j@ne futzinfarb

A Bain Capital Paradigm

2012-01-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

In a recent NPR piece presidential candidate Mitt Romney briefly weighed in with his perspective on the conversation and growing concern about income inequality: “I think it's fine to talk about those things [income inequality] in quiet rooms…”

Unpacked, this is a jaw-dropping window on his and his 1% ilk’s Bain Capital paradigm. It is identical to the “don’t worry your pretty little heads about it” school of thought, differing only in the percentage it disenfranchises, 99% rather than 50%. It endorses a paradigm in which the 99% of us are best suited to “quietly” slinging burgers for minimum wage, so that the 1% can be left to consider the issue of income inequality in “quiet” boardrooms as an agenda item between votes on outsourcing jobs, reneging on retirement obligations, and increasing executive compensation; in “quiet” private club libraries while sipping brandy and between banter about recent developments in offshoring profits for tax benefits and desirable locations for a 4th house; in “quiet” lobbyist offices between developing strategies to gut the social safety net and to hamstring essential government functions.

Finally, there is, perhaps, just a whiff of fear in Romney’s sentiment, a concern that the 1% is sensing loss of control over their “quiet” domination of the income inequality conversation. I hope I’m right and that his fear becomes ever more palpable.

Not a Category of Problems I'm Concerned With

2011-11-10T19:44:00.000-08:00

I humbly submit for your consideration a new texting acronym: NCPICW (Not a Category of Problems I’m Concerned With); typically used as a sarcastic, grossly understated indication of a lack of sympathy for a matter brought up by one of the parties to a conversation.

Sample usage:

Party 1: Dude, we should so go protest Joe Paterno’s firing.

Party 2: NCPICW.

Party 1: Oh.

Alleged Christian

2011-08-05T10:55:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to the NPR Ombudsman,

This piece says of Governor Rick Perry:

“He is open about his deep Christian faith.”

NPR needs to be much more careful about how it presents such information in order to eliminate its obvious liberal, lamestream-media, bias. Recently, Fox commentator Bill O’ Reilly in discussing Breivik’s acts of terrorism in Norway and their obvious precedents, Mussolini’s dictatorship and Nidal Hasan’s bloody mayhem, clearly articulated that the standards of whether someone is reported by the media as affiliated with any particular faith should be both ad hoc and post hoc using a “no true Scotsman” analysis in combination with assessment of business card content.

To avoid maligning Christianity in accordance with these standards, the media including NPR must prepare its reports so that anyone, including of course Gov. Perry, can at any future time be credibly identified as unequivocally not-Christian, if some act(s) of his or hers eventually falls afoul of the criteria that Mr. O’Reilly and his fellow faith affiliation arbiters apply ad hoc and post hoc. Unqualified declarations of the faith affiliation of individuals in the media such as the one I have pointed out here can be used subsequent to such determinations to associate not-Christians as representative of the faith and thus those media outlets become, at a minimum, unwitting participants in what O’Reilly has identified as the “movement in the American media to diminish and marginalize the Christian philosophy.”

In keeping with this principle I urge NPR to revise its journalistic standards immediately to reflect that statements such as the one I quoted above shall be written as:

“He is open about his ALLEGEDLY deep Christian faith.”

‘Allegedly’ is written in caps in my example only to call your attention to its addition to the sentence in question. It can, of course, be in lower case in actual reports based on NPR’s usual capitalization standards.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter,

J@ne Futzinfarb,

Alleged Agnostic

America, It Was A Good Run Wasn't It?

2011-08-01T12:10:00.000-07:00

They have learned well from our wealthy elite. What the Tea Party has completed is a straightforward leveraged buyout of America. Using the minimal capital of their role as a minority fringe in one party in one house of congress, they have exploited their opponents’ weaknesses - basic decency, moderate expectations, acting in the common interest, compromise - and aggressively leveraged the many-fold larger full faith and credit of the U.S. government to force themselves into a controlling management position, intent on profit, political and otherwise. In this position, and in order to realize their profits through a devastated national economy that will be blamed on their political opposition, they now require the U.S. to enact their management model, austerity. And if the subject of the buyout, the U.S., goes bankrupt, is destroyed, well too bad, their game isn’t for the weak, it’s all in the ideologically pure spirit of creative destruction. It’s a model that has worked wonderfully for our private sector economy, delivering the developed world’s greatest income inequality over the past four decades, why not simply implement it on a national scale? America, we had a pretty good run there for a couple hundred years, didn’t we?

Rentiers

2011-07-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

This seems to me yet more evidence of the inexorable decline and increasing hollowness of our current economic model – our biggest rewards, obscene compensation, seem directed almost exclusively to those who are siphoning wildly inequitable rewards through mere structure, simply by virtue of their proximity to, intimate connections with, and greedy manipulation of massive resource flows: CEO’s of patent troll “enterprises” as in the linked piece but also hedge fund managers, CEO’s of health insurance companies, media magnates who pervert and undermine journalism, predatory lenders, corporations that find “clever” ways of avoiding their responsibilities for taxes, to workers and to their communities, CEO’s who actively undermine confidence in government while – often corruptly - profiting from privatization of its functions, and the suites upon suites of lawyers and lobbyists and sinecured legislators undergirding and enabling all this. It’s obviously an unsustainable model, and when it collapses it will mean real pain and suffering for all (or at least most). It’s cliché but also unfortunately rings true: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” These people are compensated so obscenely for not understanding, that the rest of us need to find some way to save us and to save them from themselves. Good luck with that.

Libertarian Summer Camp

2011-07-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here is something that shines a bright contextual light on much of the current simmering libertarian delusion. The piece describes a libertarian summer camp that reminds us of nothing so much as one of those “Renaissance Faire”[s], where everyone gets to imagine that they are the lords and the ladies and the white knights. In both cases, their reimagining is explicitly designed to simply ignore the infrastructural ugly realities: the stench of raw sewage, the bloodletting, the suffering of the many for the temporary benefit of the few, the institutionalized inequities, the ignorance and the disease and the privation and the famine. So yes libertarians, by all means go play dress-up at your summer camp, but please stop trying to inflict on the rest of us the grim dystopia that would result from the realization of your adolescent willful fantasy.

In Which I Apologize to Lumbering, Oblivious, Slack-Jawed Troglodytes Everywhere for Insulting Them

2011-03-26T17:45:00.000-07:00

Hey NOMA warriors. Yes, all you brave little NOMA warriors so disgusted that Richard Dawkins critiques religion without having committed decades of his life to theological exegesis; so offended that Sam Harris paints all religions with the broad brush of fundamentalist willful ignorance without having worshipped with your eminently reasonable clergy and congregation; so hurt that someone, anyone, from the reason/science magisterium has had the temerity to glance across your beloved magisterial divide only to register and point out the gaping hollowness on the other side. Where, NOMA warriors, is your critique of, your outrage for, your bitter invective directed at this troglodyte who has lumbered, oblivious and slack-jawed, willfully ignorant of reason and science and apparently even compassion, from the faith side of the magisterial divide, and bent on wreaking untold damage:

A lot of what Beard knows he learned in church. One Congressman, talking about global warming, recently said that God wouldn't allow man to do anything to destroy the planet. Beard told me, "It is the height of hubris to think we could." I asked him about nuclear war. He said: "How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible," he said, "But, can we recover? Of course we can."…Beard believes that "God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything."

Where is your opprobrium for inappropriately wandering across the magisterial divide now, now where it really matters because life as we know it on this planet hangs in the balance? Where are your calls to GTFOOTMYS? I thought not. Your silence belies the utter shallowness of your concerns.

The Flaw in "The Flaw"

2011-01-30T12:12:00.000-08:00

I strongly recommend you listen to RadioWest’s interesting and informative interview with David Sington, the filmmaker of the documentary “The Flaw” (thank you RadioWest for podcasts), and I am enthusiastic to view the film. The one truly misleading and unfortunate aspect I found in the interview was the dismissive response that Sington gave when the subject of blame for the financial disaster arose. His (admittedly brief, and so perhaps not completely nuanced) interpretation seemed to be that the bankers and financiers and executives were as blameless as everyone else in this economic cataclysm, that they, too, were just helpless cogs in a system run amok.

That is simply not so. For decades some of us have been arguing that this is exactly the outcome to expect from deliberately engineered economic policies that seek to monetize everything principally for short term returns and in which no other values play a role, that place blind faith in the efficiency of free markets and their ability to magically transform unbridled greed into social welfare without recognition of the significant limitations of that model, that use circular and hypocritical reasoning to justify obscene compensation schemes and the greatest transfer of wealth to the wealthy in history, that privatize profits and socialize losses.

The “blameless meme” seems to me a way to rewrite history, really a way to silence dissent on economic policies and pretend there are absolutely no other voices than those of our current crop of economic elite. It suggests that literally everyone was swept up in the fiction of these economic policies; it is a very thinly disguised version of the increasingly popular (among the elite) “no one could have foreseen” escape clause.

But the blameless meme is just not true: Alan Greenspan (for whose quote before congress I suppose the film is named), in spite of his revisionist claim, didn’t discover “the flaw”. He was merely forced to finally admit that his many critics who already clearly understood it were right.

And similarly, those bankers and financiers and executives (and their confederates in government, academe, and media) willfully chose to ignore all the contradicting data and analysis and all their critics, elected to believe that “this time would be different” and that they were truly the masters of the universe. They willfully believed, advocated for, designed, participated in, and benefitted from the system that ran amok and those transparent fictions. It was, indeed, the banality of evil, and for this they are well and truly blameworthy.

In Which T. A. Frank Super-Glues Both Eyes Shut, Covers Them With Hands, And Encounters "Trouble" Seeing

2011-01-14T21:36:00.000-08:00

Someone is suffering from a crippling inability to discriminate the relative plausibility of two different arguments. I think I can help. From T. A. Frank in TNR discussing speculation about whether right-wing rhetoric shares some culpability for the Jared Lee Loughner shooting:

There is of course one advantage to all such lines of argument, if argument is the word for it. They are entirely faith-based, which makes them pretty much irrefutable. But faith-based punditry works in more than one direction. Seven years after the massacre at Columbine High School—in which two senior students shot and killed twelve students and a teacher—CBS News invited Brian Rohrbough, who had lost his son Dan, to explain why he thought the shootings had happened. “The public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value,” Rohrbough said. “And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.” Most liberals (myself included) would disagree with Rohrbough’s explanation for the shooting, but they’d have trouble explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive than explanations blaming Jared Loughner on rightwing hysteria.

Consider the title of this course “Explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive” 101: because there is not a single instance of a pro-choice advocate or biology teacher suggesting that high school shootings might be resorted to as a resolution of their concerns or expression of their principles in contrast with, oh, let’s take an example “Well it's [the second amendment] to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”

Not plausible. Plausible. Really, no trouble at all.

Bryan Fischer's Difficult Dilemma

2010-11-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

The near universal condemnation of Bryan Fischer over a recent editorial is, indeed, unfortunate. After all, so many of the critiques seem to intentionally misunderstand his position on the Giunta Medal of Honor. But a straightforward reading of his editorial clearly shows that he was not dismissing that award. It's just that Mr. Fischer is also simply pointing out an apparently politically motivated (and not coincidentally, liberal) policy, leading him to question why we aren't also awarding Medals of Honor to brave service members exclusively for acts of heroism more consistent with traditional conservative Christian values.

In sympathy with Mr. Fischer's difficult dilemma, I have done a bit of research and perhaps I could suggest that he nominate Steven Green for a Medal of Honor for his decidedly unfeminine acts of killing people and breaking things in our names.

Seriously, GTFOOTMYS.

Of Climate Hawks and Chicken Hawks

2010-10-31T12:47:00.000-07:00

Around the intertubes, some Very Serious People™ are apparently throwing in with those who have had their hair on fire about climate change for a decade and more. But first, of course, they need to very carefully preen and pose and harrumph and distinguish themselves from the riff-raff and Very Seriously weigh the singular and foremost issue in addressing potential global catastrophe: the appropriate marketing tagline to convey their newfound conviction (and, not coincidentally, to slight and hold at bay said riff-raff).

I suppose beggars can’t be choosers and those concerned about climate change should welcome anyone into the fold, no matter their little idiosyncrasies, but holy f**k. Clean energy hawk, or environmentalist, or climate hawk? The Lord of the Manor is holding up swatches of wallpaper while the servants are battling a flooding moat that is, quite literally in Pakistan, washing crocodiles and s**t into the place? And could there be a worse metaphor for how we approach climate change than with Donald F**king Rumsfeld’s brand of proactive attitude toward gathering dangers – his resolute indifference to the expertise of and consequences to others? Holy f**k.

Well, that’s out of my system. Door’s open, c’mon on in, welcome to the fold climate hawks.

Unsourcing

2010-10-20T01:52:00.000-07:00

It seems at least plausible that a principal contribution to the burgeoning income inequality in the U.S. is offshoring and outsourcing. The mechanism is straightforward supply and demand economics coupled to the de facto compensation mechanisms for corporate executives: if a corporation outsources and offshores those functions and obligations that are typically performed by lower earning workers – custodial, secretarial, customer service, manufacturing, and so on – at lower cost (and almost invariably lower compensation to the workers performing identical functions) than it would incur by hiring its own employees, it simultaneously undercuts the compensation bargaining position of its own and its competitors workers in these lower earning roles, and it boosts corporate profits which are in turn used to justify increased compensation of the high earning executives. The executive rewards incentivize (for the executives) the repetition of this income diverging cycle.

What is only now becoming obvious (at least to me) in the unfolding mortgage debacle is that a significant portion of the U.S. corporate sector has added a third component to the outsourcing/offshoring strategy: unsourcing.

Unsourcing: deliberately failing to perform essential and/or long established and/or legally required corporate functions and obligations, usually as a means only to increase executive compensation. Usage: The Countryslide Mortgage Company recently announced that it will be unsourcing its processing and maintenance of mortgage documents in all future mortgage transactions. Executive bonuses totaling the GDP of Bolivia were distributed following the announcement.

In retrospect, I suppose, we should have anticipated this. Unsourcing is the easiest and least costly of the three strategies to implement. The corporation simply doesn’t fulfill its functions and obligations.

To flesh this out just a bit, my reading of the Daily Caller article linked above (disclaimer: have your favorite stomach remedy handy before reading - it’s sickening) is that one significant element now contributing to a potentially renewed and particularly virulent contagion of the financial sector is through the complete abandonment by – for lack of a better word – “banks” of their admittedly mundane but long established and essential clerical role in processing and maintaining documentation associated with the mortgages that they issued, bought, sold, sliced, diced and apparently pureed.

Now don’t get me wrong. On the scale of evil, unsourcing by Corporate America is probably not the worst. This unfolding economic dark night of the soul has unearthed evil upon evil: gambling, unconscionable greed, collusion, corruption, extortion, narcissism, deception, delusion, fraud, theft, malfeasance, misfeasance, and on and on. But somehow through all that I still, probably foolishly, retained a sense that if we could just peel off those rotting outer layers, thick as they were and difficult and unpleasant as it might be, that there was at least a tiny redeemable core at the center. But there is something so primal about unsourcing as a corporate strategy in such a central position in the economy, that now I am not so sure.

