December 30, 2006
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
One more year in Iraq. Capped with the ignominious hanging of Saddam. The Great Hero of Crawford and the Glabrous Cheney may rejoice in their mission to destabilize the entire Middle East—for Israel, for oil, for the arms industry, and for an expansion of executive power—but the concomitant prospect for the United States of a military debacle increases geometrically each day. Responsible men and women, who bear the brunt of our leaders' scams, still haven't figured out how to switch the machinery off. Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind for the New Year is that the longer the US stays in Iraq the more difficult it'll be to get out. There's no victory to be had; but we still can choose among many flavors of defeat.
December 28, 2006
Gerald R. Ford: Not A Bad Guy
It's a little tricky to sum up Ford's brief presidency. On the one hand he helped launch the careers of Rumsfeld and Cheney, and elevated George H. W. Bush to be Director of Central Intelligence (who among many other seamy acts while there approved the murder of Orlando Letelier, carried out here in DC). Ford also, earlier in life, played a not insignificant role in the Warren Commission's whitewash of the Kennedy assassination. On the other hand, as Alex Cockburn deftly puts it, he did the least possible harm while president. I wouldn't go so far in my praise as AC, but I do think Ford was in many respects a decent person and a much better than average president. Perhaps the most underrated of the modern era.
December 26, 2006
The Good Shepherd
Some movies are bad, some are bad but amusing and worth watching anyway, some are excruciatingly bad—so bad you wish you'd known before going and saved yourself the trouble. The Good Shepherd is that bad. Compounding the misery, it's way too long with a runtime of 167 minutes. De Niro, directing, must have been trying to work out some deep antagonism for his audience, or perhaps induce the cinematic equivalent of water-boarding to put people in a receptive frame of mind for his message—and it is, I think, fair to say he has a message—that the CIA sucks. Literally and figuratively, with plenty of homoerotic overtones throughout.
December 18, 2006
Peak Oil Goes Mainstream
As usual, it looks like the US government will be the last to know something important. While the EIA continues to issue rosy forecasts for world oil supply the OPEC house organ in its latest issue (PDF) features an essay by Dr. Shokri Ghanem of Libya—their winner of "Oil Executive Of The Year" award—which puts an exclamation point next to the reality of Peak Oil. (See page 62 of the PDF.) The essay is worth noting because it doesn't include OPEC's normal ambiguity and prevarication. And since the house organ doesn't publish dissident views we can safely assume that there now exists a significant group within OPEC that's worried about Peak Oil. If they're worried, we should be, too. What catalyzed this outbreak of candor? Perhaps the fact that OPEC member Indonesia is now a net importer, but who knows... Many thanks to David W. for the heads up.
December 14, 2006
Canute By The Sea
Another scientist is worrying about an 'underestimation' of sea level rises due to global warming. Professor Rahmstorf thinks that by 2100 sea levels might be 0.5-1.4m above 1990 levels, compared to an IPCC estimate in 2001 of 9-88cm. My unscientific guess would be that Professor Rahmstorf is still too low, and too late, but that he's headed in the right direction. I'll continue to keep track of such estimates as I'm quite interested in getting a better idea of when Washington DC begins to flood. (Hokusai, btw, is one of my favorite artists—I even have a small, quite unimportant but nevertheless stylish Hokusai print that I bought when a student at the University of Chicago.)
A Housekeeping Note
I'm very pleased to be able to tell you that today Electric Politics ® receives its registered trademark. Thanks very much also to an extremely helpful examiner at the US Patent and Trademark Office who went the extra distance in getting a non-lawyer (me) through the application process. Electric Politics ® is the perfect name for this site: now it's unambiguously ours!
December 12, 2006
Revenge of the Nullities
For decades after WWII the European Bureau ruled the State Department. It snapped up those junior officers with most promise, it aggressively promoted its own, it maintained demanding intellectual standards. By the seventies an in-house revolt took the European Bureau down several notches, 'leveling' opportunities for other regional and functional specializations, making believe that all foreign service officers were more or less equal. Of course this was nonsense—the informal system limped along, albeit with somewhat lowered standards. Now, in a paroxysm of gratuitous destructiveness (the Cultural Revolution comes to mind), in the waning years of his incumbency, the Tyrant's cronies intend to finally smash the possibility of intellectual independence among US diplomats. They'll do it by rigging the entrance exam.
