Obama Bad for Blacks?

The idea that President Obama has been bad for blacks has been popping up recently.  I suspect this is news to people who depend on conservative sources for their news.  But it is now an actual thing in some circles.  And most people would label the proposition preposterous.  But is it?

It certainly is to conservatives.  There he is seen as the unpatriotic President, the anti-white President, the Muslim "president" who was born somewhere else (Kenya, Indonesia, wherever but definitely not in the USA), and, most damningly, THE BLACK PRESIDENT.  Given all this he positively must have been good for blacks, right?

I don't buy any of that (except the "Black President" part - that is unarguably true).  So I was skeptical when I first heard the idea raised.  But there is an actual a case there.  And I have found that when an idea like this appears "out of nowhere" it almost always turns out that it came from a specific somewhere.  I was mystified as to where that somewhere might have been until I saw a mini-review of a book called "Democracy in Black" by Eddie S. Galude, Jr. in The New Yorker.  Mr. Glaude is the head of Princeton's African-American Studies program.  The review indicates that the book contains "a scathing critique of the Obama Presidency" and "describes the 'devastation' suffered by black communities".

I am not positive that this is the one true source for this idea but it is definitely one of them.  That's good enough for the purposes of this post.  So is Mr. Glaude some ivory tower academic with a screw loose, an axe to grind, and a plan to raise his visibility?  I haven't read the book so I can't definitively answer the question.  But my strong suspicion is that he is not.  To understand why let me instead ask a slightly different question:  Have blacks done well during the Obama years?  It turns out that this question is easy to answer and the answer is a resounding NO!

By every measure of economic success blacks are worse off than they were a few years ago.  The number of blacks in the middle class is down.  The percentage of employed blacks is down.  The average income of blacks is down.  And blacks have been hurt more than whites over the period in question.  The middle class as a whole is smaller.  But the black middle class has shrunk more than the white middle class.  Black unemployment rates are much higher than white unemployment rates.  The gap between black income and white income has increased.  Blacks have done badly in both the absolute sense and the relative sense.  Mr. Claude lays the case out in considerable detail (at least that's what the reviews I have read say).

So blacks have done badly under President Obama.  Is it his fault?  There is this theory that the President is responsible for everything, whether good or bad, that happens on his watch.  If you buy this theory then the answer is yes -- President Obama is responsible.  But this theory is inconsistently applied.  To pick just one example:  Jeb Bush has frequently stated that his brother George W. Bush "kept us safe".  Liberals have long said "wait -- what about 9/11" but this observation was ignored until Donald Trump started repeating it.

Lets take a more thorough look at the "blame" question.  Mr. Glaude apportions a generous share of the blame to the President.  Then he moves on to what I feel are more deserving recipients.  But before moving on let's take a deeper look at Obama's role.

Most of the damage was done by the economic crash.  That definitely did not happen on Obama's watch.  It happened on Bush's watch.  This inconvenient truth is ignored by conservatives and Republicans who have invented any number of fanciful excused for why it is actually Obama's fault.  None of them hold water.  But what definitely did happen on Obama's watch was his response.  And the first major action he took was the "stim", his 800+ billion dollar stimulus package.

Conservatives have argued that it was too big.  Liberals have argued that it was too small.  The Obama Administration have argued, rightly I believe, that it was as big as they could make it and still get it through congress.  If the package had been smaller (or not passed at all) it would have resulted in more damage to black economic interests than was the actual result.  So the "stim" was helpful to blacks.  But it was also race neutral.  It was directed neither toward nor away from blacks.  So it was not really an initiative intended to directly help or hurt blacks.  So its effect was best described as neutral.

There was, however, a secondary effect stemming from the "stim".  In my opinion it was poorly constructed.  This was done in what turned out to be a futile effort to attract Republican support.  The "stim" was composed of roughly one third temporary tax cuts (many of which were later made permanent), one third one time subsidies to state and local governments, and one third spending, primarily on infrastructure.  As predicted, the first two thirds were not very effective in stimulating the economy.  But the last third is the part I want to focus on.

Infrastructure projects often include a ribbon cutting ceremony and these ceremonies now commonly feature a giant "check" so that the local TV stations will have a good visual to put on the evening news.  And, of course, there is always a smiling politician standing next to the check taking credit for the funding and, by inference, for his ability to bring home the bacon.  Many of these ceremonies featured Republicans who had voted against the "stim".  And in absolutely every case the Republican in question was careful to ensure that voters were kept ignorant of the fact that the money to pay for the project came from the "stim".  They were thus able to portray themselves as effective at roping in Federal money while simultaneously decrying the hated "stim" as useless spending.  This was one of many tactics Republicans used to rack up big wins in midterm elections in 2010.

And Republicans used the 2010 election win as leverage with which to gut programs that directly and indirectly affected the financial wellbeing of black people.  So by letting the Republicans get away with this trick the "stim" indirectly hurt the economic wellbeing of black people.

Conservatives also railed against Eric Holder, a black man and Obama's first Attorney General.  Holder was supposed to have some kind of diabolical pro-black agenda whose details now escape me.  But Holder spent most of his time in his first few years dealing with the financial crisis.  I can think of no Holder/Obama initiatives on the traditional "war on crime" / "war on drugs" front during this period.

And one thing he did, or more accurately failed to do, was anything effective with respect to Wall Street.  One or perhaps two low level people went to jail and eventually a number of large fines were levied and collected.  But this was seen at the time as largely ineffective and nothing has happened since to change this judgment.   Since Wall Street is almost exclusively a white enclave (the exception being Asians employed in technical rather than leadership positions) an argument can be made that this was anti-black.  But this is another example of an essentially color blind policy where one can argue that a secondary effect hit blacks harder than whites.  But this same secondary effect hit a lot of whites very hard too.

Another example of a color blind policy where it could be argued that blacks suffered disproportionately more harm was in dealing with the "Foreclosure Mess" aspect of the Financial Crisis.  As the economy melted down a lot of people were put into foreclosure.  There is a lot of blame here but I am going to focus on the actual Foreclosure process as that happened almost entirely on Obama's watch.  A lot of just plain bad execution went into the process.  But a lot of criminal behavior was documented too.  There was illegal "robo-signing".  Houses were foreclosed even though the owners were in negotiation with the mortgage holder.  There were even cases where the wrong house was foreclosed on.  But here again few if any were prosecuted and sent to jail.  Many otherwise law abiding and stable black families were swept up in this, more than the standard distributions and statistics would predict.  But the disproportionate impact on black people was a secondary effect.  It was not an intended result of Obama's or Holder's policies.

So in all these cases the effect was unintended and fairly modest.  There were no Obama administration programs that were designed to disadvantage blacks.  And, as I indicated above, the early Holder years included no activity on the crime/drugs front.  In fact the Obama Administration maintained a hard line on the War on Drugs until well into his second term when he finally slightly loosened up on Marijuana.

On the crime front, there was no policy push at all in the first term.  And nothing was done with respect to specific cases like the Trayvon Martin case.  The shooting happened in February of 2012 and the case played out in the months following with essentially no Federal involvement.  At this point we are just short of four years in.  It was only with the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson Missouri in August of 2014, roughly six years in that the Justice department made any pro-black move.  They eventually became deeply involved.  The Justice department has since been involved in a number of cases.  Blacks are right to fault Obama and the justice department for being somewhere between neutral and hostile when it came to blacks and the criminal justice system.  Claims to the contrary by Republicans are just wrong with respect to roughly the first six years of Obama's time in office.

I have made what I would consider a very weak case for the claim of Glaude and others.  He presumably made a much better one.  And, for the sake of argument, let's assume the case has been convincingly made.  What does Glaude suggest?  He makes what I consider two sensible suggestions and one idiotic one.  The idiotic suggestion is his "blank-out" one.  He suggests that black voters should vote for no one in the 2016 Presidential election.  The idea is to punish Democrats for taking the black vote for granted.  This is a truly idiotic suggestion.

A blank-out vote is effectively a Republican vote.  We have tried the experiment.  Blacks and others turned out in large numbers in 2008 and 2012, the years Obama was running.  In those years, particularly in 2008, Democrats did well.  Did they then work hard to advance a pro-black agenda?  No.  But look at what happened in 2010 and 2014.  Blacks stayed home, they effectively blanked-out in Senatorial, Congressional, and state elections.  And Republicans did very well and picked up lots of seats.

Unlike Democrats or the Obama Administration, Republicans have been actively hostile to a pro-black agenda.  To take the simplest example they have put in draconian voter-ID laws in many states.  These laws are effective at their intended effect, namely denying blacks the vote.  Republicans at the state level (with an assist from the Supreme Court) have often not implemented the Medicaid component of Obamacare.  This has denied poor people (disproportionately black) access to medical care they can afford.  There are other examples.  So recent history has conclusively shown that a blank-out vote by blacks is an anti-black vote.  So what should blacks do instead?

Frankly, they should do what Republicans do and have been doing for a couple of decades now.  And Glaude advocates that in his other two points, the ones I agree with.  One reason Obama has been so late to the party and why what successes he has had have been so modest is a lack of engagement by his supporters.  This includes but is not limited to blacks.  Blacks vote every four years and then they stay home the rest of the time and expect Obama to work miracles all by himself.

Republicans have many powerful, effective, and well organized pressure groups.  The religious right is only one of many.  Karl Rove's ability to mobilize and turn out the religious right in larger numbers than Democrats could imagine is widely credited for Bush's victory over Kerry in 2004.  And this one group has blackmailed the Republican party into its current rabid hostility to abortion.  Abortion is low in most voters' priority list but any Republican officeholder who is not fiercely anti-abortion lives in fear of being primary-ed.

Opinions on abortion have not changed much in recent years.  But the country has made a rapid shift from being strongly anti-gay to being modestly pro-gay.  But being fiercely anti-gay is another litmus test within the GOP.  Very few Republicans who hold office or are contemplating running for office try to buck the prevailing wind on this issue.  Other constituencies within the Republican party guard other issues and agendas fiercely.  And the way they keep their elected officials in line is not by staying home.  They do it by threatening primary challenges.  This does not, at least in theory, jeopardize control of the seat.

