12.20.06
Posted in Uncategorized, Culture at 2:53 am by steve
The early morning skies were gray, close. Sometimes the clouds never bothered going aloft; drops of dew hung in the air, condensed, dripped like subtle water torture. These were the miserably cold days. When the clouds would clear, the low, pale sun would sputter far to the south. The wind would howl in the trees at night, and by dawn the air was bitter cold. Fingers and toes would numb in this weather. As November wore out and December wore on the sun spent ever less time in the sky. By the solstace, days were short; nights long.
This had its compensations. In the dark, it was much harder to see who you were shooting, so shooting became waste of ammunition. The trench was cold, mucky, miserable, boring at night. But it was relatively safe. Misery and boredom took on an almost blessed sense because they were drawn in contrast to the daytime chores of shooting and collecting dead bodies, of mixing muck with blood by the very act of walking in the trenches.
By Christmas Eve, darkness fell late in the afternoon. Even the local farmers who tilled these fileds the year before would have eaten an early supper in darkness. Perhaps it was drizzling in some places. Or it was clear. We would like to imagine that where the lines were drawn on the fir-lined hills there was snow on the ground, snow on the trees. We would like to imagine that the earth held a hushed silence, the kind of silence that only a snow-covered evergreen wood can create.
From out of the chilly, damp darkness there came a sound. At first it was too dim and distant to make out. Then it became a familiar sound, yet it was distinctly different. If one listened closely one might have heard
Stille nacht, heilige nacht
The words sounded strange. Yet the tune carried the meaning. Men in the trenches joined in
All is calm; all is bright.
‘Round yon virgin, mother and child,
Before long, men were putting down their rifles, coming out of the trenches, and joining in song.
Holy infant so tender and mild,
Sleep in Heavenly peace,
Schlaf in Himliche ruhe.
The song shared, the spell was cast. Soldiers shared food. In the flat fields they played a game of soccer. They played freely and happily, with makeshift goal posts and without real refs. They spoke different languages, but they learned to sing the same song. And this song, for one brief moment became bigger than their differences in language, their differences in religion, their differences in nationality.
For some brief moments the men realized that there are things they share that are bigger than themselves, bigger than their differences, bigger than their fears. For some brief moments the qualities that bind us together as caring humans in a world that too often seems punishingly miserable trump the weaknesses that cow us and make us fear, hate, or loathe people we do not know - people who are not like us.
Time wore on, the men tired, they returned to their trenches. Eventually the pale sun slipped once more above the horizon. As they could yesterday the men in the trenches could see each other whenever their helmets popped above the edge of the trench. And as they did yesterday they shot. Yet for many of them it was just a little more difficult to shoot at someone they sang with or played soccer with. So maybe the mortality rate dipped a little bit. Maybe the petty officers got in a jamb because the war stopped being quite so violent, quite so brutally mortal.
News of the affair reached the officers thirty miles behind the lines. And they were outraged. The men stopped shooting at each other? “What gives them the right to do that? Heads will roll. How, after all, is one expected to run an army if the soldiers fail to shoot? How is one to exercise national policy if the troops drop their rifles and start singing, at the drop of a hat? It is outrageous!”
Orders go out: anyone who sings with the enemy will be courtmartialed. Or shot. And that takes care of the problem. No more Christmas singing. Mortality rate stays high through the rest of the war. Millions die. Four years later, the lines are the same. Germans surrender, and the conditions that spawn the next world war are drawn up at Versailles by the same men who prohibited Christmas singing with the enemy.
The soldiers who sang with the enemy, however, started a movement that eventually united Europe, not as a single entity, but as a group of nations with distinctive backgrounds, histories, languages, and cultures. As Europeans they saw that they shared enough common interests that they could set aside their differences. This emphasis on common interest to the exclusion of differences is a central idea in liberalization. It caused Europe to blossom, much as a similar idea had done in America.
Liberalization began to sweep the globe. China, India, and a number of nations in Southeast Asia became more open. They traded with the west. And they engaged more in the same liberalizing ideas. The same liberalization trend swept the urban areas of many Islamic nations, not the least of which were Iraq and Iran.
But somthing began to happen in America. Americans learned to fear and hate people who were not like themselves. Perhaps it happened spontaneously, or perhaps a certain class of leaders understood that fear is the easiest means by which to control a culture, especially a culture that is unused to physical deprivations. Fear of anything can be a powerful motive force in manipulating men. Were it not so, the threat of courtmartial would have no ability to stop men from singing “Silent Night” with the enemy on Christmas.
When we forget how to sing “Silent Night” with the people we fear, we forget how to be truly human. We lose sight of the bright and shining gift that is the subject of that song.
My Wednesday Worry this Week is that I will not get what I want for Christmas. I am one of the people who is fortunate enough to lack for nothing I need. What I will value most about the things I unwrap on Christmas will not be the value of what they are, but the value that was represented by the fact that someone thought enough to associate me with an object.
What I really want for Christmas is the kind of world where we all lay down our rifles and arise singing from our trenches. One where we share a common vision and sing a song whose meaning we all grasp, one we can all cling to tightly. One where we actually embrace our cultural differences, and where we set aside our incompatible points of view in order to work together on things that matter to us all.
