Obama's foolish "red line" statement converts Syria from a regional tragedy into a U.S. interest

The most foolish mistake that President Obama has made, I believe, was his statement that if Syria were to use chemical weapons they would be crossing a red line and that we would have to respond to that "game changer." George Friedman points out that this is normally a message from a superior power to a lesser power that although they don't like what the lesser power is doing, as long as they stay on the other side of the "red line" the greater power would not intervene militarily.  
            
Well, Assad crossed the red line, a couple of times, and now we are all paying the price for Assad's stupid cruelty and Obama's foolish naivete.  Before Obama made his red line statement, Syria was a tragic situation, but had no strategically important interest for the United States. Up to now only humanitarian hawks wanted the U.S. to intervene.

After his red line statement, Syria becomes enormously important to the U.S. and the world. If we let Assad cross the line, then red lines declared by the U.S. become meaningless and future much worse actors (think North Korea with nukes) will cross them as well, and the world will suffer tremendously, and the U.S. will be drawn into terrible wars as a result.

It looks like there are three options.  

First, work like hell diplomatically to move Assad out of office and try to empower the more secular forces inside Syria.  Good luck on that one. Plus, it allows a hard red line to be crossed with no consequences.

Second, punish the Assad regime with a symbolic strike that damages some chemical weapons, or some such thing.  I guess that's supposed to show him that there is a price to pay for crossing Obama's red line. I'm sure he's quaking in his boots.  The world will note that the punishment for crossing the red line is symbolic and not real.

Third, go in with air and ground troops to remove Assad just as we removed Hussein.  We all remember how well that worked out.  Just don't expect gratitude from those we help, nor expect anything other than an Islamic anti-American nutcase government to replace Assad.  Plus, don't expect a reduction in the slaughter, it will increase dramatically, with American soldiers' body count added to the dead and maimed.

All of the options are terrible - have no effect diplomatically, have no effect symbolically, have a terrible effect militarily that makes things worse and kills Americans.  

I have no idea of how the world gets out of this terrible box.  It just looks to me like the Islamic world is bent on civil wars.  Osama bin Laden kicked it off with an attack on America, Bush took it to the Middle East with invasions, and the Islamic religious factions seem to be unleashing centuries of grievance and hatred upon each other in terrible civil wars.  

My only real hope is that the Arab Spring, better thought of as the Arab Awakening, will become a meaningful force arising from the people themselves to end the tyrannies, and also end the worse tyrannies that want to replace the old tyrannies.  I have a hope for the sprouting of new green secular, inclusive, real democracies rising from the ashes of the religious and tribal wars raging throughout the Middle East.  This has little to do with the United States military, or the United States at all except as an inspiration and a guide.

One can hope.

Banks are still dangerously overleveraged

Stanford business professor of finance and economics, Anat R. Admati, reminds us that the financial system has not really been reformed, that the banks that are too big to fail are still too big to fail, too big to regulate, and too big to manage.  They have successfully defeated banking reform in the U.S. and around the world, the world economies are still at risk, and taxpayers will pay if and when their reckless gambling with other people’s money fails catastrophically.  2008 is waiting to happen again.

The one fundamental solution she proposes is to require banks to increase the percentage of equity.   Her key sentence:

“We will never have a safe and healthy global financial system until banks are forced to rely much more on money from their owners and shareholders to finance their loans and investments.  Forget all the jargon, and just focus on this simple rule.”

Another interesting point she makes is that other corporations rarely have debt of more than 70% of assets, whereas the banks are well over 90%.  So, when they lose just a little it has the effect of shaking the viability of the bank to the core, and in  2008, only the government could rescue them with taxpayer money.  Heads they win, hundreds of millions and billions for individuals in the banks, tails we lose, multiple billions in bailout taxpayer money.

Her hope:

“If banks could absorb much more of their losses, regulators would need to worry less about risk measurements, because banks would have better incentives to manage their risks and make appropriate investment decisions.  That’s why raising equity requirements substantially is the single best step for making banking safer and healthier.”

Sounds like sound advice to me.

Fukushima's contaminated water is heading for the ocean

The terrible nuclear power plant disaster at Fukushima Japan is not over.  As I understand it, the radiation is too high for people to spend time inside the reactor to actually see what is going on and fix it.  But more to the point, it is leaking radioactive water.  That water has apparently been captured in about 1000 tanks and those tanks were expected to have a five year life.  FIVE YEAR LIFE?  I guess they thought of them as being temporary and that a permanent fix would be found before then.

But, the tanks are leaking.  According to Salon.com:

"The latest leak comes from one of the site’s 1,000 tanks, about 500 yards inland, Tepco said. Workers discovered puddles of radioactive water near the tank on Monday. Further checks revealed that the 1,000-ton capacity vessel, thought to be nearly full, only contained 700 tons, with the remainder having almost certainly leaked out.

There had been concerns raised among some experts over the durability of the tanks. Mr. Ono said that Tepco had assumed the tanks would last at least five years, but the latest leak comes less than two years after the company started installing the storage vessels at the site to deal with the growing amounts of runoff."

No matter where the radioactive waste goes, it is a disaster, but it could get to the ocean, and that is probably the worst that could happen.  It's not just that there is a bunch of radioactive water on the loose, but it's that the destroyed power plant is generating radioactive water and can't be stopped from continuing to do so, or so I think the issue is.  

It's a big ocean, but not that big.

Religious wars escalate in the Middle East

On the one hand there was Mubarak who ruled as a dictator in Egypt.  Then there was a popular uprising against him, and the Egyptian military removed him from office, putting themselves in power temporarily.  One dictator down, hurrah!

Then there was an election, and the only faction that was prepared for an election won it - the Muslim Brotherhood.  The U.S. and the West tried to assure themselves that the Muslim Brotherhood would renounce its history of radical Islamist fanaticism and rule the country democratically, i.e. inclusively, protecting the rights of religions, minorities, and women.  Good luck on that one.

Result?  A Muslim Brotherhood President Morsi ever growing dictatorship.