But there are few Democratic pressure groups who reliably deliver votes if Democratic candidates toe the line and credibly threaten primary challenges if they don't.  Take the classic black pressure group, the NAACP.  The NAACP almost went out of business in the '90s.  Then Republicans started making anti-black moves like voting restrictions.  This breathed some life back into the NAACP so it is still around.  But it can not turn out large blocks of voters so it has little actual power.  Theoretically there are pro-women's groups, and anti-war groups, and so on.  But they are not as effective as their Republican equivalents.  If they were Republicans would be unable to consistently clean up in off year elections and would not have achieved a near-lock on state government.  Glaude advocates that blacks get way more active and organized and I agree with him.

Glaude also advocates that blacks be more willing to "disturb the peace".  Theoretically, this level of activism is counter productive.  But gays used it effectively.  They went from being invisible to visible to effective in advocating for their agenda.  We have seen the same thing with the Black Lives Matter movement.  There have been people within the black community advocating for years.  But they were not heard.  The "in your face" tactics of many in the Black Lives Matter movement has resulted in attitude and policy changes.  In the years before Black Lives Matter these issues were not a priority of this or previous administrations.  But consistent pressure exerted over a broad front and for a substantial period of time has garnered results.

And there is no doubt that this is a tried and true and effective tactic of conservatives.   We have gotten to the point where gun tragedies are completely routine.  Yet the NRA is famous for its "take no prisoners" tactics.  It is also notorious for its ability to set the legislative agenda.  They have been completely successful at the national level.  They have been only slightly less successful at the state and local level.  The anti-abortion movement has a similar track record.  Clinics have been firebombed.  Employees and patients have been threatened.  Doctors have been murdered.  Yet the NRA and anti-abortion movements are seen as legitimate.  And, more importantly, they are effective.

And this is a broader problem.  Republicans decided at the beginning of the Obama administration to blindly and categorically impede any Obama initiative.  They have been ably supported by their pressure groups.  This has allowed them to maintain this stance for a long time and simultaneously be successful at the ballot box.  Obama has advanced many initiatives that are broadly popular but have gone nowhere.  This is because he has generally been on his own.  He has had little or no active support from pressure groups.  More telling is the fact that he has been routinely subjected to vicious personal attacks.   "He is not Christian."  "He is anti-American".  "He is not an American citizen."  "He is exceeding his authority."  Any similar attack lunched against a Republican from outside the Republican party would result in a fierce counter-attack.  But there is little or no response from outside pressure groups to these attacks on Obama.

There has generally been no sustained and vocal groundswell of support from the constituencies these initiatives are designed to support.  This is true of black issues but also of issues pretty much up and down the line.  Obama is expected to deliver on his own.  An exception is the gay movement.  There has been a lot of outside pressure and Obama has been able to get results.  But this means that in most cases a Republican attack is free of cost.  This has effectively tied Obama's hands behind his back.  It should be no surprise that he has been less effective and slower to the starting line than many constituencies would like.  On the other hand, Republicans in states have been very successful in pushing their agendas.  Their pressure groups have been active and vocal.  Groups that oppose these policies, on the other hand, have been pretty quiet.

We may now be on the brink of more "same old same old".  We are seeing record turnouts for Republican caucuses and primaries.  Blacks (and others) should be shocked and appalled by the promises being made by Trump and the rest of the GOP crowd.  They should be pleased and comforted by the promises being made by Clinton and Sanders.  But people are not turning out on the Democratic side, even for Sanders who has made increased turnout a cornerstone of his campaign.  Sanders people seem to be up for turning out for a rally but not up for showing up on election/caucus day.  Turn out so far on the Democratic side is substantially below 2008 levels.  Blacks and other groups that traditionally support Democrats should be concerned.  If we get a general election that looks more like 2010/2014 than 2008/2012 we will get results very like 2010/2014.  And it will not be pretty for blacks.

The tank was supposed to revolutionize fighting in World War I.  In its first couple of battles it did not.  But it became a game changer when tactics were changed from "tanks can replace infantry" to "tanks and infantry can support each other".  Blacks and others need to vote and to organize and to be in our faces.  Voting is necessary to provide persuadable elected officials.  But people also need to actively participate in the efforts of pressure groups working on their behalf.  This is the tactic of tanks (pressure) plus infantry (voting) that worked in World War I, works for Republicans, and can work for blacks and other constituencies.  We have lived through the political equivalent of "trench warfare" when infantry alone (elected officials) could not get the job done.  Democrats need to go back to the methods Democrats used successfully several of decades ago.  Then elected officials were beholden to active and vocal pressure groups.  Politicians were expected to deliver results but in exchange they could depend on the pressure groups delivering the votes necessary to keep them in office.

Obama has a remarkable record of success given what he has been up against.  Imagine what he could have achieved had he been properly supported.

Digital Privacy

A story has recently broken about a fight between Apple Computer and the FBI.  The context is the San Bernardino massacre which resulted in 14 deaths and many injuries.  The perpetrators, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were dead within hours.  So the "who" in "who done it" has been known for some time now.  The only open questions have to do with how much help they got and from whom.  There has been a lot of progress on that front too.

Enrique Marquez, a friend and neighbor has been arrested.  Among other things, he purchased some of the guns that were used by the perps.  Literally hundreds of searches have been done and mountains of evidence has been seized.  Online accounts of all kinds have been scrutinized.  Even after all this effort there is more to be learned.  A few days before I wrote this Syed's brother's house was searched.  This was only the latest in a series of searches of his house.

As a result of all this effort the story is pretty much known.  All that is left is to fill in some details.  It is possible that a new major development could be unearthed in the future, say substantial participation by overseas terrorist groups.  But the chances are small.  And that brings us to the phone.

A tiny part of the mountain of seized evidence is a smart phone that belonged to one of the perps.  It has been in FBI custody for some time now.  But that hasn't stopped the FBI from being frustrated, literally.  The phone is encrypted.  The FBI has not been able to break or get around the encryption so they have not been able to access the contents of the phone.  This literal frustration has not been for want of trying.  At least that's the story from both the FBI and Apple Computer.  The FBI has asked Apple for assistance and Apple has provided it.  But the FBI now says Apple must take that assistance to a new level.  And that's what the fight is about.

Before proceeding let me stop to make what I believe is an observation of monumental importance.

ENCRYPTION WORKS

Why is this so important?  Have you seen an "action" movie or TV show any time in say the last 50 years?  These shows often feature a scenario where encrypted data is critical, frequently a matter of life and death.  Sometimes a good guy is trying to decrypt the bad guy's secret plan.  Sometimes it is a bad guy trying to decrypt the good guy's security system so he can steal the secret formula or the invasion plans or whatever.  Regardless, the scene is always handled in the same way.

A geek types away furiously while "action" visuals play out on screen and dramatic music (queue the "Mission Impossible" theme) plays underneath so we will know that important things are happening.  This goes on for about 20 seconds of screen time which may represent perhaps a few hours or days of "mission" time.  But we always have the "Aha" moment when the geek announces that the encryption has been cracked.  And it never takes the geek more than a week to crack it.  In fact it is common for the geek to only need a few minutes.

This is the pop culture foundation for a belief that is widespread and grounded in things that are a lot more solid then a TV script.  We've all seen it over and over so it must be true.  Any encryption system can be broken.  All you need is the genius geek and perhaps a bunch of really cool looking equipment.  People in the real world support this idea often enough for one reason or another that most people have no reason to doubt its veracity.  But it is not true.  And we know it is not true because the FBI has just told us.  Let's look at why.

It starts with the fact that FBI has publicly said that it has been unsuccessful in breaking Apple's encryption.  This is in spite of the fact that they have had weeks in which to try and they have had a considerable amount of cooperation from Apple.  But wait, there's more.  Which government agency is the one with the most skill, equipment, and experience with encryption?  The NSA (National Security Agency).  It's literally what they do. 

Before 9/11 it was possible to believe that the FBI and the NSA did not talk to each other.  It was possible to believe this because it was true.  But in the post-9/11 era those communications barriers were broken down and there is now close cooperation between the two agencies, especially on terrorism cases like this one.  It is literally unbelievable that the FBI has not consulted with the NSA on this problem.  And that means the NSA has also not been able to crack Apple's encryption either.

Let's say they had.  Then the FBI could easily have covered this up by claiming that their own people had cracked the phone.  Even if this was not believed it provides the standard "plausible deniability" that is commonly used in these situations.  It doesn't matter if the official line is credible.  It only matters that there is an official line that officials can pretend to believe.  This is why I believe the NSA failed too.  (For a counter-argument see below).

There is actually a lot of evidence that encryption works but it is the boring stuff that the media ignores.  It gets dismissed as a "dog bites man" story.  I worked in the computer department of a bank for a long time.  They treated computer problems that could screw up data very seriously.  "We are messing with people's money and people take their money very seriously."  I then worked for a company that ran hospitals and clinics.  After observing the culture there I remarked "If you want to see people who treat computer problems seriously, talk to bankers.  They deal with money.  Around here we only deal with life and death and that's not as serious."  That's a cute way of highlighting that people take money very seriously.  And every aspect of handling money now depends critically on encryption.

If even one of the common encryption systems used in the money arena could be cracked there is a lot of money to be made.  Look at the amount of noise generated by people stealing credit card information.  It has finally caused the credit card industry in the US to move from a '60s style magnetic stripe technology to a modern RFID chip based one.  The important take away is that the hackers have never broken into a system by breaking the encryption.  They have used what is generally referred to as a "crib".  One of the most successful cribs goes by the name of Social Engineering.  You call someone up (or email them or whatever) and talk them out of information you are not entitled to like say a high powered user id and password.  You use this information to break into the system.

