The Walter Duranty Report

Value Meal or Last Meal: Jay Leno and the Death Penalty

2010-06-10T09:11:00.007-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- I never thought that this blog would get dragged into the insipid mire of America's Late Night Wars, but Jay Leno has forced my hand.

While the various programs may jockey for ratings, in terms of quality, the winner is so obvious that it pains me that this is even a conversation in America. Jay Leno is a mean-spirited hack. All the hosts, from Grand Master Letterman, to my beloved Ferguson, to oft-forgotten Kimmel, go after the low-hanging fruit of celebrity scandal, but Leno poaches exclusively in this preserve. Watch his monologue, and you will find that almost without exception, every single so-called joke is a vicious personal attack.

Now, this blog was not created to rush to the defense of the likes of Lindsay Lohan (she does cocaine! Ha!) and Jon Gosselin (he's sort of fat and balding! Double Ha, Jay!), but a recent segment on The Tonight Show did go after some defenseless people in a misguided stab at humor: America's death row inmates.

Jay unveiled a bit this season (he calls it "one of my new favorites"), "Value Meal or Last Meal," in which he offers up a menu of items, and then invites the audience to guess whether this is a prisoner's last request or a combo dinner option from a chain restaurant. The two times I have seen the bit, the offerings have indeed been revolting concoctions from Applebee's and Chili's, not death row fare. To me, this indicates that Leno is happy make light of the desperate situations of men and women who are facing certain death at the hands of the state, but he is too cowardly to openly mock them, instead turning his sights at the last moment onto fast food restaurants. The meals are usually enormous and enormously unhealthy, and the crowd seems to believe that the big reveal will be that this is a last meal, not a value meal. This whole segment plays on the notion that death row inmates are overweight simpletons who choose to spend their last moments stuffing their faces with fried food. It degrades their deaths and trivializes a monstrous practice. As for the innocent victims of the executed, all I will say is that you do not need to demean one life to celebrate another, and Jay Leno is not championing victims' rights with this bit.

Now, if Leno wants some really funny material, one of the most hilarious last meals of all time must have been that of Rickey Ray Rector. Rector, executed in 1992 by the state of Arkansas, asked for steak, fried chicken with gravy, cherry Kool-Aid and a slice of pecan pie. Nothing about that meal seems outwardly funny – he didn't order grotesque amounts of fried foods, as Leno finds so hilarious, nor did he order anything bizarre or exotic. No, the gut-busting part is his dessert – you see, Rector was so severely mentally handicapped that he set aside his piece of pie to save for later, believing that as soon as this whole ordeal was over, he would be back in cell where he could enjoy his dessert in peace. That right there is comedy gold, Jay.

There are other options that would fit Jay's sensibilities nicely. He could make a joke about the fact that inmates in the federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana have to place their orders for their last meal at least seven days prior to their execution date – "That federal bureaucracy is such a nightmare!" Or how about the fact that many states mandate in their execution protocols that prisoners eat their last meal at least several hours before the death penalty is administered. This is largely to maintain the atmosphere that a pseudo-medical procedure is being carried out, much like you are not supposed to eat the day before major surgery. Jay could riff on this with a zinger like, "Hey, I'm going to die anyway, I don't care if I throw up a little bit on my shirt!"

Finally, Leno has got to do this segment about Edward Earl Johnson, a 26-year-old man executed by Mississippi in 1987 for the murder of a sheriff, a crime of which many believe he was innocent. His final two weeks of life, including his last meal, were documented in the film 14 Days in May. He ate his last meal surrounded by friends and family in the Parchman Prison Farm. Leno could use this moment to really run with his family restaurant/death chamber dichotomy – "Is this guy in prison or at a Bennigan's?!"

If you can't stomach a second more than is absolutely necessary of Jay Leno, fast forward the clip below to the 6:00 mark to see the segment from the May 28 episode of The Tonight Show.

Should Jay Leno decide to use any of this Grade-A material I have written for him, I would expect an invitation to The Tonight Show, where I plan to behave like this when he ruins it with his horrid delivery.

Russia Today Thinks British Bobbies Are Violent Stormtroopers

2010-02-24T16:09:00.006-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- A few people have recently pointed out to me that Kremlin-owned cable channel and propaganda mouthpiece Russia Today (full disclosure: I briefly worked at Russia Today) has released a series of controversial advertisements promoting it's supposedly contrarian coverage.

These ads have appeared in airports in the UK, but airport operators in the United States rejected them. A compromise was struck, and Russia Today was allowed to use ads the simply bore the phrase "Politically Incorrect" – I'm not sure if this is some sort of pun, or if it's in reference to the censored ads, which the American audience have never seen. Either way, the revised ad somehow makes less sense than original. The ads superimpose seemingly opposite images over one another – the most controversial of these ads depicted US President Barack Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asks, "Who poses the greater nuclear threat?" The rest of the ads can be seen here.

The Ahmadinejad/Obama advertisement is ridiculous (especially considering that Obama has articulated a sincere desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons); the AK-47/camera is interesting, if trite; and the insurgent/soldier is compelling, if wholly biased and politically opportunistic.

Perhaps the most interesting of this series of ads is the last one (above), depicting a policeman and some sort of tattooed hooligan or activist; it asks, "Who is more dangerous?" It is a valid question – protesters, both peaceful and not-so-peaceful, are routinely suppressed with overwhelming and disproportionate force all over the world. Russian law enforcement is one of the worst offenders in this regard, as the government frequently resorts to violence and arrests to silence critics of the regime. However, this advertisement clearly depicts a British police officer. British policing is not without its problems, but for the Russian government to depict a British officer as a baton-wielding skull-cracker is the height of absurdity. Who's more dangerous? Neither – the answer is these guys:

Unfortunately, censoring these ads may have been the best thing for Russia Today. These propaganda images lay bear the obvious biases of the network; the scrubbed ad just positions it as an "alternative" new source. The network is part of Russia's soft power offensive. The Kremlin has tried to sell the network as similar to news outlets like the BBC or Deutsche-Welle, which are at least nominally government-owned but remain editorially independent. In addition to providing news about Russia to an English-speaking audience, the network was also founded with the mission of countering negative views of Russia in the foreign media (this mandate also extends to news outlets for the domestic market). Of course, the hand of the Kremlin could not be more obvious in its editorial positions or its news coverage. No matter what advertising campaign RT runs in the US, it is unlikely that anyone but the most uninformed contrarian (like their own employees) will turn to it for news. This may be, as my compatriot said, "largely due to prejudice, but that doesn't mean it's wrong."

Of all the bad things that the Russian government does, running a poorly-produced propaganda cable channel is probably one of the most benign, and probably short-lived. To spread its gospel of a "multi-polar world," Russia Today offers its feed to satellite providers and public broadcasters for free, and it has no advertisements, meaning all of the channel's costs are paid straight from government coffers. With the country's finances in poor shape, the regime may see rapidly diminishing returns on its propaganda investment when budgets for public services are squeezed.

But then again, I'm wasting my breath. This is all just propaganda.

Thanks to my friends for their many insightful comments on this issue, some of which have been lifted for this post. Check out more commentary on this story on Sean's Russia Blog.

Medvedev Promises Police Reform, But Proposals Are Off the Mark

2010-02-18T10:39:00.006-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is talking tough about police reform.

On Thursday, Medvedev dismissed two high-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry, as well as 16 regional ministry officers, 15 of whom are generals. According to the Russian daily Kommersant, half of these dismissals were tied high-profile incidents of police criminality and corruption, while the rest were the result of scheduled position rotations within the ministry.

The changes were announced in a speech before senior officials of the Interior Ministry, in which Medvedev said the country needed to "cleanse this evil from the state and municipal structures."

(Agence France-Press translated that phrase as "cleanse the state structures of evil," which could be interpreted to mean that Russia's security agencies are "state structures of evil." The original Russian phrase was, "очистить государственные и муниципальные структуры от этого зла." Either way, I think the misinterpreted phrase is closer to the truth.)

Among other reforms announced by the president was a plan to cut the Interior Ministry's bloated general staff in Moscow by half from its current size of 20,000. He also called on Prime Minister Vladmir Putin to draft a sweeping reform proposal for the country's law enforcement agencies, which is to be submitted to parliament by December 1. Medvedev stated that he would maintain personal control over the reform project, but giving Prime Minister Putin a central role is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

While the housecleaning and tough talk about corruption are somewhat heartening, I remain skeptical (an opinion I've expressed before here and here). In the past several months, the country has been rocked by shocking criminal acts by police officers, including well-publicized beatings, mysterious deaths, and a not-so-mysterious video-taped mass killing. Some commanding officers have lost their posts as a result of these incidents (though not their jobs or their pensions), but almost none of the guilty officers have seen the inside of a courtroom, and jail time seems like a remote possibility.

One thing that Medvedev said betrays a fundamental misunderstanding (or, more likely, an intentional misinterpretation) of how democratic policing works and how the country's law enforcement structures should be reformed. While his principal target of reform should be dismantling the police's culture of corruption and bringing dirty cops to justice, he has taken elsewhere: clearance rates.

"Only one in every two crimes is cleared annually. There are over 1.3 million unsolved crimes in Russia each year, and a quarter of these are serious or very serious crimes," he said Thursday.

The clearance rate is the proportion of reported crimes that lead to an arrest –they are "cleared" when the case is turned over to the courts for prosecution. The political reasoning behind Medvedev's statement is clear – people want the police to solve more crimes, because they think it will put more criminals in jail and will make them safer. It is true that solving more crimes is a good thing, but setting your sights on clearance rates is highly problematic.

Clearance rates are easily manipulated. Especially within an embedded culture of corruption, there is a powerful temptation to doctor figures. This can be done in two basic ways – by not filing reported crimes, thus reducing the overall crime figures, or by making knowingly erroneous arrests, which moves the case off the police department's ledger and into the hands of prosecutors. Medvedev said about these supposedly paltry numbers, "Most importantly, behind [these figures] lie the fate of real people – of victims, their loved ones, their family members." He should remember that there are also countless victims of bad police work and police corruption who get caught up in this chase for ratings.

Law enforcement agencies in the Soviet Union were obsessed with clearance rates, and every department was mandated to keep theirs at 95% or above until that target was scrapped in the 1980's. This is an impossible figure, but like so many other statistics in the USSR, it was doctored and fudged, often by ignoring crime reports, planting evidence, throwing innocent people in jail, and coercing confessions through torture. None of these things are acceptable from police in a democratic society, yet they were and remain commonplace in Russia.

No up-to-date statistics are available on Russia's clearance rate nationwide (if you can find them, please let me know), but the regional figures fluctuate wildly and are highly unreliable. For certain crimes, like murder, many jurisdictions report preposterous rates of 90 to 100%. Regardless, Medvedev's ballpark figure of 50% is absurdly high – if he believes that it is too low, then it suggests that he is not aiming for accurate, accountable figures, but the phantom rates of the Soviet days that will dupe citizens into thinking that the police keep them safe.

By comparison, in the United States, 45.1% of violent crimes were cleared in 2008, and 17.1% of property crimes (theft, burglary, etc.), according to the FBI. America's law enforcement system is by no means perfect, nor is it fundamentally broken like Russia's – so why are the figures so low? Because the clearance rate only tells a small part of the story. It does not tell you how officers go about solving crimes, and whether they do it legally.

Boosting clearance rates can be part of a successful crime control strategy, but only part, and not when corruption is so widespread. Cities like New York used clearance rate targets to reduce crime, but the NYPD also meticulously maintains its databases and they are subject to regular audits. Even then, the system is prone to manipulation, and many have criticized the department for being too focused on clearance and crime rate numbers. Statistics are only worthwhile if they are accurate and reliable, and even then, they are only part of the answer.

Medvedev's focus on police reform is admirable, and it is certainly more genuine than the promises of his predecessor, who remains irretrievably entrenched in the rottenness of the Soviet security apparatus. But this endeavor looks doomed to repeat the mistakes of past reform efforts by focusing on top-down, statistically-driven initiatives that pay no attention to the institutional problems of Russian law enforcement.

UPDATE: For more on the topic of policing statistics and fudging the numbers, check out this post from Peter Moskos on his blog, Cop in the Hood - "Juking the Stats."

The Sergei Magnitsky Murder: Siloviki Circle the Wagons

2010-01-21T13:17:00.009-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- It has been more than two months since the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in police custody after being refused medical attention. Magnitsky represented British investor Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, in a case involving a huge tax fraud allegedly perpetrated by Russian police officials and uncovered by Mr. Magnitsky. He had spent nearly a year in pre-trial detention, imprisoned without charge by the very people he accused of perpetrating the fraud against his clients and the Russian government.

Were it not for his British citizenship, Mr. Browder himself could have wound up in similar circumstances. He has been refused entry to Russia since 2005, despite the fact that he runs one of the largest investment firms in the country and has been a tireless booster of investing in Russia. He is not a political activist or human rights campaigner; instead, he champions investors' rights, which are also severely trampled in Russia. He refused to play by the crooked rules of the coterie of Kremlin insiders and current and former members of the security services, the so-called siloviki, who control business in Russia. Magnitsky was a tireless advocate of his client's interests, and he was murdered because he refused to flee the country or commit perjury by implicating himself or his client for the crimes of his captors.

Since this case became an international sensation (though only after Magnitsky's captors had succeeded in killing him), President Dmitry Medvedev has done some house cleaning, firing top prison officials who oversaw Magnitsky's detention and non-existent medical treatment (he died of untreated pancreatitis and gall stones, not a heart attack and toxic shock as the government claims). As for the men who orchestrated the fraud and arrest, Viktor Markelov, a sawmill foreman and likely a bit player in the $230 million tax fraud, was convicted in April 2009 of stealing government funds (his conviction was in fact based on the investigative work of Magnitsky himself). The two police officers who orchestrated the whole affair, Lt. Col. Atryom Kuznetsov and Maj. Pavel Karpov, have been reassigned to desk jobs at the Interior Ministry, and no charges are pending against either one. Not a penny of the $230 million has been recovered.

This is how things usually work in Russia when a scandal like this breaks. The government offers up a few sacrificial lambs – this time in the form of Moscow prison director Vladimir Davydov and 19 other prison officials and the fall guy Markelov – but it always protects its own in the police.

For more details on the Magnitsky case, read Bill Browder's letter published in Foreign Policy in December. You can also listen to an interview with Browder from The Economist, which I highly recommend.

Hermitage has set up a website, Law and Order in Russia, which chronicles this entire ordeal and contains a wealth of documents related to the tax case and Mr. Magnitsky's detention, all of which have been translated into English.

More Hockey: Playing and Watching the Game Outdoors

2010-01-12T16:51:00.011-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Hockey was meant to be played – and watched – outdoors. On New Year's Day, the National Hockey League pulled off another spectacular Winter Classic, an outdoor game between the Boston Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers at historic Fenway Park. I was not able to make it to Boston for those festivities, but this past weekend I did make the trip to Beantown to see college hockey rivals Boston University and Boston College face off at Frozen Fenway.

It seemed a bit sacrilegious that my first visit to Fenway would be to see a hockey game – a lifelong Red Sox fan, I've never seen them in their home ballpark – but you could not ask for a better atmosphere for a hockey game. As my brother and I shivered through three periods, and temperatures dropped to 15F, we did not complain that we had to watch the game through binoculars from the bleachers, or that the public address announcer kept talking during play. That's acceptable in baseball, but not okay in hockey – once the puck drops, the PA, organ, and infernal jock jams must all cease so that the crowd can hear the swish of the skates and the crack of the puck off of stick blades and boards. Our sightlines were not great, but they did a great job micing the ice; and I'm fine with an obstructed view seat, if that view is partially blocked by the Pesky Pole.

The trip to Fenway brought back memories of places both very near to and very far from my home. Playing shinny on local ponds was a big part of growing up, and quite a few of the rinks I played on in youth hockey in Connecticut were outdoors. But this was the first time I had been to an outdoor hockey game since I lived in Russia. While in Irkutsk, I was a rabid follower of our local bandy club (not exactly hockey, but close), Baikal-Energia. 15,000 fans braved temperatures that dipped well below freezing – at their most recent home game, against Stroitel Syktyvkar, the official game t ime temperature was -13F – on a regular basis. I guess I have grown soft and used to the warmth and comfort of an NHL arena; so had most of my fellow spectators in Boston, as the crowd had thinned out significantly by the third period. What we all needed was a few belts of honey pepper vodka and some slices of salo, a type of Ukrainian salted pork fat. Neither was on offer at the concession stands, however; just beer, which promptly froze in the plastic cups.

Unlike previous Winter Classic events, the NHL decided to leave the ice down in Fenway for a full month, making it accessible for public skating and youth, high school, and college hockey. That is, for those who could afford it – two hours of ice time cost high schools upwards of $20,000, meaning only wealthy private schools could have the privilege of staging a game there. Nonetheless, the rink's extended stay was a big success, and the league hopes the next host of the event will make similar accommodations. Connecticut hockey fans had a lot to cheer about; not only did Avon Old Farms and Taft square off on the Fenway ice on December 21, but the honorary captains for the BC-BU game included two of the state's greatest players: former Eagles standouts and NHL stars Craig Janney (of Enfield) and Brian Leetch (Cheshire).

Outdoor hockey used to be ubiquitous, and even though leagues are staging more and more outdoor games, fewer and fewer kids are growing up playing on natural ice. I was lucky to play a few games last year at an outdoor rink in Nederland, Colorado, located at 8,500 feet amidst beautiful mountain scenery, but few have such a privilege. Interestingly, no Stanley Cup final has ever been held outdoors. Even in the early days of the trophy, when the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada battled for the title, all the deciding games were held inside. When the Montreal Hockey Club won it for the first time in 1894, they played at Victoria Rink, which opened in 1862. Even when the cup was contested in far-off Winnipeg in 1896, the city hosted the games in the recently-constructed, 2,000-seat Granite Rink. The Vancouver Olympics are fast approaching, where the hockey tournament will be staged at the Canucks' home, GM Place. When the Games were held in Cortina d'Amprezzo in 1956, all the on-ice events were held at the open-air Stadio Olympica (which has since been covered), including the Soviets' gold medal game victory over the United States (Canada finished with the bronze, though their goaltender was Denis Brodeur, father of the team's current backstop, Martin).

As for the game we watched outside, the Terriers dominated most of the way. A late rally drew the Eagles within a goal, but they came up short, and BU earned some bragging rights with a 3-2 victory. Let's hope this great tradition continues, and more fans and players get to experience the game out in the open.

Hockey and Nationalism Should Be Kept Apart

2010-01-06T13:22:00.007-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Tuesday was an historic day for American hockey. The United States defeated Canada in the final of the World Junior Hockey Championship, winning just the second gold medal in the country's history. Canada had been aiming for history themselves; having won the tournament five years in a row, a sixth consecutive gold would have set a new record of dominance. Instead, the US came out on top in an end-to-end overtime thriller that was without a doubt one of the most exciting hockey games I have seen in years.

Meanwhile, my friend Gene sent me this blog post from The New Republic by Adie Tomer, which relates an idea by everyone's favorite pop psychology maven, Malcolm Gladwell, about how to fix the National Hockey League. Apparently, I have not been experiencing enough diarrhea of the mouth, so I subjected myself to reading his interview with serial ego-blogger and self-referential nincompoop, ESPN's Bill Simmons. Simmons and Gladwell think it would be totally radical if the NHL were realigned into two 12-team conferences divided equally between the US and Canada. Not only would this endow hockey-mad Canada with the six more franchises it richly deserves, but it would also set up an awesome "border war" in each Stanely Cup final, stoking national pride and making everyone from sea to shining sea (in both countries) totally excited about hockey, regardless of which cities are represented in the final.

So, how are these two things related? Well, if this national showdown would be so awesome for hockey, why does nobody in the US care that we just had a cross-border battle for the ages? Not only does Tomer make no mention of it (his commentary was posted the day of the final), but it was totally ignored by the national media (ESPN only mentions it on their NHL page, not their main page). The reason is that the appeal of teams isn't just limited to their respective cities; the appeal of hockey in the US is limited, period.

While there are lots of deserving cities in Canada without NHL teams, and lots of undeserving American ones with them, this hare-brained idea will do little to help hockey. Fewer teams in the US might be better for the overall health of the league, but it won't do much to grow the game in the US. Gladwell and Simmons' idea of creating national buzz about the Stanley Cup final is already true in Canada, as it's non-stop national news whenever there is a Canadian team in the final or even the conference final.

Gladwell keeps harping on the mismanagement of the NHL, but the fact that the Phoenix Coyotes are a mess does not give his ideas any more credence. Here is one of his nonsense analogies about how to improve hockey:

I was once in Brazil when Brazil was playing Argentina in soccer, and the entire country was in a state of advanced hysteria. I was at a conference and they stopped the proceedings, in the middle of the day, so everyone could go watch the game. Unbelievable. That's what happens when you combine sports and national loyalties. Can you imagine this happening every spring?

Perhaps this would be a better idea if Canada shared a border with Sweden or Russia, but even these countries cannot match Canada's obsession with hockey or its sheer output of talent. The Coyotes should definitely move back to Canada, and Gary Bettman should have been fired many, many years ago, but drawing analogies between the hockey rivalry of the US and Canada and soccer matches between Brazil and Argentina is ridiculous (see my point above re: diarrhea of the mouth). And we really need this in hockey:

I think this realignment is an idea dreamed up by an American (Simmons) who likes the example of Green Bay – a small town with a big professional franchise – and thinks it would be quaint to have NHL teams in places like Saskatoon and Winnipeg. Practically speaking, not only is it tough to decide which 12 of the 24 US franchises should be cut (once you get past the usual Sunbelt suspects, it gets much harder to decide), but it's hard to find six more Canadian cities that could support a $200 million+ hockey franchise, especially considering that Toronto won't let anyone into their southern Ontario fiefdom, which contains most of Canada's larger cities (my picks were Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Quebec City, Halifax, Hamilton and Victoria, hypothetically speaking).

Gladwell's other idea is that Canadians "secede" from the NHL and run their own league. Many Canadians have in effect done this. Instead of trekking to the league's six Canadian outposts, they watch junior hockey in their hometowns, where 17- to 20-year-olds ply their trade in the Western, Ontario and Quebec Major Junior Hockey Leagues, and in the various junior A and B circuits across the country. Canadians may be happy to spend their ticket dollars on their local youngsters, but they still tune in every Saturday night to watch Hockey Night in Canada. If the NHL is to remain the world's pre-eminent hockey league, it needs the revenues that large US markets and American TV networks and advertisers provide.

Lastly, I would like to take aim at a larger point made by Gladwell and expounded upon by Tomer, and that is that melding sport and national pride is a good thing. Why do we need to inject nationalism into the NHL? It is a cosmopolitan league with players from around the world who are embraced by their adopted cities across North America. The Washington Capitals are captained by a Russian, the Ottawa Senators by a Swede. The Montreal Canadiens are without a captain, but their three alternates are two Americans and a Russian; Toronto is in a similar situation with a Czech, an American and a Canadian wearing the "A" on their sweaters. There are plenty of opportunities for players to wear their national colors, such as the annual IIHF World Championships (another non-event in North America), the WJC and the Olympics.

Sport may on occasion be a peaceful proxy for actual confrontation between nations, but nationalism and sport often make for a dangerous combination that can boil over into real violence. Just watch the soccer hooligans at this summer's World Cup in South Africa. Hockey has been largely free of fan violence on this continent, but there were a pair of ugly nationalism- inspired incidents during the 2002-03 NHL season, when Montreal Canadiens fans booed "The Star-Spangled Banner" in response to the invasion of Iraq; Florida Panthers fans responded by booing "O Canada" at their own arena. We don't need to encourage that nonsense every year at the Stanley Cup final. The World Junior Championship has also experienced that nationalist boobirds, when Canadian fans in Vancouver in 2006 jeered the American squad while cheering on their traditional rival, Russia. Booing teenagers is always a classy move. I have made my opinions about the Olympics well known here and elsewhere – they just provide another tool for xenophobes and bigots to manipulate national sentiment, and international events are no less sullied by corporate advertising and fraud than the professional athletic circuits. But the vocal fans in Vancouver should add a little flavor to the usually tame Winter Olympics, especially during the hockey tournament.

I will admit to feeling a great deal of pride in my country when John Carlson netted the game winner in Saskatoon last night, but I would be far happier to see the Boston Bruins Slovak captain Zdeno Chara hoist the Stanley Cup. Let's keep nationalism out of the NHL, and let's keep people who don't know what they're talking about out of hockey.

