation there. The price of everything skyrocketed, from rents to home prices to everyday essentials. Art galleries and upscale restaurants drove out supermarkets and bowling alleys. Ultimately, there was a crisis as nobody could afford to live in Vail except consumers. They wanted their hotel housekeepers, their waiters and busboys, their cops and janitors and plumbers, their dry cleaners and retail clerks. And those people couldn't afford to live there. The service providers had to scramble, subsidizing commutes, setting up private bus lines to bring workers as much as a hundred miles from where they could afford to live, even setting up dormitory - type accommodation for workers to stay in town. This is a cautionary tale.

America cannot simply become a financial services economy sitting on top of a huge population of low-wage service workers catering to financial sector wealth. If financial and corporate interests continue to strangle unions, export jobs, hold down wages and limit necessary government spending, they will find themselves living in walled compounds in an increasingly dystopian landscape of poverty, hatred and violence. Certainly, they will have the option to leave for Switzerland, Germany or Dubai. But one wonders if they even realize that if the American middle class consumer goes the way of the dinosaur, they will have to find a new supply of readily-influenced customers with significant disposable income to replace them - and that does no appear to be forthcoming. At some point, it simply HAS to be in the interest of the plutocrats to make sure there are enough Americans with enough money to sustain their profit growth. One wonders how bad things will have to get before they act on that interest...
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Homeland Insecurity

2011-06-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

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Defense contractors Lockheed Martin and L3 communications have recently been the victims of an extremely professional and sophisticated team of hackers. Their networks have been penetrated an unknown number of times, to an unstated degree, at a loss of unspecified data. Now, the good news is that the most classified data sits on "air-gapped" networks, computers that cannot be accessed from the Internet, or even from any computer that can access the Internet. But that doesn't mean that a tremendous amount of critical information wasn't compromised. And here's the thing: Everyone KNEW this was going to happen, and it was entirely preventable. There is simply no point in a public-private network security partnership when those partners are either unwilling or unable to act, even when they have certain knowledge of critical vulnerabilities.

Quick lesson in network security. At its root, the network just needs to know that you really are who you say you are - this is called authentication. Because if you are truly and legitimately YOU, the network knows what privileges you are entitled to. As Bruce Schneir put it so succinctly, you provide authentication to the network in one or more of three ways: What you know, What you have, and What you are. Put simply, what you know is a password, what you have is some kind of device or smart card, what you are is biometrics. If you secure a network using two of these, called "two factor authentication", there is virtually no way to hack that network by spoofing a legitimate login. If someone gets your token, they don't have your password, and if they crack your password, they still need your token. Of course, they can easily crack your password, so if they could somehow clone your token, they could authenticate as you to the network. And the very assumed security of a network using a two factor authentication scheme would mean that it would be very hard to react to such a breach.

March, 2011. EMC security subsidiary RSA, providers of the widely used SecureID network security token reported a network intrusion, with some uncertain level of data loss. All the news wires carried the report, but very few people outside of the IT and Security communities had any sense of what it meant. But many of us have been holding our breath, waiting for exactly this. It seems incredible that RSA's clients wouldn't demand that every SecureID token be replaced immediately - how could you possibly be in the network security business and NOT assume that the tokens in the field are all compromised?

Think of RSA tokens like this. It's a simple little device with a custom chip designed to do one thing. The token itself has a unique identifier, and it leaves the factory with a 'seed', a numeric or alpha-numeric string that represents a 'starting point'. Every one is different - or not, it theoretically doesn't matter. Because every sixty seconds (or whatever interval is specified) the device takes the current string and does some kind of mathematical operation on it. So it generates a different code every minute of every day that is known only to the device, and displayed when the user requests it. So what the user has is a unique device that displays a unique number that can be verified as having been generated by a specific device. There are over 40 million of these 'key fob' devices in use, along with over a hundred million software clients, often by very large multi-national firms and government agencies.

So back at least as far as March, RSA knew they had been hacked, and they knew it was at least possible, if not likely, that many, perhaps even all of their authentication code generating systems had been compromised. They have thousands of clients, many with genuine high level security concerns, who depended on those systems to protect the data on their network. How could they have decided to just go on with business as usual? How could they not have told their customers, PAYING customers, that the Security devices they issued to their employees had become insecure, and that they could no longer trust that any authenticated login was not an attacker? How could they not have begun a program of replacing those systems immediately? Would it be embarrassing? Yes. Inconvenient? Absolutely. Expensive? Tremendously. But it's not like this is some unimportant IT side business. This is RSA. THE security company, in business to serve only one purpose - network security, encryption and authentication. And far from providing those services at this point, they offered only a false sense of security and tens of millions of pathways into tens of thousands of 'secure' networks all over the globe.

It seems like a weird kind of paralysis has set in, all around the world, at every level. Whether it's Climate Change, Unemployment, Regional Peace or even just basic Network Security, some unholy combination of the profit motive, political cowardice and tribal rancor has effectively eliminated the ability to take any action, on anything. Everything costs money. Everything entails risk. But it seems as if doing nothing has become the cheapest, safest solution to every problem.

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With Friends Like Us....

2011-05-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

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The Pakistani government is quite unhappy with the behavior of the United States, their economic benefactor and sometimes ally in the war on - well, whatever it is we are fighting against. The original understanding was we were in South Asia to disrupt and destroy organizations, primarily al Queada, that had the intention and ability to mount mass casualty attacks against American civilians. This has evolved into a war on any Muslim community or organization that might do something violent to someone somewhere for some reason that we'd really prefer not to analyze at this point.

So in the course of this endlessly expanding conflict, we regularly bomb villages in Pakistan. Now, for some reason that's never been satisfactorily explained to me, using airplanes without pilots to bomb civilians in sovereign nations with whom we are not at war, even those we consider our putative allies, is perfectly OK. Even when we would be the very first to proudly declare that it would NOT be OK for us to bomb Pakistani villages using airplanes WITH pilots. Needless to say, many apparently unenlightened Pakistanis fail to understand this distinction either, and would in general strongly prefer if nobody was bombing them from any kind of airborne contraption.

Then, in something out of a Tom Cruise movie, an American CIA operative in Lahore, busily doing something secret and nefarious, drew his Glock and fired through the windshield of his car at two Pakistanis on a motorcycle. When one of them ran (the other was down, dying) the American agent, Raymond Davis, chased him down and shot him dead too. He called for an extraction team to get him clear before the authorities could show up, then began using his cell phone to take videos of the bodies and surroundings. Despite desperately driving the wrong way on a Lahore thoroughfare, killing another motorcyclist in the process (honestly, do they have something against two - wheeled transportation?), the extraction team was unable to reach Davis and he was taken into custody. As is well known, the US paid at least two and a half million dollars to the families of his victims in order to gain his release. Once again, the Pakistani population was unhappy with the behavior of the Americans in their country, apparently preferring that Americans have their shootouts in exotic foreign lands on the big screen.

But the real-life Tom Cruise movie didn't end there. Last month, a team of American special operations commandos raided a compound north of Islamabad, killing a comfortably-ensconced Osama bin Laden. Of course, elements of the Pakistani government, intelligence services and military knew he was there, and were protecting him, so the Americans decided it would not be prudent to share their plans with them. In more fastidious times, this is called an "act of war", but today is merely another way that the US demonstrates its commitment to it's friends and allies. Of course, these events were just the high points, but the net result of Pakistan's ten year relationship with the US is massive public anti-American sentiment, an embarrassed military seeking ways to reassert their authority within their own borders, and a government looking at its options for a new international benefactor, and finding a willing investor in China.

All of which brings us to this week, and the visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Pakistan. Against the background of increasing anti-American sentiment, and the Pakistani's newfound independence and demands that America respect her sovereignty, Ms. Clinton's role was to find a way to encourage or coerce Pakistan to continue to serve American needs and desires, even at the expense of their own. So she presented the Pakistanis with a list of people living in Pakistan with whom the American government is unhappy, and demanded they be killed. Now, I've been a house guest with reluctant hosts at times, and one of the first lessons is when they begin to perceptibly tire of your shenanigans and begin to seriously entertain the possibility of just throwing you and your possessions out on the sidewalk, one of the very first things you do NOT do is demand they poison the fishtank and blow up the den. It just tends not to be the 'course correction' they are looking for.

One of the larger shortcomings of American foreign policy is the relentless, unqualified insistence that other nations shape their policy to primarily serve American interests. This process inevitably results in bad outcomes - either the nation attempts to do so, at a significant cost to their standing and credibility both in their region and with their own people, or they refuse to do as demanded and finds themselves on the receiving end of economic and political isolation and even sanctions. America is often like a bully who moves into a neighborhood and offers you a bag of marbles to play with him, but if you later go across the street to play with Billy he beats you up. One wonders if the rest of the world will watch the way the strategic relationship between the US and Pakistan has played out, and when Washington comes calling after the next global crisis, those nations might just decide to seek another, more mutually beneficial alliance.

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Thinking About Thinking About Stuff

2011-05-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

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One of the things that is most repellent about the Republican Party in their role as the political wing of the American Political Right is a widespread and repeated tendency to adopt extreme and radical tactics in order to advance their agenda, even if the country would benefit if they did otherwise, and then decry those same extreme tactics when used against them. Or, of course, the process also works in reverse - a paroxysm of outrage over a tactic that they will immediately adopt when the opportunity presents itself (google 'demon pass' for an example).

Now, somewhere at the most structural level of my political worldview is one very simple organizing principle, a foundational belief stated in the negative in recognition of its profound clarity: I do not want to be like them. Ever. In any way. Full stop.

Now, a few years ago, when the worst American President of all time, George W. Bush was nominating a foul collection of hacks, apparatchiks, party functionaries and wild-eyed true believers to key positions in government, foreign service and the judiciary, I believed, and often stated, that the Democrats in the Senate were doing their jobs, indeed, serving their nation and their constituency, but slowing and often blocking these Presidential appointments. And when they refused to allow the Senate to adjourn in order to prevent Bush from using the Recess Appointments mechanism to put these people in these often powerful and consequential positions, I cheered. I smiled and watched them send a local Senator in every morning to gavel the Senate into session, even though there was no one else there, and I felt a frisson of schaudenfreude when I thought about how frustrated Bush and Cheney must be by this mere parliamentary tactic.

So one could not be surprised, not really, when the Republicans objected to the call for adjournment this afternoon. They believe, and not without some fairly valid reasons, that the Obama White House might take advantage of the spring recess to appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the CFPB. The Senate will stay in pro forma session and, as it will not be in recess, there can be no recess appointments.

So here's the thing. I LIKE Elizabeth Warren. I think she's the ideal head of the CFPB, and I think an effective, functional agency like the CFPB is both good for consumers and good for the economy. Much of the worst excesses of the housing bubble would have been subject to oversight by a consumer watchdog agency, and as such, most of the worst of the sub prime mortgages might not have been written at all. No one can say for sure, but that is the intent of the Dodd Frank legislation that created the agency in the first place.

