Obsidian Wings

Regrets ....

by von

APOLOGIES.  I will all-but-disappear for the next several months:  a four-week trial starting in mid-September and possible business trips to London, Mexico, Hong Kong, and both coasts will take their inevitable toll. (And, trust me:  the doing of the foregoing is substantially less exciting that the sounding of the foregoing.) 

See you in November.  Play nice.

The Information War

by Charles

As noted in my previous post, I've been critical of Donald Rumsfeld's performance as Defense Secretary. But my opposition does not extend to cheap shots. An example is the hatchet job by Robert Burns of Associated Press, making stuff up about Rumsfeld's Tuesday speech at the American Legion National Convention. Thankfully, McQ at QandO exposes the rank bias that Burns is guilty of, comparing Burns' interpretation of Rumsfeld's speech with Rumsfeld's actual words.  [Update:  In typical fashion, AP changed its content without announcing any changes.  See the QandO update.]

The worst part of Burns' misleading reportage was that it was unquestioningly spread to other news sources such as CNN, ABC, Fox and who knows how many other outlets. Mainstream media was already burned with fauxtography in the Israel-Hezbollah War, yet here we are again, witnessing a mainstream media reporter peddling faux news. Predictably, the Democratic Party took the Burns' hit piece and ran with it, never mind the actual text of the speech. [Update: Allahpundit has found more interpretation problems concerning Rumsfeld's speech.]

It's hard enough fighting an information war against al Qaeda and its sympathizers. The challenge is all the greater when a sometimes hostile media twists and distorts the words of the very people who are directly engaged in fighting this War Against Militant Islamism.  Concerning the Information War, Rumsfeld is dead right:

More Sweden-Blogging

by hilzoy

Via TPM, I note that Sweden has been the subject of a very minor blog argument, in which Tim Worstall notes that Swedish poor people make about as much money as American poor people, and concludes that:

"All those punitive tax rates, all that redistribution, that blessed egalitarianism, the flatter distribution of income, leads to a change in the living standards of the poor of precisely ... nothing."

He is then corrected by Max Sawicky and Matt Yglesias, who point out that the poor in Sweden may not have higher income than the poor in the US, but they do have such trifles as free health care, child care, university education, pensions, and all sorts of other little things that make the lives of the poor (along with everyone else) a lot better. Whether they improve it enough to make it worth the higher taxes is a legitimate debate; that they 'change the living standards of the poor', however, is not.

While I was reading these posts, I was also struck by this bit from Worstall's article, about the Economic Policy Institute (source of the income statistics):

"They are, as you may know, the people who urge that the USA become more like the European countries, most especially the Scandinavian ones. Less income inequality, more leisure time, stronger unions and so on. All good stuff from a particular type of liberal and progressive mindset -- i.e. that society must be managed to produce the outcome that technocrats believe society really desires, rather than an outcome the actual members of society prove they desire by building it."

Personally, I would have thought that the EPI, which publishes studies designed to persuade people, rather than trying to launch a technocratic takeover of the USA, is committed to thinking that society should be set up in accordance with the desires of its members. Certainly their alleged model society, Sweden, is not "managed to produce the outcome that technocrats believe society really desires, rather than an outcome the actual members of society prove they desire by building it." Actual Swedes -- solid majorities of them -- voted to bring the people who enacted its policies to power. They built their society in the only way such a society could be built: by voting for its policies, repeatedly. And I haven't seen any evidence at all that they secretly desire something else.

In fact, one of the striking things about Sweden, to any American, is how very far to what we think of as the left its political discourse is. The basics of the social welfare state are absolutely taken for granted. Proposing the abolition of state funding for health care or education would be political suicide. (One of my Swedish relatives who is very informed on such matters informs me that proposing tax cuts would be political suicide, since everyone assumes that that would require serious cuts in social programs, rather than a large increase in the national debt. They don't seem to have Republican-style mythical financing here.)

The debate between the left and right seems to be much less about what programs the government should pay for than about the best ways of implementing those programs. People think about questions like: should the government run all hospitals, or should private hospitals compete with public ones while receiving full public reimbursement for medical care? This is a debate that takes place, in the US, on the left: most liberals support some sort of national health insurance, but we divide about which particular version is best.

