Babylon 5 (and more Sarah Palin)

In 1993, there was a science fiction television show launched called Babylon 5. It ran for five years. The first 4 years I saw when they ran in syndication on a local UHF station. The last season was on the TNT network on cable and I saw one episode when I stayed overnight in a hotel on a business trip. I remembered being very fond of the series and I have been watching the old episodes on DVDs borrowed from the library or as available online.

The show concerned a space station, Babylon 5, conceived as a meeting place for the various spacefaring humanoid races to settle differences. The events of the show mostly contribute to a preformulated 5-year mytharc in which a series of political developments lead to a galaxy-wide war, among other things. Its structure was virtually unique at the time, it was unusual in its prolific historical references, and it had some very compelling drama.

Re-watching it now, I am much more critical. The use of CGI, groundbreaking at the time, now looks in the early episodes a bit too much like a 20-year old videogame. At the beginning of season one, the sets and lighting are lifeless, the dialogue and performances of the human characters flat and unconvincing. The script is full of exposition. The episodes often coast in to anticlimaxes trying to tie up episode storylines after the big moment is passed. Even the historical references that I enjoyed originally seem trite and obvious. What was seen 15 years ago as a dose of realism to correct the idealistic fantasies and gross internal inconsistencies of the old Star Trek, now seem cheap compared to the almost documentary-like reimagined Galactica.

But it improves. After the show gets going, everything improves. The technology behind the special effects evolved. There was evidently a better budget for sets and props. As the story unfolds the characters that were uninteresting develop somewhat, and the stories themselves develop a depth through internal consistency and allusion. The actors settle into more confortable rhythms. The aliens, who were always the most fun to watch (brought to life by stunning makeup and costumes, interesting accents, and broad threatrical flourishes) see their roles get meatier as their races slide into war.

One thing that remains annoying, however, is the show's flavor of minimal administrative institutions.

The B5 station itself begins with a population of 250,000. It has no industry, but has an economy based on trade, tourism (it particulaly becomes a destination for religious after an angelic sighting), and information technology. In season 3 it declares itself independent of its sponsoring government and becomes a state unto itself. Its own taxation system apparently erects and runs itself after state funds are cut off. It has a security chief that personally knows everyone who might be a criminal, like a small town sheriff. Its number two military officer personally commands the station's defensive fighter squadron. It has the flavor of a very small operation, with a shallow command staff that does little delegating and has few meetings or protocols.

In addition to having the government of Earth withdraw all support for the station, its commander becomes the mostly-absentee leader of a fleet of advanced ships that spearheads one side in a war of galactic scale in which whole planets are destroyed and countless billions are affected.

Over and over, the show commits the embarassing lapse of treating serious matters of galactic consequence in this folksy small-institution way. When the consequences grow to a tremendous scale, big-time institutions simply do not follow. There is no apparent second eschelon of leadership beneath the top command staff. Huge operations simply coordinate themselves. None of the top people possesses a personal security force, and remain vulnerable to small bands of unsophisticated crazies and malcontents. They continue to carry out their regular activities, doing everything themselves. The show is incredibly naive about death and torture and the role of espionage, as if none of the characters has any real experience or serious training or anticipates the extent to which people ordinarily go with much less at stake. The heroes develop a fastidiously honest broadcasting operation not as part of a comprehensive set of war operations but because the captain says one day, "hey, I have an idea -- let's do this." Treaties are forged without any concerns over the details. The captain takes command of the warfleet without asking how many ships there are, what firepower they possess, what their crew complements are... There appears to be no understanding of the questions of bureaucracy and administration, of established ways of doing things, and the millions of unpredicted but extremely predictable things that tend to go wrong when ordering levels of management and control do not exist, and everyone is doing everything by ear. Everything that happens requires a support structure, staff must be recruited and trained, materiel must be procured, advantages that present themselves must be exploited, and mistakes that have been made in the past must be prevented in the future.

These mistakes threaten the integrity of the show and infect otherwise exciting storylines with a distracting problem of complete unreality. You do not feel the weight or inertia of tradition, structure, a large body of professional knowledge and experience and layers of management and administration.


Without exaggerating the point, I would contrast the better handling of this consideration by the current Battlestar Galactica series. Galactica is the story of a struggling remnant of humanity which flees in a ragtag fleet of spacecraft after massive nuclear assault by evil God-crazed robots. The fleet has a civilian president and the one surviving battleship itself has a military commander. The two together are responsible for roughly 50,000 souls, a number which is chopped down by nearly a third due to losses over the course of a few years, mostly during a disasterous period of enemy occupation of a large segment of the population. But even with a much smaller body of people involved, institutions feel weighty and resilient. When there is a task to be done, someone must do it. Three episodes in, prison labor must be recruited to mine ice to replenish the failing water supplies of the fleet. Personnel losses must be compensated by recruitment and training. The overtaxing of the workforce erupts into conflict. Attack plans must be developed, presented, and approved. Meetings are held in which problems are quantified and solutions proposed and debated. There is a maturity in recognizing hard choices.

B5's crew managed to avoid total disaster because it had the advantage of being fiction. With good writers, the logistics will take care of themselves. In real life, what you get is more like FEMA's response to hurricane Katrina, or the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, which lost the initiative, credibility, and uts shirt before it knew what was happening. If you buy something without a plan to deliver or distribute it, you waste it. If you distribute something on an emergency basis but provide no security against fraud, it gets stolen. If you fail to think of people staying in their homes because you won't let them leave without their pets, or because you have not secured the streets, or because they are listening to a religious leader whom you did not understand to have any authority, you lose.

Personally, I've been on the executive board of several organizations, but let me mention three: a metropolitan group representing 25,000 people, a state group representing 150,000, and a national group representing 3.5 million. Because these were groups that represented an interest sector and not all citizen concerns, my portfolio at any of these groups was not nearly what would be faced by a mayor or governor. But there were plenty of issues, budgets to develop and debate, staff to hire, legal issues to confront, internal politics, and external relations. The smallest group was something I worked on full time; the others I had a more ancillary role. Still, I have some impression of the effects of scale and how instututions grow more complex, expectations higher, and a more sophisticated set of protocols involved as one moves up.