So my first instinct is to be annoyed by this action, as it clearly steps on the prerogatives of a duly elected executive branch. And hey, it's not like the Republicans in Congress have been playing it at all straight when it comes to their "Advise and Consent" constitutional role. They should NOT be allowed to get away with it!

But no. If I didn't feel like that when the Democrats did it just a couple years ago, to feel that way now would be disingenuous in the extreme. The media likes to use the term 'partisan' as a pejorative, something to be avoided whenever possible, something toxic to discourse and disruptive of political solutions to pressing problems. But that isn't right. Partisanship is inherent in a multi-party political system - there HAS to be some philosophical or ideological differences between the parties or these would only be one. Partisanship is the political equivalent of the adversarial system in justice. It causes groups of people with different political agendas to find a way to work together to make sure that problems are solved and the constituencies are provided for. But it would certainly be a toxic form of partisanship if I supported a tactic when one side exercised it and was outraged when the other side did precisely the same thing. That would be acting like...like a Republican.

So gavel away, Mr. Minority Leader, even while Ms. Warren must wait for another time. And when she is elevated to the CFPB leadership by recess appointment some time in the future, I'll remember the genuine offense I took to the appointment of John Bolton to the United Nations post and I'll try to work up some authentic outrage. Because I don't want to be like them...
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Israel and the US - Realizing the Possible

2011-05-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

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There's a lot to be said about Israel and the US, about Netanyahu and Obama. But a lot of that tends to wander off into the weeds. Before even beginning the discussion, there are two key points to keep uppermost in mind. First, both Netanyahu and Obama are first and foremost professional politicians. That is, they became the political leadership of their respective nations by winning democratic elections, and whatever intentions they have for retaining those leadership positions are dependent upon maintaining a functional majority within their constituencies. The second thing to remember is that the relationship is premised, at it's very core, on a set of asymmetries that control and define it. And the primary asymmetry is that Obama has NO ability to influence Israeli policy, but through the efforts of the lobbies, primarily AIPAC, Netanyahu has the ability to directly affect American policy through the US Congress.

The entire basis for the relationship, and any rough patches it may hit, is rooted in this key asymmetry. Since Obama cannot influence Israeli policy, his only option for trying to effect events in the Middle East is through American policy. But he lacks the ability to make changes in American policy without both being thwarted by Congress and putting his political coalition, and thus his chances for re-election, at risk. Of course, it is also true that Netanyahu is rigidly constrained by his political coalition, which drives him to take the very actions that create friction with the United States, but unlike Obama, it is not clear that, given broad political freedom of action, he would do anything substantially different.

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It's ultimately easy to see how Likud's maximalist position on negotiations is inevitably destructive to Israel. A first-grader could clearly understand that the only alternative to a two-state solution is a one-state solution. It's really no more complicated than that. And in a one state solution, either Israel grants citizenship to the Palestinians, ultimately becoming Palestine itself through the inexorable combination of demographics and politics, or Israel does NOT grant citizenship to her non Jewish residents, resulting in a de facto apartheid state that will be an international pariah, subject to increasing international political and economic pressure until the apartheid state collapses, resulting in Israel becoming Palestine.

This, more than anything else, is what informs us that Netanyahu will continue to espouse a hard line on the West Bank and Gaza, continuing settlement expansion while threatening and occasionally attacking his neighbors in the region. No matter what he truly believes, he knows that any other course will break up his coalition and thus he would lose his position of power. So, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, it is pointless to try to encourage or even coerce Israel to change their policies. It would require an act of political suicide, and if we know anything about Bibi, it's that he's a survivor. So, since the question is no longer "What should Israel do?" (if it ever really was), and the Palestinians seem to have settled on their own course of action (unilateral declaration of a Palestinian State), the only remaining variable is what the United States will do.

Prior to the 2012 elections, we can expect the Obama administration to toe the line on Mid-East policy, hewing closely to the goals and desires of the Likudniks in power and their proxies in the Congress. As long as the calculation is that a hard line against the Palestinian cause results in the best political outcome in American national elections, the Israeli leadership can expect unlimited and unquestioning support from Washington DC. The more interesting question is what happens AFTER the election.

The US will explicitly veto Palestinian statehood in the UNSC in September, and as time goes by world opinion of Israel and the brutal mis-treatment of a stateless, powerless Palestinian people will increasingly harden. By the time he is elected to a second term, Obama will be the only real ally Israel has left, in a region still reeling from the political changes brought about by the 'Arab Spring'. With his second Presidential term, Obama's political career will be at an end and he will be considering his legacy. Meanwhile, global opprobrium for Israel will be higher, and international political pressure for some kind of justice for the Palestinian people will be at its peak. The newly democratic Arab nations, along with those old despots who only survived by realizing they have a responsibility to their people, will find common cause in demanding an end to the occupation.

The Israeli occupation is obviously unstable, and unsustainable. The Palestinians WILL have a homeland at some point, either alongside a Jewish Israel or replacing it. While it would make sense to reach an equitable solution sooner rather than later, political realities lead us to the conclusion that the best case is the status quo begins to change in 2013. And it certainly could be longer. But the balance of power is inexorably shifting, and the political and economic realities in play all mitigate against unfettered American and Israeli power. The calendar is the only ally the Palestinians really need.
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A Head On Collision With Reality

2011-05-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

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One of the irrefutable measures of the viability of a political movement is whether it falls within the political and economic belief system of the constituency in question. We judge a movement as "radical" when its support is limited to those most committed to that ideology, while the vast majority of less politically invested voters are not merely disinterested, but openly hostile to that movement. This is the primary reason that even opposing political movements have traditionally had narrow, technical differences, and while goals can vary widely, implementation tends to follow a well-rutted path. When a movement seeks to implement its agenda in a manner that falls outside of the regular experiences and expectations of the vast majority of voters, it is by definition a fringe or radical movement, and will seldom register in the national political conversation.

It would be an exception, of course, if that radical or fringe program were to become the primary plank of one of the two mainstream American political parties, one that they explicitly supported and, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, insisted that it was the only reasonable response to an existential threat. Which brings us to Paul Ryan, and the special congressional election in New York's 26th district.

As I'm sure you've read by now, NY26 is a longstanding safe Republican congressional district in upstate New York. The seat became prematurely vacant when Republican incumbent Chris Lee succumbed to the overpowering horniness of his own unique mid-life crisis, was exposed on Gawker, and resigned. A special election was scheduled for May 24th. Now, this was going to be just another pro-forma exercise in safe/gerrymandered district politics, but two things happened. First, the Republican candidate, Assemblywoman Jane Corwin, expected to be a shoo-in for the Congressional seat, was challenged on the right by Tea Party Wackadoodle Jack Davis, along with the duly expected Democratic cannon fodder Kathy Hochul. And even as Davis pulled the far right votes away from Corwin, the campaigns were running pretty much as expected - until Paul Ryan forced the US House of Representatives to vote on a budget that eliminated Medicare for Americans under 55 years old. Support for that budget became a Republican litmus test, and Jane Corwin embraced it with open arms. And lost significant amounts of support. Today, on the eve of the election, polling shows both Corwin and Davis losing support to Hochul, who appears poised to win an historic victory.

Of course, anything can happen tomorrow, and Jane Corwin could still win the election. But even so, we can at this point take away two key lessons, lessons that will provide the framework for the debates around the 2012 General election. The first, and truly obvious lesson, is that a political agenda that is unpopular among it's constituency is doomed to fail. Sure, this seems obvious, but the young lunatics of the far right fringe that has taken control of the Republican Party were congenitally unable to discern the difference between votes for them and votes for their agenda. They repeatedly operated from the assumption that their election to the House of Representatives represented a mandate to implement their entire agenda, regardless of popular political risks associated with its more plutocratic policies. So they attacked labor, working people and their unions, in an attempt to help businesses become more profitable. And it was genuinely hard for them to understand that some of their strongest supporters would react negatively to a policy that hurt them and their families. Then came the Ryan budget plan. As the press worshiped it for being "courageous" and "serious", the House Republicans grew emboldened, as the plan was highly popular in the hermetically sealed environment in which they lived and worked. So they convinced themselves that the popularity of Medicare among seniors was strictly a matter of narrow self-interest, and all but six of them voted for a budget that preserved Medicare for those over 55, and privatized it for all others. Now, of course, the Republican Party, from Jane Corwin to Newt Gingrich, has realized that Medicare is a third rail that is politically suicidal to touch - a lesson, oddly, they understood clearly in their fight against Obama's health care reform legislation. Of course, as the Republicans frantically try to walk back their support for the elimination of Medicare, they struggle with the fact that no less than 235 of them voted for the Ryan budget when it passed the House.

The second lesson is more nuanced, and will take longer to have an effect, but it may turn out to be critically important in American politics in the future. This lesson has less to do with a political or ideological agenda and more to do with its implementation. You see, the Republican agenda is straightforward - Lower taxes on the wealthy and corporations, less regulation on businesses, higher profits through lower wages, fewer benefits and fewer government services - but when expressed in unambiguous terms is unpopular. So for the last few decades, Republican politicians have addressed this rather significant shortcoming by lying. The thing that made this tactic successful was their broad success at co-opting the media, so that there was no credible or respected outlet that would challenge their narrative, no matter how absurd it became.

So here, for the first time, we see this approach fail. Certainly the Republicans became so collectively delusional that they massively over-reached, but however it came to pass, the lies they told about the implementation and effects of their agenda are exposed, and they are being forced to walk back the inarguably untrue statements they made in the budget debate. Now, much of their distasteful agenda remains concealed behind their claims that the US budget deficit is an immediate and existential threat to everything we love and believe, and that everything - short of raising revenue, which would, they say, also destroy the economy - and anything must be done to reduce that deficit NOW! This position falls apart whenever it is examined, but a lot of Americans have been willing to believe it without question. Which allowed the Republicans to move their real agenda forward. But now their lies have been exposed on a budget matter. Now we are seeing cracks in the dam - if it is ok to question their honesty and credibility on budget matters, it becomes that much more acceptable to hold their other claims up to genuine examination.

This may be the key lesson going into the political silly season leading up to November 2012. It may be that the parties, and their candidates, will be held to some kind of standard of truth telling. It may be that reporters, pundits and even moderators challenge the most bald faced of lies, demand evidence to support claims and ask for examples of actual events in response to generalized smears. It may not only be bits of our meager social safety net that are preserved, but some important parts of our political system also.
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State of Confusion

2011-05-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

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The American Political Right is noteworthy for, among other things, a single-minded, obsessive focus on a particular set of issues and ideological positions. Their entire political constituency has a virtually homogeneous set of political beliefs, a single unified ideology that can be expressed in a series of brief 'bumper stickers' that simultaneously define a position and eliminate any and all nuance from the issue. They wield their political beliefs as a blunt instrument, and it is universally accepted by American Conservatives that there is one right answer to any political or philosophical question. From abortion to climate change to energy and tax policy, there is much less variation from issue to issue on the Right than there could ever possibly be on the left. It is fortunate that this kind of narrow world view, one that doesn't only refuse to tolerate dissent, but enforces its internal orthodoxy with a brutally exclusionary process, is necessarily self-limiting, ensuring that a political belief system rigidly enforced by it's own most radical adherents will never appeal to a large enough constituency to actually hold unfettered power.

