ATS Rentals Review

I recently rented a Sony camera from ATS Rentals. The way it works is that you order online and ATS ships the equipment to a location you choose. This was imperative for me because I was not able to transport equipment to Tampa in a cost-effective way, so I had the camera shipped to my uncle in Orlando, who kindly drove up to assist me with the film.

The process was extremely easy and sending the package back was a breeze. UPS actually lost track of the return shipment for a period of time, but ATS contacted me and once I gave them the information from my UPS drop receipt they told me not to worry about it and that it was between them and UPS. A few days later I got a message that it had all been resolved.

I left some of my own equipment in the box and ATS even shipped it back to me! It was a great experience and I'd recommend them, just as they were recommended to me by award-winning Athens, GA filmmaker Chris Ethridge.

If I had to complain about something, I'd like it if you could search their site by feature set so that I could browse all the cameras with similar features (1080p capabilities plus external microphone, for example) without having to look through other cameras that don't fit my needs.

Michael Mandel on Innovation

Michael Mandel breaks down the State of the Union's focus on technological innovation, arguing that the US should focus on areas where we already possess a big competititve advantage over the rest of the world.

I'm not really in a position to evaluate the wisdom of that position, but I do think it's worth looking at the bigger picture here. American commentators are constantly fretting that "health care spending" and "education spending" are consuming larger and larger shares of our national income. Supposedly this constitutes an "unsustainable" trajectory that will eventually bankrupt us.

However, if you look at the macroeconomic situation that's actually being described by these measures, what's happening is that the economy of the richest, most prosperous country in the world is being devoted more and more to hospitals, universities, and research facilities. It's hard to see why that's a problem; in fact it's basically what you'd expect to happen.

I personally don't see the US as facing a choice between clean energy research and biomedical research - I think we can do both and do them well. But the big problems with these things come on the production and consumption side, not the development side.

The problem with our medical system isn't that it's expensive - it's that a lot of the stuff we spend money on isn't actually useful medical care. Ditto education spending - it's not that we need to spend less money, it's that we need to address the areas of our education system that don't work very well.

Of course the most useless and wasteful spending in in government actually also happens to be the area where we pour the lion's share of our federal R&D money - military technology. The US could shift 70% of its military R&D to trying to create leprechaun unicorns and still get more out of those dollars while remaining the largest and most advanced military in the world for the foreseeable future.

In Praise of Vagueness

Matthew Yglesias notes today that a number of commentators are chiding Obama for being too vague in the State of the Union and not offering enough specific policy proposals.

I'm all for bold strokes, but on issues like tax policy there just isn't anything to be gained by laying out a detailed plan. The President can describe the basic principles that would lead him to support and sign a tax reform bill, but anything more specific than that gives his opponents something to shoot at before his supporters have time to load their rifles.

The State of the Union is usually a place to describe goals, not tasks. One of the worst things about Bush's SOTU speeches is that he routinely threw in specific tasks he wanted to accomplish and then he would just sort of abandon them later for no obvious reason.

Remember Mars?

Blogs I'm Reading

Just coming out of a long blogging hibernation, and still quite focused on editing the film, I nonetheless am going to try to return to general-interest blogging and I thought the State of the Union would be a good opportunity to let you know what I'm reading and will probably be commenting on in the near future.

I don't really have much to say yet about the SOTU myself except that I found it unusually good and that I continue to be impressed by Obama's clarity and incisiveness at the podium. Certainly a contrast to Paul Ryan who evoked nothing so much as LaVar Burton reading from a YA novel set on Capitol Hill.

Here's who I'll be watching for reactions:

Matthew Yglesias

One of my favorite bloggers from way back when, MY has boucned around a bit but has found a good niche as the Center for American Progress' "name" political blogger. He's good on almost everything and great on applied political philosophy and other generalist-type topics.

Progressive Fix

Readers who know politics might be surprised to see Raul Groom's alter ego linking to Will Marshall, who's something of a pariah in true lefty circles, and for good reason. But I've always found Marshall's analysis cogent and sober-minded, unlike so many who call themselves "centrist" and "pragmatic." The time may well be coming that the Will Marshalls of the world can again find common cause with those of us on the true left. At the very least, the PPI doesn't put out the same old crap most Liebermanite orgs push on us.

