Conspiracies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An idea for solving the Debt Ceiling Impasse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debt Ceiling Negotiations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pakistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Matrix

I have the deluxe 10 disk boxed set of the trilogy.  I watched them again recently.  It got me to thinking.

"The Matrix", the original film in what eventually turned out to be a trilogy, was a trend setter and a huge box office success.  Its success was what enabled the subsequent two movies to be made.  Although they made a lot of money, chapters 2 and 3 (go ahead, try to remember their titles) did not have the impact the first movie did.  Why?

The Matrix movies fall into the general category of "Action Movie".  As such there are three components, the plot, the babe, and the action.  A good action movie will have all three in the appropriate balance.  The long running "James Bond" franchise is a classic example of the action genre.  So I will use them to examine these components in a little more detail before moving on to the Matrix movies.

The Bond series highlighted the role of the babe.  There is such a thing as a "Bond Girl".  I even have a book devoted solely to Bond Girls.  Most Bond movies have only one but several have two or three.  Being a Bond Girl has been the high point of many an actresses' carrier.  Ursula Andress, one of the early ones, is almost entirely unknown outside of her Bond Girl persona.  And the quality, for lack of a better term, of the Bond girls in the various films, has been erratic.

The Bond series is also noted for its "set piece" action sequences.  Typically a Bond movie opens with one.  In one movie Bond is chased from what turns out to be a mountain chalet.  He is chased on skis down a steep mountain slope by the bad guys.  Finally he literally skis off a giant cliff.  After what seems like an eternity watching our hero fall through space, finally a parachute in the pattern of a British Union Jack flag opens and we cut to the opening credits.  For obvious reasons, this scene is still burned into my retinas even though the movie came out decades ago.  Other action sequences are peppered though each movie.  One standard set piece type is the chase.  It can be in cars, under water in SCUBA gear, in at least one case in space, and on skis as it was in my example.  Another action sequence type is the fight between Bond and the villain or his henchmen.  Finally, most Bond movies end with a giant explosion or series of explosions, which destroy the villain's lair.

Finally, there is the plot.  Early Bond films had elaborate plots.  Later the series settled on a standard plot.  The villain is trying to take over the world.  Bond first discovers this, then tracks the villain to his lair, and finally blows the place up, foiling the plot.  Usually Bond and at least one Bond Girl are thrown together and romance ensues.  Since it is important to be able to move on to the next Bond Girl in the next movie, a depressing number of Bond Girl characters are killed off.

The early Bond films were very successful and eventually the Bond films became the prototype that most action movies followed.  The "take away" for Hollywood was that the plot was not very important, the babe needed to be beautiful but was otherwise disposable, and action was king.  So the Bond films maintained a high standard in their action sequences throughout the series.  The Bond Girls were beautiful for the most part, but generally unmemorable.  There were usually given little to do but hang around looking beautiful.  And the plots were allowed to deteriorate.  You had the villain du jour implementing the "plot to take over the world" du jour.  No one, even fans, paid any attention to the plots of the later movies.

This formula worked very well for many years.  The first Bond movie came out in the early '60s and the films were reliable money makers for decades.  But by 1999, when "The Matrix" came out, the formula looked vulnerable.  A lot of action movies with a non-existent plot, a great babe, and the usual number of well executed action sequences were no longer doing well at the box office.  And, since the action sequences were expensive to create, action movies need a large box office to be profitable.  For several years, Hollywood could count on foreign revenue to close the gap.  Action movies, with little dialog to translate and not much in the way of story that might not go over well in a foreign culture, did well in the foreign market.  You might have to cut back on the violence and/or sex to cater to a specific foreign market segment but that was easy to do.  Eventually the foreign market saturated out too leaving some to believe that the action genre had run its course.  And then along came "The Matrix" in 1999.

I am going to delay talking about plot and talk about the second component first.  In the case of the Matrix movies the babe was "Trinity", played by Carrie-Anne Moss.  Some commentators say she was not beautiful enough but I disagree.  And for the "matrix" parts of the movies (you know what I am talking about if you have seen any of them, and as for the rest of you . . .) she was dressed in a shiny bondage style outfit.  She made a real and positive impact on me and that's what the babe is supposed to do.  And, unlike the Bond movies, the Matrix movies stuck with the same babe through all three movies.  And Carrie-Anne turned in solid performances in all three movies.  I know of no action movie that has been made or broken solely by the babe.  If Carrie-Anne was weak in the second and third movies, she was weak in the first one.  So she wasn't the deciding factor in why the first movie has a much better reputation than the other two.

