athenian_abroad

I'm glad to see this piece of drama winding up:

The Sentencing

A few quick observations on recent developments.

Putting the best possible face on it, the loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat may be a blessing in disguise. It's a desperately needed wake-up call for the Democrats, who are apparently unaware that, not only is their strategy not working, but that it is failing catastrophically. The good news is that the wake-up call comes in the form of the loss of a single seat, not both houses of Congress (as in 1994). There's still time to turn this around.

It also creates a stark choice. Given that the Republicans now control at least 41 votes in the Senate, they have the absolute power to execute their political strategy -- block everything, make the Democrats appear hapless, blame Obama for the ensuing deterioration in the economy, win big in 2010 and 2012 -- unless the Democrats change the rules.

So that's the choice: change the rules or lose. Simple, no?

The Democrats' only hope of winning, it seems to me, is to declare all-out war on gridlock. This would involve:

• Reminding the country that we are in a midst of a national emergency; we face the risk of double-digit unemployment as far as they eye can see, and we are (lest we forget) at war. Deliberately paralyzing the national government at such a time, purely for partisan gain, is little short of treasonous. We cannot afford to permit it.


• Declaring the immediate intention of Democrats in the Senate to amend the Senate rules, abolishing the filibuster forever. In the past, the filibuster has been used with restraint by responsible minorities to block the most egregious overreaching by the majority party. In the past twelve months, Republicans have changed all that. Their indiscriminate use of the filibuster and other procedural maneuvers to block or endlessly delay even the most routine Senate business has demonstrated incontrovertibly that they cannot be relied upon to wield this power with even a minimum of responsibility. The time has come to take our chances with majority rule.


• Sending to the Senate, not a watered-down health reform bill, but a strengthened bill. Pass it with fifty votes, plus the Vice President. Show America what real Democratic health care reform looks like. (I'm curious to see what it looks like myself!)


• Passing a whopping additional stimulus bill immediately; pass it with fifty votes plus the Vice President. This should include immediate unrestricted grants to the states to close state budget gaps, prevent service cuts and layoffs, and avoid state-level tax increases. Immediate additional stimulus is the only hope of sparking the beginnings of a real recovery before the mid-term elections; in fact, it's probably too late for that already. But recovery is good even if the Democrats don't get electoral credit for it. (I'll write more about the "fiscal responsibility" angle in another post; the short version is: spending a lot now is the best thing we can do for the long-term national debt position.)


• Passing real financial regulation reform, again with a bare fifty Senators if that's what it takes. This should include both consumer protection legislation and tight curbs on risk-taking by leveraged institutions. (Again, the details are a matter for another post.)


• ETA: Announcing that Senator Lieberman will be removed from his committee and sub-committee chairmanships, and that he will not be included in any Democratic caucus meetings regarding financial regulation reform. This will send the message that holding major legislation hostage is a high-stakes gamble, and it will cripple Lieberman politically by rendering him powerless to protect the interests of the insurance industry, which I believe is his fund-raising base.

Do I imagine that this is at all likely? No. I do expect the strategy to be "blame Republicans for gridlock," but I don't expect Democrats to do what's necessary to overcome gridlock, so they won't be able to pass any real Democratic legislation. That will demoralize Democratic voters and frustrate the independents (who are growing impatient waiting for Washington to simply do something), leading to big Republican gains in November.

But Barack Obama has surprised me before. So who knows?

A number of members of Congress seem to have figured out that they can score Populist Points by disapproving of the Federal Reserve and of its chair, Ben Bernanke. In very serious voices. Or with outrage. Outrage works too.

But if you watch carefully, what I think you'll see is Congress saying (and perhaps doing) mean things to the Fed as a substitute for serious, tooth-having reform of financial regulation. This way, Congress can claim to have "done something" to "punish Wall Street" (since the Federal Reserve is just a pawn of Wall Street -- see how the whole thing hangs together so nicely?), without the inconvenience and mess of actually imposing adequate regulation on Wall Street.

So everybody wins!

These guys just keep getting scarier. From the New York Times:

Glenn Beck, the popular and outspoken Fox News host, says he wants to go beyond broadcasting his opinions and start rallying his political base — formerly known as his audience — to take action.