The Man-Dog Case: The Life of a Stray in Russia

2009-12-15T01:56:00.012-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- I was a member of the debate team in college, competing in an extemporaneous style known as American Parliamentary debate. We competed in tournaments around the northeast, and we had rather limited success (limited, really, to a single moment, when we bested one of the top teams in North America by successfully defending the right of professional basketball players to use performance-enhancing drugs). When we entered the final round of a weekend tournament, and it was clear that we had no chance of making the playoff rounds (know as the "break" in debater parlance), we would often debate topics that were absurd or funny because the outcome didn't really matter. One such joke case was a particular favorite, and it was known as "The Man-Dog Case." In the scenario of this debate, you find yourself transformed overnight into a dog, and the question up for debate is this: do you stay at home and become a docile, domesticated dog, or do you choose to roam the streets as a stray?

Inevitably, the debate regresses into a discussion about the pleasures of dog sex, whether trash is tastier than kibble, and how hard it really is to evade dog catchers. This was certainly not the highest level of discourse possible, but during my time living and traveling in Russia, this debate stuck with me. The country is crawling with stray dogs nearly everywhere you go, from the center of Moscow to remote Siberian villages. When I saw these dogs huddled in great masses at my local subway station, or chasing children on dirt roads outside Irkutsk, I thought to myself, is it good to be a stray in Russia? Russian strays have been in the news a lot lately, so I decided to have a debate based on these stories as well as my own work as an amateur canine biologist. So let's do some debate!

In support of the resolution, it is better to live as a stray in Russia than live in a home.

Contention #1: You might get sent into space.

This is the dream of all stray dogs. All the dogs of the early Soviet space missions were female strays picked up off the streets of Moscow. Of the 11 sent into space, six returned to earth safely, including Strelka, who would later give birth to Pushinka, a puppy that was given as a gift by Nikita Khrushchev to the Kennedy family. From the streets of Moscow to the space program to the White House in one generation – now that's what I call the American Dream. You will also get your portrait hung in an obscure museum in Los Angeles, as a bonus.

Contention #2: You will have free reign of the Moscow subway.

Back in April, Moscow's subway-riding canines became a bit of an Internet sensation, as blogs and news sites latched on to this latest meme. These dogs are not news, and I had I been diligent with my blog posting, I could have "scooped" all these sites with my personal knowledge of Russian strays. Regardless, dogs freely ride the subway in Moscow, often sacking out on benches or taking over whole sections of cars. They cannot read Russian or understand the announcements (much like your average tourist), nor can they count or read a map, so to find their desired stop, they quickly hop off the train, look around to see if they recognize the station, and then either get off or jump back on the train before the doors close. Perhaps their most amazing feat is their ability to coolly ride the gargantuan escalators, which would easily spook your average American house pet. Riding the subway has also given Moscow strays an evolutionary advantage, as they have become smarter and developed advanced behaviors never before seen in other dogs (Metrodog.ru is no longer actively updated, but it is a great archive of these canine behaviors).

Contention #3: There are career opportunities in advertising.

Advertisers abhor blank space, and stray dogs are really just underutilized billboards. So, in 2002 in the city of Penza, a local business beg an employing the beasts for advertising. After being snared by means of an enticing meatball, the dogs then had stencil advertisements spray-painted across their bodies and were then released unharmed back into the streets to unknowingly flog the wares of a number of different brands, including the country's largest oil producer, Lukoil.

And opposing the resolution.

Contention #1: You might get sent into space.

While some space dogs went onto lives of fame and fortune, Laika and four other less fortunate hounds never got the chance to enjoy their notoriety, as they ran out of oxygen and their capsules burned up in the atmosphere.

Contention #2: You might get poisoned and turn green.

Stray dogs have become masters at tracking down the most delicious detritus of human civilization, and they will travel across the city, and even make several subway transfers, to feast on discarded shawarma. But even for a dog, there is no such thing as a free lunch. In Yekaterinburg, a pack of about 20 dogs has reportedly turned green after scavenging in a local dump. Officials believe that the color change is due to the dogs consuming chemicals that were illegally dumped at the site. It was probably no worse than being spray-painted by an advertising company, but eating trash, poisoned or otherwise, probably sucks pretty bad.

Contention #3: People will try to castrate and kill you.

Last year the Moscow city government announced plans to spay and neuter nearly half of the city's estimated 100,000 strays. This program was coupled with a plan to erect several shelters around the city to house homeless dogs, but these facilities are horribly mismanaged. Rather than sterilize the dogs and house them during their recovery, as the city program intended, most shelters just kill the animals, keeping them in appalling conditions before putting them down while pocketing the cash from the city. At least dogs do not have to worry about the police so much anymore – until 2002, police officers were authorized to shoot any stray dogs on the street, a policy which likely endangered far more people with wild gunfire than it saved from marauding strays. Now Russian dog catchers use tranquilizers to subdue animals.

So, would you choose the life of a tramp, endlessly riding the underground rails in search of your next meal, or would you choose a cozy life in a Moscow high-rise? I'm still undecided, but I think all that we have learned from this debate is that while Russian strays are some of the most resilient, resourceful, and adorable creatures on earth, being pretty much anything in Russia, man or beast, is quite a terrible proposition.

Whistleblowers in Russian Police Turn to Youtube, But Real Reform Still Unlikely

2009-11-14T15:57:00.008-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Several days ago, Alexei Dymovsky, a police major in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, released a series of Youtube videos that have caused a stir across the country. In the three videos, Dymovsky launches an assault on the country's law enforcement agencies, accusing them of corruption, incompetence, and abuse of junior officers. Throughout his monologue, he appeals to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to tackle these problems.

These videos have become an Internet sensation, drawing more than one million hits and sparking some measure of debate about the state of law enforcement in Russia. In very uncharacteristic fashion, Russia's Interior Ministry, which controls the country's police forces, has launched an investigation into police corruption, though the Interior Minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev, denied that it has any connection to Dymovsky's allegations. Nurgaliyev claimed that it was part of a normal review process, yet he ordered that Dymovsky be suspended until the review is completed. Nonetheless, the major's employers in Novorossiysk were less impressed; despite the order from the minister to merely suspend him, he has been fired from the police force for slander. The local police chief, Valery Medvedev, has also asked prosecutors to file criminal charges against him for libel. Following the release of the videos, Dymovsky traveled to Moscow to address the news media - he claims that law enforcement officials attempted to prevent him from leaving Novorossiysk, forcing him to make the journey by car.

Here is the first of the videos, with English subtitles (here are the second and third, without translations):

Dymovsky’s videos have caused other police officers to come forward with stories of corruption and misconduct. One such whistleblower is Mikhail Yevseyev, who worked for the police department in the northern city of Ukhta, where in 2005 a firebombing of a shopping center killed 25 people. Yevseyev claims that the case against the two young men who were convicted of the crime and sentenced to life in prison in 2008 was entirely fabricated, and following the verdict, he resigned from the department in protest. Soon after Yevseyev’s video was released, Grigory Chekalin, who formerly worked in the Ukhta procurator’s office, posted a video describing how his office fabricated the evidence in the bombing case. Dymovsky has spawned a whole new genre of Youtube videos in Russia, and even a Moscow traffic cop has gotten in on the action.

This story has been picked up by news outlets all over the world, but what does the case of Maj. Dymovsky really tell us about Russian law enforcement? Frankly, not very much that we did not know already.

The fact that the public has embraced Dymovsky simply underlines the high levels of distrust of the police and other public institutions in Russia. According to a survey conducted by the Levada Center in 2005, only 12% of Russians expressed trust the police. Sadly, this ranked higher than many democratic institutions - the federal legislative bodies, the State Duma and the Federation Council, garnered only 10% trust, while political parties managed only 5%. According to a 2007 poll, 65% of respondents believed that efforts of police are "mainly devoted to their own interests," while only 21% believed they were "devoted to the security of the population of the country." Researchers Theodore Gerber and Sarah Mendelson concluded that policing in Russia was fundamentally “predatory”; that is, rather than serving a useful societal function, the police use their coercive power to extract wealth from the “prey” population.

For some, the quick reaction of Kremlin authorities was suspicious - one political analyst hypothesized that the entire affair was fabricated by the Interior Ministry, perhaps to draw attention away from other public scandals - principally, the murderous rampage of police officer Denis Yevsyukov, who killed three people in a Moscow supermarket in April. He, like many other officers guilty of heinous crimes, has somehow avoided prosecution. I think that this public relations conspiracy is unlikely, but what makes these whistleblowers somewhat convenient for the Kremlin is that they attack some degree of systemic corruption, but they do not challenge the foundation of Russia’s security apparatus. Dymovsky appeals directly to Vladimir Putin, as if he can sweep away his corrupt underlings with his purity and sobriety; what the major fails to understand is that this former KGB stooge is at the very center of the country’s systemic police corruption. He derives his power from the predatory state.

One of Dymovsky’s most important criticisms is of the quota system. This was one of the superficial policing reforms that Russia has undertaken in recent years. These quotas are so rigidly enforced that officers are in effect encouraged to make bogus arrests and fabricate cases to meet their absurd targets. Rather than improving professionalism and accountability, this system has had the perverse effect of retrenching the predatory policing model. Rather than tackle this substantive issue, it is more likely that the government will find scapegoats. This is a tried and true method of giving the appearance of making reforms while avoiding real change. During perestroika and the early years of the Yeltsin administration, some people were brought to justice for the excesses of Soviet oppression, but these were usually low-ranking officials. One would expect that the current investigation will result in some very public firings of regional officials but no concrete changes in policy or practice. Dymovsky actually gave the Kremlin the perfect scapegoats, blaming his superior officers in the local police force - the least-connected brass will make perfect sacrificial lambs.

Corruption has always been a popular target of reform because it is an issue that impacts many ordinary citizens’ daily lives, but focusing on the corruption and misconduct of individual officers distracts attention from the philosophical foundations of the Russian police state. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, reforms to the Russian security services have been superficial and ineffective. The Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service (FSB - formerly the KGB) remain largely unchanged in structure and function from the Soviet period. “Law enforcement” is a misnomer in Russia - you must have the rule of law in order for it to be enforced, which Russia lacks. The police forces (called the militsia in Russian, sometimes referred to as “militia” in English) may resemble those you would encounter in a Western democracy, but they differ in fundamental ways. Louise Shelley, an expert on policing in Russia and the Soviet Union, described the difference like this in her book Policing Soviet Society:

A superficial glance at the militia’s patrols, safe houses and covert techniques might suggest that the Soviet militia differed little from the police of western societies. Such superficial similarities, however, masked fundamental differences. Without procedural guarantees of the rights of citizens, the law remained on the side of the Soviet militia, which readily imposed its will on both criminals and law-abiding citizens.

This fact remains largely unchanged in Russia today. In the US and other democracies, most people (I will grant that there are those who disagree, and most justifiably) believe the job of the police is to protect the public against crime and disorder. In Russia, their job is protect the state from the public. As long as that fact remains true, and believers in this philosophy continue to hold power, not amount of Youtube videos will change the practice of policing there.

20 Years After the Fall: Progress for Some, Repression for Others

2009-11-05T17:18:00.007-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- As we approach the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, commemorations of those momentous events of 1989 are all around us. I'm marking the occasion by reading The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia, Past, Present and Future.

The book was published soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and author Yevgenia Albats, an investigative reporter who currently hosts a radio program on the independent station Echo Moskva, recounts the rise of the KGB and its terrifying hold on Russian society from the early days of the Revolution to the nascent Russian democracy of the early 1990's. She began her work as a journalist in the 1980's during perestroika, when a small degree of openness allowed her to investigate the depravities of the KGB.

Russia has changed a great deal in the 15 years since this book was written, but what Albats wrote in 1994 - that the state was still in effect run by the KGB, as it always had been since the state security apparatus was erected soon after the October Revolution - is even truer today. During the 1990's, Yeltsin made half-hearted attempts to curb the influence of the security services, but they were in vain. There is no more KGB, but its successor, the FSB, remains largely unreformed, with the same institutional structure and personnel in place as in the Soviet Union. A KGB agent rose to the presidency, and he remains entrenched in power, surrounded by a coterie of stooges who are all veterans of the secret police. These torturers and assassins have traded epaulets for business suits, yet they still wield the power of a violently repressive state.

The problem is that Russia, unlike most of its neighbors in Eastern Europe, has never come to terms with its past. There were no Nuremberg trials for the tens of millions butchered by the Soviet state. Almost no one has ever been held to task for the crimes of the KGB; the few that have were merely the pawns of power struggles within the organization (for example, Beria was executed not for ordering extrajudicial killings, as his indictment stated, but for opposing Khrushchev). Even today, chekists, as agents of the secret police are known, are protected from prosecution (and not just protected - Andrei Lugovoi, the alleged murderer of dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London, is currently a member of the Russian parliament.)

Who wants to come to terms with anything? Putin's rule has reinscribed Soviet-era thinking among the people - democracy and free markets are a trick by the West to impoverish Russia, and the state must remain strong, even if that means resorting to violent repression. According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 58% of Russians view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a "great misfortune." Since 1991, support for nationalist views and imperial expansion has increased, while support for multiparty democracy and free market capitalism has declined. History is written by the winners, and contrary to what the events of 20 years ago may have indicated, in Russia at least, the winners were not the democrats; they were the communist stooges who have always run the country, and they are writing a history that glorifies Stalin, demeans the victims of Soviet atrocities, and legitimizes state repression.

Things are not so grim everywhere in Eastern Europe. Nearly all the Soviet satellites have become democracies and joined the European Union. Even as we are disheartened by the lack of progress in Russia, we can celebrate the liberation of millions of people elsewhere on the continent. So, if you are looking for a more uplifting way to celebrate the fall of communism than reading about torture in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison, over the next four months, New York will be host to Performing Revolution in Eastern Europe, a festival of music, theater, film and art.

To kick off the festival, this weekend (Le) Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village is hosting the Rebel Waltz music festival. The two-night event features bands from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Poland, all of whom found themselves at some point on the wrong side of the communist censors. In The State Within a State, Albats writes about the efforts of Soviet authorities to curb the deleterious effects of rock 'n' roll music. She quotes Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB general who became a strong critic of the Russian security services. He was convicted in absentia in Russia for espionage in 2002, though his real crime was airing too much of the KGB's dirty laundry; he currently lives in exile in the United States:

"When Leningrad's stages began to fill up with rock-oriented musicians, a rock club was formed at the KGB's initiative to keep the rock movement manageable and under control."

Unfortunately, the censorship in Russia continues. DDT, a Russian rock band formed in the early 1980's that remains one of the country's most popular groups, has been unable to perform or record in Russia a song critical of Vladimir Putin, "When the Oil Runs Out." We now offer a recording from a concert in Lithuania, and with it a sincere hope that more tyrants will fall and criminals will be brought to justice twenty years on from the "fall" of communism:

And how would any celebration of the Berlin Wall coming down be complete without David Hasselhoff?

Canada Shores Up Arctic Claims With Olympic Flame

2009-11-02T16:12:00.005-05:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- The torch relay for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver began on Friday. The Olympic flame started its Canadian journey in Victoria, British Columbia, and over the course of 106 days, it will travel 28,000 miles to hundreds of Canadian towns and cities, arriving back in Vancouver for the opening ceremonies on February 12.

One of the communities the torch will visit is Alert, which sits on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in the province of Nunavut. Alert is the northernmost permanently inhabited place on earth, located just 507 miles from the North Pole. The torch will be flown more than 1,700 miles from Churchill, Manitoba just so it can briefly touch down and greet the five permanent inhabitants of Alert, all members of the Canadian military who man the signals and weather stations there. Alert will not be the only stop north of the Arctic Circle - on its way back south, the torch will stop in Ausuittuq (also known as Grise Fiord) and Qausuittuq (Resolute) in Nunavut. It will also make stops in Kugluktuk (Coppermine), Nunavut, Inuvit, Northwest Territories and Old Crow, Yukon Territory.

This arctic leg of the relay is particularly interesting because it has obvious geopolitical overtones. In recent years, Canada has increased its military presence in the north in an attempt to shore up sovereignty that it sees as increasingly under threat. The region is gaining geostrategic importance. As ocean temperatures rise and sea ice retreats, the Northwest Passage through Canada’s vast northern archipelago may become a viable year-round shipping lane. The arctic also holds vast untapped supplies of natural resources, especially oil and gas, that may become accessible in the near future.

The main competitors for these arctic treasures are the United States and Russia. The US refuses to recognize Canada’s claim that the Northwest Passage is an internal waterway, asserting that it is international waters that foreign ships can ply without Canada’s approval. Russia, meanwhile, has claimed that its own territorial waters - and therefore its claims to undersea resources - extended to the North Pole and beyond, setting its maritime boundaries uncomfortably close to Canada. In 2007, in an apparent attempt to legitimize this claim, Russia sent a submarine to the bottom of the ocean at the Pole to plant a small Russian flag on the sea floor (they appear to be unaware that flag-planting ceased to be a legitimate way to make territorial claims sometime in the 17th century).

Now Canada is using the Olympics to further shore up its claims to the arctic, and the torch can be used to enhance sovereignty both externally and internally. Externally, the torch’s arrival in Alert signals to the world that Canada considers these far-flung regions as integral parts of their national territory. Internally, it binds these remote communities to the national center - Canadians who live in the arctic, or who are members of the First Nations minority, are just as much a part of the national celebration as the metropolitan south or Anglo-, French- or any other type of Canadian (the weekly television show Hockey Night in Canada plays a similar role).

Canada is not unique in doing this. Most host countries carry the torch through every one of their constituent regions. At the last Olympics, the Chinese government used the torch relay to reaffirm its territorial integrity, carrying it across the restive regions of Tibet and Xinjiang and even to the top of Mt. Everest (the Himalayan region has long been at the center of territorial disputes between China, India and Pakistan). Much of the torch relay in 2008 was besieged by protesters in foreign countries who spoke out against the Chinese government’s oppressive policies in Tibet and elsewhere, but once the flame reached China proper, it was met mostly with celebration of the Olympics as a symbol of Chinese global power and national unity.

During this march to Beijing, the American news media rediscovered the origins of the torch relay in the 1936 Berlin Games and spoke breathlessly about “Hitler’s Olympics” and the parallels with Red China and their nationalist spectacle. Chinese nationalism can be a terrifying and dangerous thing, and the government has shown a great deal of recklessness and a great lack of control whenever it unleashes nationalist anger. Nonetheless, the point here is that no one is above using sport, especially the Olympics, for promoting nationalism. The 1936 Olympics created many iconic images that linked sport to fascism, militarism, and racial prejudice. We like to think that instead we have inherited the mantle of Jesse Owens, who embarrassed the Master Race, but Berlin lives on at every Olympics. China was chided for its global torch tour, but no other country has shied away from the practice because of its Nazi origins. The International Olympic Committee has long been run by fascists, from Nazi sympathizer Avery Brundage to Francoist Juan Antonio Samaranch. The current body is filled by corrupt sycophants and apologists who hand the Olympics to the highest bidder, even if it is an oppressive dictatorship like China or Russia. We would all be better off if we just did away with the Olympics entirely - the institution is too corrupt and too compromised to even approach any of the lofty goals it aspires to.

Canada is using the Olympics, albeit in a tiny, insignificant way, to further its geopolitical agenda, but so does every other country that hosts the Olympics. When Russia inherits the Olympic flame in 2014 for the Winter Games in Sochi, it will undoubtedly be used for far more aggressive and chauvinistic nationalist purposes. It will likely make stops in Georgia's breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but I bet that it will also be taken to the North Pole, either undersea or over ice.

How Obama Can Earn His Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-09T23:12:00.002-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday. It is not entirely clear why he deserved this award. The Nobel Committee seemed to award him the prize for his tone and aspirations rather than any concrete accomplishments.

"It was unavoidable to give the prize to the man who has improved the international climate and emphasized negotiations and dialogue," Thorbjoern Jagland, the chair of the Nobel Committee, said, as quoted in GlobalPost. In effect, he was given the award for not being George W. Bush.

George Packer made a good case for refusing the award, noting on his New Yorker blog, "The prize should be awarded for achievement, not aspiration, and so far Obama’s main achievement has been getting elected President, which is in a different category."

I wholeheartedly agree. He was already elected President of the United States - how much more validation does he need? Will this prize suddenly cause the North Koreans to surrender their nuclear weapons, the Russians to abandon their claimed sphere of influence, or the Palestinians and Israelis to get serious about peace? Certainly not. While it may affirm the Europeans' love affair with Obama, it does little to improve his position or prestige when he gets to the negotiating table.

I will give credit to Obama for staking out one particularly bold position: to rid the world of nuclear weapons. As he has stated, this goal will probably not be achieved either during his presidency or his lifetime. This marks another distinct departure from the policies of the Bush administration, as well as nearly every other administration before it.

George W. Bush did have some accomplishments in the field of nuclear non-proliferation. The nuclear smuggling ring led by Pakistan's A.Q. Khan was broken, and Libya was persuaded to abandon its weapons of mass destruction. But Bush's marks were quite poor overall. The nuclear club has expanded, not shrunk. North Korea is now in possession of the bomb, and Iran continues to make strides toward it. In addition to withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and continuing America's refusal to join the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (in force since 1996), Bush also supported the development and use of tactical nuclear weapons, specifically to deter the nuclear efforts of Iran.

No past president has ever made it his stated goal to make the world free of nuclear weapons. Earlier this year, Philip Taubman described in the New York Times why this goal is so ambitious and daunting, offering this analogy: "To fully grasp the political and military implications, consider what would have been involved had the great powers of the 19th century decided to abolish gunpowder." Perhaps Obama is acting more like Superman in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace than a human president. He can't gather up all the world's fissile material and throw it into the sun, but his goal is admirable, and should he go even part of the way to achieving it, his Nobel Prize will be well deserved.

To mark the president's award, I would like to share with you the 1939 cartoon Peace on Earth. This MGM short directed by Hugh Harman has been incorrectly credited with a Nobel Peace Prize nomination; nonetheless, it offers a noble aspiration of peace, and that is worthy of something, if not the Prize itself.

Finally, if you think that nuclear weapons are not scary things, or if you don't believe that just two decades ago, the world teetered on the brink of utter destruction, this recent news about the Soviet doomsday device - Dr. Strangelove for real - should terrify you. Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece is certainly a powerful piece of anti-nuclear cinema, but if you would like to be scared shitless of atomic warfare, I suggest that you watch the 1964 film Fail-Safe, starring Henry Fonda.

Borders and Migration: Erecting Fences On the Canadian Border

2009-10-08T14:11:00.013-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Borders are never as straight and bright as they appear on maps. They are messy. They are uneven. Due to a whole lot of messiness - in the form of the drug trade, illegal immigration, arms smuggling, and a vicious war between drug cartels and the government - a lot of attention is being paid to the US-Mexico border. But changes are also taking place along America's northern frontier, and they deserve attention and concern.

Earlier this week, authorities erected gates along the border in the towns of Derby Line, Vermont and Stanstead, Quebec. The two towns are essentially one - due to an incorrect survey, the American town was founded north of the 45th parallel. When the border was corrected, nobody saw the need to move the town, so the border line runs through homes and streets, and even through the town's lone public library. American authorities decided last year to clean up the warren of streets that crisscross the border by erecting these gates which will force travelers to move through designated border crossings.

This summer I visited Derby Line, and I went poking around the border to see what changes had been made. The library was closed that day, so I could not go and see the border line painted on the floor, but I did see some shiny new signs advising me to turn back and go through the crossing. When I did turn my car around, I was bombarded by sirens from the border post. When I pulled over, the visibly angry American agent accused me of illegally crossing from Canada and threatened me with a $5,000 fine. When I told him I had made a wrong turn, he lectured me some more and then directed me to the Canadian border crossing, where I continued on my way to Quebec City.

Apparently, turning a small, remote Vermont town into Belfast or Nicosia is what we must endure to be safe from terrorists. While some increased security measures may be necessary along the Canadian border, the problem is that the logic of these changes focuses entirely on security without acknowledging the other impacts of the border. Rather than a zone of interaction, the border is seen as a barrier to keep people out of the United States, thus completely ignoring trans-border social and economic relations.

Fear mongers in the Bush administration like former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff pushed for draconian border measures, even suggesting that British citizens of Pakistani origin should be subjected to stricter passport controls than other Britons. The new DHS chief, Janet Napolitano, has not softened the line when it comes to the US-Canadian border. She has repeatedly stated that she wants the border with Canada treated like the border with Mexico: hardened, strengthened, and more closely monitored.

This has had dire economic impacts, especially along the highest-traffic section of the border, that between Michigan and Ontario. Over the past few decades, the American Big Three automakers have have built up networks of production facilities and suppliers that capitalize on certain cost advantages on both sides of the border. NAFTA only accelerated this trend, and last year, Ontario surpassed Michigan as the world's largest auto producing region. Stricter border controls have hampered this model, and this has been a contributing factor to the uncompetitiveness of North American-built cars; the result has been that the recession and unemployment have cut deepest in these two regions. Here's one example of this impact from the Economist last year:

Now the stickier border is adding to the troubles of Detroit's uncompetitive carmakers. A ship carrying 4,000 cars from Asia landing on the west coast of the United States undergoes just one inspection; the components in a car made in North America will, all told, have gone through thousands, notes Jayson Myers of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, an industry body.

