A little clarity on the Julian Assange Case

If these charges are true, then Julian Assange is a rapist.

• Used his body weight to hold down Miss A in a sexual manner.
• Had unprotected sex with Miss A when she had insisted on him using a condom.
• Molested Miss A "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity".
• Had unprotected sex with Miss W while she was asleep.

There's been a lot of debate on this point recently on the internet, but these charges make it pretty clear what we're talking about. There isn't a lot of ambiguity there. Last week Salon had an interesting post discussing the differences between Sweden and the U.S. rape laws, which sadly highlights the many ways in which U.S. rape laws are not sufficient to protect rape victims, but I think that what is described above would still fit the U.S. definition, at least I hope it would.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

Don't Ask Don't Tell Might Finally be Repealed!

Senator Reid announced tonight that he is bringing the Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal bill up for a vote this weekend.

Senator Lieberman already confirmed earlier today that he had over 60 votes for the repeal bill, which is enough to pass cloture in the Senate, and therefore assure passage.

Obama may be able to sign this thing before Christmas, which would be very merry indeed.

RIP Bob Feller 1918 - 2010

Hardest thrower in Baseball History? American hero. Hard to be greater than Rapid Robert.

The Importance of Seeing the Larger Context

This is a great post by Nate Silver on how helpful bayesian statistics is in maintaining our focus on how important the underlying context of a given situation is in determining events. In this case Silver is talking about the arrest of Julian Assange, and how unlikely it is that his arrest is unaffected by his actions in releasing classified government documents.

But Silver's point is larger than that. He notes out how bad people are at understanding the importance of the underlying context or major drivers in determining the course of events. We overestimate the importance of information that is readily at hand, and don't look beyond that to see what the larger forces determining events are.

For some reason this reminds me of the movie All the President's Men when Robert Redford playing Bob Woodward is down in the parking garage talking to Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat, and Woodward is sort of fixated on Donald Segretti, who he and Bernstein had just learned had been part of a dirty tricks operation for the Nixon campaign known as "rat-fucking." And of course Holbrook in his masterful portrayal of Deep Throat says something like "Don't concentrate on Segretti. You'll miss the overall," (with that sly knowing lilt at the end) meaning that Segretti was obviously just the tip of the iceberg. This was corruption on a massive scale, the kind that would send the highest law enforcement officer in the land to jail. But on his own Woodward couldn't see the forest for the trees perhaps because it was too unbelievable. This is what the major academic fields on inquiry all have in common, they each emphasize the importance of seeing the real forces driving change, not just the forces at hand.

Today You Tomorrow Me

Great comment on Reddit by rhoner responding to the thread "Have you ever picked up a hitchhiker?" We are all connected no matter how hard we try and divide ourselves.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

You Are How You View Time

H/T Andrew Sullivan

What does Wikileaks Portend?

This is I think a very perceptive insight from Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com.

Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they have not been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. Yet look what has happened to them. They have been removed from Internet … their funds have been frozen … media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization. What is really going on here is a war over control of the Internet, and whether or not the Internet can actually serve its ultimate purpose—which is to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions.

I think it is certainly fair to question the wisdom of Wikileaks in disseminating all of these government cables that while often interesting in some of the specific details they provide, have so far failed to reveal any double-dealing or unknown corrupt behavior by the U.S. or any other country's government. In general many of the revealed facts were known or easily assumed. And yet the harm that these documents have caused to some very important relationships between countries and individuals may be incalculable. Certainly the U.S. government will at least in the short-term likely become less transparent and less willing to share some important information internally, which in and of itself has far-reaching consequences.

But there are also consequences to the actions now being taken against Wikileaks as Greenwald points out. There is indeed a war going on for the control of the internet. Information most assuredly wants to be free, but there are a lot of people that want information to be controlled, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not so good reasons, but either way there is always going to be this inherent tension between those who want the information and those who control it (if only for a time).