There are people who really are working to create the same kinds of Christmas presences as the soldiers shared when they got out of their trenches. And I realize that I am not yet one of them. My own hope is that more of us work to see the vital humanity we share and overlook the differences in background, religion, nationality, beliefs. When we see the real humanity in each other and treat each other as we would be treated, that is when we receive the real gift of Christmas in our own lives.
I can wish for no greater gift than this for us all. Let us choose to see in each other what we see in that manger, calm and bright.
Merry Christmas.
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12.18.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:41 pm by steve
Kevin Philips in American Dynasty tells an amusing story of how George Bush, at the end of his career as Texas Governor has all the documents of the office palletized and shrink-wrapped. He then moves them to the “Bush Presidential Library” where they are unavailable for perusal. But all of this turns out to be in controversion to a state law requiring that he turn them over to the state librarian for indexing and preservation. A suit ensues. Bush loses, he relinquishes the documents.
This is a good story to keep in mind when one reads the great flap about Flynt Leverette’s quashed Op-Ed piece. Leverette was an undersecretary in Bush’s administration who was in charge of Iran policy. And his piece is assumed to be a blistering indictment of the administration’s inept handling of Iran. The implications of snuffing out this important piece cannot be overstated. This is but the tiniest tip of a Titanic information - busting iceberg.
Two years ago I read an obscure story about how a giant pile of documents that had once been public domain began disappearing from the D.C. library where historians went to study them. These were all documents that were long ago classified, but were later were declassified. One document, for example was a CIA report dating from early in the Korean war concerning Chinese troop levels or effectiveness that materially underestimated their effect. It showed how seriously limited the skills of the CIA were in its early days.
Turns out these documents were being reclassified. Why? There is absolutely no “national security” reason for it. Nor is the reason given that they “embarrassed the CIA” compelling.
The obvious questions at the time were “What is going on?” and “Why should we be concerned?” And the answer is that Bush is determined to write his own version of history - one that denies any inconvenient facts. Unfortunately for him, just about every fact contradicts his strange orthodoxy. His only hope is to nullify all known fact. It is a big effort. Yet he has been remarkably effective, at least in spots. This little flap gives a view of what appears to be happening on a grand scale.
Snuffing out this Op-Ed piece may be the most visible act of Bush practice of controlling information that would allow him to write a convenient, if fictional, history. It is barely the tip of the iceberg. John Dean, in Worse than Watergate, argues that Bush’s systemmatic efforts to misinform, deny the truth, control opinion, and create almost totally self-serving fictions out of whole cloth are the primary characteristic of the administration. He warns us that the path of democracy is dimly lit by the torch of information. And when the executive systematically and purposefully deceives and makes unavailable crucial information for making decisions, it extinguishes that torch. It is only a matter of time before democracy stumbles and falls. And who knows how far that fall might take her?
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Posted in Rant and Rave at 3:08 am by steve
Detainee 200343 of Camp Cropper in Baghdad is shackled and interrogated until extremely fatigued. Then he is kept in a cell lit brightly around the clock in which disturbing metal and country music blares around the clock. He is held without charges and without legal representation. Reasonable interpretations of the law would call the incarceration procedures unconstitutional and his treatment torture. What has he done to deserve such uncivilized treatment? He must be some sort of terrorist. Guess again. A murderer, or at least an arsonist? Nope. What then? A whistleblower.
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Posted in Rant and Rave at 2:09 am by steve
Two weeks ago we read that the DHS had successfully implemented an illegal program that tracks all international travel of all US citizens and was actively assessing the risk for each person.
Today we find out that it is just about ready to give up on tracking which foreigners have entered and left the country, despite spending $10 billion per year on it for several years.
DHS will know where Americans are and how much risk they pose, but the organization will be incapable of detecting which foreigners are in the country, and which have overstayed their visas. Why is it so much easier to track 300 million Americans than it is a few million or tens of millions of annual visitors? Does anyone remember how this organization came into existence: what there official charter was? Are we all happy enough to attribute this outcome to incompetence?
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12.16.06
Posted in Rant and Rave at 9:55 pm by steve
It would be rightly argued that policy debates about a subject are normally informed by a careful examination of the nature of the policy; and debates about law are generally informed by a careful examination of the nature of the law. But there are exceptions. Occasionally a body of law is so conspicuously antithetical to a millennium old tradition of Anglophile history that one need not know very much about it to reject it. Such is the argument for the Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, and the body of law and resolution that authorize what would otherwise clearly constitute violations of Constitutional ideals.
When a surgeon discovers a tumor there is not much question about whether the tumor itself ought to be removed. He does not set about to learn much about its nature; he simply excises it. Tumors may be of two kinds: malignant or not malignant. Malignant tumors poison other tissues and spread their deathly nature to other parts of the body. The other sort are simply mal-formed and useless bits of tissue. Knowing a tumor is malignant may be of some help in subsequent treatment, but it is of little help when it comes to deciding whether to remove a troublesome tumor. One simply removes the tumor.