Update: More here.

U.S. Economy, 2010 (In A Nutshell)

2010-10-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

What do you call it when the proudest infrastructure accomplishment of a country whose economy is imploding, primarily provides quicker access for retirees to gamble away their savings and is named for a friendly fire casualty from a deficit-fueled and unwinnable war?

Prescient.

Are you taking notes, China?

GTFOOTMYS

2010-10-15T22:57:00.000-07:00

In response to the “shrillness and intolerance” of the New Atheism (NA), one of the distasteful conceits that has enjoyed a revival in defense of religion against the onslaught of the NA “barbarians” is that religion and science/rationality are non-overlapping magesteria, NOMA. The basic idea is “that’s yours to think about (leptons and quarks) and this is mine (how many angels can dance on the head of pin), and you stay out of my business (wine BECOMES the blood of Christ) and I’ll stay out of yours (covalent bonds).”

There are some pretty straightforward arguments that decimate the NOMA paradigm, but the fact that despite these it is stronger than ever, suggests it may not be a worthwhile front in the overall conflict.

So rather, than fight the NOMA paradigm in a frontal assault, I humbly suggest that a more productive approach might be to enlist, to challenge, the ardent NOMA proponents – for example, the Karen Armstrong’s, and the Francis S. Collins’s, and the Francisco Ayala’s and the whole Templeton lot for that matter – to live up to their grand NOMA ideals. If they are genuinely willing to live the NOMA ideals then I am genuinely willing to give them a second listen.

But let’s be perfectly clear about what that means in practice: when some s**thead two-bit cleric says of homosexuality:

"Some suppose that they were pre- set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, he is our Father.”

a s**thead two-bit cleric utterly lacking in understanding of prenatal biochemistry, genetic predisposition, the empathy necessary to gracefully accept others living out their lives as they were born, and even, apparently, the reflective ability to experience cognitive dissonance at his infantile doctrine in the face of something like, say, spina bifida [yes, why would our heavenly father do THAT to anyone?], then the brave little NOMA warriors will in unison, very loudly, and in boldface font say unto him or her: “Get The F**k Out Of This Magesterium You S**thead!”

Karen? Francis? Francisco? Anyone??

Update: Shrill and intolerant. Guilty as charged.

Gambling

2010-10-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

The structure of gambling necessarily engenders both winners and losers, the winners benefitting at the expense of the losers. It’s part of the visceral “joy" of gaming. What has America done over the past generation but eagerly, seamlessly, ruthlessly integrate the gambling ethos into our economy, so much so that even curbing the gambling will utterly destroy the economy? It must feel exhilarating, self-actualizing, so self-evidently proper and natural for the few to walk away from the table with their multi-million and billion dollar compensation packages won so effortlessly at the expense of all those hapless 50+ year old losers and all the rest. What have we wrought? What have we wrought?

An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

2010-09-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

President Obama,

I urge you to reconsider your administration's extraordinary and, in my opinion, extreme position on invoking the state secrets privilege to prevent review of targeted killing of U.S. citizens.

If we have learned anything as a nation, anything at all over the last troubled decade, it is that our extensive intelligence apparatus and best functioning executive processes are not immune to even the most basic failures.

It seems to me that precisely because of the inevitability of these failures our government was and has been wisely structured with checks and balances and this is nowhere more true than in the competition between the rights of individuals and actions of the government with its overwhelming power and resources. The targeted killing policy simply discards this fundamental principle and in a stunning manner that is the most irreversible, unenlightened, anti-democratic fashion imaginable.

As a veteran or our nation’s armed forces, I clearly understand that we live in a dangerous world and that the most important of your charges as president is the safety of America’s citizens. But, again, such safety is always a competition between the rights of the individual and the actions of an overwhelmingly powerful and self-evidently failure-susceptible government. Any realistic reflection on this policy in consideration of history, politics, and our constitution can lead to no other conclusion but that it demolishes a cornerstone of our values as a nation and will ultimately have tragic consequences. Again, I urge you to reconsider.

Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome - ADKEAS

2010-09-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

I humbly submit a new, brash, and untested hypothesis - that the existence of the tea-party, and particularly of the many tea-party enthusiasts enthusiastically embracing ideas that are patently counter to their own interests, is evidence of a heretofore unidentified chronic, devastating medical affliction: Acquired Dunning-Kruger Effect and Anosognosia Syndrome (ADKEAS).

An Open Letter To My "Moderate" Republican Representative

2010-03-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

`God save thee, ancient Mariner !
From the fiends, that plague thee thus !--
Why look'st thou so ?'--With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.

As you know from my missives to you on a variety of topics, you and I do not see eye to eye on many issues. Therefore you might be surprised to learn that I probably agree with you that the recently passed Health Care Reform bill is a stinker.

Now you might be thinking: “Great! The ‘stinker’ aspect of HCR is a winner, it even has my opposition constituents disgruntled” – and that a lot of folks like me will simply associate the stinkiness with your political opponents who voted for the bill. But, you know what? Some voters have the ability to be a bit more nuanced in our understanding of politics than when we voted for 5th grade class president, and I intend to make sure everyone I know is familiar with the following narrative of your role in HCR.

The background, and again, something on which I suspect we both agree: Americans currently pay more, a great deal more, per capita for health care than any other nation and yet more than 30 other countries have health care outcomes that outperform ours, and this situation is a serious and growing threat to the competitiveness of our economy, to say nothing of what it says about our values.

The leadership of your party, leadership you apparently willingly followed (considering your extensive voting record, public comments, and legislative actions and inactions with respect to HCR), opted to implement a strategy intended to do nothing less than simply ensure the defeat of any HCR legislation. This was in spite of your party leadership’s failure to advance any meaningful legislation to address the health care issues identified above during the many years when it was in control of the legislative and executive branches of government, the wide margin of victory by your political opponents - opponents who had made clear that health care reform was an agenda they would undertake - in the 2008 elections, the obvious attempts to forumlate the HCR bill in a bipartisan fashion, and the now painfully clear political miscalculation that the HCR bill would be defeated by a shameful partisan effort.

That is, when given the chance to improve a stinky HCR bill, to really do something on behalf of your constituents, even if it meant compromises on some issues, you instead squandered the opportunity in loyalty to party leadership whose judgement is now so obviously questionable. I will now and always think of and represent the stinking aspects of this bill as your legacy, a legacy you now so richly deserve.

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

New Word: peud

2010-02-15T02:13:00.000-08:00

OK, new word. You know that ~~accursed and annoying~~ ubiquitous blogging technique where a provocative or inflammatory word or phrase is crossed out, but still visible, and then followed by a more benign word or phrase, but of course the edgy insinuation is still stuck in your brain like the ~~nauseating stench~~ unpleasant aroma of dog poo in your nose long after you've scraped it off the bottom of your shoe? I propose we call these pre-emptive up-dates, or "peuds" (to rhyme with feuds) for short. You heard it here first.

Meanwhile, back at the 13.7 blog...

2010-02-15T01:39:00.000-08:00

...Professor Kauffman continues his march to the sea (where fish are, no doubt, right now engaged in employing their swim bladders as exaptations to be turned into hummingbird beaks). There are many things about his posts that rub me the wrong way, really rub me the wrong way, but a big one is the incomplete and hence misleading logical construct used to formulate his "no law" assertions.

Since he is, apparently, an accomplished scientist, I am forced to conclude that he is intentionally misleading his nonscientist readers. The crux of his deception is an incompletely formulated syllogism (paraphrasing): - since the natural laws we understand and accept tell us there is, in principle, no way to deterministically predict future events, there is "no law [sic]". Leaving aside for now the inspired creationist jiu-jitsu technique of enlisting scientific principles and findings as their own enemies, it is crucial to recognize the unstated initial proposition in this syllogism: "If we admit as natural law only those principles that make deterministic temporal predictions, and - since the natural laws ..." That is the only proposition that can lead off his logical construct to arrive at a valid "no law" conclusion. But that initial proposition is, not, not even remotely, the general scientific understanding of what we admit as natural law.

C'mon, Stu!!! You know as well as anyone that when Peebles "predicted" the cosmic microwave background it wasn't a temporal prediction that two guys named Penzias and Wilson would be cleaning pigeon droppings out of their radio telescope 40 miles away in a few months! It was a "phenomenal" prediction: under appropriate conditions, a very specific and precisely circumscribed phenomenon would be apparent. THAT's what scientists nearly always mean when they use the term "predict" and phenomenal prediction is nearly always the form of scientific law.

Professor Kauffman's conspicuous finessing of this initial proposition looks to those sufficiently versed in this science "magic" thing, as nothing more than sleight of hand employed to fool the ~~rubes~~ nonscientists. Reading his entries, I just can't shake the sense that instead of using his role in the 13.7 blog in an appropriate dialogue with nonscientists, he's intent on scoring cheap shots against Steven Weinberg, located conveniently off ~~camera~~ blog, and advancing a pet economic model, by deliberately misleading - browbeating, really - some blog readers to a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of the general structure of science.

And finally there's this: be very, very wary of scientists and others who are eager to (mis)apply some natural or physical law to address what are fundamentally social issues. This is, for instance, what gave us the marvels of eugenics, and boy-oh-boy do I viscerally distrust the general thrust of a scientist invoking the principles of quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity in support of an economic paradigm. There is simply no mechanism, none, that would allow an understanding of the worldlines of events in the special theory of relativity or the superposition of quantum mechanical eigenfunctions to credibly inform an economic paradigm. If you resort to having these principles undergirding your economic model, to quote lolcats, "ur doin it rong". If Kauffman-economics grows legs, trust me, move your investment portfolio to mattress manufacturers. Or if Hank Paulson becomes CEO of Sealy-Posturepedic, maybe straight to mattresses.

Deconstructing the Liberty Belle

2010-02-05T07:24:00.000-08:00

I wonder, I wonder … ? Could it be that NPR has a policy of letting willful stupidity speak for, and thereby hang itself? It’s an innovative and radical notion. And probably one that won’t work given the apparent willful stupidity of great swathes of the nation. After all, calling willful stupidity stupid falls on the stupidly deaf ears of the willfully stupid.

Now, remember that kerfuffle at NPR over the Mark Fiore “Learn to Speak Tea-Bag” cartoon a while back? They caught some heat over it, and as a supposedly unbiased national media outlet reporting in a time of intense political passions, it was definitely a very edgy thing to publish. But most of the group the cartoon was poking fun at couldn’t have been more deserving.

Well, quick on the heels of that dustup, NPR did a report on a charming piece of work who calls herself the “Liberty Belle”. Because of its timing, and at first glance, one might easily have taken the piece as a conciliatory gesture to those it had insulted.

But take a look at this Liberty Belle quote from the piece:

"I tried to boil down in essence what makes me so angry about it," Carender says. "And it was this idea that he and other people decide what the needs are in society. They get to decide. But in order to fund those things, they have to take from some people in order to give to the other people."

So here is Liberty Belles’s “boiled down” political manifesto: let us never again submit to evaluating the quality of ideas themselves; let us, instead, simply demand that our elected officials be free of ideas; freedom, after all, means never having to think; come my friends and let us declare freedom, sweet freedom from the tyranny of ideas!

Sweet Jeebus, that explains so much, including, the until now, mysterious (to me) appeal of Sarah Palin, she of the infamously and perfectly sanitized of any semblance of ideas, empty political rhetoric.

So look: we know NPR has limited time to report on Liberty Belle – they have to pick and choose what parts of her story they will publish. Could it be that NPR cleverly slipped this report, this cartoon more laughable and more disparaging, than Fiore’s, under the radar of the Tea Party movement, relying on 6th grade reading comprehension levels to defuse the otherwise inevitable invective from those it so clearly lampooned? So it might appear based on a comparison of the comments garnered on the two pieces.

And that report was quickly followed by an odd little piece on Andrew Breitbart, raising his profile to NPR listeners just as Breitbart’s albatross was so clearly settling in for an unpleasant, and one can only hope, long stay: a minion with an extended resume of right-wing and racist associations, ugly and possibly illegal political tricks, and, ultimately, a federal felony charge.

Unfortunately, my experience with those possessed of willful stupidity, and its apparently inexhaustible current supply, leaves me pessimisstic that such an approach will have any effect. Still, it provides some comic relief as gotterdammerung ensues. Thanks, NPR, for the few smiles you can provide as the flames consume us.

Executive Compensation

2010-01-25T00:46:00.000-08:00

So much debate, so little time. Should the government regulate executive compensation? I'll ignore, for now, whether such regulation is realizable (for all kinds of reasons), consistent with the American vision, and popularly supported. Instead, I conducted a thought experiment to determine whether there would be ANY condition under which it would be appropriate to regulate executive compensation. The answer is unequivocally yes: if executive compensation so undermined, so endangered, so threatened the common good and/or the welfare of the nation that it was a clear and present danger, then it should be regulated just as any other danger would be (including economic concerns), e.g., sale of methamphetamines, child labor, disposal of radioactive waste, indentured servitude, export of weapons technology, etc.

If that is the case, then the real concern is not the size of executive compensation packages per se. (The flip side of Jesus' "the poor you will always have with you" is that the oligarchs you will also always have with you). What seems much more problematic is that compensation mechanisms may have been a proximate cause of the financial crisis and the "great recession," and indeed may be at the root of a great many other economic pressures that are not in the public interest. There is, in fact, a great deal of compelling evidence for this. Many compensation schemes we have heard about handsomely, obscenely, rewarded executives and others for precisely those actions and decisions that precipitated, is precipitating the ongoing disaster: short term metrics at the expense of long term prospects, extreme leveraging of positions, IBGYBG attitudes, hedging against one's own positions, abandoning prior obligations to employees and retirees, cronyism, cowing regulators and buying legislators, ignoring blatant conflicts of interest. If it walks like a clear and present danger and quacks like a clear and present danger...

Does a Bear ...

2010-01-07T01:02:00.000-08:00

Ooh, ooh, what's it called, when you "complicate" a well known saying? Kind of the reverse of a euphemism, but not quite. One occurred to me as I was putting together the last post - and got me all agiggle:

Does a bear increase the overall entropy of the universe while converting energy from one form to another in the woods?

On second thought, it's too obvious - surely that saying or a close variant is already out there, right?

Update: circumlocution or periphrasis? Not quite - they don't seem to carry the intentional humorous connotation that is always an element in these sayings.

Update: Proposed T-shirt for physics students:
On the front: "Do I like physics?"
On the back: "Does a bear increase the overall entropy of the universe while converting energy from one form to another in the woods?"

Update: Proposed tee shirt for chemists, engineers, biologists, oh, hell, anybody:
On the front: "Do I like thermodynamics?"
On the back: "Does a bear increase the overall entropy of the universe while converting energy from one form to another in the woods?"

