The Donald

This blog has been organized around the idea that I have a contribution to make to public discourse.  I try to find topics where what I have to say is different and hopefully more informative than what you can find elsewhere.  But this post is an indulgence.  I am doing it because I want to.  At best it will contain a few gems but I would characterize them as semi-precious at best.  This is substantially below the standard I try to hold myself to when I am writing a post  But I just can't stop myself.  I have to remark on the fact that Donald J. Trump has entered the race on the Republican side for the nomination to become the next President of the United States.

Various pieces of legislation have been facetiously characterized at "the Accountant full employment act" or "the Lawyer full employment act".  The Donald's entry into the race can be and has been characterized as "the Comedian full employment act".  As just one example, David Letterman, who only recently retired from his CBS "The Late Show" gig, popped up on stage a few days ago.  He said that The Donald's announcement had convinced him that his decision to retire was a mistake.  He then read off a The Donald oriented "Top Ten List".  One of the things I am really bad at is comedy so that's all I am going to have to say in a comedic vein.

I welcome The Donald's announcement.  It represents the culmination of a trend that is more than 50 years in the making.  It dates back to at least the 1960 election.  That year John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon squared off in the first presidential debate to be carried live on television.  On paper Nixon was the much better qualified of the two.  He had served in the House of Representative before moving on to the Senate.  From there he moved on to become Vice President for two terms.  Along the way he acquired considerable expertise on both foreign and domestic issues.  Kennedy, on the other hand, had spent only a short time in the Senate and had no obvious in depth expertise on either foreign or domestic issues.  So if the contest was a "battle of the resumes" Nixon should have won in a walk.

But it was not a battle of the resumes.  And conventional wisdom is that in a very close race the deciding factor was Kennedy's performance in the debates and, more specifically, on TV.  The debates were covered simultaneously on both TV and radio.  The consensus among the radio audience was that Nixon won in a relatively close contest.  However, the TV audience rated Kennedy a clear winner.

We saw pretty much of a rerun in 1992 with George H. W. Bush, a man with a long and distinguished resume that was capped by a term as President.  He was challenged by a small state Governor named William Jefferson Clinton with no obvious national credentials.  Again, a battle of the resumes would have put Bush well ahead.  But Clinton impressed the TV audience (by this time no one paid attention to radio any more) and went on to unseat him.

We saw the same sort of thing in 2000 when a Governor with a weak resume (George W. Bush) squared off against a man with a resume almost as impressive as that of Nixon or George H. W. Bush (Al Gore). To a lesser extent we saw the same thing in 2008.  Obama had an extremely thin resume.  And while McCain's resume was not as impressive as others I have mentioned it was definitely more impressive than Obama's.  We definitely do NOT pick our Presidents based on who has the best resume.  So how do we pick the winner?

Back in the day the story was "by some kind of deal between the power brokers in a smoke filled room".  The Primary system was put in place to do away with that system.  We would have a separate mini-election for each party in each state using the Primary system.  A small vestige of the "smoke filled room" system is present in the Caucus system.  The party faithful meet but no longer in secret in a smoke filled room.  Instead a long series of meetings are held in public where everyone can watch and many can participate.  After a winnowing process a public state convention selects delegates pledged to specific candidates that go on to the national convention.  At the national convention the first candidate to 50% plus 1 gets the party nomination.  This complicated process requires a large expert staff, it is said, that knows all the ins and outs of each step so that at each stage the candidate's interests can be protected.

So ok, this is a complex system but at heart it is just a bunch of elections.  How does a candidate win these elections?  It turns out this has been complex too.  You need money to hire all that expert staff.  But you also need more money and more staff to identify supporters and people who can be convinced to become your supporters.  Then you need more money and more staff to engage in an elaborate advertising campaign.  You design, print, and mail targeted messages.  You design produce and air TV commercials.  In the old days you also needed newspaper and radio ads but they have become far less important.  Finally, there is GOTV (Get Out The Vote).  You need more money and more staff to get your supporters to the caucus or primary and make sure they support your candidate. But what about volunteers?  If you are lucky, you have a large and energetic volunteer organization.  Aren't they free?  Volunteers are free but you need more money and more staff to organize and direct them.  That's how it is supposed to work.

What is interesting is that so far The Donald has done none of this.  He personally has a lot of money.  But I expect that it will turn out that he is spending very little of it.  And he is not raising money.  "I'm rich.  I don't need to fund raise.", he says.  And there is no evidence so far of any kind of serious fund raising effort by his campaign.  So what about the rest of it?  Does he have an organization, consultants, a "ground game" operation, ads up on TV, and so on?  Nope!  None of it.  So he is doomed to failure, right?  Again, nope!  He is doing fine, actually better than fine.  He went from being down at one or two percent in the polls and well back in the field to about 15% in the polls and in second or first place.  So what's happening?

I talked above about this candidate or that candidate having a great resume.  It turns out that The Donald has a terrible resume as measured by the standards of yesteryear (experience, expertise, etc.).  Instead what he has is a great resume as measured by modern standards.  He is a whiz at marketing and particularly at marketing himself and most particularly at marketing himself on TV.  He is not doing all the things candidates did (and most candidates still do) to get themselves the nomination (and presumably eventually win the general election).  He is instead "the very model of a modern major candidate", to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan.

We have been going down this path for a long time.  I quoted example after example above where the most qualified candidate lost out.  In every case the winner beat out his more qualified (at least on paper) opponent by coming over better on TV.  People just liked (or at least trusted) the winner more than they liked the other guy.  Over time this had a profound influence on how the political media acted.  In the olden days you had a cadre of political reporters who prided themselves on their expertise.  It might have been policy expertise ("so and so has a good/bad foreign policy because of . . .") or electioneering expertise ("so and so is winning/losing the farm/blue collar/etc. vote because of . . .").  This has been totally replaced by "horse race" coverage ("so and so is up/down in the polls").  And the "because of" part has been dropped as being boring.

The fact that "because of" is no longer part of the coverage has had a perverse effect.  Politicians can say whatever they want.  The question is not whether it is true or not but whether it moves the polls in the right direction or not.  The modern definition of "truth" in a political context is "if it moves the polls in the right direction it is true;  if it moves them in the wrong direction it is false".

Now let me state the obvious.  Politicians have always lied.  The '50s featured a lot of talk about a non-existent "bomber gap".  This was replaced in the '60s by talk of an equally non-existent "missile gap".  I pick these examples because one (bomber gap) was successfully used by Republicans against Democrats while the other (missile gap) was successfully used by Democrats against Republicans.  Politicians on both sides of the aisle could only occasionally get away with an outright lie.  They could get away with lying about these particular issues because in both cases the evidence that would have exposed the lie was highly classified.  In other words, the truth would not, and in this case did not, come out until well after the election.  But situations like this used to be fairly rare.

And that's how the game used to be played.  Mostly politicians would exaggerate or cherry pick the evidence.  Only occasionally would they flat out lie.  They only lied if they were confident they could get away with it.  And these safe situations were a fairly rare occurrence.  Mostly they felt that if they strayed too far or too consistently from the truth they would eventually be caught out and pay the price by losing the next election.  That started to change when it became more and more obvious that the press had completely abandoned any interest in content.  In that environment you could tell almost any lie you wanted to and be pretty sure you would be able to get away with it.

The mission of the political press had changed from knowing what was going on and reporting it to the much narrower mission of knowing who was up and who was down and what the trend was.  Now their responsibility to the truth started and ended with verifying that the quotation was accurate and that the poll numbers were correct.  So who was now responsible for pointing out any lies or exaggerations?  The other side.  But the other side was just another bunch of politicians.  They were susceptible to the "don't believe them because they are just trying to score political points" tactic.  All disagreements quickly devolved into "he said - she said" because there was no longer a credible referee around.

We have seen an increasing number of instances of politicians taking advantage of their newfound freedom from accountability.  Wildly untrue charges are now a dime a dozen.  Still most politicians have felt the need for at least some restraint.  But the Donald is not a politician.  He is a "reality" star on TV who is famous mostly for being famous.  In short he is a celebrity.  He has had a couple of decades to hone his craft.  He has exited (at least temporarily) his old reality TV gig in order to move on to his new gig, being a Presidential Candidate.  He made the switch when he was at the top of his game.  And he is applying the very same rules that worked so well for him for so long to his new gig.  So far that has turned out to be a very smart move.  The cardinal rule of being a celebrity is "always be entertaining".  Truth doesn't enter into the equation.

And a recent change to the traditional rules of the political game has played straight into The Donald's hand.  You used to have to run a long complicated gauntlet to get your party's nomination.  You still do.  The first gauntlet you needed to surmount used to be as to make a big splash in the "early" states.  It still is.  Iowa and New Hampshire have adroitly maneuvered to position themselves as "critical early states".  First comes the Iowa Caucus.  Next comes the New Hampshire Primary.  If you don't have enough success in at least one of those two events you are dead.  (After these two events it is a free for all with South Carolina maneuvering vigorously to maintain its "first of the rest" position.)

