What the Palin Interview Revealed

James Fallows writes at The Atlantic:

It is embarrassing to have to spell this out, but for the record let me explain why Gov. Palin’s answer to the “Bush Doctrine” question—the only part of the recent interview I have yet seen over here in China—implies a disqualifying lack of preparation for the job.

Not the mundane job of vice president, of course, which many people could handle. Rather the job of potential Commander in Chief and most powerful individual on earth....

Each of us has areas we care about, and areas we don’t. If we are interested in a topic, we follow its development over the years. And because we have followed its development, we’re able to talk and think about it in a “rounded” way.

[...]

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

Two details in Charles Gibson’s posing of the question were particularly telling. One was the potentially confusing way in which he first asked it. On the page, “the Bush Doctrine” looks different from “the Bush doctrine.” But when hearing the question Palin might not have known whether Gibson was referring to the general sweep of Administration policy—doctrine with small d—or the rationale that connected 9/11 with the need to invade Iraq, the capital-D Doctrine. So initial confusion would be understandable—as if a sports host asked about Favre’s chances and you weren’t sure if he meant previously with the Packers or with the Jets. Once Gibson clarified the question, a person familiar with the issue would have said, “Oh, if we’re talking about the strategy that the President and Condoleezza Rice began laying out in 2002....” There was no such flash of recognition.

The other was Gibson’s own minor mis-statement. American foreign policy has long recognized the concept of preemptive action:  if you know somebody is just about to attack you, there’s no debate about the legitimacy of acting first. (This is like “shooting in self-defense.") The more controversial part of The Bush Doctrine was the idea of preventive war: acting before a threat had fully emerged, on the theory that waiting until it was fully evident would mean acting too late.

Gibson used the word “preemptively”—but if a knowledgeable person had pushed back on that point ("Well, preemption was what John F. Kennedy had in mind in acting against the imminent threat of Soviet missiles in Cuba"), Gibson would certainly have come back to explain the novelty of the “preventive war” point. Because he knows the issue, a minor mis-choice of words wouldn’t get in the way of his real intent.

Sarah Palin did not know this issue, or any part of it. The view she actually expressed—an endorsement of “preemptive” action—was fine on its own merits. But it is not the stated doctrine of the Bush Administration, it is not the policy her running mate has endorsed, and it is not the concept under which her own son is going off to Iraq.

How could she not know this? For the same reason I don’t know anything about European football/soccer standings, player trades, or intrigue. I am not interested enough. And she evidently has not been interested enough even to follow the news of foreign affairs during the Bush era.

A further point. The truly toxic combination of traits GW Bush brought to decision making was:

1) Ignorance
2) Lack of curiosity
3) “Decisiveness”

That is, he was not broadly informed to begin with (point 1). He did not seek out new information (#2); but he nonetheless prided himself (#3) on making broad, bold decisions quickly, and then sticking to them to show resoluteness.

We don’t know for sure about #2 for Palin yet—she could be a sponge-like absorber of information. But we know about #1 and we can guess, from her demeanor about #3.  Most of all we know something about the person who put her in this untenable role.

The Bush Years.

McCain’s Complete Lack of Integrity

Andrew Sullivan(!) writes in The Atlantic, via truthout:

For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John Kerry in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.

And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.

He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country’s honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.

And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama’s virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent’s patriotism.

And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That’s all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.

Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country’s safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country’s national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.

Palin is a Nutjob—You Know that, Right?  Right?!?

Juan Cole in Salon:

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick. [...]

Palin is an Anti-Science Butcher

excerpts from a Salon article by Mark Benjamin:

Wildlife activists thought they had seen the worst in 2003 when Frank Murkowski, then the Republican governor of Alaska, signed a bill ramping up state programs to gun down wild wolves from airplanes, inviting average citizens to participate. Wolves, Murkowski believed, were clearly better than humans at killing elk and moose, and humans needed to even the playing field. 

But that was before Sarah Palin took Murkowski’s job at the end of 2006…

In early 2007, Palin’s administration approved an initiative to pay a $150 bounty to hunters who killed a wolf from an airplane in certain areas, hacked off the left foreleg, and brought in the appendage. Ruling that the Palin administration didn’t have the authority to offer payments, a state judge quickly put a halt to them but not to the shooting of wolves from aircraft.

Detractors consider the airborne shootings a savage business, conducted under the euphemism “predator control.” The airplanes appear in the winter, so the wolves show up like targets in a video game, sprinting across the white canvas below. Critics believe the practice violates the ethics of hunting, while supporters say the process is not hunting at all, but a deliberate cull.