So it may be possible for one to encounter laws whose provisions are so odious, so destructive of the fabric of liberty, so violently opposed to good judgment, so flagrantly insulting to the arc of civilizated government that only the most casual acquaintance with their nature might suffice to satisfy us that the constitute a tumor on the face of government. The Military Comissions Act is such a tumor. It implicitly violates a number of fundamental principles of law:
- due process: habeus corpus & innocent until proven guilty
- reciprocity
- separation of powers
The purpose of this body of law is to allow the Attorney General to nab certain people, throw them in jail without any legal due process, hold them there without charge indefinitely, and try them dark, shadowy, secret courts martial. The people in question are ostensibly people who plot to commit acts of violence and random death. That is what we have been led to believe. But the special provisions of law in question would prevent us from ever finding out. Nor is it clear that the laws in question actually require any proof of that.
Trust and the Police State
While we believe that it is useful to detect and deal judiciously with people who intend to kill other people, for whatever reason they might be intending to do so, we also believe that the methods one might choose should matter. For instance, we would all be safer if we lived under a kind of police state - the kind that existed in East Germany for about 45 years after World War II. But we do not.
There are many compelling reasons, but the most fundamental, the most durable reason we do not live in a police state is because it is the very nature of a police state to foster fear and demolish trust. The police state works by disolving all the glue that holds together a naturally organized society and interposing its own appartus, instead. Trust is the fundamental currency of cooperation, and when it is gone, society simply cannot function smoothly. Every form of transaction is tainted. Voluntary action fails. Volition itself fails. Mutual trust is, therefore, the most fungible asset in cooperative society; and police states undermine it. This is why police states are almost always very weak. When they begin entrusting to individuals the power to organize and interact effectively, they frequently lose their opressive qualities and gain material benefits.
So why go to the bother of building such a state? It is because in such a state one can create three classes of human bodies. One class exists above the law and beyond its reaches. The second lives under the law and enjoys some measure of protection against random lawless acts. The third lives beneath the protections of the law, being treated like chattel. Such a means of organization is quite convenient for the ruling classes. Probably not two persons in a thousand actually manages to get first class status. Perhaps half of society will manage to exist in the second class.
The MCA does not single-handedly set up a police state. But the principles it violates are similarly violated by the run-of-the mill police state. In other words; the philosophical view of the world that would allow a police state is the same view of the world that would create this law. They are products of the same assumptions. They implement the same ends.
Another metaphor is useful to understand the interrelationship of Bush administration security law. Imagine a bicycle as an end. One could look at a handlebar or a spoked wheel or a sprocket, each isolated on its own. They bear no resemblance to each other. And if one had never seen a bicycle or any of its components before, one might be at a loss to understand their interrelatedness. It would be impossible to discover their “bicycle nature” alone. And it would be impossible to prove that they were meant to be part of a bicycle absent a frame or a plan or an example bicycle. One would fail to ascertain that they were disparate means to a singular end.
We posit that the MCA is one such article. It presumes a state of permanently truncated personal political liberty and it sets out to enforce that presumption.
Due Process
Let us look at the three problemmatic points. The first is the suspension of habeus corpus. This seems like a trivial idea; that a governmental body may not sieze a person and incarcerate them without charging them with a crime. And that once charged, a person has a right to a speedy trial. That this ought to be a fundamental practice of government is not always intuitively obvious until one contemplates the consequences of doing the opposite.
When governments have the right to toss people into prison for no reason whatsoever, they exercise that privilege. Incarceration ceases to be a tool by which governments protect the liberties of its citizens. Incarceration becomes a tool by which government officials protect their own intests and powers. Incarceration becomes a blunt instrument with which one bludgeons dissenters. It is simply a tool of opression and not an object of justice.
This we see at work even now in two prominent cases. One is Hamdan. Hamdan was Osama bin Laden’s chauffer, at one time in history. He was forcibly removed from Afghanistan and placed in custody in Guantanamo, Cuba. There he was held without charge. Now, the idea that OBL’s chauffer is a terrorist is approximately like the charge that the White House photographer is a war criminal. In both cases we are talking about people who have almost chance associations with other people who have not been tried for a crime. OBL has been indicted in US courts, but he denies responsibility for the act that precipitated the arrest of his chauffer. He has not been tried. Bush has claimed to break laws. He has not been tried. Nor has he been convicted.
One might try to make the argument that Hamdan might have known something of value, once. But it is impossible to imagine that he does now. It is similarly difficult to believe that as a chauffer he had any substantive interactions with his boss about operational details of his organization. Perhaps his knowledge of places and contacts would have once been of some intelligence value, but it is even unlikely that his knowledge of these should be very profound. Holding Hamdan makes no sense - so long as one buys the theory that doing so has some connection to the publically espoused reason for the act.Driving a getaway car is one thing. Serving as the chauffer to a bad person is, in itself, not a crime.
Members of the Bush administration have argued that it is perfecly harmless to treat Hamdan extra-legally because the laws in question do not apply. And when that failed, the MCA was enacted to provide cover of law for what would otherwise be illegal acts. But the MCA either ought to be deemed unconstitutional.
Firstly, it violates due process guaranteed in Article V of the Bill of Rights. Due process requires that a person be charged with a crime and that they be quickly tried. So MCA’s relinquishment of habeus corpus violates due process. The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is part of the same process. This issue comes into play when a person is designated “enemy combatant” as a step in removing their Constitutionally protected rights. One cannot remove protections of the law in an extra-legal process. This, in itself is illegal and unconstitutional.
