Egregious Moderation

Matthew Yglesias: Iraq's Forever War

Iraq's Forever War: As fighting dies down in Basra, the underlying tensions fueling the violence show no signs of abating.

For over a year now, political discussions of Iraq have focused on the question of whether or not the surge strategy is "working." This appeals to the can-do spirit of Americans, but as the winding-down battle in Basra indicates it does little justice to the complexity of the situation in Iraq.

A key element in America's recent strategy of forming alliances with elements of the domestic Sunni Arab insurgency in order to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq has been U.S. support for the idea of holding new provincial elections in order to help our new friends (who also happen to be anti-government rebels) acquire local political power. This, however, perturbed the central government in Baghdad, whose main constituent parties, Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, currently control provincial government in the south but fear losing power to Muqtada al-Sadr's movement. Hence, Nouri al-Maliki's sudden determination to try to assert government authority in Basra, an area that's long been under the practical control of an array of different Shiite mafias who rose to power under the British military's efforts to pursue a policy of benign neglect.

The Bush administration chose to support Maliki's military campaign, and sought to portray it as a battle against Iranian-backed forces. And, indeed, Sadr himself has been known to complain about Iranian influence over elements (the so-called "Special Groups") of his movement. In reality, however, the anti-Sadrist forces we're supporting are also backed by Iran, exile parties that were literally founded in Teheran during the Iran-Iraq War. The all-pervasive nature of Iranian influence over Iraqi Shiite politics was on full display in the fact that the fighting was brought to an end by Iranian mediation rather than force of arms.

All of which raises the question of why we're in bed with ISCI in the first place. Years ago, ISCI and Dawa decided to collaborate with the U.S. occupation authorities whereas the Sadr movement deemed it illegitimate and demanded withdrawal. That decision locked us in to the current path and reminds that to a considerable extent the goal of the American military presence in Iraq is simply to continue the American military presence in Iraq and that means forging alliances with whichever Iraqi groups are willing to have us.

Leila Fadel: general played key role in brokering Iraq cease-fire

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 03/30/2008 | Iranian general played key role in brokering Iraq cease-fire: BAGHDAD -- Iraqi lawmakers traveled to the Iranian holy city of Qom over the weekend to win the support of the commander of Iran's Qods brigades in persuading Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr to order his followers to stop military operations, members of the Iraqi parliament said.

Sadr ordered the halt on Sunday, and his Mahdi Army militia heeded the order in Baghdad, where the Iraqi government announced it would lift a 24-hour curfew starting early Monday in most parts of the capital.

But fighting continued in the oil hub of Basra, where a six-day-old government offensive against Shiite militias has had only limited gains.

So far, 488 people have been killed and more than 900 wounded in the offensive, Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said.

The backdrop to Sadr's dramatic statement was a secret trip Friday by Iraqi lawmakers to Qom, Iran's holy city and headquarters for the Iranian clergy who run the country.

There the Iraqi lawmakers held talks with Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) brigades of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and signed an agreement with Sadr, which formed the basis of his statement Sunday, members of parliament said.

Ali al Adeeb, a member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Dawa party, and Hadi al Ameri, the head of the Badr Organization, the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, had two aims, lawmakers said: to ask Sadr to stand down his militia and to ask Iranian officials to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militants in Iraq.

"The statement issued today by (Muqtada al Sadr) is a result of the meetings," said Jalal al-Din al Saghir, a leading member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. "The government didn't have any disagreement with the Sadrists when it went to the city of Basra. The Sadrist movement is the one that chose to face the government."

"We asked Iranian officials to help us persuade him that we were not cracking down on the Sadr group," said an Iraqi official, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

He described the talks as successful but said hard-line Sadrists could goad the government into over-reacting and convince Sadr that the true aim of the Iraqi Security Forces is to destroy the Sadrists.

"I will not be surprised if the whole thing collapses," he said.

In addition to Sadr, who is in Qom pursuing religious studies, Iraqi lawmakers met Suleimani, said Osama al Nejafi, a legislator on the parliamentary committee formed to solve the Basra crisis.

"An agreement was signed," Nejafi said, referring to Sadr. "Iran was part of the problem and an effective part of the negotiations."

Sadr issued a nine-point statement Sunday saying he would renounce anyone who carried arms against the government and government forces. The statement also asked the government to halt all raids against the Mahdi army, end detentions of militia members who had not been charged and implement the general amnesty law.

To preserve the "unity" of Iraq Sadr called for an end to "all armed manifestations in Basra and in all provinces."

The Qom discussions may or may not bring an end to the fighting but they almost certainly have undermined Maliki - who made repeated declarations that there would be no negotiations and that he would treat as outlaws those who did not turn in their weapons for cash. The blow to his own credibility was worsened by the fact that members of his own party had helped organize the Iran initiative.

"The delegation was from the United Iraqi Alliance (dominated by the Dawa party and the Supreme Council of Iraq), and the Prime Minister was only informed. It was a political maneuver by us," said Haider al Abadi, a legislator from Maliki's Dawa party. "We had evidence (that Muqtada and Iranian-backed militants were fighting security forces) and we sent people urgently...If we had been waiting for one year in Baghdad we wouldn't have had this result." The delegation is expected to return to Iraq Monday.

Maliki welcomed Sadr's statement as a positive development, said his advisor Sadiq al Rikabi. Anyone who abandons weapons and goes home would not be pursued, he said, adding that the offensive would continue against a list specific targets, but he would not give details, Maliki -- who had said he would not leave Basra until the Shiite militias were defeated -- was expected to remain in Basra for a few more days, he said.

Following Sadr's announcement a curfew was lifted in most of the capital, while the Sadr controlled areas of Sadr City, New Baghdad and Kadhemiya remained under 24-hour lockdown. The U.S. military still surrounded the Shiite slum of Sadr City, named for Sadr's father and a stronghold of support for Sadr. It was still unclear what the effect the statement had Sunday night.

In another blow to Maliki, his security advisor, Saleem Qassim al Taee, known as Abu Laith Al-Kadhimi, was killed in the fighting in Basra. The Dawa party member had lived in exile under Saddam's regime for 20 years.

"With great sorrow the prime minister's office mourns one of its employees," it said in a statement. "(He) was killed by a treacherous shell during his national duty which was launched by criminal hands who are stained by crime and killing."

In Basra Mahdi Army militants fought to keep their strongholds but were overrun by Iraqi Security Force in the eastern neighborhood of Tanuma. U.S. and British aircraft conducted four air strikes in the city, the U.S. military said. In downtown Basra in the area of al Timimiyah Iraqi forces surrounded the neighborhood as coalition aircraft struck Sunday morning, residents said.

But the Iraqi security forces still couldn't penetrate the vast Shiite slum of Hayaniyah or al Qibla, two Mahdi Army stronghold of Basra.

Following Sadr's statement both the Sadr office in Basra and Sadr City said that their fighters would obey the orders and go home. But militants on the ground in Basra said they would continue to fight in self-defense.

"We will stay in our positions because the government didn't stop the raids and the attacks against the Mahdi Army and their areas," Abu Muamal said. "We are waiting for clear orders from our command and we will not withdraw until the situation is clarified."

Frank Rich: Hillary's St. Patrick's Day Massacre

Frank Rich: MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton's Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of "sniper fire" into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn't be true because by the time of the first lady's visit in March 1996, "the war was over."... Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a "comedian" and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick's Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of "four Pinocchios," her campaign pushed back.... Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was "possible" she "misspoke" in the "most recent instance" of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.

Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking -- or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obama's relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clinton's Bosnian bridge too far.

Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?

Sometimes only a shrink can decipher why some politicians persist in flagrantly taking giant risks, all but daring others to catch them in the act (see: Spitzer, Eliot). Carl Bernstein, a sometimes admiring Hillary Clinton biographer, has called the Bosnia debacle "a watershed event" for her campaign.... It reveals... the accelerating power of viral politics, as exemplified by YouTube, to override the retail politics still venerated by the Beltway establishment....

That Mrs. Clinton's campaign kept insisting her Bosnia tale was the truth... shows the political perils of 20th-century analog arrogance in a digital age. Incredible as it seems, the professionals around Mrs. Clinton -- though surely knowing her story was false -- thought she could tough it out. They ignored the likelihood that a television network would broadcast the inevitable press pool video of a first lady's foreign trip -- as the CBS Evening News did on Monday night -- and that this smoking gun would then become an unstoppable assault weapon once harnessed to the Web.... It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons.... It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of "sleep deprivation."...

The Clinton campaign's cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising....

Mr. Obama isn't going to win every white vote. But two big national polls late last week, both conducted since he addressed the Wright controversy, found scant change in Mr. Obama's support.... As the pollster Peter Hart put it, this result was "a myth buster."... The myth that%u2019s been busted is one that Mr. Obama talked about in his speech -- the perennial given that American racial relations are doomed to stew eternally in the Jim Crow poisons that forged generations like Mr. Wright's. Yet if you sampled much political commentary of the past two weeks, you'd think it's still 1968, or at least 1988. The default assumptions are that the number of racists in America remains fixed.... But politically and culturally we're not in the 1980s -- or pre-YouTube 2004 -- anymore. An unending war abroad is upstaging the old domestic racial ghosts. A new bottom-up media culture is challenging any candidate's control of a message...