Pandagon

Issues of feminism and misogyny don't get a lot of mainstream airtime these days, but feminine self-determinism and human rights are still at the forefront of the progressive agenda, and Amanda Marcotte is one of the leading lights of my generation's feminist movement. She's often bombastic, sometimes petty, but always sharp and uncompromising in pointing out the absurdities and injustices of our male-dominated culture.

Center of the Universe

Warren Mosler is best known as the idiosyncratic creator of a long-running line of high-performance cars, but he's also a finance wizard and one of the brightest stars of the school of economics often called "Modern Monetary Theory" or MMT. Closely aligned with L. Randall Wray's Center for Full Employment and Price Stability Mosler offers daily takes on everything from Federal Reserve policy to currency and commodity markets.

I hope some of you come to enjoy reading these sites as much as I do in the coming year. Leave your own suggestions in comments!

Me and Angelo Dundee

So...

[that's a joke - apparently I say "So..." at the beginning of every interview question I ask. What can I say? I'm a pro.]

As you probably know if you're reading this blog (which was defunct until very recently) I've recently filmed an interview with Angelo Dundee, the great trainer of fifteen world champions including Muhammad Ali.

It was a great experience, and once I'm done with all this editing I hope to post a longer description of everything that happened in Tampa. Right now, though, I'm focused on getting the clips cut down, the sound in place, etc.

Since that process will probably take some time, I thought I would provide a short, rough clip for everyone to see that indeed I DID conduct the interview and did not just con everyone out of a bunch of money. The clip is of Angie describing his introduction to the world of boxing via the great trainers he worked with as a kid, including Chickie Ferrara, Ray Arcel, and others.

You'll notice the sound is really bad - that's because I haven't cut in the sound from the good mic; this is the multidirectional Panasonic on-camera mic that records things like me scratching my eye. The final version should sound much better (fingers crossed.) Also the full 1080/60p resolution was too much for blogger so this version is considerably lower resolution than the final cut will be.

This clip is a little over a minute - the whole interview is around two and a half hours. Further updates as developments warrant. Thanks a lot for your support everybody!

A Man Drives a Plane

A lot of liberals, myself included, have made note of the hypocrisy of militaristic conservatives who don't seem to see why a white man flying a plane into a government building is a form of terrorism.

That's obviously one point to be made here - if a black guy trying to ignite a bomb in his underpants deserves to be treated as a violent form of political expression, then so does a white guy who crashes his plane into the IRS. But it's worth asking the question - what good does such an attitude do us in either case?

Perhaps instead of arguing that white Christians who spout some half-baked political bullshit before murdering should be labeled terrorists, we should be asking whether dark-skinned Muslims who spout some half-baked political bullshit before murdering should be thought of, in most cases, simply as criminals.

Why Not Lennox?

Not blogging recently because of a number of long-term projects eating up my time not least among them my long-term "chasing kids, cooking dinner, then eating too much and passing out after reading two paragraphs of a book" project.

One of my more productive projects right now is my attempt to put together a documentary about the Patterson Era in the heavyweight division. I've watched every meaningful heavyweight championship fight from 1956-2002 (and I'm currently holding my nose through the insignificant ones). I've plowed through books by Arthur Mercante, Sr., Angelo Dundee, Ferdie Pacheco, and a laundry list of other boxing people who can't write a lick but have eight million stories to tell.

During that time, I've become consumed by one question: why is Lennox Lewis so lightly regarded, historically speaking? Here is a man who held some form of the heavyweight title for almost the entire period from 1993 (when he beat Tony Tucker to become the WBC champ) to 2003, when he stopped Vitali Klitschko on cuts and retired with the Patterson belt. He fought absolutely everyone there was to fight, and was beaten twice - two early knockouts to second-tier fighters whom Lennox would later rematch and destroy.

