A Few (Trump Inspired) Thoughts on Nuclear Weapons

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Carrying the Football

One of the go-to arguments against a mentally-defective, impulsive buffoon in the White House is that he has access to the 'nuclear codes', and is the sole individual in the US Government hierarchy who can, without any other approval or concurrence, order the immediate release of American strategic nuclear weapons. An order that is processed by a system specifically designed and engineered to assure that  the order will be carried out within minutes, without any hesitation or option. This, we are continuously assured, is clearly a systemic defect, one we must reconsider and put further safeguards in place to prevent an angry president from being able to impulsively bring about the end of the world.

[Note: The President doesn't have any 'nuclear codes'. The famous 'football' that is always with him everywhere and at all times is a set of pre-developed Operational Plans that describe the weapons and targeting to be used against any given adversary. It also contains a set of one-time codes and ciphers that allow the president - using advanced cryptography - to authenticate his identity. Once the President issues the order and authenticates the source of the order is the National Command Authority, it is carried out by people who most assuredly DO have the nuclear codes.]

The reason for this seemingly dangerous - and make no mistake, it IS dangerous - system to be in place is based upon years of the study of nuclear weapons strategy. The idea is that nuclear weapons are not to be used - they are intended to deter any other nation's use of their strategic weapons. The number one overarching fear has always been a 'first strike'. If a nation, the thinking goes, believes it can launch a nuclear attack on a rival that eliminates the vast majority of that nation's ability to retaliate, the temptation would be to go ahead and launch. It would put the risk of global nuclear annihilation in the rear view mirror for all time.

This concern led to the streamlined command structure we have now. Russian (Soviet before) missiles coming over the pole can hit the American missile silos scattered across the northern prairie in less than fifteen minutes. The only way to deter such an attack, say the strategists, is to configure a system we call 'Launch on Warning'. If an incoming nuclear strike is detected, the entire system is designed to get OUR missiles in the air before THEIR missiles start landing. And that means one person in the chain of command, one fast decision, and the end of the world.

Oddly, despite some close calls and near misses, this system has worked for more than half a century. Nobody decided to launch a first strike, because nobody believed that a first strike would 'work'. They launch 2000 missiles, we launch 1500 missiles, then everybody dies. Nobody wins. In the Cold War, that strategy was called, quite accurately MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). You don't start a war if everybody dies.

So after all these years, the unthinkable happened. The United States population lost its collective mind and elected an eight year old with impulse control issues to the presidency. And with that, we quite logically rend our garments over this president's access to such god-like power. But if we interject another process in the launch order, we reduce the deterrence value of our strategic forces, and invite a first strike. Which way would be more likely to lead to war? Nobody really knows, but you don't get any do-overs in nuclear war.

Another topic that has gotten a lot of attention recently is the global elimination of nuclear weapons. The Swiss organization ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) won the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and organizations such as Global Zero, the Ploughshares Fund, the Federation of American Scientists and others have been working on this goal for dozens of years.

So - is it possible? Hey, anything's possible, but the process seems highly unlikely to me. If everybody and every nation - operating in perfectly good faith - eliminated nuclear weapons, then one bad national leader could secretly develop a few crude atomic weapons and dictate terms to the rest of the world.

Unless and until somebody can describe a methodology in which either nobody will cheat or cheating will be somehow nullified, you're not going to see nations give up their strategic deterrent. Personally, I believe that technology, once in the wild, can never be truly rolled back. Machine guns, drones, robots - anything that makes killing and destruction more efficient and effective - will be used simply because they exist. Nuclear weapons are so destructive that they can form their own deterrence regime, but if that deterrence regime is weakened sufficiently, that's what will lead to their use.
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After Further Review...

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He was safe. Play ball!

In general, I am a huge proponent of using HiDef imagery, powerful lenses and super SloMo to help referees and umpires in professional sports do their jobs. For too many years, we were forced to accept outcomes we could see with our own eyes were wrong. We struggled to accept the 'human factor' as part of a game, even as the technology existed to remove that human factor from the game. "Get it right", we said. The game will be better for it.

And the game IS better for it. They do "get it right", and most of the more egregiously bad calls are overturned in the name of fairness and accuracy. But like any improvement to any established process, there can be - and usually are - unintended consequences that simply could not be foreseen when the technological solution was implemented.

