Dot.Demarche

The NYT’s conservative columnist continues to impress me with being, well, sane. I know the bar is a bit low, but hey, you work with what you’ve got.

Today’s piece talks about Obama as “an ideologue and a pragmatist.”  This is, I think, exactly right. Obama ran on an inspirational platform of change – but if you examined it closely (and, as a guy working for Hillary at the time, I certainly did) the actual policies were very sensible and moderate ones.

One quibble: Douthat says that the President has “governed as a conventional liberal who believes in the existing system, knows how to work it and accepts the limitations it imposes on him.” I’m certain that Obama does not “believe in” the routinization of the supermajority requirements in the Senate. Imagine a world in which Obama was negotiating a compromise between Ben Nelson and Bernie Sanders, rather than Ben Nelson and, um, Ben Nelson.

To all my loyal readers (Hi Mom!) I wanted to wish you and your families and friends a very, very happy Christmas or solstice-time holiday of your choice. Hope you’re enjoying it with excessive amounts of consumption and surrounded by festive holiday feelings.

DC passed gay marriage today. Interestingly, they expect over the long term most participants to be couples from out of the district traveling to get married.

Now that’s a destination wedding I can get behind – traveling to a destination where it’s possible to have a, well, wedding.

Another small step; at least that’s another 63 sq. miles of justice. And maybe all the homophobic members of Congress  will become a little bit more aware of how gay couples are just like straight couples.

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The vast majority of people who hire in Congress put zero value on outside experience or expertise. This sucks and make for bad policy. Also, everyone else needs to go find a job so they stop applying for the ones I want, mmmk?

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Steven Bosworth, Dean Extraordinaire

Yup, the Fletcher School’s Dean Stephen Bosworth is pretty badass. Admittedly he hasn’t solved the intractable problem of the Hermit Kingdom yet, but I’m sure he will soon.

Meanwhile, I’ll just enjoy seeing video of a guy I had pizza with splashed all over CNN.

Some complain that he should have stepped down as dean when he took this role. Pffft. The job of a dean at a place like Fletcher, as with a college president, is to look cool, increase the visibility of the school, live in a big house, and beg for your living.

Definitely doing well on the visibility front.

The National Journal recently ran an article on American cyberwar strategy. It’s full of a lot of gee-wizzary (the military infiltrated Iraqi cell phone networks!) and ominous threats (the bad guys will destroy our financial system computers, which will be like the recent crisis, except without the inconvenience of foreclosures!)

Yawn.

Cyberwarfare is sexy and scary. People know they use computers every day, and they understand that everything from refrigerators to cars has one.* It just makes sense that our society could be destroyed by malevolent hackers from Russia or China – or perhaps even by Al Qaeda, though I doubt most of the caves in the Preghal Mountains have wi-fi currently.

There are two reasons why cyberwarfare, while important, shouldn’t be keeping granny up at night.

The Internet is a constant battlefield. This is a good thing.

The difference between the world of cyberwarfare and kinetic warfare is that the Internet is a hot battlefield where combat is happening around the clock. As you’re reading this brilliantly-crafted post, your Internet connection has probably been probed by automated bots looking for weaknesses in your computer.

Hacking technology is rather democratic; anyone can find a security hole, and many people then can automate taking exploiting it and turning your computer into a zombie spreading the infection to others.

High-profile targets are as much a juicy treat for amateur hackers looking to claim a scalp as for nasty foreign governments; there are some truly brilliant people out there attempting to do so every day.

Governments are likely to be full of scarily brilliant-er people who are well-paid and perhaps even get nice benefits. So the PLA cyberwarfare squad is likely to be better than an angsty 20-yr old hacker, but if the latter gets to the hole first he wins, the company learns, and everyone else starts patching.

Rebooting is easier than rebuilding.

The most spectacularly successful hack that I can remember is that of the Brazilian power grid (if it was in fact true.) But remember that we have done that to ourselves, too.