"Who was the best?" and "Who has the best resume?" are not the same question. Kobe Bryant may well retire with a better resume than Michael Jordan; few will ever argue that Kobe is better than MJ.

Still, and discussion of athletes must begin with the question of who did the most in his career. During the Patterson era, there's no question the top dog is Ali, for so many resons. But after that, doesn't the discussion have to quickly turn to Lennox Lewis? Who did more?

Not Holmes, who put together a great run from 1978 (when he squeaked by Ken Norton to win the WBC title) to 1983 (when he squirmed away from a tough, slick but strategically hopeless Tim Witherspoon). First of all, you don't get to Valhalla by ducking guys, and Holmes ducked more than his share at the end of his reign. He would have been better off fighting the best and taking his medicine when it came in the form of Mike Tyson than burdening the world with those two mindbendingly strange and boring decision losses to Michael Spinks. (Seriously, watch those fights if you want to know how something can be "mindbendingly strange" and also "boring" at the same time. On second thought, don't.)

Certainly not Mike Tyson or Evander Holyfield; good fighters who also happened to be Lennox Lewis' age and who between them turned in three stink-bomb performances against Lewis. Holfield's first Lewis fight resulted in one of the great screw-job points draws in boxing history, allowing him to keep his belts after a fight he clearly lost and also allowing him (and thus his handlers, who included Don King) to command a larger share of the purse in the rematch (also a convincing Holyfield decision loss, this time scored that way.) The less said about Tyson's effort against Lewis the better. Suffice it to say that the fight was a tactical mismatch and that Tyson gave no sign in the fight that he ever could have contended with Lewis at any point in the latter's reign.

Floyd Patterson himself had a good career, but only a silly old white-haired ex-trainer who watched him beat Ingemar Johansson to end the 358-day reign of the only white heavyweight champion of the Patterson era would ever try to make the case that he was better than Lennox Lewis. Lewis would have destroyed Patterson, who was small and easy to knock down even for his era.

So more and more the focus of what I'm doing is falling on Lennox Lewis rather than the rest of the era. I'm not super-excited about that because there are already some Lennox docs out there that do a decent job telling his story (though none of them are particularly good films), but that's the direction things seem to be going in nonetheless.

Just thought I'd share.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

When I was in the eleventh grade I voiced a theory, whose hypothesis I had subjected to the usual rigorous four-second cogitation period, that all poetry was about death. The idea greatly upset my English teacher; naturally I immediately adopted the half-baked argument as if it were revealed scripture.

The following year I wrote a paper on the role of sleep (and its obvious analog, death) in Updike's "The Centaur." My thesis had, as far as I could tell, no support of any kind in the existing critical literature.

To fulfill the requirements of the assigment, I invented sources that said the things I wanted them to say. I even invented a quote by George Bernard Shaw, an excellent, witty and believable one.

My teacher caught me without much trouble. Here, readers who did not grow up as babyfaced white boys in the south in the 1980's probably are wincing in anticipation of some great cataclysm of shame and disgrace.

Those who did grow up as I did are smiling a knowing, self-satisfied smile. There was, of course, no comeuppance. My teacher never directly confronted my about my deception, instead setting up a farce of a "supplemental final exam" in which she provided me with the research materials to write an essay on no notice. I have no idea what asinine, patronizing tripe I chose as my thesis. I knew it would satisfy my teacher.

I did not speak to the assembled graduates and well-wishers the day I received a diploma I did not deserve, despite the fact that a spontaneous groundswell of support had surfaced among the senior class for my inclusion in the list of presenters. The administration, in their only policy move made during my tenure for which I have an iota of respect, nixed the idea of allowing a known swindler and con artist to address a crowd of four hundred of central Virginia's best and brightest.

Incidentally, I stand by the lies I told. Updike WAS writing about a man drifting in and out of consciousness. The fact that this central fact was ignored by critics for decades doesn't change its salience.

High school WAS stupid, an endless parade of nonsense that no sane person would ever countenance. It was a time of slumber, in which the various manifestations of the self interact with one another in absurd, obviously counterproductive ways. Some things are sorted out Nothing is learned.

