This post is not about the G20

Yeah, I know that Toronto just hosted the G20 summit, and I know that the police made the most arrests at any single event in Canadian history, and I know that a couple hundred people were herded into a park and made to stay there in the pouring rain for several hours, but you know what? Fuck that shit. I'm gonna post a really fucking cool blog post about how people die from fucking volcanoes, because I can.

[T]hat is how the people at Pompeii, who's remains were found trapped and partly preserved within ghostly body-shaped tombs within that pyroclastic flow, died. They did not suffocate. They did not get blown apart by force. They did not die of gas poisoning. They simply cooked. Instantly.

Fuck. Yeah. That is some cool fuckin' research. For those who don't know (the details), Mt. Vesuvius, a still-active volcano 8 km away from Pompeii, erupted with extreme force in 79 AD, burying the city (and a bit of some other ones nearby) with ash and pumice. The type of eruption which occurred is still known as a "Plinian eruption," after the Roman author Pliny the Younger who described the eruption which killed his uncle Pliny the Elder in a letter to his friend Tacitus.

This research actually has important implications for disaster preparedness and discovery today, as such eruptions are rare and their effects have not been terribly well-documented. But forget that. Fucking awesome.

Original paper here.

Two Questions

Stanley McChrystal, or someone speaking for him anyway, called Obama weak and the French gay. Also, the Vice-President was instructed to bite an aide. That is gist of the controversy stirred up by Rolling Stone's profile on the brilliant, balsy, nunchuck-wielding, man-child of a general.

But what the kerfuffle over the name calling has overshadowed within the piece, and what leads me, much more than the insubordinate bravado of a commander, to despair, are paragraphs like this one:

Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.

And this one:

In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.

And this one:

This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner. "He's been locked up in his palace the past year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General," he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!"

And then, from the reliably dour Juan Cole:

Obama needs to define an attainable goal in Afghanistan and then execute it swiftly. As it is, when he is pressed about what in the world we are doing there, he retreats into Bushisms: “So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That’s the goal that must be achieved.”

Well that isn’t a good enough reason to be in Afghanistan. There is no al-Qaeda to speak of in Afghanistan. And although insurgents and Taliban probably control about 20 percent of the country, they have not let al-Qaeda set up shop in their territory. If they don’t now, when they obviously need all the help they can get, why would they in the future? One major guerrilla leader, Gulbadin Hikmatyar, went from expressing willingness to fight under the banner of al-Qaeda to roundly condemning the radical Arab group for having gotten the Taliban overthrown.

As for Pakistan, the US presence in Afghanistan is not necessary to partnering with Islamabad in rooting out al-Qaeda Arabs in the Pashtun tribal belt.

In other speeches, Obama has spoken about “defeating” the Taliban. But the Taliban are by now a long-standing social formation among the Pashtun ethnic group, and are a little unlikely to be wiped out by mere military means, especially the means available to a foreign military.

A congressional investigation has even thrown up good evidence that the US itself is indirectly funding the Taliban, insofar as the USG is paying warlords to provide convoy security on roads and they are using the money to bribe Taliban not to attack on their watch.

In short, we have no idea why US troops are being sent to Afghanistan at such an accelerating rate. It isn’t to fight al-Qaeda. And if it is mainly a matter of fighting the Taliban, why should we do that? They are not going to go away, and their brand of Muslim fundamentalism is by now woven deeply into the fabric of rural Pashtun life, such that for foreign Christian troops to argue the Pashtuns out of it at the point of a gun is a fool’s errand.

Even Mr. Friedman Unit wrote this morning that he can see no logical end to this. There is, as far as I can tell, no good news to report from Afghanistan.

So I ask these two questions (not rhetorically and not with any intended snark, because I'll take hope where I can get it), but if you think we ought to stick it out in Afghanistan, or second-best, you understand and sympathize with that view:

(1) What does victory look like?

(2) How do we get there?

I have been trying to answer these questions myself for the past few years. I'm still coming up blank.

And, just for the sake of chiming in, I agree with Juan Cole on this final point:

Obama has largely misunderstood the historical moment in the US. He appears to have thought that we wanted a broker, someone who could get everyone together and pull off a compromise that led to a deal among the parties. We don’t want that. We want Harry Truman. We want someone who will give them hell. We don’t want him to say one day that Wall Street is making obscene profits when the rest of the country suffers, then the next day say that the brokers deserve their bonuses. We don’t want him to mollify Big Oil one day then bash it the next. More consistent giving of hell, please.

