Local impact of climate change

In California, as usual, the future is now.

A Cocaine Iceberg

Article from here:

ACCRA, Ghana -- West Africa is an unlikely center for the international cocaine trade. It is not a producer of the drug nor is it a consumer, as the vast majority of its people are very poor.

Yet a startling 50 tons of cocaine is transported through West Africa each year, according to the latest United Nations estimates. The value of this illicit trade dwarfs entire economies and has the potential to corrupt the region's fragile states, which are just pulling out of decades of bitter civil wars. In the past Africa has been a treasure trove looted by covetous colonialists, voracious rebels and kleptocratic rulers -- over the last 300 years think slaves, ivory, gold, diamonds, tin and coltan.
Now it is a transit point and storeroom for the cocaine trade.

Title from here.

Contraction Expansion

To be fair there are two wars in there...of course the expensive one was voluntary so here is the GAO's condemnation, with commentary and more. The 1978 number represents 3.02% of fed non-interest spending that year, the 2008 number 19.79%.

You: Jewish, Attractive and Drunk

Trying to turn a long, rambling post on Obama's inaugural address and language into a short rambling post, meanwhile a love story from DC Craigslist:

Jewish girl who passed out in my bed - m4w - 25 (Chinatown-Gallery Place)
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Reply to: pers-1001706735@craigslist.org
[?]Date: 2009-01-21, 12:26PM EST

You: Jewish, attractive and drunk

Me: Not Jewish (Gentile), dashing, gazelle on the dance floor and drunk

In case you were as blacked out as I think you were, I feel as though I should reintroduce myself. You were dancing around and enjoying the festive cake and brownies at the JCC inaugural bar mitzvah…I mean inaugural ball, before cabbing to Chinatown and passing out in my bed. Nothing makes me swoon for interfaith relationships like a girl who passes out in my lap in the back of a cab.

You might be asking yourself “why did that sweet boy not call me?” or “did I really wake up in a random guy’s bed in Chinatown?” and other important questions to gauge whether or not last night was a dream, drunken haze or bittersweet reality. Allow me to answer those questions.

Keep reading for the answers.

Riddle (and quote) of the day

Guess who wrote this in the an op-ed column in today's New York Times:

The basis for the modern State of Israel is the persecution of the Jewish people, which is undeniable. The Jews have been held captive, massacred, disadvantaged in every possible fashion by the Egyptians, the Romans, the English, the Russians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites and, most recently, the Germans under Hitler. The Jewish people want and deserve their homeland.

Click here for the surprising answer.

So far, so good

The big news of Obama's first day is the order to close down the GOP's secret foreign prison archipelago, end the kangaroo courts for inmates, and accelerate troop withdrawal from Iraq. Those are all important issues. But as a matter of political aesthetics, these things please me even more.

Shutting the revolving door:

Obama rolled out new rules for his appointees, requiring them to sign a pledge meant to disrupt the "revolving door" by which lobbyists flow seamlessly into government and back into the lobbying business.

His aides are barred from lobbying any executive agency for the life of the Obama administration. That means an appointee who leaves the White House in, say, 2010 would be barred from lobbying the executive branch until 2017 if Obama were to serve two terms.

At present, officials who leave an agency or department cannot go back and lobby their old offices for at least one year.

"It's unprecedented," said Fred Wertheimer, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Democracy 21. "It basically protects citizens against individuals entering public service and then converting their public service to personal financial gain when they leave."

Lobbyists who join his administration must wait two years before they can take part in any issue on which they lobbied.

And issuing three executive orders to restore transparency to its rightful place as a centerpiece of substantive democracy:

The first order effectively undid a Bush administration policy that had restricted the release of presidential documents.... Bush's rule allowed former presidents, vice presidents and their heirs to cite executive privilege to block the release of documents after they have left office. With his order, Obama essentially threw out that rule, allowing only the current president to block the release of documents and depriving heirs of that right.

The second Obama order was designed to reinvigorate the Freedom of Information Act. Open-records advocates have complained that a memo by former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft in 2001 encouraged executive branch officials to delay or halt the release of documents requested under the law.

The third Obama memo was meant to instill a stronger spirit of openness in government. It directed executive branch employees to "operate under principles of openness, transparency and of engaging citizens with their government."

The first two rules are the most direct, but for my money the last one is the most important one, since it speaks to the spirit of governance. Small Precautions has argued for years that substantive democracy depends on a variety of tacit norms of political decency, many of which were actively and intentionally violated by the Bush regime, with transparency and openness at the head of the list. My great worry for the last four years especially was that the Bush regime's violations of those norms would be impossible to reverse, that is, that Bush was doing irreparable, irreversible damage to the fabric of our democratic culture. But Obama is showing a determination to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Looking back: how Obama won the election

Today I stumbled across the following clip from September 9, 2008 discussion between Emily Bazelon and Matt Lewis, discussing the Obama-McCain race, and specifically the impact of the nomination of Sarah Palin, who Lewis describes as "this amazingly exciting pick." (I wonder if Lewis would still stick with that judgment.)

