Friday, October 31, 2008

Iraq and Afghanistan

The mainstream media (NY Times, CNN, Fox News, CBS, ABC, etc...) has utterly and completely failed to understand Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite a closer correspondence between reality and their reporting, now, I still have absolutely no confidence that the media will adequately report on what's occurring in these critical regions of the world. Their level of incompetence has cost the American people money and lives. Their incompetence is even more reprehensible given that they have now had so much time to figure things out.

From initially allowing General Clark to use CNN as a podium from which to run for President, to utterly failing to explain or understand the complex relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper's mindless biases against McCain, Bush, the Republicans, and the Iraq War in general, to the completely inadequate coverage of China and Russia's involvement in the Middle East, the mainstream media has been abysmally bad.

I actually think that, while they are biased, it is the media's incompetence, more than bias, that has caused me such agony.

An example:
Once, in about 2004, on a mainstream national TV network, I heard a story which appeared to describe an Iraqi in Kirkuk lamenting the fact that Americans were "killing Arabs" and ranting about how much the Arabs "feared the Americans." I remember being struck by the man's facial expressions; he seemed almost to be delighting in describing the alleged carnage. Then, I started listening more closely to his voice (which was nearly inaudible, because of the voice-over translation). When I did succeed in picking out the original speaker's voice, I realized - he wasn't speaking Arabic! He was a Kurd, and he was speaking Kurdish (which sounds more like Farsi). The story that was allegedly about an Iraqi man lamenting the killing of his own kind was actually about a Iraqi Kurd nearly rejoicing in the restoration of parts of Kirkuk to the Kurds after years of a policy of genocidal arabization at the hands of Sunni Arabs.

Completely apart from the veracity of the report (which I doubt) or the motivations of the interviewee (of which I am suspicious), the most troubling thing was that the big cable network, with its legion of analysts and reporters and producers and translators, had no idea what it was reporting. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. I have heard so many cases of ignorant reporting that confuses who lives where, who gets along with whom, and who did what to whom when, that I see no point in watching the mainstream TV media's coverage of the Iraq War.

Why does it matter that the media is so bad? It matters because it results in the deaths of Americans, unnecessary expenditures from the American coffers, and damage to the prestige of the United States abroad.

Rather than ignoring the Iraq War now, as both the domestic and foreign media are doing, they should be evaluating why they were so wrong. The answers are quite obvious, but they are nonetheless failing to do so. The media's expectations that the war would be over quickly were largely created by... the media themselves. Did you know that the term Shock & Awe was misapplied by the media? Not only was the media reffering to the Iraq campaign as a shock & awe campaign inaccurately, because it wasn't one, but nobody in the military really said it was. There is a scant amount of evidence that, once, an anonmymous government official said that the strategy to be employed was "based on" schock & awe, but that's it. In fact, General McKiernan's christening of the 3rd Army's plan "Cobra II" directly disputes the idea that the campaign was planned as a "shock & awe" campaign. Anyone who knows any military history understands that Operation Cobra was not about shock & awe, even in an abstract or metaphorical sense.

If the media had, from the outset, recognized how far we were from "winning" the war in Afghanistan (which, early on, the media seemed happy to declare finished), and also had realistic expectations for how long it takes to occupy and rebuild a country (Iraq), the US government would not have been so paralyzed. All the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam tied the US Government's hands. Sending more troops to Iraq, exactly what was needed in about 2004/2005, but was not accomplished until 2007, was seem as political suicide because the media had portrayed such a strategy as an admission of defeat and similarity to Vietnam, which it was not, and would not have been. In fact, even though that strategy has worked, it's delay by and portrayal in the media until the last few months, cost President Bush dearly and will quite possibly have cost McCain the election in a few more days. I do blame Bush, to some extent, for not simply doing it anyway, sooner, even though the media, and therefore the country, was likely to completely misinterpret it.

McCain, however, championed it from the beginning. Obama, for his part, still seems unaware that it has worked, why it worked, or what should follow.

Had the media correctly assessed Afghanistan to be more like Vietnam (which is so obviously within their grasp because in the 80s the very same American media referred to the Soviet's troubles there as the USSR's Vietnam), people around the world would be conceding that the US was right on Iraq all along and would be fretting about what to do in Afghanistan. Instead, most of the people in this country and around the world are still complaining about Iraq and ignoring Afghanistan. While all you spoon-fed CNN lovers have been sitting around gobbling up the ignorance, did you realize that more American soldiers died this month in Afghanistan than in Iraq?