Testing the Emergence Hypothesis

2010-01-07T00:13:00.001-08:00

In considering the hypothesis of emergent phenomena there is, from a science perspective, a need and a responsibility to test the hypothesis, and so a singularly important question to be answered: what are the distinctive observable characteristics that an emergent phenomenon would display compared to one that is reductive. As I have already pointed out in this blog, there is a perfectly lovely historical example of such an approach in Einstein’s development of the Special Theory of Relativity. As Einstein exemplified in that case, it is one of the responsibilities of a scientist advancing a novel hypothesis to identify how it may be tested.

Now I suspect that some with a weaker grasp of the principles and practice of science would propose a straightforward test of demonstrating that an emergent principle correctly predicts a phenomenon where reductive principles were incapable of making the prediction. But I think most practicing scientists would recognize that this is not a sufficient test of the emergence hypothesis. Reductive principles may still correctly characterize a complex phenomenon in spite of the fact that we do not have the capability to apply them to predict it. Let’s take an extreme case to make the point: our capability to “predict” phenomena with quantum field theory is based on an infinite perturbation expansion – that is, everything, literally everything you can actually “predict” with it, is intrinsically an approximation; and yet no emergence proponents, not a one, has ventured to claim that the magnetic dipole moment of the electron is an emergent phenomenon even though we know we do not have the capability to predict it exactly. (Some folks just seem to go all wobbly over agreement to one part in ten billion.) So, let’s recap: even if a hypothesized emergent principle correctly predicted a phenomenon that reductive principles couldn’t because of our capability to apply them, this is not, I repeat not, a sufficient test of the emergence hypothesis.

Because of the capability dilemma, we are forced to apply a weaker and admittedly much less satisfying test of reductive principles for complex phenomena: examining whether the phenomena are consistent with the reductive principles, that is, examining a complex phenomenon looking for evidence that it violates the reductive principles. (Giraffe composed of atoms from the periodic table of the elements – check. Giraffe accelerates at 9.8 m/s^2 when dropped – check. Giraffe increases overall entropy of the universe when converting energy from one form to another – check. Etc., etc., etc.) Of every test of this kind of which I am aware (save one) there has never been a single instance that provided even the remotest evidence of violation of reductive principles. (The one instance that I am genuinely puzzled by is “dark energy”, which, oddly, seems to draw little attention from emergence proponents. That dark energy is some creepy weird shit, man!) And so here is the kicker for the emergence proponents: If a phenomenon is correctly described by an emergence hypothesis and yet the phenomenon is still consistent with reductive principles, then Occam’s Razor strongly suggests, if not demands, that the emergence hypothesis be considered unnecessary.

So, a challenge to emergence proponents: clearly and unequivocally identify the distinctive observable characteristics that an emergent phenomenon would display compared to one that is reductive and in a way that satisfies Occam. If you cannot or will not do this then it suggests that you are not doing science.

Update: OK, for the purpose of the challenge, let’s say reductive phenomena are those that are solely the consequence of the standard model of particle physics + the general theory of relativity + any as yet undiscovered components of the universe consistent with these [Higgs boson, dark matter (? – see NPR 13.7 Blog post @Mgleiser: Dark Matter), dark energy(?!?)] + any underlying reductive structure that subsumes these. Yuk. Not so pretty. But that’s still part of the problem: a claim of emergence could appear to offer clarity simply in contrast to murkiness in parts of our reductive understanding.

I know someone is going to call foul on this because we don’t know what the undiscovered components are and what the underlying reductive structure is. But turnabout is fair play: it’s just as much of a foul for emergence proponents to exclude these, because there are a number of very strong indicators that they are there. Without a knowledge of the undiscovered components and understanding of the underlying reductive structure a claim that a phenomenon is emergent cannot genuinely be tested against a competing reductionist claim, and as I have argued, if a phenomenon can be understood in terms of both an emergent hypothesis and a reductive hypothesis, Occam’s razor says reductive wins.

The posts on the NPR 13.7 blog suggest a range of interpretations of what constitutes emergence. For the purpose of the challenge, let’s say emergence is behavior which is demonstrably not solely a consequence of reductive phenomena as defined above.

Update: I hadn't noticed before I wrote this, but in the comments to one of the NPR 13.7 blog posts (see @SAK42: Breaking the Galilean Spell), there is indeed some heady discussion of a possible (extraordinarily speculative)relationship between dark energy and emergence. Like I said, that dark energy ...

Dr. Kauffman’s Challenge

2010-01-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

The discussion between Dr Kauffman and Dr. Goodenough seems to me to pivot on what is admissible as natural law. Dr. Kauffman, at least in my reading, appears to be advancing a position – really, a postulate – that in order for a principle to be admissible as a natural law all, phenomena associated with it must be deducible, e.g., for the principle of evolution to be admissible as a natural law one must, at least in principle, be able to deduce the giraffe – no deducible giraffe, “no law”. Dr. Goodenough, though, is advancing what in my experience is the much more common view within science, one that has proven at least empirically successful, that a principle is admissible as natural law if some phenomena are deducible from it and the remainder of the relevant phenomena are at least consistent with it, e.g., evolution is admissible as a natural law because from it one can deduce that some species that are subject to a rapid change in their environment will suffer extinction, and because giraffes are consistent with evolution.

Because of the more commonly accepted and empirically successful understanding, I would suggest that the onus is genuinely on Dr. Kauffman to do more than ask us to simply accept as given his postulate about what principles are admissible as natural law. Finally, I claim that this is not an insignificant point: we have an historical/scientific precedent that bears on this issue so, even though I deeply apologize for the apparently tangential nature and length of the following paragraph, please humor me.

In my experience most people very seriously misunderstand the true nature of what Einstein proposed in the special theory of relativity (STR). It is the first postulate, considered so unglamorous that it is rarely even mentioned in popular treatments of STR, that is perhaps its most profound insight. The first postulate of the STR was, in fact, a postulate about what principles are admissible as physical law: principles that take the same mathematical form in all inertial reference frames. At the time Einstein was developing the theory, there were two different mathematical representations of a single electrodynamic phenomenon, and which representation was used depended on the inertial reference frame in which the phenomenon occurred. Both representations worked flawlessly in experiments, but Einstein’s key insight, the reason he was unwilling to let this status quo stand, the burr under his saddle if you will, was what principles he considered admissible as physical law. He found that the two different representations could be shown to have the same mathematical form in any inertial reference frame provided one accepted the painfully counterintuitive assumption that the speed of electomagnetic radiation (light) is the same in all inertial reference frames. Thus, the second, sexier, postulate of the STR is, in some sense, simply a deduction following from the first postulate and the flawless experimental results associated with the two electrodynamic principles. From this point, Einstein went on to predict a number of consequences (e.g., E=mc^2) in terms of the specific observable (and, again, often painfully counterintuitive) behavior of physical systems that contrasted with the competing view. The point (yes I do have a point) is that tests of the special theory of relativity, such as experiments investigating the constancy of the speed of light and the equivalence of mass and energy were, in fact, tests of Einstein’s postulate about what principles are admissible as physical law against a competing understanding.

Dr. Kauffman’s challenge: Using the historical/scientific precedent of the STR model outlined above, if you are proposing a postulate about what principles are admissible as natural law, as it clearly seems to me you are, a postulate that contrasts with a commonly used and empirically successful understanding, I maintain that it is incumbent upon you as a practicing scientist to identify what the consequences of that postulate would be in terms of the specific observable behavior of natural systems that constrasts with the current understanding and, further, to propose a realizable test of the postulate. In conclusion it is, I suspect, pertinent to this dicussion, that a part of the reason I am so sensitive on this topic is that a fatal flaw of ID “theory” is its failure, its unwillingness really, to meet these minimal requirements.

Reduction, Kauffman, and (presumably this is where its going) God

2009-12-31T17:36:00.000-08:00

Examining his biographical information it is clear that Dr. Kauffman is an extraordinarily accomplished and widely respected scientist. This suggests his insights are worth considering and, further, that I am well out of my element in critiquing them. And yet, “fools rush in …” There are a number of oddly questionable elements evident in the presentation of his argument in this (apparently) first in a series of essays. Here is a sample:

He at least insinuates that it is appropriate to lump together with no distinction, under the rubric of the aspects of a reductionist approach that he is criticizing, the efforts to identify “natural laws” associated with the Galilean inclined plane experiment, the “biosphere, human economy, human culture and our historicity”. For anyone with an even passing understanding of the utterly divergent methods and analyses applied to understanding the principles in these different areas, such a broad brush representation seems at least disingenuous, applied merely to bolster his position. Indeed, there is a very strong case to be made, of which Dr. Kauffman must surely be aware, that the extraordinary, unparalleled, stunning success of the reductionist approach in some of these areas – e.g., the physical sciences – is what has prompted its incorrect, incomplete and/or inappropriate application in others – e.g., historicity. The failure of the approach in one of these areas does not and should not be used wholesale to indict its application to another as he seems to be doing.

He resorts to a shameless straw man argument and even then his conclusion from it is patently and demonstrably wrong: the physicist who has no mechanism in the tools of the trade to “pick out pumping blood as of special interest” from the properties of the heart. The root of this determination by Dr. Kauffman seems to me to arise from an assumption that our straw physicist is only capable of a completely literal interpretation of an abbreviated three step version of the “scientific method” taught in 7th grade science class. But, of course, there is a vast literature that unequivocally demonstrates that the true practice of (even reductionist) science goes well beyond this limited and ineffective approach. Finally, I hope I really do not need to list the nearly endless litany of advances and insights the reductionist sciences have achieved that lie outside Dr. Kauffman’s tightly circumscribed interpretation of its practice.

Also, I have become extraordinarily skeptical of philosophical arguments that venture into, or worse, rely on appeal to quantum theory. There are, of course, many intriguing and puzzling consequences of quantum theory but I’ve just seen too many appeals to it that are gross misrepresentations and nothing more than quantum woo. In fact, I feel disposed to venture a new principle: Futzinfarb’s corollary to Godwin’s law is that “any general philosophical argument that degenerates into an appeal to quantum theory must be ignored”. I’ll have to give Dr. Kauffman a narrow pass on Futzinfarb’s corollary, as his assertions about the implications of quantum mechanics for evolution are probably fundamentally correct: that its principles (laws) preclude a reproducible time evolution of the universe. The fatally flawed conclusion drawn from this, though, is that since the principles of quantum theory cannot be applied to reproducibly predict the time evolution of various systems, that there is “no law.” This is little more than an a priori assumption, really a prejudice, about what kinds principles are admissible as natural laws. Dr. Kauffman appears simply unwilling to entertain even the possibility that we may inhabit a universe governed by specific reductive principles (laws) that have intrinsically irreproducible consequences. It’s just the icing on the cake that this position contrasts with his critique of an a priori reductionist approach to understanding.

There are other things that deeply bother me about this piece on which I will not elaborate here. Though he may have profound insights about the nature of the universe, this gravely flawed introduction is troubling has left me deeply skeptical.

Economic Best Interest

2009-12-29T03:29:00.000-08:00

Background: A recent piece on NPR reported about a woman near Washington, DC, who has decided to walk away from her mortgage in spite of the fact that she was financially capable of continuing payments. Her decision was made, as the piece expressed it, on “business considerations”, on her economic best interests. As you might imagine, some of the commenters excoriated her for this decision. In nearly every case, either explicitly or implicitly, the morality of this decision was given as the reason for this treatment. Ha! Seriously?

Haven’t you people been paying attention?!? For decades now, corporations and their executive elite have been handsomely, handsomely rewarded specifically for exercising an unending litany of immoral actions and breach of contractual obligations, not the least of which is the social contract: socializing risk and privatizing profits, gutting functioning companies for quick profits in leveraged buyouts, creating and selling securities while betting against them, extorting tax breaks, charging usurious interest and fees, engaging in environmental destruction, monopolizing markets, externalizing costs, delaying resolution of judgements against them through endless litigation, creating a casino economy, seeking the cheapest labor at any price, undermining taxpayer and citizen interests through lobbying and funding of transparently mouthpiece “think-tanks” and political organizations, offshoring profits in tax havens, mismanaging and abandoning contractual obligations for worker retirement, and on and on and on, ad nauseum, ad infinitum not to mention plain old walking out on their obligations bankruptcy.

In every case, we’re told of the path of destruction they leave behind: “don’t take it personally, it’s just a business decision, it’s just in the best economic interest of the company.” And yet some of those NPR commenters expect me to be horrified that one middle-class American has learned and is going to apply this all-American ultimate-Randian economic rationale to her own situation? Fergawdsake people, this is what all those Greenspan freemarketeers are always whispering into your ear: “when people act exclusively on the basis of their own economic interest, that provides the best outcome for society.” They are telling her to do this, virtually writing out an instruction manual – to act in her own economic interest. After all, it’s what gave us those wonderful outcomes of Enron traders chortling at their screwing over of granny on her utility bills, and financial executives slopping at the public money trough like so many hogs after being complicit in nearly bringing down the world economy, and the exporting of millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs to China including some under conditions consistent with slave labor, and the willful ignorance of the auto industry to the reality that their business model was unsustainable, and a decade of explosive growth in the incomes of the highest compensated one percent of the population while compensation for the poor and middle class has been stagnant or worse, and, of course, obscene compensation for executives at the companies who engineered the debacle of millions of homeowners in underwater mortgages. I could, of course, go on with examples, but I’ll spare you the gory details.

What could corporations want more – what could warm the greedy little cockles of their hearts more – than for people to listen to and live by the creed of these morality commenters? What could be better for corporations then the asymmetric warfare of consumers following a deep, unshakeable, moral and ethical code of financial responsibility, completely independent of considering what’s in their own best interests, in their interactions with sociopathic, greed-is-good, what’s-in-it-for-me, institutions? It seems pretty clear who will come out on top in that match-up every damned time.

The sad thing, the truly disturbing thing in this story is that this woman is actually likely to suffer more severe consequences than any of the obscene financial “wizards” who engineered the near implosion of the world economy many of whom are currently milking their taxpayer funded TARP bailouts to extract huge bonuses. I’ll take your offense at her actions seriously when you begin to express some real outrage at the sociopathic executives and corporations who have have vaporized tens of trillions (that’s trillions with a T) of dollars and truly undermined the long-term prospects of the nation and the world through their immoral behavior. Until then, meh.

On A Miracle

2009-12-06T12:22:00.000-08:00

How can a simple public profession of one's faith in the context of describing an averted tragedy become offensive? When does it become destructive? Let's outline a situation: a warm Christmas-time story in a local newspaper about an energetic and engaging young woman who contracts a life-threatening condition, but who subsequently recovers through intercession, through the fervent prayers of family, friends and strangers. A close-knit family, more secure in their faith than ever, understands that this is nothing less than a miracle and that God has a purpose for the young woman. What kind of cold-hearted reprobate would begrudge these folks their joy, their celebration of this moment of grace? What kind indeed?

Well, let's fill in the outline just a bit. A previously healthy young woman suddenly and unexpectedly suffers a seizure. An MRI reveals she has a brain tumor. Across the country, a neurosurgeon at Mayo Clinic removes the malignant tumor, though the surgery and its aftermath pose life-threatening complications of blood clots and infection. And, finally, her recovery is faster and more complete than any of her medical caregivers anticipate.

