The Skewz podcast interview is on their site here.

It’s funny, but for all the talk about the ‘Right Wing Noise machine’ on the ‘net, the reality is that the left has far out organized and outplayed the right in the political uses of new media.

Much of that is genuine, a slice of it is deranged, and now we have some evidence that at least a little bit is Astroturf.

Over at the Jawa Report, Rusty Shackleford backtraced an anti-McCain Youtube video and – I think pretty conclusively – linked it to Obama’s campaign. I’d love to see the left doing this kind of research as well – I think these kind of actions are questionably illegal and certainly undermine the authenticity of the dialog on the blogs. I’m amused but not surprised that no left-wing blogs are showing up on the Memeorandum cloud around this post.

In 2004, I wrote about the increasing and hidden ‘professionalization’ of the left-wing blogs, and how for a few hundred grand a year folks like Media Matters managed to have a meaningful impact on our political dialog.

So I’ve been following the “the Surge was a fraud” lines of argument on sites like Democracyarsenal, and meaning to reply when I got a moment when this NY Times article popped up on Memeorandum: “Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm“. Amusingly, so far this morning, the only sites to have linked to it are warblogs – Hot Air, Neptunus Lex, The Astute Bloggers. In a world where I had more time, I’d do some digging into the insularity of the blogs right now, as left and right blogs increasingly ignore stories that don’t support their narrative.

Here’s the lede from the NY Times article:

At first, I didn’t recognize the place.

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park – I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene – impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

Go read the whole thing.

Now, it’s been interesting following the path of the story – based on aerial imagery – that suggested that ethnic cleansing was what really drive down the violence in Iraq – before the Surge started.

It was for some reason a debatable point whether the sectarian cleansing of mixed neighborhoods contributed to the decline in violence. Reuters now confirms – and has visual evidence – to prove that the decline in violence in Iraq, specifically in Baghdad, was caused in no small measure by the massive sectarian cleansing that preceded the surge. The sectarian violence essentially cleansed neighborhoods of their minority populations, reducing opportunities for violence. Maggie Fox from Reuters explains:

Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday. The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed…”By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left,” geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement. “Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

I haven’t had time to read the whole study, but let me suggest two things to think about before I editorialize:

First, that it seems odd to me that the decline in attacks on Coalition troops – along with the intercommunal violence – would be somehow contingent on ‘clearing’ certain neighborhoods. And such a decline clearly took place in parallel; so unless the analysts want to propose that there were two completely unrelated sets of violent activity – one aimed at sectarian violence and one aimed at Coalition troops – it seems like there was an overall pattern of change which reduced both the sectarian and anti-Coalition violence over the course of the year.

Second, I’ll freely acknowledge that population movement had some impact on the levels of violence. But it seems unlikely – given the level of violence – that simply moving from partially Sunni neighborhoods to consolidated Sunni neighborhoods would have had a lot of impact – it’s not like the Sunni were chased out of Iraq.

A deeper pattern of social change has resulted in the Iraq described by Filkins in the Times today, and he talks about two indicators which he saw:

Everything here seems to be standing on its head. Propaganda posters, which used to celebrate the deaths of American soldiers, now call on Iraqis to turn over the triggermen of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Mahdi Army. “THERE IS NOWHERE FOR YOU TO HIDE,” a billboard warns in Arabic, displaying a set of peering, knowing eyes. I saw one such poster in Adamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood that two years ago was under the complete control of Al Qaeda. Sunni insurgents – guys who were willing to take on the Qaeda gunmen – are now on the American payroll, keeping the peace at ragtag little checkpoints for $300 a month.

and

In the crowd, I saw a face I recognized. It was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security advisor. It had been a long time since I’d seen him. Mr. Rubaie is a warm, garrulous man, a neurologist who spent years in London before returning to Iraq. But he is also a Shiite, and a member of Iraq’s Shiite-led government, which, in 2005 and 2006, was accused of carrying out widespread atrocities against Iraq’s Sunnis. Anbar Province is almost entirely Sunni.

As Mr. Rubaie made his way through the crowd, I noticed he was holding hands with another Iraqi man, a traditional Arab gesture of friendship and trust. It was Brig. Gen. Murdi Moshhen al-Dulaimi, the Iraqi Army officer taking control of the province – a Sunni. The sun was blinding, but Mr. Rubaie was wearing sunglasses, and finally he spotted me.

“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked over the crowd.

I might have asked him the same thing.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

And then go back and read the mendacious post at Democracyarsenal, where they say:

So when John McCain declares “victory” in Iraq and states that the increase of just 30,000 troops was the fundamental reason for the decline in violence, he once again proves that he has no idea what he is talking about.