There are good philosophical and practical reasons to argue, as did Jefferson, that human rights transcend government, and that they are therefore not within the government’s power to take away. This view of the world suggests that it is impossible to strip a person of Constitutionally protected rights, regardless of what nation they were born into, what nation they live in, what they believe, who they associate with, or what they might possibly have done. One simply cannot write a law that passes Constitutional muster that would still do this. Even arguing that they are foreigners fails because Jefferson’s idea places the rights out of reach of any governing body. Our own government has no legitimate right to treat is own citizens in certain way. It has even less to treat citizens of another nation in a lesser way.
Reciprocity
How America treats citizens of other nations is quite important when it comes to treatment of Americans abroad. If the US is know for bad treatment, US citizens will be much more likely to be treated badly abroad. This is the problem of reciprocity.
The Bush administration has argued for special powers beyond the boundaries of the United States. In the Hamdan case, Bush has argued that Guantanamo is part of the sovereign state of Cuba, and therefore US law does not apply. This is a mighty curious argument. Imagine, for instance, that one US soldier killed another US soldier on the base at Gitmo. Are we to believe that Fidel Castro’s governernment would be involved in the criminal proceedings? Of course not. That would be unimaginable. The argument is too absurd to dignify with discussion. Gitmo is an American enclave operated under the auspices of the US government and fully subject to its laws.
There are legal traditions for treatment of “foreigners.” My own casual studies have acquainted me with two. In one tradition - that of Rome - a visitor to a state was subject to the laws of that state. If he violated those laws, he was subject to punishment under them. In Roman tradition a foreigner who was unaquainted with certain technical laws that dealt with nuanced operational aspects of Roman civilization could be excused from punishment because they did not have similar laws in their own culture. But Romans believed in natural law. There were things that one simply did not do in every society: murder, steal, lie under oath. In this tradition, legal obligations, rights, and protections all extend to people living in the same land. With the special exception for the case of participation in the governing process of voting.
The second tradition is a little newer. It was borne of westerners in China. When Europeans established large trading enclaves there in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, they negotiated with the Chinese that Europeans would be subject to the laws of their parent lands. The primary reason for this was that Chinese laws were much more punitive than European ones. European governments wanted to protect the welfare of prominent trading personages operating in foreign lands. And they had military might sufficient to back up their claims to special privileges.
In the Roman tradition, the host country has full authority. In the Chinese tradition, certain foreigners had protected status. But in both traditions, there existed a single body of law.
The Bush administration, in Hamdan, is trying to argue for a special category of law. Bush is attempting to create a body of law that lives beyond the reach of the US court system, and beyond the reach of the US Constitution. At first, this body of law would apply to foreigners in foreign lands. It would also apply to foreigners living in this country. Think about that. Bush is attempting to write and enforce law that applies to foreigners in foreign lands. This is unprecedented. And it is absurd.
It is also frightening, if nor no other reason than that it invites foreign countries to do the same thing. First, it invites foreign powers to write laws expressly for Americans in their own states. Imagine a nation that wrote a law that made it legal to kidnap US citizens and collect a ransom. Or imagine they established a special sales tax on all goods sold to Americans. Such laws would be unthinkable in a world governed by the correct sorts of respectful reciprocity. But where US lawmakers fail to acknowledge such reciprocity, they tempt such bad behavior. Bush’s misbehavior tempts exactly such behavior in other lands.
But the reciprocity issue could prove to be even more dangerous. Bush presumes to be able to operate autonomously in other nations, doing things to the citizens of those nations or to citizens of third-party nations that would not be legal under the laws that constrain persons or governments in any of those nations.
The very act sets up the moral space for reciprocal actions. It sets up the space for foreign nations to act within our own nation. And to do so beyond the constraints of our own law - so long as the executive does not prevent it. So, for instance, the Bush administration could contract with the leader of a small, pliant nation to write laws prohibiting US citizens from engaging in certain kinds of behavior. For the sake of argument, let us say the law in question would make it illegal to have a political blog that says unfavorable things about the Bush administration. Then the administration could allow operatives of that government to carry out actions against the people who break such laws. The fact that such a nation allows US action within its boundaries would be used to legitimize that nation’s operatives work in the US outside of US law. It is conceivable that such an arrangement would be quite convenient to certain abusive administrations. The federal government could contract out the treament of dissenters to Mr. Putin’s old organization, once known as the KGB.
This is quite a flight of fancy; but, frankly, it is impossible to see why Americas laws regarding the behavior of foreigners in foreign lands may not easily be treated reciprocally. Nor is it axiomatic that US officials would always find such inconvenient.
This is quite far afield from the specific provisions of the MCA; but it is completely consistent with the thinking that created it. The Constitution does not specifically proscribe making laws that govern peoples of other nations, in other nations. The reason it does not is that nations are assumed to have sovereignty over their own people. To behave as we have just suggested is unthinkable in any civilized nation. And the reason for that is that behaving as if other nations’ sovereignty were an inconvenience leads to all sorts of terrible problems and abuses.