Moving on to action, here I see a decided difference between the first movie and the last two.  (It should be noted that the last two were made at the same time and are best seen as two parts of the same movie).  "The Matrix" came out in 1999.  This was a period of great advances in CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) capability.  A lot of the action in "The Matrix" was made or augmented by CGI.  This allowed not only new effects but a seamless integration of CGI effects with "practical" effects, effects using camera tricks and effects based on mechanical devices.  An example of a camera trick was "bullet time".  This was done by positioning a hundred or more still cameras and then setting them off in a precisely timed sequence.  When the still pictures were assembled a frame at a time into the movie it was as if a fast moving movie camera had been used.  This resulted in several dramatic "swoop around" and slow-motion scenes that were highly effective.  For mechanical devices think R2D2.  For many scenes there was a man inside the "robot" operating the various appendages.  With good editing this resulted in a very lifelike R2.

By 1999 the cost of an elaborate CGI sequence had plunged.  CGI takes vast amounts of computer processing power.  By 1999 the CGI people had figured out how to hook together a large number of relatively cheap computer workstations.  It might take hours to do the computations necessary to create one frame of film.  But with many processors it became possible to do many frames in one overnight run by distributing the work across many processors.  Cheap processing power also made it possible to move to digital editing.  There is a limit to how many separate components can be used in one frame if you use traditional film techniques.  If you look at the original "Star Wars" move, not the cleaned up reissue, there are several places where you can see lighter or darker squares where a space ship image is laid into a complex scene.  So many images were combined that it was not possible to maintain a uniform black background.  Digital processing does not have this problem.  You can combine a virtually unlimited number of images into one frame without anyone being able to tell where the component from one source meets a component from another source.

The Wachowski brothers did a brilliant job of understanding that these new capabilities allowed action sequences to be taken up a notch in "The Matrix".  They designed and implemented a number of memorable sequences.  They also integrated the action sequences in a seamless manner.  In the early days of sound the typical Musical would move along doing the usual dialog and story thing.  Then it would stop and do a musical number.  Then it would go back to story and plot.  Action movies often used the same structure.  You could almost see the transitions between the normal movie and the action sequence.  With CGI advances and digital editing the Wachowski brothers were able to integrate CGI effects into what appeared to be the normal part of the movie.  So there was no sharp boundary between the "normal" part of the movie and the "action" part of the movie.  So one of the things that made "The Matrix" such a success was the outstanding action sequences that did not stand out from the rest of the movie.

The two sequels that completed the trilogy were released in 2003.  With the success of the original the Wachowskis were given a boat load of money.  The state of the art in CGI also advanced.  Computer workstations continued to get cheaper and more powerful.  So the amount of computer power that could be deployed in support of the second and third movies was far greater than that available for the first one.  And again the Wachowskis designed and implemented action sequences that took advantage of this additional capability.  They raised the bar.  The action sequences are more complex and more elaborate than the ones in the first movie.  But in spite of, and I argue because of, these very advances the action sequences in the second and third movies are less satisfactory than the now primitive looking action sequences found in the first one.  Why is this?

One problem with the sequences in the latter movies are that they are generally "more" rather than "better".  The villain in the first movie is called Agent Smith and is played brilliantly by Hugo Weaving.  Smith is also carried forward to the second and third movie.  In the first movie Nero, played woodenly by Keanu Reeves in all three movies, battles one Smith.  In the second movie he battles several then hundreds of identical Smiths.  By the time of the grand finale at the end of the third movie he is battling one Smith while thousands of Smith clones watch, presumably ready to step in to help if the "Hero Smith" needs it.

There is so much going on in the action sequences in the last two movies that it is hard to follow them and they seem to go on forever.  In the second movie there is a big chase scene.  It starts out in a nightclub.  Then it moves to a garage.  Then it moves to outside streets.  Then it moves to a freeway.  On the freeway we dodge between cars while people shoot at each other.  Then there is the Samurai sword fight on the top of a truck.  Then there is a motorcycle chase.  Then there is a big scene where two "18 wheeler" trucks slam into each other head on.  It's just too long and complex.  We start out excited.  Then we become worn out.  Then we just become bored.  When can we get back to the plot?  It's a bad sign when you are waiting for an action scene to end because you are bored.