Laith of McClatchy: Inside Iraq: They dont think about us

Blog: Inside Iraq: It had been my fourth days in the office. I couldn't go home since I came on Wednesday. When I tried to go home on Thursday afternoon, I couldn't find a taxi because of the violence wave that swept Baghdad neighborhoods which pushed the government to announce curfew. In a way or another, I could manage staying in the office in spite of the big pain in my heart. I always think about my son. I miss him so much. I miss hugging him, I missed his sweet kisses on my face, I miss his sweet smile when he sees me, I miss his tears when my wife doesn't allow him to do whatever he wants and I really love his face when I defend him as if he teases his mother. I was planning to tell my boss that I want to go early tomorrow and I know she wouldn't mind at all but it looks that planning for more that one hour is impossible in my country. About less than one hour ago and while I was watching a football match with my colleague, our office manager told us that the government decided to extend the curfew until further notice which means I have to stay another night in the office.

When I heard the news, I started thinking seriously about the most important thing. I started thinking about food, not my food but Iraqis food. I'm really surprised with the way our government thinks because it didn't take in consideration the most important need for the people, the government didn't ever think about food. Iraqi families are locked in their house for the last four days; they didn't store much food because they never expected such a curfew. The food that the families usually store might be enough for two days as a maximum. The markets are empty since the second day of the curfew. It looks that our great government forgot that not all the Iraqis are prime minister or high rank officials or it may believe that Iraqis use the solar power to live. It looks that our politicians never read history; they never realize that hungry stomachs are timed bombs that may explode any moment.

Come on our great politicians, we don't have the money you have, we don't have the power you have and more than that, we have real human hearts not politicians hearts.

Matthew Yglesias: Our SCIRI Friends (Media)

Matthew Yglesias (March 29, 2008) - Our SCIRI Friends (Media): To revisit the five year-old Charles Krauthammer quote from yesterday about SCIRI, I should say that I don't think the point is that Krauthammer was "wrong" about SCIRI. He was, of course, wrong but he's been wronger about many things over the years. Rather, the point of highlighting his changing tune -- and the hawks' general switch on this -- is to underscore the vacuous nature of the hawks' strategic thinking on Iraq.

The fantasy camp theory of the Iraq War in which we were going to install a happy pro-American democracy that led rapidly to a tumbling of Iranian and Syrian (and maybe Saudi!) dominoes was always dumb but it's at least clear why you might find it appealing. But that collapsed into the ashes years ago, and ever since it did folks have been casting about for rationales. We've gotten stuck in an inane debate over whether or not the surge is "working" or whether or not Iraq is "going well" when in reality it's been years since we've had any coherent objectives at all.

Boing Boing's Moderation Policy

Boing Boing's Moderation Policy - Boing Boing: Posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator, March 27, 2008 10:48 AM | permalink (Note: This document is subject to change. What moderation policy isn't?)

Q. Why does Boing Boing have to have a moderator?

A. First answer: Because every general-interest online forum that's worth reading has some kind of moderation system in force.

Second answer: Because four years ago, Boing Boing's first, unmoderated comment system went so septic that it had to be shut down. The Boingers want to never go through that again.

Third answer: Because Boing Boing gets enough traffic to attract non-automated scams.

Q. All the vowels have disappeared from a paragraph I wrote! What's going on?

A. We did it. Someone (a moderator, one of the Boingers) was expressing displeasure at your remarks. The technique is called disemvowelling. It deprecates but does not delete the remark. With work, the disemvowelled text should still be readable.

Q. Something has happened to the link back to my website that I put at the bottom of my comment.

A. There's an answer to this problem: please don't put links in your comments that aren't relevant to the entry. We'll just have to remove them. Instead, put a link to your site in your user profile.

Q. Are you changing people's comments in any other ways?

A. Not really. We'll occasionally fix HTML errors or zap duplicate comments, if we feel like doing it and have the time.

Q. There's an old comment of mine I want you to delete.

A. Drop us a note, if it's really important; but the default answer is "no."

Q. One of my comments has disappeared!

A. There are several possibilities. One is that we may be having technical problems. It never hurts to write and ask. Another possibility is that someone thought your comment would be better gone.

Q. I can't believe that Boing Boing, of all places, would be using censorship. What happened to freedom of speech?

A. Boing Boing is steadfast in its support of your freedom of speech. We believe that you, O Reader, should be able to have (or refuse to have) anything you want on your own website, as long as it doesn't deprive others of their rights. Yay, freedom of speech!

By that same token, freedom of speech also means that the people who write and edit Boing Boing have the right to have (or refuse to have) anything they want on their own website. If one of the things they don't want is a comment that you have posted, they aren't depriving you of your freedom of speech. You're free to put that comment up on your own webpage.

Q. Why can't you just tell everyone to ignore the trolls?

A. Because they can't. Everyone automatically reads the text that's there. If it's nasty or unpleasant, they get a dose of that. If there's too much of it, they stop participating. There's far more internet discourse lost to trollage and casual rudeness than is ever lost to moderators.

Q. Isn't the moderator just enforcing compliance with her own political views?

A. Not at all. You couldn't reconstruct her personal views from a list of the times she's intervened in a discussion. The time she invented disemvowelling, it was so she could deal with a flaming leftist.

Q. Isn't the moderator just enforcing compliance with the Boing Boing party line?

A. There is no Boing Boing party line. The Boingers have varied political opinions.

Q. What's with all the [steampunk, outsider art, papercraft, other Boing Boing obsession]?

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Q. Aiiiiiiieeeeeeeeee! Boing Boing has advertising! Doesn't that mean you've become hopelessly corrupt?

A. You mean, unduly influenced by whatever advertisers are the source of the site's revenue? Don't worry about it. Boing Boing's editorial content is unaffected by its ads.

Q. But--but--those people are giving them money! How can they not be affected?

A. (The moderator speaks solo: "In order for the Boingers to be unduly influenced by who advertises on their site, they'd first have to reliably remember who those advertisers are. Trust me: this is not an issue.")

Q. But you take ads from Microsoft!!! Aren't they the root of all evil?

A. This is rank Manichaeanism. Go lie down with a cool wet cloth on your forehead until you feel better.

Q. The moderator disemvowelled one of my comments, supposedly because I had violated some rule of debate. Doesn't that just mean she doesn't agree with me?

A. No. Online discussions are not formal debates, but the usual rules for what constitutes valid argument and legitimate rebuttal, and who's responsible for proving what, still apply. They are independent of content.

Q. I thought I was being reasonably polite when I got into an argument with Bonzo, but two of my comments got removed entirely, and he just had a couple of paragraphs disemvowelled. Why me? Why not him?

A. There are many possibilities. The biggest one is that you were insufficiently polite. In the heat of an argument, your own remarks are going to seem more justifiable, and Bonzo's arguments are going to seem shabbier and more malicious. This temporary distortion is best addressed by being more polite than you think should be necessary.

Another possibility is that Bonzo has an established history of posting clear, well-informed, apposite, and entertaining comments, whereas you're posting for the first time. Or you're posting for the third time, but the first two times you did it, you posted snarky and unilluminating remarks. Under those circumstances, Bonzo is going to have a lot more credibility with the moderators and editors.

Life is an unending series of auditions. Get used to it.

A possible explanation that's guaranteed to be wrong: we're not going to delete or disemvowel your comments because we simply can't deal with the vast swoop and majesty of your hard-hitting opinions. If we tell you it was due to your behavior, believe us.

Q. One of the people in our comment thread is behaving abominably. Does Boing Boing flame trolls, or just ignore them?

A. Neither. See the little one-eyed icon in the top right-hand corner of messages? That's the lookitthat button. Clicking on it tells the moderator that she should come look at that particular message. Be sure to explain what it was about the message that prompted your action. If you include your name, you may get a thank-you note. You can also use the lookitthat button to point out comments you think are particularly good.

Please don't use the lookitthat button to post comments. The moderator's the only one who'll see them.

Q. It's obvious that you won't tolerate anything but supportive comments from brown-nosers and yes-men--right?

A. I'll venture a guess that you responded to a new entry on Boing Boing by announcing that it was hopelessly lame and boring, and then came back later to discover that your comment had disappeared.

Q. Yes! Why did you remove it?

A. This is another one of those questions that has multiple answers.

First: you didn't explain why it bored you. Without an explanation, announcing that you're bored is neither useful or entertaining. Also, it's a real bringdown for readers who lack confidence in their own opinions.

Second: because frequently the "I'm so bored" thing is just attitudinizing. There's a whole big internet out there, and it's full of people who, if they don't like what they're currently reading, move on and read something else. They don't post about how bored they are just to have something to say.

Third: maybe that entry just isn't your thing. It could be someone else's. Why drag down their conversation?

Q. So we're not allowed to say something's boring?

A. Of course you're allowed. You just have to explain why.

Q. How come the moderator nailed me for a comment that didn't contain any swearing or personal attacks?

A. It's remarkable how many people believe that "you're good as long as you don't swear or launch personal attacks" is a universal rule. We'll tolerate both those things if you do them perfectly. (Few people can manage that. Best not to try.)

Q. What's likely to land me in your bad graces?

A. Since you've asked, here's a nowhere-near-exhaustive list:

1. Spamming. Linkwhoring. Re-posting text you've already posted on a dozen other sites.

2. Making supercilious and unpleasant remarks in a civil liberties thread about how the victim had it coming. This is not to say that victims never have it coming; but there's a species of internet demi-troll that appears to specialize in posting such comments. Try not to look like you're one of them.

3. Making snide comments and insinuations about the editors. That's right out. You don't like one of the editors? Take it up with them in e-mail. If you're going to comment on an entry, talk about the entry.

4. Being nasty to no purpose. (This is the catch-all.)

5. Using unnecessarily exciting language. Making an argument is fine. Making your argument in language guaranteed to make your hearers see red? Bad idea. It practically guarantees that you're going to have a dumb (and therefore boring) argument. And if the argument's not going to be interesting, we don't see the point.