Don't delay another day. Start admitting, right now, that you were wrong about Iraq. It may have taken longer than it could have. It did not go as smoothly as it could have. Too many people died. But, the strategy, eventually, started to work. What you should have been spending your time complaining about, all along, was the failure in the strategy employed in Afghanistan. But, you wasted your time, and now we're JUST STARTING, as a nation, to understand what's happening in Afghanistan. Your ignorance, much like the media's, is responsible, to some degree, for the number of American soldiers dying in Afghanistan today and the lack of support for that war by the Europeans.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

It's the Economy, Stupid (and your vote)

I think one could argue that the economy is the #1 issue in this election. I would then add that the #1 problem to be addressed in the economy is what role the government will play in "fixing" it.

Government will certainly play a role, and they certainly should, but what role they should play is neither obvious nor clear.

It is important to remember where blame should be placed for the problems that are going on.
#1: Consumers - People who borrowed too much money, for houses and on credit cards, who don't save enough, and who bet that "real estate prices can't go down" bear the largest responsibilities.
#2: Banks - Banks should share almost equally in the blame. It takes two to tango. Banks made bad loans and they are now paying for it. Unfortunately, we're paying for them paying for it, too.
#3: Regulators and Government - In some ways, the regulation scheme failed (see my earlier post about debt swaps, for example). Also, the "ownership society" President Bush promoted is partly responsible for the eagerness to buy homes (and to qualify people for home loans).

Government has 2 roles to play in the recovery:
A) Changes to regulatory schemes and rules.
B) Fiscal and monetary policy, in terms of interest rates, bailouts, stimulus packages, and general macroeconomic policy.

(A) is going to happen. The banking industry will be largely re-regulated. We should solve problem #3, above, through government regulation. We should *NOT* solve problems #1 and #2 above. Doing so is called socialism. If the government starts deciding how consumers should spend their money or how banks should offer their products, then it is encroaching on personal liberties and on capitalism. The government can effectively update the rules for banks without having to become so large and invasive so as to *be* the banking industry.

(B) is also going to happen. Interest rates will be lowered. Stimulus packages may be passed. Measures like this are great because they're temporary. They take effect soon, and that matters to the economy now, and then they end, which is good.

The concern with Obama is along both (A) and (B).

Along line (A): Obama is far more likely than McCain to see the current crisis as an opportunity for government to get more involved in figuring out how poor people finance their houses, for example. This, however, would be a huge mistake. It would be the same form of market distorting government policy that Bush's "ownership society" was, which is a part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

Along line (B): Obama has promised massive government spending which will likely worsen the deficit. McCain has much more of a history of rejecting wasteful government spending and trying to keep the budget deficits in line. Also, Obama has promosed long-term infrastructure projects as a form of economic stimulus. Not only does the research show that this doesn't work (it doesn't take effect quickly enough), but in reality, it's just an expansion of government programs. It just makes the goverment more directly involved in long-term attempts to "build" things.

McCain is exactly the right kind of person for the current economic climate, because he's a pragmatist and willing to compromise, in the short run, but there is little danger of him allowing any slow drift toward a more socialized state, in the long run.

This is the most powerful argument for McCain and against Obama, right now, and it's probably the most important issue in this election (and ironically, it wasn't an issue until about the last 2 weeks).

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Multiple Sclerosis

There is a branch of engineering/business/computer science that deals with very complex systems and their failure modes. Systems that are so complex that we can't really measure every part of them or understand every interaction can generally be described along two dimensions:
1) Complex systems - these are systems where there are simply many different processes or participants
2) Tightly coupled systems - these are systems in which actions are linked in long chains, meaning that a small change in one place might affect something else, far away.

A university might be a complex but loosely coupled system. There are many complicated interactions going on in different classrooms, but they are more or less independent of one another.

The Berlin Airlift, for example, was both complex and tightly coupled.

The body is generally a very complex, but fairly loosely coupled system. It is very redundant. Typically a problem in one cell doesn't affect too many other cells. One problem with MS is that it attacks one of the points within the system-that-is-the-human-body in which the coupling is tighter. The nerve cells affect many other things directly and without as much redundancy.