Iowa and New Hampshire have convinced everyone that any candidate that does not spend a lot of time in state doing small one-on-one "retail" events is doomed to failure.  They have turned the associated circus into a nice tidy little industry in each state.  And, of course, voters in each state love the extra attention.  It doesn't matter if it is true that you must do well in one or both states to have a chance.  It only matters that candidates and their staff believe it.  And historically everyone has believed it.  It is an article of faith that a successful candidate absolutely must shake hands and kiss babies for months in Iowa, New Hampshire, or both.  So serious candidates "do what you gotta do".  Any candidate that doesn't is branded as "not serious".

It is only possible to do this kind of retail politics in a few small states.  For the rest of us it's seeing the candidates on TV.  And one of the most popular TV shows for this has been the candidate "debates".  (The events rarely feature any actual serious debate.)  Heretofore this didn't change the overall trajectory because you still had to win in Iowa and/or New Hampshire.  A bad debate performance could hurt and a good debate performance could help but sufficient "shoe leather" effort in the early states was critical.  In fact, a good or bad showing in one or both states could balance out a bad or good debate performance.  The Donald has now called this  received wisdom into question and he has gotten a big assist in doing this from Fox TV and the GOP.

The Iowa Caucus is the traditional kick-off event for the official election process.  It typically takes place in February of the election year.  That means February, 2016 this time around.  But there will be several debates before then.  The first one is set for August 6, 2015.  It will be televised on Fox TV and Fox has decided to restrict the number of candidates that will make it on stage to 10.  But there are at least 15 "serious" candidates on the GOP side.  If you are not on stage you may be out before Iowa.

How is Fox deciding who to put on stage?  By averaging "national polls".  All of a sudden spending a lot of time in Iowa or New Hampshire is a bad idea.  Instead you want to raise your profile with the general public so that they will select you an a poll.  You need to spend your time in New York City or Los Angeles because that's where the national media is.  You need to be all over the interview shows.  And not just the Sunday politics shows.  Now you need to be on The Today Show or The View or even the even the late night shows like Kimmel or Fallon.  And the more appearances on the more shows the better.

These shows reach millions of viewers at a time giving them real impact.  In a typical retail stop in an early state you may get in front of a dozen or so people.  That's not going to move a national poll . Any viewer in any part of the country might be polled. And what's the secret of getting on these shows?  Be good for ratings.  Now who has spent literally decades mastering the skills necessary to have a high national profile?  The Donald.  And it shows.  He has been all over the TV machine.  Why?  Because he knows how to get shows a ratings bump that is tied directly to his appearance.  At this point he has more invitations than he has time to accept.

We have already seen The Donald's strategy work to perfection.  Before he made his tightly choreographed announcement in the major media market of New York City he was sitting at one or two percent in the polls.  He wouldn't have made the cut.  I think part of this was that frankly no one thought he would actually run.  The announcement made his candidacy real.  And what did he do next?  It was not spending time in Iowa or New Hampshire.  They are small media markets.

Instead he made and continues to make the rounds of all the national media.  And he made sure to make outrageous statements at every opportunity.  That's what a reality star does.  Would anyone watch "real housewives of wherever" if those ladies didn't regularly do outrageous things?  No!  Does anyone care whether what they say is true?  Of course not!  Any fool knows that's not how reality TV works and The Donald is not a fool.  He just plays one on TV.

There used to be something called "free media".  This was news coverage by the major TV networks.  It is now called "earned media".  How do you earn coverage on earned media?  By being outrageous.  The Donald has gotten more earned media that all his competitors combined.  He deserves the coverage.  He has worked hard for it and performed at the top of his game.

Any producer of a reality TV show knows that you must understand your audience.  You have to provide outrage they want to watch.  They have to be entertained without actually being outraged.  (Fake outrage is just part of the fun.)  The Donald has done his homework here too.  His outrageous statements have been carefully crafted to be exactly what his target audience wants to hear.  The proof that The Donald has done his homework is in his jump in ratings, ah, er, polls.  And his polls are through the roof.  So far The Donald has not put a single foot wrong.

I am not a fan of dishonesty in politics.  I would be a hypocrite it I did not acknowledge that Democrats frequently engage in dishonesty.  But I think that Republicans have raised the bar on dishonesty to a new level, one far higher than Democrats have even aspired to.  What The Donald has done is to blast past the previous exalted mark set by Republicans and put the bar into orbit.

As a result of his superior work I want to finish up this post by enthusiastically endorsing The Donald.  I am one million percent behind Donald J. Trump in his quest for the Republican nomination for the job of President of the United States.  He is a shining beacon illuminating the core values of the modern Republican party.  What more can we ask from a candidate?

Science and Race

Any regular reader of this blog will have figured out by now that I am a big fan of science.  But "race" is a subject that I think Science gets wrong.  And when I say "science gets it wrong" I am not talking about the actual scientific study of the subject or of the results derived therefrom.  Instead, I am talking about how scientists talk about "race" when they are engaging with the public.  The Twiter version of their message is "there is no such thing as race".  I get where they are coming from and why they say it but I think they do themselves, the general business of science, and the specific subject a disservice.  So why do they do it?

First, let me talk about what their scientific justifications for their position.  They usually make a couple of points.  They note that, genetically speaking (and genetics is what underpins the whole discussion) we are 98% the same as Chimpanzees.  That's true but it is also irrelevant.  Then they say that the variation from individual to individual is so great that it swamps "so called" racial differences.  That's also true and also irrelevant.  So while they are saying what they are saying what are they not saying and why are they not saying it?

Let's go right at it.  Does something called "race" exist in any kind of scientific sense?  The answer is yes.  There's a company called 23andMe.  Send them some money, about a hundred bucks.  They will send you a kit.  You use the kit to swab the inside of your cheek.  You send the swab back to them and wait a few weeks.  Back will come ancestry information.  That's code for "race".  23andMe's results are repeatable.  And there are other companies that offer a similar service for a similar price.  If you go through the same routine with them you will get roughly the same answer as the 23andMe one.  What's going on is exactly what the general public has in mind when they think "race" in a science context.  And what's going on with 23andMe is broadly known to the public.  So when some spokesman says "there is no such thing as race" people throw their hands up and say "are you nuts?"  That's not good for scientific credibility.

From a scientific point of view what we have here is a "the signal and the noise" problem.  It is similar to the problem of trying to pick out a single conversation at a noisy cocktail party.  Most of what you hear is not the conversation you are interested in.  You have to filter out the large amount of background "noise" before you can pick out the conversation "signal".  All this "same genes as chimpanzees" and "random variation from person to person" stuff is the noise.  But science is very good at extracting a small signal from a large amount of noise.  It's a problem scientists deal with on a daily basis.  So, from a scientific perspective, the question is "can science pick the 'race' signal out of the 'genetic variation' noise"?  The obvious answer is yes.  23andMe and those other companies do it profitably thousands of times per day.  So can scientists.  How?

Before modern times almost no one traveled more than 25 miles from their birth place during their entire life.  People intermarried and had children with people who lived close to where they did.  Mutations happen.  The population of any one small area is small.  This allows mutations to build up and spread around in this small population over time.  If you could identify the mutations unique to a small community then you could identify descendants of that community by searching for those mutations.    The same is true over larger areas if more time is allowed to pass.  The larger the area the more time will generally be necessary for unique mutations to arise and spread around.  Science (and companies like 23andMe) have had the ability to pick a single mutation out a person's genetic material for some time now.

The 23andMe people have built up a large database of these geographically specific mutations.  They grind all this information down with a lot of computer power.  There are about 3 billion "base pairs" and about 20,000 genes in the genetic material of one person.  So it takes a lot of computer grinding but computers are now cheap.  They concentrate on the unique mutation "signal" and put everything else in the "noise" bucket.  What pops out is a geographical profile of where and to what extent your genetic information comes from.  This is tech talk for your racial profile.  Scientists know this.  They developed all the technology that 23andMe uses.  So why do they pretend that they don't?

The problem is more cultural than anything else.  Why do people want to know a person's race and what do they want to do with it?  In short, they want to be able to jump to unwarranted conclusions.  That's bad.  But what is worse is that they want to use those unwarranted conclusions to advance economic, social, and political goals.  The "black" experience in the U.S. is typical of how this works in the real world.  Let's start with the desired outcome and work backward.

The desired outcome is cheap labor to perform difficult, dangerous, unpleasant tasks.  Working in cotton fields in the heat of summer definitely falls into this category.  You can always find someone to do a job if you are willing to pay enough.  But cotton is a commodity.  You need low production costs to be able to sell it inexpensively at a profit.  Labor is a large component of production costs so cheap labor is critical.  What is cheaper than a slave?  They are subjected to poor working and living conditions and are paid literally nothing.  The whole system is architected to make their labor as cheap as possible.  The slaves know this so they desperately want to escape their situation.

Now if we enslave people who look like us they can escape easily, disguise their identity, and get away with impersonating a free person.  (Making a cotton field escape proof would be expensive and the whole point of slavery is to keep things cheap.)  With the technology available 200 years ago this made a really effective slave system hard to pull off.  But what if instead of focusing on individuals you selected an easily identifiable population group and designated all of them as slaves?  That's what was done with dark skinned people of African descent who were imported into a society run by "whites", people with light skin.  Generally speaking, the rule was "white - free; black - slave).  This was a simple to enforce rule.

