On the merits of cruise missile kisses as an acceptable expression of empathy: A Reply to Juan Cole from 'the left'

Juan Cole has published an open letter to 'the left' - specifically those on the left that oppose the intervention in Libya and I presume the left categorization covers everyone from rank and file democrat through anarchists.

Cole's letter has several aspects to it that I'd like to respond to. First, he uses manipulative language that is eerily similar to the right-wing refrain about not caring for Iraqis if you are opposed to invading their country to slur anyone opposed to bombing Libya as uncaring about Libyans. This is probably not worth responding to in the main of this post other than beyond this because there are more substantive points that he raises, but I wanted to at least make note of it.

Before proceeding, I should mention that Cole offered supported the Iraq invasion back in 2003 on a delusion that military force would lead to constructive change and later expressed hang dog regret about his unrealistic expectations.

Cole's argument about Libya runs along on two axles. The first is making deterministic predictions about the consequences of intervention and non-intervention that conveniently support his position. The second axle is list and critique of the plausible reasons to oppose intervention.

Martyrs Of

Martyrs Of. Oil on Canvas

Here is the original, not much left of it.

Humanitarian Intervention

"Come over and help us."

The First Great Seal of the Massachusetts Colony, 1629

Via Jonathan Schwartz

The assumptions, arguments and rationales for intervening on humanitarian grounds have been around for centuries and at least from the very beginning of the colonial era of what would become the United States. The arguments about using force to help others have been answered time and time again by real world examples. So when can we conclude that although there exists different possibilities on the blackboard, since they've only very rarely played out in reality, they can be set aside as academic questions for a time? How much is enough evidence in hand to dismiss the 'on the other hand' deliberations?

Looting: Nature or Nurture?

As we discuss whether looting, and the application of that label in a selective manner, is a cultural phenomenon... I thought I'd mention that some influences are much more direct than culture.

Of course, that could never happen in a civilized country.

So, although I can easily envision money or political hay being made after disasters such as Katrina or Haiti -- (whipping up sentiment against the lower classes is always profitable, especially where the possibility of land redistribution in favor of the tourist/lesiure sector is present) -- I'm having a lot more trouble envisioning the Japanese government having any reason to introduce agents provocateurs. Hence, "surprisingly few" reports of looting. That might simply be my own ignorance about Japanese culture, but one might also argue that our expectations of what is a "normal" amount of looting have been heightened after observing many situations exacerbated by agents provocateurs.

Culture matters

Police in the devastated Miyagi region said 250 thefts had been reported in the 10 days since the disaster and around £75,000 worth of goods had been reported stolen. The authorities said they are determined to cut down on the growing number of petty offences and would put an extra 100 officers on patrol.

Reported incidents have included men trying to break into cash machines, siphoning petrol from cars and taking items from damaged stores and homes.

Japan earthquake: Looting reported by desperate survivors

Telegraph

The earthquake and tsunami that pulverized coastal Japan crippled a bank's security mechanisms and left a vault wide open. That allowed someone to walk off with 40 million yen ($500,000).

$500,000 vanishes from tsunami-ravaged bank

Associated Press

Japanese looters! Maybe the Japanese people are actually culturally predisposed to loot? Maybe its their respect for authority, tradition and culture. During times of crisis in Japanese culture, individuals assume responsibility for safeguarding the community's wealth until the usual authorities responsible for security can recover and resume their duties. Such is their devotion to community over individual.

In the original post, I overstated the Japanese government's response to the crisis. Turns out, they've been far less responsive and able to provide aide than what I understood to be the case. Some people are getting desperate and others seeing opportunities. Walk into a bank vault and walk out with money, scavenge a ruined store for canned goods, it's all looting to us.

The looting narrative was part of what pissed me off about seeing those vapid chin scratchers about Japanese culture crop up. An ostensible compliment for the Japanese reinforced the racist mindset that makes looting of any sort, even scavenging ruins for food, water or some other usable material, as one of the highest crimes humans can commit in the aftermath of destruction.

The second troubling consideration was the use of Orientalism to make sweeping generalizations. Even when meant as a compliment, such mindsets reinforces a dehumanizing understanding of the Other with their inscrutable ways and behavior. Its also worth mentioning that this compliment for the Japanese was really a way to make a criticism of others, those who do loot during crisis. And looters are always poor and black. The implication here is that if the Japanese are a people of morality and ethics that do the right thing even when no one is looking, then why are black people the sort of degenerates who rob and steal when they can get away with it? That is exactly what the Cafferty's are saying when they 'compliment' the Japanese for not looting.

The thing to keep in mind is that for every cultural label we affix to some people, we are describing certain traits that are common to a people, but far from uniform. The U.S. has a hyper masculine, militaristic, business oriented and proudly dumb culture. The rest of the world can credibly talk about Americans in those broad brush terms, but there are still tens of millions of us who don't fit into any part of the stereotype, and anyone who wrote about Americans behaving under duress in terms of their cultural stereotypes would rightly be considered an idiot.

(Corrente has more on Orientalism here, documented in the form of attributing to the universal perceived Japanese traits to culture first.)

Breathing Hard

I love the gusting winds that sweep in off the Pacific and provide the city of San Francisco with free air conditioning and strange wind patterns. Two streets can run parallel; one is always a gusting wind tunnel, the other calm or slightly breezy. If you get around on foot or bike, you develop an overlay of wind patterns to accompany your mental map of the city streets.

The winds also keep me cool when I go out on longer rides. For every awful headwind there’s a tailwind that is almost like a second motor. I’ve had headwinds that had me standing up and cranking on the granny gear on level ground, and tailwinds that could sustain a 10mph coast. I was back in Atlanta a few years ago. On the day I was heading home, a real strong wind blew. I remember thinking it was pretty fierce, but not as strong as one particularly gusty stretch on the side of the San Bruno Mountain that I ride. Later, while waiting in the terminal, the local news was reporting on the wind because it had blown down some trees and a billboard.

Radiation from what everyone is calling the ‘stricken’ nuclear Fukushima Nuclear plant has been detected on the west coast. The tone of coverage is calm, reassuring, telling people not to panic. The radiation is so diluted over the Pacific Ocean that it is not harmless here. I'm not panicking or scared, but I'm worried.

Rearranging deck chairs

Still following the Fukushima story. The reports are getting eerier and eerier. First, they tried to drop sea water on the melting down reactors. That was a bit of a mess, and then once that proved ineffective, the next step was to restore power.

Its taken several days, and they are almost there.

"This is going to be a two steps forward, one step back evolution," said Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at three U.S. power plants who has been closely following the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

In terms of restoring power at the plant, workers are "on the verge of success," he told CNN's AC360.

Now, where it gets strange is asking yourself what are they going to do with the power. They say they will try to restart the cooling systems in the 4 reactors that have been damaged for over a week. Ok, sounds reasonable.

Until you look at a picture of any of the reactors and see this.

It looks like the thing has been carpet bombed. Then you realize that the damage was done from the inside out in a series of explosions. Not only has this thing blown itself to pieces, but they've been spraying sea-water onto this radioactive mess for days in a beyond desperate attempt to cool it down, which is one of the worst things you can do as the saltwater rapidly corrodes the equipment. Does anyone really think the cooling system is intact and operational? I'm no nuclear physicist, but I can see when someone's trying to pull the wool over my eyes.

I get the spooky feeling that everyone is aware that the parts they are playing are doomed, and they know that everyone else knows, but no one is breaking character. Their collective refusal to acknowledge the un-fucked nature of this situation is kind of terrifying.

Quick, someone get this man a message board!

