The Compulsive Explainer

Political Instability in America

I am now listening to a course on Nazism. The instructor is spending some time describing the political instability in Germany after WWI. Germany came apart at the seams, and was glad to welcome the Fuhrer who would same them from themselves.

In his introductory remarks, he said he had been teaching his course for 20 years, and it had not gotten any easier. I suspect that is because the situation in America is becoming uncomfortably familiar.

A friend of mine down here just got back from a trip to the States, and he said he was amazed by how fearful Americans had become. A neighbor of his bought three freezers and filled them with ammunition in Ziploc bags. They had plans to block invasion attempts of their area, even if they had to fight tanks.

This morning, I read this in the NY Times

Weekend Opinionator: Are Democrats, Too, Facing a Civil War?

Not only are Republicans fighting Democrats, they are fighting each other. On the Republican side:

– Charles Mahtesian and Alex Isenstadt at Politico: “In what could be a nightmare scenario for Republican Party officials, conservative activists are gearing up to challenge leading GOP candidates in more than a dozen key House and Senate races in 2010. Conservatives and tea party activists had already set their sights on some of the GOP’s top Senate recruits — a list that includes Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida, former Rep. Rob Simmons in Connecticut and Rep. Mark Kirk in Illinois, among others … Activists predict a wave that could roll from California to Kentucky to New Hampshire and that could leave even some GOP incumbents — Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is one — facing unexpectedly fierce challenges from their right flank.”

On the Democratic side:

“MoveOn.org is sending out emails today seeking more contributions for its campaign to defeat any Democratic senator who does not fully support Obamacare,” reported The Washington Examiner’s Byron York on Tuesday. 

Later:

MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben says the group has raised $3,578,117 for the project and is thinking of new ways to punish errant Democratic lawmakers.

“It’s a huge sum, and the clearest signal yet that any Democrat who helps Republicans filibuster health care reform will face an enormous backlash from the grassroots,” writes Ruben. And now, working in conjunction with Howard Dean’s old organization Democracy for America, MoveOn is starting a drive to take away the committee chairmanships of any Democrat who fails to live up to MoveOn’s progressive standards. “Many of these senators hold coveted committee chairmanships that give them significant power within the Senate,” Ruben writes. “Our friends at Democracy for America have launched an open letter urging Senate Democrats to strip committee chairmanships from any Democrat who filibusters health care.” Ruben says that more than 66,000 MoveOn and Democracy for America members have pledged to contribute.

Meanwhile, Obama, the great nobody, keeps himself in the background. He doesn't want to dirty his hands.

Lemaître, Georges-Henri

I have a hard time accepting religion, due to my religious upbringing. And some hard-line scientists feel the same way, insisting that one cannot be both a scientist and religious. My course on Dark Matter, Dark Energy, proved a biological section with this summary of Lemaître. It shows clearly that one can be a first-class scientist and have a religious life at the same time - strangely enough.
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Lemaître, Georges-Henri (1894-1966) Belgian priest and physicist. Lemaître was the first person to take seriously the initial cosmological singularity - what we now call the Big Bang, which he referred to as the "Cosmic Egg" or the "Primeval Atom," Friedmann was the first to derive the equations governing the expansion of the universe in general relativity, but Lemaitre's 1927 paper derived Hubble's law on theoretical grounds and emphasized the singular beginning of the universe. It wasn't until 1929 that Hubble and Humason would demonstrate that the universe really is expanding.

Lemaître led a colorful life. His studies were interrupted so that he could Serve in the Belgian army in WorId War 1. Afterward, he simultaneously studied physics and prepared for the priesthood. His studies took him to the University of Cambridge (England), Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After Hubble and Humason's discovery, Lemaître popularized his Primeval Atom theory in lectures in Britain and the United States and became a well-known figure. Later in life, he became president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and served on the Second Vatican Council. 

Cold, Cold Heart

From the New York Review: From Amerigo Vespucci to Darryl Zanuck

Hank Williams:

I try so hard my dear to say
That you're my every dream.
Yet you're afraid each thing I do
Is just some evil scheme
Some mem'ry from your lonesome past
Keeps us so far apart.
Why can't I free your doubtful mind
And melt your cold, cold heart.

