So, apparently they canceled an Australian talk show after the hosts prank called the hospital where a certain British citizen was staying.  This is very confusing to me.

Let’s start off with an assertion with which I think most people can agree: if someone prank calls your place of work, and you unwittingly pass the call on to someone else, that is absolutely, by itself, not a reason to commit suicide.    Nurses do far worse things all the time (including similar mistakes, like accidentally revealing HIPAA-protected information) and don’t commit suicide.  If, after such an event occurs, someone does kill themselves, it is almost certain that there were other issues that probably played a far greater role — since prank calls and nurse “mistakes” (if this even was one) happen almost constantly without any results of this type.

I think it’s very hard for us to blame the talk show hosts, either legally or even just in the court of public opinion.  Perhaps what they did was rude or mean, but this single sentence constitutes the full spectrum of their actions: they called one person once and said something that made them unhappy.  If this is a standard of guilt, every person who has ever yelled at customer support on the phone is guilty as well.

Since we are unaware of what other circumstances could have led to this tragedy, there are only 2 factors that matter:

• A nurse was called by radio hosts who said some things in order to gain access to a 3rd party
• That 3rd party was a member of the British Monarchy, an organization that has no real meaning outside that which society attaches to it

As I said above, I think we can all agree that item #1 is not sufficient, by itself, for anyone to even get particularly upset, much less commit suicide.  So, what role does item #2 play?  Certainly more than the former.   I emphatically do not believe that the celebrity we grant to totally random individuals makes us (or the celebrity) guilty when someone does something tragic as a result of that fame, but since we seem incapable of not trying to blame someone when this happens, why, of the two outside parties, did we pick the radio hosts?  Why not the institution that makes these completely random people something more important than random other hospital patients no one feels terrible about when they make a totally innocuous mistake in the course of their care?

If two radio hosts can be suspended because they said some rude things that caused someone to feel that they had impugned the majesty of  a randomly selected group of people, why on earth wouldn’t we levy the same penalty on the people and institutions who decided that group of people were worthy of that respect?  People who, despite obviously not being directly responsible for what occurred, are at least somewhat more responsible than the radio hosts.  It’s also important to note that to the extent that they contributed to this tragedy, they continue to maintain the circumstances that could make it possible for similar issues to occur — unlike the radio hosts, who will undoubtedly never prank call that hospital again.  It’s impossible to prevent people saying rude or offensive things that might drive others to suicide.  It is not impossible for us to decide that certain random people are unworthy of the level of respect that causes people to feel terrible because they forwarded a call about those people.  Unfortunately, while not impossible, it’s extremely unlikely — because the exact organizations that keep treating random selections of British genetics like newsworthy items (CNN, etc…) are precisely the people for whom this is not a tragedy, but a ratings boost.

Please, for god’s sake, stop covering the royal wedding.  It is not news.  At this very moment, the CNN World edition (as if the world just loved hearing the wedding affairs of the descendant of, on average, their historic oppressors)  has 3 of the 9 “highlights” being wedding related, and the primary headline (vastly more prominent than “Syrian Government Shoots Uninterestingly Non-Royal Protesters“) is “WHO’S GOING TO THE ROYAL WEDDING.”  I would like to say that this insanity was limited to CNN, but the other networks basically have the same thing.

So here’s the rule from now on: no news organization who has dedicated this much time to the wedding of the descendant of (historically documented) serial killers is ever again allowed to run an article or editorial about the sad state of our political discourse.  If you really felt that way, every dollar you spent covering the powerless, useless, politically embarrassing (you still have royalty in this day and age, Britain?  Really?  Bet the other more mature countries don’t invite you to their parties!) spawn of a long line of up-until-recently murderous butchers could have been used to help fix that — ’cause it’s not like there aren’t actually important things happening right now in the world.

