taking a breather: rivers, tides, music, stars

• from Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy, movie by Thomas Riedelsheimer, 2001 (6:35)
  
• Billie Holliday, Lester Young, "Fine And Mellow," 1957 (9:04)
  
• The Hubble Deep Field Image, movie by astronomers at SUNY, 1995 (4:30)
  

  ... assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) for ten consecutive days between December 18 and 28, 1995. [...]
  
  Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.

• Miles Davis, "So What," 1958 (8:22)
  
• from Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy/Thomas Riedelsheimer, 2001 (4:01)
  

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NOTES: Holliday video clip via Bernard Chazelle ("A Tiny Revolution") where you can read more about it. The first "Rivers and Tides" link is to the IMdB movie database, the second is to the Powell's Books entry. "Hubble Deep Field Image" link is to the hubblesite.org news release web page. Emphasis added; by my calculation, that means there are well over 25 million more distinct views like this one. A subsequent exposure, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image, is discussed here.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:30:00 PM -- |  

 
Vote Sinbad '08
In an interview with CNN earlier this week Senator Clinton, responding to a question about her foreign policy experience, listed efforts in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Bosnia, among others. But Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, of the Chicago Tribune report ("Clinton's experience claim under scrutiny"):

But her involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process was primarily to encourage activism among women's groups there, a contribution that the lead U.S. negotiator described as "helpful" but that an Irish historian who has written extensively about the conflict dismissed as "ancillary" to the peace process.

The Macedonian government opened its border to refugees the day before Clinton arrived to meet with government leaders. And her mission to Bosnia was a one-day visit in which she was accompanied by performers Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, as well as her daughter, Chelsea, according to the commanding general who hosted her.

Forwarded by my Department of Don't Get Mad, Get Even.


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UPDATE, 3/11: Sinbad weighs in. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:14:00 AM -- |  

 
Dear Hillary
There are so many ways I really, really hate this:

Look, I have said that Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, I will bring a lifetime of experience, and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002. I think that is a significant difference. I think that since we now know Senator McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it's imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. And I believe that I have done that, certainly Senator McCain has done that, and you'll have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy."

Nicely done! You've just ranked the prospective Democratic presidential nominee below the GOP nominee. And when you get done high-fiving about this with Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson, you'll notice you even ranked yourself below McCain. Are you having some V.P. negotiations with McCain we need to know about?

Look, Bill Clinton was still picking the Arkansas hayseeds out of his hair when we elected him over a former CIA director, UN ambassador, Vice President, and incumbent President. And we were right to. And we'll be right to when we pick Obama over McCain in November -- after all, McCain made the same stupid call on Iraq that you did.

While I supported him in the Maryland primary, I've been critical of the Obama campaign as recently as Tuesday. But every time I take a step back and think about the big picture, I realize I'm making big things out of comparatively small ones -- small, that is, compared to going to war in Iraq on false premises, playing on people’s fears with 3AM phone calls ...and now this. Obama's assorted missteps and off-key notes on issues like NAFTA or health care simply don't measure up to that -- and McCain can't plausibly use them the way he can use your stupid statement.

I could go on -- making this about being "commander in chief", rather than plain old "president"; conceding to McCain some kind of major foreign policy or military wisdom; playing into the "Democrats not tough enough" notion.

But you probably don't care about all that. So maybe you'll care about this: if it wasn't already dead, this should also end the notion of a Obama/Clinton or Clinton/Obama ticket – “so, Senator Clinton, you’re saying Obama’s commander in chief material now?” or “so, Senator Clinton, you’re saying Obama’s good enough to be a heartbeat away now?” Is burning your bridges with allies going to be your 3AM choice in the future, too? It seems to me that's what you've done.

Obama would be smart -- and right -- to say that he takes you at your word, so he's herewith formally ruling out a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton ticket; no two-for-one deal -- time to choose. You might be surprised how many of your more wobbly supporters will be disheartened by that. A lot more than Obama's, would be my guess.