Separation of Powers
Abuse of power is one of the normal corruptions of government. The nature and severity of abuse depends upon the nature and severity of the corruptions. As British historian Lord Acton observed “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
If one were to examine British history and compare it to other European histories, one would find an ever weak monarch whose powers were systematically limited by a relatively strong feudal aristocracy. The aristocracy established Parliament to counterbalance the power of the monarch. This balance of power has waxed and waned, but it has generally provided a solid model of government. When Montesquieu wrote his Spirit of the Law in the middle of the eighteenth century, he spent a whole chapter discussing how British government formed the ideal constitutional separation of powers.
Specifically, he argued that the Legislature and the Executive must be separate bodies because doing otherwise tempts laws of convenience - laws that use governmental structures not to further legitimate purposes of a state on behalf of the governed, but rather ones that strip powers and resources from the governed for the benefit of the powerful. Similarly, he argued that Judicial and Executive must be separate bodies because doing otherwise tempts judicial abuses. People get incarcerated for the purpose of political advantage rather than for the purpose of assuring proper liberty and order in a society.
Montesquieu put it this way:
there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary controul; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.
There would be an end of every thing, were the same man, or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws Book XI, Chapter VI -
The reason this is of concern is that the Bush administration has put forth a body of legislation aimed at creating a whole new judicial body, one that is subservient to the executive. The theory they use as a basis is that military courts have traditionally been part of the executive. But the military has generally been a voluntary organization that people would join if they hoped to elevate their social status above what it would otherwise be. Enlistment was voluntary, and as with many voluntary contracts one may choose to waive certain rights. The reason to do so is for the efficient operation of the military. And because of tradition.
The Bush administration has argued that the people at whom its courts are targeted are “enemy combatants.” This is a novel legal theory. It creates a class of people. It allows a member of the executive to assign people to that class. The assignment automatically strips them of Contistutionally mandated protections.
If one argues that due process is required to punish people under laws whose actions are constrained by the Constitution, how much more important would it be to have due process to strip a person of those very same rights? Assuming it is even theoretically possible to do so. Accusing a person of planning a crime or being sympathetic to a cause does not make them a criminal. It does not make them enemies. It does not make them combatants. It does not remove from them certain fundamental rights as human beings. It does not allow the government to suspend protections of law. Due process requires more than an allegation in order to change a person’s legal status. Specifically, it requires a charge. And it requires a court trial under an independent judiciary.
If one is to use the “enemy combatant” theory one must prove in a normal legal court that, in fact, a person is an “enemy combatant.” That is a necessary condition. But it is not sufficient. Because once one has done exactly that, the body of law in the MCA strips the person of Constitutionally guaranteed rights. Again, the rationale is an appeal to military tradition. But enemy combatants have not volunteered up special rights for special privileges of serving in the military. So there is no reason for them to be tried in military style courts. And as we have argued above, the Constitution purposefully puts the act of stripping due process from courtroom law out of reach of the executive.
It is impossible to know what motivated the Bush administration, but the MCA is part of a collection of acts that brutalize the most sacred and profound of the ideas and ideals upon which the Constitution of the United States rest. Whether this administration was doing this for the convenience of its own planned abuses or whether it was purposefully or accidentally clearing the path for future administrations’ abuses of power we may never ascertain. What we do know, however, is that there exist a collection ideas that underlie the body of legislation pushed through by this administration, and it is profoundly inconsistent with the ideas upon which the Constitution was based.
It is not elections that guarantee functional democracy; Stalinist Russia had elections. It is not the words in the laws or the Constitution that guarantees a functional democracy; Stalinist Russia had that, too. It is reverence for the fundamental principles of fairness, shared responsibility, and shared political power that guarantee democracy. Plato and Montesquieu both understood that when these were gone, democracy’s days were numbered. My bet is that Karl Rove does, too.
Random Hamdan Articles
Military comissions act partly thrown out.
Supreme Court Ruling in Hamdan v Rumsfeld
Defining People as “not People:” the process starts.
Slate’s article on Hamdan Ruling
Random Padilla Article
Wikipedia Overview
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12.13.06
Posted in Rant and Rave at 4:39 pm by steve
A new feature here at Worry Wart is the Wednesday Worry of the Week. The world is so full of worrisome problems that deserve broader exposure. We intend to take on small problems, bigger problems, and monumental problems. We may occasionally become embroiled in advocating solutions. Or we may simply complain, inform, kvetch, worry.
Today’s worry of the week is Global Warming. This is a monstrous problem that threatens everything we know and love about the physical aspects of our own civilization. Two documents on global warming came to my attention this week. The first suggests that Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf might collapse, and slide into the ocean. The second is a detailed report about the environmental costs of keeping livestock, as assessed from a global warming perspective, Livestock’s Long Shadow.
Livestock’s Environmental Costs
Let us take the livestock report first. Mostly, it is interesting because it poses a new way to look at how every strand in the fabric of our lives is composed of, derived from, or dependent upon petroleum or coal in some way. It is easy to understand how our cars depend directly on gasoline; all we need to do is to drive one until the fuel tank is empty. It is almost as easy to understand how our electricity is derived from fossil fuels.
