Paul Krugman notes an essential point about the climate change debate: it’s very hard to predict by precisely how much the temperature will rise, or, one step beyond that, to meaningfully assess the risks that a hotter climate will pose to the environment and to the global economy. As a result, the debate tends to become fractured between those predicting economic catastrophe without much hard evidence for it, and those who think the absence of hard evidence means everything’s A-OK. He quotes the Environmental Economics blog:
Climate change is fundamentally a problem about uncertainty. We are conducting an experiment with our planet by doubling CO2 levels in the atmosphere from pre-industrial levels. Concentrations have not been this high in hundreds of thousands of years. By and large, we don’t know much about the implications. Tackling this uncertainty is crucial. Extreme outcomes — fat tails — matter and should be at the heart of much of research.
New Orleans is an obvious analogy here. Pre-Katrina, the likelihood of a hurricane storm surge flooding the city was considered a “low probability, high consequence event.” The pre-K odds of the levees being overtopped was estimated at 0.5 percent per year. When people hear 1/200, they feel pretty good. When politicians hear it, they yawn. (In this case, the estimate was flat-out wrong. But today, the more accurate estimate is 1/100 and … people feel pretty good. Not as good, but pretty good. It’s crazy, especially when you consider the risk of ending up underwater “compounds” if you’re talking about not 1, but 10 or 20 years.)
Forecasting the economic effects of warmer temperatures is a far more speculative exercise than tracking hurricanes. So the numbers may be wrong, but the stakes are impossibly high. As Krugman notes, it’s unwise to discount a 1 percent, or a 0.5 percent chance of a giant catastrophe, because the losses could be so horrendous. How to convince the public that addressing the worst case is worth it when the downside is short-term sacrifice, and the upside is averting an economic cataclysm you will never know you averted?
I’m told that Mike Myers has started writing Austin Powers 4 which will be an homage to his father. “It’s very personal with a father and son theme loosely based on his own life,” an insider tells me.
I’m finding it hard to get all exercised about McCain’s new anti-Obama ad, titled “Celebrity,” for the simple reason that Europeans going ga-ga for Obama does reflect the increasingly globalized celebrity culture.
A fascination with the antics of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is, in terms of substance, nothing like cheering the emergence of a charismatic, thoughtful, and competent American presidential candidate. But that’s sort of the point of the ad – the global celebrity culture does not distinguish between vapidity and substance. So how can we be sure that millions of Europeans cheering for Obama, accompanied by media gushing, means anything about a putative Obama presidency? The McCain campaign is trying to convince us it means nothing, that Obama is all flash, no substance. I don’t agree, but this is hardly an unfair or illegitimate point to make about a candidate who has spent such a short time on the national/international stage.
I note with interest today, John McCain’s new tactic of associating Barack Obama with oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women. (See today’s new ad and this from yesterday.) Presumably, a laHarold Ford 2006, this will be one of those strategies that will be a matter of deep dispute during the campaign and later treated as transparent and obvious once the campaign is concluded.
But the “Celebrity” ad is a pretty abstract form of “association” – unlike the Ford ad, which all but said “Harold Ford fucks white women!” Maybe the subliminal effect of putting the images of Spears, Hilton and Obama in the same 30-second clip is equivalent, I don’t know. But it’s at least semi-offset by the inherent ridiculousness of the idea of Obama hanging out with either of them.
Another telling bit of evidence of the Bush administration’s politicization/de-professionalization of government – the Lexis-Nexis search string used to vet Justice Department applicants (the exclamation points sub for any/all suffixes that might follow):
[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
For the past eight years, the way the U.S. government communicates with citizens – the people who pay for it, and to whom it’s ultimately accountable – has been systematically politicized, corrupted and degraded. Sound over-the-top? Just take the two examples in the news today:
1. A Justice Department spokesman committed misconduct, according to an Inspector General’s report, by lying about the politicization of hiring practies. We know the sad story of Monica “what is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” Goodling. When a reporter called the DOJ press office to ask about this, John Nowaki called the notion “crap” and wrote up a categorical denial. (Fortunately, no one was dumb enough to sign off on it, so it wasn’t released.) Later, when questioned by investigators, like everyone else, Nowacki admitted the right-wing vetting was going on.
2. The EPA has tightened its grip on career managers, instructing them to refer all questions from the media, congressional investigators, and even the EPA IG to political appointees. This on the heels of an April report by the Union of Concerned Scientists that showed that political interference in the work of scientists is running rampant at the agency.
