February 3, 2012
Walter Kirn profiles Gingrich
A new column in GQ on the 2012 presidential race:
There are some things you don’t know you want until you get them and some that you don’t know you don’t until they’re yours. Take perfection. Now that Republicans have found in Romney pretty much all the qualities they’ve clamored for in modern presidential candidates—an aura of personal and public decorum, a record of civic-minded accomplishment backed by a record of fierce free-market self-enrichment, all wrapped up in a senior-edition beach bod and a profile fit for a gold coin—they don’t seem as wild for them as as they once were. Sure, they’re proving willing to accept Mitt (largely on the assumption that others will like him, which is how social-climbing teens choose prom dates) but what many of them now lust for in their hearts, as do certain non-Republicans who’ve caught the fever despite themselves, is something they never imagined tolerating, let alone secretly, irresistibly craving: a primordial walking gargoyle of pre-monogamous political id. Newt Gingrich, who seems to inhabit a middle state between swamp thing and statesman, frog and prince, is an arresting specimen in his own right, but as the fascination of a party whose base holds that man was created in God’s image without any scaled or beaked transitional versions, he’s an unaccountable astonishment.
He’s also an unshakable addiction. Like a drunken traveling salesman who hits on a freaky new sexual position during a night of Motel Six carnal fumbling, Newt has managed to put his stubby finger on a collective pleasure center—some undiscovered orgasmic political ganglia—that will require quadrennial stimulation from here on out. Whether he wins even one more delegate hardly matters in the screwy new scheme of things. As a style, as an archetype, he’s already prevailed, changing forever the nature of the game and earning the love of everyone who’s felt the game becoming sclerotic recently, the way games do when the money grows enormous, the press coverage relentless, and the players remain the same. Just as JFK and Reagan accustomed Americans to a higher standard of dashing glamor in Oval Office types, Newt has habituated a numbed electorate to a new level of effervescent perversity. He’s probably unelectable, it’s true. He’s entirely unforgettable, that’s truer. He has opened a process that’s routinely disparaged as a mere horse race, shallow and routine, to a whole new animal: the bred-for-mayhem Georgia kicking mule.
February 2, 2012
In Arizona “any time two or more people work together to influence a vote … they instantly become a ‘political committee’”
What’s all this about “free speech” if you are legally encumbered with ridiculous regulations even before you speak?
Dina Galassini does not seem to pose a threat to Arizona’s civic integrity. But the government of the desert community of Fountain Hills believes you cannot be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to be vigilant against the lurking danger that political speech might occur before the speakers notify the government and comply with all the speech rules.
Last October, Galassini became annoyed — like many Ron Paul supporters, she is easily annoyed by government — about the city’s plan to augment its spending with a $29.6 million bond issue, to be voted on by mail by Nov. 8. On Oct. 6, she sent emails to 23 friends and acquaintances, urging them to write letters to newspapers and join her in two demonstrations against the bond measure. On Oct. 12, before she could organize the demonstrations, she received a stern letter from the town clerk: “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”
State law — this is the state of John McCain, apostle of political purification through the regulation of political speech — says that any time two or more people work together to influence a vote on a ballot measure, they instantly become a “political committee.” This transformation triggers various requirements — registering with the government, filing forms, establishing a bank account for the “committee” even if it has raised no money and does not intend to. This must be done before members of this fictitious “committee” may speak.
Where are the carriers today?
Just in case you were wondering where the US Navy has its major surface fleet components distributed, here’s a non-classified snapshot, courtesy of Stratfor:
The Naval Update Map shows an approximation of the current locations of U.S. Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs) and Amphibious Ready Groups (ARGs), based on available open-source information. No classified or operationally sensitive information is included in this weekly update. CSGs and ARGs are the keys to U.S. dominance of the world’s oceans. A CSG is centered on an aircraft carrier, which projects U.S. naval and air power and supports a carrier air wing (CVW). The CSG includes significant offensive strike capability. An ARG is centered on three amphibious warfare ships, with a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) embarked. An MEU is built around a heavily reinforced and mobile battalion of Marines.
