The Political Omnivore

Twitter War: The Future-Shock Of Politics

2013-05-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

In 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote the book Future Shock which postulated that the extreme increase in the rate of societal change--driven by technology--would leave us stressed and disoriented. Four decades later it looks sorta quaint (or at least ahead of its time) and looking back, whatever changes technology wrought, most of the immediately visible changes seem to be in the realm of the cell phone.

But what if there's a Future Shock component to politics that we're missing--that we're mistaking for something else?

I've Seen The Future Brother, It Is Murder
We don't have flying cars (give it a decade), fusion power (hey, 4 years), robotic house-servants (2040--you'll live to see it if you take your fish oil), or rocket pants (disappointing)--but we do have something else: Twitter.

The House recently posed the 37th vote to repeal ObamaCare (for a few reasons--one of which is to allow House freshmen to tell their constituents they tried--but another is, perhaps, to have some subtle psychological impact on the acceptance of the law) and, of course, it didn't go anywhere. But this time around Darrel Issa (a leading Republican critic of the administration) encouraged a particular hashtag meme, #ObamaCareInThreeWords, which encouraged participants (detractors) to describe the ACA in three pithy words (my bet was on Total Terrible Tyranny!).

There were many entries. By turns insightful (Still largely unread), dismal (doctors are quitting), scary (TSA with stethoscopes), hopeful (pre-existing conditions covered), pedantic (Affordable Care Act), and funny (Do Not Resuscitate). The use of Twitter as a battle-space is nothing new--but (at least somewhat) noteworthy was the White House's entry into the fray:

I Read This In The Judge Dredd Voice

The response was quick!

The (conservative) site Twitchy blasts the headline:

‘It’s. The. Law.’: White House sneering tweet rubs Obamacare in faces

US News weights in:

White House Sasses GOP On Obamacare: 'It’s The Law’

Salon opines:

White House trolls Republicans over Obamacare hashtag

And so on.

So 'Effing What?
Or, as Hillary might say, what difference does it make? Here's what I think: although the smart money is on the idea that whatever the circumstances in congress are right now, we've seen them before (or worse) there are elements of the current dynamic that are actually and legitimately new. In this case? On-line instant-media peer-to-peer trolling and counter-trolling.

Here are two recent articles (not about the twitter war) that take on Obama and the scandals. The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan writes:

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is to too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too.

Over in Commentary we see a similar theme in the article:

Obama is the Ultimate Ad Hominem PresidentPresident Obama is once again engaging in what psychiatrists refer to as projection, in which people lay their worst attributes on others.

In this instance, the most hyper-partisan president in modern times is ascribing that trait to Congressional Republicans.

There's, of course, enough irony to eclipse Alanis Morissette here--it's not as though the GOP should be throwing any stones in the hyper-partisan direction--but the relevant issue isn't that people are accusing the president of being partisan or arrogant or whatever--that's old hat.

What's new here is the battle-space where this is happening. Oh, sure, the WSJ and Commentary are both ultimately paper-products--artifacts of an age that has already passed and is still hanging around like the last few dinosaurs, shedding their feathers, on the way to the tar-pits. But despite the medium of those two above messages being so last century the fact is that narrative echoes what we're not just hearing about--but actually seeing in real-time--in a very 21st century context: Twitter.

This may very well be the first historical epoch where a presidential administration can publicly troll its adversaries (and, of course, be trolled) in real-time, peer-to-peer and without making observers feel it is degrading itself. I'm pretty sure Obama himself didn't write the tweet and may not even have had to approve it--but does anyone think for a moment that if it came across his desk he'd shoot it down?

No. He doesn't have to be an arrogant, projecting instigator to do that either: the battle was already engaged and all he has to do is be young enough and (moderately) hip enough to know that he's got the valuable capability to join the fray.

That blackberry on his hip? That's the modern-day six-shooter he rode into office with (and, you know, yeah: today that looks awfully antique ... a blackberry ... he might as well have a beeper clipped to his belt--amirite?). He's might be the last blackberry president but I'll lay odds he won't be the last tweeting one.

Today, if you are one of the people who really, really hates Obama, he's not just walled up in an enclave thousands of miles away ... when you "go out into the world" (fire up your twitter feed) he electronically steps into your home and smacks you right on the nose.

Is it any wonder people are starting to get more polarized?

Is This Obama's Fault?
On the off chance I'm not clear enough above, I'm not blaming Obama for divisive partisanship ... I'm pointing at Twitter ... social media ... machine-gun rate blog-postings, and 24-7 partisan network news as the enabling factor--not individual personalities. I suspect that, transported to modern day, most presidents (and, far more likely even, most House Representatives) would engage in partisan tweeting and tweaking.

In a sense they'd be foolish not to: if someone somewhere is going to do it, you probably don't score any points for sitting it out (ask John Kerry about the Swift Boat guys). But if partisan politics and a willingness to stir the pot are nothing new, the methods by which we can do this and the speed at which this can happen are. It used to be impolite to discuss politics around the dinner table--maybe it still is ... but have you looked at Facebook recently?

If there's a standard of decorum there I don't want to see what's out of bounds! To think that this doesn't have an effect is naive. Having partisan political messages--even fairly juvenile or humorous ones--shoved in our faces on a constant basis (and make no mistake: if you've ever woken up at 3 AM and seen some Facebook posting alert on your phone, you know it's constant) certainly does have an impact. It probably hardens us--calcifies our positions--obscures key facts behind point-scoring and rhetoric--and moves us, inexorably, towards an us-vs-them dynamic.

Welcome to the future.

Scandalishious!

2013-05-14T06:14:00.000-07:00

It's a perfect-storm of breaking scandals as the Obama administration enters its second term. Let's take a look at what's going on and what the likely fallout is going to be.

It's That Time Of Year
Business Insider notes that (a) this is prime-time for some scandals (second term, no major news) and (b) what's on the table (if not Obama's head on a platter) is the 2014 midterm elections:

Indeed, these stories are coming at the perfect time for peak scandal coverages. Brendan Nyhan notes that scandals more often happen when the president is detested by members of the other party, as Obama is. Likewise, they are more likely to become big news when there aren't other news stories like the Boston bombings. Finally, scandals are more likely to take place in the beginning of the second term.

Therefore, the question is whether declining trust in the government has historically played a major factor in midterm elections. It turns out that it does. When trust in government falls, the party in the White House tends to do worse in midterm elections.

Let's take a look at the current state of breaking scandals (and Fast and Furious because, why not) and see what they look like comparatively.

Fast And Furious
The Scandal: A justice department program to track guns sold to Mexican cartels allowed hundreds of weapons to illegally cross the boarder and arm narco-soldiers. Boarder agent Brian Terry was shot and killed with one of these guns. The charges are that the program was poorly conceived ("Let's give the bad guys more guns--what could go wrong!?") and also miss-managed. Less publicized: something similar happened under the Bush administration.

Reach: This was more or less a 'sound-and-furry' scandal which was heavily promoted by conservative media and received little attention elsewhere. The message was complicated by the fact that the charges were promoted as something like Iran-Contra while the reality was more about mid-level managerial incompetence. It also didn't help that, probably, the media led most people to think of Vin Diesel.

Damage Assessment: Fast and Furious, ultimately, got nothing and (perhaps) made it look like the GOP was crying wolf.

Lesson: Name your next quasi-legal operation Star Wars Episode VII.

Benghazi
The Scandal: On 9/11 2012 a terrorist attack in Libya killed four Americans including our ambassador. The GOP charged that (a) the administration was asleep at the wheel and should have done something to save our people, (b) that the administration lied and lied hard in the days following to claim it was not terrorism (but rather a protest gone wrong ... with mortar shells), (c) that there was a cover-up possibly involving the CIA selling weapons to Syria (or something), and (d) that there was procedural mis-management that led, ultimately to Hillary Clinton who had better not run in 2016 ... just saying.

Reach: The Benghazi scandal got decent coverage--with ABC and CBS, despite the GOP narrative, breaking key elements--but it never got the coverage that the Republican base wanted. This was further complicated by the fact that during the most recent go-round the (emotional) hearings were trumped by the Cleveland Kidnapping case. This moved Rush Limbaugh to opine that 'The administration had gotten away with it.'

Damage Assessment: The Obama-damage was (a) three fired staffers (from the internal investigation which did, indeed, find some incompetence) and (b) Susan Rice who might've been Secretary of State. The real damage, however, was Mitt Romney who issued a foot-in-mouth press release the day of the attack and then fumbled his line of attack in the second debate.

Lesson: Go after Hillary first--everything else was nonsense.

IRS Gate
The Scandal: The IRS was intentionally targeting conservative groups based on whether or not they sounded patriotic. They issued a weak "uh ... we're sorry--but it wasn't that bad." It turns out, on inspection, it was that bad.

Reach: Deep. John Stewart ripped the Obama administration last night and it looks like there's no mitigating circumstances here. It's not, after all, like the IRS probes discovered these groups were cheating on their taxes or anything. What it appears, however, is that there is little to tie this to anyone outside the IRS.

Damage Assessment: The main damage will be to the trust-level of the population and 2014 elections. This will motivate the GOP base and breathe new life into the Tea Party. Furthermore, with a boost from the related scandals, this one will lend credibility to, for example, Benghazi.

Meter is purple because it's not played out yet

Lesson: Do your damn job, IRS guys.

AP Gate
The Scandal: The Justice Department apparently obtained a massive group of phone records from AP reporters trying to find out who sourced a leak to them. This is possibly "quasi-legal" under the PATRIOT Act but the breadth of the search seems to be (a) unprecedented and (b) a chilling intrusion against the press who would like to be able to use anonymous sources without having to worry that everyone's phone records will be checked. NOTE: To my knowledge, the data is only who-called-who and not the conversations or any call content.

Reach: It's getting major play and AP has a pretty loud bull-horn. Combined with the IRS story, this will get play. To be clear: the issue here is not precisely the legality ... the illegality ... or the cover-up of the event (I'm not clear on that)--it's that (a) whatever else is true, it looks bad and (b) the IRS-Scandal acts as a sort of "booster rocket" / complimentary wave-form which amplifies whatever is wrong with the AP probe.

The AP thing, by itself, might turn out to be nothing--but combined with the for-real and for-real-really-bad IRS scandal, this thing is, at best a molehill on top of a mountain.

Damage Assessment: I'm going to go with Eric Holder. It's, maybe, a bit optimistic--but the Obama administration will need to do something serious to put some daylight between him and this wave of scandals and canning Holder might do that. We'll see.

Lesson: Abuse of power is a poison.

What Do I Think?
I have three observations:

So far none of these look like they may reach the impeachment level (although if the Republicans take the Senate in 2014 that may happen). If the GOP had played its cards more carefully with Fast and Furious and Benghazi they might be better positioned to capitalize on the current, real, scandals. They would be well advised to play their cards carefully here and make strategic--rather than base-oriented tactical--decisions.
The political terrain is, of course, all about Hillary. That's what Benghazi Part 2 (3?) looked like to a lot of people and, of course, it was (whatever else it was about, it certainly was also about Hillary '16). If the GOP had gone after her first instead of Obama, then Rice, then Hillary ... they might've got her.
Team Obama is already having a narrative crisis around not being able to do anything. While this appears to be 'the Republican's fault' they have a card to play (give us the House in 2014!)--these scandals make it look like maybe they don't deserve it. They are a gift to the GOP under these conditions: this is exactly what Obama didn't want to happen.

Is Iron Man 3 A Truther Movie?

2013-05-12T05:31:00.002-07:00

Note: This contains a major spoiler for Iron Man 3.

Blog reader Bilbo writes:

I just saw the film yesterday and enjoyed it immensely, though I disagree with you about the politics. Attempts have been made to make a 9/11 Truther movie in Hollywood, and all such attempts have been shot down. So if a filmmaker wants to include any kind of Truther theme, it must be done subtly. For example, in the second Sherlock Holmes movie, the terrorists are controlled by Moriarti, who wants to make money selling weapons. But here in Iron Man 3, the subtlety wears very thin. After the Mandarin is exposed as a fake, there is even a line about Osama bin Laden. I would need to see the film again to remember the exact quote. Either that or find the script somewhere online. But the connection between the Mandarin and Osama bin Laden both being masks used by others is made explicitly. So yes, there is politics. Thanks to Robert Downey, Jr., the movie is too big for Hollywood to shoot it down, and the closest thing to a "Truther film" is now out there.

Is that true? Let's take a look.

1. What Would A Major Hollywood Truther Movie Look Like?
Fortunately, we do not have to guess. There is/was one in the works. Here is the poster:

The Truth Is Out There

This is a slated-for-2015 (maybe) release that would, purportedly star Charlie Sheen and Woody Harrelson giving us the full-force Truther experience. It's being made by a studio that has already put out one conspiracy movie about the Oklahoma bombing. I'm not sure which version of the 9/11 story September Morn would propose but, certainly, this would be a pretty major event on the basis of casting alone.

According to what I've found on Google, though, it may well not get made. Buzz has gone silent ... and the official film page doesn't mention the big name stars ... and the web-site on the poster isn't active.

Conspiracy? Let's look ...

2. So No 9/11 Movies Got Made?
Uh--no. There have been at least two 'fictional' movies about 9/11 Truther conspiracies. Both were independent releases (as is September Morn--but at least it has big stars). You can read a take on them here:

Needless to say, the Truthers have yet to find their Chris Carter or Oliver Stone. These movies repackage 9/11 skepticism in an accessible format, but they're practically inscrutable without descending further into the rabbit hole. Able Danger can only be understood by reading The Big Wedding by Sander Hicks, an indie journalist whose version of 9/11 involves an alliance of Islamists, neo-Nazis, technofascists, and a Republican "pedophilia cult." And God help you if you turn on the droning filmmakers' commentary on The Reflecting Pool dvd.

They are out there, but--in the ancient language of the Illuminati conspiracy--I strongly suspect they are 'oring-bay.'

This should not be a surprise: they are at best 'edu-tainment' and at worst outrageous and over-earnest without having the built-in documentary back-bone to carry that weight. That, however, is going to be true for any 9/11 Truther movie. There is no escaping that structural problem.

There is another issue: these are movies many film-goers (more than 60% of us) will find offensive (and, the Bush Administration having moved on, the movie-makers will have little choice but to blame both Bush and Obama--which should make everyone angry at them).

In other words: might the reason we haven't seen a 9/11 major movie be because it would be a bad idea from a studio perspective and not a conspiracy? How would we tell?

3. What Would A Movie Have To Do To Be a Major-Studio Crypto-Truther Movie?
I think we can all agree that a movie may make use of certain themes or ideas in a superficial manner. Capricorn One has a faked Mars landing--which recalls the moon-landing-hoax theories--but it does not "blow the roof" off the moon-landing. Nor does it actually address the various skeptic's questions (there are no stars! The rock has a 'C' on it! The flag is standing up with no breeze!). It just takes the idea and builds a movie around O.J. Simpson with it.

So what if Iron Man 3 is doing that? How would we tell the difference?

I think the way we would tell the difference is:

Iron Man 3 puts some real weight into the big reveal around The Mandarin--it doesn't just use the Truther-style stuff as stuffing--but actually shines a spot-light on it and tries to get it into the audience's heads ... to make them think.
Iron Man 3 actually beaks a taboo--it does something no one else has been able to do. It's "Too Big To Fail" so the (theoretical) Hollywood gatekeepers can't stop it.

Fair enough?

Let's see!

Is Iron Man 3 Emotionally Invested In 9/11 Trutherism?
In order to meet our first requirement, the movie in question has to be using 9/11 Trutherism as a gut-punch. It needs to have more than the trappings of the theory to be a torch-bearer for the theory. At very least it needs to:

Establish the key foundational elements of 9/11 Truth: (1) that the government was complicit or even behind 9/11 (or similar mass killing) (2) that the cover-up has been done by control of the media, (3) that Bin Laden is a patsy* and (4) the government is using this to curtail our civil liberties.
It would need to provide an emotional climax where this marks a major turning point for the protagonist (and the audience).
It would need to provide some link between the real-world and the movie-world in order for the audience to take the question out of the movie and into real-life. That link would have to be more than just name-dropping--but actual 'evidence' (such as the

So far as I see it, Iron Man 3 does not meet these requirements. In IM3:

The only foundational element of 9/11 Trutherism is that Bin Laden is a patsy. The involvement of the Vice President is of the LHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) version of 9/11 Conspiracy Theory--which is not the "inside job" version and the VP is given an explicit and very personal reason for siding with AIM: he wants the healing technology for his crippled daughter. This personal-actor-for-personal reasons deal is not part of 9/11 Trutherism (which requires a much larger multi-agency conspiracy and necessarily implicates the whole government). There is no evidence of any sort in IM3 that the government is doing anything to take over or leverage the explosions to control the populace.
There is no indication that the media or the narrative around IM3's bombings is being manipulated or suppressed.
It does hit #3--Bin Laden (in this case The Mandarin) is a fraud. But this is the only one.
The discovery is not an emotional climax for Tony Stark or the audience. It is played for laughs. The threat is not greatly reduced and nothing material is gained (Stark's princess is, alas, in another castle).
There is no real-world-link: The use of the name Bin Laden--which may or may not appear in the movie--is not sufficient. The audience will not be given "things to think about." Whatever the theory of OBL's role in 9/11 Trutherism, it is generally conceded that he was not a British actor who had never even considered any kind of violence. The Mandarin is too over-the-top for Trutherism.

On the other hand ...

There Is A Better Candidate For a Major Hollywood Truther Movie

Our second requirement for IM3 being 'the' Hollywood Truther movie is that there's nothing that's clearly better out there--that IM3 crosses some line that has not previously been crossed. I think IM3's Truther-score has already been exceeded: By the Wachowski Brothers' 2005 movie V for Vendetta. With V, we have:

The government is behind a mass killing using a manufactured plague.
The state run media ('the BBC' or an analogue) is complicit in covering it up.
The government has used the plague to seize control of the state.
There is no OBL analogue--but the reveal is meant to be important and unsettling. In this case it takes a "victim-less crime" and puts a face to it.
There is no real-world link--but I think one could argue that it helped launch the real-world iconography of Anonymous / Guy Fawks.

I think this still makes a better case for being a 9/11 Truther movie as it, in my opinion, hits more of the key elements and they are far more central to the story and the message (don't trust the government they'll kill you to take control).

4. Conclusions
I don't think the IM3 qualifies as "the" Hollywood Truther Movie. With V for Vendetta hitting what I would say are more of the salient points (the government orchestrates the mass-kill, it's done to remove civil liberties, and the media is compliant in the cover-up) and the lack of real emotional investment in the Mandarin being a puppet, I think it's hard to make the case that IM3 is doing something that hasn't been done before.

Basically, I think it's just clever (the press-materials really do make it look like Iron Man will face The Mandarin) and funny (Ben Kingsley is chosen, wisely, for comedic potential--rather than anything having to do with believably). Iron Man 3 isn't going to make anyone think any harder about 9/11 unless they were already skeptical of it.

* There are several things that the major 9/11 Truther documentary Loose Change is somewhat contradictory about. One of them is that Bin Laden is either (a) the guy behind the planes--but working for the US Government (the movie states he was treated, as an honored guest, in hospitals manned by the US in the middle east prior to 9/11) or maybe (b) wasn't involved at all--the movie of him taking credit doesn't look anything like him and gets key elements wrong or maybe (c) there weren't manned planes at all--they were remote-controlled.

Loose Change spreads these concepts out through its run-time so they don't typically bump into one another--and it always stops short of presenting an operational scenario (which, presumably, would be easily falsified). For example, if I have remote-controlled planes with jet-fuel on them, why bother with controlled demolitions at all? Why not just crash planes into the towers and let them burn--the aftermath will result in the towers coming down anyway. Even if they don't fall it'll be sufficient justification for any war you could want.

Another contradiction in 9/11 documentaries is that media reports are seen as truthful (Flight 93 landed safely in Ohio!) until they are not (Oh, sorry--I got that wrong). It has been explicitly said by some that reports closer to the time of the event are more accurate as the cover-up has not had time to set in. This also flies in the face of operational planning where the cover-story has to be manufactured before the event.

It also flies in the face of common sense: is a massive, frantic quest for data--any-data--without fact checking or time for examination more likely to produce the truth or not? If you think it would, consider that you are also suggesting that doing your writing in a drunken rushed haze is more likely to produce good grammar than careful proof-reading ... or that things like the scientific method and controlled experiments will probably produce worse data than seat-of-your-pants trial and error.

The Politics Of: Atlas Shrugged Part 2

2013-05-09T07:53:00.000-07:00

Then Atlas Went To Soak In The Jacuzzi

I had a chance to see the second part of the cinematic adaptation of Ayn Rand's seminal work Atlas Shrugged. In the first part I'll discuss the movie. In the second, the politics, where there will be spoilers.

The Movie
Atlas Shrugged Part II takes us back to the Rand-verse where, in the not so far future, government kleptocrats have tightened their stranglehold on all industry. Gas is north of $40.00/gallon and city streets are all but empty of cars. Planes no longer fly (save for very expensive chartered jets), and trains are now--again--the major method of long distance travel.

Worse, the great minds of industry (and some in the arts) have been vanishing. Are they being abducted? Are they being killed by rivals? Who is John Galt? (It turns out John Galt has been meeting with them and making them an offer that none of them refuse--the content of which we get a glimpse of in this movie).

Following on Part 1--and hewing, I'd say, reasonably close to Rand's massive book--this middle chapter takes us from the time when the government comes down full-force on Rearden Steel (run by captain of industry Hank Rearden played by Jason Beghe). They mostly leave his lover (mistress is too low a word: Rearden is married--but it's a purely and explicitly loveless marriage) Dagny Taggart (Samantha Mathis) alone as she has stepped back from running the last great rail empire: Taggart Transcontinental.

Specifically, she's left it in the hands of her brother (Patrick Fabian) who is in bed with the government moochers--even as their mandates and rules continue to eat away at his ability to run a business at all.

The movie is a message: the book explained critical elements of her philosophy, Objectivism, in story-form. The narrative does include a love story and she does give her characters more than one dimension--but every page is carefully built on the foundations of the philosophy she was explaining (you can note how, in the first movie, no matter what the disaster, the characters always pay their check at the restaurant before dashing out).

Is it preachy? Slightly--yes. But not overly so. Notably, the antagonists in Atlas Shrugged are the other wealthy elite. You see the poor--but mostly they just want to work. It is not about the wealthy vs. Occupy Wall Street but rather the Wealthy vs. The Government (the liberal government, anyway).

Is it good? I'd say it is. It suffers from middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome so it doesn't really "begin at the beginning" and its end is something of a cliffhanger. It gets the pageantry of the super-rich of the Rand-verse pretty well: the director knew how to throw a party. The production had to hire all new actors this time around and while the cast is generally considered to be stronger in Part II I did miss some of the Part 1 actors (specifically Grant Bowler who's slightly hapless smile managed to convey that Hank Rearden was a really, really good sport about all the abuse he was taking).

Still, it's a bit of a shock.

It got mediocre reviews and I wouldn't recommend it as a stand-alone movie: anyone seeing Part 2 had better see Part 1--but if you liked Part 1 even a little you'll probably be fine with Part 2. If you saw Part 1 and couldn't stand it? Well, there's no point.

Let's do the politics!

The Politics Of Atlas Shrugged Part II
At first I was a bit stymied: how can one "do the politics" of Atlas Shrugged Part Anything when the entire book is a political / philosophical essay? I mean--I could just have one line: 'Study the heck out of Objectivism' and call it a day. Any deep discussion of Objectivism will require--if you are talking to an actual objectivist--that you have done all and I mean all of the reading.

Good luck with that: even summarizing Objectivism is something I'm "not qualified" to do (according to Objectivists I have talked to). But then I realized there was an angle I was legitimately curious about--and it's this: is the movie (Part 2, for this discussion) Objectivist ... or is it Libertarian? [ OMINOUS CRACKLE OF THUNDER ]

Let me tell you a joke:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well, are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are your Christian or Buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, Me too! Are your Episcopalian or Baptist? He said, "Baptist!" I said, "Wow! Me too! Are your Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord? He said, Baptist Church of God!" I said, "Me too! Are your Original Baptist Church of God or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?" He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!" I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.

To most people Libertarians and Objectivists look a lot a like--at least from ~~30,000~~ 30 feet away. They're not--just ask one. Oh, sure, there are some similarities (vague ones):

Here there are two close substitutes; the world can barely distinguish between what it sees as the Tweeddledee of libertarianism and the Tweedledum of Objectivism [ You can, by this one line, tell where the author fell! ]. Both favour freedom; both oppose welfare; neither supports socialism; both are against anything but laissez faire capitalism.

The reason this is of interest with Atlas Shrugged is because it was made, in part, by Tea Party types (allegedly) and while they were certainly fans of Rand they may not have been pure ideological Objectivists. So ... let's look!

So ... Is ASII Libertarian ... Or Objectivist?
The driving force behind the Atlas Shrugged movies is John Aglialoro--a Tea Party superstar--with some help from Freedomworks--also a Tea Party promoter (and the Tea Party is neither Objectivist nor, entirely, Libertarian--although they fall much closer to the latter than the former). I've no doubt Aglialoro has towering respect for Ayn Rand, at least in his own mind, but I suspect that "any adaptation" made without full cognizant adherence to Rand's philosophy simply cannot propagate it from the page to the screenplay to the screen.

It is also critical to note that the trilogy, being created now, is being created as a political tool--with the help from political agencies (Freedomworks). Atlas Shrugged Part 1 was released when it was with the hopes of influencing the election. The messages that get promoted here too, may be calculated more for their political impact than for their philosophical teaching. You can see this with an appearance by Sean Hannity in the movie: he's not an Objectivist--but is appealing to the Tea Party audiences.