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UPDATE, 3/12: House Speaker Pelosi wades in to the fight (TPM/Veracifier video) when asked about a "dream ticket." The pursed-lipped Pelosi: "I think [Clinton] has fairly ruled that out by proclaiming McCain would make a better commander in chief than Obama. I think that ticket -- either way -- is impossible." She then doubled back to the reporter to say "[I didn't want to] leave you with any ambiguity."

DEPARTMENT OF CONGRESSIONAL KREMLINOLOGY: Interestingly, Pelosi said "the Clinton administration" where I bracketed "[Clinton]" in the quote. Though there have been recent indications of a switch in tactics (FISA, contempt citations), the House Democratic 110th congressional leadership has been a limp opponent to Bush, essentially gambling everything on winning the White House in November. It looks to me like the label for that gamble has been burned into Pelosi's mind. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:37:00 AM -- |  

 
Book tag: Shock Doctrine, Arsenals of Folly
Having answered Jim Henley's call, Nell Lancaster has graciously tagged me, Gary Farber, and JanInSanFran with the task of supplying text -- to wit, the 6th, 7th, and 8th sentences on page 123 -- from the book closest to where each of us is sitting. I hear and obey -- and tag eRobin, Avedon Carol, Tom, and Paul in turn.


At the time I read the tag, that book was "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," by Naomi Klein. For the designated sentences, the context is the Ford Foundation's prior support for the "Chicago Boys" and "Berkeley Mafia" economics teams that helped bring about major impoverishment and repression of the lower and middle classes in Chile and Indonesia:

After the left in [Chile and Indonesia] had been obliterated by regimes that Ford had helped shape, it was none other that Ford that funded a new generation of crusading lawyers dedicated to freeing the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners being held by those same regimes.

Given its own highly compromised history, it is hardly surprising that when Ford dived into human rights, it defined the field as narrowly as possible. The foundation strongly favored groups that framed their work as legalistic struggles for the "rule of law," "transparency," and "good governance."

I once threatened to try to write about this excellent book, but by now I'd need to reread it to do it justice. The book enraged many libertarian writers for its well-documented portrayal of Milton Friedman as the intellectual godfather of Pinochet/Argentine style economic warfare -- and hence of the repression that went hand in hand with that warfare. Yet Klein's critique of the Iraq disaster bonanza ought to have rung a bell with many of those same writers, if they got that far.

I actually finished that book a while ago; in case this is supposed to be about the book I'm reading, that one is "Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race," by Richard Rhodes. The text is from a 1984 address by Jerome Wiesner, arguing that it would take just 50 nuclear weapons to put American or Russian society "out of business," and 300 to destroy it.

It would take a bigger bomb for Los Angeles or New York. If you are a weapons expert you know you should "pepper 'em down"; you would get a better effect. In any event, it does not take many.

As Joseph Cirincione points out in his review of the book**, the United States and the Soviet Union had a combined 65,000 warheads at the height of the Cold War -- and still have 25,000 today.

I actually happened to talk with Cirincione about the book, and mentioned that one thing I thought about it was "what about us?" -- by which I meant the Nuclear Freeze movement that I spent a great deal of time in during the 1980s. Rhodes's book spends a great deal of time focused on Reagan and Gorbachev -- their head-to-head negotiations in Geneva and Reykjavik, even a chapter length bio of the Russian leader. But Rhodes barely acknowledges or discusses the mass movement that opposed a U.S. nuclear weapons buildup, or even the congressional donnybrooks over MX missile deployment that were defining moments of the Reagan years. I suppose that would have complicated the scope of the book, but whether it's intended or not, the omission seems to signal that we didn't matter.

If so, I would beg to differ, even if I can't prove a causal connection between the Freeze and eventual successes like the INF and CFE treaties. There was a time when nearly every Congressman or -woman was deeply aware of nuclear weapons and of their constituents' beliefs that there were too many of them and we didn't need any more of them. Like the narrator in "Masters of War," we spoke out of turn, and we won those victories, too -- even if we're still in the shadow of thousands of remaining nuclear weapons.


