Tom Brokaw is a bad journalist

I'm sorry, I just can't take it any more.  I have seen two appearances by Tom Brokaw, first on the "Charlie Rose" show and then on "The Daily Show".  He is selling his new book "The Time of our Lives".  You are supposed to buy the book because he is supposed to know what he is talking about.  He is supposed to know what he is talking about because he is a "respected journalist".  I listened to him carefully and the conclusion is inescapable.  He is a bad journalist.  Why?

First, he missed the biggest political story in the last 20 years.  This story is so big it colors all political coverage today and has colored it now for many years.  Yet Mr. Brokaw missed it.  What is this story?  In about 1990 Newt Gingrich took control of the Republican party.  He did this by raising a ton of money (for those days) and distributing it around to candidates.  He also formulated an overall strategy for how the Republican party should operate.  This strategy can be summarized by the following phrases:  "take no prisoners", "slash and burn", "my way or the highway".  In general he took the party to the right, enforced crushing discipline, and adopted a "no negotiation - no compromise" approach to dealing with Democrats.  In the early days he recruited candidates to run against other Republicans if he thought the incumbent Republican was not sufficiently conservative or not sufficiently disciplined (e.g. they didn't do what Newt told them to do).  In several cases Republicans lost seats they didn't need to lose.  But with savvy political operatives and enough money Newt was able to win those seats back and more.  In 1994 the GOP took over the House of Representatives for the first time in living memory.

With leadership in hand, Newt proceeded to implement his plan dubbed "the Contract with America".  Things went down hill from there for Newt.  Newt engineered two government shutdowns and got himself involved in scandal.  So he lost his leadership position in the House and, until recently, retired from the pursuit of elected office.  But by then most elected Republicans at the Federal level had gotten comfortable with "the Newt way" so it lives on in the Republican party to this day.  The whole "no compromise" approach of the modern Republican party is just "the Newt way".

Now none of this is any kind of secret.  It's all old news.  But Mr. Brokaw hews to the "it's a DC problem" rather that the correct "it's a Republicans in DC problem" to describe the current level of gridlock at the Federal level.  And Democrats deserve some blame but not much.  For instance, Senate Republicans pioneered the aggressive use of the Filibuster and other parliamentary tactics to delay or derail legislation they didn't like.  And the Democrats have tried on occasion to adopt the same methods.  But when Senate Democrats tried to Filibuster to block Bush judicial appointments the "gang of 12", six Democrats and six Republicans, instantly appeared.  The gang succeeded in derailing the Democratic Filibuster effort and a "compromise" was reached that resulted in most Bush judicial appointments going through.  Since the Democrats have regained control the Republicans have successfully Filibustered everything and no Republicans have joined a "gang of 12" or any other kind of gang that could interfere with the Republican's ability to block legislation.

Or consider President Obama.  He is considered a wuss by Mr. Brokaw and nearly all other "journalists" in DC.  Why?  Because he has spent.nearly three years bending over backward trying to find some kind of formula to generate a compromise and break loose a few Republican votes.  A cornerstone of this strategy has been to include Republican ideas into all of his major proposals.  In spite of any number of efforts the Republicans have maintained discipline, thrown up roadblocks continuously, and voted strictly along party lines against almost all of his proposals.  Mr. Obama has been so aggressive in courting Republicans that he has alienated a large portion of his base including yours truly.  So the idea that Democrats have been effective in contributing to gridlock and made more than a token contribution to "the partisan divide" is patently ridiculous. Mr. Brokaw is ridiculous when he does not accurately describe the situation.

Then there is the biggest cultural story of the last 30 or more years.  There is a fundamental conflict going on in the country.  It is not, at least superficially, the divide between the left and the right, or between the rich and the poor, or between the coasts and the heartland, or any of the usual "divides" covered in the media.  It is the conflict between "truth" and "truthiness".  On the "truth" side you have people who work hard trying to figure out what is really going on.  There dedication to "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" sometimes forces them to believe in "inconvenient" truths.  On the "truthiness" side you have people who believe that "wanting it to be true" is enough to make it so.  And, unfortunately, the truthiness people are winning.  And, still more unfortunately, Mr. Brokaw and the vast majority of his colleges contribute to the success of the truthiness side.

Now you might think that based in the divides I have so far outlined that the only people who care about this are people who are interested in cultural issues, people like politicians and religious people.  But it turns out that business has been investing heavily in the truthiness side of the conflict.  And the reason is advertising.  What if you have a product that is inferior to the competition?  In this situation the truth is not your friend.  Now instead let's say that your product is not inferior.  It's just that you are competing in a product category where all products are essentially the same.  Well, you can go with the low price strategy.  But this leads to a spiral and pretty soon no one is making any money.  It is better to end up with only a part of the market if the price is high enough so you can make a profit.  So in this "tweedle dee tweedle dum" situation the truth is at best of only marginal use.  In both of these cases truthiness works much better.  My product makes you sexier or happier or is "new and improved".  If the formulation has been changed it is new and any change must be an improvement, right?

Rush Limbaugh listeners pride themselves on being "ditto heads".  They believe anything Rush says.  So if Rush says "buy product X" they will buy it.  This means you don't have to spend a lot of money coming up with a clever marketing campaign that may fail spectacularly.  You can just pay Rush a large fee to say nice things about your product.  Now, imagine another radio personality, someone who has the same demographics as Rush and the same sized audience but whose audience is filled with skeptics.  What do you do?  If the personality on this show says "buy product X" the skeptical audience will not just fall into line and buy the product.  You will be forced to spend money on making the product better, or coming up with a really clever marketing campaign, or maybe just settling for a smaller market share.

So businesses love ditto heads and hate skeptics.  It makes sound business sense for the tobacco industry to manufacture more ditto heads that will buy phony health claims about cigarettes.  And industries that do a lot of harm like the coal industry love truthiness people.  If they can come up with a claim that these people want to believe then they have succeeded.  And even if you are just an ordinary business that makes consumer products, if you can condition people to be more likely to be receptive to a clever marketing campaign (e.g. move them closer to the truthiness end of the scale) then you can make your business more successful.  So many businesses for sound business reasons have decided to contribute to the dumbing down of the public.

Now the news business is supposed to be biased in this conflict.  They are supposed to be pro truth and anti-truthiness.  But the modern news business in just another business.  It is supposed to make as big a profit as it can.  And that means attracting sponsors that will pay high prices for advertisements.  And that means the job of a modern "newsman" has changed.  As Robert Shaffer (Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2011) put it: "News reporters don’t want to get the facts.  They want to get ratings".  So people like Mr. Brokaw diligently cover "both sides" of stories that have some other number of sides.  They let pass without comment idiocy as long as it is spoken by "an authoritative source".  They cover unimportant but dramatic stories (if it bleeds, it leads) and ignore dull but important stories.  And they frequently use the excuse "it's too complicated - we just couldn't find a way to present the story so the public could understand it".  Then a TV show called "The West Wing" came along.  Aaron Sorkin managed to condense numerous "too hard" political arguments into short and accurate statements that could be easily understood by  viewers.  So the real problem was that people like Mr. Brokaw were too lazy or too incompetent to do what Mr. Sorkin did in episode after episode.

Now some may say that Mr. Brokaw is "among the best at what he does".  And there may be some truth to this position.  But that just means there are a lot of "journalists" out there who are not bad.  They are awful.  News should not be graded on the curve.  It is not enough for someone to be not as bad as the other guy.  He (or she) needs to be actually good.  It is too important to settle for anything less.  Decades of bad journalism have left us where we are now.  We have a dysfunctional government that is not going to be fixed unless people actually understand what the real problems is.  (Hint:  The Republicans did it).  Now I completely agree that there is plenty of room for improvement on the Democratic side.  But that's small beer compared to the Republican contribution to the current mess.  And one of the critical factors holding us back from doing anything about the Republicans is the current state of journalism as exemplified by Mr. Brokaw.  Why do you think that a large number of people, myself included, think the best journalist working today is Jon Stewart.  Stewart is not even a professional journalist.  The fact that he is a better journalist than the so called professionals, in spite of the fact that he sees himself as a comedian, says it all.