Now, years later, we drift off to sleep. With all our poetry and music, dripping with false significance, what do we know even of this small death, to which each one of us has traveled and returned countless times?

The question had not been taken up by English speakers to any great degree in 1994, and to my knowledge the field remains in a state of advanced disrepair. The most universal psychological phenomenon on earth is, for practical purposes, still largely a closed book.

It bears thinking about.

Selah

Time and Tide

Uncle Kevin came by some time ago to comment on the previous post. He made several points that were important and incisive.

The Afghan/Pakistan region is currently one of several in which an wide confederacy of actors are operating against whom we have complaints.

[...]

It is merely the case that Afghanistan is a useful place with which to do battle with this confederacy. The local civilians merely get in the way, or are useful as methods with which to engage the confederacy.

The first bit is self-evidently true and is substantially confirmed by Filkins' account. The reason the war in Afghanistan was not a completely crazy idea a la Iraq is that Afghanistan/Pakistan really IS a reasonably convenient place to engage the coalition of groups we generally refer to as "al Qaeda." It is also self-evidently true that the United States has altogether legitimate grievances with this coalition.

However, as Uncle Kevin and I seem to at least partially agree, it is not self-evidently true that it is a good idea to use third-world battlefields to engage this coalition in a proxy war in the way that we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even if we grant paleoconservatives their fairly well-accepted assertion that American "projection of power" was crucial in bringing about the fall of Soviet communism, it would certainly seem logical that combating a diffuse transnational group of intelligence, counterintelligence, and sabotage experts would require a different approach than did combating the USSR.

After all, in a resource war based on petroleum, narcotics, and illegal weapons smuggling, is it really that hard to imagine that a coalition of wealthy hard-liners in Tehran, Sana'a, and Mogadishu might be able to outlast a group of wealthy hard-liners in Houston, Washington, and New York? The US military is big and scary, but it doesn't have any idea how to stop these guys, who have billions of dollars and are able to "project power" merely by convincing some poor grieving person that the best way to honor their brother's memory is to blow up a bus.

And of course it is always the civilians who bear the real cost of war, though even the sort of semi-idyllic bribery-based warlordism I described in my earlier post was and is bad enough for the Afghan population. It should probably be specifically conceded that the war in Afghanistan HAS indeed brought real benefits to some segments of the Afghan population.

Continued US operations there will kill more people, but more importantly (from a purely self-interested POV, anyway) they will be a giant waste of time.

New ideas, please. We're losing.

Warblogging: Serious and Unserious

Serious first...

While I was traveling recently I picked up Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War" in Dulles while I was on a medium-sized layover, and it's an excellent book. Anyone who is interested in Iraq and Afghanistan, and really even in modern war generally, should read it. Filkins is not a leftist by any stretch, and anyone could probably find information in the book to support their political leanings if that's what they were looking for, but quite apart from any ideological importance the book bears witness to war as it really is and that's worth reading no matter what your convictions.

Now, putting on my Dirty Fucking Hippie hat:

It's once again my duty to point out as we read about the most recent improvement to the Awesome War of Good Neighborliness that the war in Afghanistan, despite being substantially less stupid on its face than the war in Iraq, is unlikely to ever produce any outcome that could reasonably be described as "good" and that any operation undertaken today is likely to have the long-term effect of killing a large number of people for no real reason at all.

If you read through the linked article, you might notice two things. One is that some pretty important strategic realities are papered over with Newspeak (emphasis mine):

That mistrust [of the Marines by the local Afghan population] stems from concern over civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military operations as well as from a fear that the troops will not stay long enough to counter the Taliban.

First of all, this use of the term "concern" reminds me of the way dentists love to use the word "discomfort" to mean "pain." "Discomfort" is when you're shifting in your bus seat because your ass is sweaty. A steel drill boring into your tooth is painful.

In the same way, if someone kills your brother with a big-ass bomb, and you happen to run into the bomber on the subway, it's unlikely the ensuing dialogue will prominently feature the word "concern." Presumably you'd be angry. In a murderous rage, even.