In the third movie there is an epic battle for the dock (it doesn't matter what the dock is).  In this case we have the usual rag tag band of good guys.  But there are about 250,000 bad guys.  I'm not going to run you through another "first this happened then that happened" description of the scene.  Instead let me do some math.  There are a bunch of good guys shooting at the bad guys with machine gun-like weapons.  Let's say they are shooting 250 rounds per second and they manage to hit a bad guy with every single round.  Now this is a stretch, even for a world in which the good guys are inevitably good shots and the bad guys are inevitably bad shots, but stick with me.  At this rate it would take 1,000 seconds, or almost 17 minutes to kill all the bad guys.  Just how long can you stay interested in a good guy grimacing and going rat-a-tat-a-tat. In my case, and I imagine in yours too, its far less than 17 minutes.  While the titanic battle is going on the movie cuts back and forth to another scene.  But it's the usual "can the good guys make it through the gate before the bad guys get them" stuff.

Now from a technical point of view both scenes are brilliantly done.  It is wondrous how the zillions of bad guys are realized in the "dock" stuff.  It really looks like there could be 250,000 of them.  But that's just too many.  Similarly, there are too many bad guys chasing the other group.  And there is only so much "swoop and shimmy" as they are chased around obstacle after obstacle.  And just how many parts can you knock off a vehicle as you cut it too close time after time, and still believe the vehicle will not be put out of action?  It's all just too much of a good thing.

There's another way to look at it.  In the first movie most of the action is fights.  And most of the fights are mano a mano, say Neo against one Smith.  In the other fights it's one good guy against a few bad guys, say three, or a small number of good guys against a roughly equal number of bad guys.  All this is human scale.  We can develop a rooting interest in our hero.  And in the early part of the first movie it's established that the bad guys are more powerful than the good guys.  So you have a number of scenes where a good guy will end up fighting a bad guy.  Then when things start going badly the good guy will break off and run away.  All this creates dramatic tension.  Now let me create some dramatic tension myself by breaking off and talking about plot.

Frankly, one of the things a good plot does is justify the action.  The plot should logically force the hero to come into opposition to the villain and be forced to fight him (or chase or be chased or blow stuff up).  That's kind of the minimum the plot is required to do.  In the later James Bond movies we took it as a given that Bond was a hero and the bad guy was a villain and that Bond's job was to stop him.  So the minimum requirements were barely met.  Unconsciously we knew the plot was just going through the motions and that diminished the whole endeavor, which in turn made watching the movie less of a pleasure, which finally resulted in diminished box office grosses.

The plot of "The Matrix" was not any kind of minimalist effort.  It was inherently interesting and it did a great job of justifying the action.  The core of the plot was of all things a philosophical question:  What is reality?  In "The Matrix" it turns out that what appears to be the real world is actually a computer construct.  But it is so cunningly constructed that it is essentially impossible to tell that it is a construct, the Matrix of the title.  It turns out that if the construct is done cunningly enough it is literally impossible to show that it is not actual reality.  Of course the Matrix is flawed in small ways, allowing the good guys to know that it is a construct.  If the Matrix was perfectly constructed we wouldn't have a movie.  And the reason why any one or any thing would feel the need to construct such an elaborate illusion is a complete joke.  Supposedly human beings make great batteries.  In reality the laws of Thermodynamics require that human beings make lousy batteries.  You end up putting many in times the energy in the form of food into them than the amount of energy you could possibly get out of them.  But that's nit picking.  A cool movie always demands a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

Since the Matrix is artificial, if you are in the know you don't have to follow those pesky laws of physics.  Instead you can have fun.  And specifically, you can be a way cool Kung Fu fighter.  And, again for reasons that are best put into the "suspension of disbelief" bucket, the best way to defeat the bad guys is to be a much better and cooler Kung Fu fighter than your normal bad guy.  So there's our justification for lots of cool Kung Fu fighting. And this "you can bend the laws of physics" thing permits and justifies all kinds of jumps across impossibly large distances, action with cool automatic weapons, action with helicopters, in short, lots of really cool mayhem.