Important data has been encrypted for many decades now.  The DES standard was developed and implemented in the '70s.  It is considered weak by modern standards but I know of no successful attempt to crack it.  But the long voiced but so far not validated idea that "it might be crackable soon" has been enough to cause everybody to move on.  Something called triple-DES was shown to be harder to crack after double-DES was shown to provide no improvement.  We have since moved on to other encryption standards.

A common one in the computer business is "Secure Sockets".  Any web site with a prefix of HTTPS uses it.  It is now recommended for general use instead of being restricted to use only in "important" situations.  The transition has resulted in some variation of a "show all content" message popping up with annoying frequency.  That's because the web page is linking to a combination of secure (HTTPS) and unsecure (HTTP) web sites.

If the basic algorithm (computer formula) is sound the common trick is to make the key bigger.  DES used a 56 bit key.  The triple-DES algorithm can be used with keys that are as long as 168 bits.  Behind the scenes, HTTPS has been doing the same thing.  Over time the keys it uses have gotten longer and longer.  And a little additional length makes a big difference.  Every additional bit literally doubles the number of keys that need to be tested in a "brute force" (try all the possible combinations) attack.

So piling on the bits fixes everything, right?  No!  It gets back to that crib thing.  Let's say I have somehow gotten hold of your locked cell phone.  What if I call you and say "I'm your mother and I need the key for your phone."  Being a dutiful child you always do what your mother says so you give me the key.  At this point it literally doesn't matter how long the key you use is.  Actually no one would fall for so transparent a ploy but it illustrates the basic idea of Social Engineering.  It boils down to tricking people into giving you information that you can use to get around their security.

If I can get your key I have effectively reduced your key length to zero.  Cribs can be very complex and sophisticated but a good way to think of them is in terms of ways to reduce the effective key length.  If I can find a crib that reduces the effective key length to ten bits that means a brute force attack only needs to try a little over a thousand keys to be guaranteed success.  I once used a brute force approach to figure out the combination of a bicycle lock.  The lock could be set to a thousand different numbers but only one opened it.  It took a couple of hours of trying each possibility in turn but I eventually succeeded in finding that one number.  Under ideal circumstances a computer can try a thousand possibilities in less than a second.

And Apple is well aware of this.  So they added a delay to the process.  It takes about a twelfth of a second to process a key.  This means that no more than a dozen keys can be tried in a second.  And the Apple key is more than ten bits in length.  But wait.  There's more.  After entering a certain number of wrong keys in a row (the number varies with iPhone model and iOS version) the phone locks up.  Under some circumstances the phone will even go so far as to wipe everything clean if too many wrong keys are tried in a row.

The FBI is not releasing the details of what they have tried so far.  And Apple has not released the details of what assistance they have rendered so far.  But this particular iPhone as currently configured is apparently impervious to a brute force attack.  Whatever else the FBI has tried is currently a secret.  So what the FBI is asking from Apple is for changes to the configuration.  Specifically, they want the twelfth second delay removed and they want the "lock up" and "wipe after a number of failed keys" features disabled.  That, according to the FBI, would allow a medium speed brute force attack to be applied.  Some combinations of iPhone and iOS version use relatively short key lengths so this would be an effective approach if the phone in question is one of them.

But Apple rightly characterizes this as a request by the FBI to build a crib into their phones.  Another name for this sort of thing is a "back door".  And we have been down this path before.  In the '90s the NSA released specifications for something called a "Clipper chip".  It was an encryption / decryption chip that appeared to provide a high level of security.  It used an 80 bit key.  That's a lot bigger than the 56 bit key used by DES so that's good, right?  The problem is that the Clipper chip contained a back door that was supposed to allow "authorized security agencies" like the NSA to crack it fairly easily.  The NSA requested that a law be passed mandating exclusive use of the Clipper chip.  After vigorous push back on many fronts the whole thing was dropped a couple of years later without being implemented broadly.

We can also look to various statements made by current and former heads of various intelligence and law enforcement agencies.  The list includes James Clapper (while he was Director of National Intelligence and since), former NSA director Keith Alexander, and others.  They have all railed against encryption unless agencies like theirs are allowed back doors.  Supposedly all kinds of horrible things will happen if these agencies can't read everything terrorists are saying.  But so far there is no hard evidence that these back doors would be very helpful in the fight against terrorism.  What they would be very helpful for is making it easy to invade the privacy of everybody.  Pretty much nothing on the Internet was encrypted in the immediate post-9/11 period.  Reading messages was helpful in some cases but the bad guys quickly learned how to make their messages hard to find and hard to read.

These agencies have swept up massive amounts of cell phone data.  Again, mass data collection has not been shown to be important to thwarting terrorist plots.  After they are on to a specific terrorist then going back and retrospectively reviewing who they have been in contact with has been helpful.  And, by the way, that has already been done in the San Bernardino Massacre case.  But the FBI argues that even after all these other things have been done they still desperately need to read the contents of this one cell phone.  We have been told for more than a decade that the "collect everything" programs are desperately needed and are tremendously effective.  The FBI's current request indicates that they are not all that effective and that means they were never needed as badly as we were told they were.

The FBI also argues that this will be a "one off" situation.  Apple argues that once the tool exists its use will soon become routine.  If cracking a phone is difficult, time consuming, and expensive after the tool exists then the FBI may have a case.  But if it is then what's to stop the FBI from demanding that Apple build a new tool that is easier, quicker and cheaper to use.  Once the first tool has been created the precedent has been set.

The fundamental question here is whether a right to privacy exists.  The fourth amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

A plain reading of the language supports the idea that a privacy right exists and that the mass collection of phone records, whether "metadata" or the contents of the actual conversation, is unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court has so far dodged its responsibility by falling back on a "standing" argument.  I think the standing argument (which I am not going to get into) is bogus but I am not a Supreme Court justice.  And the case we are focusing on is clearly covered by the "probable cause . . ." language.  The FBI can and has obtained a search warrant.  The only problem they are having is the practical one of making sense of the data they have seized.

The problem is not with this specific case.  It is with what other use the capability in question might be put to.  We have seen our privacy rights almost completely obliterated in the past couple of decades.   Technology has enabled an unprecedented and overwhelming intrusion into our privacy.  It is possible to listen in on conversations in your home by bouncing a laser off a window.  A small GPS tracking device can be attached to your car in such a way that it is nearly undetectable.  CCTV cameras are popping up everywhere allowing your public movements to be tracked.  Thermal imaging cameras and other technology can tell a lot about what is going on inside your house even if you are not making any noise and they can do this from outside your property line.

And that ignores the fact that we now live in a highly computerized world.  Records of your checking, credit card, and debit card activity, all maintained by computer systems, make your life pretty much an open book.  Google knows where you go on the Internet (and probably what you say in your emails).  And more and more of us run more and more of our lives from our smart phones.  Imagine comparing what you can find out from a smart phone with what you could have found out 200 years ago by rifling through someone's desk (their "papers").  Then a lot of people couldn't read.  So things were done orally.  And financial activity was done in cash so no paper record of most transactions existed.  The idea that the contents of a smartphone should not be covered under "persons, papers, and effects" is ridiculous.  Yet key loggers and other spyware software are available for any and all models of smart phones.

Apple was one of the first companies to recognize this.  They were helped along by several high profile cases where location data, financial data, and other kinds of private data were easily extracted from iPhones.  They decided correctly that the only solution that would be effective would be to encrypt everything and to do so with enough protections that the encryption could not be easily avoided.  The FBI has validated the robustness of their design.

Technology companies have been repeatedly embarrassed in the last few years by revelations that "confidential" data was easily being swept up by security agencies and others.  They too decided that encryption was the way to cut this kind of activity off.  Hence we see the move to secure (HTTPS) web sites and to companies encrypting data as is moves across the Internet from one facility to another.

Security agencies and others don't like this.  It makes it at least hard and possibly impossible to tap into these data streams.  And, according to agency heads this is very dangerous.  But these people are known and documented liars.  And they have a lot of incentive to lie.  It makes the job of their agency easier and it makes it easier for them to amass bureaucratic power.  Finally, given that lying does not put them at risk for criminal sanctions (none of them have even been charged) and can actually enhance their political standing, why wouldn't they?

Here's a theory for the paranoid.  Maybe the FBI/NSA successfully cracked the phone.  But they decided that they could use this case to leverage companies like Apple into building trap doors into their encryption technology.  The Clipper case shows that this sort of thinking exists within these agencies.  And agency heads are known to be liars.  So this theory could be true.  I don't think it is true but I can't prove that I am right.  (I could if agency heads could actually be compelled to tell the truth when testifying under oath to Congress but I don't see that happening any time soon.)  

The issue is at bottom about a trade off.  The idea is that we can have more privacy but be less secure or we can have less privacy but be more secure.  In my opinion, however, the case that we are more secure is weak to nonexistent and the case that we have lost a lot of valuable privacy and are in serious danger of losing even more is strong.  I see the trade off in theory.  But I don't see much evidence that as a practical matter the trade off actually exists in the real world.  Instead I see us giving up privacy and getting nothing, as in no increase in security, back.  In fact, I think our security is diminished as others see us behaving in a sneaky and underhanded way.  That causes good people in the rest of the world to be reluctant to cooperate with us. That reduction in cooperation reduces our security.  So I come down on the side of privacy and support Apple's actions.

In the end I expect some sort of deal will be worked out between the FBI and Apple.   It will probably not be one that I approve of.  It will erode our privacy a little or a lot and I predict that whatever information is eventually extracted from the phone will turn out to be of little or no value. And, as Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has stated, once the tool is built it will always exist for the next time and the time after that, ad infinitum.  That is too high a cost.

Distracted Drivers

I try to pick subjects where I can either provide new (or at least not well known) information or a different perspective.  The bulk of this post will be rehash but I do have something new to add.  It's down at the bottom.

There is a computer term:  multitasking.  Over time the term has moved beyond its initial use only in a purely computer context to now frequently being applied more broadly.  As we will eventually see, it now applies even to the subject at hand.  But let's start with it in its original context.  Old computers were really slow compared to their modern counterparts.  But there was still a problem.  Generally speaking data would be pulled into RAM and processed.  It was then spit back out, typically in a new form.  But where was it pulled from or pushed to?