When it comes to agriculture, we see things growing around us without much help from fossil fuels and we imagine that this is how modern agriculture works. But it’s not. As we have pointed out several places in this blog, fifteen percent of the calories Americans consume derive directly from fossil fuels. They are traceable to corn. And corn derives much of its constitution thanks to plentiful use of the nitrogenous fertilizers that have been derived from natural gas. So in a very substantive way we are literally eating natural gas. Similarly, many of the fibers that we use as clothing are derived directly from petroleum. There just isn’t very much outside of sitting crosslegged on the ground beneath a shade tree that does not depend to some significant degree on energy, specifically hydrocarbons.
When we take all these things together, it should soom become clear to us is that carbon dioxide production is not a result of some evil and unrepentant corporation. No. Carbon dioxide production is a direct result of how we have chosen to live our lives. If the world is to produce less carbon dioxide we must choose to make it so. And no matter how we go about making that choice, it will mean having less of some things.
Ross Ice Shelf Collapse
The motivation to make that change may be more clearly in evidence now than ever before. It has been widely observed that polar ice near the North Pole is rapidly disappearing. And scientists predict that year-around ice cover will be gone at the North Pole by mid-century. That is not such a big problem, by itself. In fact, it may open up some promising trade routes and make oil fields available that were not so before.
The real problem with polar warming lies at the antipodal extreme, Antarctica. The primary difference between poles is that the ice sheet in the north floats atop the ocean; but the one in the south sits atop a solid continent. When the northern ice melts, it will not change sea level much. The same is not true of Antarctic ice.
Antarctica holds enough water in the form of ice to raise sea level 94 meters - about 300 feet. Global warming scientists have been sanguine about the risks that global warming pose to the stability of this ice. Some have calculated that it would take 10000 years for global warming’s thermal signal at the top surface to reach the level that would cause melting at the bottom surface and imminent transport of the Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ocean.
There are some reasons, however, to worry that number might be wrong. For instance, it assumes all thermal transport is by conduction; but some workers have shown that convection moves thermal energy through a significant portion of the ice thickness. This might make heat move considerably faster. But even then, it would take centuries for the effects of global warming within the air to melt the ice at the land surface and cause sliding.
A goodly portion of the ice rests on what is known as the Ross Ice Shelf. This ice is near the ocean. And the thermal transport mechanisms here are evidently faster than the ones we talked about above. The Ross Ice Shelf might be more prone to being heated by the environment either from above or from below. In any case, scientists report that it may be in “imminent danger” of falling into the sea.
Before we look at the consequences, we need to think about “imminent danger” in terms consistent with their own. At one level one could compare “imminent danger” against a 10,000 year time frame. If one did this, it would leave one with the impression that the ice-shelf problem may happen in the next century or two. Perhaps this is just what they mean.
If it is, it suggests that humans might be wise not to over-invest in development on coastal plains. Many of our greatest cities are an amalgam of durable investments built up over a century or a millenium. We need to imagine that some of the things we have built will be taken by the sea within two centuries.
Naish, the scientist responsible for making the prediction, says that all that is required is a 2 degree C warming. That sort of condition happens sponaneously in the absence of high CO2 levels. This amount of warming is almost inevitable over the 50 year time frame given current CO2 usage.
If the Ross Ice Shelf were to collapse, sea level would rise 17 meters, or about 55 feet. Cities such as New Orleans, London, New York, Mumbai, Shanghai, Rio de Janiero, and many dozens more would be inundated. Many hundreds of millions of people would be affected by loss of habitat. Ten times as many would stand to be affected by loss of livelihood, or by cascading problems that result from quick changes in the environment. Millions of acres of the world’s best farmland would be flooded by seawater. And all of the world’s ports would be closed, because they would be underwater. Trade would come to a halt. Much of industry would stop, as well, because most heavy industry exists at port cities. All of the resources that have accrued due to investment in these port cities would be lost. And all of the functions they perform would be lost as well. It is not a pretty picture. We are talking about a single event that could be perhaps a million times more devastating than was Katrina.
FAQ
Would it be enough to end civilization as we know it?
Perhaps not. Large cities such as Toronto and Chicago would still have ports and connections to rich resource areas. There is some hope that they could maintain some semblance of order. There exist quite a number of Asian and North American cities far above sea level Some parts of civilization as we know it would survive. But civilization would be changed forever.
Is there any way of knowing if and when this will happen?
No. It probably will not happen next week. It will almost certainly happen sometime within the next century. If Murphy’s law holds out, it will be right about the time we run out of oil completely and we find coal too expensive to extract. The irony will be that we will at that point have enjoyed all the benefits of fossil fuels, but will have not yet begun to pay the price.
What can we do about it?
Support renewable energy programs until it hurts. And support them well past that level. Look expecially to wind power and nuclear power in the short term, because they are economically viable now. Look to solar and certain biofuels in the longer term. In the mean time, try to become energy-wise. Insulate your home, if it is not now well insulated. Drive a car that gets more than 25 mpg. Limit air travel. Cut back on eating red meat. Try to live within your means, without borrowing against the value in your home. Recycle.
