John McQuaid

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

So diametrically opposed, yet substance-free, are the views and perspectives of Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney – whether in ideology, politics, gender or diction - that when they agree on something, almost by definition a new standard for inanity is set.

And so it is now, with President Obama and the terror-underpants attack. In Politico, Cheney attacks Obama for being insufficiently martial in his approach to terrorism, both this week and in general:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war.
…
But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.

And Dowd, while getting some zingers in at Bush and Cheney, comes to surprisingly similar conclusions: Obama is dithering while the terrorists devise new and ever-more lethal undergarment-based attacks; he has pretenses to being a socially transformative figure but this plot has exposed their hollowness: (more…)

Image via Wikipedia

Vengeance – experienced vicariously via movies or TV – is one of the purest kinds of emotional satisfaction. And the revenge flick has had something of a renaissance recently, as Stanley Fish notes in this blog post, citing Liam Neeson’s memorably-delivered statement from “Taken” as a road map for the entire genre:  “If you’re looking for ransom, I don’t have any money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.”

If you saw the movie, or even if you didn’t, you know that’s exactly what he does. And the quest to save the daughter and get the bad guy’s scalp unfolds with a number of plot flourishes – torture, Arab sheikhs collecting American virgins, corrupt French bureaucrats – that make it appear that Dick Cheney was hired on as an uncredited script-doctor.

Revenge fantasies are durable, reliable entertainments because they allow us to experience actions that aren’t allowed in real life, and that most of us wouldn’t truly want to experience even if given the chance. That would be fine if we were just talking about pop culture. But during the 2000s, the revenge fantasy escaped the realm of fiction. It came to dominate our politics and – for a while – overturned centuries of established U.S. policy and tradition toward prisoners.

Call it the Jack Bauer Decade: a strange, hopefully anomalous phase of American history, and one that America has yet to grapple with fully. (more…)

Image via Wikipedia

I’m late to this, but it’s not going away, so here’s my question: Is Matt Taibbi merely a journalistic scourge, or also a scourge on journalism itself? The question isn’t just about Taibbi, but about the state of journalism and America right now, post-bubble, post Iraq war, post-Bush.

You probably know the background: Taibbi has written a couple of searing cover stories for Rolling Stone on the financial shenanigans of Goldman Sachs over the past century and on the Obama administration’s close ties to Goldman and Wall Street and its halting attempts to reform the banking system.

These pieces are, unlike most stories that contain the word “Geithner,” actually fun to read and make a simple and compelling point: historically, and now, there is a tight nexus between the elite banks and uppermost reaches of the federal government – whether it’s run by Republicans or Democrats. This has proven to be catastrophic. Its persistence after the disaster of 2008 is a significant structural problem for the American economy – and, by extension, the global economy. Obama’s diffidence on the matter is one of the great mysteries of his presidency, given the both the substantive problem and the political advantages to taking on the bankers, which would theoretically appeal both to liberals and the tea party crowd.

Taibbi indicts not just Goldman, but the system. And that system is, well, highly indictable. But on the way, he overreaches. He imbues his villains with more agency than they deserve. He makes mistakes. (more…)

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are now in an all-out pissing match. I’d say great – nothing like a little journalistic competition to lubricate the gears of democracy, right? Except that it’s not that kind of newspaper war. It’s a stupid, Murdochian war. In other words, a war which is not about anything but war itself, or, to be precise, a state of neverending ideological conflict.

Briefly: the NYT’s David Carr wrote a piece calling attention to what a lot of us have noticed in recent months: that under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership, the Journal’s Washington coverage has moved noticeably rightward from its traditional, ideologically neutral stance. Probably the low point of this was the news story that repeatedly used the term “death tax” for “inheritance tax.”