6. Jeering, sneering, condescending, or one-upping when there's been no provocation. Telling people they're naive idiots for caring about whatever-it-is. Like the "I'm bored" pose, it's empty attitudinizing, and it's remarkably unpleasant.

7. Failing to notice that there are other people in the conversation. Posting a remark that's already been made five times and answered six. Coming back and re-posting essentially the same material after a twenty-message thread has discussed your previous comment. Trying to forcibly wrench the conversation onto one of your own pet topics. Posting a stale, canned rant you've posted a dozen times before at other sites. Not coming back to see how others have responded to you.

Why post comments at all, unless you expect to be read? And if you expect to be read, you must know you're part of a conversation. Therefore, you should act like it. Engage with what the other commenters are saying. Read the thread before you add to it.

8. Posting a snotty but otherwise worthless anonymous comment. It's a lot easier to get away with snotty comments if you're a registered user.

9. Dragging in one of those topics that's guaranteed to generate a huge thrash that goes nowhere, like gun control, abortion, or Mac vs. PC vs. Linux. You're only allowed to discuss those if (a.) they're relevant to the entry; and (b.) everyone in the discussion is doing their level best to say something new.

10. This list will undoubtedly get longer.

Q. It's not fair! You've misunderstood me and disemvowelled or removed me because you mis-read what I posted. Can't we talk about this?

A. Sure. If one of your comments is disemvowelled or removed from its thread, you're welcome to write to the moderator.

Q. I can't register or post a comment. Does this mean I've been banned?

A. If you didn't get into some kind of fracas, it's highly unlikely that you've been banned. It's moderately unlikely even if you did. We're probably just having technical problems again. Drop us a note describing what happened.

Q. I was told my comment posting privileges were suspended for a week, but they never came back on. Am I permanently banned?

A. Probably not. If you were given a specific period and it's expired, drop us a note.

Q. What happens if I re-register and come back under another name while I'm suspended?

A. If we catch you, all the comments made by that false identity will be unpublished, and your suspension period will be re-started from the point at which the false identity was caught. It's okay to change your username when you aren't suspended, though we'll look askance at you if you do it too often.

Q. Is it okay for me to have more than one userid at a time?

A. No.

Q. What happens if I use someone else's userid?

A. You mean you use their identity without their say-so in Boing Boing's forums? We throw the book at you.

Matthew Yglesias: Why We Fight

Matthew Yglesias (March 28, 2008) - Why We Fight (Foreign Policy): If you read this Washington Post account of fighting in southern Iraq a couple of things become clear. One is that the United States is deeply involved:

U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.

The other is that nobody in U.S. policymaking circles really thinks we have a dog in this fight:

The U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said that they believe Iran has provided assistance in the past to all three groups -- the Mahdi Army; the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Iraq's largest Shiite party; and forces loyal to the Fadhila Party, which holds the Basra governor's seat. But the officials see the current conflict as a purely internal Iraqi dispute.

Some officials have concluded that Maliki himself is firing "the first salvo in upcoming elections," the administration official said.

Basically, we have our troops, risking their lives and killing people and all for the sake of helping some Iranian-backed militia groups fight some other Iranian-backed militia groups and, yes, the groups we're supporting initiated this battle without clearing it with us. But we need to back them, because George W. Bush has staked his precious credibility on his alliance with Nouri al-Maliki, so if Maliki says American blood and treasure will be expended fighting the Mahdi Army, then so it shall be expended.

Alternatively we could just leave and let this people sort out their own problems.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue (1850)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue (1850): The years 1843-5 were years of industrial and commercial prosperity, a necessary sequel to the almost uninterrupted industrial depression of 1837-42. As is always the case, prosperity very rapidly encouraged speculation. Speculation regularly occurs in periods when overproduction is already in full swing. It provides overproduction with temporary market outlets, while for this very reason precipitating the outbreak of the crisis and increasing its force. The crisis itself first breaks out in the area of speculation; only later does it hit production. What appears to the superficial observer to be the cause of the crisis is not overproduction but excess speculation, but this is itself only a symptom of overproduction. The subsequent disruption of production does not appear as a consequence of its own previous exuberance but merely as a setback caused by the collapse of speculation....

The extension of the English railway system had already begun in 1844 but did not get fully under way until 1845.... The heyday of this speculation was the summer and autumn of 1845. Stock prices rose continuously, and the speculators' profits soon sucked all social classes into the whirlpool. Dukes and earls competed with merchants and manufacturers for the lucrative honour of sitting on the boards of directors of the various companies; members of the House of Commons, the legal profession and the clergy were also represented in large numbers. Anyone who had saved a penny, anyone who had the least credit at his disposal, speculated in railway stocks.... Not enough engineers could be found, and they were paid enormous salaries. Printers, lithographers, bookbinders, paper-merchants and others, who were mobilized to produce prospectuses, plans, maps, etc; furnishing manufacturers who fitted out the mushrooming offices of the countless railway boards and provisional committees — all were paid splendid sums.... Hundreds of companies were promoted without the least chance of success, companies whose promoters themselves never intended any real execution of the schemes, companies whose sole reason for existence was the directors' consumption of the funds deposited and the fraudulent profits obtained from the sale of stocks.

In October 1848 a reaction ensued, soon becoming a total panic....

[T]he whole credit system collapsed at the very moment when the corn prices were at their highest, in April and May 1847, and the money market was completely ruined. The corn speculators nevertheless held out through the fall in prices until 2 August. On this day the Bank raised its lowest discount rate to 5 per cent and, for all bills of exchange over more than two months, to 6 per cent. Immediately a series of most spectacular bankruptcies ensued on the Corn Exchange, headed by that of Mr Robinson, Governor of the Bank of England. In London alone, eight great corn merchants went bankrupt, their total liabilities amounting to more than £1 1/2 million....

We now come to the commercial crisis proper, the monetary crisis. In the first four months of 1847 the general state of trade and industry still seemed to be satisfactory, with the exception of iron production and the cotton industry. Iron production, given an enormous boost by the railway bubble of 1845, suffered proportionately as this outlet for the excess supply of iron contracted.... The bad cotton crop of 1846, the rise in prices for both raw material and finished commodity, and the consequent reduction in consumption, all increased pressure on the industry. In the first few months of 1847 production was cut back considerably throughout Lancashire, and the cotton workers were hit by the crisis.

On 15 April 1847 the Bank of England raised its lowest discount rate for short-term bills to 5 per cent... the reserves of the Banking Department had dropped to £2 1/2 million. The Bank had therefore taken the above measures to stop the drain of gold from its vaults and to replenish its cash reserves.... The Bank's decisions, and the news of the low level of its reserves, immediately produced pressure on the money market and a panic throughout English commerce matched in intensity only by that of 1845. In the last week of April and the first four days of May almost all credit transactions were paralysed.... A few months later, however, at the beginning of August, the bankruptcies mentioned above occurred in the corn trade. Lasting until September, they were hardly over when the general commercial crisis broke out with concentrated force, particularly in the East Indian, West Indian and Mauritian trade. The crisis broke simultaneously in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. During September twenty concerns were ruined in London alone, their total liabilities amounting to between £9 and £10 million. 'There were uprootings of commercial dynasties in England not less striking than the fall of those political houses of which we have lately heard so much,' said Disraeli on 30 August 1848 in the House of Commons....

This series of bankruptcies, unprecedented in the history of commerce, was caused by general over-speculation and the resulting excess import of colonial produce.... On 1 October the Bank raised its lowest discount rate for short-term bills to 5 1/2 per cent, and declared at the same time that it would henceforth make no more advances against government stocks of any kind. The joint stock banks and private bankers were now no longer able to withstand the pressure. The Royal Bank of Liverpool, the Liverpool Banking Company, the North and South Wales Bank, the Newcastle Union Joint Stock Bank and others were ruined, one after the other, within a few days.... The crisis reached its peak between 22 and 25 October, when all commercial transactions had come to a standstill. A deputation from the City then brought about a suspension of the Bank Act of 1844, which had been the fruit of the deceased Sir Robert Peel's sagacity. With this suspension, the division of the Bank of England into two completely independent departments with separate cash reserves instantly came to an end; another few days of the old arrangement and the Banking Department would have been forced into bankruptcy while £6 million in gold lay stored in the Issue Department....

[I]t is certain that the commercial crisis contributed far more to the revolution of 1848 than the revolution to the commercial crisis. Between March and May England enjoyed direct advantages from the revolution, which supplied her with a great deal of continental capital. From this moment on the crisis can be regarded as over in England; there was an improvement in all branches of business and the new industrial cycle began with a decided movement towards prosperity. How little the continental revolution held back the industrial and commercial boom in England can be seen from the fact that the amount of cotton manufactured here rose from 475 million lb. in 1847 to 713 million lb. in 1848.

In England this renewed prosperity developed visibly during 1848, 1849 and 1850. For the eight months January-August, England's total exports amounted to £31,633,214 in 1848; £39,263,322 in 1849 and £43,851,568 in 1850. In addition to this considerable improvement, manifest in all branches of business with the exception of iron production, rich harvests were gathered everywhere during these three years. The average price of wheat in 1848-50 was 36s. per quarter in England, 32s. in France. This period of prosperity is characterized by the fact that three major outlets for speculation were blocked. Railway production had been reduced to the slow development of a normal branch of industry, corn offered no opportunities due to a series of good harvests, and, as a result of the revolution, government stocks had lost the reliable character without which large speculative transactions in securities are not possible. During every period of prosperity capital accumulates. On the one hand increased production generates new capital; on the other, capital which was available but idle during the crisis is released from its inactivity and unloaded onto the market. With the lack of speculative outlets this additional capital was forced during these years to flow into actual industry, thus increasing production even more rapidly. How apparent this is in England, without anyone being able to explain it, is demonstrated by this naive statement in the Economist of 19 October 1850:

It is remarked that the present prosperity differs from that of former periods within recollection, in all of which there was some baseless speculation exciting hopes that were destined not to be realized. At one time it was foreign mines, at another more railways than could be conveniently made in half a century. Even when such speculations were well founded, they contemplated a realization of income, from raising metals or creating new conveniences, at the end of a considerable period, and awarded no immediate reward. But at present our prosperity is founded on the production of things immediately useful, and that go into consumption nearly as fast as they are brought to market, returning to the producers a fair remuneration and stimulating more production...