As we all experience with galling regularity, computers crash and components fail. This is something that system operators prepare for and expect. A successful hack that knocks a computer offline – a worst case – is not fundamentally different from the hard drives going kablewy. Any sysadmin worth his birkenstocks better be prepared for that.

A couple thousand-pound bombs do the job a lot more completely.

This is not a clarion call for complacency. There are serious threats from hackers, but they aren’t apocolyptic Collapse of the Western World Followed By Zombie Invasion scenarios some would suggest.

I’ll talk more about that in a latter post.

Here’s the message of today’s story: If you don’t want the bad guys to win, keep your computer patched and behind a firewall, mmmmkay? But don’t panic. Until the machines get smart enough to turn on us.

* Of course, we’ve been able to control coffee pots for a while.

Sprint has provided location updates on cell phone clients 8 million times in the last year.

Presumably most of these were from a small percentage of the people targeted, but still the general idea is incredibly troubling. Clearly there were not 8 million warrants issued for this information. Instead, it appears that law enforcement was able to make automated requests against the Sprint database – just computer-to-computer information exchange.

The monstrous deluge of useful data that can be captured in our Internet-ed society has a pair of repercussions. First, we can capture far more information about people now than was imaginable even 15 years ago. Second, we as consumers tend to de-value our privacy.

There was a study a few years back that demonstrated that the average person would give a tremendous amount of virtual personal information up to a corporate entity for a low-value tangible item. I seem to remember a cheeseburger.

The datamining possible with current technologies has huge repercussions we have only begun to wrestle with. You want to pull up a Google map of all the foreclosed-upon properties in your area? You can do it. You want to pull up the names and addresses of everyone who signed an anti-gay rights petition? You can do that too. Information like this used to be practically secret because of the difficulties of obtaining it.

We’re broadcasting more information about ourselves, and at the same time more of the general information about our lives is online and accessible.

Sun CEO Scott McNealy said a decade ago: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”

I don’t want to get over it. I want there to be privacy laws to protect me from companies like his, and like Sprint.

Saudis outraged over the government response to devastating flooding in Jeddah are rioting in the streets.

OK, no, they aren’t. But they are protesting on Facebook.

Another example of how the opening of digital agora for conversation can have an impact; people are able to share their opinions, organize, and mobilize. Skills people learn and networks they develop will grow and expand over time.

This isn’t all negative for an authoritarian government; one of the problems with an ossified and autocratic bureaucracy which has little more than a nodding familiarity with its own subjects is that there are few routes for people to communicate problems.

Even indolent, corrupt groups like the Saudi royals want to be able to find out and fix problems; if things like FB provide a route for them to find out about the proverbial potholes then the people will be less likely to, say, overthrow them and string them up from a light pole.

The United States of Europe have been born. Huzzah! Or perhaps just huh. Another step on the road to ever closer union and all, but jeez they’re being dull about it.

The President of Europe chairman of the European Council is a haiku-writing Belgian waffle. The Foreign Minister coordinator of the common foreign and security policy is a non-entity with foreign policy chops that just edge Sarah Palin by a nose.

*shrug* That’s the way they roll over there, I guess. Papering over the fact that Brussels is acquiring real power by putting weak individuals in there. We get George Washington, they get a guy who enjoys meditative retreats at monasteries. Having the Mayor of Snoresville running the show makes the bigwigs in France, Germany and England feel more comfortable, I guess.

It’s also worth pointing out that unlike the Prez/PMs of the other countries, the EU president is not directly elected. Not even indirectly, as in our own goofy system.

Was at a talk today by János Martonyi, once and (probably) future Foreign Minister of Hungary. He talked in part about this “democratic deficit” in the EU and how some of the dislike for Brussels is due to the lack of direct connection to the voters. If there’s a problem in an EU country, national politicians make it the fault of those damn dirty bureaucrats in Brussels. If there’s something good that comes from the EU itself, national politicians will  claim the credit.

