Repeating Collective Failure, Long After the Great War

wwi-italian-frontAlmost a century after the start of World War I, Italy is still recovering bodies of those killed in action high in the Alps. Starting in the 1990s, the Earth’s mounting temperatures melted enough ice to free some of those long-frozen souls.

In recent weeks, Britons got to read in their newspapers a war of words between Education Secretary Michael Gove and actor Sir Tony Robinson, over the latter’s TV representation of the first world war as a colossal, tragic mistake.

Sadly, that was indeed a fairly accurate summary of a war that began almost accidentally and rapidly involved every European country that had nothing to do with it.

A local assassination, excessive hubris, illogical military plans and a general unwillingness to stop a war’s wheels from grinding into action let things get out of control faster than any diplomats could rein in it – even if they wanted to.

Soon, officers were ordering wave after wave of young men into barbed-wire-tangled moonscapes, as machine guns raked across their ranks and shells exploded around them. The metric for victory became a few feet of meaningless dirt.

It is a cliché to note that the “War to End All Wars” was certainly far from the last conflict, but it seems to have become accepted wisdom that no countries could be so foolish a century later as to initiate a cascade of mistakes on that scale.

The irony, of course, is that the recently recovered Austrian and Italian bodies from the mountain front were likely only disgorged due to the melting of glaciers and once-permanent snow packs as a result of man-made global warming. Will unrestrained climate change be 2014’s tragic answer to the epic, collective failure of 1914?

The phenomenon has until recently been, in effect, a slow-motion collision of the different economic plans of nations everywhere. Our diplomats had more warning this time – but again had no support from their home governments to negotiate a solution that might head off the impact.

Every vanishing glacier that once served millions with drinking water now serves only as a catalyst for more squabbling over limited resources. Every new factory in one nation must be answered with a factory in its competitor. There is no partial mobilization of resources when economic primacy is at stake.

The world’s marginal places – the societies literally living on the margin between existence and extinction from one harvest to the next – are finding themselves drier and more prone to catastrophe than ever. They are an ecological and human powder keg that rivals last century’s Balkans.

The rapidity of South Sudan’s recent collapse – or that of nearby Central African Republic – or northern Mali in 2012 – even the wheat-driven Arab Spring – should be seen as a bigger warning of what is yet to come than any anarchist bomb or gunshot.

This warming is upon us and we are its primary cause. We can ignore the signs until an avoidable global tragedy is fully unleashed once more or we can commit our diplomats, strategists and resources to a collaborative counter-effort that will benefit all mankind.

This summer, as Europe swelters through commemorations of the Great War, we should heed the heavy cost of 1914’s chain of errors or past will again be present.

 
This essay originally appeared in The Globalist.

Virginia forges ahead on settling East Asia dispute

I’m still not sure what or who brought it up in the first place, but, having apparently solved all other pressing policy matters in the state, Virginia’s elected officials have in recent years begun debating whether or not public school textbooks in the state should refer to the body of water between Japan and the Korean Peninsula as the “Sea of Japan” or the “East Sea” or both.

Below is the CIA World Factbook map of the area, which represents the official label of the United States government and military:
japan-map

The South Korean government believes the name “Sea of Japan” is an offensive remnant of Japanese imperialism, including the period in which they brutally occupied the Korean peninsula (thus holding the territory on both sides of the sea). They want people to call it “East Sea” (their northern counterparts say “East Sea of Korea” but no one listens to them), though they are willing to compromise and call it both.

And for some reason, a lot of state officials in Virginia seem quite persuaded that this South Korean view is the right position. This is happening, despite, as far as I can tell, it having nothing to do with anything, from Virginia’s standpoint.

So Virginia would be going against the view of the U.S. government (rather inexplicably) and against the recently renewed directives of the International Hydrographic Organization, the official international body that decides what to name bodies of water — though, to be fair, the latter was originally set when Korea was occupied and could not challenge it.

Not only have their been multiple bills proposed on the issue over the past few years, but after a single-issue pressure group was formed in early 2013, the candidates for governor last year had to address the issue on the campaign trail. Here’s an example of the coverage this got in Korean media:

“The body of water known, alternately, as the East Sea or the Sea of Japan, should be properly labeled with both names,” McAuliffe told reporters after a meeting with the Voice of Korean Americans (VoKA). VoKA was launched in January to promote the use of “the East Sea.”

[…]
McAuliffe’s Republican rival, Ken Cuccinelli, also sent a letter to the VoKA last month.

“I give my full support to the use of the dual name of the East Sea/Sea of Japan in Virginia’s school test books,” said the attorney general of the state. “I understand the concerns of our Korean American community and the importance of this issue.”

 

Yes, that’s right, both candidates took the time to endorse a position (the same one, even!) in this issue, which has no substantive impact on anything in Virginia.

With McAuliffe now in office — though it would not, I guess, have made any difference on this particular issue — the very-non-Korean legislators are forging ahead on their proposed law for using both names in the textbooks. This in turn has brought upset Japanese government lobbyists down from Washington D.C. to Richmond to advocate against the change (without much success so far).