Cotton manufacturing, the dominant branch of industry, provides the most striking proof of the extent to which industrial production has increased in 1848 and 1849. The United States cotton crop of 1849 produced a higher yield than in any previous year, amounting to 2 3/4 million bales, or about 1,200 million lb. The expansion of the cotton industry has kept pace with this increase in imports to such an extent that at the end of 1849 stocks were lower than ever before, even after the years of the crop failures. In 1849 over 775 million lb. of cotton were spun, as against 721 million lb. in 1845, the year of the greatest prosperity hitherto. The expansion of the cotton industry is further shown by the great rise in cotton prices (55 per cent) resulting from a relatively minor loss in the 1850 crop. At least the same progress can be seen in all other branches, such as the spinning and weaving of silk, shoddy and linen. Exports in these industries have risen so considerably, particularly in 1850, that they have produced a large increase in the total export figures for the first eight months of this year (£12 million above the corresponding figure for 1848, £4 million above that for 1849), even though in 1850 the 294 export of cotton products has dropped noticeably as a result of the bad cotton crop. In spite of the considerable increase in wool prices, which seems to have been caused by speculation in 1849, but which has now levelled out, the woollen industry has expanded continuously, and new looms are continually being brought into operation. The export of linen textiles in 1844, the highest previously, amounted to 91 million yards, at a value of over £2,800,000, while in 1849 it reached 107 million yards at a value of over £3,000,000...

Julia Sweeney: Easter Expelled

Julia Sweeney: It%u2019s Easter. Mulan got a basket with candy and we went on an Easter egg hunt. Next year Mulan will be too old for it %u2013 many of her friends parents who have kids just a wee bit older than Mulan have given up on it, and I suspect that next year will be her last with this sort of thing. But it does feel like Spring! Eggs and hotter whether. Grills and outdoor heaters (Michael is putting one together as I type%u2026)

Last night Michael and I watched all the trailers for %u201CExpelled,%u201D the anti-evolution, intelligent design movie that Ben Stein made, or appears to have made, that%u2019s opening in movie theaters on April 18th. I am just speechless.

Well, sort of.

What it made me feel most of all wasn%u2019t anger, it wasn%u2019t defeat or fear either. It was just this overwhelming tiredness. I feel so weary. It made me want to sleep and just try to get away from people who want to debate this topic at all.

To be honest, this shouldn%u2019t even be something that is even being debated. It only continues to be in the public discourse at all because of the lack of sophisticated science education amongst the general public, coupled with groups who have a vested interest in keeping people confused on these matters, mixed with a darker push from elected officials (and some judges and those in power, funded by the more conservative religious groups) who use issues like this to rile people up and make the more complicated, truer view of life%u2019s nature and origins seem as though it%u2019s a debate between those who are moral and good and those who are cruel and heartless. So that when people skim the issue it appears as though those people (on the side of God) are the moral and just ones. They%u2019re nicer. Cause, y%u2019know, they believe in God. They are %u201Copen%u201D to a God implanting and guiding life to it%u2019s crowning glory, human beings! ARGH.

And I just%u2026 oh jeez.

Ben Stein once did a Groundling show, an improv show, that I was a part of. I found him to be spectacularly ill-informed and narcissistic and weirdly devoted to his schtick and worst of all, hacky. He didn%u2019t listen to his fellow performers and played everything outward to his friends in the audience who laughed (fake, forced) at every single thing he did. When he became known as a %u201Cthinker%u201D %u2013 when his public persona became the %u201Csmart guy%u201D I was astounded. So this type of film does not come as any surprise.

I can%u2019t listen to his voice. I can%u2019t stand how he draws out his vowels in that fake-professorial way. He%u2019s a cartoon character, for God%u2019s sake.

But to a lot of people he will appear to make sense. His style will have the stamp of truthfulness to it (because his voice sounds so%u2026 um%u2026 smart!) and it will also make people feel better about what they already believe and what has made them feel comfortable their whole lives. And yet, if his mission is realized, which is to change education practice so that evolution isn%u2019t taught properly, it will only end up handicapping our kids in a world who is %u2013 generally %u2013 moving towards a greater understanding of science which can lead to advances in technology which can lead to %u2013 well, it can lead to prosperity among other things. So they want evolution out, and handicapping their kids science education in, and yet they want a better and brighter future for their kids.

I hope this movie dies a horrible and embarrassing death.

%u201CWhat The Bleep Do We Know?%u201D gave some people a cheap and temporary spiritual blast of hot air and now this movie will give some people a cheap reason to be self-righteous in the name of science when they are being anything BUT. ARGH.

Well, I guess I am a little angry.

Anyhoo %u2013 HAPPY EASTER!

Felix Salmon: Ben Stein Watch: March 23, 2008

Ben Stein Watch: March 23, 2008 - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com: Now that I've left the desert and I have proper internet access rather than trying to update the blog from my iPhone, I can finally get around to Ben Stein's NYT column from Sunday. Given that I'm still on holiday, though, I'll allow myself a slightly broader remit this time round. I'll explain just how Stein is wrong, as usual. But I also want to ponder Stein's bigger shtick, as well as my own.

Stein has two main points in this column. The first is merely wrong: he says that as far as we know "we are not in a recession," and that "as a matter of definition, we simply cannot be in one yet". This is simply false. Stein is correct that a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and that growth in the fourth quarter was positive. But that doesn't mean we can't be in a recession now: we're in the first quarter, and if both Q1 and Q2 growth are negative, then the recession will have started in Q1. Alternatively, if Q4 growth is revised downwards into negative territory, then a recession could have started as early as Q4. We don't know for sure, but it just makes no logical sense to move from "we don't know whether X" to "therefore not X". (Would that Stein felt the same way about the existence of God: he might not have made the world suffer through his latest film.)

Stein's second point is more insidious. It, too, is wrong: he complains, essentially, about some shadowy cabal of investment bankers and hedge-fund managers who between them control so much money that they can move the market and bring down entire financial institutions on little more than a whim. Why is the market melting down now? He's willing to go out on a limb:

The new part is the hedge funds and the changing of Wall Street from a financing entity to a market manipulation entity. The new part is hedge funds with (supposedly) $1.5 trillion in capital, immense hedge funds within banks and investment banks. The new part is that they have so much money and so much selling power that they can do what capitalists really want and love to do: to make money not by betting on the markets, but by controlling the markets, by putting so much sell side (and occasionally buy side) firepower in play that they know they will move the markets. This takes all that annoying uncertainty out of it.

The task of the hedge funds is to find a weak spot in the market, and to put so much pressure on it that they can move it down, scare other players into selling (with the endless help of guileless journalists), wreak havoc with the markets' indexes and then create that much more selling. Once the process starts rolling, it's shooting fish in a barrel.

Just think of what the short sellers did to Bear Stearns.

Stein has been here before, but back then he was a bit vaguer. Now he's blaming the demise of Bear Stearns on "short sellers", which is just ridiculous. There was a run on the bank, and yes hedge funds were involved. But the number of short sellers was tiny: if a bank suffers a run, you don't need short sellers for the stock to collapse.

Stein simply refuses to believe that anybody is really worried; refuses to countenance that the fears in the market are genuine as opposed to manufactured by secretive billionaires for the purpose of their further enrichment. At least he's consistent. His new film is premised largely on a repudiation of Occam's Razor: the basic verities of Darwinism must, he thinks, be treated equally with any unfalsifiable crackpot theory which necessitates all manner of imaginable-yet-unobserved intervention by an entity of inhuman power.

When it comes to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Stein does something almost identical. The obvious and true narrative is one of fear: if a brokerage is looking after your assets, and there's some small chance that the brokerage in question is going to go bust, then it's perfectly rational to move those assets elsewhere. If everybody does that at once, the brokerage will go bust.

The problem for Stein is that in a fear narrative there's no one really to blame. Stein feels the need to point fingers, and in return that means he needs a greed narrative instead. And there's only one way to construct a greed narrative out of falling markets: short sellers! Never mind that the main role of secretive billionaires in this story was to lose money (Joe Lewis): Stein's convinced that there are some other even more secretive billionaires, with even more money, who were shorting Bear's stock and making a fortune. And the great thing about this theory - just like any conspiracy theory, and just like Intelligent Design - is that it's impossible to disprove.

But the unfalsifiability of conspiracy theories is always just a means to an end - the end being the uncovering of said conspiracy, which is one in which a small group of powerful men stays rich and powerful, even if that means destroying the hopes and dreams of ordinary people. In other words, conspiracy theories are by their very nature populist: they thrive on blaming powerful others for the real or imagined travails affecting the masses. In that sense they're a repudiation of the meritocratic American Dream. You thought you believed in science, or in fair and efficient markets? More fool you for being hoodwinked!