Meanwhile, it seems unlikely to me that the people who are "concerned" over the large number of locals being killed by the Marines are the same folks worried that the Marines won't stick around long enough to finish the job. It seems more likely that those are two distinct groups with distinct interests, who need to be approached in (at least) two different ways.

The second thing you might notice upon reading the article is that in an article of some 1500 words, one paragraph is spent actually describing the goals of the mission:

Once basic governance structures are restored, civilian reconstruction personnel plan to focus on economic development programs, including programs to help Afghans grow legal crops in the area. Senior Obama administration officials say creating jobs and improving the livelihoods of rural Afghans is the key to defeating the Taliban, which has been able to recruit fighters for as little as $5 a day in Helmand.

I'm tempted to say that the first clause in this graf is doing all the work, but actually I don't think that's the case. My limited but not totally impoverished knowledge of asymmetric warfare suggests to me that when the US military really focuses on restoring "basic governance structures," the results are usually pretty good. Marines grumble a lot when they're asked to do "nation building" (later caricatured in the article as eating goat and drinking tea with locals), but the results, tactically speaking, can often be surprisingly impressive.

The problem, almost always, comes next - "helping Afghans grow legal crops" and the like. International agricultural development is pretty good at solving technical problems - reducing transaction costs through the use of scrip, etc. - but it's not great at solving problems like "the entire economy of this country is based on the production of an illegal crop." There's just no sustainable path forward for Afghanistan to join the international economy as a normal agro-export country.

When the US leaves, whether that's in ten months or ten years, Afghanistan will revert to its natural state as a poor, landlocked country with a weak central government and constant warring factions that mostly operate by bribing each other's soldiers to change sides before any real battles can happen. If great powers would leave the place alone for fifty years, maybe something better would come along, but in the meantime it's all just wishful thinking.

The Afghani economy, outside of opium and pot production, doesn't really exist. Subsistence agriculture, a little wheat. . . there's just no there there. No platoon of Marines, however well-trained and well-intentioned, is going to fix that fundamental problem.

What they can do is kill a bunch of people for no good reason. And that, their training and intentions notwithstanding, is what they will do.

Raul's Reflection #5

One of the functions of wisdom is to serve as a corrective against certain tendencies. This is one reason that ideas that are said to be "timeless" are not so at all. While people are conditioned in a certain way, a wise saying may truly be wise - helping to bring humankind away from old patterns and into a new phase of thought and action.

When "wisdom" becomes merely a saying, which reinforces the way people already tend to think, it ceases to be wisdom and becomes at best a useless plaything and at worst an obstacle to further development.

A strong medicine, taken for too long after the passing of an illness, may make the patient sicker than he was to begin with.

Obama's Cairo Speech

Let me start this off by saying that I've been pleased by the first six months or so of the Obama administration. Obama is to my right on most issues, but then, that's elected officials for you. People to my left tend to get locked up in psych wards rather than elevated to political office, so I've gotten used to that.

Though there are lots of things I think Obama could be handling better for the most part he seems to be doing a decent job with a rough situation.

In that context let me also say that the Cairo speech last week was a pretty decent attempt to lay out some basic common ground between US foreign policy thinking and the thinking of the rest of the world's people who tend to take a dim view (as I do) of most of the core tenets of US foreign policy.

That said, there was one part of the speech that gave me a case of the disappointed-headshakes, which was paradoxically the part of the speech that's being most characterized as an "antiwar" sentiment.

Near the beginning of the speech, Obama had this to say:

The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America's goals and our need to work together. Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al-Qaida and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice. We went because of necessity. I'm aware that there's still some who would question or even justify the offense of 9/11. But let us be clear. Al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on that day.

Which is pretty standard boilerplate for US foreign policy discussions over the last eight years. The statement's main drawback is that it has only a very vague relationship with reality.

The truth is, the war in Afghanistan was a war of choice. We didn't HAVE TO go invade Afghanistan. It is undeniably true that many people (including many people who are generally antiwar) felt at the time, just a few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, that we had no option other than to invade. But that simply wasn't the case. There are many paths we could have taken with regard to pursuing the goals set forth at the start of the Afghanistan invasion.

