Years Not Months

So, the mission creep built into the UN mandate to bomb for peace and tranquility has crept.  Whilst the Bush/Yoo doctrine of obscuring reality and expanding presidential powers continues on apace.  David Brooks can now be wrong about more than one political system and use that wrongness to write pro-authoritarian political system op-eds. Matthew Yglesias cannot distinguish underemployment combined with stagnant and declining wages from work sharing schemes designed to reduce profits by increasing people with decent wages.

On the plus side, it's burgers and tater tots for supper.

Why Journalist Don't Matter

Did Lance Armstrong take EPO and other PES? I don't know. Right now I do know that all the allegations that have been adjudicated were found to untrue, or at least insufficient to establish Armstrong's guilt. Tyler Hamilton's recent denunciation isn't and doesn't contain anything new. Should the state prove that Armstrong was a drug cheat, well sucks to him.

However, not content to wait for actual evidence of any wrong doing and seemingly unaware that Hamilton's allegations are not new, Andy Baggot of the the Wisconsin State JOurnal's sports page provides more evidence, should it be needed, of essential foolishness of the press here in America. After praising Armstrong's cancer work and thinking that the lying and cheating were fundamentally necessary for the cancer work and deciding that he would do the same thing, Baggot writes:

This is how I choose to reconcile the now overwhelming perception that Armstrong isn’t who he says he is — that he isn’t the person whose incredible story prompted me to buy his books and admire him in this space. 

That's right, he decided on Armstrong's guilt because of an "overwhelming perception," sort of like opposing the end of slavery or the emancipation of women because of the overwhelming perception of their intellectual inferiority.

This is exactly like the rounds of fibbing and lionizing of Ryan following on in the wake of his idiotic budget. An overwhelming perception, although it's unclear about who Baggot his small circle of friends and professional colleagues seems most likely, emerges and then people who really don't not know what they are talking about decided to accept the version offered by whatever spokes model stands in front of the cameras.

It's a small wonder that yesterday's WSJ editorial was a song of praise for old Ryan's dishonest plan to stop paying for health care instead of controlling its cost.

Schooling Superman

Diana Ravitch dismantles, yet again, the Charter School Myth.

Books Are Forever

For a while now, I've been worried that the book, the physical printed book, was going to disappear. I use kindle and its perfectly adequate, but books are the bee's knees. I am, therefore, heartened by this from Megan McArdle:

I'm pretty sure the print book's days are numbered for anything except specialty applications.  The die-hards will cling for a while, but ultimately, book buyers are already an extremely affluent group, and the convenience in acquiring, porting, and storing your library simply overwhelms the drawbacks, especially as Amazon has introduced innovations like eBook lending.

Inasmuch as she is wrong about everything it follows that she is wrong about this. For my money, if you want to know, the book's future lies in ondemand printing services like the Espresso ondeman book making machine.

Corporations Treated Better Than People: Example 11tybillion

Some poor slob in Michigan wins 2 million in the lottery but because he took it all in a lump sum he has no income and therefore continues to get foodstamps. For obvious reasons, the state is going to develop a new set of regulations to deal with this problem. Would that we could deal with wealthy corporations and their welfare payments with such alacrity.

David Brooks Uses Words As Weapons

Against reality and meaning, that is. Here is a paragraph from his op-ed thingy today:

Here in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is trying to foster that sort of society. Until Cameron, Britain — like the U.S. — had one party that spoke on behalf of the market (the Conservatives) and one party that spoke on behalf of the state (Labour). But Cameron is initiating a series of policies, under the rubric “Big Society,” that seek to nurture community bonds, civic activism and social capital.

Labour spoke for, you know, laboring men and women and tried to use the state to overcome the unfair advantaged enjoyed by the monied classes and their dependents, like Brooks.  The "Big Society" seeks to privatize and individualize all positive state functions, positive in the sense of making life better for working men and women and the various kiddiewinks and seniors. So, in other words, after Blair the UK, like the US, has two parties dedicated to market fundamentalism with a basic disagreement about how much the state ought to protect its citizens from the rapacity and cupidity of capitalists.

Crises Management

When I think about a crisis, I think of a discrete moment during which the normal means of dealing with one or another of life's problems fails and the problem metastasizes and fundamentally alters the problems scale threatening lives, homes, and etc. During a crisis those actually dedicating to solving it pursue multiple paths, attacking immediate and underlying causes, and jettison those methods that fail. The same, it seems to me, is true of forest fires, floods, and the Berlin Air Lift. There is an underlying intractable problem that grows into a life threatening something or another, previous measures fail and therefore something new and dramatic must be done.