And it's largely for that reason that I believe Stein has no place in the august pages of the New York Times. It's not only that he's wrong; it's also that he's anti-enlightenment, in a publication whose first purpose is to bring truth to its readers. Stein's bit about the "guileless journalists" is a regular feature of his column: he uses his NYT real estate regularly to paint the NYT itself, along with other media outlets, as being but a pawn of the powerful. And again he does so not in any falsifiable way: he's much happier using insinuation and innuendo to tap into the inchoate fears of the poor that they're being taken advantage of. And that's something which really doesn't belong in the business section of a paper desperately trying to be taken seriously by financial professionals.

Which brings me to my last post - the one from the iPhone. Last week, I posted a blog entry with the headline "Why It's Safe to Bet Against Joe Lewis", in which I said that it was a good idea to bet that Bear Stearns stock was going to fall. I concluded:

I see only one conceivable way in which Bear gets taken over for much more than $2 a share (or a bit more than that now, as the offer is in stock, and JP Morgan's stock has risen since the offer was made). And that's if Jamie Dimon unilaterally decides to raise his offer, deciding that spending a couple of hundred million dollars more on the acquisition is worth it if it avoids months of legal headaches. And Dimon's said quite explicitly that he won't do that. In this deal, Dimon's the winner, and Lewis is the loser. If you want to bet on the loser, feel free. But don't expect to make any money doing so.

As we all know, the following weekend Jamie Dimon decided to unilaterally raise his offer, and I put up a short and mildly snarky iPhone post saying that I regretted the error. But in truth I don't regret anything. I'm a blogger, not a hedge-fund manager or the editor of an investment newsletter. I make no bets in the markets, and I lay no claim to "alpha". All I do is call things as I see them. If that's valuable to you, great. But one thing I'm quite proud of is that sometimes I'm going to be right and sometimes I'm going to be wrong, and most of the time it's going to be very easy to tell the difference. I've been wrong about many things in the past; hell, in the MBS market alone I've been wrong many times over. When I'm wrong, I try to learn from my mistakes, and you can't do that without admitting your mistakes in the first place.

Every so often I get comments on this blog saying that I'm an idiot because something I said has turned out to be wrong. But that just doesn't make sense to me. The real idiots, to me, are people like Ben Stein. Stein makes factual errors, but that doesn't make him an idiot. What makes him an idiot is his evident belief in his own infallibility, to the point at which he clearly doesn't allow the NYT's editors to do even a cursory fact-checking run over his copy before it's published. And what makes him more of an idiot is his steadfast refusal to engage with his critics - indeed, he will even stoop to outright deception in order to avoid having any kind of real debate.

Maybe the reason I feel so strongly about Stein is that we are both, in our own ways, opinion journalists. Stein is of the "here's my opinion" school; I, on the other hand, thrive on debate. Every day I link to something I disagree with, and tease out exactly where the areas of disagreement are and why I think the other person is wrong. The end result, for the reader, is something much richer and more nuanced, especially when all the people I'm linking to are busy linking away themselves.

With surprising frequency, differences in the blogosphere end up being settled by events. On the question of Wall Street bonuses I was right and Jesse Eisinger was wrong; on the question of the Bear Stearns share price I was wrong and Jim Ledbetter was right. In both cases, the debate itself was illuminating. The problem with Ben Stein is that he doesn't listen, he doesn't debate; instead, he simply panders. It's an attitude which might go down well among fundamentalist Christians, but it's not one which belongs in the New York Times.

Gershom Gorenberg: The Strange Case of Robert Malley | The American Prospect

The Strange Case of Robert Malley | The American Prospect: Of all the recent efforts to smear Barack Obama, none strikes me as stranger than the claims that one of his informal advisers on foreign affairs, Robert Malley, is anti-Israel. This, in turn, is supposed to prove that as president, Obama is liable to institute dangerous changes in U.S. policy toward Israel.

As a campaign trope, the calumny may have begun with Ed Lasky, news editor of the right-wing Web site The American Thinker, who posted a fervid attack on Malley in January. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has taken time off from its hawkish media-bashing to post a blast at Malley on its Web site. Journalists regularly speculate on whether the Malley connection will hurt Obama among Jewish voters, though there's no evidence of that. Meanwhile, Malley's diplomatic colleagues -- including Sandy Berger, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk -- have issued an open letter defending him.

There's more at work here than the usual, nearly boring, attempts to slime a liberal candidate as anti-Israel for the "sin" of supporting what Israel needs most -- determined diplomatic efforts to achieve peace. Lurking in the background is another of the battles over how Israel-Palestinian history is told. In that fight, the original furious critic of Barack Obama's adviser is former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. There's also a lesson about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy: Besides settling the practical questions, it requires resolving the conflicting narratives about the past. To approach this task, the next president will need not just hard work but a gift with rhetoric, with words.

The Malley story actually goes back to 2001, when the former Clinton foreign-policy staffer began writing about what went wrong at the Camp David summit the summer before. First in The New York Times, then in a joint article with Hussein Agha in The New York Review of Books, Malley described mistakes made by Israel and the United States, not just by the Palestinians, that led to the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

As special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, Malley was part of the American negotiating team at Camp David. Today he is the Middle East director for the International Crisis Group and one of many informal advisers to the Obama campaign. Though it should not be necessary to mention this, he is Jewish. Agha, his frequent co-author, is an expert on Palestinian affairs, today at Oxford.

As Malley wrote in the Times, by 2001 the accepted story of the long summit was that "Camp David is said to have been a test that Mr. Barak passed and Mr. Arafat failed." While rejecting that simplistic account, he and Agha did not spare criticism of the Palestinian side. "The Palestinians' principal failing is that they were unable either to say yes to the American ideas or to present a cogent and specific counterproposal of their own," they wrote in their detailed New York Review article. Even more telling is their assertion that for the Palestinians "Oslo ... was not about negotiating peace terms but terms of surrender." This was hardly an attitude likely to lead to creative diplomacy.

But Malley and Agha also described the mistakes of Clinton and, particularly, of Barak. As prime minister, Barak first tried to negotiate with Syria, treating the Palestinians as second priority. More concerned with not upsetting Israeli settlers than with addressing Palestinian concerns, he allowed rapid settlement construction to continue. He prevented any progress in preliminary negotiations, insisting that a peace deal would have to be put together at the conclusive summit. To the Palestinians, these moves radiated arrogance and were an attempt to force them into a corner. Once at Camp David, Barak did go beyond what Israel had offered earlier yet kept his position ambiguous. The Palestinians did make concessions, but neither side went far enough to bridge the chasm between their positions. As for Clinton, his errors began with pushing Arafat into an ill-prepared summit.

No one answered Malley with more outrage than Barak. Barak, once intent on making peace, was trying to salvage his own reputation after the collapse of the process and of his premiership. To do that, he was willing to reinforce a narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has deep resonance for many Israelis and Diaspora Jews -- but that warps history, harms peace efforts, and ultimately hurts Israel itself.

Barak delivered his response to Malley and Agha in The New York Review of Books nearly a year later, in an interview with Benny Morris. This in itself was deeply ironic: Among Israeli historians, Morris has been the most insistent that interviews are to be mistrusted, that history can only be constructed through documents. In Morris' description, "Barak continuously shifts between charging Arafat with 'lacking the character or will' to make a historic compromise ... and accusing him of secretly planning Israel's demise." Arafat's plan, he said, was to establish a state only as a step toward gaining all of Palestine. As Morris hints, this is indeed a contradiction, because if Arafat had really regarded any deal as temporary, he could have settled for less.

Barak also asserted an essentialist cultural divide that made agreement impossible: The Palestinians "are products of a culture in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture," he told Morris. To explain why he had not succeeded, he argued that success was impossible -- a description that offered much comfort to hawks who had once opposed him.

It will be many years before documents are available to reconstruct what happened at Camp David. In the meantime, Malley and Agha's version rings true for several reasons. Diplomacy is complex, rife with misunderstandings. New York Times correspondent Deborah Sontag, in an extensively researched article, reached a similar picture (also enraging Barak).

My own journalistic experience with Barak suggests that he approached diplomacy belligerently. I interviewed him for The New Republic in 1997, just after he was chosen as leader of the Labor party. When I put my tape recorder down on his desk at the start of the conversation, a Barak aide demonstratively put down another recorder, as if to tell me: "We're keeping track of you." I've never met that gesture of suspicion from any other politician. In the interview, he compared peace negotiations to Greco-Roman wrestling -- "a form of struggle with agreed rules." It makes more sense to accept Barak's a priori description of his negotiating philosophy than his ex post facto explanations. Going to Camp David, Barak was brave in seeking an agreement but was also tragically unsuited by temperament to achieve what he wanted.

What's interesting is how tenaciously Barak's version has been accepted by many supporters of Israel. The reason, I'd suggest, can be found in a superb recent book by Bryn Mawr political scientist Marc Howard Ross, Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflicts. (Disclosure: Ross and I have cooperated professionally in the past, and I'm in his acknowledgments.) Ross doesn't deal specifically with Camp David. But he describes the historical narratives that ethnic groups build to explain their past, their present, and their relation to their opponents. The narratives are "compelling, coherent" and link "specific events to that group's general understandings." They are also selective and inaccurate. Disagreement with a group's memory is often perceived as an attack on its identity, if not its existence.

The most common versions of the Israeli and Palestinian narrative share this: Each side perceives the other as wanting to push it out of the land through both aggression and artifice. Those stories helped foil the talks at Camp David. They also shape the post mortems. The story told by Barak, erstwhile peacemaker, reinforces the old story of conflict. Malley's account -- a careful, scholarly telling by a diplomat committed to Israel's future -- is met with ferocious emotion by those who misperceive it as an assault on Israel's very existence. The reaction becomes another obstacle to understanding of the past and to future compromise.