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* Hers was quite unusual and interesting, you should have a look.
** Along with three others, which are more about Pakistani/A.Q. Khan proliferation.

EDIT, 3/5: Final sentence of Klein discussion split into two sentences, 'if they got that far' added to 2d. Also, "impoverishment" and "economic warfare" moved to the first spots in prior sentences, ahead of "repression"; I'd summarize much of Klein's point as being that the order matters, just as the motive matters in any crime.
EDITS, 3/6: 25,000, not 26,000; the other 1,000 are divided among the other nuclear powers. Also, on re-reviewing the index, I found 3 references to the nuclear freeze movement; the effect in the text is that Rhodes "barely acknowledges" rather than "doesn't acknowledge" it.

TAG WATCH: Tom has probably nailed down the Most Eclectic Response Award: "La vie du pape Saint Gregoire, ou la legende du bon pecheur." Paul checks in with a little light bedtime reading: Walter Isaacson's "Einstein: His Life and Universe." posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 AM -- |  

 
(UPDATED) Austan Goolsbee, International Man of Mystery
Last weekend news broke that the Obama campaign had quietly told Canadian officials that Barack's anti-NAFTA talk might just be swill for the rubes. The revelation can not have helped Obama's chances in Ohio today, where NAFTA-skepticism runs deep. After initial denials by the Obama campaign, it developed that University of Chicago tax policy guru and Barack Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee had in fact visited a Canadian consulate, and had in fact spoken to them about NAFTA. Michael Luo reports in today's New York Times that a memorandum by Canadian consular officer Joseph DeMora says that

...Professor Goolsbee assured them that Mr. Obama’s protectionist stand on the trail was “more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.”

It also said the professor had assured the Canadians that Mr. Obama’s language “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

For his part, Goolsbee says that was DeMora's gloss, not Goolsbee's exact words.

I've purposely tried to describe the impression the news gave, rather than the absolutely verified, 100% accurate truth behind it, because Obama's campaign has (in my opinion) basically lived by two things: making a good -- no, great -- impression of standing for change and a new kind of politics, and by running a tactically brilliant campaign. Goolsbee's visit has undermined both advantages. If Obama fails to land a knockout blow tonight, it's possible Goolsbee will have done even more than Hillary's deeply regrettable (and somewhat ridiculous) "3AM phone call" to cause that result.

The truth appears to be that Goolsbee was acting on his own initiative and at the invitation of the Canadians, rather than as an emissary with a "don't worry" message from the Obama campaign. However, the truth also appears to be that (1) Professor Goolsbee was unable to resist the invitation, and (2) he was then unable to stick to "nice weather we're having" once he got there. The point is there was absolutely no upside for Obama in Austan's visit to a Canadian consulate. Obama did not need to nail down Canadian approval of his finely nuanced views -- he needed to nail down the approval of Ohio voters.

While learning what Goolsbee told a Canadian consulate is interesting, it's more important what Goolsbee thinks -- and how much that matters. My admitted bias is to think anyone who gets favorable mention by George Will, pens a glowing Milton Friedman eulogy, and gushes about having his picture taken with David Brooks can't be all good. (But then, I'm the kind of hateful ideologue who wanted John Roberts filibustered, too, and look how well he's turned out.)

In his widely noted profile of the Obama policy team, The Audacity of Data, Noam Scheiber describes Goolsbee as "an almost unprecedented figure in Democratic politics: an academic economist with a top campaign position and the candidate's ear." Scheiber depicts the Obama domestic team as gifted engineers compared to the theoretical physicists of the Clinton 1990s:

Reich and Galston are the kinds of people who'd sketch out the idea for time travel in a moment of inspiration. Goolsbee et al. could rig up the DeLorean that would actually get you back to 1955.