For anyone who thinks either that Obama was inevitable (or who doubts that the financial meltdown that commenced with Lehman's implosion a week later decisively changed the race) would do well to watch this clip:


By the way, before anyone accuses me of being unjust in mocking Lewis, I'll note that I made the call on Palin right out of the gate.

Purdy

I can't believe I'm endorsing anything that Jedediah Purdy has to say, but he's profoundly right on the issue of balancing liberty and security. Money:

The Bush-era conceit that we accept no level of terrorist threat is, as philosopher John Searle once said about Jacques Derrida's work, the kind of bullshit that gives bullshit a bad name.... It may be rational in one way to lump terrorism in with traffic accidents and trans-fats as just another way for Americans to lose quality-adjusted life years; but that public-health take on terrorism is superficially smart, profoundly obtuse. Terrorism strikes at a government's capacity to protect its people from organized violence. That protection is one of the most basic reasons to have government at all. Terrorism is a glimpse of Hobbes's State of Nature, the antithesis of political society, in a way that the worst traffic accident or artery-clogging restaurant chain can never be. But to say that it's never "acceptable" doesn't mean either (1) that we can always prevent it or (2) that we should sacrifice other core values in trying. The fact that we can't perfectly prevent it is tragic, literally - the product of a clash of irreconcilable values, and of flaws in the formation of the world - but imagining that because it's evil, we can stop it altogether, is the kind of magical thinking that gives magical thinking a bad name.

Where "Mandarins" succeeded

I've spent the last few days reading the most recent articles that discuss Mandarins of the Future, and I am gratified to note that it appears that one of the central historiographical aims of the book has succeeded, namely to convince historians and practitioners of the American social science that modernization theory stands at the very center of postwar American social science, that is, it is the linchpin paradigm that, properly understood, unlocks the puzzle of why postwar American social science was what it was. I'm not solely responsible for promoting that thesis, of course (the work of David Engerman, Michael Latham, and Nick Cullather has been at least as important) but I believe that Mandarins was important for helping to define this nascent consensus.

Even more gratifying, I think that the moral thrust of the book, namely that modernization theory was an abomination, but that the Enlightenment ideals it venerated must be critically revisited and revitalized, has also found an audience, including among many critics who might otherwise have been presumed to be skeptical. This judgment is more tentative, and we'll see over the next few years where it goes, but this is my hope.

Update on the crisis

Banking stocks got absolutely hammered today, losing 20 percent of their value. They've already lost over a trillion dollars, and Nouriel Roubini thinks that have $2.5 trillion more to go.

The Financial Times suggests that the best solution is to "shoot the bankers and nationalize the banks." With friends like those.

Welcome to office, Mr. Obama.

Restoring the ambition of the social sciences

Peter Hall's sweeping assessment of the transformation of American social science over the last six decades contains some heroic overgeneralizations, but also identifies something profound about constricted political vision of post-Mod Theory American social science:

Shifts in the social sciences have also fueled political cynicism and eroded confidence in the possibility of alternative political projects. The ghost in the machine is the loss of faith in the modernist political vision that animated social science until the 1970s. That vision embraced Enlightenment ideals, regarded agitation on behalf of a working class as one of its best expressions, and saw the state as the political vehicle for realizing such aspirations. One by one, each of these pillars has crumbled under an acid intellectual rain....

The collapse of the modernist ideal has also left social science without a firm sense of political agency. Post-modernism cannot supply it. There is something oddly similar between the radicalism of Michel Foucault and the conservatism of Michael Oakeshott. Each sees the webs we weave as such complex constructions that it seems foolhardy to imagine disassembling them. Both find something risible in projects of reform. (p. 19-20)

I think Hall gets his causality backwards: it's not that methodological shifts in the social sciences have led to the collapse of utopian or even meliorist hopes and ideas, but rather that the ideological collapse of Enlightenment ideals have precipitated a narrowing of methodological ambition.

US 1549 as political symbolism

I've been wondering why a liberal political blog like Talking Points Memo has spent so much time writing about the US Airways crash.

At first I thought it was just because it was an obviously dramatic human interest story, and one happening right outside their offices, to boot. But I've also just realized that part of the fascination of the story is its latent political symbolism. This story is a metaphor not only for what the Obama administration faces, but also for the hopes that the country is investing in him.

George Bush and the GOP are effectively handing over the country in a state not that different from a plane where both the engines have gone out at low altitude. Obama's task -- his "historic opportunity" as the pundits like to say -- is to make the cool decisions that can bring the country down for a soft landing where no one gets seriously injured, rather than flame-balling into a heavily populated urban center.