If Obama doesn’t fire McChrystal, he will never be respected by anybody in the chain of command that leads to his desk. Moreover, moving McChrystal out now would be a perfect opportunity to pull the plug on the impractical counter-insurgency campaign that the latter has been pursuing, which probably has only a 10% chance of success. (A RAND study found that where a government that claimed to be a democracy actually was not, and where it faced an insurgency, it prevailed only 10% of the time. Sounds like President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan to me.)

Monday dose of postie-ism

Colonialism and the World Cup (via Feministing).

Lady Gaga and femin(ism)/(ity) (via my friend Catherine).

Sociological Images on hyper-sexualized hyper-masculinity in the 'net comedy world.

New Stars album comes out tomorrow! I am excited (this is unrelated to the rest of the post).

However...new book coming out tomorrow that I want to read!

Striking and sad

From a piece entitled 'Words' on Tony Judt's New York Review of Books Blog:

Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. (“True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.” —Essay on Criticism, 1711) For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.

...

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

Caught in the throes of a steep descent into neurological torpor, I imagine that declinism has a visceral feel for Mr. Judt that is otherwise far-removed from ourselves. Still and all, it can't be argued that fluidity, and even simple literacy, hasn't taken a nasty tumble since the liberationist consensus of the post-war years began making significant social--and especially educational--gains. I find myself very moved by what Mr. Judt wrote (and has been writing, as he lives the final hours of his communicative life), and not only because of his condition: does no one else have the palpable feeling of injury to, if not the mortal wounding of, intellectual clarity in the public domain?

Ideas Esteemed For Their Acceptability: Lazy Block-Quote Edition

A gem from Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”
[...]
Dan Fuss, who manages the Loomis Sayles Bond Fund, which beat 94 percent of competitors the past year, said last week that he sold all of his Treasury bonds because of prospects interest rates will rise as the U.S. borrows unprecedented amounts. Obama is borrowing record amounts to fund spending programs to help the economy recover from its longest recession since the 1930s.

Dan Fuss, one might add (but not Bloomberg in this case), and not too many others at the moment. Treasury notes of the longest maturity (10-year) are currently selling off at a yield of 3.17. That is, even with all that debt, even with all those like Dan Fuss and Bill Gross and Bloomberg journalists who are so worried about the long-term solvency of Uncle Sam, investors as a whole are still willing to lend the government money, to not see their full return for another decade and are willing to accept a return of just over 3% for the trouble. That is lower, by the way, than this years annual average. And the one from last year. And, unless I'm missing something, from every year since they started collecting the data in 1962.

So with that in mind, here are a few paragraphs to chew over. The first batch come from Paul Krugman. He's talking about a recent IMF study on future sources of U.S. government debt:

First, since cutting stimulus would weaken the economy, it would reduce revenues — that is, a substantial part of the debt growth the IMF attributes to stimulus would have happened even without stimulus, through lower revenue. Second, for the US at least the core reason for long-run budget concern is rising health care costs — in fact, health cost control is the sine qua non of long-run solvency — which has nothing whatever to do with how much we spend on job creation now.

So how much we spend on supporting the economy in 2010 and 2011 is almost irrelevant to the fundamental budget picture. Why, then, are Very Serious People demanding immediate fiscal austerity?

The answer is, to reassure the markets — because the markets supposedly won’t believe in the willingness of governments to engage in long-run fiscal reform unless they inflict pointless pain right now. To repeat: the whole argument rests on the presumption that markets will turn on us unless we demonstrate a willingness to suffer, even though that suffering serves no purpose.

Next, Martin Wolf who asks the question, "if not the government, then who?":

A consensus is forming that policymakers should tighten fiscal policy, sharply, in countries with large fiscal deficits. Yet what makes these policymakers sure that business and consumers will spend in response to austerity? What if they find that it tips economies into recession, or even deflation?...Premature fiscal tightening is, warns experience, as big a danger as delayed tightening would be. There are no certainties here. The world economy – or at least that of the advanced countries – remains disturbingly fragile. Only those who believe the economy is a morality play, in which those they deem wicked should suffer punishment, would enjoy that painful result.

Last, Stephan Gordon on the "stimulus":

There has been much talk of the size of the US federal stimulus, and much debate about whether or not it has been an effective counter-cyclical policy instrument.

But it's important to remember that the proper measure for fiscal stimulus is not spending by the federal government; it is spending by all levels of government. And when you look at the contributions to US GDP growth (Table 1.1.2 at the BEA site), total government spending has been a drag on growth over the past two quarters. The increases at the federal level have not been enough to compensate for the spending cuts at the local and state levels.