Maybe, like cancer or so many other conditions, everyone "has MS" to some extent. Maybe everyone has a natural balance between the reactions which, when unchecked, cause the destruction of the myelin sheathing around nerve cells. The basic problem is that some people have a biochemistry, or DNA, or a lifestyle, or whatever, that makes these reactions more common or likely. So, why do women in the 20's get MS 4x as often as men in their 20's?

Perhaps another dimension to the problem is that people have variable levels of coupling of the immune system and the nerve tissue. Maybe something about being a women ties the immune system more closely to the nerve cells. There is a precedent for women's bodies ability to differentiate between foreign and normal cells being quite different than mens'. It might make sense that women's immune systems "mature" faster than men's. If there is a tighter coupling between their immune systems and the MS-like problems, perhaps they, with the same natural change in biochemistry or rate of nerve tissue development, or a host of other factors, are more likley to exhibit the problems.

Essentially, I am proposing that things are easier to "mask" when they are loosely coupled. Loosely coupled things don't manifest themselves until they are very common. One doesn't refer to a college as a "Spanish-speaking" college until many of the interactions which go on inside it independently start happening in Spanish. But what if you were playing a huge game of telephone on campus? Then, you would expect that once a critical mass of people started speaking Spanish, the whole chain might happen in Spanish.

My dad said that he thought he had read that pregnancy triggered the onset of MS in young women. Maybe pregnancy is the key difference that increases the tightness of coupling of the changes in body chemistry to the immune system to the nerve cells to the MS condition.

Re-Regulation

The most important consequence that I foresee coming from the current financial crisis is the "re-regulation" of the banking industry. As I have written before, although regulation is sometimes good and necessary, less regulation is better than more regulation, all other things being equal.

There is a great danger in my mind that the US will over-regulate the banking industry again. Why? Two reasons:

1) The majority of the problems right now are not due to faulty regulation. They are due to speculation by businesses and irrational behavior by consumers. Should regulations help avoid catastrophes that result from these things? Yes. But, should a lack of regulations be seen as the sole or even primary cause of these problems? Certainly not. If that's what we see when we look at the situation, we are missing the point and failing to learn the most valuable lessons of all, here. The most fundamental cause of the problems going on right now is consumers running up too much debt, especially in real estate. The other major cause is banks making wildly speculative investments. The third, and smaller, though still important, cause is genuine fraud, deception, or uncertainty resulting from unclear, unenforceable, or out-of-date rules and regulations on financial instruments, institutions, and securities.

2) Re-regulating is "popular" right now. It is easy to see the next president succumbing to the cries for regulation. I think, probably, with a Democratic Congress, and being a Republican, McCain is less likely to heed these execratory howls.

Leaving the Ranks of the Undecided

I have left the ranks of the undecided today, and decided to vote for McCain. I still like both candidates and think both would make fine presidents.

I can explain my basic reasons for voting for McCain in a nutshell:
1) I like lower taxes better than higher taxes. In all likelihood, taxes will be lower under McCain. McCain is still more of a small government guy. Obama is more of a big government guy. In general, I think government is inefficient at doing things. So, I generally side with small government-types.
2) McCain is willing to buck his own party. Obama has voted with his party 96% of the time (and Biden is even worse). Take immigration-- would Obama compromise and build a fence in order to also rationalize immigration policy? I don't know. He voted as if he wouldn't. Would McCain compromise and allow some "amnesty" in order to secure the borders? Yes, he championed just such compromise legislation, which was ultimately defeated by both Republicans and Democrats. Also, with Democrats controlling the Congress and White House, the Government deficit would likely soar. Finally, both Obama and Biden take huge amounts of money from public sector unions such as the Teachers' Unions. These unions are unfair to their members, violate the spirit of the campaign finance reform McCain championed, and are obstacles to reform in schools. I trust McCain and Palin more to fix education than Obama and Biden, because they're not beholden to these unions for money and votes.
3) McCain has done tons of things in the Senate. Can you name one thing Obama has done since becoming a Senator other than run for President?

In the end, Obama is an inspiring figure, but more so personally than politically. Politically, he's basically positioning himself as a tax-and-spend liberal. To be fair, he might not be, but he hasn't shown anything else, yet. McCain is committed to bettering this country while maintaining his Republican principles. Yet, he's not a bigot, a xenophobe, a pedant, or a proselytizer. What more could I ask for?

Monday, October 27, 2008

Why are the Polls so Crazy?

Why do John Zogby's polls swing so violently? Why are they so volatile? First, it is clear that the pollsters suck (witness the inaccuracy of exit polling in 2000). Second, I think that there is another reason why the polls are swinging so wildly.