This is one case among many where the really transcendent awfulness of the Bush administration has screwed up the entire context of our discourse. The Iraq invasion wasn't just a "war of choice." It was a self-evidently absurd and boneheaded policy choice that was at the time completely unmoored from any rational, ethical or moral foundation.

Compared to the Iraq invasion, though, Afghanistan is generally thought of in the US as "Bush's good war." So it generally gets the sort of treatment that it got in Obama's Cairo speech.

I just want to make a couple quick points about this. At a very minimum, if we're going to talk about whether a decision was correct or not we should compare the consequences to the probably consequences of the main alternative course of action (in this case, pursuing the 9/11 terrorists through an international criminal investigation rather than through military action), and also to what might have happened if we had done nothing.

The three primary goals set out in the early weeks of the war were the goals of apprehending Osama bin Laden, disrupting and restricting the activities of Islamist guerillas operating in Afghanistan, and ousting the Taliban in favor of a democratic, representative government.

On the first goal, obviously we failed utterly as bin Laden is as far as anyone knows still at large. It can't really be known whether he could have been apprehended by an international criminal justice effort but it's certainly the case that he wouldn't be less in custody than he is now. In fact, it's fairly clear we could have gotten the same result if we had done nothing.

On the second goal, people generally assume that the Afghanistan invasion has done a lot to restrict the movement of guerillas in Afghanistan, but the one specific investigation of that question that I know of (Hy Rothstein's "Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare") concludes that the picture is at best mixed. The US effort in Afghanistan has been remarkably, and foolishly, focused on blowing things up rather than building the kinds of human networks that make it difficult for terrorist groups to operate, and thus it's not very clear how much we've really improved things with the invasion. Once again we can say that the international criminal investigation probably would have achieved at least the same result, if not a better one, and that doing nothing at all would not have been demonstrably worse than invading.

As for ousting the Taliban, we did that, but we never managed to replace them with anything particular, and thus in the judgment of most of the experts I've read if we were to withdraw from Afghanistan today the Taliban or some Taliban-like group would regain control of the country fairly quickly. This is the one area where you can say pretty definitively that the invasion came closer to achieving the goal than could have been achieved by doing nothing or by conducting a criminal investigation. It's not nothing, but given the costs of the invasion, high on the US side and immense on the Afghanistan side, it's pretty thin gruel.

Now, it's not logically impossible for something to have been completely necessary and yet failed to achieve any substantive positive results. There's an argument to be made that the Afghanistan war was necessary and correct despite having failed. It's just that I'd like to see someone actually MAKE that argument, instead of it constantly being assumed to be self-evidently true that a failed war was a good idea.

The Death of George Tiller

I rarely post about abortion. It falls squarely under the "dumb stuff I can't believe we're still arguing about" category.

However, after the death of George Tiller, by most accounts an extremely compassionate, courageous women's health care provider, I thought I would toss my basic thoughts on the matter out into the ether.

Many years ago, there was a consensus in this country that if a woman was pregnant she should be forced to carry the child to term and deliver it. There were laws against seeking abortions and laws against providing them.

As the rights of women advanced throughout the 60's and 70's, this consensus broke and eventually the Supreme Court recognized an affirmative right of doctors to provide abortions. Now, abortion is legal, and a comfortable majority of Americans consistently agree in polling that abortions should be legal and available to women who need them.

That's the state of play, though the large, vocal committed minority of people who want to make abortion illegal again do their best to obscure it. It is close to unthinkable that the old consensus, grounded as it was at least in part in the view that women were not fully citizens, will ever reemerge.

It's certainly possible that through the use of terrorist violence - gunning doctors down in church, say - some especially unbalanced abortion prohibitionists will be able to intimidate some doctors into ceasing to provide these procedures. What's much less possible is that Americans will ever again come around to the belief that women should be forced to carry to term pregnancies that they desire to terminate.

Given the roots of the anti-abortion coalition in the "born-again" social engineering movement sometimes called "evangelical christianity," I know as well as anyone that they will continue to fight on with whatever means are at their disposal - it is not in them to look around, consider the situation, and back down.