January 31, 2012
Homeland Security Theatre: The case of the “Destroy America” Brit twits
Jim Harper sifts through the evidence in the “Destroy America” Twitter case:
The Department of Homeland Security has been vague as yet about what actually happened. It may have been some kind of “social media analysis” like this that turned up “suspicious” Tweets leading to the exclusion, though the betting is running toward a suspicious-activity tipline. (What “turned up” the Tweets doesn’t affect my analysis here.) The boastful young Britons Tweeted about going to “destroy America” on the trip — destroy alcoholic beverages in America was almost certainly the import of that line — and dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe.
Profoundly stilted literalism took this to be threatening language. And a failure of even brief investigation prevented DHS officials from discovering the absurdity of that literalism. It would be impossible to “dig up” Marilyn Monroe’s body, which is in a crypt at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.
[. . .]
Other facts could combine with Twitter commentary to create a suspicious circumstance on extremely rare occasions, but for proper suspicion to arise, the Tweet or Tweets and all other facts must be consistent with criminal planning and inconsistent with lawful behavior. No information so far available suggests that the DHS did anything other than take Tweets literally in the face of plausible explanations by their authors that they were using hyperbole and irony. This is simple investigative incompetence.
If indeed it is a “social media analysis” program that produced this incident, the U.S. government is paying money to cause U.S. government officials to waste their time on making the United States an unattractive place to visit. That’s a cost-trifecta in the face of essentially zero prospect for any security benefit.
Gary Johnson calls for the immediate repeal of the Patriot Act
Posted at the Gary Johnson campaign website:
Speaking Sunday night to a national ACLU conference, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson called for repealing the Patriot Act in its entirety. The two-term governor and presidential candidate’s remarks were delivered in Orlando, FL, at the ACLU’s annual National Staff Conference.
Johnson said, “Ten years ago, we learned that the fastest way to pass a bad law is to call it the ‘Patriot Act’ and force Congress to vote on it in the immediate wake of a horrible attack on the United States. The irony is that there is really very little about the Patriot Act that is patriotic. Instead, it has turned out to be yet another tool the government is using to erode privacy, individual freedom and the Constitution itself.
“Benjamin Franklin had it right. ‘Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’.
“Absolutely, protecting the American people from those who would do us harm is the federal government’s most basic duty. Everyone gets that. But when harm is done, as on 9-11, it is the nature of government to ask for more power and more authority in order to protect us. That’s how we get laws like the Patriot Act.
Washington Post and the “Top Secret America” Project
Want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes? The Washington Post can at least get you started:
From the editors:
“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked — with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.
The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.
January 30, 2012
The anti-Moonbase chorus
Natalie Rothschild on the (non-political) opposition to the very notion of a manned space program:
Suspicion towards space exploration is not new, of course. Since the 1970s, it has variously been decried as a danger to peace and security, as a chauvinist enterprise, as a wasteful pursuit and as a threat to the environment. Yet pessimism and indifference to space discoveries are at an all-time high today. This became clear in the reaction — or lack of reaction, rather — to NASA’s announcement in December 2009 that water had been discovered on the moon. As Sean Collins pointed out on spiked at the time, this was ‘a giant leap towards fulfilling one of our collective fantasies, something only dreamed about in science fiction: humans living somewhere other than Earth’. It also made the moon a more likely base for manned missions to other parts of the solar system and NASA suggested the lunar water could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system. Yet, as Collins pointed out then, neither online pundits nor the mainstream media nor the authorities made a big deal out of the ground breaking discovery.
