A future John Kerry? A convincing tale from a veteran returned from Iraq

The Agonist || thoughtful, global, timely

I am not angry with our President, but I am disappointed.

I don't expect an easy solution to the situation in Iraq, I do expect an admission that there are serious problems that need serious solutions.

I don't expect our leaders to be free of mistakes, I expect our leaders to own up to them.

In Iraq, I was responsible for the lives of 38 other Americans. We laughed together, we cried together, we won together, and we fought together. And when we failed, it was my job as their leader to take responsibility for the decisions I made -- no matter what the outcome.

My question for President Bush -- who led the planning of this war so long ago -- is this: When will you take responsibility for the decisions you've made in Iraq and realize that something is wrong with the way things are going?

Mr. President, our mission is not accomplished.

Our troops can accomplish it. We can build a stable Iraq, but we need some help. The soldiers I served with are men and women of extraordinary courage and incredible capability. But it's time we had leadership in Washington to match that courage and match that capability.

I worry for the future of Iraq and for my Iraqi friends. I worry for my fellow soldiers still fighting this battle. I worry for their families, and I worry for those families who will not be able to share another summer or another baseball game with the loved ones they've lost. And I pledge that I will do everything I can to make sure they have not died in vain and that the truth is heard.

Thank you for listening.

The making of a non-scandal, Kerry and the intern

The Agonist || thoughtful, global, timely

I started out as an ambitious young woman inspired by politics and the media. I have ended up disenchanted with both. I don't mean to dredge up old news by writing this, and I am not trying to create any now; I don't intend to discuss it again in public. But for me, this painful experience will be hard to forget. It may be only a minor footnote to the campaign, but it has changed my life completely.

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The Kerry-intern fake scandal -- not a true conspiracy, more of an emergent phenomena. It was plausible -- Polier notes Kerry's flirtatious nature and Bostonians often intimate that's not a new thing. It was exciting. It was untrue.

Polier traces the roots of the story to a misquote of her father, an old friend who made a mistake, a sleazy UK Sun journalist, and the need to feed the news/entertainment machine.

War and youth

The New York Times > Books > Sparing No One, a Journalist's Account of War

... "The story in this war is: it's really ugly and chaotic, it's being fought by 18- to 24-year-olds who would otherwise be at some frat party hazing people," Mr. Wright said during a visit to this town (beside Camp Pendleton) that he arranged. He was interviewed with two marines with whom he had witnessed the war.

"Our country is so divided," he continued. "We swung after 9/11 from `those military guys are idiots' to `those guys are heroes.' Either way, you're not examining them as people. The fundamental thing I've tried to write about these guys is I was fascinated by what they thought of the world when they weren't shooting their guns."

His observations draw a complex portrait of able young men raised on video games and trained as killers...

...Mr. Wright's admiration for the marines runs deep. "I really did fall in love them when I first met them," he said. "I didn't want to be friends during the writing process. A reporter's motto is `charm and betray.' But I didn't hide any of the warts. I was hard on them in the writing process. And I'm glad, because I like them."

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Special forces warriors are usually in their late twenties to late thirties. These guys are young, teenagers sometimes. Young men are not known for their judgment, if they were then car insurance would be cheaper.

Reining in the Reagan Madness

The New York Times > Opinion > Krugman: An Economic Legend: "In the late 1970's most economists believed that eliminating the high inflation then prevailing in the United States would require inflicting a lot of pain: the economy would have to go through an extended period of high unemployment and depressed output. Once the inflation had been wrung out of the system, the unemployment rate could go back down. And that's exactly what happened. In fact, it's instructive to put a graph showing the actual track of unemployment and inflation during the 1980's next to a figure from a 1978-vintage textbook showing a hypothetical disinflation scenario; the two look almost identical.

Ronald Reagan didn't decide to inflict that pain. The architect of America's great disinflation was Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman. In fact, Mr. Volcker began the process in 1979, when he adopted the tight monetary policy that caused that record unemployment rate. He was also mainly responsible for the recovery that followed: it was his decision to loosen up on the money supply in the summer of 1982 that set the stage for the rebound a few months later.

There was, in short, nothing magical about the Reagan economy. The United States did, eventually, experience an economic miracle — but not until Bill Clinton's second term. Only then did the economy achieve a combination of rapid growth, low unemployment and quiescent inflation that confounded the conventional economic wisdom. (I'm aware, by the way, that this plain statement of fact will generate an avalanche of angry mail. Irrational Clinton hatred remains a powerful force in American life.)

