Greg Sanders

They actually know what quantum means!

So Chris Orr points me to the new Bond trailer and finds reason for cautious optimism.

Orr doesn’t like the name, Quantum of Solace. I do like it. Quantum’s relevant definitions area "a specified portion" or "the smallest amount of a physical quantity..." So in essence the title is a reference to a measure of comfort for the death at the end of the last film. From the trailer I suspect that the source will be revenge and from the name I surmise that it will provide minimal comfort.

Justifications for death

I enjoy reading the American Scene in large part because the range of writers there provide some insight into how the other sides think and a rather enjoyable to read. The one I tend to agree with most is Noah Millman who recently wrote on the Supreme Court decisions finding that a child rapist who had not committed murder could not be executed.

If you’re interested, I think his whole argument does a good job analyzing the ideas systematically. However, to keep things short, I’ll just quote his conclusion:

I’m more confortable arguing against the death penalty on the pragmatic grounds that we don’t want to grant ourselves the power lest we misuse it than arguing on the grounds that it violates a criminal’s inalienable right to life. But it does seem to me that if you start from a premise of such a right to life, then you can only barely justify the death penalty in cases of murder (on the grounds of satisfaction and/or expiation – the consequentialist justifications will never fly), and certainly not in any other cases.

I also reject the death penalty, at least outside of traditional federal criminal cases (not that Gitmo craziness), as being so unevenly and unjustly administered as to be unacceptable. Beyond that, were working with a reliable system, I’m torn; however murders are certainly the outer bound of people I’d consider executing.

Things I did not know about China

Learned something today from Alex Tabarrok over at the Marginal Revolution blog:

Eating lunch in a working man's restaurant in Hong Kong I hear mostly Cantonese but with occassional English words, "passion," for example.  Borrowed words or  loanwords surely tell us something important about ideas or concepts that the first language lacks.  Most loanwords are for things (e.g. mouse for a computer device), it's pretty easy to explain the adoption of such words.  But what about words for which the thing has always existed but not the word?  Chinese speakers tell me that there is a word for love but passion is more difficult to translate.

Interesting, that wouldn't have been something I'd have guessed from contemporary Chinese history.  Revolutions are full of passion after all.  Tabarrok goes on to raise some interesting questions and link to a list of difficult to translate words.

Low-fidelity world

So an article covering neuroscience from a New Yorker article made me think of computer games (via Brad Delong):

...The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

So basically our connection with the real world has low bandwidth and we make up for that with our onboard graphics/sensory processor. I’d be curious what the breakdown is among other animals, is this common for most life forms or do those with less complex brains primarily rely on raw inputs?

In any event, that particular analogy makes it a bit easier for me to process this. It doesn’t mean we’re disconnected from the world, it just means we’ve got a client side intensive way of processing the world. Presumably higher bandwidths proved the more difficult to implement biological solution.

Dogma, good God y'all, what is it good for?

So an interesting study on American religious beliefs came out the other day. The most widely discussed finding is that one in five American athiests believe in a higher power and thus are in all likelihood agnostics. On the other hand it sounds like more people don’t believe in God than identify as atheist so there’s some confusion both ways. 92% of the population believes in some sort of God or spiritual force but only 51% are fairly certain said God is a person one can have a relationship with. Also, apparently 20% of the Christian population speaks in tongues from time to time, which surprises me. Political findings were about what you’d expect.

For the Curious here’s the full report. Anyhow, I personally was raised Lutheran (we’re classified as mainline protestant) and not surprisingly have the basic demographics of that group. I’ve stuck with that religion although as long time readers can guess I tend to be pretty open about such things and tend to get rather angry when people start saying that religion is necessary to be a good person or a good American.

Happily the survey found the American population is less dogmatic than I might have guessed:

Most Americans agree with the statement that many religions – not just their own – can lead to eternal life. Among those who are affiliated with a religious tradition, seven-in-ten say many religions can lead to eternal life. This view is shared by a majority of adherents in nearly all religious traditions, including more than half of members of evangelical Protestant churches (57%). Only among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormon groups (57%) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (80%), which together comprise roughly 2.4% of the U.S. adult population [are exceptions].