Saturday Addendum
The New Scientist reports 2006 to be the warmest year on record. It points out that since 1976 global temperatures have risen an average of .16 C per decade. That amounts to almost half a degree in thirty years. It is almost certain that global warming will accellerate with greater use of coal and oil. So if Naish is correct and if there is not much time lag between air temperatures and ice shelf melting, then the Ross Ice Shelf will not last a century and a half.
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12.12.06
Posted in Culture at 7:25 pm by steve
Barney proves to us what I’m sure we knew all along, that the Bushes are friendly, down-to-earth, good humored neighbors who just happen to live in a nice, big house with a generous decorating budget. We learn, too, that one member of the household has books and knows how to use them.
Barney’s Christmas Extravaganza
Now I remember: I get nauseous on too much bread; and circuses generally leave me bored, depressed, headachy.
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Posted in Culture at 10:16 am by steve
Don’t miss Jon Swift’s new piece on Taliban Rules. And remember; choose your enemy wisely.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 1:11 am by steve
According to a recent Justice Department report, America has finally reached a telling record: Today more of our citizens are behind bars, per capita, than is true of any other nation on earth. When it comes to prisoners, America is number one. Three factors contribute: relatively higher crime rates, tough sentencing, and drug laws that are extraordinarily punitive.
America’s incarceration rate is 737 per 100,000 compared to 611 for Russia. Most western nations have incarceration rates of less then 100 per 100,000. We incarcerate more in the US for drug crimes alone than Europe, with a larger population, incarcerates for all crimes put together. The article spends only a limited amount of space asking why.
One reason for the big numbers is the destructive “war on drugs.” Two people in seven in the prison population are there on drug charges. And it is likely that quite a number of the rest have been influenced directly or indirectly by the same “war.” This Quixotic program slaps unconscionably long mandatory sentences on people who have managed to do precious little harm to society. It punishes behavior that, at worst is mildly self destructive. There are, of course, cases in which intoxication can have negative effects, for instance, when a person serves in a mission-critical job involving safety. But in these circumstances it is the intoxication, itself that is a problem and the dangers it causes. Such circumstances offer their own special prosecutorial logic that is completely independent of most of the what drug law treats.
There is another unique American problem. Americans have learned to be quite good at producing goods, and at consuming them. But Americans have been less successful at forming close-knit, durable, meaningful societies. Tocquville, I think, sensed this. He was much enamored of the sense of democracy and the community spirit he encounteded in New England. But he commented that “democracy stopped west of the Hudson.” And one of the things he was referring to was a kind of close-knit community that involved all its members.
America, instead, has cultivated the rugged indivitualist. Individualism is fine. And so is ruggedness, so long as both attributes include, if not a finely honed respect for the law, at least a high level of moral virtue that includes reasoned behavior, discipline, and empathy. But, sadly, these virtues are not the sorts of things rugged individualists gain much practice in developing, normally.
Still, all is not lost. If the social structure is developed in such a way that it is easy to behave morally, virtuously, lawfully, then people will often find a way to do so. But when society makes it much more advantageous to behave selfishly, unscrupuloulsly, unlawfully, then one finds this kind of behavior expressed widely in a population. In other words, having the world’s largest prison population is a symptom of at least one profound social problem. It is probably a symptom of several.
Mark Twain argued that one could build prisons or schools, but that schools did a more cost effective job of keeping people from a life of crime than did prisons. It is a well known axiom that each dollar put into schools saves much more than that in prisons. So jam-packed prison system is a symptom of bad schools and the social inequity and dysfunctional social institutions that cause them. It means that society is failing to build a life for American citizens that causes Americans to join society under normal cooperative terms.
The normal contractual relationships that societies have with its citizens were systematically denied by Chicago School thinkers, starting in the 1950’s. It was not until Reagan won the Presidency in 1980 that these ideas really began coming into prominence. But it was a this point in time that “free traders” started clearing the legal and other institutional hurdles for investement overseas. It was at this time that the War on Drugs was started.
And it was this time when politicians began promoting “market” solutions to things. Sometime these solutions made things less expensive, but they also tended to make them less dependable. Electrical power distributions and telephonic equipment come to mind. In some of these cases, rate reductions have created false economies. There is a rage that develops when electricity fails regularly telephones breakdown every other year. These are utilities upon which we depend. Unavailability is a kind of breakage of the social contract.
There was nothing inherently wrong with foreign investment per se. It certainly did improve the lot of Chinese workers and other Asian workers. And it made many goods less expensive for American consumers. But the Chicago School taught the religious orthodoxy that free trade must be absolute, no holds barred. And the result was that capital flowed out of America faster than it might have otherwise done. And that crippled a great number of institutions. Companies of all sorts went bankrupt. And people with all sorts of specialized skills lost their jobs. The social disruptions were unnecessarily large. And they really did shake the faith many Americans had in the core fairness of American social institutions.
The loss of high-paying jobs has been a steady one since the 1980’s, despite claims of increasing employment. Generally that increasing employment has been at a much lower nominal rate and with much less competitive benefits. Yet even the almost total elimination of manufacturing jobs in the US has not been enough for Chicago School followers; they want to eliminate some of the most fundamental safety nets left. One is Social Security. We are not here to debate the financial issues that recommend for or against such a plan. We do argue, however, that it is another institution that represents a social contract. And that breaking that social contract will produce more poverty, more dependence, more crime, and more prisonners. In the end, it will probably be less expensive to assure Social Security’s financial success by any means necessary, including paying back to the fund what the national treasury has borrowed from it.