In the overall scheme of things, these are minor stories. But they reflect a corrosive trend - the government-wide project originating from the White House to control information – i.e., to make facts that conflict with the Bush administration’s political aims go away. As a political strategy, this was dumb – White House attempts to redraw reality on Iraq and Katrina failed so spectacularly the president and vice president lost all credibility with the public.
But the reality-denial project went on anyway, and its damage should not be underestimated. The one remaining area where the Bush administration has power is in its ability to mold and manipulate the bureaucracy in the service of various GOP interest groups. This goes on below the radar, every day, across the government. A thousand Henry Waxmans, ProPublicas, and concerned NGOs couldn’t uncover it all. And it will certainly increase in pitch and intensity in the days between now and Jan. 20, as Bush appointees try to lock in various rules that favor their constituencies and finally, cover their own tracks.
The question going forward is, how much damage has been done, and how easily can it be undone? Many mechanisms of accountability have broken down. The public thinks – knows – that government officials, never the most credible of voices, habitually lie.
Walking this back will take more than just clearing out the Bush appointees (I’m talking about an Obama administration – it’s doubtful McCain, however earnest he may be about government accountability, would conduct a thorough housecleaning). The government’s own credibility on matters of fact – science in particular – has been eroded. Bad habits in conflict with an increasingly information-rich, transparent age – classifying everything under the sun, massaging data, gagging professionals – are hard to break because they have political advantages for whoever’s in office.
I am a big fan of 24 – at least, I was until the last season – but the right’s gushing love of the show and the hero-worship of Jack Bauer always baffled me. It should be obvious to anyone over the age of 12 that TV suspense dramas are not the foundations on which effective government policies are built. The fact that so many in the upper levels of the federal government saw Bauer’s ridiculously improbable antics as the model when they ginned up the legal superstructure governing “enhanced interrogation” is alarming not just because it enabled torture, but because it’s just dumb on its face.
Dahlia Lithwick takes this point to its logical conclusion, which is that those who emulated Jack didn’t really understand him or the milieu in which he operates. He is the outsider, the only person willing to cross any bureaucratic, legal, and moral line to save the day:
Bauer is also willing to accept the consequences of his decisions to break the law. In fact, that is the real source of his heroism—to the extent one finds torture heroic. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system and accepts the consequences of the system’s judgment by periodically reinventing a whole new identity for himself or enduring punishment at the hands of foreign governments. The “heroism” of the Bush administration’s torture apologists is slightly less inspiring. None of them is willing to stand up and admit, as Bauer does, that yes, they did “whatever it takes.” They instead point fingers and cry, “Witch hunt.”
In other words, the moral universe of 24 is a little more complicated than it’s usually given credit for. Jack Bauer is the only character on the show – and, by extension, in 24‘s fictional U.S. government – with the judgment to cross those lines. And he pays a terrible price for it. By legalizing and bureaucratizing torture to protect would-be Bauers, the Bush administration guaranteed that lots of people w/o Jack Bauer’s judgment, or his willingness to take the fall for the greater good, would be greenlighting torture. If this happened on the show, all those scheming CTU and Homeland Security hacks who give Jack trouble would be whipping out the electrodes on any flimsy pretext available, making it impossible to discern the truth. In fact, that’s not a bad plot device. Too bad it really happened.
I don’t particularly want to write, or see or hear, anything else about the John Edwards love child mess and the media. But, just to respond to this (and this):
A blog by John McQuaid said that there’s no “physical evidence a la Bill Clinton.” Well, there’s a baby. Not a stained dress left to hang in the closest for a few months but a real cooing, smiling little baby who I assume looks adorable on camera and probably has nice hair. That lil’ tyke is stuffed full of DNA, too. Cute little DNA.
Well, yes. But unless the Obama campaign is going to hire Ken Starr to vet Edwards for the VP slot, or the National Enquirer – or, presumably, the New York Times, if this goes mainstream – is going to infiltrate the Hunter residence, scoop up some baby dribble and ship it off to a DNA lab, this is not “evidence” and won’t be unless someone directly involved decides to go public. Which they’d be crazy to do, especially given that the baby in question is a person, not “evidence,” who will be better off not reading blog archives 13 years hence in which s/he is compared to semen.