I think that in this election, there are a lot more people who are "undecided" than there are people who admit to being undecided. I think this for several reasons:
1) Amongst intelligent voters, there is no obvious choice. Both candidates have real appeal.
2) This campaign season has NOT been about the stereotypical "issues." Neither candidate is talking about abortion, crime, education, or any of the other typical hot-button issues very much, because their positions on these things hardly differ. The only issue that has come up repeatedly is tax. McCain is on the populist side of this issue (he's generally for lower taxes than is Obama).
3) Neither candidate has positioned himself as "the religious choice" which means that people who just vote for or against such candidates don't have a straightforward way to choose.
4) Much of Obama's support is from young people and other groups whose turnout is very uncertain.
5) Much of McCain's support is from religious people who don't particularly like him and may not turn out, either.

I have seen Obama with leads anywhere from 4% (statistically, barely significant) to 15% (which would be the biggest landslide in recent history) in the course of about 2 weeks. That seems weird to me. Nothing interesting enough has happened to actually change peoples' minds that much, unless their minds weren't really made up in the first place.

Any lead of less than about 8% or so for Obama could still end up being very close, due both to the Bradley effect and to the uncertainty of turnout.

I suspect that this election will be far closer than people think. If I had to bet, I would still bet that Obama wins, mostly because of people casting their votes "against" the party in power, whom they blame for the current economic conditions. The irony of this is that it would give the democrats both the Congress and the White House, which is generally the worst possible recipe for government spending and deficits.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The (First) Invisible Hand

I recently learned that Machiavelli actually used the term "invisible hand" in The Discourses. He refers not to an invisible hand of economics, though, but an invisible hand of politics. Turning what was accepted thought at the time on its head, he argued against the Florentine Humanism School's belief in the primacy of unity.

Machiavelli thought, far from making stamping out disunity and dissension a priority, contemporary princes should try to emulate the trials and tribulations the Romans faced in sorting out the disagreements between "the rich" and "the masses." Machiavelli, though he would not have used these terms, was essentially saying that a process of dispute and dissension between the "people" and the "aristocrats" has a lower transaction cost than does the combination of methods required to attain total unity, punctuated by periodic government-shattering upheaval.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Funny Shirts

I just saw two grandmotherly looking women at Starbucks. One had a pink shirt that said, "MOM upside-down is WOW." The other, slightly older looking one, had a shirt that said, "I only date musicians."

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Renaissance Man and the Classics

Do people still value the Renaissance Man? I think that the Renaissance Man is undervalued. Knowing about, or how to do, a very wide range of things is worth more than just the sum of the disparate subjects-- it is only by this great variety of learnedness that a person can be created for whom new, uncategorized situations are tolerable and even "straightforward."

Specifically, one part of being a Renaissance Man that is now thoroughly ignored is study of the classics. The totality of modern (since the Renaissance) learning is still perhaps only equal, in scope and value, to the learnings recorded between about 500BC and 500AD.

I should really credit Matt Ward with recognizing the value of the classics, however obsessed with the pharmacon and the bad festival he may be.

Monday, October 20, 2008

There can be no Afghanistan without Pakistan

We need to get our Afghanistan strategy under control.

The US has just signed a big deal with India, Karzai went to school in India, and the Taliban has trained terrorists that fight against India in the Kashmir. To protect itself, Pakistan cultivates a common "Islamic" identity with Afghanistan. It is no wonder that Pakistan is not entirely committed to getting terrorists out of the treacherous mountain areas on its border with Afghanistan.

The US must provide a combination of good enough carrots and big enough sticks to entice Pakistan to help more. This should simply be charged as a cost of doing business with India. It's worth it, though, because doing what we have to to be friends with India and Pakistan is the way that we protect ourselves from terrorists in Afghanistan and from China. If we allow ourselves to be sucked back into the India v. Pakistan conflict (and if we don't keep that conflict from growing), we will find ourselves battling with Islamists and with China for influence in the region.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

No, the other Longoria

Yes, yes, occasionally a Sportscenter anchor will make some quip about Desperate Housewives or Tony Parker while recapping a Rays game, but seriously, how can I be the only one who finds it so remarkable how similar Eva Longoria Parker and Evan Longoria's names are?

They are not related. Can you think of a single other Longoria? It's not as if their names were Michael Smith and Michelle Smith.