The miracle, has in fact been mediated by, among other things, the diagnostics of MRI and radiologists and by access, the many different layers of access, to one of the world's foremost medical facilities, to an extraordinarily accomplished neurosurgeon, and cutting edge pharmaceuticals.

To me, attributing the recovery of this woman to miraculous intervention by a loving God is, frankly, offensive. At its root it insults the long, difficult, rational and deliberate path that led to understanding the principles and developing MRI technology, it overlooks all those who spent long years educating and training those crack medical personnel, it avoids considering the dedication and effort those medical personnel have invested in their careers, it sidesteps the understanding that an experienced neurosurgeon must necessarily have gained from inevitable mistakes and the suffering of others, it elides examination of the economic conditions that make access to medical "miracles" accessible to some but not others, it implies, however mildly, that there is no purpose for those whose outcomes are less fortunate, and on and on.

In short, the claim of a miracle in a case like this, seems to me to be one symptom of a society that has so little understanding of the sacrifice, the investment, the infrastructure, the regulation, the very social contract that has made their lives livable; a society that has so interwoven these "miracles" into the fabric of people's lives that to many of them, the "miracles" and their origins have become transparent; a society that, because of that transparency, is in fact busy betraying their "miracles". "Miracles" like this, then can even be seen as destructive because rather than fully recognizing the investment necessary to make them possible it enhances their transparency. For this reason, and between you and me and the fencepost, I prefer my miracles to be weeping faces of Mary in a pan of bacon drippings than this kind.

Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy.

2009-04-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

As a Nobel prize winning and widely respected scientist, a big part of Dr. Chu’s job now is to bring that expertise to bear in collaboration with intelligent and well-informed individuals trying to solve the gravest problems that confront this nation. The other part of his job is to work with congress.

The Intersection of Laffer Curves and Torture Policy

2009-04-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

An overly simple and probably substantially wrong understanding of the so-called Laffer curve is that, with low tax rates, increasing tax rates produce more revenue for the government, but with diminishing returns. Upslope. Finally, at some point, an “optimal” tax rate, increasing the rate causes revenues to fall due to disincentives and other impacts on the economy. Downslope. A flawed but easy to grasp analogy is that government revenues follow the trajectory of a thrown softball: as the softball gets further (increasing tax rates) from the hand that flung it, it rises higher and higher (revenues increase), upslope, reaches a highest point (greatest revenue), and then as it continues (tax rates continuing to increase), it comes crashing back to earth (revenues collapse), downslope.

As my understanding of the torture policies instituted by our government has unfolded over the years, I have always, always, deep in my liberal, bleeding-heart gut, known them for what they are: an unmitigated horror. I am now convinced that I did not speak out enough against torture polices, send enough letters to the editor, communicate frequently enough with my legislators with strong enough language opposing the institutionalization of torture. Why?

I blame my godforsaken liberal, knee-jerk willingness to listen to all sides of an argument and to reevaluate my position on an issue, and my rather unusual (for a liberal) personal portfolio of national security experience. I listened carefully to the arguments that “enhanced interrogations, black prisons, extraordinary renditions” and so on, were necessary for national security. I was also somewhat sympathetic that a fearful if not cowardly electorate had, for whatever reason, directly through elected leaders and indirectly through the appointments and approvals of those leaders, chosen to place into policy-making positions a stunning array of those who were demonstrably incompetent, and thus incapable of conceiving how to implement an effective long-term national security policy addressing a complex issue like terrorism without resort to such unsavory and inadvisable backstops.

And I have to admit that the national security arguments bought from me some good part of what their authors probably intended – they left me just unsure enough of the slope of the moral ground on which I was standing. Who am I to express moral outrage over policies that might save a mother from the tragedy of losing a child to a terrorist attack? In retrospect, I suppose I rationalized that as detainee policy and interrogation techniques increase away from a zero point of perfectly and transparently (and anyway unrealizable) idealized humane treatment, there may, in fact, be some national security benefits to be obtained. Upslope.

But as the issue has exploded over the past several weeks, the national security argument has reemerged in full force, with many now arguing that being aware of, considering, and investigating the policies, and perhaps prosecuting those responsible where appropriate, seriously endangers, has already endangered our national security. See, for instance, Porter Goss. Or Dick Fergodssake Cheney.

I simply want those who are pressing this position to understand what its effect on my consideration of this issue has been. Those developing and implementing these policies, if nothing else, had to operate from an understanding that this is a free and democratic country, a country with a constitution and established laws and treaties, and that whatever policies they developed and implemented for national security had to operate and would necessarily succeed or fail within that fundamental structure. Those responsible for the torture policies who are trying to silence their antagonists and who are now arguing that our national security is being compromised, has already been compromised, by the democratic, constitutional, legal processes that are unfolding relating to these policies, rather are, apparently transparently and unselfconciously, compounding with that argument the increasingly compelling evidence that these policies, probably in the short term, and certainly in the long term, undermine our national security.

Here, then, is my point: those who developed and implemented these policies were responsible for one ultimate purpose – to provide for national security. So much of their opposition to investigation and prosecution now rests on the pivot of national security. But they, themselves, are arguing that their misbegotten torture policies and implementation, in the context of a democratic, constitutional, legal, moral nation, went so far that their consequences in that context decrease our national security. Downslope.

These people, now even by their own argument, took us so far along the Torture Laffer Curve that our national security is crashing and burning. Their responsibility WAS national security and by their own admission the policies they developed and implemented have failed, impairing our national security. It is time to unravel these policies and to drag us back along the axis of the Torture Laffer Curve. I don’t see any way for us to do this in the long term except to: Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate. Investigate and prosecute where appropriate.

An Open Letter to Jake DeSantis

2009-03-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. DeSantis,

It occurs to me that the experience of betrayal and persecution you described in your AIG resignation letter is qualitatively indistinguishable from that of millions of American workers. According to your account: contractual obligations to you were, in some sense, breached, just like, for instance, the thousands of Delphi retirees who have had their retirement and health benefits eliminated as a consequence of the company’s bankruptcy and the unwillingness of automotive executives to undertake rational changes to their business model; you accepted a significant short-term economic disadvantage in trade for what was presented to you as attractive long-term benefits that will, now, never be realized, just like the millions of manufacturing workers who have had their livelihoods exported so that, for instance, underwear could be fifty cents cheaper at Wal-Mart and inexpensive toxic pet food could be imported from China; you were betrayed and your compensation was sacrificed on the altar of painfully myopic considerations by executives, politicians, pundits, and, ultimately, a fickle and ill-informed public, just like the tens of thousands of competent, dedicated, and hard-working teachers who are expected to single-handedly address all of a consumer society’s ills with less and less resources, yet who are routinely vilified to gain a few precious ideological points; you were compensated at a level that didn’t fully recognize the effort you have invested in preparing for and conducting your career and that amounted to only a tiny fraction of the value of your contribution, just like the thousands of academic, government, and corporate PhD scientists and engineers who are responsible for the technological foundations on which our multi-trillion dollar economy is built; you had to work in a miserably stressful and demanding environment, forgoing any semblance of a healthy family life, just like the thousands of single mothers who work two and three life-draining jobs, trying to make ends meet so that their children might have a remote chance to escape the cycle of poverty; your company’s misfortune was due not to your actions but to the ill-advised, unethical, or outright fraudulent corporate policies of others, just like the thousands of Enron workers who lost their life-savings and their careers.

In this light, your personal experience really is terribly mundane, has been repeated across the country a million times over and for decades and in every variation, is old hat, causing one to wonder why it warranted such central placement in the national media. Forgive me this indulgence, but I can’t help but suspect those who placed your story in the media spotlight, who wanted it there, are an unreflective, incapable-of-recognizing-irony cohort of media, business and political elite who probably misunderstood its ultimate nature, not recognizing the mind-numbingly repetitive themes in it that I have identified above. But I do find it genuinely unusual in several ways. First, it is striking that so many of these economic realities with which the elite have endlessly browbeaten the American public have finally reached into the very boardroom which has for so long been their champions, and that in doing so they have elicited the most bitter remonstrance. Second the quantitative nature of the situation is striking: the admittedly severe imposition of a high special tax on your bonus payment would still have left you with nearly twice the U.S. median household income, something that left you reeling at the injustice and yet which, presumably due to your prior earnings, you were in a position to reject. Even further, the situation has highlighted the paradoxical nature of the astronomical amounts of money at play: to justify the bonuses, it has been correctly, and yet oddly dismissively pointed out that $165,000,000 is only a fraction of a percent of AIG’s taxpayer financed bailout package, a truly tiny amount; yet that amount of money would pay for the operation of a university educating 20,000 students for an entire year, or would purchase health insurance for 10,000 children for a year, or could be used to erect 100 Megawatts of wind turbine capacity, enough to supply electricity for up to 100,000 homes. Why do I find it likely that most of those pointing out the “tiny” aspect of the bonuses would scream bloody murder at the use of those funds for these alternative purposes? Finally, I find your attitude about your education at MIT, quite frankly, ugly. You have every right to be proud of the accomplishment represented by that education, but somewhere along the line you seem to have missed an important point: that education was not provided solely so that you could enrich yourself, Gordon Gekko notwithstanding. A great deal of public money was invested in your education through hundreds of millions of dollars of government grants and loans and tax incentives for charitable giving to MIT and its students over many years. That investment came with an implicit understanding, a social contract if you will, that your education would benefit not just you but the nation as a whole. So where were you when AIG was constructing their financial weapon of mass destruction that would implode not just your company, not just the national economy, but the world economy? Where the hell were you? You were a hell of a lot closer to ground zero than I was, and I had enough sense to recognize something had gone terribly amiss years ago, I had enough information to write to my legislators and ask them to do something to back us out of the impending disaster, fat lot of good that did. Where the hell were you? A very conservative reading of your apparently healthy compensation during those halcyon years at AIG came with, presumably, some level of fiduciary responsibility. How can you argue that you met that responsibility, short of the innocence by incompetence excuse perfected by the Bush adminstration: "nobody could have predicted?" How? Again, forgive me my indulgence, but your protestations of innocence in the events that precipitated this unmitigated disaster sound to me strangely like those of the arsonist who returns to the scene of his crime to help put out the fire and then expects to be treated as a hero.

I wish your expertise could be applied to unwind the AIG catastrophe, to save this country the billions of dollars we desperately need to invest in other places than the now worthless financial instruments assembled by your company. I wish you no ill will and genuinely hope you can rebuild your life and your career in a way that is productive for both you and your family and for the nation. But in the end, sir, in your story to this point, I see not only the depth of your betrayal, but the height of your hubris.

Trapped Squirming Vermin

2009-03-11T21:26:00.000-07:00

Watching the exchanges suggests to me trapped squirming vermin - evidence that Jon Stewart has these racketeers dead to rights. Dead to rights.

The Michelle Obama Cell-Phone Portrait Session

2009-03-07T11:17:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that many commentators are missing the broader meaning of the brouhaha over the photo of a soup kitchen cell-phone portrait session with Michelle Obama. Those who read into that photo either a contradiction or the irresponsibility self-evident in owning a cell phone while accepting help in a soup kitchen and food pantry, who saw a confirmation of their disdain for the poor and for programs that minister to them, are simply participating in a wide-ranging long term American campaign. Some various elements of the campaign with which you may be familiar include pointing out the obesity of the poor, John Galt, Rick Santelli and his Chicago Mercantile cohorts’ tirade against “losers”, the justification of obscene CEO compensation packages, the welfare cadillac, and NY Times stories about the tragedy of a former executive working as a janitor. At its root, that campaign advances the understanding that economic well-being is perfectly correlated with personal worth, that being poor, should, in and of itself, be a source of shame, is due solely to irreducible personal failings. In order to accomplish this, though, those who pick up the threads of the campaign need to ignore any countervailing evidence: structural elements of the economy, prejudice, inequality of opportunity and education. It must ruthlessly ignore that the predominant CEO compensation mechanisms are subject to positive feedback distortions, that the businesses operating in poor neighborhoods, agricultural and corporate policies, and rational decisions about how to convert money into calories conspire in determining the diet of the impoverished, that wealth can be built with activities that are not only unproductive but counterproductive to social welfare, and the role and economics of cell-phones in 2009 (not to mention a lack of any semblance of reportorial due diligence in examining the context of a particular photograph). And with this as a backdrop, it is trivial to look over the shoulder of a young black man, scornful of how he has (apparently) chosen to spend his money, secure in the superiority of our own money management, our own net worth, the content of our character.

Ya know what I'd like to see...

2009-02-20T16:31:00.000-08:00

...purely as a dispassionate scientific inquiry, is Rick Santelli and Elizabeth Warren along with three commodity brokers, three investment bankers, three mortgage officers, three bankrupt former autoworkers, three defrauded sub-prime mortgage holders, and three workers with gutted retirement accounts, locked in a room with a stack of economic data and a rack of Louisville Sluggers. Just to, you know, verify which way the outrage pendulum is swinging right now.

Payscales and Pitchforks

2009-01-31T18:17:00.000-08:00

Shocked, disappointed, disgusted. See e.g., Claire McCaskill and President Obama. Those are the responses to news of exhorbitant bonuses and astronomical compensation packages, for CEO’s, executives, and others in anti-government, anti-tax, anti-regulation corporations that are gorging mind-numbing amounts of taxpayer funds from the bailout trough. Wronged, self-exculpatory, defensive. See e.g., John Thain and Rudy Giuliani. Those are the responses to the criticisms of the McCaskills and Obamas.

And yet, in retrospect, none of this is surprising. The principal fiction underlying the obscene compensation of those “masters of the universe” is that the market determines their compensation based purely and irreducibly on their value. This fiction becomes, has become, deeply rooted and self-fulfilling (for a time). In their minds, the cause-effect relationship between value and compensation has been conveniently stripped of every other factor: externalities, structural effects, market inefficiencies, morality, finite resources, personal biases, etc., etc. Stripped of these considerations the compensation logic is unassailable, albeit circular.

Why is their compensation so high? Because of their value! How do we know they are so valuable? Because they require such high compensation! Such simple positive feedback systems eventually consume all available resources destroying themselves in the process. But from their vantage, and applying this impeccable logic, it appears to the masters, for the time being, that the excesses are those of the mere rabble. How dare they question the value of their economic aristocracy?! The unfortunate history of the world has repeatedly demonstrated that when aristrocracy becomes insensitive to the rabble in this way, their breakthrough understanding is delivered through pitchforks, either real or metaphorical. My advice? Invest in pitchforks.

The "Obama Effect"

2009-01-24T18:35:00.000-08:00

The study has not yet completed peer review, BUT...

Take a look at the plot that is shown as evidence here. (Vanderbilt University press release on Ray Friedman research.)

Then review the critique of graphical analysis here. (Taibbi critique of Thomas Friedman.)

Finally consider the rich irony that both plotters are Friedmans.

I propose a new phenomenon: "Friedman napkin" - a plot of arbitrarily selected parameters with either real or imaginary data used to reach a wildly inappropriate conclusion.

(Note: Both "Friedman plot" and "Friedman graph" already have specific meanings in math and science, hence the slightly more pejorative term "Friedman napkin." On the other hand, the number of syllables is nicely consistent with "Friedman unit."