The old technical term was "peripheral devices", gadgets that were connected up to the "computer" part of the computer.  For modern computers these might be a disk drive, network card, etc.  Or they could be a human interface device; something like a keyboard, mouse, or touch screen.  Consider for a moment a keyboard.  A good typist is capable of typing 60 words per minute.  That's one word per second.  And, for the purposes of measuring these sort of things, a "word" was 5 characters and a space.  So in our example the computer would expect to see a new character every sixth of a second. 

But even a very slow computer can perform a million instructions (computations) per second.  This means that the computer can perform over 150,000 instructions while waiting for the next character to appear.  You ought to be able to do something useful with 150,000 instructions so it seems like a waste for the computer to sit around idly doing nothing useful while it waits for the next character to come in.  The solution was to have the computer work on two or more things "at once".  That way it could beaver away on problem #2 while waiting for the next character aimed at problem #1.

Now pretty much every peripheral device can handle data faster than a keyboard.  But the above example illustrates the problem.  And early computers were fantastically expensive.  They cost several millions of dollars each.  Wasting even a little computer time amounted to wasting a lot of money.  So various techniques were devised to allow the computer to have multiple tasks available and to be able to quickly switch from one task to another.

Most of the time any one particular problem (or task) is waiting for some I/O (Input/Output - a read or a write) operation to complete before it can continue on with the job at hand (executing instructions).  This "fill in the otherwise idle time with useful work" idea is the driving force behind many of the early networking efforts.  If several terminals are hooked up to the same computer then the computer can switch from working on the task associated with one terminal to working on the task associated with another terminal whenever the first task is hung up waiting for I/O to complete.

So the benefit was obvious.  Multitasking could keep the computer busy doing useful work more of the time.  But there was a cost.  In the very early days of computers RAM was very hard to make and, therefore, expensive.  A reasonable amount of RAM might cost a million dollars so every effort was made to keep RAM requirements to a minimum.  You needed a lot of RAM to have enough to keep the critical pieces of several tasks (say one for each terminal) resident in RAM at the same time.  But the price of RAM dropped and the cost of getting enough RAM to enable multitasking soon became manageable.  But there was another cost.

The computer doesn't really do multiple things at once, or at least computers couldn't in the old days.  So a piece of software called a "task switcher" was necessary.  This software kept track of all the tasks currently loaded into RAM.  It also kept track of what "state" each was in.  A task could be "running" or "waiting to run", or "waiting for a specific I/O request to complete" (the most common state).  The running task would go along until it needed to perform an I/O operation.  Then it would turn things over to the task switcher.  The task switcher would schedule the I/O, put the task to sleep, then look around for another task that was waiting to run.  If it found one it would wake that task up and turn things over to it.

It turns out that it takes the execution of a lot of computer instructions to do a task switch.  I have skipped over a lot of detail so you'll just have to take my word for it.  The modern "task switch" process eats up a lot of instructions doing its job.  So what's the point?  The point is that these instructions are not available for use by running tasks.  An old and slow computer from my past would often dedicate up to 45% of all instruction executions to task switch and other overhead processes.  If without task switching you can only keep the computer busy 10% or 20% of the time this overhead is a good thing but it is still expensive.

And that cost associated with multitasking applies to other contexts like people.  Most young people multitask all the time.  They might be sitting in class and simultaneously monitoring Twitter feeds and updating Facebook posts.  They are doing the same thing computers do.  They devote a small slice of their attention to one thing, say the lecture.  But then they quickly switch to focusing on their Twitter feed, but again not for long.  Because they almost immediately switch to the Facebook post they are creating.

If you ask them they will say that what is happening is something akin to what happened on computers in the olden days.  They are able to task switch quickly enough and often enough, and efficiently enough that their net productivity goes up.  The problem is that everyone who has actually studied the net productivity of multitasking people finds that their net productivity goes down, sometimes by a lot.  They think they are doing multiple things well at the same time.  But the studies show that they are actually doing multiple things badly at the same time.  So how does all this apply to driving?

It turns out that it is directly on point.  This same model of trying to do multiple things at the same time means you do them all badly.  And you especially drive badly.  People think they can task switch quickly enough and efficiently enough that nothing important happens on the road in the small time their focus is away from driving.  But every study says they are wrong.

And it turns out that there is a model for what is going on, driving drunk.  Drunk drivers aren't multitasking.  But they are doing the same thing multitaskers do.  They fail to sufficiently focus on their driving.  In the drunk driver's case their mind tends to wander.  They are not switching from one productive task to another.  They are switching from a productive task to a non-productive one, effectively day dreaming.  This behavior pattern and its impact on driving was recognized decades ago and the response has been Mothers Against Drunk Driving.  An emphasis on getting drunks off the road has cut down on crashes.

But with the advent of the cell phone things changed.  You didn't have to be drunk to drive badly.  If you were switching your focus between the road and your phone the results could be similar to driving drunk.  Lots of drunk drivers believe they can drive well while drunk.  Similarly, lots of cell phone users believe they can drive well while using their phone.  And it turns out that to some extent they are right.  What?

Put simply, there are times when driving requires laser focus and times it doesn't.  If you are driving on a straight road in good weather and there is no one else on the road driving does not require much intellectual effort.  On the other hand, let's say there is a lot of other traffic on the road.  And the speed of the traffic changes drastically and frequently.  And say your sight lines are impaired (or the weather is bad) so that things can "come out of nowhere"; a driver pulling out of a parking space, a pedestrian hopping between cars outside of a crossing zone; a bicyclist cutting in and out of traffic.  Then driving requires a great deal of attention and it requires it pretty much continuously.

The basic question to ask is "how many decisions per second need to be made".  Coupled with this are "how much time is there for the decision" and "how many items must be factored into the decision".  If the number of decisions per second is low and the amount of time permitted for decision making is long and the number of items is small then a great deal of "free time" is available without a significant diminution in your quality of driving.

Looked at this way we can see why the first scenario is easy.  Few decisions per second are required as not much is going on.  The good sight lines mean that there is a relatively long time within which to make the decision.  And few factors, perhaps one or two, need to be allowed for.  This results in few decisions needing to be made and not much effort being required to reach the correct decision and implement it.  And what this means is that in this situation a lot of time can be spent with your focus away from driving without risking any harmful consequences.  With a little discipline a cell phone conversation can safely take place under these conditions.

And also looked at this way we can see why the second scenario is hard.  This scenario involves a much higher potential decision rate.  And that's really the same as a high decision rate.  Deciding there is nothing that needs to be done right now is a special kind of decision.  And there are a lot of moving pieces to monitor.  The car in front is not far away (there is a car in front because there is a lot of traffic and it's not far away also because there is a lot of traffic) so it needs to be carefully and continuously monitored.  If it's a multilane road then cars in the other lanes need to be monitored for potential lane changes.  Blind spots need to be monitored for the unexpected.  And if something changes a decision needs to be made and acted upon quickly.  And it is possible, even probable, that several things will change at approximately the same time.  So the decision may not be a simple "slow down"/"speed up" decision.  Perhaps a swerve needs to also be thrown in so it's complex.

In the first situation if we are switching our focus from driving to the cell phone for short periods of time we will probably still be ok.  Something may have changed while our attention was away.  But the change will be simple and we should still have plenty of time in which to decide what to do and to do it.  In the second scenario the chances that something will go wrong while our focus is elsewhere is much greater.  In this environment the time and effort to task switch away from something else and back to driving is a luxury we can't afford.

I think that if we are being honest all of us would agree that talking on the phone while driving is a bad idea.  But a lot of us think we can get away with because we are good at task switching and we will be careful and only do in at "appropriate" (situation 1) times.  But people usually give themselves too much credit in these situations.  Let's move on.

The "fix" to the above situation is to only permit talking on the phone while driving only if we are using a "hands free" device.  There is something to this but not much.  The hand's free device allows us to keep our hands on the wheel and our eyes on the road.  This is an improvement but not much of one.  The decision to allow hands free cell phone use was a political one that was based on no scientific research.  The broad  availability of blue tooth hands free devices meant that many cell phone users had already gone hands free.  The industry could see sales of hands free accessories increasing so they decided to go along.  But the benefits of hands free are small.

The problem that hands free does not solve is the focus problem.  Where is your attention focused?  Theoretically hands free makes switching focus back to the road quicker.  But lots of people drive one handed so the fact that you are using one hand to hold the phone to your ear rather than doing something else with it doesn't really change things.  And it is easy to talk into a hand held phone while keeping your eyes on the road.  So there is no real difference during the conversation part of cell phone use.  Hands free plus voice activation does help with dialing and hanging up but that's only a small portion of a typical call.  In the end there is very little difference between hands on and hands free.

The discussion of talking while driving started when cell phones became common.  But a couple of generations of phones later a new threat arose:  texting while driving.  You pretty much need to look at the device and use both hands to text.  This removes your focus, your hands, and your eyes from where they are supposed to be.  It also means that the length of time you spend with your focus switched away from driving is much longer.  It require more of your brain to text than it does to talk and it takes longer to type a phrase than say it even if you are using all the cute texting shortcuts.  That means there is a much longer continuous interval where you are not monitoring the driving environment.  This is worse, much worse, and the statistics bear this out.  Texting while driving is way more dangerous than talking while driving.  And unfortunately there is a significant population that thinks they can get away with doing it anyhow.  They are a danger to us all.

So far I have mostly covered ground that everyone is familiar with.  Okay, I might have thrown is some computer stuff that is unfamiliar to most of us.  But for the most part people have gotten to the same conclusion I have by one means or another.  So where's the original content?  Coming right up.

I bought a new car about six months ago.  I purposely got a car with all the new "electronic assist" goodies.  I wanted a backup camera.  I wanted a blind spot monitor.  My car came with those and lots of other goodies.  If the road has decent lane markers my car will warn me if I start to drift across the lane markings without first putting on my turn signal.  It also has a alert that warns me that I might not have noticed the car in front of me slowing down.  It has another alert that warns me that the car in front of me has started moving and I haven't.  It has a bunch of more alerts too but I think you get the idea.

