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September 12, 2011

9/11 aftermath: “No matter how long I looked, some part of my brain never stopped waiting for the credits to roll”

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: NYC, September11 — Nicholas @ 17:06

Megan McArdle tries to put into words what it felt like to be in New York in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks:

At ground level, there was the tangible reminder — that multistory shard jutting out of the smoking rubble that became one of the iconic images of 9/11. But somehow, that didn’t make the absence any more real. I worked down at Ground Zero for a year, from shortly after the attack, to just after the first annual memorial. I stood right next to that monumental fragment when the ground was still smoking and firefighters were spraying it with hoses to keep the smoke and ash at bay. I smelled the odor that pervaded Ground Zero for weeks, maybe months — burning office fixtures and damp embers. And yet in my deepest mind I never connected any of it with the buildings where I had worked on and off throughout the 1990s — even though I stood looking at it from the very familiar streets where I’d eaten lunch so many times. It didn’t look like a building, or even the ruins of a building. It looked like a scene from a movie about the destruction of the World Trade Center. No matter how long I looked, some part of my brain never stopped waiting for the credits to roll.

As the rubble was cleared away, and all that was left was two concrete-lined holes in the ground, I spent a lot of time walking around the site trying to come to grips with what happened. I was waiting for that moment that always happens in the movies — the one where the music swells and the main character, silhouetted against a rolling sky, finally grasps everything that has been lost.

It never happened, maybe because I was not the main character. I am one of, I think, a relative few — the perhaps tens of thousands of Americans who can plausibly claim that 9/11 utterly changed their life. Without 9/11, I would not have worked at the World Trade Center’s disaster recovery effort; I would not have started blogging; I would not now be a journalist. I would not have had most of the relationships I had in the past ten years, be married to my current husband, or live in the city I now call home. I would be in all visible ways a completely different person if those towers had not come down. But in the story of 9/11, I am not even a bit player. I’m maybe an extra.

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The increasing militarization of the police

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: Drugs, Militarization, Police, September11, Terrorism — Nicholas @ 12:50

Radley Balko shows how the tools given to the authorities to fight the war on terror have instead been used to further expand the war on drugs:

New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants — also known as “sneak-and-peek” warrants — have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.

It’s a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America’s police departments.

The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs.” Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America’s drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.

[. . .]

The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It’s dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.

Update: Also from Radley, a look inside the SWAT team leader’s world.

[. . .] note the complete disregard for the rights of the people being raided in the excerpt above. The author is actually suggesting SWAT commanders lobby to have their teams deployed in situations for which they normally wouldn’t be to ensure they’re in good practice. Put another way, he suggests they practice their door smashing, room-clearing, flash-grenade deploying, and other paramilitary tactics on less-than-violent people, so they’re in better form when a real threat arises. Never mind that there are going to be living, breathing, probably bleeding people on the receiving end of these “practice” raids. There’s officer safety and “SWAT team profile” to think about. It’s just an appalling mindset.

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What is “the biggest European policy mistake since Britain and France let Hitler have the Sudetenland”?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece — Tags: Debt, EU — Nicholas @ 12:09

For the record, I don’t actually think Europe would be better off with a single federal government, but Walter Russell Mead thinks the big mistake was attempting an economic union without a political union to match:

What is worrying investors worldwide is the evident intellectual and political bankruptcy of Europe. The Europeans are not stupider than other people, but they face deep structural economic and political problems that their institutions are hopelessly inadequate to solve. Creating a monetary union without a true federal government is looking more and more like the biggest European policy mistake since Britain and France let Hitler have the Sudetenland.

The current crisis is the result of a decade of policy failure. Greece should never have been allowed into the euro; prudent leaders would have checked its statistics, discovered the blatant frauds with which the Greeks sought to conceal the true state of their affairs, and told the country politely but firmly to come back when it was ready. Following that initial blunder, Europe failed to take note in any serious way of the serious distortions that were caused by suddenly reducing interest rates in Greece and other peripherals to near-German levels. Beyond that, alarm bells should have been ringing as it became clear that Greece and a number of other countries were treating their suddenly lower interest costs as found money. They were spending the windfall rather than taking advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity to reform their economies in preparation for life under a monetary union with countries like Germany. If Europe’s institutions were up to the job, the warning signs would have been noticed and corrective steps taken years ago.

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Is the People’s Liberation Army a paper tiger?

Filed under: China, Economics, Military, Weapons — Tags: Army, Corruption, Navy, Submarines — Nicholas @ 09:36

An interesting article at Strategy Page looks at the myth and reality of China’s army and navy:

You don’t see much in the media about the poor training of Chinese military personnel. You don’t hear much about the poor leadership and low readiness for combat. But all of this is common knowledge in China. There, the military is not walled off from everyone else. Cell phone cameras and the Internet make it easy to pass around evidence (often in the form of “hey, this one is hilarious”). The government tries to play up how modern and efficient the military is, but most Chinese know better, and don’t really care. China is winning victories on the economic front, and that what really counts to the average Chinese.

Meanwhile, U.S. military leaders and defense industries are looking for a sufficiently impressive foe to help scare more money out of Congress. The Chinese Navy (or, more correctly, the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army Navy) is now the favorite candidate, for navy and defense industry analysts, to become the new Big Bad. Just how dangerous are these Chinese sailors and their ships? It turns out that, on closer inspection, not very.

This is the sort of thing that what went on during the Cold War. Russian military prowess was hyped by the American military, and their defense suppliers, to justify further increases in defense spending. When the Cold War ended, it was revealed how the Russian military, and defense manufacturers, played the same game. It also revealed that Russian military capabilities were far less than the hype indicated.

The basic weapon for this sort of thing is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Works every time, although it is difficult to pitch the Chinese navy as a crack force. Most of their ships are elderly, poorly designed and rarely used. Their nuclear subs are worse than the first generation of Russian nukes back in the 1960s. The most modern Chinese ships are Russian made, Cold War era models. Chinese ships don’t go to sea much, not just because it’s expensive, but because Chinese ships tend to get involved in nasty incidents. Like the submarine that killed its crew when the boat submerged (and the diesel engines did not shut down when the batteries kicked in, thus using up all the oxygen.) Breakdowns are more common, as well as a lot of accidents you don’t hear about (weapons and equipment malfunctions that kill and maim.) Nevertheless, the Chinese are working to change this. Ships are going to sea more each year, and troops are getting more training. But unless the corruption is curbed, this could all be wasted.

Of course, if China isn’t the big military threat to the rest of the world, how will the Pentagon get Congress to go along with its perpetual demands for more funding?

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The easy way to be come a celebrity scientist

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: JunkScience, Magazines, Newspapers, PeerReview, TV — Nicholas @ 09:28

Deevybee has the steps you need to take to become a TV science celebrity:

Maybe you’re tired of grotting away at the lab bench. Or finding it hard to get a tenured job. Perhaps your last paper was rejected and you haven’t the spirit to fight back. Do not despair. There is an alternative. The media are always on the look-out for a scientist who will fearlessly speak out and generate newsworthy stories. You can gain kudos as an expert, even if if you haven’t got much of a track record in the subject, by following a few simple rules.

Rule #1. Establish your credentials. You need to have lots of letters after your name. It doesn’t really matter what they mean, so long as they sound impressive. It’s also good to be a fellow of some kind of Royal Society. Some of these are rather snooty and appoint fellows by an exclusive election process, but it’s a little known fact that others require little more than a minimal indication of academic standing and will admit you to the fellowship provided you fill in a form and agree to pay an annual subscription.

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