I don't really know enough to say, but I suspect that I might be on the right in Sweden. The right seems to support a lot of policies that involve allowing competition between public and private players as part of social programs. I believe that the right introduced Sweden's voucher program, for instance. But Swedish vouchers are not much like the vouchers proposed in the US: schools that receive vouchers cannot ask for, or receive, any tuition above and beyond the voucher payment itself, so vouchers cannot be used for private schools that charge high tuition. They can accept people only on a first-come, first-served basis. They bargain with teachers' unions, and are subject to extensive quality control measures. And they make up only a tiny fraction of Swedish schools. Nonetheless, they have improved performance in both the public and private schools, and seem like a very good thing.

The point is just that these are the kinds of political debates that we liberals fantasize about. Assume that not having fully subsidized health care for all is just not on the table; debate the best method of delivering it. Assume that child care is available for everyone; debate what kind of child care it would be. Nothing that even remotely resembles American conservatism seem to exist here. Which is why Worstall's crack bothered me: as best I can tell, while most people would tinker with the odd detail, in its broad outlines Swedes seem to have exactly the society they want. They certainly seem very perplexed as to why anyone would want ours instead.

***

I don't have time to post on it separately, but I did want to draw attention to this post by Glenn Greenwald:

"This article from the San Francisco Chronicle details the truly amazing story of two U.S. citizens -- a 45-year old resident of the San Francisco area and his 18-year old son -- who, after travelling to Pakistan, have been barred by the Bush administration from re-entering the country. They have not been charged with any crime, and no court has ordered or even authorized this denial of entry. The administration is just unilaterally prohibiting these two Americans from re-entering their country.

A relative of the two men (the older man's nephew) was convicted in April by a California federal jury on charges of supporting terrorism as a result of his attending a Pakistani training camp (and just incidentally, the conviction was obtained under some controversial circumstances). And the Federal Government is now demanding that his two relatives submit to FBI interrogation in Pakistan as a condition for being allowed to return home to the U.S.

According to the article, the two Americans have already submitted to an FBI interview, but one of them -- the American-born 18-year-old -- "had run afoul of the FBI when he declined to be interviewed again without a lawyer and refused to take a lie-detector test." For those actions -- i.e., invoking his constitutional rights to counsel and against self-incrimination -- he is being refused entry back into his country. And the Bush administration is now conditioning his re-entry on his relinquishing the most basic constitutional protections guaranteed to him by the Bill of Rights."

Chalk up another extralegal power claimed by the Bush administration: banishment without any court proceedings or judicial authorization. These people just boggle the mind.

Supporting The Troops, Take N, For N Large

by hilzoy

Via Atrios, a story that would shock me if I still had the capacity to be shocked by what this administration does:

"Brain injuries are so common among U.S. troops that they're called the signature injury of the Iraq war, but Congress is poised to cut military spending on researching and treating them.
House and Senate versions of the defense appropriation bill would chop funding for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center from $14 million to $7 million. The center runs 10 facilities across the country, including one at Fort Bragg that has performed research and treated soldiers' injuries since 1998.

"It's just ridiculous," said Sgt. Maj. Colin Rich, a Fort Bragg soldier who has been legally blind since he was shot in the head while serving in Afghanistan in 2002. "Whoever is cutting the budget must have a head injury themselves."

"With the bombs, the gunshot wounds and everything else, their plate is full," he said. "They need that money."

The Pentagon asked only for $7 million and didn't respond properly when congressional staffers tried to find out whether it needed more money for the program, said Jenny Manley, a spokeswoman for the Senate appropriations committee.

"The Pentagon needs to get behind the things that they want," she said. "Otherwise, we'd just be kind of guessing about what they really need." (...)

The center's research at Bragg and elsewhere isn't just academic, Zitnay said. "It's developing new helmets, it's developing drugs we can use to treat memory loss, it's developing innovative rehabilitation strategies," he said.

The center's work, for example, can help battlefield commanders quickly determine whether a soldier who has received a blow to the head is fit for battle.

Zitnay testified before the Senate appropriations committee in May that the center needed $19 million this year, in part because of the number of head injuries from the wars. Thirty-three members of Congress signed the written request for that amount, he said.

The Pentagon's basic budget for the center -- $7 million this year -- has long been augmented by members of Congress with discretionary or "pork barrel" money. The Pentagon didn't request the discretionary funding this year, said Manley of the appropriations committee staff, and then didn't respond to a request about whether it actually needed more."