I think that the internet should never be seen as a panacea, as a means for bettering our society. I think that the internet is a means for changing our society, bettering our society involves making sure we live up to our highest ideals. Change is very difficult, it cuts and pulls in ways unimagined before, and that cutting and pulling can cause a society to move away from its ideals if it's not careful. The internet has this amazing power to connect people, to allow them to share lots of information, to mass together across shared interests and beliefs and change the world. But there is a trade-off in allowing all of that information sharing, you give up a lot of the control of how information flows in a society, and also what kind of information is flowing through the system. It is incredibly scary to give up that kind of control, especially when it can affect something as important as international diplomacy, or even national security.
The question is does the fear of this loss of control and the continued emergence of a world in which information with its potential to both bind us together and tear us apart cause the U.S. and other countries to attempt to take greater and greater control of the internet, escalating the war over the freedom of information. Wikileaks is most significant as a harbinger of what our future will bring. Information is now so easy to share, and that sharing is such an essential part of our system now that it will be impossible to go back. But there will be more and more attempts at control. The question is, where will this conflict finally settle into balance? We're not there yet, maybe we never will be. But this will be an essential conflict of our emerging future. Information, and all the issues around it from privacy to democracy to security, all of these issues are going to help define the new century. Can we continue to serve our ideals while finding a balance between all of these competing concerns over information?

320 Million Trees

In Katrina's Wake - short film about Hurricane Katrina by NASA

I've been reading the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program's report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States recently, and I came across this rather startling statistic referenced in the video above

Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged over 320 million large trees. As these trees decompose over the next few years, they will release an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that taken up by all U.S. forests in a year.

The report also notes that powerful hurricanes (those of category 4 and 5) like Katrina have increased in intensity over the last 30 years. One can only imagine what that will mean in the future, but it doesn't look good.

One in Twelve!

Ta-Nehisi Coates with some troubling statistics on how disproportionately large the American prison population is compared with the rest of the world, and how disproportionately Black it is.

Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males. African-Americans--males and females--make up .6 percent of the entire world's population, but African-American males--alone--make up 8 percent of the entire world's prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners. But I kind of doubt it.

H/T Andrew Sullivan

President Pragmatist

Obama is passionate about being a pragmatist and he refuses to get drawn into the trap of focusing on tactics over strategy. He has a goal of what direction he wants to move the country in, and he is willing to start small and to build piece by piece because knows that throughout history many of America's greatest achievements started small and built bit by bit till they became core pillars of our system. Andrew Sullivan has it right in his assessment of Obama's tax cut deal

Obama has secured - with Republican backing - a big new stimulus that will almost certainly goose growth and lower unemployment as he moves toward re-election. If growth accelerates, none of the current political jockeying and Halperin-style hyper-ventilation will matter. Obama will benefit - thanks, in part, to Republican dogma. So here's something the liberal base can chew on if they need some grist: how cool is it that Mitch McConnell just made Barack Obama's re-election more likely? Bet you didn't see that one coming, did you?

The mix of policies is also shrewd from a strategic point of view.

At some point, I suspect, the Congress will have to decide between extending the payroll tax holiday or keeping the Bush tax cuts for millionaires - the double-track of the current Keynesian deal. I think Obama wins on that one, and has set up the kind of future choice the GOP really doesn't want to make. What he has done, in other words, is avoid an all-out fight over short-term taxes and spending now in the wake of a big GOP victory in order to set up the real debate about long-term taxes and spending over the next two years, leading into a pivotal 2012 election that could set the fiscal and political direction of this country for decades, an election in which he may well have much more of an advantage than he does now.

This is the difference between tactics and strategy. The GOP has won again on tactics, but keeps losing on strategy. More broadly, as this sinks in, Obama's ownership of this deal will help restore the sense that he is in command of events, and has shifted to the center (even though he is steadily advancing center-left goals). It's already being touted as "triangulation" by some on the right even as it contains major liberal faves - unemployment insurance for another 13 months, EITC expansion, college tax credits, and a pay-roll tax cut.

My view is that if this deal is a harbinger for the negotiation Obama will continue with the GOP for the next two years, he will come into his own.

What you realize if you pay attention is that Obama is not looking at things the same way as everyone else. He is looking at where he wants to lead the country, what he is able to do in the present to get the country closer to realizing his vision for it, and lastly, what does history tell him about the nature of change in America, and how does that inform his decisions in the present and his vision for the future. You can call it whatever you want, but before he's out of office he'll have run circles around most everyone in Washington, and I think the country will be better for it.