I have seen people in my institutional adventures who had a big-time mindset, and those whose views refected small-time, small-organization ways of doing things. It's possible to walk out of Supercorp into a mom-and-pop outfit and not get the small scale of things, to expect a proposal to be circulated and go through comments and legal vetting before implementation, while auntie Jo could just do it before dusk. It's also possible for someone unfamiliar with the larger-scale environment to see a proposal enacted by sidestepping the usual regulatory requirements, political ane social niceties, and create a ripple of small problems and risks of larger ones in so doing. When you just call up someone you know and write them a check, instead of soliciting the proper bids, making the proper records, verifying eligibility and compliance, and paying from the proper fund with proper approval.

There are advantages to both the big-scale and the small-scale ways of doing things. That small-scale mentality can be great for getting things done, breaking away from outgrown and unnecssary limits. But...

But it also means turning a blind eye to the reasons for the limits, incurring unknown risks, creating secondary problems and side effects that must be solved, injuring constituencies, and courting all sorts of predictable failures.

Sarah Palin's credientials include representing Wasilla, pop. 5900, and Alaska, pop. 680,000. Her record is one of both corruption and reform: she basically does not conform to institutions, acts in a small-scale way. Hires cronies, ignores conventions, offends bureaucrats and powers that be, and violates the law. It's all part of the same picture. I've seen this person before. I've seen this style. It has its merits for getting a narrow range of goals accomplished, but as the scale and diversity of operations expands, it becomes more and more risky in terms of all the competing considerations that get sacrificed or distorted, and sometimes this leads to complete collapse of the overall ambition, as we saw in Katrina and Iraq.

Palin's Disclosures

Had a look at Sarah Palin's disclosure forms.

I have seen some commentary on the amount of property she owns. Not much note that her husband's tribe (native corportation, BBNC) collectively made close to 1.3 billion dollars in gross oil revenues last year, which is a significant interest even if she personally doesn't rely on it: it's important to the community.

What strikes me the most, however, is just the sloppiness of it all. Handwritten, often last-minute submissions, with boxes not checked, covered in abbreviations. BP is obviously British Petroleum, but who outside Alaska would guess that SBS stands for? Maybe Spenard Building Supply ("Alaska's choice for building materials and home improvements")? The unchecked boxes may seem trivial, but it says something when you fail to be attentive enough to fully complete the form and follow the rules. The instructions say to list all or check "none." Doing neither arguably means that the information has been withheld.

The officials monitoring the disclosures did not flag that, but they did find other items incomplete and seek further information in response to the Wasilla mayoral annual disclosure in 2002, which actually took more than a year to be supplied. Even when filing disclosures for governor, her October 2005 form generated an exchange about necessary changes and the same form was refiled in May 2006 with a new signature over the old one and new information scribbled in the margins.

This to me elevates the unpreparedness factor. It looks like a half-assed backwater operation when the chief exec is filling out these forms by hand and having them sent back for more work. can't you get someone on staff to handle it and make sure it's done right?

Remember, Alaska isn't Texas. There are five cities in Texas alone with more people than the entire state of Alaska, and El Paso is close.

Recipe for Economic Disaster

Every time I see that McCain ad, I think the same thing. It's one of the ads -- not "Taxman", the other one -- that quotes the Las Vegas Review Journal as saying that Obama's tax policies would be a "recipe for economic disaster." And I think, Las Vegas Review Journal?

This ad exploits "source amnesia." People remember they heard something but they forget where they heard it.

Ever see those film reviews where there are three blurbs and they're all from people and outlets you've never heard of? Random radio call letters and obscure papers and magazines? I always see these and think, boy, how desperate must they be? They couldn't get one good review from a source people have actually heard of?

The Las Vegas Review Journal is not the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or USA Today, not even the LA Times. These are the only four national US papers, the only ones with more than a million circulation. It's not in the top 20 by circulation. Or the next 20. Or the next. Which is not exactly a surprise. You've probably never heard of it if you live outside Nevada.

It's not just small, it's extreme. Its editorial policy is far right on economic issues. Wikipedia describes it as libertarian, but from what I've seen it's not a great fan of civil liberties or social progress. Its editorialists are fully committed behind McCain against Obama and stridently press the partisan line.

So it's a not an organ swing voters would naturally want to follow. And it's probably not what a maverick Republican would consider a reliable source. This may be a foolish mistake, or it may be an appeal to the natural followers of the Review Journal. But not likely. In all likelihood, the ad is effective because it carefully and dishonestly uses a quote from an unreliable and unrepresentative source to plant a point.

Not the biggest thing one can knock McCain on, but I see these things, and they get to me.

A Sigh of Relief in Warsaw

It's so nice to know that new missles in Poland will protect it from Iranian agression. Teheran has of course revived its historical threats, and no one could fail to share the apprehension of Northern Poles at seeing the throngs of Polish Shiities in Rzeszow carrying pictures of Khatami and demanding the reincorporation of Southern Poland into Greater Persia, the way things used to be before the shifting of Polish borders west and south in the reconstitution of 1945. This is of course a blow not just to Russia, but especially to the Yushchenko adminstration in Kiev, which has done the bidding of Iranian officials in Lvov by encouraging cross-border agitation. The missle shield is also sure to dampen Iranian territorial ambitions, frustrating their long-term drive to obtain access to the Baltic.

Palin's Selection

There's been a lot of very good instant commentary on the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. Some of the articles and comments on TPM I think are particularly good at laying out some of her potential plusses and minuses. She is to large extent a cipher, and I would not be shocked if she surpassed all expectations; nor would I be shocked if she were a total disaster. Well, maybe a little shocked: there is not a lot of time for weak spots to show.

Which is an issue in itself.

