Benghazi Is The Symptom, Not The Problem.

This whole Benghazi kerfluffle only underscores what we already knew about this administration’s foreign policy capabilities: decent on the day to day stuff, absolutely awful in emerging scenarios. 

I’ve been beating this drum since the Honduras debacle wherein Manuel Zelaya Chavez was deposed by a native coalition (including the Honduran supreme court and most of his own party) to prevent him from wiping his ass with that country’s constitution and we supported the left-wing autocrat, reversing decades of sound policy in the region and emboldening the rest of the Chavez circle.

The point is that the administration isn’t doing anything illegal or intentionally irresponsible. They’re just gun shy and lack a coherent vision of how to shape the world.

For every step forward the administration makes with trade partners or established powers, they lose more ground mishandling the unpredictable and chaotic events of daily life outside of the developed world. What the administration needs is a set of triggers and plans that go into action as soon as certain conditions are met. To build such a set of scenarios, they also need a strategic vision. Without these, blunders will continue to happen.

How I Think This All Went Down (Boston Bombings Edition)

Here’s some educated speculation on the events of the last week:

Sometime in 2011 or 2012, Tamerlan gets radicalized online, hatches and implements groundwork for plot. Has influence over dumb nineteen-year-old brother Dzhokhar, gets him to come along for the ride because he needs backup. Both execute a fairly well planned attack on Boston Marathon, but their bombs don’t have intended effect of clearing the whole street. They go to ground until the news media puts their pictures out on the wire. 

At this point they panic and go on a poorly planned spree, with Tamerlan looking for a “glorious martyrdom” and Dzhokhar presumably looking to get the hell out. Tamerlan gets his wish, though he probably takes fewer cops with him than he would have liked, and Dzhokhar goes to ground again, probably in somebody’s garage. He’s found in the next day or two because nineteen-year-olds aren’t great at being all covert, and after initial interrogation we have a better picture of their motives. I’m guessing motive consists of some poorly cobbled together mosaic of “the infidels are impure and must be cleansed” and “the American’s didn’t intervene when the Russians were flattening Grozny, and this is payback”.

In any case, I doubt these guys are logistically connected to a wider Salafi terror network, though they may have been inspired by Salafi propaganda. If you’re trying to expand the Ummah and beat back the supposed tide of American imperialism, you make a bigger splash than these guys did. I’m guessing that in the coming days, one or more of the international AQ affiliates will claim responsibility, but that’s only because they just learned that these guys were Muslims when everybody else did on cable news. Chances are they were as much in the dark as we were for the last couple days.

Where do we go from here? For starters, recognize what we did right. The immediate aftermath of bombing was handled beautifully by Boston’s emergency services. The ratio of deaths to injuries proves this. The authorities also did a great job of drumming media attention to identify and track down these guys. This week will be remembered as one of the most participatory investigations in law enforcement history, and possibly the start of a new era of civilian surveillance.

We screwed up in a couple important areas, primarily relating to news coverage. At this point it should be obvious that if you’re looking for current and relevant news, you’re doing it on Twitter and Reddit, not on CNN or FoxNews. The astounding failure of traditional news organizations to keep up with the wave of information coming at them and their even more shocking failure to factcheck key stories before they go to air or print were underscored brutally this week.

At this point our best option is to keep calm and carry on. Soft-target attacks by the militant and the angry are simply a cost of doing business in a global marketplace. We need to minimize the cost while realizing that one can never have perfect security without hampering productive activity. The law of large numbers dictates that something will always slip through. How we deal with it is the real test.

Public radio can be badass.

(Source: wnycradiolab)

Profile Pictures, Slacktivism, and Ego - John Lohrstorfer’s Take

My good friend John Lohrstorfer agreed to let me republish this gem of his, an eloquent and humorous critique of the profile picture idiocy that goes on every damn time there’s a controversial issue on the mind of the American body politic. Enjoy:

An Open Letter:

Dear Facebook Allstars and Mega Twitterati,
So you Solved a world wide moral crises, whats next?

Anyone remember Kony 2012? How like tons of people making pithy statuses and posting pictures totally solved genocide and brought peace to Africa. Good work Peeps, taught that guy a lesson He’ll never forget!

Now we get to slowly watch Equality pictures (or protests) coming down, replaced by “super cute” sepia Instagrams of you and your BFFLs slowly grinding out the memory of that minute of Social Activist Stardom you got SUCH A HUGE RUSH out of just the other day. 

You remember, when you like, took such a valiant social stand with your self congratulatory display of Compassion, Righteous Piety, Moral Outrage (for or Against), and the wispy undertone of it all pleading “PAY ATTENTION TO ME”

That is the reality of where we are today. The process of determining if two Human Beings (hold for the Irony) “get” to be considered Human beings of equal merit before the Law is going to be slow, boring, and full of political ho humming, and ultimately not give one second of thought to all of your wit and web 2.0 charm.

So where does that leave anyone actually impacted by any decision made? Well thankfully they have all of the likes on your pictures! Which made you feel “super involved with social justice” or like “totally strong in my faith, bro”. 