Conservatives harp on the point (listen to Bill Kristol's points here) that President Obama's positions on many issues related to national security have been and will remain largely unchanged from the policies of the previous president. They see this as a vindication of the their beliefs and proof that history will look kindly upon the Bush presidency. What this opinion fails to acknowledge is that security policy is more often driven by inertia and fear than by reason. It is always easier build a border fence than to tear one down, for fear of accusations of being "soft" on crime or terrorism or illegal immigration. Dick Cheney repeats this line over and over again, maintaining that illegal renditions, vicious torture, and various other war crimes keep us all safe at night. Add to this list the requirement that Americans and Canadians carry passports to cross the border. It is impossible to know how Barack Obama would have reacted had he been president on September 11, 2001, but it is patently absurd to claim that the Bush administration took the best course of action given the circumstances.

This is not to discount the fact that suspects who were plotting terrorist attacks have been apprehended while trying cross the border from Canada, the most notable being Ahmed Ressam, the so-called Millenium Bomber, who was arrested in Washington state in December 1999. However, I believe that many of these border policies are driven by a piece of mythology about the September 11 attacks. In the days and weeks following the attacks, reports began circulating that some of the hijackers had entered the US from Canada. As it turned out, the two men who flew from Portland, Maine to Boston and then hijacked the Los Angeles-bound Flight 11, crashing it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center - Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari - had long been residing in the United States. None of the hijackers sneaked across a land border; they all traveled here by air and entered the country legally. Nonetheless, the mystique of this erroneous report remains, and it contributed greatly towards transforming our land borders, both literally and rhetorically, into front lines in the Global War on Terror.

For a good portion of America's history, the border with Canada has been an area of conflict and division. In addition to the American Revolution and the War of 1812, when Americans twice invaded Canada, the two countries have fought a number of other small conflicts, including the Aroostook War, the Pig War and the Fenian Raids. In hindsight, these incidents seem preposterous, but we are continuing to move on a path towards greater division and securitization of a region that should be a zone of interaction and cooperation between our two countries. Unfortunately, border policy is formulated and implemented at a national scale, directed from Washington, and successive administrations have shown an inability to consider the local-scale impacts of a tightened border. Maybe we should start listening to the residents of Derby Line instead of Dick Cheney.

Well, not this resident. Nobody should listen to him:

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Paramilitary Force Takes Over Montana Town, Onion Story Becomes True

2009-09-30T16:36:00.003-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Everybody knows that the government sucks at everything, and private enterprise will solve all of our problems. Do you know what the government especially sucks at? Operating police departments and prisons.

The war in Iraq has clearly demonstrated that well-paid mercenaries with ill-defined rules of engagement are much better at fighting and keeping the peace than those dumbasses in the US Army. And everybody knows that shopping malls, which are almost exclusively patrolled by private security forces, are the safest, most awesome places in America.

The town of Hardin, Montana has learned these lessons well, which is why they have employed the services of the generically-named American Police Forces. Hardin made national headlines earlier this year when they offered their recently constructed and deeply indebted town jail to the federal government to house detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Well, that offer is now off the table, because APF has stepped in to not only take over the jail, but also the town's police force.

Yesterday Gawker did a rundown of all the various reasons why this whole deal is incredibly suspect and troubling. The California-based company has links to other more established private military contractors, but the exact web of relationships has yet to be unraveled. This whole thing may be some kind of scam, but one fact is certain - there are three SUVs filled with armed men driving around this town claiming to be the police department.

American Police Forces and their associated company, Defense Product Solutions, both have very slick websites, but there is one bizarre detail: APF's logo is actually the coat of arms of Serbia.

During the fiasco of the 2000 presidential election the Onion ran the headline, "Serbia Deploys Peacekeeping Forces to U.S." Could this joke have finally come true? Is the Serbian military now roaming the streets of Montana? Or does this company just have the world's worst corporate branding? Either way, I think it is probably time for the Montana State Police to step in and throw everybody involved into the still-vacant Hardin jail while they try and sort this mess out.

The Bill Sparkman Murder: The Past and Present of Resistance to the Census

2009-09-30T13:00:00.003-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- For most Americans, the decennial census is a mundane exercise that goes largely unnoticed. You receive a form in the mail, and occasionally you see census workers walking around with clipboards and knocking on doors. It is only slightly more exciting for researchers and academics, because a few months after the final count, we get a raft of brand new data about the US population with which to tinker and model.

For a narrow slice of the population, mostly those people located far to the right on America's political spectrum and far from the country's urban centers, the census is a favorite boogeyman. For mainline conservatives, the census is regarded with suspicion because every 10 years, the ranks of minorities who don't vote Republican continue to grow; Republicans would rather that it was harder to find and count these poorer, urban populations. For the lunatic fringe, the census is an invasion into their private lives by the hated federal government.

There is now evidence that these two views are converging. The grisly murder of census worker Bill Sparkman in rural Kentucky three weeks ago shows us that despite more than three centuries of census taking in America, suspicions remain. Rather than being driven deeper into the backwoods, this virulent fear of the census - and of government in general - is gaining traction in national politics. No one has condoned this dreadful murder, but certain public figures have chosen to use misinformation about the census to stoke Americans' fears, just as they used lies about the president's citizenship and the so-called "death panels." These conspiracy theories are aired every night by Glenn Beck and repeated continuously in the halls of Congress.

A look back at the history of the census in America, and resistance to it, may be instructive to understand how we reached this place.

The earliest opposition to the census had a religious foundation. Enumerating the population was referred to as the "Sin of David," a reference to the biblical King David's order to count the people of Israel, in defiance of God's will. In some parts of the world, enumerations are still rejected on religious grounds - in 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church opposed a government plan to issue tax ID numbers to the entire population; some members of the clergy called them the "number of the beast." In America today, certain strains of religious fervor drive general resistance to government authority, but few cite King David's hubris.

The first federal census was launched in 1790. In the preceding century, the 13 colonies had each conducted more than 30 censuses, but a single national effort to count every person from Georgia to Maine had never been undertaken. Many were skeptical that it could be done accurately, but few doubted the necessity of a census, especially since America was embarking on an experiment of representative government. No taxation without representation was the battle cry of the Revolution, but there could be no representation without enumeration.

It is important to remember that the census is not an exercise carried out by a faceless state bureaucracy. Mr. Sparkman was one of the thousands of Americans who work part-time and full-time to complete the census. America's first census was carried out by a few hundred individuals; they were poorly paid, had little or no training, and they often had to provide their own materials and transportation. One such person was Edward Carrington, the marshal for the district of Virginia in 1790, who was responsible for the commonwealth's census returns. In March of that year, he wrote a letter to the US Department of Justice outlining his plans for the census; in it he also noted the importance of the census to democracy, and the dangers of misinformation about the undertaking:

When it is considered that this measure is to ascertain the proportions of representation of the several states in the Federal Government, and that the due weight to which this state is entitles therein, depends on the faithful execution of the act of Congress, it is hoped that gentlemen will be careful in their recommendations, and that all the good citizens of Virginia, will be ready to aid a full and fair enumeration of the inhabitants thereof.

Later that year, he also wrote to James Madison, the most ardent supporter of the census, and predicted that there would be active campaigns against the project:

The Assistants [census takers] may compel every one he called on to make him a return by means of the penalty [a small fine levied for non-compliance], but it is not probable he will be able to discover any concealments of parts of families and there is no doubt but that many evil disposed persons will endeavour to impress upon the minds of the people, ideas that their future taxes will be governed by the numbers that shall now return.

In early America, resistance to the census was strongest on the frontier. A healthy distrust of government is what led many into the wilderness in the first place. Most of the people who had settled beyond the Appalachians had done so without the consent of the British or American governments, so they had no proper title to the land they occupied - these squatters feared that any contact with government agents was a precursor to the loss of their property rights. This suspicion, combined with the difficulty of reaching remote populations in places like Kentucky, Vermont, and western Pennsylvania, conspired to make these people undercounted, and thus underrepresented in the first Congress. A report on the first census in the remote areas along Lake Champlain in Vermont described this situation:

Due to inexperience, imagination by the inhabitants that some scheme for increasing taxation was involved, difficulties of no roads, bridges, unsettled wilderness and isolated locations of the early settlers, opposition on religious grounds, all delayed the final enumeration a full year.

It is likely that Mr. Sparkman faced some similar challenges in Clay County, Kentucky. Driving on bad roads to reach isolated populations with little support or supervision, like the census takers before him, he worked to help people be counted so that they could collect what was theirs from the national stock. In return for his service, he was lynched and branded. His killer (or killers) is still at large, and though we have no definitive explanation for this horrible crime, the fact that the word "FED" was inscribed across his chest is a chilling reminder of how deep anti-government sentiment continues to run in many parts of the country.

In reality, the census is not mundane. Embodied within this power to count and catalog the population is the power of the modern state to function. Even if we strip down the government to its most basic activities, as Ron Paul would have us do, an accurate count of the population is necessary for apportioning representatives to Congress, levying taxes, and raising an army. The framers of the Constitution understood this, which is why the census is essential to the operation of the federal government. But it does not represent an immanent threat of tyranny. We do not need Republican congressmen and backwoods survivalists to protect us from the depravities of enumeration. But the Economist described the often ambiguous position of the census like this:

Nowadays, a census is part of the standard equipment of a functioning state. In 1995 the UN called for all member nations to hold a census in the following decade. Yet counting people remains a sensitive business for two reasons, connected with the ambiguous character of government. Where government is oppressive, people want to keep out of censuses, lest information they provide is misused. Where government provides, people want to be in censuses, and to boost their numbers, in order to claim a larger share of the goodies.

As an unambiguously democratic government, America should debate the merits of collecting certain types of information about the population, and how we deploy that information to better the lives of our citizens. In doing so, we should ensure that "gentlemen will be careful in their recommendations" and not whip people into a paranoid, anti-government frenzy in order to gain political advantage or improve television ratings.

Brief bibliography:

American Antiquarian Society. Early American Imprints.

Anderson, Margo J. (2008). "The Census, Audiences, and Publics." Social Science History 32(1): 1-18.

"Census sensitivity" (2007). The Economist, Dec 19.

Hobson, Charles F. and Robert A. Rutland, eds. (1981). The Papers of James Madison, vol. 13. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.

Onuf, Peter (1987). Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scott, Ann Herbert (1966). Census, U.S.A.: Fact Finding for the American People, 1790-1970. New York: Seabury Press.

Strelchik, Yevgeny (2006). “Nelzya pronumerovat chelovecheskuyu lichnost” (“You can’t replace a person’s identity with a number”). Nezavisimaya Gazeta, April 5.

Special Commentary: Don't Be Stubborn, Scrap the Interceptors

2009-09-22T18:31:00.006-04:00

Today at the Walter Duranty Report, we are publishing a special commentary from our friend Mac Broderick on the Obama administration's decision to cancel the ballistic missile interceptor program in Eastern Europe. We encourage our friends and readers to contribute any articles or commentary they find interesting or relevant to the wide range of topics we discuss here on our site, and as always, feel free to add your comments about anything you read here.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When analyzing the Obama administration’s decision to scrap missile defense bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, one characterization seems to have trumped all others: “It is a system that doesn’t work, designed to counter a threat that doesn’t exist, designed for a people that don’t want it.” Analysts and politicians should keep this variation on former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s original description of the proposed system in mind while debating the merits of the system.

First and foremost, the system did not work, nor did it show the promise of working anytime soon. Second, neither the Western Europeans the system was designed to protect, nor the Eastern Europeans who would be hosting it, seemed particularly enthused about it. Third, Iranian missiles do not currently have the ability to reach Western Europe, and probably will not until 2018, according to most estimates. These circumstances gave the Obama administration more than enough reason to cancel the Czech and Polish interceptor stations.

So why was the decision so contentious? The reactions provide a microcosm of the political attitudes towards Russia. Those opposing the administration's decision, the “Russia hawks”, cite two arguments: 1) Demonstrating our commitment to our Eastern European allies, and 2) The notion that we need to “get tough on Russia.” The first point is a valid one. Examples abound of Russia’s belligerence towards its neighbors. At best, it can be described as an irritable neighbor with a tendency to overreact to the most petty slights. In an area where concrete actions carry more currency than diplomatic gestures, NATO would be wise to reaffirm its commitment to the defense of Poland and its neighbors in some manner other than speeches. The deployment of the Patriot missile battery originally planned to defend the missile installations would be a good start. Moreover, several politicians in the region, especially on the Polish side, have staked considerable political capital on supporting the system, and should not be punished for their decision to do so. The Obama administration’s communication of the decision did not show any sensitivity to the situations of Poles and Czechs; hopefully its further actions will demonstrate otherwise. However, this commitment to our allies does not require the US to spend irrationally on projects with little ability to confront temporal problems; rather, a pragmatic approach to the security, integrity, and stability of Eastern Europe will serve not only our allies, but ourselves well in the long term.

As for the idea of getting tough on Russia, this has become the national security equivalent of being tough on crime: it’s the low hanging fruit for establishing your national security bona fides. There is no lobby to contend with, you appear to bask in some sort of Reagan-esque glow, and you may convince a few people that you have some grasp of international politics. Unfortunately, Russia bashing is too often the result of knee-jerk politics, as opposed to a carefully thought-out decision on how to deal with this country.

This does not mean to minimize the Putin administration’s lack of respect for democracy or the sovereignty of its neighbors. However, Putin and Medvedev’s actions do not mean that opposing Russia for the sake of opposition should be the US’ default position. This is especially true when the leaders in question have a tendency to foment nationalist sentiment for domestic benefit. Careful engagement, complemented by constructive reinforcement of our allies and the clear delineation of how we expect Russia to act if it would like to be treated as a valuable member of the international community, should bear more fruit. Let’s leave stubborn petulance to the Russians.

Washington Post, Daily Telegraph Shilling for Russian Government

2009-09-21T15:58:00.008-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Everyone knows the sorry state of affairs of America's newspaper business and its derelict advertising revenue models, but I didn't think that one of the nation's most prestigious newspapers would sink to this.

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves - I totally did think they could sink to this, but I'm still disappointed that they have. Earlier this summer, my compatriot Itchy forwarded me a link to an advertising supplement on washingtonpost.com titled "Russia Now." I had thought that it was a one-off insert, but I have now realized that the Post is making this a regular monthly feature in its newspaper.

The segment is filled with articles lauding Russia's political leaders and celebrating its business-friendliness. But more troubling than the propaganda is that while the Post does rightly place the words "A Paid Supplement to The Washington Post" at the top of the Russia Now webpage, nowhere on the site does it say who is actually paying for it. On its website, it bills the supplement as an "Advertorial," a chilling new word which suggests that the paper's own editorial content may be up for sale (and a word, I was saddened to learn, that has entered the dictionary, alongside the likes of "edutainment" and "celebutante.")

Much of the content of Russia Now appears to be original, with hard-hitting articles like "How to Register Your Stay and Stay [With?] Friends" (it's a simple matter of going to the post office, apparently). The rest is press pickups from other news agencies, most of them owned by the Russian government - for example, there is a great interview by RIA-Novosti with South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity, who speaks unchallenged about the "thousands" of civilian deaths as the result of "Georgian crimes."

Another participant in this scheme, Britain's Daily Telegraph, is a bit more forthcoming, advising: "This online supplement is produced and published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia), which takes sole responsibility for the content." More honest, however, would be to point out that not only is Rossiyskaya Gazeta wholly owned by the Russian government, it is in fact the official mouthpiece of the government, as it is the paper of record for all decrees and legislation. In addition to the Post and the Telegraph, the supplement is also printed by Indian newspaper The Economic Times, Bulgaria's Duma and Brazil's Journal do Brasil. Russia Now is also produced by The Voice of Russia, an answer to America's similarly-named government broadcaster. Russia Now can also be found as a stand-alone English-language website called "Russia Beyond the Headlines."

The pages of newspapers are filled with advertisements from private businesses, multi-national corporations, and even sovereign governments who are trying to sell you something. Newspapers regularly print advertising inserts imploring readers to visit Ireland or not to be racist. They even sometimes print ads that look like news stories right next to real articles, as the Los Angeles Times did earlier this year on their front page, or the New York Times does on its website every day.

The difference here as that the drivel printed and broadcast by the likes of RIA-Novosti, Russia Today, or Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and here reprinted by Russia Now, is regarded as legitimate news in the completely unfree Russian news media market. The Russian government is paying money to foreign media to reprint its sham news - news which it foists on its own citizens on a daily basis, and which is rightfully disregarded by the legitimate independent press. Is this the state of America's newspapers then? Accepting money from foreign governments to reprint their vile propaganda? So much is being made of the advertisers fleeing Glenn Beck's program on Fox News for his outrageous demagoguery; I think it is time that the news media start turning away certain advertisers, especially one that poses as large a danger to the legitimate news as the Russian government.

The Future of Russia's Automotive Industry: Toys

2009-09-15T16:28:00.004-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Togliatti, the home of Russia's largest carmaker, AvtoVAZ, has not weathered the global recession well. Car sales in Russia have plummeted this year, and factories are promising huge layoffs.

Luckily, the Russian Industry and Trade Ministry has a plan: let them make toys.

In an effort to revive the fortunes of this beleaguered region, where tens of thousands are already unemployed or underemployed in the colossally inefficient auto plants, and thousands more may be laid off soon, the government announced plans Tuesday to create a special economic zone designed to attract manufacturers of toys and games.

The government plans to provide incentives to both foreign and domestic producers to locate production and development facilities in the region around Togliatti. According to the minister, Stanislav Naumov, the special zone would be centered around a design and production facility proposed by Hong Kong-based toy company Grand Toys. The company manufactures products for several well known companies, including Mattel, Hasbro and Nintendo. It was not immediately clear how many jobs this program would create.

In addition to preserving manufacturing jobs, the ministry cited several advantages of the program, though none of them seemed to make much sense. For example, the government believes that this will reduce the price of toys in Russia - I don't think that this is a very big problem, nor do I see how relocating production from China to Russia could possibly reduce the price. Also, this plan would reportedly reduce Russia's dependence on foreign imports, despite the fact that the import substitution model does not have a stellar track record, and there is no reason to prop up such an insignificant industry as toy production.

Needless to say, a few jobs molding plastic toys are unlikely to turn around the fortunes of this city. In late July, AvtoVAZ announced plans for 27,000 layoffs at its plants in Togliatti, which currently employ around 100,000 workers. Despite their astonishing Soviet scale, these plants produced a paltry 140,000 cars in the first six months of this year, making them some of the least efficient in the world. The government has already plowed US$750 million into the company to keep it afloat, but those efforts appear to be in vain.

In a related story, the New York Times ran a piece on Saturday about Moscow's famous "Detsky Mir" toy store. The building is undergoing a huge renovation, and many preservationists fear that, like so many other buildings in the city, its architectural integrity is being compromised. You can read the full report on threatened architecture in Moscow from the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society (MAPS) here.

Nantucket Overrun By Deer, Ticks, and Idiots

2009-09-08T12:09:00.003-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Over the weekend, the New York Times ran an article about the accelerating spread of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses on Nantucket. We have blogged about this disease in the past, and its (alleged) origin in an offshore military research laboratory. Most people I tell this story to are incredulous and don't believe any of the links between Lyme disease and Plum Island, but I again implore you to read Michael C. Carroll's Lab 257.

Personally, I think that deer should be eradicated from the island. They are not native to Nantucket, but were introduced in 1922, a time when deer were quite rare in the northeast. Now we have no shortage of deer, and an aggressive culling and birth control program would do wonders to reduce the danger of tick-borne illness to the island's human residents. Nobody needs to go around blasting the island to pieces killing 2,500 deer, but the visitors have outlived their usefulness.

Other islands have experienced a similar deer tick menace, such as Fire Island, off the coast of Long Island, which has "the highest concentration of deer ticks of any National Park area in the Eastern United States." This problem is often exacerbated by people feeding deer (as insane as that sounds). Said one Nantucket resident who opposes efforts to control the deer population, "I really love the deer, and I can’t help it. My mother took me to see ‘Bambi’ when I was little." Well, my mother took me to see "Lady and the Tramp," but that does not make it okay for me to spread garbage all over my front lawn to attract stray dogs, which I also really love.

Execution of the Innocent: Cameron Willingham and the Case Against the Death Penalty

2009-09-03T14:39:00.000-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- In the September 7^th issue of The New Yorker, reporter David Grann wrote a piece about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a man executed in Texas in 2004 for the murder of his three young daughters. Willingham's case has been much heralded as a clear-cut example of the execution of an innocent man. In the article, Grann cites a 2006 Supreme Court decision, Kansas v. Marsh, in which Antonin Scalia stated:

It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.

Many people believe that the Willingham case is that “rooftop” moment, Grann included, who concludes his article by stating:

There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person."

However, I will argue that it is not this moment, as much as I would like to put an end to the death penalty, for three main reasons. First, it is highly unlikely that anyone in Texas will admit that Willingham was innocent, due to the type of evidence used to both convict and potentially exonerate him. Second, Scalia's statement is wildly misinformed, as there have been many cases in which a clearly innocent person has been executed, yet these names have not become celebrated causes or toppled capital punishment in America. Finally, even if the state does admit that Willingham was wrongfully executed, it will make a good liberal rallying cry, but I do not believe that it will have the effect of dramatically shifting public opinion against the death penalty.

The evidence for and against Willingham

Just before Christmas in 1992, a fire raged through the Willingham home. Cameron, who was home at the time, managed to escape the fire, but the blaze killed the family's one-year-old twins and two-year-old daughter. Fire investigators quickly concluded that the fire had been intentionally set, leading to Willingham's arrest and trial for murder. Despite the lack of a clear motive, his history of domestic abuse and the expert testimony of the arson investigators convinced the jury that he was guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death in 1993.

Willingham maintained his innocence throughout, claiming that a space heater in the children's room must have started the fire. Shortly before he was executed in 2004, his case came to the attention of outside fire experts, who concluded that every piece of evidence pointing to arson in Willingham's case was invalid. This report was sent to clemency officials in Texas in hopes of earning a stay to investigate the case further. The stay was denied, and Willingham was put to death February 17, 2004.

Willingham is dead, but his case has sparked an investigation in Texas into the practices of forensic scientists. When this commission releases its report next year, there is a chance that they could conclude that the investigation into this case was flawed, though a complete admission of wrongdoing is highly unlikely. And even if the fire evidence is brought into question, that does not mean that any judicial authority will exonerate Willingham – a flawed investigation is not ironclad proof of innocence, prosecutors will argue.

This case was built on eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, and these things, it can be argued, are always subjective. Prosecutors use this subjectivity to their advantage to get convictions at trial, and after the trial – or in this case, after the execution – they can use that subjectivity to cast a shadow of a doubt on Willingham's innocence. There is no irrefutable evidence in this case, like DNA, and even that is subject to endless questioning and posturing by lawyers.

As Scalia himself stated in the 2006 Kansas opinion, correctly this time, there has never been a case in which DNA evidence proved the innocence of an executed inmate. Now, there are a lot of reasons for this. For one, most inmates spend an average of 12 years on death row. Many of those currently incarcerated or recently executed were tried and convicted before the advent of DNA technology, meaning samples that could now prove their innocence were never collected or analyzed. Most importantly, though, once someone is executed, there is little reason to reopen the case, so DNA evidence is usually not preserved after the execution.

Names we should already be shouting

Willingham's case is indeed tragic, but not unique, despite Justice Scalia's protestations. In their article “The Execution of the Innocent” (published in Acker et al., America's Experiment with Capital Punishment, 2003) Michael Radelet and Hugo Bedau argue that while “never in the twentieth century has a government official in this country admintted that an execution carried out under his/her authority, or that of a predecessor, took the life of an innocent victim” (326), the execution of the innocent is neither rare nor unlikely.

In an earlier book, In Spite of Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases (1987, with Constance Putnam) these authors identified 23 cases in which likely innocent people were put to death just in the twentieth century. Many of the names would be familiar to any high school student, like Joe Hill, a labor organizer allegedly framed for murder in 1915, and Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants convicted of murder in Massachusetts in 1920 (the complete list, with unhelpful commentary from a third party, can be found here). But you don't have to be completely innocent to be wrongfully executed. In addition to these cases in which the executed inmates probably had nothing to do with the crimes, the authors have identified several classes of cases in which the defendant was involved in the victim's death, but this did not rise to the level of capital murder, such as accidental killings, homicides in self-defense, homicides by the mentally ill, and non-capital murders (Radelet and Bedau 2003).