In 2000, George W. Bush said that he had "a message to all of our men and women in uniform and to their parents and to their families: Help is on the way." We should have remembered that he's from the same party as Ronald Reagan, who famously said: "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help", and been very, very afraid.

Another Victory For Republican Framing

by Andrew

So I'm reading Senator Byron Dorgan's new book, Take This Job and Ship It, and I get to the chapter where he's talking about environmental problems. He points out some of the problems we face when foreign countries don't force companies to bear the costs of their externalities, an important issue. He then points out (I'm paraphrasing, but the key phrase is accurate) that "This shouldn't be a Democrat or Republican issue, but an American one."

Karl Rove's got to be laughing about that one. Did he get to Senator Dorgan, or just the copy editor?

Greenwald Fouls One Off

by Andrew

I don't read much of Glenn Greenwald. Not because I have anything against him (or for him), but because by the time he showed up I had already settled into a pretty regular routine of the blogs I read and, as long as I'm deployed, I can't read BlogSpot blogs because military servers block them (or, at least, mine does). But this evening I went to a coffee shop that offers wi-fi and I figured I'd check him out, since he is the author of a New York Times bestselling book, broke a story about wiretapping on his blog that led to national attention, was cited in Congressional hearings and has become one of the biggest bloggers in the blogosphere in a very short time...or so I've heard.

I jumped into this piece, which addresses the issue of conservatives decrying obscure figures who apparently suggested that the Fox News employees who were kidnapped and converted to Islam deserved it because they worked for Fox. As Greenwald rightly notes, several prominent conservative bloggers made similar comments about al Jazeera and Reuters journalists when they were struck by U.S. and Israeli attacks respectfully. It's outrageous for anyone to suggest that someone might have merited an unprovoked attack, and kudos to Greenwald for pointing out the obvious hypocracy. But then I think he goes a little too far.

In light of all of these prior incidents and the deranged views of prominent administration supporters (it is "understandable if the Israelis started firing on Reuters vehicles"), what authority and credibility does the U.S. now have to protest incidents like the Gaza kidnappings?

You're kidding, right? John Hindraker and Charles Johnson make intemperate remarks and that undermines the U.S.'s moral authority as a whole? Greenwald has previously correctly noted that trying to use Ward Churchill and Deb Frisch as stand-ins for the 'left' is a silly exercise, yet isn't this precisely what he's doing here? I realize that PowerLine was Time's Blog of the Year, but that was a fluke; they were at the center of Rathergate. They're hardly representatives of the administration. Trying to use them as an example of how the U.S. as a whole has lost moral authority is silly.

Which is unfortunate, because I think Greenwald is making a good point overall. The U.S. has, through its official actions, harmed its credibility terribly over the past six years. There's plenty of evidence for that. Greenwald doesn't need to hang it on such a thin reed as two conservative bloggers.

Because I'm Too Lazy to Make a Real Post

by Andrew

Inspired by Bob, who has some comments well worth your perusal in an earlier thread.

So we're all dog-faces. We're all very very different. But, there is one thing we all have in common. We were all stupid enough to enlist in the army. W're mutants. There's something wrong with us. Something very very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us. We're soldiers. But, we're American soldiers, and we've been kickin' butt for 200 years. We're ten and one!

If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? Have at it.

Stem Cell Update

by hilzoy

Just a quick post on this story:

"In an innovative move, a biotech company has found a new way of making stem cells without destroying embryos, touting it as a way to defuse one of the country's fiercest political and ethical debates.

Some opponents of the research said the method still doesn't satisfy their objections and many stem cell scientists and their supporters called it inefficient and politically wrong-headed. (...)

he new method works by taking an embryo at a very early stage of development and removing a single cell, which can be coaxed into spawning an embryonic stem cell line. With only one cell removed, the rest of the embryo retains its full potential for development."

To my mind, the issues involved with this new method aren't made clear enough in the news accounts I've read, so I wanted to try to explain them here.

Any time a new development like this comes along, it's important to recognize that adopting it in place of existing methods would set embryonic stem cell research back for a year or two. That's because people are now pretty good at growing embryonic stem cell lines by the existing methods; they have figured out a lot of techniques that they would have to develop over again for this new method. To someone who believes that embryos are full persons from the moment of conception, this cost would, of course, be worth it. All I mean this point to show is: that there is a real cost to research involved in adopting a new method of deriving stem cells.