The supposed newsworthiness of this story hangs on Edwards’s role as a potential vice presidential or cabinet official. But by that measure, there are about 200 prominent Democrats who fall in the same, vague, unofficial, speculative category. And let’s face it, Obama was never going to choose Edwards for VP, so that rationale is specious on its face. So I don’t understand the cries for Edwards’ head, except as anger/spite. Which, again, makes this gossip news, not news news.
In the course of a long critique/attack on Obama’s phrase “citizen of the world” straight out of a late-night college bull session, James Poulos says this:
Our yearning for pan-human solidarity is an absurdity, the absurdity of the human condition, and the most utopian of all utopian ideas is the idea of a Brotherhood of Man: because the human race is not a family, just like it isn’t one big polity. We are stuck with differentiation; there is no metaphor that allows us to redefine humanity as a closer relationship than it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Indeed, the only trope that allows us to develop closer amicable relationships with strangers is the trope of friendship, and the only way to close the relationship with a stranger is to make friends. Not to ‘make citizens’; not to ‘make brothers’. This is crazy European talk — the discredited language of the bloody French and German experiments in various kinds of border-busting solidarity.
The notion that the vague sentiments of anodyne rhetoric should be taken as evidence of radical anti-American sympathies (in this case, European-socialist-utopianist sympathies – the same sympathies that brought us those 20th century conflagrations!) makes no sense. Of course “citizen of the world” is a sentimental phrase, and in some sense an aspirational one. It could imply membership in some kind of global club marching in lockstep toward world government, trampling individual rights along the way. But it could mean a lot of things. That’s why it’s anodyne! A more reasonable interpretation is a) we all have some things in common; b) of the things which divide us, some are potentially reconcilable, some not; and c) in spite of the differences the people of the world ought to aspire to behave in a civilized manner towards one another.
Also, I see nothing in human nature that would prevent a) continued cultural homogenization via the avenues of globalization, development, and the Internet/media or b) the eventual formation of an actual global polity of some sort, in which case we all would become “citizens of the world.” This isn’t going to happen tomorrow. And when it does happen, it’s not going to eliminate all conflict. But I don’t understand why it would be an impossibility at some point in the coming centuries or millennia.
Will the mainstream media cover the John Edwards love child scandal put out there by the National Enquirer? Is it exhibiting a double standard by giving blanket coverage to Larry Craig’s bathroom antics, and ignoring Edwards’s bathroom bunkering?
Oh, please. Edwards is a politician, which automatically puts him in the public eye. But, frankly, this is a tenuous pretext at best for covering his personal foibles right now. He is a private citizen. He is not running for president. He doesn’t hold office, as Craig did – still does! He didn’t cop to committing a crime, then absurdly try to weasel out of it as Craig did.
It sure looks like Edwards is a hypocrite who misrepresented himself by showcasing his wife and kids so prominently in the campaign. But his campaign was unsuccessful. Voters didn’t buy his arguments or his life story as reasons to elect him. In short, nobody cares about this now, except as celebrity gossip. And that’s how it’s going to play when the media picks it up, as it probably will.
The better question is, should the media have gone after this story more aggressively back during the campaign? Sounds like the answer is yes. It’s not clear, though, that this would have made a difference: with everybody denying it, and no eyewitness evidence a la Gary Hart, or physical evidence a la Bill Clinton, it’s very hard to sift the credible story from the hearsay in a situation like this.
An even better question: hasn’t the National Enquirer heard of video cameras? This is the era of TMZ, man. When we hear Edwards came down the hotel stairs at 2:30 a.m. and fled to the bathroom when he saw the NE reporters, we now expect to see it. This is one reason TMZ is fascinating – it is frivolous and stupid and is further degrading our culture, no doubt. But unlike, say, the National Enquirer, the reporting – based on legwork, video, documents – is consistently accurate.
Usually, presidential candidates wait until it is pretty clear they are going to lose before they start slinging the mud themselves, as opposed to letting surrogates do it. That is, until all other options have been exhausted and they are truly desperate to find something that will stick. In other words, October.
So why is John McCain doing this already? He’s taking random, over-the-top shots at Obama’s patriotism, his sincerity, his anodyne comments about the Holocaust, for pete’s sake. Sure, it’s been a bad couple of weeks for McCain, and the Obamafest abroad has got to be galling. But he isn’t that far behind. He hasn’t named a vice presidential pick. There is time, in theory, to change the momentum of the race. Unless, that is, you have no idea how to present your candidacy in a systematic, convincing manner. This is shaping up to be kind of sad.