Count me as one lonely voice trying to wake a few of them up.

This one's over. You lost. If this truly is an inhuman horror, it is one that, despite your ironclad conviction to the contrary, your God can clearly abide.

Pick a different battle. The world is full of injustice.

Harsh Technique Blogging

Haven't updated in a while; for that reason I'm sure my readership has dwindled to the point where I'm basically telling this to myself. That's fine; I'm writing it mostly to get it out of my head where it's driving me a little crazy.

Tons of discussion once again of "the torture debate," which I put in quotes because from my perspective I haven't seen a lot of debate, just various people rehashing various ludicrous justifications, going around and around and periodically congratulating each other on how wonderful it is that in a free society we can have open discussion and blah blah blah.

Here's how I see it. The United States of America, a government that to an almost unique degree in human history depends upon the consent of the governed, tortured people as a matter of government policy. We put people in small, dark boxes with insects crawling on them. We strapped them to boards and poured water in their faces until they broke down crying and pleading in abject fear of death by drowning. We told people we had their children in custody and threatened to mutilate their childrens' genitals.

I could go on, but really, there's no point. This happened, in part at least, because the people who authorized these policies believed that if and when these practices came to light, a significant slice of the American electorate would have trouble coming to a clear conclusion about whether such conduct is wrong, and that as a result they would get away with it.

We have seen throughout the last several years that in fact these policymakers were correct in their belief. Given enough arm-waving and bloviation about ticking time bombs and other such nonsense, many Americans do in fact appear to be able to integrate the knowledge that the United States tortured people with their image of the United States as a just and lawful nation.

This problem has no immediate solution. People who lack the moral faculties to conclude that torturing people is wrong cannot develop these faculties by continuing to run their mouths about it, or by staining the pages of academic journals with beard-stroking foolishness. What is needed is a serious exercise in self-reflection and contemplation, which can happen only in the hearts of the people who need it.

The best the rest of us can do is to stop enabling this pathetic fiction that these people are engaged in something other than evil. I am not saddled with a Manichean view of humanity and thus I can say this without fear that I am saying that these people are evil. In each person's life constructive and destructive forces are at work always. The work of conscious, terrestrial humankind is to strive to enable the good within us and to control the evil.

Occasionally it is good for people to be shocked into looking in the mirror and seeing what they are really like. It may make them angry; they may dislike the mirror or the person who held it up, rudely, to their face in a vulnerable moment.

On TV, the great perils we face are gigantic, inhuman menaces like terrorism, global warming, pandemic disease. In real life what threatens humanity is that we will be too feckless, too deluded to look in the mirror and face who we are, and what may happen to us as a result.

Time is short. Start today.

Warren Mosler and the Value of Money

In this discussion on an Yglesias thread I was reminded by another commenter of the fascinating work of one of the big three modern economists who have most shaped the way I think about economics. Kuttner is one, Taleb is another, and this guy, Warren Mosler, is the third.

The linked post is called "The Natural Interest Rate is Zero," but what it's really about, like most of Mosley's work, is how the relationship between a government and its currency is fundamentally different from every other entity's relationship with that currency.

The point he makes many times that is really quite interesting when you turn it over in your mind is that if you pay the government with cash, whether you're paying taxes or buying securities, the government shreds the money.

He does a good job going into some of the implications of that fact, but it's also fun to just sit and thing about it.

Honest Men

I once heard someone say "An honest man never won anything in a fight." I think what the guy was driving at was something akin to "Nice guys finish last." He meant it, in other words, as a statement about the value, or lack thereof, of honesty.

It occurred to me today while I was out walking that there's another, more interesting way of looking at the statement. It could be a statement about the value, or lack thereof, of fighting.

The Power of El Rushbo

In my life as a Richmonder I've had occasion to know many a Rush Limbaugh fan. There are lots of reasons to like listening to Rush - I'll admit I used to find him mildly entertaining myself back in the day. But there is a certain type of person who really LOVES Rush, who is fanatically devoted to him and cannot allow himself to understand that the vast, vast majority of the "commentary" that Rush offers is just made-up inflammatory nonsense.

