Month: July 2013

The Best Defense Is A Good Economy

Drezner has a long article (pdf) on the diminishing returns from defense spending. It concludes:

The lesson from this analysis for U.S. grand strategy is that an overreliance on military preponderance is badly misguided. Again, it is not that military power is useless; it is that the law of diminishing marginal returns has kicked in. The United States would profit more from investing in nonmilitary power resources than in military assets. An excessive reliance on military might, to the exclusion of other dimensions of power, will yield negative returns. Without a revived economy and the associated global recognition of a renaissance in American economic power, the United States runs the risk of strategic insolvency. The United States needs to focus primarily on policies that will rejuvenate economic growth, accelerate job creation, and promote greater innovation and productivity. If the U.S. economy is perceived to be rebounding, then the biggest economic beneªts that have been hypothesized to flow from military predominance will be preserved. Furthermore, over the long run, economic growth is the strongest driver for growth in defense spending. Short-term cuts can lead to long-term growth in defense spending. As policymakers weigh the choice between maintaining a large military and taking steps toward economic revival, the results in this article point strongly toward deeper cuts in defense expenditures.

Steinglass adds:

[T]here was a time when states needed huge armies because they were interested in conquering each other to get bigger, suck in more tax revenue, and justify their rulers’ thirst for glory. Then after that there was a time when states represented rival ideologies that fought each other to justify the belief systems that held them in power with their own populations. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and now that’s over too. I just don’t see the rationale for preserving a military that can defeat any other militaries anywhere in the world twice at the same time in an age when states are no longer seeking to conquer other states for fun and profit, as they were during the struggle of liberal democracies against totalitarianism. The vague strategic rationales that float underneath our defence budgets don’t describe a vision of the world that makes any sense to me.

Me neither, which finally dawned on me after the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan. This issue is generational as well. Those born after the Cold War ended cannot understand why this vast continent, defended by two vast oceans, with woeful infrastructure and massive debt, should still be playing the global hegemon game. The Founders would be appalled. But the logic of this is so powerful that even 9/11 cannot refute it. In retrospect, au contraire. Our reaction proved its expiration date had long passed.

That’s why I can live with the sequester. It may be the only way to bypass the McCainiacs and military-industrial-complex and actually slash defense.

Where Music Isn’t Free

Chris Kjorness argues that reggae outlasted mambo for the same reason the United States outlasted the Soviet Union:

At the height of  ’50s mambo fever, you would have been laughed out of the room had you predicted that comparatively tiny and impoverished Jamaica would soon become a dominant force in global music, while the Caribbean’s longstanding cultural capital of Havana fell into irrelevance and decay. But the rise of communism and its attendant cultural protectionism soon choked off mambo and Cuban creativity at the source, while Jamaica’s economic boom and unfettered recording industry uncorked a revolutionary new music called reggae.

Many Cuban musicians welcomed the revolution, and quite a few benefited at first, but that soon changed:

By 1961, all production facilities had been nationalized. State approval was required for any new recording. Censorship and bureaucratic red tape frustrated artists. Reduced tourism and trade cut Cuba off from its most lucrative markets, and the lack of profit motive meant that no one stood to make money by pushing new music or reissuing perennially popular recordings. Meanwhile, the deteriorating economy (exacerbated by the U.S. embargo) made money still more scarce. By 1966, Cuba, which used to press millions of records a year, only managed to eke out 184,000.

Meanwhile, in free-market Jamaica:

[T]he sound-system dance was the place most Jamaicans went to show off their wares and hear new tunes. An underground economy grew around the dances: Organizers charged admission, DJs received a fee, and food and alcohol vendors lined the streets around the venue. Competition between DJs was intense, and customer feedback immediate. The hottest music in 1950s Kingston was American jazz and rhythm and blues. DJs paid a premium for records by artists such as Rosco Gordon and Fats Domino. Records were imported or bought off boat workers coming from the United States. Many DJs actually got their start working as migrant laborers in the United States, using the money they earned to collect equipment and records. A new breed of music entrepreneurs was just beginning to build the infrastructure needed for Jamaican music to flourish.

The Cuban government continued its censorship as recently as December:

A crackdown on reggaeton and other unnamed musical styles that are threatening the revolutionary country’s traditional musical culture will punish artists and fine those who programme it, according to Cuban Music Institute boss Orlando Vistel Columbié. “We are not just talking about reggaeton. There is vulgarity, banality and mediocrity in other forms of music too,” Vistel told the official Granma newspaper. “But it is also true that reggaeton is the most notorious.  On the one hand there are aggressive, sexually obscene lyrics that deform the innate sensuality of the Cuban woman, projecting them as grotesque sexual objects. And all that is backed by the poorest quality music.” …

Musicians who play reggaeton are threatened with being struck off official lists, making it harder for them to work, and recordings are already being purged from official catalogues. Radio and television stations are also under pressure to drop reggaeton – though Cubans can still turn their dials to radio stations in nearby Miami or elsewhere.