But it is often noted that the overarching narrative that drives these specific issue positions, the single great organizing principle of the American Political Right is that of 'small governement'. Indeed, there is no set of beliefs about the purpose of government, other than it's management of the monopoly on the use of violent coercion, so there is no sense of just precisely how small government should be - only that in any and all cases, it should be smaller. This belief is predicated on an economic philosophy of radical free-market capitalism, where private enterprise and property ownership should, in every case, be out of reach of any government control or manipulation. Now, obviously, there is a massive inherent hypocrisy in this worldview, as those who espouse it have no problem calling for the government to outlaw, limit and punish anything they do not believe should be permitted, from abortion to homosexuality.

But as we have learned over the last decade, hypocrisy is never a disqualifier, and indeed carries with it no consequences or sanction. But there is a larger question contained within this 'small government' dogma, one I have never seen questioned and one I genuinely don't understand. All these demands for lesser government regulation, increasingly limited government participation in the community and, as a necessary outcome, less government demands for tax revenue to support its interventions in the lives and livelihoods of Americans, without exception speak to the Federal government. It is an article of faith, going back to the civil war and the civil rights debates of the fifties and sixties, that these decisions, and, must go the unspoken corollary, these government interventions and attendant taxation, are the domain of the States, and not any greater collective federal government or agency.

Well, OK then. But here's where I'm left confused. How is the one, in any functional or operational manner, really any different from the other? If I send less money to Washington and more to Sacramento, this somehow results in greater liberty? If Federal legislators decline to pass laws that constrain my right to a gun or an abortion or a marriage, but State legislators do so enthusiastically, how is that constraint any better? The argument I can come up with is that this patchwork approach would result in various regional enclaves where one could choose to live that would more closely align legal and economic policy with constituent's ideology. Eventually, I suppose, enforced by some kind of selective 'migration' policy that would prevent people with different political ideas and beliefs from coming in and "disrupting" the community.

It seems to me that, in today's highly tribal, often bigoted and extremely polarized political environment, a genuine hands off, 'leave it to the states' policy would remarkably quickly lead to the complete dissolution of what we in modern times think of as America. It would be some sort of very loose affiliation of shifting regional alliances, a 'No-Longer-United' States of America, and that the liberal tendencies of the educated and creative classes would lead to the severe economic decline of the more right wing regions. It's so clearly an unworkable arrangement that there is no real possibility of it ever coming to pass, but that doesn't provide a satisfactory answer to the larger question. Why is one government's intervention welcome, while another is anathema? How are they different, and how is one more democratic?
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Ron Paul, the Civil Rights Act and the Social Value of Libertarianism

2011-05-14T15:03:00.000-07:00

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Ron Paul, like his son, says he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act. Unlike his son, he doesn't hide, duck or dissemble. Part of the thing that otherwise sane people sometimes find attractive about Ron Paul is he is not only honest in his political ideology, he is fearless in its expression. Unlike almost every other sitting legislator or high government official, if you ask him a question he will answer it. That is, the actual question that was asked, rather than the accepted procedure of answering a politically difficult question with an irrelevant talking point, as in "Senator, do you think large corporations should be able to avoid paying corporate income taxes?" "I believe that the most important challenge facing our Nation is job creation, and I will work tirelessly to make certain that is our focus".

But not Ron Paul. To assist him in this endeavor, he has a well-formed and highly developed political and economic philosophy, an 'all in' form of savage Randian Libertarianism. This particularly virulent ideology is best suited for know-it-all post adolescents, but in some cases people retain it into adulthood, at least as long as they can ignore its contradictions and logical outcome. In Paul's case, his opposition to the Civil Rights act, he says, is not rooted in racism but rather in the belief that government should not be allowed to make laws about how people utilize their own private property.

To be sure, the Civil Rights Act is a massive intrusion into private commerce. You might own a hotel or a restaurant, but the government mandates that there are criteria upon which you cannot deny service, no matter how deeply you might wish to. But segregation is a massive societal problem, and no matter how highly one might value laissez-faire capitalism, the markets were utterly unable to overcome the deeply ingrained social taboos and solve the problem. It took the coercive power of the government, enforced by judicial fiat and in many cases men at arms, to correct this societal wrong.

Now, we know from his own writings that Ron Paul is a virulent racist. But let's take him at his word that his objections to the Civil Rights Act, along with other government contributions to the nation's well-being, is authentically rooted in his ideological belief that individual rights and the free market trump any efforts by society to actively solve its own problems. This forces us to confront perhaps the most ridiculously toxic result of actually implementing a Libertarian political and economic system. That is, under this set of beliefs, you MUST blindly follow the constitution, even when doing so is overtly harmful to the people and their communities. If something is deemed 'unconstitutional' in the sense that the constitution does not expressly allow it, then it is not to be considered, regardless of the cost. This turns the concept of 'constitutionality' on its head - instead of something being unconstitutional because the constitution forbids it, in the Ron Paul worldview EVERYTHING is unconstitutional with the exception of only those things that are allowed. In this system, there are no options for dealing with problems or emergencies. Not only can the government not address large-scale injustices like segregation, but it cannot address emergencies like hurricanes and flooding, it cannot attempt to alleviate poverty or even educate the children.

It seems that it is a political philosophy that sticks to its most basic premises out of spite - a system of governance that by definition is unconcerned with the well being of the governed. That would stand idly by in the face of great suffering merely to remain true to a rigid set of governing principles. And a government that would do so has no legitimacy, no right to claim the power of governance, however disinterested, over a helpless and powerless population.
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People Power, Political Power, Fire Power and the Balance of Power in a Connected World

2011-05-08T11:06:00.000-07:00

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First there was Tunisia, with the people demanding change and the ancient, creaking government pushing back. Then came Egypt, with it's restive, hungry youth wondering what their lives might look like, and a sclerotic old dictator who never had a chance to understand the new order - he was gone before he could slaughter his people, once again, into submission. Now there's a referendum, a re-written constitution and elections coming, but inexorably the old political order moves in to take the reigns of power once again. The ridiculous, hated "emergency" laws will be history, but the same grinding, desultory economic reality will continue to take it's historic toll.

In Yemen and Syria, regimes fighting for their lives and livelihoods, but peering over the time horizon is the status quo, in a different guise, but the same, all the same. In Saudi and Iran, the power of the state called out to crush their own people's cry for a voice, for a chance, for a future. And in Bahrain, an oppressed and mal-treated majority rises up, and a wealthy, sclerotic monarchy reaches out to their sectarian brothers for the raw firepower necessary for them to retain their increasingly illegitimate power. For them, like so many historical autocrats, the end game is nothing but increasing violence, and people increasingly willing to sacrifice for a chance for their children. So many lessons, so poorly learned.

It's all happening in a small geographic region, but it's a diverse region, and what's happening in these countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf has many reasons, a hundred fathers and a thousand flashpoints. It's difficult to learn a lesson that is anything more than an ephemeral, passing explanation, a mere case-by-case analysis. But here's what we HAVE to learn - the one data point that can draw a line across the calendar, from police state to government made legitimate by its own people.

The question is simply this: Can democracy be born in violence? And the alternate option, can a people's demand for democracy be ended by violence? Historically, the answer to the first was a resounding, unequivocal yes. People could, and repeatedly have thrown off autocratic governance, even monarchy, in the name of self determination and a viable political process. The rule of law, not of men, came into being only when the people demanded it, and were willing not only to fight for it, but to die in whatever numbers it took. Certainly there are also historical examples of a regime being willing to use sufficient violence to crush dissent and cement their political power for another generation. But like so many other things, the rapid evolution of digital communication technology has changed these calculations, and for now, unsure of how the various dynamics play out, we watch, transfixed, as people fight for a voice in their own future, and the regimes that profit from their oppression, with no valid justification for their continued rule, fight only to intimidate, to raise the cost of rebellion until it exceeds that of the status quo.

As we watch the old line, those made wealthy and powerful by the previous regime maneuver against the politically naive people in Tunisia, we realize how hard it actually is to win a modern revolution. In Egypt, the power has always, ultimately, belonged to the military, and it remains to be seen just what sort of representative government they might allow. In Libya, a stalemate, leaving open the question of the efficacy of unfettered violence and brutality as a method for the preservation of power. And all around the region, the people bleed, not only blood and viscera, but hope itself as they come to realize the size and strength of the roadblocks to real change, and as they come, every day, to understand a little more clearly how alone they are, and how hopeless is their quest.

There is, within me, a real sense of anger and helplessness. First, at the brutal, self serving regimes, who have forgotten, if they ever knew at all, that the role of a nation's leadership is to serve, protect and improve the lives of their population. But then, in rapid succession at the rest of the world. What is our role? What responsibility do we collectively bear? It so often seems that everyone involved in the process has some kind agenda, that it's all about positioning, finding a seat at the table when the gunfire stops, or at least subsides. Commodities, trade routes, manufacturing hubs, cheap labor, timber - the only thing that seems to be left out of the calculation is the desperate hopes and aspirations of a population so hopeless that they believe their best future is to face down tanks unarmed.

In Libya, the world at least tries to make it a fight and not a slaughter. In Iran and Syria, the world shrugs it's collective shoulders as the slaughter is brief, information scarce and media coverage non-existent. In Egypt, the people may have made significant political progress, but that doesn't stop the basic tribal stupidity of religion from ending whatever unity the Egyptian people might have found in Tahrir Square.

And even as we watch these people, along with their dreams, die hard and slow on Democracy's altar, we ourselves turn away without a word as our Democracy unravels into some kind of Capitalist Security State, built in the name of greed, fear, hatred and bigotry and structured to serve only the wealthy and powerful. Is it sadder to watch people fight and die for a chance at what we have, or to watch us give it all up, unwilling to even raise our voices in protest?
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The bin Laden Wrap-Up -- Just Another Paragraph in a History Textbook

2011-05-07T14:04:00.000-07:00

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Christ. What is it with us? Is there anything, any single thing anymore that we won't argue over, accuse each other with indignation and outrage, tug at the threads and rumors in some attempt to prove something we already believe and have lost all willingness to re-examine? It long ago became stupid and inane, and has now become pathological. So of course, I want to offer my two cents on all matters bin Laden.