You’re even aware of them, Mr. Strangely Anthropomorphised (see I can be British too) Embodiment of CNN, because I see that you are covering them in tiny boxes next to the article about “How To Dress Like a Princess.”  It’s really sad when the ad copy for Barbie Princess Dress-Up Dolls and your headlines converge.  I’d try to compare by listing how many times G.I. Joe action figures have the same marketing line as Fox headlines, but that might be a bit scary.

It’s bad enough how much the news focuses on the personal lives of actual leaders (to the detriment of coverage of their policies) — but when they”re covering the wedding of British welfare queens (a more accurate usage of the term has never been committed to paper) who don’t even wield a shred of political power (thank god), we’ve gone too far.  Is there anything that puts the miracle that we actually have a representative government in starker relief than the amount of time, money and energy that people spend on this ridiculous, sycophantic theatre — including, most amazingly, the citizens of a country that actually owes its existence to the fact that it shot quite a few servants of said royals?

The British royalty — and even more explicitly, this wedding — is not a news item.  They are more like a sadly prominent pimple on the fact of an otherwise respectable person, that — if we must — should be discussed only in the context of how most effectively we can cure her of this condition, so we can put the entire embarrassing situation behind us and move onto issues that matter.

God, I really hate articles like this:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Changes in the global pecking order are coming.

As western nations face stunted economic growth and years of painful budget-slashing ahead, developing nations like China, Brazil, India and Russia are slowly moving up on the world stage.

Look, people, “pecking order” implies that the person with the #1 world GDP “wins” and gets some special benefit because of that ranking.  That’s simply not how this works.  Do we really need more pointless status contests between nations?  The only thing that matters is the absolute numbers, not the relative ones.  If China is going up, that is good for everyone.  If the US is going down (it isn’t) that is bad for everyone.

The United States is struggling to hit 2.7% growth for the year, while emerging economies, which also include smaller countries mostly in Asia and Latin America, are collectively on track for 7.1% growth for the year.

Jesus, how can you state these numbers without the real figures?  Smaller percentages of bigger numbers can be larger in real terms for the citizens of those countries.  And, more importantly, you simply can’t make these kind of comparisons and say “well that means the US is screwing up.”  Or things like this:

So where did these countries get it right while western superpowers got it so wrong?

God damn.  The reason developing economies grow faster than developed economies is because they’re catching up.  You can’t compare the two.  If you compare two nations with similar conditions, and one’s growth rate is higher, then we can talk.  Comparing China and the US on percentage GDP growth is pointless.

And while we’re on the topic of pointless comparisons, there’s no point to comparing GDP without talking per capita, which apparently at least someone the article author interviewed was willing to say:

Even if China does become the world’s largest economy, its population is roughly 4.5 times bigger than that of the U.S., making it difficult for China to catch up to the American standard of living, said Jay Bryson, global economist with Wells Fargo.

This undermines the whole “pecking order” comment — and the entire tone of the article.  There is no meaningful information to be gained from knowing who has the highest GDP.  It’s pointless, and just talking about it puts it in the frame that somehow China would be “beating us” if they had a higher GDP, as if that would be bad for us.

Higher per capita growth, in any country, is good for every other country.  If somehow, every other country got to be higher than us (without US growth being negative), and we were dead last on the rankings — it would still be good for us.  In fact, it would be incredibly good — because it would mean that billions of people around the world had exited poverty and would now have immense resources to develop new technologies that we would benefit from, or buy our stuff, or sell us their stuff.  To slightly rework a great quote:

There is a single light of [economic progress], and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

Jeff Goldberg (the rest is ok, but a few too many euphemisms for me):

I had a choice of two TSA screening checkpoints. I picked mine based on the number of people waiting in line, not because I am impatient, but because the coiled, closely packed lines at TSA screening sites are the most dangerous places in airports, completely unprotected from a terrorist attack — a terrorist attack that would serve the same purpose (shutting down air travel) as an attack on board an aircraft.

The obligatory Schneier reference:

I don’t object to stringent security (as you will soon see), but I do object to meaningless security theater (Bruce Schneier’s phrase)

Roll the image of the airport security lines around in your head for awhile.  Think about it.  The idea is that we will prevent terrorists from smuggling bombs or weapons onto planes, where they will be able to use the enclosed space to kill the densely packed civilians there.  How do we do this?  By packing all those civilians into nice, tightly packed rows, in order to check them.  Relish the insanity.

