Thursday, July 31, 2008

Maverick in a jetwash

Republicans have got to be worried that it's less than 100 days to the general election, and the McCain campaign is all over the place. First they base his whole candidacy on the notion that McCain has Honor, Courage, and American Pride oozing out of every pore and orifice--which is just fine. But now they are undermining that theme by launching a spate of ridiculous attack ads against Obama, one in which they make the baseless accusation that Obama neglected to visit wounded troops at a hospital because the press would not be there, and another in which they dismiss Obama as a mere substanceless celebrity on a par with Britany Spears and Paris Hilton (again making inaccurate claims). This sort of thing hurts McCain, not just because it contradicts his claims to various capitalized classical virtues, but because these schoolyard-taunt-level jabs reinforce the negative image of John McCain as short-tempered, immature, and deserving of his old highschool nickname.

And it's not just McCain's campaign strategy that's in disarray--he is all over the place on the issues, too. At first he opposed the Bush tax cuts, but now he supports them. He has also reversed himself on immigration, landing himself in the awkward position of opposing his own immigration bill. And now there are murmurs that he may not be committed to a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions after all. The Maverick has been systematically de-Mavericking himself.

A lot of people are using all this to level criticism at McCain, which of course is fine, but I think the root cause of all this spasmodic behavior is the fact that Republicans have put McCain in a totally untenable position. Rather than gaining an advantage during the lengthy period of time in which he had the nomination rapped up while Obama and Clinton were still duking it out, McCain was forced to spend all of his energies pandering to and consolidating the Republican base. The Rush/Hannity/Romney wing of the Republican party was unwilling to go along with McCain's deviations from Republican orthodoxy, and so he has had to gradually and painfully reverse himself on the very issues which made him stand out in the first place.

The Rushes, Hannities, and Romnies might be satisfied with the transformation they've wrought, but they've also completely hamstrung their guy for the general election. Because McCain can no longer run on his sometimes-unorthodox-for-a-Republican but always-arch-conservative record, he is forced to ineffectually attack made-up character flaws of his opponent. And the Republican establishment is following suit, leading to some weird results: "terrorist fist-jabs", seven-house-owning-heiress-marrying McCain calling Obama an elitist, Karl Rove absurdly characterizing Obama as "that guy at the country club" who "makes snide comments about everyone who passes by".* The inexplicable comparison of Obama to Paris Hilton--in a campaign ad--is just the latest installment.

Unless there is a big change in the so-called "fundamentals", McCain is going to have a hell of a time winning this thing. The Independents have cooled to him because of his tacking towards the ideological right, and the ideological right still harbors the sneaking suspicion that this guy is some kind of Independent. And since there's no Hillary--and Republicans can't really remember what Republicans not being in power is like--there's little sense of urgency in getting McCain elected.

To top it all off, the GOP continues its disturbing morning ritual of playing Russian Roulette with its foot--giving us a consistent stream of Republican indictments, contempts-of-Congress, and balls-out law-breaking. For Democrats these days, it's like God is smiling down on us and nodding, "Yes", and then holding Karl Rove in contempt.

So, we'll see if McCain can figure out a way to bounce back. I just hope he keeps cranking out those entertaining commercials.


* The most awesome thing about this story was the fact that, in Karl Rove World, it makes sense to assume that your audience can relate to "that guy at the country club". You know, like that guy you always see at the Billionaire Yacht Faberge Egg Convention whose always making those snide remarks about your Faberge Egg that's on your yacht...I fucking hate those guys.

"I'm Jordan"

Ok, this proves conclusively that Jordan is the Batman of basketball. But guys--you know who this makes the Commissioner Gordon of basketball?

Phil Jackson. It sort of fits!

Although after that, the analogy kind of breaks down:
  • Robbin --> Scottie Pippen
  • Alfred --> Bill Cartwright
  • Joker --> Patrick Ewing
Really, though, Heath Ledger was channeling Ewing in that performance.

EDIT: Let me reiterate that the Commissioner Gordon of basketball is not NBA Commissioner David Stern. That would be committing the fallacy of asserting the commissioner, and it's wrong.