Abdolkarim Soroush

From the New York Review

Grave, soft-spoken, the exiled Iranian religious scholar Abdolkarim Soroush is a living record of the Iranian revolution. As a fanatical young supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini, he helped purge Iran's universities of leftists and secularists in the early 1980s. Later, as a founder and editor of Kiyan, a monthly journal of religion and philosophy, he upset his orthodox revolutionary colleagues by arguing that Islamic law should be viewed as a product of its time, subject to alteration as society evolves. Soroush has since denounced Iran's system of government, what he calls its "republic of faith," as harmful both to Islam and to politics, an argument that led to his expulsion from Iranian academic life in 2000 and, more recently, an extended sojourn in Europe and the United States. Until this year, driving troublemakers abroad has been a useful and politically inexpensive way for the Islamic Republic to deal with dissent. Iranian history is full of people who lost their relevance after leaving Iran. But this, so far, has not happened to Soroush.
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Soroush's open letter was addressed to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and it conveyed an ironic awareness of their respective standing as religious authorities. Although Khamenei's supporters refer to him as a grand ayatollah, the highest rank in Shiism's clerical hierarchy, he is known among leading Shia religious scholars to be an indifferent theologian. Since he became Supreme Leader on Khomeini's death in 1989, Khamenei has favored a dry, severe interpretation of Islam—the interpretation favored by the conservative constituency he has courted, and which is rejected by Soroush, who is an authority on the thirteenth-century mystic poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi.

Obama is in Bed with the Bankers

From the New York Review: They Didn't Regulate Enough and Still Don't

Practically everyone now agrees that the steep recession of the last two years was caused, at least in part, by lack of government oversight of the financial industry. The half-dozen or so federal agencies that are responsible for regulating the financial community ignored the dangerously risky activities of bankers and traders; so did the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury.
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President Obama promised soon after taking office to reregulate the financial markets in a comprehensive regulatory bill. The administration released its proposals on June 14 in "Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation," a lengthy white paper—not extensively covered by the press—that was overseen by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, who served as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration.^[2] Rarely has an administration had a better opportunity to explore deeply how modern financial markets work and have evolved, and how readily they can be abused.

On balance, the white paper, though it contains several worthy ideas, was disappointing. Offering little more than a wide-ranging summary of existing regulatory proposals, it did not attempt to analyze why the crisis occurred or was so intense; nor did it identify in any detail the rules or regulations that were lacking that might have prevented the crisis. The President, in a mid-September speech on Wall Street, exhorted the financial community to support reform, but essentially reiterated last June's proposals.
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Banks and mortgage brokers that issued mortgages to home buyers were able to sell them immediately to investment banks and thus were less concerned about the creditworthiness of the borrowers than they traditionally had been. They profited from the mortgages regardless of whether they later went into default. This was possible because the investment banks then packaged these mortgages into complex securities with differing interest rates to make them highly attractive investments to a variety of pension funds, mutual funds, international investors, and even subsidiaries of their own banks. Money market funds, which promised almost riskless investments and catered especially to small investors, lent money to these investment banks and others at low rates, locking themselves into loans that were riskier than they realized. Low interest rates promulgated by the Federal Reserve in the early 2000s to stave off a recession also encouraged more lending.
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What is clear, however, is that the Obama administration has lost leadership of the issue of reforming Wall Street.

In fact, much of Wall Street has already returned to the aggressive practices that were widespread before the crisis, including high levels of compensation and the creation and trading of risky derivative contracts. And profits of financial firms, such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, often based on the same sorts of trading as in the past, are for the moment rebounding.
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This entire article is interesting reading, and educational too. We had hoped Obama would save America - the whole world hoped that - but this is not to be.

The NSA Boondoggle

New York Review: Who's in Big Brother's Database?

I worked for a big boondoggle myself for 15 years: the Federal Aviation Agency, back in the Sixties and Seventies. The last time I visited DC, I saw the huge FAA offices just south of the Smithsonian. I looked at them and said to myself "I know what is going on there: nothing!" But the FAA was a paragon of efficiency compared to the National Security Agency (NSA).

NSA has had some outstanding successes:

Unfortunately for General Douglas MacArthur, the codebreakers were able to read the communications of Spain's ambassador to Tokyo and other diplomats, who noted that in their discussions with the general, he made clear his secret hope for all-out war with China and Russia, including the use of nuclear weapons if necessary. In a rare instance of secret NSA intercepts playing a major part in US politics, once the messages were shown to President Truman, MacArthur's career abruptly ended.

But it also deceived the rest of the government on several occasions. For example, in Vietnam:

The most troubling pattern, however, is that the NSA, through gross incompetence, bad intelligence, or deliberate deception through the selective release of information, has helped to push the US into tragic wars. A prime example took place in 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed that two US Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, one on an eavesdropping mission for the NSA, were twice attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Those attacks were then used to justify the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. But Aid cites a top-secret NSA analysis of the incident, completed in 2000, which concluded that the second attack, the one used to justify the war, never took place. Instead, NSA officials deliberately withheld 90 percent of the intelligence on the attacks and told the White House only what it wanted to hear. According to the analysis, only intelligence "that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials."