Now you have to ask yourself: if the complete and total failure of a discipline to produce anything resembling a believable and empirically verifiable description of the very things the discipline purports to study does not "actually undermine the overall epistimic status of the discipline," then what would? This shit really is a religion; it literally cannot be disproven; it transcends all mortal truth categories and exists in ethereal unity with the whole cosmos; it is the worldspirit moving over the dark waters; yea, verily, it is the ein sof, the unutterable other beyond even the crowning keter of the tree of life, the attributeless everythingness without form or substance, the unspeakable, infinite actuality of the name of god.

Economics is not real

IOZ

One of your hosts at AmericanCrackpot is sometimes an idiot.

I finally got around to watching Inside Job. The movie finally made it clear to me, as though it wasn't already bleedingly obvious, that I need to take back everything I ever said about there being anything honest about economics as a science. In spite of citing my own examples like Milton Friedman working with Augusto Pinochet that told me otherwise, I maintained that it was a legitimate inquiry into human behavior. The pretensions to legitimate scientific inquiry is meant to dupe fools like me.

Chest Beaters

This article by Glenn Greenwald... I get what he's saying about the implications of U.S. military action in Libya without Congressional approval, but, I don't. Seems like a bit of triviality at this point. The Congressional stamp of approval for military action is made of rubber. Is it better to maintain a polite fiction (or cynical exercise in mocking 'democracy') rather than the truth? What I am getting at is that Greenwald is very concerned about the importance of maintaining this perception, the underlying reality is the same either way whether the politicians go through their meaningless rituals of democratic decision-making when it comes to America's foreign policy or not.

Anyway, I clicked comments and saw a typical example of a blockhead attitude that I've argued with since forever by the exclusively named NotOrbitBoy,

I don't think polls should dictate our actions. But I find it amusing to see them used when convenient. . . as is done here at Salon.

The story of today is that while former hall monitors debate the bureaucratic bs, Libya's foreign minister has announced a ceasefire.

That ceasefire is a direct result of the threat of military action.

Big stick. Big results.

Acknowledge it.

Link (again) at Sig

NotOrbitBoy

I can hear the echoes of his chest beating reverberating in my speakers.

As we have seen already, the no fly zone was not about ending hostilities or protecting rebels. Qaddafi announced a cease-fire right after the vote, which was far more than the original no fly-zone 'objective' and should have been accepted by the west as a great triumph right away. It was a savvy move on his part, daring the international community expose their own lie by taking action anyway, and perhaps in the process draining international support. Anyway, its reasonable to speculate that his cease-fire was a calculated political decision rather than a quaking in his boots panic button move and complete equivocation. He could buy time with a ceasefire, maneuver out of the international response, and then quietly go about strengthening his position and planning to manufacture a pretense for resuming hostilities later. In any case, the west could have had their mandate for enforcing a no fly zone satisfied.*
* The actual UN decision gave more latitude than a no fly zone.

Instead, the U.S. announced that a cease fire was not good enough, rendering everything we said about doing this to protect Libyans from Qaddafi's air force complete bullshit. The west obviously has bigger plans than what it originally laid out, shocker, and is already proven willing to use force to implement them by going for the military resolution in the first place. The pretense of concern for protecting little people was clearly a sham, which, when you consider that while at the same we're so concerned about suffering from all the fighting in Libya we're using flying death robots to rain death down onto Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing civilians by the truckload, was already a blood soaked farce, but never-mind that. The NotOrbitBoy's of the world are still convinced that hook is a goddamn worm right up until he's drawn, filleted and his innards are fed to a gull on the dock.

No Fly Zone?

The United States, Britain and France pushed forward against Libya on Friday as they declared that a cease-fire abruptly announced by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government was not enough, at least for now, to ward off military action against his forces.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, echoing remarks hours earlier by Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, said in Washington on Friday morning that the United States would be “not responsive or impressed by words.”’ She said that the allies would “have to see actions on the ground, and that is not yet at all clear.”

Those actions included, she said, a clear move by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces away from the east, where they were threatening a final assault on the rebels’ stronghold in Benghazi.

Allies Press Libya, Saying Declaration of Cease-Fire Is Not Enough
New York Times

Didn't take long to prove those who said a no-fly zone was going to lead a wider intervention right.

The Libyan air force was never much of a factor in the civil war there, something the anti-interventionists tried to point out as evidence of a hidden agenda. A no fly zone was meaningless except as the thin edge of the full scale interventionists wedge. It's easier to get approval for what seems like a no-risk operation and expand into a more robust intervention afterward than get full blown approval to begin. If you blinked after the UN vote then you may have missed the goal post shifting, laying the foundation for invasion. Note that the UN resolution actually succeeded beyond the liberal interventionists wildest dreams, Qaddafi not only offered to halt any activity in the air, he offered a ceasefire to all ground fighting. It's no longer enough for Qaddaffi not to use his air force, the ostensible point of a no fly zone, nor is it enough to stop all fighting, now he has to pay heed to Washington's demands or face an attack. Even if he does, then Washington will come up with another set of demands, and on until intervention becomes 'necessary.'

The West's concerned about oil under them sands. I wish we could lock Clinton, Qaddafi, Obama, and David Cameron in a room somewhere and let them sort it out, because there's people living atop them sands.

Enough with the orientalism

In the wake of Japan's deadly earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant explosions, we have witnessed the almost indescribable chaos that follows a disaster of this magnitude: loss of life, severe injuries, homelessness, lack of water, food and proper medical care, the physical destruction of towns and cities, and a growing fear of radioactive contamination from power plants that seem beyond anyone's ability to control.

But one heart-wrenching byproduct of disasters like this one has been missing in Japan, and that’s looting and lawlessness.

Looting is something we see after almost every tragedy; for example: last year's earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the floods in England in 2007, and of course Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. It happens when some people who've seen life as they know it get tossed out the window feel that all morality has been tossed out too. It's survival of the fittest and whatever you can get your hands on is yours, no matter who it belongs to.

But that's not happening in Japan.

Why is there no looting in Japan

Jack Cafferty

Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. ... Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other...

Orientalism

In the list of problems and things to be concerned about with right now, this is pretty far down the list. Still, I keep seeing various permutations of this thinking and it needs to be called out for the racist, orientalist bullshit that it is.

Icons and Iconoclasts

Every time I see some privileged person protest touring, I think of Che. Every time I hear about some insurrectionists starting shit in other people’s neighborhoods, I think of Che. Every time some twenty-something white dudes audaciously roll into a room like they have all the answers – summarily dismissing the experience and knowledge of everyone else there – I think of Che.

Broadsnark explains why Che Guevera should be the poster child for cruise missile liberals.

President Obeagan

We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them...

Ronald Reagan responding to The Challenger disaster

We’ve seen this powerful natural disaster cause even more catastrophe through its impact on nuclear reactors that bring peaceful energy to the people of Japan.

Today, I wanted to update the American people on what we know about the situation in Japan, what we’re doing to support American citizens and the safety of our own nuclear energy...

President Obama responding to crisis at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant

Democratic Principles

The crackdown placed the United States in an awkward bind. The United States, which bases its Fifth Fleet here, has struggled to balance its strategic interest in placating Bahrain and its ally, Saudi Arabia, its fears that Iran is exploiting the anger of Bahrain’s majority Shiite protesters, and American democratic principles. American officials have held off backing the protesters while urging Bahrain’s leaders to exercise restraint. That advice was ignored.