So, for example, contagious disease is a recurring problem for humanity in a social state, the flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was a crisis. The state operating through a variety of humanitarian and other organizations, sought to deal effectively with the dead, provide palliative care for the ill, inhibit its spread, and find a cure. San Francisco order everyone to wear a mask as means of stopping the dread disease's spread. When they figured out that the gauze masks were of little use, the stop enforcing the rule.

Lots of ideologically driven nimrods are insisting that the American educational system is in crisis. How can this be? Educating children, young adults, and adults, has always been a difficult task. But no one is going to die, lots of homes are being built, books written, and so on. The evidence is that the choice and accountablility don't work and, in fact, that whole dealio is a scam. Rather than abandoning choice and accountablity the people are pursuing it with greater vigor or moving the goalposts and generally denying that improvement has anything to do with it.

This isn't a crisis, it's an opportunity for people who hate people trying to rob us of yet another social good in favor of market fundamentalism, which is just another way of saying let's let the rich rule.

Socially Liberal But Economically Conservative

There is a post over to Crooked Timber concerning the split between cultural and economic leftists and liberals or, at least, that's how I read it. In the comments the notion of nominal Liberals who are Socially/Culturally Liberal but Economically Conservative comes up. I think they mean people like Heath Shuler. I would argue that eh s/cl ec wing of the Democratic or Republican parties mean that they are in favor of rich people running the country and don't particularly care one way or the other about anything else. When the "New Left" denounced big labor for protecting white male privilege it wasn't just an attempt to win for marginalized groups the right to be and to enjoy legal equality it was also an attempt to restructure the economy around the idea of justice as equality in all available meanings. What we got was limited, incremental improvement in the condition of women and minorities, which is now being destroyed by the Republicans, by Neoliberals like Clinton on the condition that the rich get to get richer and the poor ever more screwed.

She Turned Me Into a Newt

Newt Gingrich has been a boil on the body politic for a long time. He latest attempt to be interesting has blown up in his face. All his attempted backtracking and related eel like twisting and turning point to an important change in Republican politics. The only rogue going allowed is further into crazy land. Gingrich is now the victim of the climate of hate he created in his years of irresponsible pandering to the 27 percenters who make life miserable for the rest of us. Fortunately, this time they seem to be devouring Newtie; unfortunately, the next Republican candidate for president will make Rand Paul look sane.

No Ride Zone

Sen Schumer's notion of a no ride list is beyond silly. The last thing train travel needs is to make the getting  on and off trains more like the getting on of planes. Especially as the idea is based on the ravings of Osama's journal.

Jonah Goldberg: Still Dumb

Jonah Goldberg complains that Obama was too quick to tell the world of Osama's death because by so doing he ruined the "actionable" intelligence. He compares the information that the Navy Seals gathered to a stolen NFL playbook and suggests that by admitting to Osama's death Obama alerted our opponents to the fact that we have the playbook. The analogy holds true only if we add that Green Bay stole the Jets' playbook by flying into Rex Ryan's back yard and shooting him in the head in front of family and associates and then dumping the body in the sea.

I mean really, does Goldberg actually think that Osama's associates, on hearing that he had been assassinated, didn't know that whatever information Osama had on any pending or other operations was compromised? I understand, as of course, that Goldberg and the rest of the Conservative punditocracy cannot allow Obama even so much as a smidgen of credit for Osama's murder but still this is the weakest of weak and lamest of lame attempts. It is, in other words, a nearly perfect encapsulation of Jonah Goldberg's continuing argument against nepotism.

This Does Not Bode Well

During the Roman Republic there was the office of dictator, who -- in a time of great crisis -- was granted all political and military powers for a period of 6 months. One example is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who  saved Rome and resigned his powers as he ought, or so we are told. George Washington is often depicted as Cincinnatus because he voluntarily gave up the presidency. Right this moment, the maniacs in the Republican party want to create

new language [for the AUMF that] eschews references to September 11, and instead centers the authorization on "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces," though "associated forces" is not defined. It replaces the authority to target "organizations" and "persons" domestically with the power to target "all entities that continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad."

Call me a pessimist if you will, but I cannot think of a moment in the history of the world since there was a USofA in which there was not someone who posed some kind of a threat to the USofA.

Why do Republicans hate democracy, freedom, and people? I ask you.

History Matters

For a very interesting discussion of why few historians take originalism serious see here. A key point

Historians devote their lives to understanding the past, so one would surmise that they, above all others, would be drawn to the theory of originalism. One might attribute the resolute anti-originalism of most historians to the fact that they are generally more liberal than the population at large and thus oppose originalism for political reasons. Although political orientation may account for some of this animus, their hostility to originalism has less to do with politics and more to do with questions of historical interpretation and method. When most historians look closely at originalist arguments, what they usually find is bad history shaped to fit an ideological agenda—what historians derisively call “law office history.”