Here’s a legislative update from South Korean-based Arirang TV:

To my mind, Virginia’s obsession with this “issue” defies virtually every “law” of American political science.

It doesn’t affect voters, there’s probably not a lot to be gained from it, and it wouldn’t seem like something either voters or legislators would care about — yet somehow they keep bringing it up in session and on the campaign trail.

Where will it end? Is it just a weirdly minute way to stick it to the United States government and assert Tenth Amendment rights? Interestingly, the naval base in Virginia would, of course, still be using the U.S. military’s labeling, even as schoolchildren learned a different labeling.

In any case, I don’t really have an opinion on this issue one way or the other. I just find the fixation in Virginia a bit intriguing and odd.

North Carolina: Go rich or go anywhere else

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory’s campaign to drive out the poor seems to be continuing full speed ahead. In addition to cutting and phasing out the Earned Income Tax Credit, Think Progress observes that,

…low-income North Carolinians will be paying higher taxes in order to pay for a tax cut for the richest people in the state. Republicans moved from a two-tiered, progressive income tax system to a flat tax rate of 5.8 percent. A person who earns a million dollars per year will get a roughly $10,000 tax cut thanks to that move, but the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution will see their taxes rise. That means that four out of five taxpayers in the state were going to pay more next year even before the EITC repeal.

The combined effects of those tax changes give poor North Carolinians some incentive to move out of the state, a population shift Gov. Pat McCrory (R) hopes to encourage.

 
It’s a flat-tax miracle, y’all!

Just last June, the state became the first in the nation to provide zero unemployment benefits. When the Federal government shut down in October, North Carolina immediately suspended WIC vouchers — literally taking food from the mouths of babes — as every other state used emergency/contingency funds.

This is all in line with Gov. McCrory’s views that North Carolina is too generous to low-income and unemployed people and that those undesirables must be just absolutely flocking to the state’s inner cities from the Dickensian hellscape that he apparently believes is the rest of America right now. That view in turn is just the tip of the McCrory/NC Republican iceberg of destruction, which has included trying to vaporize abortion rights and making it very difficult for some people to vote.

His deeply regressive policy agenda, shared by Republican state legislators in the majority there, has been called by The New York Times, “The Decline of North Carolina” and by me “North Carolina: Not Checking Itself, Before Wrecking Itself, Since 2010.”

Oddly, the former seemingly-moderate Charlotte mayor, seems to be extremely (and oddly publicly) thin-skinned for a high-profile politician and has not been taking the criticism well at all, as explored in a prominent column in the Charlotte Observer this past December:

…my interview with him last week and a breakfast with him a couple weeks earlier make clear he hasn’t changed a bit in one respect: This is a man obsessed with his image and how he’s portrayed. It’s clear he doesn’t go a day without being deeply frustrated by what he sees as unfair attacks on his good name.

My hour-and-40-minute one-on-one with the governor began with him complaining about an editorial cartoon and ended with a complaint about how Art Pope, one of his chief advisers, is depicted. In between, McCrory repeatedly sprinkled asides and bromides about how the media are out to get him and his administration. When I sat next to him at a recent breakfast, he tugged on my sleeve every couple of minutes, leaned over and murmured his displeasure with this cartoon or that editorial or a news story from six months ago.

[…]
Most of McCrory’s troubles stem, in his mind, not from his support of policies that a majority of North Carolinians disagree with but from a media that, through bias or incompetency, just can’t understand his greatness.

 

Huzzah. That’s leadership you can depend on.

Egypt’s Sisi selflessly offers to be leader forever

fake-time-magazine-egypt-200In the least convincing denial yet that he is building a cult of personality and permanent personal dictatorship, Egypt’s General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi has told voters there that they should vote for his new constitution in this week’s referendum if they want him to run for president:

“If I run, then it must be at the request of the people and with a mandate from my army,” General Sisi said at a military seminar, according to the website of the state newspaper, Al Ahram. “I can’t turn my back on Egypt.”

 

Sisi added that it would be embarrassing for him if they didn’t vote for it, and you don’t want to disappoint the Dear Father.

“Don’t embarrass me in front of the world,” he said, “not me personally but the military, because in the military we are as united as one man’s heart, and we adhere to democracy.” He noted that the new charter authorizes the military to “protect the will of the people” and he vowed, “We will protect it in any circumstances.”

 

Fortunately for Sisi, campaigning against the proposed constitution is not allowed. Seems like a pretty fair way to check on public opinion before you run for something, right? And just to be sure, the state propaganda engines are grinding away toward victory:

The state news media and Egyptian private television networks, all supportive of the military takeover, are effusive in their endorsements of the new charter and contain scarcely a word of criticism. A group of Egyptian movie stars has recorded a television commercial singing a song in praise of the new charter, ending with a call for a thousand yeses to the new Constitution. And the military itself has produced a television advertisement in which a group of children sing their own endorsement to a martial theme.