How to ruin Garfield Minus Garfield

Make a book out of it that's like this:
The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison.
Where's the fun in that? It's a bit like watching a movie for the first time with the commentary track on. Or something.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Poor choice of words







I had to read this headline twice.

Price up, demand down


Total driving on highways in the US was down 3.7% for the month of May compared with May 2007, with gas prices up 25%. The experts say that demand for gas in the short term is relatively inelastic because it is affected by long-term decisions such as what kind of car to buy and where to move, and so we won't see demand really fall off for a while yet.


PS: On a side note, I would like to take this news item as a case study of the suckiness of traditional newspaper writing in the age of the internet. First read this Reuters piece, then read this blog entry by CBS guy Kevin Drum. The first, you will notice, is terrible. Why it's terrible:
  • Even though it's short, it's bloated with all these vapid quotes from the Secretary of Transportation.
  • The first sentence tries to jam too much information in and ends up leaving out a critical piece of information: driving is down 3.7% compared to what? Compared to the previous month? Compared to the same month last year? I had to look elsewhere for the information.
  • The author insists on expressing increases and decreases in the meaningless absolute terms of millions of total miles driven. Nobody has an intuitive grasp of these figures--so why not stick with percentages?
  • There are no links to the source material.
  • There are no charts or graphs.
The Drum entry is concise, contains links to the source material, and even seems to be written by someone who knows what the hell is going on. Kevin Drum 1, Tom Doggett (and/or his editor Walter Bagley) 0.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Tumblers > Pumpers?

I'm not so sure...



Not the President

David Brooks calls bullshit on Obama's Berlin speech, saying that it lacks any actual arguments:
When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s — but still worked.

[Obama] has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far from reality....

Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.

I agree with Brooks that, compared to the Berlin speeches made by Kennedy and Reagan, Obama's was light on substance--some pretty airy-fairy stuff. But I also think it makes a critical difference that Obama, unlike Kennedy and Reagan at the time, is not the acting head of state. If Obama had gone in with all sorts of substantive policy proposals, it would have been too explicitly presidential and he would have been rightly skewered for pretending to powers he doesn't have.

So I think Obama was wise to keep this a largely superficial event--an event that shows to people back home that, hey, it doesn't have to be the case that Europeans loathe America.

Nit: picked

Internet reactions seem to be mostly laudatory, but I thought Obama was oddly off his game for the big Berlin speech, flubbing lines throughout the 24 minutes. A pretty uneven performance. But I guess his media narrative of Obama=great orator is durable enough that even a mediocre delivery will garner descriptions such as "soaring address" and "powerful speech".

And let me just clarify here that my gripe is with the delivery of the speech, not its substance. I try to focus on the important stuff.

Sen. Kevin Bryant (R-SC)

When asked what religion he believes Obama practices, his response was: "That's a good question. I don't know." You expect this thing from some loser in the House, but a US Senator? Bryant's guilty of (1) believing that implying Obama is a Muslim is a smear, and (2) implying that Obama is a Muslim. That's not good Senatesmanship.

As for the inflammatory T-shirt that he posted on his blog, I don't think it's beyond the pale. But maybe that's because for 5 years I lived in a town where bumper stickers comparing the President unfavorably to Hitler were in plentiful supply.

Credible source?

According to astronaut Edgar Mitchell--who has walked on the moon--aliens = a big fat YES:
"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real," Dr Mitchell said.

"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."
My first guess is hoax (this did occur on a radio show, after all); my second guess is this guy is craaaaazy/confused/paranoid; my third guess is that, holy shit, aliens dude. But the probability span of those guesses is 90%, 9.99999%, 0.11111%, respectively.

EDIT: Correction: that should be 90%, 9.99999%, 0.00001%.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Ebert disses comics

From his review of Dark Knight:

“Batman” isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about.

Whoa there. Sounds like Ebert's never cracked open Dark Knight Returns or Killing Joke, or any of the other "dark" Batman stories that started cropping up in the 80s...

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Financial literacy

The commentariat is slowly turning towards the issue of personal debt and financial literacy, led by reports in recent months about the terrible average savings rates for individual Americans. And it's about bloody time--I've always wondered why this very critical issue never gets any play.