The biggest mistake we could possibly make when adding an additional layer of technology to determine the fairest, most accurate adjudications are made, would be to slavishly accept the micro level of accuracy while ignoring the macro sense of the game itself.  We saw this play out in a painful call in the eighth inning of the final Washington/Chicago playoff game. Essentially, the catcher fired a pickoff attempt to first and the runner got back safely. But wait! After the implementation of replay in the MLB, the players are taught to keep the tag applied to the runner. That way, if the runner loses contact with the base - even for a millisecond - he will be called out. And sure enough, the infielder held the ball in contact with the runner, whose foot came half an inch off the base for less than a second, and that's all it took to end the playoff hopes for the Washington Nationals.

Before replay, once the runner was safe, the infielder threw the ball back to the pitcher and never worried about the possibility of the runner briefly losing physical contact with the base. This was just common sense: The runner was safe, the play was over, let's go, play ball! But the replay regime has completely legislated common sense out of the process. It's as if they've created a kind of 'Shroedinger's Baserunner' who is simultaneously safe AND out, the final determination to be made once the play is examined through the lens of technology for an arbitrarily long period of time after it is over.

Nobody ever thought about what happens five or ten or even twenty seconds after the play is made and called. Because that's not what we're here to do. We're watching two teams play a beautiful, elegant, hundred year old game at the highest level. We do not want to see games decided by a pointless call based on an unintended consequence of what otherwise was an improvement in the game.

I'm very much for using sensors to call balls and strikes. The problem isn't just missing calls - although that IS a problem - the problem is that every umpire has his own strike zone, very few of which are even close to the strike zone described in the rulebook. But I'd also like to see the League step up and figure out a way to keep the improvements to the quality of the game delivered by replay, but to put an end to the absurd, pointless nitpickery that has resulted from it.
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Who Ya Gonna Call?

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Have I Reached the Party to whom I am Speaking?

OK, OK, I get it fer crissakes. You hate Trump. I hate Trump. Two thirds of Americans and five sixths of the world hate Trump. There are people who don't know where Washington DC is and they fucking hate Trump.

But c'mon. You're doing it wrong. Acting like the tea party, throwing an endless tantrum, shrieking for a couple of news cycles over actions both existential and meaningless. We really have to do better.

You want a fer instance? OK, lets talk dead soldiers. Who did Trump call? When did he call them? What about Obama? Congratulations, you sound like Trey Gowdy. Nice work there.

First, think about it. Do you really want a rich ignorant narcissist to call you in the midst of your grief over the loss of a loved one? How is that conversation going to go? Will you feel better after a nice brief conversation with Donald Trump? A conversation, need I even mention, that will be entirely ABOUT Donald Trump?

But that's actually secondary. He's President, if he wants to call widows and orphans, that's his prerogative. But there's a much larger issue. A friend of mine referred to the old saw about 'Fiddling while Rome burns', describing the banal and pointless things people were doing while thousands of houses went up in flames last week. The phrase, of course, has a broader meaning that has nothing to do with fires or musical instruments. It describes both a leadership that is callous and even sociopathic, that has no empathy for the people it leads, and contributes zero value in the face of existential problems.

America has been at war continuously for sixteen years. Many of the soldiers and airmen deploying today have no memory of a nation at peace. The bodies come home, sometimes more, sometimes fewer, but they are an endless shame. But here's the thing - these are all volunteers. They KNOW what they're getting into, and the risk is part of the attraction. The government sent them to die in vain, but at the end of the day their deaths are not the government's fault. Unless and until there is broad conscription, every soldier that dies in a warzone is responsible, because they made the choice that sent them there.

So we have a president who is nuclear curious, who is fooling around with two more wars on two different continents, who is laughingly trying to destroy the individual insurance market - a move that will kill thousands - who is destroying the environmental and financial regulatory regime - a move that will kill, sicken and immiserate thousands more - and who blusters about trade wars, racism and extra-constitutional actions like torture and perpetual incarceration. And we're throwing spittle flecked tantrums over paper towels and phone calls.

Make no mistake, there is a cost to this. We watched it play out endlessly during the Obama administration. Every single day there was a new outrage, played out on Fox News and across the right-wing echo chamber, from his tan suit to his fooling around with a baseball bat. When everything is a shrieking outrage, then nothing is. When we take time out from protecting our fellow citizens from a feckless and hateful government to spend days screaming about phone calls, the media thinks they should cover these pointless things. And it all provides a genuine 'smoke screen' - a cloud of Sturm und Drang behind which the worst excesses of a twisted, ugly regime can play out unimpeded.

Look. We know Trump is bad We KNOW he lies. We KNOW he is incompetent, mentally and emotionally incapable of carrying out his duties of office. We do NOT need a daily reminder of his failures and shortcomings.