Now, imagine what would happen if these devices actually detected a real bomb on a passenger.  What would he do?  Would he say “oh, well, I guess you caught me — I was really dead set on blowing up hundreds of people on a plane, but you know, it’s just not the same if they’re all standing here on the ground.”  Or would he just pull the trigger and accomplish the exact same goal as he had intended?

Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing — attempting to prevent high density civilian kills… by detaining large number of civilians in small spaces where it would be trivial to blow them up.  This is all old news.  I would have told you this on September 12th, 2001.  But there’s a certain pain in realizing that we’re still doing it 9 years later.  If blatantly obvious facts have no impact on our security methods, how much safety do we think these methods are buying us, for our billions?

CNN runs this headline:

Lessons from the whole Quran episode

The first “story highlight” is:

One viewpoint: Media coverage of crackpot publicity seeker was vastly out of proportion

Gee, you think?  I’m glad that CNN, media and publicity behemoth that it is, has just now realized it.  This is like the article they ran in the 2008 election about how black women were confused about whether or not to vote for Obama or Clinton, and the first highlight was “stop characterizing black women as forced to vote their racial/gender identity!”  The double hilarious part is that a lot more than one of the “viewpoints” outlined in this CNN article vote for the “stop giving this idiot so much air time, fools!” position.

Bob Steele:

Regrettably, the saga of the Rev. Terry Jones and his Quran-burning threat proves that many journalists and news organizations too easily abandon news judgment, professionalism and ethical standards in a zealous quest for a controversial story. [...] However, the coverage of this small band of publicity seekers was vastly out of proportion to the value of the news story.

Arsalan Iftikhar:

Usually in America, when a lone crackpot of any political or religious persuasion threatens to commit a publicity stunt that will needlessly enrage millions of other innocent people, our basic common sense tells us that our national media should not even give that person the time of day.

Sadly, not only did Terry Jones successfully receive media attention, but because of the overexposure of this one man, we are beginning to see other “copycat” Quran burnings around the country.

Ed Rollins:

Before the last few weeks, nobody would even know the pastor existed. Then why did his reckless and self-serving threats to burn hundreds of copies of the Quran become a national and international story that, according to Google news, was in more than 12,000 articles? The secretary of state, defense secretary and many other serious people put aside their real work to placate this man’s ego.

Farah Akbar:

How could this situation, with the potential to have had very damaging effects here and elsewhere been avoided? Simple — don’t let obscure people, whose actions have the potential to incite violence, dominate the news cycle.

Ruben Navarrette:

It’s obvious that he was playing us — the media, politicians, activists, all of us. Whatever it took to get him the most attention at any given time — make a threat, try to make a deal, cancel a threat, catch a flight to New York, etc. — he did it.

They’re literally running an article overflowing with criticism for their choice of covering a specific event so much —  in an article that is continuing to cover that event, even after it is over — even to the extent of conscripting tons of their own contributors into saying “don’t cover this so much!”  Why the hell didn’t they just listen to these people at the time, instead of now?  If you’re CNN, you’re not allowed to stand back and comment on how tragic it is that these big media people gave this obscure idiot so much attention.  You are those people.  Be part of the solution.

Is Paul Krugman insane?  Isn’t this column a huge plea for extending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?  If spending trillions on the military “saved us” from the Great Depression, then why wouldn’t… spending trillions on the military today do the same thing, given how Krugman spends an entire column making the comparison?  Isn’t he also saying that Bush saved us from a deeper recession in the early 2000′s by getting us involved in two expensive wars?