Opposition Leaders Arrested in Bahrain as Crackdown Grows

New York Times

Oh, lulz. This wide-eyed naivety is almost as touching as the last time we heard about the U.S. balancing its democratic principles with its active, material support for dictators and assistance with the business of repressing domestic populations in Egypt. Yes, please use 'restraint' when your American trained troops fire upon protestors with American supplied guns, ammunition, tear gas and gun ships. Our democratic principles are at stake.

Taking Flight

Nicolas Taleb's Black Swan theory is sometimes invoked as a defense against over-reaction, as in we shouldn't let a sensational low probability event deter us from making systemic changes.

There have been a lot of black swans taking flight lately, the gushing well in the Gulf of Mexico, the financial meltdown of 2008, the unrest in the Middle East. The melting down Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.  Black swans are not highly unlikely events that are unlikely to repeat, they are a consequence of what happens when reality changes and our understanding and acceptance of a new reality has not yet caught up. Black swans take flight when we continue operating on assumptions about the world that no longer hold and our actions result in unexpected consequences. Black swans are warning signals that something is seriously wrong, they are neon signs telling us that something fundamental has changed and we better get up to speed. (I think this is how Taleb intended them to be understood, but the 'don't panic, remain calm, nothing is fucked here' crowd has run with their own interpretation.)

In the midst of an ongoing disaster, those vested in nuclear technology, whether as shills or people who really want to believe in a technology fix to our coming energy woes, ask others not to consider the melting down plant in Japan as an indictment of nuclear energy. It is the result of an extraordinary set of circumstances and outdated technology. Here is a typical example, via Eric. The post attempts to downplay the nuclear disaster in Japan by calculating that solar panels are deadlier than nuclear energy because more people fall off roofs installing solar panels than die from nuclear radiation exposure.

To make this claim, he had to first choose a controversial, widely criticized, extremely misleading and possibly industry funded study of the death toll from Chernobyl. Then he counted construction related deaths as deaths by solar energy. But if you are counting construction related deaths, then the relevant comparison is how many workers died building nuclear plants vs. installing solar panels. Maybe its safer to build a nuclear power plant than install solar panels on roofs on a per capita basis, but a comparison of the danger of each systems in operation is idiotic.

One of the more specious arguments I've read somewhere was that we could fit all the nuclear waste ever produced in a football field by 7 foot deep space. The point was to say there is not much of this stuff, so the fear about what to with it is overblown. First of all, is that all? That's not an insignificant volume of material. Second of all, volume is a meaningless metric without more context. 403,200 cubic feet of nuclear waste, a  teaspoon of dioxin or a drop of cobra poison may not seem like much...

Risking Other People's Money

Before Justin's economic blogposts fall too far down the front page, I'll just bop out a quick post about the economics of nuclear power. I wanted to point out that the nuclear industry in America is a fantastic example of the twisted, selective use of economic thought which we had been debating last week right here.

An 'Anonymous' commenter left with a parting shot that my exhortation to take un-economic risks for the greater good "is actually none of your business unless it is your own money being risked."
The American nuclear "industry" (scare quotes intentional) is a perfect counter-example showing how real-world economics is rife with the same evils which its philosophical adherents claim that it prevents.
In the nuclear case, government subsidies go towards uneconomical ventures -- risking other people's tax money against their wishes, as well as inviting the cronyism which the same 'Anonymous' also tried to tar me with.

The supposedly 'for-profit' nuclear industry is completely a creature of government subsidies.

Utility & Economy

"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that,"

- Larry Kudlow reacting to the earthquake and tsunami that wrecked Japan.

The economy is doing fine -- it's just the people who aren't.

- Brazilian Generals, describing Brazil's economy

A lot of people are rightly beating up on Kudlow for his callous statement and he later issued a correction.

Consider that the definition of an economy is a system of divvying up a pool of resources among people. From that, we define some values of this system. Every framework or belief system considers equity a platonic ideal.

That is the meaning of Adam Smith's invisible hand, a self-interested actor can through no intention create general welfare for others to enjoy in pursuit of personal gain. This is a pretty profound damnation of our consumer-capitalist ethos. Capitalist theory holds that the value of an individual's contribution to the economy is inversely related to the concentration of wealth gained from his initiative. In other words, according to one of the most cited quotes in the capitalist canon, the less equitably profits are shared, the less beneficial the activities that generated those profits are.

The analogous Marxist slogan is "from each according to  his ability, and to each according to need." This is a somewhat different approach to a platonic ideal of equity. Each strives to contribute what they can for the benefit of all, and each takes only what they need so that there is enough for everybody.

A common understanding of utopia imagines a completely utilitarian economy, everyone gets the exact same share as everyone else. This is the idea that animates cooperatives.

Oh Shit.

Japan’s nuclear crisis intensified on Wednesday after the authorities announced that a second reactor unit at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant in northeastern Japan may have ruptured and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam.
...
The possibility of high radiation levels above the plant prompted the Japanese military to put off a highly unusual plan to dump water from helicopters — a tactic normally used to combat forest fires — to lower temperatures in a pool containing spent fuel rods that was overheating dangerously at the No. 4 reactor.
...
The reactor’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said it had been able to double the number of people battling the crisis at the plant to 100 from 50, but that was before the clouds of radioactive steam began billowing from the plant.

Peril and Confusion at Japanese Nuclear Plant

New York Times

The European Union energy commissioner Günther Oettinger said told lawmakers in Brussels that the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power was “effectively out of control.”

“In the coming hours, there could be further catastrophic events,” he said, according to Bloomberg News. That assessment was based on information from the European Union, the union’s mission in Tokyo, the International Atomic Energy Agency and media reports, he said.

“This spooked the markets,” an analyst at Brown Brothers Harriman, Marc Chandler, said.

Stocks Fall on Japan Crisis, Economic Reports

New York Times

They're spooking me too.

It sounds like this nuclear situation has become dire in Japan and things are on the verge of being completely out of control. There’s fifty workers that are sick and getting sicker left pouring sea water into the cooling tanks with billowing radioactive steam pouring into the atmosphere. I’d guessed that authorities were downplaying the severity of the situation to this point, those billowing clouds of radioactive steam are an end to being able to do that.

A lot of people are doing an autopsy in real time on the failure of the plant. They list the flaws in planning and preparation.The plant should have been replaced 20 years ago. The plant’s disaster recovery plan actually survived the quake but the tsunami knocked out the Diesel generator backups and how could the Japanese of all people, who gave the world the word tsunami, not consider that happening? And so on. Basically, the idea is that if the Japanese hadn't been careless or thoughtless using outdated technology and making an obvious oversight about the link between tsunamis and earthquakes, this wouldn't have happened and would be easy to correct for in the future. Let’s not condemn a whole program due to a single slip-up.

Productivity Watch

As we wrote last week, even though the economy is finally starting to create jobs, there's growing evidence that those jobs pay less, offer fewer hours, and require fewer skills, than the ones lost during the Great Recession. Now, a new report by a progressive Washington think tank suggests that much of the problem is more deeply rooted. Despite large gains in productivity over the last two decades, the report finds, wages for American workers have been stagnating.

Huge productivity gains barely benefitting workers
Zachary Roth

This understanding of productivity has been one of my pet peeves for some time. Its not because I want to be a pedantic shit-head, but because I believe it betrays a giant blind spot in how people understand their roles in the work force.*

* Here are two posts that gets into this in more detail.

Productivity is simply a measure of how much money one makes off of a resource vs. how much it costs. Worker productivity is a measure of how profitable labor is. The cheaper the labor, all things being equal, the more productive the labor force. The better paid, the lower productivity is. It is not despite large gains in productivity that American wages have stagnated, but because of them. Think of it this way, pay a man $100 and he generates $101 in revenue, productivity is low - 1%. Cut his wage to $80 and he still generates $101 (or even less), labor productivity has increased to ~25%. (I run through more scenarios in the first post linked to above.) Hold his wage steady while inflation and other factors drive up revenue to $120, and productivity has increased to ~20%.

