The Compulsive Explainer

The Democrats are not Strong Enough to Govern

Joe Conason in Truthdig

By bowing to Sen. Joseph Lieberman and his obstructive pals in both parties on health care reform, President Barack Obama has confirmed what Republicans always say about Democrats: They simply aren’t strong enough to govern.
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While observing the worst expressions of Lieberman’s character, the public has learned about the president’s defects, as well. Three years ago, Obama supported the Connecticut senator when few liberals would and then defended his senatorial privileges this year, even after he had endorsed and campaigned for John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008. Now Lieberman has repaid those favors with spite—and that smart, tenacious, cool leader in the White House did nothing but flinch.

Society has Become Evil

You may think that I have become pessimistic and paranoid - and maybe even senile. And no doubt this is true - especially the senility part. But I prefer pointing my finger in the other direction. One catalyst to this has been listening to I, Claudius, about the degeneration of Roman society about the time of Christ. As he keeps repeating: there were good Romans and bad Romans - but the bad ones got the upper hand, and easily out-smarted and and out-maneuvered the good ones - who seemed incapable of realizing what they were up against: evil. This was not something they could comprehend, being basically good themselves - and a little stupid.

Back in the earlier days of the Roman Republic, the good had the upper hand, but in the later days, just the opposite was true. Societies have inertia: once they start moving in a particular direction, they tend to keep moving that way.

American society has become evil - and this is no new observation. Obama's former pastor said "God damn America!", and he meant it. Obama, who had moved from the slums of Chicago to the White House, had to leave that honest, critical part of him behind.

The value of any social theory rests on its ability to describe social trends that were not obvious before. Evil is a concept we all understand easily, because we have all been exposed to it - and hopefully we have learned from our experience. As Freud discovered, we like to project evil onto external enemies - but we need to turn that finger around and point to ourselves - and I am no different. I am as evil as anyone else, because I am all too human.

Privacy on the Internet

Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google. On a talk show he said:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Bruce Schneier, who is a security guru with his own company, responded:
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Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
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I can't put it any better than that.

However, I suspect that most care little about protecting their individuality, or that of others - and would rather live without it.

Americans Have Rejected Science

Wall Street Journal: Climategate: Science Is Dying; Science is on the credibility bubble

Daniel Henninger makes some good points here, but the reader, as always, should be aware of its source: the Wall Street Journal, not the most unbiased of sources. The important point for me  is simply that Americans have rejected Science - along with many other things - using the latest minor scientific scandal as their justification. They have abandoned the modern world, mankind's greatest accomplishment, and are gladly embracing ignorance again - with the business system acting as cheerleader.

He is saying, very cleverly, that climate science is bunk, and will be the end of science itself. He is right about the last part, but not the first - but Americans, with their seriously impaired reasoning skills, are not likely to notice the difference.

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Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
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The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Liberals are Useless

Chris Hedges in Truthdig

The photo is of a German woman buying a box of candy with Obama's picture on it.

Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

He goes on to say:

The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

He is referring to his fellow liberals here.

I have Chris Hedges latest book: Empire of Illusion, the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle. Like many others, he describes the pickle we are in.  But he doesn't back off enough to get an historical perspective on how we got here.

Neil Postman, who followed in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, did a much better job of this. He masterpiece was Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). It was translated into eight languages and sold 200,000 copies worldwide - but has since has been smashed by the landslide he warned us about: television culture.

The Struggle between the Power Structure and the People

This has been the primary struggle in the last 50 years in American, and Power has won handily, without anyone even being aware of it.

This may strike many of you as inevitable and correct, after all, power is power and it should be in control. But I beg to disagree: power is not everything, by a long shot. Our Christian heritage made this clear—or used to make it clear. Power is just one of the many important things in the world, and certainly not the most important thing.

Let's put this in context. Power, in the sense I am using it here, is a human thing. Something similar exists in other animal societies: chickens have their pecking orders. But in the human realm it is over-developed: it is the primary fuel of war and destruction. And any society that makes it its primary obsession is doomed to destruction. History is clear about that.

If America wants to survive, it must become more human and serve the human needs of its neighbors, near and far. And not be solely obsessed with its own power. This is not just unrestrained optimism, it is common sense - if Americans could tip-toe outside their borders and look around they would see that this is so.

Internally, America must make other values more important than the obeisance to power—and not be afraid to do this. It will have to start by being aware of other values and become a truly value-conscious society—not a purely power-conscious society.

America Punishes it Enemies - Whether They are its Enemies or Not

This makes perfect sense to Americans. After all, they are in charge of the world, and they get to decide who is good and who is bad - and to act accordingly. Their greatest fear is to be seen as weak, and their strongest impulse, therefore, is to make people fear them. They want others, especially small, weak countries, to treat them as gods - but for some reason they don't want to do this.