Science versus Religion

There are two basic positions on this issue.  One position is that there is no conflict, that they address two different aspects.  Steven J. Gould characterizes the situation as "non-overlapping magisteria".  And no less an authority than Sir. Isaac Newton agreed with this position.  In his time he was more well known as a leading theologian than as a scientist.  He devotes a considerable portion of "Optics", his second most famous work after "Principia", to the relationship between Science and Religion.  He believed that Science could deliver one kind of truth while Religion could deliver another.  He believed that by properly combining these truths a super-truth could be created that was greater and more complete than either lesser truth could provide on its own.  And he believed that there was no contradiction between Scientific Truth and Religious Truth.  Francis Collins, one of today's leading scientists, also sees no conflict between his strongly held religious beliefs and his strongly held scientific beliefs.  But there are few active scientists today that have beliefs similar to Collins.

Some active scientists are in the opposite camp.  They are strong and active atheists whose position can be summarized as "all religions are bunk and hokum".  Most scientists are in a middle camp however.  In religious terms they could be called agnostics.  They just don't want to engage in the battle on either side.  Some go to church regularly.  Some don't.  But most of them just want to stay out of the fight.  They want to be left alone by the religious types to do their scientific thing.  And I think that most religious people are in a similar camp when it comes to scientists.  They want to be left alone in their religious beliefs by the scientific types.  So, since there is a great consensus (according to me), why all the hoopla?

The answer comes down to the most fundamental of questions:  Is there a conflict between Science and Religion?  I believe there is.  In my previous post (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/10/scientific-method.html) I said "Science is the pursuit of truth".  In a fundamental way Religion is also about truth.  Consider for a moment what would happen if God made a great revelation to his current prophet.  But assume the revelation was full of lies.  God would still be God but would it make sense to direct our actions based on revelation?  No!  All believers believe that the word of God, the revelation, is "divine truth", that God does not lie in his revelations.  The word of God is sometimes referred to as "revealed truth" for this reason.

Now, just because God uses what some would characterize as an unusual method to communicate truth, does this necessarily mean that there is some conflict between religious truth and scientific truth?  No!  Scientists believe some truly weird stuff.  Believing that God downloaded true facts directly into the brain of Paul while he was on the road to Damascus would register as "totally normal" on the scientific "how weird is this"-o-meter.  Scientists would have no problem with the process as long as it worked.  But the real question is:  does it work?

I think that many religious people intuitively understand this.  They know that there is "religious truth" and "scientific truth".  They also believe that there is some overlap and that there are some situations where "religious facts" and "scientific facts" are in conflict.  So it is critical to discount the conflicting "scientific facts" so that there is no alternative to the "religious facts".  One technique they use is to say "religious beliefs are a matter of faith and not subject to validation".  You either believe them or you don't.  The problem, as I see it, is that religious people don't believe their own argument.  They believe that, at least in some cases, people will believe the scientific argument, and therefore the scientific "fact", and therefore doubt the religious "fact".  Religious people can disagree with me and say "faith is sufficient".  The problem is that I see a lot of religious people in a lot of places and at a lot of times acting like they doubt their "faith based" argument.

The earliest example of this that most people are familiar with is the fight between Galileo and the Catholic Church in 1616.  The fight was over whether the Earth was at the center of the universe, as the Church believed, or whether it revolved around the Sun as Copernicus had suggested.  Now most people would wonder what Celestial Mechanics has to do with religion and they would be right.  But church people at the time decided that the Bible was a source of reliable information about Celestial Mechanics and that the Bible said that the Earth was at the center of the Universe.  So "the Earth is at the center of the universe" became revealed truth.  And if one revealed truth was determined to be false then the whole edifice of belief in the Bible tumbled down.

A less drastic solution is possible.  One just decides that Celestial Mechanics is not part of revealed truth and the problem goes away.  But somehow there is always a reason why that solution is deemed not feasible by religious authorities.  The modern version of the heliocentricity conflict is the evolution conflict.  Again religious people have decided that the Bible is a good source of information about how plants and animals and people came into existence and how long ago that happened.  Scientists in the form of Evolution and related ideas say that the interpretation of this Biblical information by a number of religious authorities, namely that all plants and animals were created at roughly the same time about six to ten thousand years ago, is wrong.

Again there is a way around this.  Many religious people have long believed that the Bible is not meant to be taken literally.  Instead it should be used as a general guide.  The problem with this, the biblical literalists say, is that you can no longer draw a bright line between what is revealed truth and what is general guidance.  And they are right.  But the alternative, the literalist interpretation, means you are stuck with all the nonsense in the Bible, and there is a lot of nonsense in the Bible.  So Christians are stuck between a rock (literalism) and a hard place (fuzzy general guide with no way to draw a bright line).  Even if you go with the "general guide" school Science represents a problem.  Science keeps evolving.  Scientists keep coming up with more and more scientific truth.  No one worried about Evolution in Galileo's time.  Who knows what piece of new Science will pop up (God particle anyone?) to trouble a currently non-controversial religious belief.

So far I have characterized the issue as being one between Science and Christians.  But there are lots of religions out there.  Many of them are "prophet" based.  God speaks directly to one or more prophets (Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard, etc.).  The prophet then spreads "the word of God" to the flock and off we go.  As I said previously, one of the key foundations of Science is "whatever works is right" and especially it's reverse, "whatever doesn't work is wrong".  Some part of the theology of every religion I am familiar with can be subjected to scientific investigation.  There are lots of religions out there.  And I am only slightly familiar with a few of them.  But Scientists have developed a lot of tools for ferreting out what works and what doesn't.  If just one of these tools ferrets out just one falsity in one particular religion's doctrine then the whole edifice falls down for that religion.  I contend without proof (e.g. you'll just have to take me on faith) that the doctrine of every prophet based religion has a problem that can be found by applying scientific methods.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to examine non-prophet based religions to see if they have a similar weakness.

It is only necessary for a few people in the community of a faith to be familiar with this weakness.  Over and over these people decide that Science is a threat and therefore that it must be attacked.  It doesn't really matter what most people of faith or most people of science think.  Attacks on Science by people of faith will be made because they must be made.

Science does not have this weakness.  It is normal for disagreements to arise between scientists.  There are conflict resolution mechanisms built into Science.  For those unfamiliar with them they work like this.  A Scientist makes an assertion that others disagree with.  Einstein famously said "God does not play dice with the universe", for instance.  In a faith based environment this would be the end of things.  As an authority, Einstein would be deferred to and the Einstein's statement would become accepted doctrine.  Instead scientists behave differently.  They say "Is there any way we can determine whether it is true or not?"  This actually happened.  Scientists were able to convert Einstein's general statement into testable specifics.  They then devised and executed experiments to examine the testable specifics and determined that Einstein was wrong.  The scientific version of "God does play dice with the universe" is true.  And so it goes.  It is considered normal for accepted ideas in Science to be overturned.  So proving some Scientific statement false does not overturn all of Science.  It only overturns a small part of it.  Such evolution in scientific beliefs is considered to be the normal progress of Science.  That's why most Scientific beliefs are called "Theories".  The possibility must always be entertained that a particular piece of accepted scientific wisdom will prove to be false in whole or, more likely, in part.

This is a classic case of asymmetric warfare.  Religious people must attack Science "by any means necessary" perhaps violating the very standards of morality they purport to believe in (e.g. "thou shalt not lie").  Scientists, on the other hand, do not on the whole feel a need to attack religion.  But there is an asymmetric attribute to warfare.  It is only necessary for one side to want to go to war for there to be a war.  So we have and will continue to have a war between Science and religion.