Some Empire

Today William C. Rhoden published in the New York Times one of those incredibly asinine sports columns that makes a big splashy claim in the headline that the facts it presents in the body of the article cannot even begin to support because reality is not of the writer's creation. Under the title "The Day the Patriots Empire Began to Crumble" Rhoden uses the "spy gate" incident from a few years ago when the Patriot's head coach Bill Belichick was caught in a long-term pattern of cheating by taping other teams' practices to foretell the demise of the three time Super Bowl Champion Patriots.

Normally unrestrained in heaping praise on his team, Ryan was careful with his remarks about Belichick and the Patriots. It was as if he wanted to play down the perception that a shift in power was taking place.

Too late. The shift has occurred: the Jets are in ascendancy and New England is in retrograde

One might think that the link under the highlighted phrase "a shift in power was taking place" would provide some evidence of this supposed "shift in power," but it doesn't. It just links to an article about "spy gate." And of course what is this "shift in power anyways?" Going into the game the Jets and Patriots had identical 9-2 records, so it certainly isn't a power shift that was yet evident on the field, the teams appeared equal going into the game. And of course Rhoden admits as much, arguing that the power shift "was set in motion...by a moral misstep" and "has nothing to do with one game, one season, injuries, or upheaval," which is another way of saying that Rhoden made it up, but let's let him try and make his argument.

The scandal, which came to be called Spygate, put New England and Belichick under a cloud, although by 2007, several teams had begun to suspect the Patriots were taping opposing coaches.

The Green Bay Packers caught New England in the act in 2006 but never took the complaint further. Belichick was thought to be taping opponents when Mangini was a member of the Patriots’ defensive staff under Belichick from 2000 to 2005.

The N.F.L. fined Belichick $500,000 and the team $250,000 and took away a first-round pick in the 2008 draft.

But the Patriots and Belichick lost more than money. New England lost some of its luster as a first-class organization. No one doubts Belichick’s coaching genius, but he lost a measure of respect for violating the sanctity of sportsmanship and the integrity of competition.

Is losing people's respect the same thing as losing a sports empire especially since that supposed sporting empire hasn't stopped winning and shows no signs of stopping now? It's an asinine argument. If you wanted to make the argument that people's perception of Bill Belichick has been forever diminished (I've never particularly liked him), that would be supported by the evidence, but sports empires are build on winning. In fact, that's Rhoden's ultimate conclusion

New England will not be defined by the spying fiasco. The Patriots don’t need to win another championship to validate themselves, nor does Belichick. He has three Super Bowl rings as validation.

But Spygate left a stain that will not be washed away by victories and even championships.

So instead of what Rhoden promised, the decline of a entire sporting empire, we only have the sullied reputation of the coach of that empire. And so as if to prove the idiocy of Rhoden's claimed power shift from the Patriots to the Jets, the Patriots in the words of Mike Tirico, the man who called the game and who grew up a Jets fan, "demolished and embarrassed the Jets" 45 - 3 tonight. The "same old Jets" lamented Tirico "got to the big game and didn't convert." One might also call these the same old Patriots. They are right where they've been every year since 2001, right in the thick of the playoff race. Some empire.

Lord of All Hopefulness

I can vividly remember wondering about 10 years ago when I was still in high school whether my generation would have any big challenges to face. It was a naive thought, but perhaps an understandable one for a young, white American growing up in the suburbs and living at the tail-end of the dot-com boom. The Cold War was over, we were at peace, we were making millions of dollars investing in all these incredibly exciting and innovative companies that were doing all of these really cool things, or so it seemed from watching the newsmedia. We had come a long way on Civil Rights, not far enough, but far enough that it didn't seem as potent a force for social change as it once was. From my vantage point, limited as it was, it seemed the long periods of tumult and conflict and fear and the death of thousands of young men in battles far overseas and social upheaval and economic collapse and privation that had so epically defined the generations of my parents and their parents were not likely to similarly define my future.

