No, Really. Democrats are Just Republicans in Cheap Suits.

The Obama Administration can play it cool when it wants to.

Via Feministing by way of TPM, we learn that the forced birth/hate teh gayz crowd took one on the chin last week, and, despite all efforts to the contrary, women (and gays, and transexuals, and just about anyone who thinks it’s none of anyone else’s damn business what we and our doctors decide works for us) regained just a smidgeon of that autonomy the American Inquisition the modern GOP seeks to steal from us.

Which is to say that AFAIK, this slipped past just about every radar screen:

After two years of struggling to balance the rights of patients against the beliefs of health-care workers, the Obama administration on Friday finally rescinded most of a federal regulation designed to protect those who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on moral or religious grounds.

The decision guts one of President George W. Bush’s most controversial legacies: a rule that was widely interpreted as shielding workers who refuse to participate in a range of medical services, such as providing birth control pills, caring for gay men with AIDS and performing in-vitro fertilization for lesbians or single women.

Friday’s move was seen as an important step in countering that trend, which in recent years had led pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraceptive Plan B, doctors in California to reject a lesbian’s request for infertility treatment, and an ambulance driver in Chicago to turn away a woman who needed transportation for an abortion.

Can I hear an Amen?

But yeah, Obama is just Bush with a better jump shot.

(Not to mention that this is just one more reminder of why, in fact, it does matter who wins next time round.  Just sayin.)

Image: Octave Tassaert The Waif aka L’abandonnée, 1852.

The CIA Has Joined the Vast Climate Change Conspiracy.

Read this article in the New York Times.*

Here’s the gist of what it’s talking about in this effort to piggy back on national technical intelligence gathering tools (satellites, remote sensing, etc.):

The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests….In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.

The investigators tout the access to data that can be acquired in no other way; they note its economic significance (ice forecasts, aids to oil and gas exploration; and the article also notes that the CIA itself has perceived a national security concern in the prospect of climate change.

And with that, here’s the gist of what I want to talk about:

In October, days after the C.I.A. opened a small unit to assess the security implications of climate change, Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said the agency should be fighting terrorists, “not spying on sea lions.”

and

The program resurrects a scientific group that from 1992 to 2001 advised the federal government on environmental surveillance. Known as Medea, for Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis, the group sought to discover if intelligence archives and assets could shed light on issues of environmental stewardship.

It is unclear why Medea died in the early days of the Bush administration, but President George W. Bush developed a reputation for opposing many kinds of environmental initiatives. Officials said the new body was taking on the same mandate and activities, as well as the name.

Perhaps the problem is that the scientific opportunity was and is immense.  Among the most difficult elements of the climate system to study is the cryosphere — the ice covered portions of the earth’s surface.

Understanding ice dynamics, especially those of sea and polar pack ice, is an essential component in coming to grips with a whole range of important issues in climate change:  the rate at which it is occurirng, the sensitivity of the climate system to various forcings, the risk of rapid alteration in parts or the whole of the global climate system.  (See as one example among a ton of such research, this paper picked up at random through the magic of teh google.)

If therefore, your political advantage rests (a) with a denial of the usefulness of expertise, of verifiable knowledge combined with the training and skill needed to interpret the data and (b) with economic interests for whom the reality of climate change is costly, what should one do but shut down a cash and risk-free program that would help us grasp the predicament of the planet.  Better a joke about sea lions than inconvenient truths.

And by the way: for all those who say Obama is no different from the guy, consider this:

The Obama administration has said little about the effort publicly but has backed it internally, officials said. In November, the scientists met with Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director.

“Director Panetta believes it is crucial to examine the potential national security implications of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels and population shifts,” Paula Weiss, an agency spokeswoman, said.

Elections matter.  They matter in this country now more than ever.  And if you care about science — and I don’t mean just funding levels, but rather the ideal of science, the notion that living a good life includes notion that it is better to know what’s going on than to dream of sugar plum fairies — then the difference between the two parties in their approach to science is existential.

None of this “they’re all alike…I’ll vote for Nader” sh*t, in other words.  We have work to do this and every year.