So who doesn’t know what they are talking about in this case? My money is on Max Bergmann, who – like many of the antiwar analysts who are frustrated by the outcome that appears to be solidifying in Iraq – will stretch any idea possible to suggest that our actions had nothing to do with them.

And, more important, who would pull the plug on an emerging but fragile Iraq just as things are starting to heal.

Because that’s the issue above all. If the Surge was ineffective, our presence is unsupportable, and we just need to get out. We need to stop supporting the Iraqi government, stop paying the Sunni insurgents, just stop! stop! stop! whatever we are doing. So that a political movement here in the US can feel vindicated.

No matter what hell may get unleashed on a newly hopeful Iraq.

There’s a new documentary on voting integrity – ‘Uncounted‘ – that will be showing Tuesday here in Los Angeles.

It’s showing at the Fairfax theater at 7:30pm, and if you say “No Diebold” (a sentiment left and right should both share) at the box office, you’ll get a discount.

I’m going to see if I can take LG and go see it…

So there’s been a bit of hoo-hah over a new study that has been reported as “conservatives are cowards”. First of all, if anyone has access to the AAAS website, I’d love a copy of the full paper. As it is, I’m going off of the abstract and some of the news articles about it. Here’s the abstract:

We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

As I understand it, they measured startle reactions and other physiological reactions to ‘stressful imagery’ (like images of injured people and threatening situations).

Here’s a typical reaction:

Rightwingers scare more easily than liberals, according to a new study.

…

Jeebus, they went to all that trouble when they just could have asked Karl Rove? The GOP has been using fearmongering – on terrorism, evil axises, taxes, guns, God, gays etc etc – as a vote-getting tactic for how long now?

I’ll suggest an alternate interpretation and suggest that there may actually be something underneath this.

Col. Jeff Cooper – my first shooting instructor – is famous, for among other things, codifying a ‘defensive state of mind’ hierarchy which he expressed as follows (courtesy of John Schaefer):

White – Relaxed, unaware, and unprepared. If attacked in this state the only thing that may save you is the inadequacy and ineptitude of your attacker. When confronted by something nasty your reaction will probably be, “Oh my God! This can’t be happening to me.”

Yellow – Relaxed alertness. No specific threat situation. Your mindset is that “today could be the day I may have to defend myself.” There is no specific threat but you are aware that the world is an unfriendly place and that you are prepared to do something if necessary. You use your eyes and ears, and your carriage says “I am alert.” You don’t have to be armed in this state but if you are armed you must be in yellow. When confronted by something nasty your reaction will probably be, “I thought this might happen some day.” You can live in this state indefinitely.

Orange – Specific alert. Something not quite right has gotten your attention and you shift your primary focus to that thing. Something is “wrong” with a person or object. Something may happen. Your mindset is that “I may have to shoot that person.” Your pistol is usually holstered in this state. You can maintain this state for several hours with ease, or a day or so with effort.

Red – Fight trigger. This is your mental trigger. “If that person does “x” I will shoot them.” Your pistol may, but not necessarily, be in your hand.

In the shooting and defensive arts community, the class of people who don’t react to threats have a name – victims.

But there’s another interesting point here, and it goes to some of the underlying understandings of people who I tend to classify as liberal and conservative.

Liberals, like Dr. Pangloss, see the world as inherently benign and think that it is human agency that makes it otherwise. Conservatives, think that the world is inherently threatening, and see human action as the bulwark against the threats.

To a large extent, this summarizes modern liberal and conservative thinking – crime? “if we’d stop harassing those kids, they would stop being so violent.” foreign policy? “if we don’t act from a position of threatening strength, they will take advantage of us.”

It’s almost a restatement of the old problem of theodicy. Which in a way makes me less sanguine about bridging the gap. Religious wars are the hardest to prevent and the hardest to stop.

So, flew back from Chicago in time for Pizza and Movie Night, which has been a household tradition since Biggest Guy was watching kiddie films a long time ago.

Last night, TG and LG were – suspicious – to say the least at my latest Netflix film, Billy Wilder’s brilliant comedy “One, Two, Three“.

By the time the film was over, LG decided we needed to own it.

It’s a hysterical period comedy set in West Berlin just before the border was closed. If you haven’t seen it, you’ll never think of Pepsi (or Jimmy Cagney) in the same way again. Watch it tonight…

…and it’s time for the “college fiction teacher explains why he’s sorry for the troops” oped. This one is in the Boston Globe.

My first impulse is to say, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Because I am. I’m sorry to know that the person I’m talking to might someday be maimed or killed on the job, or might someday kill someone else. Or refuel a plane that drops bombs on buildings.

I can’t see how anyone who calls himself or herself Christian – or human, for that matter – wouldn’t be sorry.

