Month: November 2008

Manzi responds to Cohn’s article on bailing out Detroit:

This story – look, we now see how foolish we’ve been, and finally have our act together; with just a little more time we’ll be world-beaters again – has been sold by Detroit to journalists many times over the past 20 years.

Here’s the New York Times in 1992, making almost the exact same argument as Cohn makes: “Ford and Chrysler have increased the efficiency of their factories and workers so much in recent years that their basic cost of producing a car is now less than that of their Japanese rivals, according to a study published today.” Here’s Fortune in that same year saying that “For the first time in a decade, the U.S. auto industry has a genuine chance to grasp the lead from its Japanese competition. Ford and Chrysler are operating at worldclass efficiency, and General Motors has taken on a new sense of urgency with seismic shakeups at the top.” How’d that work out? This kind of coverage continued almost into the current crisis – here’s Fortune as recently as 2004 saying “GM Gets Its Act Together. Finally. How America’s No. 1 car company changed its ways and started looking like … Toyota.”

It’s an invigorating and more than usually smart take on the new winds shaping the course of the journalism industry. Money quote:

Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights. In the 21st century, people are hungrier for information than ever before. And they have more sources of information than ever before. Amid these many diverse and competing voices, readers want what they’ve always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future. If you discuss the future with newspapermen, you will find that too many think that our business is only physical newspapers. I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone. But our real business isn’t printing on dead trees. It’s giving our readers great journalism and great judgment. It’s true that in the coming decades, the printed versions of some newspapers will lose circulation. But if papers provide readers with news they can trust, we’ll see gains in circulation—on our web pages, through our RSS feeds, in emails delivering customized news and advertising, to mobile phones. In short, we are moving from news papers to news brands.

The challenge is to use a newspaper’s brand while allowing readers to personalise the news for themselves—and then deliver it in the ways that they want. This is what we are now trying to do at The Wall Street Journal. The journal has the advantage of having a very loyal readership … a brand known for quality … and editors who take the readers and their interest seriously. This helps explain why the journal continues to defy industry trends. Of the ten largest papers in the United States, the journal is the only one to have grown its paid subscriptions last year. At the same time, we intend to make our mark on the digital frontier. The journal is already the only US. newspaper that makes real money online. One reason for this is a growing global demand for business news and for accurate news. Integrity is not just a characteristic of our company, it is a selling point. One way we are planning to take advantage of online opportunities is by offering three tiers of content. The first will be the news that we put online for free. The second will be available for those who subscribe to wsj.com. And the third will be a premium service, designed to give its customers the ability to customize high-end financial news and analysis from around the world.

My take here. The key thing, to my mind, is the Iraqi government’s insistence that all US troops leave the country by 2011. If left to the Washington establishment, American troops will be dying in Iraq for the rest of our lives. So this is good news: Baghdad may derail the neocon dream. And there will be no president McCain to insist that the occupation continue.

The Vatican hierarchy has become radicalized under Benedict and John Paul II – so much so that they see the West since the 1960s as entirely a creature of resistance to Humanae Vitae, the papal declaration that all non-procreative sex is a moral evil. But the notion that the recent election of Obama is a sign of the Apocalypse has, until now, been restricted to Protestant loonies. Until now:

His Eminence James Francis Cardinal Stafford criticized President-elect Barack Obama as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,“ and said he campaigned on an “extremist  anti-life platform,” Thursday night in Keane Auditorium during his lecture “Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II: Being True in Body and Soul." …

“For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,” Stafford said, comparing America’s future with Obama as president to Jesus’ agony in the garden. “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake.” Cardinal Stafford said Catholics must deal with the “hot, angry tears of betrayal” by beginning a new sentiment where one is “with Jesus, sick because of love.”

Obama as extremist? Apocalyptic? Can someone talk some sense to these people?

The good news from last night’s 60 Minutes interview is that Obama has clearly committed himself to ending the torture policy of Bush and Cheney. But that clarity will sadly be in doubt if Marc is right and John Brennan becomes the next CIA Director:

Brennan’s long association George Tenet and with the CIA during the first few years of the Bush administration may give civil liberties advocates and Congressional Democrats some pause; it is not clear to what degree Brennan participated in or was read into many of the intelligence community’s controversial post 9/11 /Iraq programs, including extraordinary renditions and orders that sanctioned coercive interrogation techniques.

The plain English for "coercive interrogation techniques" is torture. And any association with Tenet, who authorized war crimes, and used the Gestapo term "enhanced interrogation techniques", taints the office. It’s not change. Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, has a very helpful update on Brennan’s record. While skeptical of Brennan on torture, Larison points to this paragraph from the NYT’s profile:

As a senior adviser to Mr. Tenet in 2002, Mr. Brennan was present at the creation of the C.I.A.’s controversial detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama has strongly criticized. But Mr. Brennan has distanced himself from the program, and told The Washington Times last month that interrogation methods like waterboarding are “not going to be allowed under an Obama presidency.”