The Photos:

Of course you don't release the photos. Why would you? What could it possibly accomplish? If the American leadership is convinced he's dead, then he's DEAD. Why would they feel some need to prove it? If there are people who choose to believe he's not really dead, why would photos published by the very same agencies who claimed to take his life in the first place convince them? All that would be accomplished is that the world would have another reason to talk about America's violence and brutality, as his bullet shattered skull and lifeless eyes became the latest iconic image of a courageous anti-imperialist Muslim martyr. Similarly, the burial at sea was a wise decision. With no remains, there remains nothing to fight some endless ideological tug of war over, nothing to hold up as an example of, well, anything. Once he was confirmed KIA, there was nothing left to fear from him except narrative, so anything that silences that narrative can only be considered positive.

He was executed without due process:

Ok, if you want to take this position, you need to consider what you're really arguing for, or against. The attack on bin Laden was a military operation, conducted on foreign soil with the very real concern that elements of that host government were assisting him in avoiding capture. The military operates with a different set of imperatives than law enforcement - law enforcement takes people into custody and confiscates their stuff, the military kills people and breaks their stuff. So if you truly believe that a serious effort should have been made to arrest, extradite and try bin Laden, then what you are actually saying is you do not believe he was a legitimate military target. That the FBI, in coordination with State, should have made a formal request through Pakistani government channels to raid the compound and arrest those present.

Now this can be a perfectly valid argument, and depending upon your views of what appropriate counter terror operations should look like, can be made with consistency and persuasiveness. I, personally, believe it to be wrong. It was in this case a method very likely doomed to fail, and although it is certainly true that practical considerations should not be the sole drivers in decisions like this, they must enter into the deliberations. You have this chance to get the head of al Quaeda, how much are you willing to entrust that opportunity to the good intentions of the Pakistani government? At the same time, Osama bin Laden is not a cypher. We know who he is, we know what he is, and there is no argument or debate about the things he has done. And while I have often argued that it is ludicrous to claim we are at war with a small, trans national group of ideologically driven criminals, that does not in any way preclude them from becoming a military target. When they are attempting to launch large scale attacks, or even more so, when they have an established history of launching large scale attacks, they become a military target - there is no cohesive argument against attacking them. But make no mistake - when you order a military attack, you are ordering people killed, not captured.

And to second guess the people with the guns in the noise and chaos of a night raid is silly. We'll never know the circumstances that caused that operator to open fire. We'll never know what he saw, what people were doing, what the lighting was like, even if he knew who he was firing on. But knowing everything we know about Osama bin Laden, his mindset, his ideology, his undeniable commitment to his cause, it's not in any way a shock that he might go for a gun, choosing to go down fighting rather than meekly surrender. And while being the shooter who got bin Laden is without doubt a career enhancing outcome, being the shooter who got killed on the raid that got bin Laden is substantially less so.

It seems sometimes that after all the horrific and nefarious decisions the US has made in the decade since 9/11, from detention without due process to torture to warrantless wiretaps to outright aggressive invasions, there are a lot of Americans who have utterly lost faith. To be sure, there are others who refuse to even consider that anything the US does might be illegal, or even morally wrong. To my mind, both of these are the conclusions of people who have stopped considering events discretely, who have made up their minds before the events occurred and have lost whatever ability they might have had to consider each event on the merits and the available information as a result of partisan or ideological passions. It is worthwhile to occasionally consider one's position on matters such as these, to try and determine if it is the result of information or preconceptions.

Afghanistan:

There are a number of voices being raised now, suggesting that with the demise of bin Laden we can quickly draw down our troop presence in Afghanistan. My feelings are mixed. Certainly, anything that can be used to try to encourage the American Political leadership to end that pointless, indefensible charnel house should be used. It's been many years since anything even approximating a coherent argument for American troops fighting a local insurgency in support of a corrupt despot in a desperately poor nation on the other side of the planet could be made, and if it takes some random historical event to bring about the beginning of the end of that seemingly endless stupidity, I'm all for it. But as a logical argument goes, it's pretty weak.

Afghanistan is not about al Quaeda. If it was, that might be the framework for some kind of argument in support of some level of US military action. But with the 9/11 attacks, al Quaeda was on the run. In a matter of months, al Quaeda was gone from Afghanistan, indeed, had ceased to be an effective international terror organization. It was no longer a reason for the American military presence in Afghanistan, it had become the excuse for that presence. For years, al Quaeda has been in Pakistan, and the US has been engaged in fighting a loose affiliation of Islamists, Nationalists and Tribesmen who are variously opposed to the American occupation of their country and the Pashtun government of Hamid Karzai supported by the foreign occupation. And since there is no argument to be made that an Afghanistan under a leadership that is hostile to American interests represents a threat to the US so great it requires a hundred thousand troops to combat it that is not simply idiotic and insane on its face, the threat from al Quaeda continues to be offered as the raison de guerre. That being the case, to whatever extent the death of Osama bin Laden reduces the effectiveness of those ludicrous claims, there is certainly no reason NOT to invoke it again and again. But in the interest of having a realistic understanding of the dynamics in play, we need to also recognize it as the specious claim it is.

Torture:

This is an easy one. Any argument in favor of torture is stupid, dangerous and embarrassing. But this is also a cautionary tale about the kinds of arguments we want to use AGAINST torture. Beware the practical argument. For when we wail "torture doesn't work", we are leaving ourselves open to a disgraceful but logically consistent argument whenever it does "work". And if we are to be honest, while torture will generate a great deal of false information as the hapless victims desperately searches for the information that will make his tormentors STOP, there will always be cases where that same detainee undergoing torture IS going to provide some important and heretofore unknown bit of intelligence. Then where do we find ourselves?

No. We do not torture because it is wrong, it violates our most deeply and strongly held beliefs about human rights and human dignity, and yes, we are willing to suffer whatever consequences come about from our refusal to engage in such inhuman and barbaric methods. We can never be 100% safe, we cannot even describe what a 100% safe world might look like. So as long as there will continue to be risk, I'm willing to accept the measure of that risk that results from my unwillingness to violate my own personal and societal values. You tremble in fear and tell me "the Constitution is not a suicide pact"? Fine. I'll remind you there are worse things to be than dead.

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Testimony of the Dead

2011-05-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

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Meh. He sent some people to kill many of our people. In response, we sent some people to kill many of his people. In the course of this proxy war people without investment in the fight died hard. Drone strike countered by suicide bomber, armored divisions and night raids, and in every case, it was the innocent who died under the guns of the angry fighters.

One dood. You can't kill an ideology, you can't blow up a belief system. The leaders don't matter. If they had killed General Petraeus, would the idea of America somehow die with him? Of course not.

Of course, it HAD to happen. Bin Laden was one of history's loose ends, the worst kind of dangling thread, an unredeemed outlaw to most, a hero to some, but here in America he was an itch we couldn't scratch. As the years piled up and history moved on to other tragedies and other atrocities we talked about "getting" him, but he slowly grew into something more mythical than real, a dragon that appeared in fire and death and then went back to his cave, once again more concept than reality. But the US couldn't have him walking around - no matter how many nations we occupied, no matter how many towns and villages we flattened, no matter how many lives we took, as long as bin Laden was breathing the same air we were ultimately impotent, a great power tormented by a single man.

And, of course, we knew all along where he was. If not specifically, we knew he was in Pakistan, and we knew that our ally was, at some level, giving him shelter and protecting him. And when we found him we knew better than to tell them, and we acted unilaterally, in complete secrecy, across borders. And now, will they cry out in sovereign outrage, railing against America's arrogance and hypocrisy? Or will they lower their eyes and speak carefully, in clear understanding that it was they who set the rules of this game, and that in the end it could not play out any other way?

After all the ink is spilled, pixels lit and commentary made, this morning is no different than yesterday. al Quaeda remains a few hundred violent radicals bent on destruction in the name of some ambiguous set of goals that barely holds together to qualify as an ideology. Their capabilities haven't changed, but neither has the litany of their unacknowledged but quite formidable accomplishments. Single handedly they changed America's place in the world forever. As we stand in our stocking feet at the airport, shoes in hand like some odd cultish supplicants, we feel the relentless tug of al Queada on our own historical narrative. Before 9/11, the US had unquestioned power to demand and intimidate, and could do so from the moral high ground. Today, we are just another bumbling power, on a par with the old Soviet empire, lashing out and destroying without any great overarching principle, reacting to events thoughtlessly, and constantly wondering how we lost our way.

bin Laden is dead. That can in no way be construed as anything but an unconstrained good thing. But we ought to remember him for what he did to us - that sad summer day of fire and fury was not the end of it, not by a long shot. The reverberations from that single attack continue to echo down the paths of history, reminding us of honor and opportunities lost, of what we are and what we used to think we could be, of a more innocent time when we thought our role in the world was to build and create.

bin Laden is dead, and we will never be the same again...
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Bits N Pieces

2011-05-01T10:09:00.000-07:00

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Libya:
Gaddhafi loses a son and some other family in a NATO attack. I dunno - I'm finding it a little hard to work up any real sympathy for the crazy old bastard. No matter what you think about the international intervention in the Libyan civil war, there is something satisfying in knowing that there is a price to be paid for raining misery and horror down upon the citizens of your nation, and that despots can't ALWAYS hide behind some sanctimoniously maximal definition of sovereignty to commit the worst sort of crimes. Here's hoping he spends his remaining days in a cell in The Hague.

By far the more worrisome bit of news is that the fighting has spilled out of Libya and into Tunisia. Remember, the great western fear, from Israel to Lebanon to Iraq to Iran is "regional destabilization", and there really isn't anything more effectively destabilizing than a shooting war. If other nations in the region decide to get involved, it will not bode well for Gaddhafi's longevity, but in the longer term the list of potential good outcomes is substantially shorter than the list of poor ones.

Syria:
Another authoritarian "President for Life" offers window dressing to his restive young population, only to find the rebellion growing all around him, leading to the inevitable "crackdown" using soldiers and tanks against unarmed demonstrators with the predictable stunning loss of life. These things can go two ways, either the cost is too high and the rebellion fizzles (see Iran, Green Revolution) or the utter bleakness of the future drives the people to absorb the losses and stay in the streets, as an outcome that preserves the status quo is simply to grim to consider.

What will the international community do? How much murder will they allow al - Assad to get away with? How many defections of Baath party members, conscript troops and the intelligentsia will it take before they take more than the most innocuous of actions? Syria is a regional odd duck, without oil but with great political and strategic importance, analogous to a so-called "swing voter". And in an unusual case of strange bedfellows, both Iran and Israel will work every avenue to preserve the al - Assad dictatorship. Squeezed between Israel, Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the one thing the region insists upon from Syria is a reliable stability enforced by a brutal police state. Any radical political change there, whether Islamist or Democratic is viewed with fear and deep concern. The likelihood of any international consensus on real action against the Syrian political leadership is zero, and as the desperation of the Syrian people grows, the horror and brutality will increase, and the world will once again look away in burning shame.