It's a measure of how desperate the faithful are to believe in the Reagan legend that one often reads conservative commentators claiming that the Clinton-era miracle was the result of Mr. Reagan's policies, and indeed vindicated them. Think about it: Mr. Reagan passed his big tax cut right at the beginning of his presidency, and mainly raised taxes thereafter. So we're supposed to believe that a tax cut passed in 1981 was somehow responsible for an economic miracle that didn't materialize until around 1997. Apply the same timing to the good things that happened on Mr. Reagan's watch, and you'll discover that Lyndon Johnson deserves the credit for 'Morning in America.'

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Emphases mine. "Faithful" is the right word, Reaganism has many of the features of a cult.

Yesterday I wrote about Reagan as Chaunce the Gardener; enabling Gorbachev was a real acheivement, albeit completely alien to the ways of the Reagan faithful. Reagan also somewhat simplified the tax code, though his successors destroyed those simplifications (I think that was pure Reagan and reflected well upon him.) Deregulation was important in America, and I think that had far reaching consequences both good and bad. (Perhaps, despite Krugman's words, even in the 1990s.)

But Reagan was no deity. It's too early to tell if he was even an above average president. Clinton may end up ahead a hundred years from now -- if the entities of that future care to study our entrails.

The stigma of lung cancer and the nature of human reason

BBC NEWS | Health | Lung cancer carries severe stigma

The stigma attached to lung cancer can have far reaching consequences for patients, research suggests.

Oxford University researchers found many patients felt people blamed them for their illness because it is so strongly associated with smoking.

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Any campaign claiming a particular outcome is sometimes the consequence of a undesired behavior will cause most humans to reason that the converse is true -- that the outcome very strongly implies the undesired behavior. Humans do not understand correlation.

Lung cancer and smoking. HIV infection and unprotected anal intercourse. Adolescent misbehavior and neglectful parenting.

Having made this inference, humans will further infer that the person, having "caused" the bad outcome, is themself bad. Not only are they unworthy of comfort, they are deserving of shame.

This is how human cognition works. As noted in a prior post, our cognition is not so different from that of our fellow mammals (dogs). It evolved, it "suffices", it is profoundly imperfect. Logic and reason can adapt or modify our intuitive thinking, but that takes training and education. Reason and logic are often uncomfortable precisely because they contradict common human cognitive structures. Hence the strong preference for evangelical conservatives for teaching obedience, discipline, doctrine and memorization rather than reason and logic.

Dogs again -- not so far behind?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Collie dog's word power impresses

A very smart collie dog named Rico has stunned German researchers by learning words with the apparent flare of a young child, Science magazine reports.

Rico understands more than 200 words and can work out the meaning of new ones, by a process of elimination.

What is more, Rico can often remember new words after a whole month - even though he has only heard them once before, the scientists claim.

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This article quotes some who deprecate Rico's capabilities. They are unconvincing. Canine genius or not, he teaches us some fascinating things about the evolution of language and cognition.

A bit of breeding for puberty, longevity and language capabilities and we might produce a quite different dog. I wonder if the dog would thank us or not.

DeLong on Seymour Hersh's U Chicago speech

Torture and Rumors of Torture: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

...If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today. The scariest part: "[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened.

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I think Hersh is quoting from another blogger, but forgot to link to the author. It's worth going to DeLong's site to read this.

Reagan - Chaunce the gardener

The New Republic Online: Unorthodox - Jonathan Chait

...The missile treaty was no fluke. Alongside Reagan's (justly) celebrated steely revulsion toward communism sat a wooly-headed, almost peacenik, sensibility. Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon's 1991 biography of Reagan--celebrated for its fairness by left and right alike--revealed Reagan's attachment to anti-cold war movies like The Day After and War Games, which inveighed against the horrors of nuclear war in the most syrupy way. He had a particular affinity for the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien arrived and forced the United States and Soviet Union to make peace. Reagan invoked this trope so frequently that Colin Powell, his national security adviser, would tell his staff, 'Here come the little green men again.' Reagan even brought up the movie in his 1988 summit with Gorbachev--who, understandably, didn't know quite what to make of it--in the course of proposing a deal by which both sides would destroy their entire nuclear arsenals. All in all, his view toward the cold war was far different than the 'moral clarity' that is currently ascribed to him.

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Peter Seller's 1979 movie "Being There" was a masterpiece about a very simple gardener who, by virtue of cryptic responses and a good suit, is elevated to the presidency. At the end of the movie Chaunce the Gardener strolls across a pond. Not around, across.

The movie was based on a book that preceded Reagan, but Reagan inspired the movie.

The movie may be the best possible guide to Reagan's contributions to history. I suspect, however, we really owe as much to Howard Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev as to Ronald "Chaunce" Reagan.