Well: waterboarding isn’t even currently used under Bush any more. Talk about low expectations. And anyone close to Tenet has no place in an administration eager to restore America’s moral standing. This report from CQ is also very disturbing:

Although Obama issued a statement during the campaign supporting the idea of applying the Army field manual interrogation standard to all agencies, not just the Pentagon, a senior campaign adviser to Obama left the door open to applying another standard.

“He [believes] torture not be allowed in any form or fashion in any part of the federal government, and he would make sure that was the case,” said John Brennan, who served under former CIA chief George J. Tenet in a variety of capacities at a time when the agency has since acknowledged it waterboarded a small number of terror suspects.

“Whether the Army field manual is comprehensive enough to cover all those tactics and techniques, that’s something I think he’d look to his national security advisers for,” Brennan said in an interview with CQ in August.

Appointing Brennan to the CIA does not mean change from Bush. That was absolutely a critical part of Obama’s message. With Brennan, we get the taint of a Bush and two-facedness of a Clinton. We need to say goodbye to all that, not perpetuate its double-speak.

You will notice that the website of the biggest gay rights group in the country has one single mention – it’s a blog about a celebrity, of course – of the massive protests that occurred for marriage equality across the country yesterday. (A letter from Joe Solmonese tells us to be nice.) You will also notice that a handful of young non-professionals were able to organize in a few days what HRC has been incapable of doing in months or years. You will know from brutal experience that in the two decades of serious struggle for marriage equality, the Human Rights Campaign has been mostly absent, and when present, often passive or reactive. Here’s a simple statistic that might help shake us out of complacency: HRC claims to have spent $3.4 million on No On 8. The Mormon church was able to spend over $20 million, by appealing to its members. Why are non-gay Mormons more capable of organizing and fund-raising on a gay rights measure than the biggest national gay rights group? I mean: they claim (absurdly, but bear with me) 725,000 supporters and members. In the summer, the major problem for No On 8 was insufficient early funding. If HRC had led, they could have thrown their money weight behind it. If every supporter had given $20 – chump change for the biggest ever battle yet for civil rights – they could have delivered $14 million overnight. So why didn’t they?

They will argue that this was a state, not a federal, measure. Sure – but its implications were obviously national, as protests in almost every state revealed. They are supposed to have "expertise" – but the ads that ran in No on 8 were the usual fearful, focus-group driven, conviction-free pap. So in the biggest national struggle in the history of gay civil rights, this organization – which has vacuumed money from the gay community for years – were by-standers. Why is that not a scandal?

How many struggles do we have to wage with these people always, always failing to lead – before we demand accountability and reform? Losing a battle this important should mean, at least, the rolling of some heads. Or we have no accountability at all. What are we: the Bush administration?

Even now, in Washington, they are sticking with the same legislative agenda they have had for two decades: a trivial piece of hate crimes grandstanding and ENDA, which is moot in many states. They endorsed Obama on June 6 – only after the Clintons gave them permission. The endorsement was written by a low level staffer. Civil unions at a federal level? That again would require leadership. We were promised ENDA and hate crimes in the last session. What we got was an end to the HIV immigration ban – an issue HRC didn’t even ask the presidential candidates about in their questionnaire, and which was pioneered by others (although HRC did come through with Congressional lobbying in the end). It’s not that they do nothing; it’s that it’s rarely enough; and never with sufficient energy or vision.

It’s time gay people realized that this group is often part of the problem, and rarely part of the solution. It needs to be swept clean of its deadwood, overhauled, or if it persists in its ways, defunded. When we are in a civil rights movement and the biggest organization is essentially a passive observer and excuse-maker, it’s time to demand better.

A nice catch of one of Sarah Palin’s more honest moments in her interview with Larry King.

You can buy the bumper sticker here.

Nick Carr:

Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, have published an in-depth roadmap for "whole brain emulation" – in other words, the replication of a fully functional human brain inside a computer. "The basic idea" for whole brain emulation (WBE), they write, "is to take a particular brain, scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain." It’s virtualization, applied to our noggins.

The catch:

They deal with the problem of free will, or, as they term it, the possibility of a random or "physically indeterministic element" in the working of the human brain, by declaring it a non-problem. They suggest that it can be dealt with rather easily by "including sufficient noise in the simulation … Randomness is therefore highly unlikely to pose a major obstacle to WBE." And anyway: "Hidden variables or indeterministic free will appear to have the same status as quantum consciousness: while not in any obvious way directly ruled out by current observations, there is no evidence that they occur or are necessary to explain observed phenomena."

The only way you can emulate a person with a computer is by first defining the person to be a machine. The Future of Humanity Institute would seem to be misnamed.

“I think that she is going to be a significant player. But she’s going to be one of 20 or 30 significant players. She’s not going to be the de facto leader,” – Newt Gingrich on Sarah Palin.