If that were the case, it would be libertarian--even if it only touches on the areas where Libertarians agree with Objectivists. The principal differences between libertarians and objectivists are, I would say, as follows:

Libertarianism is a political position--freedom as opposed to tyranny. It has certain rules but no consistent philosophical base. Objectivism, conversely, arrives at many of the same rules (No Initiation of Force) but comes about them differently--from specific, consistent objectivist principles. Libertarinaism has a larger tent. Objectivism has specific underpinnings for each rule (so there might be a distinction in Libertarian vs. Objectivism on, for example, retaliatory strikes).
Libertarians and Objectivists see a substantial difference in the role of the state, laws, and crime. Take for example whether or not a citizen in either regime could forgive an assault. Under libertarianism, the citizen (presumably a pacifist) could tell an arresting officer not to haul off an attacker. Under an objectivist regime, presumably, if the law was violated ... it was violated. There is also a question about the innate coercive nature of states and the requirement for a standardized philosophy for successful government (Objectivist, presumably)--something libertariansim does not have.

Looking at the plot, I think Atlas Shrugged Part 2 has four 'critical' scenes where the philosophy is most exposed. These are:

The Francisco d'Anconia speech at James Taggart's wedding--which is about the value and goodness of money.
The Hank Rearden trial where he is brought before the judges for failure to comply with the Fair Share Law (and sells coal to the guy who pays for it rather than who the government tells him to).
The Winston Tunnel Disaster where the eventually mismanagement of the railway under the boot of the government leads to a crash with hundreds of deaths.
The government requirement that patent holders sign over their patents to the government as "gifts" (when Readen refuses, they threaten to ruin Dagney Taggart's reputation with blackmail photos of her going out with him--a married man!)

The Money Speech

The money speech:

The link is to a person from the Ayn Randian Atlas Society discussing the speech and its meaning (that, alone, is a fair Objectivist-endorsement). The speech in the movie was cut down a lot (listen to a computer reading of it here). If you compare the two of them there are similarities--but there are also differences. Specifically these differences are:

The book speech exalts the intellect and the mind as the source by which value is created. That is left out of the movie speech.
The book speech makes the case that money is the tool of deals for the participant's own benefit only (and that you will, philosophically, never use money in a deal that is not to your advantage)--that the common bond of men is the exchange of goods (which links to their reason) and not the sharing of misery.
It points out that the degree of productiveness is the degree of a man's reward.
The book speech notes that money will not give a code of value, a focus, or ideas if he has none--it will not make up for weakness--it will only help you realize what you already have in mind.
Only the man who does not need it, says the book speech, is fit to inherent wealth (as he would make it wherever he started).

Conversely the movie speech hits on:

The measure of a man is not in having money--but in how he got it.
That making money from back-room deals and political manipulation is wrong.
It centers on the concept of "crony capitalism" (although not by that name)

The movie speech is the political element of the speech only--it leaves out the book's philosophical content. What is important in today's political environment is not the moral underpinnings of money and the philosophy around its exchange and moral virtue--but rather the influence of money on industry--specifically a few hot-button issues ("Crony Capitalism") like Soylendra.

None of what is in the movie is out of keeping with Objectivism--but it seems to me that the movie makers have chosen the middle ground where Objectivists and Libertarians agree in a way that highlights a specific issue that is of interest to the Republican party and the Tea Party. It does not introduce any philosophical issues about who should have money or how money functions in an ideal fashion which could possibly cloud the issue (and instruct viewers). This simplification is probably "necessary" for the length of the movie--but it also seems to me to be calculated.

Conclusion: Libertarian.

The Judgment Of Rearden
Here is the scene where Rearden is judged:
Here is audio-only from the book: Part 1, Part 2.

While the book is much longer the key elements are similar:

Rearden requires the government be overt in its use of force ("I won't participate--send guns").
The government cites the public good as its moral value.
Hank does not recognize the public good as anything of value to him.

What is important, however, is the order in which these arguments are developed. In the book there is a great deal of emphasis placed on the idea that there is no public good and therefore any attempt to coerce him / take his stuff is cannibalism and thievery. In the movie it is the other way around: Rearden declares their actions thievery and then the court cites the public good as a defense.

The book also makes much more of Hank's refusal to cooperate. His refusal to enter a plea is in the movie but is comparatively shortened. I think this is because Rand is making the philosophical point that the court has no moral principals as its foundation whereas the movie is more focused on making the point that the court is coercive.

This is subtle--and I think it leans Libertarian as the practical consequences (the government initiation of force) is

Conclusion: Leans libertarian--by a hair.

The Tunnel Disaster
Two trains go into a tunnel (due to mismanagement)--no train leaves. I can find no video for it--but here's a link to an excerpt from the book. Note that Rand catalogs her victim's crimes against Objectivism before killing them:

The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.

The man in Drawing Room A, Car No 6, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying 'frozen' railway bonds and getting his friends in Washington to 'defreeze' them.

The man in Seat 5, Car No.7, was a worker who believed that he had "a right" to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.

The woman in Roomette 6, Car no. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had "a right" to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.

The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man's mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad and it's only a matter of seizing the machinery.

The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children* to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, 'I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.'

The idea in the book is, I think, to show, with concrete deaths, the wages of non-Objectivism. The movie, on the other hand,makes no mention of the mental state of anyone on the train (we get some conversation). Presumably innocents die (especially on the Army train)--but there's no direct tie-in to the philosophy or even to government mismanagement (if Kip had been a little more patient he'd be just as bad but alive). It wasn't high taxes or initiation of force that causes the collision either (nor was it Obama).

This makes the event not a philosophical one but rather a practical one. No matter how badly run the lines were there was no requirement for a spectacular disaster. It goes from a scene that makes an inescapable point (non-Objectivism or governmental influence kills people) to one that simply shows a possible outcome of some bad mangement.

Without the book's narrative judgment or a direct connection to Libertarian principals it lacks philosophical underpinnings for either Libertarianism or Objectivism.

Conclusion: Neither.

Taking Patents As Gifts
Hamsterdam Economics writes that Atlas Shrugged II high-lights how confused Ayn Rand was about intellectual property as she decries the government's forced taking of patents from their owners:

I think that Rearden’s position on this is a bit contradictory. He is indignant that the state would move to deprive him of his patents, thereby also depriving him of the fruits of his labors. But isn’t that what those patents do to others? Don’t they prevent others who develop similar products from bringing them to the market? ...

Furthermore, Rearden’s position seems to me to be a little bit disingenuous. After all, he opposes the state’s use of force. ... At the same time, however, his patents themselves rest on just such a threat. I see this as something of a double standard.

If, indeed, mainstream libertarian thought is against patents (and copyright?) then, yes: this is Objectivist. I'll assume it is!

Conclusion: Objectivist.

Conclusion: Libertarian
I think that looking closely and carefully, the political requirements (like putting in Sean Hannity) and the requirements of making a movie (taking out the narrative judgment of each train rider) override the source material's philosophical underpinnings. The end result is the seminal Objectivist work of fiction has become a Libertarian artifact.

In a way you'd expect this to be good: the larger-tent position of Libertarians would encourage more people to see it. Thus, it would make more money. Rand-verse Galt Gulchians would approve (note: did not do well at box-office despite that).

* She ends with: "These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas."--presumably either (a) the kids are either too young to be 'men'--or maybe were both daughters? In any event, uh, way to go Rand-verse.

The Politics Of: Iron Man 3

2013-05-08T07:16:00.001-07:00

Iron Man 3 is the latest Marvel franchise movie from Disney featuring Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark: the man inside Iron Man. The review will be relatively un-spoiler-riffic and then we'll talk politics which will have spoilers.

The Movie
Man, oh man, is the Iron Man franchise lucky they cast Downey in the lead role. To be sure, the rest of the cast is good--and the multi-million dollar spectacle would be fun to watch even if there were someone less capable under the helmet--but that would only get it near greatness. By the 4th time we see Tony don the armor (three movies plus The Avengers) it would get pretty old if the guy playing Tony Stark didn't have mega-watt charisma.

Fortunately, Robert Downey Jr. does.

The third Iron Man movie is big, loud, makes very little sense (I'll discuss that in the politics section as it's a spoiler) but it's a hell of a ride. Downey inhabits Stark in a way that allows him to not just do the heavy lifting but pretty much carry the whole thing with the ease of his super strength-augmented character.

The story is a fairly convoluted mess: a master terrorist (The Mandarin) is setting off explosions around the world and in American and no one can stop him. There's a mysterious business-man who runs Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM) and wants to do a deal with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) who now runs Stark Industries. Tony is hanging around for all of this but is way more involved with not-sleeping and working on new armor.

Stark has taken a backseat because he's dealing with post traumatic stress disorder over the alien invasion in The Avengers. When it turns out there may be some connection to the AIM guy, The Mandarin, and Potts, Stark becomes entangled (mostly due to the actions of his chief of security played by former director Jon Favrau). Then we get to see if Tony Stark--the man under the mask--is actually a capable hero in and of himself--or if it's all just clever mechanics.

The story is not especially deep and it isn't trying to be dramatic--and that's a good thing: I keep waiting for these Iron Man movies to devolve into the maudlin mess that the Spiderman series did and, fortunately, they don't. Part of that is probably the writing and directorial intent. Part of that is the pretty much unique way that Downey can play Stark as a jerk and still make him lovable.

I believe that there is at both the studio/producer level and at the script-writer level a problem with making these superhero scripts: they are, at least, half, power-fantasy. Yes, Spiderman lives in a dump and has the world's worst boss--but when he's swinging around the city, being Spiderman is great. Yes, Tony Stark is an alcoholic--but he's also actively a playboy billionaire and, unlike Batman (where that's just a front) he gets to enjoy it. And wouldn't flying around in the Iron Man suit be a blast? Yes. Yes it would.

When writers (probably encouraged by producers who are afraid of making a 200-million-dollar kid's movie) try to find a dramatic core to the character beyond the origin story (which is usually somewhat dark) they mine it for relationships: The (not-illogical) assumption is that being an ego-maniac superhero would be hard on the family life. I believe there's also some implicit themes in Superhero movies that they're basically "adolescent." That is: they need to grow up. This isn't absurd: remember, to a degree, these characters were created and meant for young people. Kill Bill's The Bride isn't on too many first-grader lunch boxes.

The problem with using relationships to drive the emotional drama of superheroes is that it results in (a) domestic discord which is not fun to watch but probably does 'contrast nicely' with the power-fantasy heroics of the superhero identity in the opinion of writers and directors and other people with script approval and (b) results in the heroes inevitably having to "learn a lesson" about being more attentive to their girlfriends / wives to complete an arc. We've seen this in:

Spiderman 3 ... interminably
The Fantastic Four movies where the family drama isn't The Thing and The Human Torch--the kids--fighting (which was prevalent in the comics) but rather Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Girl ... the parents
The Green Lantern who, to be fair, really did need to grow up in that movie
Batman falling out with Alfred in father-son dramatics
Sometimes Superman not appreciating Lois Lane sufficiently

And so on.

In Iron Man 3 Stark needs to learn to appreciate Pepper Potts some more ... and he does.

Part of my problem with this, other than it being not so much fun to watch ... and predictable (and kind of trumped up: although those elements do exist in the comics, the comics themselves are not generally, nearly so filled with domestic strife) is that you take even a half-step back from the narrative you suddenly see that these women (it ... thus far ... is always women: I wonder what they'll do with Wonder Woman?) are really acting incredibly entitled and unbelievably self-centered.

This is not the message the script writers intend to convey--but look:

Mr. Fantastic is basically on the front-line of global defense against humanity-ending threats. If he's delaying a wedding because it looks like Australia might sink or something, that's not being an immature man-child--that's being the only guy in the world who can save billions.

Spiderman is out stopping murders no one else can stop: if you hear sirens in the middle of your "big talk" with the guy ... maybe that can wait a few--if someone dies because you guilt-ed him into staying ... what's that say about you?

Batman is a justice-machine: if Alfred hurts his feelings he pauses for a moment and grumbles: I actually have feelings? News to me. Punk.

Superman is more or less the hand of God: if he's a bit busy, well, you might want to understand that.

In other words, while Potts--and in this movie she does get a good deal to do, thankfully--may be right to have some issues with the admittedly immature Tony--she may also want to consider that he has responsibilities (literally saving the planet) that other people don't.

Fortunately, the movie doesn't get dragged down by this--but it's still in there more prevalent than it ought to be.

Despite this complaint (rant), Iron Man 3 is fun--and you should go see it if you saw the other ones and liked them. In a way it may obviate the need for a 4th (although, you know, shut up and take my money if they it)--it didn't add much to the story or the character. It's competent (even with a new director) and I think it still gets the character right and does it with style.

Let's do the politics!

The Politics of Iron Man 3

The big spoiler is this: The Mandarin, played brilliantly by Ben Kingsley, is really a British, drug-addicted actor bloke who has been taken by the AIM guy (Guy Pearce) to act as a master terrorist (sending out video Pearce shoots). This is done to fool the world into thinking there's a bad guy when, really, AIM is trying to both create terror (having people using the new experimental treatment blow up as giant bombs) and then fight it (sell more stable versions of the treatment for use as super soldiers).

Interestingly: every Iron Man villain thus far has been a genius businessman. Iron Man 3 is no exception.

Interestingly: AIM, in the movie, is doing exactly what 9/11 Truthers think the American government is doing--propping up "fake terrorists" (or, less literally, 'creating them' the way the US 'created' Osama Bin Laden) and then using them as an excuse to conduct a 'War on Terror' which, among other things (such as taking our civil liberties away), makes someone a whole lot of money.

Interestingly: Iron Man 3, despite these plot constructs, doesn't really have a single political idea in its pretty little head.

Consider this: You are Iron Man. You are in Tennessee without the use of your armor or anything. You discover your girlfriend is being held captive in Miami by a madman. Do you:

Pick up the phone and call SHIELD and have Sam Jackson storm the compound himself and dispatch various guards by swearing alone?
Call your good friend Captain America to wreak havoc on the bad-guys until you can get your armor working to go help him? He can maybe bring Hawkeye and the Black Widow if you think the other super-soldiers might be too much for him to handle by himself?
Call your best buddy Don Cheadle who wears the Iron Patriot suit--and, by doing so, depending on the timing--realizing he's been compromised so you could properly warn the US government of that?
Call the cops?
Hire Blackwater?
Create McGuyver style assault gear, load it into a suitcase, and take a commercial jet to Miami, rent a car, and then storm the compound yourself? Without even regular body armor?

You know which one he picked ... even if you didn't see the movie.

Iron Man's plot construct is not political not just because it has a massively stupid plot-hole in it (if that were the standard everything would be shot) but because of the reason why it has the plot-hole. Iron Man 3's script needs to show that Stark is effective even without his armor--that He. Is. Iron. Man. (Ozzy Osbourne GROWL + METAL GUITAR RIFF). Indeed, it's the needs of the story that drive every other decision Iron Man 3 makes.

The reason that they use super-rich genius business men as antagonists is because you want the guy facing down Iron Man in an armored suit to also be "a super villain." You don't want him to be a flunky who is just wearing the suit someone else made (see what happens with the Iron Patriot battle: that guy doesn't last too long, does he?). So the foe has to have more or less invented the outfit too--not just be wearing it. That takes brains and money: TAH-DAH!*

The Mandarin reveal is in there because (a) the original character's 'orientalism' may have given some people pause and (b) the reveal (that he's a soccer-loving, hard-drinking Brit) is shockingly hilarious. The movie doesn't need two separate villains and it doesn't need three "climactic battle sequences" (and, arguably, if you count Stark's assault on the compound, it does in fact have three climactic battles. If you concede that then it definitely does not need four).

The camera sells you The Mandarin and then pulls the rug out from under you and you laugh. It isn't commentary on arms-deals to Osama.

If I had to guess Stark's politics, I'd say ragingly Libertarian**--which would give him a rightful distrust of the power-elite in Washington (or, whoever those guys on the TV screens were in The Avengers who could order a nuclear strike on New York without having the President on the line)--but we never even see him wearing a Ron Paul T-shirt.

So no, despite some construction that looks political, Iron Man 3 is pure summer-blockbuster.

Conclusion: No political message.

* Note that Tony Stark is also a super-rich genius businessman and he's the hero. The franchise sure isn't anti-capitalist even if it is, modestly, anti-arms-merchant.

** Doubly so after he stopped his arms-deals and stopped being the military industrial complex ...

A Look At 9/11 Trutherism (James Tracey Part 3)

2013-05-07T07:30:00.002-07:00

A few days ago The Omnivore interviewed Professor James Tracey who writes the Memory Hole blog that details the government conspiracies behind 9/11, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Bombings (among other things). We then took on his 12 questions he meant to pose to news outlets skeptical of his positions. I want to end this with a look at the way that discussions are constructed around 9/11 Trutherism (the same construction and pattern applies to Sandy Hook and Boston Trutherism as well).

What Do I Mean By "Patterns"?
What you see below is the hour-and-19 minutes video Loose Change. It's a lengthy, reasonably well made documentary which posits that the 9/11 official story simply cannot be true. The truth, it suggests, is that something else must have happened: that something is supposedly the US Government using missiles, controlled demolitions, and remote-controlled planes to orchestrate 9/11 in order to bring about fundamental change in America.

The argument is structured as follows:

Connect The Dots
We get a view of documents which are designed to point the viewer in a basic direction. These are things like:

Operation Northwoods documents: plans by the CIA to use false-flag terrorism to justify intervention in Cuba. This was never realized.
FEMA and CIA documents showing the towers in cross-hairs ... a prelude to an operational plan?
Technology allowing remote-controlled jumbo jets.
Put options on various airline stocks.
San Francisco mayor Willie Brown getting a warning not to fly from Condoleeszza Rice.

We then move to video "questions" and contradictory eye-witness testimony:

People don't agree on what exactly hit the pentagon.
There isn't enough plane-damage (look at the hole! Look at the pieces in the yard!)
The pieces of the plane we do see don't match the proposed kind.

When we get to the WTC we see stuff like:

There's no way the fuel could burn hot enough.
A lot of eye-witnesses described "an explosion" (or more) rather than just "fire."
The buildings fell too fast--could it be controlled demolition?

And so on ...

If you are interested, here is a point-by-point "debunking" of Loose Change. If you take the time to watch the video, take the time to read the link.

The Structure Of The Argument: Sleight of Hand

The structure of Trutherism arguments goes as follows:

Make or insinuate an allegation of blame (of the US Government or portions of it did it).
Create doubt about the official story by showing inconsistencies in various pieces of evidence (especially video evidence or through discussion of science the viewer is inexpert in).

The doubt creates a "blank space" which the speaker's proposition is then allowed to fill. The reason this pattern recurs is this: the approach that the Truther is forced to take is that of a defense*: the creation of reasonable doubt rather than that of a prosecutor where the speaker can actually use evidence to indict a perpetrator.

Why is this?

The most obvious reason is this is that the evidence necessary to meet the standard to indict the government simply does not exist. No one has ever found it. There are no whistle-blowers inside the conspiracy coming forward (despite the fact that the conspiracy must involve hundreds of civilians and military personnel at all levels of government**).

The secondary reason is that despite what the documentary sort of implies this is not investigative journalism. It's Internet journalism where various pictures, interviews, and other materials are taken from afar and then put together on the user's home computer. The filmmakers don't go and interview people--they don't go to the company that did "security drills" at the Twin Towers and grill workers or ex-employees.

They don't talk to relatives of people on flight 93 about 'fake phone calls' (the Loose Change theory is that maybe those calls were all made up using electronic voice synthesis and maybe those people disappeared some other way) from the airplane. They don't interview the structural engineers who weighed in on the tower-collapse--they just print other people's rebuttals.

It is pretty well done so it looks like investigative journalism--but it isn't. Truther discussion can get asymptotically close to evidence of wrong-doing but it can never actually reach it because it isn't designed to.

Here is a quote from an Ex-Truther blog that, I think, lays this out pretty well:

There are no facts in the 9/11 Truth Movement. Just a lot of theories, which eventually break down to "hey, we're just asking questions" if someone questions the validity of such. No structural, civil, or any engineers agree with the truthers. Yet, most of my friends will try to explain the hard physics involved in structural collapses. None of these people are engineers, physicists, or even in a scientific field, for that matter. Someone's supposed to take their word over an expert's?

Of course there are experts or at least 'experts' on the side of Trutherism--but the vast weight of the expertise is on the other. The key is not "the experts" (which you and I are unqualified to judge anyway) but the dynamic. If the conspiracy was this big, this complex (planes, missiles, disappearing passengers, the CIA, Homeland Security, the FBI, FEMA, the White House, The Pentagon, Naval ships at sea, the press, etc.) it would leak like a sieve.

How To Approach Outrageous Claims
What you see below is Luke's Change: a dead-on parody of Loose Change which claims that the destruction of the Star Wars Death Star was an inside job perpetrated by Darth Vader. If you have time to watch one of the two videos, watch this one. It's only 7 minutes long.

There are two things you should consider when viewing this:

How convincing is it? The answer is: pretty. It makes charges for which there are no really good answers (why did Darth Vader get into his Tie Fighter and join the battle? Why did he order his wing-men to stand-down firing on Luke)?
In a case were we know the conspiracy to be false (we saw the movies) how would we argue this were that not the case?

The answer is by stepping back a little and asking "What must be true for this conspiracy theory to be correct." Rather than getting bogged down in the science or the photographic evidence--or listening to sincere-seeming eye-witness accounts--ask the big question: if [ X ] was perpetrated by the government, what kinds of planning and risk-assessment would have been necessary for it to go forwards? How sure would the perpetrators have to be that they would not be caught? What kinds of security would have to be in place to make sure no one talks down the line (for example: if everyone in Bush-Brother's company showed up dead in 2008 (a) that would raise questions and (b) the last guy to die would almost certainly talk--how would you even plan on containing that?)

These questions have even worse answers than the ones posed by Loose Change: at some point almost everyone but you has to be in on the conspiracy. By the time you are done thinking it through a disastrous war in Afghanistan and tons of stolen gold seem like a pretty poor reason for someone like Bush to play bumper-cars with the nation's economy and his own life (if he were caught he would certainly be put to death).

You have to assume that everyone in the top chain of command is utterly corrupt and that their self interest is never served by coming clean--for decades. How would you even assess that? How far would you trust Bin Laden with your deadly secrets? Considering that he didn't deny the video (nor did Al Queada)--but the video is presumed fake--what would you do if he or someone in AQ had come out against it? How would you hope to manage that? Is Bin Laden really that big a fan of the US? That easily bought?

Do you know?

Ultimately this massive constellation of things that would have to be true is much harder to believe than the idea that the official story is correct. On the other hand ...

Hey? Why Not?

* Who is Loose Change defending? Osama Bin Laden, of course.

** Think about that. Condoleezza Rice apparently warned the Mayor of San Francisco not to fly. So she must be in on the conspiracy and this guy (Willie Brown) rated a warning? Does that make sense? Rice knows the biggest false flag attack and most devastating attack on American soil is about to go down and she decides to warn that guy not to fly?

That's terrible operational security--and, in fact, it would be absurd--but then why is it included at all in the movie? This is because they don't have to build a reasonable case that the warning was related--they just have to give the viewer a moment of pause and hope you don't Fridge Logic it later.

Prof James Tracey's Questions On Conspiracy Theory: Answered!

2013-05-06T09:57:00.001-07:00

Florida Atlantic Professor James Tracey is one of the more public faces of Sandy Hook and Boston Bombing skepticism (or, if you will, truther-ism) claiming that the attacks are the work of the American government for the purposes of getting rid of our civil liberties. His blog, Memory Hole, is a collection of vague, often visually asked, questions to which he feels the answers can only be that the US government is lying to us.

One of his posts, however, In Search of the Last Liberal Intellectual, poses somewhat more concrete questions he tried to ask various 'defenders' of the orthodox narrative (such as the High Times editor or one of the Snopes researchers). Snopes may not have been able to talk to Prof James Tracey but we, at The Omnivore have, shall we say, more time on our hands.

So let's do it.

1. Does The Term 'Truther' Hinder The Search For Truth?
Question: The main thrust of John Milton’s Areopagetica is that in a fair exchange an argument based on the truth will triumph over lies and deception. Do you think that the major media’s use of terms such as “truther” or “conspiracy theorist” to designate individuals or groups with ideas and theories that differ from government and/or corporate entities is a productive part of the journey toward truth and enlightenment Milton envisioned?

Short Answer: Is the term Truther making truthful, enlightened discussion harder? No: It does not meet the conditions for being counter-productive to the discussion.

Long Answer: There are a few legitimate reasons to reject a categorizing term:

It is an ethnic or racial slur (example: the n-word).
It is posed as a negative (examples: "anti-abortion" vs. "pro-life"). This is especially true when the issue in question is a political wedge issue as people reputedly dislike voting "against" things and would rather vote "for" them).
It has pre-existing negative connotations (example: describing Branch-Dravidians as 'a cult'). This may be a legitimate use if the negative connotations seem accurate and the term does facilitate clear communication (i.e. Branch Davidian was, in fact, a cult and describing them as simply a "religious group" may be less clear about facts which are not in question--newly minted non-traditional group, very unusual beliefs, single charismatic leader, highly insular, paranoid, etc.)

Disliking a term because "you don't like it" recalls the silliness Hacker vs. Cracker. Now, words do mean things and labels can be important. GOP strategist Frank Luntz has made his career testing words and phrases to see which ones "sell" the best and then instructing the GOP to use those.