So, there was a popular uprising against him, and the Egyptian military once again removed a dictator from office, putting themselves in power temporarily. Two dictators down, sounds good?

Then there was another very quick popular uprising against the military, this time from the Muslim Brotherhood, and this time not very peacefully.  No surprise there.  

And Egypt is exploding.  Good grief. Which side to root for in this battle?  

I can't root for and support the Muslim Brotherhood because they have shown themselves pretty much to be the religious fanatics that people feared they would be, and re-establishing, by violence, a Muslim Brotherhood regime would turn Egypt into an Islamist state along the lines of Iran.  Remember the Green Revolution in Iran? Smashed by the religious fanatics with an Islamist regime firmly in dictatorial control.

I can't root for and support the Egyptian military because of their long history of tyranny and their brutal, dictatorial on-going slaughter of their people. 

 I can only root for the more moderate, more secular factions inside Egypt who rose up against Mubarak and then against Morsi.  But how do they get any traction while the Islamist fanatics and the military are waging war against each other?

In hindsight it looks like the U.S. and the West made a mistake in pushing for quick elections after Mubarak's overthrow.  But would it have made a difference?  Wasn't it always most likely that the Muslim Brotherhood would win a nationwide election?  And isn't it always likely that they will rule dictatorially?  Imposing their fanatical religious rules on everyone?  

The religious wars in the Middle East have been trying to erupt for some time, and what is happening in Syria and Egypt are looking like a big step in that direction.  The Arab Awakening is becoming an Arab Nightmare.  

And the U.S. and the West are mostly bystanders watching in horror.  

Had the Muslim Brotherhood governed democratically rather than ruled religiously, this wouldn't have happened.  The country rebelled and threw them out, then the religious faithful have erupted into riots.  The conflict lays at the feet of the Islamist fanatics, in my view.

The U.S. and the West needs to find ways to help the moderates and sectarians become stronger in Egypt and the Arab world.  I have no idea how they do that. All I know is that I don't want U.S. troops in the middle of fanatical Islamist religious and civil wars.

Finally, baseball strikes back at A-Rod and Performance Enhancing Drugs

I have been saying for a number of years, kind of tongue in cheek but kind of seriously too, that the reason for the financial collapse was Alex Rodriguez.  What I mean by that is that as long as a baseball player is making twenty million dollars a year, how could any self-respecting financial titan at places like Bear Stearns, Lehmann Brothers, or Goldman Sachs allow themselves to make any less? 

In other words, the world has been out of balance for some time now and the symbol of that has been ridiculous compensations for superstar athletes like A-Rod, and for top employees in the financial industry.  The results showed up in destructive ways, where baseball records were obliterated by drug inflated statistics, and the financial industry changed their focus from supporting industry and business to creating wealth in ways that had little or no benefit to the economy, and the entire country got involved in chasing unrealizable financial goals (too many people bought houses they couldn’t afford), overextending themselves, and falling into financial ruin. 

So, from just the standpoint of wanting to see the world go back into balance, I am very happy to see that major league baseball has finally banned Rodriguez from playing until 2015 because of his taking PEDs (Performance Enhancing Drugs).  I would like to see a real crackdown on PEDs in all sports and have sports return to the competition between outstanding athletes rather than the shows put on by robo-humanoids.

But even deeper than that is how Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, and the entire generation of PED athletes made their hundreds of millions of dollars.  They cheated.  And I don’t like it.  In fact, I don’t watch it. 

Baseball and football are both obviously being populated by drug pumped super-humans, and I don’t enjoy watching phony sports.  I watch golf instead where PEDs have no role that I know of, mainly because PEDs won’t be able to help someone chip and putt.  Tiger Woods has developed a pretty buffed up physique and strength, but I don’t think he is on PEDs.  Plus, his power advantage in the game was back in his first few years when he was a skinny whip-like kid. Today he has no particular distance advantage. It’s not his strength that has made him win so much on tour.

In my ideal world, top earners would make a couple of million dollars a year in sports, in finance, in medicine, in industry.  That would make them wealthy but not put them in an experience so far outside the realm of normal people that they become almost a different species on the planet. 

I think that the huge gap between the super-wealthy and the masses puts the country out of balance and sets up a dangerous environment where the country is run as a plutocracy on one side, and the country is susceptible to political demagoguery and radicalism on the other.  And it puts people like Alex Rodriquez and Lloyd Blankfien so out of touch with the experiences of common people that they have no way of gauging their impact on the world.

As the Beatles said long ago, "Get back Jojo..."

Republicans warn of a trainwreck while trying to derail Obamacare

I continue to watch in amazement as the Republican Party continues to destroy itself.  I think this political cartoon captures an essential truth about Obamacare.  The Reps actually seem to think that if Obamacare fails the Republicans will triumph.  I guess they think no one will notice that it failed largely because of Republican sabotage. Whether it would have failed on its own or not becomes moot because Republican fingerprints are all over the refusal to implement the law and do whatever they can to make sure it doesn't work.  

I really don't know if there will be a viable Republican Party in 10 years.

A sad day in America

It's pretty disturbing to me that a 16 year old kid can be shot to death going home from a convenience store in the early evening and no one is held responsible for that killing.

Prior to the verdict I decided that I would accept the jury's decision, and I do.  They were at the trial and I wasn't.   If we don't accept the trial system we lose a foundation of civilization.  So, I accept that it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense.  I guess the trial ended up being about the fight that ended with a gunshot. The point of a trial is that the person being accused is supposed to be looked at by the jury as innocent unless proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty. He said it was self defense and it wasn't proven otherwise, so...

But, what about the context?  Why did the older man have a gun?  Why was he following Martin?  How crazy is it to have armed vigilante neighborhood watch people walking around through neighborhoods carrying firearms?

Isn't that a recipe for disaster?  Aren't the police specially selected and trained in order to qualify handling guns when dealing with the public?  Doesn't Zimmerman prove that armed civilians who volunteer for for these kinds of roles just the opposite of the police?  Aren't they un-vetted and untrained?  

Aren't they just disasters just waiting to happen?  Shouldn't neighborhood watch people be barred from carrying weapons?  How about they watch, and report to the police, and let those who are specially trained and seasoned do the rest?

