Today’s Screed

I’ve been looking at the last few day’s blogs, and at some responses to them, and have come to the conclusion that I’m being too superficial. Max can’t find much to take exception to, but also thinks I’ve dodged some of the hard questions, and in looking back, I think he’s right.
If Howard can think I’m a conservative, I’m not making my points.
I have to take a day or so off to get my sinuses roto-rootered, so while I’m in dreamland, I’ll think of some ways to make my points more substantive.
Yasir, please try not to blow up any more kids while I’m away, OK?

Joe Katzman has a Churchill quote that sums it up neatly.

Just got this month’s Atlantic magazine, with the brilliant article on clearing the WTC site by Langewiesche, and discovered this gem of an article on Arafat by David Brooks.

He has proved to be a mediocre guerrilla leader and a terrible administrator but a brilliant image crafter and morale builder. Early in his career he dressed in Western suits; it was at the 1956 International Students’ Congress in Prague that he first publicly wore a kaffiyeh, or head scarf—a gesture that caused an immediate sensation among the Westerners in attendance. (According to Aburish, each morning Arafat would spend nearly an hour folding his kaffiyeh so that when it hung to his shoulders it resembled the map of Palestine.) The army fatigues, the pistol, and the three-day beard came later, but, like the kaffiyeh, all were carefully considered symbols. Arafat’s greatest moments have always been publicity coups—appearing on the cover of Time in 1968, speaking at the United Nations in 1974—rather than military victories. His primary goals have always been to create and nurture what might be called the Palestinian brand and to rally the Palestinian psyche around himself.

and

He and his army have brought disorder wherever they have settled. In 1969 they based themselves in Jordan, where they soon began terrorizing the local people, running extortion rackets against businesses, and undermining the Jordanian regime. Black September followed in 1970: Jordan’s King Hussein launched a huge and bloody war against the Palestinians, killing thousands and leading to the expulsion of Arafat and his army. The same sort of thing happened in Lebanon a decade later, with Palestinian thugs looting banks and destroying the local government. The Syrians finally came in to restore order, in what became known as Black June. Arafat has somehow survived his many crises—battles with the Jordanians, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Lebanese Christians, and, of course, the Israelis. And each time, instead of being held even partly responsible for the widespread suffering his actions have caused his people, he has been lionized as the figure who will someday bring deliverance from that suffering. This is a monumental political achievement.

There’s more, go read it.

File13’s Amish Tech Support will put everything in perspective.
How would you negotiate with the people who do this as a matter of course? I used to support the idea of a Palestinian state. I used to be irritated at Israel for all the things they did in the name of ‘security’. I was the political audience Arafat played to.
Not any more.
Thanks to Kathy Kinsley.