Does 'Truther' meet the conditions for any of the above? The answer is no. It is neither ethnic nor racial. It is not phrased as a negative (nor does it impact ballot issues). It does not have any pre-existing etymology.

It is generally clear. If I type it into Google I will get, on my first hit, a solid set of definitions (both pro and con) which all agree on the salient points.

The term Conspiracy Theorist is questionable under #3--however it does seem to be the case that it facilitates clear communication: a person hearing a Truther described as a Conspiracy Theorist will, in fact, get a very good idea of the dialog and belief structure that person holds.

What is the preferred term by the Truther constituency? I think 'Hoaxer' is out as it generally applies to the person perpetrating the hoax and 'Denier' is too strong (did 9/11 happen at all?). I suspect 'Skeptic' would be welcome--but 'skeptic' is generally held by people refuting extreme claims rather than embracing them: it would, in fact, mislead most listeners.

Edited to Add: If you consider 'Truther' to be negative today, that's fine--but if the term is negative it's because of its own reasons. The #3 point is when a category is used for something and links it to a whole lot of other, historical badness. If 'Truther' had been the term from the American Revolution for "Traitors who felt America should be crushed under British rule" or something and it was being brought back to apply to the 9/11 guys, okay--they'd have a point.

But, today, if you think 'Truther' is a negative word and you are one, you have only yourself to blame for it (unless you do, in fact, have some belief other than that 9/11 was an inside job ...)

2. How Much Responsibility Does the US Government Bear for 9/11?

Question: To what degree do you think citizens and the press should hold government officials accountable for momentous events such as the terror attacks of September 11, 2001?

Short Answer: A little, for missing some intelligence signals.

Long Answer: There is an entire, giant investigation on this (which satisfies exactly no conspiracy theorist anywhere). It shows some warning-signs may have been missed. If I reject the report then I can hold the government accountable for anything I want. I could also hold, for example, the Israelis or even space-aliens accountable.

Should the public hold the government accountable? I think the answer is "no"--the presence of a storm of questions (which is what the 9/11 Truth movement and other Truther-movements boil down to) is not the same as the kind of legal evidence necessary to establish culpability.

3. What Is A Conspiracy Theory?

Question: What characterizes a conspiracy theory? How can we distinguish between a conspiracy theory and a valid assessment of a specific phenomenon, issue, or event?

Short Answer: A theory which suggests an unlikely conspiracy 'did it.'

Long Answer: Conspiracy Theories (to my take) tend to require these two characteristics:

They fly in the face of sound risk-to-benefit planning.
They require large (sometimes huge) numbers of people keep a deadly secret.

The idea that an administration (or force behind it) wishing to Invade Iraq would go about undertaking a massive operation (demolitions of buildings on a scale never done by mankind--involving moving tons of explosives into very secure installations with no one noticing it, coordinating planes flying into the building, hijacking the planes or otherwise disappearing the personnel, coordinating with Bin Laden who would stand to benefit greatly by selling out Bush, etc.) simply defies Risk-to-Benefit analysis.

If one wanted to invade Iraq, why not have Oliver North sell them WMD undercover and then, once they buy them, invade them for it? No one would ever figure that out.

4. Who Was Behind 9/11?

Question: US political leaders uniformly maintain that Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network were the sole agents behind the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission’s report attributed this set of events to “a lack of imagination” in terms of government agencies’ preparation. In your view, what are the most compelling pieces of evidence to support this official explanation of the 9/11 events?

Short Answer: The most compelling piece of evidence is the video of Osama taking credit for it and the reaction of world intelligence agencies. The official investigation's report is also, to my mind, credible.

Long Answer: Prior to 9/11 I flew with a small knife on my key chain. It never occurred to me that such a device could be used to hijack an airplane. The use of a jet-liner as a terrorist weapon had been discussed before--but the context was usually blowing it up over a city (low) so as to damage the area below it--not to crash it into a large building ... which would take training.

9/11 was devastating out-of-the-box thinking. Even the idea that terror-cells (especially suicide groups) could operate for lengths of time in the US without just walking away was the conventional wisdom. Unfortunately 9/11 proved that wrong--it was a lack of imagination on the part of every security expert I was reading. I think that fits.

What evidence do I have? I have heard stories from relatives of people on the flight that the passengers took down--their phone calls--and so on. This seems to indicate that planes were hijacked by teams of people (as do radio tapes from the planes). Osama took credit for it on video. People saw planes strike the buildings--even the Pentagon--and so on.

But the fact remains: I have not seen most of the evidence--and neither have you. I also haven't investigated every crime committed in my home town--I haven't seen the evidence for anyone in jail in my city--but other people have--and I more or less trust them to do their jobs. I haven't been to Alaska--but I've seen evidence of it--and both I and Professor James Tracey seem to agree it exists.

5. Why No Love For Conspiracy Theorists?

Question: Historian Richard Hofstadter argues in his well-known essay, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” that regardless of how much evidence the conspiratorially-minded gather and present on a topic or phenomenon they are not worthy of a hearing as their views may endanger rational political discourse and consensus. Does such a position potentially jeopardize effective and honest journalistic practice?

Short Answer: A little. Does your email spam filter sometimes get it wrong? Yeah? Turn that thing off for a few weeks and call me.

Long Answer: Claims that are considered "outrageous" (i.e. "I was late to work because I was abducted by aliens") generally require more proof than those that are not ("I was late because I overslept."). When someone comes up with a humdinger of a proposal (9/11 was an inside job involving scores if not hundreds of people) it will be met with serious question unless there is serious evidence.

Serious evidence is not "pictures with questions I can't answer" when I am not a photographic analyst by trade. The Truther arguments are identical in practice to "I can prove the sun revolves around the earth because ... look at it!!" I'll admit, I've been outside: the sun looks like it's going around the earth ... the earth looks, well, pretty flat. It doesn't feel like it's rotating, does it? Can you disprove this:

Proposed Flat Earth Map

The answer is: you can't--not with personal experience. You may be able to prove the surface of the earth is somewhat curved (use a stick and a well a few miles apart--or watch the masts of a ship come in to port)--but get into a debate with a flat-earther and things get strange fast (I've looked into it). At that point ... do you conclude the earth must be flat because you can't explain exactly how it is that gravity "curves space." Or do you take the word of various physicists and astronomers who you don't know personally.

So the answer is that there are some claims ("I was abducted by aliens this morning, yo" or "the earth is flat, bro") which you can kind of safely ignore. Then there are gray areas ("Nixon is spying on Democrats, yo.") and you have to decide if "9/11 is an inside job" fits into those or not.

How much evidence will you demand? Will unanswered questions do it? Or will it take something more substantial? When a proposal falls into that gray-zone it may be unfairly dismissed--but that's why investigative journalism exists.

6. Are Conspiracy Theorists Dangerous?

Question: In your estimation, is the tendency to entertain or proffer conspiracy theories a sign of a potential psychiatric condition? Along these lines, are at least some conspiracy theorists inherently dangerous?

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Just holding a conspiracy theory is not evidence of a psychological issue or any evidence of the person being dangerous. I'd use the 'alcoholic test': is holding this theory causing you recurrent on-going problems in your life? If the answer is "yes" you might have a problem. Is it giving you thoughts of harming yourself or others? If "yes" then you might be a danger to such. This has nothing to do with the theory and everything to do with the person holding it.

7. But The CIA Was A Conspiracy Machine!

Question: In 1977 Carl Bernstein reported that through “Operation Mockingbird” and related activities many major news organizations were infiltrated by CIA operatives or consciously aided the CIA in intelligence gathering activities and “planting” stories in the press. CIA document 1035-960 suggests how the agency went about thwarting criticism of the Warren Commission’s examination of President Kennedy’s assassination by utilizing intelligence assets in news outlets to bolster the Warren Commission’s legitimacy and labeling critics “conspiracy theorists.” In your estimation, is the intelligence community’s penetration of the press an ongoing phenomenon? Is it more widespread today or has it subsided to any significant degree?

Short Answer: It has subsided, largely due to the end of the Cold War and things that came after.

Long Answer: First off, Operation Mockingbird was real--it was a CIA operation to influence the media (both the US's networks and other countries' media) to further both American and, allegedly, corporate interests. Whether it was ultimately successful or not is in debate but it did happen--it was covert--and it's allegedly over now ... or is it?

While we don't know for sure, there are a few things we could consider:

The world today is very different than that of the 1950's and the CIA of today is not facing an existential threat* in the form of the Soviet Union as it did when things like Operation Mockingbird or MKUltra were in effect. Today's CIA has a different mission--on the books at least. The budget for clandestine operations was greatly reduced in the 70's and has been reduced even more since.
The CIA's capacity for HUMINT (Human Intelligence) has declined in favor of SIGINT (Signal Intelligence--electronic data gathering . Whatever the reasons for this, it's generally considered that our on-the-ground intelligence isn't what it used to be. This kind of decline would also probably reduce our capacity for things like Mockingbird.

Secondly, today's "press" (and Tracey uses the term 'press'--but he must really mean media) is a very different animal than that of the 1950's. It is vastly more diverse, often ideologically polarized, and no longer looked upon with the reverence that Walter Cronkite at 11 PM used to be.

It is cut-throat and downsizing: perfect fodder for a legion of whistleblowers to erupt from (if someone who knew about CIA payola got fired what might they do when laid off)? In short, the return on investment would be going way, way down and the investment itself would be getting more expensive every day.

So, no, to answer the question: I think the CIA has dropped that kind of operation in preference of using drones overseas to spy on people and listening to cell phones with the help of the NSA. I don't think trained agents are playing cub-reporter for the New York Times.

I have heard another theory: I don't subscribe to it--but it is interesting. The theory is (take a guess) ...

Did you guess Mormons? No? Gee.

Yes, there's a theory as to why the CIA "cleaned up its act" (and became less effective) and that theory is Mormons. Mormons are over-represented and allegedly highly valued in the CIA and FBI because they are hard to corrupt. Some people think this over-representation of stuffy non-coffee drinking Mormons has led to a decline in the dirty tricks that made the CIA so effective.

Whether or not any of this is true, I know one thing: it is funny.

8. The Declaration of Independence Was A Conspiratorial Document!
Question: Political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith cites The Declaration of Independence as a conspiratorial document and asserts that the ideology of America’s founders was in many ways motivated by paranoia toward British rule. In fact, the notion of conspiracy has been a consistent theme in American politics. With this in mind, what is it about modern forms of governance that render such impulses and worldviews irrational, obsolete, and perhaps even dangerous?

Short Answer: I don't think anyone ever considered the Declaration of Independence a conspiracy document in the say way that the modern term means it so either deHaven-Smith is being taken out of context or he's wrong.

Long Answer: Modern day Conspiracy Theory or "the notion of conspiracy" in the way 9/11-was-an-inside-job means it and various beliefs, even paranoid ones, about the British Crown are very, very different things. The first is a set of questions which are meant to be hard to answer and then lead the subject to the asker's conclusions. Questions about whether or not revolution was necessary are very different.

The people who wrote the DoI were running America. The people posting Loose Change to YouTube aren't running anything. I don't think public understanding of the difference has changed--I think the comparison Prof Tracey is making is faulty.

Conclusion: Category error.

9. Did McVeigh Blow Up The Federal Building In Oklahoma?
Question: The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City brought into public consciousness the notion of “homegrown terrorism.” At the same time the event provided the pretext for laws compromising Americans’ civil liberties and paved the way for the PATRIOT Act that was enacted in the wake of 9/11. Is it reasonable for the public to conclude that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were the sole or principal agents in the bombing? Have you examined the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee’s 2001 report on the incident? If so, would you consider its findings to be sound and cause for a new judicial interrogation of the event?

Short Answer: I have not examined the 2001 report--but everything I have heard suggests the official story is correct.

Long Answer: "Have you read ..." is one of the things that makes Conspiracy Theory discussions difficult. One party has 'done the research' and the other party (the skeptic) inevitably hasn't.

Unless they have--like I have with scanners and birth certificates and layers--in which case the discussion falls apart and you just move on.

The question is leading: did the laws "compromising Americans' civil liberties' get the way paved for them? Well, "yes" in some sense--but the question is phrased in such a way that it is easy to assume it is taking it as a given that this is intentional. It isn't.

The NSA used to be able to spy on America--today it isn't. There were several fairly racist initiatives the FBI wanted to launch--they weren't allowed to. Originally we had slavery--not so anymore. Today women can vote: Didn't used to be the case.

The idea that there is a never-ending march against civil liberties is created by looking only at one dimension of events (those that restrict civil liberties) and not by looking at the whole (which is much messier and subject to a lot more interpretation). The assault rifle ban did, in fact, expire without any discussion of Oklahoma.

I'll need more than a leading question and a suggestion to read a report (I read the 9/11 report ... and no one seems happy with that) to do the research.

10. What About Sandy Hook!? No One Investigated That!
Question: The official theory of what transpired at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012 involves 20-year-old Adam Lanza going on a murderous rampage that resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 7 adults. Major media outlets appear to have unquestioningly gone forward with this scenario. In your estimation, have law enforcement and medical authorities produced evidence sufficient to support this theory of events?

Short Answer: The place was slammed with reporters, FBI, and so on. I'd say there's been a ton of investigation. I see no reason to question the official story.

Long Answer: We still don't have Adam Lanza's death certificate--isn't that weird? Yes--it is. I suppose so. Therefore: I conclude they cut him open and he was determined to be an alien. So they had to cover that up.

Not really--but I'm also not an expert on how death certificates get issued--how long autopsies take--and what events other than a massive and poorly managed conspiracy might be responsible.

The salient point here, however, is not that I have or have not seen "sufficient evidence" to convince me of anything but rather that I have not seen "any evidence at all." I have seen pictures of the school. I have seen talking heads discuss things. I've heard official reports.

This is also the kind of evidence that I have seen for:

The suggestion that nuclear reactors blew up at Fukishima.
That WWII happened at all (much less the Holocaust).
That the space shuttle actually goes into space (instead of, say, Ohio).
That Alaska exists--and that a person named Sarah Palin comes from it.

Only #4 is actually hard to believe (consider: could we really have bought the nation's largest state for next to nothing!? And would they really elect Palin governor? Sounds fishy--someone should investigate that shit--and I don't mean the billion people who investigated it during 2008--I mean an independent commission).

Okay, I'm being silly there--but the fact remains that I am not on a jury--I am not an investigator--I am not being "shown" evidence--I'm watching a zillion different people give me the news. I'm also watching a lot of them go "Crap: I got that wrong." That happens. It doesn't take a conspiracy.

11. Why's Alex Jones Less Credible Than Bill O'Reilly!?

Question: There are a variety of public figures and websites that deem themselves as “alternative” sources of political news and analysis, such as Alex Jones and Infowars.com, and Dr. Webster Tarpley of Tarpley.net. Why do you believe such individuals are frequently held up as promoters of conspiracy theories? In your view, what is it that makes these commentators and sources of analysis less reliable than, say, CNN’s Piers Morgan, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, or the editorial and op-ed pages of a regional or national newspaper?

Short Answer: Because Jones' world makes no sense and O'Reilly isn't proposing a "new world" but rather commentary on this one.

Long Answer: Here's a partial list of things Alex Jones got wrong:

Worldwide shortage of rare earth metals – Didn’t happen
Food supply disruptions hit western nations – Didn’t happen
Deadly superbug mutation goes wild – Didn’t happen
New evidence links vaccines and neurological disorders– The opposite happened
U.S. power grid suffers catastrophic failure – Didn’t happen
Satellite breakdown – Didn’t happen
GM crop contamination leads to crisis – Didn’t happen
Honeybee population collapse spreads to other species– Didn’t happen
Weather patterns become increasingly radicalized – Debatable
Nuclear power sees global resurgence – The Fukushima incident discredited this
Nuclear weapons unleashed in the Middle East – Didn’t happen

The list goes on-and-on. But the real issue isn't with Jones as prediction is dicey at best--everyone who tries gets a lot of stuff wrong. The problem is that Jones isn't anything like BOR or Rachel Maddow: he's an entirely different product.

Maddow isn't telling you that everyone is lying to you--she, like everyone else there--is giving her opinion on things that presumably happened. Jones is telling you those things didn't happen. BOR might tell you why they happened or what they mean. Jones is telling you that if something did happen it was done by Spec-Ops wet-work guys and that what you heard was all fake anyway. Jones is predicting various disasters, Maddow is predicting that Hillary is gonna run in 2016.

Let's put this another way: if you could bet on Jones' predictions with your own money--real money--would you? The answer of course is (a) no. And (b) If you did, you'd argue forever with whoever you bet with that whatever it was really happened and they covered it up. Satellite breakdown? Those things fell from the sky like rain--remember the Leonid Meteor Shower? That was Van-Star-One coming down!

If you'd hesitate to bet money on GM crop contamination leading to crisis or a catastrophic failure of the US power grid--or new evidence for vaccines and autism? Well, there's a reason for that.

If I were to "follow the money" from the Boston Bombing it would lead to Alex Jones--not Homeland Security.

12. Does Money Influence News And Public Opinion?
Question: Philanthropic foundations contribute large sums to a wide array of non-governmental organizations and media outlets in the United States. What role, if any, do you believe such entities play in shaping public discourse and opinion around controversial issues and events?

Short Answer: Some but not much.

Long Answer: Let's back up--does money influence elections? Yes? Oh Hells yes. Money buys elections ... unless you are Sheldon Adelson in which case it doesn't buy you Gingrich and then it doesn't buy you Romney. The influence of money on the media can't be contested--but most of that is in the form of advertisers paying for television they think will reach women (Lifetime) or 20 year old men (Spike) or 30-somethings (everyone) so they can sell their products.

After that, though, the influence of money becomes questionable. Scientology (rich) has been trying to alter public opinion (bad) for a long time. Recently they took out a big ad in the Atlantic. The Atlantic got all kinds of shit for it and promised they'd never do it again.

Things don't always go so well for big money.

The real question here, though, is this: what NGO is paying money for Sandy Hook--for either a programmed assassin group (Lanza + Shooters 2 and 3) or a big-time hoax ... or both? Procter and Gamble? Bushmaster Arms (doesn't seem likely)? Taser? Hey--if guns are illegal ...

That's the question with no answer: we can't show much (any?) evidence of corporate sponsors for mass killings--we can't name corporations--we don't have faces to put to this or even goals or agendas (other than Agenda 21) as an end-game. I do know that there is discourse around abortion, for example--or immigration (tech companies want more visas!) and I know how that works--but I don't see any conspiracy there ... just some spin.

So I'll answer: I have no idea of the role that any of this money plays in shaping discourse but I suspect that if they're paying a lot? They're not getting their money's worth.

Ask Karl Rove.

Next Post: Conclusions on all this!

* This is when your English Teacher threatens to make you read The Stranger.

The Omnivore Interviews Conspiracy Theorist Professor James Tracey

2013-05-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

The Omnivore got a chance to talk to Florida Atlantic University Professor James Tracey who you may have heard of: he's the guy who thinks the Boston Marathon bombings were faked--or were an inside job or both (it turns out both).

I Got The Picture From Google. It's Him ... Or Is It!?

James Tracey writes the Memory Hole blog which covers the big lie from the Oklahoma bombings to 9/11 and more.

The Omnivore: Hello Professor Tracey!

James Tracey: Hello.

TO: I wanted to start with a question--I know the conventional narrative for the Boston Bombing or Sandy Hook shooting. But it seems there's two conflicting counter narratives. The first is that it's a False-Flag attack where the CIA with Navy SEALS special operators perpetrates the bombing and blames Islamic extremists. The Second is that there are these "crisis actors" and fake blood and that it's a drill or something.

This seems contradictory to me: if I have Navy SEALS and real bombs I don't need actors. If I have actors and fake blood and prosthesis I don't need real bombs. Can you set that straight for me? What do we think really happened?

Alleged Navy SEALS Compared to Alleged Boston Bombers. The Punisher Wants To SUE

This is Only A Drill. Promise.

JT: That may very well be two narratives that are purposely put there to mislead people looking into this. My take is that this was a drill at the finish line and further down the street there was a real bomb. I can't be certain of that--but that's what I think.

I'm quite certain that the one at the finish line is not genuine and overall, even if you take both scenes the idea of there being 267 causalities is extremely inflated. If both of those bombs were real you might have causalities of 100 or less.

If you look at the immediate aftermath of the first bomb there aren't that many people involved and they aren't' that traumatized--they're merely reacting to the volume (sound) of the blast.

TO: Do you think anyone was actually killed?

JT: I don't think so.

TO: Do you think anyone was actually killed in Sandy Hook?

JT: That's harder because we don't really have photographs or video or the like. Who knows? There may have been children who turned up missing--taken away of their families in some way shape or form ... it's difficult to say.

TO: If you took children away from their families I would expect them to want to see the bodies and stuff. I'd expect that to be all over the place. Do you think people were hurt in Boston?

JT: I Think there were some injuries. If you look at the website of the Forum Restaurant they have a notice up saying they are under repairs and there were several injuries. But what is "several"? Six? Eight? It's not 100.

TO: I don't think that 200 number is legs blown off--that's like any sort of injury from any source.

JT: The newspaper accounts don't distinguish how many people were injured in which bombing.

TO: True. I have seen a graph of people crossing the finish line and it seems there were a lot of people there.

JT: No athletes and no one in the race were hit. Shrapnel didn't penetrate the scaffolding--which seems unusual.

TO: Okay--let's do evidence in a moment--For now I want to talk about the scenario Who is behind this? The CIA? FEMA? The White House?

JT: I think it's Homeland Security and the FBI at least. The FBI is largely in the business of creating terror: They have to create the terror to perpetuate the war on terror both at home and abroad (We have other agencies working abroad). This is an instance of manufactured terror.

We see a lot of talk about the use of actors in these drills--in their literature and stuff.

TO: I was actually in a drill for a mock accident with makeup and stuff. It was a school bus being hit by a truck or something.

JT: I have a video of a scenario like that from north Florida.

TO This was like forty years ago or so. I was in second grade--but it was a real drill--with semi-professional makeup and burnt clothing and stuff. So certainly those drills do happen as drills.

JT: The duck-and-cover excises from the 50's were like that too--much simpler--but real drills.

TO: Do you think President Obama is aware of the conspiracy?

JT: I think that he's generally somewhat removed from these operations. I think that there is an expressed intent to create an environment of increased gun control and increased police state measures so they're involved in a fairly round about way.

TO: But if we start with the Oklahoma bombing and we go through 9/11 in 2001 and then to 2012 and today that's three presidential administrations with very different guys. If we put Obama, Bush, and Clinton in a room together, I don't think they'd agree on too much.

JT: I think on larger issues like economic policy and the military industrial complex there's that much disagreement. Other issues like abortion or gay marriage--

TO: But in terms of gun rights, I think Bush is a hunter--

JT: I'm doing some research on the Oklahoma city bombing. I think it's very important--a very important event. If you look at that more closely in a historical context you'll realize that the patriot movement was gaining traction at the time and there was a move to appeal the assault weapons ban and that was about to be voted on and it was knocked off the rails.

TO: Why do you think these people care about assault weapons. If I'm willing to kill American children--I'm going all out black helicopters or FEMA concentration camps--or ecological control (which I don't think Bush would agree to) that's pretty extreme. What end game that justifies blowing up the world trade center? It has to be more than banning assault rifles.

JT: I think the World Trade Centers was an attempt to justify this expensive attack into the Middle East.

TO: We went into Afghanistan first--I'd think if we planned on going in somewhere we'd go somewhere with oil--like Saudi Arabia.

JT: Saudi Arabia is very close with the Bush family.

TO: Okay--how about Iraq or Iran?

JT: I think it was supposed to get us to Iraq.

TO: But Iraq was a disaster. If I planned to go in and staged an attack to justify it, wouldn't I also plan to plant some WMD? Make sure we found it on like day 3. But--back to assault weapons: are the conspirators planning to subjugate the US and they have to get rid of assault weapons to do that?

JT: I think so. I think that may have something to do with that.

TO: But there are millions of assault weapons already sold in the US. Tons of ammunition. It'll be good for 100 years. What will banning them do?

JT: It'll make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to own them.

TO: But these are already out there. If I went to gun owners I know and said "start handing them out"--there are a lot of them already out there. I think the horse left the barn. Also, no one is trying to ban hand guns. There was this gun called the Liberator--ultra cheap, one shot--and it came with a comic strip that showed using the gun to kill a soldier and take his rifle.

So how does this take over work? The TSA? Half of them are going to quit--they won't fight. They're doofuses. The army is also more ideologically diverse--you're going to lose a lot of them--and you're dealing with a heavily armed populace.

So what does this look like? I do my stuff and I make it illegal to sell assault weapons and I'm decades away from seizing power. No one in charge will ever see this happen in their administration.

JT: That's true--the elected leaders won't see it happen. That's probably true.

TO: The average CIA director lasts 3.09 years. The average FEMA director is 2.40. Presidents get two terms. Is their end-game 50 or 100 years out?

JT: I Think they're generally fulfilling roles--positions. I don't think they're in charge--I don't think Obama is either.

TO: Do you think it's the Illuminati--a power beyond America? Do you think it's bad-actors in middle management?

JT: I think it's a select number of individuals who are influential in the corporate sector and the financial sector--banking and what-not.

TO: Banking?

JT: That's part of it.

TO: I know some banking guys--that's my day job. It's not like I'm having lunch of the president of Bank of America or anything but I've seen what their days are like--these are guys at the top or near it. Their days are like slices of five minute meetings where they are slammed with work, trying desperately to make an informed decision with minimal information. You can't get on their calendars for months.

I don't see them having an extra week of the week to be plotting insurrection.

JT: Like CEOs?