There's two implications here: Precisely because he is committed to Israel's well-being, Barack Obama will do well to listen to Robert Malley's analysis of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. But if he has the opportunity, beginning next January, to renew diplomatic efforts, he will need to do more than reconcile conflicting interests. He will have to look for ways to reconcile the conflicting stories. The right choice of words will be critical. It's said that Obama has some skill in that realm.

Reidar Visser: The Enigmatic Second Battle of Basra

The Enigmatic Second Battle of Basra: On the surface, the story may look plausible enough. A provincial city rich in oil degenerates into mafia-style conditions affecting the security of citizens as well as the national oil revenue; the central government intervenes to clean up. This is how many in the media have been reporting the latest clashes between government forces and militiamen in Basra: the Maliki government has launched a security operation with the single aim of getting rid of unruly militias. Pundits with ties to the Bush administration have added that these are essential "preparations" for this autumn's provincial elections, or moves to forestall Iranian influence in Basra, or both.

But on closer inspection, there are problems in these accounts. Perhaps most importantly, there is a discrepancy between the description of Basra as a city ruled by militias (in the plural) -- which is doubtless correct -- and the battlefield facts of the ongoing operations which seem to target only one of these militia groups, the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Surely, if the aim was to make Basra a safer place, it would have been logical to do something to also stem the influence of the other militias loyal to the local competitors of the Sadrists, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), as well as the armed groups allied to the Fadila party (which have dominated the oil protection services for a long time). But so far, only Sadrists have complained about attacks by government forces.

Others may suggest that rather than having to do with the rule of law, this is part of a wider operation in which Maliki in alliance with ISCI are doing their best to marginalize their political enemies locally -- in preparation for local elections in October 2008, or with a view to dominate the process of forming federal entities (which could start next month, in April). Maybe it has been supported by Washington, as compensation for the bitter pill which Dick Cheney brought with him in the shape of a demand for early provincial elections? But whereas that interpretation certainly seemed valid during the first battle of Basra (when Maliki arrived in Basra in late May 2006 and enforced a new security regime that was applauded by ISCI and denounced by Fadila), it does not quite make sense today.

Firstly, if the motive was the provincial elections or the federalism question, the target should have been Fadila and not the Sadrists. Basra is an exceedingly complex city (Shiite factions, Shaykhis, Christians, secularists, Sunnis, tribal groups etc.), and the overall electoral potential of the Sadrists there is probably considerably less than what many analysts have predicted. In the federalism question, the Sadrists are entirely on the sidelines, with the director of the Sadrist office in the city recently complaining that he was being kept in the dark about the project to make Basra a stand-alone federal unit (as propagated by Fadila and some of the secular leaders in the city in a scheme that challenges ISCI's vision of a single Shiite federal entity).

Secondly, there have been too many recent instances of conflict between Maliki and ISCI on these issues for that interpretation to make perfect sense. Increasingly, Maliki has associated himself with a more centralist current in Iraqi parliamentary politics, sometimes challenging ISCI directly, as seems to have happened during the process of adopting a law for the existing (non-federated) governorates. Whereas ISCI since early 2008 has been more outspoken in its attack on any interference by the central government in local affairs (much on the Kurdish pattern), Maliki has often defended the vision of a reasonably coherent and potent central government. In early March, ISCI demonstrators criticised Maliki's two security chiefs in Basra, General Mohan al-Firayji and Abd al-Jalil Khalaf, the police commander.

A less obvious explanation that may nevertheless be worth pursuing is Nuri al-Maliki's attempts to build an independent power base in the security services, to bolster his stature as prime minister (which ISCI repeatedly has attacked), and to compensate for his Daawa party's lack of strong militias. While the media over the last days have reported disagreements between Maliki and his two top security officials in Basra (and even suggested their imminent dismissal), and despite the fact that top brass commanders from Baghdad are now in charge of operations, it may be more significant that for several weeks, both General Mohan and Khalaf (the police chief) have been talking about a forthcoming crackdown on militias (and on some occasions have singled out the Sadrists for criticism.) Prior to the current manoeuvres (codenamed "the attack of the knights" or sawlat al-fursan) there were more limited operations against Mahdist followers of Ahmad al-Hasan in Basra back in January. Success in this kind of moves against internal Shiite enemies could conceivably make Maliki more immune against challenges to his premiership from ISCI (and also an attractive partner in other governorates where the Sadrists are a more formidable challenge), but it does not resolve the contradiction between his own centralism (where the Sadrists would be a logical partner) and the decentralism of ISCI. Also, the conciliatory statements by several Sadrist parliamentarians and directors of the provincial Sadrist offices in the first part of 2008 suggested that many of them would prefer politics to battlefield; it seems like a miscalculation by Maliki to spurn these overtures.

Still, there are probably few spots on this planet where the search for mono-causality is more futile than Basra. One key player that has so far refrained from showing its hand is Fadila, which controls the governor position. Back in 2007 the party frequently criticised Maliki's security operatives in Basra, at one point even signalling reluctance to the prospect of a handover from the British to the Iraqi forces. (The party may have feared that Maliki's attempt to oust them from positions of power locally -- an attempt that was also supported by ISCI -- would come to fruition as soon as the British forces were gone.) But then, after the December 2007 handover to Iraqi control and a subsequent "pact" between Basra's main political parties, the surface of local politics turned remarkably calm for a while. In January 2008, Fadila publicly supported the crackdown on the Mahdists, but the party has made no statement yet on the recent operations (although it is reported that the Basra governor, Muhammad al-Waili, has recently met with Maliki) and very recently reiterated its preference for a non-sectarian form of small-scale federalism.

Perhaps the most useful approach is to compare the narratives of the parties involved. Maliki says this is a clampdown on illegal militias involved in "oil smuggling". ISCI also highlights oil smuggling and expresses support for "the state". The British and the Americans seem to agree with this (even if it is truly risky to engage in this sort of thing on the eve of the Petraeus/Crocker hearings next month). The Sadrists complain about highhandedness by a government allied to "the occupation". This could all suggest that Maliki and ISCI -- fundamental ideological tensions notwithstanding -- have temporarily agreed to disagree about the question of federalism and instead resolved that the Sadrists are their common enemy. But until Fadila speaks, we will not know the true significance of the second battle of Basra, what the implications are for the local balance of power, and what this in turn means in terms of the impact on the federalism issue and the question of Iranian influence.

James Fallows: God Bless Mike Huckabee

James Fallows (March 20, 2008) - God Bless Mike Huckabee: Two people have now elevated themselves thanks to Rev. Wright and his tirades.

One, of course, is Barack Obama.

The other is Mike Huckabee, who (as I see via Andrew Sullivan and others) dared speak as a human being rather than as an on-message apparatchik in his comments about Obama and Wright. More specifically, he spoke as a "hate the sin, love the sinner" Christian, as a preacher who has delivered extemporized sermons of his own, and as a white product of the segregated South who did not blind himself to how that world would look if he were black. Consider and be in awe of this:

And one other thing I think we've gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say "That's a terrible statement!"...I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told "you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus..."

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Actual honest and empathetic discussion about race...! We've come to expect that presidential campaigns will be the equivalent of World War I trench slaughter, in which there is a "winner" at the Somme but really everyone loses and it's a matter of who is farthest from being bled dry at the end. But the idea of actual discourse about real issues -- it would be nice to think that it could happen.

It was a moment like this that first drew John McCain to my attention as a politician, nearly 30 years ago.

In the bleak years just after the Vietnam war, when the tensions that would later resurface in bitter fights about John Kerry's wartime record -- and Bill Clinton's, George W. Bush's, Dick Cheney's, Dan Quayle's -- were at their rawest and most visceral, McCain played a surprising political role. He was the most inclusive and least embittered of hawks, when dealing with doves who had opposed the war in which he had paid such a price. Later he led efforts toward reconciliation between Vietnam and the United States. And when the Swiftboaters of 2004 began running their slimy ads against John Kerry, McCain was there to "deplore" the "dishonest and dishonorable" attacks, something roughly equivalent to what Mike Huckabee has just done.

John McCain probably didn't vote for John Kerry that year; Mike Huckabee is probably not going to vote for Obama this year; I am probably not going to vote for McCain. But stands like theirs, and Obama's, are glimmers of hope.

Thoreau: A Much Simpler Indictment of the Media

Thoreau: A Much Simpler Indictment of the Media: The crapitude of our elite media has been an important theme on this blog this week. First I offered that it%u2019s really time for the media to stop acting as though some stuff is debatable. Then Jim wrote a post on Iraq that is so brilliant that every second that passes without a media outlet picking it up is a stunning proof of how badly the media reeks.

But I'd like to offer a much simpler proof of how much the media sucks, since (1) my argument that the media should not treat certain things as debatable sends us on a slippery slope to intolerance and closed-mindedness and (2) while Jim's brilliance is self-evidence, we must at least pretend to have some modicum of modesty on his greatness, and not always insist that every omission of his writings is a mortal sin of omission.

So my argument against the media is this: If they had an ounce of BS detector they would stop reporting that the number 3 guy in Al Qaeda is killed. At some point they'd realize that not every single Arab ever killed by the US is the number 3 guy in Al Qaeda. This is a much more obvious error on their part. Those who want to can argue that it still makes sense to bring Iraq war advocates on TV to debate, on the grounds that it is a grave policy matter and a position still supported in high places, so we need to hear the arguments if for no other reason than to better refute them. I disagree, but, yeah, OK.