But Ezra Klein recasts the group portrait persuasively, saying Obama's domestic team is fairly conventional and cautious, with ideas like opt-in 401Ks and automatic tax returns that have been proposed before:

...Obama's team may be hardheaded empiricists, but they are also decidedly conventional. Whatever else you want to say about the health plan David Cutler wrote for Obama, it's not the perfect world proposal you'd come up with from a long, hard look at the data. It's not even what you'd come up with from David Cutler's look at the data. It's just a conventional, mainstream, Democratic health care plan that looks a bit cautious in light of Edwards and Clinton's proposals, and would've looked more solidly ambitious if it had come out in 2004. But it doesn't bespeak any unique approach on the part of Obama's team. Rather, it's verging on generic.

And little is more generic and mainstream among academics and well-connected economists than nodding wisely about the myriad benefits of NAFTA-style free trade -- or, in what appears to be Goolsbee's distinctive twist, low-balling its negative effects. I think that the upshot is that Obama's domestic policy team is both the backwater and the Achilles heel of the Obama campaign, and possibly of his presidency -- particularly if you harbor progressive/liberal hopes for the next administration, but even if you just want to avoid major mishaps.

Let's say that Obama sincerely believes that in a perfect world he would "use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced." The question is, is this something he's willing to go to the mat for, is it something he and his staff take seriously?

In a way, the clearest indication of Goolsbee's actual importance -- and hence of the portfolio of issues he advises Obama about -- is that Obama officials "campaign officials did not know about the meeting when it was held." ("Say, where's our top economic advisor in the middle of a primary that's about economic issues? No one knows? Whatever.") Meanwhile, said advisor either didn't realize or didn't care that renegotiating anything about NAFTA would be a good deal more difficult if he made any noises whatsoever to the effect that Mr. DeMora wrote down.

That's actually my favorable interpretation of l'affaire Goolsbee. The less auspicious one is that, as often the case with campaigns, the problem actually does go to the top. On the substantive domestic policy differences I've looked at, I score Clinton ahead slightly on points -- and add a penalty for Obama often running aggressively to her right on those slight differences. This may not be the fault of his allegedly pragmatic economic advisors -- it may be that his political staff believes there's a need or an advantage to that. Either way, I'm resigned to being a critic of the domestic policies of an Obama administration, rather than looking forward to them.

Goolsbee may not have been a messenger -- but he still may have accurately conveyed an "on the other hand" sense he got directly from Obama, whether that was Obama's own last word on the subject or not. Obama has the gift -- and/or curse -- Bill Clinton had of being able to be all things to all people, perhaps including Goolsbee. (Witness, for example, the bemused "not so bad" reactions to his statements on Israel by both uberhawk Marty Peretz on the one hand, and peacenik Matthew Yglesias on the other; sooner or later, one of them will be disillusioned.)

As Mick Arran and David Sirota have pointed out, Obama's "fair trade" credentials aren't all that great. He voted for a Peru agreement with labor standards built on the sand of the 1998 ILO Labor Declaration rather than on the rock of its legally justiciable conventions, and for a Panama agreement that will arguably turn that country into more of a corporate tax shelter than a free and fair trade partner. Obama reportedly didn't meet with labor groups opposed to the pacts. All but predicting this week's headlines, Sirota wrote last November:

And so this is what we get - a kabuki dance from candidates who pray that voters are too dumb to figure it all out. Here we have two candidates going before workers telling them they will really represent them by opposing sell-out trade deals, and then telling the elite political Establishment that actually, they will continue voting for those very same trade deals when they hit the floor of the Senate.

Meanwhile, Obama's predilection for "behavioral economics" types and academics may be data-driven and farsighted -- or they may both be evading tough decisions in favor of cautious policies and small proposals that don't do the good that's needed.

Obama did well with Iraq, and at $3,000,000,000,000 (that's trillion) and counting, that's not "just" a foreign policy and moral issue, but an economic one too. But Obama's reputation with voters as a "change agent" is a perishable commodity; a charge of hypocrisy that sticks could cripple a campaign fueled by the idealism of millions. He really can't afford to have advisors running around giving their own "back to the future" interpretations of his thinking to anyone canny enough to invite them.