Scientific Method

The "Scientific Method" is (or at least was) presented in school in an early grade.  The standard version is something like this:

It's a 4 step cyclical process consisting of:
1.  Gather the facts (observations, results of experiments, etc.)
2.  Look for patterns and regularities in the facts.
3.  Formulate or revise theories, hypotheses, etc.
4.  Devise and execute experiments or plans for additional observations.
Go back to step 1 and repeat.

Science is done by people and is a much more chaotic process than the one listed above.  If you want to see a good and entertaining demonstration of the Scientific Method in action I strongly recommend a TV show called "Mythbusters".  The two main hosts (Jamie Hynaman and Adam Savage) have exactly NO standard scientific credentials.  They come out of the movie special effects industry.  This is handy because they have a good sense of how to put together an entertaining show.  But they also do good science.  Which leads to my first observation:  Science is a process or method and anyone who does it is a "scientist" doing "scientific work".  Science is not about who you are or what you know.  It's about how you go about doing things.  And the standard characterization of science and the scientific method obscure as much as they help.  So let's go straight to the basics:

• Science is the pursuit of truth.
• Whatever works is right.

These two observations are the core of what science is really about.  In fact, from a practical point of view, the reverse of the second observation is of more practical consequence to the pursuit of science.  Namely:  "Whatever doesn't work is wrong".  Modern science is not performed as it once was.  Why?  Because those old procedures sometimes led to things that turned out to be wrong.  So scientists went back and revised the procedure to avoid whatever problem was perceived to have led to the error.  Modern scientific technique as practised by professional scientists is far more complex and includes many more "checks and balances" steps than it used to in an effort to more reliably attain truth.

Does that mean that the simple procedures employed by the Mythbusters people will sometimes lead them astray.  Yes!  And they know it.  So, like good professional scientists, they occasionally do "revisited" shows where they look at earlier work after it has been criticized by fans of the show.  They will redo things a different way.  Sometimes the result comes out the same.  Sometimes it does not.  I think they have done the "chicken gun" test 4 times now.  Bitter experience has taught scientists the lesson that "always be prepared for your idea to be shown to be wrong" is critically important to science.

Scientists even go one farther.  A modern scientific concept is that of "falsifiability".  Is there some way, some set of data or some experimental result, that would definitely prove that your idea is wrong?  Now it may be that the experiment is very hard to do, even impossible at this time, but the concept of falsifiability is very important.  Scientists have learned to be very leery of situations where the answer is "no".  The easier it is to come up with and do an experiment where some result would falsify the theory, the happier scientists are.  So they like theories that make predictions that can be tested.  When Einstein came up with General Relativity he predicted that the Sun would bend the light from a star when light from that star came close to grazing the Sun.  Scientists came up with a situation where this prediction could be tested and went out and did the measurements, measurements that had never been done before.  The result came back the way the theory predicted and a different way than it would have come out if General Relativity was bunk.  This and other tests of General Relativity were why the theory, which is truly weird, was accepted fairly quickly in the scientific community.

And that brings me to another point.  Scientific "truth" is determined by a popularity contest.  Scientists argue about everything all the time.  For a scientific theory to become accepted wisdom that vast majority of scientists have to accept it.  There is no outside objective way to determine scientific truth.  What differentiates the scientific endeavor form others in not the "popularity contest" aspect but how the contest is scored.  So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the vat majority of scientists that something is true. And what convinces scientists is that thing I noted above, namely "whatever works is right".  The emphasis here is on the word "works".  So why would you believe that something works?

The obvious and traditional answer is that "some important and respected person says it".  The obvious problem is that important and respected people often believe things that turn out to be wrong.  Say an I&RP says "the sky is green".  But one day you go outside and look up and it looks awfully blue to you.  (Actually it is possible for small portions of the sky to be green under certain circumstances, but I'm talking about the whole sky.)  Now what if you poll 50 friends, enemies, and strangers and they all agree that the sky is blue?  At that point most people would agree that I&RP got it wrong.  And that's where science began.  About 400 years ago some people got together and they decided that I&RP frequently get it wrong.  They said "we can do better".

And they did do better a lot of the time.  But they also made a lot of mistakes.  So they tried to learn from their mistakes and figure out how to avoid them in the future.  And that's where modern scientific techniques come from.  Over the years since scientists have tried a lot of things to get to "truth that works".  Most of them ended up not working very well.  The few that consistently delivered the goods evolved into modern scientific technique.  And one common component of modern scientific technique is repeatability.  Is someone does an experiment and gets a certain result is that the end of the story?  No!  Time after time in the history of science people have tried to replicate the result of an experiment and failed.  And in many cases it has turned out that the original experimenter goofed in some way.  So cornerstones of modern science are:

• Publish not only your results but the procedures necessary to reproduce your results.
• Someone else needs to use your published procedures to reproduce your results.

If your results can't be replicated then they should not be relied upon.  And this has resulted in the creation of the modern science lab that movie and TV show makers like to have fun with.  An easy way for things to go wrong is for there to be something going on that no one noticed.  Imagine you are doing a soil acid study in an open field and a dog comes along and pees on your soil when you are not looking.  It is easy to see that your results might get skewed.  But if you move your study "into the lab" you can easily make sure that no dog can pee on your experiment.  This is a silly example of what can go wrong.  But the idea is simple.  You need to control your environment to make sure nothing is going on that you don't know about.

Another issue that led to the "lab" idea is complexity.  It turns out to be really hard to figure out what is going on if you change too many things at once.  If you change 100 things at once you don't know which changes are important and which aren't.  So scientists are most happy when they can change one and only one thing at a time.  I have only scratched the surface of all the ways scientists have found to get the wrong answer over the years.  But these modern procedures are all driven by the same simple idea:  whatever works is right.

Think about it.  If you want to convince me that something is true what is more likely to work:  "It's true because I say so" or "I did all these things and I was very careful and here's what happened".  Better yet "do this then this then this yourself and see what happens.  Now do you believe me?"  The thing that makes professional scientists different from you and me is training.  It's not the training in a bunch of "scientific facts" or the training on how to operate some piece of complex lab equipment.  It is the training on procedures, what procedures work, what procedures don't work, and why various procedures work or don't.

Science can be done by anyone.  It can be done by a couple of special effects guys with no formal scientific training.  It can be done by a nine year old girl with no special training of any kind.  (The "New England Journal of Medicine", one of the most respected scientific journals in the world, published a paper whose lead author was a nine year old girl).  The important thing is not who they are, or even for the most part what training they have had.  What is important is what they do.  Do they do things in a proper scientific manner?  Where professional scientists can make a contribution is to review their work to see if they did it right.  There has been a big change in Astronomy in the last 10-20 years.  Much of the work professional Astronomers now do depends on contributions by amateurs.  Professional astronomers have learned that many amateurs do work in a proper scientific manner.  And the use of amateurs results in a lot more eyeballs looking up.  And some amateurs even have equipment that is professional or near professional in its quality.

Now the scientific ideal is to do the easily replicable experiment in the lab then have others replicate it.  But often this is not possible.  A classic example is space shots.  The one and only space shot to Pluto is on its way as I write this.  Scientists can't bring Pluto into the lab and put it under a microscope.  They won't even get a chance to send a second space shot to Pluto any time soon.  So this is a case of "you go with what you can get" even though it is not "in the lab" and its not repeatable.  Scientists have a choice between getting nothing (no data about Pluto) and a less than optimal situation.  They go with the less than optimal situation, in this case, way less than optimal.  Scientists treat these situations very carefully.  The farther away they get from the optimal situation of a repeatable situation in the lab, the more careful they try to be.  So they looked a everything on the Pluto mission eight ways from Sunday while they were designing and constructing the mission.  That's one reason space shots are so expensive.  But the alternative is to spend less money but to get junk (e.g. not reliable) data.

Even so, it doesn't always work.  The first mission to Mars looking for life found it.  At least that's what the experiments said.  So did scientists say "we found life on Mars"?  No!  They said "we got interesting results from our Mars experiments".  Why?  Because this was not the first time a scientist had gotten a strange result in a situation where scientists knew little about what to expect.  Lots of things had gone wrong in this situation in the past so scientists had learned to be very careful.  And it turned out they had not found life on Mars.  They found out that the chemistry of Martian soil was not what they expected and the differences messed up their results.