The WSJ’s managing editor Robert Thomson responded with (politely-phrased!) trash talk:

The news column by a Mr David Carr today is yet more evidence thatThe New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat. The usual practice of quoting ex-employees was supplemented by a succession of anonymous quotes and unsubstantiated assertions. The attack follows the extraordinary actions of Mr Bill Keller, the Executive Editor, who, among other things, last year wrote personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism. Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at The New York Times.

NYT editor Bill Keller then responded to this, and no doubt Thomson will fire back, if not now at some other propitious time. And so on.

Here’s the problem. There are a lot of flaws in standard DC political coverage – its obsession with the news cycle and cable talking heads, its deference to power, its maddening insider’s cynicism and arrogance. But American politics still depends on journalism institutions to, well, explain it to itself. The federal government is a huge and complex monster. If you’re going to go toe-to-toe with it and expose what’s going on, it helps to have a weighty name behind you – like the NYT or WSJ, with their traditions, smart editors and clout.

But those institutions are under siege and disappearing. Layoffs have all but demolished many important redoubts of mainstream media’s political coverage. Only the New York Times, McClatchy (home to fine, often prescient coverage that is often underplayed by the mediasphere), and the Wall Street Journal at or not too far below their traditional full strength in staff and clout.

Except, er, that now the WSJ Washington bureau is apparently caught in the tractor beam of Murdoch’s Death Star. I feel for the journalists there, because this “death tax” business and increasingly blatant bias will hurt their credibility in DC and in journalism. The WSJ’s rightward lurch will also hurt the public debate, because it will have lost an important honest broker. There will be a lot of heat, not much light. It will be that much harder to tell what is really going on. And that’s just the type of environment in which Thompson and Murdoch thrive.

Rep. Bachmann poses with her recent research into unified field theory (via Daylife/Getty)

“WaPost Publishes Palin OpEd on Climate Science, Michele Bachmann Piece on Quantum Mechanics to Follow” – Firedoglake headline.

(With apologies to Sarah Palin and her ghostwriter.)

No Solace in the Quantum

By Michele Bachmann

When a piece of bread dropped by a swallow can stop the universe from being destroyed, the radical so-called “nuclear physicists” who tell us that nothing really exists appear to have hit a tipping point. The revelation that the Large Hadron Collider was shut down last month allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

“Quantum-gate,” as this incident has become known, exposes a highly-politicized scientific circle at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) – the same circle whose work underlies efforts to foist a bizarre worldview on the public that reflects a socialistic view of the behavior of subatomic particles and cats and threatens lead us down a slippery slope toward fascism. The agenda-driven policies now showing up even in high school textbooks and popular movies won’t change the Newtonian conception of matter and energy, but they would change our society and our children’s minds for the worse.

The work of these “quantum mechanics” reveals that they have employed something called an “uncertainty principle” to manipulate data and since the 1930s have tried to silence their critics, including the great Albert Einstein, with their blasphemous assertion that God plays dice. What’s more, their work shows that there was no real consensus on the fundamental nature of reality even within the CERN crowd and in other organizations that make up the United Nations’ Ministry of Science, Regulation, Propaganda and Bureaucracy. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates about wave-particle duality going back to an unspeakable ritual called the “double slit experiment.”

This scandal calls into question the U.S. government’s energy, environment, and health-related policies. If we supposedly cannot know with precision where something is or its momentum, it is a license for our government to do anything it wants. Quantum theory says that an observer can literally change reality. What is to stop the Obama White House from sending out teams of ACORN-trained “observers” to “change” our communities into whatever they want? We are now a fraction of a quantum away from tyranny.

I’ve alway believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. We must recognize that subatomic physics is still an unreliable and, frankly, somewhat creepy field not in keeping with our American traditions. Scientists are using money taken from the hard work of taxpayers for research into very tiny particles including quarks, muons and gluinos. Those names may be some kind of European-derived code for organizing a fifth column, but never mind that. These crypto-particles allegedly exist for just a few nanoseconds at very high energy states. How do we know they were ever there at all? To put it another way: you will never be able to convince me or my constituents that my cat is alive and dead at the same time. She looks pretty alive to me. Well, asleep. But definitely breathing. Trust me!