Stephen Dubner at the Freakonomics blog at the Times has a must-read entry about financial illiteracy in America, and the subject's absence from school curricula:
I’d like to think I’m at least adequate in taking care of my family’s finances and everything that includes in the modern world: real-estate and insurance decisions, saving for college and retirement, investing and tax planning, etc. But it has been a bit of trial-by-error mixed with trial-by-fire — and to be honest, I was very fortunate to have an older brother who is smart, frugal, patient, and who worked for many years in finance. If it weren’t for him, I’d be in considerably sadder shape.

But here’s my point: I’m not exactly undereducated. I had 13 years of public schooling, 4 years of college, and another 2 years of graduate school — and after all that schooling, I don’t know if I learned enough to answer all three of Lusardi’s questions correctly. The subjects simply didn’t come up. Just as they apparently didn’t for the two-thirds of the older respondents to Lusardi’s questions.

I have similar story. Basically I wouldn't know jack about anything finance related if weren't for a fellow I work with named Karl who happend to press into my hands a book called The Four Laws of Debt Free Prosperity. The book sounded, and was, fairly cheesy, but it was short and in those few brief chapters made me realize that I had been out to lunch on an extraordinarily important subject, a subject that--if ignored--could literally ruin a person's life.

So it's always been sort of crazy to me that they don't make a serious effort to scare kids in high school into never, ever running a credit card debt, or show them how a steady and conservative savings plan begun early enough can make them into millionaires when they are old. And I never understood the point of quibbling over various ways to refine Social Security when a large number of Social Security recipients will have frittered away their incomes over the span of decades because they simply did not know what they were doing with their money. Financial literacy seems to me the first and most important step in establishing a sane set of policies dealing with retirement and supporting the elderly crowd, and yet in our politics it's treated as an afterthought.

Friday, July 11, 2008

A war criminal, according to some

Kind of striking when you realize this is coming not from some MoveOn/Kos type, but a conservative:
Some of the least superficially awful techniques - such as the Gestapo-perfected "stress positions" and "hypothermia" - can actually be the worst in terms of suffering. There is no doubt at this point that the president of the United States is a war criminal. The only question is whether he will ever be brought to justice.
Well, more a libertarian, really. And an Obama-supporting one, at that. So maybe not all that striking.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

When gentility breeds inaccuracy

So, the news story is: a hot mic recorded Jesse Jackson saying something bad about Obama. Now, of course, the New York Times, being a "family newspaper", will not actually just print what he said (notwithstanding the fact that anyone can find out what he said via simple Google search), so instead the Times beats around the bush:
Mr. Jackson’s words, which included a vulgar reference, were recorded by a live microphone on Sunday.
And:

The comments, which came when Mr. Jackson thought he was speaking privately, were brought to light on Wednesday when Bill O’Reilly, the host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” announced his intention to play the exchange. At least one of the words had to be blocked out.
Frustrating, right? The reader is left with a burning question at the end of the article: just what the hell did Jesse Jackson say? Just spit it out already! And the information is not trivial: just exactly what vulgarity was used sheds a lot of light on what Jackson's real opinions are, as well as how offended Obama and his supporters ought to be. And from all the circumlocution, you get the idea that what Jackson said was the worst of the worst. But of course, we don't want to poison the mind of avid New York Times reader L'il Timmy--L'il Timmy who, if he is above the age of 6, knows full well how to find Jackson's comments--and worse--using a new-fangled invention called "the internets". And so the vital information remains obscured.

My question to these Times editors is: just whose sensibilities are you protecting by not just printing the damn quote? My guess: a whole lot of ninnies who take pointless umbrage at any kind of break with tradition, no matter how much sense it makes.

Less squeamish sources, such as Fox News (whose own Bill O'Reilly broke the story), have the whole thing:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson apologized Wednesday for saying Barack Obama is “talking down to black people” during what Jackson thought was a private conversation before a FOX News interview Sunday.

Jackson was speaking to a guest at the time about Obama’s speeches in black churches and his support for faith-based charities. Jackson added before going live, “I want to cut his nuts off.”

