This is some sick shit.

Some confessions:

• I was once a registered Republican (didn't just vote that way, I identified that way).
• I was once a staunch and abiding supporter of the death penalty (as in, I was willing to say so loudly and in public).

Which is to say, I was stupid.

If I was successfully taught anything as a child, it was that being selfish is wrong.  Wanting more for yourself than for others similarly disposed is just unfair, hence wrong.  Doubly so when someone's life is on the line.  These days, I call that evil.

I have been accused of being a tad judgmental on occasion, though.

The death of Troy Davis at the hands of the Georgia Supreme Court has finally left me bereft of defenses for the death penalty, and so against it, as loudly and publicly as I was once for it.

Understand, this has nothing to do with the logic of the death penalty.  I fervently believe, still, that guilt beyond a reasonable doubt of certain crimes-- murder in all its glorious forms first among them-- is cause for the State, acting as the agent of the people, to kill the perpetrator of said crimes.

I just don't think we're up to deciding beyond a reasonable doubt.

It is a demonstrated fact that people recall very poorly the events that traumatize them (Note: this is one among many sources). Despite this, eyewitnesses are treated as being reliable purveyors of information while on the stand.  The defense cannot even legally argue this fact in some states.

Thus, our judicial system is perverted.  Horribly.  214 people have been convicted and sentenced to death all over the country, and DNA evidence has shown to the satisfaction of the courts in these cases that the conviction meets the legal standards to have it over-turned.  This is not a trivial standard.

The idea that these people were even in jail-- never mind on death row-- is frightening.  I can't imagine the Kafkaesque horror of being sentenced to death when I knew I was innocent.  I believe enough in the Golden Rule to not wish it on anyone else.

Seriously.  Put down the needles, or take your hand off the switch, or whatever, and walk away.  And start demanding justice for your fellow human beings.  Otherwise you'd best stop expecting it for yourself.

Of False Dichotomies

Frank Bruni, if you do not know, is a columnist for the New York Times, among other duties there. He used to be a restaurant critic. This information will be important later.

Lately, he published a column in which he, in a transparent attempt to appear "balanced" (as best as I can tell), by setting against each other the chef-turned-monster-celebrity Anthony Bourdain and the "deep-fried doyenne of a fatty, buttery subgenre of putatively Southern cooking," one Paula Deen.

Bourdain, in his less-than-charitable way, said some apparently unprintable and mean things about Deen whilst calling her out for, "telling an already obese nation that it's O.K. to eat food that's killing us." Bruni then quotes Deen's response to the effect that she and her friends "cook for regular people who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills" and further defends her thus:

She’s otherwise 100 percent justified in assailing the culinary aristocracy, to which even a self-styled bad boy like Bourdain belongs, for an often selective, judgmental and unforgiving worldview.

And her retort exposes class tensions in the food world that sadly mirror those in society at large. You can almost imagine Bourdain and Deen as political candidates, a blue-state paternalist squaring off against a red-state populist over correct living versus liberty in all its artery-clogging, self-destructive glory.

Well, yeah, you can. But that completely misses both Bourdain's point and the actual issue at hand: eating like a "traditional" Southerner (minus the ridiculous volume of greens, and plus the many, many calories provided by all of the biscuits, gravy, pork, and the endless desserts-- cf. Deen's appearance on NPR's "Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me") will probably kill you. And it will kill you by giving diabetes and the many other afflictions that derive from profound obesity, which are bad enough by themselves. The people who invented the food Deen celebrates worked like animals (in the case of the slaves and tenant farmers nearly literally), and generally died from things that killed them long before heart disease could set in. Unless you're out walking in a field all day every day, you don't get to eat like them with impunity.

So, Bruni's point is also that Bourdain is an ass. But if you've read "Kitchen Confidential" you knew that. What else is new? News Flash: Celebrity chef has gargantuan ego!

Tell something new.

He then tempers his criticism:

To give him his due: we are too fat and must address that. But getting Deen to unplug the waffle iron doesn’t strike to the core of the problem any more than posting fast-food calorie counts or taxing soft drinks do. A great deal of American obesity is attributable to the dearth of healthy food that’s affordable and convenient in low- and even middle-income neighborhoods, and changing that requires a magnitude of public intervention and private munificence that are unlikely in such pinched times.

Which is a bunch of bullshit excuses.

Don't get me wrong. Inner cities largely are "food desserts". But the bulk of America's obesity problem isn't among the poor. It's among the middle class (even if it's the lower middle class). And if you believe it's not possible to eat healthily on low wages, I'm here to prove that you're not paying attention. Eating healthily is not easy, mind. It requires work, and time, and sacrifice. But it's not impossible. And it doesn't require intervention (except maybe to modify tax policy for processed food).

This is Bourdain's point: if Deen really cared about families struggling to feed their families good food, she would use her celebrity to promote healthy cooking and eating. Not an endless parade of cakes and brownies, tempered only by roasted beasts.

