What to do about Detroit

As is so often the tragic truth, the debate over saving the Big Three seems to have come down to a choice between "Do it" and "Do nothing". There is a third way, which would have the effect of letting these companies die their richly deserved death, while saving most of the jobs. We should save the money that would go into bailing them out (they are doomed anyway), and instead divide that money into two pools: One pool would go to providing unemployment benefits to the affected workers; the second pool would go into tax incentives and other benefits to attract the Toyotas and Nissans of the world to rebuild the industry here in the U.S., with requirements that they hire and retrain most of the displaced workers. No one from the Big Three who held a title of Vice President or above would be eligible. They have proven they are ineducable.

This plan is about as close to win-win as is possible in this situation. Make no mistake about it: the culture of the Big Three is such that if we simply throw them a life line, we will be facing this question again, and again, and again, after each bail-out. They are beyond hope and should be put to sleep.

Biting the Hand (link)

Several observers have noted that in the recent election, the drift of wealthy/high-income/rich people away from the Republicans picked up steam. David Brooks, among others, bemoans the GOP's practiced ability to alienate the professional classes, noting that even bankers contributed to Obama vs. McCain by over 2:1. It took genius, as Brooks points out, to achieve that.

As the country debates whether this election was a cry for change from a center-right country, or a mandate for a more leftward course, there has been a rise in volume from the traditional populists, who, even with the election won, are stepping up the rhetoric of vengeance against everyone making $250,000 or more, the number which Obama has arbitrarily defined as the boundary between "wealth" and non-wealth.

I am not against hard measures against individuals who committed malfeasance. There are many Wall Streeters who deserve to be put out on the street. These are people who harvested in a few years much of what this country took 200 years to build, mainly through clever tricks of financial manipulation and the purchase of a number of congressmen. They deserve punishment they are unlikely to receive. As we contemplate the bailout of the auto companies, we ignore the very real betrayals by a generation of executives, who willfully refused to adopt modern management methods to run their companies. All the blame being placed on the unions would be moot if those companies had kept making cars that people want. Many of those executives deserve time at hard labor for sheer negligence.

But to demonize everyone making $250,000 or more, most of whom actually contributed to Obama, is an early step toward destroying the still new and fragile coalition that has reversed the past decade's slide into the Rove-ian abyss. We have voted against our immediate financial self-interest, in part out of revulsion at the kind of conservatism that has taken over the Republican party, and in part in the conviction that our long-term interests ARE best served by a fairer, more tolerant and more stable society.

There is, however, a limit. Very few of the so-called "rich" are actually so rich as not to have to care about their tax bill. Most people in the educated/professional classes have a number at which they feel their own livelihoods threatened. Reach that number, and they will move back into the GOP column.

Leaving aside the need for short-term government spending to dig us out of the current crisis, there are many progressive goals that do not require still further increases in government spending, but simply require a change of policy. Environmental responsibility, equality under the law, respect for privacy and habeas corpus, reproductive rights, teaching science instead of religion in schools, and not launching wars of choice--all of these are things that would not require more money, or would in fact be LESS costly than current procedure. The new administration would do well to focus on some of these goals and be careful about too much "spreading the wealth". A safety net is one thing, and is essential, but it should not depend on pulling the net out from others.

Washing Their hands

The images were, and continue to be moving, even days after the election. A black mom sitting on the floor of her church, overcome with emotion as her little daughter touches her face. Jesse Jackson, standing alone in the crowd at Grant Park, tears streaming down his face. Mobs of young people, white, black and everything in between, dancing with joy.

A significant portion of white America voted for the other guy, but it is undeniable that millions of white people have stood shoulder to shoulder with blacks in the struggle for "a more perfect Union", millions of people of all colours worked for this day, and millions celebrated together in victory. This election was about far more than electing a black man to be President. It was also a referendum on a certain way of governing, and on the direction of this country. But the colour of the candidates had every potential to override the substance of the debate, and we showed, at last, that we could work together to get past colour.
Only, something went wrong in California. A group even more hated and despised than blacks were handed a bitter repudiation, as California amended its constitution to enshrine the idea that they are less than human. And blacks, even as they voted overwhelmingly for Obama, also voted overwhelmingly to kick that other group in the teeth. Over 70% of the Black vote went in favor of Proposition 8. In the midst of the celebration of their triumph, one has to wonder if it occurred to these people that they have simply handed off the role of nigger to another group of human beings.

I have spoken with a number of black people about this: colleagues, fellow school parents, friends. I have listened to their rationalizations on the radio. It is clear that the directive to vote for Prop. 8 came from the pulpit, from the very churches where blacks have gone for generations to exorcise their torment. What is remarkable is the lack of questioning with which they marched to the polls to vote for this piece of hate, and the utter blindness to the similarities between their own story and the story of this even more hated group.

The airwaves are full of retrospectives on this election. The debates over what to do about Prop. 8 are all about raising more money, organizing better, reaching out to conservatives to show them that gay people pose no threat, etc. Yet there is no voice with the courage to tell us the truth that stares us in the face: if the black vote had just been 50:50, that would have been enough to block Prop. 8.

It is time for the progressive and enlightened conservative community to turn to their brothers and sisters in the black community and say "We worked with you to get to this day, and it is time you close ranks with other oppressed people. Gays are the only group left that society thinks it is OK to oppress. You can't abandon them now."

It is time for us to go to Washington to revoke the tax exempt status of every black church that incited its parishioners to vote for Prop. 8. If Progressives don't apply the same rules to these churches as they are trying to apply to white churches that have been promoting Republican causes, then they, and we, are all hypocrites. It is time to get ALL of the preachers out of the business of making law, regardless of their colour or creed.

The Economist

BARACK OBAMA
Oct 30th 2008


America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of
the free world

IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back
in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with
a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with
the federal government's huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the
seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls
next week the mood will be very different. The United States is
unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its
self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack
Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose
between them. THE ECONOMIST does not have a vote, but if it did, it
would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic
candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of
restoring America's self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble.
Given Mr Obama's inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his
beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting
for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep
road ahead.

THINKING ABOUT 2009 AND 2017
The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting
enough: repairing America's economy and its international reputation.
The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the
start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is
needed, though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral
above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care
cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the
cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror
has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its
friends than it once was.

Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only
because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to
2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A
combination of demography and the rising costs of America's huge
entitlement programmes--Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid--will be
starting to bankrupt the country. Abroad a greater task is already
evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just
a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into
global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling
economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates
American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with
Guantanamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and
strategy.

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments
against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in
opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and
extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to
recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan's party of western individualism
and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the
state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans' candidate was a powerful
reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive
politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has
long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring
in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular
positions--for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq,
tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western
Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with
both Democrats and America's allies.

IF ONLY THE REAL JOHN MCCAIN HAD BEEN RUNNING
That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six
months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good
features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal
conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts
now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who
denounced the religious right as "agents of intolerance" now embraces
theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies
(who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came
out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his
support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading
towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the
right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found
wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut
reaction over Georgia--to warn Russia off immediately--was the right
one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he
has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has
never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama,
he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers
(Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just
that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have
been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably
abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her
just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by
speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of
artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a
word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs
this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his
unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic
Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing
case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000
instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this
time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he
knows how to deal with them.

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about
what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as
irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel
many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for
the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan
if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far
harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy
is a sham. America's allies would rally to him: the global electoral
college[1] on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he
would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America's
history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their
problems on racism.

So Mr Obama's star quality will be useful to him as president. But that
alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare
nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves:
his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far
to the left.

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama's resume is thin for
the world's biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he
has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he
has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who
started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised
and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics--the
Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best
in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one
of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial
crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain's has been
febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team
of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin
and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is
a man who listens, learns and manages well.

It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing
with America's enemies. Part of Mr Obama's original appeal to the
Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq;
but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically
saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His
determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and
proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr
McCain is-- but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.

Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a
muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy.
Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his
speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what
happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor
record of defying his party's baronies, especially the unions. His
advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of
over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of
Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre
in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre
that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the
country as a whole.

HE HAS EARNED IT
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr
McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of
President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice
is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for
America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and
detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and
discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense
potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/vote2008/

Off the radar screen

We are not a very scientifically literate society. Apparently, our leaders don't think that matters. If our leaders WERE scientifically literate, and could be trusted to make good decisions about the funding and the use of science, it might be okay that the rest of us are not all that informed (although putting anything entirely in the hands of experts is dangerous--look at our banking system).

Unfortunately, some of our leaders are worse than ill-informed. They are knowledge-hostile knuckleheads. The new knucklehead-in-chief appears to be one of our candidates for VP. Click on the header of this post to see it for yourself.

Beyond the Pale?

From today's blogs:

"...there is an emerging debate—one with the potential to last for a long time about the role of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

One school—including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal—called her a drag on the ticket and implicitly rebuked McCain’s judgment in picking her. Another school believes she is the future of the party, a view backed by Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard: “Whether they know it or not, Republicans have a huge stake in Palin. If, after the election, they let her slip into political obscurity, they’ll be making a huge mistake.”"

Why is any of this even surprising? Of Course she's the future of the Republican party. The last eight years, whether you like the policies of the Bush adminstration or not, left the Republican party hollowed out. Who was going to lead them in the post Bush-Cheney era? Every credible moderate was excommunicated from the party. Who is left? Rick Santorum? Gone. Tom Delay? Too toxic, and gone as well. Huckabee? perhaps, but events have proven him to be Palin Lite. He doesn't come close to her in terms of pull. No one expected Caribou Barbie, but she is here, and let's face it, she inspires the faithful like no one since Reagan. Win or lose, Palin IS the face of the GOP for the next several years, at least.

For any liberals out there recoiling at the thought, take some solace in this: If Sarah Palin indeed becomes the face of the GOP, the GOP will in turn become a minority party for many years. Saying that she is by far their most likely future presidential candidate, does not mean she is likely to win. The Republicans began transformation thirty or more years ago, when they adopted the "Southern Strategy", appealing to the worst instincts of beleaguered working-class whites in the heartland. That process initially looked like a winner, because it secured the votes to keep them in power most of the past three decades. But the Joe Sixpacks they invited into the tent took over the party. The old elites that ran the party are gone.

It has long been an axiom that you have to tack right to win the GOP nomination, then tack to the center to win the election. The Republicans probably have any number of potential candidates who could win the presidency any given election. Unfortunately, those candidates will never win the primaries, and the GOP will become a purely reactionary, theocratic party. It makes for great rallies but is not much of a strategy. So take heart: we will have to put up with Palin for a long time, and she will probably be the next GOP nominee for President, but as long as people don't lose their minds, she will never BE president. A third party is more likely to form before that happens.

Underestimating Sarah Palin

Just as they did with Ronald Reagan, those of Democratic/Liberal/Progressive leanings are underestimating Sarah Palin. No, I am not predicting a McCain/Palin victory, though that is not out of the question by any means. But if you think an Obama victory will rid the world of Palin, you are mistaken. Educated people have had a field day making fun of her tortured syntax, her fem-bot-like delivery of sound-bites, her obvious cluelessness about almost anything requiring actual thought. Just as many dismissed Reagan as an amiable dunce, too many dismiss Palin as nothing more than Caribou Barbie.

Here is a prediction: Sarah Palin, win or lose in November, will become face and the standard-bearer of the GOP. She is the closest thing to a transformative figure the Republicans have had since Reagan. She is nowhere near being in Reagan's class as a thinker or politician, but the times are different. Reagan was part of a very deep generation of conservative politicians, especially in the day when the Republicans actually had a diversity of viewpoints and philosophies. Palin stands almost alone, after eight years in which the party has been systematically purged of diversity and stripped of any philosophical trappings. Who else is left? Huckabee? He has been exposed as Palin-lite. Romney? Even Republicans see through him. The younger generation, epitomized by Rick Santorum, have fallen by the wayside, at least for now, in part because they were one-note wonders. And none of them represented a divergence from the social conservatism that is far more ably represented by Palin. In other words, had they survived they would still be eclipsed by her.

The question is, what will this mean, and should we be afraid? If you are a moderate or libertarian-leaning Republican, you should be afraid. The Palin era will bring with it the culmination of the purge which began at least as early as 1992: all vestiges of considered and rational deliberation, all receptiveness to diversity or to internationalism, will be excised from the Party. It will devolve into a purely and openly fundamentalist lobby. The Faustian bargain that the old Republican elite made, to bargain for the votes of Joe Sixpack, will come home to roost, with the Wall Street crowd completely losing any voice they once had.

The moderates and libertarians will have to consider forming a new party, perhaps inviting centrist Democrats to join them (although, in the afterglow of a winning election cycle, few are likely to jump ship). There might after all be a chance for a viable third party, though it remains unlikely.

There has been talk of Karl Rove's notion of a permanent majority being turned on its head. Democrats are talking about a long-term reversal of fortunes. It is almost too bad that they will not have had to suffer through a few more years in the wilderness. I say "almost", because that would also have meant more years of Republican rule, which would be unaccepable and even suicidal. But the Democrats have returned to their worst instincts, demonizing rich people (by their definition of "rich", most rich people are contributing to them, not to the Republicans), openly defending Big Government, and so on. The Democrats could ensure a "permanent" mandate if they would make fiscal conservatism part of their DNA, even while standing up for the environment, equal rights, equal opportunity, healthcare reform, education and an enlightened foreign policy. But they won't do it.

Still, as long as the Republicans have to deal with the Palinization of the Party and all of its consequences, the Democrats will have a window of opportunity to get some things right. We can only hope that Obama is in fact as thoughtful and balanced as he has appeared on the campaign trail.

Letter from Calcutta

I am sitting in a room here in Calcutta, without an internet connection, hoping to get a connection sometime soon so I can send out a letter. In a couple of hours I will be heading out on the Ganga in a small boat, to scatter my Mom’s ashes. The Ganga is of course India’s holiest river, but this is also the place where she was born, so it all seems appropriate. She was not a religious person, but she tried to live her life according to the principles claimed by many religions: generosity toward those less fortunate, stewardship of the world we live in, respect for all living things. She did a better job of it than most who claim to be religious.

While I wait, I reflect on what I have seen of the country she loved, and over which she despaired. From the brief snapshot I have had in Delhi and Calcutta, India remains a place of incredible life and energy, but also a place mired in suffering. The filth and chaos in the streets are noticeably worse than when I was here two years ago. The truth is that India’s remarkable economic growth is benefitting too few people, and the birth rate remains sky high—India is about to surpass China as the world’s most populous place, and there are simply no resources to keep up.

Ironically, modernization is making the problem worse in many ways. When the streets were filled with camels and cows, and the garbage was more organic, the animals did a decent job of recycling the detritus. Now, a dense mesh of discarded plastic bags forms an indestructible trap for filth that lines the sides of the streets, and the soot of millions of recently added cars mixes with the dust to form a suffocating brown haze that leaves everything with a gritty coat. In the midst of it all, the poorest women still manage to wear their brightly coloured saris with something like aplomb, as they navigate the chaos.

One irony is that Calcutta, long the icon in the West of monumental Asian misery, looks to be a cleaner and more functional place than Delhi. It is certainly a warmer place, built on a more human scale and inhabited by less isolated people. It seems no worse than it was two years ago.

The same cannot be said of Delhi. Already designed to be people-unfriendly, it has become noticeably more miserable. The traffic is ludicrously bad, the streets more crowded, the dust inescapable. There is no sign India's economic boom, reported so breathlessly in Western papers, has touched this place, the capital of India. There are a handful of stores, often in compounds under armed guard, that sell luxury designer goods at prices that would make Neiman Marcus blush. Just steps outside, emaciated men offer shoe shines for 50 cents and maimed children beg, risking their lives in the traffic to knock on the windows of cars.

The stunning thing about it is the lack of anger. Indians of all classes seem resigned to the conditions around them. The papers, which even the poor read voraciously, cover petty political scandals (the level of personal attacks makes Washington look genteel, indeed), the dalliances of Bollywood stars, and cricket. The media are admirably free in India, and if there were a groundswell of discontent, one can be sure the press would cover, if not fan the flames. There is a lesson for us spoiled Westerners, in the easy smiles and quick generosity of people who have so little. Yet one almost wishes more of them would get angry, for the sake of their children.

No crystal ball

Making predictions is dangerous--you can look dumb when you get it wrong. So these aren't predictions, but I'm willing to call them bets, and will back them up with real money if there are any takers. I reserve the right to cancel any bets in the event of another major war.

1. The market shares of NASDAQ, NYSE etc. are going to continue to slide in real and relative terms for at least a decade. Foreign stock markets have recently grabbed a big share of listings and IPOs from the American markets. This is not a temporary thing.

2. The U.S. dollar will continue to plummet, reflecting a real and relative slide in the value of the U.S. economy. If China unpegs the RMB, it will settle at about 4 per dollar, vs. 7.5 today. The dollar's slide is due in part to the extraction of billions of dollars from the economy by financial engineers such as buyout funds, which have harvested much of the value built up over two centuries by real entrepreneurs and their workers. With no reform in sight, we can expect this wealth transfer to continue indefinitely.

3. The brain drain from other countries will continue to slow, and will even reverse (this has already happened with China). With no political base in the U.S. in favor of more immigration, and with anti-immigrant hysteria dominating presidential primary politics, there is no sign that the U.S. is going to snap out of its suicidal impulse to close the borders.

4. The U.S. will lose its lead in new patents by 2020.

5. The U.S. will fall out of first place in worker productivity by 2015. We are already subjected to a steady stream of whiny articles about how overworked and stressed Americans are. Truth: in most emerging countries, people work longer, study harder, and take less vacations. Between our sense of entitlement and the loss of immigrants to pick up the slack, we are headed for the bottom in terms of productivity.

6. If the Bush Administration does not start a war in Iran (give that 50% probability), the political time bomb they have created will blow up on the next president, regardless of party, and the U.S. will find itself confronting lethal violence, alone and friendless. There will be major terrorist attacks on the U.S., within the next 2 years, which will lead to further suspension of civil rights and liberties here at home, and a choice between isolationism or further militarization of our foreign policy. It won't matter if a Democrat is president by then.

7. The U.S., already ranked at the bottom of industrialised countries in quality of health-care, life expectancy and literacy, will continue to slide in the rankings, regardless of which party is on power. It will happen faster with the Republicans in charge, but it will happen.

If you want to take me up on any of these, you know where to find me. If any of these are not specific enough for you, feel free to propose sharper definitions.

Benedict the Lame

Sorry folks. The guy is just a moron.

Getting Osama

There will no doubt be lots of analysis of the new Osama video over the next several days. If the reports are accurate, concerning what is said in that video, there is really only one message that matters: According to Osama, we must convert to Islam or die.

This writer knows of no one, liberal or conservative (except for the late Jerry Falwell) who thinks there has ever been any justification for Islamist terrorism. Yet conservatives have succeeded in portraying liberals, and the Democrats in particular, as sympathizers, enablers, or appeasers. And they have been able to do so because, when it comes to calling a spade a spade, the Democrats are cowards. By contrast, the conservatives are not afraid to shout from the rooftops that the Islamo-fascists want us dead. The problem with hearing it from our conservatives is that the policies they advocate in response are idiotic, and would lead to World War III faster than you can say "rapture".

Meanwhile, the Democrats, who by and large have better ideas about how to deal with extremism, seem pathologically unable to use the word "terrorist" in public speech. They've got their undies in a knot, trying to be politically correct and not offend mainstream Muslims. They defend airport screening protocols that treat grandmothers from North Dakota the same as young males with beards and Arabic names. In the process, they look and sound, well, weak and stupid.

Let's have a history lesson: Islam arose latest of the world's major religions; driven by a creed that called for forcible conversion, it became the most populous of those religions in very short order. It stormed out of the desert and, in a few hundred years, completely took over North Africa and even part of Europe. Contrary to the attempts by most Democrats and even George "Islam is a religion of peace" Bush to whitewash it, the fact is that the Koran repeatedly calls for the conversion of infidels, by sword if necessary, and its adherents have been very efficient at it. "But," you say, "today those kinds of extremists are just a lunatic fringe!" Really?

An estimated 200 million "mainstream" Muslims live in communities that practice female genital mutilation. A dozen Muslim countries operate Sharia courts, where they condemn children to death by stoning for "moral" offenses such as dating across clan lines. Religious minorities are no longer safe in Muslim countries, as they once were. Madrassas across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa are teaching undiluted hate and instilling in children a thirst for martyrdom. Sudan lurches from genocide to genocide, with Christians and Muslims alike butchered or starved to death by the Muslim government. At some point, one has to wake up and acknowledge that the values system that permits these realities is intolerable to human society.