Finally, science is done by people.  People make mistakes all the time.  They believe that they are doing an experiment in the proper scientific manner when they aren't.  They think they know how an experiment will come out or they hope that an experiment will come out in a certain way.  So they see what isn't and don't see what is.  This "wishing can make it appear to be so" is why scientists like to do "double blind" experiments.  These are experiments where the scientists don't know everything (like whether the patient they are examining was given the drug or not) while they are collecting the data.  If the scientist doesn't know (until later when the data is "unblinded") then the scientist can't "accidentally" bias the result.

Scientists are trained to do things in the proper scientific manner.  So they are more likely than an untrained amateur to get it right.  But doing things in the proper scientific manner only ups your chances of getting it right.  It may be that there is some yet undiscovered flaw in the current version of proper scientific manner.  But it may also be that doing things using a flawed procedure (e.g. not proper scientific manner) gets the correct result because the flaws do not turn out to be important in this case.  Looking up in the sky one day by yourself on a clear day and noting that the sky is blue gets you the correct answer even though "your sample size is too small to be significant".  In this case the effect is so great (always blue, never green) that you don't need to go through all the scientific rigmarole to get the right answer.  So doing things the wrong way may get you the right answer and doing things the right way might give you the wrong answer.  Is this really better than the alternative.

Yes!  And for two reasons.  First, doing things in a proper scientific manner is more likely to get you the right answer.  But more importantly, science is really good at determining that a particular answer is wrong.  Doing things in the proper scientific manner has demonstrated that what was generally believed to be true is actually false.  In the General Relativity example above most people believed that Newton got it right.  Einstein came along and said "Newton got it wrong in the following ways".  Scientists then followed up by looking very carefully in the places Einstein said to look.  And they decided that Einstein was right.  And before Einstein, Newton had come along first and said "these traditional ideas of how the universe works are wrong".  He then presented his theories and the experiments that showed that the new theories were right and the old ideas were wrong.

And in both cases Newton and later Einstein won popularity contests.  There was no august body that awarded either of them a "truth" prize.  In both cases they made convincing arguments that their ideas were better than those ideas that came before them.  Essentially, that the old ideas were wrong.  Both of their new ideas sounded radical and weird to people of their time.  People were comfortable with the old ideas.  They were very popular both with every day people and with elites, in this case scientists of the time.  But both of them won their respective popularity contests, especially among scientists.  Why?  Because they provided compelling arguments.

Science has become very complex.  It frequently involves mathematics far beyond what normal people can handle.  And many modern scientific concepts are truly weird.  But the way we got here is very basic and sensible.  Scientists went about the process of looking hard for the truth.  They tried to get the best data they could lay their hands on by, for instance, continually improving their instruments and tools.  Then they tested the ideas of the day to see if they fit the data.  Frequently they did not.  So they were discarded as false.  Sometimes all of the ideas of the day were found to be defective.  This forced scientists to come up with truly weird ideas.  Why?  Because none of the non-weird ideas worked.  And "[o]nce you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth".  Am I now quoting some august scientist or philosopher?  No!  I am quoting Sherlock Holmes from "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet".  But Holmes, in spite of his fictional nature, is just speaking common sense.  If an idea is false, it's false.  If you are looking for truth it matters not if the idea is popular or "common sense" or any other thing not having to do with whether it is true or not.  Science would be a lot easier to do if only sensible ideas were true and all weird ideas were false.

Conspiracies

My thinking on conspiracies has been evolving.  I started out not paying a lot of attention to "conspiracies" as most of them were obviously bunk.  So my original position, if I had articulated it, was "I don't believe in vast secret conspiracies".  But they have been a staple of modern culture for a long time now.  So my position evolved.  For a long time my position was "I believe in conspiracies, just not secret conspiracies".  Now my thinking has evolved further.  But, to begin at the beginning . . .

The "patient zero" of modern conspiracies is the Kennedy Assassination.  I vividly remember when news of this event came over the PA system at my school when I was a kid.  Initially it wasn't even clear that Kennedy was dead.  Everyone was in shock.  And needless to say everyone was glued to the radio or the TV for the next few days.  This was the first time the TV networks went to "wall to wall" coverage.  They took this so seriously that they went commercial free for days.  We have now been through enough of these events that we still get wall to wall coverage.  But now it's on cable channels and it includes commercials.

Anyhow, like everyone else, I quickly found out that a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald was the suspect and that he was captured and in custody within hours.  Then a sleazy nightclub operator named Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald while he was in police custody.  There was a vast thirst for knowledge about how this all came to be.  So President Johnson created the Warren Commission to investigate and report, which they did.  Then the conspiracy theories started surfacing.  Initially they were ignored by most people.  After all, the events had been thoroughly investigated by the Warren commission.  Earl Warren, the chairman, was Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Furthermore, he was a prominent Republican appointed by a Democratic President.  The Warren Commission was bipartisan and completely above board, or so responsible people opined.  But the Kennedy Conspiracy books kept coming anyhow and they sold well.

We are now coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination.  If you polled people you would find a large number of people, perhaps even a majority, supporting the idea that there was some kind of conspiracy involving secret actors in the Kennedy Assassination.  But is this really possible?  Let's look at the undisputed facts:

• Lee Harvey Oswald had a complex and troubled past.  He was married to a Russian woman, for instance.  He was not anybodies idea of a "stone cold professional assassin".
• Oswald bought a bolt action rifle by mail order several months before the assassination.
• The Oswald gun fired at least some of the bullets that hit Kennedy.
• Oswald worked at the Texas Book Depository, from which at least some of the shots were fired.
• Oswald was at the Depository on the fatal day.
• Jack Ruby was reputed to have mob ties and was also someone who was not anybodies idea of a "stone cold professional assassin".

Most of the conspiracy theories concern the number of shots fired and the rate at which they were fired.  The basic idea is that Oswald could not have fired the number of shots required with the necessary accuracy.  The conspiracies then go on to spin dozens of variations on how the assassination was pulled off and by whom.  Many allege massive cover ups which have held for the entire time since the assassination.  I am not going to troll the minutiae of the "discrepancies" that various conspiracy theorists have come up with.  I am going to take a step back and ask a more general version of "who" and "how".

I have seen about a million movies and TV shows about some secretive group pulling off the "perfect crime".  I enjoy them but I don't confuse them with reality.  In fiction land it is actually pretty easy to get away with the crime and in many cases the crime is an assassination.  But a lot depends on the investigators not doing a thorough and proper job of investigating the crime.  Now this happens a lot in the real world.  Lots of "perfect crimes", in the sense that the perpetrator is never caught, happen every day.  And in a lot of cases the authorities either never know a crime was committed or the crime is poorly investigated.  But before the Kennedy Assassination there was a notorious crime called the "Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping".  The FBI went to extraordinary lengths and eventually caught the perpetrators.  Anyone contemplating assassinating a President would have to expect a "Lindbergh" investigation and act accordingly.

I am going to skip over the "how" for the moment and focus on the "who".  There are three basic motives for an assassination:  Power (the KGB killed Kennedy in order to destabilize the U.S.), money (defense contractors killed Kennedy because he was going to shut down the Vietnam war and they'd loose defense contracts), and revenge (Castro killed Kennedy because Kennedy had tasked the CIA to kill Castro).  The examples are just examples.  There are many additional possiblities and they vary in their credibility.  But all of them, to be successful, depend on the same thing:  not getting discovered.