The most important things about her nomination that we know now are not that she is a woman or that her resume includes more time as a sports reporter, snowmobile seller, and as part of a small body that oversaw her village of 1430 families than as mayor of that village or governor of the 47th largest state (about three times the size of Obama's State Senate district).

Rather, what is important at this stage is the very fact that she is a virtual unknown. And particularly that she is such an unknown even to McCain.

Reports on how McCain made the selection are not impressive. What we have heard is: He's never worked with her. He's met her once. He decided at the last minute. The announcement was clearly designed as an attention-grabber. The The selection is risky, but as Mark Halperin explained, "McCain loves to roll the dice."

Contrast this with Obama: he selected someone wih whom he has worked, and who has a 30-year public record. Biden also was subject to opposition research and media scrutiny while running for the Democratic nomination. He makes numerous public appearances. He is a very known entity and in particular, Obama knows that they interact well. Likewise, Obama went through a very public process of vetting other potential running mates, going on fact-finding trips with them, interviewing, interacting, and observing. They are also well-known public figures and well vetted.

This tells us a little about Biden, nothing about Palin, bust most importantly it tells us something about Obama and McCain. Obama went through a professional orderly process, considered the intelligence, and committed to a course of action. McCain? The clear impression is one of impulsive decision-making based on unnecessarily limited intelligence. If the risk were borne only by the campaign, this might be a plus...

But it won't be if McCain is elected. The other imporant aspect of thic calculation is that not only has Palin apparently not been well vetted by the McCain forces, but it will be very uncertain, if not impossible, whether we can get a good picture of her before election day. If elected, Palin will be in office and standing by to perform as President, whether or not her record would support that decision.

Again, compare with the Obama camp. On Obama's side, the risk inherent from nonexperience is at the top of the ticket. Experience is important for several reasons. One is vetting. We have for Obama several biographies, ranging from excellent to borderline illegal. We have had an extended campaign, with months upon months of investigating Obama as a first-tier candidate. We have a national record.

We have not necessarily had much time to time test whether the policies he championed in the U.S. Senate have been fruitful, but Illinois ain't beanbag. In contrast, Palin is on her second year as governor of a state of 680,000. To go back and see how successful her past actions have been over time, sift through the fallout, one needs to go back before her inauguration in 2006 (statute of limitations is 3 years on state contracts, 6 on torts, for example). That leaves only her mayorship. It's probably safe to say that Illinois faces most (though obviously not all) of the domestic issues the U.S. government faces. Hardly true of Wasilla, pop. 6700.

Incidentally, I don't object to political considerations entering into the selection of a running mate, but the first priority must always be the interests of the country if the nominee is elected. Obama made clear this was his priority, stated so in the face of overbearing media concentration on horserace issues, and selected someone who was credible as a backup president. McCain cannot credibly say that Palin is the best, or second-best, or third-best, or fourth-best, or among the 25 best people for this position. There are too many good people out there, and more importantly, he just hasn't enough knowledge to know how good or bad Palin would be.

McCain bought a pig in a poke, and wants to sell it to America. So the main issue is not whether it is going to turn out to be a good pig. The issue is not the pig but the poke.

Celebrity-Envy

I don't relate to the reaction of some pundits that John McCain's purchasing of ad time on the evening of Barack Obama's nomination acceptance speech as gracious or classy. First of all, the ad has a false, patronizing and at times almost sarcastic quality and most importantly, it seems to say on one level, this is your day, I won't interrupt, while on a deeper level screaming, "Hey, over here, don;t forget about me!"

First an analysis of the text:

1 Senator Obama, this is truly a good day for America.
2 Too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed.
3 So I wanted to stop and say, Congratulations.
4 How perfect that your nomination would come on this historic day.
5 Tomorrow, we’ll be back at it.
6 But tonight, Senator, job well done.

1a) First of all, it's an open message to Obama, which means, I will direct my speech to you, but rather than speak to you privately, I will pay to show millions of people the image of me talking to you, because it is really a message for them to see me talking to you. We won;t show any images of you in the ad, because it's about me looking good, not you. It's my way of hogging some attention while trying to look superficially like I'm being respectful toward you.

1b) It's a good day for America. I won't be specific why, because I want to claim to care about race relations in spite of my record, and without doing anything, and I won't even mention it because I can't do it deftly enough to not get in trouble, especially since I want to keep the racist vote energized for me.

2a) This is absurdly vague and almost certainly does not say what it means. What it suggests is, too often, we all fail to notice our opponents' achievements. For example, I may might go completely unaware of your obtaining your party's nomination for president, and you might fail to mention repeatedly how I was a POW. But this is not literally what it says. To go unnoticed is not specific as to who is not noticing. Literally, it seems to suggest that everyone regardless of side fails to notice enough. The "our" is ambiguous -- whose opponents? Who is us? We in politics? We on my side? Me and you? And it it each of us our own opponents, or our common enemies? Did we not notice Bin Laden's achievements often enough?

2b) "We" is intended to suggest you and I are in some kind of parity despite this being your day and not mine.

2c) Making it a general statement about not appreciating our adversaries is a vague way of stealing your trademark vision of a new politics, without actually acting that way or committing to do so. (See 5a.)

3a) Way to go kid. I know this will mean a lot coming from me because I'm so much more experienced than you.

3b) By stop, I mean step into your spotlight for a moment and steal a little of your reflected media.

4) Yeah, gee, how convenient that it worked out that way. What an odd coincidence. Smirk!

5a) This is my escape clause to be able to knofe you tomorrow and not look like I went back on my word.

5b) We again. You, ahead in the polls, me behind, really just alike, both alike.

6) See 3a.

What this really makes me think of is 1a/3b: this guy can't shut up for one day, he needs to get the attention. Now this is probably a campaign decision that was done for practical and not emotional reasons: throw Obama off gain, keep your own campaign from being forgotten, score points with key groups. But it also has a look to me of being a purely emotional investment, and it does this not just because that is a dominant vibe of the ad, its timing, its function. It is also because that is part of a pattern and an emerging meme for McCain: McCain the attention-craver who can't get over his envy of someone else's superior celebrity.