Now, Times, was that really so bad?

Epilogue: Is it just me, or is that a weirdly intense thing to say? It'd be like if I said, "Man, that roommate of mine got chunky peanut butter again--I'M GONNA CUT HIS NUTS OFF!!!" I mean, I just don't see how Obama's run-of-the-mill pandering could give rise to such visceral imagery. And if you look at the guy Jackson's talking to, that guy is, to his credit, clearly weirded out as well.

This can't be serious

T. Boone Pickens?

The threat of nonlinear history

I've often wondered, in a lazy sort of way, in what way or to what extent political science is supposed to be a science. From doing some cursory looking around on the internet--and from casting my memory back to that one undergraduate PoliSci course that I took--it seems like wide swaths of political science look like your standard social science, doing things like finding correlations between levels of wealth and frequency of political revolutions and the like. But then there are the other parts of political science that get more play, the ones that boldly impose models on politics and history and try to make long-run predictions. So, for instance, you have a debate like Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" (the world will fracture along cultural lines) versus Fukuyama's "Last Man" (liberal capitialism will win History), where two different theories offer competing outlooks for the next several decades (or more), and these are the kinds of views that inform the decision-making of the world's foremost power-wielders.

Now, I think it's fair to say that a whole lot of the heavy lifting that these theories do is done by the particular understanding of history and causation in history that they are founded on. For example, Fukuyama's contention that liberal capitalism is the final historical phase of humanity relies on the notion that history is a procession of battles between ideologies, and with this conception comes all of the theory-concepts (e.g., "ideology", "an ideology triumphing and continuing through history") and models he needs to identify historical patterns and then extrapolate those patterns into the future, forming (something like) a prediction (the "ideology" liberal capitalism has "triumphed" over Fascism and Communism, and so it "is the big winner of History"). And Huntington's idea about cultural conflict relies on notions about how human beings behave on a large scale, about how their cultural identity governs this behavior. And so Huntington will have a different set of theory-concepts going to work for him, not looking at "ideologies" so much as "civilizations" and their various "features", and perhaps having a different idea about what constitutes a "conflict" between them. But the point of all this is to show that though these theories impose different models on the world that make use of different sets of concepts, and that these concepts causally interact with each other in the model in different ways, and thus offer not only different predictions of the future but different sets of conceptual levers of history for power-wielders to pull, it is still the case that both theories have concepts, that they both have some causal scheme for how these concepts interact, and that they both make long-term predictions of some kind.