I’m curious whether people mean other denominations or other religions but the question did say religions. There are similar trends in whether there can be multiple interpretations of their religion. This post is long enough already, so I’ll wrap it up saying that I think arguing over whether religion is good or bad is asking the wrong question. I do believe that some aspects cause more harm than good: belief in exclusive access to morality, obsessions with purity, orthodoxy, anti-empiricism, etc. The aspects aren’t just introduced by big bad "organized religion," at least with Christianity I’m betting some of them were there in Jesus’s original teaching and not just incorrectly attributed to him. Happily it seems that many Americans are at least in part rejecting these aspects, whatever their source.

Quote of the Day

John McCain on the greatest threat to the economy:

"Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences."

Ezra Klein on John McCain:

This is more like Marvel’s "What If?" series. What is the Supervolcano explodes? What if we have an "I Am Legend" style pandemic? Or a "28 Days Later" zombie virus? What if "radical Islamic extremism" prevails and terrorists establish a global caliphate?..

Bin Laden lives on a rock in a cave near some mountains... That makes it impossible that he’ll prevail and threaten our existence, so he’s not an acceptable answer under the first premise.

Quite so. Terrorism is not an existential threat to the U.S. This does not mean it cannot hurt us or that it isn’t important, but it simply is not on the same scale as the USSR.

One cool thing about Sen. Webb

Given that I support the argument against making him Veep, I think it’s only fair to also highlight one area where he’s a Democratic standout.

Take it away Spencer Ackerman:

Katrina vanden Heuvel reports on Jim Webb’s efforts to do something profoundly valuable for the country: end the drug war.

In addition to the drug supply remaining constant, the incarceration epidemic has failed to curb illegal drug use while also “devastating our minority communities.” Senator Webb said, “the number of persons in custody on drug charges increased thirteen times in the past 25 years…[And] when it comes to incarceration for drug offenses, the racial disparities are truly alarming. Although African Americans constitute 14 percent of regular drug users, they are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses, and 56 percent of persons in state prisons for drug crimes…Our current combination of enforcement, diversion, interdiction, treatment and prevention is not working the way we need it to…There has been little effort to take a comprehensive look at the relationship between the many interlocking pieces of drug policy.”

And that’s by design. For an entire generation, avaricious white politicians have ignored how the repeatedly-refuted drug war has compounded, not alleviated, the scourge of narcotics in minority communities. Why? Because there aren’t enough votes in solving the problems of poor, non-white America.

For me, it was actually international relations that took me from skeptical of the war on drugs to strongly opposed. Civil wars and organized crime the world over are financed by drugs. It all sees so futile to me. We’re genuinely winning in Columbia, FARC has lost a lot of men and leadership and the country is doing better as a whole, but even so the amount of coca cultivation rises. Trying to fight poppy cultivation is a critical complicating factors we’re facing in Afghanistan.

To be clear I love the U.S.’s moves against smoking in recent years. They’ve been highly effective and made many places much more pleasant for non-smokers to boot. I’m perfectly fine with even some harsh public health measures, but how about we do it without shooting people, eh?

Zimbabwe

I had been optimistic when Mugabe lost the parliamentary elections, it had seemed as if his hold on power had slipped far enough that it was over. It appears I’ve underestimated his capacity for repression.

Mark Bellamy and Stephen Morrison over at the CSIS Africa Policy Forum outline what the U.S. could be doing to help.

It is now possible to transcend this indifference. Mugabe’s unpopularity, his crumbling reputation as a liberation hero, the increasing savagery of his security chiefs, and the regional economic and social costs of Zimbabwe’s meltdown — all favor an external diplomatic push...

A top priority has to be ending South Africa’s patronage of Mugabe through diplomatic pressure that exploits growing regional dissatisfaction with Thabo Mbeki’s leadership. Botswana’s new President Ian Khama, Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, Tanzanian President and African Union head Jakaya Kikwete, as well as Mbeki’s presumptive successor Jacob Zuma, all understand the urgent need to act on Zimbabwe. Other strong African voices, such as Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, are also now questioning South Africa’s role in Zimbabwe and calling for change. Once the South African linchpin is removed, the other external props that sustain Mugabe — Angola, Namibia, Equatorial
Guinea, Libya, and China — will cease to matter.

As I understand it, the value added the U.S. provides under their proposal is that of an organizer. Appoint an envoy, the envoy gathers an international team, that team works for the long haul to change the situation. Presumably the envoy would have relevant credibility and be well positioned to answer Mugabe’s constant charges that all criticism is a re-colonization attempt. This envoy then, with the official backing of the U.S. would be able to organize figures ready to criticize government already. Only once that team, with substantial African representation, would we probably be in a position to convert those not critical.