My old car was a 'mid-price 99.  It had some gadgets on it but nothing like what my new car has.  You could set my old car so the head lights stayed on for a while after you exited the car.  It had a compass built into the rear view mirror and cruise control.  That was pretty fancy for the time.  But my new car leaves all those old gadgets in the dust.  My new car has an "automatic" setting on the headlights.  They turn on and off automatically based on how much daylight  there is.  And, of course, it automatically delays shutting the headlights off when you exit the car.  My new car has a deluxe cruise control system and a full up navigation system to compliment the compass in the rear view mirror.  I'm not trying to brag here.  There are lots of other cars that come equipped with a similar (or perhaps an even more extensive) set of gadgets.  I am just pointing out that my new car has gadget after gadget after gadget.  And it's not just the sheer number of gadgets.  Each individual gadget is much more complex.

Let me give you an example.  I now leave my headlights set on  "automatic".  But once the setting got changed without my noticing it.  So now I'm driving around in the dark without my headlights on.  After a while I figured that out.  But now the headlight control is surrounded by a bunch of other controls.  So there is no way I am going to be able to fix the problem and drive at the same time.  Once I got where I was going I turned the cabin light on and spent about thirty seconds getting the setting fixed.  But while I was doing this I accidently turned the high beams on.  Again it took me a while to figure this out.  But that led to the "how do I turn the high beams off" problem.  I am so used to everything on my new car working differently than it did on my old car that the obvious solution of doing the same thing I would have done on my old car literally did not occur to me.  Someone had to suggest it to me and you'll be happy to know it worked fine.

I want to make two points.  First of all my new car is regularly alerting me to something or another.  Some of these are wonderful.  It will alert me to cross traffic when I am backing out of a parking slot.  With my old car I often couldn't see a thing until I was in the middle of the street.  By the time I was far enough out of the slot to see it was too late.  The crash would have already happened.  With my new car I get an alert, frequently before I have even started backing up.  The alert tells me when the traffic has finished passing by and I can back out safely.  So that alert is all to the good.

With the other alerts some of them are more of a mixed bag.  With the stopping alert I am most likely on top of what is going on.  I just want to start stopping a little later than the car does.  The car, for good reason, is quite conservative about when it thinks I should start to slow down.  Remember, it needs time to warn me, decide I am not going to heed its warning, and after that still have time to slow the car down on its own.  With the starting alert what's usually happening is I can see something (i.e. a pedestrian) that the car doesn't so there is a good reason why I haven't immediately imitated the car in front of me.  And so on.  The point is that my car now fairly frequently makes some noise that breaks my concentration and thus interferes with my focus.  So that's one thing.

The other thing is illustrated by the head light story.  Things that used to be simple to do are now often much more complicated.  A couple of weeks ago I was using the navigation system to get me home from an unfamiliar location.  The trip involved two parts.  The first part was "get from the starting point to the freeway".  For that part the navigation system was invaluable.  It did a great job of navigating me along a complicated path on unfamiliar streets.  But once I was on the freeway I no longer needed or wanted the navigation system.  All I wanted to do was turn it off.  But that is not a simple process.

It involved using a touch screen.  That involved taking my eyes (and one hand) away from their driving tasks and working my way through the process, all while driving in such a way that I did not run off the road or crash into anybody.  It turned out that what I did didn't turn it completely off.  I just put it to sleep.  So twenty minutes later it woke up and started alerting me to the fact that I should not take an exit that I already knew not to take.  So I had to fiddle with it some more to get it actually turned off.  And again it was important to not drive off the road nor crash into anybody.

I'm sure I will get better at this sort of thing as time goes by and I get more familiar with all these new gadgets.  And I'm sure that some of my fellow drivers thought I was nuts while I was distracted dealing with my navigation system.  But then we all see people doing nutty things on the road all the time now.  Why?  Because they are on the phone or texting or whatever.  In any case no one thought what I was doing merited a honk so I guess my behavior fell into the range of what now passes for relatively normal driving.

So my new contribution to the subject is to be the first to identify a new source of distraction that drivers can be subjected to:  new cars with a lot of electronic gadgets.  With my old car I was pretty much on my own.  I knew it and acted accordingly.  I didn't expect the car to be of much help but on the other hand the car did not routinely engage in distracting behavior.  And you could do simple things like turn the headlights on or change the channel on the radio without having to take your focus off of driving for longer than a brief moment.

With new cars things are quite different.  The car will routinely engage in distracting behavior.  Sometimes this is a totally good thing.  I love being distracted by a cross traffic alert when I am backing out of a parking stall.  In other cases the advantage is less clear cut.  Most but not all of the time the car is alerting me to a situation I am already aware of.  If I am already aware of it then it is a needless distraction that did not exist before the advent of modern "driver assist" electronics.  And I can't get a car with the long list of goodies my new car has without also getting a car that has much more complicated controls than cars like my old one.

And its not just me.  A few months ago Tesla put out an update to the software on their model S.  The update provided an extremely sophisticated cruise control.  You could take your hands completely off the wheel for long periods of time.  The car would automatically compensate for traffic conditions.  It would read the speed limit signs along the side of the road and act accordingly.  It would even change lanes if that seemed appropriate.  Way cool, right?  Apparently too cool.  Almost immediately Tesla released a new download that dialed way back on how much the car would do on its own.  Apparently It wasn't quite as ready for prime time as Tesla thought.

Finally, let me fold a "robot car" update in here.  Back when my old car was new we had a simple situation.  The driver drove the car with little or nothing in the way of intelligent assistance from the car.  That put the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the driver.  Once we get to robot cars we will again be in a simple situation.  Then the driving responsibility will be squarely on the shoulders of the car.  Where we are now is some kind of a middle zone.  Driving responsibility rests primarily with the driver.  But the car is making a significant contribution.  This makes the situation more complicated than either pure extreme.  And, as the Tesla experience demonstrates, navigating this middle ground is not going to be 100% smooth sailing.

And the general public has already picked up on this.  Surveys show that a large majority of people are not ready for a completely robotic car yet.  People definitely want a person to be able to take control back from the "robot" any time they feel the need.  That means it is going to be a while before there are cars on the market that do not include a steering wheel, brake pedal, etc..  As far as I can determine the Tesla problem resulted in a few scares but no actual accidents.  Tesla rightly dialed things back as soon as problems became apparent.  And I expect that is how things are going to continue to evolve for some time.

Development of robot cars is proceeding apace.  There are now multiple well funded groups with access to deep pools of technical expertise actively working on the problem.  It won't be long before someone finds a way to get robot cars into the hands of ordinary consumers.  And this will happen in the very near future (2020 or sooner).  Then consumers will be in a position to make an informed decision.  From Frankenstein to Jurassic World, all of us have long been exposed to "technology gone horribly wrong" themed movies.  The public is very attuned to the possibility that robot cars will somehow go horribly wrong.  So people want to take it slow for now, and with good reason.  But once ordinary consumers get their hands on these cars they will either work well in the real world or they won't.  I think before long they will work and work well.  At that point the situation will switch from movie plot to real world experience.  At that point I expect public to quickly become comfortable sharing the road with robot cars.  Time will tell.

Game of Houses

This post is actually one where I revisit a subject and check in to see how things are going.  In this case the post I am revisiting is http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-do-something-stupid-now.html, one I made a little over a year ago.  (I'll explain the title of this post shortly.)  That post started out focusing on ISIS (or ISIL, or Daesh - the controversy over which title is the one that should be used continues to rage).  Then it pulled back to encompass a bigger chunk of the middle east.

So where does the title for this post come from?  It is a major component in an epic fantasy series called "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan.  The meaning is the same as "The Game of Thrones", which comes from the epic fantasy series penned by George R. R. Martin.  The same thing was long referred to as "The Great Game" by the British.  Many have called it "Power Politics"  These are all different names for the same thing.  You have a number of players.  They are all jockeying between themselves.  They employ political and military strategies to achieve their objectives.  And their objectives are increased power and influence relative to the other players.  What's currently going on in the middle east is best understood as a many player Game of Houses where the players for the most part are countries both near and far.

And have I mentioned that George R. R. Martin based his series on the Thirty Years War, a real event from European history.  One of the defining characteristics of this "game" is that there is no end to it.  There is never an ultimate winner although there can be ultimate losers.  The game just keeps going on.  One player maneuvers and gains influence at the expense of one or more other players, at least for a while.  Then they slip or trip or are subject to a piece of bad luck, and their position deteriorates relative to the position of other players, again at least for a while.

No player ever achieves complete dominance and it is rare for a player to be completely destroyed.  This is because players often move to balance things.  A player who is up too far is knocked down.  A player who is down too far is propped up.  You don't want to let anyone else, even an ally, get too powerful and a former enemy may make a good ally in the next round.

Europe played this game for centuries.  The Thirty Years War was just one move in a game that looked like it would go on forever.  There was the Hundred Years War, the Battle of This, the War of That.  It went on and on and on.  First this country (the players are usually but not exclusively countries) is up.  Then it falls back and for a while another country is up.  And so it goes.  In the case of Europe it went on until World War I came along.  World War I was so costly in terms of blood and treasure that the traditional players fell into two groups.

There were the groups that were completely destroyed like Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Ottoman Empire, etc. Then there were the groups that were merely severely damaged like The United Kingdom, France, and Germany.  Going into World War I all three of them successfully operated overseas colonial empires.  Germany's was the biggest apparent loser as its colonial empire was dismantled after the war.  The UK and France seemingly fared better but after the War both found it difficult to find the resources to properly operate their old empires.  They kept things together more or less until World War II came along.  This second blow to their power, both financially and militarily, meant that neither colonial empire was able to last long.   The big winners coming out of World War I were the non-players like the US and Japan.  Both had been substantially excluded from the European version of The Game of Houses.