Just a terrible tragedy, and my heart goes out to every black parent in the land.  It was a fair trial, but it is a sad chapter in America.

The fence is killing the Rebublican Party

Putting up a fence tells U S Hispanics that the U S sees them as not valuable, but as leeches rather than productive people.  The words about illegal vs legal are insignificant when compared to a fence with guns. 

Talk radio is killing the Republican Party which may never recover from this nasty obsession. 

I used to be a Republican but I can no longer identify with the contempt demonstrated by the fence, the active sabotage of the safety net in the name of smaller government (shrinking the caring parts of the government), and tyrannical control over women's reproductive lives. 

Plus, of course, the disgusting display of Republicans in Congress doing anything and everything they can to make sure the government doesn't work, the filibuster of presidential nominees being the current focus.  

They have become the party that refuses to compromise, which is another way of saying they have become the party that refuses to join in the cooperative enterprise of democratic government, which is another way of saying that they are the party that refuses to govern, which is another way of saying that they are hoping that the day can come when they can simply rule by fiat.  

Talk radio extremists are leading the Republicans into a very clearly understood brand that plays only to an ever shrinking base.  Too bad. It used to be a good party. 

Absolutists ignore context

The question as to whether Edward Snowden is a hero or a villain for his massive leak of the National Security Agency’s terrorist hunting programs is interesting in itself.  But, to me, the leaks illuminate a different point – that those on the ideological edges see the world in absolute terms without reference to context. 

To 4^th Amendment absolutists, the government’s use of powerful computer programs to track communications of Americans is a de facto violation of the Constitution.  In addition, some on the far right wing see Obama as a tyrant, just as some on the far left saw Bush as a tyrant.  Both presidents authorized powerful computers to find and stop terrorists.  To the 4^th amendment absolutists, it’s a straight up violation of the Constitution.  To the right wingers it’s a straight up imposition of tyranny.

But what about the context? 

The context is that the government needs to find and stop terrorist attacks on America.  These powerful computer methods help do that.  The problem is that finding the terrorists is an exercise in finding needles in very large haystacks, and these powerful computer methods find the terrorists.  There is an attempt by the government to use big data mining to locate suspects and then go to the FISA courts to get authorization to take it to the next step and actually eavesdrop and investigate individuals.  In overarching theory, this seems legitimate to me.  Have there been abuses along the way? I suppose so, but perfection is unattainable, it seems to me.  Should the government give this approach a lot of oversight? Sure. Carry on.  But I don’t condemn the program as a violation of the 4^th amendment, nor do I see it as tyrannical oppression of political opposition.

Context helps explain a lot about the IRS scandals as well.  The Supreme Court decided, rather foolishly it seems to me, that it was possible for very political organizations to avoid taxes and avoid revealing donors as long as they met certain criteria.  Frankly, meeting these criteria is most likely just a shuck and jive.  So, the IRS decided to dig in and find out more.  This all happened during a time frame (context) where there is an explosion of Tea Party political organizations applying to get relief.  Had this happened in the ‘60s there would have been an explosion of “progressive” and “peoples’ something or others” or other identifiers of left wing political organizations applying for exemption.  To see this as the left wing Obama administration suppressing the right wing Tea Party ignores the context, or so it seems to me.  Paranoia is its own context, unfortunately, and the political extremes seem to live in contexts of paranoia – brings in lots of donations of time and money.

As to Snowden, he is clearly The Hero in his own mind, and I’m sure he expects to go down in history as a noble person.  But, I think he made the fundamental mistake that absolutists make – he ignored the context of his actions. 

By exposing terrorist hunting methods, he told the terrorists what to cease doing, and, as I understand it, the terrorists are modifying their behavior accordingly.  I don’t think I want to thank Mr. Snowden for helping the terrorists avoid detection.

By fleeing to Hong Kong and then Russia, he ended up giving up pretty much all that he knows and has access to to the Chinese and to the Russians.  Mark Theissen, conservative Washington Post editorialist, points out that he had four laptops stuffed with highly classified secrets with him, and it is obvious that both the Chinese and the Russians have captured all of that info, either having been given it by Snowden, or by taking the computers from Snowden, or by hacking into his computers against his will.  This could be amazingly damaging to the government and the people of the United States.

Absolutists can only see their own obsessions, and cannot see the contexts. 

Is killing wrong?  To the absolutist Quakers it always is, but in the context of self-defense surely it is not.  Is failure to protect an embassy wrong?  Sure, but in the context of limited military resources or human mistakes perhaps it is at least understandable.  Is going after a reporter as a co-conspirator to publish leaks wrong?  Sure, but in the context of trying to keep covert activities covert it is again somewhat understandable.  Is getting weapons into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico wrong?  Sure, but the context is an effort to track them and fight the drug wars, and that is at least understandable.  Is killing fetuses wrong?  In the context of a woman having power and control over her own reproductive life, I think it is not.  Is going to war in Iraq based on false information wrong?  Sure, but I believe the context was one of being mistaken rather than lying. Was abandoning habeus corpus by Lincoln during the Civil War wrong?  Not in the context of the U.S. Civil War where this was a necessary temporary need to protect democracy itself.

I am trying to look at the world in other than absolutist terms.  I am trying to look to the larger contexts to better understand what people are doing.  But, I am also trying very hard to disregard the paranoid contexts that the extremes on both the right and the left live in.  That is a path to a life of perpetual righteousness and dismay.

As for Snowden, is he a hero or a villain?  I think he is a fool - fooled by his own sense of grandiosity and nobility into handing over extremely vital and secret information to terrorists dedicated to killing Americans and Westerners, and to China, and to Russia.  There is nothing noble about the outcome of his self-identified heroic acts. 

I think Snowden’s heroism is the heroism of an adolescent mind which can only see the world in black or white absolutist terms.  But doesn’t that kind of explain today’s politics in general?  Glenn Beck, please meet Glenn Greenwald at the adolescent absolutist café and share drinks of paranoid accusation and righteousness.  Unfortunately, they have turned America into that adolescent absolutist café.  I’m kind of sick of it.