Picture taken by frontlineblogger and used under a Creative Commons license. Here’s the blog of the picture taker.

Belated note on Hillary Clinton's Presidential bid

Between various distractions I didn’t get around to blogging Sen. Clinton’s concession speech (link goes to Rebecca Traister’s write up; for the full text, go here). I caught part of it live and thought it was lovely and went a long way to reuniting the party and I certainly thank her for that. Ezra Klein points to a nice American Prospect article on lasting consequences of Sen. Clinton’s run. The ones I found most notably of the positive observations:

• There’s now precedent for a female frontrunner who was strong on a range of feminist issues.
• Sexism was made obvious by the campaign and did inspire some backlash and greater awareness.
• The Senator figured out an ambitious but achievable health plan.

As is obvious from the above list, I do agree with Paul Krugman that there was some raw sexism deployed against her, although in my opinion fairly little of note from the Obama campaign itself (as compared to some of his supporters). The sexism was certainly a contributing if not the decisive factor in her loss (which is all that most of her supporters are saying). That said, I do agree with Kevin Drum’s commentary that not all the alleged race-baiting from the Clinton camp was a media fabrication. On the upside, Mark Penn makes an excellent scapegoat for almost everything.

Anyways, also in the interest of unity, I tend to accept Kathy G’s argument that Obama should not pick Sen. Webb as VP. As she document, while he presently favors having women in the military, he made life rather hard for some early female entrants. Spencer Ackerman doesn’t dispute her main charges but does add some nuance on Webb’s better relevant positions. Nonetheless, after Sen. Clinton’s loss there are bridges to be rebuilt and legitimate desires to be addressed. Avoiding a Veep who is a great Democrat but has a problematic history on gender relations would probably be a good start.

As for Sen. Clinton, I hope Obama works with her on health care because she does have good experience and is a real wonk on both the policy and politics.

C is for Fruit?

Fruit has replaced cookies as the top snack for the under six set. Who is driving the new trend? Stephen Colbert has more:

More seriously, I wonder how much of a difference Cookie Monster actually made. Unfortunately, I’m not sure comparing the results in households that do watch Sesame Street, far too many confounding factors there. Perhaps if we knew how many people picked up the slogan that "cookies are a sometime food."

House Dems revert

On the whole, I’m quite content with Nancy Pelosi’s leadership. Unfortunately, House Dems appear to have inexplicably caved on FISA again. (Senate caving is explicable, they have a bare majority).

I’ll go to Marty Lederman for the legal analysis:

Note the key word: reaffirmation. The Democrats worked long and hard to include in the bill a provision (stating that FISA and other specified statutes are to be "the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance and the interception of domestic wire, oral, or electronic communications may be conducted") that is, for all intents and purposes, a reenactment of the current 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(f), which has been the backbone of FISA for 30 years.

The options, apparently, were to have this key provision stripped from FISA, as the Administration wanted (which would have made an incredibly permissive bill basically hortatory), or to retain it and "reaffirm" it. After a long, hard battle, the Dems prevailed on that one. Whew. Close call, that.

My favorite bit, however, is the Pelosi expectation that "the language would prevent Mr. Bush, or any future president, from circumventing the law." Yeah, right -- just as it "prevented" President Bush from authorizing wholesale violations of FISA from 2001 until 2007. (Note to Speaker Pelosi: President Bush’s official view, vigorously defended by the Department of Justice, is that the "exclusive means" provision is unconstitutional, and can therefore be disregarded. FYI)

I’ve basically got to conclude that there’s a portion of the House that strongly believes that it’s a political or policy imperative to loosen FISA’s restrictions on the President. Otherwise, I can’t see why we’re having such trouble with this.

[Important addendum note from Yglesias:

Second, one shouldn’t say that "the Democrats" caved on this. Enough Democrats did cave for it to pass, but others didn’t cave. Distinctions matter.]

Refugees future at sea?

Via Yglesias a neat idea for building floating islands for refugees. Lots of nice pictures, but as Yglesias notes that its easy to assert the ecological stability of such a thing. At first glance though, I’d say they look way too good. If those sorts of resources were available to refugees we’d have less refugee problems.