In my previous post I started by drilling down on ISIS and then pulled back for a broader view.  I will get back to my Game of Houses perspective later but first let's see how well my previous post stands up.  The answer is "pretty well".  I got a few things wrong but they were minor.  The big problem is a common one.  I assumed events would move faster than they actually have.  In other words, I did not lean heavily enough on my Game of Houses perspective.  On to specifics.

I questioned whether ISIS (I'm going to stick with this name for clarity) was actually unstoppable, a characteristic frequently attributed to them at the time.  They are now clearly stoppable.  In fact, they have lost territory between posts.  Have they dried up and gone away?  No!

The tensions and rifts caused by the way the boundaries of various countries in the area were drawn has increased.  And a number of those old boundaries no longer have any practical meaning.  But so far no boundaries have been officially redrawn.

Since then the position of the Kurds has strengthened.  They now control territory in what was Iraq and what was Syria.  The Kurds see the territory they control as a single unified country.  But their position has not strengthened enough for them to break away officially from either Syria or Iraq.  So while they have de facto control they do not have de jure (formally recognized) control.  And their very success has worried Turkey enough that Turkey has launched a number of attacks on majority Kurdish areas inside Turkey and has made it harder on the Kurds operating in the territory that used to be part of Iraq or Syria.

This shift by Turkey is one of a number of shifts.  Iraq has replaced al Maliki with Haider al-Abadi.  He has backed off on Sunni persecution.  Iraqi supported forces, now at least partly composed of Sunnis, have made some military gains but progress has been slow, expensive, and painful.

The situation on the ground in Syria has changed in detail but the general picture has remained the same.  There are still lots of factions fighting each other.  Al-Assad is still holding on along the coast.  He is now backed by both Iran and Russia and looks to be able to hold on indefinitely. 

Finally, one thing that has not changed is that there is still no well organized moderate Sunni opposition to ISIS.  In summary, we have a standard Game of Houses situation.  Factions rise and fall but there are no permanent winners.  Instead the churn goes on.  So let's review the current roster of players. And, be warned, there are so many of them I might leave some out.

Iraq has somewhat stabilized.  There is a big piece missing, roughly Anbar province.  But it has been missing since shortly after ISIS emerged.  There is also a smaller missing chunk that is, and since roughly the ouster of Saddam, has been administered autonomously by the Kurds.  This is not an official split but it is a split in practice.  The remainder of Iraq is heavily Shia (most of the other groups were killed or expelled during the US occupation that followed "Mission Accomplished") and is now exporting a lot of oil so it is in good shape financially.  Officially, Iraq's boundaries are the same as they were before 2003 but it seems unlikely to me that it will ever get much of the "disputed areas" back.  We are on the path to partition but we are still some distance away from official recognition of this.

Syria is still the scene of heavy fighting.  Who is winning in this area or that has changed somewhat.  This is mostly due to changes on how much outside support this group or that group gets.  It is not at all clear who will ultimately prevail.  Nor is a clear winner likely to emerge for several years yet.  In addition to a core area that Assad's people continue to control, there is a core Sunni area that ISIS has now maintained uncontested control of for well over a year.  And the Kurds have their own core area.  But that still leaves a large part of Syria that is being actively fought over.

Turkey has shifted somewhat.  They were mostly keeping hands off in Syria and looking the other way as long as the Kurds seemed focused on Syrian and Iraqi territory.  But they have decided that the Kurds are now too big for their britches and have gone back to bombing traditional Kurdish areas within Turkey.  They are also less willing to ignore what the Kurds are up to across the border.  And have I mentioned that they shot down a Russian military plane?  They have decided for whatever reason to pick a fight with the Russians.  These are all classic Game of Houses balancing moves.

Iran has seen its situation improve.  It has been supporting Assad and he has been holding on.  They have been supporting Iraq and Iraq has been doing ok.  Iran has traditionally made mischief in other places like Lebanon.  The news doesn't cover this sort of thing (one story at a time) but the impression I get is that they have dialed back somewhat in these other areas due to the need to focus on Iraq and Syria.  The recently ratified nuclear deal should also help their economy and their general standing in the world.  If they think this "world citizen in good standing" approach is working they may dial back considerably on their support for insurgent groups.

The Israelis and the Palestinians have been suffering from a lack of world media (and other) attention but this mostly seems like same old same old.  The only difference is that the outside players that traditionally backed one side or the other have been distracted by other conflicts.  This has taken some getting used to by both the Israelis and the Palestinians and it remains unclear as to what they are going to do about it.  The eminently sensible idea of settling their differences seems to be off the table on both sides so it's pretty much stalemate.

One country where things look primed for a major change is with Saudi Arabia.  Oil prices have been cut in half over the last year or so.  That means that the Saudis are running giant budget deficits.  They are still several years away from running out of money but if oil prices stay low for four or five years they are in big trouble.  They had a succession a year or so ago and the new guy is feeling his beans.  So Saudi Arabia got directly involved in the war in Yemen.  Iran is involved on the other side.  So the traditional match up between the defender of all things Shiite (Iran) and the defender of all things Sunni (Saudi Arabia) is now playing out directly in Yemen.  So far it is mostly a stalemate, which is bad for Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has yet to play the role they should be playing with respect to ISIS.  Bombing can hurt ISIS but it can't destroy them.  What's needed is boots on the ground.  I argued, I think persuasively, in the previous piece that US (or European) boots on the ground would be a mistake.  The obvious alternative is Sunni boots on the ground.  But remember these need to be "moderate" boots on the ground.  And the moderate champion is, drum roll, Saudi Arabia.  Except they make a terrible moderate champion.  Go back and reread what I wrote in the previous piece on Wahhabi-ism.  That's the official version of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia.

The next problem is population.  Most Muslims, and there are over a billion of them, are Sunnis.  So in general there are lots of Sunni Muslims around.  Just pick out a bunch of moderate ones, train them up, and send them in.  If you are Saudi Arabia the obvious first place to start is from within your own population.  But the population of Saudi Arabia is tiny.  And what population there is has been brought up Wahhabi, not exactly moderate.  So okay, go somewhere else.

How about Egypt?  Big population, check.  Sunni, check.  Political stability, oops.  The same thing is true of Libya.  The suppression of the Arab Spring movement by, among others, the leaders of Saudi Arabia has resulted in there being nowhere to go for moderate Arab Sunni Muslims.  There are lots of moderate Sunni Muslims in places like Indonesia but they are not Arabs and not interested in getting involved.  The countries that should contain lots of available moderate Arab Sunni Muslims are all in turmoil (Egypt, Libya) or places so close to being in turmoil (Jordan) that their governments are not in a position to contribute any troops.  Saudi Arabia has put together a Sunni coalition to oppose ISIS.  But for the reasons I have outlined above it is a completely paper effort so far.  So Saudi Arabia is MIA for the most part in Syria.

Finally, there is the US (and to some extent Europe).  There is a lot of "do something stupid" rhetoric being slung around here.  President Obama is trying to play a long game and not do stupid things.  He is not getting much help and support in his endeavor.  This is in spite of the fact that he is actually one of the most successful players in the region.  He has two giant triumphs.  He got chemical weapons out of Syria and has eliminated the nuclear bomb program in Iran.  Imagine inserting either into the present conflict.  Either would turn the horror up to eleven.  It is bad enough now with hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced.  With either chemical or nuclear weapons it could be worse, a lot worse.

One of the keys to the Game of Houses is to keep the stakes manageable.  In the middle ages kings used to raise an army and then march off to war somewhere.  One of the tricks was to have the war somewhere else.  That way most of the death and destruction was visited on some other country.  Poland used to be one of those "nice place to have a war" places.  Nobody from somewhere else cared how much death and destruction was heaped on the heads of Polish peasants.  So what if a king lost a few soldiers or knights as killed and wounded.  Everybody knows these are dangerous professions.  In the mean time he knows he is not risking his neck or his job.  Even if he looses things in his kingdom will continue on with little or no change.  And if he wins there's the loot and the glory.

And that's what is going on in the middle east.  Sure it's hard on the people who live there.  But the US and Turkey and Russia and etc. can afford the resources they are pouring into the area.  And since most of the death and destruction is being visited on the middle eastern locals that is not a cost borne by Americans (or Turks or Russians or etc.) so it is easy to pretend that it is not our (or their - as in Turkey's, etc.) problem.  The Europeans are dealing with a massive onslaught of refugees but that beats heck out of having a war going on in your country.

We get all up in arms about a few people getting shot or blown up on the domestic front when these deaths are somehow connected to the Game of Houses going on in the middle east.  But this is a misplaced concern.  It is a concern mostly because politicians and the media stir us up continuously about it and we are dumb enough to let them get away with it.  We kill our fellow countrymen in vastly larger numbers on a daily basis than the number killed by all the terrorist attacks put together.  But there are two critical differences.  The most important one is that the media is obsessed with terrorists.  And the other is we are so used to the daily carnage we inflict on ourselves that we no longer notice it.

Over time Europeans came to understand how the Game of Houses was played.  Since World War I no one in the western world has been willing to admit in public that it still goes on and that the rules are the same as they have always been.  So most people are no longer familiar with the rules of this particular game.  And people who are unfamiliar with the rules tend to play badly.  But their play, bad as it is, is much better than their ability to predict how the game will evolve.  This is why pretty much everybody's predictions, but especially the "experts" on TV,  have been and continue to be so wrong so often.

We are seeing this play out as I write this.  Iran and Saudi Arabia are in a big dust up.  It supposedly started because Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric.  Then an embassy got burned in Iran.  Then . . . well it really doesn't matter.  This is just typical Game of Houses play.  The TV people tell us it signals that we are on the brink of the end of life as we know it.  But that's what they always say.  In actuality, it is just a minor move in a mid-level game of the Game of Houses.