Let's say Castro decided to kill Kennedy in an effort to get the CIA to stop trying to assassinate him.   This motive is one of the more credible ones.  Kennedy had directed the CIA to try to assassinate Castro.  And the whole "assassinate Castro" program was shut down after Kennedy died.  But what would have happened if credible evidence emerged that Castro was behind the Kennedy assassination?  We would have invaded Cuba and Castro would have been a bad bet for a life insurance policy.  So the whole thing would backfire, big time.  The same is true for the other possible scenarios I have listed and many many more.  They all depend on no one figuring out that there had been a secret conspiracy.

Many of the alternate scenarios involve, for instance, other shots from other guns.  There is no credible evidence of any other shots from other guns.   But what if you were planning the Kennedy assassination and your plan involved an additional shot from an additional gun?  How could you guarantee that the investigation would turn up no proof of that shot from the other gun?  You couldn't.  Even if you had a great plan, something could go wrong.  And if that something went wrong the secret organization behind your plan would be exposed.  And what if someone talked and was believed?  And would you pick Oswald and/or Ruby?  Not in a million years.  When viewed from the planning stage it is impossible to come up with a plan that guarantee your secret organization would stay secret.  All Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories fall down as a result of these kinds of practical issues.  If there was a Kennedy assassination conspiracy we'd know it by now.  So there isn't.

Now let's move on to a more modern conspiracy:  Whitewater.  Whitewater is just one of several "conspiracies" that grew up starting even before Bill Clinton moved into the White House.  Besides Whitewater, there was Travel-gate, Vince Foster-gate, file-gate and others.  I am not going to go into all of them.  Like the Kennedy assassination, there are at least a shelf's worth of books devoted to the subject.  But let me say a little more about the Whitewater part of "Whitewater" in particular.

Whitewater was about "influence peddling".  The idea was that the Clintons got a sweetheart deal and in exchange for this they were supposed to deal out favors.  The problem with Whitewater is that the Clintons lost $29,000 on the deal.  If I lost $29,000 on a deal I would be less rather than more inclined to grant favors.  But Whitewater lived on for years anyhow.  One of the truly strange aspects of this is that there was another deal that was a better case for influence peddling.  Hillary Clinton invested in some cattle futures.  She only did it once and the transaction netted a very nice profit.  So here we have an actual case that smells of influence peddling.  The cattle futures story was a three day wonder with no traction.  Go figure.

The media including the mainstream media spent years promoting Whitewater and other Clinton "scandals".  It turns out that there was little or no evidence to back up the scandals I have listed and they all turned out to be bogus in the end.  However, there was a kernel of truth buried in all the mud.  Bill Clinton had been accused of stepping out with a number of ladies over the years.  Clinton denied the specifics while admitting to being a sinner.  And the ladies, when their names came out, backed him up.  But then came Monica Lewinski.  Illegal recordings came out and the infamous "blue dress" was revealed.  After all that it turned out that Clinton has stepped out on a number of occasions over the years.  So where's the conspiracy?

The conspiracy involves the media's years long infatuation with all of the various "Whitewater" allegations, most of which turned out to be false.  Most of the media interest was fomented by leaks and allegations fed to the media by "confidential informants".  It later turned out that much of this information was wrong and many of the "confidential informants" were associated with Republican and Conservative political groups.  And much of the funding to support these operatives came from Richard Mellon Scaife, a well know conservative publisher and billionaire.  All this eventually came out but was dismissed by the mainstream media even though the proof came from dispositions taken under oath and court testimony in various legal actions.  Why?

Well in this case the mainstream media was actively involved in promoting these conspiracies.  They were good for selling newspapers or attracting eyeballs.  So admitting that there had, in fact, been a "vast right wing conspiracy" would have made them look bad.  As a result, large sections of the media continue to pretend that Whitewater consisted solely of Monica Lewinsky and that the rest never happened. And this is not the first time this has happened.

In the late '40s and all through the '50s something called the "red scare" was going on.  The headliner was a Wisconsin Republican Senator named Joe McCarthy.  He alleged that the U.S. government was riddled with hundreds of spies for the USSR (what is now Russia).  Again, the mainstream media went along with him because he was "good copy".  Here too there was some truth in with all the mud.  The USSR did have an extensive spy program that, among other things, stole the plans for making an Atomic Bomb.  But almost all of those accused by McCarthy were completely innocent.   And as a result of "witch hunts", thousands of innocents lost their jobs and their reputations.  McCarthy was finally brought down because the ABC TV network broadcast the "Army McCarthy hearings" live and people got to see McCarthy in action for themselves without the sanitization the media had been applying.  Edward R. Murrow's reputation as a great journalist stands in part on his rejection of McCarthyism.  But lost in the mists of time is the fact that Murrow was almost alone in his condemnation of McCarthy's actions at the time even though his misbehavior was well known to many in the media at the time.  Again, admitting they misbehaved would have been bad for the media's image.  So the modern version of the era as spun by the media is "we were all with Murrow all along".

The mainstream media for whatever reasons never went along with the Kennedy assassination conspiracies.  But they were actively involved in the "red scare" and the "Whitewater" conspiracies.  The "red scare" was pushed heavily by the William Randolph Hearst media organization.  Richard Mellon Scaife owns an extensive media operation.  Both Hearst and Scaife were well known supporters of Republican and Conservative agendas.  I guess no Republican/conservative saw any benefit to getting on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy bandwagon.

In all these cases the conspiracy, or lack thereof, became readily apparent with time.  That's why I used to say "I believe in vast conspiracies, I just don't believe in secret conspiracies".  But then I was talking with my brother about the New Orleans levies and the Army Corps of Engineers.  The Corps is a kind of conspiracy.

The Corps is noted for its engineering expertise.  And 150 years ago this was justified.  Military campaigns required vast fortifications and other substantial engineering endeavors.  Back then there were no engineering schools and, for the most part things like Mechanical Engineers or Civil engineers did not exist.  So the military, seeing an unmet need, created the Corps.  With the building of the railroads and other great industrial enterprises there came to be a need to have engineering expertise in civil society.  So engineering evolved to no longer be the exclusive domain of the military.  If you needed to do a large engineering project, Hoover Dan, for instance, it was no longer necessary to go to the Corps.  But the government still needed the capability to do large engineering projects like the levies along the Mississippi.  But big projects cost big money.  And that means, since it's a government project, that politics and politicians are involved.  And that has been bad for the Corps.

Whether a big government project gets built or not depends on whether politicians come up with the money and not on need.  And the quality of the engineering is also influenced by political concerns.  Everyone in the Corps figures this out sooner or later.  If you have a problem with this you either get out voluntarily or you are squeezed out.  So the Corps still retains its mission of performing large engineering projects.  But it also has a mission to provide political cover to politicians so that they can claim the pork barrel project in their district is not pork.  It's a necessary project blessed by the Corps.  This "doing engineering in a heavily politicized environment" goes a long way to explain the levy problems in New Orleans.

And this is not a secret.  Anyone who looks around can see that is so.  There are dozens of highly scored projects that are not being done because they lack political support while many low priority projects are done because the politicians have found the money.  So where's the conspiracy?

My brother was recently writing about the New Orleans levies.  I asked him why he just didn't come out and say "It's because of politics" instead of quoting a bunch of organizations about their concerns.  He said "I can't write that".  Why not?  (I didn't actually ask him that).  It's because modern journalism is not about the truth.  If you are going to write something it's not just about whether it's true or not.  Many things will get push back.  You have to decide whether the story is going to get "inconvenient" push back.  If it is, you (and your editors) have to decide whether it's worth it to go ahead anyhow. Often it is not.  In this modern world most journalism is done from within the confines of a for profit organization.  With them, it's not about truth, it's about what is a good business proposition.  Cheap sensationalism is good for the bottom line so we get a lot of it.  Telling the truth is sometime sensational and therefore good for business.  But much of the time it is just plain inconvenient.  So we get much less of it.