Why do the religious right think homosexuality is bad?

I have often been puzzled by the notion held by the religious right wing that homosexual sex is evil.  I understand that somewhere in the bible it says homosexuality is a sin, but the bible also says that if a bride is not a virgin then she is to be taken to the village square and stoned to death by the men of the village (a pretty Freudian punishment isn’t it?).  Even though they still seem to do that in some Islamist countries, no one in the religious right in the West is pushing to stone non-virgin brides, so why are they so dedicated to punishing homosexuality?

I think underneath it are old Puritanical sensibilities about sex that sees "dirty" sex as so abominable.  Why the Puritans, and Islamists for that matter, think that sex in inherently sinful except in the context of making babies is an underlying question.  

I think it has to do with the conflating willpower and virtue, and seeing sex outside of the purpose of procreation as a weak giving in to pleasure, i.e. the Sins of the Flesh, as sinful and against God's purpose for sex, and demonstrating a lack of virtuous willpower.  I think the underlying belief and attitude in Puritanism and Islmamism is that sex is for procreation, not for pleasure, and that seeking sex for pleasure is the devil's road to debauchery and erosion of the holy masculine virtue of willpower.

I think that the masculine virtue of willpower is a wonderful virtue.  But it’s not the only virtue. 

In the Catholic Church, it was considered (back many decades ago when I was still a Catholic) that birth control using the virtuous masculine energy of willpower was good.  It was called the Rhythm method.  Only have sex with your wife when she was less likely to be fertile.  Didn’t work too well.  But to use another wonderful gift from God, intelligence, to develop contraception and abortion as a means of controlling a woman’s reproductive life was considered a sin.  Why is willpower more virtuous than intelligence?  I don’t think it is. 

And, of course, I believe there is a wonderful positive time to use willpower to avoid sex and that is not to commit adultery.  Cheating on a spouse is just a dumb thing to do.  It erodes the love in the marriage.  It’s not that exercising willpower is in itself such a virtuous act, although it counts, but the consequences of cheating harms your own marriage and the marriage of the partner.  Its consequences are destructive.  I think that is the reason it is one of the Ten Commandments, it’s dumb and harmful, not that it’s a virtuous exercise of willpower.

I think God’s purposes for sex are pretty easy to understand.  They are the functions of sex.  I think sex is for reproduction, for love, and for pleasure.  All of these are part of nature and thus part of God’s intentions.  Or so it seems to me.

So, to me, homosexual sex is perfectly in keeping with God’s intentions.  It is a means of pleasure and of love.  Just like hetrosexual sex.  The fact that it doesn’t lead to procreation is incidental.

I am very glad to see our country move more in the direction of dropping its shunning of homosexual men and women.  More to go, and more to come, I am sure.

The Far Right has a bad day

The Far Right had a pretty bad day today, but I believe that America had a pretty good one.  

I think it is interesting to observe that people who consider themselves to be a part of a political movement can only see the world in terms of the movement's ideological framework.  Cause-conservatives seem to think it is still 2010, when they had a bold victory in an off year election.  But, the world has turned and the energies in place are quite different.

Cause-conservatives lost their bid to declare gay marriage illegal.  Their anti-gay bigotry has been rightly ruled to be discrimination and unconstitutional - a bitter pill for the religious right wing who seem to think that God is in the business of punishing countries for the "terrible sin" of loving people of the same gender. I think any problems that America encounters in the future will be man made, not punishment from God.

In Texas, a state senator, Democrat Wendy Davis, staged a 13 hour filibuster and killed an extreme anti-abortion bill which would have stopped abortions after 20 weeks.  She had some remarkable support from the gallery to shout down the Republican tricks to end the filibuster.  (Although, it looks like Governor Perry is calling a special session to jam the bill through after all, but I think he does so at the peril of hurting the Republican Party in the eyes of the nation as a whole.)

And, oh yes, affirmative action was reduced some but survived.

Cause-conservatives seem to think that the world is in step with them in their obsessions, but only cause-conservatives are in step with cause-conservatives.  They repel the rest of us and hurt their cause but are incapable of seeing that. 

Cause-conservatives have very clearly branded themselves as opposed to gay love, opposed to women's right to choose and control their reproductive lives, supporting anything they can think of to reduce the turnout at the polls of non-white voters.  And, oh yes, they want to drag the country into another civil war in the Middle East.  I don't think those are winning political positions in any place other than the right wing ideological bubble.

As long as cause-conservatives limit their sources of information to right wing talk radio, Fox News, and other right wing sources, they will continue to think they are leading a charge into a more pure right wing world, featuring evangelical moralities, libertarian sensibilities, and hawkish eagerness for Middle Eastern wars.  But they only seem to be leading themselves off the cliff into the land of marginal political outrage and ineffectiveness, or so it seems to me. 

They could try tuning into moderate center left sources like NPR,  Thedailybeast.com, the New York Times, or the Washington Post and start seeing the world as it exists outside of the right wing bubble.  Who knows, they might start to come up with some helpful ideas of governance based in reality rather than continue to feed themselves the dogma within their ideological bubble and continue to march along the path of self destruction.

Stay out of Syria's civil war

Fareed Zakaria is one of my favorite commentators.  He has illuminated the situation in Syria in a way that I haven’t heard before.  It is a video, so I can’t cut and paste his quotes into this post, but I can give it a brief summary.

His first point is that after WWI, the European powers divided up the Middle East and they installed three minority powers in three of the countries.  That is, they installed leaders of a minority group in charge of each of the countries.  Maybe this was to make the new rulers dependent on outside help from Europe?  Maybe as a way to protect the minorities from slaughter by the majorities?  

At any rate, all three of those countries have had the rest of the country rise up in revolution against their minority governments.

First was Lebanon.  The country went into civil war in the ‘70s against the minority Christians put in place after WWI.  It took fifteen years.  Reagan smartly stayed out of Lebanon’s civil war.

Second was Iraq.  Bush foolishly kicked off that civil war by invading in the ‘00s and the Sunni Muslims were ousted.  It has been going on for 10 years.