Egypt:
Already, less than 90 days after the fall of Mubarak in Egypt, we're seeing sweeping political changes that have a real chance of changing the abiding, hidebound dynamic. In every direction, while the risks are real, so, at long last, are the chances of a breakthrough. In rapid succession this week we have seen the political reconciliation of the Palestinian leadership and the opening of the Rafah crossing into Gaza. In the first case, regardless of what the feckless and deeply biased Israeli and American negotiators say about Hamas, the Palestinian people, just like every other population, has the right to choose their political leadership. And the fact that Hamas and Fatah have allowed themselves to be manipulated into factions speaks poorly of both their political skills and their focus. Typically, the various factions in a rebel or separatist movement hold together until after they accomplish their political goals, then they break down and start squabbling for wealth or power. The measure of how successful the movement actually was is in whether these squabbles are waged with ballots or bullets. It is important at this time of sweeping change and demands for basic civil rights throughout the region that the Palestinian leadership demonstrate an ability to stand together, in both their demands for rights as basic as citizenship and in their tactics, for the world is moving toward a readiness to support them, if they can just demonstrate they are not murderers and butchers.

And at last, an opportunity for the people in Gaza to engage in real commerce, buy and sell goods, receive international aid, food and medicine, along with the chance to rebuild lives and towns and businesses, will be something the world can look on as a positive change. The brutal Israeli blockade and embargo against those long-suffering people could not have been enforced without Egyptian complicity, and it is wonderful to see the people of Egypt speaking with one voice, saying that they will not contribute to the collective punishment of their neighbors any longer.

The Giants:
One month into the season the Giants are 13-13, four and a half games behind the surprising Rockies. Their starting center fielder, third baseman and number five starting pitcher are on the disabled list, and as a team they are batting .241 and have committed 18 errors. Just as last year, they struggle mightily to score runs, and this year their pitching, while still better than average, seems a bit more human, and so the margin of error is even smaller. I don't honestly know what it says about this team, but yesterday the Giants pitchers walked 9 and hit another 3, a total of 12 free baserunners, and still somehow managed to hold the Nationals to a single run, allowing a San Francisco 2-1 victory. Is that amazingly dreadful pitching, or amazingly resilient? Can it be both? How many games can you expect to win scoring 2 runs? This could be a very long, hard to watch season, and if they aren't careful it could be over by the all star break. Colorado won't play .700 ball all year, but it might take 94 or even 95 wins to take the division, and you just can't get there if you play .500 ball for too long.

Tee Vee:
I'm not sure about The Event. I keep watching it, even though none of the characters are believable, or even likable. Initially, I found Sean to be interesting and sympathetic, but watching him work through the ship in Murmansk with his pistol like he's suddenly some kind of commando was jarring, and kind of silly. The abrupt change in Sophia from interstellar statesman to brutal invader doesn't make a lot of sense, and frankly I'm glad to see President Martinez incapacitated. The man was seriously stupid. Hasn't made a single good decision or judgement from the get go. Leila is just deadweight, and Michael can't seem to decide what he wants, so perhaps he is the most believable character. And while I originally found Blake to be predictably loathsome, he's actually one of the richer characters, while Vice President Jarvis is completely one dimensional as the cowardly villain who pretty much can't do anything right.

Even with all that, I keep watching. The premise is great, and while the initial thinly-veiled commentary on Guantanamo and the "War on Terror" was interesting, we're well past any valuable insights and into a straight-up fantasy adventure. And while it's hard to see how the premise extends into the next season (just a covert war between the Aliens and the Humans? What happens when the rest of them get here?), I'm definitely going to stick around and see how this one turns out.

Meanwhile, after a slow start, Justified has built this season's story arc into a powerful, compelling replay of an ancient Harlan County feud, with all the intensity you'd expect by an Elmore Leonard exploration of love and hate in the Holler. Maggs Bennett is an amazing character and you simply cannot take your eyes off Boyd Crowder. This year Raylan finds himself all alone, as Art will no longer protect him in the Marshal's Service and even Eva has abandoned him for Boyd. Drawn back together in extremis, Raylan and Winona try to plan some kind of future for themselves outside of Harlan County, even as they know that the same dynamic that tore them apart the first time will do so again.

This is an example of what Tee Vee can be, when the best writers contribute compelling stories with rich characters and a finely drawn sense of place. It is quite simply not to be missed.
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Forecast: Cloudy With a Chance of Outages

2011-04-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

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I used to think I understood copyright law. The laws were straightforward and, for the most part, reasonable, and the fair use provisions clear and unambiguous. But of course, over the last couple decades, the copyright holders of Big Content have had little difficulty convincing the courts to support an increasingly arbitrary and even draconian interpretation of those laws. One of the shining examples of this willful manipulation of the laws governing a consumer's use of legitimate IP is the case of UMG vs. MP3.com, where the determination was made that you could legally purchase a song, and you could legally purchase some online storage where you could keep your files, but you could not legally store that song in that online storage. That, you see, amounted to piracy. Absurd.

But absurd though it was, it became the conventional wisdom that the concept of a cloud-based file "locker" for a consumer to keep his or her music, so that it might be accessible from any device anywhere, was dead on arrival without a license and the accompanying payments to every major record label. And while the labels have gotten on board with streaming services and even digital distributors, there has been no path to a legitimate online storage system that could earn their approval. Of course, MP3 files are just another collection of bits, so consumers have been storing their music in the cloud if they wished for years, but obviously an approved system could be optimized for that purpose.

Which brings us to Amazon. Clearly, they viewed the court's decision in UMG v MP3.com as silly and indefensible, so they announced their Cloud Drive music locker service and Cloud Player software that allowed you to stream your music from the Cloud Drive to most any internet connected device. The service has been up and running for weeks now, and so far all we've heard from the ordinarily highly litigious record labels has been some muttered condemnation and a bunch of crickets. Could it be that they don't think they could win this argument in court? Yeah, I think so too. To ask a Federal judge in 2011 to prevent people from using online storage for their music library would be significantly over the top, and a loss in court would announce to the world that an online music locker service was a business model that could operate unfettered by music industry legal harassment.

Both Apple and Google have been planning to roll out a similar service, but they have been restrained by their belief that they would have to win approval from and pay licensing fees to the copyright owners before it could be deployed. Now, they are both watching closely to see what the response of the industry will be to Amazon's service. And the labels are faced with a real quandary. If they don't challenge Amazon in court, at some point both Apple and Google, and probably a number of others, will decide that there is no real legal risk in providing a similar service, and the genie will be well and truly out of the bottle. But if the labels DO sue Amazon and lose, then they have no basis for threatening at least the smaller players - really, they'd have no potential revenue stream at all from cloud storage.

Which, in the end, offers the only truly valuable insight from the whole ugly rear-guard fight the music industry has put up against technological change. The labels should have owned the whole market. They should have been iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon - the whole digital distribution ecosystem, just as they have always owned all phases of physical distribution. They could have led the way on R&D, partnered with electronics companies to build music players, built data centers - in short, they could have leveraged the technology to increase their revenues and control, rather than see all those pieces go into different, non-traditional hands while the record companies find themselves with an ever-shrinking piece of the pie.

Of course, the cloud comes with its own special challenges. Last week a problem with Amazon's EC2 cloud compute platform knocked a whole bunch of web - based businesses off line. The explanation is that an error caused a great deal of the associated storage to start to re-mirror, and this used up all the processor cycles and all the available storage and bandwidth in that zone. So everything stopped. Of course, the non-technical press (and to be fair, a decent portion of the technical press) ran stories with headlines like "The Cloud: Not Ready for Prime Time?" and "Is The Cloud Just Too Risky For Your Business?", without the slightest sense that these are not only stupid questions, they represent a category error of the first order.

Two points have to be made about utilizing a cloud infrastructure. First, it's absolutely necessary to understand that this is an economic decision, rather than a technical one. That is, there is a minimum baseline amount of IT infrastructure necessary to run the core business. Beyond that, there is development, new features, surges in demand, special events, any number of things that can bring that baseline infrastructure to its knees. Today, you just add fifty or a hundred servers in the cloud and manage demand and resources dynamically. Obviously, in the past, businesses didn't have, and couldn't justify procuring, those hundred servers, so the site just crashed anyway. The cloud changes the equation, and makes it easier for smart people to deploy innovative new services, because the barrier to entry isn't buying and maintaining five hundred or a thousand computers anymore.

Second, if you put your business in the cloud, the cloud is your datacenter. Treat it as such. Redundancy, multiple points of failure, failover

But no matter how many of these silly scare stories about the risks of cloud computing infrastructure you hear in the coming months, you need to understand just how stupid, pointless and without meaning they truly are. The web already is entirely dependent upon cloud based compute and storage capacity, and it would be economically impossible to return to the days when all your server metal was in your building. This "compute elasticity" is actually a very good thing, both from the standpoint of allowing innovations on the web that let you do cool stuff you like to do, and from the standpoint of giving all of us consumers a better option for storing and accessing our digital stuff.

Ain't technology wonderful?
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Dispatches from Silicon Valley - My Week in Unemployment

2011-04-24T16:34:00.000-07:00

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Friday morning. A week ago. Got up, went to work. By nine I was home again, without a job or an income. The dark grey kind of déjà vu that leaves you gut punched, shoulders sagging and that voice in your head asking if you truly ever expected any other outcome. I made another pot of coffee and stood, staring out the window, doing the one thing in the world I am the very best at - dwelling.

How did it come to this? Don't try to blame anybody else, you need to own this shit, buddy. If you knew how to act like a regular person, like everybody else, if you were something other than this weird combination of eccentric granny and murderous biker you could function in the world with other people. But waitaminute - they hired me, didn't they? Yeah, sure they did, but it sure didn't take 'em very long to figure out that mistake, now did it?. Ok, fine, whatever. Just what the HELL are you going to do now?

That's the question, ain't it? I LIKED this job - well, no, let me try that again. I like the idea, the product, the industry segment, the customers, the buzz. It was exciting, and people were overwhelmingly willing to talk with me about their plans and requirements. This is THE hot segment right now - they call it "Big Data". The realization that if you could just capture all the data that went by, you could learn important things from it. But that's a LOT of data. But in the meantime, they were building Facebook and Twitter and Google and Flickr and YouTube - in essence figuring out how to deal with amounts of data that only existed in theory a decade ago. As Gigabytes gave way to Terabytes that are now starting to be Petabytes, much of it in small snippets, messages and tweets and status updates and text messages and blog comments, metadata and location data and clickstreams, the biggest companies were having to invent entire new technologies to capture, store, index and analyze all this digital stuff. Technologies like Map/Reduce and NoSQL, all resident in a set of robust open source communities figuring out how to scale up the web. And it's captured everybody's attention, because they've been struggling with existing tools to keep up with the amount of data they have to deal with, not even considering the data they want to capture.