To do so, Mr. Beck is styling himself as a political organizer. In an interview, he said he would promote voter registration drives and sponsor a series of seven conventions across the country featuring what he described as libertarian speakers. [...]

Mr. Beck did say the conventions would resemble educational seminars, and he emphasized that while candidates may align themselves with the values and principles that he espouses, he would not take the next step to endorse them.

Libertarian speakers, huh? Anyone want to give odds on the likelihood that Glen Beck's conventions will feature speakers who support legalization of prostitution or of drugs? Or equal marriage rights for all -- straight, gay, group, etc.?

But that's an insignificant side issue.

The real issue is the increasing prevalence of out-and-out demagogues in our politics. And while there may have been an unhealthy whiff of cult-of-personality among some Obama supporters, this is primarily a right-wing phenomenon. Sarah Palin and Glen Beck worry me, and their conspiracy-mongering and increasingly frenzied supporters worry me even more.

Polls and focus groups can be depressing if you're trying to cling to some shred of faith in America's ability to govern itself. There's an AP poll on health care making the rounds of the blogosphere (link, hat-tip to xtricks here) that's even worse than usual. Here's an example:

A ban on denial of coverage because of pre-existing medical problems has been one of the most popular consumer protections in the health care debate. Some 82 percent said they favored the ban, according to a Pew Research Center poll in October.

In the AP poll, when told that such a ban would probably cause most people to pay more for health insurance, 43 percent said they would still support doing away with pre-existing condition denials, but 31 percent said they would oppose it.

Apparently, a significant fraction of the public is surprised to learn that covering more conditions might raise the cost of insurance.

It gets better:

For example, asked if everyone should be required to have at least some health insurance, 67 percent agreed and 27 percent said no.

The responses flipped when people were asked about requiring everybody to carry insurance or face a federal penalty: 64 percent said they would be opposed, while 28 percent favored that.

Huh? Around forty percent of Americans don't quite get that "to require" means "to impose a penalty for non-compliance?" Did they imagine the requirement being implemented by mind-control satellites? Or what?

This isn't about intricate policy analysis or a deep knowledge of the facts. It's about common sense vs. wishful, magical thinking. It's about understanding that benefits have costs, that ends are attained by means, and that adults connect these things when forming judgments.

I think that it has been a few years since I posted this, so it is probably time to post it again:

When I was a boy...all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Vonnegut, of course, passed away about two years ago, and the veterans to whom he refers almost surely passed away long before that. Ghosts, it seems, are memories of memories.

Like most of my friends, I enjoyed Joss Whedon's short-lived television series Firefly. A few of the episodes are among the finest things I've seen on TV, and a couple of the best constructed scenes still move me. But I've never been an unreserved Firefly fan for one basic reason: I hate Malcolm Reynolds.

Who?

For the uninitiated, I'll explain that Malcolm Reynolds ("Mal," as I'll call him -- as if he were my buddy rather than a fictional character) is the leading character -- or hero -- of the show, and the owner of the spaceship (Serenity, a "Firefly-class" cargo ship) which is the show's major setting. (Yes, we'll be coming back to the fact that Serenity is Mal's private property below; it is not an insignificant detail.)

What kind of person is Mal? Well, he's a rugged individualist, a man's man who takes no guff and stands on his own two feet. He has no patience with the dandified ways of civilized life (such as medical care and laws against shooting people and stealing their stuff), so he lives on the rugged frontier, as rugged individualists are wont to do. He has bootstraps (helpful for standing on one's own two feet when on the rugged parts of the frontier) and he's not afraid to pull himself up by them. He's beholden to no man, and lives by his own rules. You get the picture.

But that's not my problem.

( So what exactly is your problem? )

It's Adventure Time (tm) on the frontiers of cloud computing for consumers! This is apparently real:

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. ...

We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.

Trust the cloud. Nothing wrong can go.

BTW, has anyone noticed that "regrettably" is press-release-speak for "how much bottled water do you have in your bomb shelter?"

While looking over the list of Turing Award winners for my previous post I learned something I hadn't known before: Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1978 for his work on the limits of rational decision making (inventing the terms "satisficing" and "bounded rationality"), also won the Turing Award in 1975.

Jeez.


It is a sobering thought, for instance, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years. -- Tom Lehrer

via xtricks (link, link)

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration.