December 11, 2006
The Curse of Arthur Schlesinger:
The Bugaboo of Best and Worst Presidents
By Werther*
In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., Harvard professor and tea-party confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt, asked American historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from "great" to "failure." Since that time, we have been inundated by such lists, which invariably parade the ideological fashions that periodically sweep academia. As anyone who has spent five minutes in a faculty lounge would recognize, higher education is a profession so rigid and cloistered as to make Kaiser Wilhelm's Great General Staff look like an anarchists' conclave. These presidential lists also subliminally reveal the frustrated will-to-power of such chalky pedagogues, who would, if they could, become Platonic philosopher kings lording over the rest of us.
Continue reading "The Curse of Arthur Schlesinger:
The Bugaboo of Best and Worst Presidents"...
December 10, 2006
Source of The Nile
The great lakes in central Africa are shrinking. And it doesn't seem to be an ‘ordinary’ drought. "A further dramatic drop in Victoria's water levels might even turn off this spigot for the Nile, a lifeline for more than 100 million Egyptians, Sudanese and others." And that's just half the story. The other interesting bit (from an interview to be posted here in two weeks) is that the rise in oil prices is making kerosene, used for cooking, too expensive for most Africans. And there's no substitute for kerosene in urban Africa. So global warming takes away their water and Peak Oil takes away their food. Well, if a significant number of Africans are priced out of the oil market—or die off—that decrease in demand will slightly soften price rises for everyone else. But those living the life of Riley in America's suburbia might want to keep a wary eye on the dark continent: travails there point to subsequent travails here, and the typical rule that during a catastrophe the weakest die off first.
December 8, 2006
The Iraq Study Group
Contradictions within the ISG report doom its implementation (if any) to failure. On the bright side, the report strongly supports those who object to an escalation of the Iraq war into Iran. It also locates Iraq in a wider set of foreign policy problems—helpfully calling for more negotiations across the Middle East—and it offers a number of moderately important procedural recommendations to do with intelligence, budgeting the war transparently, etc. Its downside is that it tends to strongly perpetuate the view that some fine-tuning of policy associated with a continued US occupation can produce an acceptable outcome. Not only is this entirely untrue, it tends to invisibly drive policy into the very escalation the report seemingly condemns.
December 7, 2006
EP Podcast Program Notes for December
Sometimes problems become great opportunities. Last week I'd had an interview lined up, on Peak Oil, that was to be the show for tomorrow. I did the interview but decided against using it. That, however, left me without anything scheduled and less than a week to find somebody. To make a long story short I overcompensated, finding four good guests, which not only takes care of tomorrow but all of December—and that's probably extra lucky because my guess is that as December gets closer to Christmas and New Year's it's going to be more difficult to book people. Now, four interviews in one week is really a lot, I think, so I hope you all appreciate them! Here's the schedule:
December 6, 2006
John Edwards: Deserves A Second Look
It wouldn't be fair to blame Edwards for Kerry having picked him for Veep. How could he have said no? Early on in 2004 I liked Edwards quite a bit—I thought he was one of the few who understood economic issues in reasonably clear perspective (trade, jobs, class warfare), and one of the very few who could actually connect to crowds of people. He has a pastor's knack with a crowd: genuinely inspirational. Thus, with the 2008 cycle beginning to heat up, it's interesting to read speculation about another Edwards run, and in particular this item regarding his pick if he does run of former representative David Bonior to manage his campaign. Bonior is a real union guy and a good indication of the kind of tough fight Edwards may now have in mind.
A Minor Correction
If anybody was a bit dismayed at the numbers I gave for EP's overall podcast audience in my survey results post, those are not quite as low as they looked. I had eyeballed a partial count to get my median, but I now see that that estimate was a bit low; instead of 250 it should probably be around 300, perhaps slightly higher. (I prefer using the median to the average because I think it usually gives a better sense of a group, but maybe not in this case.) The median, here, doesn't capture the high volume podcasts, of which there are more than a few. So I went back and added bandwidth for September, October, and November, then figured the average podcast size for those months, divided it into the total, then divided by the number of weeks. Roughly, the average number of downloads for those months is 550 per podcast, which I'm quite happy with. And this does represent slow, but steady, growth. So not to worry: I'm working at turning us into a social force to be reckoned with!