*I dump on the MSM with reasonable regularity.  I’m working on one of my several thousand word screeds about the Times’ own David Brooks right now.  But it’s important to remember how big media institutions matter — and encourage them to do more of what the informal media can’t.  This is an example.  The article turned on a reporter’s ability to access both very high level science sources (Ralph Cicerone is a seriously good get, for those of you without scorecards handy) and with at least some kind of hook into the intelligence community.  That takes institutional support to develop sources and an understanding of your beat.  So kudos to reporter Bill Broad, one of the Times’ long lasting good ones, and to the great grey lady formerly of 43rd St. herself.

That kind of knowledge/access can be acquired from an independent base — but it’s very hard and it is what the big media at its best distinguishes itself by achieving.  If only places like the Times, and even the Post, long since returned to its roots as the house organ/gossip rag for DC, understood that the one real unique asset they have is reporting other people can’t do because they lack the scale and institutional memory to do so.  That’s a barrier to entry no amount of internet servers can bridge.  Go there, my friends.  We need you to do so, and you can make money there.

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, “Wreck in the Ice Pack” 1798.

Torture…An Unnecessary Post, Part Two (The prehistory edition)

Friday, I ranted.  To channel my inner Bob Dole, I wanted to know where is the outrage over torture, over the use of the name and power of the US to give official, legal sanction to the acts that we hung people for after VE and VJ days.

It was a completely superfluous rant; others are saying the same, better (h/t Eric Martin) and with more eloquent rage.

But it’s still important, I guess, just to add one more jot to the load of outrage. If everyone who can, does, perhaps we will begin to feel what is necessary after eight years of sustained, calculated official nattering intended to numb moral judgment.

So in this half of my superfluous post, I want to inject just a little history into the chorus, some perspective on just how badly wrong the Bush torture cabal got it, and how much moral and practical damage they have done to the legitimate exercise of state power.

The pre-Bush view of torture has a number of modern sources, but it ultimately derives from the English experience of law, pain and vengeance.  I found myself doing some research into this history for my book on Isaac Newton’s little-known career as a crime fighter, in part because one of his earlier biographers, Frank Manuel, in his mostly excellent Portrait of Isaac Newton made the claim that Newton revealed himself as a monster in his pursuit of the currency criminals it was his duty to police as Warden of the Royal Mint.

I found myself disagreeing with Manuel, a little nervously, given his stature as a historian of science.  But I found that while Newton was no pacifist, no advocate of Satyagraha, he was no sadist either. He knew that imprisonment in the notorious Newgate Jail was bitter, dangerous, and put the inmate at risk of real abuse.  He was certainly willing to use the known horrors there to frighten informers into speech.  But there is no evidence in the over four hundred documents I read in his hand or over his signature that he relied on physical violence to elicit the evidence he used to convict the coiners and countefeiters it had become, as Warden, his job to pursue.

In fact, the legal framework in which torture had been a regularized tool of the English justice system had fallen into disuse a half a century before Newton began to act as a cop.  It was supplanted  for the same reasons that we have throughout most of American history understood torture to be illegitimate — then, and until very recently, it was understood to be both ineffective and illegitimate, corrosive of the state’s moral authority.

To see how this transformation occurred, I looked into the history of a document called a royal torture warrant, used to formally authorize the use of torture.  My main source was John H. Langbein’s excellent Torture and the Law of Proof, which conveniently included a table with details on all 81 known torture warrants.

It is not particularly surprising that Elizabeth I was the most prolific user of royal torture warrants in English history, issuing (or having issued) 53 of the surviving warrants.  She had as much as any monarch to fear from her subjects, given the vicious intrigues of succession that followed the death of her father, Henry VIII, religious conflict, wars with Spain, internal court rivalries, fueling resentment at rule by a mere woman, and so on.  That Elizabeth was as tough as required to retain her throne and her head is a matter of historical fact; among the means she used was state violence against those of her subjects deemed to dangerous to leave at large.

Among the techniques used were several that are recognizably the same as those that the moral bankrupts within the Bush administration attempted to define into legality.  They include confinement in a dungeon with rats (Thomas Sherwood, 17  Nov. 1577, during an investigation of one of the plots against Elizabeth); manacles — essentially a stress position, as the manacled prisoner is lifted to the point where his feet do not support his weight, all of which pulls on the suspended wrists of the victim (several times through Elizabeth’s reign); whipping (Humfrey “a boy” for burglary in 1580 –  note that Jesus too would have had some knowledge of Humfrey’s suffering) and “Little Ease” — confinement in a cell so small that the inhabitant could not sit, nor stand, nor move.  This was used on several occasions including the case of George Beesley, a priest in violation of the Anglican acts in 1591.