I knew a guy back when I was first starting out in the computer biz who was one of these Limbaugh dittoheads. His name was Nick and he was a little angry guy who was reasonably intelligent but not particularly curious and who had a massive Napoleon complex that required him to tell everyone what to do and how to do it at all times.

I remember once he gave me a ride somewhere in his little dirty white sedan and he had Rush's radio show on in the car. I, being young and arrogant myself, sort of thought that everyone must listen to Rush the same way I did - appreciating his cracked perspective, but understanding that his views didn't represent any coherent, serious political philosophy.

I made an offhand comment that somehow revealed my point of view, and Nick blew up. It was instant and impressive - his face got red, spit flew from his mouth, and he began an impromptu tirade about how I had been brainwashed by the liberal media to believe that Rush was a fool when in fact he was the only sane man in the entire media landscape.

It's important to reiterate - Nick was screaming at someone who, at that point in his life liked Rush Limbaugh. To him, nothing less than fanatical, unquestioning devotion was sufficient to separate me from the massing communist hordes poised to tear the country apart with their fascist campus speech codes and capricious environmental regulations.

Over time, as the old Republican base of old-style racist white male voters has aged and begun to die out, the GOP has become increasingly dependent on guys like Nick whose worldview is ENTIRELY shaped by talk radio, and Rush in particular.

The dilemma for the GOP is that there just aren't enough guys like Nick. As the years roll on, the Republicans are going to lose more and more elections as long as they cling to a narrative that most of the population finds moronic. The trouble is, Dittoheads now represent a decent chunk of the Republican coalition. They vote at a high rate, so it's possible that Rush Limbaugh fans represent a large plurality of the Republican electorate in many elections. If those people were to desert the party suddenly, the Republicans would be doomed.

Unfortunately, unless they can leave Rush behind somehow, or at least marginalize him to the point where he is no longer the de facto leader of the party, they're doomed anyway. I hope they keep him around - an extended run as a permanent minority party seems like the proper fate for the modern GOP.

Grief #1

It's now been a full two weeks since I received the news that my good friend Nathan had died.

So far I would take a bit of issue with the idea of the "stages" of grief, at least as I've heard of them. I definitely see that the early days of knowing of his death were characterized primarily by a refusal to admit, emotionally to myself, that he was gone.

These days I'm definitely very angry. However, my experience of the anger is in a sense an expression of denial. It is not that I feel angry at Nathan for dying, or even for taking his own life. I feel angry in the way that we used to feel angry together, an unfocused, juvenile dissatisfaction with the obvious cravenness and parsimony of the world and the people in it. I feel angry so that I can be close to the ferocious, passionate intensity that made it so hard for me to reach out to Nathan while he was alive, to drink it in one last time.

So I am angry with my kitchen for being messy, and at my family for expecting me to do my job and clean it up. I am angry with my parents for all the things they ever said to me that I didn't want to hear, and also for all the things that they didn't say to me that I needed to hear. I'm angry with my high school teachers for not understanding me. I'm angry at my high school crushes for not falling in love with me. I'm angry with my cats, the trees in my yard, my muddy lawn, my cracked driveway, and my ridiculous heap of a car.

I wish I could write all this on a card and tape it to my chest so that the people who cross me in minor, insignificant ways over the coming weeks will understand that yes, there IS a reason why this normally easygoing guy is looking like he might punch them for blocking his path in the produce section of the grocery store.

The reason is because when I stop being angry and go back to being myself, then Nathan will really be gone. And I'm not there yet.

Raul's Reflection #3

When someone says "I don't understand" it is usually assumed that he is describing something he has tried and failed to do.

It's worth remembering that he may be describing something he has succeeded in doing.

Raul's Reflection #2

People often say "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Pessimists like the phrase because it confirms their pessimism. Cynics like it because it excuses their intellectual laziness.

I myself, being an optimist, like the phrase too. Who, after all, would want to travel to hell on an unpaved road?