But ultimately, you have to do something, don't you? It's paralysis that will kill you. You can do something stupid, but the only way to ensure failure is to do nothing. So I updated the old resume, sat down and called every company that we had considered the 'competition' in our segment.

A lot of what I actually DO for work is talk on the phone. So I'm not much for phones on my own time. I like email, and I tend to frustrate people by not answering the phone, then answering their voice mail by email. So for the last several years, I have watched the iPhone and Android smartyphone revolution sweeping the world, I have kept my stupid little LG phone that really couldn't do anything other than be a phone, and I was happy. But when I went back to work in December, the company issued me a Sprint EVO. Damn. Amazing - perfect voice recognition, Google maps, all three email accounts, NPR and BigR Radio, GREAT music player software, decent camera...you get the point. I was hooked. So after I had to turn it in I only lasted a couple days of pretty serious jonesing before I couldn't stand it another minute and went to Verizon and got the Droid X. Frankly, the EVO was better, faster and friendlier, but all we're talking here is degrees of greatness. I find it very painful to be away from my smartyphone for very long, even though I still don't use the phone part very much. It's nice to take it to bed and check get the NPR hourly news summary whenever I wake up. I think I'm in love with Lakshmi Singh.

So it was while I was setting up my Google Calendar on the smartyphone that I noticed that I had tickets for the Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers show in San Juan Capistrano on Friday. I bought them one night in February when I was drunk (as opposed, I suppose, to the night in February when I wasn't). I had completely forgotten about it. But here it was, a couple days away. And me without an income. Ah well, it's better to spend a few hundred bucks than throw away fifty, right? So I got up Friday morning at 4am and headed off to the South coast. It's 430 miles, so it's an eight hour run. I got in on Friday afternoon and went for a nice walk on the beach (I have a bunch more pictures, but you can see a few on here.) The show was fantastic, but then, if you've seen Roger and the Boys play then you knew that, and if you haven't, well, I've never understood that kind of asceticism. He is one of those very special entertainers that forms a powerful and emotional bond with the audience, and the band is so tight and polished that it looks entirely effortless, even as the love flows both directions, from the crowd to the stage, but also back from the band.

The response from those companies has been positive in general, but once again its the same startup ethos and chaotic atmosphere as the previous, so I don't read too much into any of this so far. But it's positive in its own right, and that sense of something positive sustains me into the second week.

And it still makes me smile when it occurs to me that I don't have to go to that weird and oppressive place tomorrow morning...
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A Few Observations

2011-04-17T09:31:00.000-07:00

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So I’ve recently spent a few months working in a very young software startup. It’s utterly fair to say that I was not successful, although there are a variety of reasons for that, it doesn’t help, and for the purposes of post mortem examination, I won’t examine those that are external. In the final analysis I had a pretty profoundly exciting opportunity and was unable to make the management team see me as a valuable contributor to the effort.

A great deal of that is nothing more than my unfamiliarity with the whole startup ethos, and that’s the focus of this particular examination. Because it’s not at all what I thought it was, but rather something a good bit seedier, less honorable and and quite a bit less admirable than what I previously believed.

First, the concept that this is some kind of small, narrowly focused team is not only false, but actually flies in the face of the psychological makeup of the participants. It’s chaos. Not a team so much as a loose affiliation of desperately greedy and hopeful players, most of whom have ridden this treadmill multiple times and have lost sight of any normal approach to business in favor of chasing that magic billion once again. They operate independently, and while they speak highly of one another, there is an endless process of preening and positioning as they try to be one of the people with a seat at the table when the music finally stops. And that can require a particular kind of almost psychotic ruthlessness.

Second, there is a disproportionate focus on the development team. Sure, without them you won’t have a product, but all the product in the world won’t do you a bit of good if you can’t monetize it or sell it. The assumption is “our developers are good so therefore our product is good and therefore we have something the market will pay for” contains more than one critical fallacy. I watched as our vaunted developers released a major upgrade to our core product that was just catastrophically buggy. And all the brilliant code in the world won’t make a successful company if you give it away. The challenge of monetizing open source software is a brutal one, where no matter how much expertise you hold within the commercial sponsoring organization, if the product is successful the market will produce experts outside of that organization, and then, unable to monetize the product OR the expertise, the organization founders. Red Hat is both the prototypical example and the exception, and it cannot be argued that a free operating system is in any way like a free database or a free application.

Third, there is the problem of funding. I come from a long historical understanding that in order to grow you had to increase revenues and, drawing from that organic source of funding, invest in capital equipment, personnel and and marketing. That’s long been the model for American business, and that is as it should be because it makes sense and is sustainable. Which brings us to the inside view of a venture funded company. A venture - funded startup feels a bit like a heroin addict, except the substance is capital, not drugs. I was frankly gobsmacked to find that revenues weren’t considered important, and there was absolutely NO discussion of profitability. Rather, everything hung on convincing the Venture Capitalists to invest more money in the organization. Revenues didn’t matter, something opaque and ill-defined we called “bookings” mattered. And more than half of those bookings were bullshit. But that didn’t matter, you see, because it wasn’t about generating revenue, it was about convincing the venture funders to invest more money. And I’m sure they aren’t stupid, and they understand the game that’s being played. Which means that the goal isn’t to EVER be a profitable business, but rather to be bought out by a larger company. And that would generate individual wealth, justifying the chaos and positioning and bullshit. Or something. Now, this might be a viable business strategy (although I can think of some reasons to question that premise), but from the standpoint of recruiting, training and motivating a sales staff, it’s toxic. I mean, what do you do? Do you tell them you don’t give a shit about revenues, or do you try to pretend you do, and if that’s your strategy (it’s the one I observed) are you capable of actually sustaining that falsehood, participating in the negotiations and helping your sales team close actual deals? It turns out, at least in this case, that no, that isn’t something that is important enough to deal with. Even if it means closing an 80 thousand dollar deal. That’s just weird.

Now I suppose my experience wasn’t representative of all tech startups, and I’d certainly join another one, this time better prepared to operate within the realities of that environment, rather than drawing from an entirely different experience that seems not to apply. But I think one thing to watch out for might be an organization comprised of serial startup workers - and that was what I found myself a part of. At some point, after going through the process a number of times, creating the image and getting the funding and building the narrative and getting acquired by a bigger company - something most of my colleagues had experienced multiple times - an understanding of building a business, selling and delivering a product or service, building long-term relationships and making good decisions about supply chains, vendors, partners, customers and pricing models just fades away in the chase to generate wealth from nothing more than a well-told story. I don’t know. It may very well be that I’m not suited for this. I have spent decades in a work environment where you could look at my monthly and quarterly billings and tell whether I was successful or not. I generated plenty of revenue at this gig, and that wasn’t enough. Indeed, it may not even have been what was expected...
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Cry Havoc! And Let Slip the Bytes of War

2011-04-10T14:07:00.000-07:00

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For all the violent conflict in the world today, 2 things we genuinely thought were no longer realistic possibilities were global war and endless war. With the advance of technology the world has become highly asymmetric militarily - a few rich nations with advanced aircraft and ships and satellites and limitless resources have the power to utterly overwhelm and dominate any of the other nations in a matter of days. And enough nations now have nuclear weapons that a global conflict cannot happen without escalating into a nuclear exchange, which means that global war cannot be won, and is therefore unthinkable to every side.

Which brings us to what we like to euphemistically call "cyber war". War waged digitally, across networks at the speed of light. Where weapons are bits and packets, malicious programs and malformed headers, escape sequences and Jscript. For at least a decade we have been warned repeatedly that there are nations waging cyber warfare against us, and that we must defend ourselves even as we hone our own offensive capabilities. But make no mistake - what we have seen up to this point is not cyber war. It is more along the lines of cyber - intelligence operations, probing, snooping, hacking, learning where the networks and data centers were, learning how they were hardened and defended, finding ways to penetrate them undetected and learn the secrets contained inside. For all the talk of destroying dams and bringing down power grids, or even crashing entire economies, there really hasn't been much, if anything in the way of offensive operations. Nobody really knew how another nation might react, or what the unintended consequences might be. If things got out of hand and people died in significant numbers, would it lead to an even worse cyber-counterattack, or even a conventional military response?

As a result, most nations were careful to disguise not just their operations, but their very identity. Working through small groups of proxies and hackers, routing attacks through networks around the globe, they always maintained a layer of plausible deniability, and because the goal was information, rather than destruction, it was never possible to link a particular attack to a particular adversary. Oh, we "knew" that China was active in these kinds or actions, as was Russia and others (certainly the US has done it's share of penetrations) but other than expressing outrage, the diplomatic equivalent of a Cease and Desist order, there has been no real reason to escalate the response. Just business as usual in the 21st century.

Then, last July, while we were all busy with our lives and preoccupations, the world changed, radically. dramatically and forever With the release of the Stuxnet worm, the gloves have come off, and the rules of the game have changed for good. Stuxnet is a complex, finely tuned assembly of exploits and malicious software narrowly designed to do one very specific thing. It targets industrial controllers manufactured by Siemens through their own Step 7 SCADA software, and once it is installed in those controllers it sends a very specific set of commands and instructions to the devices under control. At first, nobody knew what it was. It was hard to understand - it didn't seem to want to turn a PC into a zombie for sending spam, it didn't seem to have any bad economic intent, indeed, as it was reverse engineered it became increasingly clear that it was highly sophisticated and very carefully targeted. And then, as the weeks went by and researchers were able to watch its actions and evolution in the wild, along with its propagation pattern and it became clear that it was designed to infect the computers controlling the Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. And it wasn't there to gather information, or to observe their progress. It was there to break thing, to destroy the actual centrifuge hardware and force the Iranians to shut down the plant while they tried to clean their systems and make sure they would function properly when restarted.

This kind of attack clearly didn't originate with a band of Ukrainian criminal hackers, or from a loose international affiliation of disaffected anarchists. This was designed and built by a nation, with the industrial, intelligence and financial resources to develop and produce this very complex and specific weapon. And when one nation develops a weapon and uses it to attack another nation, that is an act of war.

So now they've done it. They've taken down whatever barriers previously prevented truly destructive acts of cyber warfare, and announced to the world that this is a legitimate and acceptable part of the way adversarial nations interact with each other. They've said "if global norms prevent me from dropping bombs on your nuclear research facility, it is nonetheless OK for me to seek to destroy that facility by infecting the computer networks that control it". But here's the thing. In this form of modern warfare, there is no asymmetric advantage. EVERY nation can put together a team of a hundred (or less) smart programmers and beat you at your own game. You've given up the advantages of of wealth and power, grounded your stealth jets and mothballed your aircraft carriers. This is the twenty first century equivalent of tribal conflict with clubs and stones, where at any given moment anyone can deliver the decisive blow. Indeed, it is countries like the US, Israel and those in Europe that are most dependent upon technology, and therefore most vulnerable to the widest variety of attacks.