[...]

“Palin acts like she has never met an animal she didn’t want shot,” says Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, based in Connecticut.

The controversy over Palin’s promotion of predator control goes beyond animal rights activists recoiling at the thought of picking off wolves from airplanes. A raft of scientists has argued that Palin has provided little evidence that the current program of systematically killing wolves, estimated at a population of 7,000 to 11,000, will result in more moose for hunters. State estimates of moose populations have come under scrutiny. Some wildlife biologists say predator control advocates don’t even understand what wolves eat.

...[I]t is not hard to find Alaskans who say Palin’s enthusiasm for predator control fits a broader narrative of how she edits science to suit her personal views. She endorses the teaching of creationism in public schools and has questioned whether humans are responsible for global warming.

In 2007, she approved $400,000 to educate the public about the ecological success of shooting wolves and bears from the air. Some of the money went to create a pamphlet distributed in local newspapers, three weeks before the public was to vote on an initiative that would have curtailed aerial killing of wolves by private citizens. “The timing of the state’s propaganda on wolf control was terrible,” wrote the Anchorage Daily News on its editorial page.

“Across the board, Sarah Palin puts on a masquerade, claiming she is using sound management and science,” says Nick Jans, an Alaskan writer who co-sponsored the initiative. ”In reality she uses ideology and ignores science when it is in her way.” The initiative was defeated last month.

Gordon Haber is a wildlife scientist who has studied wolves in Alaska for 43 years. “On wildlife-related issues, whether it is polar bears or predator controls, she has shown no inclination to be objective,” he says of Palin. “I cannot find credible scientific data to support their arguments,” he adds about the state’s rational for gunning down wolves. “In most cases, there is evidence to the contrary.”

Last year, 172 scientists signed a letter to Palin, expressing concern about the lack of science behind the state’s wolf-killing operation. According to the scientists, state officials set population objectives for moose and caribou based on “unattainable, unsustainable historically high populations.” As a result, the “inadequately designed predator control programs” threatened the long-term health of both the ungulate and wolf populations. The scientists concluded with a plea to Palin to consider the conservation of wolves and bears “on an equal basis with the goal of producing more ungulates for hunters.”

Apparently Palin wasn’t fazed. Earlier this year she introduced state legislation that would further divorce the predator-control program from science. The legislation would transfer authority over the program from the state Department of Fish and Game to Alaska’s Board of Game, whose members are appointed by, well, Palin. Even some hunters were astounded by her power play.

The legislation would give Palin’s board “more leeway without any scientific input to do whatever the hell they basically wanted,” Mark Richards, co-chair of Alaska Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, wrote in an e-mail. The legislation is currently stalled in the Alaska state Senate.

Scientists insist that the Palin administration is systematically killing wolves with an inadequate understanding of the relationship between the carnivore and hoofed animals. The state responds that predators kill over 80 percent of the moose and caribou that die each year, while hunters and trappers kill less than 10 percent.

Haber says the state’s numbers are wildly inflated. His decades of wolf research have shown that wolves are, in fact, mostly scavengers. “Sixty to 70 percent of the moose they eat are scavenged, not killed,” he says. He adds that the state’s wolf population estimates, based on secondhand observations and extrapolations, are also high.

Palin offered the $150 bounty for wolf paws in 2007 after efforts to kill wolves from airplanes that season were, in her view, coming up short. State officials had hoped that 382 to 664 wolves would be killed during that predator-control season. State officials were disappointed when only 115 wolves were killed from the air.

Palin thought the $150 cash bounties would do the trick. Haber has another explanation for the dry spell. “I can tell you from my own research that the reason they didn’t get many wolves in certain years, particularly last winter, is because they have scraped those areas clean,” he says.

Last year, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., introduced legislation designed to curtail predator-control programs, except as a last resort. “It’s time to ground Alaska’s illegal and inhumane air assault on wolves,” Miller said. Palin quickly fired off a curt letter in response, applauding the state’s programs as “widely recognized for their excellence and effectiveness.” She pointed out that her state has “managed its wildlife so that we still maintain abundant populations of all of our indigenous predators almost fifty years after statehood.”

Says Jans, co-sponsor of the losing initiative to outlaw aerial wolf hunting: ”This is a reflection of a somebody who doesn’t have any use for science.”

Boxer on the McLiar Acceptance Speech

I’m not sure about the last sentence, but the rest of Barbara Boxer’s statement on McLiar’s blubbering is on target (i.e., truthful):

Last night at the Republican National Convention, John McCain used the word “fight” more than 40 times in his speech.