You heard it here first.

The trouble with global warming skeptics

2009-01-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

In a NOVA piece on global climate change, “What’s up with the weather?”, James Trefil observed:

If you sat down and said, "I'm going to design a public issue that is the absolute worst nightmare of every scientist, of every communicator in the world," you couldn't do better than the greenhouse effect. You're dealing with something that's very complicated. You're dealing with something where there's legitimate uncertainty in the science. It's not that people are trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There's legitimate uncertainty. You're dealingwith something that has enormous consequences for people. And you're dealing with something whose effects will happen 30 years down the road, you know, when they happen. And then you say- you give people this and say, "Okay, do something about it."

For context.

The Crystal Vase: A one act play in three scenes.

Cast, in order of appearance:
Futzinfarb
Futzinfarb’s spouse
Millie, an orbital forcing cat
Trouble, an AGW monkey
Antimarx, a pet store clerk

Scene 1: A cozy living room, two chairs arranged around a fireplace

Futzinfarb: I sure do like that expensive crystal vase you gave me.
Fuzinfarb’s spouse: You’re welcome dear.
Futzinfarb: And it looks so nice on the mantelpiece.
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Indeed.
Millie: Meow!
Futzinfarb: Oh look, isn’t that cute? Millie likes the vase also. She’s rubbing against it….. Oh, oh no, it’s starting to tip! Millie! Stop! No! Bad cat!
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Oops, there it goes!
(Sound of vase smashing to bits.)
Futzinfarb: Fudge.
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Double fudge.
Millie: Meow!

Scene 2: The same living room, the next morning.

Futzinfarb: Oh look, honey – we won the ebay auction for the vase! It will be a perfect replacement for the one that Millie tipped off the mantel last night.
Futzinfarb’s spouse: I’ll go get my credit card. You’d better figure out what to do about Millie before the replacement vase gets here.
Millie: Meow!

Scene 3: A pet store, later that afternoon.

Futzinfarb: I want to complain about Millie, this cat that you sold me last week.
Millie: Meow!
Trouble: Ee, ee, ee. Ooh, ooh!
Futzinfarb: She rubbed up against an expensive crystal vase that we had on our mantel last night. It rocked and then tipped off the mantel and smashed to bits.
Futzinfarb’s spouse (wandering away, distracted): Cool! A tarantula!
Millie: Meow!
Trouble: Ee, ee, ee. Ooh, ooh!
Futzinfarb (ignoring Futzinfarb’s spouse, who is sticking one hand into a tarantula cage): We bought a replacement vase, but what do you suggest we should we do about Millie’s bad behavior?
Antimarx: No problem! We’ll happily trade in your cat Millie for this monkey, Trouble. Since Millie is the one that tipped your vase off the mantel last night, you’ll have nothing to worry about with Trouble.
Millie: Meow!
Futzinfarb’s spouse: Ouch!
Trouble: Ee, ee, ee. Ooh, ooh!

Curtain falls.

Update: It has a name.

He Kept Us Safe, Redux

2008-12-20T00:58:00.000-08:00

In these crisis filled waning days of the Bush 43 administration, among the manifold efforts to assess his legacy are a dwindling number of brave little recruits in his willful ignorance army sifting the debris of his multiple catastrophes for a few scraps of anything that could even remotely be considered positive.

One of the shiny nuggets they have turned up and repeatedly pointed out is that “he kept us safe.” It’s trivial to point out, as many have done, that this claim is a grossly misleading interpretation of his record. In fact it is a baldfaced lie: one of the considerations that the responses to the “he kept us safe” chorus fail to point out strongly enough is that as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, a title he and his disciples seem to have fetishized without absorbing its implications, he is responsible for placing U.S. troops in harms way and for the casualties suffered by those troops (in Iraq alone, over 4200 dead and over 43,000 wounded, with no official tally for civilian contractors).

It has been vigorously argued, of course, that those casualties prevented much worse consequences, an argument slipping ever deeper into solipsism and fantasy as the harsh reality and colossal scale of the Iraq debacle solidifies. Nevertheless, as Commander in Chief, he is responsible for the safety of those he leads - that is the nature of the military chain of command, its ultimate meaning, its special hell (for those with a conscience), the reason for those salutes as he struts down the tarmac.

Bush elected to place those troops in harms way, many of them young and idealistic, and with limited background to judge the virtues and shortcomings of the orders they followed, and they died or were wounded under his command. He (presumably) considered the costs and benefits and chose to risk their lives.

They were boys and girls and husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and most of them would have fit right in on the 90th floor of the World Trade Center. They were Americans. They were us. I am sickened at the apparent willingness to consider the issue of their safety as somehow deeply discounted because they had 18 weeks of training, or deposited a signing bonus, or knew the ins and outs of an armored Humvee, or were gung-ho. Their military commitment especially obligated their military chain of command: “I will trust you with my safety so that, in turn, those that I protect will be safe”. They were Americans and their commander knowingly put them in harms way and whatever else you say about him and his motivations, whatever history eventually says about him and the quality of his decisions, they were us and he did NOT keep them safe.

Is PEOTUS Obama THAT Smart?

2008-12-19T12:57:00.000-08:00

What I see as one of the brilliant and remarkable accomplishments of Republicans, picking up momentum with Ronald Reagan and extending at least through the election of George W. Bush and a Republican dominated legislature in 2004 and the continued reddening of a swath of the deep south in the 2008 election, is persuading an enormous sector of the electorate to, demonstrably, vote against their own interests.

Republicans did this in many ways including standard outright misrepresentation of their policies (lying), but I would suggest also primarily by methodically establishing a misleading (a charitable assessment) kneejerk association between a series of social icons and symbols and their party and candidates. In essence, many Republican candidates were campaigning with an invisible twin (e.g., the white baby Jesus driving a 4WD pickup truck loaded with stacks of tax-free cash, swaddled in the American flag, cradling a handgun in His lap, and reciting the pledge of allegiance – you get the idea). In the voting booth, it was the twin for whom the lever was pulled (now that’s an anachronistic metaphor, eh?).

How does one change this situation in which much of the electorate has become comfortable with and habituated to voting against their own interests, in which this type of voting has become structural? The evidence of the past 30 years unfortunately and perversely strongly suggests that it cannot be addressed effectively by simply developing, articulating, and running on a platform that is in the interest of the majority of the electorate. I think it is an enormous understatement to say that PEOTUS Obama is very smart, but in the face of the unprecedented array of converging long-term crises and disasters that the Bush administration is bequeathing him, a big part of his job has to be to convince a majority of the electorate to vote in their own interests over the short term while these crises and disasters play out. As obvious as this sounds, those structural iconic and symbolic associations by much of the electorate will make it extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

Enter the current brouhaha over PEOTUS Obama’s selection of Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. Now as a lifelong devout agnostic I admit I have a visceral negative reaction to Pastor Warren and his noxious brand of evangelism. And many others also have very good reason to find Pastor Warren an appalling choice for this role. I suspect that you’ll now see where I am going with this: what I wonder is whether that very smart PEOTUS Obama is cleverly and strategically working to coopt some of that iconic and symbolic association, to put it into the service of having the electorate vote in their own interests again. Is he THAT smart?

In Which I Channel Malthus

2008-11-28T19:06:00.000-08:00

It might be relatively easy to dismiss mockery of President George W. Bush, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and their ilk for episodes of apparent “airborne fact finding” (or aff as I prefer to call it) as simply taking these events out of context for either political or comedy fodder. (The archetypes of making an aff of oneself are Bush’s flyover of New Orleans, and Rumsfeld’s August 2006 take on the Iraq security situation). I can’t help but wonder, however, whether there is more to this than isolated incidents, or even broader evidence of a flyover presidency. Rather, I am beginning to suspect that there is a wholesale willful ignorance afoot here, mixed with a dim recognition that the common experience of aircraft vistas can serve as a useful means to transmit hollow messages brimming with naught but ideology. Exhibit B is Linda Chavez’ stunningly moronic AFF-based analysis of population statistics on Weekend America in December 2007.

A more recent example that seems to me to be consistent with aff analysis is advanced by Michael Anissimov and bolstered by Tsteel. Basically these arguments, arguments that I have seen in nearly limitless and infuriating permutations, are little more than, “whoa, look out the window of my plane, all that empty land, all that sunlight. Dude, it’s all cool!” Tsteels agreement with Anissimov’s claim that concern about overpopulation is a selection effect based on people living in crowded cities, is patently and quantitatively unsupported by his aff argument. Showing that there are regions of this country where population density is higher and regions where it is lower, imagining that somehow all the population might be spread out so that both yellow and blue regions turn green, and from that sunnily concluding that there are enough resources on this finite planet to support six billion, rushing headlong to ten billion, people is sophomoric at best.

Randomly selected from among a vast list of issues this conclusion ignores are the additional resource impacts of those formerly yellow regions turned green (shouldn’t our experience with the suburbanization and exurbanization of America have at least a bit of a role in considering how this might work out?), studies showing that dense urban areas can be more resource efficient in many ways than less dense communities, and a quantitative and scientifically/technologically grounded consideration of the many, many parameters beyond map colors that determine the population carrying capacity of the earth and the quality of life of its inhabitants.

Technology, ah yes technology. It has been a wonder at, for instance, delivering porn to your desktop, engineering Segway scooters to search for a problem, developing Humvees that can lay siege to nearly any landscape, and distributing obscenely large high definition television screens to homes across our great nation. At reducing the consumption of finite resources, um, not so much. In my own view, this is only partly due to the market failures that many other commenters have identified. It is also due in large part to the second law of thermodynamics – an inviolable principle that so many of the technology pollyannas have chosen to ignore, the brick wall to end all brick walls, dead in the path of all those schemes that propose to replace, joule-for-joule, the extraordinarily low entropy and high energy density, and efficient and easy to transport energy source of fossil fuel with high entropy and low energy density, low efficiency and difficult to transport energy alternatives. It’s all so reminiscent of that long ago watershed, when a president came before a nation in crisis and asked, not for sacrifice, but shopping. Our resource pollyannas tell us that we’ll be able to shop ourselves out of this one as well, that we can plan on consuming in the same gluttonous way we have for the past century, that by buying more we’re saving more, that we live in a Wal-Mart biosphere whose shelves will be miraculously stocked and pennies knocked off the price while we sleep, a more absurd and fundamentally flawed prospect than President Bush’s own prescription.

The elephant in the room as the Hubbert peak passes, as ocean fish stocks collapse, as fresh water becomes a battleground, as media and corporate interests design, spread and buttress a culture of consumption even for the impoverished, as ugly anitbiotic resistant strains of microrganisms multiply, as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations relentlessly exponentiate, as the global arms market continues to boom, as extinctions accelerate, as the economics of global food supplies continue to undermine the meager foundation that has kept many millions just this side of starvation (not to mention the many millions it has abandoned to that horrific fate) really IS becoming how many people is too many? As the most extraordinarily successful large life form that has ever existed on the planet, we had better start asking the very painful question whether it is possible to be too successful. I still remember what I learned over the course of a few days from a little jar of nematodes and pablum with a tight fitting lid, a failed science project from many years ago: the problem with biological systems and finite resources is that they always ask that question about success – and then answer it - if someone else doesn’t ask it first.

AUMF

2008-09-27T21:03:00.001-07:00

A modest proposal: let's name the Wall Street bailout legislation in a more illuminating fashion. I think a good fit is "Abandonment of the US to Monetary Fraud", or AUMF for short. It really is all of a piece now isn't it, just bookends on eight years that have unravelled a country?

Supply Side Follies

2008-09-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just stand back and marvel at an apparently inexhaustible supply, a veritable white hole of folly. As the current phase of the mortgage related asset hurricane gathered strength, as I watched my 401K hemorrhaging like a stuck pig (albeit, sans lipstick), and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the need for a bailout plan, I thought to myself:

"OK, surely, during the last year and a half that this crisis has been brewing and building, some very smart, conscientious people - I mean there have to be a FEW of those, surreptitious competency insurgents in the Bush administration's political hack/ideologue corps, somewhere in the government, right? - had seen the same storm clouds on the horizon that I'd seen, and had been spending brutal hours piecing together contingency plans for a spectrum of potential crises that could arise."

I anticipated that Paulson would roll out a mildly modified version of one of these ideas, perhaps tweaked a bit to a few finer details of the storm's actual landfall. That is, a plan presumably pretty well thought out and pretty much fully formed.

The next frackin' paragraph:

And then I read it. All three pages. Three frackin' pages! Three frackin' pages that asked for $700,000,000,000 and provided not one frackin' word about how this plan would be implemented! Three frackin' pages that a frackin' presidential candidate, a frackin' presidential candidate who insisted that he was playing a vital role in addressing the crisis, a frackin' presidential candidate who insisted on sticking his big frackin' presumptuous presidential nose into negotiations on the proposal and gumming them up, hadn't bothered to READ, though he was flapping his big frackin' presumptuous presidential gums about it. Three frackin' pages that included an unconscionable, unconstitutional "no oversight" provision. Three frackin' pages! I've written frackin' proposals for $500 that were three times as long as Paulson's Nigerian email scam and which required explicit implementation and oversight plans.

Seven hundred billion dollars! OK, you know when I buy a cup of coffee, and let's say its a liberal elitist frou-frou four dollar cup of coffee, I might get a penny back in change and I'll leave it in the little penny cup on the counter. The penny equivalent on seven hundred billion dollars is $1,750,000,000; that is, the penny cup change on what this proposal asked for is over a BILLION dollars.

Ooh, ooh, and then WHY, exactly, seven hundred billion dollars? OK, there's this funny scene in the movie Twins (I've also been told there's a somewhat similar scene in the series Taxi) that's set up when Danny DeVito’s character accidentally comes into possession of a complicated device. DeVito’s character has no idea what the device is or its value but nevertheless hatches a scheme to extort money in exchange for it. Sitting in front of a phone preparing to place his extortion call, he writes down and auditions a series of wildly varying numbers, quickly crossing them off as he attempts to home in on the best sounding "right" extortion amount. Very amusing fiction, right? Then, THIS is what a treasury department spokesperson actually, honest-to-god, said about the seven hundred billion dollars:

“It’s not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Um, what about 39 biggity-big fatillion galillion? Isn't that a really large number? God help us.

So anyway, all this and much more to be disgusted with, to be nauseated by in the mortgage related asset crisis has already been noted by other commentators and in most cases much more articulately and humorously. Yet for a week or so I still had a vague and nagging sense that I was missing something, that there was something hiding in plain sight in all this. And finally, it dawned on me: the Paulson proposal left out the budget it needs for pallets and shrink wrap!

Maybe Roy is on to something.

Update: Roy Zimmerman has taken down his song from YouTube that was linked above. It was his "Impeachment Song" and I suspect his attorneys counseled him to remove it, touching on the subject of beheading as it did. Find it and listen to it!