And there are a number of other small pieces of philosophical conundrums thrown in, each in a very entertaining manner.  There is a really nice short bit where Neo knocks over a vase.  The philosophical problem results from the fact that Neo would probably not have knocked over the vase if the Oracle (another character) had not said "watch out for the vase" first.  So there is a nice "cause and effect" puzzle pulled off in about 30 seconds of film time.  These bits add gravitas to the movie.

Of course the whole thing is a bit of "I only read Playboy for the articles".  Hugh Hefner was smart enough to realize that by putting those articles in side by side with pictures of pretty unclothed ladies it would give his magazine some gravitas which would provide some measure of cover justifying more young males buying more copies of his magazine.  To see what I mean let's take the core of the Matrix premise seriously for the moment.

Neo is a computer hacker.  The Matrix is a computer construct.  By applying his knowledge that it's not real combined with that fact that it is computer generated, combined with his computer skills, Neo should be able to seriously bend the rules.  The problem is: what rules to bend.  Let's take a quick journey into the land of computers using Unix as our example.  (Don't panic -- this is not going to get very technical).  Unix uses something called "shells".  Shells fall into three general categories in terms of power.  The shell with the least power is called a "restricted shell".  It is only allowed to do a few things and the whole idea is that a restricted shell is not supposed to be able to break out into the wide world of the full Unix environment.  As the name implies, a "standard shell" has normal powers.  It can can navigate through the wide world of the full Unix environment but it is not supposed to be able to get into the guts of the system and break it.  The "root shell" is all powerful.  It can do anything it wants to do including change or destroy any or all of the system.  The root shell exists so the system itself has enough power to build and maintain itself.

In the Matrix world Neo starts out as a restricted shell.  He doesn't have enough power to see the real system so he presents no threat to the real system.  When Neo breaks out into the "real" (as opposed to the artificial "Matrix") world it's like he has graduated from being a restricted shell to being a standard shell.  He is not powerful enough to destroy the core system (called the Kernel in Unix-speak) but he can at least see it.  Any hacker worth his salt who is given standard shell capability tries to find a "back door" that gets him "root shell" power.  There is some business with the "key maker" in the second and third movie that is analogous to this.  If you go through the right door (a back door, perhaps) you disappear into the guts of the system.  In the movie this is represented by a hallway that is invisible to the normal Matrix environment.

In the movie Neo spends a lot of time doing cool stuff (e.g. Kung Fu, playing with cool guns, etc.) rather than going straight for the "root".  This makes the movie much more fun for the audience.  We get to see cool fights, chases, etc.  But those are not the thoughts and actions of a true hacker.  So the cool stuff (Kung Fu fights, playing with cool guns, etc.) is the Matrix equivalent of pictures of the Playboy unclothed pretty girls whereas the philosophy stuff is the equivalent of the Playboy articles.  Now in my callow youth I used to read Playboy.  I read the articles and I looked at the pictures.  And I enjoyed both.  I probably even enjoyed the pictures more because the articles were there.  But the articles without the pictures?  No!  I wouldn't have read that magazine.

And this is demonstrated by the other two movies.  The plot of the other two movies has to do with saving Zion.  It's a classic "save the town (western) or the neighborhood (modern cop movie) or the world (James Bond movie) from the bad guys" plot.  It's just not that interesting.  We've seen this plot enough times that we know that the "whatever" will be saved in the nick of time just before the closing credits.  And there's another problem with the second and third movies.

By the end of the first movie Neo has effectively become Superman.  In fact he flies using the exact same "right fist pumped in the air" style made famous in the Superman movies.  There's even a direct reference to Superman in the dialog.  The problem with being Superman is that taking on normal baddies is just not fair or interesting.  As numerous writers of comic books, TV shows, and movies have learned, if you have a Superman as a good guy you need a super-villain as a bad guy.  Now we learn that Smith has had "upgrades" early in the second movie.  That, combined with the fact that there are now Smith clones all over the place, is supposed to make for a super-villain.  But it just doesn't work.  But wait, there's more.

The problem with super-anything is how do you kill it?  This shows up most clearly in the climax fight at the end of the third movie.  Neo beats the crap out of Smith.  Smith beats the crap out of Neo.  But, since they are supermen, this does not kill or even seriously injure either of them.  So how do you wrap things up?  Well, first you have another action sequence that goes on for far too long while they try unsuccessfully to kill each other.  Then finally they decide that it's not important who wins the fight.  In a big letdown Neo ultimately gets inside Smith and all of his copies and explodes them from the inside then dies himself.