In the 16 years that we have served together in the Senate, I have seen John McCain fight.

I have seen him fight against raising the federal minimum wage 14 times.

I have seen him fight against making sure that women earn equal pay for equal work.

I have seen him fight against a women’s right to choose so consistently that he received a zero percent vote rating from pro-choice organizations.

I have seen him fight against helping families gain access to birth control.

I have seen him fight against Social Security, even going so far as to call its current funding system “an absolute disgrace.”

And I saw him fight against the new GI Bill of Rights until it became politically untenable for him to do so.

John McCain voted with President Bush 95 percent of the time in 2007 and 100 percent of the time in 2008—that’s no maverick.

We do have two real fighters for change in this election—their names are Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Smarter than You

New Rule: Republicans need to stop saying Barack Obama is an elitist, or looks down on rural people, and just admit you don’t like him because of something he can’t help, something that’s a result of the way he was born. Admit it, you’re not voting for him because he’s smarter than you.
--Bill Maher

huggie bear and papa doofus

Global surface temperature variations during the past 2000 years

From MongaBay, a plot summarizing results from several proxy measures of surface temperature.  Temperatures in the past decade are on average higher than during the Medieval warm period.  Much more alarming is the extremely high rate of increase during the past few decades.

[plot from Mann et al. (2008). Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS September 9, 2008, vol. 105 no. 36]

What Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy really think of the Palin pick

Rethuglicans are hypocrites.  We all know that.  As if we needed more proof, here is yet another example, wherein Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy, two of the most Kool-aid-drunk Bush hacks in existence, are caught on open mic telling Chuck Todd what they actually think of McCain’s choice of Palin.  Listen to Noonan agreeing with Murphy’s criticisms and saying “It’s over”, and that the political narrative that resulted in the Palin choice is “political bullshit”.  I suppose she would know.  What these two hypocrites say in public, however, is quite different.  What a surprise.  Read her dissembling response in that Repug rag, the WSJ.

Fascism in the U.S.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

—Harry S. Truman, 33rd US President

Which Candidate has the Most Annoying Ego?

Frank Rich, in a NYT Op-Ed, compared (among other things) the pomposity on display at the three speeches given by McCain, Obama, and Clinton on June 3, the night Obama claimed the Democratic nomination.  Rich didn't quite get his numbers right, but it is indeed interesting to attempt a quantitative comparison of the three over-inflated egos.  So I sat down and did a slightly more careful analysis.

Take the three speeches as transcribed for the NYT, and remove the "APPLAUSE" clutter so that we have just the actual words spoken.  The word counts for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton speeches are 3164, 2583, and 2247, respectively.  Now do a simple count of the words involving nominative and objective first person pronouns: I, I'm, I've, and me.  We won't try to parse the context associated with each usage. Hence, therein lies a potential bias, since each speaker likely uses these pronouns in a linguistically different manner than the other two.  We'll just live with that and assume the bias is not large enough to significantly alter the conclusions.

The resulting counts from the three speeches are as follows:

where an asterisk is a placeholder for the pronouns.  We see that the percentage of pomposity is 1.5, 2.4, and 4.0 percent for Obama, McCain, and Clinton, respectively.  Put another way, one out of every 68, 42, and 25 words in each speach is an ego reference.  Thus, of the three, Clinton is the clear leader in pomposity, with McCain's score falling about midway between those of the two Democrats.

Young Hillary Clinton

Red-Light Cameras: Profit in Place of Safety

from BoingBoing:

Red light cameras cause more accidents, and not just because drivers slam their brakes to avoid getting a robo-ticket—also because the optimal money-making strategy for red-light cams is to make them less safe.

If city planners want to reduce traffic accidents at intersections, the best practice is to make the yellow last longer and insert a pause between the red signal on one side and the green on the other. However, if the objective is to make as much money as possible from red-light cameras, the best thing to do is shorten the yellow signal, eliminate the pause, and enrich the city coffers (even as you kill its citizens).

Leftlane reports that six cities have been caught turning down the yellows to make more money.  Link

Gee, what a shocking surprise.

What caused the Black Death?

Over at Aetiology, Tara Smith has posted a useful series on the arguments for and against Yersinia pestis being the cause for the Black Death in the 14th century. 

Part 1: Objections to Y. pestis causation

Part 2: Examination of the criticisms

Part 3: Paleomicrobiology and the detection of Y. pestis in corpses

Part 4: Plague in modern times