Right now, for example, the Taliban is considered an enemy of America - very flattering for the Taliban, who were put in power by America, during its conflict with the USSR - and who have no power outside Afghanistan and Pakistan - and no plan to destroy America itself. It just wants complete control over its own area - in other words, self-determination. These are not very nice people, by any standards - but hardly a threat to the world, or to America.

It has always opposed the opium trade: successfully, when it was in power - while America's allies, the local warlords, have profited mightily by it. True, it has modified this policy, because of extreme pressure from the American military, and now only taxes these warlords - but that is only an temporary expedient.

Meanwhile, the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan suffer - both from the Taliban and from American missiles. But this is only collateral damage, and not important. America is destroying its enemies, and that is all that matters.

Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Community Organizer We Elected President?

Robert Scheer in Truthdig

The world is not listening to me. I keep saying Obama has a split personality, but they keep believing in Obama's populist persona - while his real personality is very much aligned with the powers that be. 

Finally, a leading Democrat, in this case Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, has a good idea for monitoring the Wall Street fat cats who all but destroyed the American economy, and the Obama administration condemns it. 

Dodd wants to take supervisory power from the Federal Reserve, which is controlled by the banks it pretends to monitor, and put it in the hands of a new independent agency. That makes sense given the Fed’s abject failure to properly monitor the financial sector over the past decade as that industry got drunk on greed. As Dodd’s spokeswoman Kirstin Brost put it: “The Federal Reserve flat out failed at supervising the largest, most complex firms.” But White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee frets that taking power from the Fed would cause financial industry “nervousness.” Isn’t that the whole point of government regulation—to make the bandits look over their shoulders before they launch their next destructive scam?

Not so in the view of Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, who blithely insists that the Fed “is the best agency equipped for the task of supervising the largest, most complex firms,” despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. There is some irony in the fact that the largest of those complex firms got to be “too big to fail” because of the radical deregulatory legislation that Wolin drafted during his previous incarnation as the Treasury Department’s general counsel in the Clinton administration. Wolin is now deputy to Timothy Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed in the five years preceding the banking meltdown looked the other way as the disaster began to unfold.

A Common-Sense Attitude Towards Terrorism

From Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram

Bruce Schneier is a security guru, a real one. And he has been pointing out, over and over, that we need to use some common sense when dealing with terrorism, and not become obsessed with counter-terrorism theater. 

Real counter-terrorism work, however is ordinary police work, and most of it is boring, routine stuff. Unfortunately, Americans have become addicted to drama and spectacles - and uninterested in plain facts. Banking, for example, used to be boring until it discovered how to be wildly profitable and therefore dramatic. And the Bush administration made the War on Terror dramatic too. But I am digressing. Schneier says:
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Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.
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We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice -- not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

Supporting real security even though it's invisible, and demonstrating indomitability even though fear is more politically expedient, requires real courage. Demagoguery is easy. What we need is leaders willing both to do what's right and to speak the truth.

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.
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Today, we can project indomitability by rolling back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. Our leaders have lost credibility; getting it back requires a decrease in hyperbole. Ditch the invasive mass surveillance systems and new police state-like powers. Return airport security to pre-9/11 levels. Remove swagger from our foreign policies. Show the world that our legal system is up to the challenge of terrorism. Stop telling people to report all suspicious activity; it does little but make us suspicious of each other, increasing both fear and helplessness.
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Counterterrorism is also hard, especially when we're psychologically prone to muck it up. Since 9/11, we've embarked on strategies of defending specific targets against specific tactics, overreacting to every terrorist video, stoking fear, demonizing ethnic groups, and treating the terrorists as if they were legitimate military opponents who could actually destroy a country or a way of life -- all of this plays into the hands of terrorists. We'd do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don't need to pretend otherwise.

How Congress Doesn't Work

From Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics by Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, page 15.

In mid-2003, Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, attempted to rush a ninety-page pension reform bill through his committee. Not having an opportunity to read the bill, the Democratic members fled the committee room to review the legislation in an adjacent library. An irate Thomas called for an immediate vote and passed the vote with only one Democrat, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), still in the room. When Stark objected to Thomas's tactics, Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.), a majority party committee member and Thomas ally, told Stark to "shut up." The seventy-one-year-old challenged McInnis, twenty-one years his junior, to "make him" shut up and then repeatedly called him a "little fruitcake." Chairman Thomas took the unusual step of calling the Capital Police to subdue Stark and eject the Democrats from the Library.

I was in Pete Stark's congressional district when I lived in Silicon Valley, and I was proud to have him as my representative. At first, I thought this book would be useful for me, but I quickly got bogged down in Academic minutia. When social scientists try to be too objective, they get boring.

I have written about this before: HR 3200 from a Systems Design Perspective and High-level Critique of HR 3200, where I pointed out that software development techniques could be used to improve the writing of laws.

No one noticed. Americans seem to think the legislative process is so messed up it cannot be fixed.