To wrap it all up, it's harder to make a good action movie than it once was.  In fact, it's just plain hard.  The first Matrix move was and still is a great action movie.  That's because it gets the balance right.  It has a truly interesting plot.  The plot has ideas and a great justification for the action.  It has a great babe, at least in my opinion.  The romance never works for me.  I think that's a result of weak writing of the romantic components combined with a wooden performance by Keanu Reeves.  But Carrie-Anne more than makes up for this by being a great action babe.  She looks great doing jumps and fights in the action stuff and is easy on the eyes the rest of the time.  Finally, the action scenes are great.  They are human scale, draw the audience in and cause you to root for the good guys.  They are also very creatively done.  With all three components in balance the movie rocks.  The other two movies in the series are not so good.  The most obvious defect is the plot.  It's just not that interesting.  The babe/romance is no better but also no worse in these movies.  And finally, in spite of the fact that they are technically far superior, the action sequences in the other movies are inferior to the first movie as entertainment.  The Wachowski brothers spent too much effort putting "more" into the sequences and not enough effort making them entertaining and human scale so they would draw us in.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

This is a book written by Jamie Ford that I recently finished reading.  If you are looking for a review of the book, look elsewhere.  What I want to talk about is the history covered in the book.  Most of the action takes place in 1942.  The rest of the action takes place in 1986 where we find out what happened to the main character.  I will focus on the 1942 activities.

The main character is a Chinese boy who is 12 years old at the time.  He falls in love with a Japanese girl who is a few months older.  Most of the action takes place in Chinatown and Japantown in Seattle during the early part of World War II.  A key point is the hostility between the Chinese and Japanese during this period.  Towards the end of the book the girl is sent to an internment camp in Idaho.  Before this happens one of the impediments to the romance is the boy's father.  The father hates the Japanese.  The father is not aberrant.  This is an opinion that was broadly shared within the Chinese community.  The book spends some time on why this was so but I want to get into this in more detail.

The cause is both the result of domestic politics within the U.S. and also of international politics.  And funnily enough you can get another look at this issue in an entirely different book.  The book is, of all things "Charlie Chan" by Yunte Huang.  The center of the Chan book is the fictional detective named in the title.  Charlie Chan was immensely popular (6 books, a couple of dozen movies) between 1925 and the late '40s.  The author takes pains to set the Chan the phenomenon in the context of the Chinese, and to some extent the Japanese experience in the U.S.  There were no orientals in the U.S. in any numbers until California businessmen imported Chinese to work originally in the Gold fields and later on the railroad.  At some point the need for labor to work in these industries dried up.  The the same businessmen who had originally supported Chinese immigration reacted by stirring up "yellow peril" trouble and causing anti-Chinese immigration laws to be passed.  This caused other businessmen to turn to the Japanese as a source of cheap exploitable labor that got around the Chinese exclusion laws.  So almost from the beginning the Chinese and Japanese were put into competition with each other.

And this competitive situation was a microscopic version of what had been happening in Asia for millennia.  The Chinese have been the dominant culture in Asia for thousands of years.  The Chinese influence on Japanese language, writing, and culture is so strong that it can't be ignored. So a major aspect of the Japanese experience has been the effort by the Japanese to differentiate themselves from the Chinese.  So while Japanese writing is superficially similar to Chinese there are many differences in the details.  The same is true of Japanese architecture.  There are overlapping themes and motifs but at a detailed level there are many differences.  And so it goes through all of Japanese culture.  The Japanese swim in an ocean of Chinese culture but, where they can, they try to build in some distance.  This long battle for a separate identity results in a certain amount of resentment by the Japanese toward the Chinese.

And the modern (last 500 years) history of the two countries has diverged quite a bit.  Both countries spent a lot of time initially rejecting western influences.  Over a long period of time various assaults by Europeans weakened the Chinese to the point that by about 1900 the country as a whole was a basket case.  The Japanese also followed a course of rejecting western influence.  But eventually they too were forced to abandon this course.  The Japanese response was to do a complete reversal.  They embraced western culture particularly western business and military methods.  This was so successful that in 1905 the Japanese scored a military victory against a traditional western power in the Russo-Japanese War.  They did it by using traditional western technology operated in the usual western manner.  In the 1920's the Japanese were a party in the 5-5-3 Naval treaty, a very big deal at the time.  By this time they were seen as having a completely modern and western navy and the third largest in the world.  So during the run up to World War II you had China, effectively a third world basket case as opposed to Japan, now a major power and one of the largest.  This was a complete reversal of fortunes.  Japan was now culturally, economically, and politically the premier Asian power.  This could have engendered a great deal of resentment by Chinese with respect to Japanese.