Now the third is Syria.  The minority Alawite Muslims are being thrown out of power.  They have no choice but to fight to the death, because if and when they lose they will be massacred, and most will likely flee.  Obama is smartly staying out of Syria.  It will last at least 10 years.

It seems humanitarian to try to help the “good Muslim rebels” overthrow the savage dictator, Assad.  But, as Fareed pointed out, even the massive presence of U. S. troops in Iraq didn’t prevent the slaughters of their civil war, which is still ongoing to some extent.

Stay out of other country’s civil wars.  It looks like the various Muslim sects do not get along, and are intent on killing each other.  U.S. intervention doesn’t keep that from happening, kills lots of Americans, and just annoys the Muslims we are trying to “help.”  

The notion that we have to intervene to keep the West safe is a false one, or so I now believe.  At the beginning of our intervention in Iraq, I thought it was about creating a Middle East that wouldn’t be a breeding ground for al Qaeda.  But now I think this whole thing was always about the Muslim wars, including the attack on 9/11/2001, which was really about driving the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.  

Personally, I have no problem with the U.S., and Europe, getting out of the Middle East.  Leave them to their wars.  We’ll buy their oil, at least until we don’t need it anymore, which inevitably is going to happen (natural gas, green energies, efficiencies of operation, environmental sensitivities, etc.)  

We can offer humanitarian assistance with refugee camps in surrounding countries, but stay out of those civil wars.  No need to add Americans to the casualty lists.

Bored with politics

I have been posting less about politics and current events recently because I am pretty bored by them. If there was anything interesting going on in Washington I would have written about it.  But,  to me, it has been mostly just more partisan wars to no real import other than scoring points by one side against the other.  Dull, dull, dull.

OK, so what about the scandals of the administration?  To me, they are less than meets the eye.

First, the IRS singling out Tea Party political groups claiming to be humanitarian groups in order to qualify for tax-exempt and donor-revealing exempt status.  It was wrong, of course, for the IRS of a Democratic administration to focus on conservative political organizations for extra scrutiny and harassment.  But I just don't believe it was directed by Obama or the White House.  I think it was local decisions.  However, I do think that the White House set the moral tone that permeated the local IRS. By that, I mean that Obama personally did all he could to signal his administration that he thought the law that created special ways for huge political contributions from corporations and multi-billionaires via the Supreme Courts decision on Citizen's United was a bad law and should be overturned.  So, I guess it was no surprise that some in his administration saw that law as not one to be very careful in enforcing.  Bad on them, and bad on the president.

That being said, I think the law is stupid as well.  Indeed, I think that all tax exemptions for political organizations should be eliminated.  The notion that organizations with Tea Party identifiers on the right, or Socialist activist monikers on the left for that matter, should be tax exempt is ridiculous.  Tax them all.  Make them all reveal their donors.  All of their donors.  Citizen's United just gives power to a shadow government of super wealthy oligarchs.  It is fundamentally undemocratic and should be unconstitutional.  While we're at it, tax religious organizations too.  I'm sick of tax exemptions to wealthy organizations that have to be picked up by the middle class.

Next, the Big Brother scandals of the National Security Agency's monitoring of electronic communications in search of terrorists.  Although the potential for abuse is profound, I think that Obama's use of it is understandable and acceptable, just as I thought Bush's use of it was understandable and acceptable when the New York Times exposed his data mining back in his term.  The Dems erupted in outrage when the target was Bush, and now some Reps want to erupt now that they can see a way to target Obama.  As far as I can tell there are a number of checks on the powers of data mining and narrow focusing in on terrorists.  The point is to find people who are, by definition, trying not to be found until after they kill Americans.  It is the job of the NSA and the administration to find them before they kill.  Good job.  Keep it up.

As to Benghazi, give it up.  The administration made a pretty big mistake in not protecting its embassies.  Let's hope it is a lesson learned and will be done better in the future.  Trying to turn this into some kind of impeachable offense is just stupid, as far as I'm concerned.  Trying to use this as a way to destroy Clinton's chances at a presidential run in '16 is just politics as usual, annoying, distracting, and forgettable.  Move on.

I think it is time for the government to govern.  Do the Reps really think all they have to do is vote to overturn Obamacare 37 times that they are governing?  or that all they have to do is hate and oppose Obama and that is the ticket to their future victories?

Clearly, Obama has given up on the idea of finding bi-partisan solutions in Washington.  He has appointed three judges to the D.C. District Court, appointed Susan Rice to be his National Security advisor, and Samantha Powers to be U.N. Ambassador.  He is surrounding himself with more and more like minded people and given up on the "team of rivals" concept that he modeled after Lincoln's administration.  The Reps have only themselves to blame.  Their only goal for the last five years has been to demonize Obama.  They have taken themselves off the political map by offering only negatives rather than visions.  They need a vision, or better yet, a visionary.  But as long as they are in the clutches of talk radio, conspiracy theories, the Washington Times, and the Tea Party, they are lost in a wilderness of their own creation.  I don't know how they survive.

Fuel cells and artificial leaves

When I first learned about fuel cells some years ago, I had a vision that the days of a centralized power stations delivering power to homes and businesses via a huge grid infrastructure would become obsolete, and it should be possible for fuel cells to create a new paradigm for energy - that of each home or business having its own power source rather than buying power from the grid and paying the large utilities for the power.  

I saw a future where we each generate our own power rather than get it from a centralized source, which is run by some combination of gigantic corporations and gigantic governments.

I saw a home as having a furnace, and air conditioner, and a fuel cell that produced the power needed to run the home.  The fuel cells seem to work just fine, but the problem has been how to get hydrogen to the fuel cells.  Now, perhaps, there is a way for this to become real before too long.

Daniel Nocera, MIT chemistry professor, has come up with what he calls the "Artificial Leaf."  He points out that plants store energy in order to live by gathering energy from the sun and via the process of photosynthesis.  Nocera mimics that to some degree and has come up with a way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using earth abundant materials, in a glass of water, at room temperature, using a catalyst.  Designing the catalyst is the key, and he seems to be well on the way of doing just that.