TO: CEOs, COOs--CTOs. Pretty up-there guys. Guys you'd need.

JT: They're just filling a function as well because they're good at what they do. But there are guys above that. Owners.

TO: The board of directors. That's true--but come on: if the Board of Directors orders Vickram Pandit--ex-CEO of Citi--who they later kicked out--and they order him to capitalize on this "thing that is going to happen"--there's a chance it'll explode on contact.

If he realizes that he's being asked to make money or something off 20 dead kids there's no guarantee he'll go along with that. Same with the army guys. I know plenty of army guys--and there are so many diverse people there. I don't think these people will go along with "Operation Seize America."

One last thing on the plan: We have total control over the CIA, FEMA, Navy SEALS, Obama--they can't control House Republicans? Is the solution then to vote Tea Party forever more because they're beyond control?

The assault weapons ban totally failed. They defeated background checks.

JT: They didn't move as quickly as they needed to. The window of time when Sandy Hook took place was like 2-3 weeks.

TO: I listened to the Slate political podcast and they said that if Obama had moved in the first month we'd all be talking about how crass it was for him to be using the tragedy to push his agenda. So now we'd be talking about how it failed because he was tasteless.

If these guys are good at demolitions, maybe they're not so good at mass manipulation.

JT: They got us to sign onto the UN Assault Weapons ban.

TO: That's so we don't sell those to other regimes. As an American citizen I'm not real fired up about people in other countries having weapons. I'd prefer we not be selling them.

JT: Well, it could be the basis for disarming civilians inside the US at home.

TO: Isn't that kind of slippery-slope? There's nothing in that bill that suggests it could be used here. Wouldn't even trying that cause an insurrection?

JT: It was done in Australia and not the UK.

TO: Yeah--and the Australia hasn't exactly slid into dystopia.

JT: The weapon bans came off of indignation over events like this.

TO: Yeah but come on--door-to-door weapon searches would be cause for revolution here.

JT: They were doing door-to-door searches in Boston.

TO: True--but they weren't seizing things. We haven't read about coincident mass arrests for pirated software and cocaine they found. People believed those guys were dangerous. Was there actual damage from this? No one said "you can't come in."

JT: Why should they. We don't know if these guys even did anything. Or if these bombs were as deadly as the media claimed they are. As far as I'm concerned it's just smoke and mirrors.

TO: Okay--but back to the Senate. Once the conspirators realized the bill would die why not just seize a Senator's families and forcing them to pass the bill? If I have total control over the media and the CIA or whatever--why can a Senator hold out?

JT: I Don't think power is being exerted in that way. I don't think one could be that blatant. I think it's more furtive. Look at Senator Paul Wellstone. He would've been a strong opponent of the invasion of Iraq and his plane went down in very suspicious circumstances in 2002. But I don't think it'll be done in a whole-hog kind of way to push a bill through.

I think Congress leaves a lot to be desired but I think it requires popular opinion to act.

I think 9/11 was an event that traumatize the country and galvanized public opinion in such a way that the Bush administration was actually pushed to go into Afghanistan which they wanted to anyway (if you look at the documents).

TO: Okay--let's talk about the evidence. My problem with the pictures that we've seen is that none of us are photo-analysts. There's this site where a blog author posted a picture of one of the bomb sites. I looked at it and I saw chairs standing up and glass windows in one piece and stuff and I said "this doesn't look like a bomb site to me."

The blog author was apparently in the CIA and stuff and said "No, that's exactly what an IED site looks like. I concluded: I was not an expert and I was not qualified to judge. So I don't really know. but I do know this: when Reddit went on the case they examined lots of photographic evidence and it was compelling, but it turns out it was wrong.

Not the Bombers.

If you want some really good description of this, look here: This American Life Picture Show. Listen to the pre-amble. It covers this.

So I pulled up a bunch of photographic evidence as a test and using your pictures I find that if I believe the photos then I also believe in:

Bigfoot
UFOs
And they faked the moon landings.

Does Bigfoot Have a Backpack?

And that Obama faked his birth certificate--well, not that--but I have some expertise.

Do you think Obama faked his birth certificate?

JT: The one he released later? Yes I do.

TO: Why?

JT: Because it has multiple layers.

TO: If you take your birth certificate and you scan it and you don't turn off Optical Character Recognition it'll have layers too. Because the scanner software tries to make sense of the writing as other layers so you can do searches and stuff.

JT: Okay.

TO: That's my little piece of document analysis expertise.

JT: His alleged autobiography isn't very believable also.

TO: Okay--but ... do you believe Bigfoot exists?

JT: I don't know I--

TO: UFOs? Fake Moon-Landing? They say there can't be a moon landing--the same techniques that I'd use to conclude that the bombing was fake would prove the Moon Landing was fake. Do you think that might be true?

Fake Rock 'C-Series.' C is for Capricorn One.

JT: I haven't looked at it closely enough.

TO: Do you believe the Holocaust happened?

JT: I'm not an expert or a scholar of the Holocaust. One would have to look at it more closely. But there are some beliefs that we as a culture have that have to be interrogated more closely.

TO: Have you ever been to the state of Hawaii?

JT: Yes.

TO: Washington State?

JT: Yes.

TO: Any state you haven't been to?

JT: Many.

TO: Do you believe they exist?

JT: Yes.

TO: Good. Global Warming?

JT: No. There's a huge amount of money in foundations and research.

TO: But there's huge money in oil too.

JT: It's whether or not CO2 emissions are causing a greenhouse effect. It's about why. I think the true science disproves their theories. I'd point to their methods--the idea that the earth is heating to such and such temperature and it's linked to carbon dioxide is valid.

TO: Well, okay--back to Bigfoot. As far as I can tell the photo-evidence for Bigfoot is great if the story doesn't otherwise not make too much sense: one has never been found. For the actors and fake legs story I would say that the photos may or may not show something--but the story doesn't seem to make sense.

If someone sees people taking off a fake leg the whole thing is blown. The plan of faking mass casualties seems so risky--so fraught with error that it damages my ability to believe it. What would we do about about the many people in emergency rooms all over the city.

JT: I'm not sure. It's a bigger question. Boston is much more finite.

TO: Yeah but isn't the same thing. If there's multitudes of people saying the same thing whether it's about Boston or Global Warming isn't that the same question? Isn't it more likely that if scores of independent people are telling the same story that they're telling the truth?

JT: I think there is an impulse amongst most of us, highly educated or not, to defer to the system. To believe that if most people are saying "it happened" to believe that it happened. To believe that the media would not lie to us. That experts would not lie to us. That governments would not lie to us. But Governments do lie and our government is one of the biggest liars.

The media are, to a large degree, controlled. I do not believe they are truth-tellers and if they could do what they did to sell us 9/11 and this war on terror, then this is really small potatoes.

TO: I knew who Bin Laden was prior to 9/11--I read Messages To The World which is his manifestos, all annotated to explain what he was talking about. Unless those are all totally made up, 9/11 isn't out of character at all. What's implausible about 9/11? Did Bin Laden exist?

JT: He existed. He worked for America for most of his career.

TO: We armed the Taliban in the context of the cold war. But Bin Laden was no fan of our form of government.

JT: Yeah, that's probably true. But he's not capable of doing what took place on 9/11. He couldn't wire the towers and building 7 to explode.

TO: I've seen those arguments--but the majority of the scientists I've seen come down on the side that a fully fueled airplane could bring down the towers by weakening the steel.

JT: I can't accept that. I don't think it's scientifically--

TO: Why not? We're not material scientists.

JT: It was a controlled demolition. In every building collapse they could recover almost all of the bodies. In that case over 1100 bodies were turned into dust.

TO: Those were two of the biggest buildings in the world and I'm not aware of any other buildings hit by fully fueled jumbo-jets.

JT: They were designed to withstand being hit by jet-liners.

TO: They were designed to withstand being hit by airplanes--but a fully fueled jet? I don't know about that--and the plane hit it at speed ... I could see saying "Are you sure?" But I gotta defer to the experts. I can't be 100% sure but I see no compelling reason to say it couldn't have worked.

JT: There's over 1000 engineers for 9/11 truth. That's over 1000 people--maybe more. I think they put together a very compelling argument.

[ NOTE: You can read some criticism / analysis here. ]

TO: We do agree that planes hit the buildings? Yes?

JT: Yes. But we're not sure that all the alleged people are really dead. Some of them have been found alive since then. [ This is true. Although cases of mistaken identities were resolved fairly quickly. ] Which brings up a Sandy Hook question: who were these children whose pictures we have here. Have they all been identified?

There should be autopsies and death certificates and the like and journalists don't even have that. They don't even have a death certificate for Adam Lanza [ Also True. The Certificate will be released when complete--Huffington Post has requested one on as of Feb 11th and apparently it has not been released yet. ] bringing into question that he was the perpetrator.

It reminds me of the same questions around the 19 hijackers or however many there were. These people had their pictures produced--and this was them--and yet some of them still showed up alive. Some were pilots and such--but they're alive and well in other countries.

TO: Okay. So even if some data isn't correct it still takes a massive amount of proof to overturn something as big as the Holocaust or similar. I've seen all these Bigfoot pictures. I've seen the analysis of the Boston pictures--nothing there is compelling enough to make me decide the conspiracy theories suddenly make more sense than the conventional narrative.

JT: Did you see pictures of severed limbs in the Boston pictures?

TO: No--generally not.

JT: I couldn't see any of that.

TO: But we're seeing a select group of pictures well away from the fact. If 'Joe the medic' shows up and he's not part of the conspiracy and there are tons of problems [ such as people without limbs--but no sign of the limb or enough blood ] he's going to know something is very, very wrong. There has to be, like, hundreds of those people.

JT: Not if it's a controlled drill.

TO: How do you control a drill at the finish line? As soon as the noise-maker goes off, some people are going to go in the direction of the blast.

JT: It was cordoned off by police.

TO: But in the immediate aftermath there are going to be people coming out of shops or going to windows to look ...

JT: People won't run towards the explosion.

TO: What if someone exits the shop into the "blast area."

JT: I think most people would be terrified.

TO: Yeah--but everyone? People with cell phone cameras are taking pictures right away and on twitter instantly. It seems like a terrible risk to stage something that I want to keep secret in a place with more cameras than anywhere else in the city.

JT: The Boston Police department was having drills that day anyway.

TO: I've heard that said. That there were claims of drills. But if I were going to set off an explosion I'm not sure I'd want a drill there that day--and published on my website--and then have a terror event go off. If I were going to do that I might not want a drill there at all. I need all those people to keep the secret.

JT: But the event is the drill.

TO: But then they'll go "it's a drill." Doctors in hospitals won't see people come in. People will say "I was on that drill group." There'd be scores if these were just innocent actors. There's like 15 to 30 people there. Unless they're in on it, they'll be talking immediately to the press.

JT: Perhaps they signed non-disclosure forms.

TO: I've signed a billion NDA's. Nothing that would keep me quiet about a massacre / conspiracy I was a part of as a drill. If I thought the people had killed someone - or even MAYBE killed somene - it wouldn't stop me: let them come after me.

JT: Right ... Well, the media was there and they just made this a reality.

TO: So Joe-Cub-Reporter runs over there ... and sees stuff that doesn't add up. Joe is newly hired and not part of the conspiracy. Are all reporters in on it? Do they have a meeting in the morning to set this up?

JT: Not necessarily because they create the impression the event is real. The drills are very lifelike.

TO: But this is the story of the decade and Joe thinks he'll win a Pulitzer for this. My mother did some reporting a long time ago--she'd have killed for that.

JT: I read the NYT report on this and the story they told--the body parts on the ground--it wasn't there. It's not in the photos. There was a video circulated on the Boston Globe. The pictures we've seen and the story on the cover don't match.

TO: Remember that picture that the NY Post put on their front page [ Warning: Guy About To Die. You don't need to see it. ] of the guy who was seconds away from getting killed by a subway car? They took tons of abuse for that. Maybe the media is intentionally not showing severed limbs?

JT: Well they did show the blown off limb of Jeff Bauman.

TO: In the context of a heroic story.

JT: If someone had wounds like that, why would anyone transport them in a wheelchair.

TO: In the army we were taught to, like, fireman's carry guys who were missing limbs or whatever if we had to.

JT: If a limb had sustained that much injury--that's not what it looks like. I got photographs last week of shark bite injuries. The complexity of the leg and muscle tissue is great--it's illustrated in these photos and the Boston photos don't look anything like that. I was skeptical of the Bauman photos and after seeing these other injuries I'm even more skeptical.

TO: Yeah--but neither of us are capable of doing the analysis of what limb-loss looks like from an IED. But some people--a lot of people do know because of the wars. I suspect a shark bite looks different.

JT: But aren't there numerous others--not just Bauman?

TO: Well--let's be careful. In the early hours there's terrible reporting. If someone reported blown-off limbs early on but maybe most injuries weren't anything like that. If the emergency rooms in Boston had a quiet night on the 15th all these doctors would know. There would be huge medical staffs who would be raising questions.

JT: Well, I disagree. I think that allopathic physicians are probably the easiest to buy off. Pharmaceutical companies do it every day. It wouldn't surprise me.

TO: My wife's a doctor. The way that the drug guys work really isn't like paying for a cover-up. They don't just mysteriously show up and give them money. Some mysterious guy showing up would have to pay off not the doctors--but nurses, orderlies, secretaries--scores of people who might not "take the money." You'd have to do this before your plan--and any given person could "explode on contact" and go public right there.

JT: That's assuming people are honest.

TO: You have to assume that 1 in a hundred isn't honest.

JT: Well, several dozen medical staff.

TO: But it's not just the doctors. What about the nurses?

JT: They say there are 264 injuries. It started at 170 -- and went up. It seems really inflated. Are those figures coming from the hospitals. But look at the EMT reaction on that day. There's closed-circuit footage. It seems really unusual for an alleged event of that scale.

Why didn't the ambulances go right to the scene? There were police cars down there.

TO: I don't know.

JT: You want to wheel people up the street for a photo-op. In a wheelchair.

TO: Maybe--but I think it's more likely that I just don't know enough about what the protocol is with this kind of event.

JT: They have wheels just like police cars.

TO: Yeah, but maybe they don't maneuver as well. Maybe there are security concerns or safety concerns like secondary bombs? Just because I don't know why they set it up that way doesn't mean it's for a photo-op.

JT: Well I didn't see any triage there. It's typical, as you probably know, for EMTs to do triage on the victims to sort on the degree of severity of their wounds.

TO: On the Slate podcast they talked about this. They said there were tents set up for runners for extreme dehydration and stuff and they were converted to triage tents.

JT: But the nurses we've seen--their actions and demeanor didn't match. I noticed that with the Sandy Hook reportage too. These individuals didn't look that disturbed in their body language and tenor of their voices.

TO: I saw people saying one of the Sandy Hook fathers was a fake because he was laughing one minute and crying the next. That's like every funeral I've ever been to.

JT: I wasn't even thinking about that one. But there was hardly a tear there in town that I could see. It was a matter of the anxiety and panic--the adrenaline -that one would have after those events. I didn't see that over-all. I wasn't there, of course.

TO: Isn't this like the "Ref must be blind" things from sports fans? I mean we're not there. So we're at a distance. I think we've gone over a lot of this. I have a place to close this. You have a post of questions you'd like people to answer. I really liked that. I'm going to do a post where I answer those questions. But one of them I want to talk to you about here. "What is a conspiracy theory?" I really liked that and I'd like to answer it here. I think a conspiracy theory has two elements:

It violates risk-to-benefit planning like "I want to invade Iraq so I will knock down the world trade-towers and, if caught, die and possibly destroy the US economy."
They require large numbers of people to keep deadly secrets--secrets that would get them killed if they came out.

JT: I do think that's generally Noam Chomsky's take on 9/11--that there would be too many people involved for it to be fake.

TO: I don't agree with Chomsky on too many things--but I guess we agree on that. Professor Tracey, thank you for a great interview. This went on far longer than I expected.

JT: I'd like to see that post. Thank you!

What Do I Think?
Professor James Tracey was friendly and articulate. I have a very poor reaction to doubting (and worse for denying) the Holocaust--but I'm pretty certain James Tracey is no Nazi. Here's what I think is going on: all of us carry around axioms that we use to build our narratives of events. For example, I think any large conspiracy will leak so I don't see effective large intricate conspiracies anywhere.

In Professor James Tracey's case, I think the axiom is that "most people are not honest" (or, at least, many people)--this is made clear when we talk about the possible bribing of doctors to keep quiet about not seeing a massive influx of causalities.

If this is your axiom--and, perhaps, another is that everyone is using whatever power they have in the ruthless pursuit of more power--then you do see massive conspiracies everywhere.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader which axioms make more sense.

As To The Conspiracy Itself
The conspiracy looks something like this:

Ag group of military/industrial leaders wish to turn the US into a police state for [ reasons ]. They have co-opted the president and Homeland Security and the FBI and the CIA and FEMA but not individual congressmen (jury still out on the Supreme Court*)
They decide the way to do this is to make assault weapons illegal as a sort of part-1 to forcibly seizing power and crushing the resistance. I will note that there are an estimated 1.5 million assault weapons and over 100 million handguns in the US today. These weapons and their ammunition will remain good for a century if kept in reasonable storage. Regardless, first they have to limit people from buying more.
They start staging "events" based on the idea that pubic outrage will lead to gun-reduction the same way it worked in Australia. These events are a strange fusion of real killings or abductions and staged "drills."
The drill-elements (which sometimes are presented to the press as the actual event) use people recruited off the internet but kept quiet somehow--possibly NDAs. Deaths are claimed--but instead of really killing people (save for some few public figures who might cause problems) they only pretend to and therefore cannot produce death certificates or autopsy reports--and cannot fake them. They are forced to suppress any possible questions from, for example, area hospitals, law enforcement that is not "in on it," and EMTs who are not part of the drill and arrive after. That is okay: they have staff to do this--and time--and planning to make it go smoothly. But even if someone leaks ...
It does not matter because the media--all major elements--network and cable news, radio, talk radio, small press, and local press unquestioningly or intentionally accepts their story and will shout down anyone who disagrees. People are, surprisingly, allowed to disagree: they are not killed or disappeared but rather "discredited" (to the limits of the media's ability--these people do not always lose their jobs).
The plan is not working well: despite successfully managing the events (including tricky ones like demolishing two of the largest buildings in the US with, at least, some people inside them) we have been involved in the required wars with little to show for it and gun control has been taken off the table without even a vote. Their operations have also, predictably, produced a massive video record where their operatives are caught plainly by amateur camera operators. The copious publicly available data presents a clear story that, if it were to be accepted, would destabilize the entire conspiracy.

As should be clear from the above, I don't buy this: I believe that the media is too large and diverse to be effectively controlled by a small cabal of board of directors guys--that a conspiracy that could blow up the WTC with firemen (not to mention civilians) inside would have killed Ted Cruz rather than let him scuttle their gun control bill. I don't see why one would have a real and a fake bomb or mix real shooters and missing kids with fake kids in this fashion.

I do not believe it would be likely to control the heads of numerous public organizations over more than a decade (3 presidents, 7 CIA Directors, 5 FEMA Directors, various FBI agents, and so on from 1996 to 2013) who would be necessary for success over the span of Oklahoma to Boston.

I believe the use of actors and drills, at all, would be a non-starter: people seeing their names and images in the paper and being heralded as heroes when they knew they were just part of a drill would collapse instantly. No NDA in the world will protect in the case of a criminal act. All the actors--recruited, we are led to believe, from the Internet (rather than internal sources to various agencies where they could, at least, be screened for psychological suitability)--would be required to maintain character when a story that it was real was breaking on TV and they were on the scene.

I don't believe the presumed cabal could exist for decades without devouring itself.

Finally
The problem with believing in Bigfoot is not the presented photographic evidence: I can't--and most of us can't--properly analyze it. The problem is with the larger narrative itself. Are there giant, very intelligent--but utterly undiscovered hominids living in North America? It's not impossible--but it strains credibility badly. So long as we stick to pictures and questions about them we, without expertise, cannot answer, the conspiracy narrative lives--it makes sense of that 'C' on the moon rock, the lack of stars above the lunar lander, the fact that mountains in the distance are "too close."

So long as we keep data out of context (reports from the first 72 hours around a major event) we can find pieces that don't fit (reports that Lanza had four hand guns, for example).

When we see pictures we instantly and innately build stories around them--two high school guys were the bombers ... or "don't those look like Navy SEALS?"

But when we add expertise and personal experience a lot of this collapses. Scanning a document creates layers if OCR is active. There were triage tents for runners. Doctors--even allopathic ones--would question taking bribes or threats from mysterious individuals however cozy they are with their drug reps.

I think it's very human to use our own beliefs and pictures with elements we don't understand to scaffold up various theories--but they are still faces we're seeing in clouds. They're just pattern-matching to our own internal axioms.

In the end, I guess, we'll all have to decide what levels of proof we need to accept anything.

I'm not real sure Minnesota exists myself.

* See what I did there?

Election 2014: The Obi Wan Kenobi Gambit?

2013-05-02T08:46:00.002-07:00

At 100 days into his second term, Obama got asked by a reporter if he'd "lost his juice." He brushed it off--or tried to, anyway--but it's certainly true that for someone who came out to the Correspondents Dinner to All I Do Is Win he hasn't won a lot this time around.

The relevant question, though, is: will he win in 2014?

Sean Trende, RCP's analyst, predicts that "all things being equal" the Democrats will lose modestly in the House--but, probably not enough to make a big difference.

What happens when we put this all together? Democrats have quite a lot of work to do to take back the House. President Obama would probably have to get his job approval into the high 60s, and the economy probably has to take off. It would probably require a pro-Obama wave akin to 2010-in-reverse. Again, not impossible, but not very likely.

At the same time, things probably have to deteriorate quite a bit for the Democrats before Republicans can expect even low double-digit gains. There just aren’t enough vulnerable Democratic seats to expect big gains, absent some significant wave. Somewhere between a five-seat Democratic pickup and a 15 seat Republican gain seems a safe prediction for now.

That's the basic game--and it's the "smart money" too. It's what the models show.

The results of the midterm forecasting model indicate that while Democrats have a real chance to buck the normal pattern of midterm elections and gain seats in the House of Representatives, they are unlikely to pick up the 17 seats that they would need to regain control of the chamber. That outcome would require a wave election like 2006 or 2010. But the 2014 midterm election is unlikely to be a wave election.

Indeed, it isn't--even if we got D+8 (the 2012 national election) the pick-ups look like this:

There's NO WAY It'll Be D+8 in November 2014! Can't Happen.

Of Course ... Of Course ... But MAAAYBE ...
We know there's no way minority voters--black voters--who, proportionally turned out at a higher rate than white voters in 2012 will come back to the polls without a black man, Barack Obama, running, of course. But maaaybe--just maaaybe the people who felt empowered in 2012 will return in 2014.

We know that women surpassed men in 2012--perhaps the whole war-on-women thing had some currency there--but we know in midterms the population is older ... and male (and white). Of course.

But maaaybe--just maaaybe--there was some recent issue the Democrats might use to galvanize them and get them back to the polls. What about the significant gender-gap on women vs. men when it comes to guns. The Democrats lost that one--and Obama looked pretty weak, of course--but maaaybe their failure could be used to galvanize women voters in a mid-term?

Consider the Latino vote--Rubio is making inroads with the Gang of 8 proposal--but even with him pushing it, it's likely to fail. Especially if the Dems introduce a gay rights amendment into it. It's conspiracy-theory to think the Democrats would tank their own immigration bill--of course--of course. But maybe--just maaaybe--the gay issue could be being used to not only pull the Latino vote but also the youth vote.

The problem from a strategic standpoint is not so much that Obama is well loved or, certainly, has done a great job--the problem is that he is far better at using his failures to mobilize a base that was, for the first time, hyper-mobilized--and won in 2012--than any candidate in the history of candidates.

Turn On Your Voter Targeting Computer, Luke

This, of course, is the tech-gap that Team Obama built--and the Democrats are continuing to expand on in preparation for 2016. We know that Obama can reach individual voters in targeted districts in a way no campaign has ever seen before. What if losing in the first 100 days is part of the plan?

It turns out, the GOP isn't worried:

The Obama campaign’s superior ground game is a myth. They claim they have double and triple the people and offices across the country, yet poll after poll has shown voters have been contacted equally if not more by the Romney campaign and the Republicans. It goes to show you what big government bureaucracy gets you.

I’m glad Democrats are so eager to talk about their ground game. The more they talk, the more they prove the numbers don’t add up.

It’s (ground) game over.

That's from Nov 5, 2012.

The Excel Error Heard Round The World

2013-04-25T05:50:00.002-07:00

WAKE UP, AMERICA!! Well ... They're All Standing Up ...

What you see above is a picture of Mormon inspirational and political artist John McNaughton's Wake Up America! He writes on his website about the painting:

Every man, woman and child in America is enslaved to our national debt. As an artist, I have laid out my vision of the dire circumstances that surround us. Now, more than ever, each American must make a choice: will we unlock the shackles that enslave us, or will we give up the greatest gift we have—our freedom. It is my hope and prayer that America will "wake up" before it is too late.

Truth be told, I'm a sucker for McNaughton: I love his ham-handed symbolism--the game of deciphering the faces to figure out who is playing which parts (many faces are "real people"). I love that he's hidden actual images of keys in the picture and if you mouse over them you get his secrets to ending the national debt (One of them is Vote Out Obama in 2012--I guess we blew that one). I love this stuff--but I don't think McNaughton is being especially sincere here: I don't think he's a deficit hawk so much as a religiously motivated socially conservative Mormon. Oh, sure--I do think he cares about the deficit and the national debt--but I don't think his image of Obama holding America in chains is really about the nation's monetary policy per se.