Drill baby drill

2008-09-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

“Drill, baby, drill!”, perhaps the most memorable slogan of the Republican convention. How odd that those conventioneers so blithely and enthusiastically chose to evoke the horror movie title, “Kill, baby, kill”! IMDB.com lists two movies associated with that title, the first a movie also known as “House of the Living Dead”, the second whose plot is initiated by an unmistakable symbol of greed, an autopsy that reveals a gold coin imbedded in the heart of the deceased. Can it possibly be a mere accident, an unfortunate coincidence, that these messages were broadcast to the attentive by their mindless chant? I think not: I suspect these were uncontrollable howls from their very foundations, from deep in their souls. Would that we were paying attention.

Oil: A Bleak Vision

2008-07-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

The critiques of my position on the current oil crisis at pandagon - positing that we have trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure dedicated to an oil-fueled civilization and so imagining essentially immediate and drastic change in our oil consumption patterns is both imprudent and unthinkable - while possibly correct, a point I would love to be able to concede (I desperately want my daughter to grow up in a world that is not a nightmare of privation and desperation), depend significantly on a basic assumption. I find that assumption inconsistent with a detailed understanding of the fundamental principles governing the systems we are discussing. First, I'll give you my punch line and then make the argument, so that if you decide you'd rather go get rickrolled on another website you don't have to continue reading this:

The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.

The assumption that the critiques make is that there are some capacities in our system that will allow us to undergo a slow transformation (slow being one or two generations) from the unsustainable oil-fueled culture we have built. For example, some of the capacities that have been referred to include rapid spin-up of alternative oil equivalent fuel sources, corporate self interest that controls oil supplies in a prudent fashion, and what I would characterize as moderate conservation efforts. And perhaps the more important point is that these capacities are very likely an inescapable requirement for a slow transformation. Evidence strongly suggests that the situation we are currently encountering is consistent with the peak oil model - the infamous Hubbert's peak. In this analysis an exponentially increasing demand for a limited resource produces an exponential decay - a crash - in the availability of the resource. Notably, this crash depends simply on an interaction between supply and demand - it doesn't for instance take into account potentially disastrous external events, for instance, conventional - or, God forbid - nuclear military conflagration in the Middle East. The only way to cushion the ruthless mathematics of such a crash is through capacities external to the resource such as those identified above.

Since slow transformation may ultimately depend on the external capacities, these should be critically examined.

1. There are currently no obvious technologies that can be used to produce alternative oil equivalent fuel sources. The unforgiving and unassailable principles of physics strongly suggest that developing them at a level sufficient for a slow transformation is unlikely, at best. We have a long history of imagining that pressing problems will yield to relatively quick technological fixes, only to be repeatedly disappointed: unmetered electrical power from nuclear plants? fusion? corn ethanol? Energy principles are extraordinarily well understood in the scientific and engineering communities and there just isn't a lot of low hanging fruit waiting to be picked.

2. Imagining that corporate self interest will play a significant role ignores that corporations are probably singularly incapable of addressing issues such as these. Our free-market model rewards corporations based on criteria that almost without exception do not include thoughtful long-term stewardship of resources. Is there any more evidence necessary than the fuel-efficiency obstructionist history of U.S. domestic automakers, now facing bankruptcy? The sub-prime mortgage debacle? Corporations are at least as likely as individuals to act in fundamentally irrational ways that prove their own destruction.

3. Conservation. Aye, that's the rub. Assuming my analyses above are correct (obviously, debatable), can conservation play a key role in a slow transformation? That becomes simply a question of whether the conservation rate is sufficient to offset the exponential crash associated with Hubbert's peak, and that is the heart of my argument. From what I understand about the mathematics of these principles the rate of conservation suggested by slow transformation (people being more careful about when and how they use their cars, people replacing 25 mpg vehicles with 50 mpg vehicles over the next decade, redesigning and rebuilding a less oil-dependent infrastructure) is insufficient to offset the rate of collapse predicted by Hubbert's peak.

The critics of my argument point out that because of deep infrastructure investments we cannot expect a drastic and immediate change from our current oil-dependence, that we need to approach this in a gentle and orderly fashion . The problem with this critique is that those prehistoric forests that produced the oil fields we are currently sucking dry just don't care that you live in a suburb 50 miles from your workplace, that your food supplies need to travel an average of 1500 miles to reach your plate. The solar constant of 1340 W/m^2 just doesn't care that our agriculture, our food supply, depends on climate conditions in the mid-west grain belt and the Asian rice belt, that much of agriculture depends on fresh water supplied by a slowly melting summer snow-pack. The second law of thermodynamics just doesn't care that you have to pay 5 dollars for a gallon of gas or 10 dollars, or 100 dollars, that you are wishing or praying as hard as you can for a miraculous new source of energy. And guess what? Those players win by default: they are inescapable principles and they JUST DON'T CARE.

I understand my vision is a very bleak one. I hope against hope that it is deeply flawed. But it is insufficient to argue against it simply because it would prove problematic for those who are now ensconced in an oil-dependent infrastructure. The models and principles underlying the vision are orthogonal to those considerations. The black plague that killed perhaps 75 million people simply didn't care that the civilizations of the 14th century were built on an infrastructure that fed the devastation, and oil simply doesn't care that our civilization is built on an infrastructure that has some potential to surpass that horrific history. The mathematics of exponential functions are ruthless.

Boumediene v Bush

2008-06-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Boumediene v. Bush decision has been denounced for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most viscerally through maintaining, as Justice Scalia put it, “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” I understand that for a variety of practical and political reasons, and because of the utter irrationality of the electorate on matters of life and death as well as its mathematical/statistical ineptitude (ala the lottery is a tax on people who don’t understand statistics), no-one in a position of public responsibility can afford to become Vice President Cheney’s alter ego on this matter, thus I have decided to speak the unspeakable: “So?”

Americans currently die at a rate of somewhere in the neigborhood of 3 million per year and among those are a whole range of preventable causes: traffic related deaths ~50,000; gun-related homicides ~20,000; smoking related deaths ~500,000; alcohol related deaths (though, admittedly, it would seem to a casual observer that this category has significant overlap with the preceding categories) ~ 250,000; obesity; medical errors; industrial accidents; and on and on. The terrible events of September 11, 2001 – knock on wood, to date, the ne plus ultra of terrorist acts - caused around 3,000 deaths. Our military response to it has cost well over 4,000 deaths of American soldiers and a toll so staggering to Iraqis that some Panglossian supporters of the Iraq policy stake out their position with sunny low end estimates of “only” 100,000.

Now, lets briefly consider that extraordinarily straightforward policies could immediately be implemented that would save many times the number of lives lost in the terrorist incidents on September 11, 2001: for instance, impose a national speed limit of 35 miles per hour. The statistics on this are unequivocal, unassailable. But, of course, that would be considered an utterly absurd proposition. What is it about our out-of-whack psyches that makes those thousands of bloody, violent and needless traffic deaths and the many more crippling injuries something less than terrorizing? I’m serious: really, what is it?

My point, if somehow you’ve missed it, is this: yes, perhaps – perhaps - some Americans will die because of Boumediene v. Bush, but we always accept tradeoffs between safety and other considerations, like getting to Wal-Mart five minutes sooner. Notwithstanding the intractable corner into which the Bush administration insisted on painting the country in its determination to go to the dark side in its treatment of prisoners in the Global War on Terror and that ultimately led to this Supreme Court decision, and notwithstanding the hypocrisy of neoconservatives expounding on the the hale and brave character and willingness to sacrifice of the American public while simultaneously advocating for cowardly anti-democratic policies that, in the end, cannot assure their fetishized absolute “safety” from the carefully cirumscribed forms of terrorism that involve melanin bearing perpetrators, doesn’t preserving one of the most fundamental rights in the historical development of the rule of law warrant some tradeoffs? Come on Americans – lets reach down deep and show a little of that “home of the brave” for a change. Just a little.

Coping With High Gas Prices

2008-06-12T00:29:00.000-07:00

So, NPR , you want to know how I’m coping with high gasoline prices. When there was a frenzy to buy into the suburban fantasy of the country micro-estate that coincidentally requires commuters to drive 25 or 50 or sometimes, insanely, 200 miles a day, I quietly declined and settled for a house that was less “perfect” but that is very convenient to my workplace and shopping. When so many of those in my community seemed to be Hummering-up in some sort of ritual of purification by gasoline consumption, I made an effort to get in the habit of walking or bicycling for as many of my errands and trips as possible. When I understood the enormity of our trade and federal budget deficits and the economic risks inherent in those, I wrote to my representatives and legislators asking them to address the issues (clearly, the least effective of my coping strategies). When RV’s and four-wheelers and snowmobiles and speed-boats were all the rage, I cultivated interests and recreational activities that didn’t require the combustion of fossil fuels. I taught myself to be satisfied with the slightly unkempt look of a lawn after it is cut with a push mower and I thought of the chore of lawnmowing as part of my exercise regimen. When I needed a new car, I made sure the one I selected had at least reasonable fuel efficiency. I steadfastly supported and voted in favor of public transit, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure in my community and region. My coping was over years ago.

As much as it sounds as though I am gloating, in fact I am not and, indeed, I am by turns, dispirited, more than a little scared, and contrite. I understand that our fates -mine and the Hummer driver's- are entwined and, you see, it was obvious to me many years ago that the day of reckoning with our oil consumption was coming very quickly. I think we are in for a long and perhaps very painful readjustment to this new reality and that we have been terribly betrayed - betrayed by the selfish indifference of our policy makers, captains of industry and agriculture, national leaders, media, including you, NPR , and, finally, by people like me who were troubled by what they saw but just not quite sure enough of themselves to genuinely sound the alarm. That betrayal lost us the opportunity to really do something about the situation - to do something when there was time and it might have softened the blow. And I have no illusions but that now we will all of us pay a very dear price for our gluttony and our silence.

Bailouts and Myths

2008-03-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Following the Bear-Stearns bailout by the Fed this week, never again, never again, can I possibly hear the arguments of America’s free-market corporatocracy (AFMC) without the deepest sense of their utter hypocrisy and lack of anything even remotely approaching a reflective outlook, or for that matter, a conscience.

During the last 14 years Bear-Stearns CEO, James E. Cayne, led that company to the brink of disaster. The precipice is so deep that a panicky federal reserve board determined that a Bear-Stearns plunge could drag much more than just that one assemblage of greedy bastards over the edge with it, and warranted what is, at its root, a multibillion dollar publicly funded bailout.

Forbes reported in 2007 that the 5 year compensation for James E. Cayne was more than 150 million dollars. It is not unreasonable to estimate that during his tenure as CEO, a tenure in which his leadership set the groundwork for the ruin that prompted the Fed response, Mr. Cayne was compensated to the tune of about 300 million dollars: $300,000,000; 3x10^8 greenbacks! The standard argument of the AFMC for CEO compensation like this at a level of about 500 times the median household income, is the “extraordinary value” they create for their companies and the economy in general.

Where is that “extraordinary value” now? Where’s the perfection of the free market that “punishes” economic inefficiency? Where are the demands that business operate free of government intervention? I’ll tell you where: greedily reaching into the public pocket for a post hoc endorsement of business decisions that were ruinous and that, not incidentally, ballooned the obscene fortunes of executives who pursued policies that not only threatened their companies, but the entire economy.

I understand why the Fed had to do what it did – desperately scrambling to avert, or at least moderate the looming economic disaster, and that failure to act threatens the economic well-being of so many more than the 14,000 Bear-Stearns employees – but PLEASE, PLEASE, can’t we finally stop this stupid charade that recklessly unregulated American business practices, that obscene executive compensation, is in everyone’s interest. Can’t we please see that business, far from wanting no government intervention, desperately seeks government intervention on behalf of the rich and powerful. Can’t we please finally dispense with the myths of American business and on the way work toward something that does actually operate in the public interest?

Whence Oil

2008-03-04T00:05:00.000-08:00

So now Karl Rove opines that the policies of his political opponents may push oil to $200/barrel specifically because of their possible Iraq policies:

Rove:

"If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the control of Iran, don’t you think $200 a barrel oil would have a cost to the American economy?"

But it's important to recognize that oil did NOT cross the $100/barrel threshold simply because of the Iraq disaster. A range of reasons, including the inevitable peaking of the logistic function and the blind eye that has been turned to that issue by government, industry and consumers alike, and a deficit-crippled, reeling US economy coupled with exploding competition for oil resources from other economies while the dollar is deeply sagging are contributing to send oil in the $200/barrel direction NO MATTER what happens in Iraq.

At EVERY juncture the willfully ignorant policies of this administration and its enablers in the legislature and the electorate have relentlessly pulled us into this death spiral with our addiction to oil. Rove and his desperate band must know this and must understand at some level their abject complicity in, if not active pursuit of so many aspects of this situation. I suspect and as always, they are trying to lay the ground so that when the worst inevitably happens and the associated suffering ensues, he and his fellow hacks can blame their political enemies. Sic semper propagandists.

Sand Dunes and Science

2008-01-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

Part of what has angered me so much about the “Intelligent Design” (nee Creationism) movement, is their willful and ruthless exploitation of the general public’s weak or non-existent scientific literacy. There is plenty of blame to go around why this strategy can be effective, not least the somewhat careless and historically established jargon scientists use (a common thread revolving around the meaning of the term “theory”, which is baldly misrepresented by IDers, but also not as clean as some of the scientist rebuttals suggest), but that is not the purpose of this comment. Rather, it has occurred to me that the idea of scientific principles (laws, theories) and their relationships with data, experiments, and observations desperately needs an analogy that frames for the scientifically illiterate the nature of the critiques that that are mounted by the IDers against the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

The analogy of the type of scientific theory represented by TENS that occurs to me is a sand dune. Just as a sand dune is composed of many grains of sand, so TENS is a broad structure composed of a vast array of data, experiments, applications, observations, confirmed predictions, and dependent relationships with other well established branches of science. Just as moving, or removing a few grains of sand among the million billion that compose a sand dune does not change its fundamental nature, so changing our understanding or interpretations of some of the data (a fossil here, a species there) or, pointing out one circumstance (a flagellum, for instance) that is not yet contained in the framework of TENS does not even remotely suggest the imminent collapse of the entire structure.

If I might, the analogy goes further: Scientific theories of the form represented by TENS can shift their shape over long periods of time as very large amounts of data are amassed, just as sand dunes can grow or shrink as wind adds and steals sand. And over long periods of time, grain by grain, dunes can merge to become larger structures just as theories can be subsumed by those that are more fundamental (A real sore point with me is the gross misrepresentation of the Relativity/Quantum Mechanics revolution at the beginning of the 20th century – these new scientific theories emphatically did not cause the abandonment of the physical theories of Newton, Maxwell and Boltzmann. Rather, those older theories were subsumed as special cases of the new more fundamental theories, as they had to be because they had been so well established with an array of data, experiments, applications, observations, and confirmed predictions) . But such a massive structure is persistent in the landscape, just as TENS must persist because of its extraordinary ability to organize our understanding of living systems.

Taking a teaspoon of sand from the side of a sand dune and flinging it into the wind doesn’t change the fundamental nature of a sand dune, and pointing out the biochemical complexity of the flagellum in a small class of organisms does not change the fundamental structure that organizes a profound understanding of living systems. It’s important to point out the scale of the critique ID has mounted to TENS and the sand dune analogy does that: they are picking out one or two grains of sand and ignoring the sand dune looming on their horizon. That’s not science.