There’s also been a libertarian effort at this sort of thing. It’s called the Seasteading movement and they rightly realize that if you don’t want to deal with nations, going to sea might be one of your best options. I’m no libertarian, but I think it makes an interesting experiment. Here’s a Wired write-up, apparently a founder of Paypal has given them $500k to have a go at it. Anyways, unlike the LILYPAD’s discussed above, Seasteading actually has some dollar figures.

The costs that we are talking about (say $50 - $200 / ft^2 final cost to residents) are not drastically out of line with first world house prices. It’s not as cheap as Costa Rica, but it isn’t as expensive as Silicon Valley either. If these estimates are right, we can build
brand-new sovereign territory for a cost similar to the housing of many upper-class Americans. To us, this seems incredibly encouraging!

To solve refugee problems, it’ll have to get a whole lot cheaper.

Is Industrial Policy back?

Industrial policy is basically an attempt to intervene in the economy through government investment to create growth. Classically looked down upon by neoliberals, it was a part of the New Deal and part of the economic policies of the East Asian miracle economies. That said, it also has a history of failure and waste, one of the biggest problem is kill mechanisms, once you’ve got a bad subsidy or the like going it has a vehement constituency looking to protect their rents.

Anyhow Dani Rodrik has looked at a WSJ article on Obama’s economic policy and thinks it may be back. Specifically Obama is putting $15 [billion[ a year towards energy tech, funding an "infrastructure reinvestment bank to promote high speed rail, doubling research spending, supporting high speed networks, etc.

Rodrik is cautiously optimistic about what he sees:

Although it is difficult to be sure, Obama’s comments in the interview suggest that he has thought these issues through more carefully than we are accustomed to with politicians and presidential aspirants. I sense the outlines of a coherent and economically sensible strategy here.

My personal take is that if there was any reliable connection between industrial policy and growth, someone would likely have found it by now. So it’s probably a gamble in terms of growth. However, most of these initiatives sound worthwhile in their own right. Also, absent these sort of things, we might have a repeat of the 90s where the economy grew but the median wage stagnated as inequality continued to rise.

Also, I’ve got the perhaps naive hope that this might take some of the pressure off the one part of the U.S. government that does have an official industrial policy, namely the Department of Defense. I’d rather have members of Congress trying to funnel clean energy investment dollars to their district rather than building some Cold War weapon system not relevant to current or likely U.S. conflicts. Some level of pork is inevitable and perhaps even advantageous, but it needs to be channeled in productive ways.

Ironman review

As I said in my brief, the film was superior. All of the actors seemed well chosen, the main characters were fairly interesting with executive assistant Pepper Potts standing out as a independent person willing to stand up to Tony Stark. As our hero, Stark himself, Robert Downey Jr. was simply perfect as an adult who didn’t come of age but did find more to life than just hedonism. I like having adult heroes as at this point I’ve come of age so I’m more interested in questions of what to do with ones life afterwards.

Stark makes an interesting contrast to Bruce Wayne (aka Batman), Wayne pretends to be the person Stark is, but Wayne’s skills are much more rounded and Stark is a better engineer. The movie did play up both Stark’s flaws and strengths quite well and I particularly enjoyed a moment in the final fight where Stark used a trick he only knew about because he irresponsibly pushes the limits of everything he does.

Part of the fun of the movie was also the conspicuous consumption. As Ann Horraday said, Iron Man has just as much of it as the Sex and the City movie does, it just happens to take a different form. I actually don’t care that much about the fancy cars but I loved the house and the lab. The movie also focused a lot on Stark’s development and invention process, which was great. Also the robots were really cute, plausibly engineered if overly intelligent, and quite funny.

Quick game designing note

From a Transformers game preview by Jason Cipriano article over at MTVs multiplayer blog:

Much like “Advance Wars” the combat is turn-based, but there is a slight twist. At the end of each turn the player has the option to transform. This adds another level of defensive strategy to the game; encouraging the player to take into consideration whether they are likely to be attacked or not. I was told the designers did this to really encourage as much transforming as possible.

I just thought this was noteworthy because often designers don’t seem to get this. If using an ability either takes an entire turn, requires in depth menu access, or has a time penalty in a real time game, players are going to be less likely to use it.

I’ve been thinking about this since Rondo of Swords makes this mistake with its skill system. If for some reason, your character is stuck in place for a turn it can be useful, but otherwise it really seems like a distraction. This isn’t crippling for the game by any means, it’s just a waste of designer effort.