No, HE needs a daily reminder that we're here, that we're watching him, that we realize that all the little stupid/mean stuff he does would have derailed any other President, but it's not going to derail him. The rules have changed - partly because the tea party helped to cripple their own ability to challenge presidential actions - and now we just keep falling into the trap.

Why? Why are Americans dying in Niger? What are we trying to accomplish in Afghanistan? Why are we tormenting a hapless little dictator like Kim Jong-un? Why are we pretending that Iran represents some kind of implacable enemy? What will happen when America next falls into recession, or there is a major terrorist attack? What will we be focused on, what will we be shrieking about?

We need to get our shit together. This isn't fun and games. This isn't entertainment. This isn't paper towels and phone calls. Seriously, don't sweat the small stuff, because it's not the small stuff that's going to kill people and ruin lives...
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Racial Injustice and the NFL - It Don't Mean Nothin'

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Respect for What Now?

People who know me know I am a football fan and a committed advocate for social justice. So why, they are apparently wondering, have I been silent on the events of the last weekend? Trump's vicious, authoritarian, racist tweets and the overwhelming response of the NFL players, coaches and owners have dominated the news cycle over the last several days, and oddly - it seems - mikey has had nothing to say. I'm going to clear that issue up right here, but you may find yourself unsatisfied with my position. Why? Because it's a nothingburger, a false argument based on rigid idealism, institutional racism and a fundamental unwillingness to face the hard truths about the lived experience of poor African Americans across the US.

Now, of course, people will shriek at this point "mikey, are you saying that the horrific social injustice brought about by hundreds of years of institutional racism is a NOTHINGBURGER??!!11". And of course, that's not at all what I'm saying, but that's a clear insight into the problem. Everybody's lying. They KNOW what this is about, but they refuse to have THAT conversation. So they use this one weird trick to argue against what someone DIDN'T say rather than engage them on the issue honestly. That, of course, would require they accept the fundamental premise. Not. Gonna. Happen.

Think about the wall to wall coverage of the Warrior's statements, the Trump responses, and then the huge outpouring of opinions and vitriol that carried through the football games on Sunday. This all started when Colin Kaepernick decided that he could not stand for an anthem that spoke to American values when the institutional racism in law enforcement and city management in cities and towns all across America were killing children and destroying families. When now, unlike the preceding two hundred years, there was repeated, ubiquitous video evidence of these brutal murders and beatings, and yet, time after time, these uniformed thugs, filled with hate, were repeated absolved of any wrongdoing. Another young person dead, another family destroyed, another cop goes home to his loved ones, smirking at our corrupt system of 'justice'. But when you look at the coverage on TV and social media, you hear about the flag, the anthem, the military, words like "respect" and "patriotism", of soldiers who died protecting the very rights we find ourselves arguing about.

Now, let me tell you why it's all a lie:

1.) The flag is a piece of colored cloth, mass produced by the millions. No one ever died defending a flag - or if they did, they were a mindless tool. 

2.) The national anthem is a song. A crappy song, commemorating the otherwise fairly obscure naval bombardment of Fort McHenry in September 1814, a small part of the larger Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. No one ever died defending it either - or even tried to encourage troops in battle by singing it. 

3.) Black Lives Matter is not a political movement. It is not "Liberal", nor is it "Conservative". It is an anguished cry for justice - a demand that the lives of young African American citizens not be thrown away by angry men who hate the communities they ostensibly serve, and that the people who carry unimaginable power into the heart of cities and towns already racked by a century of poverty and oppression use it with even just a modicum of restraint and humanity. 

So how much did we hear about the actual point of the argument this weekend? I don't know what you heard, but I heard nothing. It was about respecting the flag, standing for a song, slavish mindless love for an overpowered and grossly mis-used military. The dead kids, the free smirking cops, the images of dead children lying facedown a block from home, shot to pieces by a heavily armed, armored, uniformed thug? Yeah, no, I didn't see any of those. I didn't hear any of the voices of the aggrieved mothers, the vacant-eyed siblings, the cops with blood-soaked hands sitting at home retweeting our racist presidents twitter rants. I heard about the military, and some weird kind of childlike 'respect' that sounded more like loyalty demanded by an authoritarian cult leader. In a weird way, it kind of sounded like North Korea, not America.

So no. I've got nothing. I'm not going to lie to help people perpetuate the claim that this was about a flag, or a song, or a soldier. When we're ready to have a real conversation about institutional racism, when we start to hold our law enforcement officers to at least a minimal standard of humanity, when SOMEBODY in power agrees that yes, Black lives DO matter? That's a process I want to participate in. All the hand-waving and misdirection in the name of protecting the status quo? Nope. I'm just not interested.