The most common techniques ordered specified  in the warrants were either the rack, or else simply “torture”  — once “such torture as is usual,”  a chilling  statement to carry the force of law if ever there was one.

It is also important to understand that the English in this period understood –as Bush’s thug’s willed themselves to deny — that torture was not simply about causing physical pain.  During the century or so of torture authorized by royal warrants in England, the administration of the technique came in two steps.  First, the prisoner would be shown the implements of torture, to see if the horror of the thought of the pain his body would suffer on those devices would induce a confession.  If that psychological coercion failed, the next step was to begin the actual process of imposing physical pain on the prisoner.  Both steps were included in the instructions within torture warrants.  Thus, in 1642, when the apprentice glover John Archer was to be put to torture to gain information about a riot outside the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth, he was first given time to stare at the rack — and only if he remained silent, according to the warrant, the last to be issued in England, was he to be bound onto the machine.

Such mental torture was recognized to be genuinely coercive as well — though in this case it did not persuade the luckless Archer to betray any of his fellow rioters.

That is:  fear of pain and the terror of plausibly imminent death, have been recognized as elements of torture for a very long time. 

There is much more to the history of English legal theories of torute, but the point of this lightning fast gloss is simply to reinforce what should be obvious:   the opinions of the Bush “Justice” (sic) department were nothing more than words in the form of law whose sole purpose was to provide cover for what any competent lawyer would have had to recognize as crimes. Those who wrote them were teaching theselves to unknow what they know; they were wounding themselves, amputating their own capacity to reason. 

That’s the pity of it; the terror lies in whatever success they have in persuading the rest of us to so self-mutilate.

And what is worst of all is that the Bush administration descent into moral deformity came four hundred years after our English legal antecedents recognized that torture was both ineffective and irrelevant.   

The last monarch-issued torture warrant dates from 1642, just before the start of the Civil War.  This was hardly a time when Charles I could have felt any more secure than Elizabeth at her most precarious; the revolt that would cost him his life was almost upon him, and no one on either side of the Court/Parliament divide had any doubt about the potential for violence at every turn.  So why did the King cease to brandish the rack at his subjects?

Several reasons have been advanced for the forgoing of torture as a tool of investigation or the discovery of evidence. Two matter most.  First, even then, it was understood that information received under torture was unreliable.  Second, and much more important in the current context:  the fact that England had adopted the system of using juries at trialspermitted the evolution of new ideas about judicial truth. 

In traditional approaches to justice confessions were seen as certain proof of guilt, and hence, absent some system for finding fact, were almost essential to legitimize verdicts. But with juries, other evidence could take on more and more weight, rendering confessions less significant and finally unnecessary in making a judgment of guilt.

That is:  the English in the early 17th century figured out (a) that you hurt someone enough they’ll confess to murdering Father Christmas and (b) that there were smarter ways both to find out what you need to know to preserve security (in much more precarious states than our own) and to convict those who did in fact commit harm to individuals or the body of the state.

To sum it up in one sentence:  if you trust the rule of law, you don’t need to act in ways that would make Jesus weep.

And that’s why it’s past time to shine a light on what crimes the Bush torture cabal actually committed in our names.

[The accounts of the history of torture in England of this post were originally published by Andrew Sullivan in slightly different versions as messages from an anonymous emailer, written a couple of years ago (before I started this blog).  I felt and feel the argument I was trying to make then needed reformulation now; hence the resurfacing of this material.]

Images:  Jacopo Pontormo, “Torture of St. Quintus,” 1517-1518.  

William-Adolphe Bouguereau “The Flagellation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” 1880.

1000 Words’ Worth…Bush Fail dept:

Check out this graph at Brad DeLong’s indispensible site.  See also Krugman’s version, with the boundaries of the Bush disaster conveniently marked in gray.  (Should have been black crepe– ed.)

It is perhaps too much of a simplification to suggest that this picture tells you all you need to know about the efficacy of tax cuts for employment creation…but not by much.