Anyways, it’s a cell phone game for Nokia, so I almost certainly won’t be getting it, but I always like to see good design decisions.

Saw Iron Man tonight

Lived up to the trailer.  Man that was a fun movie for tech geeks an engineers.  As a military-industrial complex critique  was dated/misfocused but that's what I'd heard going in.

Anyways, write up tomorrow.

Also, I was rather amused when I took the time to check what a certain organization would be abbreviated as.

Quick addendum: Whoever did casting should win an award.  All around brilliant.

Tim Russert has died

I think Joel Achenbach's tribute sums it up best.

An excerpt:

He was also a fun guy to run into at a party or out on the campaign trail -- friendly, generous, down-to-Earth. He was never the type to look over your shoulder to see if someone more important was coming along...

And we'll all have, forever, the memory of Russert and his little white board on election night 2000 as he documented the unfolding narrative of a race too close to call.

It's true.  I will be surprised if I ever forget that night or that whiteboard. It let us make some sense of the insanity. My sympathies to his friends and family.

Addendum: Matt Yglesias does a respectful rundown of Russert's journalistic legacy, both good and bad.

Second hand battleships

One of the reasons some U.S. aid may have been turned away by the Burmese government is that some of the assistance would come from warships. The U.S. Navy has a lot of capacity to do good, but even smaller detachment of ships still could pack a serious punch. We do have strictly hospital ships, such as the USNS Mercy shown below, but they’re only part of our response capability. One possible solution, suggested my friend and colleague Bryan Shea, might be to transfer some older ships to the State Department rather than selling or simply decommissioning them.’

The idea would face complications. To be effective the ship(s) would probably need to be forward deployed, perhaps combining aid with public diplomacy when there isn’t a disaster to respond to. Piracy can be a real issue in southeast Asia and aid teams often are targeted by spoilers or those simply seeking to rob them. An old nuclear carrier would have the advantage of fast movement but would raise a whole new class of concerns. But ultimately for our civilian agencies to be effective they must be in the field, and for large parts of the world, the field can be the oceans.

Image taken by Telstar Logistics and used under a Creative Commons license.

What to do about Burma?

It’s about month since Cyclone Nargis hit. The Burmese government has consistently failed their people with 2.4 million still homeless. More aid was allowed in after the government conducted its unfair and unfree constitutional referendum in the week following the quake. Near as I understand it, some U.S. aid is allowed in, but the aid workers who can actually operate in the country largely have to be from Asian countries. Given the severe limits on aid, from most of the world, I think it’s safe to say that initial harsh U.S. comments might not have made the difference in terms of access and were certainly well deserved. Sullivan has a link with pictures.

There are some, such as George Packer, that consider intervention. I don’t think anyone is arguing for a full on invasion, but instead sending in naval ships that have a proven record when it comes to disaster relief. Sadly, it would probably take ships or landing aircraft, as the PCR project points out airdrops can’t really be effective in this sort of situation.

I’d oppose a naval intervention, the Burmese government is made up of paranoiacs with no interest above maintaining power, they would escalate and a limited intervention would not stay limited. At the same time they’d likely cut off humanitarian access to those countries they’ve allowed in. Moreover, gross negligence in disaster response, while evil, doesn’t rise to the level of genocide. At the same time, setting aside China’s active opposition, we don’t have the support of democratic regional powers such as India or Indonesia.

However, as Matt Yglesias notes there are many opportunities, such as non-coercive relief opportunities in Sudan, where aid could help deal with disasters. We’d do well to gain experience by taking these opportunities that would give valuable experience. We actually handled the tsunami pretty well, but often have difficulty dealing with the other parts of a failed state even when we do have U.N. support. Learning to get better at that and developing a track record of success would much improve our performance and ability to gain support when coercion might be appropriate.

Image taken by groundreporter and used under a creative commons license.

Summer 2008 Movie Quotes

Brilliant quotes from Francesco Marciuliano. Read the whole thing, but here’s a few samples.

"She broke my heart. First with her cruelty and then with her broadsword."

"And thanks to Wal-Mart’s low prices and great selection we’ll all be armed in time for the invasion!"

"Do you want to see the youth center close down forever? Or do you want to join us and help raise the necessary funds by producing the best low-budget, highly lucrative porn films for the direct-to-video market ever?!"