Why I think this is important is because the widespread lament about soaring productivity "despite" stagnating wages misses the contentious relationship between labor and capital in favor of a more collaborative fantasy. Its a dog-fight for that pie and when productivity goes up, labor is getting a smaller cut.

Official Responses

The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage...

- Emperor Hirohito

Official responses to calamity often downplay the severity of what has happened. Sometimes, they lie. Other times, they suffer from hubris, vastly overestimating how much influence they have over events. Any out of control circumstance is an implicit threat to authority. They may not lie or downplay every aspect of a catastrophe, only those they have tried to control.

After the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Japan, the U.S. government made a sustained effort into concealing the consequences of nuclear fallout. They suppressed photos, videos and testimonials. Eventually, their efforts were overcome, but some of this information is still surfacing.

After the meltdown at Chernobyl, the Soviet government first tried to cover-up of what happened by hiding it first from Russian citizens and then from the world.

A common thread tying together the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is the degree to which American officials and military leaders lie about how in control they are to the public. Internal documents later revealed an entirely different understanding.

After 9/11, the U.S. government assured people that it was safe to work near the wreckage of the twin towers. It was later found that people were exposed to high concentrations of poisonous chemical dusts.

During the financial meltdown in 2008, prominent members of the media and political elite were assuring the public that things were not as bad as they seem, issuing statements like, "the fundamentals of the economy are strong," mid-collapse.

When BP's Deepwater Horizon opened a gushing oil well in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, government and BP officials continuously tried to downplay how much oil was being spilled.

In Japan, we can reasonably assume that as bad as officials are making this nuclear meltdown out to be, the situation is far more dire than they are letting on.

Birth of Death

As a debate continues over the ultimate human and ecological toll of Chernobyl, there is some scientific consensus that at least 6,000 to 7,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer have occurred in the 25 years since. Because cancer can take decades to develop, 25 years “is not enough time to see long-term impacts on human populations,” Mousseau said.

The increased thyroid cancer was the result of the kind of broad food-chain contamination that can arise from a nuclear incident. Cows ate grass exposed to iodine-131 and then produced radioactively hazardous milk that was unknowingly fed to children, who are most at risk of thyroid cancer.

About 180,000 people were permanently displaced around Chernobyl, and this “exclusion zone” within 30 kilometers of the reactor will need to be maintained for “decades to come,” concluded a 2005 report by the Chernobyl Forum, a high-level international body organized to dispense the final word on the catastrophe.

Ecologists also debate the toll on wildlife in the exclusion zone, where radiation lingers. Mousseau and colleagues found “many fewer species than you expect, the species that are there occur in much lower numbers, and there are much higher rates of genetic mutations” than in unaffected areas.
...
And so, 25 years after the worst nuclear disaster in history, the ultimate cost remains unknown.

Ultimate impact of damage to Japan nuclear reactors still unknown

Washington Post

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.

The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja's genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys.
...
Birth-defect rates in Falluja have become increasingly alarming over the past two years. In the first half of 2010, the number of monthly cases of serious abnormalities rose to unprecedented levels. In Falluja general hospital, 15% of the 547 babies born in May had a chronic deformity, such as a neural tune defect – which affects the brain and lower limbs – cardiac, or skeletal abnormalities, or cancers.

No other city in Iraq has anywhere near the same levels of reported abnormalities. Falluja sees at least 11 times as many major defects in newborns than world averages, the research has shown.

Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault

Guardian

The nuclear energy lobby is terrified that the unfolding tragedy in Japan will halt their efforts to profit from nuclear energy. They've been chipping away at the public's fear of nuclear disaster with a well funded public relations campaign promising the public that nuclear energy is part of the solution to dwindling oil resources and telling us that fears about nuclear catastrophe are overblown.

The nuclear energy lobby sprang into action immediately after Japan's national tragedy began compounding itself with multiple nuclear disasters.

Lobbyists for the nuclear energy industry rushed to Capitol Hill Monday to try to reassure members of Congress and their aides who are deeply concerned about the nuclear crisis in Japan, and what it could mean for nuclear energy in the U.S.

At the same time that the nuclear energy lobby has been working public opinion in one direction, the foreign policy establishment has been working it in the other. They've played upon fear of nuclear technology to create a context where the public will be prepared to accept declaring war on Iran. The point is not to create a war, but to make sure that should the powers that be decide that they want to declare war, the decision to do so is accepted by a terrified public rather than face angry opposition by a war weary public. They also have a vested interest in denying the effects of their depleted uranium in Iraq, a nuclear catastrophe that has attracted little notice in the public eye.

The public finds itself whipsawed by these two factions of elite interest.

To be sure, what is happening in Japan is terrifying. One hopes against reason and experience that the extent of what is going down is, for once, not as serious as what the authorities admit to in their initial reports rather than more. Will we choose to learn anything from any of this or will the unfolding tragedy in Japan only serve as yet another lurid spectacle to watch from afar?

Cookie Monster Off 'The Street'!

Republicans Make Fozzie Bear Cry
March 14, 2011|Matea Gold and Kathleen Hennessey, Variety

In a restructuring move some analysts believe is intended to be an olive branch to Republican lawmakers calling for a cut to the publicly funded broadcasting corporation in the face of a growing controversy, the top paid performer Cookie Monster will no longer be a part of popular children's program Sesame Street.

Public broadcasting executives already knew they faced a stiff fight this year to protect their federal appropriation in Congress amid stern calls for deficit reduction, but after a conservative activist released a video this week of a top National Public Radio fundraiser maligning "tea party" activists and the Republican party, station managers braced for the worst, but few expected this.

Don Blanders, head of NPR's talent management division, released a statement Sunday that the Cookie Monster would no longer appear on the popular children's television series Sesame Street. "The Cookie Monster was an important part of the family for years and we are all deeply saddened at his departure. This is solely a financial decision and no one is immune to these tough financial times, not even Sesame Street. We wish him the best in all future endeavors." he said in a conference call with reporters on Monday morning.

American Contempt for Democracy

Russians, he said, “want to be able to choose their national and local leaders in competitive elections. They want to be able to assemble freely, and they want the media to be independent of the state. And they want to live in a country that fights corruption.

“That’s democracy,” [vice president Joe Biden] said. “I urge all you students here: Don’t compromise on the basic elements of democracy. You need not make that Faustian bargain.”

Plain Speaking From Biden in Moscow Speech

New York Times.

Asked if he would characterize [Egyptian Autocrat] Mubarak as a dictator Biden responded: “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with – with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”

Joe Biden says Egypt's Mubarak no dictator, he shouldn't step down...

Christian Science Monitor

It's always important to remember that 'democracy' abroad is code for doing whatever the political elites in Washington D.C. want. Elsewhere, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates explicitly berates NATO countries for doing what their constituents want (leaving Afghanistan) rather than obey Washington's directives.

In a deliberately undiplomatic speech to NATO defense ministers, Mr. Gates called on European allies to put aside their domestic politics and work with the United States to secure the “semblance of normalcy” that he said was emerging in some parts of Afghanistan.

This is not a surprising or new development, American elites have long hated and feared democracy, whether at home or abroad, but its still useful to keep examples like these in mind.

Devolved?