Contractual agreements upon which people have based their behaviors are being broken every day in the marketplace, and in a way that simply did not occur during the first twenty years of my own life. Laws passed during the last two decades have weakened several institutions from which most of the other institutions in America derive their part of their strength. Banking institutions and other lending institutions have placed almost unprecedented bets on consumer credit, driving a residential real estate market to a level of valuation roughly twice what any rational valuation system would allow. The amount of debt guaranteed by this fictitious value must amount to just about half the consumer debt in the nation. And if things come unzipped, the whole financial system might get ripped to shreds.
Deficit spending by the Federal government threatens the very function of the federal government, as well. The federal government owes an amount equal to about eight month’s work for the worker of median income in the US. It takes a lot of time to work off that amount of debt.
All of these represent macroscopic ways in which public policy makers have either defaulted on public trusts to society or have gambled with public trusts, placing them in a position more likely to fail. These behaviors violate the public trust. Antisocial behavior by the society members who are most abused by such violations of trust is an inevitable, if unfortunate byproduct of that behavior.
A burgeoning prison population is not just a sure sign of a repressive society. It is a definition of one. Until America learns how to contract with our own populace and how to abide faithfully and honorably by that social contract, we will face ever greater internal challenges and threats to peace, stability, and social cohesion. Doing the right thing by people makes us all better people, and happier. When we have learned to do that well, our prisons will naturally empty out.
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12.11.06
Posted in Culture at 8:08 pm by steve
Here is some pretty good advice from a distingushed and sagacious man, outgoing Secretary General of the United Nations, Khofi Anan.
Nearly 50 years ago, when I arrived in Minnesota as a student fresh from Africa, I had much to learn — starting with the fact that there is nothing wimpish about wearing earmuffs when it is 15 degrees below zero. All my life since has been a learning experience. Now I want to pass on five lessons I have learned during 10 years as secretary general of the United Nations that I believe the community of nations needs to learn as it confronts the challenges of the 21st century.
First, in today’s world we are all responsible for each other’s security. Against such threats as nuclear proliferation, climate change, global pandemics or terrorists operating from safe havens in failed states, no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. Only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves. This responsibility includes our shared responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. That was accepted by all nations at last year’s U.N. summit. But when we look at the murder, rape and starvation still being inflicted on the people of Darfur, we realize that such doctrines remain pure rhetoric unless those with the power to intervene effectively — by exerting political, economic or, in the last resort, military muscle — are prepared to take the lead. It also includes a responsibility to future generations to preserve resources that belong to them as well as to us. Every day that we do nothing, or too little, to prevent climate change imposes higher costs on our children.
Second, we are also responsible for each other’s welfare. Without a measure of solidarity, no society can be truly stable. It is not realistic to think that some people can go on deriving great benefits from globalization while billions of others are left in, or thrown into, abject poverty. We have to give all our fellow human beings at least a chance to share in our prosperity.
Third, both security and prosperity depend on respect for human rights and the rule of law. Throughout history human life has been enriched by diversity, and different communities have learned from each other. But if our communities are to live in peace we must stress also what unites us: our common humanity and the need for our human dignity and rights to be protected by law.
That is vital for development, too. Both foreigners and a country’s own citizens are more likely to invest when their basic rights are protected and they know they will be fairly treated under the law. Policies that genuinely favor development are more likely to be adopted if the people most in need of development can make their voice heard. States need to play by the rules toward each other, as well. No community suffers from too much rule of law; many suffer from too little — and the international community is among them.
My fourth lesson, therefore, is that governments must be accountable for their actions, in the international as well as the domestic arena. Every state owes some account to other states on which its actions have a decisive impact. As things stand, poor and weak states are easily held to account, because they need foreign aid. But large and powerful states, whose actions have the greatest impact on others, can be constrained only by their own people.
That gives the people and institutions of powerful states a special responsibility to take account of global views and interests. And today they need to take into account also what we call “non-state actors.” States can no longer — if they ever could — confront global challenges alone. Increasingly, they need help from the myriad types of association in which people come together voluntarily, to profit or to think about, and change, the world.
How can states hold each other to account? Only through multilateral institutions. So my final lesson is that those institutions must be organized in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong.
Developing countries should have a stronger voice in international financial institutions, whose decisions can mean life or death for their people. New permanent or long-term members should be added to the U.N. Security Council, whose current membership reflects the reality of 1945, not of today.
No less important, all the Security Council’s members must accept the responsibility that comes with their privilege. The council is not a stage for acting out national interests. It is the management committee of our fledgling global security system.
More than ever, Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system. Experience has shown, time and again, that the system works poorly when the United States remains aloof but it functions much better when there is farsighted U.S. leadership.
That gives American leaders of today and tomorrow a great responsibility. The American people must see that they live up to it.
Khofi Anan does not dazzle us with great abstraction or florid language. Rather, he appeals simply and directly to our common humanity. He approaches his task teaching by example. Let us hope America listens. It is only through establishing and strenghening our common interests that we can hope to have peace and security.
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