However, such contentions rest on the notion that the media's fundamental flaw is excessive fairness. (Excess virtue must be a heavy burden to bear, poor things.) OTOH, no serious person can really believe that Al Qaeda's number 3 guys are more numerous than Spinal Tap's drummers. If the media was really just bending over backwards to be unreasonably fair they would solicit quotes from skeptics rather than just repeating the Pentagon's press releases. The fact that they never bother to solicit a skeptical comment when the Pentagon claims obvious bullshit, but treat even the most heinous policies and obvious mistakes as debatable matters rather than blatant crimes shows just how deep the rot goes.

Mark Thoma Directs Us to Richard Green: We Are Not There Yet"

Richard Green: "We Are Not There Yet": Micky Kaus and Bill Kristol want us all to shut-up about race, by Richard Green: Kristol, in fact, "cringes" that Obama brought up the subject. But while my fellow white guys Kaus and Kristol (perhaps we need to find a third K?) think it is time to get over race, the problem is that many white people have yet to do so. Consequently, the best empirical evidence shows that while there is far less discrimination now than there was in the past, discrimination remains substantial, and arises from prejudice.

Here in an abstract from Zao, Ondrich and Yinger (2006):

This study examines racial and ethnic discrimination in discrete choices by real estate brokers using national audit data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study. It uses a fixed-effects logit model to estimate the probability that discrimination occurs and to study the causes of discrimination. The data make it possible to control for auditors%u2019' actual demographic and socioeconomic characteristics and characteristics assigned for the purposes of the audit. The study finds that discrimination remains strong but has declined in both the scope and incidence since 1989. The estimations also identify both brokers' prejudice and white customers' prejudice as causes of discrimination.

Before any of us white folks who have never suffered meaningful discrimination or prejudice, or who have never even suffered the little indignities of being stopped by the police for no reason, or been followed by a security guard in a store, or been looked at suspiciously or altogether avoided on the street, tell the world that we don't need to talk about or think about race anymore, perhaps we need to try to walk in the shoes of someone who has suffered all these things.

Things are getting better. All I have to do is see how kids behave at my daughters' high school to know so; who knows, by the time my generation is dead, race may no longer be a problem. But we are not there yet. We are not even close. I think Obama's speech nailed where we are with remarkable precision.

Fareed Zakaria: Stuck in the Iraq Loop

a href="http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/articles.html">Stuck in the Iraq Loop by Fareed Zakaria: There is a paradox in the current situation in Iraq. We are told that the surge has worked brilliantly and violence is way down. And yet the plan to reduce troop levels--which was at the heart of the original surge strategy--must be postponed or all hell will once again break loose. Making sense of this paradox is critical. Because in certain crucial ways things are not improving in Iraq, and unless they start improving soon, the United States faces the awful prospect of an unending peacekeeping operation....

In a brilliant and much-circulated essay written in August 2007, "Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt," David Kilcullen, a veteran Australian officer who advised Gen. David Petraeus during the early days of the surge, wrote, "Our dilemma in Iraq is, and always has been, finding a way to create a sustainable security architecture that does not require 'Coalition-in-the-loop,' thereby allowing Iraq to stabilize and the Coalition to disengage in favorable circumstances." We have achieved some security in Iraq, though even this should not be overstated. (Violence is still at 2005 levels, which were pretty gruesome.) But we have not built a sustainable security architecture.

How does one create a self-sustaining process that leads to stability? Do we need more troops? Longer rotations? Kilcullen points in a different direction: "Taking the Coalition out of the loop and into 'overwatch' requires balancing competing armed interest groups at the national and local level." In other words, we need to help forge a political bargain by which Iraq's various groups agree to live together and not dominate one another. "These [groups] are currently not in balance," Kilcullen wrote, "due in part to the sectarian biases of certain players and institutions of the new Iraqi state, which promotes a belief by Sunnis that they will be the permanent victims of the new Iraq. This belief creates space for terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda in Iraq, and these groups in turn drive a cycle of violence that keeps Iraq unstable and prevents us from disengaging."

Watching the recent spike in suicide bombings, one has to wonder if we are watching precisely that cycle start up again. The sectarian tensions in Iraq have not improved much. The Sunni militias--who switched sides over the past six months%--have developed some trust for the United States but little for the Iraqi Army. Reports suggest that as the Iraqi Army gets stronger and better trained, and gets more expensive weapons... the latter are becoming more worried that they have made a bad decision. In the crucial province of Diyala last week, thousands of members of "Concerned Local Citizens" groups (CLCs) stopped working in protest over the sectarian activities of the local police force and its chief. U.S. officers have kept promising that a significant number of CLC members would be given jobs in the regular Army and police. That does not appear to be happening anywhere near as fast as it should. At the same time, the new provincial elections that Sunnis and many Shiite groups have demanded for years have once again been delayed. Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S. forces in Anbar province, publicly warned that if these polls were not held as promised by Oct. 1, it could mean more violence.

There has been some positive news reported in the past few weeks. On closer examination, it is more hype than reality. Two of the laws passed, one reversing de-Baathification and the other offering a limited amnesty to former insurgents, have been worded in such a way that much will depend on how they are implemented--by the Shiite government. The reason these assurances were written into law in binding terms was, of course, that Sunnis place so little trust in the good will and fairness of that government. When Baghdad promises to administer oil revenue wisely and fairly, though there is no law telling it precisely what to do, its claims are met with mistrust and unease by the Sunnis and the Kurds.

A Pentagon report to Congress last week admitted that "all four components of the hydrocarbon law are stalled." The law on provincial elections passed but was then vetoed by the presidency council, specifically by Shiite Vice President Adel Abdel Mehdi, whose party now runs most of southern Iraq and does not wish to take its chances in new elections. And it's worth noting that the laws that passed did so only after months of intense wrangling, which produced an 82-82 tie that was broken by the Sunni speaker of Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani. Finally, all these measures I've mentioned add up to only three or four of the 18 benchmarks set out by the Maliki government and the Bush administration to judge their own progress.

It's possible that the uptick in violence, the tensions in Diyala and other such signs are just twists and turns in Iraq's troubled path. That is probably the way they will be read in the current atmosphere of self-congratulation in Washington. But they might also be signs that the architects of the surge--chiefly General Petraeus--were right all along when they said that the purpose of the military deployment was to buy time for Iraqis to make political progress. One year into the surge, five years into the war, those metrics have not improved. That's why American troops remain stuck "in the loop" in Iraq.

John Holbo: The Idiocy of Victor Davis Hanson

John Holbo: The Idiocy of Victor Davis Hanson: I have to say: Victor Davis Hanson should probably stop trying to write about the difference between right and wrong. (I know, I know. But this one is unusually terrible.) In response to the Obama speech, he objects that 'racism is a universal wrong'. Furthermore, because there should be an 'absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars,' it is not acceptable to attempt to mitigate charges of racism by pointing out parallel wrongs committed by others, or by adducing facts about the background of the racist; or by arguing that the racist has done good things, which ought to be weighed in the balance. Last but not least, it is apparently necessary to 'disown' all racists, regardless of prior personal attachment or loyalty.

Now, to note only the most obvious, flagrantly salient consequence of this rigorous refusal of 'situational ethics': Hanson has just provided an argument that Wright was absolutely right to damn America (right?) And the fact that Hanson is not saying so himself therefore gives me a chance to pull a serious face and say I am very sorry to see him falling prey to moral relativism and, if I may say so, kneejerk victimology. It must be all the rap music.

Seriously, what it shows is that conservatives see they have a pressing situational need to move some goalposts. But they aren't sure where. So they are running in all directions, carrying goalposts. The Corner has been a hoot for 48 hours. (To be fair, there are a few voices, urging that the posts be put back where they are supposed to go. That adds to the comedy, when people run into each other, carrying goalposts.)

I am one of the many who is very, very impressed with the speech. My support for Obama has gone up significantly. All I really have to add is just reiteration of what others have said: how effective Obama was at saying things that were, basically, plain good sense. The only trick to it -- but what a trick -- is to speak generous good sense, in a curiously mild manner. His ability to say what people of good will already all think, but say it in a way that makes them sit up and say, 'but of course', is what liberals have been needing. Not that conservatives can't be good willed, but that just goes to show there was nothing liberal about the speech...

Walter Pincus: A Call for Journalistic Courage

A Call for Journalistic Courage: In 1959, Douglas Cater, then Washington editor for Reporter magazine, wrote a book titled "The Fourth Branch of Government." In it, Cater argued that the press and more importantly television, which was coming into its own as the primary source of news, is a powerful participant in the governmental process.

This was not a new idea. Edmund Burke in the 18th century described three estates in the British Parliament, and then added: "But in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. 'Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.'"

Cater's view... was that the power of the press can be used to both good and bad effect, depending on your point of view. Cater wanted journalists and their editors and managers to realize their actions and decisions directly affected government, whether they liked it or not. "The reporter is the recorder of government but is also a participant.... He (or she these days) operates in a system in which power is divided. He (she) as much as anyone, and more than a great many, helps to shape the course of government."

Electronic and print media today probably have more potential influence over public opinion than they had 50 years ago. Yet owners, editors and reporters today rarely push issues they believe government should take up. If a vote were taken among editors of the major daily newspapers, the vice presidents of network news divisions, television and radio anchors, and I hate to say, probably even most younger print and electronic reporters, the result would be that few to none want or believe they have the right to shape government actions. They don't want to play activist roles in government%u2014either personally or professionally--unless, of course, it could affect the bottom line.

I believe this failure is a threat to our democracy and a poor example for the rest of the world, where we supposedly are spreading the need for a free press. This is my romantic and unfashionable view of journalism, but it is the one that caused many of us to take up the profession in the first place....