I was reminded of this picture and, at the same time, something Mitt Romney said during the debates recently when we learned something about a very influential Excel Spreadsheet. Here's what Mitt Romney said:

He said to moderator Jim Lehrer, who works for PBS: “I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to the stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”

Does Mitt Romney really think that cutting PBS will have any impact on the deficit? On the national debt? He can't--it's a ridiculous notion--but he said it. Why?

Before we get to why, let's look at what. Specifically, what have we learned recently about deficit cutting and austerity? Let's start with this chart:

Note: Debt and Deficit are NOT the Same Thing (But This Is Still Worth Noting)

The chart comes from this article:

John Makin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, looks at the Congressional Budget Office’s projections and argues that “American fiscal austerity has been moderate and probably . . . has proceeded far enough for now.” A budget deficit that was more than 10 percent of GDP in 2009 is on track to be about half that this year. “The federal budget deficit is shrinking rapidly,” writes Jan Hatzius, the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, in an April 10 report. Goldman estimates that in the first three months of 2013 the deficit was running at 4.5 percent of GDP, and they forecast a deficit of 3 percent of GDP or less in the 2015 fiscal year. Hatzius adds that “there is still a great deal of room for the economic recovery to reduce the deficit for cyclical reasons.”

You know who Goldman Sachs is--who is the American Enterprise Institute? They're the think tank (influential during the second Bush administration) that fired David Frum for being a liberal and (allegedly, at least) paid money to scientists for critiques of global warming.

Could it be that policies ... like the sequester ... have already had a deficit reduction impact? They seem to think so. But don't we need actual austerity to break the chains of Obama? Maybe.

Maybe not.

A Very Important Excel Spreadsheet
An influential 2011 paper Growth In A Time of Debt by Harvard economists Rinehart and Rogoff has formed the basis for a great deal of thinking and talking about economic austerity programs. Specifically, it says that if the Debt/GDP hits a magic 90% or more tipping point the results are negative growth.

The problem with this paper is that its findings are based on an Excel spreadsheet which, unfortunately, was never peer-reviewed and contained ... a bunch of math errors and missing data (especially Austraila, Canada, and New Zealand who all enjoyed growth after that tipping point). This came to light when a student was assigned to re-create the work on an established paper ... and couldn't do it.

When adjusted and corrected with full data though, it looks like this:

Oops. Growth Was Actually Positive ...

Now, this isn't the only time the report was criticized:

Note also that we need to distinguish between debt that is denominated in domestic currency versus that which is denominated in foreign currency-again a distinction that is not always clear in the Reinhart and Rogoff book. It’s like the difference between, for example, Japan and Argentina. In the case of the latter, the currency board arrangement effectively hamstrung monetary and fiscal policy. The central bank could only issue pesos if they were backed by US dollars. So dollars had to be earned through net exports which would then allow the domestic policy to expand.

But whether or not the excel is wrong--or data is missing--or the guys didn't distinguish something or other nothing in any of this debate negates the requirements that you pay your debts--that you must run controlled deficits over a large period of time. High debt ratios still do correlate to low growth and that shouldn't surprise anyone--but whether or not there is a specific tipping point which requires decisive dramatic action--a policy trigger so to speak--that is now in question.

It is also noteworthy that a great deal of the energy around selling austerity has been hung on this work. Now that the numbers, themselves, do not say exactly what a lot of proponents thought they did (the authors hold that their original thesis remains--but a lot of the dialog and urgency was centered on the idea of a tipping point and that is no longer the case)--will anyone change their minds?

What if their minds weren't made up based on the "facts" anyway?

The Real Issue: Health Care Costs
The issues around the sequester, stimulus, increasing taxes--or cutting Sesame Street--are all pretty much irrelevant. In fact, even assuming we do next to nothing for the next several years our deficit will continue to fall.

If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $845 billion, or 5.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), its smallest size since 2008. In CBO’s baseline projections, deficits continue to shrink over the next few years, falling to 2.4 percent of GDP by 2015.

In fact, it's falling right now:

Blue Bars Going Up Are Smaller Deficits

Here’s a pretty important fact that virtually everyone in Washington seems oblivious to: The federal deficit has never fallen as fast as it’s falling now without a coincident recession.

The problem is that around 2020 heath care costs--most specifically medicare--are projected to rise sharply (end-of-life issues, aging population, etc.) and by 2030, because of this, debt per capita would exceed GDP per capita. This would not be good (American bonds are Junk-Bonds by 2030).

But the takeaway is that all the stuff that people are worried about--arguing about right now? Austerity and cutting SSI and whatever-else? We need to be figuring out how to make health care costs more efficient without damaging the quality of life for people who currently are well served by their medical plans.

When you take all that away the issues about austerity and "entitlement" boil down to one thing (two if you count reductions in military spending if you wish to place that on the table--I don't think those are really on the table for most discussions): ObamaCare.

I'll say, up front, that I am unclear as to whether O-Care will actually achieve any of its goals of lower health care costs (PolitiFact says "Half True") but I know this is where the battle-space needs to happen. It's not about borrowing for PBS and it's not about spending in general. It isn't even about "entitlements" in the way that most people think of them--the broad spectrum of various kinds of government aid such as food stamps and so on.

So Why Cut Big Bird?

The Omnivore holds that not only are all politics personal--most energetic political advocacy is emotional. We have certain emotional needs and we seek facts and positions to support them rather than the other way around. Sure, sometimes a preponderance of the facts can change some opinions (especially if you trust the source) but for the most part our feelings are largely immutable and therefore it's the facts that "must change."

As such my takeaway is that I don't think the mistaken spreadsheet will have much impact on austerity politics. I don't think that the deficit hawks will back off in light of "falling deficits." This is because for the most part the driver isn't the numbers themselves but the emotional issues around making the policy (both for the politicians themselves and, more importantly, their constituent base). I don't think Romney would personally take any joy in axing Sesame Street--but I do think the base he was playing to needed to hear that some of the people's "toys" were being taken away in the name of austerity in order to accept his conservative credentials.

I don't think the visual image of a broadly smiling Obama before a population in chains is simply meant to show how government spending will have some negative impacts on the nation--it's meant to be a visceral gut-punch. It's meant to not only blame Obama--but to ascribe malign intent to what he's doing. Did McNaughton come by the idea that Obama is evil after reading a CBO report? Or did he gather his facts around an emotional core of deciding that Obama is trying to economically (and socially) dismantle America?

Do you think Paul Ryan, who apparently really liked that Rogoff/Rinehold paper, read it and then decided he liked austerity polices? Or did he come into play as a deficit hawk and then pick up a piece of research that seemed to justify him?

I think the answers to these are pretty clear and while I don't think Romney is emotionally driven to ax Big Bird (again, I think it was a political position that played well to his base) and I do think Ryan is a wonk's wonk (meaning that he probably does appreciate the intellectual arguments for austerity as much as the emotional ones) I'm pretty sure that the Excel-error-heard-round-the-world will be far more meaningful to the anti-austerity crowd.

After all--it now becomes their piece of paper to flog as it now upholds their emotionally-driven agenda!

WHY!? (Boston Bombings)

2013-04-22T13:40:00.001-07:00

The word I'm hearing is that the captured suspect 'White Hat' Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is awake and in the hospital--talking. The first question, of course, will be "Who else (if anyone) were you working with." The second question will probably be "Why?" Even now--and moreso in the days that follow--you will hear various pundits try to answer that second question. You will see nonsense like this:

Likewise, one must pay no attention to the fact that terror attacks have increased sevenfold following the invasion of Iraq, which a study cited favorably by the Brookings Institution (hardly a leftist outfit) found. Whether or not the bombing in Boston was carried out by a group originating in the Middle-East, if we are serious about ending attacks like these we must consider their causes, of which U.S. imperialism is certainly one.

And plenty of (more sensible) speculation about how the older brother might have been radicalized. Here are a few things that, if they turn out to be true, might sound pertinent:

Of the (small) number of non-Afghanistan Islamic radicals fighting in Afghanistan, most are Pakistani--but after that? Chechen!
The FBI interviewed the older brother in 2011. He had returned from his trip to Russia (visiting "the homeland" is common for many Russian immigrants)--but they got a tip, from maybe the Russians, that he had been "radicalized." They didn't find too much.
He apparently had some linked YouTube videos (some of which were deleted) from radical Imams.
Many terrorists are, in fact, brothers (the 9/11 groups were largely brothers) and killer diads are not uncommon either. The dynamic (one leader--more psychopathic, one follower is well understood).

But this doesn't answer the question "Why?"

Why Boston? Why the Boston Marathon?
Why the USA? The break-away republics generally hate Russia--not America--even the Islamic factions.
What were they expecting to happen?

The Omnivore Will Tell You

Actually, the Omnivore will speculate--something could come out in the next few days that could change a lot of this thinking--but for now, I believe it's very straightforward: they did it for the same reason all low-level recruits enter into terrorism: relief from alienation. If you look at the literature you will find several theories which have a lot of information on both how and why.

But the stuff that I believe boils down to this: the narratives about terrorism--grievances against the west, the various evils of the "puppet regimes" if the Arab world--and nonsense about Drone Murder--are all the 'reasons' that terrorist give when they decide to take up the war. They, themselves, are not what makes one person do that vs. another.

What drives people to do "this"--and it's the same "this" that drove the Columbine killers which, I think, this is a lot like--is an emptiness inside them (the alienation) intersects with a 'script'--which is a fancy word for "an idea that's out there that kinda presents itself as a solution to your problem."

In the case of immigrants the alienation often comes from not feeling you fit in with 'America' but you also aren't 'in your homeland.' The 'script' of radical religious terrorism promises that you will become something: fierce, terrible, and known by everyone. The terrorist doesn't think of it that way--they tell themselves a story. Their narcissistic grandiosity speaks to them in the language of the oppressed giving the oppressor their righteous comeuppance.

It stokes their rage--and off they go. All that nonsense about US Imperialism? It's an excuse. The suggestion that there was some "trigger" event? Bullshit. This guy went looking--either in Russia or on the Internet or both--and he found what he was looking for. The bomb instructions were like a 'key' that fit into the 'lock' of the uncomfortable emptiness in his mind. When it connected, it turned and suddenly he knew what to do: kill a bunch of people.

For no reason.

This answers all their questions. Why Boston? That's where they lived. The Marathon? It's big and public and easy. It was close by. Why the USA and not Russia? No reason--they lived in the USA. If they'd lived in Russia they'd have attacked something over there. What were they expecting to happen? They were expecting to feel fierce and powerful and terrible--to feel important--to face adventure and danger. They may have held ideas about dying in a way that vindicated everything they did. They may have fantasized about some kind of escape to a place where they would be heroes. Ultimately, though, the answer is the same as always in radical [anything ]: There is no logical end-game. That's why it's radical.

What Can We Do To Stop It?
Nothing. There is no policy change that will make this stop any more than closing a Saudi army base would have stopped the Columbine killers. There will always be scripts. There will always be empty people to be filled with rage. Gun control won't work. Even if guns were entirely illegal. Mental health initiatives won't prevent it--neither of these guys were insane in the way the Aurora shooter was. Neither killer in this case was disordered.

All those things might prevent some attack--sure. Especially the mental health one--but it won't work on this incidence. Nothing beyond getting lucky would.

The answer to the question WHY? is a cold, chilling: WHY NOT.

But that's the wrong question. Knowing "why" is the booby-prize. The right question is "How can we be happy--have hope and faith and joy in a world where this sometimes happens?" The answer is going to be different for everyone--but that's why we have to keep asking it.

Can You Smell What The GOP Is Cooking?!? (Why Can't World Leaders Talk Like Pro-Wrestlers?)

2013-04-19T14:39:00.003-07:00

As a blogger I take my readership pretty seriously and pay close attention to comments, suggestions, or requests. Sometimes, even without a request, I'll find something interesting or funny to write about based on what people on Facebook or Twitter are telling me. This is one of those cases!

Facebook reader Zach DeBoer (who explicitly wants me to use his actual name) self-described conservative and high-information voter writes:

Basically, what I am saying, is it is people like you [ Anyone Who Disagrees With Him] two that allow this crap [ The Boston Bombings ] to continue because you don't live in the real world. Shit like this is always going to happen. The only goal is to limit it as much as possible. Your plan [ Whatever Plan He Imagines Other People Have ] would open the doors for more attacks and would deter nobody. My plan [ To Have America Threaten Military Retaliation On Any Nation Who "Messes With Us" ] Would make people shit their pants just thinking about it.

Why can't world leaders talk like Pro Wrestlers?

No One Would DARE To Bomb Goldberg!

The basic answer (and note, this article has the humor tag if you feel it's obvious) is that world leaders can't talk like The Rock because unlike characters on TV, every word that comes out of their mouths means something--has actual consequences. When world leaders don't or can't back up what they say, they lose face. Losing face has very real real-world consequences.

In the 1985 geo-political game Balance of Power the players took the roles of the US or USSR and made geo-political moves which gained or lost them prestige. The more the situation escalated the more prestige the situation was worth--and backing down would cost you the points--seeing it through would gain you the points ... and if you pushed things too far: Nuclear War. And everyone dies. This was a very canny game--and was based on real-world geo-political simulations. Apparently you can download it here ("Abandon-ware").

I'm Gonna Send Some Insurgents!

While we don't have "prestige point" monitors on the news, the dynamic is very, very real: if following the Boston bombings a statesman had promised retaliation against some nation-state and then did not follow through (apparently, in Zach-world, against Chechenia--meaning against Russia) it would further weaken the US's footing in world affairs. For proof, let's look at someone who follows the exact advice Zach is giving:

Yeah, He's Being Taken Seriously ...

If you think I'm being unkind by suggesting that someone who considers themselves politically smart is endorsing North Korea, rest assured I'm not:

Zachary DeBoer North Korea has it right. Nobody, including the United States, wants to mess with them. They are pathetic compared to the United States but they seem to be able to keep the U.S. at bay. That is because they are crazy and the United States knows it. You shoot one soldier they might just set off a nuke.

What Zach, apparently, isn't seeing is that North Korea is a pariah state--a rogue nation under crippling sanctions where only a tiny, tiny portion of the populace can live any kind of reasonable lifestyle. Their leadership is a joke--both figuratively as we try to determine if this guy is serious or not--and literally as everyone--everyone makes fun of them. They are already in the geo-political loss-state. They have no further to fall.

Now, it's true that no one messes with North Korea and, sometimes, they get away with military provocations against South Korea ... usually semi-accidentally. Does this mean their "insanity" and "tough talk" is working? No--firstly, despite what Zach says, they are not "crazy." They are brutal, petty, and backwards--but they are wholly rational when playing from that position--which is why their gambit works: Game Theory.

From Wikipedia:

Game theory is a study of strategic decision making. More formally, it is "the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers."

Game Theory tells you what your best-odds move is for a mathematical simulated "game" (scenario). In the case of North Korea, the game is simple: so long as they get the goods necessary to prop up their regime they not only will not attack--they cannot: to attack would be suicide ... and their generals are not suicidal. So long as everyone knows this, the only winning move is just to pay. More deeply to (a) not initiate a regime ending attack (which would provoke a terribly expensive Seoul-crushing* counter-strike) and (b) pay up until they hopefully decay safely from the inside.

It's this calculus that keeps them going--not Kim's tough talk or KAH-RAY-ZEE FACE. Everyone in the game knows this--but to people who aren't paying attention (and the sheltered Nork citizens?) it may well look like Kim really is pushing us around.

For a world leader like America, though, where people want all kinds of things from us? Well, that's a little different--if we were subject to being pushed into corners because our leaders were running their mouths like Kim Jong Un runs his? What might happen?

For one thing, under the Zach-Doctrine, you can bet "Iran" would attack us immediately:

The Saudis always want to "fight the Iranians to the last American" and it is "time for them to get in the game," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells the French foreign minister in a newly released cable from February 2010.

Zach believes we have "a lot of buttons to push" meaning nuclear ones--but he'd be unintentionally right in that if we adopted a maximal unthinking retaliatory stance? We'd have an awful lot of buttons other people would be pushing too.

Of course we all know Kim is no statesman. We have to hope America's leaders would be. Who did Zach like in the 2012 primaries?

Uzbeki-beki-bekistan!

* I know, right?

What Color Is Your Terrorist?

2013-04-18T13:29:00.001-07:00

Terrorism Issue Chart: Color Coded For Your Convenience

Dylan Byers of Politico writes:

For many journalists I've spoken with today, this ignorance is tortuous. The identification of the attacker(s) and the reasons for the attack will likely have enormous political (and potentially geoplitical) ramifications, which will vary greatly depending on whether the attacker(s) is domestic or foreign, acting alone or as part of an organization. We're standing on the verge of a very important national conversation about something, and we have no idea what it is.

Ace of Spades wisely decodes this:

Basically he wants to know if he's on Offense or Defense, or, as he puts it, "what sort of national conversation we'll be having," or something like that. (Safe link to The Other McCain.)

I think this is right--when we see the faces of the terrorists (and there are plenty of potential faces bouncing around the Internet) based on their skin color we will instantly decide we know who they are and why they did it. Once that happens there will be an immediate attempt to repudiate the actions by whichever side feels defensive and to pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey by whichever side feels vindicated.

There have been several "suspects" and images circulated. As far as I can tell, the current state of affairs is this:

The police are looking for two people--suspects--but have not released images of them.
They have identified the bombs (only two), their composition (pressure cookers using an Internet available recipe), and there has been no claims of support from abroad.
That's about it--and it's precious little to speculate on.

What Do I Think?

Terrorists thinking usually has a goal that they wish to promote in one of two ways*. The goal of terror is to inspire otherwise inert people to support the terrorists either by recognizing them as a defacto government or by rallying them to take up arms against the terrorists oppressors. In the case of attacks on America by foreign agencies they are trying to make the sell to sympathizers in their own land who they hope will take up arms against either American forces or, prior to the Arab Spring, US-supported governments.

In the case of domestic terrorism the goal is either to bring attention to a cause the terrorists feel isn't getting enough attention or to provoke a "security response" by the state which will "prove them right" (that is: ordinary people don't think The State is evil enough but after the post-terror crack-down, boy will they). These rules have applied to IRA bombings (provoking a crack-down), abortion clinic bombings (drawing attention and rallying the faithful), and the 9/11 attacks (making America look weak to bolster support by overseas forces).

We tend to sort these causes--and these audiences--by skin color and then, after skin color, by presumed ideology. What's interesting about this is not "that we do it." We all know we do it--but the interesting question is: Why are we waiting to find out 'why'?

After all, if it turns out that the bombers were upset about the lack of attention to Kermit Gosnell will that make his crimes any less heinous? If they turn out to be Islamic, will it make the already-apocalyptic threat of Al-Q any more threatening (after all, who among us, would be surprised by another AQ terror attack)? If it turns out the bombers were upset about the lack of gun-control in America would that make gun control activist any less credible (if you answered "yes," and it turns out the bombers are pro-life will it make the pro-life movement less credible?).

If you think the individual actions of crazy people make a side "less credible" what are you doing to police your own--do you have a global reach to shut down crazies who act on your interests? No--you don't. Everyone in America save for a few demented fools (and remember, there are fans of the Aurora shooter) will decry this act.

Why are we all waiting to see what conversation to have?

* There is also the goal of driving a specific foreign policy such as the release of prisoners or whatever. In recent times we have seen very little of that.

The Boston Blast: Terrorist Or Not?

2013-04-16T06:22:00.001-07:00

The story of the Boston Marathon atrocity is still unfolding. Right now, it looks like there are three dead--including an 8 year old boy--and many, many injured. Some gravely. Perhaps we got lucky: apparently there were additional devices that did not explode and it surely could have been worse. John Hinderaker (Power Line) notes that while people did flee in the immediate moments following of the explosions many of the runners crossed the finish line and continued on to the hospitals to help with the wounded or donate blood. He notes that even in the uncertain smoke-filled, blood-soaked aftermath there were many civilians as well as police running "towards the sounds of the guns" to help their fellow Americans.

Many of these were professionals. The finish line of a marathon is a fortuitous spot to bomb, in that doctors, policemen, ambulances and so on are stationed there. Some soldiers happened to be on hand. But others were not professionals. Many just helped out, bravely, wherever they could.

We didn't all "come together:" Bill O'Rilley criticized Obama for not using strong enough language (he did not use the word terrorism--which probably makes the Benghazi folks feel trolled). InfoWars goes straight to the point asking "Who Do They Plan To Blame?"

The unaware and naïve will state that “They will blame the true culprit behind the attack, of course!” Unfortunately, in the past couple decades I have seen numerous terrorist attacks where the blame was NOT placed on the true culprit, or, the blame was extended to totally uninvolved groups and organizations in order to politicize the event. Governments (especially our government) squeeze each man-made disaster like a ripe papaya until every drop of sweet advantage can be collected.

And they ask: Is This The Moral Equivalent Of Drone Strikes? Slate, on the other hand, weighs in with some good, solid advice about how to act in the still-early hours: the media will get much of the story wrong, we should not jump to conclusions (especially vile, racist ones), and we should hold off passing along speculation until things are confirmed. Also: hold off on clever tweets.

It's A Gosnell Dig (If You Don't Know What That Is, It's Because Of The Media Black Out--but You're Probably Happier For It)

Omnivorous Analysis

I am not a terrorism expert--and, although I have had Military Intelligence training, I am not qualified to expertly diagnose this attack from thousands of miles away--however, I would like to point out a few things and so I'm going to engage in my own speculation and analysis with the explicit caveat that repeating anything I've said is dicey. While I have tried my best to keep my facts straight, even some of the major-league news sources may have gotten things wrong at this stage.

Analysis: I do no think this is external Islamic terrorism. I believe the choice of the Boston Marathon is opportunistic and the date/place is, likely, not important symbolically (I do not think this is a 'tea party' tax-day protest).

Why?

What Do We Know?

We know that this happened in Boston on April 15th, the day of the Boston Marathon. We know that the bombs were relatively small in size (compared to, say, massive car-bombs). No one credible in the international world has claimed credit (so far as I know, no one at all has).

What Does This Mean: Terror attacks usually have symbolic meanings beyond the dollar-value of damage and loss of life they cause. One of the reasons why the American heartland has not been struck despite it being much worse defended than New York City is because the "terrorist street cred" doesn't extend past the East Coast. If you hit NYC, you're a hero. If you blow up St. Louis, they're going "where's that!?"

I do not think the choice of Boston or the event of the marathon is likely to be a target for Islamic terror.

Something has been made of the fact that April 15th is "Tax Day" and Boston has a mythological position in the history of American Taxation (the, erm, Boston Tea Party). I, again, do not place too much stock in this coincidence: I think it is more important that the marathon was held on April 15th in Boston rather than the other way around ("Gee, guys, we have to hit something in Boston on April 15th ... inn' there some kind of running event?").

In short, I think the smart money is that whatever the ultimate motives of the bombers, the choice of the date was picked because of the marathon and not because of its historical significance.

A final conclusion from what we know: If this were an act of Jihad there would have been Public Relations immediately after the event. For a foreign actor there is simply no reason not to take credit: enough bombs detonated that this was not an embarrassment. Islamic terror acts are conducted with planing after the event to gain media cycles. The machinery would have been in place.

What Do We Think We Know?

If you want to get on StratFor's mailing list you can get their (short) article analyzing the explosives. They know what everyone else knows: they were small, likely used plastic explosive, there were three or four of them, and not all of them went off (they note a lack of broken windows speaking to the relatively small size). Their conclusion: these are the kinds of bombs almost anyone could build. They require no special knowledge or infrastructure. They could be hidden in backpacks or almost any other container.

A Counter Terrorism Expert calls the bombing "Madrid-Style." He notes that:

The timing was done for maximum traffic in the area.
There were probably several bombers (he estimates "two")
There were many, many cameras in the area--we should get footage.
Someone posing as a helper or audience member could have "easily fooled" security personnel

I do not think much of this analysis--especially since the bombings in Madrid killed almost 200 people and wounded almost 2000. They used far more actors and were far more coordinated. This hit more or less one area with small bombs, outdoors, and with minimal "coordination."

What Does This Mean: The takeaway, however, is that this bombing is a low-skill, low-investment attack on a porous and densely packed event. In short, the choice of the Boston Marathon may well have been ideal for a small group of inexpert actors with small explosions. There is no reason to suspect a large support network or elite training was involved.

Conclusions

We'll know more in a few days as events unravel (especially footage) and the narrowed suspect list. Until then, I would be leery of any speculation--especially the above. I think that a key thing that we know is something we are not seeing: the press-release. It makes no sense to blow a lot of people up without issuing some kind of statement. Even individual actors of questionable sanity like the Unabomber issued manifestos.

Why haven't we seen one? My best guess is that the actors are right now going to ground and are reluctant to release anything that would further give them away. The American post-9/11 security apparatus is like an iceberg: for every part you see (TSA agents groping you) there is a lot you don't see (NSA Signal Intelligence). These guys may have heat on them already.

At least I hope that's the case.

My prayers to everyone in Boston or otherwise involved. May they recover ... and may we do justice to the perpetrators.

Only Rand Paul Can Go To Howard: The Real Story

2013-04-12T06:24:00.002-07:00

Rand Paul, potential 2016 Republican hopeful, spoke at "Traditionally black university" Howard as the second Republican guest in 30 years: Here is a transcript. As a rising star in the GOP it was a fairly gutsy bit of outreach: he got tough questions, he got (slightly) heckled, and he probably knew going in that he wasn't going to change a lot of minds with just one speech.