If pointing this out is cultural imperialism, then so be it. Conservatives, usually quick to defend oppression under the guise of "letting people be" (think apartheid, south American death squads) have, to their credit, been crystal clear about the threat of radical Islam, even if they have to hold their noses while defending womens' rights. Meanwhile, progressives, so willing to protest China's crimes in Tibet, can't bring themselves to look the Muslim world in the eye and demand an accounting for its vastly greater and deeply endemic barbarism.

The only way the world's Islamic "mainstream" can earn the trust of the rest of us is to reject the use of force, and to repudiate Bin Laden and his ilk. Refusing to shelter and aid terrorists would be a great start. The conservatives in this country are not bothering to ask for that, because they are too busy with their own calls for blood and vengeance--they frankly love the idea of Holy War, and if you don't believe that, listen to Sean Hannity and Matt Drudge on the radio, if you can stand it. No, only the liberals and the Democrats any longer have the intellectual or moral standing to call for the Muslim world to stand down and embrace moderation. But to issue that call, they are going to have to get over their own reticence about Islam's brutal history. As long as they cower in the margins, they will deservedly be painted as appeasers. And, with the conservatives defining the debate, we slide closer to the abyss.

All the wrong reasons

Yes, we are all sick of hearing about Larry Craig. But there is one thing which keeps going unsaid, and should be said. Despite the claims of the Republican leadership that this is not about Craig being gay, in fact that is exactly what it is all about. The only one who seems to get that is Craig himself, whose major public statements have consisted of repeated, desperate denials that he is gay.

It is a wonderful illustration of the problem the Republicans have bought themselves by relying on hate to build their coalition. They cannot come out and say they are throwing one of their own under the bus for being gay. That would cement their position as the party of intolerance. But they have to satisfy their base, which, to be honest, doesn't give a damn about some minor infraction in an airport mens' room. All you have to do is listen to the conservative radio folks to know that, for them, Craig's homosexuality IS what it's all about, and they want Craig out. So the Senate leaders pretend it is about the infraction, while tacitly reassuring their "base" that they can be counted on to root out any sign of queerness from the ranks.

This writer is no fan of Larry Craig. He has been wrong on a lot of stuff, most of all in his hypocritical campaign against human rights in America. But he should not be losing his office over this. As in the Ted Haggard case, the Republicans, handed a golden opportunity to re-examine their doctrine of intolerance, have instead dug themselves deeper into the hole. And Craig, handed a golden opportunity to come out and become a free man, has thrown away the key to his own prison.

The Terror Index and Rope-a-Dope

Another study, surveying 100 top experts on foreign policy, concludes we are less safe than before and are losing ground in the war on terrorism. Blah Blah. If we think the Administration cares, we are seriously deluded.

But then, what is there we can do? Even this writer, convinced from the start that we were short on constructive approaches and long on the wrong kinds of power, has to concede that we have been put in a box. We can't just lay down our arms. Too many people hate us at this point. The metaphor of the "tiger by the tail" has never been more apt. The fact that the Bushies will go down in history as the ones who locked us in this box is no consolation.

On the radio today, a discussion of this problem produced a long series of single-issue advocates. One guy wants us to distance ourselves from Israel. Another proposes pouring money into good works. Another suggests the problem is Arab overpopulation. Lots think it was all about oil, and we are seen as pillagers. Some fault inflammatory rhetoric. Others fault appeasement. All of this proof that the problem is probably too complex to solve.

This column will not suggest yet another single-issue approach. In what follows, keep in mind that this writer agrees with all of the above, and is convinced, like 86% of the experts surveyed by the Foreign Policy Institute, that we are headed for more 9/11's down the road. But there is one theme that gets too little attention, and it probably fuels the passions over all the other issues. We have a long and dishonorable history of stomping on the political aspirations of people in that part of the world. From the Pahlavis, to the Sauds, to Algeria and Egypt, and of course Saddam (when it was convenient) we have supported despots who thwarted their own people. No wonder the people hate us. Maybe it is time to see what happens if we actually let them govern themselves. In other words, let the lunatics try running the asylum.

Now of course, it seems clear that if we let them do that, much of that region will wake up tomorrow under Islamic dictatorships. Anyone who has read this column knows that there is no love for religious zealots here. To the contrary, they are really REALLY scary, plus they don't seem to have any sense of humor. But it may be time for us to take a gamble, and let them have their way, at least in their corner of the world. Let Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, among others, go Islamist. With the exception of Pakistan, which has nukes, none of the predominantly Islamic countries can harm us (which is why we can't adopt this approach with Pakistan). Having gotten what they want, and faced with the prospect of having to govern, it is quite possible, even likely, that their bloodlust will abate and they will be forced to moderate their behaviour, if not their rhetoric.

We will still have to deal with the threat of terrorism, (and must not relax our vigilance, such as it is) but as the Islamists find themselves, not outcasts, but part of the world order, they will have to decide whether they can afford to keep trying to destroy that order. They will have to feed their people, employ them, and all that good stuff. That will keep them quite busy, and they will begin to realize the world order is not such a bad thing to belong to, if you want to eat more than dates and camel jerky.

One nice corollary for us is that fundamentalists do not do very well at things like science and technology and progress. If they fail to feed people, there is a very real risk some of the people will get even more resentful, but their ability to do anything about it will diminish over time as those societies retreat to the dark ages. They will get less and less able to build really nasty weapons, let alone launch them, and they will become even more dependent on us to buy their oil (assuming they haven't dynamited their own wells, as some of the loonier ones have threatened to do). If we couple this with a strategy to become oil independent, we will end up with a far stronger hand than we could ever achieve by building military bases in their deserts and Green Zones in their cities.

The downside? There will be a few more 9/11's, most likely, but that is probably true no matter what we do. The upside is that as we engage these societies on many levels, other than bombing them, they will eventually hate us less and the 9/11's will stop. If, on the other hand, we stick with our current policy, we are guaranteed endless 9/11's for as far as we can foresee.

Think of it as rope-a-dope. The big strong guy keeps throwing haymakers at the clever nimble guy, until he exhausts himself and the nimble guy punches him out. In the current situation, we are the big strong guy, and we are losing. It is time to pull a little rope-a-dope ourselves. Back off. In fact, get out of the ring, let them have it to themselves for a couple of rounds. And then approach them, cautiously, with a hand out in friendship.

Losing the battle for truth

Tonight I watched James Carville debate Ralph Reed on the topic of teaching creationism in schools. Despite the fact that Carville had all the facts on his side, he ended up looking stupid. And this, from a man who is considered a master of the political mudfight.

It is time for this to stop, and the only way for it to stop is for pro-science people to stop being so bloody earnest, and to admit there is an element of verbal gamesmanship to the process. The creationists figured this out long ago, and they had to, because they don't have anything else on their side, such as facts. Defenders of science have let the creationists frame the debate, and on those terms, truth usually gets whomped.

The ironic thing is that we don't have to abandon truth to win the contest of verbal gymnastics. We just need to be more clever, and more aggressive, in re-framing the debate. For example: Reed repeatedly looked into the camera with his earnest expression and said "Jim, it's only about academic freedom! Why can't we hear people with other views and then make up our minds?" Carville responded, predicably, by ranting about how we "have to teach hard, cold science", and how "all scientists agree about evolution". In doing so, he appeared to validate Reed's view that scientists are dogmatic, and that science is a closed club with no room for dissent. This is exactly how the religious zealots want people to see us!

What if, instead, Carville had replied thus: "Ralph, we believe in academic freedom. Academic freedom only works when it is linked to intellectual honesty. The day a creationist comes to us with an argument that is intellectually honest, we will welcome them into the classroom. Until then, what you are advocating is faith, not science."

Or thus: "Ralph, I am glad you raise the topic of academic freedom. Because that is what Christians like Charles Darwin did not have when they first began looking for evidence of God's grand design. When Darwin was forced by the facts to admit that God might be working through something like evolution, he risked his life in the process. And people like you have never stopped trying to drown out the message. So don't lecture us about academic freedom."

If our spokesmen were to stop being so defensive, and take the zealots on with their own hatchets, the zealots would not be winning. Unfortunately, this is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of our national future. Countries like India and China are poised to run us over in the most brutal fashion, and they are using education to do it. How are we going to compete if we can't convince our own kids that investigation, questioning and thought are legitimate ways to get answers about the world?

Instead, in America, science has been painted as religious dogma. How ironic, since it was once the deconstructionists on the Left who claimed that the scientific method was all an artifact of peoples' prejudices and social conditioning, and that there are no facts. The Right used to hate that kind of thinking. Yet, here they are today, using clever turns of phrase to portray scientific consensus as a totally arbitrary choice, subject to social prejudice and up for a vote. The difference is that the deconstructionists never influenced anyone outside their own weird little echo chamber, while the religious zealots are undermining a key foundation of our nation's strength. We owe it to our children to do a better job of defending their future.

When a bumper sticker can say it all...

• 1/20/09: End of an Error
• That's OK, I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway
• Let's Fix Democracy in This Country First
• If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran
• Bush. Like a Rock. Only Dumber.
• If You Can Read This, You're Not Our President
• Of Course It Hurts: You're Getting Screwed by an Elephant.
• Hey, Bush Supporters: Embarrassed Yet?
• George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight
• Impeachment: It's Not Just for Blowjobs Anymore
• America: One Nation, Under Surveillance
• They Call Him "W" So He Can Spell It
• Who's [sic] God Do You Kill For? The person who wrote this was probably in George's spelling group.
• Cheney/Satan '08
• Jail to the Chief
• No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade Iraq?
• Bush: God's Way of Proving Intelligent Design is Full Of Crap
• Bad President! No Banana.
• We Need a President Who's Fluent In At Least One Language
• We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them
• Is It Vietnam Yet?
• Bush Doesn't Care About White People, Either
• Where Are We Going? And Why Are We In This Handbasket?
• You Elected Him. You Deserve Him.
• Impeach Cheney First
• When Bush Took Office, Gas Was $1.46
• Pray For Impeachment
• The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century
• What Part of "Bush Lied" Don't You Understand?
• One Nation Under Clod
• 2004: Embarrassed
• 2005: Horrified
• 2006: Terrified
• Bush Never Exhaled
• At Least Nixon Resigned

Republicans face a choice

Note: This piece was written in the weeks before the recent midterm election. The author stands by the prediction that the Republican Party is going to move further to the "right".

Ex-House majority leader Dick Armey, a 1994 "Contract on America" author, said earlier this year that his former colleagues "need to do some serious substantive legislation" to improve their electoral chances. Armey, a conservative Republican, said his GOP colleagues are wasting time. “They're not doing real work. They're making political statements," he said, in his June remarks, referring to a long string of actions which, among other things, repeatedly placed ideology above rationality.

Like Armey, a lot of us find it bizarre that the GOP are so far off track, but in fact, he may be wrong about what it takes for them to win elections. I had the occasion to ask a major beltway Republican operative (call him "Tony") whether there was any chance the GOP could return to its more cosmopolitan, internationalist roots, and he shrugged. "Look, it took us 50 years to figure out how to put together a winning coalition, and we're not going to change course now." That was three months ago. Now, that coalition is showing signs of cracking. Truthfully, we should have seen this coming, and some did (but were dismissed). However, it has taken a month of really bad news to expose the contradictions within the GOP.

The two major components of the Republican coalition, namely Wall Street and the social conservatives, have nothing in common except a shared hatred of an empty box labelled “liberalism”. The irony is that the world the Wall Streeters want is awfully cold and frightening for the typical heartland Christian conservative. It is a world of free-agency, free capital flows, unfettered economic competition, and unchecked vulgarity in the media. It is a world that would eat most fundamentalist Christians alive (an image of the Colisseum comes to mind). Most important, it is a world in which we must teach science in schools, or our shiny new industries will vanish.

And the world of the Christians is certainly not one the Wall Streeters would like. Picture Afghanistan under the Taliban: Lots of religious indoctrination. No fun, no dates, no laughing. Nothing to do with all your money except wait for martyrdom (ie., the Rapture), unless you own your own island. It was, in one sense, the genius of the Republican leadership over the past 20 years, that they were able to convince the Christian conservatives to blame the increasing pornification of the world on liberalism, rather than seeing it as a natural consequence of free-market policies, exploding media and greatly increased mobility.

Now that there in dissension in the ranks, an old debate is taking on new significance: which wing of the Republican coalition is using which? Some say the Wall Steeters have been using the Christians to win votes, in the service of policies that strictly benefit the money guys. This is an obvious implication of the just-published book “Tempting Faith”, by a former Bush Administration insider, David Kuo (link?). With the common folk under control, the money guys can clean up as they never have before, goes the theory. There is certainly some soul-searching within the ranks of the social conservatives, who are finally wondering if they have been had.

Others say the Christians are using the infrastructure of the old GOP to take over the country, after which women will have to wear burkas, our schools will become like the Madrassas, and we may become a third-world country. This has been my fear since the day I was told by a fourth-grade classmate that I would go to hell for thinking we “came from monkeys”. Even with the tide turning against the GOP, and, in fact, perhaps because of this reversal, the threat of a fundamentalist takeover of the party seems only to loom larger. After all, party leadership has responded to its stress by pandering even more to the Christian right, not less. Hence, Dick Armey’s comments from earlier this year.

If the Republicans lose big in November, the party is going to change radically. The few remaining moderates have been targeted by the Democrats (which is unfortunate), and infighting will eliminate those who survive. Even reduced to a minority in one or both houses, the prospect of the Republican party as a party of theocracy should frighten all of us who value human progress. It is essential that we find and support Republicans who will stand up for education, science and reason-based decision-making, before it is too late for the party and for all of us.

Christian values and the Amish

Even as various self-professed "Christian" organizations ratchet up their messages of hate, we have all been given an opportunity to see real Christian values in action. In Pennsylvania the Amish community endure unthinkable tragedy in full view of the world, and have given us a heart-rending embodiment of the core Christian values of grace and forgiveness. They have asked that the family of the killer share in any funds raised to support victims. Can we imagine any of Pat Robertson's or Tony Perkins' flock exhibiting such courage? To the contrary, Robertson and Perkins have inculcated a spirit of vengeance that forgives nothing and no-one. In their fear and desparation they pray nihilistically for the End of Times, when all including the Amish, whom they despise, will perish in flames.

We can be sure that the Amish never asked to be in the national spotlight, or to become role models, yet there they are, bearing up with such fortitude as to put the rest of us to shame. I never understood them, in part because I could not imagine forgoing the pleasures and conveniences of modern life, but I have only respect and admiration for the way they have lived their values out under such unbearable pain. It is time for our leaders, religious and secular, to re-examine what we mean by "values". We now have an example for all to see, and it would be tragic if we didn't get the message.

Religious Right vs. Hollywood

On any given day, we can hear, if we wish, right-wing spokesmen (and women) railing against the "media". According to them, the "Media" is a giant conspiracy, run by jews, gays and other subversives, to destroy America by undermining American "Values". No one gets the religious right more twisted up in their undies than Hollywood. And they hate no one more than Disney, though that is mainly for giving gay employees full benefits, not because of Disney's cloying and culturally illiterate pap. Christian organizations regularly call for a boycott of Hollywood movies. Around Academy Awards time, we are assaulted by right-wing talkers insisting that the Oscars are really not that big a deal, that they are not watched by that many people, blah blah.

Now, there is no desire here to defend Oscar night. It is really hard to imagine something less interesting. That so many people DO watch it, is inexplicable. But my reasons for saying that have nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with boredom. Meanwhile, it is actually weird that the religious right are so suspicious of Hollywood--is there any more effective purveyor of the kind of cathartic mayhem and Stalinist kitsch that warms the hearts of fundamentalists? If you visit any country outside the U.S., you will find they are surprised and puzzled that conservatives hate Hollywood. After all, other than Coke, what is a more powerful symbol of American cultural dominion than our movie industry?

For one who has time for neither religious zealots nor for Hollywood, it is almost fun to see them at each other's throats. Too bad neither camp show any sign of climbing out of the gutter.

Why is democracy more important to Iraqis than to Americans?

From the UN to the campaign trail, the President never misses a chance to talk about supporting democracy in the Middle East. We are bankrupting our Treasury and sacrificing our young soldiers, ostensibly in the name of this idea. Unfortunately, we are not protecting this idea here at home. Our government and its partisans do not seem to believe that the opposition have the right to a voice. We have been threatened, suppressed, and told we are unpatriotic. We have been told we are siding with the enemy.

It does seem ironic that this president, so convinced of the value of democracy that he will shove it down middle-eastern throats at the point of a gun, sees no reason to protect democratic principles at home. His operatives have orchestrated the removal of the very term "democratic" from our political lexicon, substituting the word "democrat", as in "the Democrat party". The major media networks have gone along, just the first step in erasing our consciousness of the concept for which the word "democracy" stands. You don't have to be a member of the party to care about the devaluation of the word "democratic".

It is clear that what the Bush Administration wants for the Middle East is not democracy at all, but merely pliability. That is a critical distinction, because it means no one should assume we will act on principle. Saddam was a good friend, deserving of billions of dollars in military aid, until he became inconvenient for us. He wasn't the first dictator to find that out, and probably won't be the last. But before we dump the likes of Musharraf, should the day arrive when he, too, becomes inconvenient, we should not forget that the people waiting to take over from him hate us even more than the Iraqis do. Unlike the Iraqis, however, the Pakistanis do in fact have WMD.

Conservatives are finally getting it

From Chris Buckley, second-generation conservative pundit:

"Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles. George Tenet's WMD 'slam-dunk,' Vice President Cheney's 'we will be greeted as liberators,' Don Rumsfeld's avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves 'neo-conservative' (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others' throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000 -- with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. . . "

Why Lieberman deserved to lose

An interesting race is shaping up in Connecticut, with Joe Lieberman recovering from his initial stunning loss to Ned Lamont, and now leading in the race to keep his seat, as an independent. Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Lamont, and all the pundits made this out to be a single-issue loss, ie., a referendum on the war in Iraq. Whether it is Dick Cheney, claiming that the Democrats didn't “get” 9/11, or Lamont, campaigning almost entirely against the policy in Iraq, everyone focused on Lieberman's support of the war as his defining issue. For someone with his longevity in politics, that seems almost sad, but has it turned into his political reality.

That is too bad. Iraq is not, and should not be, the defining issue for anyone, not even for George Bush, though he seems determined to make it so. Ultimately, history will judge it as a tragic mistake, but it will also be seen as only one of many important mistakes, by many presidents, along the way to wherever it is we are headed. Yes, Lieberman's fate does seem to ride on this one issue, but, unfortunately, that has distracted us from the real reasons he no longer deserves our votes.

Of far more long-term importance than Iraq, is the fact that Lieberman also took sides with the regressive wing of the Christian "right" regarding the role of religiosity in politics. He began doing this during his run as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, and he continues to throw bones to the fundamentalists. No one minds that he takes his religion very seriously, but unfortunately, he debased himself, with his staged photo-ops at various Jewish holidays, and his obsequious pontificating about the role of religion in his political life. It was a blatant attempt to appease religious conservatives, and there is no indication he persuaded a single person to vote for him because of it.

The only thing most people remember about Lieberman is his cozying up to the President’s Iraq policy, and that is a problem, because in the long term it is the war between reason and unreason that is going to determine what becomes of us, not a pointless war in Iraq. Lieberman got a well deserved slap from the voters in Connecticut, but will probably win in November. He did at one time have a reasonable record as a centrist. The question is whether he is going to have the courage to stand up to his friends in the Administration on the really important issues, such as global climate change and science education in our schools. Don’t count on it.

Medical Care

There was a time when the VA was the dregs of our healthcare system. It seems that is no longer the case. According to the above study, the VA is now one of the best places in the country to get healthcare, and it is also one of the most cost effective.

We are so used to hearing extreme viewpoints on what makes for good healthcare, that we are unlikely to do anything with this new information. That would be unfortunate, because the VA seems to offer us a template for how to do it right without bankrupting us. The question remains why we let ourselves stay in the crossfire.

Threatening China? Begging is more like it...

The Axis of Evil was Iran, Iraq and North Korea, as I recall. So we went after the weakest and most irrelevant of the three. How smart is that? Actually, maybe smarter than it looks, since the other two options might have led to nuclear war. Unfortunately, now that we have exposed ourselves as far weaker and less competant than anyone could have expected (short of nuking people), we really do seem to have run out of options with the two remaining members of the AofE.