It's a nothingburger....
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Syria Gets Serious

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The broadly multi-faction 'civil war' in Syria is moving into a new state. Probably not an end-state, but something more clearly defined, and certainly more dangerous for the rest of the region. The opportunity for things to go sideways in unexpected ways is much greater now than it has been before, with more of the factions fielding well-equipped, militarily capable armies. Russia, Turkey, Iran Saudi Arabia, America, NATO and Israel are just SOME of the factions involved in the existential struggle of the Alawite Ba'ath regime against a wide variety of insurgents and trans-national Islamic rebel militias, all playing out as the huge 'Caliphate' of ISIS is slowly ground into dust by the US/Kurdish coalition. Almost any day offers the chance of a miscalculation that will lead to a major regional conflict involving multiple nuclear powers.

But today I really just want to highlight one particular upcoming problem. It's not something that's getting a lot of discussion, but because of some of the international relationships among the various combatants, it could be the most critical and dangerous problem in the war. Let me show you a map:

In the east you have Iran. In the west, on the Mediterranean, you have Lebanon, and critically, Israel. In between you have Iraq and Syria. Lebanon is dominated by a Shi'ite Islamic political organization called Hezbollah, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran, Inc. And, it should be noted, is deeply hated and feared by Israel as the only military force in the region that can fight the IDF straight up and win. Iraq is, if not a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran, Inc. at least a junior partner. The Persian Shi'ites sheltered and protected the Iraqi Arab Shi'ites who were grossly persecuted by the Saddam Hussein regime, and then when the US helpfully toppled Saddam, they moved back to Iraq and took control of the government, while returning the favor and persecuting the Iraqi Sunnis. Now, as the Syrian army (SAA) is weakened and exhausted by years of bloody war, the Iranian militias under Russian air support are the primary forces available to Assad to hold on to power. The Israelis haven't done anything massive yet because it's been very difficult for Iran to move heavy weapons into Lebanon for Hezbollah to use, but that situation is about to change.

The only thing standing between an easy 1200km road route from Tehran to Beirut is an outpost of American backed rebels and some US 'advisers' in southeast Syria on the Iraq border. That's where all the action was last month, where an American F-16 shot down a Syrian bomber and a couple of drones. Ground Zero is a village called al Tanf. Bear in mind that these are rebel fighters - at war with the Syrian government - and their US benefactors are in Syria illegally, as the Syrian government does not want them there and has not given them permission to enter the country. This makes the whole exercise fraught. Just how hard will the US fight to keep that road route closed?

And if Israel believes that Iran could begin to ship endless truckloads of rockets, missiles, artillery, drones, armored vehicles and other military hardware to Lebanon, what might they do? One suspects the US will be willing to commit major forces and risk major regional conflict to keep Israel from doing something massive that changes the status of the region.

Much of the problem is predicated on the political narrative the west has built around Iran. Israel had to designate a new boogeyman when the Palestinian threat was crushed, and they chose Iran. The US has had an institutional hatred for Iran since the embassy takeover in 1979. This has resulted in the very odd condition of the US officially describing Iran as an authoritarian theocracy, a brutal dictatorship and a global sponsor of terrorism, but not using any of those terms to describe Sunni Wahabbist Saudi Arabia, which arguable fits the description much better.

If the Iranian militias and the Syrian Army want to push the rebels out of southeastern Syria and open up the road route, the Russians will have to decide whether to provide the air support that will bring them into direct conflict with the Americans. And later, if that overland direct route is opened, the Israelis might consider bombing the trucks, which will bring THEM into the range of Russian/Syrian advanced SAMs and once blood is spilled, the outcome is anybody's guess.
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Healthcare Wars 2017 Part 2 - What Did I Just Tell You About That Pony?

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At least until somebody writes a bill they can read

Single payer. Two words, a simple concept. There are variations, but the core principle is that every citizen is entitled to free health care, and the government sets up a system for paying the costs incurred with public funds. It's really two pieces - there is the insurance, or payment side, and the delivery side. On the payment side, it's easy - mostly. Just like Medicare or Social Security, the government merely sets up a straightforward bureaucracy to make the payments to doctors, hospitals, dentists, nurses, specialists, pharmacies and the rest of the health care delivery infrastructure. Because the government is a monopsony - the only buyer on the market - they can set their payment/reimbursement rates at any level they choose, much like a monopoly can set prices for their goods at any level regardless of market imperatives. The only 'challenging' portion of this part of the process is to raise the funds.