I'm not an expert on McCain's bio, but here are some bits that strike me from what I know:

He describes in his autobiography how at age 2 or so he would keep passing out because he would hold his breath until he turned blue. He was a spoiled little kid who wanted attention.

He led a wild life and was a bad boy prior to his military service and period as a POW. Lots of sex and booze and nasty behavior. He was like a spoiled little kid who wanted attention.

He was treated by the Vietnamese as a celebrity POW because his daddy and granddaddy were famous and important admirals. After returning to the US, he enjoyed some celebrity because of being a POW, so for a while he had the fame he wanted.

His military career was okay, but he was never gonna get to be dad or granddad. He loved the legislative liaison work with lots of travel, power, and money closeby, so he got into politics. Public service my ass. He was a nobody on the fringes of fame and he wanted some of the that celebrity for himself as he had had before.

He got into politics. He soon developed a comprehensive media strategy which involved selective brief adoption of populist stands on reform issues to develop a phony reputation as a maverick, being unusually chummy with the press (although still hiding the dirt), and relying on the POW card. He started running for president, writing books, appearing on shows like 24 and SNL, doing more talk shows than anyone else, and grandstanding on selected issues.

His ads have appeared obsessed with griping about Obama being more successful, younger, smarter, and better than him, drawing bigger crowds, mastering issues more easily, quickly gaining access to and praise from national and world leaders. What an elitist, celebrity, hotshot, smartypants -- ooo, he makes me so mad, I could just hold my breath till I turn blue and pass out.

"Suspect"

In a report on the local news last night on WTMJ, the reporter did something again that I've occasionally noticed, but which freshly struck me when I saw it again: she used the word "suspect" to refer not to a particular person of whom the authorities bore suspicion, but a person acting in a clearly criminal manner, e.g., "So-and-so was at home and heard a noise in their living room. Going to investigate, they saw a burglar in their home. The suspect was stuffing the family possessions into a backpack." Tonight's was a pretty clear-cut case of this.

The ill which this portends, and which I hope comes back to bite these stations in some form of libel action, is that it means they are re-defining the word "suspect" for their viewers to mean "perpetrator" so that when they describe an innocent person as a "suspect," they are in fact stating literally and explicitly that that person is guilty.

I know this seems like an exaggerated claim. Surely, it must be merely implicit that they are being called guilty, right? Wrong. Consider how this plays out in the form of a debate:

P: You ruined my life. You told everybody I committed this crime.

D: No we didn't. We never said that.

P: Well, that was clearly what you meant. That's what everyone understood.

D: We're not responsible for how our reports may be misinterpreted. We clearly stated you were only a suspect. Look it up. It means you didn't necessarily do anything. It means just that some people think you might have done it.

P: But that's not what it means to your viewers. It's not how you use the word yourself. On other newscasts you've said someone definitely did something, and then you call the person who did it the "suspect." When you use the word in that way, you give it the meaning of someone definitely guilty. A reasonable person, familiar with the way you use language, would understand you to be saying that I was definitely guilty. And that includes you: you knew what you were saying when you said it.

More on Georgia

As the news filters in with respect to the Russia-Georgia conflict, I find myself with some views and ideas, which are not necessarily those that would be suggested by my comment a week ago.

I still think the media and some politicians' responses bear internal contradictions that make them seem not a little bit odd, to say the least. Perhaps they are simply unclear, but in any event it is confusing and suggests a very odd mindset indeed when the same figures refer to Russia as having violated the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation, and as having responded disproportionately in how they did so. This would make sense, perhaps, if Georgia had invaded Russia, but it is hard to see how the two ideas are consistent when the same comments make no acknowlegement of any attack or provocation against Russia. It makes it sound like Bernie and Jeff are standing on a streetcorner, Jeff minding his own business when Bernie suddenly smacks him in the head, throws him to the ground and starts kicking him in the gut. Along comes George Bush or John McCain and says, gee, I find that to be an overreaction.

It turns out, though, that Russia has a position that makes the charge of disproportionality a rational one. It has rights and obligations under treaty which include stationing of forces in South Ossetia. So when Georgia decides to throw aside the treaty and subject the Ossetian entity -- something less than a recognized state, but nevertheless paradoxically a party in its own right to an international accord with Georgia and Russia -- to an attack that afflicts Russians and Russian rights, the whole equation reverses and Russia becomes the unsung victim. At that point it is credible to say that they overreacted. But the talk of Georgian territorial integrity becomes somewhat strained. If recognition of the old Georgian border was a consideration in the threaty Georgia has broken, then we can talk about respecting sovereignty, but Russia has a reasonable argument that it can respond with its own incursions against Georgian territory. An aggressor is in no position to demand that the one it attacks limit its responses to disputed territory.

I don't know much about this situation and don't take an ultimate position, but I have always remarked that the most acute failures of the media are those which take little knowledge to detect. This is such a case. The commenters have a lot of trouble making sense.

Take the claim, endlessly repeated, that Russia is trying but failing to take over all of Georgia. Well, maybe it's trying but failing to take over all of Asia. Maybe Georgia is. But what's the evidence? That it has not done so? Perhaps Turkey is trying to overrun Brazil. The fact that it has not done so is proof that it has failed in its ambitions. I somehow think that if Russia wanted to seize Georgia it could do so. Has it ever done so before?

A parallel I am waiting to hear mentioned is Panama. A superpower has troops in its backyard, permitted by treaty, right at the edge of a major global transshipment point for a vital resource. A hostile local leader, with a horrible record on democracy and human rights, rattles his sabre. A prospect looms in the future for a treaty realignment. Then there is a petty outrage against the superpower's constabulary. Suddenly the entire country is taken over and a friendly government installed. The last part has not happened in Georgia, but Russia is accused of wanting it. Does anyone sense a bit of projection here?