The U.S. is suddenly playing the diplomacy game with Iran. How many people think it is because the White House actually learned from its mistakes? Let's not delude ourselves. Condi is talking either because we have no choice, or because we need cover for when we nuke Iran. And then we have North Korea. Lindsay Graham, a Republican senator, threatened China today with "hanging by a thread, diplomatically" if they don't do something, now, about North Korea.

Huh? Just what leverage does he think we have over China? It's time to get real. We pissed on, and pissed off, our allies, and now we have to turn to China to bail us out of a sticky situation. There are those who could say "I told you so...", but who would listen?

Religion of Peace?

Americans and Europeans alike have been tied in knots over how to deal with Islam in their own societies. Our liberal norms say we must be tolerant. President Bush himself says "Islam is a peaceful religion!", while many of the preachers who make up his political base stir up hatred and fear. Bush's actual policies have undeniably fanned the flames of Islamic extremism the world over. When home-grown thugs murder in Holland and in the subways of London and Madrid, we tie ourselves in knots over whether they represent the true spirit of their religion, or have hijacked it for perverse ends. We argue over whether the legacy of Euro-American imperialism has come home to roost. Meanwhile, we have to decide whether racial profiling is an acceptable means of self defense. And the fact is, that if we succumb to the temptation to hate and fear, we lose what we are, and so we lose, period.

All this said, we are in trouble. Whatever the historical causes, the fact is that Islam around the world is being radicalized, and the process has a momentum all its own. For anyone, progressive or not, who wants to hide his head in the sand about this, I give you the following pictures. They were taken at "Religion of Peace" rallies by muslims in London.

The Do-Nothing-est rep finally gets going

Representative Lynn Westmoreland has finally sponsored his first legislation: an amendment to the Voting Rights Act that would basically gut its enforceability. Now, there are some provisions in the VRA that probably go too far, especially those requiring multilingual ballots without any end in sight. But most of the provisions address genuine threats to the rights of minority and disadvantaged voters. It is telling that the only issue that could rouse the Congressman from his stupor was one where he could stand up for the right of officials to disenfanchise their citizens.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Westmoreland, this link is all the introduction you need. Take the five minutes to watch the interview. It would be funny if it were not so sad.

(Note: Since this was first posted, the Westmoreland and other amendments were voted down.)

The Fat Scam

(This is a copy of my letter published in USA Today on June 30):

We owe Barbara D’Souza thanks for her courage in writing about the ordeal of being obese. We have no more right to abuse fat people than we do to abuse anyone else. Still, she has bought into a dangerous and self-defeating myth, namely that that obesity is beyond our control, and is essentially a genetic disability. As a biotechnology executive, I am part of the community that has created and perpetuated that myth. I understand the desperate need people have to feel that they are not at fault, but the truth is, the modern epidemic of obesity is not genetic in origin.

The gene pool has not mysteriously changed since the time of our grandparents. Therefore, genes cannot explain the increase in obesity from their generation to ours. The true explanation is that we have changed our environment and our behavior. The only guaranteed solution to the problem would be to undo some of those changes. There is, however, a whole industry focused on diverting our attention from the truth, and people like Ms. D’Souza are all too vulnerable to the deception.

My industry has aided and abetted this hoax. We stand to make billions, selling pills that can treat obesity. The food industry has an even bigger incentive, because it wants to avoid being held responsible for the toxic environment it has created. It would rather keep people addicted to super-sized meals. Those of us in the food and pharmaceutical industries have a duty to tell the truth: that if we behaved more like our grandparents (eat less, walk more, make and sell better food), fewer of us would be fat. I’m not worried that this truth will harm my business. Since lots of people won’t heed the warning, we will always have a gigantic profit opportunity in treating the consequences--but at least we will have a clear conscience. As they say, the truth can set you free.

Was Ken Lay Assassinated?

Some have suggested so. It seems a stretch, but stranger things have happened. The unfortunate thing is that his sudden death lays a patina of sympathy over a man who cavalierly allowed thousands of people to lose their lives' savings, largely because they trusted him. And we have to wonder what other inconvenient facts go to the grave with him.

The problem with the ideologically pure version of capitalism is that it strips away any notion of responsibility, as merely a form of weakness. In the wake of the fall of Stalinism, and the run of success by the Chicago economists, and fuelled by the heady pseudo-populism of the Reagan era, we have adopted unfettered capitalism as a cult. The result is that we have steadily eroded even the basic notions of trust and truthfullness, as unwanted impediments to the maximization of wealth.

As a person whose job description includes the word "Capitalist", I remain unpersuaded by the notion that all we need in order to reach the best outcome is to let greed run rampant. The reality is that we need ethics as well, if not from within, then through other instruments. Ken Lay should have had the opportunity to understand what he did. He professed to a great religiosity, so perhaps he is being judged by his maker. I hold out no such optimism.

In the Net

We had a certain kind of peace before the internet and the web came along. I miss the days when doing research meant going to a quiet library somewhere, thumbing through old books in a room full of sunlight, occasional dust-motes dancing in the air. I miss hand-writing a letter, mailing it, anticipating the reply, which might take days or weeks to arrive, knowing that both I and my correspondent would have put a lot of thought into what we had to say. I suppose this is what people from a prior era felt, when air travel displaced ocean liners as the preferred way to travel long distances: a sense of having lost the moments of contemplation along the way.

My good friend Mike says that we idealize the past, and that it was never as good as we remember it to be. Yet I have a whole filing cabinet full of old correspondence, and few things give me more pleasure than to read through old letters, and remember. Yes, I could still write the old-fashioned way, but with everything so accelerated, it seems the opportunities to do so are vanishing. I am always waiting, in vain, for that moment of solitude. And, of course, the internet offers us the exhilarating feeling of being able to reach somebody right away in a moment of inspiration (or aggravation). How easy!

The internet, the web, also offer the seduction of having much of the world’s knowledge (albeit leavened with misinformation) right there for the grabbing. Being of the net is like being at an ever-expanding buffet, served up in an infinite warren of rooms, some of them big and bright and bustling, and others dark, dusty, obscure, with the food going stale. I eagerly explore. I can cope with the minor annoyances along the way: As I sample, I dodge the constant stream of touts trying to lure me into their dens of iniquity. And, like many of us, I have learned that some of the delicacies on the tables, even in the brightly lit rooms, are poisoned.

We are bees, in an enormous hive, just emerging from the larval stage. We were, until now, cozy and comfortable, knowing only our own little hexagonal cells, perhaps sensing the vibrations from nearby cells. We were occasionally fed by workers who came from somewhere and went we knew not where. Now we must adjust to the light and the noise and the frenetic hum of the hive. And we must learn to navigate the deluge of new information. I find myself wondering if we have been freed by all this information, or are ruled by it, running ever harder to keep up with the torrent. We run about on our appointed tasks, following the strands of the Web, unaware that perhaps we have been caught in it.

Now that I am willingly and eagerly wireless, I am aware that the internet transcends the very notion of a web, a warren, or even a hive. It is a presence, an ethereal organism, like one of those alien life forms in old Star Trek reruns, enveloping me, talking to me, feeding me, spying on me, collecting little bits of me, depositing little bits of itself on me. Even when I am logged off, I am permeated by it, by the multiplying halos of 802-dot-11, passing through me. Invisible pipes, carrying urgent emails, web porn searches, blogs from the lonely or paranoid, today’s news and non-news…marinating me in a dense drizzle of bits of which I am largely oblivious, until I am reminded of it.

I know I could disconnect, but I am not ready or willing to do so. I can proudly say I have managed to draw the line at hand-held devices such as Blackberries. My old firm issued them to us, and I gave mine back after a few weeks. Carrying a Blackberry around, I did not feel connected, I only felt caught. The organism had wrapped itself around me, constricting me and at the same time blasting me with a relentless stream of nonsense. It was like being strapped into an interrogator’s chair with a light shining in my face. I watched as my addicted colleagues spent whole meetings frantically sending and receiving messages, after which they had to ask what had happened during the discussion at hand. It was not for me.

Still, I connect several times a day. I suppose it is like being in a co-dependent relationship. It’s funny - television, the original icon of electronic co-dependency, never did this to me. I haven’t had a TV in 27 years, and I’ve rarely missed it. The internet is different. It responds, it hears, and then it talks back. It has a mind of its own, a composite mind composed of billions of smaller minds. All of them have their own theories of their place in the organism, or no theories at all. Some of them are human, others electronic. I have never felt so connected to so many, yet I wonder if the depth of those connections will ever approximate that of the old kind, the kind that were hard to plant and long in growing, but lasted.

Real Work

Ex-House majority leader Dick Armey, a 1994 "Contract on America" author, says his former colleagues "need to do some serious substantive legislation" to improve their electoral chances. Armey, a conservative Republican, says his GOP colleagues are "wasting time" debating constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage and flag burning. "They're not doing real work. They're making political statements," he said, in remarks made two weeks ago.

Obviously his compatriots are not listening. Congress is on a roll, not only trying to ban gay marriage and flag-burning, but dirty TV shows, prostitution, and the free press ( I refer to their measure condeming a newspaper for recently reporting what was already public knowledge in 2001.) Like Armey, a lot of us find it bizarre that the GOP are so far off track, but in fact, he may be wrong about what it takes for them to win elections. I had the occasion to ask a major beltway Republican operative (call him "Tony") whether there was any chance the GOP could return to its more progressive, internationalist roots, and he shrugged. "Look, it took us 50 years to figure out how to put together a winning coalition, and we're not going to change course now."

The question, then, is whether it is about actually standing for something, or purely about winning, regardless of what that means. If you take "Tony" literally, it is about taking a box, labelled "Republican", and filling it with whatever will get people to choose it. If you want to win, you work your butt off for the box labelled "Republican", and you don't care what's inside it. That is the essence of mindless partisanship.

The irony is that the major components of the GOP coalition, namely Wall Street and the social conservatives, have nothing in common except a shared hatred of an equally empty box labelled "Hillary". The world the Wall Streeters want to achieve, would be awfully cold and frightening for the typical heartland Christian conservative. It is a world of free-agency, free capital flows, unfettered economic competition, and rampant vulgarity in the media. It is a world in which we had better teach science in schools, or our shiny new industries will vanish. It is a world that would eat most Christians alive (an image of the Colisseum comes to mind). And the world of the Christians is certainly not one the Wall Streeters would like. Picture Afghanistan under the Taliban. No fun. No dates. No laughing. Nothing to do with all your money except wait for martyrdom (ie, the Rapture), unless you own your own island (which some, but not all of them, do).

As a supporter of free trade, liberal markets, open immigration policies, technological advancement and internationalism, this writer finds common cause with the old advocates of "progress", and by extension, to some extent, with the Wall Streeters. However, all evidence suggests that to avoid the destruction of the environment and the enslavement of most people, one needs a balance of power, so that there is a floor beneath which the less successful are not permitted to fall, so that the guardians of the environment have the power to say "enough". That balance of power can also serve to protect non-economic freedoms and the dignity of the weak and the different. Markets don't provide that protection; only the enforcement of enlightened norms can do that. This all seems to be achievable only through democratic institutions, wherein those with little individual strength can collectively wield a measure of power to protect themselves.

The genius of the Republican coalition builders was to find a way to motivate large numbers of ordinary people to vote against their own economic interests, and to disregard the future of the planet. That way involved appealing to them on non-economic grounds, by feeding their fears and giving those fears a name. Call it liberalism, Hillary, gay marriage, immigrants... whatever, just keep them in fear. The problem is that the yahoos and rednecks have proven smarter, more organized, and more determined than any of the old guard gave them credit for, and they have risen up and are taking over the party. Now they are the 800-pound gorilla in the room, but they still feed on hate and fear. What they hate and fear are the very people with whom they would be making common cause, if they really cared about their childrens' futures.

I have heard an interesting debate: which wing of the Republican coalition is using which? Some say the Wall Steeters are using the Christians to win votes, in the service of policies that strictly benefit the money guys. With the common folk divided, the money guys can clean up as they never have before. Others say the Christians are using the infrastructure of the old GOP to take over the country, after which women will have to wear burkas, and we may become a third-world country, but at least gays will be back underground where they belong. Will one of these wings end up ascendant? If so, what happens to the losers? Do they join forces with the remnant of the Democratic party to form a new, more centrist party? Will there be any Democratic party left to talk to?

More disturbing: what if the two wings manage to keep co-existing, and keep a largely comatose opposition in its place? That certainly appears to be the strategy of those in and around the White House. So far, it has worked, and the consequences are becoming clear. The combination of suppression of personal freedom, persecution of the unpopular, and concentrated ownership of the government, starts to look like something we were all taught died in 1945.

National Death Wish, part 2

Gradually, more and more Americans seem to be waking up to the reality that our current president and his cronies are bad for this country (forget about what they are doing to the rest of the world). Yet polls show there is no assurance we will do anything about it in the next election. Part of the problem is the apparent unwillingness of the opposition (the Democrats) to articulate anything like a reason they should govern. But part of is is also the continued success of Republicans at using misleading names for everything ("Death tax", "Patriot Act", "No Child Left Behind", "War on Terror", "Culture of Life", "Family Values") and getting away with it. These terms appeal to their "base", without requiring explanation.

This brings into clear focus the rationale for their war on education: the harder it is to read, the less people are willing to do it, and thus the less they will do it. With a population unwilling to read, all you have to do is give everything a clever moniker, and no one will be the wiser. This already explains why the "base" increasingly vote against their own interests. And it explains why we are unlikely to change course before we have irretrievably damaged ourselves. Unfortunately, we will drag the rest of the world with us.

National Death Wish

Young people make impassioned pleas to be heard and respected. They march, wave flags, burn cars, in frustration over their lack of prospects. Meanwhile, Villepin fans the flames by publicly hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, champagne glass in hand. And so the cycle goes, with each iteration inching closer to complete meltdown. The French seem bent on committing slow suicide.

The problem is that the desperate and highly sympathetic youth in the street is asking for the wrong things. In solidarity with the labour unions, he wants lifetime job security while only having to work 35 hours per week (and only those 43 weeks he actually has to work). The tragedy of the workers and students is that they seem to have internalized the idea that work is a bad thing. (And, Americans, don't laugh--we invented a restaurant chain called Thank God It's Friday!) They have taken the spirit of worker empowerment and turned it into a right not to have to work. Just who do they think will produce the stuff and perform the services that make their lives so comfortable in the first place?

One short-term solution is to outsource it all to the third world. Outsourcing, of course, the worst sin of all. Leaving that aside, even if they were contract it all out to people from developing countries, where is the money going to come from to pay for stuff? The decline will just spiral more rapidly out of control. How is it that at least 60% of these people don't understand this? We are no longer talking about masses of exploited workers, slaving away under the watch of robber barons. We are talking about a country that survived some horrific tragedies to make itself, partly through hard work and resilience, into one of the richest and most desirable places in the world to live.

As with so many disputes in today's world, the French dispute over employment laws has become an all-or nothing fight, a struggle not to yield an inch. In part, it reflects the understandable fear that is seeping into the consciousness of many in the industrialized world, the fear that their cushy lives are getting a little less cushy. But to respond to that fear with a complete retreat from competing is, well, suicidal.

Where have you been all this time?

At last, a leader who articulates the values of his party while being willing to challenge its dogma. I refer to Barack Obama, who today, acknowledged that the Democrats need to re-examine their New Deal heritage, and who dared to demand performance from teachers in return for better conditions. He exhorted the party to stay true to its core beliefs, while being willing to put obsolete policies to rest.

Last fall, here in California, we were given a Hobson's choice between caving in to the teachers' unions or eviscerating them completely. The rare voices in favour of sensible compromise were drowned out. The truth is, teachers labour under intolerable conditions, and deserve both better pay and more support for their mission. The truth is also, that teachers' unions have made a religion out of the wrong things, like lifetime tenure, instead of focussing on the right things, like their own continuing education, and pay for performance. They will never admit it, but their focus on protecting bad teachers has been bad for all teachers. Why should anyone have lifetime tenure after only two years at their job? But then, why should we expect to attract the best when we pay them barely above the poverty line?

We have been hearing about this shining new talent, Mr. Obama, for some time. In his statements today, he showed the way. If the Democrats can reform, if they can hold to their core values while being willing to jettison dysfunctional methodology, they will deserve a shot at returning to power. If they merely trot him out to attract black votes, and don't listen to what he is saying, they deserve to remain in perdition.

We should have let them secede

The Georgia legislature passed a bill this week that creates state-funded Bible classes in Georgia public schools. The bill requires that the Bible serve as the core textbook for these new courses. Groups like Defcon America are taking to the barricades and the airwaves to try to prevent this bill from being signed by the governer.

I say, forget it. Let him sign. We should raise money to allow sensible Georgians to relocate to other parts of the country, where their taxes don't pay to support a religion. We could use some of the money to help the hard core fundamentalists move to Iran or Afghanistan, where most people share their values. Oh, I know, the Christian extremists and the Islamic extremists make a big deal about hating each other, but once they get to know each other, they will realize how much they have in common.

Americans DO get it...

From the news today: Poll: Americans Question Foreign Policy
By MICHAEL MELIA, Associated Press WriterThu Mar 30, 12:45 AM ET

Americans question the ability of the United States to create democracy in other countries, and are divided on whether successful efforts could even make the U.S. safer, according to a poll released Thursday. Only 36 percent of those surveyed by the Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index believe the U.S. can help spread democracy — a major objective for the Bush administration in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

"People do regard it as a desirable goal," Public Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich said. "But from a common sense point of view, both Democrats and Republicans have concluded that democracy is something that countries come to on their own."

The biannual poll, which last came out in August, found public confidence has declined overall in Washington's ability to achieve goals including capturing terrorists, protecting U.S. borders and meeting objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraq war remains the top concern, with 22 percent naming it America's largest global problem, followed by terrorism at 13 percent.

But poll directors noted Americans are also alarmed increasingly by U.S. energy dependence. Ninety percent in the survey — conducted in January, before President Bush's declaration in his State of the Union address that the country is "addicted to oil" — said it was important to find alternatives to foreign energy supplies to strengthen national security.

The survey, a joint venture by Foreign Affairs magazine and Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization, offered multiple perspectives on how America sees its role in the world. The goal of spreading democracy received the lowest support among other priorities, with only 20 percent saying it was "very important." A slight majority, 53 percent, said there would be less global conflict as more countries adopt democratic systems, but 73 percent worry that U.S. actions in the Middle East are indirectly aiding the recruitment of terrorists. Only 22 percent believe the U.S. government can do "a lot" to create democracy in Iraq.

On other fronts, the poll indicated a preference for activism. Seventy-one percent said it was very important to help countries deal with natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami. Other priorities were cooperating with countries on problems like the environment or disease control (70 percent) and improving the treatment of women in other countries (57 percent).

The survey of 1,000 adults was conducted Jan. 10-22 and had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Immigration Reform

Immigration has always created strange alliances and schisms. The labor wing of the Democratic party has always feared more open immigration; the internationalist/humanist wing has always favoured it. The business community has generally favoured it (cynics paint that as a simple ploy to access cheap and compliant labor); the far-right hate it, often barely disguising the racisim that drives their viewpoint. All of these views become infused with passion where illegals are concerned.

The simple truth is that we are not going to deport 11 million people, though we are managing to deport some, often destroying families in the process. We need to find a more compassionate and, at the same time, socially equitable way, to solve the problem of illegal immigrants. The President has always been consistent on this point. What is remarkable, though, is how the breakdown of this debate within the Republican party reveals the extent to which it has been hijacked by the forces of fear and hate. Republicans from both houses are proposing draconian and violent measures to punish, not only illegal immigrants, but anyone who is caught giving them aid and comfort. The language is little different than the language we used for countries that harboured terrorists.

The list of things that the President has gotten wrong is too long to belabour. The list of things he has gotten right is invisible. Until now. Where it comes to immigration reform, we have to give him credit for being right, and support in standing up to his own party on this issue.

A footnote: we recently learned that the man who has been cleaning our offices for 16 years is being deported. He worked like a dog for all those years, often holding three jobs at a time. He married and started a family. His daughter is a gifted student. He paid taxes. He kept our workplace immaculate, and was never angry or bitter. He learned everyones' names and greeted us as friends. He somehow saved enough from his minimum-wage jobs to buy a HOUSE! But he did not have papers. Instead, he had a lawyer who robbed him of a substanial part of his income while giving him almost comically bad advice. There are a lot of illegals who are not contributing to our communities. Instead of going after them, probably because it is too much trouble to track them down, the INS is going after a man who played by all the rules but one, and whose loss will hurt all of us. THAT is why we need reform.