Eating healthily means you have to cook for yourself. You have to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, and cut them and chop them and steam, blanch, or saute them. I did it on what is now $7/hour. You can do it. You may have to give up watching TV in order to shop and cook (without slicing off a finger). You may have to learn a lot about how food works when it's in your pan or pot. You may have to eat a lot less meat and potatoes and a lot more rice and beans. But, if you have fresh vegetables and fruit available to you at a distance comparable to that you go to get your Mickey Ds (or whatever is your particular poison), and you are paying for anything beyond shelter, transportation, and power for your stove, you have no one to blame but yourself if you are not eating healthily.

Once you make this transition, you might even be able to afford a bottle of wine to go with it once in a while (I hear there's something called "3-buck Chuck"; I'm guessing there's competitors....).

Michelle Bachmann's profound misunderstanding of our form of government (or outrageous hypocrisy)

My apologies for failing to comment on this when it happened.  Michelle Bachmann: "Our founding documents, they cannot be improved upon," said Bachmann, giving an almost Biblical rendition of the work product of the nation's first generation of politicians. "They're brilliant. We believe in them. That's not divisive."

If you believe in them, you know that they contain the mechanism for changing them.  And you accept the changes that have been applied through that process.  You don't pine for halcyon days when they were pure (or at least not if you're as fond of freedom of speech as I am).  Fer cryin' out loud, the thing was amended ten times in four years after first passage!  Then there was that whole Prohibition-of-demon-alcohol nonsense.  You can even propose your own.  Why not?  Oh, wait, I see that you are.

Wow.  That's pretty disingenuous.

When Reason is overtaken by spite

Of late the conversation in Washington that's been getting the most attention by the press is the question of whether to raise the debt limit. To grossly oversimplify the positions in question, the Rs want to refuse to raise the debt limit until they get some (unspecified) reductions in future spending/a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget/a unicorn that shits rainbows. Or something. It's not entirely clear. The Ds are mostly saying that, while the debt could be a problem someday, today is not the day to start paying it down, what with the economy in the toilet.

It's certainly true that, in the long run, the debt needs to shrink substantially (even dramatically). Currently it's at about 90% of the GDP, or about 14 trillion dollars, and it's rising. That's not sustainable forever, but there's substantial disagreement about how long it will be before things will reach a point where no one will lend us more money, or at least not at a sustainable interest rate. When that will be is a matter of debate itself, and isn't discernible by mere analysis. It strongly depends on whether or not people and institutions who are interested in buying US Treasury Bonds are sure they'll get their money back. Refusing to pay off the debts of the United States is a good way to engender fear in the average investor (who, so far, has viewed US T-bills as a rock-solid investment, particularly when T-bills are paying more than inflation).

The Rs, for reasons that appear to be rooted entirely in satisfying a lunatic fringe of the body politic, are holding that record, those promises, and our near-term economic future hostage to, well, to the rest of us agreeing to destroy the economy.

That assessment may seem a bit harsh, but it's an assessment of the obvious consequences of pursuing a policy of immediately shrinking the government to the size of revenues (that's a high-falutin' way of saying "spend only what we take in" while also saying, "No, you may not raise taxes"). You may wonder, "how can he say such a thing?" Well, the current deficit is 13% of GDP, with total spending of 40% of GDP. It's not good. That's just what it is. If tomorrow, you stopped the government from spending more that 27% of GDP, the economy would shrink by 13%.

This may sound awesome (yay! no deficit!) but for the millions of people that would lose their jobs, it would be very unpleasant. I'm concerned that more than 13% of the currently employed would lose their jobs, since folks with money would have even less incentive to invest.

Again with David Brooks...

...and apologies for being so late to the party.

David Brooks really knows how to miss the point. After psychoanalyzing Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, he decides to use the occasion to obliquely criticize his employer for not respecting "the World Order" in deciding what to publish, or not. He decrees that the pinnacle of civilization is "order" in opposition to "chaos", that the leaked documents pose a threat to said order, and uses the particular case of the cables purporting to describe the reaction of American and Arab diplomats to the problem of Iran.

Fundamentally, Brooks praises said diplomats for reactions that are neither novel nor brave: American and Arab diplomats alike wisely express concern that Iran is as powerful as it is, and seek council or seek to provide it regarding how Iran can be deflected or opposed. For reasons that are completely left unspoken, Brooks imagines that 1) Iran is not aware of this set of reactions, 2) that American (and thus in his eyes by extension world) security is threatened by this exposure, not least because the relationships on which American and Arab security depend are threatened.

This is absurd. There is nothing new here. These are opinions that have been publicly and openly expressed by many people in all of these governments for literally years. So, to pretend that the public revelation that these same opinions have been expressed by functionaries of more than a few governments is somehow going to threaten the "order" on which our civilization depends is to imagine things that are not true and that cannot be true. Worse, the idea that order is dependent on secrecy and political chicanery is disturbing and wrong.