Some argue that many of the failings of capital punishment have been fixed since the Supreme Court struck down all existing capital statutes in the 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision, and admittedly, only one of the 23 cases occurred after the death penalty was reinstated in 1974 (that of James Randall Adams). However, since the Radelet and Bedau study was conducted, more names have been added to the list – in Grinn's article, he adds the cases of Ruben Cantu and Larry Griffin. Furthermore, death row inmates continue to be exonerated, suggesting that people are still wrongfully convicted. According to Radelet and Bedau:

If the history of the last twenty years is any guide to the future, an average of three death row inmates per year will continue to be vindicated and released. How many equally innocent death row inmates will be unsuccessful in obtaining relief is impossible to know, but the number is most certainly not zero (2003, 334).

Since 1973, 135 people have been exonerated and released from death row. Some people point to this fact as evidence that the system worked – despite a wrongful conclusion of their trials, the appeals process eventually led to the truth. But we must assume that the appeals process works as imperfectly as trials; just as certain people are convicted because of insufficient resources, ineffective counsel or misconduct, those same barriers exist – and are in fact greater – for defendants seeking a reversal on appeal.

Does Willingham's innocence even matter?

As stated earlier, I am a staunch opponent of capital punishment, and the case made here may sound cynical and defeatist. Willingham's case was an enormous miscarriage of justice, and I do not want to see any defendant, guilty or innocent, face that same fate.

But nonetheless, an admission of wrongdoing in this case will not turn the tide against capital punishment. As Justice Thurgood Marshall pointed out, most Americans are completely ignorant about the death penalty; they support it or oppose it on emotional, not evidentiary grounds. As for active proponents of capital punishment, many acknowledge that innocent people will be put to death, but they are willing to accept that in exchange for the retributive and deterrent benefits, which likely do not even exist. Ernest van den Haag likened the death penalty to any other activity in society which carries inherent risks: "Despite precautions, nearly all human activities, such as trucking, lighting, or construction, cost the lives of some innocent bystanders. We do not give up these activities, because the advantages, moral or material, outweigh the unintended losses."

This does represent a victory, however, for death penalty abolitionists, as Radelet and Bedau point out at the conclusion of their 2003 paper:

One of the amazing things that has happened in the fifteen years since our research was first released to the public is that those who defend the death penalty now concede the inevitability of executing the innocent ... We know of no defender of capital punishment who, prior to 1987, was willing to make such a concession in public.

Despite this concession, a majority of Americans continue to support capital punishment, and it remains the law of the land in 35 states. So shout Cameron Todd Willingham's name from the rooftops; just don't forget to add his name to the others that have fallen on deaf ears.

Baseball Skies

2009-09-02T11:00:00.008-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- This has been a summer of transitions for me - moving to a new city (Brooklyn will now be my more or less permanent dateline), coping with life after graduate school, and looking for work in a tough economy. But there has been one constant throughout the summer: baseball.

I crisscrossed the nation between New York and Colorado three times this year, and on every trip, I made sure to stop at some of the hallowed sites of America's pastime - not the gleaming corporate cathedrals of the monopolistic MLB, but the minor league parks of America's small cities and the sites where baseball history was made.

Unlike most other popular American sports, baseball is played almost exclusively outside (and with the impending demise of Minnesota's Metrodome and Tampa's Tropicana Field, there will be no more indoor baseball in the major leagues) and during the most beautiful time of year. So, here I would like to share some of my pictures from the summer and the beautiful skies of America's ballparks.

Here were some of the other highlights of my travels:

Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, Louisville, KY: In addition to being home to the world's largest bat, the Louisville Slugger museum will teach you such interesting facts as how the two-tone bat was invented (it was a spare bat that we being used to stir paint) or how many bats a major leaguers uses in a season (over 100). One of the coolest things about the museum is that they have a batting cage where you can hit with a wide selection of wooden bats fresh off the factory floor.

Bob Feller Museum, Van Meter, IA: When Babe Ruth walked onto the field at Yankee Stadium for the last time on June 13, 1948, two months before throat cancer would take his life, he held a bat at his side to steady his ravaged body. That day the Cleveland Indians were in town, and the bat he grabbed off the rack belonged to future hall of famer Bob Feller. Today you can see that bat, signed by Ruth and Feller, on display in the pitcher's hometown museum.

Nemo's Kitchen, Detroit, MI: Located in the shadow of the now-demolished Tiger Stadium, Nemo's is as much a Tigers institution as Ty Cobb and gothic lettering. With the stadium gone, they have adapted to the times - where you could once walk down Michigan Avenue to a Tigers game, the bar now has a fleet of buses to shuttle patrons to games for a modest $3 (and parking around back is free). Anyone contemplating a trip to a Tigers game should make this a mandatory stop.

Collegiate Summer Baseball: When the college baseball season ends, players need a place to hone their skills and keep the scouts' attention - that's where the summer collegiate leagues come in. In small towns across America, players play for room and board, usually boarding with local families, and in the evenings they ply their trade for the crowds. It's not quite the big leagues, but the spectators treat the players like their adopted sons.

For future summer trips, I have put together a short wish list of baseball shrines I would like to visit:

Koshien High School Baseball Tournament, Japan: Though a bit far for a weekend road trip, the annual Koshien tournament is one of the most popular sporting events in Japan, eclipsing even the country's major leagues. 4,000 teams compete for the right to play in the tournament at historic Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya, where more than a million fans show up to cheer on their hometown squads while millions more tune in at home. Japanese and American culture are very different, yet I find it remarkable that we both love such an idiosyncratic and arcane game as baseball; Koshien is one of those institutions that gets at the heart of the game - kids playing, not for money, but honor and glory. (The PBS program POV ran an excellent documentary on the tournament, a trailer is here.)

Esquina Caliente, Havana, Cuba - "The Hot Corner": Cuba is not known for its freedom of speech, but at this spot in Havana's Parque Central, people gather for heated debates - about baseball. Recently featured in the documentary about Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant's return to the island after 46 years of exile, The Lost Son of Havana, the Hot Corner is a sort of Speakers' Corner that American baseball fans should envy.

Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY: Now just a few hours drive from my front door, the Hall of Fame is near the top of my to do list.

Little League World Series, Williamsport, PA: As Kenny Mayne said, "The best entertainment, and the true spirit of any sport, can be found at any children's game." As an unmarried man with no children of my own, people give me strange looks when I show up at a random little league game, but the LLWS offers enough public spectacle that I could show up on my own to watch kids play without anyone calling the cops on me. Congratulations, by the way, to Chula Vista, California, who defeated Taoyuan, Taiwan 6-3 in Sunday's final.

Fenway Park, Boston, MA: Most people who know me are aghast when I tell them that I, a lifelong rabid Red Sox fan, have never been to a game at Fenway Park. I have traveled as far as Detroit and Baltimore just to see the Sox, but never to their home ballpark. Hopefully this fall I will get the chance to walk down Yawkey Way with a playoff ticket in hand.

Facebookin' Health Care

2009-08-05T13:14:00.007-04:00

NEW YORK, New York -- This might be a lame use of a blog.

This post follows from a facebook conversation about health care reform in the US, and I'd like to offer my thoughts below. This is entirely because facebook limits comments on links, etc., to a paragraph or so, and there no longer seems to be any way to create content on facebook by uploading a note from scratch, as opposed to pasting in a blog link. Hence, my use/abuse of the blog to continue an argument that would've remained on facebook, if Mark Zuckerberg didn't suck.

At any rate, the article that spurred the back-and-forth was this WSJ article about Democratic lobbying groups attacking party members who were "out of line" in criticizing the Party Leadership's (still not elucidated) stance.

I had commented on the article as follows:

Still unclear on why it's supposed to be wrong for businesses to want to make a
profit. I really don't know what worldview the majority of Democratic
congresspeople are supporting -- trashing an industry simply because it is
profitable?

There seems to be a need for some healthcare reform (or so I'm
told...), but allowing the motivation for it to be the fact that certain
companies are profitable is inane, vengeful, and economically backward.

A friend of mine responded:

Once again you have posted a link to an article along with a comment that
is almost unrelated. The article is about political infighting among democrats,
not the overall economic philosophy of the democratic party. Are you hoping no
one will bother to read the article, and we'll all just assume it substantiates
your point?

I'm sure that privately run fire departments would also be quite
profitable, if not for the public option... Not all things should be left to the
private sector.

Your "or so I'm told" bullshit suggests that you don't personally know
anyone who has suffered under our current health care system. I'm glad you and
your family have been so fortunate, but open your eyes. It is not working....

I am sick of you guys posting this shit. (Yes, G-Man, I'm talking to you
too.) So please answer the following question: What is the republican
health-care platform, other than opposing the democrats? No change to the status
quo?

My reply is this:

Guys, I'm glad you commented -- some debate is obviously a good thing when Congress and the administration want to radically alter something that affects our financial and physical well-being to the degree that healthcare does.

Firstly, though, I think your criticism was pretty off-base: the comment I made is in no way unrelated to that article. The article is about lobbying groups publicly attacking Democrats who have qualms about undertaking radical changes to 1/6+ of the economy without slowing the process down for debate. The POV of the attacks is that "profiting" is somehow wrong. To my mind, that is a dangerous, populist route to take.

In any economy, in any sector, you need to turn a profit to stay in business and, ergo, to employ people. People need jobs, but those jobs will only exist when an industry is profitable. Yet in a recession, when people feel financially hit, demagogues can appeal to populist anger at "rich bosses." As recent incidents in France (workers rigging bombs to factories) or China (workers beating executives to death) show, that populist rage can be an unpredictable, violent thing. Today far-left lobbying groups rail against "profiteering" in healthcare; but that same logic can apply to any other industry tomorrow: energy, agriculture, food processing, higher education, technology, finance. I find the line of attack these lobbies are taking to be fundamentally worrisome.

Moreover, let's look at the larger, overarching point of the article that you say I'm not addressing. The point is that lobbying groups are launching ad hominem attacks on politicians who don't want to go along with the government's plan. As I said, when you're talking about restructuring 18% of the economy, some debate is a good thing. The administration, however, wanted a bill to go through by early August -- after virtually no debate. Sure, Obama goes on YouTube and urges people to have "health care parties" where you can talk about how worried you are about health care; but there hasn't been any actual open debate in Congress or the administration about what changes would be best, either in an ideal world or in the current situation. Instead, as he has done elsewhere (the stimulus and energy legislation, e.g.), Obama puts out a few forceful advertisements or press conferences about how badly something needs to be done … and then he lets Nancy Pelosi worry about the details behind the closed doors of congressional committee rooms.

And those Democrats who have qualms about the closed manner in which the process has taken place are then vilified by lobbying groups that are apparently connected to the Democratic Party. Stifling debate is a dangerous, unhealthy thing to do in a democracy. That's especially true when a plurality of people are opposed to the initiatives that are coming together and feel that it will make their own health care worse.

As much as Obama portrays healthcare as a huge crisis, 80% of Americans are happy with their own coverage, and coverage rates have been more or less stable for about 20 years. There are problems, certainly -- most people feel that the system in general has problems even if they themselves are satisfied -- but people don't want a radical revamp. Doesn't that count for something? After all, isn't democracy about the will of the people? Can you force a new health system with a big government role on people, the constituents of the state, if most of them don't want it but because you think Congress and the president know better than people what's good for them?

But that sort of stifling is what those ads aim to do. Incidentally, by attacking people who post articles critical of this process, you are also stifling any attempts by people to create discourse.

Why is discourse important? It helps to know what the government is trying to pull when it comes to any policy. But in this case, there are some good ideas out there, and then there are some less-good ideas, many of which are arguably in the main congressional plans. A quick look at the only state to have introduced health care reform of the sort that seems likely to be pushed by Congress -- Massachusetts -- isn't much of a success story. Fewer uninsured have been covered than thought (though coverage rates are pretty good there), but more importantly costs have soared, the system is in debt, and growth-killing taxes are being introduced despite promises of no new taxes for the middle class to fund the program (sound familiar?). And that's in a state of 5 million people that is one of the wealthiest, healthiest, least-obese states in the country.

So what needs to be done? What else is out there? I don't know what the Republicans' plan is, to answer your question. They don't seem to have one, and it's a pretty big disappointment when the opposition is either irrelevant, has no idea what to say, or goes along with the ruling party. It was annoying when Democrats went along with Bush initiatives that were ill thought-out, and it's annoying now when the Republicans appear to have little to add. One-party rule is always a bad thing.

More proactively, there are probably three areas to look at here: quality, coverage and cost. As for quality, the quality of care in this country is pretty good. Granted, we pay 80% more as a % of GDP than France and Japan and don't have markedly better outcomes. But outcomes are still better than, e.g., in the UK. So quality is good, but, importantly, we don't get enough value.

That brings us to cost. Theoretically, rising costs aren't in and of themselves a problem. As an economy grows more sophisticated, people don't need to spend all their money on nondurables like food or clothing. That they spend more to advance technologies that let people live longer, healthier lives is a given. But cost is an issue when it becomes prohibitive -- or when health care is run by the government and those costs eat into other government expenditures or raise the public debt. So if you want to have real problems with cost, giving government greater responsibility for health care costs is a pretty good way of making cost a real problem -- which is what you have when that responibility eats into other spending, or worsens the debt load.

As for prohibitive costs, they play into coverage. People get hit hardest financially when they aren't insured or their insurer gives them poor coverage. Making sure more people are covered, and that that coverage is good, is important.

But the biggest driver of rising costs is the same factor that results in the US having outcomes no better than France while paying twice as much compared to GDP: Waste. The system is full of waste, with doctors ordering far more expensive tests and ineffective treatments than is needed. The reason behind that is that reimbursement for hospitals and doctors is based on the costs they run up, not on the quality of their outcomes. As a doctor or hospital, you get paid more by insurers or the government when you order more expensive tests, whether or not they're needed. The incentives are totally backward.

That's the biggest factor driving cost increases. It's a problem, but there are hospitals and health care systems that have tackled it: the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, California's Kaiser Permanente system, the Cleveland Clinic. What they all do is pay doctors yearly salaries rather than commissions based on the costs they rack up, and have outcome-based systems of cooperation among different doctors to coordinate treatment and make sure unnecessary tests aren't given.

Revamping the system in that mold -- putting in place a system (Medicare incentives, e.g.) that moves reimbursement to a salary model and coordinates care to achieve better, more efficient outcomes -- would be the best step in the right direction. But the plans being hashed out by Congress don't do that. And prominent Democrats bucking the government's plans get steamrolled when they might have something good to say.

That change of incentives is agreed upon by academic health-policy experts, yet it has no place in the main plans. Other policies have achieved mainstream acceptance among health-policy experts (including Obama advisor David Cutler, whose book "Your Money or Your Life" goes over these issues really well; maybe if Obama came up with his own plan instead of leaving it to Congress, we'd see more of Cutler's good ideas…) include separating insurance from employment. Employers today get tax breaks for offering health insurance. That leads to an incentive structure where they can offer really, really expensive plans -- and write it off as taxes. The result is to push up costs and have more waste in the system -- all funded by the US government's tax system, and none of it reformed under Congress' proposals. Neither Democrats, influenced by unions that have the most generous and wasteful benefits, nor Republicans, influenced by the insurance companies that can benefit from this policy, want to touch this one, although every health-policy expert sees it as Public Enemy No. 1. You stop offering those tax incentives, and you can move away from employer-based coverage. Not only does that mean that US employers don't have to shoulder insurance burdens (making them more competitive globally), but it means people don't get screwed when they lose their job. That step toward portable insurance is key, although insurance under the competing congressional plans would only be portable if it's controlled by the government, while employers will continue to have the same bad set of incentives vis-a-vis private insurance.

Another reform: Individual mandates. This is a bit more controversial, but a large number of uninsured are younger, healthy people who can afford insurance but choose not to purchase it, preferring instead to have more spending cash. The result is that if you are, say, unemployed or a young adult and not yet working, it's expensive to buy insurance. That's because you aren't part of a group buying pool, and also because so many other young, healthy people don't buy insurance. The upshot being that insurance costs go up when it's only older or less-healthy people buying the insurance. When younger people with lower medical costs buy it, they bring costs down for everyone. Putting in place tax penalties for people who don't buy insurance could create individual mandates that bring down costs for all. Lots of Republicans are reasonably opposed to this as a violation of personal liberty, but it may not be the worst of ideas.

There are various other ideas, some supported by Democrats (more government spending on EMRs and other technology; a health "exchange" where people can go to get good, clear info on what plan would be cheapest/best for them), others by Republicans (tort reform; allowing insurers to operate across state lines, breaking up the local monopolies that exist). Then there are interesting ideas that both, or no, parties support: non-profit health cooperatives; prohibiting insurers to exclude based on pre-existing conditions; tying outcomes to value so that, e.g., people can use any clinic with their insurance but using more costly and less-efficient ones costs you more out of pocket; and, importantly, action to break up the local monopolies that insurance companies have become.

Look, at the end of the day, US health care is among the best in the world. I know it's not New York hipster-cool to say that (maybe Conor Oberst will be pissed at me), but it's true. There are big problems, but on the bright side there is a broadening consensus among health-policy experts about how to take care of them. Unfortunately, Congress' plans don't really take them into account. Instead, they try to ape European-style plans. Doing that doesn't mean we'll get European-style outcomes, and it may mean that, despite European-style taxes, outcomes here are affected negatively. Medicare, after all, is a politicized, wasteful mess (they still haven't figured out where funding for Part D is coming from...) and hardly the path you want to follow. The number of hospitals is about half of what it was in the 1970s. That's because hospital profits have been getting squeezed both by insurers and by Medicare for decades. The result is that there are fewer hospitals, pushing costs up and making care less accessible. If you have a government-run plan that artificially pushes down costs, unless you put hospitals under government control (that may work, but it's not exactly part of the plan now), they'll take more margin hits and more of them will go out of business … pushing costs up further at the existing, less-accessible ones.

Atul Gawande wrote an interesting article a few months ago about how different health care systems came about. It's pretty interesting, but he recommends the US stick to what it knows and improve that, expanding coverage, cutting costs and improving quality. As he notes, that would be done by embracing reforms like those above, rather than having a government insurance plan that doesn't cut costs or restructure the way doctors are paid; that retains a backward employer-based system necessitated by WWII-era worker shortages; that politicizes health decisions (meaning any cost cuts will be political death and that therefore costs will keep on rising); and that creates more debt and eats into other government expenses. Yeah, it's fashionable to focus on how the Republicans, who are pretty irrelevant here, have no plan, or about how ridiculous and hickish Max Baucus or Ron Wyden sounds. But it's just stupid to try to silence Baucus' or Wyden's voices when what they want is an examination of the largely closed way a handful of powerful congresspeople have cobbled together a populist but iffy plan.

Gambling in Russia and the Rust Belt

2009-07-25T18:59:00.010-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Earlier this month, the Russian government implemented a ban on gambling, restricting casinos to four special zones scattered across the country. The Western press was all atwitter over this story, acting as if the Kremlin had declared over night that casinos be shuttered.

The deadline of July 1, 2009 to close or relocate all gambling establishments had actually been established two and half years ago, but due to a lack of planning by the government and the general arbitrariness of the law in Russia, few operators chose to close before the deadline, and none have yet moved to the new gaming zones.

The four tiny enclaves to which gambling is now restricted are located in the Kaliningrad Region along the Baltic Sea; in the Altai Region near the border with the Altai Republic in southern Siberia; near the Far Eastern city of Primorye; and along the border between the Krasnodar and Rostov regions along the Sea of Azov.

The regions have been described in the press as "remote," "far-flung," and "far from Moscow." It should be noted that the last casino zone listed above is not far from Sochi, the city that will host the 2014 Winter Olympics. Like the casino operators view of the ban, I have a similar attitude towards the Sochi Olympics - I'll believe it when I see it.

Says one resident of Siberia, "When do we get the showgirls?"

The Russian Ministry of Finance has plans to spend $31 billion of public and private money (roughly 80% from the private sector, the rest from the state) developing these gambling regions, but so far no one has stepped up to invest anything. Some operators have even chosen to move to the hermit kingdom of Belarus rather than open up shop in the Russian enclaves.

As this ban was taking force, I found myself driving across America's rust belt - though upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan - where casinos are popping up everywhere. Many of these dying post-industrial cities have decided to bet their chips on gambling to improve their fortunes.

Downtown Detroit is now dotted with massive new hotel casinos, built to compete with the establishments across the river in Windsor, Ontario, a city hit just as hard by the decline of the auto industry. Meanwhile, the landmarks of Detroit's city center remain dilapidated, the city remains as dysfunction and destitute as ever, and the crushing competition for gambling dollars has driven Windsor to become one of the worst cities in Canada.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, once one of America's colossal steel centers, has turned to the golden gambling goose to at least slow its breakneck decline. A massive steel crane that in a previous era may had carried iron ore to the blast furnaces is now adorned with a massive sign welcoming you the new Sands resort casino.

This is not a new trend, of course - the former steel town of Gary, Indiana opened its first casino over a decade ago, and a growing list of cities and states with nowhere left to turn to improve their economic plight fight and claw with one another to attract the next gleaming casino to their city.

Not only do casino operators squeeze the most desperate municipalities for tax breaks and financing, but they then turn around and squeeze their profits out of the most destitute members of the population. Anyone who thinks that casino revenues come from high-rollers, or from people who are making a reasoned, informed choice to gamble, has clearly never been to the casinos outside of Las Vegas or the Riviera. Bethlehem, Detroit and Gary will never become vacation destinations, meaning the casinos will sell their "entertainment" to the unemployed citizens of these impoverished cities.

This was the case in Russia as well. Yes, the law was poorly planned and badly executed, but gambling had become a serious social ill in the country. Roughly 400,000 people have lost their jobs as a result, a tough pill in Russia's faltering economy, but I have little sympathy for the operators who are mostly homegrown gangsters or foreign profiteers. I can say from personal experience that the expats working in Russia's gambling industry are some of the worst people in the world.

One of the most depressing sights I have ever seen was a man, drunk and likely homeless, pouring 1 ruble (roughly 3 cents) coins into slot machine outside a Moscow subway entrance. The machine was nothing more than a steel box with three digital clock-like displays that flashed random numbers. No bells, no pictures of fruit, and no waitresses plying him with free drinks. For millions of people, this is the so-called glamorous world of gaming.

Bush and Nixon: The Men Who Would Be Baseball Commissioner

2009-07-23T14:29:00.006-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- President Barack Obama recently enjoyed the privilege of throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at the Major League All-Star Game in St. Louis. The tradition is nearly as old as the game itself. The All-Star Game started in 1933, and every president since Franklin Roosevelt, who first pitched at the game in 1937 at Washington's Griffith Stadium, has made the ceremonial delivery.

This is just one of many connections between the presidency and the national pastime. While attending the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory earlier this summer, I watched a documentary chronicling this relationship. Lincoln was lampooned in a political cartoon from 1860 for his love of the game its in infancy; ambidextrous Harry Truman and Gerald Ford each threw Opening Day first pitches with their left and right arms; and Ronald Reagan, when working as a Cubs radio announcer for a station in rural Illinois, would make up colorful descriptions of the action on the field for listeners, as all he had to rely on was a play-by-play ticker tape.

Two men who achieved the highest office in the land also nearly held the highest office in baseball. The dearly departed George W. Bush (well, he's just moved to Dallas) and the irrepressible racist Richard Nixon were both considered for the job of commissioner of Major League Baseball, though both chose instead to run for president.

How different would America - and the game of baseball - be today had both of these men become commissioner? They were arguably the two worst presidents ever to be elected to two terms, yet baseball could have kept them away from the presidency. The ball club owners could have done the nation a favor by keeping these men out of public office. Nixon's presidential ambitions were clear when he declined the offer in 1965, though Bush's were not when he was considered for the job 1992. In Nixon's case, the owners could have been acting much like when a country accepts to host some deposed Third World strongman to prevent them from causing any more trouble, like Saudi Arabia did with Idi Amin, or Boston University continues to do with many former African dictators.

(Above: Nixon making a proposal to add the expansion Saigon Senators to the National League)

Nixon did cause at least one owner a headache when he became president. In 1973, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn fined and suspended newly-minted Yankees owner George Steinbrenner for making illegal contributions to Nixon's re-election campaign, something Big Stein claimed he was forced to do under pressure from Nixon campaign officials.

As commissioner, what challenges would Nixon have faced in 1965? That era saw some big changes in baseball, including expansion into Canada, the playoff system, the players union, free agency, and the growth of night games. As the man who presided over much of this time period, Kuhn was a dynamic yet controversial commissioner, and he was hardly on the cutting edge of all of these changes, especially the new labor relationships that were taking shape between owners and players. Nixon was no friend to unions as president, but during the 1960's he had been considered to head up the nascent Baseball Players Association, and long after he had left the White House, he did successfully arbitrate a dispute between MLB and the umpires in 1986 to avert a strike. With this solid baseball resume, I think it is unlikely that Nixon would have left his office in disgrace aboard a chopper flying out of Dodger Stadium, waving the "V" for Victory.