The fact that the that one of the primary missions of the Corps is to turn a lot of pork into "needed nonpartisan engineering projects" is not well known is a kind of conspiracy.  And the fact that it is hard to say that in a story means that it could be considered a secret conspiracy.  And the fact is that this particular development is long standing makes the whole thing a "long standing vast secret conspiracy".  And it's not just the Corps.  There are a lot of situations where it is inconvenient for the media to say something even though it is true.  The fact that there are "long standing vast secret conspiracies" out there is where my thinking has evolved to.  I am on thin ice in that these conspiracies are not really very secret.  But no one talks about them so I am going to stick with my "secret" characterization.

"And that's the way it is", as Walter Cronkite used to say at the end of his news shows.

An idea for solving the Debt Ceiling Impasse

Frankly, nothing that is currently on the table sounds like a good idea to me.  Here is my idea for solving the Debt Ceiling impasse.  It is a completely different approach than anything currently under discussion.

Step 1 - fix the problem for the current fiscal year.  We actually hit the debt ceiling a couple of months ago.  Treasury has been using work arounds to delay default.  The ceiling needs to be raised enough to undo these work arounds.  I don't know what the amount is but the Treasury Department should.  It should be roughly the amount of the deficit for the last couple of months.  We also need to cover the additional deficit that will be run up in the next two months (August and September) of the current fiscal year.  These two figures should total to a few hundred billion dollars.  We immediately raise the debt ceiling by this total amount.  So we are now covered until the end of September.

Step 2 - fix the next fiscal year.  The debt ceiling would be automatically raised as of October 1, 2011.  The amount would be equal to the projected deficit for the new fiscal year that starts on October 1.  I expect that this figure will be contentious.  It will need to be negotiated between the Democrats, Republicans, and the White House.  Note to deficit hawks:  Don't worry if the agreed on figure is a little high.  See below.  Call this number "X" dollars as we will be using this number in the rest of our calculations.

Step 3 - fix the fiscal year starting October 1, 2012.  On October 1 2012 automatically raise the debt Ceiling again.  Raise it by 90% of "X" dollars.

Step 4 - fix additional fiscal years.  Every year the debt ceiling would be automatically raised.  But each year the amount of the increase would be reduced by 10% of "X".  So on October 1, 2013 the debt ceiling would be raised by 80% of "X".  Repeat this process where every year the debt ceiling gets raised but by 10% of "X" less than the previous year.  This would continue until one year we are raising the debt ceiling by 10% of "X".  In the next and subsequent years the debt ceiling would not be raised.

All of these dates and amounts would be put explicitly into the debt ceiling law.  Changing the debt ceiling on a certain date to a certain amount has been done before, typically to allow for temporary extensions.  So we know how to do this.  Why is this a good idea?  Because it meets the important objectives of all parties.  Specifically:

• It is easily doable in the short time we have left.  It is simple enough that it is easy to analyze and understand.  It should require a bill of only one or two pages in length to implement.  It is simple enough that it should not have any unexpected consequences.  Many proposals currently being discussed are complicated and difficult to understand.  As such, they are likely to have serious unintended consequences.  Since they are complex and rushed they have a large chance of containing serious drafting flaws that we will only find about later.

• It meets President Obama's objective of solving the problem through the 2012 election.  In general, it provides the "certainty and predictability" so desired by many.

• It gets us to a balanced budget in about 10 years.  Getting to a balanced budget is a key demand of the Tea Party.

• It gets us to a balanced budget before the "Ryan Plan" budget would and before the Obama budget forecasts would.

• The time line for achieving a balanced budget is similar to the time line in the House Progressive Caucus budget so progressives should like it.

• It shows fiscal responsibility, a key concern of Wall Street, the business community, the International business/finance community, and others concerned about the long term U.S. fiscal situation.

• It is gradual enough to avoid doing major harm to the recovery, a key concern of Paul Krugman and many others.

• It is a simpler and more effective "trigger mechanism" than any of the proposals I have seen.

• It is undoubtedly constitutional.  As I said, date triggered changes to the debt ceiling have been done before.

• It retains Congressional prerogatives.  If something unexpected and drastic should happen, Congress could amend the law.  But it would change the traditional view of the debt ceiling.  After all this it no longer be viewed as a "routine housekeeping matter".  As such it would become politically much more difficult to raise the debt ceiling in the future.  It also gives Congress and the White House explicit targets for deficits in future years.  But it retains complete flexibility as to the means, how the deficit targets would be met each year.

There are certainly objections that can and will be raised to this idea.  But I think it is politically doable and almost everything currently out there is likely to be vetoed by someone.  It represents a good compromise that gives pretty much everyone almost all of what they want.

If my idea is implemented it would let Congress get back to the business of passing a budget.  We only have two months as it needs to be in place before October 1, 2011.

Debt Ceiling Negotiations

I have argued elsewhere (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/12/president-lets-make-deal.html) that the Obama Administration is not very good at negotiating with the Republicans.  Another group that is none too good at this sort of thing is the media.  High powered "negotiations" have been around in politics for a long time now.  As such, there is a lot that can be said about how things go.  But the media consistently operates like this sort of thing has never happened before.  Why?  More sensational headlines resulting in better ratings.  And rating is what the media cares about most.  So, since I am not concerned with my ratings, what do I think is going to happen?

Well, some of it has already happened.  In high powered negotiations the most important thing is that each side be perceived by its supporters as having gotten the best deal they could.  Many times a side could have gotten a better deal if they had behaved differently early in the process.  But most people don't pay attention until the last minute.  So what matters most is what happened in the end stages of the process.  And the effectiveness of the sides in measured most by how close to the last minute they get and how much they give away at the last minute.  So all canny negotiators take things to the last minute and frequently beyond.  You don't have a clue as to what's going to happen and when until you know what the deadlines are.

And deadlines turn out to be a much more fluid concept than you would think.  We have already passed one deadline.  The government ran out of money on May 16.  Everybody agrees on that.  So why didn't Armageddon begin on the 17th?  Because deadlines are more fluid than you think.  The government really did run out of money on the 16th.  But that just meant that government officials started using a bunch of gimmicks to get around this.  As a result of these gimmicks the new "hard and fast" deadline is August 2.  So if things run true to form nothing of substance will happen until about the first of August.

The White House has tried to get itself some wiggle room by suggesting that the real deadline is July 22.  The idea is that it will take some time to implement the "deal", whatever it is, so we are in real trouble if the debt ceiling is not extended by July 22.  This is a good idea in the real world.  But we don't exist in the real world.  So the Republicans are unlikely to pay any attention to this.  It would be nice if the media paid attention to the results of this kinds of Republican bad behavior but they won't.  So the Republicans will get away with this.

It is important to understand that Republicans have had a lot of success by behaving irresponsibly.  That's because the media give Republicans a free pass on bad behavior.  The Republicans pretend that they are the party of fiscal responsibility, for instance.  The fiscally responsible thing to do is to raise the debt ceiling.  The fiscally irresponsible thing to do is to play games with the process and to force the circus that is currently under way to precede a raising of the debt ceiling.  The Republicans have learned that they can get away with this kind of bad behavior and pay no penalty.  This results in them having a reputation for being tough negotiators and getting what they want.  And, of course whatever they want is good for the country, if you ask them.  And more importantly the stunts, they would argue, have not actually caused any harm.  Neither of these contentions are true but bad reporting by the media has allowed them to pass unchallenged.  Democrats and especially the current White House also bear some responsibility by not effectively responding.  But the media contributes substantially to Democratic ineffectiveness by failing to cover Democratic challenges to the same degree they cover Republican nonsense.

So we can expect with 100% confidence that the Republicans will play hardball on this.  They will make sure there is not a deal until the last minute at the soonest.  Remember that the Republicans have employed the "move the goalposts" strategy effectively on many occasions.  If the Democrats and the White House cave immediately on the entire list of current Republican demands they will just add more demands.  Why not?  It has worked on other times in the past.