But then in my last quarter of college at Ohio State I took a graduate-level seminar on the history of modern American political economy and my eyes were opened. I was given a preview of what is happening now in America with our economic malaise, with the slow-motion destruction of the middle-class, with the disintegration of the rust-belt and the once vital now crumbling manufacturing communities that defined it. All these acute problems now before us are the results of decades of decisions that have eroded the social compact that the political and economic elites once had with the American middle class.

Both Black and White working class Americans used to be able to leave high school and go work hard in a factory and still be able to own a home, a car, and provide for a family. Things were that way for a short amount of time, but it became in Post World Way II America a powerful symbol of the success of the American system. The knowledge in the security afforded by hard work was the backbone of American confidence and sense of self-worth. In America you could be anything if you worked hard for it, or at least that was the myth.

But already even then, even when factory jobs provided entry into the middle class for millions of Americans forces were already at work that would break that compact and its been broken ever since. Now we're just paying the full price for it.

When we helped set up the World Bank, when we helped rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan, when we began to re-knit the world's economy back together after World War II we were doing it because it would benefit us enormously, but of course one of the unintended consequences of that was that the world got a lot richer too, and we lost our relative economic position. A lot of people act like it's some kind of recent phenomenon that American workers have to compete with the rest of the world's workers. But this has been true for a long time now. American workers have been losing going on 60 years now, and they're not going to make it back up anytime soon. We've failed to ensure for a long time now that our education system was providing for young Americans the skills they need to succeed in the world we helped to make so much more competitive. As a result of that and the decline of unions and the explosion in corporate compensation we've seen real wages stagnate since the Johnson administration for almost everyone except the very rich. We had been using debt for a long time to make up that difference and now we 300,000,000 Americans owe something like $13 trillion in private debt, more by the way than we owe in public debt.

And yet our politics is so corrupted and so cynical at the moment that it can't produce any actions that might actually help grow the economy back out of the massive hole it's fallen into, let alone begin to start helping the middle class to crawl its way back. And so I posted the video above of my favorite hymn because no matter what you believe in, we all need hope at a time like this.

Follow Up from Gee

So in the wake of everyone (I love speaking in hyperbole) jumping all over President Gee for his "We don't play the little sisters of the poor" needling of Boise State and TCU, Gee decided to remind everyone why he was voted the best University President in America by Time Magazine, and masterfully displayed his self deprecating charm to diffuse the situation.

What do I know about college football? I look like Orville Redenbacher. I have no business talking about college football

You gotta love that quote, it's hilarious, it shows self awareness, it's self-depricating, and it diffuses the situation with his admitting that he shouldn't have been talking about the issue in the first place (I disagree but from a pr standpoint he's probably doing the right thing) and it also suggests a background question of "why was anyone paying so much attention to what I was saying about college football anyways?" But then he outdoes himself with these statements quoted from the end of the article.

Gee told the Dispatch he has since decided, "I need to keep my mouth closed."

"I'm very blessed to have the best athletic director and best football coach in the country," Gee said, the newspaper reported. "They run the athletic program and I run the university, and I should have stayed out of there. What I should do is go over to the surgical suites and get my foot extricated from my mouth."

As for the real Little Sisters of the Poor -- a Roman Catholic women's religious order serving the elderly -- Gee said he had reached out to one of the order's homes in Ohio.

"I sent a [personal] check to the Mother Superior up there and invited her to a ballgame," he said, according to the report.

I mean, that's just text book right there. He puts his full support in his staff and says he'll let them handle things from now on, they know what they're doing, and then he even sends a check to the real Little Sisters of the Poor and invites their Mother Superior to a game. Genius! Thank God Ohio State's got him. Right now the state really needs good people in charge of its institutions and Gee is one of the best.

Photo Attribution: Joebengo at en.wikipedia

Potential consequences of the private control of public spaces

So I'm on an Ethan Zuckerman kick lately, and here's Zuckerman responding to a report in the Guardian that Joe Lieberman was able to pressure Amazon into kicking Wikileaks off their servers in the wake of Wikileak's recent State Department cable dump.