The last one on the page is also one of my favorites, but I won’t repost it in an attempt to make you actually go to the page.

The future of the Air Force

Not that long ago, Secretary of Defense Gates fired the military and civilian heads of the Air Force. This decision has been pretty popular on the blogs I read and among the people I talk to. Kevin Drum has a quick rundown of the reasons they were asked to resign.

Publicly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says that his recent firings of the Air Force’s top civilian and military leaders was due to a couple of incidents of mishandling of nuclear components. But Noah Shachtman says Gates’s feud with the Air Force has roots that go back to his decision to prevent them from taking over almost all of the military’s big unmanned aircraft:

Things only got more tense when Gates said that the future of conflict is in small, "asymmetric" wars - wars in which the Air Force takes a back seat to ground forces. Then Gates noted that the Air Force’s most treasured piece of gear, the F-22 stealth fighter, basically has no role in the war on terror. And when a top Air Force general said the service was planning on buying twice as many of the jets - despite orders from Gates and the rest of the civilian leadership - he was rebuked for "borderline insubordination."

The next Air Force general, for the first time in 25 years, is not going to be a fighter pilot. Ben Friedman praises this idea hoping it will reduce the "threat inflation" of China and end the push for more F-22s. Yglesias also thinks this is a good idea, but notes that it doesn’t get to the core problem: we don’t need a separate Air Force.

My thoughts after the cut.

DnD 4th edition out

Yesterday I went out and participated in DnD game day and had a fairly good time, although embarrassingly my character dropped unconscious in the final fight before breaking out his best abilities. Anyhow I also picked up the players handbook for the newest edition.

I’m rather pleased with this new version of the game. Basically the current owners, Wizards of the Coast, did a good job of systematically analyzing gameplay and finding ways both to simplify the rules and to spread the fun around. Part of it is that I think that much of their market is now adult gamers like me that want to play but don’t want to be forced to spend lots of out of game time prepping. That said, the options for customization and obsession are still there, which is important.

Anyways, this sort of thing goes to show the power of market share when that market is reasonably visible to corporations. If a group is a potential source of income (or support in politics) then they’ll find some products tailored to them. In a diverse economy or political sphere this doesn’t always going to have to be a zero-sum game. Reaching certain thresholds gets you some level of power and respect, even if it doesn’t mean you’ll win in terms of binary questions where you disagree with the majority.

BSG thoughts

I am feeling way too lazy to put up cuts (I really need to do a macro to handle the LJ-cut part automatically), so I’ll keep this basically spoiler free.

The most recent Battlestar Gallactica episode was most pleasing, and it came on the heels of another episode that had my favorite guest star. This is quite good, as I was worried by when two episodes ago one of my favorite characters did something both massively stupid and in my view quite out of character. That sort of thing is quite common when you’re dealing with prophecies, which is why I tend to worry about fate driven plotlines. Anyways, based on these last two eps I’ll forgive you BSG.

Anyhow, in extremely vague spoilers, my idea of the Cylon master plan was that they were trying to essentially set up a narrative by which human and Cylon would ultimately live together. I’m going to modify that view to say that it also appears that that this exodus is also meant to be a time of hard testing to judge the worthiness of humanity and perhaps Cylons as well.

Also, I approve that Baltar is now not just trying to sleep with most any available female but that he also attempts to subvert anyone given the opportunity.

Event Write Up: Nationbuilding after Iraq

Amb. James Dobbins who is presently working for Rand gave a pretty good presentation at CSIS on the state of nation building (the Project on Middle East Democracy also has notes). I went to this one because Rand has done some good work on the topic, and is the source of the estimate that we’d need 400k U.S. troops to really pull off Iraq right.

Iraq was 7th time the U.S. tried nation building in little more than a decade with the prior cases being Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bonsia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. Six of those seven where Muslim nations. Thus our screw ups were not a matter of inexperience but not taking it seriously as core mission. More specifically, we fail to transfer skills from administration to administration and he offered multiple proposals on how to fix that.

Nation building became much bigger after the Cold war where the goal was typically suppressing conflict rather than resolving it. The goal was to prevent high level clashes. Subsequently many more that go longer and thus add up.