So, his plan is to use solar panels during the sunlight to power your house, and send the extra energy to the catalyst which breaks out the hydrogen and oxygen, store them, and run the fuel cell to generate power for the home at night.  The hydrogen and oxygen get recombined in a fuel cell which powers your home when the sun doesn't shine.  Viola, no more need for a power grid for your home.  Or your office building.

It could be that a vision of mine of the last twenty years or so is actually possible.  I like it.  

Feeding the paranoia

The Obama administration is having a real problem right now with scandals of their own making.  

The right wing of the Republican Party has always seen Obama as a totalitarian in the making, and they have been screaming that his long range  design was a Big Brother Socialist take-over of the country.  The latest paranoia from the hard core Right Wing was that he was coming after their guns under the guise of background checks and limits on magazine sizes, that he was taking over the medical industry to create a socialist Utopian dream, and using government to destroy personal freedoms in order to empower his Socialist totalitarian state. 

This has always seemed silly to me, and just some combination of paranoia and political scare tactics to advance a political agenda.

But…what on earth is going on with this administration?

The Bengazi attack was spun for political purposes to look like it wasn't a terrorist attack, right in the middle of the presidential campaign.  The truth came out, and only three days after the infamous Susan Rice’s Sunday shows talking points that the attack was a response to an American anti-Muslim film, so I can easily write that off as the government message being muddled by inter-departmental fights over who was to blame for the disaster (C.I.A. vs State Department).  OK.

Then, we have the IRS scandal where obviously right wing political groups are targeted by the administration, again, in the middle of the presidential election cycle.  This is the kind of thing that Nixon was famously accused of doing back in his abuse of power days. 

Then, we have AP reporters’ phone logs being tracked by the Justice Department trying to track down sources of a story that the administration didn't like.

All of a sudden, the paranoid Right Wing has all the evidence that it needs that the government is mushrooming into the totalitarian monster that they have been warning of for the last four years plus. 

Obama needs to respond very quickly and harshly to punish these abuses of power.  The IRS and the AP scandals at least must have full investigative disclosure and people responsible must be removed, and perhaps prosecuted for criminal activity.

I understand that what the administration did seemed fully justified in their minds - preventing life threatening leaks and taking short cuts to weed out the legitimate from the illegitimate tax exempt and donor disclosure exempt organizations.  But, they appear to have crossed the line.  And it certainly feels like political persecution to their political opponents, who now have justification for their claims of persecution and suppression by the state.

What I have been writing about for some time is that if a party does not have a viable opposition, it will become corrupt and abuse power.  It is the nature of power to justify corrupt tactics to crush those who oppose it.  Power assumes it is doing good, and assumes that crushing opposition is good because it is part of pursuing the good it is trying to do. 

Obama needs to crush the abuses in his own administration in order to keep his legitimacy.  It is bad enough that the opposition is paranoid about his intentions, without having proof that he is abusing his power for political advantage.

Message to conservatives: innovate or die

Jennifer Rubin, conservative blogger and columnist for the Washington Post, has just written a wonderful and brave editorial.  It is so needed for conservatives to say what she said, not just for the sake of the Republican Party but for the country and the world.  The Republican Party is quickly becoming obsolete, and we need two good parties for this country to run. 

Her primary message is in her headline:  “Tear down this icon: why conservatives have to get over Ronald Reagan.”

Her main point is the one I have been making ever since I started blogging over three years ago:  Reaganism was needed in 1980, but new thinking is required over thirty years later. 

How to find the "new" conservatism?  

Isn't the heart of conservatism the empowerment of individuals?  Isn't it about empowering the middle class?  What is all this guff about taxes or gay marriage or contraception or abortion or high capacity spray guns or immigrants or endless wars in the Middle East or .. or .. or all of the things that so enrage or frighten the permanently enraged and frightened?   

Or for that matter what has an ever smaller government to do with conservatism?  

In 1979 Reagan was right when he said government was the problem.  Back then the country was over-regulated and over-taxed.  But now, after a near worldwide financial meltdown as a result of an under-regulated blood thirsty financial industry, that is no longer true, no longer true, no … longer … true.  How does the government empower the individual by being eviscerated?  How does the individual become empowered without the context of civilization that can only be created if it includes the essential factor an effective government? 

I switched my registration from Republican to “Declines to State” in California about four years ago.  My history is that I voted for: Cleaver, McGovern, Carter, Reagan, Reagan, HW, Clinton, W, W, Obama, Obama.  The Rigid Right drove me from their ranks, which I am sure is exactly what they wanted to do.  I am certainly not one of them.  Thank goodness.  But I am not a Democrat either.   

When I changed from liberal to conservative in 1980 I was aflame with the new ideas of conservatism.  It was conservatives who were coming up with creative new ideas, and it was liberals who were trying to relive the glories of FDR and LBJ.  The liberals were worn out, and had nothing much to offer other than the same old same old.

But, the creative and innovative thinking of today is now coming from the left.  All Rush and Glenn and DeMint and the '80s crowd are doing is hitting the replay button - old, old, old, tired, tired, tired, lazy, lazy, lazy, regurgitation.  I recently heard Rush say his job was ideological purity.  How true.  Simple job.  Thinking not required.  All he is is a replay button on the old jukebox.  All that is missing is the revolving mirrored ball with the Bee Gees playing for the dancers on the floor. 

Republicans need to innovate or die, to find the real heart of conservatism and create from there. 

They should start with empowering the individual and the middle class.  The Democrats have figured out the middle class part.  It’s now up to the conservatives to come up with better ideas to get that done by focusing on the individual empowerment part.

The TNT within terrorists’ minds that leads to “heroic” killings of … us

I celebrate the killing of one and the capture of the other young murderers who tried to terrorize the country by killing and maiming people in Boston.  At this point it appears that they were “self-radicalized” rather than operatives of al Qaida or some other transnational terrorist organization.  The older brother apparently spent months overseas before his attack, and I am sure that he completed his indoctrination in that environment, but I doubt that he and his younger brother will be discovered to be part of an organized campaign or some larger terrorist organization.  I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like so far. 