The author does a really fine job of destroying Yoo, of which activity there ought to be more. 

Crises

Let's say you're on a boat and the boat springs a leak. You face a crisis: too much water and the boat will sink. One group wants to plug the leak another wants to start the bilge pumps and a third wants to do both. Suddenly a dim bulb shows up and says: No, let's fire the deck hands. If you decide that the dim bulb is correct, you really have no place talking about this crisis and it's solutions.

As we all know, Detroit is a failed city and its school system reflects that. The "learning outcomes" of its students are reflection of the corruption, poverty, and so on. Yet Matthew Yglesias views this particular engine room slowing filling with water and insists that the deck hands did it. Moron.

Tortured Logic

As I mentioned lots of peoples are discussing torture in lots of unhelpful ways. Over to Crooked Timber a commentator makes this argument

I think it’s just obvious that torture can be effective, at least in the case where the information you’re trying to extract is immediately verifiable, like, say, the password for a document that is right here, in front of you. I think people understands this, and they probably take the line “we shouldn’t torture because torture doesn’t work” as an insult to their intelligence.

Much like the ticking time nonsense, this hypothetical assumes perfectly imperfect knowledge. The torturer is has perfect that the only missing piece of information is the password and that this person right here has it. Consequently torture is okay. How does the torturer know this? Because if he or she didn't the hypothetical falls apart.

Wrong In Both Directions

To repeat myself, the humanist argument, which is the correct one, is that "we" oppose torture on the grounds that it doesn't work and it degrades everyone involved, in different ways obviously. Mistermix, over to Balloon Juice, apparently thinks that being serious means distorting reality.

See also for evidence that the torture led to wrong information, which is always the case -- except in movies and the perverted imaginings of serious people who get most of the information from movies.

You Are, Of Course, Stupid

The reason to criticize Obama is because his policies are wrong. I would, as an example, argue that he has been lukewarm in working to end the surveillance state and should be investing more in infrastructure and so on. I understand, equally as of course, that the various coequal branches of government hinder and obstruct, see Gitmo. One thing not to do, however, is to use one's misapprehensions of Obama's character as the basis for criticizing his policy. Glenn Reynolds:

Meanwhile, on foreign policy -- another Carter weak point -- Obama also looks worse. Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conceived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.

Obama has done a very fine job of foreign policy, if we view it through the narrow lens of America's traditional foreign policy goals. Indeed, the recent "success"[1] is further evidence of his actual seriousness and leadership ability. Odd, then, that bufflaheads chose this to attack him. I suppose this results, at least in part, from the fact that his other policies accomplish more or less what he expects them to.[2]


[1] It's strikes me as clear that the assassination was illegal. But, so what? If Bush would have done it way back whenever, the loss of one life would have saved god knows how many lives and endless trillions of dollars. The idea that one death of an unpleasant man dedicated to murder in the service of his own ends violates all manner of moral and ethical rules indicts the rules not the action. IMHO.

[2] Obama isn't, in other words, a man of the left.

David Brooks

I was going to mention that David Brooks' column from today was bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense of bullshit, when I stumbled on a London Review of Books post on the "Ten Weirdest Sentences" in Brooks' latest opus. My personal favorite:

Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.

I really do think that sums up Brook's utter thingness, where thingness stands for idiocy.

Torture Doesn't Work

This line of argument, from Josh Marshall over to TPM, is really bizarre:

As a more general matter it's important to recognize that torture could easily have produced the key information. It just seems not to have in this case. You can be doctrinaire in opposing torture without being doctrinaire in assuming that it can't produce any good intelligence, which would be foolish.

We have known for the longest time that torture doesn't work.It's like the ticking time, how would you know if what the torturee said was true?  You torture the guy, run to where he says it is. If it's there okay, if it's not? More torture. New information also proven untrue. More torture. etc.  That's how it worked with the witches. Unless, of course, you think that witches actually existed.

Justified

Allegedly, Obama's doing something Bush couldn't in a way totally different from Bush's notion of defeating "terror" by invading various nations, some of which had nothing to do with "terror," proves that Bush was right all along. There is also the notion out there by unnamed-highly-placed somebodies or another that it was torture that got the ball rolling. Peter King, for example, on the basis of nothing asserted that waterboarding led to the information. There is also the idea that Bush's sticktoitness made the killing of Osama possible. Remember that by the end of his time spent ruining all our nice things, Bush claimed that he had stopped worrying about Osama.