In an essay published two years ago in Time magazine, the writers of The Wire made the argument that we believe the war on drugs has devolved into a war on the underclass

The Arrest of Felicia 'Snoop' Peterson

David Simon

Devolved? Was the war on drugs born of a noble purpose that has since been lost? Let's go to the tapes... literally, the Nixon tapes, where we have archived recordings of Nixon outlining the origins of what has evolved into the war on drugs with his staff.

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House Chief of Staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare

Michelle Alexander

Oh.

Parents irrational by definition... a final example?

Parents who read only the data showing how expensive kids are should have responded more negatively to parenting. But in fact they idealized parenting far more than those who were also given the information about the benefits of parenting later on.

Why? For the same reason you keep spending money to fix up an old car when it just doesn't work — or keep investing in the same company when it's failing. Humans throw good money after bad all the time. When we have invested a lot in a choice that turns out to be bad, we're really inept at admitting that it didn't make rational sense. (Justin: emphasis mine)
...
Does this mean you shouldn't have kids? Yes — but you won't... In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we thought nothing of requiring kids to get jobs even before they hit puberty. Few thought of it as abuse... As Eibach and Mock write, “As children's economic value plummeted, their perceived emotional value rose, creating a new cultural model of childhood that [one researcher] aptly dubbed ‘the economically worthless but emotionally priceless child.'” Or, as the writer Jennifer Senior put it in a New York magazine article last summer, “Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.”

Why Having Kids is Foolish

Time Magazine

I hope commentary is unnecessary on this one.

Post 1200 (sorta): Lari Pittman

Lari Pittman. Untitled #2 (view from living room)

As Americana veterans may remember, I like to use the occasion of numerically round numbers to highlight the work of artists that I enjoy. Last time, it was Inka Essenhigh. This time, Lari Pittman for post 1200-sorta. (I lost track of the numbers in the recent flurry of posts, so I might be off by one or two.)

I love the look of Pittman's work, but the influence runs much deeper. You may look at Pittman's painting, with all its interlocking shapes, figures and designs and wonder how the hell anyone could come up with that. No one can. The trick is that Pittman works largely by intuition, he plans almost nothing except for the bare bones of the painting, and once that is set he intuits the rest of the piece, adding, adding, subtracting, working and reworking until he feels it is complete. He doesn't conceive of it all at once, but bit by bit, and each new idea is custom fitted to what is already there.

When I first started painting, I had a very tightly scripted process. First, came the concept. Then I would sketch out a thumbnail composition. Then I would take components of the composition and draw and redraw them to satisfaction. After that I would redraw the entire thing onto canvas and resolve all my lights and darks using charcoal. Then I would paint a monochrome under-painting in acrylic or a wash. Finally, I would use color.

This is how I thought paintings are made, every element is thought through before hand and practiced before the final image is committed to canvas. However, I was aware of a pretty serious issue with the results. My paintings often looked stilted, flat, and choppy. They lacked some dynamic that was present in the original drawings, but I couldn't figure out why that was. At first, I figured I wasn't doing enough preparation, so I doubled down on my sketch and prep time. That didn't fix anything.

I realized that the problem was that at some point with all this drawing and redrawing, painting and repainting while remaining locked into the original ideas, I had stopped creating and was effectively making lifeless copies of my own work. I'm still in the process of reworking my entire approach. Now, I come up with an idea, and I do not commit to a composition. I use that as a starting point, and then once I have the canvas in some kind of shape, I begin intuiting where to go with things. I often sit down to paint without any concrete ideas and begin picking apart what's there, reworking, editing, refining, all on the fly. If I need to resolve something or get stuck, I step back while painting, get a sketchbook, and then once I have an idea of what to do, get right back on the canvas. The principle I try to stay true to is spontaneity.*

I started changing my approach at about the same time as I learned a bit about Pittman, and seeing him in action and his mind-blowing work helped reassure me that I might have come to an approach that suits me.

* Changing my approach is a work in progress and you can see development in Fractals and Figures, the in progress rework of the Martyrs of Mass Production, and the completed re-work of Commitment to Sparkle Motion. There's a couple others sitting in my garage that are in progress and not posted yet.

Energy Economies

5 years ago, in the US, 70% of those surveyed reported that they believed that global climate change was real and caused by human activity. Today that reported number is closer to 40%. The reason often given for the change is the propaganda efforts of oil companies and other polluters, but I have another explanation. I think that, in fact, more than 70% fundamentally understand that anthropogenic climate change is real and are so terrified (rightly so) by the incomprehensible changes coming that they must deny, must go mad.
...
We must understand that real solutions require that people change how they live and that this is frightening, but people can’t be frightened into doing new things, they can only be frightened into fighting to stay with what they know (how the right wing has used this fact to get people to act to their disadvantage is another topic). People can’t be frightened into accepting climate change as a reason to change, but they can be frightened into denying climate change even as they are actually acting in its reality.

Apology

Keye Commentary

Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of vaster wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses who are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism.

This time we're taking the whole planet with us

Chris Hedges

My brother is a blacksmith/metal sculptor who lives in upstate New York, Cooperstown, actually, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and a farmer’s museum. He called to wish me a happy birthday last weekend, and our conversation, as they often do, sprawled over a range of topics after the birthday formality was complete.

We have a complicated relationship. He’s five years older than I am and we’ve followed very different paths to arrive at similar destinations. (My biographical sketch for him may not be fully accurate as it is largely based on memory.)

Shortly after he turned 18, he disappeared for a few years, getting the hell out of where we were, same as I did by heading south and to college on scholarship. He didn't go to college, instead travelling through the country hustling work and living arrangements. He’s the kind of guy who could arrive at a new city, and within a month find people willing to offer him room and board in return for cooking their meals while spearheading a grassroots political campaign agitating for changes to zoning ordinances to allow chickens in an urban setting. I'm the sort of person who, after living in San Francisco for three years, can count the number of friends made on one hand. He's the kind of guy who can book a gallery show for his sculpture work without having a single piece in inventory, I am the kind of guy who has yet to make any contact, much less acceptance or rejection, sitting on a garage full of canvas. His political awareness started with Ann Rand, but there is little evidence left of his adolescent libertarianism. I started as a liberal, but I like to think there is little left of that political identity.

My sister eventually tracked him down living in the Pacific Northwest. At some point, he wandered back home, and after spending the first 30 years of his life cycling through a series of intense passions that flamed out, he found his calling in blacksmithing. He’s always had an allergic reaction to working within a corporate environment, or under any circumstances where the fruits of his labor benefit someone else and he has to bend to someone else's standards of appearance and behavior for the privilege of being exploited.

He has a keener intellect than I, but I am probably more formally learned – not just in an educational sense, but about specific world events, politics, history of dissidence and so on. I'd assume he has more philosophical education because he is a very good self-educator and I remember that being a point of interest for him. My knowledge about these topics is more abstract, things I've read, his is more through direct experience as a self-taught American nomad. I think he also has a bit more latent artistic talent than I do, but I’m working myself into shape. Talent is just a starting point. I am probably quite a bit more advanced than him at this point in creating representational art or painting, but that's not his interest, he works with 3 dimensional stuff, which is something I am interested in pursuing one day.

In addition to making metal sculpture, he creates functional tools that double as works of art – mostly farming tools like awls, shovels, picks, and so on. Some are more decorative than functional, and others more functional than decorative. All are hand made by forge, beginning with ore and scrap metal he gathers. His decorative pieces have inlaid designs using rare metals for highlights. He's a bit of an anachronism as a blacksmith in industrialized, mass produced America. He's had visitors to his shop inspect a hand forged tool, inlaid with intricate designs and precious metals, fitted on a custom made wooden handle with its own decorative patterns and ask him point blank, what the point is when they can get the same tool for $20 at Wal-Mart? He's self-aware enough to acknowledge their point.