And in Iraq:

Not having learned its lesson, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq the NSA again told the administration only what it wanted to hear, despite the clearly ambiguous nature of the evidence. For years beforehand, the agency's coverage of Iraq was disastrous. In the late 1990s, the Iraqis began shifting much of their high-level military communications from radio to buried fiber optic networks, and at the same time, Saddam Hussein banned the use of cell phones. That left only occasional low-level troop communications. According to a later review, Aid writes, NSA had "virtually no useful signals intelligence on a target that was one of the United States' top intelligence priorities." And the little intelligence it did have pointed away from Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. "We looked long and hard for any signs," said one retired NSA official. "We just never found a 'smoking gun' that Saddam was trying to build nukes or anything else." That, however, did not prevent the NSA director, Lieutenant Gen. Michael V. Hayden, from stamping his approval on the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate arguing that Iraq's WMDs posed a grave danger, which helped prepare the way for the devastating war.

And in 9/11:

Based on the NSA's history of often being on the wrong end of a surprise and a tendency to mistakenly get the country into, rather than out of, wars, it seems to have a rather disastrous cost-benefit ratio. Were it a corporation, it would likely have gone belly-up years ago. The September 11 attacks are a case in point. For more than a year and a half the NSA was eavesdropping on two of the lead hijackers, knowing they had been sent by bin Laden, while they were in the US preparing for the attacks. The terrorists even chose as their command center a motel in Laurel, Maryland, almost within eyesight of the director's office. Yet the agency never once sought an easy-to-obtain FISA warrant to pinpoint their locations, or even informed the CIA or FBI of their presence.

But worst of all, because of widespread use of advanced encryption by the major powers, NSA has switched to spying on us:

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

The Spy in Your Smartphone

From New Scientist

It's a camera, diary, navigator, and social secretary rolled into one. Se if your smartphone falls into the wrong hands, how much could it reveal about you?

THERE are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.

Gone Pishing

These changes could well be exploited in much the same way that email and the internet can be used to "phish" for personal information such as bank details. Indeed, some phone-related scams are already emerging, including one that uses reprogrammed cellphones to intercept passwords for other people's online bank accounts. "Mobile phones are becoming a bigger part of our lives," says Andy Jones, head of information security research at British Telecommunications. "We trust and rely on them more. And as we rely on them more, the potential for fraud has got to increase."

These days, the latest smartphones incorporate GPS, Wi-Fi connectivity and motion sensors. They automatically download your emails and appointments from your office computer, and come with the ability to track other individuals in your immediate vicinity. And there's a lot more to come. Among other things, you could be using the next generation of phones to keep tabs on your health, store cash and make small transactions - something that's already happening in east Asia (see "Future phones").

According to the UK government's Design and Technology Alliance Against Crime (DTAAC), 80 per cent of us carry information on our handsets that could be used to commit fraud - and about 16 per cent of us keep our bank details on our phones.

Meanwhile mobile commerce, or M-commerce, in which phones are used to transfer money or pay for shopping, is already expanding rapidly. Cellphone users in Japan can buy train or airline tickets with their handset, while people in Afghanistan, the Philippines and east Africa can use their handsets to transfer money to each other. "M-commerce is coming, and the expectation is that it will become prevalent in the UK and other European countries within four years," says Joe McGeehan, head of Toshiba's research lab in Europe.

The Tico State of the Nation Report

I have said so many bad things about Costa Rica I want to balance my reporting with something positive for a change. And this really impresses me: their Estado de Nacion. I quote here from the Nov. 6 Tico Times:

This began as an independent joint effort of Costa Rica's four public universities and the national Ombudsman's office...The program and its report have been hailed by professors, professionals, and decision-makers as one of the few things that consistently work well and can be depended on in a country where things can easily go awry. 

I wish to note in passing that none of Costa Rica's private universities, which are large and prosperous, were involved. Evidently, they are not interested in their social responsibilities, and many of them little more than diploma mills - which many students prefer, because they are cheaper and less demanding.

The painting at the top of this posting was on the front cover of the report. This is not typical Costa Rican art, of which it has practically none, and it is not flattering to Ticos in general. The setting is a wedding party. The groom is a familiar type: a man with more money than brains: a scary figure. The bride is familiar in any culture: the woman with no brains at all, only interested in fancy clothes. The dominant figure is a young woman dressed in a skimpy black dress, looking at her cell phone. Here again, a familiar figure. Two agricultural workers are deliberately placed in the right background where you can hardly see them. This is because they are now a small and unimportant part of the national economy. In the left background is a male tourist and his temporary Tica girlfriend - also a common sight in the capital, where some hotels cater to them. In the left foreground is a poor fat woman, another common sight. She is trying to look seductive.