Footnote 2 (Nov. 2006): The worst of the proposed laws was passed, and we wait to see whether the President has any capitall left to turn the tide back, on this, the one issue of his presidency where he was right.

A Call from a Republican Fundraiser

He sounds like a brown-noser from the get-go. He is calling from the Republican National Committee. They want to "honor" me for my "leadership", at an ass-kissing dinner in Washington, for which privilege I would have to pay a lot of moolah, which would of course go into the Republican war chest. The guy sounds genuinely shocked when I tell him that I disagree with everything they've done lately, so they can count me out until they have undertaken some serious reform, starting at the top. He whines and tries to get me to listen to a taped message from his boss (some slimebag congressman from a state which still uses the barter system). He tells me the tape is all about how they're going to lower my taxes. I tell him I know the message and don't need to hear it again. I have other concerns. So he whines some more about how, if I come to this dinner, where they're going to "honor" me, I can get my message out then. Right. As though they care, once they have my money. I tell him he can relay my message to them right now: Reform, or else.

Afterward, I reflect on this, and I realize nothing has changed. The bedrock of the Republican party is people with money, and the appeal the party always offered them was greed, pure and simple. That strategy, of course, was a minority strategy. To win, they had to find other voters. Since the traditional elitist message was not likely to resonate with voters in the heartland, they had to find some other form of common cause with those people. They found it in hate: hate for the newly uppity blacks; hate for immigrants (unless they are cleaning your toilets); hate for all this dangerous free thinking that happens in big cities and big universities; hate for non-christians, who can't be counted on to obey orders. Hate for anything new. And it worked. So the Republicans became the majority party.

Unfortunately, the old guard in the GOP sold the party's soul to the religious right and the skinheads. Suddenly, a lot of the things that are necessary to build their kind of wealth are under attack, by the folks they invited into the tent. Education. Science. Immigration. Diversity. The problem is that you can't build an alliance forever based on hate. A lasting mission needs something positive to aim for. Hating everyone who is not like you doesn't fill the bill.

Meanwhile, there is a room full of geeks somewhere in Washington, phoning away, still trying to find people they think have money (if they saw my bank account, they would stop calling), and who will sell out every semblance of principle in exchange for a tax break. What the geeks don't get is that the people who are generating the new wealth in this country have values other than pure greed. We are looking for a home, and today's GOP ain't it.

Even when he is right...

A curious thing has happened recently. George Bush has said several things that, coming from another man, would have sounded credible and, in one instance, even inspiring. First, there was the remark, in his State of the Union address, about America's addiction to oil (!). Then there was his comment, in defense of the Dubai Ports deal, that we risk compromising our message of tolerance and free markets if we kill the deal through legislation (he is right, but we still should not do the deal). In his speech in Hyderabad, he put forth a remarkably progressive vision for India's future. In saying "India is our natural ally," he articulated something that should have been said decades ago by U.S. leadership (America's stiff-arm to India, the world's largest democracy, ranks as a shameful black mark on our conduct since WWII). He coupled that to a call for free and open trade, as opposed to fear and protectionism. And yesterday, he called for Congress to fund the mandates for the repair of New Orleans.

So how should we take all this? Does he mean any of it? Do his speechwriters and handlers mean any of it? Does he even understand what he is saying, especially regarding India? Is this merely a series of accidents, that his words just happen to mirror reality, while we, meanwhile, continue on with the sophisticated savagery that passes for a governing philosophy?

The darker possibility is that this is all a smokescreen, a calculated ploy to make W look worldly, compassionate and reasonable while Rome burns. Where tolerance is concerned, for example, it is curious that he didn't discover the evils of racial profiling until it swept the Emir of the United Arab Emirates up into its net. Where free trade is concerned, he seems blithely unaware of the havoc that U.S. agricultural protectionism is wreaking on the farmers and workers of developing nations like India. Where New Orleans is concerned, his newfound concern must be a bitter pill for those still suffering from his, and his team's, aggressive neglect of the risks, and then the aftermath, of the storm.

Then there is a third possibility, namely, that with his administration a failure, his reputation sinking, and his spinmeisters losing their traction, he has suddenly discovered his "good" side, or at least a streak of moderation, even earnestness. Maybe he isn't just the paranoid, overcompensating, confused, inflexible bully who has presided over the desecration of America's covenant with itself. Maybe "compassionate" conservatism really did mean something once, and he had to shelve it to serve the aims of forces bigger than himself. Then, of course, we have to conclude he was in fact the puppet that many liberals suspected him to be when he was first elected. Certainly, in the hands of Rove and the rest of his team, W has not been the President one would have predicted years ago, when he governed Texas as a relative moderate.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

--H.L. Mencken (Courtesy of S.S.)

The evidence suggests, at least, that the "plain folk" are not, in fact, morons. They were duped by the world's most sophisticated lie machine, but given the truth of what they have done, a growing majority are repudiating that choice. The question is whether it is too late.

Hanging out to dry

Like many, I just shrugged my shoulders as Michael Brown was publicly humiliated by Congress, and flogged by the press, after so obviously botching preparations for, and the response to, Katrina. Just another incompetant Bush stooge--that was the refrain among those of us who have come to expect this sort of thing. Along with the vitriol thrown at Brown, there were occasional barbs about the Administration's habit of assigning tasks to incompetent cronies. The Bush team were largely silent.

Yesterday, videotapes were released, of consultations among senior government officials, including Bush, in the days before Katrina hit. While I have not seen the tapes in their entirety, several things become clear from the various accounts of what they show. First, competent or not (and it still seems clear he was not fit for the job), Brown pleaded for more help, repeatedly, in the days before and during the disaster. Second, a number of other federal, state and city officials warned of catastrophe, and some of them pleaded for more resources, both before and during the disaster. Their warnings were urgent, and highly specific. Third, Bush was present at a key videoconference, the day before the storm landed, and did not ask any questions. He merely closed with a statement assuring everyone that we were "fully prepared".

The main crime is Bush's complacency in the face of mounting evidence of imminent, and then actual, tragedy. But to that we can now add an additional crime: his, and his team's, gutless betrayal of Michael Brown, who, it turns out, had been telling the truth at his hearing, when he said he had asked for more help and been denied. How symbolic, this betrayal. It should be a warning sign to other Bush loyalists, of what to expect when the chips are down.

Meanwhile, over in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, on trial for crimes against humanity, told the court "I don't know why you are trying these other people. I gave the orders. I was responsible." That forthrightness doesn't diminish the magnitude of his crimes, but it serves as a stunning counterpoint to Bush's craven abandonment of Michael Brown. How is it that Bush has sunk so low that he can make the Butcher of Baghdad seem almost noble by comparison?

This administration has been built on lies and "misinformation ", and many of the lies are about matters of huge consequence. But they are also about matters of great complexity, and this has allowed them to dodge and weave and keep a large number of people confused. How else to explain that most Americans, including an overwhelming majority of the troops in Iraq, still believe that a major motivation for the war was the "connection" between Al Qaeda and Saddam?

In the matter of Katrina, we no longer just have general accusations of incompetence or negligence. We now have direct proof that the President and his top aides lied about what they knew and when they knew it. The betrayal of Michael Brown is a footnote to this tragedy, but it is a telling one. "The buck stops here" is a quintessentially American statement about what it means to lead. That a despot like Saddam understands it better than our own President, just deepens the shame Bush has brought upon this country. Even his most die-hard supporters have to look at this and wonder if they were wrong about the man.

Kinder and gentler zealots

In today's USA today, Michael Medved, who has become a sort of modern-day Know-Nothing (for those who haven't heard of them, they were a real political movement at one time) wrote about the Religious Rat's surprising forebearance in not violently protesting "Brokeback Mountain". He sees it as a sign of grace and maturity on their part. His point of reference was, of course, the Muslim riots over cartoons.

As a civil libertarian, I can only hope that Medved is right, that the Christian movement is softening its hysterical attempts to demonize and restrict behavior it considers immoral. Ironically, Medved himself remains one of the most hysterical and, frankly, confused, commentators on our culture and its supposed degradation. He has been in the forefront of those who would blame, for example, heavy metal rock for teen murder rampages. Yet, with breathtaking hypocrisy, he is silent on the young woman who cut off her baby’s arms while reciting biblical scripture.

Corporate Sellouts, the Religious Rat, Bird Flu and more

(This is an updated version of the post of 21-Jan, "Random Neurons Firing")

Google was apparently alone, among major search engine companies, in standing up to the Adminstration's brazen demand that it cough up data on the search habits of its users. On fears of a confrontation with the Injustice Department, Google's stock tanked (still leaving it at surreal levels). While there is a lot to fault in Google's relentless hype, this is one issue on which we should all stand with the company. Yahoo, meanwhile, caved quietly, and deserves only our scorn. From having once been a symbol of edgy rebelliousness, Yahoo has become just another gutless corporate stooge. But we saw it coming. Their tie-up with SBC amounted to a wholesale sellout of both companies' customers. Why should we expect any better of them now?

Of course, it turns out that Google, along with Yahoo and pretty much everyone else in the browser/search engine/OS business, have caved in completely to the Chinese. We have mentioned this here before: U.S. companies are racing to do the bidding of the Chinese government, in exchange for a foothold in the China market. All of these companies (count Microsoft and many others among them) are complicit in multiple cases of surveillance, arrest, and mistreatment of Chinese citizens by their government. This correspondent is a strong advocate of the idea that engagement, not confrontation, is the route to greater freedom in China, and has even invested in companies operating there. But engagement cannot include active involvement in suppression. The arguments of these companies, when questioned by Congress this past month, rang hollow and self-serving. There are no shades of grey. Either you rat on people, sending them to prison and torture, or you don't.

_______________________

Following their setback in Dover in December, a few of the Religious Rats have been jumping ship. Suddenly, congressmen like Rick Santorum, the apostle of ignorance, are standing up for science. We'll see how long that lasts. In Santorum's case, it can be traced to an acute attack of re-election anxiety. Some of the rats are turning on each other: the moderates (Creation as metaphor) and the extremists (Genesis as literal truth) are accusing each other of hurting the cause. Meanwhile, America remains the only industrialized country in which a majority reject the scientific account of how we got here. A whole lot more rats are going to have to devour each other before that changes.

_____________________

Right wing spokesmen (and especially their buddies on the talk radio stations) continue to defend the Administration's desire to spy on us. First it was the Patriot Act. Now the justification is catching web porn users. For a crowd that continually thunders about limiting government power, these people are remarkably casual about telling us to give up our rights. The question: if this kind of government power is OK, then just what does it mean to talk about "getting government off our backs?" Ooops. Forgot, the Constitution doesn't say anything about privacy.

____________________

Meanwhile, as institutional panic about Avian flu builds, governments are stockpiling a treatment of dubious value. The company that makes it once had Donald Rumsfeld as its Chairman. Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists on the Left are using this as a pretext to claim that Avian flu itself is a hoax, or at best, overblown. If they have their way, we won't do anything about it until 40 million people have died, and then they will point fingers at the "callous" establishment for not having prepared adequately. The current “preparations” for Bird Flu are a travesty, and the political squabbling a case of multiple wrongs making a bigger wrong. We can only hope that the critical mutation that would enable this virus to spread easily between humans does not occur.

__________________________

On a quasi-personal note: as my brother and I try to help our mom navigate through the healthcare system, extended care, and all that they entail, a few things are obvious: Without either Medicare, long-term-care insurance (which has become prohibitively expensive) and/or children of means, people like her would be dying in the streets. Period. In spite of Medicare, some die there anyway, because our system is beyond broken.

Having the means to pay for care is not enough. We have to take turns hounding the doctors, nurses and administrators at the hospitals and clinics, to make sure they do not forget her (and these are some of the best hospitals in the country). Even in the hospital, patients without such advocates may as well hurry up and die, and many do, in great pain. Most doctors and nurses went into their professions in part because of an idealistic desire to heal other human beings. What is it about our system that leaves them so jaded and exhausted that they don't pay attention unless you badger the crap out of them?

And for those who insist that our system is better than anything in Europe, I can only offer my own experiences in Germany: Doctors who saw me, without any wait; clinics that treated me without any assurance I could or would pay; staff who took the time to learn about me before making any decisions. No system is perfect, and Europe certainly has its problems, but could it be we're missing something?

Back where we started, almost

Five years ago, the Middle East was composed largely of a handful of barbaric Arab semi-states, plus Iran (not Arab), Afghanistan (neither Arab nor even resembling a state), Kurdistan (ooops, wishful thinking), Turkey, and Israel. Israel survived in part because the others were too busy murdering each other to unite behind their shared hatred of the Jewish state.

So, since 9/11, the U.S. has bombed Afghanistan into dust, decided to take out Iraq for good measure, and is busy trying to install new governments in both piles of rubble. Lo! and behold, the Afghans remain in tribal chaos, the Iraqis are busy killing each other, Iran has decided to resume building nukes, and, for good measure, the Palestinians have elected people who hate us even more than the previous thugs did.

Are we back to where we started? Or is it perhaps even worse? Is Israel any safer? Are we? Why do any Americans still think Bush and his gang of draft-dodging bullies have made us safer or stronger? And what of the rest of the world? Our friends must be in shock at how hollow our power has been revealed to be. We know our enemies are drooling with excitement. We are measurably poorer than we would have been if we had simply let time take care of Saddam. And the much of the world, and Iraq most of all, have lost trust that we could deliver.

So, now, a deal to sell the management of 6 of our largest ports, to people who harboured some of the 9/11 terrorists. The clown in the White House claims he knew nothing of the deal (until he heard about it from the press). If that's true, it was his perfect out. Yet, instead, he will go to the wall to defend it?!?!?!?! Am I the only person completely baffled?

In fact, it is coming out that the man who approved it, Treas. Secy. John Snow, has a web of ties to folks with a huge vested interest in buttering up the Emir of the United Arab Emirates, who will now run a major part of our nation's ports. This writer actually believes that the risks of the deal have been exaggerated by its critics, but is there any level of gratuitous risk that is acceptable?

Why there is no call from security hawks to remove Bush from the White House, is truly a mystery.

Final PostScript on India, and other stuff

One of our alert readers (with apologies to Dave Barry) spotted clear and convincing evidence of the loss of American jobs to India. The question now is: when will the bike be replaced by a cage full of gerbils? (Photo courtesy of W.L.; Who knows where she got it from...)

In the meantime, allies and critics alike have been praising the President's commitment to expand funding for science and mathematics education in the U.S., along with packages of tax breaks for corporate programs that support ongoing education and retraining of American workers. It is all part of a strategy to preserve U.S. leadership in technical fields. Of course, as long as we continue to attack the actual teaching of science in schools, one has to wonder: On what do they plan to spend the new money? Special leather-bound copies of creationist textbooks? Creation movies with really great special effects? Wiretapping teachers who insist on teaching science? We await the details.

Idi Amin would have been proud...

So now it comes out that the U.S. has been seizing the wives and children of suspected Iraqi insurgents, as "leverage" to use against said insurgents. Yes, we are fighting against an enemy that knows no bounds. But what is it we are fighting for? Don't our leaders understand that when we sink to that level, we have lost?

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The debate rages on, over whether Hamas will be forced to moderate its positions, now that it is the party in power. Some have likened it to the IRA/Sinn Fein. But Hamas is faced with more than a renunciation of terrorism. It is faced with having to renounce its entire raison d'etre, or risk turning a million Palestinians into instant martyrs. Today, there were gunbattles in Gaza between partisans of Fatah and Hamas. One has to wonder if they realize what they look like to the rest of the world.

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It isn't just the Religious Right that knows no decency. The Queen of Bile, Ann Coulter, has come out in favour of assassinating a Supreme Court justice using rat poison. She was quick to insist it was just a joke. As though we believe that. She has previously advocated jailing, deporting or executing everyone who disagrees with her, and never cracked a smile. It's all in writing, not that you would want to waste your money on her books.

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This correspondent has occasionally pointed out the similarities between our homegrown Christian Right and the Islamo-fascists. He has been met with indignation over the comparison. After all, the latter bomb buildings while the former don't (Oops. Forgot about Oklahoma City...) Well, there is a new movement taking hold in Africa, a melange of evangelical Christianity, Islam, Catholicism and native African Animism. Their sermons draw on elements of all of these traditions, with a lot of speaking in tongues and the like. This movement appears to be spreading like wildfire. For the moment, it is putting a damper on the inter-tribal warfare that has ruled the day in places like Sudan.

Now, one could, in a hopeful moment, imagine this to be the beginning of an unforeseeable rapprochement among these various religious communities, the seed of hope that we might finally transcend sectarian hatred and violence. But don't bet on it. It is just as easy to imagine a new brand of ultra-fundamentalism arising from this experiment, one that will spawn Jihad infused with Christian righteousness and a touch of Voodoo. Picture book burnings, massacres, and witch hunts. Picture schools being bombed. Ditto for labs that do medical research. Picture the execution of wayward girls, the murder of interracial couples, mass rapes, and conversions at bayonet point. Don't laugh. It's been going on for two thousand years, with almost every religious and political creed having blood on its hands. Heck, the past 40 years have seen nary a break in the insanity (think Cambodia, the Great Leap Forward, Bosnia, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Darfur, Rwanda, Pakistan, Jonestown, Gujarat, the Taliban, Iraq under Saddam, Iraq under the "Coalition"... and so on....) A combined Islamo-Christian movement would have the power to take the violence to levels never before imagined. We can only watch with morbid fascination.

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(A self-congratulatory note here: This writer foretold the rise of such a movement two years ago, in a draft for a work of fiction that is still in progress. He imagined it spawning a global terror network, called the Hand of God. With any luck, the story will see the light of day before it becomes dated.)

Surprise, surprise?

This is a foretaste of what will happen throughout the muslim world if we “succeed” in forcing democracy on them. If you’re a betting person, here is a list of countries which will almost certainly elect islamic theocracies the first time they get to hold truly open and fair elections, whether forced on them at gunpoint or not (note that at least one of them is a nuclear power already):

Egypt
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Algeria (actually did, twice, and the result was annulled with support from the US and EU)
Pakistan

Here is a partial list of countries which would almost certainly break up into smaller states, some of them Islamo-fascist, if allowed complete self-determination:

Iraq
Sudan
Afghanistan

Here are our best “friends” in the region:

Kazakhstan
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Kyrgyzstan
Jordan
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Kuwait

Funny, that they are all despotic, authoritarian regimes, hated by their people and guilty of massive human rights abuses. Makes you wonder where we went wrong. The idea that we can promote democracy around the world is cute. The reality, however, is that our leaders don’t understand the need to walk the walk, nor how to handle getting what we ask for. It is not as though any of this needed to be a surprise, but no one with real knowledge of that part of the world was invited to the table.

Random Neurons Firing

Google was apparently alone, among major search engine companies, in standing up to the Adminstration's brazen demand that it cough up data on the search habits of its users. On fears of a confrontation with the Injustice Department, Google's stock tanked today. While there is a lot to fault in Google's relentless hype, here is one issue on which we should all stand with the company. Yahoo, meanwhile, caved quietly, and deserves only our scorn. From having once been a symbol of edgy rebelliousness, Yahoo has become just another gutless corporate stooge. But we saw it coming. Their tie-up with the likes of SBC amounted to a wholesale sellout of both companies' customers.

Following their setback in Dover last month, a few of the Religious Rats have been jumping ship. Suddenly, congressmen like Rick Santorum, the Apostle of Ignorance, are standing up for science. We'll see how long that lasts. In Santorum's case, it can be traced to an acute attack of re-election anxiety. Some of the rats are turning on each other: the moderates (Creation as Metaphor) and the extremists are accusing each other of hurting the cause. Meanwhile, America remains the only industrialized country in which a majority reject the scientific account of how we got here. A whole lot more rats are going to have to devour each other before that changes.

Administration spokesmen (and their buddies on the right-wing talk radio stations) continue to defend their desire to spy on us. First it was the Patriot Act. Now it is catching web porn users. For a crowd that continually thunders about limiting government power, these people are remarkably cavalier about telling us we should give up our rights. The question: if this kind of government power is OK, then just what does it mean to talk about "getting government off our backs?" Oh, I forgot, the Constitution doesn't say anything about privacy.