I mean, that's really weird. At almost exactly the same time that Eva Longoria was becoming a household name, Evan Longoria emerged as a budding baseball superstar.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Offers of Assistance

I hereby offer my assistance in the following subjects to any and all takers:
1) Financial Planning
2) Business and Commerce
3) Calculus
4) History
5) The Liberal Arts
6) Literature
7) Ethics
8) Computer Science

Upon request, I will help craft a reading list and/or study plan, and will personally tutor in any or all of these subjects.

Talent vs. Hard Work

For a long time, I basically believed that the less talent a person had, the harder they had to work to achieve the same thing. I still think this basic premise is true, but I have come to see how short-sighted it is as a concept.

Those who have talent should, in fact, work even harder than those who do not. Those who have talent have a comparative advantage in activity. To NOT work hard, for them, wastes more than does lazyness by the talentless.

Pandit Nehru, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Bejamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Julius Caesar, Winston Churchill, and many of the other great men I have studied, had unfathomable natural gifts, AND worked harder than everyone else around them.

When I think about what makes them great, it seems to be equal parts natural ability and hard work.

Perhaps greatness amongst men is only greatness when the great minds of men are put into motion to aid mankind.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Founding Mythologies

I concur with David McCullough, when he says (in the biography of John Adams) something to the effect of:

"It's not clear whether Franklin actually said, 'We must all hang together or we will all hang separately' or whether John Hancock actually signed his name in oversized letters so that 'King George could read it without his spectacles,' but it doesn't really matter; these legends have endured because they are in character."

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Bullying

There are many types of bully. Some people bully physically. Some bully emotionally (I will withhold love, respect, or attention from you unless you do what I want). Some bully socially (I will put you in positions of subordination publicly). Some even bully intellectually (I will thrash you with facts and the implication that if you don't agree with me, you must be unintelligent).

Recently, I have become aware of a new kind of bullying - bullying by flattery. Someone is actually bullying someone else I know by flattering her. By constantly building her up and complimenting her, he is creating an intolerate expectation for her performance. He is then using this expectation level to govern her behavior and to prevent her from exerting any control over the work they are doing together. Subsequently, he feels himself powerful (like all bullies, he has subconscious (and perhaps even conscious) doubts about his potency).

I have recently become more involved in the project they are working on, and I intend to break him of his bullying ways.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Cicero, The Roman Empire, and the Supreme Court

"The ministers of the law are its magistrates; the interpreters of the law are the judges; we are therefore all slaves of the Laws, that we may enjoy freedom." - Cicero

Looking for causes of the Roman Empire's downfall is nothing new, and I don't offer the following so much as a tally mark in the column of this or that particular cause, but rather I offer it as a testament to two things:
1) The greatness of the founding fathers and the constitution of the United States, and
2) The interconnection between the Roman Republic's downfall, and the drafting of the constitution of the United States.

When Hannibal threatened Rome, the Senate realized it must invest greater and greater power in a military executive in order that the Republic survive. This tension, between parliament and absolute monarch, republican senate and president, or Presbyterian kirk and glorious revolutionary, has plagued nations ever since. Although 220 years is not enough time to be sure, it appears the United States may have solved this problem. The three branch government, with its independent judiciary and the supremacy of the rule of law which our constitution implies and our courts protect, has resolved this dilemma perhaps better than any other attempt in history.

Marbury v. Madison, United States v. Nixon, FDR's attempts to pack the court, and even Bush v. Gore have tested the separation of powers, and in each of these (and most other) cases, the court (and thereby the rule of law) has triumphed.

If the Romans had had a Supreme Court that established powers of judicial review and independence, perhaps we'd all be speaking Latin today.

Monday, October 06, 2008

Blame the Bankers and the Bankees

I would like to point out that, while it's fun to rail against the greed of Wall Street, we should also rail against the irrationality and stupidity of Main Street.

It takes two to tango. 50% of the problems we're experiencing right now are because American consumers borrowed too much money. They paid too much money for houses, borrowed too much on credit cards, etc... I can't tell you how many people told me that Bay Area housing prices couldn't go down. Even though prices have already gone down, they still tell me that Bay Area prices can never go down as much as other places. OF COURSE THEY CAN. Get your heads out of the sand.