Can you imagine how liberals (and rightly so!)  would jump on a Republican for saying something like this?  They would scream, as I would, that this is precisely the kind of “war is the health of the economy” crap that we should all condemn.  Yet we’re just supposed to take Krugman’s word (though I can’t actually find anything in the article that says “well I don’t really advocate spending trillions more on the military) that he’s really not advocating war capitalism.  This is like walking up to an alcoholic and mentioning that – hey, you know what’s been a really good plan for getting more booze in the past?  shooting people and taking theirs! — and then feigning shock when they hold up a liquor store.

Sure, he could counter that he actually prefers spending on things like roads and bailouts, but it is extremely reckless to be one of the most influential economic policy advisors in this country (it nauseates me to type that) and say things like “Hey, you know what really got us out of that Great Depression I keep comparing this recession to?  (And even named my column “1938 in 2010″!)  A gigantic war!  Man, if only we could have something like that today!” to a current government that has proven far less dovish than it should, and a future 2010 government that (and Krugman states he is aware of this) is likely to hold a much larger percentage of Republicans that have such a reputation for fondness towards the military industrial system and still think both of our current wars are super-swell ideas.  There is a non-trivial group of people who think fighting Iran or China would be a great idea, and we don’t want to be giving them any ideas that it would be an economic solution as well.

Update: Peter Schiff rather humorously rips the “we need a new WW2!” idea to shreds in a column written even before Krugman’s!  Now that’s prescient.

For all the people debating private prisons, I want to point out that this exists:

Prison Tycoon: Alcatraz

• Never underestimate the limitations of Alcatraz- from staff to prisoners you need to plan for everything!
• Expand your walls that house the most dangerous and diabolical criminals on earth- all for the bottom line.
• Anticipate escape attempts by hiring the baddest guards and staff around to manage the hardened criminals.
• Brick by brick. Steel door by steel door. Build your prison from the ground up in Free Play mode or take on preset objectives in Challenge mode.
• Keep ‘em busy- put your prisoners to work around the prison cleaning, cooking and maintaining your prison.

I guess it’s, uh, like Sim City?

To everyone angry about wikileaks: this is why we we need them.  That is how things happen when events that don’t fit our perception of a war are not made public.  If you are serious about civilian oversight of the military, then you have to believe that civilians need to know what they are overseeing.

Also: Claudia Rosett has a wikileaks wishlist: terrorists, Iran, North Korea, Taliban.  I think it’s a great idea, and I’m sure Assange would too.  The irony is that there is already one organization that already has tons of documents in these categories — the US government.  I think they should send them all (not actually classified stuff of course) to Assange, or publish it themselves.  To take one example, I know for certain they have thousands of hard drives that they’ve captured from terrorists.  Now, to be fair, a lot of it is pornography (not joking) and otherwise banal, but even the publication of that would help drive a stake in the idea that such terrorists are noble martyrs for Islam.  Rosett links one specific case, which is priceless reading.

Clarification: just publicizing things is, of course, not sufficient to prevent them.  There also has to be the perception that the actions revealed are wrong, and to have a mechanism for politically punishing those who committed those actions.  The US has those things today, and did have them in 1945 as well — I believe that if the rape of Okinawan women by US soldiers had become widely known, people would have been very upset in the US and  demanded some action.  No amount of publication of Japanese  crimes against Okinawans, though far more severe, would have had an effect on the Japanese Empire’s actions.  I don’t know the nature of public opinion in wartime Japan to know if it would have been condemned, but I do know that even if it had, their government and military weren’t set up to punish (or even credibly pretend to be opposed to) war crimes of this nature.  A similar situation probably governs the cases that Rosett suggests, but I think everyone would agree that more info on what they have done couldn’t hurt.

… of the “Where Do Libertarians Belong?” debate:

Is social conservatism worse than less-free markets?

Brink Lindsey: Yes.

Jonah Goldberg/Matt Kibbe: No.

(more…)

From Johann Hari (via Radley Balko):

Who now defends alcohol prohibition? Is there a single person left? This echoing silence should suggest something to us. Ending drug prohibition seems like a huge heave, just as ending alcohol prohibition did. But when it is gone, when the drug gangs are a bankrupted memory, when drug addicts are treated not as immoral criminals but as ill people needing health care, who will grieve?