I’m not getting deeply into ‘what’ a liberal is; I never have enough time to work on these things…let’s say for now that when I talk about creating a new kind of liberalism, I’m talking about acknowledging the government’s real role in creating social capital (things like knowledge, infrastructure, an educated workforce, etc.), and in a desire to have the government do something to keep poor people from starving.
Both of these are, I believe good ideas, even if they don’t get you all sweaty and breathing hard over the morality involved. We are a rich country, in part, because our workforce is better educated and healthier, and because we have first dibs on all the cool things that get invented by all the smart people here.
Once you are rich, you always have the problem of poor relatives and neighbors, who are at best jealous and at worst desperate. People who are desperate have little to lose, and tend to do things like riot and loot; the levels of force necessary to repress that tendency tend to lead to revolutions.
So, in short form, it’s my belief that one of the most useful things a society can do is to work hard to create social capital, and to work to keep the poorest and most marginal members of the society well on this side of desperation. Now as you may have noted in my earlier posts, I believe that government is not the same thing as society; that culture and tradition, and all that anthropological and sociological stuff exist prior to government, and that governmental arrangements are made on top of those deeper structures. Those allow for community- and church- based charity, for example. Or education, Or childcare.
Now there are a lot of reasons why those cultural ties are weakening in modern Western society; and a lot of back-and-forth over whether it’s a good thing or not. But I think we can take as a given that the informal structures have yielded much of their role to government.
I don’t think that necessarily a good thing, but I take it as a fact.
And I take as a fact that certain functions simply are not going to get done by voluntary associations. No one will build the large water and power infrastructures on which our society depends (see John McPhee’s great book ‘The Control of Nature’ … actually, read any of his great books, including ‘The Curve of Binding Energy’
, an early book on homemade nuclear terror). No one will create the kind of opportunity that inexpensive, excellent state universities and community colleges have created.
Which means that government has to find a way to take on these roles effectively, which I don’t believe it has done. It’s taken them on, but I don’t believe that it has been as effective as we need and want it to be; and I’ll suggest that our view of government action would be substantially different if we felt it was effective.
It is my personal observation that people’s attitudes toward government are in part ideological, in part driven by bad experiences with ineffective or actively hostile agents of government, and in biggest part a simple sense of old-fashioned Yankee search for value for the buck.
And it is the key to this whole post that I believe that a more flexible ‘4th Generation’ approach to these problems could, in places, both make these kind of activities more effective (more results for the dollar), and make them more humane, by either tying into existing social organizations or reproducing the scale and effect of these smaller social organizations.
Here are a few categories, with several links (sorry about the pdf links, but that’s all I could find) for background, and some suggestions on approach.
Infrastructure
Our society depends on a concrete infrastructure (literally!) of sewers, water supply, energy supply, roads and highways, railroads, airports, and the subsidiary facilities that make each of these work, like air traffic control.
But what if we enable the pilots to have some say in determining their routing and flight path? Then we’d have something like free flight. Here are some reviews on two good books on the subject.
Electricity nearly bankrupted California last summer, and while much of that crisis was a sham, we are facing a real structural crisis as we outgrow the generating and transmission capacity of the current systems. So what do we do? Many are arguing that we should ‘go nuclear’ in order to avoid further dependence on the Middle East’s supply of oil. But there are alternatives that make sense, as this paper points out…’negawatts’ – investing in conserving energy through retrofitting existing energy users…and ‘distributed power’ – using smaller power sources, and moving them closer to the user – the inherent lesser efficiency of the smaller generator is made up for, in part, by avoiding the losses in transmission and in the flexibility of use.
We have to do something, because the great burst of infrastructure we built during and after World War II (Thanks, Gov. ‘Pat’ Brown!) is both wearing out and simultaneously serving a far larger population than it was ever designed for.
Check out this article:

Yet the electricity debacle is a jolting reminder that California’s
failure to reinvest in itself has very real consequences. Looming fallout
from decades of disinvestment has some legislators and business
organizations urging the state to start spending big on public works
while there are budget surpluses available. The state’s Department of
Finance estimates that California will need to spend $82 billion over 10
years to shore up its aging infrastructure, though others put that figure
at more than $100 billion.
Skeptics say private-sector solutions would better serve taxpayers.
Still, the state’s power troubles vividly demonstrate the risk of inaction.

I’m not sure what has to happen, but something does…and soon.
Environment
I’ve already mentioned my view on the history of pollution in Los Angeles:

The population of Southern California has gone up by about 60% since 1970, according to the Southern California Association of Governments. Auto ownership and use has grown faster, probably about 25% more, I’ll estimate, so we’re looking at a 75% increase in vehicle-miles. We’ve probably lost a bunch of manufacturing and refining, but employment is still a whole bunch higher than it was back then.
And I remember summer days in high school when you couldn’t see the end of my West LA block for the smog. Two-a-days in the pool at school when you spent the day with “aqualung”—a chest so sore you couldn’t raise your voice.