Unlike Nixon, Bush had few political ambitions, at least that anyone was aware of, in 1992, and even when he assumed the presidency just eight years later, few foresaw that his campaign promises of modest foreign policy, limited federal spending, and education reform would turn into ... well, we all know what happened. Bush also has a baseball resume, but the crises that faced the game during his potential tenure were far more serious. While still the managing partner of the Texas Rangers, Bush was a candidate to replace Faye Vincent. Steroids would become the single most important issue over the next decade, and while he did employ at least one proven juicer (Rafael Palmeiro), it's hard to say whether he would have handled the situation any better or worse (which would be quite hard to do) than Bud Selig. One decision that Bush was surely on the wrong side of was to expand the playoffs to six teams and break the leagues into three divisions, which has been an unabashed success. Every owner voted in favor of the change in 1993, with one exception - the Rangers' George W. Bush.

Bush also understood the power of baseball as a national symbol, something that he mobilized for maximum propaganda effect after the attacks of September 11th, 2001. His theatrics at Yankee Stadium a few days later would make any die-hard nationalist proud. The Yankees, true to form, have continued this ceremony to the present day, forcing everyone to sing "God Bless America" at every seventh-inning stretch. And if you don't feel like singing, then you can get your ass to jail. USA! USA!

It is an interesting bit of counter-factual history, and if I had to choose, I would gladly pick both these men to be my baseball commissioner instead of my president. Bush may still have ambitions to become commissioner, though his rock-bottom popularity make him a risky choice to replace Selig when he retires, supposedly in 2012. I can say this without exception, though; in many cases, both the country and baseball have deserved far better leadership than they have gotten.

Despite his brief term, Bart Giamatti is considered by many to be the last great commissioner. He famously banned Pete Rose for life for betting on baseball, but more importantly, he was able to eloquently express his love and admiration for the game to the public, something that Selig appears utterly incapable of doing. Giamatti also served as president of Yale University, and immediately upon assuming this post in 1978, he issued this memo:

To the Members of the University Community:

In order to restore what Milton called the ruin of our grand parents, I wish to announce that henceforth, as a matter of University policy, evil is abolished and paradise is restored.

I trust all of us will do whatever possible to achieve this policy objective.

That's a platform I can get behind, whether it be from a university president, a baseball commissioner, or the president of the United States.

Wednesday Links: Recession Solutions

2009-06-18T16:53:00.007-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Everyone is trying to cope with economic hardships. The Russian government is giving people free lumber. New Yorkers can no longer steal paper plates from their local Whole Foods. And Oprah just wants you to read The Secret and think positively to solve all of your financial, emotional, and medical problems.

Wall Street Journal: Let the forest be your stimulus. Despite having the third-largest hard currency reserves in the world, Russia still can't spend its way out of economic oblivion. So instead, the government is letting ordinary citizens fell timber, prospect for gold and plant potatoes for free in hopes of stimulating the economy.

New York Times: Russia's defense minister is a "stool salesman." Russia's military has long been plagued by a bloated officer corps, but in its current economic dire straits, the country can hardly afford to gently show these officers the door. They just roughly kick them to the curb.

Architects' Journal: We will build Europe's largest ... er ... parking lot. The Russia Tower was slated to become Europe's tallest building, but financial mismanagement has brought the project to a halt, and little has been built since the cornerstone was laid two years ago. So much for Norman "The Apologist" Foster's wet dream of a building.

Geography of Jobs: Americans are equally screwed everywhere. That's not entirely true, but almost no major cities have been free from job losses. This map comes from consulting firm TIP Strategies and displays the change in the number of jobs for the 100 largest metropolitan areas since 2004.

WNYC: Forget NYSC, I'm joining the YMCA. Like the two-dollar bill story reported earlier, WNYC is asking listeners to submit their own uncommon indicators of the recession. The result is a fascinating interactive map of New York City.

Newsweek: Oprah wants you to inject things into your vagina. Oprah got thoroughly skewered by Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert in this Newsweek cover story, where they portrayed her as an uncritical, weak-minded ninny who unflinchingly endorses crackpots and cranks. The results are hilarious.

Toronto Star: Foreigners don't like hockey. Canada has been lauded for its open and fair immigration policies. Now if they could only get the new arrivals to take up hockey.

ESPN: I wanna be like Barry. If you want to get close to Obama, join in on some hoops. This borders a bit on a cult of personality, but luckily basketball is already very popular in the US, so we don't risk facing a situation like Russia, where niche sports like tennis, judo and skiing saw their popularity skyrocket simply because the president (Yeltsin in the first case, Putin in the latter two) played them.

Metropolis Magazine: Meet America's stupidest mayor. We have leveled our own broadsides against illiterate Boston mayor Tom Menino; now he may be facing a challenge to his authoritarian rule.

Tor Project: Help stop the Iranian thugocracy. Speaking of authoritarian rule, the Iranian government has become quite adept at thwarting journalists and would be protesters from gaining access to the Internet to get information about the unrest out of the country. This piece of software prevents the authorities from easily tracking them and cutting off their access, or worse, finding out their identity and personally targeting them. It can also be quite useful to bloggers and journalists in any part of the world.

The Recession and $2 Bills

2009-06-18T10:58:00.006-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- Recently a friend took a trip down to Baltimore for a family wedding. During that trip, something rather curious happened: on multiple occasions while making commercial transactions - usually with cab drivers - he received back in change the elusive two-dollar bill. He returned to New York with three of them in his wallet, totally befuddled as to why Thomas Jefferson's visage was in such regular circulation in Maryland.

Just last week, I took a trip back to my hometown of New Haven, and I retold this story to a mutual friend of ours at a local bar. We were both equally puzzled about this strange occurrence. I have never in my life been in possession of a two-dollar bill, and we both thought perhaps that Baltimore was such a backwards place that the bills had never fallen out of use. The bartender overheard us and said that he had two in his pocket that he had received from customers that week.

"It's the recession," he said simply. His theory was that when economic times are tough, people start dipping into any reserves of cash they might have on hand, whether those be collectible coins, loose change in the couch, or a stash of two-dollar bills.

The two-dollar bill has actually never been pulled from circulation. They currently make up roughly 1% of the money supply, and the Federal Reserve continues to print the bill. According to the Fed, "The $2 bill has not been removed from circulation and is still a circulating denomination of United States paper currency. The Federal Reserve System does not, however, request the printing of that denomination as often as the others. The Series 2003 $2 bill was the last printed and bears the names of former Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snow and Treasurer Rosario Marin. As of April 30, 2007 there were $1,549,052,714 worth of $2 bills in circulation worldwide."

Most of the bills, however, are not in regular circulation. Banks hold on to them and usually only distribute them to customers when they are specifically requested. Most of them end up, for example, stashed away in the pockets of bartenders instead of in the register to be given out in the normal course of transactions.

Perhaps the cab drivers of Baltimore are simply following the orders of the Federal Reserve to use the bills like you would any other currency, and our neighborhood bartender just happened to get lucky. I have not found any evidence or research about links between the resurfacing of two-dollar bills and recessions, but it seems to make logical sense.

For the past several years, the two-dollar bill has started to become more and more common. A Reuters story from 2006 reports increased orders for the bills from banks since 2001, though it is hard to say why. The piece cites the bills' popularity among strip clubs, as they mean double the tips for the dancers. It is possible that the combination of increased supply and less reluctance on the part of spenders to use them due to the recession has led to their increased visibility.

The bill has been linked to the current recession, but in a different way. Recently a story appeared in several news outlets about a pharmacy owner in Alabama who earlier this year gave his employees his own economic stimulus. Danny Cottrell gave each of his full-time employees bonuses of $700 and his part-time staff $300, with two conditions: they had to give 15% of the cash to charity, and the remainder had to be spent in local businesses. To track his employees' spending, he handed out the bonuses entirely in two-dollar bills, so that if they did as they were told, the local market would be flooded with the bills (A similar scheme was tried by the Geneva Steel Company in Utah in 1989 to show the economic importance of the company and its employees. The bills have subsequently been used to show the impacts of the plant's closing in 2001.) Interestingly, Mr. Cottrell also wrote an article in 2004 for VFW Magazine about a limited-time release of uncirculated two-dollar bills from the Federal Reserve. Perhaps that is how he managed to get ahold of $16,000 worth of the bills to dole out to his employees.

Is the two-dollar bill really an indicator of the recession? It is hard to tell. I think we will only know how bad things really are when people start paying for their beers and cab rides with their own gold teeth.

Western Dispatches: The Lone Survivor of Little Bighorn

2009-06-12T15:25:00.010-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- This week I will be bringing you a few observations and highlights from my recent road trip from Boulder to Brooklyn, one I will be repeating in reverse in just a few weeks time. The trip included my first visit to South Dakota; I was expecting a slightly less populated Kansas - some spectacular views of the prairies, but worth getting across as quickly as possible - but I was in fact mesmerized, and I wish I could have spent more time there.

While driving past lonely exit 191, right smack in the middle of the state, I stopped in at "1880 Town," an Old West attraction that looked too campy to pass up. The place is actually a collection of historic buildings taken from towns around the state and plunked down alongside the highway. Like many roadside museums, this one is filled with a somewhat random collection of artifacts, from signed pictures of Red Sox great Bobby Doerr (who, as far as I can tell, has no connection to South Dakota) to props from the movie "Dances With Wolves."

One of the most interesting exhibits was the above photograph of a horse accompanied by this letter:

Headquarters, Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory
April 10, 1878

General Orders No. 7

I. The horse known as "Comanche", being the only living representative of the bloody tragedy of the Little Big Horn, June 23, 1876, his kind treatment and comfort should be a matter of special pride and solicitude on the part of every member of the Seventh Cavalry to the end that his life be prolonged to the utmost limit. Wounded and scarred as he is, his very existence speaks in terms more eloquent than words of the desperate struggle against overwhelming numbers; of the hopeless conflict, and of the heroic manner in which all went down on that fatal day.

II. The commanding officer of Company "I" will see that a special and comfortable stall is fitted up for him, and he will not be ridden by any person whatever, under any circumstances nor will he be put to any kind of work.

III. Hereafter upon all occasions of mounted regimental formation "Comanche" saddled, bridled, draped in mourning, and led by a mounted trooper of Company "I", will be paraded with the regiment.

By command of Colonel Sturgis,
(Signed) E.A. Garlington

In reality, probably more like 100 American horses survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but the US Army heaped all of this praise on Comanche. He became a symbol of the battle, and the Army's resolve to fight the Indians to the last. The horse became so famous that he was even "interviewed" at Fort Abraham Lincoln by papers from across the country. For more on Comanche, go here for an article by Deanne Stillman, published in New West magazine.

When Comanche died in 1890, he became the first horse buried with full military honors - the only other horse so honored was Black Jack, who's only accomplishment was acting as the riderless horse at more than 1,000 military funerals. That hardly compares with being wounded in several battles and surviving seven bullets at the Little Bighorn. But Comanche was not laid to rest when he died; his remains were sent to the University of Kansas, where he was stuffed and put on display in the Natural History Museum, where he remains today.

Alongside Comanche's portrait were also those of the last surviving fighters from the battle (pictured below), who gathered in South Dakota in 1948 to commemorate the still-unfinished monument to Crazy Horse. These eight men have no monuments to their victory; one of the few Indian triumphs of the Indian Wars is instead remembered as a national tragedy. Had the outcome of the battle been the opposite, and the Sioux were slaughtered to the last man, this would likely be the marker left behind for these men.

On the western edge of the state, standing beneath the colossal outline of Crazy Horse's torso and horse, where 18 million tons of rock have been blasted from the Black Hills, and no less than 60 more years of blasting and carving remain to be done, I could not help but feel melancholy about the whole undertaking. Not just because the project seems Sisyphean, but because the monument to the Indians appears to be aping the nearby monument to the colonial occupiers. True, the Crazy Horse monument dwarfs Mt. Rushmore, but it will always appear as a copy, an effort to beat the white man at his own game, and a similar desecration of the sacred Black Hills. Of course, I am not an Indian, so I cannot say what is desecration and what is commemoration, but I could not feel comfortable about either place. If a reporter were to interview him today, I wonder what Comanche would have to say about all of this.

Enter the CELL: Denver Museum Tells You When, Where and How Terrorists Will Kill You

2009-06-11T13:30:00.014-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- I recently visited Denver's Center for Empowered Living and Learning, ominously referred to as "The CELL," to see their inaugural exhibit on international terrorism. The museum probably told me more about the politics of fear and the construction of threats than it did about actual terrorism, so I thought I would share some information and insights from my visit.

Titled "Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: Understanding the Threat of Terrorism," the implied clause to follow the exhibit's name is "could be killed by terrorists," and they make every effort to convince you not only that terrorists are everywhere, but they all are part of a vast, sinister network who's only object is to kill innocent people. The museum was not as crazy as I had hoped, but it was as uninformed as I had feared.

The CELL opened last fall as part of Denver's Mizel Museum, which is dedicated to Jewish history and culture. The museum was founded by Larry Mizel, a real estate developer who is also the chairman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The museum claims to be non-partisan, and despite Mizel's history as a major Republican contributor, I was quite surprised to see not a single image or even mention of President Bush anywhere in the museum. There was a lot of information on attacks in Israel, but considering the number of terrorist attacks that have been inflicted on that beseiged country, this was probably appropriate (it was not mentioned anywhere that the first terrorist groups in historic Palestine were in fact Jewish, though mention of this fact would be a lot to expect from any museum, regardless of its politics.) The museum's slant goes beyond partisanship - the rhetoric of terrorism and fear transcends party lines.

The museum strives to make the visitor identify with the victims of terrorism. When you purchase your ticket, they give you a card for their "Shattered Lives" exhibit. At three points in the museum, there are kiosks where you insert the card, and you are given information on a particular victim of terrorism, very similar to the approach used at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. At the first kiosk, you are told about the person's biography and background - my victim was Yanis Kanidis, a resident of Belsan, Russia. The second station tells you about the circumstances of their encounter with terrorism - there was a brief description of the attack on the Beslan school in 2004, and the terrible conditions the hostages were held in. Finally, like at the Holocaust Museum, you are told whether your person lived or died - Mr. Kanidis was killed by the terrorists while attempting to get other hostages out of the school, for which he posthumously received the medal for the Protection of Human Rights by the Russian government.

Encouraging visitors to identify with people who's lives have been affected by terrorism is a somewhat noble goal of the museum, but another exhibit tries to accomplish this in a far more heavy-handed fashion. Called "Hitting Home," when you enter the room halfway through the museum, you are surrounded by floor-to-ceiling screens depicting crowds of people mulling around Denver's Civic Center and 16th Street Mall. The screens are then filled with explosions and fireballs and the sounds of sirens and anguished cries (pregnant women are encouraged to avoid this portion of the museum). This is the type of thing one would expect from a Tom Tancredo campaign ad, not an educational museum.

The main problem with the museum is that their definition of terrorism is at once too broad and too narrow. The museum tries to draw links between all terrorist groups across the world, which is similar to the Cold War efforts to link all leftists to an international communist conspiracy. It is even more absurd than that, however, because terrorism is not an ideology, it is a tactic. It is employed by state and stateless actors, by the downtrodden and poor and by the rich and powerful, by the left and by the right. The CELL explains that there is no universally-accepted definition of terrorism, which they see as problematic. But will this make terrorism any less ambiguous? Is the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden in World War II, or the shelling of Sarajevo, all of which specifically targeted civilians with the intent of inciting mass terror, much different that setting off a suicide bomb in a crowded Baghdad market? Many countries are labeled "terrorist states," but it is without dispute that the United States has provided both material and moral support to groups around the world that are unequivocally terrorists. Yet somehow we justify supporting the Contras in Nicaragua or insurgent groups in Iran. If these issues are black and white, and terrorism is morally wrong, then there can be no "freedom fighters" who set off bombs in shopping malls or use death squads to execute civilians.

America's struggle with terrorism has revealed that it is a complicated, messy business that makes it difficult at times to draw bright lines between good and evil in this so-called war. We have sacrificed many of our own moral principles in pursuit of the GWOT, and we are left with little to show for it. Despite our efforts to weaken terrorist organizations, people around the world, regardless of their ideology, are no less willing to murder and maim civilians to achieve their political goals. There are many valid question to be asked about the nature of terrorism and the use of violence to achieve political ends, but they remain largely unexplored in this museum. Saying that Timothy McVeigh, Hezbollah, and the Earth Liberation Front are all cut from the same cloth and should be treated the same obscures more than it illuminates.

Not Just Homeland, Hometown Security

I recently discovered another ad from Tom Tancredo's failed presidential bid, and it is even more crazy and racist, but it bears another similarity to the CELL. Tancredo says he wants to deport "those who don't belong," a wonderfully ambiguous phrase that is simply a code for racism and xenophobia. The CELL encourages visitors to be diligent in the fight against terrorism and offers tips and directions for the average citizen. These include looking out for people who "don't belong in the workplace, neighborhood, business establishment or anywhere else." You should also look out for people who might be rehearsing for committing an act of terrorism, or it could be for The Amazing Race, as Liz Lemon learned. Also look out for people who are conducting surveillance, which may include "use of cameras, note taking, drawing diagrams, annotating maps or using binoculars." Apparently, terrorism is an activity remarkably similar to birdwatching.

It would be far more useful if they included a poster like this one I saw at a zoo in Russia. It doesn't just tell you how to spot a terrorist, but what to do should you be held hostage. The most important thing is to avoid being killed by the police when they storm the building.

Making Terrorism Black and White

This effort to paint all terrorists with the same brush has led to a number of factual inaccuracies throughout the museum. Even the basic facts of terrorist attacks can often be disputed, but the CELL does not look at any accounts with a critical eye, choosing instead to give the visitor a clear-cut version of events. Two examples of this were particularly striking.

Throughout the first exhibit of the museum, there are television monitors that display information about various terrorist attacks that have taken place in recent years, including the location, the number of casualties, and the culprits. The segments are produced like news reports to give them an air of objectivity. One of the featured incidents was the hostage taking at a Moscow theater in 2002 by Chechen separatists. The attack resulted in the deaths of 129 hostages, though not a single one was killed by a terrorist - all of the hostages died as a result of a toxic nerve gas that Russian security services pumped into the building. The plan worked in rendering everyone inside unconscious, but there was not sufficient medical staff or equipment on hand to deal with the 700 affected people, and most of the victims died after being carried out of the building and left lying in buses and trucks, waiting to be revived at a hospital. It should also be noted that Russian special forces then summarily executed the 40 hostage takers while they lay unconscious inside the theater, when they could have easily been removed, arrested and tried for their crimes. None of this was mentioned in the CELL's report.

Mentioned in one of the exhibits was an event that took place on the eve of the Beijing Olympics last year, when reports came out of China of an attack by Uighur extremists on a police station in the western Chinese city of Kashgar. The official account stated that men armed with machetes and home-made explosives killed 16 officers, which is exactly how the event was recounted in the museum exhibit. However, pictures of the event taken by American tourists - and published in this article from the New York Times - show that the attack was far more complicated than insurgents attacking police. The attackers were dressed in police uniforms, and it is completely unclear who were the attackers and the targets in these photos. Clearly there are important details that the Chinese government either fabricated or left out, but the unambiguous official account is passed along to CELL visitors.

Wednesday Links: Baseball, Batons, and Bankruptcy

2009-06-04T18:12:00.011-04:00

BROOKLYN, New York -- I have spent the past week wending my way across the United States (and Canada), seeing as many roadside attractions and minor league baseball games as humanly possible. In the coming days I will be publishing dispatches from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Buffalo, New York, as well as some links on places worth visiting should you ever find yourself in northern Iowa or southwestern Ontario. Itchy has also promised to emerge from hiding and complete his series on America's immigration policies.

This was a week of landmarks - of bloody crackdowns, bloody pogroms, and bloody bankruptcies. My brief detour through Ontario yielded a number of interesting stories, courtesy of CBC radio, and some old demagogues have found their singing voices.

Guardian: The internet is for porn, not protest. This week China chose not to commemorate the 20th anniversary of what they refer to as the "June 4th Incident"; instead, they marked the occasion by shutting down all manner of websites. In protest, many websites shut down voluntarily, citing Thursday as "Internet Maintenance Day."

CBC: Why read books when you can burn them? This week also marked the 28th anniversary of the destruction of the Jaffna Library (pictured) in Sri Lanka by a Sinhalese mob. The library, which housed one of the largest collections of Tamil-language texts in the world, was burned as part of a pogrom against ethnic Tamils after two policemen were killed at a Tamil nationalist rally on May 31, 1981. The destruction was a key moment in the formation of the violent separatist Tamil movement, which has supposedly been "defeated" by the Sri Lankan military after a 25-year civil war. Dr. Rebecca Knutsen, a professor of library science at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, has written extensively on the topic of "biblioclasm" and "libricide," including on the Jaffna incident.

The Wall Street Journal: P.J. O'Rourke hates pointy-headed busybodies. After driving more than 2,000 miles across 10 states, one province, and countless dirt roads and wide-open highways in my V-8 pickup, I must say that I sympathize whith O'Rourke's frustration. Trains and bicycles and other greener forms have transport have their romance, but it is tough to compete with the automobile as a symbol of freedom and exploration. So the next time you fill up your tank, pour a little out for GM and Chrysler.

CIUT.FM: Al-Jazeera English is not propaganda. Tony Burman, the former editor-in-chief of the CBC, is now the managing director of Al Jazeera English. In this talk aired on the University of Toronto's community radio station, he speaks about his new network's focus on coverage of the global south, accusations of bias, and their efforts the secure a license to broadcast in Canada. Listen to this talk, and you will definitely consider tuning in to Al Jazeera English if you haven't already.

New York Times: Maybe if they made Freedom Toast. In more depressing idiotic American immigration policy news, a French couple who immigrated to this country to open a bakery in the struggling logging town of Colebrook, NH are denied visas by the State Department.

Financial Times: Here's that green-collar job you've been promised, America. The green energy sector has long been touted as a savior of American manufacturing, but the experience in the solar cell industry has not been encouraging. Like so many other industries, despite government subsidies and the need for inputs of advanced technology, solar cell manufacturing is drifting away from the US, Germany and Japan to lower-cost locations like China.

Toronto Star: The SkyDome seems much older. Toronto's SkyDome, now dubbed the Rogers Centre, turned 20 this week. Once the paragon of modern sports stadiums, back when it appeared every baseball and football game was destined to be played on turf in climate-controlled domes, the SkyDome has fallen behind the times, as have its occupants, the struggling Blue Jays.

Livejournal: Prokhorov will punch your face. Russian metals magnate Mikhail Prokhorov was quite upset about something somebody said about his sister in the press. So, in true billionaire fashion, he has threatened to punch the person responsible in the face if they don't apologize within the week. He made this threat on his personal blog.

Youtube Stand-off: Churchill vs. Hitler. Here we bring you two videos that have brought me endless pleasure. The first comes from the geniuses who created the Autotune the News videos (I challenge you to find a more satisfying sound than Katie Couric singing the news). They have also remixed some historic speeches (the autotuned version of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech is sublime), including these words from Winston Churchill. In similarly inspired fashion, someone else has taken the wild gesticulations of Adolf Hitler and set them to the theme song from The Jeffersons. I guess by "east side," he means "Poland." You decide which is more awesome.

One final note ... Last week the Memorial Cup, Canada's premier tournament for major junior hockey, was won by the Windsor Spitfires of the Ontario Hockey League. Located just across the river from Detroit, Windsor has fallen on hard times as jobs in the auto industry evaporate. Winning the Memorial Cup was a real bright spot for the city, but it was especially meaningful because the victory was dedicated to Mickey Renaud. Renaud was the Spitfires captain who died in February 2008 of a rare heart condition at the age of 19. Congratulations, Windsor, and Mickey and his family are in our thoughts.

New Hampshire: The Original Guantanamo Bay

2009-05-23T21:06:00.004-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- The soon-to-be-closed prison camp at Guantanamo Bay was such an anathema to American democracy because it was expressly created to imprison people beyond the reach of American courts; or more specifically, to hold them beyond the reach of the most fundamental right of prisoners, that of habeas corpus. This right has been suspended only a handful of times in American history - Andrew Jackson did it after the capture of New Orleans in 1815, and Abraham Lincoln did it in Washington, DC at the outbreak of the Civil War - and never for the 7+ years that some detainees have been held at Guantanamo. Furthermore, none of these instances are looked upon fondly by history.