And another:

By 1926, he [Capone] and his fellow gangsters were making $3.6 billion a year—in 1926 money! To give some perspective, that was more than the entire expenditure of the U.S. government. The criminals could outbid and outgun the state. So they crippled the institutions of a democratic state and ruled, just as drug gangs do today in Mexico, Afghanistan, and ghettos from South Central Los Angeles to the banlieues of Paris. They have been handed a market so massive that they can tool up to intimidate everyone in their area, bribe many police and judges into submission, and achieve such a vast size, the honest police couldn’t even begin to get them all.

The recent unrest in Jamaica mirrors this: the drug dealers are stronger than the government.  This may seem shocking to Americans, but we were in the same situation 70 years ago.  What was the solution then?  I almost don’t even care about domestic policy any more — the global destabilization that the War on Drugs is creating is incredible.

I don’t always agree with Mr. Zakaria, but this is the best take on the oil spill I’ve seen so far:

What worries me is that we have gotten to the point where we expect the president to somehow magically solve every problem in the world, appear to be doing it, and to reflect our anger and emotion. This is a kind of bizarre trivializing of the presidency into some kind of national psychiatrist-in-chief.

That’s just one good line; I basically agree with the rest too.

Update: I like this too. (Via Boing Boing)

“Should This Be The Last Peter Singer Article?”  I feel like the answer is yes, but he wrote it anyway: (via Radley Balko)

Should This Be The Last Generation?

It’s kind of impressive that in a week that saw an Eliot Spitzer article telling me that Abraham Lincoln wanted me to pay higher taxes, that I would find an article that angered me even more, but Mr. Singer has accomplished this.  How could he achieve this, you ask?  How indeed.   (more…)

Just as the US needed the Civil Rights Act to help clear up some of the abuses and discrimination that exist post-Emancipation, there were serious issues in other countries.  One of the most dramatic of these was “The Revolt of the Whip,” in the Brazilian Navy: (more…)

Jamaica (link via Microkhan) joins the club of countries destabilized by US drug policy.  Well, to be fair, they were already in the club, but now their membership is obvious even to the notoriously dense American media.  I’ll just reprint my comment from Microkhan’s site:

It’s bad enough that we have to mess up our country with late night drug raids that kill children, but when we’re actually destabilizing a large number of foreign countries with this moronic policy, you’d think people would start to reconsider.

What is this now? Jamaica, Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan, all with severe internal control issues directly stemming from US drug policy? If another country were creating this much havoc, we’d have invaded them by now.

Reagan was right.  The War on Drugs is a national security issue.  But not the way he meant.  It becomes even worse when you look at the recent left-wing tilt in South America.  People in these countries resent our interference.  Take Bolivia, where we spent millions trying to obliterate coca production, which was the livelihood of millions of Bolivians.  Is it any surprise that these newly impoverished farmers turned around and elected Evo Morales, who rails against US capitalism?  We are creating our own enemies and, ironically, ensuring that they have a steady stream of funding.

This is pure foreign policy incompetence.

Hey assholes, stay out of this.  Don’t be so excited to take the only thing we have.  I realize it’s nice being from Chicago and New York, where teams, you know, actually win things, but people from Cleveland don’t think this is so funny.

Related: How To Save Cleveland, in concise non-video format.

I had basically the same reaction to the “strip citizenship from suspected terrorists” idea:

We don’t need no steenkin’ constitution with all those liberal trial lawyer and ACLU types.  We can just have 12 honest, ordinary Americans look at the evidence, and if they don’t find any reasonable doubt, you’re in prison.  That’s way harsher than anything that latte-sipping elitists like Jefferson and Madison would have come up with.

At any point in history, has it been hard to prosecute and convict terrorists?  Especially ones who, you know, confess?  Who cares about citizenship in this case?  If someone attempts to kill a bunch of people, then confesses to doing so, I think you are probably going to be able to convict and imprison him for a very long time.  If someone succeeds at doing so, you can even execute them.  Does it matter that a person in prison (or a shallow grave) has citizenship?  Was citizenship such a dire burden in prosecuting, say, the Oklahoma City bombings?