On The Front Lines, On The Job

Chris Chafin considers how war correspondents rationalize risk:

Holding seemingly contradictory ideas in close proximity seems to be important for combat reporters. You acknowledge that you put yourself in dangerous situations, but believe you have the ability to figure out which are dangerous in a general sense and which are dangerous in a more immediate sense. You recognize that things are out of your control, that conflicts shift in ways that are unpredictable for reasons that are opaque to you, and yet trust yourself to stay safe. These are close cousins to the decisions we make every day, to smoke, to drink too much, to bring drugs on an airplane. “I know this could go badly,” we think, “but I know what I’m doing.” In combat situations, consequences can be more immediate.

Francesca Borri, a combat reporter in Syria, says that living with fear is part of the job :

One recent evening there was shelling everywhere, and I was sitting in a corner, wearing the only expression you could have when death might come at any second, and another reporter comes over, looks me up and down, and says: “This isn’t a place for women.” What can you say to such a guy? Idiot, this isn’t a place for anyone. If I’m scared, it’s because I’m sane.

Armed With Ingenuity

SYRIA-CONFLICT

Matthieu Aikins profiles the Syrian rebels’ arms makers:

More than in any of the other Arab nations riven by war in recent years—more than in Egypt, Libya, or Iraq—the rebels here have taken a DIY approach to arming themselves. This has been born out of a combination of necessity (other rebellions have been better supplied) and uncommon opportunity, as rebels have been able to hold significant territory where workshops can be set up and kept safe from regime attacks. Though regional countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have supplied arms to the rebels—and the US decided in June to begin its own limited program—weapons have been scarce enough that the rebels continue to manufacture their own. The whole region around Aleppo, which had been the center of Syria’s heavy industry, quickly became particularly fertile ground; as the rebels captured machine shops, steel mills, and power plants, they began adapting them to the task of war.

Some of the rebels’ creations verge on the outlandish. When I ask about one odd-looking, 15-foot-long wooden trebuchet, which its proud creator is using to hurl 4-pound fragmentation bombs, he tells me he got the idea from the videogame Age of Empires. Another Aleppo inventor gained fame with an armored car called Sham II (an improvement on an earlier Sham). Two crew members sit inside the car, an old diesel chassis with steel panels welded around the outside, and look at TV screens. While one drives, the other uses a PlayStation controller to aim and fire a machine gun mounted on the roof.

Hannah Lucinda Smith also toured the rebel workshops:

By taking apart weapons they’ve captured from the regime’s checkpoints, the rebels’ manufacturing team has worked out how to reverse-engineer them, meaning Assad’s troops are getting carbon copies of their weapons fired back at them.

(Photo: A rebel fighter holds an improvised mortar shell, one of many stacked at a factory in the city of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial capital, on July 7, 2013. Syria’s 27-month war between rebel forces and pro-government troops has killed more than 100,000 people, a monitoring group group estimates. By JM Lopez/AFP/Getty Images)

Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing, Ctd

A reader responds to this post:

I can go through periods when I think that life isn’t worth living. But I don’t have the will to enact a suicide. For when I think of those in my life who would be affected, it makes those thoughts moot. Life is sometimes not worth living for myself, but it is always worth living for others. I have a cat who depends on me; I have family and friends who love me; colleagues and clients with whom I am trustworthy and dependable; how could I break that love and defile that trust? I can handle my own black thoughts, but I couldn’t handle imposing them on others in such a way. My connections tether me to this world. I stay for them, when I can’t for myself. Suicide isn’t painless.

Another:

My wife tried to commit suicide once, by injecting herself with her diabetic husband’s insulin (that was her second husband, I was her third).  She had three children very young (her first was born when she was 19, the third four years later), which ruined her life financially, and she felt she was an unfit mother.  The incident happened long before we got together and when she told me about it all I could do was hold her. I too have suffered from depression and the occasional suicidal thoughts, so even though I’ve never actually attempted suicide, I understood what she was going through enough so that I could sympathize with her.

To feel like you’re inadequate, that you’re incapable of handling all the things life throws at you, unable to cope with the inevitable sadness that comes to any of us, is a common thought among suicidal people.

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, the rich and poor alike feel the same thing. Some of us, myself included, feel like we’re nothing more than a burden to the people who love us, whether that means emotionally or financially, and don’t want others to have to exert any more energy on our behalf.

I can speak for myself, and I can speak for my late wife (who died several years ago, not from suicide), that what we want mostly is to feel wanted: we don’t always want to be cheered up, we would like people to tell us from time to time that they like us, to recognize that we are just sad sometimes and we’d like them to respect the fact that we have the right to feel sad.  My wife and I were very happy for the five years we were together in great part because we shared that feeling of inadequacy and clung to it as a means of mutual support.  In losing her, I still have the memory of that, and that keeps me going despite the many difficulties I’ve had since she left us.