There was such a thing as freed black people but it was common for them to be re-enslaved by unscrupulous people.  The obvious physical difference that skin color represented made the system easy and cheap to implement and maintain.  But how do you justify enslaving people based on their skin color?  It turns out that in some situations a light skin color is advantageous and a dark one disadvantageous.  But in other situations the reverse is true.  So the fundamental differentiator, skin color, is not enough by itself.  What do you do?  You jump to unwarranted conclusions, the next step in the chain.

If the population you wish to enslave is of low intelligence, is "lazy and shiftless", is violent and inherently immoral then it is far easier to make the case that "those people deserve to be enslaved".  And the people you need to convince are obviously not part of the group you want to enslave.  So that's what was done.  But from the current scientific perspective the conclusions are completely unwarranted.

Modern science is still mystified by the genetic basis of intelligence.  It is obvious that there is a genetic component to intelligence but science has yet to find it.  Characteristics like laziness are even more problematic.  Here there is not even any kind of consensus on how to identify the congenitally lazy or even if such a thing exists.  We are all lazy sometimes and energetic other times.  I know that if I was enslaved I would quickly become as lazy as I could get away with.  It would not be driven by genetics.  It would simply be the sensible thing to do.  And so it goes for other "moral shortcomings" attributed to the enslaved by the enslavers.

So why is science so reluctant to speak out?  Well, there is an additional problem.  Science's hands are not clean on the subject.  Roughly a hundred years ago there was a "scientific" movement called eugenics.  This was considered good science at the time.  Proponents published learned papers in all the best scientific journals "proving" that black people were of low intelligence, had bad moral character, etc.  "There is scientific justification for according black people an inferior position in society", the argument went.  All of the research has since been discredited.  Scientists try to learn from the mistakes of the past so they are now bending over backward to avoid repeating the "eugenics" mistake.

What's really going on is that a lot of scientists just want to steer clear of the whole area in any kind of public situation.  The science is in an unsettled state, can't tell us much with authority, and in the recent past science screwed up in this area.  So for all those reasons avoiding the subject as best as is possible seems at first to be a good idea.  But I don't think it is.  People take in the Twitter summary of the whole thing and decide since science is obviously wrong about this they are justified in believing it is wrong on other issues (evolution, global warming),  I believe science needs to go where the facts lead.  So where do they lead?

It is important to emphasize that scientific understanding of this area is evolving rapidly.  A little over a decade ago the first complete genome of a human was decoded.  We now have complete genomes for thousands of people and doing a full genetic sequence is getting cheaper at an astonishing pace.  At the time of this first genetic sequence more than 90% of the sequenced DNA was characterized as "junk", DNA that apparently served no purpose at all.  We now know that a lot of that "junk" actually serves useful and even critical purposes.  But we are just at the beginning of figuring out what those purposes are.

For a time people thought that a "gay" gene would be discovered.  There does not seem to be a single "gay" gene.  And scientists thought that many "genetic" diseases would be nailed down to a single "bad" gene.  That idea has also pretty much evaporated.  And so it goes.  The idea that if we can read the genetic sequence out we will know all now looks badly mistaken.  Everything is much more complicated than we used to think and everything is intertwined with everything else in complex and poorly understood ways.  Just as a single example, we now know there is a whole complex mechanism for turning genes on and off.  This means that the mere presence of a certain version of a certain gene is not the end of the story.  Presently we know the mechanism exist but we know very little beyond that.  Science is at just the beginning of understanding area after area after area of what used to be lumped together as genetics.

Fundamentally, what science can tell us about race does not deliver the result people who think race should be important desire.  It most specifically does not deliver a reason to enslave a "race" or even relegate them to a lower social position.  The current scientific "state of the art" on race mostly consists of being able to determine where our ancestors lived.  And even this information often shatters people's preconceived notions of their ancestry.  It is common to find out that we don't have relatives where we thought we did and that we do have relatives where we thought we didn't.  The descendants of Thomas Jefferson have had to wrestle with the fact that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemmings, a slave, for instance.

Still I think it is counterproductive for scientists speaking to the general public to say things like "there is no such thing as race".  The statement "race isn't what you think it is" is of roughly the same length and is far more accurate.

Bob Lee and Reby Boys

This post is motivated by the recent slaughter of nine innocent people in Charleston, South Carolina.  Among the many horrific aspects of this event is the fact that it follows directly out of "southern culture".  This aspect and what "southern culture" stands for is getting an airing in the media, finally.  The more you look at it the worse it gets.  But it has persisted for centuries.  And most specifically it has persisted and grown in the wake of the Civil War.  Well, actually, if you immerse yourself in southern culture you will find that "Civil War" is some kind of evil northern plot.  The proper name for the event is the "War of Northern Aggression".  And so it goes.  As my contribution to pushing back against southern culture I want to directly attack two tropes that are commonly held by its adherents.  They are both closely associated with the Civil War.  Here goes.

Bob Lee is almost always given his full name and frequently accorded his title.  So he becomes General Robert E. Lee, by inference an esteemed figure.  And there is no doubt that he was a great (as in effective) leader of men and a brilliant general.  But does he really deserve his esteem which extends far beyond his military exploits?

Lee claimed to be generally apolitical before the war.  As a senior military officer he spent what one commentator has called his "contemplative years", those between 1831 and 1856, outside the heart of slave territory.  This supposedly contributed to his moderate views.  But he married Mary Custis in 1831.  She was from a wealthy family that owned a lot of slaves.  There was a belief among many that when Mary's father died and Lee took control of the Custis holdings the slaves would be freed.  But, as with many other similar situations, this did not happen.  If Lee harbored anti-slavery beliefs he never spoke or acted on them with sufficient vigor to put him in conflict with his friends or community, for the most part supporters of southern culture.  But the telling decision was the one he took at the start of the war.

Southern culture claims that its adherents are "100% all American patriots".  It frequently denigrates people it doesn't like for not being sufficiently patriotic.  A typical example of this is the criticism that President Obama was somehow disloyal or un-American because he did not wear an American flag lapel pin when he was out in public for the early part of his term in office.  (He quickly decided that this wasn't worth fighting over and has since worn his pin.)  Flags are definitely important to these people.

So these people could be accurately described as "America first" people, right?  Wrong!  When given a choice between putting America first and the state of Virginia first, Lee chose Virginia.  And, in general, southerners loyalty starts with southern culture, then descends to their states and only then descends to cover America.  The flag they care the most about is not the American flag.  It is the Confederate Battle Flag the "stars and bars".  As I write this the American flag is flying at half mast over the capitol of South Carolina while the stars and bars is at full staff.  These people in general and Bob Lee in particular are not "100% all American patriots".  They are perhaps "60% somewhat American and sort of patriots when it suits them".  The only thing they are "all out 100%" about is being southern.  They are the last people we should turn to as judges of who is a true American patriot and who isn't.

The next issue I want to cover is that of bravery.  Southerners are also 100% behind our brave boys in uniform and by "our brave boys" they mean confederate army soldiers.  And, of course, they were the bravest of the brave.  That's their opinion but it is true?  I think not and here's why?

Many people consider the Civil War the first "modern" war.  Now this is definitely one of those things where opinions differ but let's take a look at why this opinion is popularly held.  And, if you don't try to push things too hard, the idea holds up pretty well.  The Civil War saw a lot of innovation introduced that were later broadly adopted.  The biggest of these was a complete overhaul of standard military tactics.  For a long time before the Civil War the best way to fight a big battle was to put your soldiers into colorful matching uniforms, line them up in rows, and have them have at it.  The reason for this was "volley fire".   If your army fired volleys of synchronized fire then it pretty much destroyed any army not employing the same tactics.  The uniforms and lines were necessary to organize and coordinate the firing of volleys.

But that's not how the Civil War was fought.  Why?  The Civil War was the first war fought between armies where the average soldier was equipped with a musket with a rifled barrel.  The rifling made the gun a lot more accurate.  It meant that its effective killing distance was increased by a factor of about three.  Before the Civil War standard tactics called for a set of volleys to be fired.  This was followed up with a charge that finished the other side off.  With unrifled muskets enough charging soldiers could make it across the gap to the other army's line to have a good chance of winning.  But the greater accuracy of rifled muskets meant that the soldiers had to begin charging from much further away.

The now much longer distance the charging soldiers had to cover meant that far more of them could be cut down before they reached the other line.  In effect the standing soldiers had enough time to thin the lines to the point that the charge was ineffective.  Charges no longer worked.  And the best defense was no longer a good offense.  Instead it consisted of hiding behind something like a tree or a fence and firing from there.  In the absence of a handy tree or fence you could go down.  The term "fox hole" dates from this period.

To his credit Lee figured all this out early in the war.  So he tried to arrange things so that his soldiers were "dug in" behind some kind of cover and the Union soldiers had to march across and then charge across an open area.  It took most of the war for the northern generals to figure this out.  And being in a position to use the right tactics made a tremendous difference.  The battle of Gettysburg proves just how important this difference was.

On the Southern side you had Lee at the height of his powers surrounded by his revered general staff, also at the height of their powers.  On the Northern side you had a much inferior general supported by an undistinguished staff.  How inferior was the northern general?  I'm not going to tell you his name because it doesn't matter.  (Look his name up if you care.)  What I will tell you is that he was put in charge of the Northern forces a relatively short time before the battle and fired for incompetence not long after the battle.  So on one side you have the person most people characterize as the best general of the war and on the other side you have a third rater.  So Lee won easily, right?  Even the southern culture people know that Lee lost.  The battle took three days and was a spectacular defeat for the "Army of Northern Virginia".  Oh yes, that's what Lee's army was called.  It was not "The Confederate Army".  So even in this oh so important matter and at this oh so important time southerners couldn't quite get completely behind the idea of a country.