But there was a much more powerful and more specific basis for bitter resentment of Japanese by Chinese.  In the summer of 1937 Japan invaded China.  China at this time was too weak to represent a political, economic, or military threat to Japan.  It was a pure and simple power grab, a colonial annexation, if you will.  And the war was particularly viscous.  China was much larger in terms of both physical size and of population.  The only way Japan could pull it off, and do so cheaply, was to use its much superior military to intimidate the Chinese population into submission and acquiescence.  An example of Japanese tactics was the so called "Rape of Nanking", which involved the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians.  To be effective in intimidating the rest of the Chinese population the rest of the Chinese population needed to be aware of what was going on.  And what was going on inevitably made its way to the overseas Chinese population in places like Chinatown in Seattle.

So by 1942 Chinese communities in places like Seattle were very familiar with the tactics the Japanese were employing in China.  And U.S. politics forced Chinatowns and Japantowns to be adjacent to each other in city after city.  Seattle was no exception.  So it is entirely understandable that in 1942 the average Chinese as exemplified by the main character's father in the "Hotel" book would fear, hate, and resent the Japanese living a couple of blocks away in Japantown.

With all the history that has happened since the 1930s and early 1940s the war between China and Japan has been largely forgotten outside of China and Japan.  Things have evolved to the point where the Nazis pretty much fully occupy the role of WW II villain and the Japanese misbehavior, to use a perhaps too mild term, is far less prominent in our consciousness.

Now that I have explained why a Chinese man in 1942 would very reasonably have not wanted his son to have anything to do with a Japanese girl let me widen my scope and take a more nuanced look at things from the Japanese perspective.  (Spoiler alert:  The book has a happy ending).  As the Chan book admirably points out, by well before 1942 the U.S. perspective had broadened out.  It wasn't just the Chinese that were subhuman and undeserving of "full human" status, it was any member of "the yellow races", what we would now call Asians.  In most situations, whites saw no reason to differentiate between Chinese and Japanese.  And the very idea that there might be still other kinds of "yellow devils" like Koreans, Viet Namese, etc. had just not entered anyone's consciousness.

I have already alluded to an example of this sort of racism in action and directed specifically at the Japanese.  The 5-5-3 Naval treaty was ostensibly about avoiding an arms race.  The Battleship was the super weapon of its era.  By the 1920's there had been several generations of Battleships and each generation was substantially more expensive than the previous generation.  For instance the Dreadnought, the original Battleship, was built by the British in1906 and was considered obsolete by 1912.  Battleship construction was consuming larger and larger chunks of military budgets.  If this kept on too long bankruptcy seemed the inevitable result.  So the idea of the 5-5-3 treaty was to cap the rate of construction of Battleships.  The British and Americans would be allowed to build equal amounts of tonnage (5 to 5) and everyone else would build less.  So why couldn't the Japanese build the same amount of tonnage as the Brits and the Americans?  Simple racism and because at the time the Brits and the Americans could force the Japanese to accept lesser status and only get to build 3 for every 5 the Brits and the Americans could build.

And, of course, the seminal event around which "Hotel" is built is the internment of people of Japanese descent in the early days of WW II.  The measure was justified on military grounds - "they be spies and saboteurs".  But that's nonsense.  All you have to do is to look at what happened to the other two nationalities on the WW II "enemies" list: the Germans and the Italians.  In all the years since the war and even during the war there was precious little evidence of spying and sabotage by Japanese-Americans.  All the intelligence work done leading up to Pearl Harbor, for instance, was done by Japanese diplomatic people or by people brought in from Japan by the Japanese government specifically as spies.  No Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii were involved in spying.  And there is no evidence of spying by Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast either.