I suppose that this could be interpreted as good news: despite a contractionary fiscal stance, the US economy is in recovery. But it raises the question of how much better it could be doing if it had an expansionary fiscal policy.

Public Opinion and the Flotilla

I want to start from a relatively contentious place, in order to make I think a less contentious point. Let's say, for my sake, that the world we exist in is not one where either Israel or Palestine can ever really be proven to be right or wrong in any given situation. There are many intangibles, justifications and provocations abound, and for all intents and purposes there are two separate and highly distinct histories of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Between these two histories is a spectrum upon which the rest of the world sits - a multitude of shaded and nuanced takes on what has transpired in this one fairly small part of the world over the last couple millenia. These takes, as an aggregate, matter a great deal to the fate of the conflict - they dictate which side receives aid, foreign sympathy, and political clout to maneuver for its preferred outcome.

Now, some of these perspectives are immutable, and some may be more important than others on a strategic level, but I would argue that a sizable portion are still fluid. Israel built up a lot of international goodwill through the late 20th century, and Jewish communities around the world have lobbied effectively for some time to keep a lot of support on their side. Assuming, for the sake of this exercise, that this is a zero-sum conflict*, one would think that it was in Israel's best interest to work assiduously to push this window as far as possible in their direction. In that sense, a rational-thinking Israel would assess its Palestine policies in two ways: one, are they advancing our goals, and two, are they helping to create a favourable environment to do so?

We've already discussed, at length, the public image nightmare that the flotilla attack presents for Israel. As Ben pointed out, even those who are comfortable with the WHAT of the situation are going to have a hard time with the HOW. But bad shit happens, and while it may be difficult to pull off, one could see a lot of political upside to a stance of public contrition by Netanyahu and his government. Instead, we get this:

When Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered his angry response to a cascade of international condemnation of Israel on Wednesday, he spoke first in Hebrew to a domestic Israeli audience. Choosing to address his home constituency, rather than the broader world, was a sign of his continued willingness to accept international ire as the price of upholding policies that are broadly supported at home...

"Once again, Israel faces hypocrisy and a biased rush to judgment. I'm afraid this isn't the first time,'' he said.

This is really, really, really the wrong tack to take. Especially now, as Israel is slowly decoupling from what once was its strongest ally abroad: American Jews.

Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

The New York Review of Books published that article on May 12, two weeks before the attack even occurred. It focuses on a group to which exactly one half of this blog belongs, and it's right, if a little hyperbolic. As Israel turns inwards on itself, rejecting all criticism from abroad (even from its friends) as hostility, it will start to cede ground in the public sphere. By refusing to address the flotilla in a responsible, honest way, Israel is doing more than its share of work to push away those groups abroad that could do it the most good.

In other words, the window of public opinion is closing fast. What makes the flotilla assault so terrible and so frightening is that it's simply going make it close even faster.

* There are some caveats here. One, this would imply that Israel and Palestine at all times would pursue the wisest courses to their end goals. Two, it implies that they are coherent entities with coherent goals. Three, it assumes that these goals are mutually exclusive and thus necessitate conflict. I don't really believe any of these things, I just want a simpler model to work with when discussing this absurdly complex situation.

Another Quick Flotilla Post

From the Guardian:

Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.

Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.

The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.

[...]

"The only situation when a soldier shot was when it was a clearly a life-threatening situation," said a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London. "Pulling the trigger quickly can result in a few bullets being in the same body, but does not change the fact they were in a life-threatening situation."

Meanwhile, from Noam Sheifaz:

At this point it is extremely important to say what we don’t know..We don’t know where [the dead activists] were killed, when, and how they died. We don’t know if and when people were given medical treatment. There were security cameras on deck, but Israel doesn’t show us what they filmed, except for the material which serves its purposes. The night vision clips released by the army end just before the shooting begins.

If you're of the mind that either the raid itself, taking place in international waters, or the Gaza blockade on the whole is unambiguously illegal, it probably doesn't matter much what the confiscated video shows. As Glenn Greenwald puts it, "Whether the Israelis fired at the passengers before or after landing on the ship matters little to the crux of what happened here. The initial act of aggression was the Israeli seizing of a ship in international waters which was doing nothing hostile; that action was taken to enforce a horrific, inhumane blockade and, more generally, a brutal, decades-long occupation"(Salon). In this respect, the immorality of a massacre only compounds the greater immorality of Israeli policy; focusing on such details only serve to distract from the larger issue.

On the other hand, if you believe, as does Sol, that it isn't so much the What or Why of the military action, but the How, the details that might emerge with the release of the supposed footage start to seem a lot more important.