So why did Lee lose at Gettysburg?  Because almost by accident the Northerners held the high ground and were dug in.  This caused the Southerners to have to charge uphill across open territory.  Southern leadership and southern valor were not enough to overcome the disadvantage of a superior northern position even though the northern army was at best mediocrely led.  Lee never made that mistake again.  But northern generals frequently did both before and after Gettysburg.  Grant even did it at least once late in the war.

And what does this have to do with the valor of the common foot soldier?  Their lives were on the line.  That caused them to be acutely aware of what was going on.  It was no secret that the northern armies were frequently poorly led while the southern armies were generally well led.  Soldiers in battle are, of necessity, a fatalistic lot.  "When your time is up it's up".  Still soldiers in both armies were keenly aware that Bob Lee was a better general than the long line of men that Lincoln put in charge of the northern armies before Grant.  So the northern soldiers knew that when they went into battle the battlefield would be tilted, often literally tilted, in favor of the guys on the other side.

But the northern soldiers did their duty in large numbers anyhow all through the war.  It is much easier to be brave when you can have faith that your commanding officers know what they are doing and are not wasting the lives of you and your fellow soldiers by doing something stupid.  That is how things looked for southern soldiers.  Northern soldiers marched into battle over and over knowing that the people in charge had routinely snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  It is far harder to be brave in these circumstances.

When Grant was finally put in charge late in the war he spent lives profligately.  But so had his predecessors.  The difference was that Grant won where his predecessors had lost.  Soldiers know that war involves bloodshed, a lot of it.  It says something about the human condition that soldiers have always known this but they march to war and do their duty anyhow.  But northern soldiers did not begrudge Grant his blood because Grant got results.  And what about southern soldiers, those Reby Boys of my title?  Well, late in the war when Lee started losing a lot of them went home.  The case is clear.  Northern soldiers were a lot braver than their southern counterparts.

Update (added June 24, 2015):

The "confederate flag" has all of a sudden became a subject of intense interest.  As a result I now know a lot more about the subject than I did 24 hours ago.  And it turns out that some of what I wrote above is incorrect.

For instance, the "Stars and Bars" does not refer to what I called the "Confederate Battle Flag".  Instead it refers to the first iteration of the official flag of the Confederate States of America.  That design consisted of a blue box in the upper left corner with a circle of white stars in it.  The initial design featured seven stars.  As additional states joined the confederacy more stars were added.  The final total was 13.  The rest of the flag, in this iteration, remained constant.  It consisted to three equal width horizontal bars.  The top and bottom bars were red and the center bar was white.  This is certainly a design I am not very familiar with.  In fact, I think most people including southerners are unfamiliar with it.

The flag we now most closely associate with the confederacy is based at one remove on what I referred to above as the "Confederate Battle Flag".  But it turns out that is not the whole story either.  There was no "Confederate Battle Flag".  Instead there were separate battle flags for each of the various confederate armies.  The most well known of these flags was the one belonging to the Army of Northern Virginia, Bob Lee's Army.  And Lee's flag featured a design that differs slightly from what we now think of as the "confederate flag".  Lee's flag was a square flag with two blue diagonals that together formed an "X".  On the diagonals were a number of white stars.  The number varied in a manner similar to that of the Stars and Bars.  The rest of the flag was red.

The modern "confederate flag" is identical to another battle flag, that of the Army of Tennessee.  The Tennessee battle flag was identical to the Lee flag except that the outline was changed to a rectangle.  As far as I can tell, neither of these designs ever acquired a nickname along the lines of "stars and bars".  Tennessee's appropriation of the Lee design for its army is indicative of how well known and popular the design was at the time.

But, rather than being adopted wholesale as in the Tennessee case, instead the Lee design was used as a component of a larger design.  For instance, the second version of the Confederate Flag incorporated it in the upper left corner as a replacement for the blue box with the circle of stars.  In this version the rest of the flag was solid white.  The third version of the Confederate flag took the second version as a starting point and added a vertical red bar down the right side of the flag.  The Lee flag was also used during the war as a component of various confederate naval ensign designs.  (These designs, especially the ensign designs, are even more obscure than that of the stars and bars.)  After the war Lee's flag was occasionally used as a component of some state flags, most notably that of Mississippi.

The modern "confederate flag", but actually the battle flag of the army of Tennessee, mostly dates from the '60s and was a reaction to the civil rights movement.  And it should be obvious now, but it bears repeating, the design featured so prominently these days was only the flag of one of the various armies, and not even the most prominent one, that fought on the side of the confederacy in the Civil War.  It was never a symbol of southern culture more broadly nor of the geographic area we think of as "the south".

When I originally wrote this piece I assumed, silly me, that the people who lie so often about so many things were actually telling the truth, or at least something close to the truth, about something they claim to hold near and dear.  I should have known better.  My bad.

Robot cars - an update

I last addressed this subject back in 2011.  Here's the link:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2011/03/robot-cars.html.  In reviewing what I wrote then I must say I did a very good job.  I first covered potential alternatives to the car (the alternatives work less well than many think they will).  Then I addressed engines and fuels (I think gasoline powered hybrids will be the best choice for a long time to come).  If you want to know more about either subject I refer you to my earlier post.  The last subject I covered then was the one mentioned in the title of both that post and this one.  I made some predictions about robot cars then that are looking pretty good now.  In this post I am going expand on what I said about robot cars then and add some new predictions about how things will develop.

Not a lot of time has passed since my previous post.  But cars are now evolving at warp speed compared to the historical norm.  The first car I drove was a 1950 Plymouth.  It was one of the first cars to sport a new and, at the time "cutting edge", feature.  Most cars built even a year earlier required you to stomp on a button on the floor to get the engine to turn over and start.  This car contained a technological advance.  You could make the engine turn over and start by giving the ignition key an extra bit of twist.  The car my dad bought was the cheapest Plymouth on the lot.  That car did have the new feature but it did not sport what were then options including electric turn signals, a clock, or a radio.  But many other cars of that time did come equipped with all three.  So, if you had bought one of those other models it would have driven just like any "stick shift" car made in the next 50 years.

While I was in college in the late '60s I drove a '58 Pontiac.  It had an automatic transmission (and turn signals, a clock and a radio).  It turns out that driving that car was pretty similar to driving any "automatic" produced in the next 50 years too.  But in roughly the last decade cars have started changing quickly.  A couple of years ago I drove a car that literally had a push button.  You push the button to tell the computer that you want to start driving (or that you are done).  That's a really different experience than the old "put the key in the ignition and go through the rest of the rigmarole necessary to get the engine to start" routine.  In fact with many cars now you don't even have to put the key in the ignition at all.  As long as it's in your pocket you are good to go.

And that's not even the current cutting edge.  A friend of mine has a Toyota Prius.  It has the same push button (and key in the pocket) setup but what happens when you push the button is now radically different.  Now he no longer controls what is happening with the engine.  The computer does.  He pushes down on the "gas pedal" but now all that does is tell the computer you want to go faster.  The computer figures out how to make it so.  What's going on?

I recently saw a story about a $9 computer.  The basic package does not include everything.  There's no power supply or keyboard or monitor.  But the same people that sell the $9 computer will sell you an add on that includes all this stuff and it costs $15.  So you can get the whole package for about $25.  Why does that matter?  Because that $9 device includes a CPU, RAM, a solid state disk, and a number of standard ports you can plug stuff into.  It is powerful enough to run real computer programs.  And it costs $9 if you buy them one at a time.  My point is that large amounts of computer power is now really cheap.

That means that car companies can afford to put a powerful computer in your car.  And that computer has access to power and it will be designed to get inputs from things like the gas pedal or various sensors scattered round the car and it will be designed to send outputs to things like controls on the engine or actuators on the transmission or whatever.  So to add a computer to a car costs the car maker $9 or possibly quite a bit less.  And, if you can use the computer to replace something like the old complex machinery that figured out when to shift automatic transmissions you can save the cost of the components you are replacing.  In fact, replacing components with a computer can actually save a lot of money.  The computer has a negative "cost".

The tipping point on all this was reached about 10 years ago.  I currently drive a '99.  It has a limited amount of computer capability.  But the same make and model of car made only five years later has several much more powerful computers, each dedicated to a different task.  That is now just the cheapest way to go for the car companies.  And computers keep getting even cheaper and even more powerful.

I talked about the DARPA challenge that kicked this whole "robot car" thing into high gear in my previous piece.  To pull that off then contestants had to jam many thousands of dollars of expensive computer and sensor equipment into the cars.  It was hard getting everything to just fit and function.  But car companies have gotten better and better at integrating computers into cars.  And the sensors have gotten incredibly small, incredibly cheap, and incredibly frugal in their power consumption.  Why?  Because in many cases what we are talking about are smartphone components.