PS:  What the nonesense of last week was really about from the horse’s ass mouth:

Despite the struggle, some Republicans seemed to sense the White House would ultimately prevail, and sought political mileage.

Obama “could have had a very, very impressive victory early on,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who heads the Senate Republican campaign committee. “But this is not turning out to be an impressive victory. it is turning out to be a little bit of a black eye.”

Image:  Ernest Lindsay, “WPA Camp,”1936. U.S.Forest Service Database, Photo Number: 340843

Numbers: MSNBC’s Gots Them/George Bush Gots Indicted by Them

This blog always likes numbers as a way of providing a check on qualitative claims about reality.  Here’s a nice set

It’s a Harper’s Index-like treatment of basic numerical assessments of the well being of the United States from the beginning of the Bush II presidency to now. (h/t Ezra Klein).  With the increasingly less young  Mr. Klein (joining the rest of us at a constant rate of one day per day), I wonder what metrics one could choose to produce a different outcome.  ‘Cause right here, the embattled self-made-son is losing on ten out of ten judge’s cards.

Image:  Fresco from Akrotiri (Santorini), “Children Boxing,” before the last quarter of the 17th century B.C.E.

A Quick Thought on the Wall St. Mess: No Virginia (AKA George Bush/John McCain), This Comes as No Surprise

There is plenty on the web today that is more informed and more detailed than anything I could write about the current mess, so I’ll just offer these two brief notes as we struggle to avoid our own personal visit to a new Great Depression:

1:  This should have come as no surprise to anyone.  The connection of the subprime mess to the mortgage backed securities market — and that market’s significance to the financial market as a whole — has been documented everywhere for a long time.  See Duncan Black’s long list of posts with the words Big Shitpile in them for just one of an unbelievable number of more or less ordinary folks who know of this toxic intersection.

Crucially, smart money — really smart money — knew about the dangers of the new financial engineering years ago.  My own realization of this came when I did a quick google search about a year ago to find some more detailed coverage of the concept of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) — the name for one of the major culprits in the current fiasco.

Near the top of my search I found this, a briefing paper from Nomura Securities that dates from February 5, 2005.

The paper discussed in only slightly technical and fully comprehensible detail, how a particular form of CDO called a CDO squared is structured so that a relatively small number of defaults concentrated in a single instrument can bring down a much larger pool of otherwise more or less stable financial instruments — in effect reversing the expected result of creating a diversified pool of assets.

This is just one paper, of course, and it discusses just one of the species of lovely new ways to monetize debt that flowed through the financial system in the wake of the housing bubble.  But the point is that this kind of knowledge had already, by the beginning of 2005, filtered down to the level of publically available brokerage research.

And this leaves aside the chorus of folks who pointed out that the underlying driver of this crisis, the housing bubble itself, was driven by the kind of practices documented in car-wreck-on-the-highway obsessed detail here. This was not exactly a difficult disaster to forsee.  The full dimensions, maybe (just maybe) — but the fact of folly — that has been obvious for a long time.

And that brings me to my second point:

2.  As this post from Think Progress documents in gory, painful detail, the claim from the Bush administration that no one could have seen this coming is, politely, that which emerges from the south end of a north facing bull.

What this means in terms of thinking through to the new administration?  Well you have a choice between the man who has chosen as one of his lead economic advisors (and a potential Secretary of the Treasury) one of the chief architects of the deregulatory scheme that enabled this crisis, and who had this coherent thought on the economy to utter as recently as Monday.

Or you could choose the fella who had this to say today.

As they used to say on football Sundays:  You Make The Call.

Image:  Dorothea Lange “Tractored Out” — tenantless farm in Childress County, Texas, 1938.  Shot for the Farm Security Administration.  United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID ppmsc.00232.  Source: Wikimedia Commons.

More Mental Health: Gilbert and Sullivan Take On Science And The Modern Presidency

From Jim Easter, a delightful gloss on the fate of science in the hands of the Christianist GOP.

Read it, laugh, and weep.