It’s going to be very interesting to hear how Amazon justifies this decision. If the company was required by a court order to remove the content, that’s one thing. If they simply responded to pressure from a US Senator, or to boycott threats, it sends a very disturbing message: that Amazon will remove content under political pressure. Yes, Amazon is within its legal rights to refuse service to a customer… but as I’ve argued previously, they’re a private company responsible for a public space. That’s the nature of the internet – we use it as a space for public discourse, though the sites we use for much of our discussion are owned by private corporations and controlled by terms of service that are significantly more stringent than restrictions on public speech.

In the video I posted below, Zuckerman talks for a bit about Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital, and most specifically about Negroponte's idea that it is hard to build connections in the world of atoms, in the world of tangible things. But, Negroponte predicted way back in 1995, in the emerging future, in the digital world, it would be much easier to build connections because information would move very easily as tiny bits at the speed of light across the globe.

But of course as Zuckerman goes on to point out, things haven't quite turned out that way (not entirely surprising when you remember that we didn't all of a sudden become a new species devoid of clannish tendencies). Information does move very quickly indeed in the digital world, but that information tends to stay within rather closed loops; basically, we talk to people who are like us.

And so, Zuckerman argues, even though we have an amazing physical infrastructure that allows us to transport both goods as well as information all across the globe, if we only focus on that infrastructure, we won't have a very good idea of what is really going on, we won't know what kinds of connections people are building and what they are doing with those connections. And he's quite right, it isn't very useful to look just at the infrastructure, but of course as his quote above makes clear, the infrastructure is still pretty important.

People are certainly aware of the change, but I sometimes wonder whether they appreciate the magnitude of the shift toward private control of our primary places of public discourse. With facebook and twitter you have incredibly important spaces for both public discourse and the private discourse that sustains it being policed by private entities. That simply wasn't the case 20 years ago. Even with the early advent of the internet, information was not as easily policed or controlled or circumscribed as it is today. It is more difficult to limit the content of a phone call, or an email message, or a short wave radio broadcast, or a snail-mail letter without reducing the desirability of the communication in a free and open society. But a post on facebook, or twitter, or this blog post for instance, it's much easier to limit the bounds of that content without materially reducing the desire to communicate through that interface because you can filter out or block just certain messages, or certain audiences from seeing certain messages.

Now, I'm not saying that facebook or twitter or amazon or google are doing anything terribly nefarious (yet), but they and the political-economic power-structure that controls the U.S. are acting in a formative period in our new media environment. Our republic has succeeded in large part thanks to the fact that our government has protected and subsidized the free press throughout our history. As communication moves increasingly through private networks instead of through public or publicly-regulated networks, will we still be able to have the free and open discourse that is so necessary to the success of a governance structure that takes its driving force from the will of the people?

One of my favorite parts of Tocqueville's Democracy in America is when he describes traveling out to the hinterlands of Tennessee or some such frontier place and coming upon a cabin deep in the woods and being dumbfounded that the resident there could speak intelligently on all the major subjects of the day because he received a newspaper. Such a thing would have been unheard of in monarchical France among the "peasants." But newspaper's in the early republic's period were subsidized by the postal service, and that allowed information to flow freely.

Will we be able to say the same about our information 20 years from now? To answer that question we will have to pay close attention to both changes in our communication patterns and in our communication infrastructure.

Ethan Zuckerman on Rewiring Our World

There's a lot to think about here. I will say that I think this works at many different levels in one's life, not just globally. We need people to knock us out of our orbit. We humans love regularity, love pattern, and that can be ok; but too much of a good thing...well, you know. New pathways, new ways of seeing the world, new information, all of these things are healthy and necessary. Whether you're talking about family, work, friends, whatever, it's never good to be locked into the same way of doing things time after time. When you get out of your pattern, and are willing to accept the value of that change, you are often able to learn valuable things about yourself and the world around you that you would never have known before.

The Late Great Leslie Nielsen Shares a Policy Thought

Mayor: Now Drebin, I don't want any trouble like you had on the South Side last year, that's my policy.

Frank Drebin: Well, when I see five weirdos, dressed in togas, stabbing a man in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy!

Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of "Julius Caesar," you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!

RIP Leslie Nielsen