The other 50% of the problems we're having should be blamed on the bankers. Everyone from individual mortgage bankers all the way up to commercial bankers and investment bankers made mad loans. You wrote bad loans -- now you have to eat them. Lucky for you the US taxpayers (like me) are going to partially bail you out. I expect thank you notes from all the people who overpaid for houses or are mortgage bankers. You're welcome for continuing to pay taxes (actually paying even more taxes this year) which will largely go toward bailing you idiots out over the next few years.

Everyone who thinks that spending hundreds of $B on the war in Iraq, which, by the way, fraught as it may be with problems, is actually accomplishing something, should seriously check themselves. If they also went out and borrowed a bunch of money to bid up the price of a house somewhere, and are now irrationally sitting on that house (even though they should probably just be selling it at a loss), then they are part of the reason that *I* now have to pay back a share of the $700B the government is about to eat up so *your* stupid loans won't wreck the economy and cost *you* even more money.

And by "you idiots" I mean 'all you people who overpaid for houses, encouraged people to buy houses, think that renting is "wasting money," think housing prices can't go down, etc...' All that kind of talk is idiot-speak.

Renting is often good for the economy. It keeps people mobile and reduces their liability to interest rates. Please mail the thank-you notes right away.

You're welcome,
Andy

Failed States

Somalia is unquestionably a failed state. In fact, it has failed catastrophically. With no real, functioning government, it is lawless and anarchic at best. Al-Qaeda and/or other Islamists use it as a base to the extent they can, pirates and bandits run rampant there, and violence is widespread.

It failed in 1991, and after that time, was a humanitarian disaster. While at least 5 different militia-backed factions fought for control, several hundred thousand people died. Most of the relief food that was sent was stolen and sold. Finally, the US, Pakistan, Malaysia, and others attempted to subdue one of the most aggressive and confrontational of the factions, the SNA, led by Mohammed Aidid. The Blackhawk Down incident, and the ensuing "Battle of Mogadishu" constitute the pivotal chapter in this attempt, after which the attempt was abandoned.

After being attacked by these militias, which Bin Laden has claimed he trained and supported (although these claims are difficult to verify), the US withdrew from Somalia. Since that time, Somalia has remained contested and lawless. In 2006, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) attempted to control and suppress all the people of Somalia, but was opposed by Ethiopia and Eritrea, with some American support. It has really not gotten much better since that time.

Failed states are dangerous. While casualties are difficult to swallow, and the US clearly made several military and political miscalculations in 1993, they should have remained in Mogadishu to straighted things out. Instead, after perhaps alienating more civilians by fighting in the streets of Mogadishu, the US withdrew, leaving the people, already bitter at the United States, to suffer even more.

Even today, the ICU attempts to control the country to impose such Draconian policies as the outlawing of public sports viewing or movie watching. Somalia remains a haven for Al-Qaeda and related groups. As in Sudan, the United States should intervene directly to support improved stability, personal liberties, women's rights, and democratic institutions in Somalia, as well as to aggressively disrupt and destroy the terrorist networks operating from Somalia.

Friday, October 03, 2008

IT and the Business Climate

This week we have seen a broadening of the financial crisis as auto-makers and other businesses have started to be more directly affected. In the case of the automakers, they can't sell as many cars because people can't get financing as easily.

One looming question, though, is why other industries have not been affected more by the mortgage crisis and all its banking-and-insurance-industry fallout.

Is it simply because consumer confidence has not fallen that low and because individual consumers have not been hit as hard as we think? If that's the case, continued real estate price drops may quickly sour consumer sentiment further.

The fact is, we still have not actually had a recession, in the technical sense. We also still have not seen the surge in unemployment we might expect. Perhaps these things will materialize soon. Perhaps not.

I think that one factor is that businesses, due to improved IT, have been able to adjust very, very quickly to changing conditions. When you have good systems, you can quickly adjust inventories, workforces, etc... Whereas in the old days it may have taken a manufacturing company 3 months from the start of a panic before genuinely changing its purchasing strategy and inventory levels, I think that today's technology allows them to change their behavior in under 3 weeks.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

You Should Not be Allowed to Comment on Politics Until You Know Anything About Politics

Ok... I really hate to have to do this, but I've been hearing too much of this crap about how Palin screwed up in her interview with Katie Couric.

A couple of disclaimers:
1) I don't love Palin. I have mixed feelings about her. Above all, I feel she is an unknown commodity.
2) I know what Hamas is. In all likelihood I know more about Hamas than Palin, Couric, or you.
3) I was a champion debater once, and I know and have studied the formal rules of logic.
4) I object to the kind of questioning that Katie Couric is doing in this interview in general.