Faith and Reason

2007-12-27T03:27:00.000-08:00

As a nearly lifelong devout agnostic I have watched with much interest (and occasionally even participated in) the increasingly rancorous argument between the New Atheists and the many stripes of Faith Apologists who, often bitterly, disagree with them. In the interest of full disclosure, my sympathies usually lie with the NA’s, not least because of their underdog status in these battles. I expect that it is not at all an uncommon experience for those of us living explicitly and purposely outside the FA communities in this country to feel extraordinarily intimidated and marginalized, and there is some vicarious salve of these wounds to be had through the irreverent arguments and anger expressed by the NA’s.

But, much as I’d like it to be for simplicity’s sake, my consideration of the matter is not exhausted at the foot of the NA arguments. I believe in ends as much as means, and I cannot deny that those operating in the name of faith often achieve good ends. Make no mistake: I find utterly repugnant and malign many or even most FA dogma, doctrine, and acts. But I also find that I simply cannot ignore the profoundly good and beautiful and humane acts of some individuals who claim their inspiration or motivation was based in their faith.

I have been wracked for many years about how to resolve this dissonance in my thinking about the FA’s – the dissonance between what I find repugnant in religion and the utter humanity of some of its practitioners. I have recently stumbled across some multiple threads that offer me a glimmer of hope that perhaps the gulf between these can be bridged. The first thread is the neurological/physiological investigation of spirituality, primarily through functional magnetic resonance imaging. Those investigations strongly suggest that spiritual experience is associated with a particular N/P process. A second thread is the nebulous and shifting nature of what many of the FA’s seem to be arguing for in the current skirmishes: variously, faith, doctrine and dogma, ends (as opposed to means), God, spirituality, a specific Messiah, religion or some combination thereof. The clear lack of a universal rallying point for the FA’s (and in many of the FA arguments this shifts inside the space of a sentence) also suggests to me that their experience of faith phenomena is both highly provisional and individual. So far, these threads are consistent with and support significant aspects of the NA critique of faith.

The final thread though, which I recently found through reading and thinking about the tidy little book “Born on a Blue Day” gives me a sense that though faith may simply be a provisional and individual N/P process, yet it might also have value. BBD is the autobiography of an individual with Asperger’s and savant syndromes. (If you are not familiar with these, think high functioning “Rain Man”.) In the context of this essay, the important features of these syndromes is that, though they are not well understood, they almost certainly have N/P origins and the savant syndrome manifests in a range of abilities that are completely and profoundly inaccessible to linear rational mental processes - those championed by the NA’s.

I have several “take aways” from this. First, I strongly suspect the spectrum of experiences and behaviors that we call faith are associated with particular N/P processes and further, that some individuals have intrinsically better or easier access to these processes. This would explain the spectrum of individuals between those who profess the tangible and indisputable nature of their faith experiences and those for whom the evidence and the experience is nonexistent. Second, I strongly suspect that just as the N/P processes of savant syndrome manifest in particular mental capacities, so the N/P processes of faith may give some individuals some valuable capacities that are not easily accessible by linear rational thought. This would explain how, for some individuals, faith can play an important role in their humanity and how it can provide comfort and purpose.

Finally – and this is the resolution I have sought for so long - should my conjectures prove true, this understanding of faith provides a basis for considering its role and the limits of its role in society. If faith is an intrinsic human N/P process then the NA program of eliminating its influence is moot. But it must be recognized that any faith claim is just the product of an individual human mind. Faith N/P processes may produce valuable understanding that is not readily accessible by linear rational thought, but that understanding must be subject to the same skepticism that informs every other assessment of human ideas. When a savant rattles off ten thousand digits of pi, the mathematicians run their computer programs to check them. And when my deeply religious catholic neighbor stands silent vigil in protest of the Iraq War because of her faith, I must also evaluate her understanding.

My Idea

2007-12-24T23:23:00.000-08:00

Cooking and Human Evolution – see:

University Of Minnesota (1999, August 10). Light My Fire: Cooking As Key To Modern Human Evolution. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/1999/08/990810064914.htm

and

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains

Hey that was my idea! Oh well Easy come easy go. That’s what happens when you’re slow out of the starting gate on a hot scientific hypothesis – AND you’re not working in the right field of science. It occurred to me (as an avid cook and more avid eater, and as extraordinary as it sounds in the 21st century to have to say this, evolution believer) a long long time ago that cooking very likely had a profound and, as the above articles suggest, perhaps THE pivotal role in human evolution.

You know how just about everyone advances their pet aspect of humanity that is displayed by no other species – tool-making, or language, or love, and so on and so on? Trouble is, one by one they’re falling by the wayside. Ask Roger and Deborah Fouts about the whole language thing, for instance. But cooking – with the possible exception of whether or not you count those galapagos marine iguanas that eat seaweed and then heat themselves (and their ingested seaweed) to high temperatures in the blazing equatorial sun – still seems to be limited to just humans. And not just limited to, but universally practiced by all human cultures.

And then there’s the brain case issue – cooking foods reduced the requirement in our ancestors for the huge jaw muscles, anchored into a volume of the skull that once released from that application could be turned over to neural occupancy.

I’ve also wondered about and speculated on the role and importance, the nutritional synergy if you will, of combining nutrients in a single cooked dish with multiple ingredients. Cue the nutritional anthropologists.

Ok, all circumstantial – I know that the hardest work of a scientist isn’t coming up with the brilliant idea – after all brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen - but to obtain the evidence that tests the ideas and, more importantly, to discard nearly all of them. I’ll leave it to Prof Wrangham to do the heavy lifting while I get started on a lemon meringue pie.

The Reason for the Season

2007-12-21T23:56:00.000-08:00

In the face of crass and unbridled, if not completely unhinged, commercialization of the winter holiday season we have to admit that we somewhat welcome those infrequent reminders of “The Reason for the Season”; alas, so few of those get it right:

Many of our cultural traditions come from an agrarian culture that developed primarily in the northern hemisphere of an approximately spherical terrestrial planet whose axis of rotation is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the axis of its orbit around its parent star. Due to physical principles that govern the motion of celestial bodies, the fundamental symmetry of the universe that gives rise to the conservation of angular momentum, and the geometry and thermodynamics of (approximately) point sources of electromagnetic radiation illuminating distant spheres, this state of affairs produces a highly predictable phenomenon of seasons, significant for its crucial agricultural implications, and dramatically demonstrated twice a year in the reversal in direction of the apparent motion of the parent star with respect to the horizon from a fixed location on the surface of the planet. This latter phenomenon, a solstice, and our understanding of it and our ability to understand it, and our understanding of its place in the unfolding of natural phenomena is exquisitely beautiful and worthy of celebration. This recognition takes nothing – absolutely nothing – away from the metaphor and mythology, the symbolism and legend, and, yes, religion, that has been piled on to the holidays that we celebrate near the winter solstice. Indeed, I propose quite the opposite: that a failure to recognize this as the reason for the season undermines our ability to see and to celebrate the genuine and true majesty and splendor of the world we are so fortunate to inhabit and that we must share with others. Happy solstice

Waterboarding: Everybody Wins

2007-12-14T23:13:00.000-08:00

What a wonderful new law enforcement tool our national leaders have made available to us! It’s the dawn of a bright new age in which waterboarding is finally recognized as simply another useful tool in saving lives, and I say it’s about time. We should deploy this new instrument into our law enforcement policies in careful stages, starting exactly as we have, with those who are terrorists, or have been accused of being terrorists, or who might be terrorists, or who might have information about terrorists, or who might be able to accuse someone else of being a terrorist. Cautious and thoughtful introduction of the technique in limited situations like this allow us to more carefully tune it to achieve its greatest utility and to prevent, as it’s been made clear we must, potential targets of the technique from preparing to resist it.

But it’s important to begin considering its next stage of deployment and I humbly propose one I find as perhaps the most compelling: cases involving the report of an abducted child. This scenario perfectly exploits all of the best and most promising features of waterboarding: the speed with which it provides information to interrogators, its potential to save lives in time-sensitive situations, its harmlessness to those who undergo it, and the ease with which it can be applied with limited resources.

We know that minutes and hours matter in child abductions – the likelihood of recovering a child alive after a stranger abduction falls very rapidly as time elapses. We also know that police frequently lose precious hours and days trying to establish whether the parents themselves should be considered suspects. So making sure that police have all the information from parents quickly, makes all the difference in where police resources are directed early on in these situations, ultimately determining the survival potential for many of the children involved.

So here is how I see what should happen: upon reporting a child missing, police should immediately interrogate the childs parents with the technique of waterboarding. No more namby-pamby rapport building or good-cop, bad-cop routintes, or any other tricks of the police interrogation trade that, when they work at all, can take hours or days to generate information. Information extracted from parents by rapid resort to waterboarding will insure that police resources in these time-sensitive circumstances will be most appropriately directed to recovering children who are in mortal danger: no more wasted police time in corroborating a parents account of events, no more wondering if the parents were involved and squandering police resources and effort on lines of inquiry that go nowhere, no more guilty parents sending police off on wild goose chases, and no more coddling of monsters who are responsible for their own children’s deaths.

Indeed, as word spreads of the effectiveness of waterboarding in these situations as inevitably it must due to the blabbermouth liberal media, I think it is likely that criminally involved parents, will soon become less likely to seek out police involvement. This will, over time, give police so much more confidence in the accounts of abduction of those parents who do come forward with a willingness to be waterboarded to get an aggressive investigation underway, and with that confidence will come the resolve and the empathy that will result in many more of these situations ending happily.

Only those who are morally bankrupt beyond redemption could argue against such an approach in these situations. Waterboarding, is recognized by its proponents and practitioners as speedy, harmless and productive. It is inexpensive and so will save precious public resources and most important of all it will save childrens lives. Join me in contacting your representatives to demand WPACEW legislation now: Waterboarding Parents of Abducted Children: Everbody Wins!

Waterboarding = Forced Water Inhalation

2007-12-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

In recognition of the extraordinary situation we face in which morally challenged national leaders have generated a “debate” about whether waterboarding is torture, and in which some “reasonable” observers have given credence to the merits of such a debate, and in which a complicit national media in presenting the “debate” has nearly universally adopted the clever and mild euphemism, simulated drowning, perfectly packaged for a population immersed in seeking out virtual experiences (grand theft auto, internet porn, second life, simulated drowning, they sound all of a piece, no?) I propose a modest modification to the language used in referring to this innterrogation/punishment/revenge technique: let’s call it “forced water inhalation”. It serves the same purpose as the euphemism – to briefly and pithily elaborate on the physiological basis of the technique – while more appropriately characterizing it.

Declining Support for Suicide Bombings - A Very Dim Bright Spot

2007-09-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

Typically, terrorism is one of the tactics pursued by those who know that they would face certain, immediate, and overwhelming defeat in a conventional military confrontation with their opponents. Thus environments that support relatively small cores of zealous terrorists are, almost by definition, those in which terrorism can flourish.

It is tempting at first glance to view as good news for the “Global War on Terror”, new Pew Global Attitudes Project data, showing declining support for suicide attacks (for instance, the striking decrease from 40% in 2004 to 13% in the current report for Moroccan respondents), and that was recently reported in a letter to the editor in my local newspaper. Such a decline in support can be helpful in combatting terrorism; it is not, however, by any means the end of the story.

Since a terrorist movement can be, and usually is, structured around relatively small zealous cores of followers, it is well worth asking whether declines in support that still leave significant minorities supporting terrorist acts are consistent with other trends in the ongoing “Global War on Terror” in which we have been engaged now for six years. That’s where the data gets very ugly. In 2004 the U.S. State Dept proudly rolled out data showing that by several measures, incidents of international terrorism in 2003 had reached their lowest levels since 1969, at least implying that the “Global War on Terror” was responsible. Let’s make this clear – this data, incidents of international terrorism, is what the State Department self-selected as an assessment of progress in the “Global War on Terror”.

What has happened since then? The most recent State Department report of incidents of international terrorism, for 2006, shows that by virtually every measure acts of terrorism have skyrocketed. Let’s pick a single measure: number of individuals killed in terrorist acts. In 2001, an especially notorious year for deaths from terrorist acts, the State Department reported 3547 worldwide deaths from terrorist acts. Five years later, deep into the “Global War on Terror”, the State Department reported 20,498 deaths in terrorist acts, this following 2004 during which they tallied 14,618 deaths. So briefly, our five year investment has bought us a well over 500% INCREASE from 2001 in this measure of the effectiveness of the “War” that presumably should be decreasing if we are succeeding.

An alternative hypothesis to the “good news” of the Pew Report is that the “Global War on Terror” is having the effect of metastasizing and hardening, and perhaps even growing, international terrorist movements. Popular sentiment may be growing against these movements, indeed, perhaps largely because of these effects, but once more, terrorism can and does thrive, is designed to operate, in small cores at the margin. And don’t get me started on how this analysis is also consistent with recent National Intelligence Estimates.

So…, Pew, Schmew, I think we’re in deep, deep Doo-Doo.

Bush and the Bully Pulpit

2007-09-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

“I remind people that, like when I’m with, Condi, I say she’s the Ph.D. and I’m the C student and just look at who’s the president and who’s the adviser.”

I know, I know, there are more substantive issues about which I should be concerned, but there is, I am certain, a doctoral dissertation lurking in coming to understand how we have arrived at a point where the President of the United States comes before a press conference and stumbles through such a deeply unfunny, smug, unenlightened, degrading, irrelevant statement in just 30 short words. Whether he has actually ventured this observation to others, or whether he blurted it out here for the first time, "misunderestimating" its profound offensiveness, it is so inappropriate in so many ways, that it is uncomfortable to hear. Even though Dr. Condoleeza Rice is clearly not the only target of the benighted sentiment seething in this utterance and has made, in my opinion, some pretty severe mistakes for which she and we are bound to suffer, she is incontrovertibly a highly accomplished and important – not to mention ambitious – figure, and it made my insides squirm to think of her having to tolerate this. In the context of a range of past and unfolding revelations of how the President accepts, encourages, and arranges the humiliation and degradation of those working with him, how could one not but conclude that, at least in his personal interactions, this man has the sensibilities of a profoundly insecure and deeply disturbed third-grade bully. It seems even Jon Stewart cannot find a funny angle in this. Is it perhaps more the stuff of tragedy?

Civilian Control of the Military

2007-08-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

An utterly misguided and foolhardy recent editorial on huffingtonpost has called for a military coup against President Bush. However, for a long time now, the manner in which the present administration has handled the principle of civilian control of the military has deeply bothered me. This handling has, I would maintain, significantly weakened the nation's commitment to the principle in a variety of ways, including:

military commanders have not been held strictly and visibly accountable for a variety of grave failures

avid pursuit of privatization of a variety of military functions and further failing to enact policies that hold these military contractors to standards of conduct at least consistent with the principle of civilian control of the military

rhetoric in a range of contexts that frequently sidles up to the idea of allowing the military to make policy decisions, e.g., listening to the troops

disconnecting a majority of Americans from an "ownership" relationship with the military through a refusal to ask for significant shared sacrifice

equivocation on the obligations of the U.S. Military under both U.S. and international law

The breadth and seriousness of this record warrants that any responsible position of outrage grounded in the principle of the profound importance of civilian control of the military should recognize these ongoing, real policies that actually are - as we "speak" - undermining the principle.