What Happened?
The general consensus is that he took some hits but didn't collapse. His biggest flubs were asking if the audience if they knew that Abraham Lincoln as well as the first black legislators and the founders of the NAACP were republican. The answer from the audience was a resounding (and unimpressed) "Yes!" It turns out those guys know their history after all: there was laughter when he got the name of the first popularly elected black senator wrong.

Perhaps the worst bit was when he got quizzed on the Civil Rights Act--which he had criticized at length--but claimed he supported during the speech. As someone whose father has newsletters that discuss a coming race war he may have to provide better support for his claim that he's all-in on civil rights.

Still, he was mostly treated respectfully (some students unfurled a banner saying they rejected white supremacy--and got applause) and did not really gaffe or call Latinos "wetbacks" or anything similar.

What Did He Say?
If you read his speech, the crux of his argument is as follows:

My position is that I'm really for rights for everyone. And all rights. So are all Republicans! Specifically, I and other Republicans believe rights are best served when government is run by the states! That's State's Rights, y'all.
State's Rights is not just code for the right to discriminate, segregate, and abuse.
And hey, we're the face of emancipation--ask Frederic Douglas! Or, hey, how about ... Lincoln? We like Martin Luther King too ... (and a bunch of other guys) ... But we lost the black vote ... it's true ... how'd that happen?
In the Great Depression Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered free markets! They put food on the table--but how'd that work out?
It sucked: Black unemployment is 14% and the economy sucks. Big government isn't your friend!
We'd give blacks vouchers to avoid failing schools and stop the massive drug incarceration that often puts black kids in jail when white rich kids get off!
So maybe consider me in 2016, ok? (Okay. He didn't actually say that--but trust me: it's implied if maybe not the way you think).

During the Q&A he made some of the comments discussed above.

What Are People Saying?

Hot Air thinks he gave it a good try--and while he may not have 'stuck the landing' he probably came off okay.

That’s what Paul did today. It wasn’t perfect. It likely didn’t turn a lot of voters. But it gave a young, minority audience mostly ideologically hostile to the idea of libertarianism a new face to put on right-of-center ideas. A man who came to them and answered their questions.

The Root concludes Paul's plan for winning black audiences is ... amnesia:

That's the only conclusion I can reach after watching the C-SPAN broadcast of Paul's 52-minute appearance today at Howard University. He deserves credit for appearing before a potentially hostile audience to make the case for conservative policies with which most black voters utterly disagree. But he also deserves strong criticism -- even derision -- for pretending that there's any mystery about why most black folks are so skeptical about the GOP. He wants us to forget the party's recent history -- and his own.

TPM points out that Rand Paul's own father point by point refutes a lot of what he claims to be true about the GOP quoting one of the infamous newsletters on segregation:

“It is human nature that like attracts likes. But whites are not allowed to express this same human impulse. Except in a de facto sense, there can be no white schools, white clubs, or white neighborhoods. The political system demands white integration, while allowing black segregation.”

Charles Blow is even more blunt:

The speech was a dud. It was a clipped-tail history lesson praising the civil rights record of the pre-Southern Strategy Republican Party, while slamming the concurrent record of the Democrats.

What's Going On?
All that commentary is missing the real point of Paul's speech. We can see a textbook case of this when The Washington Examiner suggests that Paul "stumbled but did not fall" noting:

“I’ve never been against the Civil Rights Act,” Paul stated flatly in response. “Ever.”

After the audience was silent in response, the host of the event encouraged Paul to explain his position further, reminding him that “this was on tape.”

Paul responded that he was only concerned about certain portions of the Civil Rights Act that were beyond race.

His attempt to explain earned him a little bit of applause from the audience but it perhaps he should have been more prepared to address the topic.

Rand Paul ... wasn't sufficiently prepared? What's up with that--he ... uh ... didn't know that might come up? Does that, you know, seem likely? The guy is an eye surgeon. He knows how to be prepared. If you want to know what was really going on, everything you need to know is right here:

During the Q&A Paul was asked what he thought of Voting ID laws, comparing them to the ruled-unconstitutional literacy-test of the Jim Crow laws. He responded:

One student asked about voting rights, wondering how he could say he was in favor of voting rights when he supported voter ID laws.

“I think if you liken using a license to using a literacy test, you demean the horror of” what happened during the Jim Crow era, Paul responded.

What's "right there?" you ask? Well, it's in front of your face--Voting ID laws from one perspective make a lot of sense: why should someone who cannot provide evidence of citizenship--the bar one legally must cross to vote--be allowed to vote? That's seems--from a certain perspective--like a no-brainer.

The reason these laws are controversial is because for a certain demographic (poor, black, and often older) providing that documentation turns out to be hard in a way it really, really, honestly isn't for most middle class and even poorer whites. Many in this group don't drive, may not have easy access to their birth certificate (I can't lay my hands on mine, for instance--I'd have to go hunting for it), and otherwise get by day-by-day without citizenship-proving ID.

If you know someone in that demographic (or someone sympathetic to that demographic who also knows that particular demo doesn't statistically contain any Republican voters) then it looks different: specifically, it looks like voter suppression. This looks a lot like the Jim Crow laws where a test (can you get an ID vs. can you read) is layered on top of the constitutional requirement (are you a citizen) in a way that makes it specifically hard for one demographic that is voting against the one pushing said law.

In other words, to the black audiences they look a lot alike. To you, reader, the white audience (how do I know? I know--even over the Internet) they (maybe) don't.

That's what this was about: Rand Paul was physically at a historically black college talking to a black audience. Politically he was on the Internet talking to a white audience: his potential base-voters for the 2016 primary.

His arguments--that Republicans historically loved MLK (his dad didn't)--that Democrats won the black vote with "gifts" in the New Deal Era (true--but they also won white votes with that deal--they won everyone)--and to totally ignore the Southern Strategy and, uh, perceptions of GOP racism--sound great to the GOP Base and almost nonsensical to the black audience at Howard. You can argue that the GOP as a whole is misrepresented by the media and liberals (but I repeat myself)--but to not address it at all? That's insane and that's how you know what his real purpose was.

It's key because his approach is not intended to win over blacks in the audience who found it a bit preposterous--could he really think the kind of educated students who go to Howard wouldn't know that Lincoln was a Republican? No. But modern day white voters might not. Eh?

What he's doing is preparing a battery of approaches--a talking-points-strategy--intended to shore up the Republican base against charges of racism and stop "white flight" from the party. Consider:

It was frequently observed that a Romney victory would have required a historic performance among white voters, provided that Obama could match his ’08 performance among non-white voters. Bush’s 2004 performance among white voters wouldn’t get it done anymore. In 2016, the math gets even more challenging. If the white share of the electorate declines further, Republicans won’t just need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among white voters, they’ll also need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among non-white voters.

Rand Paul wishes to position himself as the "savior" of the party. He's doing this by sticking a very public thumb in the eye of the administration (his theatrical 13 hour filibuster) and now by providing a narrative to be used against charges of racism which he hopes will make him seen as a leader both in outreach and strategic ideological positioning against the biggest hurdle of 2016: the potential of another huge minority vote turn-out and under-representation by whites.

That's what this is all about. He isn't trying to win blacks with his outreach--he's trying to win the hearts of white GOP base voters. Trying to rehabilitate State's Rights? The use of Frederick Douglas (remember the CPAC dust-up where a black speaker was trying to get Republicans to use Frederick Douglas as a defense against leftists playing the race card)? The Obama-Failed-Blacks narrative? These are all white talking points that are used in discussions, largely, with other whites when the race thing comes up. They're not convincing to black audiences who will need more than Rand Paul waxing elegant about general constitutional rights to change their minds about the Southern Strategy.

But for white people feeling that the GOP might be ... toxic? This is a a darn good try at an antidote to their fleeing the party or just not turning out in sufficient numbers. That's what Rand Paul's trip to Howard was all about--being that champion. His speech was properly structured and filled with all the right talking points for that.

And in that context? He did a pretty good job!

The Politics Of: Flat ScreenTVs

2013-04-08T14:05:00.001-07:00

I Bet That Wheel Chair Was Paid For By The State!

Above is an image of London looter and all around droog David Knots, a looter on government disability. He was one of several, the linked article notes, who although receiving money from the state due to his disability, was able enough to kick in a store window. It's easy to get upset at someone who not only takes money from the government to live--but "repays it" by stealing a television--but let's not be so hasty ...

Bob Here, Clearly Not Disabled, Was Able To Loot THREE TVs AT ONCE!!

And let's also consider the fact that those TVs were the easy pickings. Some ...

Are Harder To Get ...

Why is the Flat Screen TV the "iconic image of looting?"

Like This Guy--From The Movie Cloverfield ... A Giant Monster Is Tearing Up The City ... But Hey? SIXTY INCHES!!

Why Are Flat Screen TV's The Image Of Luxury?

Let's back up a second--what the hell am I talking about? If you have been paying attention to the dialog around "what constitutes poverty" today, you may have run across something like this:

The teacher presented the class with a scenario of a [poor] woman, outlining her day-to-day expenses and asking what she could cut to save money.

The class was merciless. By the time they were done with her, that hypothetical woman had NOTHING left, and she didn't have much of a life to start with.

Of course:

The instructor asked how many people in the class thought they could live that way themselves to help budget, and let me tell you, no one raised their hand. It wasn't a matter of budgeting, it was a matter of living.

Well, yeah--but we all got ours now, don't we?

Or, maybe, you've seen something like this (commentary that many poor people own 2 or more TVs):

You cannot be poor if you are overweight. You cannot be poor if you have air conditioning. You cannot be poor if you have indoor plumbing. America’s definition of poor has changed but mine has not. I grew up poor and now consider myself wealthy. Most people would look at my possessions and think that I am lower middle class. I live in a barn with air conditioned living quarters. I have indoor plumbing and never miss a meal. I drive a ten-year-old truck. I am warm in the winter and cool in the summer (even in this 108 degree temperatures we are having). My clothes are jeans and shirts without designer names stitched on them. I have at least two coats that I wear in winter. I have satellite TV and also a cell phone. In 1950 not even the wealthy had all these things. So I am wealthy. Thank God for the wealth we enjoy in America.

The larger question (flat-screens aside for a moment) is this: If you have a certain degree of comfort of living can you actually be said to be poor?

It's a big deal: The Heritage Foundation published a report that points out that a lot of people below the poverty line have air conditioning, refrigerators, and even things like an Xbox ... and TVs ... usually flat screens.

They Have AC AND A Ceiling Fan!? WHAT THE HELL, POOR PEOPLE!?

The immediate take-away from the above is that almost everyone has a TV, Fridge, and Stove/Oven. After that, we're in "most people" until we get down to around a coffee maker.

In fact, whether you are poor or not seems to have almost no effect on whether or not you own two TVs:

I Bet The TVs On The Far Right Are Much Bigger ...

So what's going on? Can you truly be said to be poor if you have a couple of flat-screens? At that point, what does "poor" mean, anyway?

The Truth About Poverty In America
Poverty in America--defined as having nothing or next to nothing--is best described as homelessness. As of 2011 there were a little over half a million homeless in America. These people have no TVs, no Xbox's and no air conditioning.

The next level up from homeless is "extreme poverty" which comes to around 20MM people. This can be around (or as little as) 2 dollars per day. However, at this level you can get food stamps and other aid so you can get help. Despite that, apparently around 50MM Americans are "food insecure" (they miss meals due to poverty). Food insecurity generally comes when a family is close to the edge but is making it--and then suffers a hardship like medical bills or the loss of a car. In these cases the family may be able to ultimately get help but that will take time. In these cases, so long as the poverty is not extremely rural, food insecurity is generally temporary.

Do these people own TVs?

Each Point is 1 Amenity from the Heritage List.

The median score for poor households is 14 Amenities but we can see that there are quite a few--say, 15% who have a lot fewer than that. I bet, however, that after a refrigerator (which, you know, I'm not sure people would really consider a luxury--also a stove)--a lot of those are TVs. Probably flat screens. Keep in mind that 30% of poor households own an XBox so that's probably the top 1/3rd there (maybe from 10 or 11 on).

The Truth About Flat Screen TVs
The problem with the "flat screen" TV, today is that any TV you buy is pretty much going to be a flat screen:

As Far As I Can Tell, This Is The Cheapest TV Walmart Sells

And, really, that's not surprising:

The Prices--They Are Down!

Looking at these numbers, it's no surprise that many poor families own flat screen TVs. If you own any TV, it's a flat screen. If you ever have 200 bucks to spare you could even own two of those Walmart specials. But the real fact of the matter is that things have changed in America. It's not that easy to get an apartment without a refrigerator, stove, and oven. The way consumer credit works, making purchases in the 1-3 hundred dollar range is available to almost anyone with anything approaching a credit card.

This past weekend I bought a new flat screen TV to replace the one in our bedroom that had gone bad. The 42" Plasma TV in our bedroom was 2300.00 new when I got it in 2005. Eight years later, it was replaced by a similar model (same size, no internet or other fancy features) for under 500.00. The weight difference is around, I'd guess, 40 to 60 pounds. I wanted help to carry the old Samsung. The brand new Vizio? I carried it up the stairs myself without any difficulty whatsoever.

Let's Do An Experiment

Let's pick a time in our past when we knew what "poverty" looked like. I'm going to select 1990 as a year for people of my generation (I'm in my 40's). Back then a 32" TV would have been one of the larger ones in existence. Cell phones were for the very rich. A VCR was state of the art and a cordless telephone wasn't quite science fiction--but was definitely a big deal.

We will purchase for that person a TV (32"), a Microwave, a VCR, a stereo, a cordless phone, and a coffeemaker (these are the Heritage Amenities that aren't things like kitchen appliances, air condition, or a ceiling fan--which are above about the 40% mark). I'm leaving out the cell phone business because it's either an obvious low-blow or time for an Obamaphone rant.

Our 1990's family goes shopping. The TV is the priciest item at 1200.00--but the Microwave could be a big ticket item too at maybe 700.00. I've priced the VCR at 175.00 and the stereo at around 130.00. I don't doubt you could do a little better--but I think that's reasonable. I cannot find a price for a cordless telephone but, in 1994 the digital cordless phone arrived--I have estimated it at 300.00. A coffee maker? Hasn't changed much: around forty bucks for a medium one. That total? A grand sum of 2545.00.

Today, using Walmart? Well, I can't find a VCR--but we'll get the guy a DVD player. The price for everything comes to only 484.00. In 1990's dollars? Only 272.00 USD.

Conversely, that 2545.00 1990's dollars? That's 4520.75 2013 dollars.

What did we learn?

We learned that the cost of consumer electronics has nosedived in the past twenty years. The cost of food and rent has not. Families that live "close to the edge" are in a position where even small amounts of extra cash can buy luxuries like game-systems for the kids or TVs (even large ones) or DVD players. When these things first appeared they were hundreds or thousands of dollars. Today, these cheap.

Rather than being the hallmarks of big-spending by an upper-middle class family (which, I think, is where these are psychologically for many of us) they are, instead, a lot more akin to a family from the 1990's having a single Aiwa CD Player which clocked in at around 200.00.

TOTAL LUXURY. Throw in a Furby or two to round it out.

Would you think that a struggling family that owned one of those in the 90's was totally out of control? Me neither (but look at that cassette deck--do they need that and a CD Player?). We're treating a family with the CD player like they bought an 80" AQUOS TV instead. In short, a lot of the concern about poor people with TVs, cordless phones, and microwaves has, I think, a lot more to do with what these things signify than what they really, actually cost today.

END NOTE: One thing that poor families lack in greater proportion to better off ones is a Personal Computer. I have read that buying a PC replaces the "educational niche" that buying a set of encyclopedias filled previously--families get a PC "for the kids" (if for no other reason) and spend the ~1500.00 on that instead of encyclopedias ... which is why all the encyclopedia companies are out of business. It's also doing some damage: lower income families may actually suffer from a PC-gap in ways that are meaningful.

The Politics Of: BioShock Infinite

2013-04-05T06:18:00.001-07:00

A Time When Men Were Real Men, Women Were Real Women, And Flying Cities ROCKED YOUR WORLD

BioShock Infinite is, by the early date of April, the game of the year--it might be the game of the decade. Released as a follow-up to the original blockbuster BioShock which, itself, came from the group that produced the well-lauded System Shock II (they claim the Shock series are spiritual successors) it had a high bar to pass. It didn't just pass it--it vaulted over it--into the sky.

We'll take a look at the game--and the politics--of BioShock Infinite.

The Game

The Whole Game Is a Moving, Interactive Work of Art

BioShock Infinite is set in an alternate reality in the year 1912. You are Booker DeWitt, hard-drinking, hard-core ex-Calvary ex-Pinkerton private detective on a mission to ... recover a girl ... or something. You're on a boat, in the rain, going to a lighthouse while the people rowing you there make snide remarks as they banter. When you get there ... well ...

There's a lot to say about BioShock that would count as spoilers and I'd rather not, even in the next potentially spolier-rific section, just give everything away. So let's stick to the basics: where the last BioShock had you in a fantastical art-deco city at the bottom of the ocean, BioShock Infinite takes you to an awe inspiring neo-colonial floating city in the clouds.

Again we see the BioShock system of magical enhancements to go along with your arsenal of weapons. You recharge both energy (Salt) to power these as well as finding ammo and food to replenish health and conventional weapons (if they ever make a BioShock Infinite movie--unnecessary as playing through the game is kinda a movie--they better have whoever is playing DeWitt grab and eat a pear for no good reason--in the game you run around scarfing down fruit, popcorn, and hotdogs in the middle of fire-fights).

The game is polished. The characters are vibrant. The story is intricate and perhaps even deep. We'll talk about that in a minute but there are a few things I want to say up here.

The first is this: Saying that BioShock Infinite is what the future of First Person Shooters will look like is like saying the Mona Lisa is what the future of artwork will look like. First Person Shooters are no more going to be able to recapture Infinite's lightning in a bottle than the multitudes of artist throughout history are going to be able to become Leonardo Da Vinci. BioShock Infinite is an example of the art-form at the top of its, well, game.

That said, it isn't without its problems. If BioShock Infinite does mark a turning point in game-design evolution it will be the point where a game was made that some significant part of its target market came away thinking "I'd rather keep exploring than shooting." Indeed, the slow, awe-inspiring build-up to the first set of running fire-fights does leave you wanting more--and you do get more--but that slow, amazing wandering through the city of Columbia echoes the original opening of HalfLife where the credits came in over a tram-ride through the Black Mesa facility and gamers of a previous era were amazed by the, well, the story-like opening. BioShock Infinite turns this up so high that for some people the eventual realization that this is a shooter is a letdown.

Slate found the ultimate message to be shallow because, eventually, you do wind up shooting everyone:

In changing the frame of reference from deviant computer intelligences or comic book heroes to evangelical racism and labor organizers, Levine's mistrust of extremism begins to feel like sleight of hand. It’s fair to wonder if Levine creates moral equivalence between an oppressor and his victims as a sneaky way to fall back on the same old shoot-‘em-up model, covering over any inconsistencies with spectacle and production value. It would be possible to make a shooting game tied to the point of view of one side in a conflict, but Levine’s expectation that extreme commitment necessarily leads to corruption makes this structure impossible. His stories don’t commit to sides—they mistrust all parties, something that’s easiest to express by having everyone eventually turn on the protagonist.

Kotaku was dismayed by the extreme often graphic bloody violence:

And you can just walk around drinking it in, and you're eating all kinds of candy and hot dogs and there's this amazing carnival tutorial section where you can launch magic at a hidden devil and there are posters, so many posters, posters everywhere, you read them all and see all these names and brands and colors, and you keep having to just sort of stop and stare, and there are flowers everywhere, and a woman offers to sell you a flower to stick in your lapel and then there's this huge robot dude standing there and oh my god it's a barbershop quartet singing the Beach Boys and whaaat...

You grab one police officer and RAM HIS FUCKING FACE INTO A SPINNING BLADE and like, BLOOD AND SKULL-CHUNKS BLOW EVERYWHERE and WOW what in the world and then everyone starts shooting and then this happens: [ Graphic Image ]

Yeah. It's kinda like that. The Kotaku piece notes that when asked, game creator Ken Levine gave an "impenetrable answer" when asked about the violence. I think he was stumbling around trying to say "Dude, I got around 100 Million to make a First Person Shooter. What was I supposed to do?" In an interview Levine likened the FPS design to a musical where, instead of music breaking out, fire-fights do.

That said, whatever the future impact of BioShock Infinite is, if you half way like computer games you ought to take a look at it: it's a milestone of some kind. As I said at the start, early in the year, it's probably the game of the year. Early in the decade, it's probably the game of the decade.

Let's do the politics!

The Politics of BioShock Infinite
Let's start with the language. The floating city is called Columbia. It's named after the Hollywood studios, no? No. Columbia is the female persona of America (until she was replaced by Miss Liberty--you know, the Statue and, post WWII, by her brother Uncle Sam. The studio's icon comes from her--not the other way around):

In the political cartoons of the 19th and early 20th century, this personification was sometimes called "Lady Columbia" or "Miss Columbia." She was a classical goddess of the New World, comparable to the British Britannia, the Italian Italia Turrita and the French Marianne.

The city in the sky is America--a timely name for her, anyway.

The city was created by The Prophet Zachary Hale Comstock after receiving a vision from an archangel. The character of Comstock is a callback to two people. The first is Joseph Smith, founder of the Later Day Saints movement known today as the Mormons.

He's Not A Good Guy--But Up In The Clouds, Almost Nobody Is

In this case the echoes are extreme patriotism (of a sort, we'll get to that in a minute) and the relocation of the religious center of gravity from Jerusalem to America. In Comestock's world, his city leads the people out of the "Sodom Below" and into, literally, the heavens--but it's still America (at least until they have a falling-out and he takes his city up, up, and away).

The second call-back is to his name: that of Anthony Comstock. Anthony Comstock was a US Postal Inspector and anti-pornography crusader. He created / inspired a battery of laws called the Comstock laws that prohibit the sending of pornography through the mail. They also prohibit mailing contraception or even information about contraception. These laws were used to go after doctors mailing various legitimate contraceptive devices and found themselves in court as lately as 1965. He is considered by some to be the inspiration for presidential candidate Rick Santorum and some of the laws in modified form remain on the books today.

The language of BioShock infinite runs deeper than this (click for a look at parallels to the Wizard of Oz that appear, probably quite intentionally, in the game)--but the meat of the politics of BioShock isn't exactly the language or the references--it's racism and religion.

Father Washington. Certainly George Would Agree--AMIRITE?

In BioShock Infinite the citizens of Columbia literally worship the Founding Fathers--Father Washington, Father Jefferson, Father Franklin. You even fight things with porcelain Washington faces ... and a chain gun. They pray to them. Literally.

They are also, well, totally racist. The first episode of shooting happens in Shirely Jackson style, at a raffle where you draw a lot and are selected to hurl a baseball (the coming deluge of which will no doubt be lethal) at ... a bound, pleading interracial couple:

You Do Get An Option To Throw It At The Barker ...

It's the punctuating moment of stark horror that kicks off the bloodbath. Whatever else you may think, the makers of BioShock Infinite knew exactly what they were doing.

The question that we have to ask at this point is this: Are the creators of BS Infinite making a political statement--or just following the contours of a narrative they know will be resonant without taking a particular side in the fray? Consider that, at five years in the making, the game (and, presumably) the story-line predates a lot of modern politics ... Comstock's resonance to Joseph Smith isn't directly applicable to candidate Romney, for example. While I haven't read their minds, though, I think the answer is pretty clear: Irrational Games is horrified by the Tea Party.

The first BioShock was set in a visually amazing--but overrun with mutants--undersea dystopia that was created by Ayn Rand (okay, Andrew Ryan--but let's be serious). While it was not, shall we say, a sophisticated critique of Objectivism (Main problem with the philosophy: It leads to rampaging magical mutants!) it wasn't friendly to it either. The soaring iconography and sloganeering of the undersea miracle was rendered Ozymandias like (Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair) as it had fallen to wreak and ruin in a Hobbsean war of all against all.

In Columbia the worst elements of constitutional worship and xenophobia are realized in an actual still-standing paradise and it's a terrible place (even as it's comfortable for its inhabitants unless they happen to be, you know, black). Is this actually a critique of right-wing politics? You be the judge:

Despite the fact that the number of interracial marriages in the U.S. reached an all-time high this year, there are many who still believe that mixed-race marriage is unacceptable and should be made illegal, according to a new report.

And ... Here, from Salon:

For a bunch of people who worship the Founders and like to play dress-up American Revolutionary War, Tea Partyers sure hate knowing anything remotely reality-based about the Founding Fathers. Tennessee Tea Party groups have introduced a proposal to take what few minorities there are in American history textbooks out of American history textbooks, along with any negative portrayals of the wealthy white men who led this young nation in its infancy.

To be sure, this isn't everyone on the right nor even on the Tea Party--but was it in the heads of the people creating Columbia and Comstock and the rest of BioShock Infinite?

If you want to argue there isn't a bright-line between Ayn Rand and the Tea Party, I suggest you look to Rand Paul who is both a Tea Party hero, objectivist hero (kinda, less so now), and revitalizing the GOP. If there is any counterweight to the idea that Infinite's ideology is left-wing by virtue of making Columbia evil and right-wing, it's that eventually everyone tries to kill you.

I'm going to comedown on a side though, and I'll pick the side that says: "That's because it's a video game and they needed more enemies." I'm not sure Ken Levine is a Democrat--in fact, if I had to guess, I'd doubt it: he does seem to espouse the view that all power structures tend towards badness. But I think it's clear that whether or not Infinite draws from the current state of politics Levine would find himself agreeing that, in some ways, it echoes it.