The fact that we have an army, that we need an army, is inherently tragic. It’s an admission that our species is still ruled by fear and aggression.

Gosh, that’s just too bad. But he’s just getting started. He’s obviously been reading the media about what depressed, enraged brutes our soldiers are.

It remains unthinkable for a politician (or public official of any sort) to say aloud that our troops sometimes commit atrocities, that they are not all worthy of support, that some of them – faced with a terrifying and ethically incoherent mission – are driven to savagery. This grim duty has been left to the soldiers themselves.

And he managed to blame them for war profiteering.

The problem with the knee-jerk militarism of the past several years is that it has led to an absence of financial and moral oversight that is fundamentally undemocratic. Our troops have become human shields for war criminals and profiteers.

Consider the $1.39 billion contract awarded in 2003 to a subsidiary of Halliburton. The reconstruction project was secretly bid – to one company. There was much tough talk in Congress about preventing such sweetheart deals. But five years later, the US government continues to pay vast sums of our money to firms with ties to the administration.

And he finishes up with a moral Klein bottle where he manages to invert the morality of his position without actually turning himself inside out…

Americans have often looked to heroic violence as a means of spiritual regeneration. Our most powerful national myth is the notion that anyone fighting on our behalf is a hero. I understand why friends and families of our soldiers feel this way. But for the rest of us, too often “supporting the troops” isn’t about the troops at all. It’s about the childish desire to feel morally exempt from the violence carried out in our names.

Let me retort.

By thanking the troops, the average citizen – like me – is actually reaching out and helping to carry the moral burden that soldiers must – of necessity – carry on our behalf. It is Mr. Almond whose position manages to position him neatly on the other side by throwing up his hands and claiming that his moral insight is obviously keen enough to ensure that he sees through the mythology.

Now I haven’t read Mr. Almond’s books, and I’m unlikely to. But I’ll bet that he’s no Jainist. He lives the luxury of a life in a society built on violence – violence that is a part of all of our histories. And he thinks he can scrub himself clean of that history with this kind of public declaration. I think it’ll take more than that.

OK a few sketchy comments on the economy.

First, I think it’s a mistake to think that we live in “an economy”; we live in a collection if economies, which intersect more and less strongly at different connection points. The economy I live in has very little to do with the economy of an immigrant worker who lives in Lima, Ohio and works in a building services company, nor with the economy of a hedge fund manager who lives in Greenwich. The economy is one of ‘layers’ that coexist geographically but really have more to do with a larger, global network of peers – mine in Bangalore or London or Boston. We’ve been living through a decades in which the old industrial economy layer in the US has been eroding while other layers – technology, services, financial services – did great. Now we’re seeing two layers – two critical ones (the housing market and financial services) – get slammed.

And these are getting slammed because the markets are doing exactly what they are supposed to do – slam people who are massively greedy (“pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered”) and who have been living and investing beyond their means.

And, I’ll suggest we’ve been doing that – somewhat – since the Clinton boom. I think we had two bubbles that started about the same time in the late 1990’s. One was the technology bubble, and one was the financial bubble that we’re just now starting to see deflate.

The financial history of America, remember, is one that was built on bubbles. Read Charles Beard on the economic history around Independence and the financial bubbles and manipulation that surrounded the actual creation of the country. The railroads left European investors with rooms full of worthless paper – and America with a railroad system. Global Crossing and the other tech companies didn’t just make Terry MacAuliffe rich; they left us with an infrastructure that’s valuable today.

I’m asking myself what will be left behind by this bubble, and to be honest, I’m not sure.

I’ll go read ‘Black Swan‘ again.

OK, something trivial and yet close to my heart.

I walked out of the airport bookstore with a copy of the Economist (still a damn good magazine), and didn’t buy the $30 – 550 page history book. Then I thought it through and realized that I’d done the wrong thing. The magazine lasted about 20 minutes, and the book probably would have lasted 5 – 10 hours. So the $7 copy of the magazine is far more expensive than the $30 (plus tax) book.

On the other hand, I’d have to lug the damn thing around.

This was emailed to me –

FORT BRAGG, N.C. – The Army says a Special Forces trainee found dead this summer during a land navigation exercise in North Carolina was bitten by a poisonous water moccasin, also known as a cottonmouth.

The military said Wednesday the autopsy of 20-year-old Pfc. Norman M. Murburg of Dade City, Fla., ruled out heat or dehydration as a cause of death. Murburg was bitten multiple times while training at the Hoffman training area, near Fort Bragg’s Camp Mackall.

Well, it’s good to have resolution; it was a Giant Meteor Impact – my phrase for an unavoidable event. The only protection is to be someplace else when one of those strikes.