And remarkably, McCain actually gets credit from the press for the best reaction despite: (1) having no nuance or precision or sense of proportion, and actually saying that countries don't invade other countries in this century (Iraq and, if he get's his way, apparently won't count because they'll continue through 2101.) (2) jumping to an extreme and bellicose position before he has any reliable intelligence, a formula that has proven in the past to get us into conflicts that may last to 2101, (3) saying exactly what he is told to say by his lobbyist advisors and effectively becoming the puppet of a tinpot Central Asian despot.

Energy Policy: Top Ten Reasons to Reduce Demand

It surprises me that the presidential campaign is mostly about energy policy. Perhaps I'm overcompensating for my surprise it was not a bigger issue four years ago. I'm also surprised that McCain would make drilling and nuclear his big issue. My impression is that most people aren't especially positive about those things, though obviously, they buy the argument that they got better when oil prices went up again.

At any rate, there are a few really compelling arguments for conservation that I think deserve more attention:

1. Comfort. People associate saving with austerity and constant attention to details, all stress and burden and sacrifice. That's not what conservation is about. If you lived in a house with an extremely inefficient heating system, you are not making yourself more comfortable. You're just losing money to no good effect. If you improve efficiency, it becomes cheaper to purchase comfort, and you have more money to purchase it with, so efficiency means a longer shower, not a shorter one.

2. National Pride. If you don't conserve, you waste. It's like having an army of people around the country whom we pay to dig a big hole in the desert, suck oil from the ground, refine it, transport it to the hole, and keep it burning all summer long. Everyone knows it. No one respects waste. It's just stupid. So follow that up with one simple question: Is that what our country stands for?

3. National security. If you free yourself from a need, that's one less vulnerability that can be used against you. If you reduce demand for oil, there's no way that can be used against you. But if you cater to it, feed the need by turning to riskier and less secure sources, you prostrate yourself before anyone who can threaten that resource. Pipeline. Tanker. Nuke. Any of those sound like potential targets to you? The transalaska pipeline is notoriously vulnerable and impossible to secure. We've seen the damage a breached tanker can do, and we've seen our enemies target sea vessels. And drills to test our security at nuclear plants have shown they are not ready.

4. Speed. Conservation and alternative energies are closer at hand than you may think. While we've been slow to implement them, we and the rest of the world have developed the technologies. In contrast, nuke plants and new oil exploitation take forever. Paris Hilton may think otherwise, but she and McCain are just wrong.

5, 6, 7, 8. Environment, Sustainability, Climate Change, and Piety. These are all aspects of an overarching stewardship issue. There's no need to spend a lot of words saying that the prospects of conventional pollution from fossil fuels and nuclear are generally greater than that from conservation. Or that one can keep saving forever, while fossil fuels are limited. Climate change is worth noting especially because the effects have intensified and produced a global awareness and consensus only recently. Piety is an aspect that should not be overlooked. Most religious traditions, and evangelical Chrisianity in particular, view careful stewardship of nature as not just a human good but a divine mandate. Faith would call upon us to save energy even it it were not already in our interest in many other ways.

9. Economics. If you keep demand high, you are engaging in a risky economics. The economics of fuel consumption become the same as they are for heroin addiction. Demand is inflexible, meaning suppliers can push up the price by limiting supply. There is no way we can expand domestic supplies so much as to completely negate this effect. On the other hand, if we reduce domestic demand, that will leave us more domestic supply which we can export for profit.

10. Technology. Conservation is a technology-intensive endeavor that plays to our strength. By going this route, we master something and create an area where we will lead the world. We create jobs domestically that cannot be easily exported, developing and installing the new tech. This has benefits for economics and national pride (see above) and is likely to produce spinoff technologies which will benefit us in ways we cannot even guess at. Finally, conservation technologies experience synergy: technologies to improve efficiency themselves consume energy, but when several exist, each can improve the efficiency of the others so there is a massive multiplier effect. For instance, transport ethanol in high-efficiency vehicles and it turns from a boondoggle to an effective efficiency technology. The point is that this should be not cast as some sort of hippie fantasy, but as the object of modern technophilia: the opportunites are there to develop systems for efficient production, use, and recovery of energy that resemble science fiction. Oooo! Ahhh!

Media Oddity: South Ossetia

Another short note.

Since the US government position emphasizes that Georgia is sovereign and South Ossetia is part of it, and therefore that Russia is committing aggression against Georgia by its military action in South Ossetia, one might expect the US news networks to adhere uncritically to labeling South Ossetia as a mere region of Georgia, and at most point out for sake of context that South Ossetia did declare independence, but its statehood has not been recognized by the world's governments.

So it has surprised me, and contradicted to some extent my general view of the US government's hegemonic role over the media, that so much of the early reporting, not just by my local news, but by the networks and major print media, has at least fudged on the status of the region, and at times, has seemed to positively suggest that it is a genuine independent breakaway republic, which Georgia was undertaking to re-acquire. This despite the fact that in the narrative of the government, it was not seeking to annex a state formed by separatists; it was cracking down on its own citizens that resisted the supremacy of the legal national government.

My explanation is that the media responds to what it sees and feels more than it responds to the law. As I understand, the de facto situation was that there was a separate country of South Ossetia, because Georgia had let that condition persist since the end of the war back in the '90s. That situation existed in seeming contradiction to the legal status of the region as part of Georgia. On this account, it would be something like the U.S. letting Texas get taken over by far-right nuts who think of the federal government as an occupier, and after that letting Texas do whatever it wants, and operate with complete autonomy, but remain legally a part of the U.S. for foreign policy purposes. Looking at Texas from the inside, you would not think it was part of the U.S. The media would get caught up in that, and their language would reflect that, even if it were not legally correct.

UPDATE: I have made a couple of unmarked edits to the above. It appears to me now that there is another explanation. There is in fact a more nuanced legal status of the region, and there is a deeper narrative under the surface reporting in which the government acknowledges some of this nuance and is actually sending mixed signals. This comes through in the media with the contradictions appearing in the surface without the explanation. (Also, the comparison to nuts in Texas is valid as a theoretical point of debate, but paints both Texans and Ossetians in an unfairly negative light, so I declare the example withdrawn.)