In the short run, the mystery is why he hasn't canned the one who did. In the long run, it's which Obama plans to show up in the Oval Office: the fiery NAFTA skeptic, or the follow-the-leader Panama and Peru "yea" vote.


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UPDATE, 3/5: See also this discussion at fact-esque. Today eRobin writes, "I hope Obama went to bed last night realizing that trade deals make a real difference in real people's lives now that one has made a difference in his. Welcome to Pennsylvania."

UPDATE, 3/13: Via jbc, Mark Kleiman feels the story has been debunked by this report -- "Anatomy of a Leak: What We Know about NAFTA-Gate" by the CBC's Neil MacDonald. One of the key passages is here:

DeMora, it turned out, did not write his summary until five days after the discussion had taken place. And he had no direct quotes to support his characterization of Goolsbee's remarks.

Thus, some of the most explosive statements attributed to Goolsbee -- in particular, the "political positioning" one -- have been disavowed by the Canadian Foreign Ministry. MacDonald is a professional reporter and I'm not, so I assume he has an explanation for the "(unintelligible)" comment inserted into the memorandum by DeMora just after he reported that remark. That seemed to me like something you'd do for a hard-to-hear part of a recording of the meeting, but it could also be how DeMora wrote up a scribbled "?" from his notes.

To me, the question remains why Goolsbee made the visit at all, and whether the official Canadian disavowal of the memo is mainly due to professional mortification at its being leaked in the first place. But I should also acknowledge that these days Canada is unlikely to be undercutting the US in labor laws, at any rate. On the other hand, NAFTA also has sovereignty-undermining effects that have been exploited in the US by Canadian companies (and in Canada by US companies), though the examples in the US are more about circumventing environmental regualtions than labor ones.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:23:00 PM -- |  

 
Worth reading

The true cost of war (Aida Edemariam, The Guardian, 2/28/08) — After 3 years of research, Nobel prize economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it at three *trillion* dollars, so far, to the U.S. alone.

The Myth of the Surge (Nir Rosen, Rolling Stone, 3/08) —

Hoping to turn enemies into allies, U.S. forces are arming Iraqis who fought with the insurgents. But it’s already starting to backfire. A report from the front lines of the new Iraq. […]As the Awakening gains power, Al Qaeda lies dormant throughout Baghdad, the Mahdi Army and other Shiite forces prepare for the next battle, and political assassinations and suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence. The violence, Arkan says, is getting worse again.

Chicken Doves (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 2/21/08) — [C]ongressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.

Security Gains from “Surge” Backsliding (Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent, 1/31/08) —

It used to be that surge enthusiasts would at least hint at the unachieved strategic objective of the surge. As Bush himself put it, the surge was meant to provide the Iraqi government “the breathing space it needs to make progress” on sectarian reconciliation. But reconciliation hasn’t happened, and, in important respects, sectarianism has deepened over the past year. So surgeniks are now simply declaring victory by the sheer fact of reduced violence itself, unmoored to any strategic goal.

The Greatest Threat to Us All (Joseph Cirincione, New York Review of Books, 3/6/08) — Cirincione reviews Richard Rhodes’s excellent third book chronicling the nuclear arms race, “Arsenals of Folly.” Not only did the Iraq WMD myth similar to prior ones about the relative strength of the USSR’s arsenal — some of the same people were involved in selling it. Put differently, it’s prudent to assume most of what Richard Perle says is either stupid or a lie.

The Dean Legacy (Ari Berman, The Nation, 2/28/08) — Top Dean supporters “believe the Clinton-Obama contest has become a referendum on the kind of grassroots party building and citizen empowerment Dean pioneered as a presidential candidate and continued as DNC chair.”

posted by Thomas Nephew at 8:32:00 PM -- |