Not highly functional, but hey, they’ve been limping along in the right direction for the last 50 years, so I guess they know what they are doing. I’m just not expecting any strong leadership from them, even on looming disasters on their doorstep.

I guess like any adolescents they are rather moody, introspective, self-conscious, and feeling awkward about their recent growth spurt. As long as they don’t start listening to crappy emo music.

DC today voted 11-2 to permit gay marriage in the District. I like my new homeland. (Voting no: Marion Barry, who opposes it on moral grounds. *Snicker*)

Meanwhile, the New York Senate voted in a shockingly lopsided tally to oppose gay marriage. I do not like the Empire State.

There’s been so much change on this issue over the last year that it’s hard to divine any real trends. Maine, and CA a year ago, were a real kick in the teeth. At the same time, all the polling and trends go in the right direction, and once a state approves gay marriage – and the good citizens realize that disasters of biblical proportions do not result – it is there to stay.

This will be the work of years, but we will get there. I would bet that by 2025 the Supreme Court will find restrictions on any two people choosing to get married to be unconstitutional, wiping prohibitions out in the states where they still exist, presumably the deep south.

Easy enough for the straight white guy to say, it will happen. And at some point we will train our children to be ashamed that America was ever homophobic.

Fantastic gift from the Royal Society of England, the oldest group of scientists in the world: they have started putting up their back archives of seminal research papers on a special historical timeline.

Here, for example, is an account of using willow to cure fevers from the charming days when their journal was called Philosophical Transactions. Later we figured out it was in fact salicylic acid in the bark that did the trick. And here’s the first two they’ve released, a grisly pair of experiments on puppies. Different kind of bark, I guess.

A lot of gems there, and I’m sure many more to come.

Just browsing a few highlights of the extraordinary discoveries of the last centuries has to make you pause and wonder at what the scientific method has done for the human race. (Reminder: scientific method = idea, test to prove, have another person repeat test. New idea that builds on the first, lather, rinse, repeat. Next thing you know: 3D TV!)

Of all the things that scary me about modern political discourse in America, one of the most frightening is the idea that science has become a partisan thing, as if one gets to choose one’s facts. I guess when it’s considered a bummer that the president is smart, this is where you end up.

Because the casino aggregate index always wins. Check out Drum’s article.

Two young political activists in Azerbaijan were given two years in prison on trumped-up charges after posting a sardonic video mocking the government with a man in a donkey suit.

Working in human rights can be pretty depressing. I don’t really have anything witty or wise to add to the sad case.

From the department of it’s-about-freakin’-time: U.S. AID Chief Chosen

The 36-year old *cough* nominee from the  Agriculture *cough* department will be tasked with heading up what is supposed to be a co-equal tentacle of the US foreign policy establishment.

My friends inside AID have had a tough time; it’s hard to have the crew doing their job when your ship doesn’t have a captain.

This speaks partly to the incredible difficulties with the vetting process; ridiculously talented people are not taking jobs with the Administration – not because the pay is low or the work hard, but because the vetting process is too damn hard.

Of course, the vetting process has gotten so onerous because there is so much political theater to be made out of the high-wire act of Senate advice-and-consent positions. Given the depressing and destructive obstructionism of Republicans, Obama has to be careful – but it is another example of how the machinery of American government is being forced to a halt.

There’s a new international juggernaut on the world scene. Russia? Nah, they’re too busy drinking themselves to death. India? Nah, they’re 34% illiterate. China? Brazil?

Nope, it’s the United States of Europe. After a long journey, the European Constitution Lisbon Treaty has crossed its final hurdle.

This is a truly historic moment. Much as one might laugh about Brussels, the process of “ever closer union” has made a very significant step. Remember that, after a period under the weak Articles of Confederation, we quickly got a much stronger federative document – but even with that the balance of power was in the hands of the states for a long time.

The logic of centralization will continue for a long time. God forbid another Great Power war, but if we have one then things will speed up infinitely.