He travels often, to places like Korea and Africa (can’t remember which countries) to study how indigenous people make their tools by hand. Again, I might know more esoteric facts about some of these places by way of studying colonial history, but he has very concrete, lived in experience and, I would argue, ‘knows’ more about them than I ever will absent real world experience to substantiate the abstract knowledge in my head. And its not like he doesn't have any of the abstract knowledge too, and likely knows far more of that in the areas he's been by virtue of being curious.

We often talk about the changing of the times, industrialization and energy economies, and this conversation was no different.

Another example: the freedom to choose longer working hours for your children

Oh, I don't think this really deserves a main post, but here is another example of econo-thought's ascendancy.

State Sen. Jane Cunningham says her quest to change Missouri's child labor laws is driven by her belief that the current restrictions are "implying that government can make a better decision than a parent."
...
Cunningham said that she believes it's improper to saddle schools with the responsibility of deciding whether a child younger than 16 should be allowed to work. She also contends that many parents and their children already are violating the state's current labor laws, which she says are "so over the top'' and prevent parents from "teaching a work ethic to their children."
...

She may have more cynical and depredated motivations and incentives here, but speculation about that is unimportant. What is important is how she packages this draconian labor law for the public, what she believes will be the best way to sell it. She frames this as a matter of giving choice back to the public. There has been a decades in the making propaganda effort on behalf of the business community to conflate free markets with political freedom. Slogans that conflate political acts with consumption abound, like 'voting with your pocket book.' These should be familiar enough to anyone reading this that I don't have to do a lot of substantiation on this point.

Layers upon Layers

So far, I have declined a couple of requests to collate my economic rants under one blogpost heading. But more economic discussion is still coming down the pike.

Meanwhile, just now I was struck by such an example of the futility of partisan politics, that I just had to start a political post.

Robert Scheer used the word "reluctant" twice today, to describe some of President Obama's executive decisions.

Ignorance is the real victor in the president’s RELUCTANT decision to abandon the effort to bring the alleged perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attack to account in civilian court. ...
...faced with a shrill Republican-led opposition in Congress that succeeded in banning the trials on U.S. soil, the president RELUCTANTLY reversed the decision he had made upon taking office to halt military commission trials of those detained at Guantanamo. The announcement Monday by Defense Secretary Robert Gates rescinding the ban on the military trials also called for the indefinite imprisonment of those Guantanamo inmates thought to be too dangerous to be released but against whom the government doesn’t have enough evidence to obtain convictions.

...emphasis mine...

A couple days ago I made disparaging noises about Dean Baker's economics, but Dean Baker has been exemplary in calling out this kind of woolly thinking, and to Dean's credit he applies it pretty much equally to Democrats as Republicans. I'm just taking my cues from Dean here.

Yes, I will kiss the girl from Venus for science

This Stillers fan-site is taking a break from cheering for his rapey hometown team to take a swipe at David Brooks. In an ensuing discussion, commenter and fan of the Stillers bitter rival, the Baltimore Ravens, Professor Coldheart has a great idea.

just for funsies I copied Brooks' column into Excel, made each sentence its own cell, and used OFFSET() and RANDBETWEEN() to string together sentences at random.

It gave me the following sample paragraph:

For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student. I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing IQ, degrees, and professional skills. You get a different view of, say, human capital. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect.

While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror. Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism.

History made here: I can fail David Brooks in a Turing test

For those who don't know, the Turing test is a pass fail test for artificial intelligence. A human referee asks questions of a human and a machine, but he doesn't know which is which. If he cannot reliably discern the computer from the human based on their answers, then the computer passed the test. We should call the above the Turing Salad Test.

Let's think about this scientifically. What we need to do is to repeat the above experiment, but add more columns. When we add the last column that finally fails the Turing Salad Test, then we have a measure of hack-itude. I'd estimate that David Brooks would fail the Turing Salad Test after about 6 columns. So we could say that David Brooks is a hack to the 6th power, or a level 6 hack, or something. Now we could take Thomas Friedman and figure out what degree of hack is and have a scientific way to judge and compare hacks. I'd estimate that Friedman would stop making sense after about 250 columns, or maybe never, he could be the limit.

Someone like Richard Cohen would probably only get about to level 4, which may surprise some people who consider him a pretty serious hack, but makes sense because is topic of the week style gives him enough range that it would be hard to mix many of them together. I think that's fair, one of the marks of  a true hack is possessing an agenda and their ability to shoehorn any topic into it. Cohen's range of topics feels more like laziness than any agenda, in comparison to someone like Thomas Friedman's globalism monomania.

Any of the Kristols with their single minded and bloodthirsty drive for war and domination would get within range of Friedman. Charles Krauthammer is actually - from what I understand - actually the first self-aware computer program, so I'm not sure how that affects things. I guess we'd need close to 300 columns before the truth about what he is was proven.

Good God, can you imagine Victor Davis Hanson's results? I think we would have to come up with a better science before we could even approach his hack score. The sun would burn out before he could write enough columns to fail the Turing Salad Test.

Showing my work

A couple of posts about economics got a lot of traffic here and a bunch of comments. A lot of the same points got made, over and over, points that either a.) I addressed or b.) were misreadings of what I wrote. (Ok, there might have been a few that poked some of my squishier or vagues statements.)

The whole point of the religion-science economics post was to separate the scientific approach to economies, which is what economists do, from the religious approach, which is what glib opinion makers and politicians do. The interesting work of economics is carried out in a similar manner as the interesting work in other sciences, which is to explain why the models fail to predict reality. That work is not what I was talking about. What I was talking about was when a media or political animal makes noises about how we ought to be more rational, self-interested, etc. and forming as the basis of their understanding of optimal behavior their often superficial, simplified understanding of economics. When they understand and discuss every event in terms of economic considerations.

Another point I tried to make was that understanding the world through economics has become a dominant frame of reference for our elites and this is not a good development. There are other ways of making sense of the world, political, philosophical, hard scientific, religious, humanist, what we call common sense, and so on. Economics is one way to make sense of things among many, but it is crowding out others in our time. My argument was against the emphasis of economics, not its inclusion. This ties into the previous point because I believe that we have come to a point where we are shaping policy and making choices to satisfy our economic theories rather than the other way around and without regard to how those choices affect people. Again, its not that I want to completely ignore economics in decision making, but that I think currently it has too much influence in what we consider rational decision making in comparison to other ways of making sense of the world. I hope that repeating myself will drive home these points.

I was lazy and picked on one person, Matt Yglesias, which gave rise to a whole lot more confusion - people thinking my bone to pick was with Ygleasias. Well, no, I don't really care about Yglesias. He is figuring out to butter his bread, and if he didn't do what he was doing, some other Ivy League educated aspiring pundit would fill his place. The point is that he has to adopt the styling, even as clumsily as he does, of economic religion to be considered respectable and taken seriously in our establishment. That was my point. But, I should have grabbed some other examples I guess.

Well, there is a good example found in the Matt Taibbi mailbag today. A reader writes in pointing out that the subsidies spent on building and maintaining our nations highways, parking garages and streets has made driving seem a lot cheaper to Americans than it is. Hence, the reader argues, we should stop subsidizing those things so that people realize the true costs of our 'happy motoring' system and would switch to mass transportation alternatives.* Taibbi's response is kind of a big nothing semantical hand-wringing over the meaning of subsidy, but the first comment I read in the thread was a perfect example of what I am saying about econo-thought.