There are only two potential answers: First, that you just want to be mean to terrorists.  In which case, I’m fine with just passing laws that declare that “Terrorists Are Big Poop Heads, So There” and then we can all feel good about how much we all hate ‘em.  Sounds good to me.  The second potential answer is this: that you DO think there is a material reason that you would want to strip their citizenship, because there are mean things you can do to them that you couldn’t otherwise.  This is the worrisome one, because sometimes the person you’ve accused of terrorism isn’t actually guilty of it.  Deep stuff, I know.

… hero of a nation of amnesiacs.  I must have missed the meeting where everyone decided that he wasn’t a crazy neo-con any more.  Or maybe this is a different guy with the same name, whose wikipedia page doesn’t include this information:

Frum’s book An End to Evil was co-written with Richard Perle. It provided a defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and advocated regime change in Iran and Syria. Furthermore, it called for a tougher policy with North Korea, as well as advocating a tougher U.S. stance against Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations in order to “win the war on terror” (from the book’s subtitle).

That must be the case, because no one who wrote that could possibly be considered a rational political thinker in the year 2010.  Or maybe he got rehabilitated right along with the Iraq war, which all sane Americans agree is now a glorious Victory.

Iraq: Mission Really Accomplished!  Greenwald, Doherty (2007!), Hastings.  I don’t agree with everything they say, but the general gist is right: everyone thought Iraq was a disaster until it wasn’t politically beneficial to think it was a disaster, and now it’s a Victory.

This confirms two general theories of mine: that Americans really are pro-war on average, but can be convinced to go against them to buttress political motives.  I think the general idea is that Americans didn’t like the Iraq war, and so came to dislike Bush — but in my opinion it’s more descriptive to say they came to dislike Bush and so also came to dislike the Iraq war.  Especially when you compare favorable opinions on nearly every previous war (very high) with the average favorable opinion for the average president; which is something approaching 50/50 — under 50% in Bush’s case, if you happen to remember the 2000 election.  No doubt some people disliked the war, then Bush, but general public opinion (pre September 11th) was much more positive for war in general than for Bush.

Second; that Bush II is going to undergo a (undeserved) rehabilitation, like Truman — to whom Bush was fond of comparing himself.  If I had to guess, I’d say that in 40 years or so, Bush will be seen in the same tough-talkin’, hard-decision makin’ light as Truman, and just as positively — like nearly ever other wartime president.  Even though, of course, both Truman and Bush had low approval ratings when they left office.

I’ll admit my own biases: if this propaganda shift to Iraq as “Victory at Last” provides cover for Obama to remove our troops because we’ve “won,” I’ll gladly cheerleader it all you want.

… in talking about anything other than this?:

[..] one of the Gitmo Three [ostensible "suicides"] was arrested at age 17, held for some years without being charged, and scheduled for release at the time of his death due to the military’s conclusion that no evidence linked him to al Qaeda or the Taliban. We may never know exactly how he and his fellow detainees died: A conclusive, independent autopsy is impossible because their bodies were returned to their families with their throats missing.

What I want to ask everyone: what do you lose by loudly condemning this?  You can still support the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, indefinite detention, torture or whatever else you want to support, while still admitting that murdering an innocent person and then covering it up is wrong.  There is no reason to not denounce this; except as a signal to your ideological masters that you are willing to overlook even the worst crimes to prove your obedience.

A just war is in the long run far better for a nation’s soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence in wrong or injustice.

- Theodore Roosevelt

But sometimes it’s not so much better for the poor slobs who get sent over the trenches.  This quote is in the same category as Obama’s Nobel speech: perhaps without context it is true that yes, there are times where a just war would be superior to some inequitable peace, but I’m not sure humanity has ever constructed a real scenario where this is true.

And, when you look at what Teddy considered to be a “just war,” it also makes you wonder.