We will find out more as time passes I am sure.

But, the big question to me is, who becomes a terrorist?  And why? 

Shortly after 9/11/2011 I thought the answer to that was pretty easy – I thought terrorism was a religious tenant of Islam.  There were many quotes from the Koran and from terrorists that proved to me that radical Islamists were on a religious mission to destroy Western Civilization and impose an Islamic Caliphate on the world. 

But, Chritopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, has written an article that makes sense to me.  He says that there is an explosive combination of three elements that go into the makeup of a terrorist – TNT.

First, is T as in Testosterone.  Nearly all terrorists are young men.

Second, is N as in Narrative.  Here he says:

“This is perhaps the most important and most misunderstood element in the shaping of a terrorist’s thinking.  It is often confused with ideology, and, in the case of Islam, with religion.”

What is actually in the minds of the terrorist is a Narrative, one where he is the hero who identifies with “a People” suffering repression by Others. The terrorists are often not victims of suffering themselves, but rather see themselves as Holy Knights “righting epic wrongs.”  Theirs is the narrative of a selfless hero, a martyr to a great cause, brave knights changing the course of history.  He gives examples of terrorists as the Irish under Britain, Jews in Palestine before 1948, Palestinians in Israel since then, Tamils under the Sinhalese, Latin American peasants under oligarchs, and Islamists under “Jews and Crusaders.”

The Islamist religion apparently can be twisted to provide the Narrative that cries out for a Brave Knight to battle the Oppressor Dragons, but by now it is pretty clear to me that bloody, brutal, killing jihad is not really fundamental to Muslim religion.  It is the motivation of men with personality problems who are manipulated by men with political aims.

And third, is T as in Theater.  They need their terrorism to be on a huge world stage, seen and feared by the Oppressors, seen and admired by those they are “saving.”

This is an explanation that makes sense to me.  Testoserone  plus Narrative plus Theater creates a terrorist.  Treat them like low life criminals, not like heroic knights storming our castles.

Letting the terrorist attack fail to terrorize us

I have been out of the country on business, and as a result have been less tuned into the news cycle than normally.  I am very saddened by the attack on innocent people at the Boston Marathon.  I don't know how people are reacting in the States, but my sense is that the country is not reacting with excessive shock and rage.  Certainly nothing like our reaction to the 9/11/2001 attack.  

My feeling is that our justice system is fully capable of finding, capturing, and prosecuting the attackers. 

What I hope the most is that the terrorists are unsuccessful in throwing the country into a state of terror.  The point of terrorism is to terrify a country, and if we can absorb this attack, respond decisively against the terrorists without overreacting and letting it absorb our entire national consciousness, and carry on with our lives, we will effectively defeat the purpose of the attack and of the terrorists themselves.  

We can refuse to become terrorized.  We can treat these people as low life criminals rather than monstrous threats to our way of life.

Or so I hope.

Liberals also don’t want to compromise (or negotiate, or commit politics)

I’ve been pretty critical of the rigidity of extreme conservatives on the right recently.  But I also know that there is also a very rigid wing of extreme liberals on the left.  The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, center right editorialist, makes note of their calls to refuse to negotiate with Republicans, and attacking Obama’s budget as containing unacceptable compromises with conservatives. 

From Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont, to the AFL-CIO, NOW, MoveOn.org, Campaign for America’s Future, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and National Committee to Preserve Social Security, they all are appalled at Obama’s budget proposal that includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare. They apparently staged a protest yesterday against Obama's budget.

The key take-away to me from his article is that he posed a mirror image question to these folks from the Republican presidential campaign.  Remember that eight Republican candidates for president were asked if they would raise taxes evin if it had $10 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increases?  And all eight said no, that under no circumstances would they raise taxes at all?  Well, Milbank writes that

“…At Tuesday’s protest, I put the reverse question to participants:  Could they accept a dollar of cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits for every $10 of taxes on corporations and the wealthy?  All those I asked said they would decline.”

So much for the idea that only one side of this debate is unwilling to negotiate.

There is a difference between the two parties, however, I believe.  And that is that the Republican Party has been in the iron fisted grip of their non-compromisers, whereas the Democratic Party has iron-willed non-compromisers but isn’t totally in their grip. They are on the margins of the party.

My hope is that the 2012 election has gone at least a little way toward moving the Republican Party away from the right wing non-negotiators and into a place where they can actually do some politics and come to some agreements with the Democrats, i.e. the federal and state governments can actually start functioning again. 

The key is to have the voting public see the extremists as being in the margins  rather than in control.

A tribute to the Iron Lady

I have no doubt that the actress Meryl Streep is a liberal in good standing in Hollywood.  She brilliantly portrayed ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a couple of years ago and won an Oscar for that performance. 

Today, she made a very gracious statement to the press on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s passing due to a stroke at age 87.  Although Ms. Streep didn’t agree with Ms. Thatcher’s politics, she highlighted what was most important to her, and to young girls, about the Prime Minister – she was a model for women to be powerful in the world in a way that has nothing to do with their gender.  I think Meryl managed to highlight one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievements – her own success against stunning odds. 

Her statement:

 “Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer, willingly or unwillingly, for the role of women in politics.

It is hard to imagine a part of our current history that has not been affected by measures she put forward in the UK at the end of the 20th century. Her hard-nosed fiscal measures took a toll on the poor, and her hands-off approach to financial regulation led to great wealth for others. There is an argument that her steadfast, almost emotional loyalty to the pound sterling has helped the UK weather the storms of European monetary uncertainty.

But to me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system,class bound and gender phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement. To have won it, not because she inherited position as the daughter of a great man, or the widow of an important man, but by dint of her own striving. To have withstood the special hatred and ridicule, unprecedented in my opinion, leveled in our time at a public figure who was not a mass murderer; and to have managed to keep her convictions attached to fervent ideals and ideas- wrongheaded or misguided as we might see them now-without corruption- I see that as evidence of some kind of greatness, worthy for the argument of history to settle. To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable.