Perhaps these flaws can one day be addressed with bigger microscopes and better slide technologies. But for the moment, let me just say, we in Minnesota are sensible, bottom-line folk. Seeing is believing. If we can’t say with assurance what happens on scales smaller than the width of a hair, President Obama, we owe it to the American people to base our policies accordingly.

If you read only one thing today about climate change, take a pause from all the Copenhagen coverage (the conference lasts nearly two weeks, after all) and take a look at James Fallows’s post comparing the New York Times’s climate email hack story with that of the Washington Post. Fallows argues, compellingly, that the Times does a better job explaining the basics: that the hacked emails don’t cast doubt on the scientific consensus of climate change. If you want the story from the ground up, read the Times. The Post, he notes, casts this as a political story and temporizes a bit on its scientific importance or lack thereof:

In this case one big-time paper, the Post, sticks with “critics contend,” while the other presents a contrast between “decades of peer-reviewed science” and politically-motivated opposition. Moreover, the NYT presents the controversy as something that might get in the way of deliberations in Copenhagen; while the Post presents it as a scandal in which “wonky” emails may not constitute “proof” that climate change is a “lie or a swindle” but still justify introducing “lie” and “swindle” as possibilities.

Not to overdramatize, but: in a way the papers are betting their reputations with these articles. The Times, that climate change is simply a matter of science versus ignorance; the Post, that this is best treated as another “-Gate” style flap where it’s hard to get to the bottom of the story.

I think Fallows is a little unfair to the Washington Post reporters (one of whom, Juliet Eilperin, is a friend). The climate emails do “raise hard questions,” as the story says, about how some climate scientists have been operating, and they have set off a significant political fight. There’s nothing wrong with focusing a story on this. The problem is context. To cover the politics, first you must take pains to establish the scientific – and political – context, otherwise readers will never get the bottom line on what it all means. That is: The fundamentals here are not in serious dispute, though there are unresolved issues and thus fierce intra-academy disputes. The Post goes through the motions on this, quoting scientists on the consensus, but still seems curiously agnostic about what to make of the whole thing. We don’t get a sense of how serious the issues really are. (As a former newspaper reporter, I’ll tell you where I think the problem lies: the piece needed more/better editing, and didn’t get it.)

Image via Wikipedia

Sarah Palin showed up at Saturday’s Gridiron Club meeting in Washington, regaling the media elite with a series of one-liners (example: “If the election had turned out differently, I could be the one overseeing the signing of bailout checks, and Vice President Biden could be on the road selling his book, ‘Going Rogaine.’”) In other words, it was awful. In fact, a harmonic convergence of awfulness. Why?

The Gridiron Club is an exclusive coterie of a few dozen Washington uber-elites, mostly newspaper and TV bureau chiefs. Every spring they put on a white-tie banquet in which they mock Washington in sketches and song. And the president, usually in attendance, takes a few humorous potshots at the press. Maybe this was all once harmless good fun – a way to blow off steam, a custom that showed that the poobahs of the press and government could laugh with as well as at each other, and also that, on a deeper level, the system worked – politicians from both parties and media leaders could break bread and set aside their differences, because those differences really weren’t all that great.

OK, sorry. That was never really true – when the media who cover Washington are sipping champagne and cracking inside jokes with politicians in grand, hot-ticket off-the-record parties, something must by definition be amiss. (more…)

A geodesic cage used by Open Blue Sea Farms

If the the future of food is hazy right now due to overconsumption, globalization, and climate change, the future of seafood is even murkier. The global fish catch topped out sometime in the 1990s, leaving many fish populations more or less permanently overstressed. Aquaculture has grown to satisfy rising global demand – but fish farms have brought environmental devastation to many a coastal zone.