With a first EU president, Kissinger’s snide question – “If I want to call Europe, who do I call?” finally has an answer. I hope it’s this one.

Iceland just lost its McDonald’s franchises. As we all know from the MacDonald’s theory of international peace, this means they now are beyond the pale of polite global society, and a risk to the tranquility and stability of the international order.

Of course, the true nuclear-armed rogue state we have to worry about is closer to home.

If you haven’t seen it, this Vanity fair story on the Icelandic financial meltdown is spectacular. Upshot: blame it on the elves.

A pair of Kiwi researchers suggested that we would be better off not having dogs and cats due to their carbon footprint. Instead we should raise pigs and rabbits, love them, welcome them into our homes and hearts, and then eat them. Presumably you could do the same with your canine companions, but that wasn’t mentioned as an option.

This reminds me of a similar idea someone had once. Now, what was that…

The researchers suggest that a typical dog has as much impact on the environment as an SUV.

[As an aside, I find this incredible. Dogs don't have to be manufactured out of parts assembled from around the world. They do not burn fossil fuels extracted from the ground under thuggish governments. Dog chow largely consists of food byproducts we weren't about to eat anyway. But let's concede the point.]

There is at times a puritanical obsession in the quest to have a zero-impact lifestyle. The only way to really do that would be for all of us to switch back to subsistance farming off the land. As long as we didn’t overgraze with our evil goats.  Or deplete the soil and leading to the collapse of our civilization. Or drain our aquifers

Misguided, in my mind. Yes, we should try and moderate our impact to the extent possible. But I like living in the 21st century. I am fortunate that I’ve  been able to ride around in huge, polluting jets. I’m really fortunate to have had a beautiful dog who was a wonderful part of my life.

While we should make lifestyle changes, we want to retain as much of the benefits of what we have as we can. Instead, we need to squeeze more efficiency out of what we do.

I’ll write up some thoughts on that next time.

The UN has approved a new phone charging standard. Presumably it will interoperate globally while protecting the sovereignty of member devices.

It is unclear at the present time if the P5 retain a veto over connection of new devices or if Responsiblity to Protect applies to people using their iPhones for purposes that may be in violation of Geneva conventions on stupidity.

Let’s just hope the UN’s International Telecommunications Union is less cumbersome than their attempt to draft an Internet communications standard.

The Goldstone Report on potential war crimes during the Gaza conflict Operation Cast Lead last winter has set off a frenetic flurry of spin and pushback in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. The report could even lead to International Criminal Court prosecutions for Israeli leaders.

Goldstone’s report, commissioned by the somewhat ridiculous UN Human Rights Council, condemns both Israel and Hamas for violating humanitarian law by targeting civilians. The Human Rights Council is a travesty packed with governments that sometimes, say, torture their own people. Despite that and the fact that the group relentlessly bludgeons Israel the Council, in this case, still has a point worth investigating.

The Israeli government and allies have been running a full-court press to try and quash and discredit Goldstone’s report and the man himself. A past president of of Human Rights Watch excoriated the criticism of Israel, suggesting that rights defenders have no business criticizing largely open governments.

I disagree completely. As someone deeply concerned with civil liberties here in the United States, I vociferously criticize developments in my country that I think are human rights violations, and I applaud outside groups who apply pressure and scruitiny to the US on these topics as well.

This does not mean that the US – or Israel – is as bad as Zimbabwe or Hamas. It does mean that one must speak out about injustice in your home as well as abroad. Countries that are more open and more liberal – and that proudly claim to be so – have a special obligation to acknowledge mistakes, investigate them, and attempt to ensure they do not occur again.

You don’t need to get into a who-is-more-awful pissing match to recognize faults that need to be corrected.

Oh, but Israel doesn’t need to worry about referral to the ICC. The Chinese have promised to veto any Security Council move to do so.

I guess all the worlds problems will not be solved immediately. Too bad.

It is impossible to solve all problems at once: Turkish President.