Contrast this with the German community.  By the late '30s there was a large network of "bunds", clubs formed to support Hitler and to agitate for Nazi interests.  Hollywood made numerous "B" movies about the FBI breaking up German spy rings in the run up to the war.  There were well known and prominent Nazi sympathizers like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.  Yet there was no general roundup of people of German origin and no action against prominent Nazi sympathisers.  Of course, all these Nazi sympathisers and people of German origins all came out as "100% all American" after war was declared.  But there is little or no evidence that Japanese-Americans were ever anything except "100% all American" at any time and large numbers of them volunteered to sign various pledges immediately after hostilities broke out.  And although the Italian pro-Mussolini forces were never as active as the German pro-Hitler people, the Italian model generally followed the German one.

Finally, I want to note a small and, as far as I know now completely forgotten, piece of Washington State history.  I had a paper route while I was in High School.  My father helped me out on Sunday when the papers were particularly overwhelming.  I distinctly remember a story on the car radio during one of these Sunday excursions with my dad.  There was about an Initiative on the ballot.  If approved it would again make it legal for people of Japanese descent to own real property in Washington State.  Some time during WW II the state had passed a law making it illegal for people of Japanese origin to own property even if they were U.S. citizens.  This heinous law effectively made it legal for white people to steal land, etc. from the poor Japanese people who had been bundled off to the internment camps.  In the early '60s an effort was made to get this horrible law off the books.  The State Legislature and State Courts had apparently been too gutless to do it themselves.  So at some point an Initiative campaign had been launched.  The campaign for the initiative was deliberately kept low key so as to avoid stirring up anti-Japanese racism.  Fortunately, the campaign worked and the law was finally gotten off the books.

My experience with this initiative (at the time I know nothing of the background and was mystified about why the original law existed) and other experiences since have convinced me of something.  All peoples, Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans, whoever I have left out, are capable of wickedness at least some of the time.  And all peoples are capable of goodness some of the time.  I don't buy the argument that some person or group of people are evil (or good) because of who they are.  I try to judge them by what they do.  And I expect that I will judge anyone to have at times done evil and at other times to have done good.  Google's slogan is "Don't be evil".  I think most of the time they live up to that slogan.  But not all of the time.  The great villain of our time is Osama bin Laden.  Certainly he has done a lot of evil.  But I am sure he has done good some of the time.  But don't get me wrong, I'm glad he is dead.

Numbers in the News

The news business does not do well with numbers.  But, some would say the news is full of numbers.  And technically that is true.  Many news stories feature graphs and charts that are full of very precise very accurate numbers.  But the numbers in these graphs and charts aren't really important.  Instead what is going on is a "cool graphic".  The modern news business is almost entirely about pictures and a "cool graphic" is an effective kind of visual.  But so is a picture of a scantily clad starlet.  Now I like to gaze fondly at scantily clad starlets so I am all for this sort of thing.  But I don't confuse pictures of scantily clad starlets with news.  And I bet that if a news producer has the choice between a scantily clad starlet and a cool graphic to illustrate a story the starlet will win 100 times out of 100.  So what's important about the cool graphic is not the numbers its the coolness.

And thus I introduce numbers.  I use the number "100" above, twice.  How important was the specific number I picked?  Not very.  What I needed was a number that was "big" but not incredibly big.  And I am using the word "incredibly" in the sense where it measures how believable something is.  In this example "big" was important, I was going for "impact".  But credibility was also important.  I wanted you to believe what I said.  If I had used 1000 instead of 100 I would have gained bigness but lost believability.  100 seemed like the right balance between a number big enough to get impact but not so big to lose believability. And this is a long windy way of demonstrating that the psychological impact of a number is important.

Amping up the psychological impact is incredibly important in the news business.  One simple strategy is to use a big number instead of a small number.  This plays out by consulting an "expert" who has an ax to grid and who will provide you with an exaggerated estimate of how likely, big, or important something is.  If expert #1, who actually is an expert, says "nothing to worry about" and expert #2, who is more interested in shilling for his cause than in enlightenment, says "be afraid, be very afraid", guess who gets lots of air time and who does not.  And news producers go into orgasms if they can get two dueling "experts", one saying "it's very very very red" and the other saying "its very very very blue".  It doesn't matter that a real expert might say "its mildly green".