Read the press release and the PM's official apology here.

I'll only add that the emphasis on Turing's WWII work on cryptography significantly understates his importance. When he wasn't defeating the Nazis and saving democracy in Europe, Turing kept himself busy by inventing computer science as we know it today. It's not by chance that the Association for Computing Machinery's most prestigious technical award is named in Turing's honor.

We'll never know what he might have accomplished if he hadn't taken his own life in 1954, at the age of 41.

John Kitzhaber has announced that he's running for Governor of Oregon in 2010. Interesting.

The peculiar indie sleeper Ink is going to be shown a the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle next Saturday and Sunday (link). For those who might be interested.

Remember: A Christmas Carol meets Wings of Desire in the Matrix of Lost Children! What's not to like?

(Inspired in part by comments on heron61's post.)

Q: Do corporations enjoy the same free speech rights as individuals in the United States?

A: No, that's one of those weird pseudo-legalistic myths, like the claim that the income tax is "voluntary." Somewhere, somebody heard that corporations are "legal persons" and concluded that this meant that the legal system can't tell the difference between, say, Martin Luther King and Haliburton. But courts and the law routinely distinguish between natural and artificial persons, in campaign finance as in other areas. Corporations -- contrary to popular imagination -- are in fact prohibited from donating to candidates for federal office and from spending corporate funds to advocate the election or defeat of such candidates. Natural persons, of course, are free to do either. The political influence of big business -- and of those who own and run big business -- has approximately nothing to do with the concept of "corporate personhood."

Q: Would it be a good idea to abolish the doctrine that money is speech?

A: Probably not, but it's worth thinking about the question in two parts, depending on what we mean by "money" -- in particular, whether we mean "spending money" or "donating money."

I'm not sure there's much value in a right to articulate an opinion if it doesn't extend to the right to spend money to disseminate that opinion. Do we really want it to be possible to outlaw paying a print shop to run up a hundred bumper stickers or a thousand copies of a newsletter? Or to pay the post office to deliver those newsletters? Of course not. I think it's pretty obvious that spending money to spread our opinions around has always been part and parcel of what we mean by "free speech."

When we get into donating money, it's a good idea to keep in mind that the First Amendment doesn't just protect the freedom of speech; it also protects the freedom of association. That means that not only do we have a right to articulate and disseminate our own opinions, but we have a right to cooperate with others of like mind, to pool our energies and our resources. Donating money to groups organized to advocate our values and goals seems like an essential political liberty. And to place some sort of arbitrary cap on what such an organization may spend ("I'm sorry, ACLU, but too many people are giving too much support for civil liberties...you'll just have to send the contributions back!") seems like a bad idea.

Q: So you're happy with the quality of public discourse in America?

A: Good heavens no! Quite the opposite. But I do think that a preoccupation with campaign finance reform is an unhelpful distraction, simply because I don't see how reform could simultaneously preserve our free speech and association rights and still have the desired impact on big money politics. I'm open to new ideas on the subject, but at the moment I don't think you can get there from here.

Q: So...?

A: I'm not sure I have an answer, but I'd like to draw attention to a question that's often overlooked: why and how does money buy votes? It's usually taken for granted that money buys votes, that campaign spending and issue advertising and so on actually influence the outcome of elections. But why should they? I can't remember ever changing how I planned to vote because of a campaign ad or a flyer or a robo-call. Can you? Do you know anyone who can?

Campaign spending seems to be influential mainly with a relatively small group of uncommitted and uninformed potential voters. Without much knowledge about candidates or issues, and without strong ideological identity or partisan affiliation, these folks are susceptible to emotive appeals -- to patriotism or fear, for example -- and to familiar stereotypes ("bureaucrats bad!").

I wonder if there isn't some way to create fewer such people. Is it foolish to look forward to a day in which practically everyone "tunes out" the propaganda carnival (the way that virtually everyone I know already does) because they've got better ways to make up their minds?

Moon

Silent Running meets Groundhog Day...on the moon!


ETA: A sampling of the film's fine score appears on the composer's MySpace page (Clint Mansell).

As I write this, there is an honest-to-god black helicopter circling my neighborhood. And according to the markings on its side, it's from Fox News.

I am not making this up.