Don't Cry For Me, DC
Google "stroke" and "crying." You'll get a lot of hits, including a few scientific papers towards the top. The thing is, what I've heard is true: having a stroke can often result in uncontrolled crying (or laughing, or both). Anybody who's watched Bush père lately has probably noticed his new tendency towards weepiness. To me, he doesn't seem well. Now, I don't have much sympathy for the guy—none, to be honest—but as a question of general human decency it wouldn't be right to make fun of him for a medical condition that's out of his control. We don't know what's happened to him; that's the point. I haven't seen any comment about this, at all, but I have seen endless loops of his most recent crying jag on TV, with much derision accompanying it. I wish the chattering class would just ignore him instead, and move on to other things. (Photo credit: CNN, for fair use.)
December 5, 2006
Survey Results
Thanks very much again to everyone who participated in the EP survey! The results are extremely interesting, and most helpful in specifics for programming guests and conducting interviews. Thanks especially for all the comments from the end of the survey in the free-form entry boxes. And just a word about accuracy: while this is an unscientific self-selected sample, the survey results very closely track EP site logs for percentages of domestic and international traffic and thus it seems reasonable to suppose that other dimensions of the survey results are not wildly inaccurate. It also seems more than reasonable to suppose that in an anonymous survey such as this, with EP's audience, that respondents are not inventing answers. With that: On to the summary.
December 4, 2006
Rising Seas
It's interesting to compare the BBC report on past melting of the Antarctic's Ross Ice Shelf with this New Zealand report—closer to the research action—which preceded it by a few days. Though the BBC generally isn't shy about gloom and doom stories it seems to have fairly drastically edited the salient detail: "You can go from full glacial conditions to open ocean conditions very abruptly." With a resultant rise in sea levels of an estimated 5-17m. I've been pointing out for a while in this space (for example, here) that it makes sense to speculate about the possibility of a very rapid sea level rise in our near term future, and I'm glad to see that at least some scientists are doing just that, even if reports of it get a bit garbled along the way.
What They Fear Most
I feel sorry for the Post reporter who wrote this story about new recommendations on ballot procedures from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST's report (pdf), written in passive tense bureaucratese, guarantees cognitive lock-up. Still, it's an important document and well worth noting because it will form much of the basis for federal Election Assistance Commission standards—due in 2009 or 2010—which despite being voluntary are in fact required by most states. Since NIST's report strongly suggests that only paper ballots or a voter certified paper 'receipt' can be accurately recounted (if necessary), I would expect that prior to the 2008 election many states will move to early adoption of NIST compatible guidelines. A medium-sized and actually very important victory for democracy!
‡ It appears from wire service press reports that the Election Assistance Commission may have rejected NIST guidelines at the last moment, but I'm not sure whether this is in fact the case, or whether any further review may be part of the process—until a more detailed account of what happened becomes available I would not jump to any conclusions.
∗ Sure enough, and I'll toot my own horn on this (one sometimes has a sense for bureaucratic momentum), while just about everybody wrongly reported that the NIST guidelines had been rejected, it turns out that in a (not-so) stunning reversal they have been approved, more-or-less, after all.
December 3, 2006
A Certified Idiot
I guess that when I dream about a news item it must mean something unusual. This article in yesterday's Washington Post struck a nerve if only because I had trouble figuring out whether Lurita had checked with the White House before trying to cut the GSA's budget for its Inspector General. Odds are she did, but either way it's bad news. And for those who've forgotten recent history—it was not so long ago that David Safavian, the former GSA Chief of Staff, was convicted for a scam he had going with Abramoff (a fact, btw, that should have been in the Post's story). Bad news, and bad timing.
December 1, 2006
Electric Politics Survey (now closed)
I'd been considering trying to do a short survey for some time, and when Bluehost (which hosts EP) set up a survey for its users using Zoomerang, I thought I'd try Zoomerang's free, slightly limited product. Actually, its limitations shouldn't be a factor here. Please take a moment for this anonymous survey—it will only take five minutes or so—to help me understand you better and make improvements. Thank you!