Image:  A.S. Seer Print, New York, Poster for The Pirates of Penzance, 1880.  Theatrical Poster Collection (Library of Congress), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/var.1961.  Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Amateurs talk tactics, Professionals study logistics: The Surge, Afghanistan, Bush, McCain edition

The running theme of this blog is the importance of being able to count. Genuinely elementary arithmetic, if actually applied, is the foundation of scientific thinking, and scientific thinking is how we arrive, however imperfectly, at reliable guides to experience in the world.

That said, this post is another in my informal series arguing that because John McCain can’t count, can’t take advantage of the tools of analytical thinking, he is unfit to be President. A corollary of the argument I’m about to make is that the latest news out of our multiply mismanaged foreign wars provides independent support for General Wesley Clark’s argument that Senator McCain’s military career has not given him the experience needed by a President.

What’s the news?

This: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, yesterday told reporters that the US military has run out of troops, that it cannot dispatch more units to Afghanistan, where the Taliban is on the rise, unless and until the US draws down its forces in Iraq.

What does this have to do with counting, with analytical thinking? Here is John McCain, from his campaign website, on the”success” of what he calls “The McCain Surge” of US troops in Iraq:

Today, our new counterinsurgency campaign is showing signs of success, and John McCain believes we can still prevail in Iraq if Washington politicians exercise resolve not panic.

Remember: Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics (a quote attributed to General Omar Bradley).

Leave aside the question of whether or not the surge is working even in its own limited sphere. (There is, sadly, a very strong argument that its primary accomplishment has been to prop up an unpopular, inept, Iranian-leaning government, leading to a decrease in US power, and an increase in that of our primary regional rival. See Michael Massing’s latest from Baghdad for the depressing details.

(As an aside: I don’t usually link to David Brooks, who I regard as a fact-deprived, innumerate writer, but his column of June 24 illustrates the problem of punditry without a grasp of the details. Massing’s on the ground report demonstrates why just about everything Brooks says is wrong in this particularly empty bit of triumphalism. (Find one actual testable claim in it, and I’ll give you a lollipop.)

Back on track: the question isn’t just whether or not the surge can work in a local sense, but whether it does now or ever did make sense in the context of the larger war in which we were and are engaged.

The answer was and is no — because the ground forces at our disposal were insufficient for the task of fighting in Afghanistan at the level of intensity required even before the surge began, and more or less everyone in a responsible position knew it.

The military equivalent of the green-eyeshade folks knew in in 2004, as Sy Hersh documented way back then, that the diversion of resources to Iraq threatened operations in that first theater of engagement — the one that actually hosted those who did us harm on 9/11, the ones whose presence on the border was disrupting a key ally, which also happened to be a genuinely nuclear armed Muslim-majority state.

They certainly knew in late 2006 that John McCain and the rest of the armchair generals, those daring knights of the keyboard (h/t Ted Williams) who called for winning in Iraq by shoving a brigade here and a battalion there, were talking tactics, and ignoring logistics.

At that moment, Afghanistan was already receiving scant attention. The Taliban and its allies were already resurgent. Pakistan was already spiraling into political turmoil. The war we failed to finish was and is now in danger of being lost — and no professional, no one who understood the hard data of what it takes to keep boots on the ground, had any reason to doubt what would follow a further starving of this campaign to pour more resources down the sump of Iraq.

This isn’t higher math; this is arithmetic.

And what of McCain? He has focused his claim on the Presidency on the assertion that he has more experience than his rival, especially in military matters, which is certainly true. But General Clark raised in public the issue that a lot of folks have wondered about for a long time: what is the impact of that experience on McCain’s judgment and decision-making.

Now, Admiral Mullen has given us the sadly obvious answer: not much good. It helps to be able to count.

Program Notes: Iraq disaster/NY Times does good edition…

Read this on the fate of wounded Iraqi soldiers. (h/t TPM)

Weep, then think.

Two issues related to the themes of this blog come to mind. The first is that this is an example of the kinds of issues that lie behind the broad point I tried to make in this post about why we have alreadly lost whatever was worth “winning” in Iraq.

There, I used the most simple minded of quantitative arguments to assert that the destruction of life in Iraq had already topped the threshold that other experiences — the Civil War, World War I — suggested produced lasting, conflict-perpetuating damage to the societies that suffer them.

