Monday, April 30, 2007

George Tenet

National Review has a compelling editorial that pretty much dismantles George Tenet's new posture regarding the Iraq war intelligence.

He's now claiming that his infamous "slam dunk" quote referred not to the intelligence itself, but to the public presentation of it. That's his defense? That he was uncertain of the intelligence, but told the president he was damn certain it could be sold to the public? This is supposed to make him look better?

NR is right to highlight this sentence from his book:

“Intelligence professionals did not try to tell policy makers what they wanted to hear, nor did the policy makers lean on us to influence outcomes.”

If that is the case, then we're back where we started, and where we'll be for the foreseeable future, grappling with two big problems:

1) The need to act with prudence and courage despite lacking perfect knowledge of security threats, which in all likelihood will often not meet the old standard of "imminent danger," like troops massing on our border. We'll most likely encounter less obvious dangers posed by non-state actors with access to WMD (including weapons not yet invented) that piggyback on the same globalized travel, communications, and financial systems that are spreading prosperity around the world. I believe George Bush has acted with prudence and courage in the wake of 9/11, including the invasion of Iraq. But even the greatest statesmen make big mistakes -- sometimes big mistakes -- and even their best decisions still have to be executed with the cooperation and support of his subordinates working together, doing the best they can. Some of these people will make mistakes also. Let's identify and fix those errors when we can -- but let us not fall back into paralysis.

2) From time to time, some of the Commander in Chief's subordinates, rather than doing their best to carry out national policy, will instead choose to engage in petty turf battles or even outright attempts to undermine the policy. Since we're dealing with human nature, this syndrome is as predictable as it is lamentable. But it seems to me that in situations described above, this kind of bad-faith behaviour can be more dangerous than ever, because there will always be good-faith disagreements within intelligence and defense circles. Presidents and other government and military executives have to make prudential decisions based on sometimes imperfect and/or conflicting information, and if someone is deliberately concealing, inflating, or falsifying something in the information stream, their ability to skew the decisions might be greatly magnified.

My great fear, of course, is that the intelligence failure re: Iraq WMD will lead to paralysis in future administrations. If this paralysis is combined with Vietnam Syndrome II, i.e., the nasty hangover we'll get if we accept defeat in Iraq, better fasten your seat belts -- we're in for a bumpy ride.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Tolkien, Gay Dwarves, and Same Sex Cybermarriage

Unless you play a lot of online games, reading this Salon article on the issue of same-sex marriage in roleplaying games may be a bit a journey through the looking glass. The makers of an online "Lord of the Rings" game currently in beta have generated controversy by removing the ability to have your character marry another character of the same sex. In fact, they ended up "pulling the marriage feature altogether."

Here are a couple of key graphs:


Largely due to the uniquely libertarian culture of game design, games are ahead
of the real world in terms of acceptance of same-sex marriage -- the first game
reported to have allowed same-sex marriage debuted in 1998, two years before
Vermont recognized civil unions and six years before Massachusetts became the
first state to allow same-sex marriage. Today, the discussion of same-sex
marriage in games redraws the battle lines over the issue, making it not a fight
over marriage but an issue of the philosophy of video games themselves.

[...]

Rodney Walker, a spokesman for Rockstar [makers of "Grand Theft Auto" and "Bully"], says the Rockstar team thinks of their games not like films, with static storylines, but as worlds that allow players to make their own choices, and Rockstar tries to shut down as few of those choices as possible. "If you're planning to take a vacation to California, you don't say to yourself, 'Where am I not going?'" Walker says. "When people talk about what's allowed in a video game, it's not about permission, it's about experience ... The thing that's so exciting about video games, which is why we think the medium is so popular right now, is because ... you can have an actual individual experience."

[...]

"Players should be able to do whatever they want within their own game, and it's not our business to stop them," Rod Humble, head of the Sims Studio, says, explaining Electronic Arts' decision. "If you have two regular plastic dolls, you wouldn't expect someone to come along and tell you what positions you could and couldn't put them in. That's generally our philosophy."
Maybe. Except that Mattel, the makers of Barbie, has twice unsuccessfully sued to stop the use of their doll by "artists" who photographed Barbie in various, uh, un-Barbie-like situations.