The thing I want to explore is: what kinds of assumptions are made by these theories such that they can have these formal features about them (theory-concepts or models, causal scheme, long-term predictions)? To me, it seems like they necessarily view history as something like a linear system that can be lassoed with broadly applicable concepts, that these concepts interact with each other in a regular mechanistic way, and that this mechanistic motion of broadly applicable concepts is what provides the basis for extrapolations of the system's behavior into the future (i.e., long-term predictions). When I say a "linear system", I mean a system that has this property: if you start the system in nearly the same state this time as you did last time, then the results will be nearly the same this time as they were last time (or at least, the difference in results between the two runs will be predictable/regular and proportional in some way to the difference in the starting states). A system's being linear is critical for the formation of broadly applicable concepts, because of the pragmatic limitations of being able to precisely repeat an experiment over and over again. For example, take Newtonian physics. At some point someone wanted to be able to predict how far a ball would travel given that it was thrown with a certain force at a certain angle. Of course, we know now that there is an elegant little algebraic formula that will yield the right answer. But for that first person doing the investigation, he had to start off by taking a ball and propelling with some force at some angle, and measuring how far it travelled. And he ran this same experiment over and over, and recorded all the measurements. Of course, the initial conditions for all of the different runs were not precisely the same. With each throw, there were arbitrary small variances in amount of force applied and the precise angle thrown brought about by shaky hands or uneven springs or whatever. But because of the linearity of the system, this didn't matter too much--the differences in starting state were small, and so the differences in end states was also (commensurately) small, and these small differences could be cleverly disappeared, either by deliberately reducing the granularity of the measurements so that the differences could not be detected ("significant figures"), or by leveraging the randomness of the differences by averaging the results together, thus cancelling out the "noise" and converging on the "true answer". What this means is that, at the end of the day, our experimenter has a long list of what can for all intents and purposes be considered the same exact test run over and over again. And he can take the regularities found here, and see if they hold with other objects--and if they still hold, he can try tweaking different variables in the initial state (halve the force, double the angle, etc.) and see if the results are altered in a predictable and proportional way. The broader the set of scenarios that he finds his regularities in, the more general and broadly applicable will be the concepts that eventually populate his finished theory. And in this case of Newtonian physics, the concepts are very general and broadly applicable indeed: he gets to say that "an object" weighing W will travel X distance when propelled with Y force at Z angle. But of course, none of this would be possible if Newtonian physics of this type were nonlinear--that is, if even imperceptible differences in starting conditions caused erratic and unpredictable differences in the result. If this were the case, then on the first test run, the ball might go 5 feet--and on the next run, might fly 18 feet, all due to a very slight difference in the number of air molecules that happen to strike the ball as it accelerated through the air. And then on the next test the ball might fly a measly .2 inches, because on the last run a few molecules were shaved off the ball when it hit the ground, and so the weight variable changed ever so slightly. Under these conditions, there are no tricks the experimenter could deploy to cancel out the "noise" of the results--because of the imperfect fidelity of each test to the previous one and the system's nonlinearity, his results would amount to nothing more than a list of random numbers (reflecting the randomness of the variances in the initial conditions of each test), and he could no more average the results than one can average the results of a television screen full of static and get an image. With no regularities to extract from his results, he cannot broaden his theory by generalizing it to other scenarios, and so cannot form an appropriately general theory with appropriately general theory-concepts, like "an object" and "X distance". Rather than a very useful and interesting generally applicable statement of a causal relation that can be used in the future to make predictions in all sorts of different situations involving objects being propelled through space, the experimenter has a very not-useful and uninteresting dead historical record that describes some meaningless events (ten separate occasions of some ball being thrown in some guy's backyard) that will have no bearing or impact on anything that comes after it. He will have not a theory, but a collection of arbitrary data. And of course, with no broadly applicable and causally interactive concepts with which to formulate a theory, there can be no mechanistic fast-forwarding of a model to make predictions about the future (indeed, if Newtonian physics were nonlinear, the world would be craaaaazy).

So you can see where I'm going with this. Could it be that the engine of history--the vast system of human beings that interact with each other, each with its own idiosyncratic motives and behaviors and tendencies--is essentially nonlinear? Could it be that if you were to somehow model all of humanity on a computer and run it in fast forward, that if you went and removed, say, some insignificant English peasant in 1132 AD, then the result in 2008 would be vastly different, Sliders-esque world with totally different leaders, countries, and dominant ideologies? Or we can go even smaller: if a butterfly gives its wings an extra flap in 540 BC somewhere in Greece, does the same kind of wild and erratic variation in world-makeup occur? You may think: well what does a butterfly have to do with human affairs? But as we all know by now, the weather is famously sensitive to changes of even this scale. If the butterfly did this, it would unleash a whole alternate history of weather patterns, weather patterns that would effect human society in countless different ways over the centuries.

How can we tell if human history is, indeed, massively nonlinear? This I do not know. Maybe the surest way we would ever be able to tell is by somehow coming up with a computer model of humanity that everyone could agree really does model humanity accurately. Then we could simply experiment by running the model (a computer model has the benefit that it can be run in precisely the same way as many times as you like. If the model is deterministic, then even a nonlinear system will spit out the same result over and over). But it seems to me that you could also make a fairly educated guess at humanity's nonlinearity by applying some armchair common sense. Just by reflecting on your own life, you can easily see how incredibly and delicately contingent are so many basic features of your life. For example, when my mother was a little girl and her family was moving out West, they were originally planning on settling down in Seattle. However, things changed when they decided that they would take a detour to Los Angeles to take the kids to Disneyland--they ended up taking a liking to the then-undeveloped San Fernando Valley, and lived there ever since. So if it wasn't for the decision to visit Disneyland--and if it wasn't for Disneyland being located in LA--and if it wasn't for Walt Disney having the idea for Disneyland--and if it wasn't for Walt Disney's mother missing a train and having to share a taxi with a charming fellow by the name of John Disney--and on and on and on, branching through history in a million parallel branches going as far back as you want to go--if it wasn't for all those meaningless contingencies, I wouldn't have been born. And I think when you take this and multiply it by every little event and fact and all the people in all of history, and factor in on top of this other nonlinear systems like the weather that affect everyone all throughout the world through history, I think there can only be one sobering conclusion: that humanity, that history, is massively, terrifyingly, unendingly, unsolvably nonlinear.