The Future of Work: SSI and the Citizen's Wage

2013-04-02T10:39:00.002-07:00

The Grim Future Can Be Brightly Lit!

In the British comic-book satire Judge Dredd in the post-apocalyptic Mega City One the public schools train people for unemployment. They get to learn how to spend their days with a hobby or something so they aren't out committing crimes. If you saw the recent movie, you know their public schools are failing even worse than ours are:

They're ALL OUT COMMITTING CRIMES!!

What if that future was closer than we think?

Social Security Supplemental Income
The NPR Radio Show This American Life recently aired Trends With Benefits about the massive rise in recipients of government aid in the form of SSI: Social Security Supplemental Income. The radio show takes us to Hale County Alabama where a stunning 1/4th of the population doesn't work: they're on government disability. The numbers are staggering: the amount of people on SSI has doubled in the past 15 years. These people (something like 14 million of them) are not counted on unemployment. There is no way to "get off" SSI--it's for people who are too disabled to work. It's for life. You get about 1k a month: you will die poor.

The story that intrepid reporter Chana Joffe-Walt tells is even more breathtaking: she asks a recipient of SSI what job, if she could have any job in the world that she wants, would she want. The woman didn't know--but then she came up with something: she'd be the lady who sits in the DMV office and reads out the rules on who gets SSI and who doesn't.

The reporter assumes that's because the woman thinks she'd be good at catching the frauds--but no--that's not it. It's because that's the only job she has ever encountered that you can do sitting down. Think about that.

The doctor in this town asks people coming into his office looking for claims what their level of education is. Very few have completed high school. No one has completed college. When he assess a claim for SSI he asks himself: Is there any job available that this person can do on their feet all day that doesn't involve heavy lifting? The answer, for the uneducated, is always no.

If you want to listen to some astonishing radio, click the link and have a listen. If you think NPR is a tool of the liberal left and has a driving hidden agenda you should definitely go click the link and have a listen: you are exactly the guy who should hear this (and you're not wrong--but man, you should hear it).

The Awful Truth About SSI
Here The (indomitable) Last Psychiatrist writes about his(?) SSI patients. His look is, as is his wont, cynical and penetrating. He dissects it and concludes it is an awful system and is set up specifically to be awful because you demanded it.

What you should be asking is why, if society has decided to give the poor a stipend of $600/month, does it do this through the medical establishment and not as a traditional social policy? And the answer is very simple:

you, America, would go bananas if poor people got money for nothing, you can barely stand it when they get it for a disability;

if you offload a social problem to medicine, if you medicalize a social problem, then you've bought yourself a generation or two to come up with a new plan or invade someone.

Do you want riots in the streets? How much does it cost to prevent LA (your choice) from catching fire? Answer: $600/month/person, plus Medicaid. Medicalizing social problems has the additional benefit of rendering society not responsible for those social ills. If it's a disease, it's nobody's fault. Yay empiricism.

You should read the whole article. If you think that TLP (not that you've heard of him) is a raving tool of the patriarchy and has a crypt-fascist agenda even as he decries the morality of the state you should definitely go read that link. And then you should keep on reading. It'll be good for you.

The Real Problems
These pieces of reportage are parallel lines. To the psychiatrist who proscribes Xanax on SSI to patients lest they kill him things look one way. To the reporter doing the math in Alabama things look a different way. The lines converge here: There are not enough jobs for everyone to be employed and for the kinds of jobs available a huge majority of people may neither be able to do them (be on their feet all day as they age) and/or they may not pay enough to live on.

This has the effect of ensuring that not only are there a lot of college educated kids without jobs--but the people without college educations do even worse. They move further "down the ladder."

Megan McArdle addresses this in her recent article: When B.A. Stands for Barista.

Obviously, if Beaudry et al right, this is ferociously depressing news. It suggests that we're pushing more and more people into (more and more expensive) college programs, even as the number of jobs in which they can use those skills has declined. A growing number of students may be in a credentialling arms race to gain access to routine service jobs. Or maybe the productivity of our nation's wait staff is spiking as more skilled workers flood into these jobs.

This trend might reverse itself--but it may get worse too. Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 writes that as society continues to separate from the more successful (for a variety of reasons that he goes into) to the less successful there may be a need for a solution that does not let the otherwise unemployable masses at the bottom starve. Perhaps a kind of stipend paid for by taxes--a "wage" just for being a citizen.

The Solution: A Citizen's Wage?
Various solutions look something like this: either everyone gets a wage or everyone who works gets extra income (or both)--and a lot of it too. As everyone pays more in taxes--but you get the wage / extra-income back you don't come out as far behind as it seems like if you were in the middle brackets. This also takes the place of most other welfare programs.

As it is "flat" (everyone gets it) and identical (everyone gets the same amount) it is far easier to administrate than our current programs that it replaces.

Of course, if you believe it'll kill all desire to work, I'm not going to argue with you--maybe it would (I personally believe some--perhaps a lot--of people would continue to work--but certainly there would be some people who take their 20k/year and kick back ... forever).

Would It Work?
I have no earthly idea. The basic math seems pretty daunting but not impossible. Certainly it would re-order our economy overnight in unpredictable ways. It would definitely make masses of people dependent on the government--but a lot of those people may be so dependent now anyway.

I think the question is not "would it work" but rather "what is it that we are trying to accomplish." The American experiment doesn't guarantee safety or a safety net of any sort. There is no promise of employment or the like. If we are doing this we are doing it for one of two reasons:

Because we are "good people" and this does good in an effective way that outweighs the harm and compensates for the risk --or--
Because there is a reckoning coming and if we don't fix our society in some way it will burn.

Let's not discount the possibility that the reckoning that's coming is that taxes and entitlements are too high and that the burning will be like Cypress. Let's not forget about that.

I don't know the answer and I don't have too much of an opinion save this: if, indeed, we are looking at a future where, because of structure elements in the economy we can expect a large number of people to be unemployed and neigh unemployable we will have to do something--even if it's just build walled communes for us ... until we lose our jobs.

By Request: What To Do With A Problem Like North Korea!

2013-03-30T10:12:00.002-07:00

What Can They Hit?

North Korea has been making some very, very belligerent moves recently--threatening to launch missiles as US targets (and others), potentially cyber-attacking South Korea, and over-all behaving like a, well, a rogue nation. The Omnivore was asked his opinion on North Korea--what Obama might do--and what Republicans might do. What can anyone do?

The Facts
This is what's going on with North Korea: Their leadership is not (or, at least, has not to this point) been insane. They are not innately warmongers. They do not want to die. What they want--what their society (such as it is) is set up to need--is a steady flow of luxury goods, money, as well as food and other aid to the top generals (and Dear Leader). In order to get this they have offered a M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) deal with the west: Pay us and we won't bomb you.

This has a caveat that, if their society fails either due to non-payment or internal pressures they might bomb us anyway. In short, if we don't pay, their society will collapse and they might as well be dead.

They have pledged to take Seoul and whatever else they can with them.

The North Korean DMZ houses the largest collection of conventional artillery in the world. It is within striking distance of Seoul. If they were to order an attack it would be devastating--even without nukes or missiles that could hit Japan.

Even worse, on their side are millions of North Koreans who have, effectively, been traumatized by growing up in a totalizing authoritarian regime. When people do escape to South Korea? They don't do well in general (even with extensive programs to re-educate and integrate them). In the case of a war--even a war that South Korea and its allies won handily--the massive flood of refugees would be a social disaster.

What Will Happen?
The smart money says: nothing. We have just had an new leader in North Korea and that means he has to establish his power. He is young (allegedly 29) and is trying to get the generals to take him seriously. If he can prove he is a strong man--like his father--then all will be well: he will continue the propaganda with the west and game theory will continue to say it is better to lose a little and pay up than lose a lot and gamble with South Korea being bombed or even nuked.

There are a few things that could go wrong with this scenario:

Miscalculation. One of the things that China believes about the US is that our government "plans" everything. That our congress people are scheming all the time to get things done. The fact is that a lot of our actions are random, reactionary, or just plain flying by the seat of their pants (I'm talking about individual actors like congressmen--not military maneuvers or large scale foreign policy). If North Korea believes that--for real--their leader bullies the west into submission (rather than the situation simply being one where it is way, way better to just pay up) then either (a) Kim Jung Un might over-promise because he thinks he can be SUPER SCARY--and get more! or (b) They might, for example, believe that they have to blow something up for this 29 year old new-guy to get respect. Both would be fallacies--but they are the kinds of mistakes that another culture might make about ours.
Itchy Trigger Finger. Military maneuvers done for intimidation have a problem: you know you aren't really going to launch. They know they aren't really going to attack. Neither of you can be sure about the other guy though. So the closer you play to the net the bigger the chance for a fuck up. North Korea's rhetoric is enough to have us on high alert. A mistake would be throwing a lit road-flare into gasoline soaked kindling. Our flying a B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber (not to mention massive B-52s) over South Korea make a point (that we can attack with overwhelming nuclear force--and with no warning)--but they also raise tensions which can increase the chance of a fatal mistake.

So there is potential for things to go ... wrong.

Every Hour is Earth Hour In North Korea

What Can Obama Do?
The short answer is "nothing." Every American administration that has faced North Korea has come to the same conclusion: wait for them to start collapsing internally and then hope China can be convinced to provide aid and take some of the survivors. The hope is to peacefully unravel the situation without a shot being fired.

It turns out that a regime like North Korea can go a long, long, long time without collapsing. In the spirit of things, let's look at a few less likely scenarios:

The Google Revolution: There was a meeting not too long ago where Google execs went to North Korea to talk with them. One of the big problems for the modern age in North Korea was small radios and TVs which could get signal from South Korea. Seeing what the outside world was really like had destabilizing effects on them. If there was a way to expose North Korea to the Internet it could be even worse. The problem with this scenario is that if the society does unwind a very likely event is either mass slaughter of their people (in which case we would have to interviene ... or watch it unfold in horror) ... or if they were going down, they'd attack us.
The Assassination Game: What if we were to kill some of North Korea's leaders in a special-forces style stealth attack? It turns out that North Korea has been doing this/trying to do this to South Korea for quite some time. North Korea boasts around 5000 highly trained special operators and they have sent teams into South Korea to try to kidnap or kill people they don't like. It hasn't accomplished much. The reverse, of course, would destabilize the government--just because they don't really think we're trying to kill them right now doesn't mean that if they realized we were they wouldn't attack us. It's, at this point, the only card they have to play.

All roads lead to Seoul being bombarded, essentially.

In this case, Obama can do what he is doing: a show of force ... and pay up.

What You're Supposed To See: HEY! THOSE ARE AMERICAN TARGETS!! BE AFRAID. What We Really See: HEY!! KIM JONG UN IS USING A MAC WTF!?

What About Republicans?
They've been notably silent on this front and with good reason. They don't have any better ideas than Obama does--than anyone does. It's tough to be the "hawk party" when Obama is really about as hawkish as anyone can stand and the public is weary of war. I think the Republican top brass realizes that so long as no one "blows it" this is as good as it gets.

Edited To Add
North Korea re-starting its reactor is probably a bad sign (although it'll take a while so it will give them ample chance to back down). The reason this is bad is that one of the few things Korea could do to get itself attacked without launching a first strike is to become an assembly line for nuclear weapons with the fear that it would sell one to, say, Iran (or whoever).

Deception or Defeat: Should the GOP Lie?

2013-03-29T08:01:00.002-07:00

Facebook reader Zachary Deboer "reads" the Omnivore and concludes its message to the Republican party is lie or lose. This paraphrase is his read over the change-the-message pieces that have been covered often here. He thinks I am counseling the party to engage in deception and deceit in order to win votes.

Now, never mind (and he doesn't) that everything from the GOP Autopsy, the Jeb Bush warning memo about talking about immigration, the Bobby Jindal speech, and so on are all written by high-profile Republicans. And never mind that The Omnivore almost never gives advice--Zach believes he has broken the code:

Try writing something different than "Republicans need to stop saying it like it is" just so they can win elections.

For the record, and to be clear:

Republicans are not "saying it like it is." If they were, we wouldn't have gotten Romney's 47% pitch. There wouldn't have been the massive, pervasive, and, dare I say it, humiliating poll-unskewing discussion that raged from conservative blogs to Fox News and even the Romney campaign. We would not have had Herman Cain leading in the primaries for a time--much less Michelle Bachmann.
As I have said, bluntly, "changing the message" (which can mean a few different things--but in this case we'll assume it means soft-peddling the terms used and the tone used on things like immigration and racial politics) cannot work for the GOP at this time. Why? Because the base is driven by victim politics and until that changes there can't be any change in policy or messaging. In other words, even if being more diplomatic or having some modest policy changes might work, the structural tools to make the party change course simply are not there. Counseling the GOP to change its message is pointless.

First: Watch This

Romney Blames Loss On Successfully Communicating His Message To Minorities

Would It Work? Could Being Nicer Work For The GOP?

But let's play "What If"? Suppose I had a window to an alternate reality and I could set a dial where the GOP keeps its policies but refers to Illegal Immigrants as Undocumented Workers? Suppose that instead of some yahoo standing up at CPAC and asking whether we could go back to racial segregation everyone in the audience just sat and nodded? What if, when polled, Republicans in the deep south lied and said they thought, in the 21st century, mixed race marriage was 'fine and dandy'?

Would the GOP win elections?

Maybe.

There is some evidence that when a politician takes an obscuring position on an issue--or just plays it 'by-the-book-safe' (I'm against abortion but I'll leave it up to the states or the courts to decide that as the United States of America's Constitution requires!) voters are willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. If I otherwise like a candidate but he's iffy on one of my pet issues I may let myself assume he really agrees with me--but c'mon, he can't just go and say that.

If you're a Republican and reading this and going "IT WOULD NEVER WORK!" consider how the blank-slate that was Obama appealed to all kinds of people in 2008 as they projected their hopes and dreams onto his empty resume.

It certainly can work. Whether it would work for the GOP right now is another matter entirely.

Let's see:

Immigration: Illegal vs. Undocumented

The Change: Stop referring to [those guys] as Illegals immediately. Drill the term "Undocumented Worker" into everyone's head. Talk about how otherwise law-abiding undocumented workers are hardly evil but need to obey the law at which time they will be welcomed with open arms.

Would It Work? Changing the terms used when referring to those guys would certainly not help a lot. Firstly, some polling shows that while Immigration is an important issue it isn't the top one for most Latinos--it's the economy. But worse (for the GOP) Latinos see "more government" as a means of getting ahead rather than the Republican proscribed less-government. Just changing your term won't help there.

On the other hand, one group of Latinos, Cubans (who don't have the same immigration issues that other Latinos do) are irked by the terms used and much more reliably vote Republican (part of that is Bay-of-Pigs backlash). So you might win a few more Cuban votes if you don't piss people off.

Deception or Discretion: Discretion. The change of the term, if it doesn't change policy, is not a lie. Illegal Immigrants / Aliens are also Undocumented. The only thing it does it lower the anger-level directed at them. Making this change would not fundamentally change what's being done policy wise or what is being said in literal terms.

The Problem: The problem, of course, is that the base believes that undocumented workers--even if they are currently otherwise obeying the law--are a big problem. They're sucking up American jobs. They're taking up beds in hospitals. They're on the freakin' dole. Never mind that this largely isn't true--it's what the base believes.

Instead: If you want to move the dial at all on immigration, adopt the DREAM act. It impacts a relatively low number of people (those who were brought to the US as young children, have completed school, are in good standing with the law, and are in college or the military) who are mostly innocent and definitely identify as American. This is a policy change that would stand against charges of anti-immigrant racism.

Would It Work: A little. You'd get back some Cubans you lost with "self deportation" and "papers please" laws. Supporting the DREAM act might get more. You could erode the slide a little from the last election.

Gender Politics: The War On Women

The Change: The GOP's messaging issues with women come in three parts:

Rape gaffes (both the Legitimate Rape thing and various defenses or soft-pedal explanations thereof)
Tangents around contraception access (Planned Parenthood, Insurance Mandates, and Santorum speculating that a state should be allowed to outlaw contraception)
Abortion access--especially in the extreme cases (rape, incest)

To change the messaging the party would need to:

Have someone stand behind every candidate or elected official with a sledge hammer and vow to strike them if they say anything about rape other than that it is a horrible violent crime.
Sing the praises of contraception access for those who want it and make it clear that attempts to de-fund Planned Parenthood are around protecting the unborn and maybe propose other programs designed to keep contraception access going. Say it's fine--great even--for all employer insurance Other Than Religious Employers to provide contraception access. Maybe try to pass a law that makes Catholic insurance cost less as they don't provide contraception. Keep Santorum from speculating about anything until after he is elected.
Say that while abortion is always a moral wrong, the state's job is to defend mothers as well as children and that in the cases of incest or rape (or the life of the mother) the sate will leave that choice up to her--possibly providing some assistance should she decide to keep the child. Give up on trans-vaginal ultrasounds.

Deception or Discretion: This is actually deception. The GOP platform offers no exceptions to its abortion stance and while that doesn't prevent candidates from adopting one, the fact remains that the position of the base is hard core. There are also problems with belief about rape and contraception that go beyond ignorance of biology. Let's see what those are ...

The Problem: The problem with the rape-exception for abortion is that if the woman says "I was raped" you then have to have some kind of police investigation to prove it was so--what if she's lying just to have an abortion!? You also make allegations of rape go from a nightmare scenario that only someone really victimized (or really degenerate) would participate in to something the woman feels she "has to do" since she isn't ready to have a baby. The right knows this. Legitimate Rape may have referred not to forcible rape (which is what Akins fell back to after thinking on it) but actual rape as opposed to the woman lying about rape.

It's probably good he didn't clarify it in that way.

The second problem is that a portion of the hard-core So-Con religious base really does believe that contraception is a moral wrong. This is both for religious reasons (every sperm is scared!) and for societal ones (removing the baby-producing consequences of sex has led to increased promiscuity! STD's! Women getting educated!). They don't like to talk about it--but it's there.

In other words, for the religious base their basic for-real stance is probably going to alienate young unmarried women if it's correctly understood. Right now the GOP is frantically engaging in a cover-up of this and it isn't working too well.

Instead: Rove's Super PAC might work if he can target candidates who appeal to this section of the base to help ensure that while, yes, some people feel this way, they, mostly, don't get into office.

Would It Work? Yes. Women can be Republican voters so long as the So-Con's base's views aren't rubbed in their faces. Akins did a lot of damage and while he did get backlash against him, if it had never happened in the first place he might well have won his election and not damaged countless more.

Racial Politics: Black Voters

The Change: Today the GOP has virtually written off black voters themselves. They want more black candidates and spokespeople because it'll help defend against the charge of racism but that's about as far as they think they can go.

In this case the change would be to speak favorably of government programs that help majority-black populations ... like Obamaphones ... noting that until such a time as something better can be found the GOP would support them too. You can get a Romney Phone! It has gold leaf.

They would also acknowledge that there is actual institutional bias against blacks in many walks of life (as studies show) and that as a party that champions civil rights, they would be good with the government taking a stand against those.

When that guy stood up at CPAC to suggest segregation the audience would have booed him ... instead of applauding.

The GOP would support early voting and pull way back on voter ID card rules.

Deception or Discretion: This would be deception. Firstly, the GOP more or less does not acknowledge studies that suggest there is institutional racism remaining the United States and does not really see the government as a method for doing much with civil rights anyway.

The GOP top brass may realize that "Obamaphones" are actually from a program started under Bush but it seems likely to be one of the things they'd cut anyway. The CPAC audience was gathered to hear how to "refute the charge of racism"--you aren't having those sessions if you don't already have a problem and nothing short of mind control would make the audience boo the guy.

The Problem: The GOP base believes that there is massive voter fraud. Enough of the base felt that separate-but-equal was reasonable for the CPAC guy to not get heckled off the microphone. Obamaphones as an abomination before God get enough air-play that it's part of the Republican mythology today. In short, black people are welcome in the GOP if they are rich and educated. If they are not they really aren't--and they know it.

Instead: When recruiting black officials create a fund to attract and back those that are critical or even highly critical of the party but still agree with some of its platform (fiscal responsibility? social conservatism?). Allow them to speak their minds and still get help from the RNC. Be willing to lose some races or create controversy.

You might also set up a system to reduce fraud in the Lifeline (Obamaphone) program. That would be a good idea (which is why we're already doing it).

Would It Work? No. Not much, anyway. Racism is a powerful demotivator and a tiny amount of it goes a long way. It will be decades before the tiny amount goes away.

Homosexual Voters: Gay Politics

The Change: Stop talking about gays at all--just give up on it and focus on the economy. Allow for gay marriage. Integrate the military. Stop worrying about it. Make it clear that, yes, gays are discriminated against in real life (such as bullying in schools) and, in the 21st century that isn't right. Make it clear that gays want the level of acceptance heterosexuality already has and are not asking for "special status above straights."

Deception or Discretion: Deception. The GOP--or at least major parts of it--is holding the line against gay integration and recognition. This would not be honest until the GOP changes its name to the libertarian party.

The Problem: The problem is that the so-cons feel that gays are morally wrong and that society should recognize that. They also feel it's within their freedom of speech to "hate the sin" and shame gays for it (so popular straight kids should be able to speak out against un-popular gays in school because: The First Amendment!).

Instead: Get the GOP gay organizations front and center and loud. Make sure they speak during conventions (and early--and during prime-time). They can't be at CPAC but they can present a Republican gay vision that is more prominent. Have them talk about what being a Republican means to them--even though they are seen as godless heathens by some portion of the base ... Good luck.

Would It Work? No. While some gays will vote Republican, most will not while there is still wide-spread anti-gay bigotry out there. In two or three decades maybe there will be enough acceptance that the presence of a few so-con bigots in the party won't matter--but that's no time soon (granted in 2-3 decades the old guard will be dead so that problem may solve itself).

Non Christian Voters
The Change: The theory is that Jews (who should, presumably, dislike Obama's policies towards Israel) and Asians (who are socially conservative) moved away from the GOP in 2012 because it was perceived as the all-Christian party and therefore excluded them. The change here would be to remove religion from the dialog (as, uh, the Democrats did).

Deception or Discretion: Deception. The GOP may not be "The Christian Only Party" but they are certainly The Christian Party. If you are an atheist or Republican Muslim they are happy to have your vote but you are not welcome. Pretending otherwise is deceptive.

The Problem: So much of the GOP platform is based on Christian morality (in fact, a lot of radical evangelical support for Israel is due to a belief that Israel will play a role in Armageddon--which can't happen if it is overrun with Arabs) that if you took God out of the platform it'd fall apart.

Instead: High-light how the GOP handles non-Christian members. Support the Ground Zero Mosque as the GOP supports America's view of religious freedom. Have non-Christians speak during conventions.

Would It Work? Maybe a little. The economic message of the GOP should appeal demographically to (again, demographically speaking) financially successful highly educated minorities who, presumably, would like to pay a little less in taxes. If you can make them feel included they might come back.

The Young / The Poor
The Change: Instead of going with (secret) 47% rhetoric instead talk up opportunity and real-world solutions for problems young people face.

Deception or Discretion: Discretion. The party is trying--is supposed--to be doing this. Gingrich said he didn't want a safety net for the poor ... he wanted a trampoline. This is textbook Republican thinking. It should be the selling point. The 47% remarks were just plain logically wrong and there is no place on the front-lines of politics for that sort of nonsense.

The Problem: The problem with this is that (a) we aren't seeing any policies that really appeal to the poor. At least the ACA tries to get them health care. Where was the Republican counter-proposal? While we are told that cutting taxes and deregulating energy will create jobs, is a girl who just graduated with a degree in comparative literature supposed to believe it'll get her a job? Also (b) The Republicans, after Bush, have a credibility gap on the economy. His 'compassionate conservatism' has been roundly mocked by the base--but for those who feel some compassion might be good? They need to look to the Democrats.

Instead: Adopt pro-gay-marriage stance (you might get some of the young) and propose cost-cutting measures that target the rich. Yes, yes, I know--but start with higher taxes on the rich--even if just a little--say, half of what Democrats want. It'll speak to credibility that you want to help the poor. The propose a massive infrastructure building jobs program looking for bi-partisan support.

Would It Work? A little. The young and poor want jobs. The theory that cutting taxes and removing the social safety net will give them one doesn't really stack up against someone who will promise to keep you from starving right now or will give you a job (building infrastructure). Asking people to vote for starvation or take your economics on faith is a bit much.

Conclusion
None of these would work even moderately today without wrecking the party. Trying to be more inclusive is not where the GOP is right now. Here's a suggestion that might actually work: Get More Of The White Male Vote ...

But absent from the outreach [ of the GOP Autopsy] was the one group whose future mobilization holds the greatest promise for a GOP victory -- whites especially white males. This is the pandering that dare not speak its name and its omission is especially odd since today's Democratic Party has a lock on targeted constituencies, e.g., African Americans, gays, pro-abortion women among others. Note well, we are not speaking of some white nationalism akin to re-taking "a white" country. This is about promoting measures no different than those policies targeting minority groups, e.g., improved access to higher education

Perfect! They can even run Romney again!

A Note On Gay Marriage And Incest

2013-03-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

I started writing this as a Facebook post and realized that Facebook sucks for this kind of short-but-not-that-short kind of writing.

From Hot Air

S/He Won The Battle

Gay Marriage and Adult Incest
If you don't like Same-Sex-Marriage (SSM) it's tempting to tell SSM proponents that they should also support polygamy and adult incestuous relationships! This is because:

A lot of people think polygamy is a bad idea and a lot of people are grossed out by incest--even between consenting adults.
We are told to believe that logical inconsistency and hypocrisy are the worst things possible and if we can catch a target in the act of hypocrisy they will have to cede the argument and the crowd will cheer us. Largely we get that impression from the media.
Getting the pro-SSM target into debates about "How Incest is biologically-objectively bad!" or how polygamy subjugates women(!) or "doesn't look AT ALL like 'marraige' is good ground to fight on. These are your terms and your framing. You will win*.