But here's what I find really scary:

The difference for "The Lord of the Rings Online," ... is that for Turbine [the
design company] the idea was all about keeping Middle-earth, the world in which
the story takes place, authentic. The team at Turbine is serious about staying
true to the source material. Several Turbine employees can speak Elvish, Tolkien
scholars have been hired as consultants, and Nik was even asked to do research
on Middle-earth plants and minerals so that clothing colors in the game could
correspond to available dyes. When fans complained on the message board about an
erroneous squirrel color, Turbine promptly corrected the mistake. Turbine had
released a screen shot of a forest scene featuring a gray squirrel, but Tolkien
once wrote in a letter thathe hated gray squirrels.
Just ponder that phrase: "fans complained on the message board about an erroneous squirrel color".

Friday, April 27, 2007

Sheryl Crow and Mr. Whipple

You heard it here first: Sheryl Crow will do a commercial for Charmin before long (a la Dan Quayle's potato chip spot).

She's now claiming her proposed "one square per visit" policy was a joke.

AP: "Immigration-related Cases Swamp Courts "

4/26 AP story:

Immigration-related cases swamp courts

Immigration-related felony cases are swamping federal courts along the
Southwest border, forcing judges to handle hundreds more cases than their peers
elsewhere. Judges in the five, mostly rural judicial districts on the border
carry the heaviest felony caseloads in the nation. Each judge in New Mexico,
which ranked first, handled an average of 397 felony cases last year, compared
with the national average of 84.

Federal judges in those five districts — Southern and Western Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona and Southern California — handled one-third of all the felonies
prosecuted in the nation's 94 federal judicial districts in 2005, according to
federal court statistics.

While Congress has increased the number of border patrol officers, the pace
of the law enforcement has eclipsed the resources for the court system. Judges
say they are stretched to the limit with cases involving drug trafficking or
illegal immigrants who have also committed serious crimes. Judges say they
need help.

"The need is really dire. You cannot keep increasing the number of
Border Patrol agents but not increasing the number of judges," said Chief Judge
John M. Roll of the District of Arizona.

[...]

During a push to crack down on illegal immigration last fall, Customs and
Border Protection floated a plan for New Mexico that would have suspended the
practice of sending home hundreds of illegal immigrants caught near the border
with Mexico. Instead, these people would be sent to court. The idea, called
"Operation Streamline," was to make it clear that people caught illegally in the
U.S. would be prosecuted. Then New Mexico's federal judges reminded the Border
Patrol that they lacked the resources to handle the hundreds of new defendants
who would stream into the court system every day. "We said, 'Do you realize that
the second week into this we're going to run out of (jail) space?'" Martha
Vazquez, chief judge for the District of New Mexico, recalled telling Border
Patrol chief David Aguilar. "We were obviously alarmed because where would we
put our bank robbers? Our rapists? Those who violate probation?" she said.

[...]

It is estimated more than 1 million people sneak across the
southwestern U.S. border and illegally enter the country every year. In Arizona,
the busiest entry point for illegal immigration, state officials believe almost
4,000 people attempted to enter every day in 2006.

[...]

The Border Patrol has almost 2,800 more agents than the 9,821 it had in
September of 2001. An additional 6,000 National Guard troops have provided
logistical support to the Border Patrol since last May. Congress has made
available more than $1.2 billion for reinforcements, including fences, vehicle
barriers, cameras and other security equipment. Homeland Security officials say
the increased security is working. In Yuma, Bush said that the number of people
apprehended for illegally crossing the southern border into the U.S. has
declined by nearly 30 percent this year. Court officials, however, say they are
in crisis mode trying to deal with all the defendants.

I sure would like to hear more about enforcement at the employer end. It seems clear to me that all the fences and border agents in the world won't be enough if we don't focus more on the demand side of the equation.