How Reagan & Gorbachev ended the Cold War

Ron and Mikhail's Excellent Adventure - How Reagan won the Cold War. By Fred Kaplan

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In which Reagan is given some credit, in an odd sort of way, for peace with Russia and the end of the USSR.

Antidote to the republican deification of Reagan

BBC NEWS | Americas | Critics question Reagan legacy

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Nice round-up by the BBC.

Terraforming - Polynesian style

The New York Times > Science > Tasty, and a Great Source of DNA

There is much evidence that the Lapita people took R. exulans along for food. Unlike European rats, Dr. Matisoo-Smith said, exulans do not swim and dislike wet conditions. So it is unlikely that they accidentally reached the islands through infested ships.

As a food source, the rats do not require much effort. The Lapita would have just had to release them on the islands they settled, and rats being rats, there would soon be plenty for eating.

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Quite a few science fiction writers have based their "space faring cultures" on the Polynesian peoples. Using a bioform to prepare a habitat (thereby wiping out many local species) for colonization is a classic terraforming move.

Remembering Reagan - as he was

Salon.com | The Reagan legacy

As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter.

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A good article. Reagan was nastier than I'd remembered.

Apple - AirPort Express - Yes.

Apple - AirPort Express

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Yes. As soon as the first set of disastrous bugs are fixed. I wish there were a firewire port too, but I think iPod firewire is passe. I'm betting the next generation will be all USB 2.0. I wonder if the USB connector on this device will allow one to eventually broadcast off an iPod ...

No kidding, GWB may really qualify as a war criminal

INTEL DUMP - Archives 2004-06-08 - 2004-06-14

Jess Bravin reports in Monday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about a classified legal memorandum prepared by the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel that appears designed to find every legal workaround possible to justify coercive interrogation and torture at Guantanamo Bay. This report comes in the wake of disclosures about other memoranda — one written in early 2002 by UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo while with the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and a second written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — justifying the White House's overall Guantanamo Bay plan. This latest memo, signed in April 2003, goes much further than those though — it specifically authorizes the use of torture tactics, up to and including those which may result in the death of a detainee...

...The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."

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If you want to be a Nazi, this DOJ document suggests how to get away with it. I rather doubt Bush is going to sign any international war crimes treaty -- he'd be convicting himself.

The term "war criminal" is used so carelessly that it's lost most of its meaning. The bombing of Cambodia may have been a war crime, and Kissinger might thus qualify as a war criminal, but I can't think of many other clearcut post-1980 examples (though I'm no historian). Except for this one. Even I'm a bit stunned.

Ashcroft should go now. Bush should not be reelected. If he is, no American with half a brain can claim they "didn't know".

On redistribution

The Atlantic | January/February 2004 | Are We Still a Middle-Class Nation? | Lind

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The disparity between rapid productivity growth in mechanized sectors and slow productivity growth in human-service jobs produces Baumol's disease—named after the economist William J. Baumol. According to Baumol, in a technological economy falling prices for manufactured goods and automated services eventually increase the relative cost of labor-intensive services such as nursing and teaching. Baumol has predicted that the share of gross domestic product spent on health care will rise from 11.6 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2040, while the share spent on education will rise from 6.7 percent to 29 percent.

The shifting of relative costs need not in itself be a problem. If Americans in 2050 or 2100 pay far more (as a percentage of their spending) for health care and education than they did in 1900, they may still be better off—if they pay correspondingly less for other goods and services. The problem is that as the relative cost of services like education and health care rises, more and more Americans will find themselves in service-sector jobs that, unlike the professions, have historically been low-wage...

... In the absence of some system of private or public redistribution, then, there is no guarantee that rising national productivity will spontaneously and inevitably produce rising incomes and wealth for most Americans, rather than just windfalls for the fortunate few.

Since the 1970s inequality of both income and wealth in the United States has increased dramatically. As Paul Krugman has observed in The New York Times, a Congressional Budget Office report shows that from 1979 to 1997 the after-tax income of the top one percent of families climbed 157 percent, while middle-income Americans gained only 10 percent, and many of the poor actually lost ground. The share of after-tax income that goes to the top one percent of Americans has doubled in the past three decades; at 14 percent, it roughly equals the share of after-tax income that goes to the bottom 40 percent. The concentration of wealth at the upper levels of the population has been even more extreme....

... It is doubtful that in any society with universal suffrage the majority is going to sit on the sidelines and watch, generation after generation, while a handful of investors and corporate managers reap almost all the benefits of technological and economic progress.

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Argentina.

This is a good complement to Reich's Book, except Reich backs away from redistribution. A bit of intellectual cowardice, as his text makes the case even more strongly than this article.