I wake up

I've been kind of depressed and not working much for the last six weeks. I feel like the last couple of days I've really picked things up and gotten back to my old self. I have had a number of things I've wanted to post lately. But it seems like a tradition at this blog to break silence with a short gripe against my local news, so here goes:

Hundreds dead as war breaks out between Russia and Georgia. We'll have that nine-second report in a few minutes, but first, more fan reactions about Brett Favre's trade to the Jets.

More Little Media Pickiness

Throw these in the hopper:

1) I recently have been annoyed by news reports that say "bucks" instead of "dollars", use the verb ending "-in'" instead of "-ing" and generally use colloquialisms. Is that wrong of me?

2) Brian Williams tonight led off the first report with a comment that air travel "hasn't been fun for a while" and my thought was that: (a) "fun" is subjective--fun for whom?; (b) "a while" is not very precise, but then how can you be very precise about when something ceased to be "fun"? Am I just being way too anal?

3) That same report included a lot of fancy graphics, like showing the numbers of announced layoffs at different airlines on the tails of their planes, showing logos of airlines given as visual examples of a set described but not enumerated in the spoken text, and using an animated flying plane as a wipe between screens of data. Even though this added to the report, my first thought was that this was a waste and showed a misplaced emphasis on flash over substance. Should I focus on the positive?

4) The report was about the airlines political action to support anti-speculation legislation. They went to a senator and a person identified simply as "CNBC" as experts, focusing on what the political fallout might be. But there was only the on-air reporter, standing as always in front of a symbolic backdrop, to tell us (inconclusively) whether such legislation would be good or bad for the country. Is it hypercritical of me to think that when something like this happens, the focus should be on whether the promoted policy is well-advised rather than on what the political reaction is likely to be?

5) The report also briefly mentioned "concerns over Iran's nuclear program." It was pretty elliptical about why that was even mentioned. Whose concerns? What concerns? I feel that lines like this are especially dangerous because they operate at the level of innuendo. People will hear that Iran has a nuclear program and that it is a "concern" for someone, and take from that that they should see it as a concern, be concerned, be negative, be distrustful, be opposed, even if no reason is given why. You can't confront something like this directly, because it is not based on evidence or even directly assertive. It would actually be better to be inaccurate than the be insinuating. Or am I being too conspiratorial here?

An epilogue on the Butler Campaign

Today it was reported that the US Supreme Court has decided that in most cases, a murder victim's prior communications to the police are inadmissible because the accused murderer has no ability to cross-examine the victim on the statements. The local paper is reporting that this could end up meaning a retrial for Mark Jensen, against whom such a statement was said by jurors to be the sine qua non evidence for conviction.

Having offered the same opinion as the majority of the highest court of the land was offered as evidence of Louis Butler's being unqualified or undeserving to remain on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in attack ads that successfully removed him from the bench.

But the decision does reflect well on Scalia. This was one of those instances of exactly the type he cited where fealty to his judicial philosophy yielded a decision that was not the desired result for conservatives. The conservative wing of the court was pro-defendant to the man. It was Breyer, Stevens and Kennedy dissenting. It is gross stereotyping to presume that anyone on this court is entirely consistent or blandly predictable either positively or negatively.

McCain's Reward

We already have a publicly funded reward for new inventions designed to promote new technologies. It's called a patent. It's mentioned in the Constitution. John McCain should learn about it.

The Founders realized that innovation was cool: Jefferson prided himself as an inventor. They also respected but didn't completely trust the market. They implicitly understood that there was an appropriate space for the government to shape the market, and one way was by guaranteeing artificially by law that profit from innovations should be exclusive to the inventor for a while so that they would have a stronger mercenary incentive to invent. They left it to Congress to fix the terms in an effective manner.

If there's a technology we want developed, we can muck about with the patent system, or we can mandate it. If we know something is inventable, we can pass technology-forcing regulations that, say, mandate that all vehicles run on super-efficient electric batteries by 2015. Car companies can either develop the tech, or get out of the business and leave it to someone who will. That has worked in the past, but for obvious reasons, business does not like it. So it's easier to sweeten the patent prize.

McCain thinks this is a super-duper technology that it would benefit the public to develop, to the tune of $300 million. Supposing that is so, we should mandate its use, right?

Consider that one of three things is true: (1) the new tech would be very profitable to its developer, or (2) it is of marginal difference, so not worth investing in developing, or (3) it would ultimately be a bigger threat to existing profit streams than it would be an advantage, enough so that's it would be worth developing it or buying the patent just to keep it off the market.

If (1) is true, then an extra reward is unnecessary. It may cause a breakthrough to come marginally sooner, but for the most part, it's just an extra bonus to someone (most likely a Korean business) who already stands to get truckloads of money.

Number (2), although logically possible, is far-fetched in real life. If it is true, then it stands as an extraordinary example of market failure that should make McCain re-examine the economic philosophy he claims to have (although he probably does not really know what it is, or actually have it).

If (3) is true, then McCain's proposal gives a pile of extra money to someone for actually harming the national interest.

More on Scalia

It's been pointed out to me that in his Boumediene dissent, Justice Scalia did some other wierd things:

1) He relied on the supposed "fact" that 30 former Gitmo detainees have committed acts of violence since their release, despite the fact that that "fact" was repudiated by its source, which was, incidentally, the U.S. Department of Defense.

2) He also described them as "returning to the battlefield" which is at best misleading -- most were not picked up on any literal battlefield, but Scalia may just mean the everywhere-battlefield of the global war on terror, which takes place wherever people have a potential to do evil. Even in that sense, it's a stretch, since there is pretty strong evidence that many of our detainees were pro-US in their sympathies, but turned into enemies of America after being kept under our gentle hospitality for several years alongside genuine al Qaeda. It's amazing how much anger you can generate by locking someone up for several years without a hearing, subjecting them to a kangeroo proceeding, torturing them, shitting on their religion, and then suddenly letting them out without any explanation or apology.