* James Howard Kunstler

Markets optimize resource allocation when the costs are applied most closely to goods being produced, and you get market failure when costs are hidden inside lump sums for a basket of services. When everybody drives, it makes sense to pay for roads out of income tax. When not everybody drives, it's better to pay for driving infrastructure directly from the drivers. If we did that, income taxes would all drop sharply - we really spend a lot of money building, re-paving, and maintaining roads - but the price of gas would double, a driver's license would cost a grand, a car licence two grand, and maybe we'd add 10 grand to the cost of every vehicle.

Net result: I pay less, drivers pay more: the market in action, rewarding me for getting the hell off the road and onto the bike path or the bus.

There are a couple of problems here, and its not with respect to the accuracy of this comment. Again, let me repeat that, I am not making a judgement one way or the other with the accuracy of what he is saying. As far as I can tell, he is basically correct within an economics framework.

So what are the problems? The first problem is what is circumscribed in all this econo-blabber, and that is this: For 60 years, we've subsidized and shaped our country's infrastructure with one overriding design consideration; that every American drives a car. We have far flung suburbia, hour long commutes, massive highways that are restricted to automobile use only, huge parking garages in our cities, and so on and so forth. To suddenly reverse this assumption, which is effectively what happens when you privatize parking garages or roads and all of these subsidized costs show up all at once, would wreck havoc on many people, and the less money you have, the greater the wreckage.

Secondly, note the econo-outlook in this view and its rather callous disregard for the consequences of economic efficiency. Econo-thought says that where there is demand for a good, there will soon be supply. It is a possibility, not certainty, that the sudden unaffordability of happy motoring would result in improved public transportation. It may just be that all of these people's worlds get much smaller, all of a sudden, cutting them off from their jobs, family or friends whom they suddenly could no longer afford to travel to see. That world may be permanently shrunken, just because there is demand for better transportation, does not mean there will ever be a supply. What is certain, is that their lives would get a whole lot tougher right away and maybe permanently. The economics of running public transportation - especially unsubsidized transportation, may never make sense. (A side point: This touches on the infamous Citigroup Plutonomy memo's thesis, that bulk of consumer demand comes from a minority of relatively affluent Americans, the rest of the country are doing all they can to make ends meet and can be effectively ignored in any non-commoditiy market considerations. This trend is only going to continue.)

Keep in mind that the original problem is that we just spent 60 years making our infrastructure very specifically tailored for the single occupant automobile and are finding now that this is not going be a system we can maintain in an era of dwindling oil energy. We did things like tear out trolley cars from our cities and rip up rail lines. I believe General Motors was once found guilty of conspiring to destroy this infrastructure and fined... $5,000. Anyway, that infrastructure has to be radically remade before things like rail trolleys and bus travel becomes a reality.

The infrastructure is what creates a context for markets to exist, not the other way around. Rail lines and trolley car company's are not just going to spring up out of rising demand. They will require investments in laying trolley tracks in our cities, planning on where to lay rail lines in the country, where those rails can and cannot be laid, and so on. We are talking about a lot of coordination and cooperation with state governments just in planning, much less over the investment in things like cars and tracks. The switch from happy motoring to a more European model would require massive public subsidization to remake the infrastructure we just spent decades building. To ask the public to subsidize this product, and then at the end to effectively kick them out is a pretty nasty trick to pull.

This is not just true of cars, but is true of every major industry we have in our world today from aeronautics, to microchips, to our highways, medical research and so on. It took decades of public funding for many of these industries to get off the ground. Airplane travel didn't come about because people demanded the ability to fly all over the world, it required decades of public investment in research before airplane travel could become affordable. They still receive massive subsidization from the public through the military, the WTO just found Boeing guilty of receiving undisclosed subsidies to develop their new Dreamliner. If the true costs of air-plane travel were borne by travelers from day one, there would be no airline industry, no computers, no internet, no cell phones, and worse medical technology.

Now, and this might be an even bigger problem, is that econo-thought has one ideal to aspire toward; economic efficiency. There are often very good reasons to create market inefficiencies. I'd hope the above paragraph should make that point for me. The problem here is not just that there are other concerns than market efficiency, but that market efficiency is quite possibly a counterproductive goal in the context of public transportation. Ensuring that everyone in the country can get places easily and relatively safely using well maintained roads is a public good. Its not just for the fuck of it that we made this system of transportation; the goals were to a. keep the American automotive industry booming and b. to ensure that people didn't have to live within walking/riding distance of their job. (Also, technically, for military reasons.)  I don't like the happy motoring culture personally, but if you are going to have one, then making sure that access is more or less equally shared by all is pretty important. Economic effeciency? No.

The final problem is that look at how this econo-thought's approach to a specific problem has led to a terrible solution. The problem is that our current system makes no sense in an age when energy is getting more expensive. A system where having a car per person so that everyone can live 80 miles from where they work is only going to get harder to maintain until it becomes impossible and breaks down at some point in the future. The obvious solution is to start remaking the existing infrastructure, bring back rail lines, and invest in public transportation, not just cut off access by way of suddenly jacking up the cost of using roads and parking and expect people to take pony rides to their job or the city the day after the new costs go into effect. Those are all courses of action that would require public subsidies and some planning among state and local governments. Market forces would do jack and shit to solve this problem, and using econo-thought as the primary lens for understanding this situation leads to a terrible prescribed solution.

Edumacation

A little personal history. My parents divorced when I was young, mother got custody. Father was a construction worker, mother was a stay at home mom. We moved to upstate New York, mom worked as a teacher's aide. Point is, it was a struggle economically. We lived in the country, one summer, for no reason that we could tell, the gardener snake population exploded, you could hardly walk anywhere without almost stepping on one. There were dozens around our well. We starting eating them. We also ate road kill quite a few times. My uncle knew someone who was responsible for getting dead animals off the road. When a deer got hit, if it was fresh, he would call my uncle to give him a chance to claim it.

School was tough, kids were pretty vicious when it came to having the right brand of shoes, jeans, or whatever. Looking back now, it was so ridiculous given the bleak economic picture of the region for everybody. But we were kids, and that's what kids do. When I first got to school, I had two things going against me. 1.) I was new. 2.) I certainly did not have the right pair of shoes and probably never would unless Air Jordans went on sale for $20. So I had to fight a lot for the first few years. What is the point?

Oxtrot has a little post up about education that mentions school uniforms, and given that a previous post of his on the process of mastering a skill inspired me to write a response, which is still not completed but hopefully will be someday, but a digression in my response led to this post*, I figured I better just respond now and think later or I might never get around to either.


* It kills me that I get a bunch of traffic and a 50 comment thread about Mathew fucking Yglesias, but posts like that are untouched - eventually I am going to realize how unsuited I am for blogging. 

It sucked going through those experiences as a kid and maybe uniforms would have made things easier. But if I had to go back and do it, I don't think I'd change anything at all about my life. I believe that going through that experience of having little and being called on it was a little education about life. I didn't come out of it with an obsession of obtaining material goods or status, but I like to think that I have a bit of genuine empathy with the downtrodden who are humiliated by the privileged. Even if compared to them, my 'humiliation' was a joke and I was living the good life.  Sheltering me from the reality of that would have hurt my education.

A second episode from that time that taught me another important lesson. I've written about it before, but cannot find it. The story is that one afternoon in 8th grade, I found myself fighting a kid who was one of the first friends I made when I first moved to this town, a kid whose farm I'd helped work, who I stayed up all night once playing Ninja Gaiden with, played little league football with. I don't think either of us wanted to fight the other, but the bizarre social hierarchies and their pressures that arise from putting a bunch of still developing human beings brimming with energy and enthusiasm into an environment with very little to occupy them had found us amidst a mob of screaming kids who literally shepherded us into another kid's backyard to fight.