It seems to me that what this event shows is that Obama would have followed a different tactical and operational path had he been in office and, if getting OBL, was the end game he'd have gotten there sooner. Although I doubt that this will change the larger policy of blowing things up and killing people, one can always hope that Obama will declare victory and bring the troops home.

UPDATE:
It looks like torture played no role in the information gathering. Score one for humanism.

History Remains a Discipline: Analogy Edition

Lots of people are going to use Bush I's popularity after Gulf I as an analogy to any increase in Obama's popularity after Osama's assassination. It's important to remember that Gulf I was an invasion fought to get rid of history's greatest monster that ended without getting rid of the monster, who the majority of America had never heard of. Osama, on the other hand, is a long-sought and well-known example of history's greatest monster part twenty thousand. Plus and also, his death comes at the end of a long week in which Obama showed that he has no time for silliness because, you know, he is busy killing Osama, to say nothing of his making the point, with jokes yet, that he has no time for silliness because he is busy doing important things, like killing Osama. The events and any increase in popularity Obama obtains are different in kind, degree, and import.

Edumacation

Yesterday, the NYT had to op-eds on education. One, written by DAve Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari,argued from improving teachers conditions of work, wages, and status as a necessary, but not sufficient, step in the process of improving education. It was nice to see somebody discussing educational reform without relying on the tired and sloppy habit of blaming teachers. But still the focus in teachers.

The other was another in a series of one of those here is the necessary and sufficient step that solves for all time any problems in education. Its author, R Baker Bausell, bashed teachers and made the argument for

measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction — in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day.

Adminstrators

could simply videotape a few minutes of instruction a day, then evaluate the results to see how much time teachers spent on their assigned material and the extent to which they were able to engage students.

 And

the very process of recording classroom instruction would probably push some underperforming teachers to become more efficient.

See what he did there? Identified a problem: teachers need to spend more time teaching. Then identified a villian: lazy teachers. Offered solution: increased administrative interference in the classroom.

The first point is that teaching, particularly in the primary and secondary level, has to components: teaching and classroom management. Classroom management means, fundamentally, making the little darlings behave. Classroom management becomes more difficult if students don't, for example, respect their teachers, see much point in education and, consequently, aren't sufficiently motivated to do much of anything.

Size matters. Image that you have to teach as 7 year old reading, writing, maths, geology, history, civics, etc five days a week for 180 days between 6 and 7 hrs a day. How many would you want to confront at any given moment? 5? 10? 15? 20? 25? 30? 35? 40? When people start discussing education and insist that classroom size is really not that important. Imagine this nightmare situation: a class of 40 7 year olds in the spring, the first nice day of spring -- in fact, and you're about teach them about the formation of igneous rocks. A walk in the park, no doubt. 

Teachers in America faced that reality everyday, not in the sense that everyday is the first nice day in spring, and in many cases do so little to no community or administrative support with students whose parents struggle to earn enough to make live. Teachers play perhaps the most important role in creating education; however, they don't do it in a vacuum and pretending that they do is consistently and persistently put the cart before the horse. If we fail or refuse to work on diminishing and, ultimately, extirpating inequality all the reform proposals in the world aren't going to make enough of difference.

A Funeral and Four Predictions

Osama bin Laden is dead. I predict that
1) The Right will not, except grudgingly, acknowledge that Obama is ultimately and immediately responsible.
2) The Right will, by the end of the month at the latest, decide that Osama really didn't matter.
3) This event will not change America's foreign policy by a jot or tittle.
4)  There will be no terrorist attack on America for which AQ or the Taliban is responsible.

Did You Know

That Canada has a complicated and contentious political system in which, right now, its the social democrats versus the prince of darkness?

Reviewer Reviewed

Recently Tom McCarthy reviewed both David Foster Wallace's Pale King and the collection of essays on fatalism and free will in which a Wallace essay appears. Today the Times printed two letters. The first, respectfully, calls McCarthy an ignoramus on the cogency of the debate on fatalism and free will. The second, for the fatalism and free text's editor, points out, much less respectfully, that McCarthy was wrong about the publications content, history, and purpose and that he knows nothing about the philosophic roots of fatalism versus free will. McCarthy, understandably enought -- why make himself look worse, doesn't respond. Both letters, but the second in particular, raise the question of editors and fact checkers at the NYTRB do. It is, I suppose, to much to ask that they understand the philosophical aspect of the two books but surely McCarthy's claim that fatalism and free will was only Wallace's text could be checked with the Google.

Also, Shirley McClain's I Over All That, in which she discusses, among other things, her "past lives" inclusion on the nonfiction list is further evidence, should it be needed, that the NYT is losing interest in words and their meaning.