3) Of course, it's been noted that the end-of-America fears stoked in the opinion stem from the sought relief of the petitioners merely getting a hearing. Is it that a hearing will result in embarassing disclosures, or is it taken for granted that the petitioners would be granted release because there is no probable cause to detain them, and hasn't been for six years?

4) Finally, why should Scalia care? A few nights ago, he was on Charlie Rose expounding his purpoted adherence to originalism. As Antonin explained to his never-critical, never-skeptical friend Charlie, the trying thing about having a stricy judicial philosophy where the Constitution has a fixed meaning, is that you have no flexibility in your decisions. They are dictated by the philosophy. Hence you have nothing to horse-trade in negotiations, because your position is non-negotiable. Also, you get stuck with outcomes you don't like. Scalia particularly said that as a conservative, he was often forced to take pro-civil liberties views when dealing with prisoners. That's because you don't get to consider your own policy views regarding the effects that your decision will have. You just look at what Madison and the rest of them meant, and you go with it wherever it leads. So, I repeat, why should he care how many Gitmo releasees have gone on to bad things? What does that have to do with the text of the Suppression Clause or the views of Madison and Jefferson?

Navel Gazing

Seems like it's been a while but I guess it really hasn't been. I have been sitting on a couple of thoughts, but what stirs me to log on is the thing that always gets to me: the stupid local news. Tonight on the WTMJ news with Mike:

Mike talks about an event that happened today. He attended with his wife. There's a picture of him smiling and waving. Now to our interview. Mike finds out that the famous interview subject used to listen to the radio broadcast by the sister station of his TV news station. How about that! Mike tells the celeb what an honor it was to meet the guy. Thanks, Mike. It's really more important to hear your opinion than anything else he might say that isn't somehow about you. And they opened a new lane of highway. This is great news. I know because Mike gave his opinion that it was great news. Also, he smiled so wide at announcing the news that he looked like he'd been drugged, so either he really was on drugs, or this was an intentional means of making absolutely sure that we understood his very strong opinion what great news this was.

Also, I'm not sure how much of what he reported on the McGee trial was what McGee said on tape that was played in court, and how much was Mike's characterization and interpretation of what was played, but in Mike's version, McGee sure must be guilty, so I guess I know where you stand, Mike. Yessiree, I went into that newscast with only a guess of what Mike thought, and now it's like I've met him and his wife and got to know what makes him happy and how he feels about stuff. Just like the local news is supposed to do. Now if I want to know the facts, I can just read a newspaper.

Scalia's Derangement

I'm just setting down to read the big Habeas decision from SCOTUS. Thought I'd dash out one point that seems incredibly obvious about one of the dissents. Scalia is a smart guy who says incredibly stupid things, despite access to smart clerks and concurring justices, their clerks, and a community of lawyers who all presumably don't point out these stupidities because of some combination of laziness, subservience or groupthink. The NYT quoted his dissent, which makes a point in passing about the seriousness of the threat America is facing from its enemies in the GWOT. In the third paragraph of his dissent, Scalia says, "one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know the threat is a serious one." I find this remarkable.

Translating, Scalia is saying, look, we've received no evidence here that there is a serious ongoing threat, and we're not going to ask for any. Our chief of intelligence has told us that our enemies are on the ropes, their capacities destroyed, their entire organization on the verge of elimination. We're just going to take for granted that that's a load of political bullshit, and yet when the same government insists that the threat is so serious that it must buttress and barricade the capital city, we choose to accept this without question. In fact, why even refer to these signifiers of danger. All we need to look at is the government's decision to strip its accused enemies of habeas protections. Would they do that if the threat were not severe? Of course not. We're not going to doubt the sincerity or the wisdom of the political branches.

Having assumed at the outset that whatever is done is therefore justified, hence having disposed of every question before the court, Scalia goes on for 24 superfluous pages. This little piece of dicta is nothing less than the virtual repudiation of judicial review. Of course it's all just rhetorical garbage. Scalia will say anything that suits his immediate purposes and backtrack the next day, because it's all activism and no principle.

Hillary's Derangement

For a long time, there has been a perspective out there that Hillary, or at least her surrogates, were going out of their way to exploit racism to better position her against Obama. It was and remains a topic on which I remain agnostic. Some of the evidence out there I think is pretty unconvincing, and I think when you have a machine that's speaking a million words a day on a subject, it's easy to build a case for almost anything by cherrypicking statements, but I think it's still a very plausible position. I don't think Hillary is anything close to what we paradigmatically call "a racist" but she obviously is smart enough to see the racial dimensions in what she says, enough to know that they exist at least to some degree in almost anything she could say, so it was always going to be a question of how much one could draw on that strain of thinking without getting queasy over it.

Her extreme tenacity, to the point of ridiculousness, over remaining in contention despite having lost the race irretrievably months ago, relates to the race-baiting charge in two ways, both as a cause and as an effect. This stubborn resolve to fight obviously evinces the kind of passion to win that would tempt her to accept a degree of racist support that she otherwise would not. That is the causal side.

On the effect side, one sees the deep denial of defeat and wonders at what has gotten into her most avid supporters. Getting carried away, locked in a Hillary bubble, being wedded to the historic symbol her victory would represent, they're all poweful. But maybe it's cynical, but I find it very easy to imagine that racial animus is furnishing some of this intensity.

Watching her poison Obama's candidacy by comparing him negatively to McCain; hold a gun to the head of the Party to get her way; arguing incessantly that she should win regardless of what the rules say, and demanding the rules be broken or changed to accommodate her ambitions, her supporters, and her view of the party's interests; and failing to concede after victory has become all but impossible (as it is now and has been for months) and after the mainstream has finally reasoned this, thanks to an absolute majority of delegates won by her opponent; where has one ever seen this? Hostage situations? Suicide cults?

