Month: March 2011

Mark Thompson recalls other NFZs:

The U.N. — but actually, largely the U.S. — maintained no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq for about a decade following the first Gulf War in 1991. … The Iraqis never succeeded in shooting down a U.S. or allied plane patrolling the no-fly zones — they flew more than 250,000 sorties — despite the promise of cash bounties for any Iraqi who downed a plane. But the U.S. Air Force did succeed — after misidentifying a pair of aircraft as Russian-built Iraqi Hind helicopters — in downing two U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawks in 1994, killing all 26 aboard.

The soul of James Brown lives on:

It seems pretty clear by now that stripping public sector unions of all collective bargaining rights is a step too far for most Americans. The impact of reality on a movement largely sealed off from it is an interesting moment. And if you thought Virginia was going to be an easy electoral college gain for the GOP in 2012, this poll might give some pause. Obama wins the state by "8 points over Mike Huckabee at 51-43, 12 over Newt Gingrich at 51-39, and a whopping 19 over Sarah Palin at 54-35."

A 19 point Obama-Palin gap in Virginia? Can you imagine what that means in the rest of the country?

David Roberts is still pondering "ClimateGate":

Consider that there have now been five, count 'em five, inquiries into the matter. Penn State established an independent inquiry into the accusations against scientist Michael Mann and found "no credible evidence" [PDF] of improper research conduct. A British government investigation run by the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee found that while the CRU scientists could have been more transparent and responsive to freedom-of-information requests, there was no evidence of scientific misconduct. The U.K.'s Royal Society (its equivalent of the National Academies) ran an investigation that found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice." The University of East Anglia appointed respected civil servant Sir Muir Russell to run an exhaustive, six-month independent inquiry; he concluded that "the honesty and rigour of CRU as scientists are not in doubt … We have not found any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."

All those results are suggestive, but let's face it, they're mostly… British. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) wanted an American investigation of all the American scientists involved in these purported dirty deeds. So he asked the Department of Commerce's inspector general to get to the bottom of it. On Feb. 18, the results of that investigation were released. "In our review of the CRU emails," the IG's office said in its letter to Inhofe [PDF], "we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data … or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures." (Oddly, you'll find no mention of this central result in Inhofe's tortured public response.) Whatever legitimate issues there may be about the responsiveness or transparency of this particular group of scientists, there was nothing in this controversy — nothing — that cast even the slightest doubt on the basic findings of climate science. Yet it became a kind of stain on the public image of climate scientists. How did that happen?

Jay Rosen says that question "has confounded our political culture, our press, and me."

John Payne lectures on its history:

The most famous battle in the long, internecine war on the right between libertarians and traditionalists was fought over Labor Day weekend, 1969 at the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) convention in Saint Louis. The two groups argued semi-peacefully over a number of proposed planks for YAF’s platform–the legalization of marijuana, withdrawal from Vietnam, etc.–but when a libertarian delegate stepped to the podium, declared the right of every individual to resist state violence, and lit his draft card on fire, the convention was ripped apart. The libertarians cried “Sock it to the state!” while the traditionalists chanted “Sock it to the left!”  and mocked the libertarians as “lazy fairies” (get it?).

Many people consider that moment the birth of the modern libertarian movement as a separate entity from the conservative movement. The old alliance between the two groups never completely dissolved, but the rift between them has never fully closed either. When the libertarians struck out on their own over forty years ago, there was no question which group was dominant: the conservatives were more numerous, better funded, and far better represented in the halls of power. Now, despite being united in opposition to the Obama Administration, that rift appears to be widening again, but it’s less clear who is winning this time.

Payne sees libertarian successes at CPAC this year:

Conservatives still far outnumber libertarians, and in most cases, they wouldn’t vote Ron Paul  or Gary Johnson for president. However, CPAC has never been representative of conservatism as a whole–it’s a conference for conservative activists, intelligentsia, and college students, who are by far the largest group. So while CPAC does not perfectly reflect conservatism at the moment, it does give us a glimpse at its future. Libertarians are clearly ascendant among activists on the right, and that will probably translate into a far more libertarian conservatism ten or twenty years down the road.

One wonders how many more young people the Republican Party could attract but for its image as anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-fun.

Money quote from Robert Gates' speech to West Point cadets:

"In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it."

So Rummy was crazy as well as incompetent? Stephen Walt runs with this: 

[I]f the situation in Afghanistan were exactly as it is today but U.S. forces were not present at all, would President Obama be getting ready to send 100,000+ troops there?  I very much doubt it. And if that's the case, then the only reason we are still fighting there is some combination of the "sunk cost" fallacy, misplaced concerns about credibility, overblown fears of an al Qaeda "safe haven," and the usual fears about domestic political payback.

Ground Zero, 12 pm

Joanne McNeil explores technology meant to simulate online chats with friends and acquaintances so that you needn't have them yourself. :

Reading the company’s mission statement, one imagines a dystopian cyber world of chatbots holding conversations with each other in lieu of actual persons too busy, too lazy, or to indifferent of one another to bother allocating time to talk.

It's a fascinating post, complete with a James Franco bot. The best line: "I like to joke that the perfect Facebook app would crawl through birthday listings and automatically leave 'Happy Birthday' comments for others on the appropriate day — without you ever needing to know about it." Oh, man, if they manage that, I'll have to get my own Facebook account. I mean an "authentic" one.

I'm delighted that an openly gay man is now the White House's social secretary (although one wonders how many closeted gay men have been involved in organizing social events at the White House over the centuries). And he has a beagle! More encouraging is that he won this job the old-fashioned way – by lobbying, networking, fund-raising, and being a loyal Democrat. Money quote:

“There was never a party he did not like to go to.”

Still there's something a little ghettoish about the jobs he has held: National Endowment for the Humanities followed by social secretary. Wake me up when there's an openly lesbian woman running the Department of Homeland Security or Justice or on the Supreme Court – or any job in the cabinet. And then there's the classic Washington power-couple dynamic. His ex-boyfriend is finance director for the DNC. No wonder the DNC front-group, HRC, is so excited. Still, it's a good sign that open sexual orientation is no longer a bar to the same greasy pole so many others slide up and down in this town.

More daring: 3 MPs in the new Irish parliament are openly gay. That's about the same as the US Congress, except Ireland has 4.4 million people and the US over 300 million. Over the pond, the England cricket team's wicket-keeper has also come out as gay. Money quote:

"It was a fantastic thing to do, telling the lads. The difference is huge. I am so much happier."

Again, wake me up when an active 24-year-old NBA or NFL player does the same.

Judith Thurman connects John Galliano's anti-Semitic rant to his profession: 

Galliano lives in the bubble of the high fashion world, a club restricted, almost without exception, to the comely, and the magazines that feature his work have been cleansed—if not ethnically, then aesthetically—of bodies that are not superhuman. Galliano, an anointed high priest of chic, has been accused of calling a bar patron—who, for the record, is not Jewish—a “dirty Jew face,” and, in the video, called a woman “ugly” and deplored her clothes and grooming. Their physical appearance, in other words, inspired his desire for their extermination. We should perhaps stop to consider to what degree, wittingly or not, the fashion world has the same fascination as the Nazis with eugenics.

About three centuries ago, I wrote a cover essay for TNR on the fascistic aesthetic of Bruce Weber, Herb Ritts, et al. It was a little over-the-top, but there's something there. Ask Leni Riefenstahl.