Smartphones are small and have tiny batteries that don't work very well.  So cell phone components have to be small and have to be very frugal when it comes to power consumption.  They are still relatively expensive.  If you bought an iPhone 6 without most of its cost being hidden in your monthly phone bill it would cost about $600.  That's a far cry from $9.  But you can now get a phone with the capability of an iPhone 1, introduced in 2007, for perhaps $100.  It would look pretty wimpy and pathetic sitting next to an iPhone 6.  But the iPhone 6 costs now what the iPhone 1 cost then.  The big difference is that the new components that are so much more powerful and so much more capable now cost what the iPhone 1 components cost then.  The price of this sort of thing is plummeting at an astounding rate.  And it is going to keep plummeting.

This is reflected in the features you find on new cars today.  The capabilities that were available on perhaps one or two high end cars in 2011 included sophisticated cruise control, blind spot detection, collision avoidance, and collision alert when you are backing up.  All of these features and more are now available on mid-priced cars.  But the "same" features on these new cars work much better now than they did then.  These include the ability for the car to find the lane markers and keep you in your lane and a feature that tries to figure out if you have nodded off behind the wheel.  And, as the late night infomercials have it, "but wait - there's more".  Car makers are rolling out new and improved features like they are in the fashion business.

One thing I pointed out in my previous post was the importance of cars talking to each other.  That looked like a problem then.  But the Federal Government stepped in recently and is now coordinating a project to standardize inter-car communication.  That problem got solved before most people even knew there might be a problem.  The rate at which cars are gaining intelligence is astonishing.  And perhaps most astonishing is that several car makers have announced that they will be selling robot cars by 2020.  That's only five years from now.  Even more astonishing is the fact that it looks like they will hit their target date.

There is always someone willing to try to scare people.  With respect to robot cars the standard line is "what if a robot car goes berserk and kills a bunch of people?"  It could happen.  But look at Google's experience.  I was able to report in 2011 that a Google car had been in an accident.  I can now report that Google cars have been in 11 accidents.  And something surprising, at least to the "kill a bunch of people" crowd has happened.  In all but one of those accidents it was obviously the fault of the other person.  The accident that was not caused by the other driver happened while the car was being driven by a person not the automation.

The most common accident scenario has been where the Google car is stopped at a stop sign or a traffic light and someone rear ends them.  The accidents were not the result of the stop.  The Google car had been stopped for a while when it was hit.  The other driver was just not paying attention.  And all the logs and readouts were able to unambiguously and with great detail and specificity tell the tale of exactly what happened and who was at fault.  The attention of robot cars does not wander.  They do not text while driving.  Or, if they do, they are able to multitask so the quality of their driving does not suffer.  It is very likely that robot cars will make the roads safer, much safer.  Robot cars also do not drive drunk.  By far the most difficult problem the robot car people have had to cope with is other cars being driven by people.

I am sure that when robot cars first become available they will not be for most people.  For one thing they will be expensive.  And a lot of people will be unwilling to trust their lives and those of their friends and loved ones to a robot.  I expect that concern to disappear pretty quickly.  The cost problem will take longer.  I expect the first robot cars that hit the road to be quite sophisticated.  But I think they will follow the iPhone model.  The first iPhone blew everybody away.  Until, that is, the iPhone 2 came out.  Apple has succeeded in making each generation of the iPhone more cool than the previous one.

I expect to see the same thing with robot cars.  With the iPhone Apple saw how people were using them and that suggested improvements.  Also, so many iPhones were sold that the parts manufacturers were able to figure out how to make the same part more cheaply or a better part for the same cost.  So later iPhones had better hardware.  Apple turned that into new features or old features that worked better.

I don't expect robot cars to sell in the numbers iPhones do.  But advances in smart phones will help car makers out as will experience gained as many cars hit the road.  I think robot car 2.0 will be much better than robot car 1.0.  And then 3.0 and 4.0, etc. will all be a big improvement on the previous generation model.  iPhones have been around for less than ten years.  Every time a new model rolls out people ask "how can they make the new model better than the old one"?  So far Apple, and the other smart phone makers, have figured out an answer that generates an incredible volume of sales.  At some point this will stop.  But I have no idea when it will be.  I think it will take longer for robot cars to get to the point where the new models don't not seem like that much of an improvement over the old one.  But I am not going to try to guess how long that will take.  Instead I am going to apply my crystal ball to a other related issues.

As I covered more thoroughly in the previous article there are people that think cars are the root of all evil.  I think like an engineer.  Engineers don't think "cars are evil".  Instead they think "what are the problems with cars?"  Then, if they agree that this or that actually is a problem they go on to ask "what is the best solution?"  If the best or only way to fix the problem is "get rid of cars" then "get rid of cars" becomes the engineer's solution of choice.  But the focus is on solving the problem and not some moral judgment about whether cars are good or bad.  We live in a world where people like to fixate on the moral judgment to the exclusion of trying to find the best solution to the problem.  But instead of doing that I am going to apply the engineer's perspective to a couple of problems associated with cars.  I am going to skip over the "is it a real problem" part because I think both of these are real problems.

The two issues I want to address are pollution and streets.  Let me start with pollution.  Cars turn gasoline into several different nasty things.  One of them used to be smog.  Smog is smoky, smelly, and unhealthy stuff hanging around in the air.  It is unpleasant.  It blocks our ability to see blue sky and fluffy clouds.  It also just smells bad.  So it is an aesthetic disaster.  But it also turns out to be a health disaster.  It does terrible things to your lungs.  Smog in the US is mostly a thing of the past.

Changes to the formulation of gasoline and to how cars work got rid of the problem.  Some places still have a smog problem some of the time but for most of us it is pretty much a thing of the past.  The guts of a car (and the chemistry of gasoline) are now quite different than they used to be but it turned out to be possible to fix cars so that they did not create smog.  China has a terrible smog problem.  And some of this is caused by cars.  But most of it is caused by coal fired power plants.  And modern designs for cars and gasoline would take care of the car part of the problem.  So China can fix its smog problem.  It just has to decide to fix it and then do so.

That's an example of where the solution was not to get rid of cars but to make changes so that the problem went away.  If smog was the whole problem we would be done.  But it isn't.  It was just the most visible and the easiest problem to fix.  The big problem that everyone knows about is carbon dioxide (CO2).  If you have a gas (or diesel) car it is going to make lots of CO2.  There is just no getting around this.  If you switch to Natural Gas as a fuel the amount of CO2 goes down but it is not eliminated.  If you switch to Hydrogen you can eliminate the CO2 problem.  But I indicated in 2011 what the problems with Hydrogen are.  I still think they are insoluble so I don't see Hydrogen ever going anywhere.

The best you can do is to manage the problem to minimize it.  There is plenty of room to make cars much more efficient.  That's why I am a fan of hybrids.  I think you can get the amount of CO2 per mile way down from where it currently is.  A car's basic purpose is to move around.  To make this work you need a way to have a large amount of stored energy move around with the car.  A gas tank full of gas represents an unbelievably large amount of stored energy.  It is so vastly superior in this role to anything currently available that I frankly have trouble imagining an alternative.  But we can do a lot better at getting the most out of what is there.  In almost all cases burning generates CO2.  And lots of the burning we do does not have mobility issues.  So I think there are lots of ways to drastically cut the amount of CO2 produced in these situations where mobility is not involved.

Now I would be delighted if I could justify tossing out the entire preceding paragraph out.  If someone comes up with a decent battery, a device that can store and release a lot of energy at a small cost in terms of volume, weight, and money, then I would be all for all electric cars.  A good battery would make all kinds of approaches to CO2 reduction possible.  That would mean that we could ditch the whole hybrid thing for something much better.  The good news is that between 2011 and now there has been some progress in battery technology.  The bad news is that the amount of progress has been very modest.  Batteries still suck.  And I see nothing currently on the horizon that looks promising in terms of a large improvement in batteries.  We should do what we can to reduce CO2 emissions from cars and other vehicles but we are not going to get it to zero or anywhere near zero.  I wish I had better news on this front but I don't.  The same is not true about the other issue.

I know a couple of people that know a lot about urban planning and that sort of thing.  Both of them do not like how much of a city ends up as pavement (streets and parking).  In actual use streets are very inefficient.  We get in our car and drive somewhere.  On both ends there has to be someplace to park the car.  And we go to several places.  So we don't need two places, on average, to park our car.  We need more like ten.  Now if you drive to the mall today but don't tomorrow the parking place you use today can be used by someone else tomorrow.  But you don't go to two or ten places in your car.  You go to hundreds or thousands.  So, on average, many parking places have to be provided for things to work.  That means vast amounts of land devoted to parking.

Then there are the streets that connect everything together.  First, there has to be a street to wherever you might want to go even if you don't do it very often.  Then there has to be enough capacity so that you can go there when you want.  It doesn't matter if the street is wide open at three in the morning if you want to go there at three in the afternoon.  So in the same way that there needs to be lots of parking spaces for each car there needs to be lots of streets to handle the traffic.  So here too the average utilization is low.  And that bugs the urban planners.  They like alive and green not paved and barren.  And most people agree with them.  It seams reasonable to be unhappy about the amount of land area in a city devoted to streets and parking.  It seems reasonable because it is.

