SECDEF Gates lays down the law to NATO
It's nice to see US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates using the fact that he's soon due to retire to good advantage. In wide-ranging comments on NATO today, Gates threw down the gauntlet, and made clear that an "alliance" that, in practice, has really meant "reliance" on US power is not a formula for a sustainable long-term mutual-security arrangement.
"The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense," he said.
My personal take: Gates' comments are spot-on, not only on the surface of it --the American public isn't going to tolerate being "stepped forward" by virtue of our allies' stepping backward forever-- but also in light of the "multi-lateral" world that every politician and policymaker claims to want.
The bottom line is that the realpolitik Golden Rule applies, that being that if you have one country spending the bulk of the gold, you can't cry when that country also wants to make the rules.
Napoleon on Trees (An allegory for high-speed rail)
A brief snippet of conversation on my Twitter stream caught my attention today.
The subject was high-speed rail, and the tweeter (twitterer?) in question was of the opinion that spending hundreds of millions upgrading a rail corridor between Chicago and Milwauke wasn't worth the investment, when the train actually took eight minutes longer than the same trip by car.
It brought to mind an old story about Napoleon. As the story goes, one time, as the Grande Armee marched out of France on one of Napoleon's invasions, the Emperor asked his engineers why there were no trees on the roads to shade the marching troops, and how long it would take to put them there.
The engineers looked at one another, and one finally said, "Emperor, it will take twenty years for those trees to grow!"
Napoleon immediately replied: "Exactly. That's why we must begin at once!"
By the same token, looking at high-speed rail with an eye towards the present cost/benefit calculus is an error in judgment. Like it or not, the oil supplies are drying up, and we don't want to be caught unprepared with 19th century rail infrastructure when that happens.
Where are the phantom jobs?
Great article here discussing how, in the 00's, there should have been 15 million more jobs created than actually were, even after overlooking the exact business cycles that occurred.
This we do know: The U.S. economy created fewer and fewer jobs as the 2000s wore on. Turnover in the job market slowed as workers clung to the positions they held. Job destruction spiked in each of the decade’s two recessions. In contrast to the pattern of past recessions, when many employers recalled laid-off workers after growth picked up again, this time very few of those jobs came back.
Yeah. Real effective border fence we got, there.
That'll learn 'em.
Oh, wait: I'm talking about the government. So, nah, it won't learn 'em at all, we'll just hear uneducated turkeys whipped into hysteria by the media talking about how now we need parapets every hundred yards....and dogs.....and hedgehogs to stop vehicles....and minefields....with moats!...and armadillos with lasers attached to their skulls....and so on....and the government will furiously tunnel its head through the sand and back up into its own rectum inventing token gestures to masquerade as "solutions" to the problem.
A Brief History of whitehouse.gov redesigns
During a brief foray into Wikipedia today, I found myself deposited on a site operated by the National Archives, that preserved the whitehouse.gov website as it existed during the transfer of power between George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
It got me to thinking: viewing the evolving capabilities, style conventions, and sensibilities of the website of this most visible of American institutions might provide insights for communicators of any stripe, whether they be marketers, writers, or political operators/organizations such as the White House is.
Failing that, it's still an interesting walk through 256-color gifs, table layouts, the dawn of Javascript, and the birth of powerful content management systems.
Since the Clinton-era website was not preserved by the National Archives, I had to turn to Archive.org, "The Internet Wayback Machine", in order to see the real evolution, as well as the evolving internet face of the subsequent Bush Administration.
Here are some screenshots documenting that evolution. You can click on the screenshots to pull up an embiggened slideshow view.
Colbert nails it: Privacy, Surveillance & the nexus between Corporations and Government
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Word - Spyvate Sector | ||||
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The Cult of Bernanke Bashing
I subscribe to several financial newsletters, and I got one today that linked to a post that made my blood boil a bit, wherein the author seizes on Time Magazine's having named Ben Bernanke as "Man of the Year" as evidence that "American culture rewards bad behavior".
It seems we cannot learn the actual lessons taught by the ongoing economic meltdown. Instead, the money men seem determined to sort the causes of this mess into neat ideological categories, prepackaged to divert blame from the originating causes, and onto their favorite bugaboo "lib'rul Democrat" boogeymen.
Somehow, their narrative goes, loosening credit to poor families on the part of FannieMae and FreddieMac single-handedly caused the Great Recession. Deregulating the financial and insurance industries, somehow, did NOT have anything to do with this. Somehow, the creation of a $600 TRILLION derivatives market --a market entirely consisting of imaginary products backed only in the loosest of senses by tangible goods-- didn't cause this mess, when that market happens to represent TEN TIMES the GDP of the ENTIRE WORLD.
The convincing math behind a bigger House (of Representatives)
FiveThirtyEight has an interesting piece up that was inspired by a suit recently filed contesting the legality of the present system of allocating Congressional representation in the House.
The suit roughly involves a concept in a "lost amendment" to the Constitution that would've capped the size of Congressional districts at just 30,000 people. While that would be absurd now --it'd leave us with a 30 million person House-- the overall thinking behind it reveals some surprising inequalities in the present representation of the "several states" in the House.
The most populous district in America right now, according to the latest Census data, is Nevada’s 3rd District, where 960,000 people are represented in the House by just one member. All of Montana’s 958,000 people likewise have just one vote in the House. By contrast, 523,000 in Wyoming get the same voting power, as do the 527,000 in one of Rhode Island’s two districts and the 531,000 in the other.
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