By sticking to adult relationships the 'savvy' anti-SSM debater takes the issue of consent off the table and avoids man-dog "Oh, crap! He went there!" style mistakes. So it's great.

It's also stupidly missing the point--unless the point is to score points in debates while further alienating potential voters.

Which, at this point, I'm willing to concede for some portion of the GOP base might even be the point.

Why Is This!? What's Going On?

The reason this is a self-defeating strategy is that it makes the implicit assumption that logical equalities are the same thing as emotional equalities. I'll illustrate that, if it didn't make sense in that reading:

Experiment For Anti-SSM People: Ask yourself how you feel about this (that's the experiment): From now until the Supreme Court issues it's ruling on DOMA and Proposition 8, when trying to convince people that same-sex-marriage is bad, limit your discussion, with explicit words and images to hot lesbian couples. With every Facebook post show Ellen and Portia or some other totally hot set of girls who love each other.

Use This One

Not Hot Enough? Go With This One.

When talking, no more 'Adam and Steve'--now it has to be Amanda and Linda or something. Choose names that you think sound attractive or, at least, reasonably feminine. Promise to do this--explicitly--at all times. You won't use the word "gay" anymore--but rather "lesbian." The pronouns will all be "her" or otherwise explicitly feminine.

Are you up for it? Or would that undermine your message?

If it's the latter (and you know it is) are you now a logically inconsistent hypocrite? That's okay: I forgive you.

What IS Going On Here?

It's possible you are telling yourself that the above made zero sense and you don't understand why I said it or what I was hoping to accomplish. If so, the odds are very high you are a conservative woman. If you talk to a man, if he is under the age of 45 and being honest he will tell you lesbians are hot. If you think I am bullshitting you ask someone you ought to trust: Adam Smith's invisible hand which has been fingering lesbians in the massively profitable (well, until the 'Tube' age) porn industry since it existed.

What's going on here is that "gay sex" freaks a lot of dudes out. Hot Lesbian Action packs 'em in the red-light district. If you still don't believe me, you're deeper in the "anti-reality bubble" than people who listen to Glenn Beck (while trying to deny the fact that, uh, he's a Mormon--no, don't think about it too closely).

The problem is that, today at least, the social taboos against incest and polygamy are simply not as strong as those against gay marriage. That, and hot lesbian action is now just a mouse-click away for everyone so that social taboo has fallen too.

Don't get me wrong: real-life lesbians get discriminated against all the time. There are still social taboos in the flesh--but on the Internet?

What Was It That Really Got The Printing Press Going After The Bible? Yeah--Exactly.

The social taboos--especially for the under-30 crowd around polygamy haven't been removed. No one, so far as I know, is blazing a path towards saying Adult Incest is okay. Sister Wives exists--but I'm not sure that's an endorsement in the same way I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry was. It doesn't have to be: if you think scheming movie company execs (Jews, no doubt) made Chuck and Larry to win the culture war you need to get yourself over to Prison Planet (your Alex Jones all paranoia conspiracy theories all the time site) post-haste.

I'll break the reality to you: They made it because they think Adam Sandler prints money and people would be tempted to pay to see this. They made it because the culture had shifted--not the other way around.

They made Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (the first one) to shift the culture: if you had been alive back then, you would not have liked that one either. No--you wouldn't--be honest with yourself.

The Net Result

The net result of using the Polygamy / Incest argument against gay marriage is that you, the speaker, look like an asshole. It isn't because you are being illogical--I can find no logical argument that excludes polygamy but includes gay marriage--but because you are arguing about the wrong thing.

You are comparing gays to polygamist and incestual partners and, to the larger audience? They're not the same, emotionally speaking--that ship sailed. You might as well compare them to pedophiles and bestiality performers which will just make the listeners even more convinced you're a bully and an jerk. Oh, wait, both those things are already happening!

* BUT ... BUT ... BIOLOGY!! RECESSIVE GENES! AND What do I tell Little Suzy When She Thinks Her Older Brother Might Grow Up To Marry Her? No one cares, hot-shot: we don't like incest for emotional reasons that have very little to do with the facts. Should normal marriage *require* an invasive genetic screen to make sure children don't have three eyes? Yeah, I thought not. And familial relations can get degenerate in all kinds of ways that don't deal directly with marriage.

Defense of Defense of Marriage

2013-03-27T08:13:00.001-07:00

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments around the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California's anti-gay marriage act Proposition 8. CBS has five possible outcomes:

Gay marriage protected nationwide
Gay marriage not protected constitutionally
No difference between marriage and civil unions (if a state recognizes civil unions they must treat it as marriage)
Gay is okay in California (if you read that Californ-I-A, sorry--but that is how I wrote it)
Throw the case out

As with the Obamacare, Justice Kennedy is the big question:

I doubt that Justice Anthony Kennedy suffers from insomnia. But if he ever does, this would be the week. At the Justices' conference Friday, Kennedy may have to choose between his two great legal loves--the sovereignty of the states on the one hand and the dignity and rights of gay men and lesbians on the other.

Of course some people are also wondering what Roberts will do too ... after O-Care, anyway.

As of today we have the audio and transcripts from the oral arguments and some tweets from the SCOTUS Blog. It appears that on California's prop-8 the court may well punt. That is: decide not to decide which, apparently, would nullify prop-8 as the circuit court's ruling would stand. That's a very minor victory for Same Sex Marriage (it applies to California but nowhere else).

Today is the DOMA arguments so we may see a more vigorous ruling there.

What Are People Saying?
One theory is that it could be good for the Republicans if the courts allow gay marriage because, hey, it's out of their hands now! It gives a perfect, if limp-wristed, talking point (see what I did there?). That didn't happen for abortion ... but hope springs eternal. What if people bought that? The problem is that if conservative congress people take the squishy let-the-states-decide stance evangelicals ... will walk (so says Huckabee--and, hey, maybe he knows a thing or two).

The excellent WSJ blow-by-blow synopsis shows that the anti-SSM attorney used the "interest of the state in procreation" defense as his primary line of attack. It goes like this: The state--and therefore the people of the state--have an interest in protecting marriage because procreation is in the interest of the state. This, as pointed out by several justices, has a bunch of logical problems (i.e. that lots of people who can't or won't procreate enjoy marriage rights).

On the other hand we can see why they chose this attack: claiming that there's a constitutionally understood definition of marriage may not give people standing (what's the damage if it's just 'changing the definition of the word?') and trying slippery-slope arguments may win votes on the stump but it won't work as well on the high court.

While the DOMA arguments are still unfolding, as with Obamacare, we'll know the answers in June.

What Do I Think?
I think that the problem the anti-SSM folks are having is that they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. There's a concept of "the argument we can all agree on" as seen with: "We should invade Iraq because they are developing Weapons of Mass Destruction." The fact that 'we' can all 'agree' that WMD are bad (m'kay?) brings together coalitions of neo-cons who think we should export democracy tied to a cruise missile, people invested in Halliburton, guys who think that America needed to knock someone over after 9/11 to show that America wasn't to be trifled with, people not-paying-too-much-attention who thought Saddam attacked us on 9/11, guys who hate Arabs, and, well, a whole bunch of people who don't like WMD proliferation.

So you take the argument everyone agrees to and you make that your front-line approach. In other words you don't say "Legalizing gay marriage makes my (Judeo--because I gotta put that in there)/Christian state complicit in sin and will bring the wrath of the heavens down on us all"--even if that's your driving feeling about it. You don't say "Gays are gross and wrong and I beat them up in high school and now I don't want to have to think about gays any more"--and so on.

The problem is that almost no one really thinks that legalizing gay marriage will have any direct effect on procreation. There's no good evidence that it damages children (and, compared to the likely alternatives of single-parent households and orphanages the stats are positively sunny!). Yes, the state needs to replenish it's supply of young workers--else HOW WILL WE PAY FOR OBAMACARE!?--but whether or not the 1 or 2% of gay couples get 'married' will have any impact on that is at very best conspiracy-theory levels of speculation.

In short, it's a disingenuous and therefore ultimately weak argument. There are, after all, plenty of gay couples that get pregnant (lesbians) and produce children (surrogates) in ways that completely mirror what heterosexual couples sometimes do.

The real issue is whether or not the court itself will decide this matter for us or not. That's the issue I think most of the justices were struggling with and, from the transcript, it seems clear that the lawyers knew it too (at one point the anti-SSM lawyer tries to argue that if they overturn Prop-8 in California that defacto permits gay marriage everywhere--he was "raising the stakes.").

On the other hand, to convince Roberts and Scalia you don't need a cracker-jack argument and, to be fair, I'm pretty sure Kagan and Sotomayor had made up their minds too before coming in. The question is Kennedy and he's going to be pondering constitutional and procedural issues as well as moral ones.

For my part, I think that the court will probably take the easy way out on Prop-8 deciding that there's no standing and therefore no SCOTUS ruling--that's just based on my reading of the material and a guess that at 5-4 more-conservative vs. more liberal the urge to "make history" on this will will be lower than the urge to simply throw it back in the political realm.

I'm not as sure on DOMA, though, where I don't know that the same defense exists.

I also want to note that civil rights are generally not good fodder for a state's rights argument: if we feel separate-but-equal water fountains were wrong then why would we leave that up to the states? If it's wrong in New Jersey isn't it also wrong in Georgia? If you, don't feel separate-but-equal was wrong then there's a guy at CPAC you should hook up with (and Rince Priebus and every other forward thinking Republican are be actively wishing you don't exist).

The similarity of SSM to interracial marriage was, indeed, brought up to the court and was kicked around a bit. If homosexuality is ingrained the way skin-color is, that's a 1:1 argument. If it's not it applies less--and no one on the floor made the case that we know for sure one way or the other.

But I think that's not the point. Whether or not the exact same moral argument applies to SSM vs. Interracial Marriage isn't the issue the same way that the-argument-we-all-agree-on isn't always the real one. The point is that Interracial marriage was seen, widely, as wrong for a variety of unpleasant reasons dealing with racism and bigotry. A lot of the very same sorts of arguments (about children facing more difficulties from mixed households, for example) were brought up to try to paper-over this fact. It took until 1967 for this to get sorted out and unless you're really, really young you shouldn't be thinking that's ancient history.

It's shamefully current.

Today the real problems with SSM don't have to do with children or the interests of the states or the institution of marriage as a historical artifact ("It belongs in a museum!")--they have to do with people who are grossed the fuck out by gays and feel that religious judgement hangs over us should we morally descend into Sodom. If that argument doesn't convince you and you're telling yourself this is about gays wanting undue privileged positions in society or about the chipping away of our precious ~~bodily fluids~~ societal virtues you are kidding yourself.

What Should The Republican Party Do?

2013-03-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

We have seen the 97pg GOP Autopsy which the RNC put out saying the party had a lot of problems and it's appeal to women was definitely one. Other pundits have not been shy about putting forth their own suggestions--which brings us to the topic what ought the GOP do?

Here are some suggestions:

Anti-Obamacare 2014
By the time 2014 rolls around Obamacare will be in full swing--and it won't be good:

Even on election day 2012, a majority favored repealing the health law. But they cared more about other issues or didn’t care for Mitt Romney. The 2012 election was not a referendum on Obamacare.

November 2014 will be different.

In this model the winning issue of 2010 will rise again and as Americans feel the pain which was held off (cannily) before the 2012 elections it'll be Round 3--this time for keeps.

The Attack
Obamacare has a problem built into it: it helps key constituencies differently. Unlike Medicare which helps "everyone the same" (whether or not that is technically true it is close enough to true) Obamacare does things like give insurance to people who didn't have it but, probably, cost people who already have it more money (this, again, may not wind up being true across the board--but stay with me). This creates a natural wedge which can be driven by the Republicans against vulnerable Democratic incumbents. Ultimately this could result in either repeal or reform. In the interim it may result in Republicans winning seats.

The Problem
The problem with the all-Obamacare attack is two-fold (a) what if Obamacare, like the sequester, lands and isn't all that bad? Sure, there'll be time to re-tool but at least some Democrats think the issue is used up:

Democrats welcome renewed attacks on the law, confident they will win against a party trying to regurgitate a stale issue. An attack that went bust in 2012, when the GOP spent tens of millions of dollars linking Democrats to Obamacare but still lost just a net of two Senate seats, won't suddenly return to bite them two years later. And that was before a plethora of high-profile Republican governors, like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, approved the dramatic expansion of Medicaid in their home states.

Secondly, (b), the GOP has a deeper problem: they aren't offering a better solution.

And Republicans risk alienating voters with a blunt message of repeal when they gloss over the fact doing so would mean tens of millions of people losing health insurance. Avoiding that pitfall might not be easy, either, with a conservative base that still thirsts for outright repeal.

As one GOP strategist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, suggested, the party needs to offer ideas explaining how to provide them insurance.

Verdict
Using Obamacare as one arrow in a quiver is fine--but if Republicans are counting on it to be the tip-of-the-spear (to mix weapon metaphors) that's dangerous. As one pundit said, the real question is going to be how the press covers Obamacare. If they focus on seniors suffering in massive queues outside of hospitals ... in the rain ... that's one thing. If the camera shows new mothers getting health care for the first time ... that's another.

Ask a conservative how the press covers Obama <anything> ...

It's The Message
While some of the GOP Autopsy boiled down to 'the method' (data and technology use, get-out-the-vote ground game, etc.) a lot of it boiled down to a political version of The Tone Argument.The link is to a wiki on feminism but I think the thinking applies--to an uncomfortable extent--to Republican political arguments. In The Tone Argument a speaker offers "concern" that what the (feminist) person is saying is correct--but that their tone won't win them any friends. This is used by the person advancing the argument to de-rail the conversation or maybe to try to shame the (feminist) speaker.

In this formulation the GOP candidates can consider saying the same--or almost the same--things they were saying (more on that in a minute) but need to exercise message discipline around any topic that create problems. For example:

Use Undocumented Worker instead of Illegal Alien.
Say nothing about rape save for that it is a terrible, violent crime. If asked? The woman is never at fault.
Go to State's Rights on everything that is controversial (abortion, same-sex-marriage, contraception). Note, a congressional candidate can, correctly, say that abortion has been decided by the courts and is not a congressional issue today.

The Attack

In this case the attack is structured around providing a "smooth glass face" which the Democrats try to get a foothold in when sticking charges of racism, sexism, or other discrimination on the GOP. The candidates run on their policies but are careful not to use any loaded language or make other mistakes when talking. That should be worth at least two more congressional seats, right!?

The Problem

Outside of the fact that 'the base' is clamoring for the use of this language and considers its use to be part of what makes a candidate legitimate the real problem is that if you change the message as above there is a big problem in that you aren't really standing for social conservativism. I acknowledge that the State's Rights approach is (a) the winning approach and (b) legitimate in its way--but if the candidate claims to have no opinion on the matter the press will smell blood.

The final problem is that all any prospective voter who is feeling excluded needs to do is go to a conservative blog and read the messages: to be sure these posters are a very, very small percentage of the GOP--but they do represent the base and their language and positions are very clear.

Verdict

Whether or not this solves the problem, it needs to happen to a degree. If the GOP can combine this with some moves around immigration and, say, gay marriage that'll go a long way to looking less like the So-Con party first and everything-else-second. My feeling is that, as I've said, the emotional engine driving the GOP base won't allow for this.

It's The Messenger / Method

The final problem is that maybe it's the Messenger (Romney? McCain!) and / or the method of selecting candidates. In this case, the GOP just needs the "right guy" (Dr. Carson) and we're good! This has two parts:

Fix the primary system (both for presidential candidates) and, maybe, to stop Akin types from getting in
Pick a presidential candidate with Real Charisma (TM).

The modern history of the Republican party has been a bargain: the party selects a mainstream moderate who adopts conservative values during the primary and then promises to keep those values if elected. That has, arguably, been the case since Bush II and with McCain and Romney. What happens if you break that mold?

The Attack

In this case the party needs to recruit (a) a real conservative with (b) real charisma. This would mean Carson or Huckabee. Santorum is not uncharismatic but he is not Huckabee. Dr. Carson may well be a presidential contender some day as well (I do not think he will be ready by 2016). The idea is that this person--this candidate--can both rally the base and bring the moderates. If you start with that as your goal you find them rapidly.

Changing the primary system is a must: fewer debates are a no-brainer. Winnowing out the field rapidly is probably a good idea too (why let Bachmann share a stage any longer than absolutely necessary). Getting rid of the caucuses will create massive backlash but: the drama in 2012 was whether Santorum would beat Romney and then go on to win, in the words of a Democratic strategist, "A Dakota" (presumably not both). Anyone who thinks Santorum would've won the election is kidding themselves. Yes, the system worked, but also (yes) the caucuses brought the party closer to utter defeat than it should've.

One thing that might be interesting is to change the states that go first during the primaries. If you started with, say, the swing states or, say, the "most Republican" states you would get very different candidates coming out of the gates with momentum. These kinds of changes have unforeseen consequences and any change will create complaints--but we might see something interesting if some brilliant political game-theory guys get in there.

The Problem

The problem with "The Messenger" is that it makes people think you don't need to change the message or the policy. That might be true--but what if you make all these changes and the chosen one still doesn't win? Also, if your current choices look like Huckabee and Carson you already have a problem in the making (where was Huckabee in 2012 and Carson, again, has no political experience). If you think [your favorite guy] (I know, I know: Rand Paul) fits the bill, think again. It won't be your guy--it'll be someone else. What will you do then? Yeah, I already heard: the constitution party.

Just how far can the GOP bend before it breaks?

Who Won't Be President In 2016!

2013-03-21T06:17:00.002-07:00

It's WAY too early for 2016 speculation--we don't know what'll happen in 2014 ... what the economy will look like ... whether Hillary is really running or not ... and so on. But in the spirit of wild, gross speculation there is something I can tell you: who will NOT be elected president in 2016. So let's do that!

Dr. Ben Carson

Dr. Ben Carson is an intelligent, articulate, accomplished man who delights Republicans by being (a) very religious, (b) outspoken against Obama, and (c) very conservative. He's also, welll, you can see it for yourself. He has retired from medicine and has hinted he'll go into politics. I'm sure he will--and he'll do well there.

But he will not be elected in the 2016 elections.

Why Not?
Carson will not be elected because he has never held office before and his first stop won't be the oval office. The GOP may have broken away from "next in line" but I don't think they're ready for never in line. Yes, Cain did well in the primaries--but that was psychotic. By 2016 the Republican party will either have gotten over its psychosis or they will nominate Carson (or someone like him--probably someone much, much worse) and lose.

Rand Paul

Rand Paul, son or Ron, held congress hostage for 13 hours revitalizing the GOP with his stories of innocent Americans sitting at a cafe getting blown up by drones. We know he can go 13 hours without a bathroom break which is probably close to what running for president feels like. He's also smart--and despite having (as the meme shows) endorsed Romney, he could probably carry his dad's base at least part way to the polls. He will not win the 2016 presidential election.

Why Not?
Paul will not win the 2016 election because despite his EVOLution over his father's positions taking a more reasonable centrist stance his views on foreign policy will still be an anathema to the base. Also, he's still basically a libertarian ... and that won't happen. He will be very, very popular with the under 30 voting block but will lose hard with everyone else. Remember that his dad, gaming the system as hard and as expertly as possible, didn't win a single state in 2012. That was the height of his power. Paul will win a couple of states--like Maine. Maybe, I dunno, Oregon. It goes no further.

Chris Christie

Chris Christie is one of the most popular Republican politicians alive. He wins easily in a blue state (Jersey) and comes off as a no-nonsense bad-ass who speaks truth to power ... even, uh, while he is power. He has personal charisma and definitely has the ambition to hold the highest office in the land. He even, as a governor, has the executive experience to do it--unlike the others here.

He's got bi-partisan cred that no one in the party even approaches. And, hey, by 2016 might we be ready for some bi-partisanship? We will be. But Chris Christie won't win the 2016 presidential election.

Why Not?
Was it his dreamy moonlight walk on the beach, arm in arm with President Obama just before Romney's disastrous election? Was it the man-love bromance they shared in the wake of Superstorm Sandy? Is it Christie's liberal views on things that might make blue-state Democrats (not to mention centrists across the nation) vote for him? No. It's not.

The Overton Window is the narrow range of ideas the public finds acceptable. It moves slowly and whatever is "within it" is what the public could accept in a president. Here is our state of affairs:

Sorry, Christie

The 'GOP Autopsy'

2013-03-19T11:06:00.002-07:00

That's what they're calling this: The GOP Growth and Opportunity Project. It's an in-depth look at what went wrong in 2012 and what the GOP is doing right now that needs to be done more of, done better, or not done.

Here's the short form:

Republicans have a damaged brand--people think "they don't care" or "are the party of the rich." America's demographics are changing and the GOP messages are not reaching minorities. This has to change.
The GOP needs lots of work with minorities of all stripes, women, and the young. This involves supporting these groups in politics such as encouraging women to run as "The Republican Party committees need to understand that women need to be asked to run. Women are less likely to run for office on their own*, and we should be encouraging and championing their desire to seek elective office."
Improve our technology, especially around data. The tech-gap is staggering.
Improve intelligence of finances, media buys, and sharing information. Get rid of group-think in discussion.
Improve candidate selection. Go with primaries over caucuses! Fewer debates!

Just Having a Field Office In San Francisco May Not Be Enough

At close to 100 pages, there's a whole lot of deeper material. Here's a link to the 10 Funniest Things in it. For example:

8. In the last two Republican presidential primary races, “there have been too many debates”
As the report mentioned, the Republican presidential candidates participated in 21 debates during the 2008 campaign, and 20 in the 2012 campaign. But the report does not mention that the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries featured 26 debates. So it’s not the number of the debates. It’s what gets said at the debates.

Reaction to the report has been mixed. Jennifer Rubin finds it bold:

Interestingly, the report has its most extensive discussion of gay rights in the section on appealing to youth, noting that “there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays — and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the Party is a place they want to be.” It does not explicitly endorse gay marriage but it acknowledges a variety of viewpoints is essential. (“If our Party is not welcoming and inclusive, young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out.”)

Yeah, bold (no, I'm not kidding--she found that bold).

Ace of Spades finds it "Meh."

This is a pretty vanilla report. That would be fine because that's what these things are. The problem is the RNC hyped it as some important moment in the history of the GOP's renewal. Once again, they are over promising and under delivering. Stopping that bit of terrible marketing would be a major step in the right direction.

The Tea Party (and friends, like Rand Paul) find it infuriating because the proposed changes to the primary system will disenfranchise grass-roots voters:

"Elimination of caucuses and conventions would mean nuclear war with the grassroots, social conservatives, the Ron Paul movement and Tea Party Republicans," said John Tate, a senior Paul advisor who now runs the Campaign For Liberty, a libertarian grassroots lobbying group.

I'm with Drew from Ace of Spades: None of this is new or really surprising. The problem with these recommendations is not that they are bad--for the most part they are modest, reasonably well stated, and generally positive. The problem is that the GOP Autopsy doesn't uncover the actual "cause of death."

The Problem: Victim Politics
The problem with the GOP base is that it is driven by "victim politics."

Yesterday I linked to a fairly heart-stopping video of a guy at CPAC asking a black speaker (on the subject of reacting to charges of racism) if Frederick Douglas had "forgiven" his former slave master for "giving him food and shelter." The guy said he felt white males, like him, were being disenfranchised.

While this is pretty mind-blowing it shows the basic problem that is driving the GOP right now: after the 2008 defeat by Obama--a candidate many people still can't believe won--the victim machine went into full power. The conservative media has taken up the cause and the echo chamber has become louder and louder: it's a positive feedback cycle**.

Nothing in this memo addresses it and, to be fair, nothing probably could: telling the GOP base that they are acting like victims and that it's turning people off would not drive any restorative behavior. Given their choices cutting out caucuses is probably the best bet.

* ~~the poor dears~~

** This also creates damaging "epistemic closure" wherein arguments that make perfect sense to "the base" may make no sense at all to anyone else. Consider the case where one of the fathers of a child killed at the Sandy Hook massacre asked 'why anyone needs an assault weapon or high capacity magazines'. When he was answered with shouts of "The Second Amendment" we see a good example of epistemic closure.

The Second Amendment is why he gets to have an assault weapon and high-cap magazine. It is not why he 'needs' one. The 2nd is why he can't rightfully be questioned about it--it's on the menu so to speak. If I order the lobster in a restaurant I don't have to explain myself to the waiter and, similarly, nor do I have to explain owning a (legal) weapon to anyone.

However, the Second Amendment is not a reason I need one. A reason I might need one would be to fight a war of attrition against a tyrannical government (that, after all, is why the 2nd Amendment exists--and such a war could not be fought with handguns). I could argue I "need" one because they are excellent guns and fun to shoot--or for home defense--but neither of these may convince a well meaning fellow voter who finds himself struck by the question (they may well think that handguns make more sense for self-defense and the joy brought by shooting an AR-15 does not qualify at the level of a 'need.')

If I do go into detail about how my possession of an AR-15 will keep the US Government from tyrannical actions I will probably scare the listener ... and not in a good way.

The "closure" happens when the defenders of the right to bear arms use the right itself as an answer to a question about the reason to need a particular arm. It makes sense to them--but may not make sense to anyone else: it's not a convincing argument even if, constitutionally speaking, it may be a correct one.