Meanwhile, as institutional panic about Avian flu builds, governments are stockpiling a treatment of dubious value. The company that makes it once had Donald Rumsfeld as its Chairman. Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists on the Left are using this as a pretext to claim that Avian flu itself is a hoax, or at best, overblown. If they have their way, we won't do anything about it until 40 million people have died, and then they will point fingers at the "callous" establishment for not having prepared adequately. This doesn't have to become another Katrina (think 30,000 Katrinas), but it appears there are too many agendas for us to expect our institutions actually to do the right things.

On a quasi-personal note: as we try to help our mom navigate through the healthcare system, a few things are obvious: Without Medicare, or children of means, people like her would just have to suffer and die in the streets. In spite of Medicare, some die there anyway, because our system is beyond broken. But the Republican campaign to bankrupt the program is simply unconscionable. It needs to be fixed, not destroyed. We could start by applying a means test for eligibility, and allowing the program to negotiate drug prices, as it does with services.

More on the system: Having the means to pay for care is not enough. We have been taking turns hounding the doctors, nurses and administrators at the hospitals, to make sure they do not forget our mom. (We are talking about some of the best hospitals in the country.) Patients without such advocates may as well just hurry up and die, and many do, in great pain. Most doctors and nurses went into their professions in part because of an idealistic desire to heal other human beings. What is it about our system that leaves them so jaded and exhausted that they don't pay attention unless you badger the crap out of them?

Final India Dispatch: Kolkata

To the minds of westerners, Calcutta has long symbolized mass human misery. The few images that are available, in venues such as Life Magazine, National Geographic and the occasional documentary on Mother Teresa, typically depict unending seas of people living in unbearable conditions. As we prepare to land, we wonder: what is Kolkata like today? Does the name change mean anything?

We arrive at night. The airport is a huge improvement over the disaster that is Delhi's airport. Outside the terminal, the air has a slight tropical taste, complemented by palm trees and people in short sleeves. The temperature on New Year's day is comfortable--a foreshadowing of the unbearable heat to come in summer. Only vague impressions, lights and silhouettes, are visible from the car, but already the feeling is different. Kolkata is more vertical than Delhi, and there is life everywhere. It has the feeling of a real city.

Kolkata was the heart of British India, and in the light of day, the signs are everywhere: in the architecture, the place names and the air of history. The largest edifice in the city is the Victoria Memorial, a gargantuan marble palace with domes and columns and several wings, sitting near one end of the Maidan, Kolkata's huge open-space park. There are, in the old sections of town, rows of grand houses in varying mixes of European styles. Some were built by the Brits, others by various Bengal princes and tycoons, who managed to ride out the colonial period in grand style.

A British East India Company cemetary lies just off the main shopping street, serving as a quiet sanctuary in the midst of chaos. The monuments inside are ostentatious, though stained with soot and mold, and evince a strangely Egyptian obsession with pyramids. Most of the people buried here died before they turned 30, yet they had been captains, professors, mayors, barristers, and society ladies. There are few visitors to the cemetary, and those we see today are speaking something that sounds like Czech.

Woven around this monumental infrastructure are the slums and bazaars, crushed into an endless maze of narrow, twisting streets and alleys. Cutting through it all are a few major thoroughfares, vestiges, ironically, of the pre-British era, when townsfolk made pilgrimages from their communities to the north to local burial grounds and temples in the south. Hordes of people wend their way through these alleys, and along the edges of the larger avenues, past shops, tea-stalls, cobbler stands, and open-air vegetable markets. Laundry hangs everywhere. We wonder where they wash clothing, and then pass the answer: huge, rectangular stone wells, at intervals along the roads, gushing water into open cisterns. We pass men, stripped to their breechcloths, bathing in water scooped from the cisterns in banged-up metal pots. Amid all the filth there is still a desire to keep oneself clean. In a society still constrained by strict codes of modesty, such a ritual is out of the question for women, so we are left wondering how they accomplish the same goal.

We are told that the hordes are largely from outside the city--Biharis, East Bengalis, others, who have swarmed into the only major city in this part of India, in search of work. And they do appear to be working; at night there are few of them left on the streets--they have found shelter in the tenements that crowd in among the old buildings. But with the carelessness of people who do not own the place, they litter on a gargantuan scale. There are cleaning crews that come at night, but overall there hangs an organic smell, part decaying garbage, part local spices and the aroma of cooking fires.

Bengal is an anomaly in India, a state run by a Marxist government. Everywhere there are pro-worker slogans painted or scrawled on walls. They are not official, but are sanctioned by the local officials. Contrary to today's orthodoxy, Bengal is also one of the more prosperous states in India, with a growth rate among the top eight. It is not one of the centers of high-tech growth, but has attracted a sizeable new-industry element, mostly in software. Still, the population of poor grows faster than the economy. With the influx of migrant workers and refugees, the human burden seems more than the place can bear.

Outside the city itself, we pass wide open spaces that are being converted into industrial parks and tract housing. The construction is done by crews using their hands, moving dirt in small baskets carried by relays of villagers, men and women alike. Where labour is so cheap and plentiful, it would make no sense to bring in heavy equipment, so there is very little. But there are ambitious plans afoot, judging by the miles of land that have been marked off for future construction.
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Final thoughts from this trip:

Is India a credible rival to China, as the next economic superpower? All of the numbers say that it is falling steadily behind, but is still in the running. India’s overall GDP growth lags that of China, but at 7% for the past decade, is far ahead of that in the G8 countries. In foreign direct investment, India has fallen off the map. Still, India has key strengths that could keep it in the game, including the emergence of a young manager class and the continued flood of graduates from its highly-regarded IIT system. In certain sectors, India is ahead, especially business process outsourcing, where English language skills count. India runs a trade surplus with China, but the base is narrow and could evaporate quickly.

Statistics don’t lie, but they don’t tell a complete story. Nothing can replace direct observation, for forming a sense of the texture of a place. For this writer, having traveled in the interior of China, as well having spent a lot of time it its showcase cities, the contrast with India is unmistakable. For all its troubles and challenges, China has crossed a threshhold. Its worries are now different from those of India. It is no longer coping with the kind of poverty and suffering that we more typically associate with the “third world”. India still is. China's corruption, while pervasive, is driven by constructive pressures--the desire to control and be credited for advancement. India's corruption is driven by the desire to steal.

The irony is there for all to see. Ideologues in the West insist that China, a dictatorship, cannot possibly be a better model than India, a democracy. Perhaps they will eventually turn out to be right. China certainly faces deadly challenges, including its own growing gap between the rich coasts and the poor interior. But so far, the results say China is doing better. India’s political freedom, which is real and is to be nurtured, has nevertheless not produced a class of political leaders with a sense of mission. India must develop a sense of mission, if it is to fulfill its promise.

Dispatch from India (2)

It is early afternoon, and we are headed out of Delhi. Our destination is a nearby suburb. Of course, terms are relative: A town or “suburb” here can mean a million people. As we leave the center of Delhi, we pass more of the long narrow slums that line the main arteries. It is impossible to get used to them. We continue on. The traffic gradually thins out, the three-wheelers replaced by rickety lorries and a smattering of expensive European sedans.

The roads widen, and the quality of the pavement improves. Now we are on a divided multilane boulevard. The density of habitations drops, and soon we are traveling past landscaped green areas, small clusters of buildings, an office park, and forested areas. Here and there are reminders of where we are--hand-drawn wagons at the side of the road, dilapidated stands where vendors sell fruit or fabrics, weather-stained buildings in need of repair. Still, things look more developed, and there is less of the oppressive grey dust.

We see a sign indicating a biotechnology cluster nearby. A few of the buildings we pass could have been transplanted from Silicon Valley--rounded forms, cryptic logos, lots of glass. The intersections are a less chaotic than in the city. The lights and signs look maintained, and most of the drivers actually heed them. This is one of the areas where India’s much-touted advancement has had a profound effect.

We turn off the main road into a residential neighborhood. Well-maintained homes are interspersed with broken buildings, but there are signs that the latter are slowly being replaced. Almost all of the older, crumbling buildings are occupied by squatters. We wonder where they go when these structures are demolished. There are massive low-income housing projects on the outskirts of the cities, but we have been told that the officials in charge of relocating people are instead auctioning off the apartments on the open market, most likely pocketing part of the proceeds. Some of those who win the lottery to get into these places collaborate with the officials, or illegally rent the places out because the cash is more important to them.

Wherever we go, the talk turns to politics, development, education, the future of India. The recurring motif is corruption. In the public sector, every job, it seems, is awarded on the basis of a bribe paid to the appropriate official. Applicants typically borrow money to pay the bribes. They then are forced to extort money from all comers to pay off the loans. And so the cycle goes. People bribe for the privilege of being bribed.

The local papers carry stories every day, about newly breaking scandals involving various political leaders. The stories are usually planted by their opponents, but are reported breathlessly by the local press. Then there are the purges and counter-purges, threats of retribution, and grandiose posturing on an embarrassing scale. After two days here, we wondered if we had stumbled into a particularly unstable moment in Indian politics. We were told, with a wry shrug and a smile, that it is just business as usual.

The vicious and desperate infighting among political factions is driven, not by competing ideologies, but by competition to control the limited feeding space around the trough. The main differences between this kind of corruption, and that of the current crowd in Washington, is that in the U.S. there is so much to go around that even Enron didn't get noticed for 15 years; here there is far less to go around, but the spoils are far more equitably distributed--trickle-down economics in action. Ideological differences are mainly window dressing, used to mobilize those voters whom no-one has bothered to buy. So say our local sources. Is this view accurate? Given that it is repeated by almost everyone we ask, no matter their political philosophy or affiliation, it probably contains more than a bit of truth.

Somehow, through it all, India does not appear in danger of giving up on democracy altogether. Perhaps the fragmentation of various factions guarantees that. The question is whether the political chaos is mere noise, or a real impediment to broader advancment. As we have seen this afternoon, there is real material progress. Perhaps we shouldn’t read the papers, but merely focus on what is within our reach.

After a pleasant afternoon with family and friends, we drive back into Delhi, back into the dust and the crowds. It is late dusk. The shadowy forms of the shanties, the makeshift fires here and there, the dull red glow in the sky, give everything the feel of one of those post-apocalyptic movies, where strange machines grind on through the night, past encampments of people thrust back into the stone age. It is an eerie and disquieting feeling.

Next: Kolkata

From India: A perspective on the good news from Dover

One of the remarkable things about India is the way many religious groups, as well as other philosophical traditions, have coexisted in relative peace for decades. Of course, there are those who are not content to allow that, and so in recent years we have seen a rise in militancy among both Hindus and Muslims in India. In the context of the worldwide rise of Islamic extremism, India is playing with fire. There could be few greater tragedies than to see this country, a model of tolerance and diversity, and home to a billion people, torn apart by religious strife. Yet there are leaders here who persist in fanning the flames. Fortunately, in the most recent election, the Hindu nationalists were set back, though that may be temporary. The result was a surprise, and still has not been explained by the pundits, and so it is hard to know what the reverse means, or how lasting it may be. Nevertheless, large numbers of Indians seem to have woken up to the fact that religious sabre-rattling will not solve their problems or create opportunities.

For an American, seeing this play out is a poignant reminder of the risks we face at home. There has recently been reason to breathe a sigh of relief, as rationality finally won a round in Dover. There has been a great deal of coverage of this case, so these comments will be brief. Put simply: we are facing a worldwide war on reason, waged by ideologues of all stripes. The convenient explanation, perhaps the right one, is that the rapidity of change in the world has driven many to seek the security to be found in religious dogma. Whatever the reason, now that we have a slight respite, it is time to be honest about what we are confronting in the U.S.

Those who have compared the Christian Right with the Taliban have been shouted down, accused of intolerance, or worse. But the comparison is perfectly appropriate, and the dangers are not dissimilar. The absurd argument is made that one has to choose between supporting Christian extremism or supporting Islamofascism. It does not seem to occur to some that one can, and should, oppose both, as they are cut from the same cloth.

The Christian Right and the forces of Islamofascism, as well as the Hindu fundamentalists, want essentially the same things; it is only their means that differ. They long for a society in which prayer has replaced knowledge, women are subservient, holding other beliefs is itself considered intolerant, and the natural human impulse to question is dead. Their dream of a return to a pre-industrial, pre-enlightenment existence makes groups like Earth First look moderate by comparison. We cannot fight the values of Islamofascism without recognising and confronting those values in our own society.

Dispatch from India

4:30 PM, Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi: It has been a marathon trip, but exhaustion does not prevent us from eagerly observing all we can. The initial impression is disappointing: The airport is tired, decrepit, even filthy. The customs folks sit at wooden desks, the signs looking hand-lettered, the paint peeling. The baggage area is chaotic; there is a sad-looking duty-free shop, with a sign saying it is an enterprise of the Government of India. I wonder why the duty-free operation is adjacent to the baggage-return area, without any apparent barriers separating the two, but there is no one to ask.

The trip into town brings back childhood memories. The incessant honking of the little three-wheeled taxis, which appear to navigate the chaotic traffic using a kind of sonar. The jumble of vehicles of different types and speeds, all sharing the same lanes. The makeshift stalls visible in the dusk, all along the roads, and the swarms of pedestrians. A man single-handedly pulling a large cart piled high with some kind of produce, as buses, trucks, cars and scooters swerve to avoid him. I wonder how far he has come, on foot, pulling a load more suited to a team of oxen, to try to sell his wares in the big city.
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We have come to spend the holiday with our extended family here. We stay at the house of cousins who are away. They are privileged people, especially by local standards. Their house is large, nicely laid out, with most of the modern amenities, clean water being the most important. Just outside their gates is a different world. Down the street is a row of shanties, half-hidden behind crumbling walls that have not been repaired in 50 years. Dung fires smolder, and laundry hangs from lines strung throughout a jumble of walls and poles. A street repair crew shovels gravel by hand; two young men hand-crank a tar mixer. The work site is not marked; scooters, pedestrians, and a couple of cows somehow make their way around the workers. It is hard to discern what they are accomplishing--the road looks as though it could benefit from far more repair than this crew can possibly effect.

We take a trip into the center of the city to explore, perhaps shop. There have been changes in 20 years--large concrete overpasses here and there, a few modern buildings, some of them on a grand scale. But mostly, it looks the same. The streets crooked, the signs as well; the fruit vendors parked randomly along major roads; the endless streams of people in their stained tunics and flimsy sandals. Many of the stands and stalls are nothing more than a cloth spread on the ground, covered with wares for sale: fabrics, clothing, household implements, food. Some of the stands are attended by three or four people--far more than needed to carry on their business. A lot of the people sit for hours, nursing chai in their little clay cups. There is probably little else for them to do.

The old arcade at Connaught Place, the central market, a holdover from British times, is soot-stained, the columns coated with tobacco and pan spittle, everything finished in a layer of dust. In the center, the old park is gone, replaced by a massive construction site. They are building the terminus of a modern subway system, which they hope will relieve the unbearable traffic jams. The crowds are dense, but here, many of the people are unmistakeably middle-class, judging by their clothes and demeanor. They do not have the grim, beaten look of the poor. It is Christmas Eve, here in this non-Christian land, and someone must be doing a brisk business selling red Santa caps, because they are everywhere.

Delhi doesn’t have a single large slum. The shanties and hovels infiltrate all over the city, crammed into the corners between larger neighborhoods. The people build right on the dirt, using recycled board, brick and metal. It is unlikely any of them hold title to the land--they are squatters, one step above homelessness. Bony women, in their bright saris and shifts, pick their way gingerly through the filth and clutter and pools of muddy water, or worse. Here and there, children play cricket on improvised pitches, but as many children wander through the traffic, begging. They mingle with the maimed and the lepers, some of whom bleed from lesions that cover their limbs. This city is booming and modernizing, but over all there is the miasma of deep and intractable suffering.

Back at the house: we find ourselves subject to rotating blackouts. The phones work only fitfully. We are taken care of by domestic staff, who are dedicated and hard working. But it begs the question: how is it that this is the best work they can find? They are lucky compared with many in their villages or in the tenements from which they commute. Those villages remain mired in the 16th century. How can that be?

There has been much breathless coverage in the West, about India’s economic boom, and its rivalry with China. Americans are afraid of all the jobs they are losing to India. Indians are proud of the new industries which are springing up, taking those jobs. We see reports of gleaming new industrial parks in places like Bangalore. But the reports do not talk about the dysfunctional infrastructure surrounding those compounds, nor about the need for the companies to build their own power supplies because they, too, are subject to rolling blackouts. Most important, the reports rarely touch on the most important question: Is the growth and modernization going to touch the lives of the desperate poor in India? If not, how is that acceptable? What needs to happen for these people to have a future?

Next: Outside the city, signs of hope...

Quick question....

A number of people reading this have been sending me comments off line, directly to my email. I appreciate the comments, but wonder why you don't leave them here on the site (just click the "comments" button below). Part of the purpose of this blog was to provide a forum for the kinds of discussion some of us have had over the years via email. I wanted to keep the lively discussions going, while reducing the volume of email and also providing an archive of peoples' thoughts. A number of you have had a lot to say over the years via email, and it seems to me the rest of the group would be interested too. Is this the wrong place to do that?

Responses? Explanations? Ideas?

Thanks all...

A little common sense with that?

It's kind of funny to see far-right Christian organizations attack Walmart, for replacing "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays". Don't they just deserve each other? Yes, the religious fanatics have worked themselves up into a righteous sense of persecution, no question about it. That sense of persecution has become a dangerous force, one that threatens the greatness of this country.

So why do progressives insist on feeding that sense of persecution? Is it really necessary to ban the 3rd-grade Christmas play? Is it really necessary to ban the Bible club from using schools after hours like any other interest group? It is one thing to insist that teachers teach science in science class. Any reader of this journal knows that I give no quarter on that issue. However, it is a whole different thing to ban cultural traditions that are, all in all, a positive influence on young lives as well as old.

Ok, my experiences may not be typical. I went to a big public school, in a grim industrial town with many ethnic groups and boatloads of tribal hostility and suspicion. The Candlelight Service, which was our version of the Christmas pageant, was one of the few times that kids of all ethnicities and religions participated together in something, with a feeling bordering on genuine love. I was neither Christian nor Jew. I often had heated debates with kids whom I thought were letting faith trump reason. That did not stop me from participating every year, with great joy, in the Candlelight Service.

No, it did not make me a believer. But I loved the message of peace and fellowship. I loved that so many of us, who were walled off most of the time in our little cliques (or, if we were geeks, no clique at all) could get together each winter to do something that did not engender posturing, threats, or one-upmanship, but instead fostered camaraderie and kindness. Most of all, I loved the music. Our music director was smart, and ahead of his time: every year we performed a few songs from other religious traditions, mostly Jewish (because there were a lot of Jews in our town, and in the choir and orchestra). All of it was gorgeous, and I was in awe that this bunch of scruffy kids could make something so wonderful together.

Never in all that time did I feel anyone was shoving anything down my throat. This is a largely Christian country, and it seemed natural that their big celebration would be the most visible ritual in our community. It was also the one time that I felt most Christians came closest to feeling and behaving as Christ would have wanted them to. To me that was a good thing.

Those of us who advocate rationality have a tough war ahead of us. But we must choose the right battles. Science education is a good one. Religious hazing in our military is another. Defining our nation's mission is another. Giving public funds to groups that proselytize is another. And there are more.

But banning Christmas from our public schools, or being offended because people wish us Merry Christmas, strikes me as pointless, if not downright sad.

Back from China: A riff on freedom of information

Now that I've been back for 48 hours, I can share the following observation:

Soon after publishing some recent observations on China, and in particular the challenges it faces, there were unmistakeable signs that my email was being monitored. For two days after the last dispatch, I was cut off. After that, it was really slow, and a number of emails never reached their intended recipients. I was only able to check my servers at home by using aliases and alternative login protocols. A sobering reminder that China is ruled by an authoritiarian and sometimes paranoid regime.

As offensive and frustrating as it was to have this happen, I also found myself wondering how they can waste such enormous resources on monitoring people as harmless as I am. Yes, a lot of the surveillance is automated, but in my case the pattern also betrayed considerable human involvment. Some poor slob was actually taking the time to go through my emails and decide what to let through, and when. What will happen when human labour is no longer dirt cheap? Of course, such surveillance will become more and more expensive. Will it become so expensive that the government has to cut back, or be more selective? Or will technology fill the gap?

There are U.S. technology firms that have eagerly bid on projects to help the Chinese government develop tools to monitor their population. If we take human rights in China seriously, we must institute rules that strictly prohibit U.S. corporations from abetting the government's dictatorial impulses. The current U.S. administration has appropriately blocked sale of critical defense-related technologies to China, but has not done anything to curb the sale or development of tools the Chinese government can use to oppress its own people. It is a remarkable and disturbing omission, especially given our rhetoric about human rights.