Ink

A Christmas Carol meets Wings of Desire in the Matrix of Lost Children

Unemployment isn't an equal opportunity hazard. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes an interesting breakdown of unemployment by educational attainment (for individuals age 25 and above). This table is based on the just-published figures for June:

---

			Some
	No HS	HS	College	BA +	Total
Population	26.7	61.2	51.6	58.5	198.0
Workforce	12.5	38.2	36.5	45.2	132.4
Employed	10.7	34.7	33.6	43.0	122.0
Unemployment	14.4%	9.2%	8.0%	4.8%	7.9%

---

Population, workforce and number employed are in millions.

---

First of all, notice that the average unemployment rate in this group (age 25+) is only 7.9%, compared with the national rate (which includes teens and people in their early twenties) of 9.5%. The unemployment rate for kids between 16 and 19 is almost 28%.

Second, within the 25+ group, educational attainment makes a big difference: college grads face an unemployment rate less than 5%, while those without a high-school diploma experience an unemployment rate three times as high.

My Take On The Evolutionary Psychology "Debate"
A Play in One Act


The Conceit

We set our story in an imaginary world in which the structure of the human body remains a mystery because dissection is impossible. Nobody knows what lies beneath the skin, but scientists struggle to understand the body's inner workings as best they can with the limited evidence available to them. Sometimes, controversy erupts.

The Scene

We are on the set of a popular television talk show. In the center sits the MODERATOR, flanked by PROFESSOR A and PROFESSOR B. The lights come up and the MODERATOR introduces the program.

---

Act One


MODERATOR
Hello everyone. Tonight, I have the pleasure of talking with the controversial and iconoclastic Professor A. As you may know, Professor A is widely known as a leading proponent of the Muscular Theory of movement, and the author of a new book, The Natural History of the Bicep.

In it, he makes the radical claim that the body contains a special purpose structure for flexing the arm at the elbow, a "muscle" in the language of Muscle Theory, which he calls the "bicep." He goes on to claim that the structure evolved because humans who could flex their arms were favored by natural selection in the primitive evolutionary environment, and that this "bicep" is part of a universal human anatomy.

If true, this could change everything. The moral and political implications are as shocking as they are earth-shaking. Professor, tell us about your theory.


PROFESSOR A
First of all, I should say that, while we think this is pretty interesting stuff, there really aren't any big moral or political implications. We're just trying to figure out how the human body is put together.


MODERATOR
But if these "biceps" are in our genes, we can't possibly be held accountable for our actions. It's a get out of jail free card for all the most reprehensible and titillating transgressions.

But before we talk about your plan to impose moral nihilism, let's explain the theory for our viewers. What's a "bicep" and what makes you believe that it exists?
( Read more... )

George W. Bush, reflecting on his tenure in office:

You know, not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment.

There are two ways to read this sentence. First, it could mean that the President of the United States was disappointed that Iraq didn't have nukes. Or weaponized Ebola virus. Or something. I think most Americans were relieved, but apparently the good news came as a bit of a disappointment to the President.

On the other hand, perhaps we should read the sentence literally -- that is, the President was disappointed not to have weapons of mass destruction himself. Perhaps the Pentagon simply declined to provide President Bush with the nuclear launch codes and so forth.

You can imagine how disappointing that would be. He'd been promised weapons of mass destruction, but, in the end, nobody would give him any.

So...for reasons which need not detain us, I found myself in need of a copy of the Geneva Bible, an English-language Bible composed by Calvinist refugees from Queen Mary's reign of Catholic frolic and first printed in 1560 (with a second edition in 1599, IIRC). (The Geneva Bible became the dominant Bible in early modern England, and was particularly popular among Puritans and others who favored a decentralized, presbyterian form of church governance to the centralized, hierarchical, episcopalian structure of the Church of England, in part because of the Geneva Bible's many helpful explanatory notes which were not, in all cases, precisely politically neutral. Fifty years later, James I hoped that the new Authorized Version -- which was required, by royal edict, to be "note-free" -- would eclipse the irksome Geneva Bible, but this didn't happen for many years.) But I digress.

So...after a few seconds with Google, I located a site from which a complete facsimile (i.e. scan) of the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible could be downloaded in PDF format for free. And it's on my laptop at this very moment.

Yep. Golden Age.