An Open Letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates

2007-07-22T02:36:00.000-07:00

Secretary Gates

I urge you to immediately ask for the resignation of Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman for his inappropriate communication to Senator Clinton in response to the exercise of appropriate oversight functions of the United States Senate. Specifically, I understand that he sent a response to Senator Clinton’s request for briefings on contingency planning for the withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Iraq that appeared to be a refusal to provide the requested information and in addition claimed that the very request “reinforce[s] enemy propaganda.”

Included among the many causes that I see for the troubles we face in Iraq, is a period during which Congress largely abdicated its oversight responsibility. Given this situation that has committed the nation to policies that have cost hundreds of thousands of casualties, millions of refugees, a trillion dollars of treasure, and a decidedly dissatisfied American public, I am frankly utterly disgusted that Under Secretary Edelman, acting on behalf of the Department of Defense, appears, now, to be arrogantly resisting appropriate oversight and engaging in what appears to be a campaign to impugn and intimidate a Senator for performing exactly the Constitutional oversight function that is fundamentally necessary to the effective functioning of my government.

I must conclude that Under Secretary Edelman is not serving the interests of the country and I urge you to immediately ask for his resignation.

BDS

2007-07-19T20:49:00.000-07:00

Some commentators pejoratively refer to Bush Derangement Syndrome, an epithet which is most frequently used to marginalize resistance to this administrations policies. But the reactions that manifest as what is called BDS are based in large part for many simply on long experience with the utter incompetence and destructive record of the Bush administration.

When Bush was first elected I was put in the the position of comforting a crestfallen colleague of mine – incidentally, one of the most brilliant individuals I have ever known – with what I genuinely believed to be a reasonable case in defense of Bush: I told him that I agreed with him that the evidence was that Bush was probably not well qualified to be President and that he would probably be somewhat incompetent, but that the checks and balances in our system of government could adequately handle such a situation, indeed had in the past, and that the consequences, overall would be minimal. That is, I argued with him that, all in all, things wouldn’t turn out much different, no matter who was elected, that he should give the Bush administration a chance and that Bush’s election wasn’t a priori a disaster. I report this experience only to establish my bonafides as not having suffered from BDS, at least initially.

But now with a simply breathtaking record of incompetence, dishonesty, and partisan hackery I simply do not trust the Bush administration to do ANYTHING. I have worked in scientific laboratories where for the sake of safety and to protect delicate instrumentation the policy for visitors is “put your hands in your pockets and do NOT under any circumstances take them out.” THAT is the policy I want the current administration to follow. Their every act seems the apotheosis of farpotchket at best, like the moron who tweaks a mirror on an optical table that has taken six months to align. Act on a nuanced and delicate situation? Jeebus, I’d rather Bush perform my laproscopic gall bladder removal, and the evidence suggests a better chance of success!

I resent the marginalization of resistance to actions of this administration as Bush Derangement Syndrome: my resistance is based on an expectation from painful experience and on a desire to stanch the unremitting flow of disasters, and is well summed up by the sentiment: “…fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Blame it on the Liberals

2007-06-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

Placing even some portion of the blame for the failure of the U.S. in Iraq on liberals (and, oh yes, a tiny subset of conservatives) who opposed the war is absurd and smacks of desperation by a frightened and very culpable conservative movement. Analogously we might blame the failures of the War on Poverty in part on conservatives because they maintained a public posture that it was fundamentally flawed policy: “oh, if only they had kept their protests to themselves” moans L.I. Beral, wringing his (or is it her) hands, “or better, gotten behind the effort, the bureaucrats would have felt that their efforts were valued, and the Great Society might have had a fighting chance.” ABSURD and pathetic.

I have a difficult time imagining any military effort that isn’t likely to have some segment of the U.S. population opposed to it – that is a fundamental and necessary aspect of democracy and is exactly as it should be – and is a simple fact that must be competently managed as a part of war efforts by the nation’s leaders as any other aspect of a military undertaking: logistics, personnel, casualties, diplomacy and so on. If public opinion about the Iraq war has had a significant negative impact on its prosecution then that simply compounds the utter failures of this conservative administration in its diastrous misadventure in Iraq.

In several different contexts over the course of my life I had experiences or was engaged in work that suggested to me in the runup to the Iraq invasion that the administration had access to very tangible information about WMDs that it could not reveal in full to the public and that warranted the invasion. I therefore reluctantly, and perhaps to my shame, supported the invasion. As it became clear that the effort would uncover no significant WMDs, and that, perhaps, intelligence was manipulated to generate public and diplomatic support, I was aghast. Schadenfreude for those that opposed the war? I seem to remember a great deal of Schadenfreude on the right when we were kicking the a$$es of poor schmuck draftees in the Iraqi army and destroying infrastructure with precision bombing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Iraqis suffer quite nearly as much as Americans from bullet wounds and explosions and I don’t remember any significant public rebuke for the pleasure that was taken at the expense of that suffering. Let the liberals have their tiny spark of pleasure in having been right about the absolute tragedy we unleashed – may it be, god willing, some small antidote to future leaders who would venture into such an ill-advised undertaking, uninformed, underprepared, incompetent.

An Open Letter to My Senators About S.J. Res 14, No Confidence in Alberto Gonzales

2007-06-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

Over the past six months I have lost a great deal of confidence in the entire Department of Justice to act in a fair, non-partisan fashion, and in the best interests of the country. The origins of that loss of confidence include the blatant disrespect and dissembling or outright lying of DoJ officials in their response to the oversight role of Congress, the apparent use of bald-faced political motives in a range of personnel and policy matters, and admissions and allegations of unquestionably illegal actions including vote caging and politicization of the civil service hiring process. I am certain I am not alone in these feelings and I find it deeply, deeply troubling that the current leadership has administered the DoJ in a fashion that has so eroded citizens’ faith in this fundamentally important American institution that relies, for the good of the nation, so much on their trust.

I hope you will take into consideration the extraordinary negative impact these situations have had on my perceptions of the Department of Justice, as you consider your vote on whether or not the Congress has confidence in the Department’s continued leadership by Alberto Gonzales.

Please Stop, It's Hurting America - An Open Letter to Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman

2007-06-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

Mr. Fineman and Mr. Matthews-

Jon Stewart said it ever so much more eloquently than I ever could - "it's hurting America ... stop hurting America." That you could look around this nation with so many difficult and crucial issues facing us, and given your implicit responsibility by virtue of your journalistic roles, and then sink to these inane depths in speculative commentary on its potential leadership:

FINEMAN: He doesn't—he looks like a guy who, if he had had the opportunity to grow up as a hunter, would have been a great one.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
FINEMAN: He just gives off the aura of a guy who wouldn't be afraid to use a gun, you know? That's just—and that's the record that he had in New York.
MATTHEWS: Would he—would he have been a catch-and-release guy when he went fishing?
[transcript from Hardball May 23, 2007]

that you could actually consider these "insights" anything less than utterly degrading to yourselves and your networks and generally destructive of our democracy given your roles, particularly in these troubled times, is mind-boggling. Please stop, you're hurting America.

"...But Withdrawal Will Be So Much Worse!"

2007-06-05T22:59:00.000-07:00

The argument usually goes something like this: “yes, the occupation is a disaster for Iraqis, but if we withdraw it will be so much worse.” It seems to me that there is a major flaw with these analyses. Briefly, the flaw is inherent in the question: are we, as a country, going to commit to the sacrifices necessary to prevent this disaster from unfolding? As far as I can tell, this desperately incompetent administration figured that they could “do Iraq on the cheap” and more than just about anything else I see that as the “strategy” that they are unwilling to change. They have been unwilling to ask for any form of national sacrifice, though, of course some have sacrificed all. I expect someone genuinely concerned with our responsibility to the Iraqis, someone maintaining we have a moral obligation to the Iraqis that can ONLY be met by our continued military commitment in Iraq, will recognize the abject failure, the disastrous consequences of the current Iraq policy and will, because of the moral obligation, advocate strongly for the sacrifices that are necessary to redeem this disaster.

What sacrifices? A military DRAFT, so that we can field appropriate anti-insurgency military forces, realistic, engaged, flexible DIPLOMACY that starts extracting the U.S from the extreme isolation in which we have been positioned in this quagmire, an Iraqi (or even Middle East) “MARSHALL PLAN” to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure of Iraq and channel the efforts of Iraqis into being productively engaged in the world economy, and, finally, much higher TAXES to pay for these things rather than mortgage our children’s and our grandchildren’s economic future and threaten our own. Empirically, it seems obvious undertaking such a program is extraordinarily unlikely, at least a single data point being that no serious politician has even broached these ideas – our professional political class understands that these ideas would be touching, nay, clutching, the third rail of politics.

So, even though we are currently engaged in a slow motion disaster (is it really that slow?) we are not committed to doing what is necessary to stop it. Taken in this context it occurs to me that an analogy for the “we must stay to prevent a greater disaster” crowd is folks who go to their doctor with a bad cold demanding antibiotics who then fail to take the full course of the drugs. That “slow motion disaster” produces, as is well known, drug resistant bacteria that become dangers to everyone. That is what I see the these analysts arguing for – a low-level, inadequate, “treatment” of the Iraq disaster, in most cases, simply advocating for some variation of a “Friedman unit” approach. We already have some solid evidence that this produces results that are, at a very minimum, contrary to our military goals – serving as a means to recruit for (global) insurgency against America, honing the skills, tactics and strategies of those engaged in the insurgency, and exporting these experienced fighters to other regions.

So, I can not even begin to take pieces like this seriously until I see their authors take a deep breath and advocate, integrally in their positions, for the SACRIFICES that are necessary to stop the disaster. Go home, take two aspirin, and get into bed. When you are ready to take the medicine, all the medicine, the full course, come back and we’ll talk. Otherwise, methinks you are really not so serious about the moral obligation and perhaps withdrawal is the better of a fistful of dreadful options.

Another Moron Mismanages, Oh, Maybe the Most Important Issue EVER

2007-05-31T08:37:00.000-07:00

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:

“I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:

“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Shorter NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:

'As you know, you live (and die) with the climate you have. They’re not the climate you might want or wish to have at a later time.'

Enough said. No, I take that back, not enough said – there are not adequate words for what should be said. Insert guttural primal noise HERE.

Update - Here's the email I sent to NPR about their reporting of this on Morning Edition:

Thank you for Steve Inskeep’s reporting that provided us with NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s views concerning climate change, but I am deeply disappointed that NPR elected not to completely fulfill its journalistic responsibilities in this report.

Griffin's eerie mirroring of Donald Rumsfeld’s irresponsible unwillingness to plan for and act on potentially disastrous scenarios – (Rumsfeld: “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time”; Griffin: “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change.”) – aside, I was stunned by the ideologically positioned empty moral posturing of his statement: “…I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Why, of course, Administrator Griffin, in the context of his straightforward recognition of anthropogenic climate change, has precisely and unilaterally decided that HE is “... to be accorded the privilege of deciding …[the] particular climate that we have” - and perhaps a not very forgiving climate at that - by refusing to take action on our placement of over 10 TRILLION pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. I think it borders on journalistic misfeasance for your reporters to be served up such conspicuous garbage from a public official and not point it out to your listeners.

An Open Letter to Former U.S. Attorney John McKay

2007-05-23T20:19:00.000-07:00

Several recent editorials in our local newspaper by commentator Adele Ferguson addressed your situation as U.S Attorney. She claimed that US Attorneys are simply political appointees serving at the whim of the President, and that citizens should really expect no higher standard than political considerations in the handling of personnel matters for these important government posts, implying that if you were asked to resign solely for political reasons we should all just get over it. Oddly, considering that according to her first point no substantive rationale is necessary, she also alleged your firing was justified for performance reasons, though her allegation differed with the performance-based rationale provided by the Department of Justice.

First, I would like to know, based on your experience as US Attorney and your legal expertise and familiarity with the American justice system, what I should expect of the U.S. Department of Justice. That is, as a voter, taxpayer and citizen, is it unreasonable of me to expect the Department of Justice to operate in a fair, non-partisan fashion, that is, that US Attorneys, once appointed by the President, serve the United States to the best of their ability by evaluating cases on their legal merits and importance, upholding the laws as they are written? I had thought this is a big part of what is meant by the phrase: “the rule of law.” Or should I accept the Department of Justice for which Ms. Ferguson advocates, one that is a political tool of whichever party controls it, recognizing that it will pursue an agenda motivated principally by partisan considerations? Which one of these approaches do you think better serves the interests of our nation?

Second, do you think that perhaps Ms. Ferguson has somehow obtained information to which you and the office of the U.S. Attorney did not have access, or that her legal judgment is more acute than yours and the professionals in the U.S Attorney’s office in Seattle. She seems quite certain that a mistake was made in a high visibility case, despite extraordinary public interest, and the expertise, deliberative processes and checks and balances which your office brought to bear, and in spite of your record of accomplishments, your positive performance reviews, and your professional and political credentials (not least of which is that you are a republican nominated to your position by a republican president). I wonder whether in retrospect and given Ms. Ferguson’s profound insight, it might not have been appropriate to hire her as consultant to the U.S. Attorney’s office?

I suppose I should point out that it might bother me significantly if you answered that I should expect the DOJ to be a partisan political tool. I, and I suspect many others, could lose faith in our legal system. I cannot shake a sense that Ms. Ferguson’s prospectus for the Department of Justice is not consistent with the sentiment “… and justice for all”. On the other hand, I can easily see that having someone on the staff of the U.S. Attorney’s office who can determine when crimes have been committed without having to resort to the difficult process of availing themselves of the facts would be a great convenience. Thank you for considering my questions.

George Tenet's Honor

2007-04-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

Since I began reading about George Tenet’s recent revelations about his role in the runup to the Iraq war, I have found myself nearly speechless with outrage. Others have given voice to much of my response but, I still feel it necessary to splutter and spit through my virtual clenched teeth from this virtual soap box a response to this:

"You don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me," Tenet said in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday.

Mr. Tenet, sir: Honor?! Honor?! You SOB! You worse than SOB, you sociopath, you vile excuse for a specimen of the human race! More than 100,000 dead, many hundreds of thousands wounded and maimed, half a trillion dollars squandered, nearly 2,000,000 refugees, the foundation laid for violence and hatred and division and ruin that is likely to last generations, and you have the effrontery, the superficial ethics, to come before the people you betrayed –betrayed! - and to include among your accounting of the horrors, the piddling insult of your tarnished honor! Whether from incompetence, or political expedience, or for personal gain, or out of cowardice, or for your own personal cover for the mistakes of 9/11, or for whatever the hell the reason was, you, to whom we entrusted our resources, our lives and the lives others, to whom we entrusted our future, you betrayed us when it mattered the most. Listening to you whimper about your self-indulgent honor, I could just vomit.