Dispatch from Shanghai

After several months of chaotic and intense planning, the Mayor of San Francisco, accompanied by Senator Feinstein, brought his trade delegation to China last week. I had the privilege (and occasional exasperation) of being able to propose and then help plan some of their stops here in Shanghai. The past two days have seen those efforts come to fruition: Successful visits with local companies and universities (all wrapped in a constant and occasionally suffocating blanket of official protocol, bureaucratic ego-stroking, and speeches), a long list of follow-up items, and some real chances for people to learn from each other.

Following in the wake of the recent visits by Arnold and, separately, by the President, it is interesting to contrast the three delegations, as seen through the eyes of the locals with whom I have spoken. Arnold's was a series of huge public rallies, deluged with press, making a lot of splash but leaving people here unsure what it all meant. The orchestrated events, meant to persuade China to "Buy California", looked to folks here like a Hollywood promotion, with about as much credibility.

The President, sadly, left the folks here quietly shaking their heads. His preaching to President Hu about religious freedom struck them as offensive and absurd. Fortunately for us, most people here completely detach their views of Bush from their views of Americans. But one local businessman told me (off the record) "If Americans wonder why we are not ready for democracy, they only have to look at their own elections to understand what we are afraid of."

The Mayor's delegation is completely different. All the speeches, politicking, protocol etc., notwithstanding, etc., there is no question about it. First, there are no press along for this ride. The entire entourage fits on one-and-a half large buses, which would not have accomodated half of Arnold's advance team. Security is tight but unobtrusive. We are not shutting down whole sections of the city as we pass through, which goes a long way toward maintaining good will. The Mayor himself is relaxed and personable. All of the events were arranged based on local knowledge and contacts, and the entire atmosphere is one of inquiry. We are not here to sell (well, maybe a little) or to preach; we are here to learn, and that is indeed refreshing and encouraging.

The Mayor's overarching purpose was to energize the sister-city relationship between Shanghai and San Francisco, which dates back 25 years. With San Francisco the symbolic capital of Bay Area, which, in turn, is the epicenter of the New Economy, and with Shanghai on course to be the Bay Area's only credible challenger for that position, the sister-city relationship has taken on new meaning. For a few of the mayor's colleagues, as well as some of us working with the delegation as volunteers, there was a parallel purpose: to shock, if need be, the Mayor and his entourage, many of them with little or no prior exposure to this part of the world, into realizing in their gut, the impact of what is happening here.

All of those purposes seem to be on track to being achieved. The Mayor and the delegation connected with our hosts here in China. They are working furiously to come up with ways to follow up on those contacts. But he also gave a talk last night in which it was clear he understands that we are no longer in a paternalistic relationship with a bunch of peasants; it is now our turn to learn if we are not to be left behind. I am sure he did not anticipate giving that kind of talk when he stepped on the plane a few days ago. He understands that we need to be proactive and creative, both in the public sector and the private, if we are to ride this huge wave that is taking shape across the ocean, rather than being drowned.

Now, the caveats: China's growth has been financed by massive foreign investment and a huge trade surplus; the domestic economy is still a low-consumption, low-wage economy, which is great for the aforementioned trade but not great for making the whole thing sustainable. The wealth gap is huge and growing. Moving a billion people from a medieval subsistence economy into the modern world is not a small task. The one-child policy has yielded 45-million excess adult males, most of whom are (according to the women) spoiled and petulant. Despite their overwhelmingly great numerical odds, young women are increasingly refusing to choose at all, which exacerbates problem for the men, leading to the potential for great social disruption. Water is in short supply and the water shortage could become a crisis. Prosperity is coming at huge environmental costs. Shanghai, for all its overwhelming glitter and power, is a showcase that does not represent the state of the rest of the country. And so on....

All that said, the progress and the potential here are mind-boggling indeed, and it is gratifyfing to know that some of our political leaders are beginning to get it.

Taking the danger seriously

Many people I talk with simply don't take seriously the threat posed by the religious right to education in this country. Yet over the past 20 years, the number of school districts teaching religious doctrine in place of natural history has steadily gone up. Major textbook publishers have two versions of their science texts: one version does not contain any references to evolution or to modern cosmology. Since losing a number of cases at the Federal level, the flat-earth folks have gone local, taking school boards in towns across the country. Now, some of these folks are actually using the courts to attack the publication of web-sites that contain information about evolution (news here).

The anti-science movement is not only targeting evolution. Its hit list includes the writings of E.O. Wilson, James Watson, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Sigmund Freud, Peter Medawar and Isaac Asimov (!), to name a few. Thus, it is hardly exaggeration to say it is targeting modern science, not just Darwin. The biblical literalists have a fundraising network that operates 24/7, raising money to fund lawsuits and PR for their agenda. They are tapping many of the roughly 60% of Americans who think that the earth and humans were created in their present form some 6000 years ago. A measure of their success is that growing percentages of Americans subscribe to some or all of the tenets of creationism, in stark contrast to trends in all other industrialized countries (see poll) In the long term, the religious extremists who carry out suicide bombings in the name of Allah, are far less a threat to our country than our own, home-grown variety, who would use our political process to send us back to the Dark Ages.

Bigger than the Next Big Thing?

In discussing education, this forum has focused mainly on science education, and its impact on our national competitiveness. However, the importance of education goes far beyond that. Knowledge of, and appreciation for, art, history, literature, and all the other fields we call “humanities” and “social sciences”, are vital to our existence as human beings. Without the arts, without history, without imagination, we are no more than big termites. Our ability to ask questions of our place in the universe, to be curious about our own nature, to imagine “what if”, to find beauty in our surroundings, to ask whether there is a higher being responsible for all of this--these are the things that make us different, as far as we know, from termites.

Pure science, motivated by curiosity and the sense of beauty in nature, falls into this category. But it happens that science is very closely linked with the primary instrumentality by which we deal with the world: technology. In a world dominated by western rationality, whose cornerstone is Baconian reductionism, this is natural. While there are other systems of thought, that lead to different concepts of how to cope with our environment, reliance on physical technology has established itself as the dominant paradigm. This is now true even in cultures, such as those of India and China, in which the dominant paradigm for millennia was spiritual or metaphysical. Yet there is no evidence that technology per se fulfills us in any fundamental way.

Since technology is derived from science, the two often become blurred in peoples’ minds. However, science, like art, arises from the human hunger for beauty and understanding, and has value unto itself, regardless of its practical implications. The urge to understand is part of what makes us human. Technology enables us to get by; science, art, and all the other “impractical’ pursuits are what make “getting by” worthwhile.

Why raise this? Part of the great culture war going on in this country is not just about the teaching of science. It is about the broader issue of teaching everything. The debate has reached a critical phase as we struggle with budget shortfalls and the pressure to focus on “essentials”. And when we discuss essentials, certain things such as the arts, cultural history, the social sciences, do not make the cut. (The study of other cultures is seen as worse than “impractical”: it is seen as an attack on American culture, or as rampant PC’ness.) And science is not exempt, even among those who support neither radical christianity, nor the theory that science is part of some sinister corporate scheme. There is a growing, mainstream, bipartisan consensus, which demands that science, and the teaching of science, be more “directed”, or goal-oriented. This demand reflects a profound misunderstanding of how the imagination works, as any scientist would tell us if they had the soapbox.

Some of the greatest technological solutions arose from work being done by people who were thinking about completely different questions. Examples include germ theory (the microscope started off as a toy for looking at small things); cures for most infectious diseases (antibiotics were discovered by accident); modeling of weather, aerodynamics and other metastable phenomena (chaos theory was an obscure branch of mathematics), scaling of complex systems and modeling of networks (fractal geometry was the even more obscure obsession of one maverick scientist who loved the patterns of seashells and coastlines; its best-known application is in computer graphics); and biotechnology (restriction enzymes are the reason some bacteria are immune to infection by foreign DNA).

If our leaders had studied the history of the Enlightenment, they would not be so eager to force scientists to justify their existence with specific goals and timelines. And if we teach science merely as another instrumentality toward some practical end, we will kill the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs. Even more important, in doing so we will diminish ourselves in ways that cannot be measured or quantified at all.

More on Dover

The proponents of intelligent design (ID) have forcefully insisted that it is not religion, but an alternative scientific theory. Thus, it was striking that the day after the voters of Dover, PA ejected the pro-ID members of the Board of Education, numerous conservative Christian leaders cried out that Dover had rejected God. The most infamous comment was that of Pat Robertson, who predicted that God, having been run out of town, would not save Dover-ites in the event of a disaster (see prior post). These remarks effectively end the debate over the true nature of ID and its proponents.

Sudden Realization

The yelling is getting louder and more vitriolic, as the Administration tries to discredit opposition to the war by calling names. How many times is Dick Cheney, the ultimate draft-evader, going to get away with slandering veterans who served with honor? The Bush team, from Cheney on down, have shamelessly questioned the patriotism and character of veterans who opposed them, from John McCain to Max Cleland to John Kerry, and now Congressman John Murtha (story here). When will patriotic Americans call them on it?

Another, more important realization struck home while listening to replays of Murtha's speech today. He spoke of a mission that was no longer achievable. I suddenly realized that he's wrong! The Administration's original mission is quite achievable; it just doesn't happen to be the mission they sold us, and it is not a mission to which they will ever admit. That mission is not democracy for Iraq; it wasn't even overthrowing Saddam, or saving us from WMD. It may not even have been about oil. It was about establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East.

Bush admitted as much, a half-year ago, when he commented that we might be there indefinitely. Seen in this light, his team's behavior suddenly becomes very rational. They must do everything in their power to get us not to "cut and run",to "stay the course", no matter how hopeless the situation looks. They must persuade us to accept the reality in Iraq--namely that the insurgency is getting worse; that the insurgents are targeting U.S. troops; that they recruit based on our presence there; that Iraq may be moving closer to civil war--as the cost of a noble endeavor. The administration sends its mouthpieces out periodically, to insist we are accomplishing good things, while in fact it is unlikely that they actually care.

In light of this, the Administration's true mission in Iraq is unacceptably perverse. The escalation in hate and death is not an unfortunate cost, but an actual requirement, of the Administration's strategy. The ongoing disaster may prevent the achievment of the "official" objectives, but it furnishes the pretext for keeping the troops there, and so it serves a purpose. The only way the worsening conditions impact the actual mission, is if we wake up and realize what that mission was all along. It makes the administration's recent accusations, that their critics are irresponsible and immoral, breathtakingly cynical.

In The Eye of the Storm: Dover invites God's wrath...

On the day that the Kansas Board of Edumacation voted to reject science, the town of Dover, PA rejected its Board for having done the same thing. They replaced the zealots with eight Christians who ran on the premise that religion belongs, but just not in science class. Congratulations to the citizens of Dover for realizing that. Of course, they were immediately subjected to gouts of vitriol from the Hateful Right. Pat Robertson, as always, managed to top the list, saying on his daily television show (the 700 Club):

"...to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there." (full story)

One of the newly elected Board members, Bernadette Reinking, responded with remarkable eloquence and aplomb, pointing out that 1) the town is deeply Christian ("there's a church on every corner") and they still do not feel that faith belongs in science class; 2) they are not throwing God out of the town, only putting discussion of His plan where it belongs--in philosophy class or the study of World religions; and 3) by creating the right forum to discuss religion, and thereby opening the discussion up to people of ALL faiths, they feel that they will bring God INTO their community. Another of the new Board members simply dismissed Robertson as "beyond the fringe."

That ordinary citizens (both Christians) can see so clearly, and stand up so calmly to Robertson and his ilk, is a ray of hope indeed.

A question about encouraging tolerance...

A good friend of mine posed the following question: If you were appointed or elected the USA philosopher king, how would you design and mandate an education program for all that would breed tolerance for diversity in society? On thinking about it, I realize: It is not about designing the right program. It is about having a program at all.

Silicon valley, where brilliant and intellectually awake people from all over the world have gathered to create new industries, is almost completely colour-blind, religion-blind, nationality-blind, and culture-blind. Pakistanis and Indians, Christians and Atheists, Sikhs, Jews and everyone else, work, party and dream together without animus. If they have cultural affiliations, they celebrate them without shoving it in each others' faces. They have seen how small the world is, and they have no patience for tribalism. That is a consequence of education.

The danger to the U.S. is that our culture, outside a few havens, is deeply suspicious of education, and actively hostile to the concept of a broad and deep humanistic education. Even people who are not christian fundamentalists scorn “nerds” and “geeks”--terms which have no equivalent in most Asian languages. We need to change, or we will end up doing their laundry.

So how can we change? It starts with parents caring and being involved in, and valuing education. The process of education itself leads to greater understanding and tolerance, so the objective of tolerance need not be an explicit motivation. Yes, of course teachers should seek to build inclusiveness into their classroom environment, and intervene when children display prejudice and intolerance. But classroom sessions on tolerance, as well as on “self esteem”, are a silly waste of time. Those are values that are embedded in the larger enterprise of life, or not.

So we come full circle to your question: as philosopher king, or, say, President, I would use the bully pulpit to extoll the values of education and intellectual achievment, instead of snickering at them; I would not go around making it a point of pride that I was a “C” student. I would side, uncompromisingly, with the teaching of science in schools, and not with those who want to dilute it with religion.

On the economic front: Even a doctrinaire fiscal conservative must recognize when government investment in a public good is essential to our future—and education so clearly belongs in that category. We have to shift funding into, not out of, public education. But that investment must come with quality controls (not standardized tests, thank you). We should make a bargain with the teachers’ unions: We will double your pay if you agree to give up the possibility of lifetime tenure. There is nothing like better pay to attract the best; and there is nothing more effective at ensuring high performance than knowing your job depends on it.

So, to me the answer is very little about diversity, and all about allowing people to develop their minds. Do that, and tolerance will almost certainly follow.

Ok, my friend, what would YOU do?

With us or against us (2)

I thought that the era of sex-hating feminism was long past. Many of my progressive women friends have assured me of that. So is it discouraging to hear movement leaders again railing against the presence of womens' sexuality in media and popular culture. To hear them tell it, the fact that young women like to dance on bars and dress like Britney Spears cancels out all the gains that have been made in education, pay, and economic and civil rights. I heard one feminist author the other night say that we are living in an unmitigated nightmare for feminism. If she had been referring to the current political assault on womens' reproductive rights, it might have made at least some sense. But she was focused on pop culture.

Let's set the record straight: Girls are kicking butt in our schools (I posted earlier on this topic)--so much so, that there is now hand-wringing over whether boys are disadvantaged. The wage gap for women has gone from the proverbial $0.59 per dollar to, depending on your sources, $0.85 and climbing. Put the two trends together, and most of the remaining glass ceilings are due to be shattered within a generation. None of this counts? Is it really all for naught because some young women like to act trashy or sexually aggressive in public?

Such behaviour may simply reflect a realization on the part of women and girls that the old double standards that imprisoned them are melting away. They are now free to act the way boys have always been free to act. The tragic flaw of doctrinaire feminism has been its premise that women must be the victims of every situation. Boys are presumed to hold all the cards in traditional roles; yet, reverse the roles, and suddenly the same behaviour is a sign of weakness and subjugation. How can that be, unless you make the assumption that men and women are fundamentally unequal?

Finally, as trashy as much of pop culture may be, we should not buy the constant whining and kvetching, from both the Left and the Right, that overt sexuality is a sign of the end of civilization. We actually live in a pretty repressed society. If young women are breaking out of the mold and flaunting it, how is that a bad thing? Let the religious zealots get all hot and bothered. The real reason they are upset is that they secretly like trashy sex, and that frightens them. The rest of us should not be making common cause with creeps like Pat Boone.

With us or against us

Our public discourse has been poisoned by our leaders' insistence on all-or-nothing, either/or, with-us-or-against-us thinking. George Bush's application of this approach to the international response to Iraq reached new heights of shortsightedness, but was hardly unique.

In the upcoming special election in California, we are faced with a list of Hobson's choices. Perhaps the most tragic is the ballot measure which forces us to choose between eviscerating the teachers' unions, which perform a vital role in protecting the meager resources we allocate to education, and sanctioning their sclerotic, self-defeating insistence on preserving outdated and even harmful methodologies. Either way, our children lose.

There is a long list of issues on which we, the voters, have been backed into choosing between extreme viewpoints, without being given the opportunity to pick and choose the best planks from opposing platforms. This is one of the reasons a third party is so essential, and it is also one of the reasons that the coalitions that make up the two major parties are so terrified of the idea.

Do you have favourite examples of this kind of either/or thinking, which you think are obstructing our ability to reach productive solutions?

Numbing and Dumbing our Children

My four-year old son wants to be a skeleton for Halloween. So I cruise a couple of department stores, looking for stuff I can use to make a skeleton outfit. Nothing doing. There are, however, racks of ready-made, complete costumes. Out of curiosity, I check them out. What's this? No witches? No ghosts? No devils or princesses? No skeletons? Nothing but commercial product tie-ins: Batman. Spiderman. Ninja Turtles (I thought they were long obsolete). Lots of armoured, amped-up, alien-ish assassins from the latest video-games. The sad thing is, people actually pay for the privilege of marketing these products, when the companies should be paying us for the right to use our children as billboards.

I persevere--I find some black pants and a black turtleneck that will fit the little guy. I head for a crafts store to find fabric and paints to make bones. As I search for glow-in-the-dark paint, I hear a little girl in the next aisle, whining, "But Mommy, no one makes their own costumes. That's so lame!"

Our media and entertainment industries have built a huge machine designed to homogenize us and our children, to get us to be suspicious of our own imaginations. They have mastered the use of psychologists and focus groups to turn entertainment into a vast marketing ploy. We hear constantly from the "family values" crowd that Hollywood and the media don't play it straight enough. Unfortunately, the opposite is true: From Disney to Target, the machine profits most when it convinces our children to trade in real magic for a cheap imitation.

Courageous statement from Danforth

John Danforth, a conservative stalwart with impeccable credentials (Senator, Ambassador, minister...) has stated the obvious: the hold of the religious right on the Republican party is a bad thing, for the country, for the party, for all of us.

The Republicans, who once stood for fiscal discipline, a cosmopolitan world view, global engagement, and progress, have mutated into something ugly and unrecognizable. If there are any left of the old school, it is past time for them to redeem themselves. The party may suffer in the short term if losing the votes of some religious fanatics costs it a few elections; but in the long run the party and the country would be far better off.

The truth is that the cultural conservatism of the "base" is deeply at odds with the principles of free trade, free enterprise and individual responsibility that were once the mantra of the GOP. It once appeared that the challenge to the Republican leadership would be keeping the religious right in line while pursuing a traditionally pro-growth strategy. After all, no one is more at risk, from globalism and technological progress, than people who reject the modern world. Unfortunately, the religious right has become the tail that wags the GOP.

Though it was certainly not intended thus, Danforth's courageous honesty calls into question the entire rubric of the current two-party axis. If the Republican party has been so thoroughly infiltrated by the cancer of fundamentalism, that it cannot recognize itself, then the remaining secular moderates would do well to make common cause with the moderates of the Democratic party. In the ideal world, the wackos on both sides of the political spectrum would be left where they belong: outside the tent. Well, at least we can dream...

A Mind is a Terrible Thing...

In the midst of the religious right's war on reason, we now have to contend with a resurgence of militant stupidity on the part of the left. I have been bombarded with bizarre rants claiming that the threat of crossover avian flu is a hoax, cooked up to enable the Cheney/Rove cabal to take us ever closer to martial law and suspension of civil rights. I don't for a minute put it past Cheney et. al. to use this threat to those ends, but that does not mean that the threat itself is not real.

The same nuts who think this is a hoax are the ones who opposed fluoridation in water, and who deny that vaccines and antibiotics have saved millions of lives. To these people, modern medicine (yes, it has deep flaws....and?) is a huge conspiracy to poison us. What if we listen to them, and ignore the threat of crossover strains of avian flu? You can rest assured that, in the event of an epidemic or pandemic, they will be the first to point fingers, comparing the situation to our criminally negligent preparations for, and response to, Hurricane Katrina. And they will be right.

It is depressing to be an advocate of rationality today. We have to contend with Bush and his band of idiots, who don't believe in science, and then we turn around to find ourselves being betrayed by so-called progressives and their own brand of aggressive ignorance. There are real issues that they could help us address, for example the fact that high-density farming greatly increases the chances of a crossover influenza pandemic (not to mention the spread of other pathogens). But they would rather we just hid our heads in the sand. How sad.