I’m sure those likes will be such a comfort to all of the families facing decades of conflict and division because they can’t just get a divorce with custody settlements like 50% of everyone else in America who’s succeeded so well in marriage, or jointly file taxes, or maybe even *gasp* share a dental plan! Its really kind of hard to worked up when you realize how boring and, well “un-gay” the stuff most Gay people do is. How are you supposed to break 1,500 “likes” with that?

But don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, in no time flat there will certainly be a new cause to get worked up about… Maybe radioactive baby formula, or banning unattractive greeters in stores, or someone famous tweeting a pic of their junk, and you will be right back in the fray!

So fire up Facebook, spell check the mini bio on the blog you work 10 hours a day at fellating your own ego on, maybe add something fresh to your twitter handle, and relax knowing you really made a difference today, and more importantly; everyone was watching.

-JL

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

— Abraham Lincoln

(Source: mordreds)

A Constitutional Morass

I’ve felt this way for years, but I finally feel comfortable saying it: The Constitution of the United States has been over-litigated and over-legislated to the point of complete uselessness. I don’t blame the Supreme Court for what it did today, because their predecessors laid that groundwork from the mid-1930’s. They just let the decision stand as did so many courts before them. The US Constitution and sound neoliberal economic policy are at this point incompatible. Legislation like this leads us closer and closer to the morass that India found itself in during the 1960’s: overregulated, underproductive, and unequipped for human flourishing. In the end it doesn’t really matter whether this law was Constitutional or not. What matters is that our political and legal framework allowed for a remarkably illiberal policy to go from conception to implementation. The era of limited government is over.

Facebook IPO and Tech Overvaluing

The economy being what it is, it’s fairly disconcerting to see a firm like Facebook have such a lackluster IPO. On Friday I tweeted that FB’s IPO was likely to signal this decade’s first major failure of tech and web companies to gain “real-world” traction despite large investments from various big players. I hate to say this, but web-based firms are notoriously difficult to monetize on the scale that Zuckerberg et al. seem to be shooting for, and I don’t think they’ll be able to pull it off, especially given the added attention their business practices will receive from a very scrupulous open market. We’ll see how this develops, but I’m decidedly bearish.

mklemos:

I want at least a dozen of these bad-boys. 

A Charleston-rolled Llanos Dos Palmas Dominican cigar. Will review tomorrow if I get the time.

The Shot Heard Round Nowhere

At the moment, 2012 Mitt Romney is losing to 2008 John McCain and only beating 2008 Mitt Romney by 4%. If he doesn’t break 45% by the end of the night, this is no major victory.

I’m about to test drive this Arturo Fuente Gran Reserva.

Looks like the Newt camp is finally falling into the narrative that I predicted would be the most effective going into the middle of the season, contrasting the boldness of Gingrich’s policy ideals to the fairly anemic ones offered by the Romney camp. Negative, in a sense, but truthful, and that’s what counts.

The Hawkeye Caucii Postgame Analysis

Well that was fun to watch.

Despite his 8 vote deficit in the final tally, Rick Santorum won last night’s contest in Iowa. Had Mitt not campaigned as hard as he did in Iowa, this would simply be another case of social conservatives battling it out while the real action got going in New Hampshire, and Mitt’s showing would be stellar. Unfortunately for the Romney camp, they legitimized the caucuses with Mitt’s attention and a massive amount of super-PAC money, and I think they’ll pay the price for that move over the next few news cycles, not by feeding the perception of failure, but by feeding the perception of anemia that has plagued the campaign to this point.

The other winner last night was Jon Huntsman, whose decision to stay out of the Iowa mudfest was probably the best strategic choice of his campaign to date. It’s now clear that Huntsman was the smart one here, and he’ll reap the benefits of keeping himself clean up to this point. Look to Huntsman as the credible challenger to Romney in next week’s New Hampshire contest.

Dumping 3 million dollars in ads to trash Gingrich, the guy who wasn’t even the actual threat, makes Iowa a phyrric victory at best for Mitt. Romney now has to lean hard on New Hampshire to make sure there are no surprises at all (can you say Jon Huntsman?), which gives everybody else the chance to tool around South Carolina, and build enough momentum to carry on and be a real rival to Romney. 

I’d be remiss not to mention Ron Paul’s contribution to last night’s madness. We now know that his fabled youth turnout machine is a paper tiger, and that his support came largely from the same petulant fringe activists that always show up to these things. A third place finish in Iowa now relegates Paul to gadfly status, which is where he should be. Eventually we’ll see the 10% of Republicans who are in his camp leave the GOP for good, and the party will be better off for it.

Newt remains ahead in the national RCP average, and within the margin against Mitt in the Gallup tracker, so I think he’s the guy to pull of a few crucial victories as South Carolina and Florida approach. I guess we’ll see how the bones fall over the next few weeks.

Iowa Predictions

For the record, here’s how I think the bones will fall: 

Santorum wins by 2%, followed closely by Romney and Paul. Gingrich takes 4th place, not by much. The complicating factor here is the proportion of new caucusgoers that may go for Paul. If new and young voter turnout is big enough, Paul could edge out Romney. We have a good general idea of where likely voters fall, but Paul has a very untested base of support that hasn’t been subjected to many of the traditional metrics yet. 

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned a lot is the fact that this will ultimately come down to delegates, regardless of who wins the horserace. I expect a lot of the media coverage the coming weeks to focus on how this actually plays out in terms of awarding delegates come time for the national convention.