Behind the blunt statistics — the fact that 2 percent or more of the Iraqi population have died as a direct or indirect result of the conflict — lie the individual stories that produce their individual quanta of grief, shame and rage. Today’s New York Times article, the well written and wrenching work of Michael Kamber, does what good journalism should do: tell particular stories that provide the specific human experience that drives the larger trend of events.

What does it do to an army to know that it’s wounded are left on the heap? What does it do to a society if the best organized and armed group assumes its polity and its generals are willing to abandon them? Nothing good. If you are looking for places where the seeds of future conflict sprout, this is a good place to start, IMHO.

The second point is the one that should be obvious by now within our public discourse, but strangely isn’t. Kamber writes that “In the United States, the issue of war injuries has revolved almost entirely around the care received by the 30,000 wounded American veterans.” That’s true — but what has been missing from that coverage is the issue that lies at the heart of this account of Iraqi problems: the ongoing cost of caring for the novel populations of wounded soldiers in modern war. It happens for American soldiers more than for Iraqis, I believe, but broadly, more seriously wounded soldiers survive now than did in previous wars due to advances in frontline and later medical care.

As Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have documented in their insufficiently well publicized studies, the cost of caring for US wounded is going to drain hundreds of billions of dollars from the Treasury for decades.

That cost, of course, is the reason wounded Iraqi vets are receiving such a poor shake; it helps explain at least some of the disgraceful lapses in care US soldiers have endured. It also leads directly to the bigger story that Stiglitz and Bilmes have tried to tell: the true cost of major modern conflict is a disastrous burden for any society to bear.

When they actually added up all the numbers, the indirect cost of the war to the US economy turned out to by conservative reasoning to double the direct costs — on the order of 1.5 trillion dollars over time.

That’s about 11 percent of the total output of the US economy in current dollars — and while that seemingly devastating cut in our wealth is eased by the decades-long schedule over which the money will be fed to the maw of war, ask any economist what compounding does to seemingly small cuts (or gains) in output. Again, nothing good in this case.

This post could go any number of directions from here. One stray thought: all that missing US money could have done a lot of good in taking care of the Iraqis we arguably most need to think well of our presence in their country.

But there is a much more important point to be made than yet one more plaint about tthe venality and corruption of the war here and there: Governments — and empires — fall when the economic cost of maintaining control over resistant or even indifferent satrapies rises too high.

I don’t give long odds for an Iraqi administration that cannot take care of its army; if the kind of indifference Kamber documents in today’s piece persists, I’d bet that power will fragment, flowing to those people and groups that promise and deliver the kind of social web that have so aided Hezbollah and Hamas in their ascents — not a good prospect for all kinds of reasons.

And as for us: whether or not we meet our moral obligation to take care of our own soldiers and those Iraqis who we led into in the conflict we initiated, the American imperial adventure in Iraq has already demonstrably weakened us within a world with rapidly shifting centers of influence, wealth and power. It has done so in all kinds of ways, as Andrew Bacevich expertly and efficiently documents in today’s Boston Globe. (Again, h/t TPM).

One of the most obvious ways that this is taking place, one which is (as Bacevich points out) strangely absent from our politics right now, is that the kind of cold-eyed quantitative analysis provided by the likes of Bilmes and Stiglitz strongly suggests that the Iraq war could be the kind of pure econmic drain that kills empires. Derangement of state finances and overextended military adventures have afflicted empires both old and new.

For a cartoon tour through the controversial history of imperial decline, think the Syracusan fiasco that doomed the Athenian empire, the fate of the Qing dynasty after half a century or more of devastating internal rebellion and sustained external conflict, and then the collapse of the European empires under the weight of the material and moral costs of wars large and small. Go on one step more, and ponder the impact of the twin costs of the mostly cold conflict the Soviets waged to retain control of their western provinces — the Warsaw Pact nations — and the hot one fought and lost in Afghanistan.

The US weathered Vietnam with its global position largely unchanged, perhaps even strengthened, given what happened to its leading rival for power.

The world is different now.  To draw out the political point that I hope is obvious even unstated:  the cost of John McCain’s vision of indefinite war in Iraq  may well turn this conflict into our Somme.  Even if we “win” in Iraq, in the sense that we retain a compliant client in power, basing rights and contractual control of that nation’s oil, we are well on our way to losing the larger and much more important conflict.