Either way, one would think it to be in interest of the Israeli government (particularly if it wants to maintain any sense of legitimacy as it plans to conduct its "independent" review) to release the footage. Refusing to do so (and worse yet, doctoring it heavily for propaganda purposes) have only lead critics to assume the worst.

Ideas Esteemed For Their Acceptability

A new wisdom has gone conventional. That's according to Paul Krugman anyway, whose column last Friday warned that the respected thinkers of the world are fast coming upon a new and sad conclusion: it's time to get austere. With the crisist-y part of the crisis now over, the argument goes, it's time for governments around the world to start cutting back before countries like Spain become countries like Greece and countries like Greece implode into homo-friendly Zimbabwes. It's an argument which has, according to Krugman, been recently "proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations." I haven't seen too many of these op-eds and I haven't heard too many of the speeches, but I sure have been hearing a lot about them from people like Paul Krugman. In the Financial Times and a half a dozen blogs and now for the third or fourth time in the New York Times, the conventional wisdom to which I've been exposed has not been that of the crisis of government debt, but of the crisis of the conventional wisdom of the crisis of government debt.

That being said, I was listening to an LSE public lecture podcast on my way home from work today in which Carlos Guitierrez, Secretary of Commerce under George W., stood in perfectly for Krugman's strawman Chicken Little. With the soft-spoken fatalism of the well-and self-assuredly informed, he regretfully informed the audience that government largess across the West would have to be trimmed--nay! slashed vigorously and unforgivingly (with spending cuts and tax increases, but mostly spending cuts). He talked a lot about Europe. And then with a wink and segue, he talked about the United States.

The first criticism to this new old way of thinking is predictable. Economies across the world are still largely fragile, if not totally in the shitter, and pulling the life-support now could cause another collapse. In any event, concerns over unsustainable debt or inflation seem particularly misplaced when looking at the U.S., where neither interest rates nor inflation seem anything other than historically low and stable. But I've blogged about that before, and recently too.

What might be a little more worrisome is the sudden ubiquity of the call to surplus. As Peter Dorman writes, with the OECD, the EU, the Obama Deficit Commission, and a growing number of U.S. Congressmen and women calling for the brakes, "[t]he deficit hawks seem to have forgotten, if they ever learned, the granddaddy of all accounting identities": with one person's debt being another person's asset (or to put it another way, with every borrower matched by a creditor), there is no way for everyone to pay down debt at the same time. It's functionally impossible.

In the grandest scheme of things, there are only a few ways for an economy to adjust to a government surplus. Looking at most of the countries in question, the adjustments that aren't very painful are very unlikely. Keeping in mind that total spending has to equal total income and that any change in the former must automatically translate into an equal change in the latter, the options are:

1) The government saves a bit more than it spends, the domestic private sector spend the difference, and the economy keeps chugging along.

But...
I doubt anyone would really anticipate this happening while private sector deleveraging and high unemployment are still a major facts of economic life in most Western democracies.

2) The government saves a bit more than it spends, foreign consumers spend the difference, and the economy keeps chugging along

But...
What's true in one country is likely to be true in the next one. And for problem economies like Greece, Spain, Portugal, and maybe Italy, more competitive exchange rates are off the table. At least, their off the table that doesn't involve the EMU crumbling around at the edges. But on a more fundamental note, from John Mauldin, "Every country cannot run a trade surplus. Someone has to buy...Yet politicians want to believe that somehow we all can run surpluses, at least in their country. We can balance the budgets. We can reduce our debts. We all want to believe in that mythical Lake Woebegone, where all the kids are above average."

3) The government saves a bit more than it spends, some combination of the domestic private sector and foreign consumers spend the difference, and the economy keeps chugging along.

Check out my previous Buts.

4) The governments saves a bit more and no one spends the difference (at least, not enough to compensate the decrease in total spending); with less total spending, total incomes across the economy decline by difference; tax revenue falls accordingly.

Or, to put it another way, private sector indebtedness increases by exactly as much as the government surplus. This is not because fiscal thrift magically induces the public to get irresponsible, but because in the absence of any other spending, by accounting necessity, the income withdrawn from the economy by the government will show up as a decline in income on the private side. With total private debt left unchanged, household indebtedness increases.

Back to John Mauldin, "You can run a trade deficit, reduce government debt and reduce private debt but not all three at the same time." In Greece, with constraints on its ability to borrow or adjust via the exchange rate, this is a real dilemma, not so for the U.S.

Cite your sources!

Edit: I am aware that it has been extensively discussed that this is James Murphy's Eno/Bowie in Berlin album and all, but still. Kanye's reached back into Krautrock to cover this inane topic already. Why do it again?