I was honored to try to imagine her late life journey, after power; but I have only a glancing understanding of what her many struggles were, and how she managed to sail through to the other side. I wish to convey my respectful condolences to her family and many friends.”

Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister when I was changing my politics from liberal to conservative, and I still think she gave Britain and the world what was needed at that time.  Now, I think the time for Thatcherism has passed in Britain just as the time for Reaganism has passed in America.  But both leaders stood for what they believed was needed and were able to implement their visions.  And I believe that both leaders saw what was needed for their time.

Time passes and new visions are being hashed out in the messy arena of politics.  The world could do a lot worse than having new leaders arise with the integrity and strength and ability of Margaret Thatcher.  I honor her and her passing, and I thank Meryl Streep for a gracious eulogy for her.

Republicans strut their stuff, but why?

It is interesting to me that after the Republicans are handed a decisive loss in the 2012 election, they have decided to make as much of a display of their least popular ideological dogmas as possible. 

Taxes - they went to the mat to avoid raising taxes on the wealthy and forced The Sequester.  The House of Representatives voted for Paul Ryan's harsh budget which raises no taxes on anybody, especially the super wealthy, while cutting services to the middle class and poor.  To me, by refusing to raise taxes or cut defense spending they demonstrate that they are not serious about the budget, but only serious about cutting government services.  Only the true believers are on board with this harshness.

Choice/abortion - they ban abortion in some red states as early as six weeks. This thrills evangelicals, but there are many more voters who are not evangelicals, especially young ones and women.

Gay marriage/gay equality - they are going to the mat to ban gay marriage currently in the Supreme Court, fighting to stop something increasingly accepted by young voters.  Denial of equality always seems unfair.

Gun control/second amendment - even in the wake of the Newtown slaughter of small children they refuse to limit magazine clip size and insist that rapid fire spray guns are protected by the second amendment.  The gun manufacturers masquerade as second amendment purists, but I think they repel more than they attract.

Affirmative action - they are pushing to revive the debate about affirmative action in college admissions. They never stop the attack.

Health care - they keep promising to overturn Obamacare.  I guess they think losing is proof that they have a winning hand?

All of these things excite the conservative base. But they do not attract non-believers.  They seem to be doubling down on the ideology that lost them the election with the well worn, Limbaugh and Beck type calls for more hard core conservative crusades. The faithful still seem to think they are the vanguard of a movement that is sweeping the country and the world. 

I think they have lost touch with reality.  Just as they thought they were going to win a landslide victory in 2012, they still seem to think their only problem was that they weren't conservative enough, so they double down. 

One thing that I think they are doing is deeply branding themselves with their old and worn out ideas, just when savvier party politicians see that they need to re-brand themselves with new approaches.   

The old white guys are strutting their stuff, but their rigidity, stubbornness, and delusions are what they are really showing, or so it seems to me.

My hope is that this brand of conservativism becomes seen as the past of the Republican Party and becomes more and more marginalized, while the Republican Party itself finds a new center that speaks to values of conservatism in creative and innovative ways - and a new and exciting Republican Party is born.  

The old war horses aren't going to change, but most likely just gather themselves together and charge off at every increasing speed - over the cliff into the obscurity of a past that is long gone.

Iraq, ten years later

Ten years ago we went into Iraq.  I thought it was the right thing to do.  I was convinced that World War II had taught the civilized world that the only way to deal with tyrannical bullies was to stand up to them and refuse to appease them because appeasing them only caused them to attack.  The model was Hitler and Stalin.  Al Qaeda and Hussein seemed to me to fit that threatening mold and I thought knocking them over was needed to secure a safe future for America, for Democracy, for freedom.

And a few years into the war, I stopped believing what I had believed.  I started to notice that we were creating more enemies than we were killing.  And I backed off and wondered if I was wrong.

Now I think our attacking Iraq was a very serious mistake.  One of the reasons is the main strategic outcome of our war in Iraq was to strengthen Iran.  Iraq had been a counterbalance to Iran.  Iraq's power is gone, Iran's power has grown.  So now what?  Attack Iran?  Good heavens, no.  I have seen enough young Americans lose their lives, limbs, and their normality in the Middle East.  I do not want to see more of that.

I think the biggest mistake that America made in Iraq was the terrible intelligence that said Saddam had nukes and other WMD.  He didn't.  It was a bluff.  And our intelligence got it wrong.  Big mistake.

I think the second biggest mistake was to destroy the existing institutions of power of the Baath Party and army.  There was nothing left, and the country collapsed into civil war amongst the competing tribes.

David Ignatius is one of my most trusted voices on the Middle East.  He apologized to his readers today for being wrong about whether the war made sense.  He made some key points.  

He remembered two powerful conversations that had given him pause in 2003. 

The first was a man who had told him that if America were strong enough, they would succeed and the rest of the Middle East would follow.  But, America wasn't strong enough.  The civil war broke out beyond America's control.  And Bush couldn't sell the war to the American voters.  The army went off to war, and the country was split.

The second was a man who told him: 

"I am sorry for America.  You are stuck.  You have become a country of the Middle East.  America will never change Iraq, but Iraq will change America."

Personally, I'm tired of being "a country in the Middle East."

Another point he made was that the CIA was dead set against demolishing the Baath Party and the established order.  But they lost to Rumsfield and Chalabi. And of course it was W who was the decider.  Bush, with the Texas bravado of a kind of hyper-masculinity that defines itself by its toughness.  I'm for a new kind of masculinity that defines itself by its brains and heart.

His third, and perhaps most important point, was the enormous importance of dignity in the Arab world.  People who are impoverished, dominated, and disenfranchised crave dignity most of all.  

So, what do I conclude ten years later?  

Do not put Americans in harm's way in the middle of Middle Eastern civil wars.  

Stay out of Syria.  Stay out of Iran.  Let them fight their fights, without the shedding of the blood of American young men and women.  Time for the soft powers of persuasion, diplomacy, covert assistance, intelligence, and engagements that are based upon knowledge and tact and and technology and craft and politics rather than force and destruction.