The framers of the Constitution had a healthy anxiety about the potential of the new federal government to violate the habeas corpus rights of citizens. Recently I read an article by Eric M. Freedman, "Federal Habeas Corpus in Capital Cases," published in an edited volume, "America's Experiment with Capital Punishment," and I came across this fascinating passage from the Constitutional Convention. A debate was raging about how to deal with habeas corpus rights in the Constitution (this is relevant to the article because even since the Guantanamo debacle, the most common use of petitions for review of habeas corpus come in death penalty cases). Could it be suspended? For how long? And under what circumstances? Luther Martin, a delegate from Maryland, offered this commentary:

And it was urged, that if we gave this power [to suspend habeas corpus] to the general government, it would be an engine of oppression in its hands, since whenever a state should oppose its views, however arbitrary and unconstitutional, and refuse submission to them, the general government would declare it to be an act of rebellion, and suspending the habeas corpus act, may seize upon the persons of those advocates of freedom, who have had virtue and resolution enough to excite the opposition, and may imprison them during its pleasure in the remotest part of the union, so that a citizen of Georgia might be bastiled in the furthest part of New-Hampshire - or a citizen of New-Hampshire in the furthest extreme of the south, cut off from their family, their friends, and their every connection.

So, just as our founding fathers feared, we have supplanted New Hampshire with Guantanamo Bay, or with the vast number of other black sites across the world. The Supreme Court has since ruled that the government cannot declare a blanket suspension of habeas corpus for so-called "enemy combatants," whether they be US citizens (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld) or not (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld).

Even so, the Global War on Terror has unleashed a new geography of detention and torture specifically designed to circumvent the rights of prisoners to contest their detention or be treated humanely. Scholars like Trevor Paglen have tried to unravel and decode these new networks, not by relying on government admissions and documents, but by finding evidence on the ground. For example, the Terminal Air Project, who's work was featured in Paglen's book "Torture Taxi," is a community of researchers and aviation enthusiasts who have meticulously recorded tail numbers of unregistered flights as they took off and landed at airports around the world. Many of these secret flights were part of the Extraordinary Rendition program, and the group's website offers interactive maps of flights from places like Smithfield, North Carolina, near the headquarters of Xe (formerly Blackwater Worldwide) and Symany, Poland, or Amman, Jordan.

You can read more about Paglen's work on Extraordinary Rendition in "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," which includes a map of the rendition flights. That map was also incidentally turned into a billboard on LA's Wilshire Boulevard in 2006 (pictured below). But this trend is not limited to fighting terrorism. In the past we have also mentioned efforts to detain migrants in isolated areas beyond national borders - sort of like Ellis Island on steroids.

The founding fathers were afraid that the remote corners of our own republic, separated by vast distances, could afford an ill-intentioned government an easy means of ferretting away undesirable opponents. They probably never could have imagined the government holding prisoners on a foreign naval base, or in a secret CIA prison, or even aboard an aircraft that didn't touch down, to circumvent the right of habeas corpus. Though they probably knew quite a bit about prison ships.

Obama Sets Out Postition on Future of Guantanamo Detainees

2009-05-21T20:30:00.002-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- President Barack Obama Thursday laid out his positions on closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, handling the remaining detainees, government transparency, and combating terrorism.

Obama reiterated his pledge to close down the facility, and in the same stroke dismissed fears about relocating detainees to American soil. He cited the ability of the federal prison system to safely hold these prisoners until a final resolution of their cases can be reached, adding that no one has ever escaped from a federal supermax prison, and that they already house hundreds of dangerous terrorists.

The president broke detainees down into five categories and explained how each will be handled:

Detainees found to have committed criminal acts will be tried in federal courts.
Detainees found to have violated the rules of war will be tried by military commissions, a position the White House articulated earlier this week. However, Obama pledged that he will stop some of the legal practices of the previous administration, including allowing in heresay evidence and evidence gathered as the result of torture.
Detainees who have been ordered released by US courts will be released forthwith, though not into the United States, as some had inexplicably feared.
Detainees who can be transferred safely to another country for detention, of which there are roughly 50.
Detainees who cannot be prosecuted but can also not be released because they "pose a clear danger to the American people."

Obama discussed this last category at length, though he did not say specificially how they will be handled. He did state that, "We must have clear, defensible and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures, so that we don't make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified."

Obama stated that as many as 250 detainees could be safely moved to the United States, which suggests that the administration will not be seeking to pare down the numbers of detainees through swift prosecutions and relocations within the next year, which we had earlier said was a possibility. While the 50 or so who are eligible for relocation to another country will likely be transferred soon, as many as 100 could be facing long-term detention in the US without being charged, which is the number that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cited last month.

Here is the entirety of President Obama's speech:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I support the president for saying unequivocally that the camp at Guantanamo must be closed, and closed soon, and that there is no reasonable argument against relocating them to prisons on US soil. It still remains to be seen if the system of military tribunals will be workable and fair, even under the new parameters. And the category of detainees that will not be released or charged poses a conundrum without any easy resolution, and while the president's candor was refreshing, the problem remains no less vexing. It appears that we will still have at least a few dozen detainees who are denied the right of habeas corpus for an unforeseen period in the future; at least we can take some comfort in the fact that they will no longer be imprisoned in a legal black hole.

Also on Thursday former Vice President Dicky Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute (where he is now a trustee), decided to take the opportunity to continue his campaign of fear-mongering and justify and rationalize his indefensible record of torture, Constitutional violations, and obfuscation.

Wednesday Links: Screw you, GPS

2009-05-21T13:30:00.009-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- This week we offer you new rights for Gurkha soldiers, stomach-turning photos of children dressed like adults, and Russia's war on GPS.

Urban Oyster: Brewed in Brooklyn. After twelve months of researching, interviewing, and exploring the streets of Brooklyn, Urban Oyster, which offers unique, hands-on experiences in some of New York City’s most fascinating neighborhoods, is ready to launch. In two weeks their new tour on the history of brewing in Brooklyn will start, and they will be offering their bus tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. If you're in New York, this is definitely the way to see some of the city's out of the way places.

Gurkha Justice Campaign: Jai Mahakali, Ayo Gorkhali! Nepalese Gurkhas have long served in the British army and are renowned for their courage and tenacity. Despite this, they have been denied the right to become British citizens or even reside in the UK. The campaign to win them this right won a huge victory today when the British Home Secretary announced that Gurkhas who have served four years in the armed services would be allowed to settle with their families in Britain.

Financial Times: Why interview anyone else? The rivalry that may play out between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin over who will stand in the 2012 elections is interesting, by the FT's reporter may want to ask someone other than a longtime Kremlin stooge with close ties to the intelligence apparatus.

Baseball Analysts: The new Yankee Stadium is three times better than any other ballpark. And its premium seats are six times better, which is why they cost $1,250 (down from $2,500 on opening day) as compared to a league average of $203 for front-row seats.

Youtube: Get a three-course meal for a dollar. Take a gleeful romp through the bodega economy of the Bronx, which has rendered it, and much of inner-city America, a food desert. Why eat fresh produce when you can get two honey buns and a forty for $2.50?

Jezebel: Which one is the tireless human rights campaigner? In case you are confused, here is a rundown to help you distinguish between anti-death penalty advocate Sister Helen Prejean and beauty pageant loser Carrie Prejean.

Anna Skladmann Photography: Russia has pageants, too. These aren't beauty pageant photos, but they possess the same creepy aesthetic of children's pageants in which these young Russian girls and boys are made to ape the poses, mannerisms and dress of Las Vegas strippers. The results are terrifying (as pictured above).

Zagolovki: GLONASS will dominate the heavens. GLONASS, the Russian government's answer to America's GPS satellite navigation system, is having trouble catching on. Perhaps that is because it is unreliable, and they have yet to develop any sort of workable, hand-held consumer electronics that can interact with the system. But now the government is going to make people use it, by banning any foreign navigation devices that do not use the GLONASS frequency.

New York Times: One man's freedom fighter. This article needs no introduction. I will just say that writing an imperialist travelogue of Israel does not help convince people that the New York Times is not part of a vast liberal Jewish media conspiracy.

Colorado Senators Against Relocating Guantanamo Detainees to State

2009-05-21T00:17:00.003-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Colorado's US Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet voiced their opposition Wednesday to any proposal to relocate detainees from Guantanamo Bay to their state.

The senators spoke up when California's Dianne Feinstein suggested that Colorado's federal supermax prison, Florence ADMAX, which houses the country's most dangerous criminals, would be a suitable location for the detainees. Feinstein also said that her own state could house the inmates: "We have maximum security prisons in California eminently capable of holding these people as well and from which people - trust me - do not escape."

Feinstein is right, and I have not heard any protest from either Colorado senator about how the state already houses over 4,000 federal prisoners. In fact, despite the state's moderate crime rate (ranked 25th in the country - the definition of moderate), it has experienced the country's second-highest rate of prison growth since 1979 (trailing only Texas), thanks in large part to the vast network of federal prisons. During that time period, the number of state and federal prisons in Colorado has increased from seven to 32, including six federal facilities.

I was so incensed by the senators' reaction that I composed a letter to both of them, reproduced here:

I was extremely disappointed by your position on the relocation of prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Why not Colorado? It is especially hypocritical for a senator from Colorado to be so against relocating them here, since we gleefully accept the most dangerous criminals from the federal system, turning our state into the country's Gulag.

Colorado is already home to the country's most dangerous criminals at Florence's ADMAX, who are likely more dangerous than the handful of Guantanamo detainees that the federal government has determined don't even warrant immediate prosecution.

Guantanamo Bay is a stain on America, and you are keeping it open by pandering to the most base, ludicrous, irrational fears of the American people. These are not supercriminals, and they can be easily handled like any other inmates at ADMAX or any other maximum-security facility in the state. Why do you have no faith in the federal prison system? These prisoners have rights to due process, and we should not keep them sequestered illegally beyond the reach of the Constitution. They can be safely detained, tried, and convicted in Colorado or any other US state. The focus should be on closing Guantanamo, not passing this hot potato to another jurisdiction. Shame on you, sir, for slowing the closing of one of the Bush administration's worst legacies.

Perhaps the senators have been watching a different science fiction movie, and instead they support sending the detainees to Ceti Alpha V.

Still 35 and Counting: Colorado Senate Defeats Death Penalty Ban

2009-05-19T12:42:00.003-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Colorado remains among the ranks of the 35 states that have retained capital punishment. On May 6, the state senate defeated a measure to repeal the state's death penalty statute by one vote. This was the same narrow margin by which the measure had passed the state's House of Representatives two weeks earlier.

The bill, HB 1274, was introduced by House Speaker Paul Weissmann at the beginning of this year's legislative session and sponsored by Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons, or FOHVAMP, a Colorado-based victims rights group. The proposed law would have eliminated the state's death penalty and then used the savings to the state to fund the investigation of cold cases.

During the senate debate, the bill was actually stripped of all language pertaining to the death penalty, and an amendment was introduced that would provide funding for cold case investigations through surcharges on traffic and felony fines. The death penalty ban was restored in the final version that the Senate voted down.

The combination of these two objectives into one bill has drawn a lot of controversy. Prosecutors across the state, including Attorney General John Suthers, railed against the bill, claiming that abolitionist groups were manipulating grieving families by dangling investigations into unsolved murders in front of them if they supported the ban.

As an organization, FOHVAMP has only sought the abolition of the death penalty because they feel it is a misallocation of the state's law enforcement resources. They have worked to distance themselves from both anti-death penalty groups and national victims advocacy organizations. FOHVAMP is not a large or well-funded organization; rather, they are focused on their goal of finding funds to investigate Colorado's more than 1,400 unsolved murders, and perhaps more importantly, providing a forum for families to grieve together.

The bill's proponents were accused of providing false hope to these families with this bill. But prosecutors and politicians continually extended the false hope to the families of homicide victims that the imposition of the death penalty will provide some measure of closure for them. But there is no closure to be had from this lengthy, arduous process that usually lasts for more than a decade and only ends in more death, more suffering, and one more grieving family.

And it is wholly disingenuous for prosecutors to suggest that grieving families were used by abolitionists in this fight. Firstly, FOHVAMP members are not led down a primrose path, deluded into believing that every last killer will be brought to justice, and to suggest so is offensive. Secondly, families that are in favor of capital punishment are gleefully paraded in front of the press by prosecutors when they seek death, while families that might be opposed are shuttered away. I guess prosecutors don't like it when someone suggests that they don't speak for victims' families.

Just as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that being sentenced to death is like being struck by lighting, seeing your loved one's murderer put to death is equally arbitrary and random. Since 1967, only one person has been executed in Colorado, though the state has sought death 130 times. The lone execution was in 1997, when Gary Lee Davis was put to death for the brutal kidnapping, torture and murder of Virginia May in Adams County in 1986.

As a death penalty opponent, I must applaud FOHVAMP's efforts as admirable and shrewd. But I find the moral calculus in discussions about the death penalty troubling. Several states have recently looked into abolishing the death penalty as a means of closing budget shortfalls, and that was certainly a major reason why this Colorado bill nearly carried through the legislature. But putting people to death for their crimes is either morally right or it isn't; it is a societal necessity or it isn't. We should not be debating the costs, but the moral implications. Frankly, most of the debates on the utility of capital punishment never really hinge on utilitarian arguments, since the preponderance of evidence so heavily favors abolition. But if the debate is going to remain on an emotional level, then it is good to see a few grieving families on the side of abolition.

Sending Guantanamo Detainees to the Phantom Zone

2009-05-18T11:20:00.007-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- On Friday, the Obama administration announced that they would be revamping the system of military tribunals established in 2006 to try terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The announcement seemed to come as a reversal of pledges the president had made to try the detainees in federal courts or established courts-martial.

Apparently, the government is worried that the previous administration's systematic program of torture and denial of basic rights may hinder prosecution in normal American courts. But basically Obama is making the same argument that Bush officials did: the pesky Constitution keeps getting in the way of fighting the Global War on Terror. But the decision may also be linked to the problems the government is having in finding a suitable home for the remaining detainees once the prison at Guantanamo is closed in 2010. Military tribunals would allow for speedier prosecution of the remaining detainees, meaning fewer would have to be relocated when the camp is closed.

Last month Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the US Senate that of the 240 remaining detainees, there could be as many 100 that would not be tried or could not be transferred to another country, which means they will likely have to be relocated to US soil. This has whipped many communities that host federal prisons into a panic, and members of Congress have been scrambling to try and prevent these prisoners from being transferred to their districts. Apparently, these people are so diabolical and terrifying, if transferred to the US, they will likely immediately escape and set up the new Caliphate, with its capital in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Let us not forget that the candidates for this transfer are those detainees that the government will not even bother to prosecute, meaning that they are probably poor Pakistani farmers that their home government does not want to take back, lest they hasten the toppling of the government. But they are being portrayed as if they are General Zod and his minions, people so dangerous that they had to be cast into the Phantom Zone for all eternity in Superman 2.

There are some very unseemly and dangerous characters who will be searching for a home when Camp Delta is mercifully shuttered, but the notion that they will escape is ludicrous. The Justice Department does not publish yearly statistics on prison escapes, but the numbers that are available are remarkably low. According to data compiled by Richard F. Culp and published in The Prison Journal in 2005, in 1998 (the last year for which data were available), there were 0.4 prison escapes for every 100 prisoners in America's state and federal prisons and jails. That year, there were 6,530 escapes, the vast majority of which were prisoners who had gone AWOL during an authorized leave or walked off of a minimum security work site. Nearly all were recaptured in short order, and this was out of a prison population of 1.8 million inmates.

In the federal system, the figures are even more encouraging. Though official data are unavailable, I did a Lexis-Nexis search of US newspapers, which revealed that in 2008, there were four escapes from federal prison. Three of the fugitives escaped from minimum-security facilities, while the fourth was in a medium-security prison. All but one of the escapees has since been apprehended - only Eddie Davidson, who walked off Colorado's Florence Prison Camp in July, evaded capture. Tragically, just a few days later, he was found dead, along with his wife and daughter, the result of a murder-suicide. In 1999, there was only one escape from federal prison, and that was the first in four years.

The other puzzling thing about this controversy is that the federal government has already constructed a facility tailor made for terrorists right here in the U.S. and A. The Communication Management Unit in Terre Haute, Indiana (dubbed "Little Guantanamo" and mentioned here before) already houses a couple dozen or so "terrorists," most of them of Middle Eastern descent, in a medium-security wing. If the CMU is good enough for John Walker Lindh or the Lackawanna 6, why not Khalid Sulaymanjaydh Al Habayshi? Granted, the facility would have to be enlarged, but no one is afraid that Terre Haute will be overrun by escaped terrorists.

But not every prison town in America turns into a bunch of NIMBYs when the feds try and move Islamic terrorists there. Hardin, Montana, has actually volunteered their brand new 460-bed prison for the Guantanamo refugees, which currently sits empty and deeply in debt. Montana's senators have tried to put the kybosh on the plan, but one town official said, "Somebody has to stand up and put [the Guantanamo prisoners] in their backyards. It's our patriotic duty." He added, sensibly, "You have hardened criminals in jail all around the state, you have sexual offenders. When they're in jail, they're not a whole lot different."

Well, perhaps the Guantanamo detainees are not all sex offenders, but the notion that they are too dangerous to ever set foot on American soil, or be allowed access to due process in America's courts, is ludicrous. To defend this move as shrewd or prudent gives the president too much credit. I am tired of politicking when it comes to civil liberties and basic Constitutional rights, and Obama has backtracked on what was, for me, a key promise in his campaign. So much for the kinder, gentler GWOT.

Wednesday Links: Happy Fake New Holidays!

2009-04-29T22:21:00.006-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- We have been off for two weeks, meaning we missed informing you about two new holidays - Talk Like Shakespeare Day and Chechnya Is Totally Safe Day. Be sure to save this post and put them on your calendar next year.

CNN: My close friend Shylock introduced me to the bagel. In 2003 while attending the College Music Journal festival in New York City, I had a nervous breakdown while spending five hours looking for a parking space. This caused me to spend the next three days talking like Shakespeare, at least how I imagined he would talk. Which was a lot like Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars, and he was fascinated with "new technologies" of the Elizabethan era, like the inclined plane and the fulcrum. Now his birthday is dedicated to talking like him, in Chicago, for some reason.

Newsru.com: Mission Accomplished! The Russian government officially ended counter-terrorist combat operations in Chechnya, and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov is ready to party! The thug-in-chief is declaring April 16 an official holiday so that he can have his very own "Mission Accomplished" moment every year. Meanwhile, the north Caucasus continues to be a pretty violent place.

Boston Globe: Peering across the border, and back in time. In the aftermath of the arrest and indictment of two American journalists for straying into North Korea, these photos help illustrate how one might accidentally wander into the Hermit Kingdom; in many places the border with China is a poorly-marked stretch of barbed wire, and in almost all places it is patrolled by what appear to be child soldiers.

Wall Street Journal: OCP comes to Oakland. Not really, but Omni Consumer Products (the evil corporation that built RoboCop and then took over Detroit) could probably do some good business in Oakland. The city has decided that real cops are too expensive to patrol their crime-ridden streets, so they will just hire private security guards to indiscriminately shoot people. At least when they get killed, no one will care enough to rent out the Coliseum. Maybe soon Oakland could hire some of these guys.

Subtopia: Muslims stand to the right, all other prisoners to the left. A little-known corner of America's new landscape of detention is the Communications Management Unit at the federal maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Labeled "Little Guantanamo," the unit was designed to control the external and internal communications of supposed terrorists, but the overwhelming majority of prisoners are put here simply because they are Muslim. In addition to strictly limiting their mail and phone calls, prisoners are also prohibited from speaking their native languages to one another, if they happen to be one of them terrorist languages.

The Daily Show: You're living in a socialist nightmare! Conservative talking heads like to shout that Barack Obama wants to turn America into Sweden. Despite high taxes and everyone being annoyingly tan and attractive, I really don't see how this is a bad thing. They may not have Baconnaise, but they do sell salmon caviar in a toothpaste tube.

Gazeta.ru: Just hold that pose for a moment longer, Mayor Luzhkov. Public Art Terrorist #1 Zurab Tsereteli has just completed his 10-year cycle of sculptures that he calls "My Contemporaries." Included in the collection are Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, shirtless and attempting to play multiple sports at once; Vladimir Putin ready for some judo; Luciano Pavarotti; and the sculptor himself, chiseled with the physique of a Greek god.

New Blogroll: Cop in the Hood. In 2007 sociologist Peter Moskos released his book Cop in the Hood, about the year he spent patrolling the Eastern District as a Baltimore city police officer. The book provides some excellent insight into the nature of police work, the failure of the war on drugs, and the desperate poverty that grips America's inner cities. His work has inspired me in my own research, and his book has even made me contemplate becoming a cop, if just to do some awesome participatory research. He has a blog that covers issues related to policing and police studies; here he offers some analysis on the coverage of the tragic murder of four cops in Oakland mentioned earlier.

Psychiatrists and State-Sponsored Violence: Torture and the Death Penalty

2009-04-27T22:59:00.005-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- The release last week of memoranda detailing the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation program" has revealed another terribly troubling component of this already appalling practice - the role of psychiatrists in abetting the psychological torture of detainees in American custody.

Reports from the Red Cross had already detailed the participation of medical personnel in the CIA's torture program. Psychiatrists conducted evaluations of detainees, and they then disclosed their results to interrogators so that they could best exploit the subjects' psychological weaknesses, such as particular fears or paranoias that they had expressed to the doctor. Doctors also stood by while many of the harshest techniques were used, such as waterboarding, to ensure that the detainees didn't drown, and to revive them if they did. In his blog for Harper's Magazine, Scott Horton had this to say about these "torture doctors":

The conduct disclosed in the Red Cross report would plainly constitute cause not merely for prosecution, but also for revocation of medical licenses. The fact that Bush Administration lawyers wrote made-to-order memoranda saying that the perpetrators didn’t need to worry about prosecution has no bearing on this point–to the contrary it probably provides more evidence of conscious wrongdoing, especially after the memos were exposed and uniformly condemned by the legal community.

We have written on this blog recently about the use of psychiatry as a political weapon in the Soviet Union. We are not anti-psychiatry Scientologist fanatics - not by any stretch of the imagination. But the torture program has explicit ties to the Soviet Union. Many of the interrogation techniques were reverse-engineered from the Pentagon's S.E.R.E. (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program, which trains military personnel to deal with torture at the hands of our enemies, should they be captured. But as Jane Meyer pointed out in the New Yorker in 2007, quoting retired Air Force colnel and interrogator Steve Kleinmann, "It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence." Despite the protestations of Dick Cheney, it is pretty clear that the program yielded little valuable intellegence, while also severely compromising America's moral standing. Perhaps we should not base our interrogation techniques on Darkness at Noon. As Horton points out in his interview on Democracy Now on April 17, we have already put ourselves in dubious company by torturing detainees; impressing medical professionals into the service of torture puts us in even nastier company.

This is not the only example of doctors using their expertise in the service of state-sponsored violence that clearly violates their Hippocratic oath. America's entire death penalty system places medical professionals in a very precarious position. Most states that have the death penalty require a doctor to be on the scene to oversee the administration of the lethal procedure (in the case of lethal injection) and to pronounce death, though no doctor will put the needle in themselves - that is left up to prison staff with varying levels of training. Most states also protect the identities of the personnel involved in the exection, though this still raises many ethical and legal issues. In Washington state, the state physician resigned earlier this year, saying his ethics prevented him from even indirect supervision of executions; then earlier this month, the state's entire execution staff resigned because they feared a pending lawsuit over their qualifications would jeopordize their anonymity.

Some doctors see serious ethical conflicts with the death penalty system, while others have embraced their participation in it. Even if they are not administering the lethal cocktail to execute a prisoner, doctors - especially mental health professionals - play a key role in moving defendants through the system from the courtroom to the death chamber. The Supreme Court has ruled (in Ford v. Wainwright) that it is unconstitutional to execute an insane person. Regardless of the prepoderance of medical evidence, some states are just hell-bent on executing their prisoners, and an entire cottage industry has developed of psychiatrists who will certify that pretty much everyone is fit to be executed.

The most notorious of these doctors was James Grigson, nicknamed "Dr. Death." Grigson testified as a prosecution expert in 150 capital trials, and in nearly all of them, he declared the defendant fit to be executed. He testified in many trials in Texas, where he almost uniformly stated that inmates met an aggravating factor in the state's death penalty statute - that they posed a threat of future dangerousness to the community should they be allowed to live. Grigson was stripped of his medial license by the American Psychiatric Association in 1995 for making such declarations without ever interviewing subjects, and he died in 2004.