I think that the ARB folks have actually done a pretty good job. But in any process, there comes a point where you need a tool with a sharper edge. Cars make up about 50% of the smog in most American cities, and 50% of the smog cars generate, according to this study, come from 10% of the cars.
At some point, we need to go after those cars if we want to have any meaningful effect, rather than driving the pollution from new cars down at a cost of an additional $1 – 2,000/car. It’s not unreasonable to assume that we’d be better off identifying and junking the bad cars, and depending on one’s state of charity, either giving the owners new Hyundais or bus passes.
Public health
The isolation of a cholera epidemic to a single water pump in London is what has made cities habitable in the 20th century. Concentrating this many people in this little space means we have to work very hard to make sure that plagues are not given a chance to develop or spread … or be developed or spread.
I went to college with Laurie Garrett, who was an unreconstructed Marxist, and who still seems to be kinda anti-capitalist, but has a helluva point about our collective vulnerability in modern urbanized, high transportation society.
The preservation of public health should be one of the major functions of government, and the integration of real public health (as opposed to issue-of-the-month public health) into our government’s priorities should be happening right now.
And the answer again, is to have central labs which do research and which inform the front-line doctors (we’ll talk about the health care crisis another time) and hospitals, who need to have the information and communications to figure out whether what they see is an isolated problem or not.
Education
Giant smoking hole right now. I am throwing up my hands.
Development
I believe that most people want a house in the suburbs with a fence, a car, and to have a decent job. Many people in our country, for a variety of reasons, can’t begin to figure out how to get there (hint: part of the answer is education, as above), and instead have become perpetually dependent. How to make them independent?
Here are a few hints:

Walking along the street of any low-income settlement in developing countries, one is struck by the apparent contrast of dwelling and habitat. On one side of the street is a dilapidated, single story, windowless house of tin sheets and open drains; across the street is a fine two-storied brick and concrete house with glass windows, paneled doors, and painted walls. While there are many reasons for such contrasts, one variable that repeatedly surfaces as a common denominator is the accessibility to different sources and types of credit.

From the Grameen Bank website. The Grameen bank makes ‘microloans’, which typically allow poor people to buy materials or equipment needed to set themselves up in low-level businesses, such as vending, sewing, or carpentry. They may tie the loans tightly to a group of borrowers, each of whom is responsible for the performance of their fellow borrowers. Their default rate would make Citi very proud, and they have been extremely successful in moving people from poverty to independence.
I mentioned another program a while ago:

Wilson, 36, who has a wife and two young children, brings in $800 a month making cabinets, tables and chairs for a furniture store and for neighbors. His business got a big kick six months ago when he bought a used drill press and lathe for $650. It doubled his productivity, which in turn allowed him to purchase the materials for the extension and hire a mason.

That’s what it’s all about.

Joe Katzman had an insightful blog on his knee-jerk reponse to the Harvard Jihadi, and to his more measured and human response afterwards. It’s at Winds of Change.
Supposedly, Lord Keynes had a placard in his office which read ‘When I’m Wrong, I Change My Mind. What do you do?’
What do you do?

This is what I’m talking about:

When Johnson pulled out the lighter, two Manhattan women jumped him, and he shot one in the leg, police said. Officers heard the shots and stormed the bar, grazing Johnson in the head and taking him into custody.
“Those two women did the right thing, a very important thing … they were very brave,” Kelly said.

Thanks to Instapundit for the news.

Was glancing at the Blogoverse between games this morning and found a link on NZ Bear’s site (another anonymous blogger, BTW!!) to a story on Michael Kielsky’s site about a young Arab boy who was flown to the U.S. to have a bullet taken from his chest (note: This is how we treat people who celebrated 9/11 and Daniel Pearl’s death…we fly them here for medical treatment. Yes we are better than they are.)
The bullet appeared to be a .22LR, as opposed to the .223 and .308 ammunition typically used by the Israeli military. Kielsky felt that this was evidence that he had not been shot by an Israeli.
I have been told, in the shooting world, some things about Israeli tactics…almost always with a lot of admiration. One thing which I have been told is that the IDF uses .22LR in riot supression as a ‘less-lethal’ alternative to .223 or .308, which are typically quite lethal.
I passed this on to Michael and NZ, and Michael has at least some confirmation of it.
This isn’t an anti-Israeli point; and anyone who reads this blog knows how I feel about the Intifada (hint: it’s a rare mixture of immoral and suicidal).
But if we demand the truth from others, we ought to tell it ourselves.