The standard urban planner solution is to replace cars with feet or bicycles or mass transit.  I looked at those options previously too.  So now let me focus on how robot cars can make things better, possibly a lot better.  I am going to start with a simple idea:  If a car can drive itself it can park itself.  Ok, how does this help?  Consider the present situation.  When you are home where's your car.  It's in the garage or on the street.  Why?  Because you don't want to have to hike a long distance to get from your car to your home.  But the need for close in parking goes away if the car can drive itself.  It can be waiting close at hand when you want to go somewhere but it can be somewhere else the rest of the time.  It can also drop you off then go away when you return.  You don't need to have an attached garage or on street parking any more.

As long as the car is reasonably close, say within a mile, it can get to your door in almost no time.  An application on your phone to summon it a minute or so before you need it is not hard to implement.  Your phone, if you have a smartphone, already has much more complex applications running on it now.  So that takes care of the home end.  On street or on premises parking is no longer needed where you live.  And the same kind of approach also works at the other end.  As long as you car can be summoned quickly it does not need to be parked within a few steps of your destination.  Then there's the in between part.

There are expectations about how close you will stick to the car in front of you.  They are based on an average plus a margin.  On average a driver can react to changing circumstances in a certain period of time.  You need to be far enough away so you don't hit something while you are in the process of reacting.  On top of that a margin needs to be built in because this is not the kind of thing where "mostly right" is ok.  Enough margin needs to be built in so that it is extremely unlikely that two vehicles will hit each other.  That means that even the most obnoxious tailgater leaves considerable space.  And the timid may leave a ridiculously large amount of space.

A standard number for the capacity of a highway car lane is 2000 cars per hour.  That translates to a bumper to bumper distance between cars of about 160 feet.  I drive a big beast of a car.  It is almost 20 feet long.  If all the cars on the road are about 20 feet long that means that following each car is 7 car's worth of empty space.  If we could somehow jam cars bumper to bumper the same freeway lane could handle 8 times as much traffic.  With cars driven by people you can't do that.  The situation on city streets is not as bad.  The cars are, on average, much closer together.  But the idea is the same.  And then there are those pesky traffic lights.  I spend a lot of time stopped waiting for traffic lights.  And I can't tell you how much of that time I have spent stopped even though there is no one coming.

Remember the part where cars will soon be talking to each other.  Well how about putting a "car" at each intersection.  It wouldn't actually be a car.  It would instead be the traffic light system.  It could tell my robot car when the light was going to change.  That might help.  But much more is possible.  Most traffic lights are connected to sensors in the road that detect cars.  Pretty much the only thing this information seems to currently be used for is to decide whether or not to cycle the "left only" signal.  Smart traffic lights could also use the information to retime the light cycle on the fly.  This should allow the lights to cycle in a more efficient pattern.

The sensors in the road can also be used to continuously monitor the amount and timing of traffic.  This would allow the signal duration to be dynamically adjusted to allow for increases or decreases in traffic no matter when or why they happen.  Many lights now have a "night" pattern or a "rush hour" pattern.  But these are hard wired in and only infrequently changed.  It is very expensive to gather the data and make the changes so it is rarely done.  And patterns are set for average or expected or typical conditions rather than actual current conditions.

So we can get the traffic lights to work better.  We can have the signal let the cars know when the signal is going to change.  The information can also flow in the other direction.  My car can also tell the signal when it needs the "left turn" cycle activated or that it is going to be making a right turn so there doesn't need to be a "through" cycle if it's only for my car.  That sort of thing effectively increases the capacity of streets.  And, where it makes sense, increasing speed limits also increases capacity.  If the separation between cars doesn't need to be increased then a higher speed limit increases the capacity of the street.  Computers in cars do not become inattentive and they can react very quickly.  So once most cars on the road are robot cars we can substantially increase (double?  triple?) the effective capacity of streets.  This means the same streets can handle a lot more traffic or the same amount of traffic can be handled by a far more modest street system.

And then there is this.  Most people now want a car that is their own.  Part of it has to do with the fact that a car is a statement.  Forty year old men driving a muscle car are making a statement.  But so are twenty-five year old women driving a cute pink car.  The auto industry has come up with pretty much whatever kind of vehicle you need to make whatever kind of statement you want to make.  Then there is the fact that some people haul a lot of stuff around.  They need a car of their own because it needs to have their stuff in it.  And so it goes.  But then there are other people who just don't care.  If they want to make a statement they want to do it some other way.  Or they see a car as basic transportation.  If you can get them to where they want to go they don't care how it is done.  At present most of us find a car to be the most practical option.  But what if that were not true?  What if there were other practical options?

Some people manage to get along without a car.  One trick they employ is to occasionally use a taxi.  If you only need a car once in a while it is cheaper and may be more convenient to cab it.  And we now have Lyft and Uber.  They provide what is essentially a taxi service but it is cheaper and more convenient.  At least that's their story.  But we can go a lot further in this direction in a robot car environment.  What if you don't own the car you summon?  Say some of the cars in that garage we were talking about before are pool cars.  They are available for anyone to use.  If an appropriate car shows up and gets you to where you want to go does it have to be a car your own?  For some people it does but for others that is not a requirement.

Robot cars allows us to take the taxi/uber/lyft model even farther.  Presumably the direct cost per mile would be higher.  But the purchase and maintenance costs would be zero so that actual cost would be lower.  And now the number of cars it takes to make everybody happy drops substantially so the demand for parking drops and the urban planners get to reduce the amount of pavement.  That makes them happy and us happy because all of us like more greenery in out lives.

And lots of people currently buy more car than they routinely need.  I have a big beast.  But most of the time there is only me so it is overkill.  If I could summon a small car when that's all I need but get a big car for those few times that I need one then I will, on average, be in a smaller, more efficient car, than what I now use.  Yet I will have something that in a practical sense works better than what I now have.  This will not work for everyone.  But it will work for a lot of people.

If you are an "I hate cars - period." person none of this will be persuasive.  But if you are in an "I hate cars for the following specific reasons" person or if you are an "I have and use a car because there is really no practical alternative" person then I have shown you a future that looks pretty good.  And it looks like robot cars will arrive sooner than I expected them to.  And that's even better.  I, for one,. can't wait.

Civil Unrest

I know something of this subject based on first hand experience.  I went to college in the late '60s and early '70s.  I caught the tail end of the Civil Rights related unrest and was front and center for the Vietnam War unrest.  Most of this post is going to be pretty serious so let me start with a funny story from the period.

One day things were going hot and heavy.  There was a large crowd gathered at what passed for "speaker's corner" on campus.  There was street that ran along one side of the speaker's corner area.  That day a rickety truck was carefully working its way to who knows where.  Something went wrong and everyone immediately found out what the truck was carrying.  It was bees, zillions of bees.  It was instantaneously and unambiguously established that the student protesters and the bees were quite unhappy with each other.  Needless to say the crowd of students thinned quickly.

With distrust of authority running high at the time the theory quickly gained currency that the bees were some kind of plot by school administration to get back at protesters.  But it eventually turned out that it was just some bee guy who was having some kind of bee problem and had come to consult with a professor on campus.  He had brought the bees along so that the professor could see what the problem was.  The one that lost out the most was the bee guy.  In the melee he lost most of his bees.  For the rest of us it ended up being a tee hee during a period when tee hees were hard to come by.

I have talked elsewhere about what I learned by studying the "Vietnam" problem in the years after that wound down.  See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html for details.  But the same is true about Civil Unrest.  I have also outlined just how much was going on in one specific year from this period (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/08/1968.html) in another post.  I got to observe a lot of Civil Unrest first hand from the inside at that point in my life.  Afterwards I spent some time thinking about the subject.  Here is the result of that thinking.

Our society suffers from a serious case of systemic amnesia.  We have a hard time remembering what happened last week, let alone last year, or roughly 50 years ago.  The amount of civil unrest that characterized that period is much greater than anything that is now happening or has happened recently.  Not one but several bombs were detonated on the campus of the school I attended.  For a while it seemed like there were bombs going off not just on my campus but all over the place.  The amount of death and destruction associated with the Watts Riots or the MLK riots dwarfs any current or recent event now in the US.  I write this in what may turn out to be the middle of events taking place in Baltimore Maryland.  And I write this just the day after what has turned out to be an annual event in my town, the May Day Riot.

When I now watch these events I believe I am doing so with an educated eye.  As such it is disappointing to watch people who should know better display their ignorance.  The first thing they get wrong is some variation on "this has never happened before".  It may have never happened before in the professional life of the speaker.  More likely, it has happened before, even during that often short span of time, but it makes for a better story to pretend otherwise.   That is an obvious error.  Let me move on to a more subtitle one, leadership.

As I noted above there was an area that ended up functioning like a speaker's corner.  People with portable bull horns (a recent invention at the time) would get up and speechify.  The theory is that a "great leader" will get up and by the power or his logic, or more likely the power of his oratorical gifts, will  sway the crowd.  If he is truly a great leader he will soon turn the crowd into putty in his hands and be able to get them to follow him wherever he chooses to lead.  That's how it is supposed to work.

But that is not what I saw in action back in the day.  Speaker after speaker would get up and take his, and occasionally her, shot.  Sometimes it would take and sometimes it wouldn't.  It took me a long time to figure out what the rules were.  The rules were "if you say what the crowd wants to hear they are with you, otherwise they are not".  Certainly a more articulate speaker has a better shot.  And certainly a speaker with more oratorical gifts stands a better chance.  But a bad speaker saying the right things has a far better chance than the best speaker saying wrong things.