In politics, this kind of resistance to law can work. It plays on mass support of great intensity. I am increasingly reminded of some stalwart recalcitrant like Orval Faubus, placing his body in front of the advancing forces of morality and law, to hold off the inevitable one more day. In his case, the national guard was coming to desegregate the schools. Yesterday it was the Rules Committee voting to allow the imminent desegregation of the presidency. It's an uncomfortable comparison, but apt. Even if it were not apt, it is a comparison that grows in resonance every hour that Hillary does not stand aside to let her biracial opponent pass. When it becomes too evident, it will blight her image indelibly.

Day Whatever

A brief note on the local news tonight. There was a tuition hike throughout the UW system. The station's online text and video reports are different from what I recall seeing on the air. I just wanted to reference the nomenclature here: "schools" versus "colleges" versus "campuses" or "universities." The UW system consists of a central administration, 26 campuses, UW Extension, UW Colleges Online, and maybe some other parts. The campuses include two institutions, UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, that grant graduate and professional degrees (each of which has numerous schools and colleges such as the UW School of Law, and UW-Milwaukee College of Letters and Sciences), 11 "comprehensive" campuses with 4-year schools, and the 13 "UW Colleges," which only have freshman and sophomore curricula. There are UW "Centers" in every county that lacks a comprehensive campus or doctoral insitution, which serve the Extension.

So what did the news say? The video online says "students at UW schools will pay more next year" and gives figures for undergrads in Milwaukee and Madison. "Schools" is at best ambiguous, and the sentence suggests all but could mean some. The text is better, clarifying that the increase does not affect the UW Colleges. In the report that I actually heard on TV, there was specific reference to an increase at "colleges" which is at best misleading.

Also, none of these reports, going back to the AP report or the UWS press release, captures the ways in which tuition varies among students at a campus. The press release and AP at least are precise enough to refer to resident undergraduates, whose tuition is lower than out-of-state students or grad students. But a majority of the comprehensive campuses charged differential tuition, attaching greater rates to students of particular schools and colleges. There are also segregated fees that vary by campus, which are paid as part of the tuition bill although they are not technically part of the tuition. And at least when I was a student, there was not just a flat fee to attend, regardless of the credit load. If you took an overload schedule of 21 credits, it cost more than auditing a one-credit summer class. So this idea that your tuition went up X dollars has a lot of built-in assumptions.

McClellan, McCain...

Just a few thoughts, not as developed as I would like...

First, McCain. I've been saving up a thought from a few days ago when McCain was criticizing Obama on foreign policy. Two salient critiques: (1) it demonstrates unfitness for the presidency that Obama would meet with leaders of adversary countries without preconditions; and (2) he hasn't been to Iraq as often as McCain.

Obama in July was in a debate and he was asked whether in his first term as president, he would meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Obama, apparently not wanting to overlawyer the question, said "yes" when he probably should have said, "Will I? Well, anything can happen, so I can't commit to that, but it would be fair to say that as a matter of policy I would be inclined to talk with our adversaries, and under appropriate circumstances, I would go and meet leader-to-leader with those states you mentioned." None of it is literal anyway. "Preconditions" is a term of art. "I will meet but only if I can being a Secret Service detail" is not considered a "precondition" though literally it is one.

Getting to the point, Obama took a little crit. On the margins, that's justified. But in essence, what he articulated as policy is pretty standard. The countervailing view, that meeting with, say, an Assad, gives the guy prestige and makes him a winner just by the fact that he got to talk to you, is really silly. It's considered a credible view, but it makes sense only in exceptional cases. If a person runs a country, has for more than a week, the world recognizes their government, and they haven't just done something so egregious that the world is withdrawing its ambassadors in protest, you talk. Talking may eventually be something you want, and if you set the rules in advance that talking is a victory for them, then it will be. I don't understand this fearful, counterproductive foreign policy view that wants to define every eventuality as a failure except for the unobtainable ideal of having all your wishes come true without effort or compromise. Why is there prestige for them in just talking to us? I'd say, "hey, I've met with thousands of people, and nearly every minor head of state, what's so special?" You can meet with someone and dis them. Or you can not meet with them, and talk about them constantly, which lends a lot of backhanded prestige.

Again, trying to focus here on what I wanted to say, Obama's perspective is pretty mainstream. He's got good advisors. He's given some high-profile foreign policy addresses. He basically gets how this stuff works in the mainstream DOS framework. You can disagree marginally, or disagree fundamentally. But one thing it's not, is embarassingly naive. So for McCain to assert that this was a failed test, and a disqualifying one, is either extremely disingenuous from someone promising straight talk, or way out of touch, from someone who never showed much originality or nuance on foreign policy. It shows a lack of preparation or honesty on his part. Plus, the don't-talk unless they pay a toll first doctrine is so third-term-Bush, it's an instant club for Obama to hit him with (which is why he had to come back later and nuance it).

Speaking of clubs for Obama, number (2) on this topic is Obama's untraveledness. Again, the reply is, you John went to a marketplace with a kevlar vest and 100 troops and helicopter gunships to protect you, and you couldn't tell that it wasn't really safer than main street USA, so either you're not making the most of those trips to learn something, or you need to spend more time at home, so you understand the comparisons you're making.

Second, McClellan. I'll try to get this out quick and not get distracted. The responses to this: (1) Ari Fleischer makes the rounds with some talking points, which boil down to: "Garsh, it's like it's not the same guy; I don't know what happened to him; he was always happy to spout our lies, er, um, information, before; he must just be spiteful now." (2) A dozen media bozos say what amounts to, "I find it hard to remember my own performance more than one or two days back, but as I recall, I was pretty comfortable with my performance then, so it must be that I did nothing wrong, you know, we asked questions, we did our homework, we had the issues pretty much mastered that came to us from the White House and the mainstream of the pro-war Democrats. No one really saw an issue then, at least no one that I paid attention to." So the Bush team goes ad hominem and avoids the substance. The media puts its hands over its eyes and repeats circular rationalizations. Neither seems very persuasive.