So what are my predictions?  What is most likely is that things are going to continue pretty much as they are for some time (years).  One group will be up then it will be another group's turn.  If the US plays it smart and mostly works through the locals and mostly confines our support to behind the scenes efforts then we stand a good chance of doing well in the long run.  The Republican party seems hell bent on sabotaging this approach.  Unfortunately, that means a lot of people in the middle east will be killed and a lot more will be subject to extreme hardship.  But I just don't see any way to avoid it.  There are too many players and if they see us making a strong public move their inclination will be to block us.  (That's how the Game of Houses is played.)  And there are all too many players who can block us if they set their minds to it.

Saudi Arabia is the joker in this game, the player who could break things out of standard play.  It is not clear that they can maintain their traditional way of doing business.  This consists of trying to buy what they want or need.  They have bought off their domestic religious opposition by putting the Wahhabis in charge and funding them way too generously.  Part of the deal is the Wahhabis keep the rest of them in line.  They have used oil money to purchase passivity at home and influence abroad.  The money they spent and continue to spend influencing the US, for instance, is still working just fine.

But what if the oil money runs out?  They have built an economy that only works because it is massively subsidized from oil revenues.  And the Wahhabis are not the only domestic group they have bought off.  But the result of all this is that the ruling family can only maintain its position by playing the Game of Houses within Saudi Arabia.  If they no longer have all that oil money then their house of cards will collapse.  And there will be nothing left.  They do not have a well educated and industrious population.  They do not have strong institutions.  They could be gone in the proverbial blink of an eye.

They owe their regional and international influence primarily to the leverage oil money gives them.  There are a lot of people in the region who resent them.  Their influence outside their borders will evaporate instantly the day the money spigot dries up.  They will be left with nothing.  And their will be a giant vacuum with no obvious successor around.  40 years ago Egypt could have stepped into the void.  But the reaction to the Arab Spring by government after government leaves no government, and especially not Egypt, with any legitimacy left that would allow them to step in.

Well theoretically there is Iran.  But everybody forgets that Iran is Persian.  Arabs and Persians have been hating on each other and fighting with each other for thousands of years.  There may be some short term situational advantage to allying with the hated Persians.  That, after all, is how the Game of Houses works.  But a ceding of real power for the long term to an enemy of such long standing?  Never!

If Saudi Arabia blows up, and I think there is a significant chance they will, then we could see truly massive shifts in the balance of power.  And that could blow up the Game of Houses, at least for a while.  What things would look like when the dust settled, and it could take a long time for the dust to settle, is completely unpredictable.

Civics 101

For years I have been told that various armchair prognosticators on TV are "experts" on the Constitution.  But what they then say would sound completely wrong to me.  Recently a number of Republicans running for President have said that they would do this, that, or the other thing "on day one" and presumably without any help or participation from Congress.  A number of those "proposals" have been labeled unconstitutional (or impossible to do without requiring Congress to pass legislation) by various other armchair "experts", again on TV.  Here I have generally found myself in agreement with this different set of experts.  But I decided that a gut feeling was not enough.  I needed to make an effort to find out for myself which experts might actually know what they were talking about.

I am neither a constitutional scholar nor a legal scholar.  Nor do I wish to become one.  Instead I decided to do what these "experts" said they had done and that any of us can easily do.  I decided to read the Constitution.  And while I was at it I decided to read two other key documents from the Revolutionary period.  I read the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.  (If you do not know what the Articles of Confederation are then you are not a constitutional scholar nor are you an expert of the Revolutionary period.)  But first a little background.

A number of the founding fathers were well educated people.  The others were well informed individuals.  At the time of the Revolution the subject of how governments should be put together (constituted) and how they should operate were popular subjects of discussion.  Martin Luther published his "95 theses" in 1517.  This kicked off the Protestant Reformation and resulted in centuries of political upheaval in Europe.  Entire wars were fought over religion.  To a lesser degree there were, for instance, big battles over who would succeed to the throne of England with factions lined up along religious lines.  This sparked a lot of discussion over the proper relationship between religion and government.  Opinions differed, often violently.

A side effect of all this upheaval was a long and serious discussion over how governments should be constituted.  One of many to weigh in on the subject was John Locke.  I am not going to go into his thinking or that of anyone else's.  But all this turmoil led to a lot of people spending a lot of time thinking about the subject in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War.  The disputants were not only familiar with various relatively recent models such as those of England or France.  They were also familiar with how government worked at other times and in other places.  Take the case of ancient Greece.  They were familiar with differences between governance in Athens versus that in use in Sparta.  They were also familiar with the "Republic" period in ancient Rome and how Roman governance evolved as a series of dictators and emperors replaced the that model with others.  In short they had studied a lot of examples of how things should not be done.

Before the American Revolution governments had generally run on the "strong man" principle.  You had a strong man, a King, Emperor, Pope, whatever.  Whatever he said was the law of the land.  One of many examples was the French King Louis XIV.  He famously said something that is usually translated as "I am France".  Mostly what people argued over prior to the American Revolution period was how succession should work.  The strong man generally held his position for life.  When he died (or was assassinated) someone else took over.  The most common "succession rule" was that the title and job devolved to his oldest son.  The next most popular method was that the job went to his designated heir.  History is littered with examples of this process going horribly wrong.

It is important to understand that this "strong man" approach was the rule rather than the exception.  And in spite of all the times things went horribly wrong (bad strong man, bad succession process) transferring the job to the old strong man's eldest son on his death was by far the most common method of succession.  There has to be a reason for this (both the strong man model and a simple succession rule).  And that reason is "this is the natural way of doing things".  It wouldn't have been as popular at as many times and in as many places if it wasn't.  We even see this sort of thing going on today.  The most visible example is with North Korea where the only three leaders the country has ever had are Kim, son of Kim, and son of son of Kim.  But it pops up routinely elsewhere.  Two of the leading Presidential candidates in the US are widely seen as "dynastic" candidates.

If "strong man" is the natural and normal way government is done it follows that the way we do it, Constitutional Democracy with an election determining the successor, is not natural and definitely not the normal way it is done.  And that means that there are always forces that want to move us away from it and toward the more natural and normal "strong man" form of government.  I could go into some additional analysis about why our founding fathers did what they did.  Instead I am just going to focus on what they did.  And by "did" I mean the words they put into the three critical documents I am going to review.  And I am just going to look at what the plain language says.  To work.

I am going to start with the Declaration of Independence.  Somewhere along the line I read a book on it and as a side effect I had read it, all of it.  But that was a long time ago so I read it again.  Like the Constitution most people are only familiar with a few phrases from the Declaration.  It starts out with that wonderful phrase "When in the course of human events" (I have preserved the often idiosyncratic capitalization found in the "official" versions of all three documents I consulted) and goes on from there with some language that a lot of us recognize.  It ends with another ringing (and very familiar) phrase "we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor".

The meat of the matter is also short:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government

This is extremely radical stuff.  This is the polar opposite of conservatism.  Conservatism is about order and continuity.  Government overthrow is, by definition, an illegal and revolutionary act.  That is neither orderly nor a continuation of what has come before.  Boiled down the idea here is revolution is always appropriate if the justification is sufficient.  The bulk of the Declaration lays out the tail of woe citing example after example of horrible, very bad, no good things King George III has done.  So what are these horrible things?

Most of them seem pretty obscure and hard to figure out now.  For instance:  "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance."  Are any specific examples provided to bolster this statement?  No!  It is assumed that the specifics are common knowledge and beyond dispute.  And this is true of many of the examples.  There are no specifics.  Nothing about taxes on tea or the "stamp act", items which featured prominently in my early education.  Another example of this pattern of general accusation followed by a lack of specifics is "He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."  There are many other examples along these lines that I could cite.  But I won't.  Instead I will confine myself to taking a quick look at only one more of King George III's "injuries and usurpations" before I leave the Declaration and move on.

Apparently, "He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for the purpose of obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither".  Population increase, the Declaration declares, is a good thing.  Naturalization (converting non-citizens into citizens) is a good thing.  Immigration ("migrations hither") is a good thing.  So we started a revolution because we were for a population increase, for naturalizing immigrants, and for immigration.  I will let my gentle readers decide which of the current crop of Presidential Candidates stands with the sentiments expressed in Declaration and which profess to be unalterably opposed to these very same sentiments.  With that let me pass on to the Articles of Confederation.

The Articles were finalized on November 15, 1777 and came into force on March 1, 1781 when they had been ratified by enough states.  This was the law governing the operation of the Continental Congress.  There main purpose was to allow and enable the Continental Congress to pursue the Revolutionary War.  So there was a lot of detail pertaining to this.  And the name "The United States of America" comes from this document.  It grants citizenship to "the free inhabitants of each of these States" with the exception of "paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives".  So slaves are explicitly excluded from citizenship.  Women are also excluded but not explicitly.  The "paupers, vagabonds" language was used to restrict the right to vote to land owners.  You could be as wealthy and upstanding as could be but if you didn't own land or other real property you couldn't vote.

More importantly the Articles are noted for what they did not contain.  The US government of the time consisted of the Continental Congress.  There was no executive and no permanent judiciary.  There were elaborate and complicated provisions laid out to create temporary "commissioners or judges to constitute a court" to handle various kinds of disputes.  But each commission was a "one off" effort created to hear and pass on a single specific dispute.  Once that dispute was resolved the court would be dissolved and another one would have to be created from scratch to handle any other dispute.

The Congress did have some power beyond just the prosecution of the war.  It could step in to handle disputes between the states.  But the way it stepped in was to create one of those "one off" courts I just finished discussing.  It also had the power to manage international relations.  In fact, the states were specifically prohibited from going around the Congress on international matters.  But they frequently did so anyhow.

And Congress had the power to levy taxes.  But the taxes were on the states.  The Congress would set a rate.  Then a formula was applied to calculate each state's share.  Then the state was required to pay that share over to the Congress.  This was all fine in principle.  But the states frequently refused to fork over the money.  And the Congress had no way to enforce its edicts.  So in practice the Congress, and by extension, the US went broke and stayed there.  Theoretically the Congress had an army that reported to it but the Congress paid the army (and everyone else) in Continental Dollars and by the end of the Revolution they were worthless.  So by shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War the Continental Army ceased to exist anywhere but on paper.