Let me start with a brief story.
The Biggest Guy flew back from Virginia yesterday, and because I’m a cheap bastard, his flight took him through three airports and two airlines (thanks Orbitz!!). When I picked him up, of course his bag was nowhere to be seen.
So we walked over to the United Airlines baggage office, and walked up to the counter where three bored-looking, seemingly inattentive staff members waited. We got Angela, who took the information, and noted that the bag didn’t seem to exist in their computer system, and then walked away.
I put myself into ‘deal with hostile bureaucracy’ mode, and waited for her to come back, with the ‘we can’t find it, it’s not our problem’ response, and readied myself for a painful escalation up the bureaucracy.
Instead, she came back, said that she’d confirmed that the bag hadn’t made the Chicago-LA flight, and that it was probably with US Air. But she’d called US Air, hadn’t been able to get to the baggage desk, had called the front desk, and a supervisor was headed over to the baggage office. She had us fill out a form, and said she’d stay on it and make sure the bag was chased down; United would take responsibility and they’d see that it was delivered to my house.
And this morning, it’s in our house, sitting in the foyer.
And the reason is that the person responsible for dealing with the customer had the initiative and flexibility to pick up the phone and chase something across airlines, rather than explain ‘not in our system, never got on our plane’, which is what I expected.
One approach to the War on Terrorism is to built giant formally structured security systems, backed by massive, centralized technology, and as the complex, ‘wicked’ world keeps asking questions the system can’t ask, add pages and pages to the three-ring binders of regulations and policies the minimum-wage front-line employees must follow. You can hire and retain them based on their ability to follow the rules, even when it means taking the wire clippers away from a uniformed Special Forces soldier—who has his mouth wired shut because he’s wounded, and needs the cutters to cut the wires in the event he has to throw up. Or who want to take away the Congressional Medal of Honor from an 80-year old man flying to give a speech at the Air Force Academy.
It will involve a massive investment in machines that will be rushed into production and still be obsolete long before we have finished paying for them.
I obviously don’t think much of this model in this application. I think it is based on old, Taylorian models in which you attempt to break the process into a finite series of discrete steps, and train the human portions of the system in performing these exact steps as precisely and efficiently as possible. It also removes the necessity for any kind of judgment or expertise on the part of the employee.
I’ll suggest that there is an alternative model, based on the kind of flexible, adaptive model I am talking about here.
One of the benefits of doing this in public and slowly is that sometimes people finish your thoughts for you.
Bill Whittle, another Angelino, first slagged me – ‘My God, man! What color is the sky on the strange planet where you live?’ and then made my blogging weekend. (The non-blogging part was made over dim sum by my sons, fiancée, brother and mom) I can’t imagine a better feeling from doing this – well, I could get paid – than to trigger a perfect expression of one an idea you’re struggling with in someone else.

Rather than issuing today’s color of anxiety warning, how much better would it be to offer some realistic training and intelligence to normal citizens so that the defenses are everywhere. If United 93 taught us anything, it’s that the American sense of self-reliance, determination, courage and patriotism has not been bred out of us after all. We are the white blood cells. Remember that pilot who told his passengers a few days after 9/11 that once the cabin doors were shut, no one could help us but ourselves, so get to know the person sitting next to you? That is exactly the kind of mindset I am talking about.
I’m a little short on time here, but I feel that you don’t fight a nanobot invasion with the Great Wall of China.
Okay, so I’m starving and metaphorically challenged at the moment. But that is to say that a monolithic Office of Homeland Security is ill-suited to defend against such low-signature infiltrations. What we really need is a system as decentralized and flexible as Al Qaeda’s, one that is so diffuse and interwoven into the American fabric that it can detect intrusions much as an immune system can. Such a network of private citizens could then call in the airstrikes (FBI, etc) when they get a solid hit on the detection network. Furthermore, it seems that such a diffuse, low-power system would be far less prone to abuses since the amount of power concentrated would be small.
I am NOT talking about armbanded Nazis who previously sat on Condominium Associations being deputized to snoop on neighbors. God knows that China has shown what a horror these neighborhood snitches can be. But surely raising the awareness of the public and inculcating a spirit of action when a threat is detected could do us nothing but good.
-Bill Whittle, via email

I doubt that I could say it better. ‘you don’t fight a nanobot invasion with the Great Wall of China’.
So what does this mean? We need to find models that rely on the intelligence and abilities of the Angelas of the world. She didn’t let me down, and it is the folks like her…not remote administrators creating inflexible policies…who have the best chance of defending us.
Next, I’ll talk about how a ‘liberal’ set of policies could work in the same ways, and over the next week, I’ll try and make concrete policy and tactical suggestions.