But hold on--all is not lost. Because some theory-concepts just so happen to be durable in the face of nonlinearity. For example, it may be impossible to predict a year from now exactly which days will be rainy in May in San Francisco do to the nonlinearity of weather, but it is possible to make a prediction like, next year there will be more rainy days in May than in September. And certainly we can safely predict that it will be colder here in the summer than in the fall. So it is not as if nonlinearity automatically equals total unpredictabliity. There could be some local parts of the system that show regularities, perhaps because some outside thing is significantly constraining the possible outputs of the nonlinear system (in our case, it would be the shape of the land and the affects of ocean temperature on barometric pressure and the fog and whatnot). And so the question for political scientists is: are the concepts that populate your theory durable in the face of nonlinear history? Is a "winning ideology" subject to the frail infinitude of contingencies, like my birth? Or will that "winning ideology" stubbornly remain no matter what the contingencies are, like cold summers in San Francicso?

Perhaps any theory in political science is, ultimately, a statement about what holds steady in the face of the mass contingencies of history. Still, though, one can worry about the potential damage nonlinear history can wreak on our finely tuned theories, and wonder if there might be some way of verifying that we are indeed engaging in some kind of prediction-yielding science, and not an obscure form of historical interpretation that comments on past events without shedding light on future ones.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

War powers

In response to the inability of Congress to prevent the President from duping it into going to war, some graybeards have decided to do a study of the effectiveness of the War Powers Resolution:
In a report released on Tuesday, the study group concluded that the 1973 law, which is known as the War Powers Resolution and was adopted in the wake of American involvement in the Vietnam War, was lacking in a number of regards.

For one thing, the authors said, it allows the president to wage war without any Congressional consultation or approval for up to 90 days. It sets forth conditions under which a president can commit troops, including an unspecified “national emergency,” but provides no mechanism for Congress to enforce its provisions. It also requires the president to report periodically on the progress of any conflicts, a provision that has been regularly ignored.

Many scholars consider parts of the resolution unconstitutional, including the requirement that military action be ended within 90 days unless Congress specifically authorizes it.
The study group recommends a slightly different set of conditions and duties to impose on the Executive branch, but even they admit that such tweaks are small potatoes. Says group member Lee Hamilton: “Presidents will do what they want to do, and they have the constitutional power to do it. What we hoped to ensure is that they hear other points of view before they do." In other words, the President must have Congress over for tea before he starts a war--not exactly the kind of oversight that's going to prevent another Iraq War.

The thing is, so long as the President has control over the intelligence, the President has control over war powers. As we saw during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the President has a more or less free hand in determining which data is released to the public and which data is kept secret (secret, even, from most of Congress). The upshot of this is that the President can manipulate intelligence to generate a false empirical justification for virtually any war action he feels like taking. Of course, such misbehavior can eventually be uncovered by a diligent, subpoena-issuing Congress--but by that time, the war will have already started.

What is needed is not Constitutionally questionable limits on the President's war powers, per se, but a serious overhaul of how military intelligence is to be shared amongst the political branches and with the public. The current system that allows de facto arbitrary classification and declassification of intelligence by a single elected official has failed spectacularly, and there is no reason to think it will not fail again. Simply put, it concentrates too much power in the hands of a single individual.

Friday, July 4, 2008

American children > British children

Happy 4th of July, everyone!