Are the rats bolting?

The rumour mill has it that indictments are being handed down tomorrow in Plame-gate. Meanwhile, Scott McClellan is implying that he was lied to by his masters at the White House (Link--this is obviously a partisan site, but the quotes are real--draw your own conclusions...) It is sad to have to root for the s--- to hit the fan, but these thugs have maimed our country so badly that they've GOT to go down. Our enemies could not have done a better job. And the administration's flacks still have the gall to describe the rest of us as traitors?

Gender Gap in American Schools

USA Today published an article about the growing gender gap in college enrollments in the U.S. (Link). The thesis is that in seeking to encourage girls, we have overcorrected and made things tough for boys. I had to reply:

In response to the growing tilt toward women in higher education, Ms. Marklein quotes Michael Gurian as suggesting that schools should offer more things boys (supposedly) like, such as sports. If you have read any of his books, you know that Gurian also thinks boys are naturally rowdy and violent. Hey, why not reinstate rumbles as a way of settling playground disputes? Gurian obviously never visited schools in Europe or Japan, or he would have realized that his assumptions are ridiculous.

For much of our history, the children most in jeopardy in our schools have not been girls, but gentle and considerate boys. They are considered weaklings or “fairies”, even by their teachers. They have never been safe from bullying or outright assault, and are the most likely children to be victimized by adults. Forget being a good student: for a boy, that is the kiss of death.

Decades of consciousness-raising have made schools today more girl-friendly. But the same reforms have, incidentally, made them more friendly to boys who don’t act like savages. If this makes things harder on boys of the old school, isn't that a worthwhile trade-off? Let parents teach them better values, and maybe boys will make a comeback.

Platform for a third party?

It is obvious that this country needs a multiparty system. The two dominant parties are hopelessly dogmatic, and on top of that, they are corrupt. Our electoral system is rigged to make it nearly impossible for another party to break in. Still, in the early 1990's, two developments offered hope.

First, after years of touting a "third way", the Democratic Leadership Council saw one of its own, Bill Clinton, elected President. Despite the Right's increasingly rabid hatred of him, he actually governed as a centrist, if not a moderate conservative. Second, the Reform Party briefly stirred things up, capturing over 20% of the popular vote in one election and placing a governer in Minnesota. Unfortunately, the Reform Party had no coherent philosophy, and its main backer proved mercurial at best. It is no longer a factor.

The people of this country long for a party that does not force them to choose the lesser of evils on almost every question. Today, you can't just practice simple tolerance--you are forced to choose between outright bigotry or heavy-handed "political correctness". You can't just want to preserve the social safety net--you are forced to choose between eviscerating the middle class, or complete fiscal stupidity (a la California). You can't favor reasonably regulated free enterprise--you have to choose between lawless, Enron-style capitalism, or being choked by "nanny government". And so on. In each of these cases, we face a continual Hobson's choice.

Worse, the Big Two do not offer platforms, but rafts of false associations. If you want to vote for free trade, it comes attached to Iraq and creationism in schools. If you want to vote for civil rights, it comes attached to government-paid "grief counselors" and Barbra Streisand.

A third party will have to be informed by certain broad and basic values. From more than a decade of conversations with people from all walks of life, I find it likely that a large majority of people in the country would buy into fiscal discipline, cultural openness, racial tolerance, a basic social safety net, and environmental responsibility. Yes, the devil is in the details, and any such debate is likely to sink into the mire of name-calling that has taken over our polity, but we have to start somewhere.

Suggestions and opinions are welcome as "comments". I will pursue this in future posts.

A Blue Island in a Red Sea

It is tempting to think in terms of Red and Blue states, but of course this is an oversimplification. As I write this, sitting at a desk in Research Triangle Park, NC, I am surrounded by one of the greatest concentrations of science and technology in the country. We are within spitting distance of four major universities with strong scientific research programs. The people here are proud of being one of the leading centers in the world for the industries of the future. It is no coincidence that some of these counties voted Blue as the state went Red.

Some issues transcend political allegiance. Voters here, whether Republican or Democratic, want their children to be taught real science in schools. They do NOT want their students told that biblical accounts of creation are scientifically equivalent to the theory of evolution. For these people, surrounded by communities bent on rejecting science, defending it may prove to be a lonely and disheartening struggle. For the more secular Republicans here, it poses a basic conflict, for they know their party has sold its soul to the flat-earth crowd in exchange for votes. They may hold the key to the future. What will they do?

There are some elected officials here who have worked doggedly and successfully to promote progress in North Carolina. Two or three of these people are considered strong candidates for the governership in the next election. If one of them indeed runs for governer, let's hope that he has the wisdom to reach out to the secular Republicans, and to refuse the religious zealots a seat at the table. We badly need leaders, especially in Red states, who will stand up to the forces of fear and ignorance.

A Nice Surprise

I woke up today to find that Thomas Schelling is co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics. As a college student, I read some of his papers, heard him lecture, and participated in an international crisis-resolution simulation which he designed. He was a hero of mine, for the way he was able to explain and predict so much of human behaviour based on his elaborations of game theory. Both conservatives and liberals were suspicious of him--conservatives because game theory blows big holes in their dogma that unfettered pursuit of self-interest produces optimal results; liberals because his models were not informed by their warm-and-fuzzy idealism about human nature.

I say "were" because, even though Schelling is alive and well at 84, he has faded somewhat from the scene. He commented today that he had not expected to win the prize after all this time. It is unfortunate that he did not have more influence on policy--we would have avoided much that is evil in the world today, had our leaders been so rational. Still, it is gratifying that he has been recognized, even if belatedly. Let's hope it raises at least a little bit of awareness.

Through the eyes of others

Understanding how others see you can be very illuminating. And I have recently had some very disturbing conversations with people from other countries, some just visiting this country, some long-time residents, even citizens. There has been a real change in the way people talk about us. Yes, it used to be that there were people who were jealous of America, and loved to nitpick to find fault. There were those who loved us but opposed our policies in certain parts of the world. There were people who were just against us.

Now, what I hear is either sadness or gloating. Those who really hated us or were jealous of us are cautiously gleeful at what they see as an accelerating spiral of self-destruction. Those who loved us are sad because they worry we are throwing it all away. My friends in the world of science and technology are simply horrified, and wonder if they will have to leave in order to keep their academic freedom. My friends in the arts are afraid, because there are so few places where they have ever had freedom, and this was one of those places. All of them shake their heads as we turn our backs on what used to be the quintessential American value: "Progress".

From big companies (GM, anyone?) that refuse to innovate, to labor unions that reject retraining for the new economy, to religious zealots who want to eviscerate our educational system, to political leaders who want to bomb, pollute and bulldoze us back to the stone ages, we are in the grip of a form of insanity. Is it born of fear? Has there simply been TOO MUCH progress for us to handle, that we need to turn and run?

I worry a little when people bluster and threaten me. I worry more when they shake their heads in pity. We as a country, are rapidly approaching that point.

Waking Up

As Bush's poll numbers slide, I sense growing energy on the part of those who disagree with his policies. Of course, there is growing energy on the part of the regressives, too--Rove talks openly of "finally burying the Democrats once and for all", and there is great danger that may come to pass. After all, the Democrats have been brain dead for years, with the exception of the small cadre of New Democrats led by Clinton. Let's be clear--the Democrats have taken a lot of stupid positions (opposing free trade, opposing the use of stock options, ending the draft after Vietnam--did they really think it would end war?), but on life or death issues like the environment, the war in Iraq, and now the teaching of science in schools, they have been more right than wrong. Today they are the only opposition standing in the way of complete disaster. So it is critical they get fired up.

It is striking to think back to the way political discourse used to be, and to realize how we have changed. Commentators like Limbaugh, Hannity and Drudge have inured us to hate and vitriol. Anyone who disagrees with them has been bludgeoned into polite passivity. Things have gotten so bad that the intolerance of the religious right is not even on the table for discussion--it is the rest of us who are having to defend ourselves against charges of intolerance, despite the truth that all we want is the right to think for ourselves.

Sometimes the RR are so rabid it is almost amusing. Look at their recurrent war on Disney--perhaps the most effective agency ever, for spreading American norms and viewpoints around the world. The RR have gone after them relentlessly, for the terrible sin of providing equal benefits to their gay employees. Never mind that Disney is a purveyor of the kind of bland, homogenized, mindlessly positive messages that the RR would prefer in all their art (for an example, read Michael Medved--an advocate of American Stalinist art if there ever was one). Ironically, the greatest source of traffic to Disney theme parks is our own Red States. Chew on that one!

And the war on Hollywood! Here is a community which churns out movies that portay America through relentlessly positive, idealized images, and it is not good enough for the zealots. The rest of the world considers Hollywood movies to be American propaganda. How is it our zealots see Hollywood as anti-American? Just what do they want? I am certain it is not more content--that is what the Europeans do, and aside from a few college students in bastions of "communism" like Boston and San Francisco, most Americans find it offensive.

Those of us who consider rationality a source of light have been under vitriolic and unrelenting assault for as long as I can remember, and we are paying a price for not having taken it seriously before. Some did not take it seriously because it did not seem possible that the most advanced country in the world could be taken over by troglodytes. Others looked the other way because they cynically believed that the troglodytes would vote for them without extracting a price. We had all better wake up before we really lose for good.

More Nonsense about "constructionism"

Once again, as we consider a Supreme Court nominee, the debate has been limited to very narrow ground. The cultural conservatives have framed the debate on their terms. They have succeeded in claiming minimalism as their own, even though what they really want is their own activist judges on the bench. Of course, as usual, the "opposition" are too brain dead to call them on it. For that alone, even if they are suspicious of Miers, the conservatives have won.

A true minimalist will respect state's rights on matters such as right-to-die, medical marijuana, gay unions, and other aspects of personal behavior. It is clear, however, that the regressive wing of the Republican base actually wants judges who will run roughshod over all of their principles in order to punish people of whom they disapprove.

By pretending they care about issues of principle (constructionist vs. "legislating from the bench", minimalist vs. intrusive, pro-states' rights vs. anti, pro individual vs. anti), the regressives successfully disguise the truth: they want judges who will rule in favor of people and things they like, and against people and things they don't like. It's that simple.

If you need evidence for this statement, we got it today. George Bush was emphatic: there is no litmus test on any issue, such as abortion. His only concern, he says, is that the judge is a constructionist. He says he didn't even ask Ms. Miers about abortion. Guess what? The religious right is indignant! Some of them openly say they've been betrayed!

So it is there for all to see. They don't care about abstract legal principles. They just want their way. We can only hope Bush was telling the truth, for once.

This is why it matters

If the crew of a wooden ship, out in the middle of the ocean, began burning the timbers to keep warm, would we consider that reasonable behaviour? Why, then, do we tolerate such behaviour on a national or global scale? Do we think that there is another planet, lurking nearby, to which we can escape if we destroy this one?

The scientific community, with its high nerd quotient, is terrible at communicating with the rest of humanity. We are hopeless at the game of sound bites and rhetorical spin. So when certain politicians insist that the jury is out on Global Warming, we let them get away with it. Well, for them to insist that there is no evidence we are destroying our world, is a blatant and cynical lie. Those who call Global Warming a false alarm are sacrificing their, and our, children for their own short-term greed. They are committing a crime of unparalleled dimensions.

What if we do everything we can to save our world, and it turns out the scientists were wrong? Simple: we will have needlessly sacrificed 1 or 2 % of our standard of living. But what if we continue in our reckless ways, and it turns out the scientists were right? Well, then we will lose everything. Our children will inherit a dying world.

Are those really equally bad outcomes?

Return to the Dark Ages?

Dover, PA: The rapidity with which the enemies of reason have advanced their agenda is a frightening omen for our future. Our President’s support for the war on science is sad and mystifying. How do people reconcile uber-patriotism with cutting the legs out from under the very source of our power? This should not have been a partisan issue, but the President and his strategists have cynically made it one.

Republicans who grew up in the era when the GOP was identified with sophistication in world affairs, and fiscal discipline at home, have to be horrified by what has happened to the party. If they are not, then they are simply wedded to partisan advantage, whatever the cost. The Republican party has sold its soul to the fanatics, and the rest of us must pay the price.

I've added a link to DefCon America. Take a look and get involved--it's our future.

Damn the politeness...

We have been far too polite regarding the current Administration. Here is one take on what is really happening: http://www.ericblumrich.com/14.html.

Three or four of the 14 points are perhaps a bit overstated; the rest seem pretty on point.

Judicial restraint hypocrisy

With the hearings under way on Roberts, all the talk is of judicial restraint vs. judicial activism, of states' rights vs. "heavy-handed government". Hypocrisy has become accepted truth. The fact that liberals have allowed the debate to be framed that way just demonstrates how brain-dead they are. As conservative judges have weighed in against medical marijuana, the right to die, and personal privacy, and in favour of federal police power, one thing becomes abundantly clear, if it wasn't obvious already: they like getting government off our backs only when it suits them. The reality is that you can predict most judges, not based on their adherence to abstract principles of jurisprudence, but based on who is standing before them.

If the people in front of the bench are long-hairs, drug users, single moms, elderly, sick, gay, or black, you can almost bet they will feel the full weight of the system come down on their heads. By the way, the same can be said of liberal judges: if the people in front of the bench are corporate executives, white, rich or powerful, they will feel the wrath of the system come down on THEIR heads, no matter how ethical they are, or what exemplary lives they have led. (To liberals, there is no distinction between the entrepreneur who risked everything to build a company, and the thieves at Enron.) The difference is that liberals have allowed themselves to be tarred as activists, while dangerous bullies like Scalia get away with murder because they are "strict constructionists". Only when it suits them, of course.

Escape from Insanity

Off to Asia in the morning. Away from the blame game being played by the Bush administration. Blaming the victim has never sunk so low. Those of us who see this administration for what it is, have been too polite, for too long. It isn't politically correct to use inflammatory language. But let's face it--from scapegoating minorities, starting wars based on lies, occupying foreign lands in the name of "civilizing" them, and evoking hysterical religiosity to justify it all, I challenge someone to show me how this is not a fascist administration. We are just lucky that there are still some checks on absolute power.

Meanwhile, as America aggressively squanders its great gift, two billion people in Asia are working, day and night, to get a piece of the action. Some things to note about them: they respect teachers, they watch less TV, they are less religious, they study hard, and they are hungry as hell. They can't indulge in the kind of smug, fatuous, and dangerous conceits that led us into Iraq, and that have let us stand by as millions of our own are killed or made homeless. Just how do the super-patriots in the White House think that their short-sighted, self-destructive policies are going to keep us Numero Uno, in the face of such competition?

America-haters and the Double Standard

On 9/11, Matt Drudge commented that the loss of a bunch of investment bankers was not so bad ("after all, they're scum" he said). To him, the outrage was that a bunch of towelheads would have the temerity to take it upon themselves to violate US sovereignty. Soon after 9/11, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson justified the attacks on America as God’s punishment for tolerating sins such as feminism, homosexuality, abortion and drugs. Have they had any comments on the disaster in New Orleans and Mississippi? Their silence is very telling.

Meanwhile, our old friends at Move On have undertaken a national fund-raising effort on behalf of the victims of Katrina, even asking Move On members and supporters to offer their homes as shelter for those made homeless.

How is it that the folks at Move On, whom so many have accused of being “America-haters”, have shown more solidarity with their fellow Americans, than the uber-patriotic Robertson, self-anointed messenger of God?

Making Excuses for Obesity

The most important advances in human medicine either help people avoid becoming ill, or bring hope to those who are already suffering. Some of these advances, such as new drugs or new medical procedures, make headlines. Others, such as teaching care-givers to wash their hands, or recognizing dietary deficiencies and correcting them, are generally unheralded, yet have had far more impact on human health than all of the drugs and devices ever invented. So, imagine the impact if we were to discover a simple, painless and effective way to treat cancer, something that didn’t require doctor visits or toxic drugs. Is there any question that millions of cancer patients and their families would embrace such a development with joy and relief?

We are still waiting for such a development for cancer, but for another major medical crisis, obesity, the answer has been known forever. Having bullied us into officially calling obesity a disease, why is it that fat people don’t seem to want to hear good news? Tell them that the solution to their illness is simple—better diet, more exercise, less sitting around—and they typically react with anger, indignation, or resignation. They retort that we are just “blaming the victim”. Many of them prefer to wait for a medical fix, and they rationalize their inaction by claiming there is no other hope. The question, then, is: Does medicine offer that hope?

There is only one medical treatment that reliably works today: bariatric surgery, or stomach stapling. It is a gruesome, painful procedure. Recovery times are long. It has a high rate of fatalities compared with other kinds of surgery. But it works!

How does it work? By reducing the volume of food people can eat. Nothing more, nothing less. So the great irony of bariatric surgery is that it it actually proves that the root cause of obesity is how, or how much, people eat. It is tragic that many people would rather risk being butchered on the operating table, than manage their own behaviour more effectively. The problem is that lots of "experts" have been telling them the problem is beyond their control.

There has been a surge of interest in obesity research, evinced in recent years by a stream of major stories in Time, Business Week, etc. about the “fat epidemic”. These stories all weave together some combination of recent research into genetic explanations (“thrifty genes” etc.), and environment (eg. fast food, supersizing, automobiles, and television). The gospel of the day, “thrifty genes”, runs as follows: “Your ancestors evolved over thousands of years of lean times, to store fat in case they might starve one day. Now those genes are working against you. So it’s hopeless—you can’t help that you’re fat. It’s in your genes!” Instead of taking charge of our lives, we rush, with overt gratitude, to embrace these theories, which essentially take away our hope.

The problem is that, while all this is all very plausible and reasonable, and, in a narrow sense, scientifically accurate, it is also intellectually dishonest, because it ignores the most important, most obvious fact about rates of obesity in our societies: they are increasing. Researchers all agree on this fact. Three generations ago, there were few fat people; today, most of us are fat.

Now, there is no evidence to suggest that only people with “fat genes” bred during the past 100 years. Therefore, we have essentially the same gene pool as our ancestors. Therefore, genes cannot explain the worldwide increase in obesity. Yet, scientists who know these facts ignore them in order to pander to the growing population of the obese, and to the food industry. In fact, more and more of this research is being funded by companies in the food industry. They have a huge interest in fostering our delusions: It relieves them, and us, of responsibility.

Is our environment the explanation? To listen to some “experts”, it is. And, in a narrow sense, they are right—our environment is toxic. But they take it too far, pretending that we are completely passive recipients of that environment. A behavioral geneticist, who should know better, is quoted in US News as saying that it is not the fat person’s behavior that is the problem, but his environment. Really? Then why is it that there are people who have different outcomes? There are still some people who walk past McDonalds repeatedly without going in and ordering. Yes, our environment is toxic, but it takes certain kinds of choices to succumb to it. Those who make different choices tend to be less fat. Is that such a surprise?

This is not an apology for fast-food chains, advertisers, food mass-marketers, or any of the other culprits who have created our toxic environment. To the contrary, they may have to be hog-tied if we are going to have a realistic chance to reverse the epidemic of obesity. They are desperate to shift unwelcome attention from themselves onto other targets, such as our genes. They have fought every attempt to educate children about healthy eating. That, right there, is presumptive evidence that eating their products is the problem.

This only reinforces the proof that the solution is, of course, to change behavior. McDonalds does not kill us by forcing us to eat. It kills us by persuading us to eat. Why let ourselves be persuaded? For a fraction of the amount invested in research on the genetics of obesity, we could truly blanket our schools with positive food messages. (Heck, if some of that funding were to go directly to schools, it would solve the budgetary shortfall that has compelled many of them to sell promotional rights to Coke and Burger King.) And if we are going to go after the food companies directly, we must go after their advertising. Making them hang calorie charts in their stores is a joke.

A major part of the problem in trying to educate people, is that it has become all about blame. Fat people are desperate to be told it is not their fault. We have a growing industry focused on relieving people of blame without helping us fix the problem. That industry doesn’t want us to focus on the answer, but we don’t have to be suckered. We must find ways to reach people that get away from “blame” but still deliver the core message: The solution is largely in our own hands. If we behaved more like our grandparents, very few of us would be fat. Meanwhile, as long as we choose to fall back on explanations that rob us of control, we will keep getting fatter.