“It’s to be or not to be,” the children sing, warning listeners that they will be judged by God for their vote and urging them not to “leave my country for destruction.”

 

So, to recap: If you vote against this, you’ll embarrass the national armed forces and its leader and then God will smite you. This seems compelling.

Feds have questions about NJ tourism ads

More trouble for Christie in New Jersey. CNN via Daily Kos:

In the new probe, federal auditors will examine New Jersey’s use of $25 million in Sandy relief funds for a marketing campaign to promote tourism at the Jersey Shore after Sandy decimated the state’s coastline in late 2012, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone told CNN. […]

Pallone wrote that he was concerned about the bidding process for the firm awarded the marketing plan; the winning firm is charging the state about $2 million more than the next lowest bidder. The winning $4.7 million bid featured Christie and his family in the advertisements while the losing $2.5 million proposal did not feature the Christies.

 
I saw those ads a lot while I was in Delaware (unsurprisingly) but it never occurred to me that they were funded with Federal relief aid, let alone through a sketchy contract awards process. This is the kind of waste that makes Gulf Coast and inland Republicans suddenly look righteous instead of monstrous for trying to block Federal disaster relief to New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy. (They’re still monsters, of course. They just look less so.)

Anyway, with these scandals coming out into the open, it’s increasingly clear to the public why Romney passed on Christie as a running mate between the final two picks. In the words of Double Down, “The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record.”

Giuliani recalls scandal that never happened

Rudy Giuliani (who is still a thing?) was on TV today trying to compare Chris Christie’s bridge scandal to “the IRS scandal.” You may remember this as the firestorm whipped up by the House Republicans on one of their many Oversight Committee witch-hunts, led by Darrel Issa, which asserted that the IRS was targeting conservative political groups unfairly for heightened scrutiny. Giuliani feels that Christie could have not known about the bridge closures by his senior aides, like how President Obama didn’t know what the IRS was up to.

Did someone forget to tell Rudy that it turned out that the supposed IRS “scandal” was made up? Like, not even partially a thing that ever actually happened? Because, you know, the rest of us got that point cleared up quite a while back, last June. As I wrote then:

The so-called IRS scandal just fell apart completely as documents surfaced showing they were also scrutinizing applications for left/liberal/progressive code words, not just tea party code words. In other words, they were doing their jobs, not being partisan.

So why did it take so long for IRS documents showing targeting of progressives to show up after those showing tea party targeting? Oh, no reason, except that House Republicans specifically asked the IRS to audit ONLY its records on tea party groups. So NBD, they just 100% manufactured a fake scandal from thin air.

 
The IRS doing its job, and applying that equally to both conservative and liberal scofflaws, is not a scandal. The Port Authority closing part of a major bridge to punish a political opponent of the Governor of New Jersey is.

Will “smarter” cars start snitching on us?

After a Ford exec in a panel talk raised a (supposedly) hypothetical scenario whereby the company could collect live driving data like speed and relative location from embedded GPS and other services linked back to headquarters by satellite, and noted that it would include illegal/dangerous driving behaviors, Eugene Volokh of TVC started thinking through the legal implications of such a world. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

Ford could technically gather this information, and could use it to prevent injuries. For instance, if GPS data shows that someone is speeding — or the car’s internal data shows that the driver is speeding, or driving in a way suggestive of drunk driving or extreme sleepiness, and the data can then be communicated to some central location — then Ford could notify the police, so the dangerous driver can be stopped. And the possibility of such reports could deter the dangerous driving in the first place.

Ford, then, is putting extremely dangerous devices on the road. It’s clearly foreseeable that those devices will be misused (since they often are misused). Car accidents cause tens of thousands of deaths and many more injuries each year. And Ford has a means of making those dangerous devices that it distributes less dangerous; yet it’s not using them.

Sounds like a lawsuit, no? Manufacturer liability for designs that unreasonably facilitate foreseeable misuse is well-established. And the fact that the misuse may stem from negligence (or even intentional wrongdoing) on the user’s part doesn’t necessarily block liability, so long as the user misconduct is foreseeable. I should note that I’m not wild about these aspects of our tort law system, and think they should likely be trimmed back in various ways; but there is certainly ample legal doctrine out there — whether one likes it or not — potentially supporting liability in such a situation.

 

The full piece is pretty long and gears gradually toward the technical side, for legal professionals, as it progresses, but the opening sections are for a more general audience. It’s certainly thought-provoking — the idea that companies might be able to use increasingly computerized and data-rich vehicles to monitor driving behavior and report it to the police (or to insurers, or… who knows where it ends).

Might they even make the data signals go two ways so they could control someone’s vehicle to slow them if they’re speeding out of control (or aid the police in controlling it, to stop a high-speed chase for example)? After all, some of these cars already have automated lane-finders and swerve-correctors as well as numerous other safety features. But those are locally-run by the onboard systems. Does the company have an obligation to control or report its vehicles when they’re being used dangerously or illegally? If they don’t, will they be sued? Interesting (and troubling) questions from a brave new world…