Seen in this context it was no surprise that Gingrich’s boasts were ridiculed. His plans for a space colony might have sounded like a good idea when he touted it to Florida’s struggling Space Coast. After all, when the Obama administration cancelled George W Bush’s plans to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020, it prompted protests from the communities that depend on NASA for their livelihood as well as from Apollo veterans. But it was no surprise that he was met with put-downs from most other quarters and that his ideas were entirely dismissed.
By and large, human achievements tend to be downplayed today. Exploring the unknown is seen as, at best, impractical and, at worst, reckless. When it comes to manned space exploration, the prevailing attitude is ‘been there, done that’. That’s why there’s been an unwillingness to separate Gingrich’s more wacky ideas — launching a new space race and establishing a permanent American outpost on the moon within eight years — from his sensible reminder that if we are to have any chance of making new discoveries and advances in the near or distant future, then we need to be willing at least to imagine that it’s possible and desirable to overcome the limits we face today.
January 28, 2012
Sonny Rollins honoured, but Kennedy Center misses an opportunity
One of the best jazzmen of the 20th century was recognized in an event at the Kennedy Center recently:
Was there a single jazz musician in the audience for the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony last month? Besides Sonny Rollins, that is, who was one of the five honorees. From what I saw on the CBS telecast of the ceremony, the only jazz musicians in the house were those hired hands who were on stage playing in Sonny’s honor. Is it possible that no other jazz players were there? It’s more likely that the show’s producers wouldn’t recognize a jazz musician even at close range, so all we got were long shots of the Obamas and movie and pop stars. At least the President and First Lady looked like they’d heard jazz before they got to the Center, and surely they appreciated Bill Cosby’s irony-laced introduction. But how many people in that bejeweled crowd had ever heard a note by the Saxophone Colossus?
Granted, it was great to see Sonny getting the honor, to watch the montage of images from his career and hear the narrative voiced by Cosby. Cos described his own surprise encounters with people in far flung places abroad who in the midst of their daily routines were listening to Rollins, then concluded his remarks by welcoming Sonny “home” to his native land. But notwithstanding the primacy of jazz in American performing arts, the music long ago lost its appeal for the masses, and even the curious may know little about its history and Newk’s place in it. Thus while Cosby’s comments spoke to his personal admiration for Rollins, the occasion called for something more, the kind of critically-grounded statement that a Stanley Crouch or Gary Giddins or Bob Blumenthal could have provided. But a teaching moment like this was squandered, while the most resonant image may have been the sign of Rikers Island displayed among Rollins’s personal landmarks.
January 27, 2012
NASA Moonbase by 2020: not likely
I’m just as eager to see more manned exploration of the solar system as the next person, but Newt Gingrich’s announcement the other day is just so much moonshine:
The basic idea is not actually as far-fetched as it sounds. NASA in 2006 announced plans to set up a colony on the south pole of the moon, in around 2020, as a base for further manned exploration of the solar system.
The problem for Gingrich, a space enthusiast with ideas dating back decades for zero-gravity honeymoons and lunar greenhouses, is that the 2008 financial crisis came along and turned feasible projects into pipe dreams.
“A lunar base by 2020 is a total fantasy,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told AFP.
“We got to the moon in the 1960s by spending over 4% of the federal budget on Apollo. NASA’s now at one-tenth of that level.”
The initial problem is both financial and organizational: for all the money being poured into NASA, each dollar is producing much less in the way of science and technology because of the calcified bureaucracy. NASA achieved great things during the Apollo program, but the bureausclerosis was setting in even before the first shuttle flew. To get the kind of results that the “old” NASA achieved, you’d have to blow it up and start from scratch — or better yet, privatize the whole shebang and get the bureaucracy out of the way of the entrepreneurs.
As Robert Zubrin pointed out in the February issue of Reason magazine, NASA has become far too concerned about safety — less out of genuine concern about the astronauts and other employees, but more because of the negative effects of bad PR on the next year’s budget. Under the current NASA management, none of the pre-shuttle launches would have been allowed because they were too dangerous (and we know how dangerous the shuttle was, in hindsight).