Thursday, July 3, 2008

On blunts

Today I was riding my bike home from work, and, as is usually the case, I ran into a red light at Harrison and Cesar Chavez. Now, Harrison does a sort of horseshoe action from 26th to Precita, which means that if the light at Cesar Chavez is red, it makes more sense for me to stop up at 26th, so that I can get a downhill boost when the light turns green and coast uphill to Precita in one fell swoop.

Anyway. So I was stopped at Harrison and 26th, which just so happens to be right in front of some lively projects. I say "lively" because there's always a good amount of hustle and bustle, kids playing on the sidewalk, dudes standing in their doorway talking with other dudes, people shouting things across the way, all that sort of thing.* This time, there was a dude standing in his doorway, and he looked at me and shouted, "Get some blunts, nigga!"

Before I could react, I heard a voice from behind me say "Alright"--it was the person he was actually talking to, who was emerging from a corner market. (EDIT: Maybe I should mention here that neither of these guys were, in fact, black. Don't want to mislead anyone...) So I guess this guy wanted his friend to get some papers so that they could smoke some fatty bluntz.

Now here's the thing: I was just sitting on my bike, waiting for the light to turn, taking in this humdrum slice of city life, when it occurred to me how insane it is that there's a whole lot of people in this country who firmly believe that what would be awesome in that situation is if some cops forcibly busted into that guy's house and arrested him for doing drugs. I mean, anyone can tell you what that guy's going to be doing with his life for the next few hours: something wildly uninteresting, like watching TV or playing GTA4. This is all that stoned people can do. And yet, this behavior is supposed to pose such a fundamental threat to the very foundations of civilization that we should--nay, must--bust their asses.

But the question is--why? What does this do? For anyone? Getting arrested by the police--and certainly going to prison--is far, far, far more likely to mess you up than smoking weed. And this I know, for the simple reason that virtually every single person I've ever known has smoked weed at least once (even, apparently, my grandparents, to "see what the fuss was about"), and virtually none of them are worse off for it. And, though I don't know anyone who has been seriously arrested or done hard time, I think it's pretty safe to say that that kind of experience mostly has an adverse effect on one's development, it pretty much amounting to an exercise in alienating the criminal from civil institutions of law and order and forcing him to brush shoulders with the dregs of society for a couple of months.

I mean, I think that reasonable people can take a paternal interest in trying to get that guy to not smoke weed. I even think that reasonable people could act on this interest by outlawing the stuff, if they think that keeping it legal lends it a patina of respectability that causes a significant increase in the number of users. But if the concern really is paternalistic, then it doesn't make a lick of sense to make the punishment a hundred times more damaging to the individual than the crime itself. And yet, at the level of federal policy and majority public sentiment, this is about where we are.


*It is best to be explicit here: I am not pulling one of those "I'm-a-white-person-who's-so-totally-with-it-and-urban-that-I-can-talk-about-hanging-around-the-projects-like-it's-no-big-deal" moves that gentrifiers are constantly pulling (and, yes, I am a card-carrying white gentrifier). I hate that. It's just so Stuff White People Like. So let me say that, no, I'm not completely at ease while idling on my bike in the projects--or at least, definitely less at ease than when I'm idling in some other area. At the same time, though, familiarity has an interesting way of making things less scary. Idling in some strange corner of the city is one thing--but idling on my bike route is quite another. It's like, when you can claim some place as somehow being your home or a part of your home, you suddenly get a confidence or leverage to be able to carry youself in a "Fuck you, what's wrong with you?" way that makes you feel safer, like that a significant majority of people in the surrounding area--being normal, decent people--have your back in the event that you encounter a dangerous jerk.

Ah, America

One of our country's great attributes, I think, is its ability to produce just the most outrageous--and oddly capable--characters imaginable, from Benjamin Franklin to P.T. Barnum to Snoop.

Well, I think we can add a minor character to that list: Rocky Twyman. He sounds like something out of a Wodehouse novel, and has probably caused more scratched heads than anyone now living.

Fox News and Photoshop

Apparently, Fox News displayed Photoshopped images of some reporters it doesn't like without informing the audience that they were altered. This is, I think, not only hilarious, but positively weird. You'll agree when you see the photos.