But... just because you all seem to be asking for it, I am going to do an analysis of a clip that was sent to me of an interview question that Palin answered. I didn't watch this interview when it first came on, and I still have not watched the whole thing. I don't even plan on watching the whole thing. I wish I had never seen this clip, because it's a waste of my time. Having said all that... this clip was offered to me as an example of how incompetent Palin is. I have no idea if she's competent or not, but I will assert that a) Couric appears incompetent and biased and b) the clip proves nothing of interest. Palin appears to give a normal politician-style answer to a virtually non-sensical question.

In the clip, Kouric asks this question, which I will quote word-for-word here:

Kouric: "What happens if the goal of democracy, Governor Palin, doesn't produce the desired outcome, for example in Gaza? The US pushed hard for elections and Hamas won."

Ok. Now... a little pop quiz for all of you out there. What was the question asked? The question was, "What happens if the goal of democracy... doesn't produce the desired outcome?" What the hell does that mean? The goal of democracy doesn't produce anything. What I *think* Couric meant was, "What happens if democracy doesn't produce the desired outcome?" Couric's question is a really weird, tricky (or silly) sort of a question, for many reasons. Here are a couple:

1) If you answer the question, "What happens if democracy doesn't produce the desired outcome?" with reference to Hamas, you are sort of admitting that what happened there was "democracy." This is like asking the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife?" It's not a reasonable question, because there's no logical way to answer it except to dodge it, unless you *have* previously beaten your wife. I could ask, "What's your favorite color of M&M's? Some people prefer red over blue, for example." But then... could I legitimately get pissed off if you talked about how you like green M&M's? Isn't that kind of a reasonable answer to the question?

2) The question also presupposes that we agree upon what the desired outcome was. Does Couric think there's an outcome to the elections in Gaza that would obviously have been good? Many people believe the alternative to Hamas, Fatah, is also a terrorist organization. So... if you answer the question she asked, do you have to presuppose that Fatah members winning more seats was the desired outcome? At the time (and still) many people believe that Hamas members winning was the desired outcome because of Hamas's connection to terrorism. People who think that generally believe any or all of the following:

  • By winning elections, Hamas leaders will be held more accountable. People may now assume that if conditions in Gaza worsen, it is Hamas's fault.
  • Because Hamas as a party triumphed, they will, as a party, now be held accountable for their positions. They will be forced to soften their line against Israel. To a very minor extent, this has already occurred.
  • Because Hamas was elected, it will now act more like legitimate governments do in order to appeal to other countries.
  • Because Hamas has been [at least partly] legitimized, it will no longer be forced to define itself solely as a paramilitary organization and can therefore reduce or drop its terrorist activity. This is still a very realistic possibility.

Note: Last time I checked, which was four seconds ago, the question doesn't specifically ask what Palin thinks about Hamas. It cites Hamas as an example of a group that won an election. Again, this presents several problems: 1) It is not at all clear, although Hamas members won an election, that Hamas as a party even believes democracy is good; 2) It is not at all clear that the election that happened in Gaza would be considered "democratic" by our standards. Saddam Hussein was elected, too. That doesn't mean Iraq was a real democracy. Another good example of a person who won an election in a place that alleges it is democratic, but really isn't, is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran.

I ask several questions here: 1) Does Couric believe that Gaza is a "democracy?" If so, why? Is she asking Palin if she believes Gaza is a democracy? 2) Does Couric understand that Gaza is not an independent nation? Typically, we talk about "democracies" as existing at the national level. Do you understand that this is a loaded question? I don't know if Couric understands it or not, but to refer to Gaza as a democracy or "not a democracy" is perhaps to imply it is a sovereign nation. Do you understand why a politician may be reticent to do this? 3) Does Couric realize that Palin is answering the question asked, or that Palin understands that Iran is similar to Gaza in the sense that it has elections, yet isn't really a functioning democracy? It appears that Katie Couric doesn't realize this. It seems obvious to me that Palin is aware that in both places (Gaza and Iran) elections occurred, and the people who were elected may support terrorism.