In between the time we were friends and that spring afternoon, my friend and I had stopped hanging out as much, and he had for reasons that I still don't know become a big man on campus. The fight started with a careless remark I made that I didn't fear my friend, I didn't mean it in a confrontational sense, but just that I wasn't afraid of a kid who I had grown up competing in a variety of activities with and had never felt intimidated by him. My guess is that the forces of middle school gossip had distorted and reshaped this comment into a challenge and disrespect when it got back to him.

So there we were in this backyard, a crowd of screaming kids telling us to hit one another. And we stood there, facing each other. I'd been in a lot of fights to that point, had taken up wrestling years earlier as a means of self defense, but I stood there and I knew I didn't want to fight my friend, and I made up my mind that I didn't give a shit what all these kids said, I wasn't going to fight him. The pressure was working on him just the same as me, but he snapped. He punched me in the face. I didn't respond, other than to maintain eye contact. I wasn't fighting anyone unless it was my choice. He kept hitting me, probably about 10-15 times. I stood there, absorbing each punch, and just returned his stare. Someone told me later I was smiling at him in between punches and my teeth were stained with blood, but I don't remember doing so consciously. I think he He eventually got tired of punching my face and the beating burned off the nasty energy of the crowd, so we all walked away.

I had a bloody nose and lips, but fortunately we are too weak at that age to do any real damage to one another. Still, I had blood clots in my lip for a week and some bruises. I learned from this episode was that there are worst things than taking a beating, such as being pressured into action against your own will to do things you have no interest in doing.

My point is that sometimes things really suck, and going through them are an education in their own right. I don't mean that we should be made to suffer to improve our character, but sheltering kids from the reality of the world does them no favors. Those difficulties I had were small potatoes in the big picture, but they were reflections of the serious problems of the big picture.

If we could somehow devise an educational environment that is sterile, safe, and has none of the class divisions, strife or games that people play in the real world, then we will dump young adults into a world they are unprepared to understand. Kids will emerge from this experience even more removed, indifferent to, and unaware of the problems found in this world.

Diffidence

Greenwald has done great work shedding light on what our government is doing to Private Manning and the implications of that as a threat against future whistle-blowers. Chris Floyd goes a bit further on the implications of how we define our state, calling it fascist. If we can agree that extended isolation, sleep deprivation, and forcing someone to strip and remain naked for hours are forms of psychological torture, then we can agree our government is torturing Manning. Making no judgments on the merits of what Manning allegedly did, we can probably agree that his crime was also a political act.

It's quite a queer feeling knowing that our government is not just torturing foreigners captured elsewhere in the globe, which was problematic enough, but they are actually, right now, not a thought experiment but in reality, torturing a political dissident and it is sort of just accepted by us with the same tired resentment of an increase in your car registration dues. The U.S. government, like Iran's, Egypt's, Iraq's, Saudi Arabia, and China tortures political dissidents. The difference is now only one of degree, rather than classification.*

* I think I am probably very wrong here in the sense that this is not a new development; how were Eugene Debs' stays in prison? 

______, Guns and Money

A federal operation that allowed U.S. weapons to pass into the hands of suspected gun smugglers so they could be traced to the higher echelons of Mexican drug cartels has lost track of hundreds of firearms, many of which have been linked to crimes, including indirectly to the fatal shooting of a Border Patrol agent in December.

The investigation, known as Operation Fast and Furious, was conducted even though U.S. authorities suspected that some of the weapons might be used in crimes, according to a variety of federal agents who voiced objections to the operation.
...
The ATF said agents took every possible precaution to ensure that guns were recovered before they crossed into Mexico. Scot L. Thomasson, the bureau's public affairs chief in Washington, said the Fast and Furious strategy is under evaluation.

"It's always a good business practice to review any new strategy six or eight months after you've initiated it, to make sure it's working, that it's having the desired effect, and then make adjustments as you see fit to ensure it's successful," he said.

U.S. let guns fall into drug cartels' hands, files show

Los Angeles Times

General "Buck" Turgidson: Uh, we're, still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.

President Merkin Muffley: There's nothing to figure out, General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.

General "Buck" Turgidson: We-he-ell, uh, I'd like to hold off judgement on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.

President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you *assured* me there was *no* possibility of such a thing *ever* occurring!

General "Buck" Turgidson: Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.

Dr. Strangelove

Religious Systems

A religion is a behavioral guide that provides a set of platonic ideals for followers to strive for, even if it is understood that few can reach fully realize any of them, much less all. Let he who is without sin... They are systems meant to control behavior.

Any science is a model of some aspect of the world, and is useful as tool for predicting observable phenomena.

Sciences do not have platonic ideals, there is no most moral path for a particle to travel in physics, for instance. An element in the periodic table is not expected to live up to any ideals like honesty or chastity.

These may seem like obvious and fairly banal point. Observe.

Economists call economics a science, a science intended to predict how human beings allocate finite resources. This is fine, and I have no problem with that as stated. The problem I have is with those who think of economics as a religion. They come to believe that the field of economics does not predict how humans behave, but how they should behave. The Rational Man's decisions are platonic ideals to live up to. If you come up with a beautiful equation to predict how a ball travels through the air, and then you go observe a ball travelling through the air and find your beautiful equation got it about 60% right, you do not conclude that the ball is flawed. 

I am not trying to pick on him, but he is a ready example. Look again at Yglesias's statement about the Tennessee fire, 

it should be easy to set a pricing scheme that doesn’t entail any substantial adverse selection issues.

I think there’s a surprising amount of inefficiency in the world deriving from the fact that people with various competencies—fighting fires, organizing rock concerts, cooking tasty food—don’t really understand optimal pricing.

A science based approach would say that our understanding of how people behave is flawed. Optimal pricing does not predict real world behavior, we should figure out why and update our definition of optimal pricing until our predictions are more in line with reality. The whole point of understanding optimal pricing is to be able to predict how humans are likely to behave under some set of conditions, not to figure out how they should behave.

The religious approach says something different, the people are not behaving as we expect them too, they must be flawed (in this case, ignorant of optimal pricing) and if we could teach them their condition would be improved. This is the approach of the Friedman's, George Wills, Yglesias's and others of their ilk who pick up a few economic terms, learn some of the basics, find some old time religion in that, and go on to tell us not how we are, but how we should be.



Yglesias is not alone in this. When John Nash and fellow economists holed up in the RAND corporation and invented game theory, they ran into a problem when they tested out their hypothesis on anyone that was not either a.) someone working on the project or b.) a diagnosed sociopath, it didn't do very well at predicting human behavior. When they first put their prisoner's dilemma before the secretaries working there, most of them chose to remain silent rather than betray their partner. In spite of this small set-back, however, their theories took a prominent role in the free-market work done at the Chicago School and is still influencing decision making today. You find this 'people are not acting as we expected because they don't understand what they are doing' when it comes to economics all the time. We have made the rational man behavioral model our nation's platonic ideals. Greed is good.

There is an uglier thought often found somewhere behind this first one and that is, "the people are behaving not as we predicted, and must be made to change." Few things are as terrifying as movements that lays claims to intellectual and moral superiority. That is the ugly coupling that inspires the massive blood lettings of the Jacobins, the Killing Fields, Purges and other intellectual revolutions that displaces and existing elite by killing or imprisoning the old standard bearers. It is this loose coupling that led a nitwit like Jonah Goldberg to write a crackpot thesis about liberals leading to fascism. The impulse toward controlling behavior is not liberal, it is borne in any belief system that makes claims to moral authority.