No matter what temporary advantage was gained by the release of Stuxnet, it's true result was to open a new front in what will be a global, eternal war, fought among multiple adversaries within shifting alliances for murky motives. There is very little doubt that even now, at this moment, new cyber weapons are being developed, new targets researched, new, ever more diabolically brilliant tactics designed. And we should be concerned. Perhaps even afraid. Because we are vulnerable, and because we invited it...
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Gadhafi's End Game

2011-03-19T18:21:00.000-07:00

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He is not like you and me. He is that certain, most dangerous kind of crazy that includes both the careful, practical calculations of a corporate accountant and the willingness to push in all his chips on instinct of a riverboat gambler. He's fully aware of the stakes in this game he's playing - he has very few friends left in the world and to end his days in comfortable exile is not something I believe he'd consider an acceptable outcome. It's win or go home for the wacky Libyan Colonel, but in this case the only home he has left is a martyr's grave.

You're simply not being realistic if you think he's somehow unaware of this. When the world was cautiously discussing a limited no-fly zone over Libya, Gadhafi poured gasoline on the fire when he said they would go house to house, that there would be no mercy. There were so many other ways he could have played it, acting concilliatory, playing for time, all while he brutally rolled up the rebels, destroyed their fledgling organizations and murdred and imprisoned their families. That might have been Saddam, that might have been Mubarak, but if we've learned one thing since the Gulf of Sidra, it's that simply isn't Moammar Gadhafi.

In general, the US has a counterproductive tendency to personalize a geopolitical argument, to make it about the leader, to focus on Saddam Hussein or Ayotollah Khomeini instead of the political, military and economic goals. But in this case it's the right course. Because now that we're engaged, now that we've called his bet, it's desperately important that we understand that we're NOT dealing with a government, there is no diplomatic structure or back-channel conversation to be employed to find a way out of this. There's just the mad Colonel, and the people around him who's lives and livelihood depend on him, and now they are staring into the abyss and he's the best chance they've got.

There was one chance that he might be persuaded to stand down and accept exile - and that would be if he believed there was some chance of a comeback, that he would have the flexibility and freedom of movement to attempt to depose the new leadership and regain power over Libya. But now, the gloves have come off, and while he's very definitely not right in the cabeza, he's not crazy enough to believe that he has any choice other than execution in Libya or a cell in The Hague.

So here's what's most likely to happen. The first part of the end-game will be defections. LOTS of defections. The writing is on the wall now - he can't deploy armor and artillery against the rebels, it's all small arms and hand to hand, and there's just no way he can take back the Eastern part of the country without the mobility and firepower he's now being denied. But those who do NOT defect will represent a powerful and quite desperate force, and the rebels will find it difficult to force them out of Tripoli. And if the rebels get their hands on the tanks and artillery, are we then expected to stand down and let them slaughter their fellow Gadhafi - supporting Libyans when our very mission statement is that we intervened to protect civillians?

The easiest solution is if one of those defectors can kill him or hand him over to the rebels - then the regime just fades away as the remaining elites scurry for cover with whatever they can loot from the treasury, banks and museums. If that is to happen, it will happen this week and it will go down as the shortest, least lethal and most successful international humanitarian intervention in history. But if we're still having this conversation NEXT weekend, with Gadhafi still ensconced in Tripoli and the rebels getting organized and moving west, well, this is just going to get a LOT harder.

And here's the key part to remember. You never know if the man holding the gun will pull the trigger. But with Colonel Gadhafi, we DO know. We've known since Flight 103 landed in pieces in the peaceful Scottish countryside. That's the crazy side, and make no mistake - he WILL deploy it. The question is simply this: how many weapons, anti-ship missiles, MANPADS, sea mines, whatever his fevered imagination can come up with and his oil wealth can purchase, does he have stashed away for his own final Armageddon? What desperate plans has he put in motion already? At this point, he really must believe that his only hope is to make the cost too high - a kind of a third-party war of attrition where the cost is borne at random by those in the region.

There's no doubt he'll try it. This HAS to end quickly. A protracted standoff could get terribly bloody...

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Lessons of the Fall

2011-03-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

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The San Francisco Giants World Series run last year really brings home the ground truths and hard realities of the Major League Baseball playoff system as it is currently constructed. And when you think about it, most teams are building exactly the wrong kind of team to win a championship. The fascinating dichotomy here is that a team constructed to win, say, 95 out of the 162 games in the long, grinding regular season will be poorly constructed to win in the playoffs. And conversely, a team built to win three short series with plenty of days off in the fall chill will have a very difficult time even making the playoffs.

Now, I don't for a moment think it was brilliant insight that built the 2010 Giants, but rather a rare combination of circumstances and luck that produced a nearly perfect baseball team, one that could only barely (and with a great deal of luck and assistance from the late-season collapse of contending teams) squeak into the playoffs in the 162nd game of the year, but had exactly the right combination of personnel, skills, field management and mindset to be the first team out of eight to win eleven games. And that's precisely how you win championships in MLB.

People keep asking if the Giants can repeat. It's really kind of a stupid question. The answer is, if they can make the playoffs again, then yes. You'd have to consider them one of the favorites to win it all. But therein, as that noted baseball analyst Bill Shakespeare said, lies the rub. The Giants realistically have a less than 50% chance of getting back into the post-season, and even that only because the Dodgers are so epically bad, weakening the Western Division to the point where it's a toss-up between the Giants, Rockies and Padres. And no, there's virtually NO hope that the wild card will come out of the West, so it's win the division or start making plans for November hunting trips.

One of the ideas I've come to appreciate more over the winter since the World Series is the concept that one of the key reasons the Giants won it all in 2010 is that they put together a team without a superstar. Now, one can argue that with 2 Cy Young awards under his funky young belt, Tim Lincecum is a superstar, but I think the idea focuses more on an offensive power, a Barry Bonds, an Albert Pujols, an Alex Rodriguez. I think that there may be something to that, though to what extent it might be decisive is an open question. But just as people designing networks shy away from single points of failure, just as they value redundancy, backup and failover, having a lot of good interchangeable pieces might be superior to having a few irreplaceable parts.

The other underestimated piece is Bruce Bochy. He is that rare combination of high quality clubhouse manager and excellent field manager. The way he used his resources without creating hurt feelings or animosity was nothing short of brilliant. After watching the best San Francisco team EVER lose the world championship due to the managerial incompetence of Dusty Baker, the way Bochy handled this team down the stretch and through the playoffs tells you all you need to know about his value to the organization.

So we're a few weeks from Opening day, with the championship team largely intact. This year's aging veteran shortstop is Miguel Tejada rather than Edgar Rentaria, but with Mark DeRosa healthy and Pablo Sandoval looking like he's going to try to take his opportunities seriously, the Giants are left with only two questions: What to do about Barry Zito, and the Too Many Outfielders Problem.

And those should serve as fodder for the next time I feel like writing a Baseball post.
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No Fly Just Won't Fly

2011-03-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

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No. It's just that simple. A US or UN or even AU enforced No Fly Zone in Libya is a bad idea, for a whole host of reasons, most of which center on our understanding of our role in the conflict and in the world at large. But perhaps the biggest arguments against such an undertaking are practicality and blowback.

First, you have to ask the key question - what is the goal of the exercise? Obviously, if you are going to enforce a no-fly zone over parts or all of Libya, the direct goal is to keep the warplanes on the ground. But there's more in the air than MIGs and Mirages - what about helicopters? Gunships and Slicks - whether Gadhafi is moving troops around or hitting the rebel positions directly, is that part of the no-fly effort? If so, the complexity goes up by orders of magnitude - you need to get down in the weeds, low and slow, to engage helicopters. That's not F-16s, that's very likely other helicopters. But where do you base them?

And the even larger question is about the even larger goal. If your intent is to reduce the ability of the Gadhafi loyalists to fight effectively, then a no-fly zone is nothing but a useless symbolic gesture. The loyalist fighters are winning with artillery and mobility, training and discipline, in which they conduct small - unit armored infantry operations against an untrained and poorly armed opponent. It's really just shock and awe all over again, with the infantry advancing behind armor under rolling artillery barrages and the rebels have no choice but to fall back to the next strongpoint and wait for the next assault. Air power is nothing but a statement in these battles - in no way decisive or even important.

So if the goal is to reduce the effectiveness of the Loyalist counteroffensive, you need to use air, but you need to use it against tanks, artillery and massed troops. And now you're into something much bigger than a no fly zone - now you're in a war.

But there's also the blowback consideration. Bob Gates is right when he points out that a no-fly zone is more than a combat air patrol orbiting above Libya to shoot down any fighters that sortie. No, in order to establish that air power presence, you need to take down Ghadafi's air defense capability. That means targeting radars, launchers and command and control nodes - ground targets scattered throughout the country, in cities and towns and on military bases and at airports. It means killing Libyans - those manning the air defenses and those simply unfortunate enough to be nearby. It may mean bombing airfields and fuel and ordnance depots. And in the end, there are two possibilities. The best one is the rebels come out in charge, and at least some of them will be grateful for the support - but it is a certainty that others will blame the west for another case of imperialist intervention, and use that narrative to drive more anti-American and anti-Western sentiment, with it's accompanying radicalization. The worse outcome would be if Ghadafi's forces prevail in spite of Western Military intervention. Then you face two equally problematic narratives - one of imperialist intervention and another of not enough support for the freedom fighters, which translates into just another case where a brutal dictator was coddled by America and the West, his peoples abandoned to his tender mercies once again. And the whole thing could just settle into a prolonged stalemate, with neither side able to defeat the other. How long are we prepared to enforce the NFZ? What would be the cost of staying versus the cost of walking away? The final, brutal military lesson of the last ten years is "if you can't explain how it ends, you probably shouldn't begin".

In spite of the apparent pointlessness of a no-fly zone, if one is to be put in place, it must be coordinated under the auspices of the African Union and the UN. And it would be best if the aircraft were neither American or Italian - if the Egyptians and the Saudis, along with perhaps the Turks could be convinced to take the lead it would go a long way toward inoculating the West against charges of Imperialist designs on Libyan oil. But the unanswered diplomatic question is simply what would motivate regional power players to actively side with the rebels. It seems unlikely to me.

What would I do? I would recommend the same sort of "highly coercive diplomacy" I advocated in the case of al Bashir's Sudan. A very public one-week deadline to stand down his troops and initiate discussions with the rebel leadership on a power sharing arrangement or transitional government. (Yes, nobody expects him to actually do so in good faith, the idea is to take the pressure off the rebels, allowing them to consolidate in the Benghazi and the west and organize and train and get weapons and funding and begin to build a genuine opposition political movement.) The coercion is that, at the end of the deadline, he loses one national asset per 24 hour day. Palaces, airports, power generation, rail hubs - whatever intel can determine is important to him. Oh, you'll have to carry through - he won't step down because of the threat alone. The idea is that when those around him see their wealth and status being put at risk by his intransigence, they will convince him to step down, one way or another. This action has the same sort of risks of intervention, but the goals and reasons are clear and Gadhafi's options to prevent these attacks are not, on the surface at least, terribly onerous.