How do I know? The fact that we cannot, or will not pay for the proper care of soldiers who fought on our behalf tells me so.

Images:  Francisco Goya, “The Disasters of War (Los Desatres de la Guerra),” plate 56, c. 1810.  Source Wikimedia Commons.

John Singer Sargent “Gassed,” 1918. Location:  Imperial War Museum, London.  (The painting is huge, and no internet reproduction can create the effect of seeing the real thing.  IOW:  Stop in to the IWM if you have the chance.)  Source, Wikimedia Commons.

John McCain’s reality problem: Guantanamo, State Power, and Theoretical Physics

You have to be quick to be good. Today, via Atrios, George Will (George Will!) is actually saying the right thing about John McCain’s latest, almost tragic, self negation.

The back story: The Supreme Court rules 5-4 that prisoners held by the US, on territory the US wholly controls, actually have some baseline of essential rights, in particular the right to make a habeas corpus claim, requesting a hearing (requesting! not automatically receiving) in which the government must demonstrate that it has due cause to hold the complainant, or else release him or her.

So what happened next? Joy amongst those who think the Constitution has some life in it yet, visions of the apocalypse for those who feel the rule of law is for other people.

John McCain, sadly — and I mean that — lined up with the latter, declaring the ruling “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

It is sad: I’m no John McCain fan (dog-bites-man…ed.), but he is someone who once seemed to have a sense of who he was, and now he doesn’t. On everything from torture (agin it, except when the proper Americans do it) to energy polict, (even Cheney thinks he’s gone wacky) he now seems willing to say whatever he thinks at that moment might help him out. It’s never a pretty sight to see someone turning themselves into a caricature in public.

But here McCain is worse than sad: he’s dangerous on two levels. The first is obvious, and it is the one Will nailed — with exactly the same serious of examples I was planning to provide. As he writes,

Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation? With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?

No; of course not. As Will points out, there are in fact some issues to argue here — but there is no way to say that this decision defies reason or legal basis.

Will goes on to have some fun with McCain — there’s a tone of real contempt in lines like “Did McCain’s extravagant condemnation of the court’s habeas ruling result from his reading the 126 pages of opinions and dissents?”

While I can enjoy such snark (and from such a source!) the real point of Will’s column, and the one that moves the whole incident into the realm of a blog concerned with what science can offer public life is the real risk of a McCain presidency exposed here. And it is not just that he’s revealed (once again) as a shoot from the hip reactive kind of guy (contrast his approach to this legal decision with former law professor Obama’s preparation here). Rather, it is that there is a real problem in electing Humpty Dumpty to any responsible office.

That is: the one constant across all the disciplines that call themselves science is a commitment to reality, to acknowledging the actual data that observation and experiment produce, however much they may conflict with worldview or desire. Here’s Albert Einstein, acknowledging in public, for as broad a lay audience as he could reach, explaining the significance of of the new discoveries of quantum mechanics:

There is no doubt that quantum physics explained a very rich variety of facts, achieving, for the most part, splendid agreement between theory and observation. The new quantum physics removes us still further from the old mechanical view, and a retreat to the former position seems, more than ever, unlikely….The qunatum theory again created new and essential features of our reality…”

Einstein never reconciled himself to critical aspects of the modern quantum theory; he spent three decades looking for a more general theory that would subsume it; and yet he nominated its first architects, Heisenberg and Schroedinger for the Nobel Prize, and he did not deny its obvious power or importance. He hated it, but he knew it meant something very, very significant.

Contrast that with McCain in action here. It is a fact that this decision falls within the mainstream of American jurisprudence — one may not like the outcome, and there are meaningful arguments to support that dislike, but this is a perfectly conventional bit of Constitutional reasoning. To say that this is “one of the worst” Supreme Court actions is simply to ignore example after example, fact after fact, that gives the lie to McCain’s pique.

This post is long enough. I’d just say that we’ve had enough of people asserting facts not in evidence for their own, temporary advantage. If there were a ever a single disqualifying attribute in a potential President, it is this truly anti-science willingness to ignore what they do, or should, know to be essential features of the reality we inhabit.

Image:  Jade Record, Chinese, 19th Century.  Depiction of sinners being tortured in the sixth court of hell.  Source: Wikimedia Commons.