Many doctors also find themselves in the position where they must treat a death row inmate to restore him to a state of mental health whereby he becomes fit to be executed. Some doctors have refused; others, like Mr. Grigson, never met an inmate they wouldn't help kill, and they are happy to do the state's dirty work for them, as was the case with an inmate named Claude Maturana in Arizona. After every last medical professional in the state refused to treat Mr. Maturana's schizophrenia, the state conducted a nationwide search, and they found a doctor who was willing to rubber-stamp the death warrant. Maturana escaped the death chamber - he died in 2002 during an operation while still in prison. But his case is just one of many like it.

Some death penalty statutes are also designed to maximize the number of people who can be executed by parsing the difference between "insane" and "mentally ill." Such is the case with Andre Thomas (pictured), who sits on death row in Texas. Thomas was convicted of murdering his wife and two children and cutting out their hearts; since he has been in prison, he has gouged out both of his eyes and eaten them. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (we have written about them before) ruled that Thomas is "clearly 'crazy,' but he is also 'sane' under Texas law."

We may not place political dissidents in mental institutions, but the shocking revelations about the use of psychiatric medicine to torture, maim, and even kill prisoners in US custody are not unique to the US' torture program. Nor are they only found in shadowy, extra-legal government programs. In many states this practice is actually part of the black-letter law, and it is carried out in courtrooms and prisons across the country. Everything about these memoranda is blood-curdling, and the people responsible for authorizing, legitimizing and employing these techniques should be brought to justice, but it is not unique to find people willing to set aside their personal and professional ethics to aid state-sponsored violence.

Did AvtoVAZ Workers Threaten to Strike Over Hockey Team?

2009-04-27T13:24:00.004-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Each week The Hockey News runs a roundup of news from Russia's Continental Hockey League (KHL). In their April 13 issue, their KHL reporter Denis Gibbons wrote something intriguing at the end of his report:

Lastly, employees of the Lada automobile plant in Togliatti were threatening to strike, not because of salary cuts or unsafe working conditions, but because the company decided to cut its financial support for the Lada Togliatti hockey franchise by 50 per cent. On the black market, tickets for Lada playoff games went for 10 times their face value.

This sounded like a really interesting story, even though it was a tiny item buried at the bottom of a briefing. When I looked into it further, however, I was unable to find any news at all about a threatened strike. The cuts to the team's budget were well-publicized, even in some English-language press, but nowhere was there even a hint that anyone had threatened to strike.

I posted a message on the Lada Togliatti fan message board, asking if there was any truth to the story. A user named Leshka responded, "No, they did not plan to or threaten to strike over the funding cuts to the hockey team." Another named Diesel said, "They [AvtoVAZ] will probably drive the people to strike. Not over the Lada hockey team, of course, but nonetheless."

The news about high prices for playoff tickets may be true (Lada lost in the first round to CSKA Moscow), but I find the claim about the strike suspicious for two reasons. First, AvtoVAZ is a company on the verge of collapse, and their workers have already made a number of concessions, including cutting back to four-day work weeks and six-hour shifts in a vain effort to preserve the 104,000 jobs at the gargantuan factory. It is highly unlikely that they would threaten to strike over the hockey team. Second, this is not the first time in recent memory that the car maker has slashed its support of Lada. In 2005, the team's budget was gutted, and they were forced to sell off nearly all of their top players; nobody went on strike over that, even though the company was on (slightly) better financial footing, and the team was much more competitive before the fire sale.

The Russian auto industry is in far more dire straits than even the beleaguered American Big Three. Just two years ago, the sector was the darling of foreign investors, and big international automakers were scrambling to build assembly plants as the Russian market was poised to become the largest in Europe. Domestic demand has now completely collapsed, and Russia did not take advantage of the boom times to restructure and slim down its hulking domestic producers, choosing instead to insulate them with tariffs and import restrictions. Now AvtoVAZ is on its last legs (though the Russian government has promised a massive bailout), and supporting a hockey team, even one as storied as Lada, is the least of their concerns.

As we have reported here before, Russian autoworkers have been known to protest, but strikes have been rare recently - the last attempted strike at AvtoVAZ was nearly two years ago. Many of the recent protests have been government-sponsored propaganda events to drum up support for the Kremlin's protectionist policies. It is entirely possible that at one of these events someone shouted threats to strike, but it doesn't appear as if there have been any organized public demonstrations over the hockey team cuts.

I have been in touch with an editor at THN, and he had this to say about the story:

I’ve talked to the KHL’s North American publicist and he is endeavoring to find out more. But it seems the original piece Mr. Gibbons used in his reporting has been removed from the electronic record. We’re not sure why and I’ll contact you again with any further information I find. In the meantime, the publicist remembers seeing the story as well, but believes the global recession has tempered the fans’ emotions.

They have fed me a couple of English-language pieces from the Internet, none of which in any way corroborate their story. I am also in contact with some newspapers from the Samara/Togliatti area to see if they can shed any light on this claim. We will keep you posted on developments with this story, but my feeling is that THN got caught printing a bit of hyperbole, and they should own up to it.

Monkeys and Robots: Mortal Enemies or Deadly Allies?

2009-04-26T23:19:00.006-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Since the dawn of time, monkeys and robots have had a special enmity for one another, and mankind has been trapped in the middle. Robots represent the triumph of the modern - cold, heartless machines unencumbered by emotions or death, able to construct a utopian future devoid of imperfection. Monkeys, meanwhile, represent man's evolutionary past, beasts possessing feral strength and driven by primitive instinct.

Their battle has raged on, but humans could always take comfort in the knowledge that should one group gain the upper hand, we could ally with the other to prevent them from overtaking the earth. Our technology could be used to keep the ape menace at bay, but should our machines turn on us, our primate bretheren would help us vanquish the steel beasts.

Now, someone has been foolish enough to combine these two terrible forces, and the survival of civilization is threatened.

Last year, scientists announced that they had successfully wired a robotic arm to the brain of a rhesus monkey, who was then able to manipulate that arm through thought alone. Impulse-driven beasts can now hurl feces and molest themselves with the power of robotic steel limbs. Then, just last week, the Robot Monkey World Chimpionship was held in Brooklyn. Contestants constructed battle-ready robots with the fighting capabilities of savage chimps (well, they also had wheels - so perhaps wheelchair-bound chimps) and tossed them into the ring for combat.

You know not with what dark forces you meddle, Brooklyn hipsters.

Hollywood has taught us what robots are capable of - they can be policemen, boxers, or even dinosaurs. And thanks to work of Karl Pilkington we now know that monkeys can perform nearly every task a human can, including launching small businesses, piloting a spacecraft, and rescuing people from a burning building.

All monkeys will eventually attack humans - this we know to be true (the war may have already begun). We also know that all robots will eventually become self-aware and turn on their creators (I defy you to name one robot that hasn't done so). So, do we really want to be faced with a kill-crazy army of robots and monkeys? Soon we may be enslaved under the rule of President Executron and Vice-President Zaius. Think about that on your Monday morning, and despair.

Typologies of Borders and Migration (Pt. 1A of 3)

2009-04-24T23:40:00.003-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- As Itchy continues to formulate his thoughts on American immigration policy, I thought I would do a brief intervention about some current research on borders and migration and offer up some illustrative maps.

There are two basic schools of thought on borders. The traditional view is that the current international borders are the static, physical outcomes of international relations, and they are largely unchanging. Alternatively, the popular belief today is that we are entering a "borderless" world where distinctions of national territory and sovereignty are becoming less and less important. Neither of these are correct. Borders are, as George Simmel said, "not a spatial fact with sociological effects, but a sociological fact which takes a spatial form" - that is, they are constructions, the manifestation of a set of social processes. But just because they are constructed does not mean they are not meaningful, or that they do not have impacts on people's daily lives.

As for the second line of thinking, innovations like the Internet may have broken down some walls between people across the globe, but even access to information can be controlled and restricted by states. For every wall that has come down in the European Union, for example, another hard border has been erected, whether that be in the form of a Chinese firewall or a moveable fence in the California desert. A vast new network of migration management is growing, and it permeates far beyond the border regions. As America's recent experience with immigration has shown, the free trade impulse often loses out to fear-mongering arguments about national security when it comes to border policy, so there is no clear trajectory towards freer and more open borders [for more on this see Newman, David (2006) "The lines that continue to separate us: borders in our 'borderless' world," Progress in Human Geography 30(2): 143-161.]

One of my favorite tools for teaching students about borders is "Hypothetica," a fictitious nation that is stricken with nearly every type of border conflict known to man. From trans-border oil fields to meandering rivers to irridentist nationalism, Hypothetica is besieged from all sides. Here we can see why borders pose so many problems.

But that is only the beginning of the messiness. Many of these are static physical features, but borders only gain meaning when people or things move across them, so integrating a discussion of migration into the study of borders is essential. While we can develop some typologies of borders and migration, there can never be any sort of unified theory of borders. Ultimately, this map merely argues that it is hard to draw straight lines for borders without really considering that these characteristics can overlap and shift over time, creating a much more complicated picture. Michele Acuto in her article "Edges of the Conflict: A Three-Fold Conceptualization of National Borders" offers her own typology of migration, classifying national borders as either walls that restrict mobility, ideal lines that demarcate intangible - but not physical - barriers between communities, and border regions with varying degrees of extent. What we need to do is re-scale the border and not think of it merely as a line.

Borders have traditionally been conceived as divisions between states, but we should think about their meaning and impacts on different scales as well. As Hypothetica illustrates, international borders can also divide sub-national communities, and they are often managed, patrolled, and interpreted by people and authorities other than the national government. If we take a closer look at most borders, they are not bright lines or solid walls, but a series of gaps and zones where access and enforcement are highly variable, as this map of Brownsville, Texas illustrates. This does not mean that we should strive for this ideal type of a continuous wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean - that is neither possible nor desirable.

This also means we need to rethink how borders are drawn on a map. They are traditionally thought of as linear features - the proverbial line in the sand separating two entities. In reality, few borders conform to this two-dimensional notion. The line is often broken, demarcated in some spaces and not in others. Borders can also be point features, as access across many borders is often restricted to particular nodes. Or they can be areal features as well - there are interstitial spaces where neither side can claim absolute sovereignty, or there may be a no-man's-land between the hard borders the two sides enforce. There are also border zones, areas near the border where different territorialities and legal regimes may operate. Even approaching the border may be restricted, or the border zones may have more liberalized trade and customs regimes. Even the popular conceptions of a "borderland" or "frontier" evokes different meanings and representations - the landscape, the reach of state authority, and the identities of the people living there can change as one moves closer to or farther away from a border.

We will never be able to tackle any of the challenges that immigration presents until we stop trying to achieve that perfect, impermeable border and recognize that borders are messy. They are not lines in the sand, but a series of processes of movement and management and representation that are all tied to much larger questions of citizenship and mobility. The permeability of a border depends on who is crossing it, or what, and where and why. We can never wall off America, nor would we ever want to.

Mustache of Globalization Headed for Poorhouse

2009-04-16T10:18:00.003-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- General Growth Properties, the second-largest mall developer in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Thursday. It is with no small amount of glee that we report this news because of the connection between this company and the world's worst geographer, Tom Friedman.

Friedman's wife Ann is the daughter of Matthew Bucksbaum, who founded GGP in 1954. The family's net worth was estimated at $4.1 billion just two years ago, but as the company's stock has fallen in value to 50 cents from over $40, that fortune has shriveled by 97%.

The man who waxes (his mustache) on endlessly about how the world is flat, and globalization will make the poorest of the poor richer than their wildest dream, if only they can get on Facebook, or something, and has all of a sudden developed a superficial, pop environmental sensibility, is actually a multi-millionaire spouse of a strip mall empire heiress. The poor and destitute of the world certainly look different when you are flying business class on Lufthansa and playing golf at an exclusive Bangalore country club.

I won't waste my time or yours by rattling off all the inane, sophomoric, bewildered things that Friedman has said over the years in his books and his unreadable New York Times column. I will leave that job instead to former Moscow Times reporter and Mongolian basketball star Matt Taibbi, who offers two masterful take-downs of Friedman in New York Press. I will just say this - globalization is interesting not because it makes the world "flat" and even, but because it is highly uneven, which is what leads to things like growing income inequality, the explosion of slums, and the creation of new migration and citizenship regimes. Any geography student worth their salt knows this, but Tom Friedman is too busy sucking down the climate-controlled air in his 11,400-square-foot mansion in Maryland to recognize this simple fact.

So, let's just enjoy watching him getting pied in the face and do some Tom Friedman column Mad Libs from McSweeney's.

Wednesday Links: Happy Tax Day

2009-04-15T12:30:00.003-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Today we are going to ignore all of the teabagging that is going on across the nation, because those people are nuts and ignorant. Instead, we bring you news about race in America (the two stories may be linked, however), as well as stories about the dastardly deeds of the unhirable fools from the Bush administration and some urban ruins of bygone eras.

Colorado Matters: Come fly the racist skies. Until 1963, there were no black commercial airline pilots in the United States. Carriers actively discriminated against black pilots, claiming that racist passengers would refuse to fly with them if they hired blacks, or that they would not be able to put them up in hotels during layovers in segregated southern cities. Then Marlon Dewitt Green took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Green v. Continental Air Lines that the practice was unconstitutional.

Hartford Courant: Do-over! In more recent race-and-hiring-practices news, my hometown could be approaching a landmark Supreme Court case. A group of 15 New Haven firefighters have taken the city to court over its hiring practices. The men all took a test to determine promotions, and they received the top 15 scores - unfortunately, 14 were white, and one was Hispanic, and there were only 15 promotion spots available. Because there were no black candidates who scored in the top spots, the city decided to hire nobody. The Court will hear oral arguments in the case, Ricci v. Destefano, later this month.

NASHI: All deposed presidents of former Soviet republics may now begin boarding. Everyone's favorite government puppet right-wing youth movement, Nashi, demonstrated earlier this week at the Georgian embassy in Moscow to show their "solidarity" with the Georgian people who are clamoring for President Saakashvili to resign. They've even bought Mikhael a ticket to DC, where everyone (especially John McCain) loves him. It's worth noting that these are the same people who were baying for the blood of every last Georgian during last summer's war over South Ossetia.

The New Yorker: Mr. Feith, there are some men here to see you. They have a warrant. At looks like at least six members of the Bush administration can look forward to a life like Henry Kissinger - that is, they can never leave the country, and probably can't travel to some US states, for fear of being arrested. British attorney Philippe Sands first identified the "Bush Six" in his book Torture Team, and Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon has upheld the indictments of the former officials on charges of torture.

Strange Maps: The Rochester Subway. From 1927 to 1956, Rochester, NY, once one of America's most successful boomtowns, had its very own subway. The system consisted of a single line that was placed in the former bed of the Erie Canal, which had been diverted around the downtown. Today, all that remains are a few concrete trenches and overpasses.

New York Times: Keep smallpox alive. One of New York Cities oft-forgotten islands is the quaint Roosevelt Island, located in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. Perhaps it's forgotten because for most of its history it has been home to prisoners, mental patients, and people suffering from wildly-infectious diseases. Now the city is trying to keep part of that history alive by restoring the ruins of the island's famous smallpox hospital.

Enough With the Teabagging Already

2009-04-14T14:20:00.013-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- While walking down the street in Boston recently, my mother found this flier on the ground. She had no idea what it said, so she mailed it to me to translate. The flier is back from the last election, and it was put out by the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, a grassroots community organizing group that lobbies for the rights of seniors. Here's what it says:

What would you do if 40% of your revenues were taken away?

Approving ballot question 1 threatens to eliminate $12.7 billion (around 40%) of the state budget by ending the Massachusetts income tax.

On Tuesday, November 4, say NO on ballot question 1. Today times are hard enough, and it's not worth it to make them worse.

The story behind this is that some tax-protesting fools got a measure on the Massachusetts ballot this past November that would have amended the state constitution and outlawed the income tax. Luckily, the voters of Massachusetts were wise enough to vote down this suicidal libertarian proposal 70% to 30%.

These same survivalist cranks [Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that as a semi-professional academic, I was born and raised in a secret Comintern camp in communist Hungary and sent to this country to brainwash college freshmen with propaganda about "income inequality" and "post-structuralism." Additionally, that guy is right, and the change over to digital TV is a conspiracy to brainwash America] are likely going to spend tomorrow "teabagging" Obama by chucking tea bags into whatever body of water they can find with their CPAC friends. At least the elderly Russians in Massachusetts have more sense than the Republican operative nitwits who are organizing tomorrow's fake "grassroots" movement, which is nothing more than a pathetic partisan ploy to try and gain some electoral legitimacy.

Who was it again that oversaw the greatest expansion in government spending since Lyndon Johnson? And who oversaw the near doubling of the national debt? And who had a secret, illegal wiretapping program to spy on American citizens? And who operated a global network of secret prisons to kidnap and torture people? Oh right, I forgot - Barack Obama is the Nazi fascist communist gay Muslim terrorist free-spending wealth-redistributor. I hate to sound so partisan myself, but this nonsense tax protesting, and the fake populist outrage over invented government intrusion into our daily lives by the new administration, is positively sickening, and let us speak of it no more.

Updates on the Action in Chisinau From the Moldova Maven

2009-04-12T23:32:00.002-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- My Romanian-speaking associate who has inexplicably chosen to study the country that I like to call "The Mississippi of the Former Soviet Union" offers up a number of additional juicy details on last week's unrest over elections.

1) Many opposition activists had claimed that the government received a special delivery of tear gas canisters from Moscow to deal with the protests, though both the Russians and Moldovans deny it.

2) It turns out many of the provocateurs on the government payroll to start the looting were wearing t-shirts that read "Basarabia: Romanian soil."

3) Either this dude is the world's most awesome protester, or he had a little help riling up the crowds with his EU and Romanian flag waving, as this video shows.

4) Here's what Fiodor Ghelici, a member of Moldova's Civil Congress of NGOs, had to say about the violence, as quoted by Infotag: "Everything that happened was a trap and the opposition got caught. It is obvious that had the authorities not wanted those buildings looted they would have taken clear-cut measures. I do not mean arms and batons used against the youth. But several thousand policemen with belts would have established order." There's a bit of money in the whole thing, too, for contractors that are cozy with the government. "In question are tens of millions of lei and some construction companies are already looking forward to repairing the parliament and the president's office," Ghelici said.

5) Meanwhile, the gangsters across the border in Tiraspol claim to have been unnerved by the incident.

6) As we mentioned earlier, international media were barred from entering the country during the protests. Dumitru Minzarari from the blog Political Moldova had this to say: "According to the Romanian ActiveWatch media monitoring organiztion [sic] and the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalistm [sic], on 7 april, at least 18 journalists who tried to come to Chisinau from Romania were stopped at the border, and turned back at the border crossing points Galati-Giurgiulesti, Oancea-Cahul. Moldovan border-guards invoked reasons as malfunctioning of their computerized system, and requested multiple papers such as written invitations, special medical insurance, press accreditation from Moldovan Foreign Ministry, while in order to cross the border only passport was needed for these journalists [under the usual visa regime]. They represent press agencies such as Associated Press, EPA, France Press, Intact Images, NewsIn, Mediafax, Reuters, and newspapres Evenimentul Zilei, Jurnal National, Ziua, and TV channel Realitatea TV."

The Spaceman Opens Cuba

2009-04-12T15:03:00.003-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- I recently watched the film Spaceman: A Baseball Odyssey, about the life and career of Bill "Spaceman" Lee, one the greatest left-handers ever to pitch for the Red Sox. The film is mostly about Lee long after he was blackballed and driven out of baseball for his outspoken opinions in 1983. Lee never stopped playing, and at the age of 62, he still travels the world looking for places to pitch. The film follows Lee on a barnstorming trip to one of his favorite places, Cuba.

"Goddammit, I love Cuba," Lee says. "They play baseball for all the right reasons. They play it because they love it." One of the most long-overdue changes in American policy that Barack Obama has promised is the lifting the punitive and useless embargo on Cuba. If it ever does happen, we should thank people like Bill Lee for maintaining strong relationships with the people of the island and showing them that we both share a deep and important love, that of baseball.

Being a graduate student, I have the luxury of being able to drive around the country for several weeks every summer. I visit friends, see various roadside attractions, fish, eat lots of catfish and ribs, but mostly I go to baseball games and listen to them on the radio. Between May and September, wherever you are in America, at nearly any time of day, you can find a ballgame on the radio. Major League, Single-A, rookie ball, college ball, American Legion, high school - I listen to all of it, and I love visiting ballparks big and small.

Lee is one of the last barnstormers, and in the film he talks about his hero, Satchel Paige, who pitched more than 2,000 games in his career. "I won't win as many games as him, but I will have pitches as many games as him." It's a damn shame that the dedicated fans in these small towns don't get a chance to see the big league stars in their backyards anymore. Lee plays the game because he loves it. He loved pitching for the Red Sox, and fans will always remember him for his abject and unbridled hatred of the Yankees. Players feel little allegiance to city or team these days, but Lee never, ever would have done what Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs or Johnny Damon did and foresake the Sox for a few extra bucks in the Bronx. Even if he hated Sox management and he hated his coaches, he loved his team and his adopted city, and we loved him back.

Psychiatry In Russia: A View From 1955

2009-04-10T19:23:00.003-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- In 1955, American filmmaker Albert Maysles traveled to the Soviet Union to document their practice of psychiatry. He produced a short film about his trip, Psychiatry in Russia, which was aired on American television the following year:

Psychiatry in Russia - Albert Maysles.
Uploaded by zohilof

The most striking difference that Maysles notes between Russian and Western psychiatric practice is the former's reliance on Pavlovian theory, which does not emphasize psychoanalysis and talking therapy as much as the Freudian psychology predominantly in use in the United States at the time. Obviously, much in the film should be taken with a grain of salt - while most Soviet mental health professionals were undoubtedly conscientious and caring, their statistics on the low incidence of mental illness and the success of treatment are highly exaggerated. That said, American psychiatry at the time was in large measure barbaric, inhumane, and damaging to many patients. Lobotomies were still in wide use in the US in 1955, while the Soviet Union had banned the practice five years previous.

Maysles' film misses another important aspect of Soviet psychiatry, though his amateur foray could hardly be expected to capture one of the most oppressive practices of the Soviet state - committing political dissidents to mental institutions. The practice became widespread towards the end of Stalin's rule in 1953, and subsequent regimes, especially that of Brezhnev, used the practice to muzzle and incarcerate hundreds, if not thousands, of political opponents. The favorite stock diagnosis was "sluggishly-progressing schizophrenia," which had no symptoms other than the inability to function peaceably and obediently in Soviet society. Fighting for "truth and justice" was considered a sign of extreme paranoia, and even the failure to believe in Marxist ideology was labeled a form of psychosis.

Unfortunately, the practice is not unheard of in contemporary Russia. In 2007, journalist and opposition activist Larisa Arap wrote an article about sexual abuse and other vile mistreatment of children at a mental health facility in the Murmansk Region. After the story was published, Arap was detained by police while visiting another hospital for a personal appointment. Hospital staff then drugged her and committed her against her will to a mental facility. Medical staff moved her to another hospital in the city of Murmansk and refused to give any information to her family about her condition or even her whereabouts. Finally, she was released after being held for 46 days, during which time she was repeatedly beaten, drugged, and force fed after she went on a five-day hunger strike to protest her detention. She was only discharged on the condition that she agree to continued out-patient psychiatric care, and Russian courts have repeatedly upheld her detention as legal.

In February of this year, the Russian Constitutional Court ruled that it was illegal to involuntarily commit patients without a court order, which could only be issued with a recommendation from a court-appointed expert. Like so many decisions by the Russian courts, it is unlikely that this one will be fully and forcefully implemented by the government. Because this incident was not an isolated one, nor was it the work of a few corrupt and deranged individuals. So little of the Soviet state has been dismantled in Russia, and the security services employ many of the same coercive practices that they did in communist times. Add to a police force wholly untrained in the ways of democratic law enforcement (the emphasis there should be on the law) a political leadership born of that very same coercive apparatus, and you get a society in which medicine, which is meant to heal people, is used as a political weapon.

Maysles is still alive and well, and he is currently working on a documentary about the affair of Menahem Mendel Bailis, entitled Scapegoat on Trial. Bailis was a Russian Jew who was accused of murdering a 13-year-old boy to use his blood to make matzoh in 1913, and it was the last of the so-called "blood libel" trials against Jews in Europe.

America's Love-Hate Affair With Educated Foreigners: Stop Hating, For the Love of God (Pt. 1 of 3)

2009-04-09T22:56:00.004-04:00

NEW YORK, New York -- President Barack Obama is planning to push a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would include legalizing the status of the estimated 12 to 20 million illegal aliens in the United States, the New York Times reported today.

That news came amid both a period of media attention toward illegal immigration and a number of immigration-related political decisions. While the political events have unfortunately tended to take aim at highly educated would-be legal immigrants, it is clear that the role of illegal migrants in the United States is becoming increasingly relevant on the back of concern about the economy and jobs.