This strategy works best in areas where the average audience member doesn't know much about the subject.  So we have seen a lot of this surrounding the tragedy in Japan, particular the nuclear problems.  Radiation exposure is such a subject.  Scientists have gotten very good at measuring radioactivity very accurately.  Theoretically, people should know a lot about this subject.  It has been a matter of intense public interest since at least 1945, when A-bombs were dropped on Japan.  But most of the public discussion has been on a level with my red/blue example above.  Over the years the pro-nuclear camp has been saying "no danger here" and the anti-nuclear camp has been saying "any tiny amount of radiation is extremely dangerous".  The facts support the green position.  We live in a sea of low level radiation.  It is literally everywhere.  So there are things to worry about but a lot of the "scare" coverage is exaggerated.

The "radiation" story out of Japan is one where there is at least some justification for a difference of opinion.  And at least some segments of the media are trying to clarify the situation rather than obscure it.  But it is an aspect of the story where these is some justification for the media's actions.  Unfortunately, there are many other aspects of the Japan story that illustrate the media's complete inability to deal properly with numbers.

This comes out most strikingly with respect to casualty numbers.  The media is very good at conveying the difference between zero and one.  A story in which no one dies is covered very differently than a story in which one person dies.  The first story becomes a "miracle rescue" story, like the miners in Chile.  The second story becomes a "Law and Order" story; who died, who did it, etc.  That's OK.  But what about where in one case one person dies and in the other case two people die.  Given our zero/one example one would think that the coverage would be completely different.  But the media coverage is only slightly different.  Now it's an "individual" versus a "group" story.  But the coverage of the two stories will be not very different.

Moving on, what about a two casualty story versus a ten casualty story?  The difference should be large.  In the latter case, eight extra people are dead.  And remember the death of the one person in the "one death" story was important enough to justify coverage.  But the coverage is almost identical.  Recently a bus crashed in New Jersey killing 2.  This happened within a few days of the Bronx bus crash that killed more than ten.  There has been a little more coverage of the Bronx crash but the media approach to each crash has been more similar than different.

This inability to differentiate gets even more pronounced as the numbers get bigger.  What if 100 people are killed?  Is this different than only 10 people getting killed.  No!  The media will either choose to cover the story or it won't.  If both stories are covered they will both be "a lot of people were killed" stories.  The death toll in Japan has crossed 10,000, as I write this.  It is expected to continue to rise.  The final total will likely pass 20,000.  But in the end about one person will be killed in the Japan tragedy for every ten people who perished in Haiti under roughly similar circumstances.  The media is completely incapable of differentiating in any meaningful sense between these two numbers.  But the difference is hundreds of thousands of lives.

The media has fallen into the "up close and personal" trap.  For disasters they show "devastation" video.  With their close in emphasis it all looks pretty much the same.  They have not figured out how to convey the extent of the devastation.  If they have enough devastation video to fill up a "clip loop" it all looks the same.  You get a number of short clips, usually about 10, each showing a piece of devastation.  The same clip loop is run over and over.  So once you have enough devastation to make up the ten short shots all disasters look the same.  All disasters are visually boiled down to the clip loop and all clip loops end up looking pretty much the same.

The human toll is handled in a similar manner.  We get interviews of survivors or people who knew a victim.  Again about 10 of these interviews is all the media can absorb.  So if a disaster generates 10 interviewees or millions of interviewees it is all the same.  But a disaster which creates 10 interviewees is not the same as a disaster that generates millions of interviewees.  But it will be pretty much impossible to tell one disaster from the other based on the media coverage.

Several years ago an earthquake hit my city.  Within a few hours the media had put together their clip loop of the event.  That's when the calls and e-mails started coming in.  Was I OK?   Was my home, car, or place of business wiped out in the terrible devastation?  How many friends had been killed or seriously injured?  That sort of thing.  In fact, no one I knew was killed, injured, or even had suffered any property damage.  Because no one was killed and only a few people were injured.  There was serious damage to a few specific areas but 99% of the city was completely undamaged.  You couldn't tell any of this because the national media picked up the same highlight loop showing the few instances of damage and ran it over and over.

Shortly thereafter 9/11 happened.  9/11 was a much bigger event involving thousands of deaths, and much more property damage than my little earthquake.  9/11 looked like a bigger event than the earthquake in my town.  And it has received vastly more coverage, partly because it happened in a media mecca.  But it is literally impossible to accurately gage the size and scope of the two events based solely on the media coverage.  Numbers might help.  But, as I have shown, the media is not good with numbers.