Palin answers, "Yeah, well, especially in that region, though, we have got to protect those and support those who do seek democracy and do seek protections for the people... um.... who live there and we're seeing, today, in the last couple of days, here in New York, a speaker, a President of Iran, Ahmadinejad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel, and we're hearing the evil that he speaks, and if that, if hearing him doesn't allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the mideast, then nothing will. If Americans are not waking up to understand what it is that he represents, then nothing is going to wake us up and we will be lulled into some kind of false sense of security that perhaps Americans were a part of before 9/11."

At this point, the camera shows Katie Couric, who looks very agitated. Why is she agitated? I'm struggling to understand how she thinks Palin didn't answer the question. I mean, her answer wasn't really that great or insightful, and it was somewhat indirect. Basically, the question was, "What happens if 'elections' elect leaders we don't like?" Palin's answer was, "We need to protect those who seek democracy and seek protections for the people." This is a logical, if somewhat mundane, answer. Further, she gives the example of Ahmadinejad and urges Americans to realize we must oppose him and people like him, especially in the Middle East. Lastly, she points out that since 9/11, we cannot tolerate the repressive regimes of the Middle East, such as that of Iran, or the hate-spewing, anti-Israel ones, of which Hamas is another example.

Comparing Gaza to Iran is not an entirely illogical thing to do. In fact, it's somewhat relevant. In both cases, a terrorism-supporting party which advocates attacks against Israel was 'elected' in elections of questionable fairness. Uh... why did someone send me this clip? How is this unique amongst all the TV interviews that politicians give? It sounds pretty run-of-the-mill to me.

I hope you readers out there also realize that Iran actively supports Hamas. Here's a quote from a news story from September 13th, 2008 (shortly before this interview):

Iranian news agency Khabar quoted him as saying to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh that he and the Iranian people as a whole consider it their religious and national duty to support Hamas “until the big victory feast which is the collapse of the Zionist regime.” He added that the group’s violence against Israelis would always be “a source of pride for all Muslims.”

Uhh... you realize, right... that Hamas and Iran are linked in some ways? Oh wait... you probably don't realize that, which would mean that Sarah Palin might know more than you do. Grow a brain before you send me these clips. I don't have time to help you sort out the basics of foreign policy, let alone language and logic.

Now, if you want to interpret Palin's answer more deeply, and I am not asserting that this is what she meant, but if you want to look deeper into it, then I think it has some implications for Venezuela and possibly Egypt. Palin's answer was basically, "We need to protect those who support those who seek democracy and protections for the people." This is an indirect way of saying, "We need to give weapons and money to the democractic forces in places like Iran and Gaza." Now, everyone knows that Ahmadinejad is bad, even if we aren't really doing anything about it. The "we need to wake up" message could equally apply to Venezuela, though. We need to wake up and realize that Chavez is an oppressive, authoritarian dictator-communist. We DO need to wake and up do something about him, as we do about Ahmadinejad. One can also infer from Palin's comment that, even if we don't openly fight Hamas, we need to oppose them more strongly because they support the destruction of Israel. It may not be politically expedient to say that we should openly fight Hamas, but that is not an unreasonable position, which she may have been inferring.

The alternative answer, which Palin did not give, was, "We need to respect the outcome of the elections." Not only is this not true (nowhere is there a rule that if Hitler is elected, you must then think he is a nice guy), but as I mentioned before, it's not at all clear that what happened in Gaza were even fair elections to begin with. The most clear thing about Palin's statement is that we need to protect those who genuinely promote democracy. Further, you might imply that she also says we need to "wake up" and stop adhering to the philosophy that once someone is elected in some weird, rigged election, they are somehow legitimate and on equal footing with other world leaders. If the elections in which Hamas won the majority of seats was legitimate, then a legitimate government now exists which opposes Israel's right to exist, and opposes individual liberties in general (such as many womens' rights). Palin's answer in this case should be understood as "we should back the opposition." If the elections were NOT legitimate, Palin's answer should be understood as "we should back the genuine democratic forces." Right or wrong, these are fairly straightforward viewpoints, even if she explained them in a slightly (although, by politicians' standards, not very) indirect way.

I'm sure there was more to this interview, and maybe in the other parts Palin made more or less sense -- I have no idea. But, at this point, seeing how Couric was already turning against her for her perceived failure to answer the question (even though Palin basically did answer, and Couric clearly didn't understand her answer), I don't know what I would gain by watching any more. Now, I have no faith that Couric isn't out to purposely make Palin look bad, which is fine, but it isn't interesting to me and it shouldn't be on a show that even pretends to present unbiased information or "news" of any kind.