Playing Chicken with Iran

Let's make no mistake about it: we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. But the main reason is not the one we are led to focus on. Iran does not, and will not, pose a threat directly to the U.S. In fact, it is unlikely Iran has any intention of initiating a nuclear exchange, even with its neighbors. The truth is, Iran sees its nuclear ambitions in much the way France did in the 1950's: as a deterrent. France developed its nuclear "Force de Frappe" as a deterrent to Soviet aggression. They never deluded themselves into thinking that they could win a nuclear war--their goal was purely to have enough punch to deter the Soviets from launching first. The same is obviously true of Iran, despite all the hot-head rhetoric from its President. Let's not forget that he has little power in his own country.

How can it be?

Whatever you think of his other policies, the President's attitude toward science is a threat to this country. He persists in his dogmatic refusal to allow funding of stem cell research, and he announced yesterday that we should put creationism (disguised as "intelligent design") on the same footing with science. Obviously, the vast majority of people, on both sides of the debate, do not have the scientific training to carry the argument against someone with such training. So it is not surprising that a lot of ordinary joes believe creationism may be intellectually legitimate (just as many who believe evolution probably aren't sure why.)

But the leaders of the pro-creationism movement, the ones who have hauled out pseudo-scientific arguments to attack science, know perfectly well what they are doing, and a lot of them are knowingly dishonest. The unfortunate thing is that our president is apparently among those who believe the creationist propaganda. I'm all for our leaders being cut from the same cloth as the rest of us, but in our era, when science has so much power in our lives, shouldn't our president at least have a clue?

Vioxx: Everyone loses

I've been despondent for weeks over this. We should not have lost a drug this good because its sponsor, Merck & Co, were a bunch of unethical jerks. We should not have lost it because a zealot at the FDA decided that sacrificing the people who need Vioxx was worth it to punish Merck. We all lost. I know I am not the only one for whom this drug was a godsend. The risks were tiny, even after all the revelations of data suppression. So what if Merck screwed up? The proper solution would have been 1) to require a "black box" labelling, to let us, the patients, decide what kind of risk to take, and 2) to punish the dishonest executives personally, and perhaps to fine the company. Instead of punishing the liars, we let them off and punished the shareholders of the company.

It is symptomatic of our all-or-nothing society that no one was able to come up with a solution that didn't involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's disgusting.

Nuclear Conundrum

India and Pakistan have been rivals, if not enemies, throughout the nearly 60 years since their partition established them as separate states. Few things are more inexplicable, or more shameful, than the fact that the U.S. chose to align itself with Pakistan, a dictatorship, against India, the largest democracy in the world. That choice was sustained over several administrations of both parties. Now, in the era of global terrorism, we have no choice but to remain engaged with Pakistan, but we have both practical and moral reasons for engaging with both countries. Thoughtful engagement with India would go a long way toward building a more peaceful world, as well as righting a wrong.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration seems incapable of thoughtful engagement. Bush has now abandoned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, by breaking a 30-year nuclear technology embargo against non-signatories to that treaty. There are only four sovereign states that are non-signatories: Israel, Pakistan, India and (now) North Korea. Bush has elected to allow sales of sensitive nuclear technology to India, as a way of kissing their butts to win some long-overdue brownie points. Oh, India is a democracy and is committed to peaceful engagement with the rest of the world, so what is the problem?

Simple: Within hours, Pakistan's President Musharraf was on the phone, demanding equal treatment. If he doesn't get it, he will likely turn to China, which might be quite happy to oblige. The temperature on the subcontinent will soar, and Pakistan, already a danger to the world (especially should Musharraf fall) will become even more dangerous.

Isn't anyone in this administration capable of thinking ahead?

Whose definition of "conservative"?

Does it mean that you prefer less government in our lives? Which of the following are consistent with “less government”:

Overturning states’ rights in the case of medical marijuana?
Seeking to overturn the popular vote on Right-to-die?
Using the power of Congress to bludgeon Mark Schiavo, who turns out to have been right on every count?
Seeking to overturn laws like Miranda, which protect citizens from government’s abuse of police power?
Using the intelligence agencies to investigate scientists who do research on global warming?
Using police power to arrest and imprison heterosexual couples for practicing sodomy in their own homes?
Compiling “no-fly” lists based on non-disclosed criteria, and without informing those placed on the lists?
Passing a Prescription Drug Act which forces government to pay for drugs without giving it the power to negotiate the terms?
Waging a nationwide campaign for term limits and then reneging once you win a majority?
Forgetting that your party once stood for fiscal responsibility?

If you are, like me, are against heavy-handed government interference in human enterprise, how do you fit the above into your world view?

History: Which president instituted wage and price controls? Which president travelled to Japan to try to bully them into buying more American cars? How many people know that Bush II has killed the SBIC programme, which provided low-cost leverage for startup enterprises, while expanding agricultural subsidies by several times the amount? Does that make sense????

Conversely, which administration ran the last net surpluses? Who was responsible for GATT reform, NAFTA, and WTO? Clinton did more to reduce government’s drag on trade than all the recent Republican administrations combined. (You may hate NAFTA, but that's another story.)

From the time I first heard conservatives rally around the Reagan mantra of small government, I sensed it was a scam. They like big government as much as liberals; the only difference is who gets to bear the weight, anad who gets the handouts. The only area where conservatives seem to rise to the occasion is in matters of property rights, as in their dissent to the recent Kelo decision in Connecticut (I was horrified by that decision, as were many, both conservative and liberal). On other issues, "conservatives" are quite happy to let government stomp all over us.

It is not the principle that bothers me. It is the breathtaking disconnect between rhetoric and reality.

Speedbump

Got back from China, promptly found myself facing a medical hiccup (not related to my travels, but that's another story). Some observations after about 2 weeks in one of the country's top-ranked hospitals:

Undeniable expertise and skills. The doctors and nurses alike are very well-versed in their craft, aggressive in asking questions, and willing and able to use state-of-the art technology. Yet all of that investment in training and expertise, and in technology, is undermined by the failure to do the little things. Orders repeatedly failed to be transmitted down the chain of care. The standard of hygiene doesn't match that of a budget hotel. Equipment was in poor repair, as were basic items such as hospital gowns.

Diagnosis: Our technology-obsessed culture has crowded out the basics. Top hospitals are in an arms race to have the most cutting-edge gadgetry, and to recruit personnel with the fanciest credentials, but I believe they are at the point of zero marginal return on that investment, because they are failing in two basic ways: Internal communication is lousy, and there is no awareness of the importance of the basics.

Prescription: 1) Invest some of the technology budget in electronic patient management, so the nurses don't have to read the minds of the doctors; and, 2) Invest in the basics. Floors, restrooms and the facility in general should be clean; the food should be edible; gowns should not be full of holes. If it takes aggressive retraining of staff, and invesment in a few more staff, it's worth it.

Believe it or not, simple environmental factors have a huge impact, both physically and psychologically, on patients' outcomes. Why doesn't our medical establishment recognize that?

Fishman Article on China

Excerpts from "How China Will Change Your Business: Fourteen things every entrepreneur should know about the capitalist explosion heading our way.
From: Inc. Magazine, March 2005 | By: Ted C. Fishman

(Mostly observations, not prescriptions. Our leaders, on both sides of the aisle, are clueless. We're on our own, and this is a good primer on the big picture--Carlos)

1. China's economy is much larger than the official numbers show.
2. The growth of China's economy has no equal in modern history.
3. China is winning the global competition for investment capital.
4. China can be a bully.
5. China's economy is an entrepreneurial economy.
6. The most daunting thing about China is not its ability to make cheap consumer goods.
7. China is closing the research and development gap -- fast.
8. China now sets the global benchmark for prices.
9. China's growth is making raw materials more expensive.
10. No company has embraced China's potential more vigorously than Wal-Mart.
11. There are hidden costs associated with doing business in China.
12. Piracy is a problem.
13. China's heavy buying of U.S. debt has lowered the cost of money in the U.S.
14. Americans and Chinese have become reliant on each other's most controversial habits.

1. China's economy is much larger than the official numbers show. In 2003, China's official GDP was $1.4 trillion. By that measure, it was the seventh-largest economy in the world. As with nearly all economic statistics from China, however, that measure is suspect. One reason the real number may be much higher is that, in competition for development funds, local Chinese authorities have considerable incentive to underreport their growth rates to the nation's central planners. Another reason is that the government measures only China's legal economy. Its underground economy, made up of both unsavory businesses and more mundane ones that lack a government stamp (and tax bill), is enormous but uncountable.

2. The growth of China's economy has no equal in modern history.... Since China set about reforming its economy a generation ago, its GDP has expanded at an annual rate of 9.5%. Countries in the early stages of economic reform often come up fast, but not like China. The country is closing in on a 30-year run during which its economy has doubled nearly three times. Neither Japan's nor South Korea's postwar boom comes anywhere close. Nicholas Lardy, an economist at the Institute for International Economics, notes that China grew mightily even during the worldwide economic doldrums of 2001-02.

3. China is winning the global competition for investment capital. One reason China's economy is growing so fast is that the world keeps feeding it capital. According to Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry, one-third of China's industrial production was put in place by the half-trillion dollars of foreign money that has flowed into the country since 1978. In 2003, foreigners invested more in building businesses in China than they spent anywhere else in the world. The U.S. used to attract the most foreign money, but in 2003 China took a strong lead, pulling in $53 billion to the U.S.'s $40 billion.

With money comes knowledge. The catalytic role of foreigners in the country is still growing quickly; every day China receives a river of European, Asian, and American experts in manufacturing, banking, computing, advertising, and engineering. In 2003, the exports and imports by foreign companies operating in China rose by over 40%. More than half of China's trade is now controlled by foreign firms. Many of these import goods into the country that they then manufacture into exports. Foreign companies have pumped up China's trade volume enough to make it the third-largest trading country in the world, behind the U.S. and Germany and now ahead of Japan.

4. China can be a bully. China can spend, it can hire and dictate wages, it can throw old-line competitors out of work. In just a three-year period from 2000 to late 2003, for example, China's exports to the U.S. of wooden bedroom furniture climbed from $360 million to nearly $1.2 billion. During that time, the work force at America's wooden-furniture factories dropped by 35,000, or one of every three workers in the trade. China now makes 40% of all furniture sold in the U.S., and that number is sure to climb.

5. China's economy is an entrepreneurial economy. China's industrial competitors, including the U.S., often misapprehend the source of China's productive strength. They fear that another centrally governed, well-planned assault on strategic industries is being plotted in Beijing. The world has already seen how effective the Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese can be when they focus on sectors they mean to conquer. Even Chinese government planners like to talk as though they are aping the centrally coordinated, government-financed assaults on strategic global industries that their Asian neighbors have pulled off over the past 40 years. However, in looking at how Chinese businesses really take shape -- locally and opportunistically -- Kellee Tsai, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a former analyst at Morgan Stanley, argues that nothing could be further from the truth. For a world fretting over Chinese economic competition, the entities to fear are not government planners but enterprises that spring on the scene lean and mean, planned and financed by investors who want to make money quickly.

6. The most daunting thing about China is not its ability to make cheap consumer goods. The American economy won't crater just because the Chinese can produce sofas and socks for less than we can. The Japanese, for their part, have lost the television business. The Italians are losing the fine-silk business. Consumer goods trade on the surface of the world's economy and their movement is easy for the public to watch. The far bigger shift, just now picking up steam, is occurring among the products that manufacturers and marketers trade with each other: the infinite number and variety of components that make up everything else that is made, whether it is the hundreds of parts in a washing machine or computer or the hundreds of thousands of parts in an airplane.

The next question is whether any commercial technology is beyond an imminent challenge from China. The manufacture and sale of integrated chips is ... soaring, along with healthy gains in China's software and information-services markets. Then again, every section in the directory has grown, including biotechnology, semiconductors, and Internet development, areas in which Chinese firms have newly established themselves, many now in partnership with the world's leading technology-driven companies.

7. China is closing the research and development gap -- fast. ... Last year, China spent $60 billion on research and development. The only countries that spent more were the U.S. and Japan, which spent $282 billion and $104 billion, respectively. But again, China forces you to do the math: China's engineers and scientists usually make between one-sixth and one-tenth what Americans do, which means that the wide gaps in financing do not necessarily result in equally wide gaps in manpower or results. The U.S. spent nearly five times what China did but had less than two times as many researchers (1.3 million to 743,000). China's universities and vocational schools will produce 325,000 engineers this year -- five times as many as the U.S.

8. China now sets the global benchmark for prices. Big news can be found in little places. In its November 2003 circular, a dryly written four-page publication, the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank noted complaints from American makers of automotive parts that "automakers had been asking suppliers for the 'China price' on their purchases." The bank's analysts observed that U.S. suppliers had also been asked by their big customers to move their factories to China or to find subcontractors there.

It is plainly understood that asking suppliers to lower prices is merely another way of telling them they ought to be prepared to meet the best price out of China, even if they are making their products in Japan or Germany. General Motors, which buys more than $80 billion worth of parts a year, now has a clause in its supply contracts that gives its supplier 30 days to meet the best price the company can find worldwide or risk immediate termination.

9. China's growth is making raw materials more expensive. Even as China puts pressure on U.S. manufacturers to lower prices, it's squeezing them from a different direction. Its voracious demand for raw materials has caused prices to spike. Copper prices jumped 37% last year, aluminum and zinc both rose about 25%, and oil was up 33%. In 2003, according to the calculations of Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, the Chinese bought 7% of the world's oil, a quarter of all aluminum and steel, nearly a third of the world's iron ore and coal, and 40% of the world's cement. The trend is for bigger amounts yet to come.

The squeeze is leaving U.S. manufacturers with no alternative but to become more productive. Better machines, software, and advanced management techniques, for instance, now mean that U.S. companies on average produce far more per worker than they did a quarter of a century ago when manufacturing employment was high. From 1977 to 2002, productivity throughout the U.S. economy grew by half, but in manufacturing it more than doubled. Surprisingly, despite losing huge numbers of workers, U.S. manufacturers actually finished 2003 making more stuff than they did in 2001. Output was up, if only by half a percent.

10. No company has embraced China's potential more vigorously than Wal-Mart. And no company has been a bigger catalyst in pushing manufacturers to China. Estimates of how much of Wal-Mart's merchandise comes from abroad today range from 50% to 85%. Chinese factories are, by far, the most important and fastest-growing sources for the company. In 2003, Wal-Mart purchased $15 billion worth of goods from Chinese suppliers. A whopping portion of between 10% and 13% of everything China has sent to the U.S. winds up on Wal-Mart's shelves. Writing in The Washington Post, Peter Goodman and Phillip Pan reported in February 2004 that "more than 80% of the 6,000 factories in Wal-Mart's worldwide database of suppliers are in China." The company has 560 people on the ground in the country to negotiate and make purchases.

11. There are hidden costs associated with doing business in China. Companies that engage with China must expect pressure to transfer their technology and thus create their own competition in the country. The Chinese use the carrot of their vast market to extract concessions from foreign firms that will help build China's industrial might. It is a policy worthy of grudging admiration. When viewed from the Chinese side, it has a long record of success.

Motorola virtually invented China's mobile-phone market. Its corporate archives show that the company knew that eventually the transfer of technology to China would sow formidable rivals. Nevertheless, Motorola decided its best strategy was to get into China early and to bring its best technology. The proof today is in the size and efficacy of the country's mobile communications network: Calls get through to phones in high-rises, subway cars, and distant hamlets -- connections that would stymie mobile phones in the U.S.

What no one at Motorola anticipated was how crowded the Chinese market would become. Nokia and Motorola now battle for market share in the Chinese handset business. German, Korean, and Taiwanese makers figure strongly. And all these foreign brands are now facing intense competition from indigenous Chinese phone makers. More than 40% of the Chinese domestic handset market now belongs to local companies such as Ningbo Bird, Nanjing Panda Electronics, Haier, and TCL Mobile. The domestic makers have become so strong that when Siemens found its mobile handset business in China wanting, it joined with Ningbo Bird to gain both low-cost manufacturing and a developed distribution channel. Yet Motorola can't exit the Chinese market. If it did, says Jim Gradoville, Motorola's vice president of Asia Pacific government relations, the Chinese companies that emerged would be the leanest and most aggressive in the world, and a company like his would have no idea what hit it. So Motorola stays. Already the largest foreign investor in China's electronics industry, Motorola plans to triple its stake there to more than $10 billion by 2006.

12. Piracy is a problem. Foreign companies have little defense against even outright theft of their technology in China. China's failure to police intellectual property, in effect, creates a massive global subsidy worth hundreds of billions of dollars to its businesses and people. By investing in the country's manufacturing infrastructure, by providing the expertise, machines, and software China needs to produce world-class products, the world is also helping assemble the biggest, most sophisticated, and most successful "illegal" manufacturing complex in the world.

Seen another way, China's loose intellectual property rules turn the tables on the Western colonial powers and the Japanese who throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries violated China's land and people. As China grows into a great power, the wealth transferred into the country by expropriating intellectual property will propel it forward.

13. China's heavy buying of U.S. debt has lowered the cost of money in the U.S. In the first half of 2004, China's total foreign exchange reserves topped $460 billion. In size, that puts China's cumulative dollar account at roughly equal to a third of its gross domestic product. If China simply spent its dollars, it would flood the world market with American currency and drive the dollar down. But China, no fool, is not interested in pushing the dollar down. So instead of selling its dollars, it lends them back to the U.S.

As long as China is an aggressive lender, Americans -- whether borrowing for their own private purchases or acting in the roles of taxpayers -- can borrow money at lower rates than they would otherwise have to pay. Much of the recent boom in real estate prices in America, especially in the East and West Coast markets, is attributable to these low rates.

14. Americans and Chinese have become reliant on each other's most controversial habits. The Chinese need a low-priced currency to keep their export machine going and create jobs. But maintaining the yuan's low price also means that Chinese consumers are stuck with a currency that would otherwise buy more for them on the world market. China's diligent savers suffer too since their bank deposits are tied up in accounts that earn low government-mandated rates of return, as the government, in effect, siphons off money from savers to maintain its currency peg.

Relatedly, China's vast export earnings earn less than they ought to when they are invested in U.S. debt securities that offer modest yields, when investments in the Chinese economy can return 10 times as much (albeit on riskier terms). Seen from that view, the people of China, who earn on average just one-fortieth what Americans do, are indirectly subsidizing the insatiable shopping of Americans, who acquire ever more goods at the same time that Chinese consumers are hampered from buying goods from abroad.

The obverse of this peculiar relationship is that China lends America all the money it needs to spend itself silly. The cycle of codependency, which former U.S Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers labels a "balance of financial terror," isn't sustainable. The U.S. cannot take on ever-bigger debt and amass huge trade deficits indefinitely. In the worst scenario, the U.S.'s willingness to fritter away its national wealth to finance private consumption and unproductive government spending would extract a permanent price on the economy, sending the U.S. in a downward spiral that would be hard to escape.

How can the U.S., perhaps with its traditional allies, adjust to a competitive challenger that has strengths unlike any other that America has faced? Are the transfers of talent, technology, and capital part of an inevitable dynamic? Or does the U.S., or any other country, have the power to shape a future in which everyone prospers?

Americans looking for answers and action must also find a way to move America's leadership to see China's rise as every bit as worthy of national attention as the rumblings in more obvious political hot spots. While all eyes turn to the so-called clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, China will have the more profound impact on the world in the long run.

The Betrayed

We are being betrayed systematically by the people we allow to be our leaders, our spokesmen. Examples? Christian fundamentalists are being betrayed by the Republican party, which speaks to them to get their votes, but actually pursues policies that will leave them and their children without a future. Union workers are being betrayed by union bosses who block the workers from updating their skills, adapting to new industries, changing with the times. Blacks are betrayed by their leaders who use the pulpit to keep them pitted against other minorities, especially gays, instead of building a unified coalition for justice. Industry is betrayed by high-profile leaders who lie, cheat and steal, turning public opinion against those of us who play by the rules. Scientists are betrayed by leaders who think it is beneath them to make the case for science to the ignorant masses, who, by the way, pay for all the grants on which scientists live. Feminists are betrayed by spokeswomen like Susan Faludi who are so wedded to victimhood that they can't see how much they have alienated today's generation of young women. And on and on.

What can we do? It is very hard to get people to think beyond the dogma they are used to. Every one of these groups gets its information from the very people who are betraying them. I guess we have to start by speaking up, by questioning, and hope others are doing the same.

What took so long?

While stumbling around in a sleep-deprived haze, I find there is so much to talk about and so little time. The question of the decade: why are so many people intent on forcing their narrow preferences on everyone else? The other question of the decade: When will we have a political party that jettisons the stupid crap that has made the two dominant parties in the US so hopeless?

OK , more later.