She would be angry with me if I were to take my own life, and some days that’s all I need.

Update from a reader:

By chance I’ve been to three funerals in the last month: the first a relative, the second an acquaintance, and the last a coworker who committed suicide. There were many bittersweet moments at the the first two – smiles, stories, even a few laughs and you got the impression everyone left feeling better than they did going in.

The last funeral was shocking in comparison. Despite a wonderful service and communion, it was the grimmest affair imaginable. No smiles, no stories – just crying relatives and friends staring at their shoes. Shame, guilt and misery everywhere. You could see it suffocating all the decent, hurting people left cleaning up the mess.

Suicide definitely leaves something behind.

Legalize Single-Sized Living

It could be a boon for New York and San Francisco, according to Emily Badger:

Around the turn of the last century, American cities were full of housing options that are largely nonexistent today: tenements, boarding houses, rooming houses, flop houses, single-room occupancy buildings or SROs–all variations on the idea of small living spaces at low cost. Some were rentable by the night. Some were built around shared amenities like showers and kitchens … All of them contribute to our grainy picture of early urban America as overcrowded, flammable, and full of unscrupulous landlords.

By contrast, most American cities today regulate the low end of the studio market, setting it somewhere around a minimum of 400 square feet in size. Likewise, building codes set a ceiling on occupancy, capping the number of unrelated people who can room together under the same roof. The effect, argues the Sightline Institute’s Alan Durning, is that we’ve outlawed the bottom end of the private housing market, driving up rents on everything above it. If we want to make cities more affordable, he proposes in a new ebook, Unlocking Home, we should look again at housing solutions that went out with the last century.

More Dish on urban housing here, here, and here.

Hathos Alert

[youtube http://youtu.be/Ub22k36YwLA]

Chris Sims revisits the 1999 made-for-TV movie NetForce:

You know that stereotype about older people and computers, how they use Internet Explorer with 26 toolbars and make phone calls to their kids for step-by-step instructions on how to log into Facebook? If you took that exact person and asked them to write a three-and-a-half hour movie about cybercops who battled Internet crime, you would still end up with something that had a slightly better grasp of technology than NetForce.

Based on a series of novels by 132-year-old writer Tom Clancy, NetForce follows the adventures of Alex Michaels (Scott Bakula), who takes charge of the FBI’s NetForce division in the not-too-distant future of 2005, a time when “technology has outstripped our morality.” Michaels is something of a loose cannon, to the point where he even goes so far as to time-jump an e-warrant that he got from a virtual courtroom — and I swear that these are actually things grown-ups were paid to say to each other while standing in front of cameras — but he gets the job when his boss, Kris Kristofferson, “one of the major architects of the internet,” is assassinated.

Money quote from the video compilation seen above:

The problem is, the whole cyberuniverse is expanding so fast that any kid who can hyperlink a GIF is a webmaster nowadays!

Will Obamacare Become Invisible?

Krugman claims that Obamacare “is going to work, it’s going to be extremely popular, and it’s going to wreak havoc with conservative ideology.” Ezra, on the other hand, bets that “stories about various problems in the implementation of Obamacare will be a net negative for Democrats in 2014, and after that, the program will cease to matter much politically at all – even as it works pretty well, and the coverage it offers is pretty popular”:

The key thing to remember about how people will experience Obamacare is that most people won’t experience it at all, and those who do experience it will never, ever experience a program named “Obamacare.”

If the law works, then a decade from now, about 25 million people will be insured through Obamacare. About half of them will be insured through Medicaid. The other half will be insured through state insurance marketplaces with names like “Covered California” and “Health Access CT.” They’ll get this insurance because their minister will mention it to them or because their community health clinic will sign them up. Few of these people are likely to connect their coverage to that Obamacare thing they heard about a lot back in 2010.

Beutler counters:

If the implementation fails, then it will be a disaster for Democrats for obvious reasons.

But let’s say it goes pretty well. In the White House’s mind, that means about 7 million people in exchanges, about one-third of whom will be young voters. It also means a few million more on Medicaid. That’s not very many people compared to all the folks whose insurance benefits won’t change at all. But it’s still a lot of people! Moreover, not all of these people are going to be partisan Democratic voters, and they almost certainly won’t be people who reliably vote in midterm elections. But they will come into this new benefit in an election year and suddenly be confronted with the fact that one party wants to rescind it, and quickly.

That’s why I think Republicans will dial back the repeal efforts, or maybe even change their campaign strategy more broadly. If they don’t, though, a modest but substantial number of people who might have otherwise sat out November will have a very good reason to vote.