Is the answer to pack up those coastal operations and move fish farming offshore? That’s the question I attempt to answer in this Yale Environment 360 piece. I started out with the assumption that, whatever the environmental hazards, a big move into deeper waters is inevitable someday – the economic and political pressures pointing in that direction, now weak in the United States and elsewhere, are only going to rise as the world’s demand for protein goes up.

And, on the surface anyway, offshore aquaculture is promising. The entrepreneurs and advocates I talked to seemed environmentally responsible and thoughtful. If you locate a fish farm in deep water (employing large pens or cages designed to withstand the stress of the open ocean), many of the problems endemic to coastal fish farming – accumulating waste, nutrients, et al and the attendant ecosystem damage – are minimized.

On the other hand, as I note in the piece:

The example of the lone, tiny fish farm surrounded by miles of open water is not an ideal indicator, though. O’Hanlon and other fish farmers say that to be profitable they’ll need to scale up.

“It’s an industry that will achieve better economics as it scales,” says Neil Sims, the co-founder and CEO of Kona Blue Farms, an offshore operation in Hawaii that farms a local species of yellowtail it calls Kona kampachi. “We need to grow this industry. Larger pens are going to be more efficient than smaller ones. Better technology, more automation is going to be better than using manpower. We need to locate closer to the market or find ways to get product to market more inexpensively.”

Indeed, if deep-sea fish farming is to have any impact on the seafood marketplace, not to mention global food supplies, it will have to get much, much bigger. That prospect alarms environmental groups that have spent years fighting poorly managed industrial fish farms.

As fish farming migrates offshore, we’re going to have to confront these problems. Right now, though, there’s basically no federal U.S. aquaculture policy. And the longer we go without one, the greater the risks.

A geodesic cage used by Open Blue Sea Farms

If the the future of food is hazy right now due to overconsumption, globalization, and climate change, the future of seafood is even murkier. The global fish catch topped out sometime in the 1990s, leaving many fish populations more or less permanently overstressed. Aquaculture has grown to satisfy rising global demand – but fish farms have brought environmental devastation to many a coastal zone.

Is the answer to pack up those coastal operations and move fish farming offshore? That’s the question I attempt to answer in this Yale Environment 360 piece. I started out with the assumption that, whatever the environmental hazards, a big move into deeper waters is inevitable someday – the economic and political pressures pointing in that direction, now weak in the United States and elsewhere, are only going to rise as the world’s demand for protein goes up. (more…)

I’ve been avoiding the great climate email hack story because, on one level, there’s not much to say about it. Obviously the global scientific community is not nefariously conspiring to foist man-made global warming on an innocent world. The notion that there might be such a conspiracy is preposterous on its face: there are simply too many scientists, scientific institutions, and credible, time-tested scientific practices and traditions, dating back to the Enlightenment and beyond, to make such a mass conspiracy possible, especially on the most important scientific issue of our time (or at least the one with the most real-world implications). So, Jim Inhofe, George Will, et al, enjoy this controversy while you can. You’re ultimately going to have to keep looking if you want to discredit global warming science.

That, of course, doesn’t make this whole controversy meaningless. It is, sadly, significant. There’s a huge fight underway for public opinion and over government action, and it’s not going particularly well. While it’s abundantly clear humans are having a significant impact on climate, and bold action is needed soon to head off a lot of disastrous effects, according to the latest Pew survey only 44% of people in the United States (and the same percentage in Russia, and just 30% in China) say global warming is a serious problem.

And the scandal, in which internal emails apparently showed that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit massaged data and discussed how to foil freedom of information requests has handed a cudgel to opponents of action on climate change.

It’s amazing to watch. Climategate allows the political opponents of action on global warming to perform a brilliant bit of misdirection. For the moment, anyway, they don’t have to argue that anthropogenic climate change can’t be real (an increasingly difficult argument to make). Instead they can now argue – credibly – that scientists behaving badly must be investigated. (more…)