Republicans also believe that a government shutdown, the expected result of not extending the Debt Ceiling, is something they can weather.  There are already a number of Republican elected officials saying "shut her down".  They are receiving exactly no push back from "moderate" Republicans.  Those Republicans might be expected to do so.  But they too have seen "move the goalposts" and other hardball strategies work successfully many times in the past.  The Republicans behaved irresponsibly for two years straight between the 2008 and 2010 elections.  The result was large gains for Republicans in 2010.  Why shouldn't they expect similar results for additional bad behavior now?  And at this point it doesn't matter if they are wrong.  They believe that experience tells them that hardball negotiations and bad behavior will work this time too.  And that entirely reasonable belief will drive their actions.

So we are in circus time.  It's all a show.  The mainstream media should know this.  But there are papers to be sold and viewers to be attracted by pretending that what is happening now is important.  So that's what the media will continue to do.  The Republicans will continue to be irresponsible and act contrary to their "beliefs".  And the media will give them a free pass.  President Obama made a few modest and temperate remarks pointing this out recently.  Mark Halperin, a media heavyweight and a so called "nonpartisan expert", called the President a "dick" for doing this.  President Bush frequently had far worse things to say about Democrats in his eight years in office than President Obama has said about Republicans on his worst day.  Yet President Obama is a "dick" and president Bush is not.  And its not just Halperin.  It's the whole DC media establishment.

Will nothing of substance happen between now and August 2?  It's possible.  But what is more likely is that Obama and the Democrats will make unilateral concessions.  In other words, they will make things worse.  Other than that, nothing of substance will happen.  That's my prediction.  Now it is possible that I will turn out to be wrong.  Here's how.

Most politicians are in bed with large corporations.  It is almost impossible to be successful and not be.  So many Democrats are beholden to large corporations.  But not to the extent that Republicans are.  And what do large corporations want?  They want the debt ceiling raised quickly and quietly.  "Business likes certainty and predictability".  That's a slogan the Republicans have been beating us over the head with as they justify tax breaks to their friends (corporations and rich people).  So what's the certain and predictable thing that corporations need desperately?  To have the debt ceiling raised quickly and quietly.  How do Republicans skirt around this apparent contradiction?  They say "we are just doing brinkmanship, which has worked so well in the past".  And they are no doubt promising that the winners in whatever emerges as the "deal" will protect rich people and corporations.

Rich people and corporations are also not hurt by a short government shutdown (days to weeks).  It is government employees, people who depend on government services, and small companies who depend on prompt and consistent payment that will hurt.  Big corporations can afford to wait to be paid.  They also have the clout to wangle "penalties" and other extra payments out of the government.  So some of them may end up directly benefiting from a shutdown.  And, if past is prologue, Republicans will make sure that the cuts they extract from the final "deal" will fall on the middle class and the poor so the rich will do just fine in the end too.

So rich people and corporations may put enough leverage on Republicans for them to do a deal before August 2.  But I see that as unlikely.  More likely they will exert their influence to make sure that the ultimate "deal", whenever it is made, has the shape they want it to have.  But wait, there's more.

The official final date is August 2.  But is it really?  Past history says "no".  The Treasury says "that's it".  But "hard and fast" deadlines have turned out in the past to have some wiggle room.  It doesn't matter if there is or is not any wiggle room in the August 2 deadline.  If a significant number of the players think so, then they will act accordingly.  This kind of thinking could push things past August 2.  It would be nice if the media would look into this but that would require them to actually go out and do some reporting rather than rewriting what is fed to them.  So I don't expect that to happen.

With all this in mind I expect the government to be shut down on August 2.  The Obama Administration should be conspicuously making preparations now.  They should also be making preparations to cause pain to interests that are near and dear to Republicans.  As I have written before (http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/12/negotiation-101.html), real pain has to be inflicted before people believe in it.  In a shutdown it turns out that this is easier to do than you would think.  Generally speaking, blue states get less money and red states get more money from the federal government.  So I would make sure that programs that pay out to red states are hit the earliest and the hardest when the cash stops flowing.  Of course this is "hardball" and the Republicans are as adept at hardball as the Democrats are inept so I will be surprised if this happens.

Unfortunately, this White House has a track record as a bad negotiator.  This means that even if they do the right thing people will not believe they are serious.  If this were not so then they could bring in business and say "do you really want this to continue?  If not, then light a fire under your Republican buddies".  Given the poor position they are in it is still a good idea to do this.  They should also get out a consistent message bashing the Republicans.  And, as I said, they should be conspicuously planning for a shutdown.  And that planning should signal that they are going to be hardest on Republican constituencies.  If there is a way, and there should be, they should start picking on Republican constituencies immediately rather than waiting for August 2.  They could hold up on payments to defense and other contractors that are doing business in red states because "of the need to hoard cash to cushion the shutdown".  Some things might be illegal.  But it takes time for things to wind through the court system, probably enough time so that the case will not be decided until after August 2.

There is also some talk about the 14th Amendment.  I think it will turn out to be nothing.  But talking about it puts a small amount of pressure on Republicans.  So I am all in favor of more talk.  The general strategy that is needed is to play hardball back at the Republicans.  Obama now has a track record spanning more than two years of playing anti-hardball.  And, even if they do, it will take until after August 2 for the message to be received and believed.  So I think we are locked into an August 2 shutdown.  I expect nothing significant to happen until a couple of days before August 2, unless the White House decides to cave on some issues beforehand.  I expect lots of activity in the few days before August 2.  It is possible that a last minute settlement will be achieved at the "11th hour".  But the probability of that is less than 50%.  If we get too close the Republicans will move the goalposts.   That's my official prediction.  We will know how accurate I am in about a month.

Pakistan

What's with Pakistan?  From the U.S. perspective Pakistan's actions make no sense.  But a people does not act irrational for long periods of time.  Pakistan's actions make sense from the Pakistani context.  You just need to understand the Pakistani context.

Fareed Zakaria is a smart guy.  One of the things, unfortunately, that makes him smart is the fact that he was not born in America.  America has become incredibly insular.  As a country we have become the complete embodiment of "not invented here".  We literally don't care what anyone else in the world thinks.  This is really stupid because the U.S. contains about 5% of the world population.  That means that the U.S. contains only about 5% of the really smart people in the world.  19 out of 20 really smart people live somewhere else in the world.  Now we actually do a little better than 5%.  Fareed is one example.  He grew up in India and moved to the U.S. when he was 18.  When he came here we were not as hostile to foreigners as we are now.  He was able to get an education here and stay on, eventually becoming a naturalized American citizen.  Thanks to the current War on Foreigners we can count on fewer and fewer people like Fareed coming here and then sticking around.  Back to Pakistan.

Fareed observed recently that "lots of countries have an army.  Pakistan is an army that has a country."  This is the key insight to understanding Pakistan.  There are a number of countries that are run by the military.  The nickname for a lot of them is "banana republic".  They are small countries that have a big army for their size but a small army compared to the rest of the world.  And this model works.  The country may be (actually always is) poor.  But an unusually large percentage of the GDP goes to the military.  This makes the military small beans on the world stage but a big cheese locally.  And this is enough for most tin pot generals.  But Pakistan has been able to take the game to another level.

To understand how they did this you have to look at Pakistan's history and its geography.  Pakistan as an independent country only dates back to 1947.  Before that it was part of Britain's greatest colony, India.  India was broken up into three pieces.  The bulk of it ended up in what is now India.  But a large chunk ended up as Pakistan and a smaller chunk ended up as Bangladesh.  As usual, these kinds of things are a lot more complicated than people think.  If you want a great book on the subject I recommend "Freedom at Midnight" by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.  For the rest of us, we can skip the details and cut to the chase.

Colonial India was a mishmash of thousands of religions.  But the two biggest were Hindu and Muslim.  Modern India is dominated by people subscribing to the Hindu faith.  Part of the reason for this is that the majority of the Muslims in colonial India ended up either in Pakistan or in Bangladesh.  There are still lots of Muslims in India but they are now far outnumbered by the Hindus.  And, in order to keep the story simple, I am ignoring the many other religions in India like the Sikhs.