The economic part of the report is encouraging. Costa Rica has made giant strides since the financial crisis of 1980-1982, which devastated all of Latin American. The bad news is the unemployment is rampant - and more wealth has been concentrated in the upper economic strata.

The ecological report is sobering. Costa Rica likes to bill itself as an ecologically advanced country. The report says this is simply not true. Costa Rica produces far more carbon than it locks up in its forests.

Ticos are losing faith in their democracy. Their government is not working for them. The report has the statistics.

Crime rates are up. In 2008, homicides reached 11 per 10,000 people. That represents the highest number of murders in the nation's history and surpasses the widely acknowledged limit of 10 murders per 10,000 that determines whether a country is labeled safe or unsafe.

Mexicans are Trash

If you have ever lived close to an Hispanic Ghetto, you know what I mean: the worst kind of people end up there. This is true of any ghetto, the worst places imaginable. It is hard to imagine anyone wanting to help them.

However, I had a girl-friend in Silicon Valley who was Mexican-American, her family had worked as migrant agricultural workers. But she was different: a nun trained as a nurse, who dropped out of that life and became a social worker. But she still defended her people vigorously. I didn't dare say anything critical about them. After a while, I got to see her point: these people deserve a chance for a better life - after all, they are people. It was hard to argue with that.

During the Contra War in Nicaragua, a Christian organization called Witness for Peace sent observers to Nicaragua to witness the atrocities perpetrated by our allies. I had to admire their guts. Who doesn't want to help the underdog? I am still on their mailing list and donate a little to them. Recently I got another appeal:
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In May, Roberto died in the Arizona desert while trying to make his way from his native farming community in southern Mexico back to a low-wage restaurant job in Los Angeles. The Witness for Peace staff in Mexico consoled his dismayed father, Pantaleon-an elderly man with tears streaming down his checks - after he was told the search and rescue operation for Roberto in the Arizona desert had been called off.

"A person should not have to risk their life to work," Pantaleon said as he wept. Roberto was a good son and a hard worker. He had a dream shared by the children of farmers the world over - to own a piece of land to farm alongside his parents. 

But by the time he turned sixteen, Roberto already understood that jobs paying a living wage in post-NAFTA Mexico were almost non-existent for farmhands like him. That year. he risked his life and followed another 500,000 Mexicans north, across the border and into the U.S.

After five years in El Norte, Roberto missed his family and native Mexico and so traveled home this April. His father, Pantaleon, was overjoyed to see him. But without enough money saved to buy a piece of land and with no jobs to be found, Roberto left again for the border.

He died just days later.
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A sob-story obviously, but a true one. I can see both sides: the desperate migrant workers who only want a job, and the Americans who want to keep foreigners from destroying their way of life. 

One cannot reason with the desperate migrant workers, but one should be able to reason with resentful Americans. Unfortunately, this is not usually the case. Human rights are not something they are interested in.

People Obsessed with Power Become Weak

This is one of the oldest lessons of history, but one Americans have not learned. They became intoxicated with power, became powerful, and are now in the process of losing it. Military power is expensive and can overwhelm a civilian economy - and it keeps getting more expensive. It costs half a million a day to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan.

The details of the American decline were unique to their time and place. However, true to form, Americans were completely unaware of what was going on. And they disappeared as a people before they disappeared as a nation. The effect on the people has not been documented before, but perhaps I will help with my own observations. During the rise and fall of the British Empire, the last time this happened, no one paid much attention to the changes to British people themselves.

As a participant in the fall of America, during the last half of the last century, I can remember that time clearly - and now, in retrospect, can recall what happened to my fellow Americans. At the time, I went into shock at the horror of the situation, but now that has worn off, my mind is starting to work again.

If I have an unusual skill, it is this: I notice more of what is going on than most people; I am not well-adjusted. I no doubt inherited this from my father, who was also a loner - but noticed what was going on more than people realized. He was the fly on the wall, taking it all in, but staying out of harm's way.

The basics are simple: power is transferred from the people to the power structure. The people do not feel this loss, they feel empowered by identifying themselves with this larger identity, which has many names - including (most importantly) no name at all - only the euphoria of power that isn't really there. The people no longer exist as persons with their own identity, but they now have a powerful group identity. Once the people no longer exist, however, the nation is a hollow shell that cannot last. The nation loses its ability to self-correct itself, because it has no sense of personal ethics.

This is process is greatly assisted by television, which taught the people their new roles as non-persons: education disguised as entertainment: sitcoms. Our schools could not compete with this edu-tainment, so the young were affected most of all. They became charter members of a economy that could not last.