If the perfect political symbol of the Bush years was Cheney's preemptive shotgunning of his friend, then the miraculous landing of US 1549 is the perfect political symbol of the country's current hopes for Obama.

Amazing video of the US Airways crash and rescue

Coast Guard surveillance video. The crash happens about two minutes in, and then it zooms in and you can see the people scrambling out of the plane and onto the wing, and then rescuers arrive. Check it:

One for the Kids

The Playmobil Security Check Point


It's all about the comments, sample:

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.

Finding the Humor

thebailoutgame.us

A phase shift?

John Robb on the implications of the financial crisis: Apocalypse Now:

Historically, economic recessions that last longer than a year have durations/severities that can be plotted as power law distributions (Ormerod and Mounfield).* Given that we are already over a year into this recession, it implies that we are really into black swan territory (unknown and extreme outcomes) in regards to our global economy's current downturn and that no estimates of recovery times or ultimate severity based on historical data of past recessions apply anymore. This also means that the system has exceeded its ability to adapt using standard methods (that shouldn't be news to anyone).

Quote of the Day

Fernando Enrique Cardoso, addressing Lula, in 1998:

We were taught, years ago, to expect there would be a tremendous crisis, the uprising of a new society, a new political system, and the working class taking power.

All that is gone. The Berlin Wall is gone. So is the Soviet Union. There is no historical alternative now. So if there is a crisis... after that there will only be disaster.

Renal Recompense

"If you ain’t no chump; holla we want prenup!"

Good to know the going rate for a kidney is $1.5M, question Nils, in your research what do the back alley kidneys go for?

Update (by Nils): The retail price of kidneys varies tremendously worldwide--hence creating massive arbitrage opportunities for organ brokers. The cheapest kidneys come from India, where the price is typically under US$1000. In Iran, there the official state price for a kidney is US$1000, but the black market price is said to be significantly higher. A Romanian kidney fetches for US$3,000 dollars, while Turkish kidneys cost US$10,000+, and Mexican, Brazilian and South African kidneys fall in between. Finally, in the U.S., the price is typically US$60-90K. These are the prices the donors get; middlemen add a significant markup, so that the price recipients pay is often over US$100K. And that's before the surgery costs.

How to deliver cash to a pirate

The U.S. Navy has released a fine image of contemporary ransom-paying:
Historically, piracy (and, more generally, warlordism) has tended to arise in the context of unstable power relations between major powers, which opens up loopholes and arbitrage opportunities. With this in mind, it's noteworthy that the Chinese have decided to dispatch a couple of warships to help patrol the Gulf of Aden--a move that, depending on your perspextive, can be seen as either an alarming escalation of Chinese military ambitions, or as a salutary increase in Chinese contribution to the global public good of safe international waters. What it undoubtedly indicates is that the Chinese think the Americans aren't willing or able to defend the Chinese merchant marine. 

Chilling

The Indian government has released a dossier of alleged transcripts of the VOIP-based cell phone calls that record what handlers in Pakistan directing in real-time the actions of terrorists inside the Taj Mahal hotel during the Mumbai attacks last month. Some of it reads like dialog from a bad Hollywood thriller:

The dossier notes that on the basis of the interrogation of Mohammed Ajmal Amir ‘Kasab,’ the lone terrorist to be captured alive, the role of Lashkar commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi in the training of the crew had been established. The terrorist group initially consisted of 32 persons but the team chosen for the operation was eventually whittled down to 10.

[snip]

At the Oberoi at 0353 hrs on November 27, a handler phones and says:

“Brother Abdul. The media is comparing your action to 9/11. One senior police official has been killed.”

Abdul Rehman: “We are on the10th/11th floor. We have five hostages.”

Caller 2 (Kafa): Everything is being recorded by the media. Inflict the maximum damage. Keep fighting. Don’t be taken alive.

Caller: Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims. Keep your phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire.

Fahadullah: We have three foreigners, including women. From Singapore and China.

Caller: Kill them. The dossier then notes that the telephone intercept records the “voices of Fahadullah and Abdul Rehman directing hostages to stand in a line, and telling two Muslims to stand aside. Sound of gunfire. Cheering voices in background. Kafa hands telephone to Zarar,” who says, “Fahad, find the way to go downstairs.”

There's also a strong suggestion that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence--widely regarded as an Islamist-sympathizing rogue agency within the Pakistani government that once backed the Taliban in Afghanistan and still supports Kashmiri insurgents--was behind the Mumbai attacks.

Now it's certainly possible that this released material is disinformation--it's impossible to verify definitively. But if these allegations are true, it's a casus belli for sure.