The other side of the Single Payer question in America is how to make the current privatized delivery system work in this new publicly funded process. Private for-profit insurance companies would just die - quickly - because no one would need to purchase insurance anymore, and only wealthy people would buy policies that provided them with access to better service than the public delivery infrastructure. So, somehow, in a free market in a democratic nation, the government would have to take control of virtually every doctor, hospital, pharmacy, dental office - trillions of dollars, millions of people - and then pay them a fraction of what they are used to receiving in the current for-profit private health care world.

So, when you think about it, it's hard to imagine what this single payer legislation would look like. You'd end up with a whole bunch of unemployed people in the private insurance industry, and whole bunch of doctors and hospitals that simply refused the government's mandated payment rates, only accepting patients from the remaining private insurers that paid full freight. And you'd end up with a massive constitutional problem - you can't privatize the health care delivery industry, and you can't force them to take patients they don't want.

And, of course, there's getting the people to buy in. 80% of Americans get their health insurance as part of their employment. That means they pay for insurance with lower wages, but that's baked into the cake by now. So they never see an actual insurance bill, and their only out-of-pocket expenses are deductibles and co-pays to their delivery providers. So now, if we come skipping up with our bright, progressive smiles and tell them that they're going to get a somewhat poorer - but perfectly acceptable - level of coverage, and we're only going to raise their income taxes 35% to give it to them, do you really think they're going to get really excited and tell their representatives to make it so?

See, that's what a pony looks like...
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Healthcare Wars 2017 Part 1 - No, You May Not Have a Pony

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And everybody gets a vote

The latest political battle over healthcare policy in the US is raging as debate over the Senate healthcare bill is extended through the summer recess. And the outpouring of outrage and resistance from the sane portion of the electorate is wonderful to see. But this bill (like the version the House passed last month) is deeply, desperately unpopular, with favorable polling running at below 20%. That means there are a LOT of Americans who are far from being politically liberal who are concerned for the well-being of their families and fighting just as hard as we are.

All of which gives us an opportunity to think about our political ideology and the belief system in which it operates. Last year, in the presidential primaries, there was a strong liberal cohort that was all in behind Bernie Sanders. Now, I'm not going to go back through all the problems with the Sanders campaign and message, but there is a larger point that is critically important to recognize at this point. That point is simply this - the other side has a vote too. Now, everyone you know might be politically liberal and broadly welcoming of tax increases to improve the lives of our fellow citizens, but that is not true of the population as a whole. Much of the nation is deeply suspicious of liberal economics, 'tax and spend' policies that have been deeply maligned by general consensus over the decades. Everyone from far-right tea party wingnuts to suburban 'social liberal/fiscal conservatives' are going to fight us every step of the way on any movement away from America's very limited activist government and safety net. There are more of them than there are of us.

You can demand single payer healthcare, tuition-free colleges (not even in the federal jurisdiction), Universal Basic Income and humane immigration policies all you want, but you're never going to get them. You do all the work - and get a little luck - you might just get some compromise, watered down version that improves everyone's life. Kind of like the ACA. In America, corporations make a profit by selling you a cure when you're sick or injured. That system is deeply entrenched, which is why American healthcare costs are so much higher than they are elsewhere in the world. Given time, favorable politics and a HUGE effort, President Obama was able to push through the greatest breakthrough in American healthcare in history. But make no mistake, it was a compromise, necessitated by the fact that every stakeholder in the system wasn't a liberal.

Here's the point. Liberals aren't going to get elected in America demanding far left policies, as much as we want them and believe that they are the right thing to do. When liberals DO get elected, they aren't going to be able to force those same policies through a system with as much friction and as many veto points as ours. And don't tell me we just need to take control of both houses of congress - even if the Democrats do that, it won't result in congress being populated by liberals. There will be Democrats from across the political spectrum, and most of them will not be in favor of the kinds of policies that Bernie Sanders championed. We have to recognize reality, accept that we're going to have to negotiate, compromise and accept incremental improvements in the system. There's no magic potion, there's no sparkle, there's no pony. The US is a huge nation with a huge diverse population, a nation that has in recent history elected both GW Bush and Donald fucking Trump.

Pretending is not a strategy. Understanding reality, and working within its constraints is the best we can do. And when we remember that, we do pretty well - from the ACA to the Iran nuclear deal to DACA - and when we forget it we get our political asses handed to us, and we get things like this horrific health care legislation. We can do better when we get serious...
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