The subject, for the most part was the war in Vietnam.  Students were mostly against it for good reasons and bad.  So that wasn't the issue.  The issue was what to do.  There were a whole range of options from "do nothing" to "burn everything down".  The trick was to occupy the spot on that scale that was closest to where the listeners were.  Mostly this crowd was non-violent.  Few supported the campus bombings, which were carefully planned and executed to result in no death or injury.  That was too extreme on one end.  And no one was at the other extreme, in the "do nothing" camp.  Mostly what the crowd wanted was to have their beliefs voiced effectively.

So they wanted to demonstrate and they wanted to demonstrate at a specific level of intensity.  If you could think up a gimmick that would succeed in getting the word out, that would make you a hero.    Shutting part of campus down was ok.  Shutting everything down was too far.  Although one day after something particularly horrible had happened someone came up with the idea of walking down the I-5 freeway.  And so it came to be that the first time a freeway was shut down anywhere as part of a protest was in Seattle.  The establishment claimed at the time that this was the most horrible thing that could possibly have happened.  Now what happened that day would be seen as a normal commute.  Traffic around here has gotten that much worse since then.  To summarize, speakers advocating something that was too hot or cold didn't get anywhere with the crowd.  Speakers who hit the "Goldilocks" spot (just right) got somewhere.

What all this taught me was that "leadership" consists to a great extent of figuring out where the parade is going and getting to the front of it.  Now it may be that the parade wants to go where you want it to go.  Great!  But it will not go where it does not want to go.  Does that mean there is no role for leadership?  No!  It is just not what it is usually made out to be.

Most of us are pretty inarticulate most of the time.  A leader can take ideas that we have a hard time articulating and say them in a way that we wished we could.  A leader can also take a fuzzy, muddy concept and clarify it.  It is also true that organization is necessary to turn incoherent desire into coherent and hopefully effective action.  If there is an organization an individual can join his individual efforts can join with those of many others.  This can result in a more powerful effort that is more likely to succeed.  Finally, although a leader can't get the parade to go in an entirely different direction, the parade can be nudged into a slightly different path.  A leader can, in effect, get the parade to march down the left side of the street, the right side of the street, or the center of the street, as long as it is the right street.

Let me demonstrate this with some examples from back then and from now.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was widely acknowledged by friends and enemies alike as an inspired and inspiring orator.  He was also a great leader.  But a careful examination of his record will show a number of misses to go with the hits.  When he was assassinated in 1968 it was during a period when people had almost completely written him off.  Why?  Because he was saying unpopular things and not saying popular things.  He was still organizing and leading the same kinds of campaigns as before.  His rhetorical skills were still superior.  But it wasn't working.  Why?

He had come out against the Vietnam War.  You would think that would be a good thing.  But people within the Civil Right's movement saw it as a distraction.  And people outside the Civil Rights movement like President Johnson who had been his supporters saw this as King abandoning his friends.  So it actually turned out to be very unpopular with the people who would normally make up the membership of King's parade.  And the country had moved on.  The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 had been passed and enacted into law.  The immediate need to do civil rights right now was widely seen as no longer so immediate.  In short people were not interested in his message.so they tuned him out.  He was still a great orator and a great leader but people did not want to be led in the direction he wanted to lead them.

In the modern era President Obama has the same problem.  In my opinion he is a great leader and I believe history will eventually agree with me.  People may disagree with my opinion.  But, as with King, the general consensus of friends and enemies alike is that Obama is a great orator.  In 2008 when he was running for president that was enough.  But a concerted effort to undermine and block him has been successful.  Enemies hate him and despise his policies.  Friends are disappointed that he hasn't done more.  He can argue that he got as much as there was to get but that's not the kind of rhetoric that stirs the soul.  Now let's consider a noted opponent of each of these people.

In King's case Richard Nixon immediately comes to mind.  Nixon was not ever considered a great speaker.  He also is no one's idea of a leadership role model.  But he found a group of people and figured out what they wanted to hear and then told them that.  If he needed a great turn of phrase there was always a speech writer around somewhere.  That turned out to be enough.  He used this technique to get into congress and eventually into the White House.  And Nixon demonstrates something else about leadership.  You don't need to get everyone to join your parade.  You just need to get enough.

Nixon is also instructive in another way.  He used the "find the parade and get in front of it" strategy in the late '40s and early '50s to become a successful politician and nationally prominent.  He also used it to get elected President in 1968 and reelected in 1972.  But he also ran for President in 1960 and governor of California in 1962.  He lost both races after using the "I'm more experienced and competent than the other guy" argument.

That brings us to President Obama's most effective opponent, Senator Mitch McConnell.  Here again we have someone with no gift for rhetoric, soaring or otherwise.  He can make a modest claim to leadership ability as he has been in charge of the Republican contingent in the US Senate since the end of 2006.  But Mitch McConnell is not the name that comes to anyone's lips, even those of his most ardent supporters, when the subject is "great leaders".  Nevertheless, he has been quite successful.

He has been able to block many popular Obama initiatives.  This has redounded to his benefit by causing the afore mentioned disappointment among Obama supporters.  And he has orchestrated a successful effort to bring Senate Republicans from the minority to the majority.  McConnell's achievements are mostly of the negative kind.  But he has proved to be brilliant in his ability to get to the front of the parade he has chosen to lead.  He has brought voters to the Republican cause and that has cemented his position at the front of the parade of his fellow Republican Senators.

Now let me move on to the most noteworthy feature of Civil Unrest, in a word rioting.  Unfortunately, (more on this below) what makes an example of Civil Unrest noteworthy is the amount of mass destruction.  In the '60s this often involved actual death.  There were 34 deaths associated with the Watts riots in '68.  In another notable event from the period National Guardsmen killed 4 college students at Kent State University in 1970.  (Since they were white kids this event probably had a bigger impact in the end than Watts and that's sad.)  On the "and destruction" front one source lists the number of buildings damaged or destroyed in the Watts riots at roughly a thousand.  There were lots of other instances of Civil Unrest in the period.  At least one happened in the vary same Baltimore that is now back in the news.  Compared to the level of death and destruction then, recent events have been small bore.

The inciting incident in both the Ferguson and Baltimore examples was a death.  But the civil unrest that followed has so far been free of additional fatalities.  And while destruction is preferable to death I am against it for a number of reasons.  I was against it too back in the day.  So I also asked myself how it could be avoided in the future.  And, as recent events have more than amply demonstrated, there is no public solution on display.  Which leads me to my next topic, the news media.

There has been an unofficial education process going on stretching back to the civil rights activities of the '50s.  In the '50s the only technology available for procuring news "video" was the movie camera.  In ideal circumstances (an event at a fixed location where the schedule was known well in advance) a stand was set up where the bigger news organizations could put their 16mm movie cameras.  Elsewhere I am sure that 8mm "home" equipment was put to use.  But it didn't work very well.  Film was expensive.  You had to get it back to the studio so it could be developed and edited.  Then very short snippets would find there way into "newsreel" previews at the movies or onto 15 minute news broadcasts on TV.  People who became involved in "man on the street" situation did not know what was going on and just played it straight.

This was true through most of the '60s as TV stations got networked together and video tape replaced film.  TV news also went to a half hour of national news and 30-60 minutes of local news.  "Man in the street" encounters were still rare enough so that most of the public didn't know how to "game" them.  But technology marched on.  News gathering made its way into movie and TV plots and people became much more knowledgeable about the process and much more skilled at gaming the system.

Now everyone knows how the dance goes.  And average people on the street know what is expected of them when the TV cameras show up.  There are even lots of people who know how to "Jerry Springer".  Springer's long running show is about people behaving badly.  It is widely believed that most people on the show now are just making up the most outrageous behavior they can think of in an effort to get their 15 minutes of fame.  They know that everyone is in on the gag and their friends and family won't take what they see on the show seriously.

It would be nice if people only "Jerry Springer"-ed on the Springer show but they don't.  Things have gotten to the point where people are coming up to news people and critiquing them, often quite knowledgably, for covering Springer-type behavior and ignoring what is really going on .  So the expertise of the average viewer has changed a lot.  And the fact that this level of expertise is now common means that it is common knowledge that a good way to get the news media to show up is to burn something down.

This aspect of the situation has changed a lot.  Other aspects have not changed nearly as much.  In thinking about civil unrest and how to avoid it I came to the conclusion that the news media has a very important role.  "If it bleeds it leads" (a variation  on Springer-think) is now no longer a secret, as I indicated above.  So this leads to more "burn it down" going on, right?  Well, actually not.  The part of society that is outside the news business has concluded that the disadvantages of a "burn it down" strategy outweigh the advantages.  So, in spite of how well it works if your objective is to get on TV, there is remarkably little "burn it down" going on.  But this is in spite of how the news business operates not because of it.  I think that's bad.

There is a way for the news business to make a positive contribution.  Unfortunately it requires them to move away from the current "if it bleeds it leads" story selection model. They don't have to move completely away.  But they need to make different news decisions having to do with demonstrations.  Frankly, I can't figure out how the news business decides what level of coverage to give a demonstration.  If violence breaks out and there is video, of course it is covered.  But sometimes non-violent demonstrations are covered and sometimes they aren't.  They sometimes cover small demonstrations and frequently don't cover big ones. There doesn't seem to be a consistent rule.