The illegal migration issue heats up again

The Times’ report may be the most significant development since the illegal immigration began bubbling up in recent weeks, but it is already not the most recent. Following this news, the Wall Street Journal reported this evening that Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has lately softened his stance on illegal immigration.

The Walter Duranty Report has previously advocated the need for comprehensive immigration reform and increased numbers of legal immigrants. However, I find the Obama plan, as described in the New York Times, to be a potential disaster for including what appears to be a blanket amnesty for illegal aliens – something that I find morally debatable but unacceptable from the point of view of upholding the rule of law, giving all would-be immigrants an equal playing field, justifying the considerable effort and blood expended by the country’s 1 million annual legal immigrants, and the way it may threaten any lasting reform.

Over the next few days, I'd like to put together a few pieces representing my thoughts on this subject at the moment. Those pieces will cover three areas: Why Immigration Reform Is Necessary; Why a Blanket Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Is Wrong; and What to Do.

WHY IMMIGRATION REFORM IS NECESSARY

America’s immigration system is broken. We have previously said that fixing it is the single most important thing the country will need to do to prosper in the long term, and that continues to hold true. Without going into the moral or historical arguments in favor of immigration, we'll focus on three economic arguments that present a case for reforming a system that keeps out skilled immigrants:

1. Today's antiquated, restrictive system cannot accommodate the numbers of skilled immigrants who want to enter the United States, especially in relation to unskilled immigrants;

2. Skilled would-be immigrants not allowed into the United States are wooed by other nations to improve their economic competitiveness; and

3. Our biggest pool of skilled immigrants (foreign students) is increasingly alienated.

Let's look at the system first. It's safe to say that under our current system gaining a visa or green card to work in, live in or immigrate to the United States is incredibly difficult and confusing for people in most countries. Most visas and green cards, for instance, are given out via a random lottery that grants randomly selected people the right to enter the US. Would-be immigrants-cum-lotto winners from various countries, however, have different numbers of green cards and visas they can bid for. Until this past year, for instance, Russians were ineligible for green cards entirely.

Not only is this system totally random (literally) and based on opaque nation-based quotas, but even the types of visas that exist is labyrinthine and confusing: The best-known visa program is the green card, but while nearly a quarter of all US naturalized citizens in 2008 were Mexicans, for example, zero qualified for a green card.

Meanwhile, the status quo allows a mere 65,000 work visas under the H1-B program that brings in high-skilled immigrants. Last year, however, over 1,000,000 people became naturalized citizens. So at best 6.5% of people receiving citizenship are skilled workers -- not a good sign for a country that wants to compete with the rest of the world in a high-tech, globalized 21st century.

This, however, is not due to a lack of skilled workers who want to enter the United States. As the Economist reported last year, hundreds of thousands of doctors, computer programmers, engineers, lawyers and businessmen apply for H1-Bs each year.

So what happens to the many, many skilled immigrants who aren't among that 65,000? While in years past, those people would apply year after year hoping to one day get into America, other rich-world countries have caught on to the gains they can make while the US shooes away the world's best and brightest.

Canada, New Zealand and Australia now grant visas and residency based on "points" systems that allot points for education and skills. The UK allows in anyone who has graduated from the world's top business schools. For its part, America spins the PowerLotto wheel to let in 65,000 out of hundreds of thousands of educated would-be immigrants.

What do we have to show for this? Well, 25% of Silicon Valley companies were started by Indian or Chinese immigrants, and 40% of US PhDs are annually earned by foreigners. Sending that large number of Indian and Chinese PhDs home means the Silicon Valleys of tomorrow may be quite foreign-sounding places.

And not only do our immigration policies improve the competitiveness of other countries, but they objectively hurt the US as well. The Labor Department is projecting 2 million unfillable vacancies in US tech positions by 2014 because we send home all of the engineering graduates of US universities. Meanwhile, tech giants like Microsoft are rightly basing ever more of their operations in Canada, where immigrants are more welcome.

Perhaps not surprisingly the Economist also recently reported that new studies show American policies that restrict skilled immigrants are hurting our ability to innovate and create new, competitive companies. Another study released last month showed that the Chinese and Indian PhDs who once applied to remain in the US now simply go home to start their companies, given the economic growth in their home countries and the small chance of being allowed to stay in the US. Whereas 50,000 immigrants from those countries returned home in the last 20 years, the next five years are projected to see 100,000 Indians and Chinese leave the US.

Realizing the deleterious effects of US immigration policy, American technology executives, business leaders and academics have long called for dramatically increasing the cap on H1-B visas, or eliminating it entirely.

Instead, Congress seems eager to do just the opposite. The Employ American Workers Act (EAWA), part of the stimulus, bans banks that receive TARP money from hiring foreign workers, and Bank of America has already withdrawn offers to foreigners. Meanwhile, Indian media are reporting that Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa and a co-author of the EAWA) and Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) are trying to prevent foreign IT professionals from gaining H1-B visas.

These men want you to be poorer and dumber: Grassley (left) and Durbin

Again, business leaders (who argue we need the world's best to fix our broken finance system and corporations) and academics (realizing that fewer job opportunities for foreigners means fewer foreign students means less revenue for US universities) are aghast that Congress is again taking aim at its own foot. But even the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation is now worried, demanding a large increase in the number of H1-Bs because it reasons that having more smart people in the US is -- surprise! -- good for the economy. Unfortunately, Dick Durbin is unlikely to be influenced by that particular think tank, which may have had better luck gaining Washington's ear in the Bush days.

Finally, the largest source of high-skilled immigrants -- international students at US universities -- is increasingly fixing its sights on other destinations for study because of difficulties in obtaining a visa to stay in the United States, as the New York Times reported last month.

Who needs scientists?

That's only logical, given that the entire academic continuum of a foreign student's life in the US is under close scrutiny by the government. Yep, foreign students are monitored at all times under the SEVIS system that, as of January 2009, turns university employees into agents able to access student files and write about anything suspicious they do.

Once those foreign students who make it past SEVIS graduate, there's another juncture at which they may choose to go home. Any American who went to college probably knows a number of smart international kids who left the US after graduation either because they couldn't find a job "directly related" to their major and were not given a visa to stay, or because they didn't want to put up with the bureaucracy and uncertainty of trying to stay.

A Canadian acquaintance's story is indicative of the absurdity of demanding that foreign workers be employed in fields "directly related" to one's major. The acquaintance works at a charity that helps young Bronx residents learn computer and other job-related skills. She went last winter to the Caribbean for vacation and to apply for a new visa (an annual endeavor). She was denied a visa, however, because her degree (a Bachelor's and Master's in English from Cambridge University) did not "qualify" her for her job, which the consulate staff told her was in "social work." Since she still had a month left on her current visa, she flew back to the US planning to get some advice from her lawyer and reapply in a few weeks.

When transferring in Houston, however, she was stopped, handcuffed, and held in a Texas detention center for a night without being allowed to make a phone call or given a blanket to keep warm in her cold cell. She was then put on a plane to Toronto, where she had no friends, family or place to stay. Her crime? Because she had a month on her visa, she was an "immigration risk." Intervention from her employer and New York politicians helped her to renew her visa and re-enter the US.

This is how we treat the world's most educated and ambitious people. The people who can help America remake its banking sector, its energy economy, its healthcare networks, and its education system -- all while ensuring that our technology, software and entertainment companies stay at the top of the pack -- are told not to apply, and at risk of being handcuffed if they do.

Do we need foreign workers to fix the economy? Who knows. What's clear is that America has always been a magnet for the world's top scientists, from Joseph Priestly to Albert Einstein. Lesser scientists than they are capable of building tomorrow's most agile companies, creating jobs and expanding the economy. Immigration reform is needed to make sure the brains that keep an economy and a society going can find their way here. America built itself on attracting the world's most ambitious, hardworking and intelligent people. Unfortunately, they can no longer come here legally without great difficulties. Reform is needed because now is no time to neglect that tradition of attracting -- and welcoming -- the world's best and brightest.

Wedneday Links: Play Ball!

2009-04-09T16:03:00.006-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- This week we bring you some stories on how baseball makes math fun, Mikheil Saakashvili and his sexual perversions, and the tantrums of the Military-Industrial Complex. So let's get right to it.

Happy Opening Day! Who wants to do some math? In celebration of the start of the 2009 baseball season, we offer you a few pieces on my favorite aspect of the game, arcane statistical analysis! Eric Neel at ESPN.com writes about how fielding like they're wearing boxing gloves has relegated the likes of Bobby Abreu and (sadly) Adam Dunn to MLB's backwaters, thanks to more sophisticated statistical techniques that prove sucking with the glove really does hurt a team. From the New York Times, Alan Schwarz looks at Diamond Mind, a powerful statistics package that allows anyone with a computer to run their own massive simulations. No more Strat-o-Matic dice and cards for me! And finally, Dana Carvey offers his impression of George Will and his Heideggerian take on the national pastime, in game show form.

New York Times: Who wants a porno massage? Mikheil Saakashvili, that's who! The embattled Georgian president has become quite cozy with an American masseuse with a rather unorthodox technique. His political opponents have made hay out of his massage sessions, but Saakashvili is apparently content to be the Marv Albert of Georgia.

Hearst Photography Biennial: Don't touch that! The winning submission in this year's competition is a collection of photos of the old ladies in Russian museums who shadow your every move to make sure you don't touch anything or take pictures without paying for permission to do so. They can be sour-tempered and mean or enthusiastic and informative, adding a great wealth of knowledge to museum exhibits that are usually pretty short on information.

The Daily Show: America's worst Senate delegation? Barack Obama is upping military spending, but on the wrong stuff, apparently. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Boeing want the government to spend money on overpriced, exotic weapons, which we need to kill Somali pirates in rubber dinghies. In this clip Jon Stewart does his stellar impersonation of Joe "GWOT" Lieberman, the Droopy Dog of the Senate. Tag-teaming with Chris Dodd, the handmaiden of AIG, Countrywide, and other financial felons, they make perhaps the worst pair of silver-haired representatives in the country (well, outside of the South).

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Global Detention Project: Lock 'em up. From the Military-Industrial Complex to the Prison-Industrial Complex, the Global Detention Project recently launched its website. It is an inter-disciplinary research project that examines state responses to migration and the networks of detention facilities that are expanding across the globe. The site features a map of all the immigration detention centers in the US, which they count at 961, with a total capacity of 33,400 detainees. This is only a small portion of America's incarcerated population, which currently stands over two million. Some have had enough of this modern Great Confinement, including the Economist and Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia.

Tilt Shift Photography: Make mine miniature. Don't you wish everything looked like a model train set? Through the wonders of tilt-shift photography, you can accomplish just that. The effect can be achieved either through the use of a special lens or by digitally-altering your photos, which you can upload to this site. The results are quite amazing. Filmmaker Keith Loutit has made a series of films depicting Sydney in this minaturized form.

Moldovans Protest Parliamentary Vote, Violence Sparked by Government Provocateurs?

2009-04-09T13:11:00.014-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Moldovan authorities regained control of the country's parliament and presidential administration buildings Wednesday after the capital Chisinau had been gripped by demonstrations sparked by Sunday's parliamentary elections. Protesters claimed that there was widespread vote-rigging by the government. Moldova's communists, led by the country's president Vladimir Voronin, did far better than expected, winning nearly 50% of the vote, ensuring their ability to form a government and choose the next president.

The protests, which began Monday, were led mostly by Moldovan youth movements. More than 10,000 people gathered in the city streets, many waving signs telling people to "trash" the communists. By Tuesday, the protests had devolved into rioting, and the authorities sent in riot police. Protesters stormed the parliamentary building, setting fire to furniture and hurling objects out of the windows, and it was not until Wednesday that the police managed to regain control of the building. Police made 193 arrests over the past three days, and more than 200 police and civilians were injured during the violence.

While sparked by political grievances, the protests also centered around economic concerns. Nearly a third of the country's adult population travels abroad for work, and remittances made up 36% of Moldova's GDP in 2007, making it the most remittance-dependent economy in the world. However, the economic downturn in Europe has caused jobs to dry up, and many workers, especially young people, have been forced to return home, unemployed and dissatisfied with the economic and political stagnation they are witnessing there.

Several of the protesters were waving Romanian and EU flags, demanding closer ties with their western neighbor. The government took this as a sign of foreign provocation, accusing Romania of inciting the riots. While there is a strong Romanian nationalist movement within Moldova, most citizen want closer ties with Romania and the European Union because EU membership would allow easier access to job markets for Moldovan workers and provide the country some degree of collective security from Russia, which supports and occupies its breakaway region of Transdnistria. During the unrest in Chisinau, Transdnistria sent troops (many of them Russian "peacekeepers") to its western border to seal off access, apparently fearing the unlikely scenario that someone from Moldova would flee to the gangster republic.

Some are now speculating that the worst of the violence was actually instigated thugs organized and paid by the Moldovan government. Unimedia has posted photos of several young men they claim were mainly responsible for ransacking the parliament, and may have been told to do so by the police. There are photos of people raising EU and Romanian flags atop the parliament with policemen clearly visible in the background, making no effort to stop them. The site also includes a video of police allegedly placing stones and other projectiles around the parliament for their paid provocateurs to throw.

Russian nationalist and all-around crackpot conspiracy theorist Alexander Dugin somehow managed to place the blame for the riots on Barack Obama. [Note: the preceding link comes from the Moscow News, a Russian government-owned propaganda rag now edited by apologist fool Tim Wall.] He claims that the American government has organized a "color revolution" for Moldova, much like the public uprisings that toppled governments in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, events he also blames on the US.

Meanwhile, protesters are also putting pressure on Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. Tens of thousands gathered in front of parliament to demand his resignation, citing his dictatorial rule and brazen mishandling of relations with Russia, which culminated in last summer's disastrous war in South Ossetia. The protests come on the twentieth anniversary of a brutal crackdown of independence protesters in Tbilisi by Soviet authorities. Soldiers and police killed twenty civilians that day, which is now considered a formative moment in the Georgian independence movement.

Many of the protests in the Moldovan capital were organized by the help of social networking sites Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, the country's Internet service provider is the state-owned (and awfully-named) Moldtelecom, which promptly cut off access to the services. Most foreign journalists were not allowed access to the country during the violence, meaning much of the information was disseminated by participants via the Internet. The pictures in this post come from unimedia.info, which contains several galleries of photos and videos of the protests.

While the parliamentary voting was nominally approved by foreign observers as fair, many in Moldova believe that the vote was rigged to keep the communists in power. Voronin will have to step down from the presidency in a few months, as he has reached the constitutional limit of two four-year terms, but it may be very important for him to have a say in choosing his successor. In a move similar to Boris Yelstin passing power to Vladimir Putin in 1999, in part to ensure that the Yeltsin family's corruption would not be investigated by his successor in the Kremlin, the 67-year-old Voronin could keep his own ill-gotten riches safe by passing power to a close political ally. There has been some speculation that he may even choose his son Oleg, though the corruption allegations that have swirled around him make that unlikely.

So You Say You Want a Reset Button?

2009-04-07T21:45:00.015-04:00

NEW YORK, New York -- Well, you know, we all want to change the world.

Or at least President Barack Obama certainly does, to the delight of Americans and non-Americans alike.

Americans are sick of being hated by other countries; other countries want America to change the way it interacts with them (ironically, it was for this same desire to change others' behavior that President W. Bush gained worldwide wrath). And these are generally fair sentiments.

One of the Obama administration's most visible attempts yet to kick off its foreign policy revolution is a move, first expressed by Vice President Joe Biden in February, to "press the reset button" in relations with Russia. Biden's words were later followed by a gift (as in, what you receive on your birthday, or for Christmas) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The gift was a plastic button with the word "reset" inscribed on it in Russian.

Well, almost. The word was peregruzka. And that does not mean "reset," as the New York Times pointed out last month. In other words, the Obama administration went out of its way to inscribe a gift for Lavrov in Russian, only to blow the Russian like a 7th-grader who didn't study for his French test ... only to learn the test was in RUSSIAN!

How did this happen? Part of it is that, to a degree that is hard for most English speakers to fathom, the Russian language relies on a system of word-formation based on adding fixed prefixes and suffixes to a finite number of roots. The prefix pere- means to do something over. A bit like "re-" in English. And the root gruz means a load. So the construction peregruz would logically (and Russian is a very logical language) mean something like a reload.

But as any native speaker of Russian could tell you, while some technical applications -- think of a manual for a microwave in Yakutsk -- may use the word perezagruzka to mean reset, peregruzka is far from there. For better or worse, pere- can also mean to do something excessively, and here peregruzka would actually mean an overloading or overcharge. (In reports in the Russian press about Biden's original statement, the word used for reset in Russian was ... Reset. In English.)

Not surprisingly, Clinton's gaffe did not go unnoticed by Lavrov, her Russian counterpart. The mistake should "contribute to the advancement of Russian in America," Lavrov said.

Well, not quite ...

First impressions matter, and both the incredibly thoughtless mistranslation and Lavrov's reaction to it have great portent for any strategy based on the feeling that the US needs to "reset" the way it treats Russia. From the American side, the bad translation is as inexcusably (there are millions of native Russian speakers in the US! Couldn't they have run it by any one of them?) naive and lacking in forethought as is any talk about unilaterally "resetting" relations with Russia. From the Russian side, Lavrov's instinct to score a cheap point off Hillary is indicative of a Kremlin foreign policy entirely based around scoring cheap points off of "opponents" -- the greatest and most vilified of which is the US.

But why is it naive and thoughtless to "reset" relations with Russia? After all, judging by the ecstatic comments (now skirted off into the Internet ether) that Times readers left in response to the focus on bringing US-Russian relations back to the drawing board, Americans are relieved to hear about the "reset." But the fact is, for all of Bush's many foreign-policy foibles, the US has no need whatsoever to do penance before Russia.

In many ways, there weren't any large problems with US-Russian relations under 43: Bush largely ignored Russia, and that was a good thing. Russian officials since 1917 have been a bunch of pre-modern gangsters who today love to compare the United States to, for instance, Nazi Germany. The best policy in those instances is to do what Bush did -- keep a stiff upper lip, and let the world judge Putin's megalomania for what it is.

Granted, Bush did have mis-steps regarding NATO expansion. But that was less so because he encouraged Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO than because he failed to do it with Europe's support and in so failing was able to be labeled a unilateralist. Kosovo, on the other hand, was recognized with Europe's support -- and Russia, not the US, looks like the loser on that one.

I'd gander that history will show the largest mistakes made by the Bush administration vis-a-vis Russia were 1) when Dubs told the world he had "seen Putin's soul" while letting the man stamp out democracy and 2) the fact that the Bushies continuously failed to unite Europe with itself in policies touching Russia (involving energy, the former Soviet republics and democracy, e.g.).

Looking beyond the absence of any reason to atone for sins (not) done unto Russia, what consequences would any undue penance have? The smart money says it would not change Russia's behavior toward the US is in any positive way, but would merely cause Russia to smell blood in the water. I have no newspapers to cite here beyond personal experience, but when Russians sense weakness -- if you're alone at night, or if you're a racial minority -- they attack. This is especially true of the Kremlin, which takes the most base traits of many Russians and amplifies them. As its relations with its neighbors show, Russia is in many ways a medieval kingdom, like pre-Enlightenment Saxony.

In the case of Hillary's "reset" button gift, the short-term repercussion is that Lavrov, rather than smile and make a polite joke as an American or Belgian or Congolese or Korean diplomat would do, tried to score a cheapshot about teaching those dimwitted Americans foreign languages. The longer-term repercussion is that Russia will smell weakness in the US's bid to "reset" relations and will opportunistically seek to undermine American geopolitical interests while perhaps offering "olive branches" on flighty, noncommittal issues like nuclear non-proliferation. This is already manifesting itself: Chinese calls to unseat the dollar as the world reserve currency (a status that gives America undue influence and flexibility in borrowing money cheaply) originated last month in Moscow, shortly after the "reset" button was given to Lavrov.

The truest, and best, reset: Let them in

The one "reset" Washington should consider in regard to Russia is to dramatically expand access for Russians in getting to the US. No matter how many toy buttons or stuffed animals Hillary gives Lavrov, Russia will continue to rail against the US for domestic consumption (how else can we tell if Putin really is a strong leader than if he's taking on the hegemon with his bare hands?), indoctrinating further generations of US-hating Russians.

The US needs to let Russians come here, study, work, live, immigrate, vacation, buy property, whatever, and let them see that things aren't so bad, planting the seeds for a less anti-American populace and leadership in the future. Instead, we let a very small number of Russians get any sort of visa to the US, and treat them like prostitutes and criminals when they attempt do so. Again, this is based on personal experience rather than any Interweb articles I can cite. But it's another instance of how the Obama administration seems to be losing a few things in translation in its Russia policies.

Oliver's Army Is On Their Way

2009-04-05T13:53:00.017-04:00

BOULDER, Colorado -- Thirty years ago, Elvis Costello released one of my favorite songs. "Oliver's Army" chronicles the many opportunities on offer for the British working class to see the world on the margins of the country's dwindling empire. In faraway Hong Kong or nearby Belfast, the unemployed from dying industrial towns like Newcastle and Manchester could find themselves a professional career patrolling the world's hot spots.

The song is a laconic account of the decline of imperial power, and it remains especially poignant in today's America. Where once the army struggled to meet its recruitment goals, enlisting convicted felons and the illiterate to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession has driven many people from the unemployment lines to the recruiting office.

The song offers a little guided tour of the death throes of the British Empire. In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the record's release, here I offer some interesting details on the locales Costello mentions:

Checkpoint Charlie: Until the reunification of Germany and the withdrawal of foreign forces from Berlin, Britain had a garrison of 3,000 troops in the city. Once the very fault line between East and West, this central checkpoint between the two Berlins is now one of the city's most popular tourist attractions. The nearby Mauermuseum has exhibits on the various ways Berliners attempted to escape the communist East, and the many who died trying.

Murder Mile: Like Berlin, Belfast has long been a city of walls, dividing Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Some of the so-called "Peace Walls" have been removed since the warring sides signed a peace agreement in 1998, but the many that remain are adorned with murals chronicling the many heroes and victims of the protracted conflict. The Murder Mile refers to a particularly violent area around Crumlin Road that was the site of numerous sectarian killings. The famous Crumlin Road Gaol is located here, and it has since been converted into a museum. More than 4,000 people were killed during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, including 1,667 members of the British security services.

Hong Kong and the Chinese Line: During the more than 150 years of British rule in Hong Kong, the Chinese had always held a tiny toehold in the colony. The Walled City was an ancient fortress in Kowloon that stayed under Chinese control even after they ceded the surrounding territory to Britain in 1898. The area was completely neglected by China, and it grew into a center for criminal activity. By the 1980's, the population of the 0.01-square-mile area had swelled to 50,000, and the two countries agreed to evacuate and demolish the area, which had grown into one massive, tottering warren of makeshift buildings. Even though all of Hong Kong has reverted to Chinese control, the 20-mile-long border fence remains in place as the former colony is now a Special Administrative Region, and ordinary Chinese citizens need special permission even to visit. (For more on borders and security, check out the excellent blog Subtopia.)

Palestine: Palestine had been a British protectorate until 1948, when the UN partitioned the territory and the state of Israel was declared. During the period of the Mandate, British forces fought against a number of Jewish insurgent groups, including the Irgun and the famous Stern Gang. Seeking revenge for fallen comrades killed by the Zionists, a number of British soldiers left the army and began fighting alongside the Arabs in the bloody exchange of terrorist bombings that eventually escalated into the first Arab-Israeli War. (For more on this subject, see chapter four of Mike Davis' book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb.) Britain would return to the region in 1983 as part of the multinational peacekeeping force in the Lebanese Civil War.

Johannesburg: For the past several decades, civil conflict in Africa has provided ample opportunities for enterprising British and Afrikaner mercenaries. South Africa became independent in 1910, and by the 1970's, Britain's African empire was all but gone, with the exception of Southern Rhodesia. In 1965 the colony's white-dominated government declared independence, which the home country never recognized. This unilateral declaration and the imposition of apartheid-like rule sparked a long and bloody civil war, known as the Rhodesian Bush War. During this period, the Republic of Rhodesia, as the country was called, was only recognized by South Africa, who was fighting alongside the white government against black insurgent groups, and Britain successfully lobbied the UN to impose sanctions on the country. In 1979, the UK brokered the Lancaster House Agreement, which paved the way for elections the following year. As part of the agreement, the country reverted to British control between December 15, 1979 and April 18, 1980, when the elected government of Robert Mugabe took control.

Even long after the sun had set, so to speak, there were plenty of war zones and fence lines for Tommies to walk. The British Empire still technically exists, though it has been reduced to a scattered collection of islands and few rocky promontories. I have created a map showing the empire as it is today, and as it was in 1979, including the various places discussed above.

[Click on the image to enlarge]