By the end of 1786 it was obvious to everyone that the government created by the Articles of Confederation was a complete failure.  Something needed to be done and done quickly.  So in Philadelphia, starting on May 14, 1787 and running until it finished business on September 17, 1787, a convention was put together to come up with a fix.  The initial idea was to amend the Articles but the convention quickly decided to completely replace it instead.  The result was a proposed "Constitution" that went into effect on March 4, 1789 after nine states had ratified it.  All thirteen original states had ratified it by 1790.  This was important because the Articles required all thirteen original states to ratify amendments before they went into effect.  Almost immediately amendments to the Constitution were proposed.  The first was proposed in September of 1789 and ratified in 1791.  We have been at the amendment process ever since.

The system of government in the Constitution was completely different.  There were now three main components.  An executive and a permanent judiciary were added.  And instead of one legislative body, the Continental Congress, we now had two.  The US Senate had an organization similar to the Continental Congress.  In the Continental Congress each state could send a number of delegates but got only one vote.  In the Senate, the delegate count was standardized at two delegates and each one got a separate vote.  The House of Representatives was a complete divergence from the old model.  Here the size of the delegation was determined by the state's population and each delegate got a separate vote.  Legislation generally passed through both legislative bodies and was implemented by the executive.  The judicial got the final word on whether it was constitutional.

Some things were carried over from the Articles.  The US government, not the states, was responsible for international relations.  The new government was now more explicitly responsible for relations between the states.  And the US government, specifically the Congress (a combination of the two legislative bodies), had the power to declare war.  Article I Section 8 states "The Congress shall have the power To . . . declare War".  The US Government also had the power to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises".  This government was no longer dependent on the states doing their duties.  This government could "lay and collect" money directly.

Article I of the Constitution lays out a lot of areas where it is appropriate for the legislature to make laws.   If that's not enough, there is also some "catch all" language.  Congress has the power to "make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the forgoing Powers, and all other Powers vested in this Constitution in the Government of the United States or in any Department or Officer thereof."

Article II covers the President.  Section 1 starts out in a very general manner.  "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."  That's it.  After that it wanders into the length of his term in office, a bunch of minutia about how he will be elected, what qualifications he must have to stand for the office (i.e. "attained the Age of thirty five years"), some "succession" language, the oath of office, etc.  Nothing about his powers.  That has to wait for section II.

Section 2 starts by saying that he "shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy of the United States".  He also "may require the Opinion, in writing" of various government officials.  Next, he may "make Treaties", "appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court", and "other officers . . . not otherwise provided for".  Sounds good.  But in my compression I have left the infamous "Advice and Consent" language out.  He has to consult the Senate when making appointments.  What specifically "Advise and Consent" means has been argued about for hundreds of years.  If you want to make a contribution I suggest you read the language herein carefully and go for it.

Section 3 tells us he "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union".  This is the language underpinning the now annual "State of the Union" speech current Presidents give toward the start of the calendar year.  Does the constitution require the President give it in person?  No!  For a long time Presidents sent written messages.  Does it require it be given annually near the beginning of the calendar year?  No!  That's just the modern tradition.

In terms of power, that's it.  The President has the power to be the chief executive.  He has the power to be the commander in chief of the armed forces.  (There was no Air Force at the time.  And the status of the Marines, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine are more or less ambiguous as they did not exist in their current forms at that time.)  He has the power to appoint various people but the appointment power is subject to "Advice and Consent", whatever that means.  That's it.

Article III lays out the Court component of the government.  But it is pretty process oriented.  The Supreme Court is laid out in some detail.  But the workings of "such inferior courts" is left to Congress.  "Congress may from time to time ordain and establish" the details.  Notice that this is another power given over to Congress.  The founding fathers' intention was that Congress would set policy.  They have the power to create statues governing how things will be done.  The executive (President) is passive.  He just executes the statutes.  He has no control over what they direct him to do or not do.  The role of the courts in all this is left completely ambiguous.

It hasn't worked out that way.  To see why just look at the modern Congress.  It is broken down into numerous factions.  No faction has enough power to actually govern.  They only have enough power to impede things and block the efforts of other factions.  The President is the single chief executive.  He sets the agenda for the entire executive branch.  Theoretically, he could easily be thwarted by the legislature.  All they have to do is pass a statute directing that this be done or not done.  When they act in a coherent manner they can control policy.  President Obama has failed to close Guantanamo because Congress has been able to get statutes passed into law that force it to stay open.  Contrast this to the whole issue of War.

As I indicated above, the Constitution specifically gives the power to declare War to congress.  But the last time Congress actually declared war was in late December of 1941 after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the Germans had declared war on us.  President Johnson famously went to war in Vietnam based on a vague piece of legislation called "The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution".  Congress and the executive have been battling back and forth about this for over 50 years now.  Congress has effectively ceded power in this area in spite of the plain language of the Constitution by a combination of actions and inactions.  Congress controls the purse strings (see Article I).  But they tend to be reluctant to cut the money off so Presidents find a way to have wars and pay for them.

But its even worse than that.  The whole battle has devolved into something called an AUMF, an Authorization for the Use of Military Force.  Congress passed a number of them in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  They are still being used today to justify a number of military actions.  So it's the President's fault for abuse of executive powers, right?  Nope!  President Obama has specifically asked that the current AUMF laws be updated.  He has even sent sample language (which he is not required to do) to Congress.  All they have to do is repeal the old AUMF statutes and replace them with whatever they want even if that is nothing.  But they have not acted.  They have not held hearings.  They have not introduced alternatives to the President's proposal.  They have not acted, nor does it look like they are going to act soon, an any proposal.  They have done exactly nothing.   Well, they have created a vacuum and they have expended vast amounts of hot air criticizing what the President is doing or not doing.

And the whole AUMF debacle is a frequent occurrence.  Congress leaves a vacuum and the executive fills it.  The cases where they actually do the work to set policy as in the Guantanamo example are far less common.  But the most common situation is actually the situation where things work as they should.  Congress passes a bill that sets general policy.  But they leave the details to the executive.  Statutes frequently include language directing some portion of the executive to draft regulations co cover "details" like implementation or rates or who specifically is affected and how.  The legislation covering the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) says "regulate cancerous chemicals".  The EPA then decides which chemicals are cancerous and to what extent they should be regulated. The Constitution itself is a classic example of the adage that you can't write a law to cover every situation.  You want to allow the system some flexibility.

The flexibility in the Constitution comes in two forms.  First, it is purposefully vague in a lot of areas.  This is most obvious in Article III, the one dedicated to the courts.  It is very vague.  Over time the details have been filled in and now how our legal system works has been determined in exquisite detail.  But that detail is entirely missing from the Constitution.  Secondly, the Constitution includes an amendment process.  The first use of this process was to add the ten "Bill of Rights" amendments.  But it has now been successfully amended 27 times and will most likely be amended some more in the future.

In starting to wrap things up I want to take a look at Section 1 of the 14th amendment.  It reads "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This amendment was passed after the Civil War to make it abundantly clear that former slaves are full citizens.  But many conservatives are "strict constructionists".  That means they believe that the way you interpret the meaning of a provision of the Constitution is to look at the plain language.  So let's consider the plain language.  You are a citizen if you are born in the US.  How do you establish where you were born?  You point to your birth certificate.  It is unconstitutional for a state to "abridge the privileges" of a citizen.  And many privileges hang on whether you are a citizen or not.  So it is an abridgment if a state impedes a citizen's ability to prove he or she is a citizen.

Texas and other states are denying birth certificates to children manifestly born in Texas and, therefore, the US.  Being born in Texas (or any other state) is all it takes to make them a citizen.  By my logic the state's action is unconstitutional based on a plain language interpretation of the Section 1 of the 14th amendment because they are abridging the privileges of a citizen by denying that citizen a birth certificate.  But it is conservatives, the very ones who claim to be the protectors of the Constitution and the supporters of strict constructionism, who are holding up the issuing of birth certificates.

One of the privileges of citizenship is the right to vote.  Yet conservatives in Texas and many other states are erecting barriers that make it hard for some but not all citizens to vote.  This is an "equal protection" violation.  And note that the phrase "equal protection" is taken directly from the section quoted above.  It is certainly reasonable to require proof of citizenship.  But the appropriate document for that is a birth certificate (or naturalization papers).  It is not photo ID.  Birth certificates do not now and have never in the past included a photo ID.  And many "valid" forms of photo ID do not guarantee that a person is a citizen.  Another thing some states have done is to make polling places hard to get to in some areas but easy to get to in other areas.  I contend that the plain language I quoted above makes these kinds of things unconstitutional.

I will now warn you that the Constitution has things to say about citizenship and voting rights in other places.  I leave it as a homework assignment for you to hunt them all down then try to reconcile them.  It is common to find that two or more provisions of the Constitution sometimes come into conflict.  One of the most important functions of the judiciary is to identify these conflicts and come to a resolution.  Often this is done by making reference to the facts of the specific case under consideration and making a determination that in this case one right takes precedent over another.  Which right?  It depends.  In other words, nothing is absolute.

Let me finish wrapping things up by going back to the main text of the Constitution, specifically Article IV.  It reads in part "all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land".  In plain language what this means is that any provision of a ratified treaty is exactly the same as if that same provision was part of a US law.  There has been a line of argument that "it's just a treaty.  So it's not a real law.  So we can just ignore it if that is convenient."  No!  The Constitution explicitly says that a ratified treaty is, in fact, the law of the land.  The US government signed the Geneva Conventions.  The US government ratified the Geneva Conventions.  The Geneva Conventions are treaties.  They are the Law of the Land in the US no matter how inconvenient that might be to some people.  Why?  'Cause the Constitution says so.

There's lots left that I have skipped over.  I invite everyone to do what I did and read these three documents.  All three can easily be read in an afternoon.  It won't make you a Constitutional scholar.  But it will definitely give you a much better idea as to what's actually there (and, just as importantly, what's not there).  And you will end up with a much better idea what it means than you would get by listening to most of the "experts" on TV.