Entity	Cold War frequency	Post-Cold War frequency	On-going	Now Peaceful	Now Democratic
U.S.	1 every 10 years	1 every 2 years	5 (in 2004)	4 / 8	4 / 8
U.N.	1 every 4 years	1 every six months	20	6 / 8	7 / 8

So U.N. scored higher than U.S., why? Part of it is case selection and the difficulty of the cases the U.S. chose. At the same time, the UN takes the mission more seriously, has doctrine, a cadre of experts, and while smaller than the U.S. still 100k deployed soldiers. It can work, look at stats, cold war fueled dozens of proxy wars, killed millions of people every year, number of conflicts now down by 50% 1993 to 2003; casualties dropped even more. It’s still lower now, although current conflicts have slowed the decline.

I’ll discuss some of the policy implications in a future post.

Why do we like Hamlet?

Noah Millman of the American Scene has a spectacular review of Hamlet as staged at the Stratford Festival. I would love to catch that staging, although I doubt I will. Nonetheless, this is the best piece of criticism I’ve read in a while and I read a fair amount of good criticism.

A sample:

Why do we take to Hamlet [the character]?

The false but easy way to make the necessary connection with the audience is simply to make Hamlet more appealing – play him as less brutal to Ophelia than the text directs; cut lines that play up his brutality; and so forth. The more true but also too easy way to make the connection is to play up Hamlet’s weakness, his psychic vulnerability – make us believe that, on some level, he really is mad. Carlson takes the harder, truest route, and aims to win us over by sheer display of intelligence. His Hamlet is peevish and dispeptic, but he runs rings around everyone else in the play. He does not want to be alone, but he is alone, perforce, and that loneliness has made him bitter. And you can see him, over and over again, trying to find someone who will not disappoint him, and finds only Horatio...

Read the whole thing.

The blog itself, the American Scene, is one of the conservative/libertarian blogs I read for good writing and insight into that part of the opposition that argues in good faith. This sort of piece is my reward.

Top 10 subways

Wired has a 10 photo spread on the world’s most impressive subways. Sadly, though not unreasonably, Washington doesn’t make the cut. I’ve ridden six of the ten, I will not be satisfied until I’ve ridden all of them. The picture below is of Moscow’s, I knew that it was impressively engineered and timely but had no idea it had any stations this opulent.

Via Yglesias

Photo by Vanity Press used under a Creative Commons license

Freight vs. Passenger

Europe is well known for having excellent passenger train service while America’s trains typically run on track where freight has priority. Almost any regular Amtrak customer has had experiences where they have to weight for a freight train, which isn’t surprising as the freight companies own most of the tracks outside of the Northeast corridor. Interestingly, according to a recent Paul Krugman post, Europe may have the opposite problem.

I was a bit surprised early this week reading about the ferocity of fuel protests in Europe led by fisherman, truckers, and farmers. The farmers I expected, the fisherman were a bit of a surprise, but the relative strength of the truckers may have to do with the above graph. Regardless, goes to show that in our efforts to improve passenger rail in America we probably put some emphasis on new track rather than undercutting our relative strong (and quite energy efficient) freight rail system.

Image from Paul Krugman’s blog

Review: Maps at the Walters Gallery in Baltimore

This superior exhibit is a must see for map lovers. It covers most things one could want, history, modes of presentation, imaginary and heavenly realms, and honestly a bunch of maps that are beautiful in their own right. The map above is actually of the ARPANET back when a map of this scale was still possible.

The exhibit closes June 8th, so this is your last chance. The Walters is a few blocks from the Centre Street Light Rail station or can be reached on a pleasant walk up Charles Street from Baltimore’s downtown. (Baltimore does have some dodgy areas, but Charles streets has been restored as an arts district.) It’ll probably be crowded, based on this Saturday, so you’ll likely want to be there at 3 or earlier and maybe be prepared for a fifteen minute to half hour wait. Well worth it though.

I can think of three quick reasons why I love maps. First they have a lot of information and allow for exploring. Second they’re often very pretty in their own right, this can be particularly true for maps from around the middle of the last millennia where artistic techniques had advanced and expectations seemed quite high. Finally they can be strategic puzzles. Maps are often made up for travel, trade, and war and with careful study you can figure out how to do better at any of the three. There’s a reason that I picked the two games I’m playing now, Rondo of Swords and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. I love map-based games and units aside, each level can be a map puzzle in its own right.

Picture from http://www.thewalters.org/maps/exhibitions_images.html