The events in Baltimore exactly illustrate the problem.  There was little or no news coverage of large non-violent demonstrations surrounding earlier events similar to the Gray event.  There was little or no news coverage of the large non-violent demonstrations after the death of Freddie Gray but before the rioting took place.  That results in people feeling that they are voiceless and powerless.  At some point someone thinks "time for a fire".  If there is no alternative then it should not be surprising if thought eventually morphs into action.

So far the Baltimore situation has involved exactly one day of rioting.  This was not due to anything the authorities did nor was it a result of anything the news media did.  In fact, one of the features of post riot news coverage has been the count down clock.  A 10 PM curfew has been imposed.  Many news stations have run clocks counting down to 10 PM.  This is an open invitation for riots to break out on the stroke of zero.  It is hard to think of a more obvious invitation to mischief than that.  Anyone interested in mischief is guaranteed a large audience that have been put on to the edge of their seats.  There is some modest justification for this particular behavior.  There is no justification for their pre-riot behavior.

And its not just Baltimore.  In the run up to the 2003 Iraq war there were large anti-war demonstrations in my home town of Seattle and in other places.  There was almost no news coverage of this.  The result is that people like Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who carried water for the Bush Administration in the run up to the war, can claim with a straight face in her new book that there was no one making a case against going to war.

I believe it is incumbent on the news media to cover a demonstration, especially if it is peaceful, if you can get a large number of people to turn out.  It's news.  It also gives voice to the frustrated.  Often people are willing to settle for a fair hearing.  If they get one and they lose the argument they may be unhappy but they don't feel powerless .  So a part of the coverage needs to include an airing of their position.

Often public opinion is one sided because people are only exposed to one side of an issue.  Now it may be that there is only one sensible side of an issue.  I think most of the arguments advanced by the pro-gun people are nuts.  But if they can get a big enough group of people to show up somewhere then that should get them some coverage.  I think eventually people figure out who makes sense and who doesn't.

What gets covered and what doesn't depends to some extent on the prejudices of news organizations.  But it depends even more strongly on business reality.  "If it bleeds it leads" gets ratings.  Higher ratings gets more ad revenue which keeps the business in business.  Covering non-violent protests will not help their ratings.  But it is the business they are in.  I believe that the lack of investment in non-sexy news had led to a deterioration in the amount of trust and respect accorded news organizations by the public.  And I believe that has been bad for business in the long run.

Pretty much all of the news business is struggling financially.  It is another example of the kind of short term thinking that pervades so much of what passed for "smart" business these days.  It made a number of business operations a lot of money for a long time (as measured by Wall Street) but it is not working very well at the moment.  Unfortunately, in the same way it took trust in the news business a long time to erode, it will take a long time to build it back.

There is another issue where recent events resonates with past events.  In Baltimore the neighborhood CVS Pharmacy was burned out.  Pretty much everyone, with the possible exception of a few of the people actually responsible, thought this was a bad idea.  The community lobbied hard to get the store located where it was.  And it provided a service that many in the community found necessary and important.  It is not clear if CVS will rebuild.  Certainly, on one would blame them if they chose not to.  And that echoes what took place in the '60s.  Most of the burning and looting happened in the local neighborhood.  It has been noted that parts of what used to be the business district of Baltimore has still not been rebuilt since it was burned down in the '60s.  It seems counterproductive to burn out your own community.  So why is that what seems to inevitably get burned?

The answer is pretty obvious.  These people don't have a lot of resources.  They burn what they can get to.  But it is a bad idea long term.  And nearly immediately after the one night of rioting in Baltimore it was obvious that most residents in the affected areas were well aware of this.  Movements broke out immediately to clean things up and make sure the rioting was not able to start up again.

It is too soon to tell if it is for real or not but it has been widely reported that the Crips, Bloods, and other gangs have declared a truce and gone into "law and order" mode.  They are stepping in and playing the role of the police in the current absence of the real police.  The gangs claim this is not some kind of protection racket.  A contributing factor to this surprising development is the past absence, according to many citizens, of effective policing by the real police.  Things like this have a way of falling apart as time passes.  So some time will have to pass before we will know if this development is what it appears to be or not.

Finally, I want to cover one more issue.  And to do so I want to circle back to something I opened this piece with.  And that's the annual May Day riot in Seattle.  It came off this year in pretty much the same way it has in the last few years.  It is important to know that while it is now an annual event it actually has a known starting point.

In 1999 the World Trade Organization (WTO) held a big conference in Seattle.  Steam had been building up for some time among a number of activist groups to try to make some noise and the WTO meeting seemed the perfect opportunity.  Everybody knew this.  So both sides geared up for a lot of activity.  Lots of "anti" groups geared up to descend on the town with the intention of staging big protests.  The police and various government agencies geared up to be ready to handle the protests. 

Now Seattle is not like Baltimore.  It's pretty liberal and at that time the Police Chief was very liberal.  He tried to reach out and do some co-ordination.  He wanted to give the protesters plenty of opportunity to vent but he wanted to keep things peaceful and under control.  The protest organizers, even the pacifist ones were having none of this.

Things got completely out of control.  Most of the protesters wanted to confine their protesting to marching around, perhaps blocking streets and so forth but they were not into violence and property destruction.  But then there were the anarchists.  They were into some serious mayhem.  Their plan was to blend in with the larger peaceful groups.  Then they would peal off, quickly wreck some havoc, then filter back into the larger protests confident they could blend in.  They had masks and other simple disguises to facilitate this plan.  The anarchist plan worked to perfection.  Everything else was a complete mess.

The police were underprepared for the activities of the anarchists and the non-anarchist protesters were un-cooperative.  The police over-reacted and reacted incompetently.  The result was more chaos than the anarchists could have possibly predicted.  If you are an anarchist, chaos is your objective.  The rest of the protesters saw whatever message they were trying to get out drowned in coverage of tear gas and broken glass.  The cops looked like incompetent thugs.  The anarchists won and everyone else lost.

I did not understand the reluctance of the nonviolent protest organizers to work with the police.  Part of it might initially have stemmed from the fact that the police wanted them to stick to a schedule, stay in designated areas, and not block streets.  In short, they were supposed to be good little protesters.  And I think there was a significant amount of mistrust on the part of the protesters when it came to the police.  But I believe that the Mayor and the Police Chief sincerely wanted to give the protesters a fair shake.  (I'm guessing the protest organizers would disagree with this sentiment.)  But after the event, I don't understand the total lack of cooperation.

The anarchists made the protesters look bad. The cops may have come off looking worse but that didn't help the protesters or their causes. They still looked pretty bad when the tear gas cleared.  I thought there would have been at least some co-operation by the protesters to try to identify and round up the worst of the bad actors.  It would have given the protesters a way to make up for the damage done by the anarchists.  But there was nothing.  That was a mistake because average people conflated the anarchists with the peaceful protesters.  And that has done the protesters and what they care about a lot of harm since.

And so things stayed for nearly fifteen years.  People on both sides have dug in.  There seems to be a great deal to support the idea that the Baltimore Police are part of the problem and not part of the solution.  Certainly, there are still factions within the Seattle Police that share that sentiment.  Seattle is one of several cities under a "consent decree" with the Justice Department over bad behavior.  More than a hundred cops joined a law suit challenging implementation of the decree.

But I see some motion in the wake of Ferguson.  The early days of Ferguson were bungled (polite characterization) badly.  But after a few days the cops backed off and things went much more smoothly.  And there was no talk of permits and staying on the sidewalk and that sort of thing.  Baltimore moved to a more sensible approach much more quickly than Ferguson did.  People need space to vent.  If you give them that space things will become much less uncivil and return to civility more quickly.

But that still leaves us with the actual bad actors.  Not a few teenagers who go too far but the anarchists who wrecked so much havoc at the WTO conference in Seattle in '99 and who burned the buildings and cars in Baltimore that night.  Seattle, then or now, would have been a good place to start.  As I indicated, this May Day thing has settled into a routine.  The peaceful protesters show up in large numbers during the day.  They protest peacefully during the day.  Then evening comes.  The number of protesters goes down but an anarchistic component now makes its presence felt.  And there is an incident.  There always seems to be an incident.  I suppose you can say the police come off looking bad.  But how does that advance the cause of any of the groups that protest peacefully?  And the anarchists seem to get away with it so there is no reason for them to stop showing up.  So every year we go through the same dance.  That's not progress.  There is only the thinnest of excuses for the peaceful protesters to fail to help.  Frankly, the excuse is too thin.  Their behavior needs to change.

I understand why the community finds Baltimore police so untrustworthy.  The situation is much worse in Baltimore than it is in Seattle.  Given that it is hard to argue that Baltimore is the place to start.  But peaceful protesters need to understand that they get tarred with the same brush as the violent ones.  It is obvious that most of the people who live in the most affected neighborhoods of Baltimore understand that.  So maybe Baltimore will find a way to lead where Seattle so far hasn't.

All that is necessary is to upload some video to YouTube then make an anonymous tip to the authorities.  Maybe that has already happened.  If it has then the news media doesn't know it or they have decided not to report it.  Every day it become more and more obvious how little privacy is left in situations where there is a lot of interest.  This is a situation where that very lack of privacy can have a beneficial impact.