So Pakistan split off from the rest of India so that the Muslims that dominated the land that is now Pakistan could free themselves from the religious domination of Hindus and other religions.  And the separation was not pretty.  Originally "Pakistan" consisted of what is now both Pakistan and Bangladesh.  Modern Pakistan was "West Pakistan" and modern Bangladesh was "East Pakistan".  That did not work out well and there was a lot of warfare.  Finally Bangladesh became its own country in 1971.  During this entire period from 1947 to 1971 the Indians meddled in Pakistani and later Bangladeshi politics.  And I'm leaving out the whole dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.  This whole mess resulted in a lot of resentment between India and Pakistan.  It also convinced Pakistanis that they needed a large powerful army.

During this same period India made a calculated decision to be an active member of a group that called themselves "non-aligned nations".  That is, they lined up not as supporters of the U.S. nor as supporters of Russia during the Cold War.  They considered themselves as part of "the third world".  This whole "non-aligned" strategy on the part of India annoyed the U.S.  As a result they turned to Pakistan, who was willing to sop up large quantities of U.S. money in exchange for declaring itself firmly in the U.S. camp.  This annoyed India, which then tilted toward the Russians, and got a bunch of Russian foreign aid.  And the cycle continued.

This whole business worked out well for the Pakistani military.  They got a bunch of U.S. money and toys.  Then they were able to work the geography trick.  China was weak during this period.  So they couldn't do much.  But one thing they could do was dole out nuclear goodies.  The Chinese gave the Pakistanis a bunch of nuclear help, especially after India got the Bomb.  This allowed Pakistan to get the Bomb too.  This allowed the Pakistani military to get even more money out of foreign countries like the U.S.  Then geography really kicked in.  The Russians invaded Afghanistan.

Afghanistan provided an opportunity for the U.S. to "Viet Nam" the Russians.  See "Charlie Wilson's War", the book not the movie, for details.  The movie is fun but the book, by George Crile, goes into things in a lot more detail and provides a more balanced and accurate picture of the situation.  The U.S. wisely chose to wage a proxy war.  Pakistan, in particular the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, ran the war.  All the U.S. (and Saudi Arabia, matching us dollar for dollar) provided was money and equipment.  On the ground Charlie Wilson's War in Afghanistan was a Pakistani show.  This was smart for two different reasons.  First, it provided "plausible deniability".  There was no U.S. personnel nor equipment on the ground in Afghanistan.  So the U.S. could say "what war?  That's not us."  Second. the Pakistanis understood Afghanistan from a cultural perspective.  They shared the religion.  The Pashtun tribe was the largest single tribe in Afghanistan.  There was a large Pashtun population in Pakistan that the ISI could use to connect to Pashtuns across the border in Afghanistan.

And, at the time (early '80s) the war was a big success.  There were no American soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land.  The Ruskies were pushed out of Afghanistan at great cost in both blood and treasure to the Russians.  And it was relatively cheap.  The most the war ever cost the U.S. in one year was a billion dollars.  The U.S. is currently spending over a hundred billion a year on Afghanistan.  The Charlie Wilson Afghanistan war, start to finish, cost what we are now spending in a month, and that's adjusted for inflation.  But for the purposes of our story what is important is that the Charlie Wilson War pumped a great deal of money into the Pakistani military especially the ISI.  It also made them very powerful politically inside Pakistan.  The Charlie Wilson War was very popular in Pakistan.

So the Pakistani military, of which I consider the ISI a part, has been able over a long period of time to get its hands on a lot of money and a lot of military equipment.  And it has been able to do this outside of the usual Pakistani political structure.  Now it is important to have domestic political support, even if you have access to all this outside money and equipment.  The Pakistani military has been able to do this by using outside enemies, particularly India.

As I have indicated above, India has provided a lot of ammunition to support the argument that they are bad people, at least as viewed from Pakistan.  Therefore Pakistan must have a large military, and nuclear weapons, and rockets to deliver them with to defend itself from the big bad Indians.  This has justified a large Pakistani military establishment.  And Pakistan, for various reasons at various times, has had a weak political establishment.  So the military argues that it is important to have a large independent military to defend the country because you can't depend on the civilian side.  The weakness of Pakistani political institutions, which are weak in part because of the strong military, is used effectively by the military to continue their own political power.

Then there is an aspect that is little noted in the U.S.  It is not a secret but we are too busy navel gazing to notice.  That is the fact that the Saudi Arabians provide tremendous support for the most militant and reactionary components of the Islamic religion.  This component is usually referred to in the west as the Wahhabi sect.  Madrasahs hewing to Wahhabi doctrine have been built in large numbers in Pakistan.  The weak and frequently ineffectual civilian government in Pakistan has not been able to build a decent educational system.  The only thing most Pakistani parents can do, if they want their children to learn to read, is to send them (boys only, due to Wahhabi doctrine) to a Wahhabi Madrasah.  This has been going on now for a couple of generations.  So there are now lots of Pakistani adults that received their education at a Wahhabi Madrasah.  It should come as no surprise (but it does to many Americans) that there is a large contingent of the Pakistani population that is both radical and anti-American.

With this background it now make sense that Pakistan behaves as it does.  The military wants to perpetuate itself.  So they drum up fear of India thus foreclosing better relations with India.  They play the nuclear card in order to blackmail foreign countries to keep giving them large quantities of money.  They need Afghanistan stirred up, again to put the fear of God into domestic Pakistanis and to facilitate more and larger blackmail payments from the likes of the U.S. The civilian government lives in abject fear of the military.  Pakistan has a long and complicated history of military takeovers.  This leaves the civilian government incapable of serving as a counterbalance to the military.  The Wahhabi oriented Madrasahs keep churning out anti-American radicalized Pakistanis.

Pakistan plays a double game.  They play the U.S. ally on the one hand while supporting our enemies.  They are anti-terrorist because they have suffered at the hands of terrorism while supporting terrorists.  Why?  Because it has worked for them for a very long time.  The "we are your only best option" argument has worked well to get large quantities of money out of the U.S. while giving the U.S. limited leverage to force the Pakistanis to become more effective allies.  The "you think it's bad now?  Wait till we are gone and see" argument, a variation on the "only best" argument they use with the U.S., also works domestically on the anti-terrorism front.

So what should the U.S. do?  Step one is to stop being stupid.  There is a lot of expertise out there.  We need to tap into it instead of continuing to believe that we're smart and everyone else is stupid.  This should allow us to get out of our current "to a hammer everything looks like a nail" thinking.  In our case we only think of military options.  So every solution involves sending in more troops and equipment.  We have put a lot of troops and equipment into Afghanistan over the last 10 years.  How's it working so far?

A more careful analysis would tell us that Afghanistan is a problem primarily because Pakistan is a problem.  The Pakistanis are in a much better position to kick whoever they want to out of Afghanistan now than they were in the early '80s.  And with our help they were able to kick the Russians out then.  But instead of kicking the bad guys out and helping to straighten the country out they are supporting the bad guys.  If we can fix Pakistan, Afghanistan will fall into line quickly.

And the way to fix Pakistan is not do do what we have been doing for many years, namely giving the Pakistani military lots of money and equipment.  Elements of Pakistani society can fix Pakistan.  They understand the culture and are not viewed as foreigners because they are not foreigners.  We need to support the non-military (and non-ISI) components of Pakistani society.  A good first start would be to put serious money (e.g. the kind of money that is thrown around for the military) into a non-militant educational system in Pakistan.  Putting serious money into other things that would be seen as positive contributions by the Pakistani public like public health, roads and other infrastructure, etc. also make sense to me.

There are lots of people in lots of countries that can help us figure out how to do this in a culturally sensitive way.  For instance, the unemployment rate in Egypt is very high now.  Why not pay to send moderate Egyptians to Pakistan to teach (or build roads and hospitals or as doctors, etc).  If these positions are well paid by Egyptian standards then both the Egyptians and the Pakistanis will be happy and we can give Pakistani parents an education option that does not involve Wahhabi Madrasahs.