People (in democratic societies at least) are best served by diplomacy that is open and honest about the goals of the society and about the methods used to attain those goals. To wit: in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States government, under administrations of both major stripes, used assassination and support for insurgencies to overthrow more than a few governments (Chile, Iran, and Congo come immediately to mind, but one suspects I've listed only a few out of many). The governments that we supported in the aftermath of these "successes" killed many more of their citizens in the name of "order" than the governments they replaced. In fact, with the exception of Chile, very few of these countries have recovered from the disorder we sowed.

Secrecy in diplomacy (and in diplomatic skulduggery) did not serve "order" in these cases, or their close relatives. It undermined it. Perhaps not in the US. No doubt there were a few American "interests"-- read: businesses-- that benefited, in the short term, from Iran's government being beholden to the US government for being in power. I doubt, thought, that any amount of money would make a difference to the many families who lost their loved ones to the Shah's secret police. And it's difficult not to believe that the attitudes that allowed our government to think it was OK to overthrow the democratically elected governments of Chile or Iran is the same attitude that allowed it to lie to us about the situation in Vietnam or Iraq, so we'd end up bankrupting our treasury and throwing away tens of thousands of American lives (not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese or Iraqi lives throw away).

The sooner we recognize these things, and demand openness and treaties (voted into place by the Senate) as the way to conduct diplomacy, the sooner we'll begin to live in peace with the rest of the world. No, it won't end the war in Afghanistan immediately. But it might keep us out the next "Afghanistan", or "Vietnam", or "Iraq".

Move along. Nothing to see here.

@Jimcat: This doesn't necessarily diminish the value of the rest of your position, but fission was discovered only in 1938 (albeit by [Jewish in at least one case] Germans). It was only hypothesized as possible in 1934.

Nevertheless, fission was an extremely new fact, and the fact that enormous (possibly historically incomparable) resources were necessary to proceed to building a weapon in the time available based on that technology probably made it likely than only a few nations had the resources to contemplate the effort, never mind bring it to fruition in the midst of a war.

FWIW, if the rest of the political developments post-war had proceeded apace without the US having developed and used a nuclear weapon in WWII, I feel confident we would have had a nuclear war circa the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why? Curtis LeMay wouldn't have seemed so insane— no one would have known just how bad it would be, and some one would have pushed the button, which would likely have meant everyone pushing all their buttons.

All of which is to say: @Misterben: I think you're mistaken regarding deterrence. It is exactly because deterrence works through mutually assured destruction that you are correct to say that, "[i]t's like we're the world's biggest suicide bomber." Only "we" is anyone who starts a nuclear war with another nuclear power, and we aren't "like" the world's biggest suicide bomber— we are the worlds biggest suicide bomber.

The real question you have to ask yourself is, "would I submit to nuclear blackmail if I couldn't respond in kind?" If the answer is yes, then you may find yourself never understanding those of us who prefer the tension of possible conflagration to the reality of submission.

I'm not suggesting this is a perfect result. It isn't. It's just the least bad result given the cards in play. Someday, probably after my atoms have dispersed permanently, maybe we'll find a way to resolve this problem. Maybe it'll be through that dreaded one-world government (Oooh! Scary!). Maybe not.

Which brings me back to Ed's actual point: the Rs are just sure that if they look like their shitting their pants thoroughly enough, people will be scared of a change that will, 1) cost their political contributors a few bucks, 2) have no other meaningful result. Because, honestly, all this really says is we won't obliterate Venezuela, or Cuba, Somalia, or some other country full of brown-skinned folks no matter how much fun their juvenile troglodyte supporters might think it'd be when they get uppity. Iran and North Korea? Well, you just never know, now do you?

A letter to David Brooks

Dear Mr. Brooks—


In your columns (like today's— 6 April) you often express unbridled optimism about the future of the United States. All too often, in thinking about what you've written as compared to the universe of data available on the subject, I find myself wondering why you dismiss the view that we have serious problems that we are ignoring because we can't imagine the answers.


I can't help but think that this blog post ("The Collapse of Complex Business Models") and more importantly the work that it references (Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies") hint at the challenge the present state of Western society faces. We've built an edifice that works very well for the top 10-40% of Americans and Western Europeans. It even works OK for another 20-30%-- their lives are vastly better than their ancestors just three or four generations removed (with all but a few exceptions born of squandered gains).


As any investor knows, though, past performance is no guarantee of future gains. We are at a point where we must change so much about our society-- not least how we use and create the energy we need to support our (historically) lavish lifestyles-- but the systems we've put in place to support our societies have ossified. De-constructing them (and re-constructing their more flexible replacements) will require real sacrifice from the elites. Yet still the elites pretend otherwise.


I can't help but see works such as the one you wrote today as being a shining beacon of foolishness in a world filled with dark and murky truths-- it looks good and gives everyone a warm fuzzy, but it's a false lead and presages doom.