Today's mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, unbiased and objective, presenting both or all sides as if they were on the sidelines refereeing a game in which only the players--the government and its opponents--can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people's ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy.... From the 1950s through the 1980s, I could name reporters and columnists whose experience on their beats or in their areas made them thoughtful and respected commentators. Younger reporters today are regularly shifted around from beat to beat, never really having enough time to master totally complex subjects, such as health, public education and environmental policies. Coverage then depends on statements and pronouncements by government sources or their critics.

Starting sometime in the Nixon administration, probably with Vice President Spiro Agnew's attacks on the liberal press, newspapers began pulling back. Ironically, the press's Watergate success led to increased conservative criticism of newspapers and enterprise reporting. Publishers and editors began to worry more about critics, who for their own either biased or political reasons disagreed with what they read....

The abstract idea that journalists need to appear objective has passed down through the ranks. Some standards are obvious and accepted. No staff member gives campaign contributions, marches in demonstrations involving hot-button issues, speaks publicly on behalf of candidates for any political office or takes trips paid for by foreign governments. The executive editor and the editorial-page editor of The Washington Post do not vote in elections to preserve the appearance of neutrality, but they luckily don%u2019t demand that of others on staff.

Recently, Byron Calame, former public editor of The New York Times, took to task Linda Greenhouse, the distinguished Supreme Court correspondent of that paper. His complaint? She had spoken before 800 people at Harvard University upon receipt of the Radcliffe Institute Medal and gave what he considered her personal opinions about issues of the day.

She said the government "had turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world."... Greenhouse told Calame that she considered her remarks to be statements of fact and not opinion. He raised questions of whether she had violated a Times ethical guideline against expressing personal opinions in public and whether allowing her to cover Supreme Court cases that involve topics she mentioned "risks giving the paper's critics fresh opportunities to snipe at its public policy coverage."...

Earlier this year, I wrote an article for the Nieman Reports on the subject of courage in journalism. Reporting from a war zone such as Iraq or from a totalitarian country where a reporter's life or safety is at risk are examples of traditionalistic courage. In Washington, it's a far less dramatic form of courage if a journalist stands up to a government official or a politician who he or she has reason to believe is not telling the truth or living up to his or her responsibilities.

But I wrote that I believe a new kind of courage is needed in journalism in this age of instant news, instant analysis and instant opinions--in this time of government by public relations and news stories based on prepared texts and prepared events or responses. This is the time for reporters and editors, whether from the mainstream media or blogosphere, to pause before responding to the latest bulletin, prepared event, or the most recent statement or backgrounder, whether from the White House or the Democratic or Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.

Today, there is too much being offered to the media about government than can be fit into print or broadcast on the nightly news. The disturbing trend is that more and more of these informational offerings are nothing but PR peddled as real "news."... Journalistic courage should also include the decision not to publish in a newspaper or carry on a television or radio news show any statements made by government officials that are designed solely as a public relations tool, offering no new or valuable information to the public.

This is far from the concept of the media being the fourth branch of government. But I don't know what will bring back the media to play their full role, other than new owners, editors and reporters who see their newspapers, magazines, or radio and television properties as more than merely a way to gain notoriety and make money.

Ed Boyden: How to Think

How to Think: When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules, which I sometimes share with students. I've listed them here, followed by some practical advice on implementation.

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.

2. Learn how to learn (rapidly). One of the most important talents for the 21st century is the ability to learn almost anything instantly, so cultivate this talent. Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works. (I often need a 20-minute power nap after loading a lot into my brain, followed by half a cup of coffee. Knowing how my brain operates enables me to use it well.)

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound--or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day. The act of making the plan alone is worth it. And even if you revise it often, you're guaranteed to be learning something.

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things. Then, find the things that are not dependent on anything but have the most dependents, and finish them first.

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. That way, when you return to something you've done, you can make it routine. Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world. Much of creativity is learning how to see things properly. Most profound scientific discoveries are surprises. But if you don't document and digest every observation and learn to trust your eyes, then you will not know when you have seen a surprise.

10. Keep it simple. If it looks like something hard to engineer, it probably is. If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler, do it. It will work better, be more reliable, and have a bigger impact on the world. And learn, if only to know what has failed before. Remember the old saying, "Six months in the lab can save an afternoon in the library."

Two practical notes. The first is in the arena of time management. I really like what I call logarithmic time planning, in which events that are close at hand are scheduled with finer resolution than events that are far off. For example, things that happen tomorrow should be scheduled down to the minute, things that happen next week should be scheduled down to the hour, and things that happen next year should be scheduled down to the day. Why do all calendar programs force you to pick the exact minute something happens when you are trying to schedule it a year out? I just use a word processor to schedule all my events, tasks, and commitments, with resolution fading away the farther I look into the future. (It would be nice, though, to have a software tool that would gently help you make the schedule higher-resolution as time passes...)

The second practical note: I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I've conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago--at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.

Matt Asay Drinks the Koolaid and Enters the Reality Distortion Field

The inevitability of the iPhone | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs: I walked into my local AT&T Wireless store on Saturday fully expecting and prepared to get a Blackberry 8820. My Blackberry 8800 died while I was in London last week, and both Visa and American Express tried to protect me from fraud by disallowing my attempts to order a new phone over the web. Hence, my face-to-face visit with AT&T.

Unfortunately for Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, the in-store price for the 8820 was the same as the iPhone. I deliberated for all of three seconds and walked out with the iPhone.

My reason was simple: I needed something that would sync consistently with my Mac. My Blackberry-to-Mac sync has been hit or miss for the past year (though I've been testing a beta of the new PocketMac and it is quite good) and I'm fed up. I just want something that works.

The iPhone "just works," and then some.

I thought I wouldn't be able to type on the iPhone without tactile feedback. I was wrong. I'm actually faster on the iPhone than I ever was on the Blackberry, and that's with only an hour of "training."

I thought I would miss a host of things with my Blackberry, but I haven't. Instead, I've been blown away by the innovative use of gestures and the user interface. I resisted the iPhone for a year or so, but looking back it was inevitable that I'd end here.

It is the best-designed phone that I've ever seen or used. It's not perfect: It aggravates me that I can't create SMS groups so that I can blast groups of friends (the Blackberry also lacked this), though I can simply save a "conversation" with a group and use it to send out group texts. I also could do without the clever (but time-consuming) graphics that accompany the deletion of an email, for example. Plus, the lack of Flash makes the full-blown browser a bit less "full-blown" (though I hear Flash is on its way).

But all its good points make up for these negatives. The iPhone is an amazing device. It was inevitable that I'd find my way to it, just as it's inevitable that it will continue to take more and more market share, eventually breeding lower-end devices that will change the way we use mobile "phones."

The iPhone is designed too well to be anything less than inevitable.

Spencer Ackerman: Friends Don't Let Friends Read the New Republic

a href="http://toohotfortnr.blogspot.com/2008/03/you-played-yourself.html">toohotfortnr: you played yourself: It's amazing that TNR is actually so clueless as to write this line in its lede this week:

Where it once looked like Bill Clinton and Al Gore had helped purge the party of the lame identity politics that had ruined Democratic candidates for a generation, discussions of race and gender have returned with a vengeance.

Not long ago, the deputy editor of a much better magazine observed the following, with ruthless seriousness:

After all, Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren't playing "identity politics" any more than John Kerry's supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush's did in 2000. It's absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics. And after several early primaries, as it became clear that white men most strongly supported John Edwards, nobody accused them of playing identity politics. Nope, that distinction is reserved for people who have historically not been in positions of political power. In short, you can't be a white guy voting for another white guy and still play the identity game.

And of course, TNR loves identity politics, as it's devolved into a biweekly mimeographed synagogue newsletter. Another issue, another fucking Kinky Friedman diarist about Obama and the Jews or the New York Times and the Muslims and Jesus fucking Christ it's like he wants to become Norman Podhoretz. But that's not identity politics, no way.

Pete Davis: Good New and Bad News from Today's Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report | Capital Gains and Games

Good New and Bad News from Today's Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report | Capital Gains and Games: At 2 p.m. today, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson presented the annual Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report. The good news is that the solvency of the trust funds hasn't changed much over the past year. The Social Security Trust Fund will remain solvent until 2041, and the Medicare Trust Fund until 2019.

Most Americans believe Social Security won't pay equal-value benefits in the future. Most Social Security experts say Social Security can be kept solvent well beyond the retirement of the Baby Boomers over the next 20 years with relatively modest changes to the GROWTH of future benefits and to payroll tax rates. Even if nothing were done, after 2041, Social Security could still pay 75 cents per dollar of benefits due into the future.

The bad news is that little time remains to restore the Medicare Trust Fund to solvency. It's going cashflow negative this year. That is benefit payments will exceed payroll tax revenues plus interest earned starting this year. Some drastic benefit cuts and/or payroll tax increases will be needed soon if Medicare is to remain solvent. The program is open-ended and woefully lacking in efficiency. It costs twice as much to deliver the same health outcomes to Medicare beneficiaries at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA as it does at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, MN. When Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag recently asked the CBO panel of health experts what savings could be achieved in Medicare without diminishing health outcomes, the estimates ranged from between one-third and and two-thirds with an average of about half. They also agreed that the aging of our population is not the cause of our runaway health care costs; it's the rapidly rising cost per beneficiary that is the problem.

Former Congressional Budget Office Director Rudy Penner published excellent analysis last week on the fiscal challenge we face from Social Security and Mediare. He concluded we won't grow our way out of these problems and that the sooner we face up to Social Security and Medicare reforms, the better.

So remember, how we provide health care is the cause of our fiscal problem, not the aging of our population.

TBogg: Post-Minstrel Syndrome

TBogg: Years ago (more than I care to remember if I could) I read an interview with Lyndon Johnson who, remembering his youth in Texas, said that you could always tell when it was an election year beca