That cost makes it important to think hard about whether this technique, or any other substitute that is suggested, really does represent a moral advance over the existing method, which involves the destruction of an embryo. If it does, then it might be worth paying that price. If it doesn't, then it is obviously not worth it.

The main moral problem with this method is this: it might or might not be possible for the cell they remove from the embryo, and which they then grow into embryonic stem cells, to be implanted and develop into a normal infant. If this is not possible, no problem. But if it is possible, then presumably we should treat this cell as an embryo, which is being destroyed to create a stem cell line -- which is, of course, the very same problem the existing method has. This wouldn't be a more moral method of making stem cells at all; it would be exactly like making an embryo divide into identical twins, killing one of them, and saying: look! one of the twins is still alive! so everything is OK!

No one who is opposed to killing a blastocyst should think that this would be in any way an improvement over killing the original blastocyst.

The crucial question, then, is: can this cell develop into an infant? As I said, we don't know. In some species a cell like this can develop into an infant; in others, it can't. We don't know which group humans are in. Moreover, we aren't likely to find out, since to do so we'd have to do some plainly unethical experiments. (Consider: we also don't know whether an infant that did develop in this way would be normal. How would we find out? Trial and error? That would be plainly wrong, and no ethics review board would allow it.)

There are other questions we would need to answer in order to say that this method is morally OK. (For instance, does taking one cell at this stage harm the embryo from which it was taken? We take such cells now for various sorts of genetic tests, but as far as I know no one has studied the resulting kids to see whether or not they are more likely to have, for instance, birth defects.) But if I were opposed to abortion, this one would be a deal-breaker for me.

It would be one thing to delay research if a means of creating stem cells that did not involve destroying embryos were found. In that case, there would be something to debate. But to delay research in order to substitute one technique for another, when the new technique does not solve the problems of the old one, is just silly.

The Dissatisfieds

by Charles

My latest entry at Redstate is here.  I didn't put it on ObWi because there's quite a bit of overlap with my previous post, but there's enough new material that I thought it worth linking to over there.

Hej Från Sverige! (Öppen Tråd)

av hilzoy

The Swedish is beginning to come back...

Birdwatching in other countries is lots of fun: even the most ordinary birds are completely new, so everything is wonderful. Plus, as done by me, birding is basically an excuse to take very long walks while paying attention to my surroundings, and long walks here means long walks in hills covered with pine and birch trees, which is especially nice. Regrettably, I don't think I'm going to make it to an island I had thought of going to, not to mention the World's Largest Cheese Scraper, but I will have walked for ages and ages and ages by the time I go to Stockholm to meet up with my various relatives, most of whom I haven't seen in decades.

It's really astonishing to be in a country that's as clearly egalitarian as Sweden, coming from the US. There are no poor people that I've seen (and I have walked all over, as is my wont. I might be more hesitant to say this after being here for only a couple of days had I not seen the same thing when I lived in Stockholm for six months. I kept track: I saw one (1) poor-looking person during that time, and he was fairly clearly alcoholic.) There are also no McMansions, and I have yet to see one of those places like, say, Bar Harbor, where it seems as though money has been flowing around looking for any tiny crack it has yet to penetrate -- a doorknob that is not handmade by a master craftsman, a rosebush that is just an ordinary gorgeous rosebush, and not an incredibly rare new hybrid, etc. -- and rushed to fill it, the way water seeks out tiny fissures in a rock it is trying to penetrate.

It's also a country that plainly believes in public investment. There are all sorts of well-maintained parks with lots of people walking in them; public bike paths (also well traveled) and bike racks; all sorts of things that make it easy to have lots of fun for free. The cars are a lot smaller; I have yet to see an SUV. Everything is very tidy, and many of the houses have cheerful and well-maintained little flower boxes. And an alarming number of people are blonde; the kids' hair tends to be one shade away from white. There are a lot more immigrants than there were twenty-five years ago, chattering away in Swedish. Everyone has cell phones, and the food has improved a lot. (I remember, when I was living there, finding it pathetic that grocery stores made a big, big fuss about Fresh Potatoes!!!, but didn't seem to understand that, or why, it mattered that other vegetables be fresh. Tiny, defeated-looking clumps of celery; the odd mouldering onion; so much room for improvement, and all they cared about was Färsk Potatis!!!)