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It's The Twenty First Century, Fer Crissakes - Even If We Can't Have Jetpacks, Can We At Least Get Rid of Hitler?

2011-03-05T20:40:00.000-08:00

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Everything we know, hell, everything we THINK we know, is in one way or another a product of history. We don't really "know" anything, instead, we draw conclusions from what has transpired previously. The theory is that a certain combination of events leads to a certain outcome, and we should be able to shape the outcome by shaping the events. And that makes sense.

But the key question that no one seems to be asking is "are we looking at the right history"? Because if my cable TeeVee is any measure, what we keep looking at is Nazi Germany under Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. I swear to you it's all Hitler, all the time, twenty four by seven, HITLER.

And judging from the American political opposition, from Glen Beck to Rush Limbaugh to the guy that paints the signs for the Tea Party, they've taken a firm hold on this historical bogeyman and used him to threaten every kind of downfall, economic, political, intellectual, spiritual, even moral.

But it's time to be honest, and put Hitler away. Hitler was a product of postwar (that would be World War ONE for those of you who are unclear) Europe, where there were massive displacements, great poverty and a sudden outburst of ideas, from physics to psychology to, yes, politics. It was a continent that had been at war with itself for two thousand years, and a time when technology ran ahead of any understanding of it's consequences.

I surf the channels, and every night I see more grainy black and white footage of Jews being rounded up, taken off in trains to concentration camps, and worked to death or directly murdered. And you show me this, night after night, as if there is something new to be discovered, some breakthrough yet unlearned, and you wonder why I fear a government that might want my guns? I wonder what the outcome might have been if the Warsaw Ghetto had the same firearms ownership as the Bedford-Stuyvesant Ghetto. I know it makes no sense to arm entire communities in America in the 21st century, but you don't talk about that. Instead you show me Hitler, over and over again, without context or relevance.

There have been modern holocausts, from Cambodia to Rwanda to Sudan. Why not update the narrative, make me understand the political and economic forces at work to bring industrial - scale death to entire populations? Could it be nothing more than they are a different color, a different religion, a different tradition? Could it be that the only thing that makes Hitler relevant nearly a century later and Omar al Bashir unimportant even today, with people dying a month after the referendum, is that the victims of today are not Jews? Should we even consider that it is the Zionists who stand triumphant today, even with their boot heel on the throat of another persecuted population?

It's time to get past Hitler. It's time to put the second world war in the rear view mirror, time to understand Stalin was a product of his time and move on, time to merely accept Truman's brutal hatred that unleashed hell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, time to view the world in its own modern context. Finally, at long last, is there anything left to learn from a world gone mad a generation before we were born?

Here's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid that we just can't confront our own evils, from Bush to Abdul Aziz to Putin to Hu, that the challenges and complications are beyond the courage of our willingness, and so instead we oddly choose to cling to the super villains of the past, the ones whose names whisper to us down the dark hallways of time, because the alternative is to understand that the fundamental evil never left, never ended, it just morphed into a global "marketplace" where people are exploited rather than conscripted, where war is less common only because it is a drain on profits, and where the casualties are economic rather than military, while the conquests are even greater and the costs even more horrific....
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Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child

2011-02-13T12:17:00.000-08:00

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So the Egyptian political leadership, which is also at this point the Egyptian military leadership, made it clear today that they would continue to honor international treaties and agreements put in place over the decades of Hosni Mubarak's 'pragmatic' rule. There are a lot of these bi-lateral and multi-lateral treaties, and most of them are intended to preserve trade and peaceful relations in the region, and to assure, if not reassure, benefactor nations and trade partners that Egypt, in exchange for considerations from military aid to favorable trade status, will act in accordance with the expectations placed on it by its allies, particularly the United States. Which of course means the peace treaty with Israel.

This is unfortunate in a very real way. Israel's behavior over the last decade has become increasingly belligerent, intolerant, heavy handed and hostile, to an extent far exceeding what are considered international norms. Many of these actions, from political assassinations to collective punishment to operating a de facto apartheid state are actions even superpowers are unwilling to take. So why does this little regional power with a population barely one half of that of Los Angeles and a GDP a fifth the size of Mexico continue to get away with the most egregious of human rights violations? Easy - the US provides not just massive direct military aid, but explicit unconditional support for anything and everything the radical right-wing Israeli leadership chooses to do.

And as long as there no international outcry, no consequences for these horrific actions, no concerted effort to bring pressure on the Israeli government to moderate it's hateful and criminal mis-treatment of a people they logically should consider long lost brothers and sisters, there will be no incentive for Israel to behave like a civilized, modern nation. Like the quintessential spoiled child, without discipline there will be no motivation to seek solutions through politics, diplomacy and compromise, because there is no compelling argument for moderation. In Israel, any movement in the direction of political compromise is viewed as a 'unilateral' action because no third party can force them to move in that direction - therefore it must be their choice alone.

But Egypt has a great opportunity to bend this curve. Positioned where they are, they could abrogate their agreements with Israel, open the Rafah crossing to international aid, travel and trade, and even recognize the Palestinians in Gaza as a kind of a proto-Palestine, with real governance and even passports. This would bring about an end to the blockade - if Israel continued to refuse to lift the ban on commercial trade, Egypt could give Gazans special access to Port Said. Several good things would flow from this action - Israel would learn that there actually ARE limits to her power, even with the US as big brother, and the Palestinians would be able to start down a path to a sustainable independent future. There are risks, of course - the US could shut off the flow of aid to Egypt, but after the last year's whole Settlement debacle that seems unlikely. Israel could invade and re-occupy Gaza - it would not make any sense for Egypt to intervene militarily - but ultimately, every nation in the region is at risk from an Israeli attack, and will continue to be until Israel faces actual consequences for her aggression, so that seems a risk worth taking at this point.

There are occasional tipping points in history, and they always have ramifications and opportunities far beyond what is initially apparent. There is something historic and important happening in the middle east and North Africa right now, and however it all shakes out, the status quo of today will be nothing but a chapter in the history books, just as certainly as the Eastern European countries of the Soviet bloc. It's always important when people throw off the chains of a despot and demand the freedom to choose their own destiny, but it's also important to think about how those new governments might choose to interact with other nations. The US, for some perfectly pragmatic reasons made some terribly unpopular choices in a region that is now re-thinking everything they thought they knew about their place in the world. Now we must accept that the people of the new order may not choose to be our friend simply through bribery, fear and intimidation. Certainly China, Russia, Iran and Saudi, for starters, will be willing to provide better bribes and markets. Just as the revolution we watched this week didn't have to bloody, so a realignment of alliances and agreements need not be so either. But while we are powerless to influence these fast-moving political events, through our behavior we can have some influence over that realignment. Perhaps this time we'll make better choices...
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When Despots Fall

2011-02-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

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I'm still here. I haven't left, or been taken by extraterrestrials, or even those time travelers who know I'm onto them. Thing is, I live in a new house, in a new city. I have a new job, in a new industry. It's been a life-changing few weeks, and I'm still trying to get past the psychological whiplash. Soon enough, one trusts this will all devolve into something approximating a routine, and there will be time, energy and processor cycles to devote once again to...whatever this is.

In the meantime, a few quick notes. Egypt, of course. People love to take brute advantage of events like these, overlaying their narrative on events they could neither predict nor control, in order to prove the things they believed were true before everything changed. So explanations tend to focus on individuals and groups, with supporters crediting them with wisdom and patience while those who hate and fear them describe their nefarious, though concealed ideology and support from external enemies. But let's keep it all in perspective.

Motivations, like outcomes, vary. There are conditions - technological and political - that make this time different, to some extent, but while revolutions are occasionally successful, they are never pure. The question is not whether they will be co-opted, but rather by whom and to what ends. There is no simple narrative - by it's very simplicity it will necessarily be false. But amidst the chaos and uncertainty, there are two ground truths we can understand even at this point.

First, the internet. While journalists struggle with the idea that instaneous rich-media global communications can render them, if not obsolete, then at least superfluous, they decry and deride the impact of "Social Media" on the global political landscape. And in their desperate rear-guard struggle to cling to their own significance, they accidentally tell an important truth. It is not Social Media that represents the breakthrough - not Facebook, not Twitter, not al Jazeera, not texting, not YouTube - it is the internet. The various implementations aren't the point, the infrastructure is. Nothing can happen in the shadows anymore. No longer can the secret police break up a demonstration or arrest it's leaders. No longer can journalists be silenced or communications managed by taking the TV and Radio stations by force. No longer can compromises be negotiated that take weeks to reach the people in the hinterlands. The internet makes it a Wikileaks world, where everything is done under the glare of international scrutiny, and any action has its responses in seconds. This is a huge change, one that will effect the way nations are governed and the way that governance is changed forever. But alone, it is not enough.

Since most popular uprisings against authoritarian rule fail or are crushed, they do not spread to become regional (or even broader) movements. It was the rare success of the people in Tunisia that provided the people in Egypt and Yemen and other places (Serbia? Is that you?) the belief that they might achieve their polical goals, and this belief is what gives them the power to overcome their perfectly reasonable fear of the regime's brutal countermeasures. Further successes will fuel further belief, and this leaves the region's remaining dictators and Presidents for Life in a quandry: A brutal crackdown, with mass imprisonment, extrajudicial killings and beatings and draconian emergency legislation or even martial law may well suck all the momentum out of the movement and bring a whimpering end to the entire process. But it all balances on a razor's edge - insufficiently brutal and you will anger those you sought to intimidate and silence, and at some threshold of savagery you sicken those in your own leadership circle, inspiring them to put an end to your regime to relieve the unnecessary suffering of their fellow citizens.

Thus there remain two unanswerable questions. First, can the regime wait out the protests? These people have lives and families and jobs and they need money and food and eventually they'll need to go home. It's extremely hard to maintain the passion and provide the support and resources necessary to keep the people in the streets. The regime knows that if it can hang on long enough, it will survive. The protesters know that in order to win, they have to end it quickly, so it becomes incumbent upon them, along with their leadership, to continue to find ways to ratchet up the pressure. Every day, the pressure on the opposition to force the regime to quit becomes more intense and the risk of explosive violence and massive bloodletting grows greater.

Second, it the revolution is successful, what sort of government will arise in the place of the authoritarian Mubarak? In Iraq, democracy has led to sectarian voting, which implements the "tyranny of the majority", and is really not an ideal democratic implementation. In Egypt, there are many possibilities, from a vibrant, mostly secular democracy like Turkey to an authoritarian leadership under the guise of democracy, to a corrupt kleptocracy that uses it's power to steal elections and enrich the elites. There is much promise, and there is much at risk...

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