One of the greatest threats that the world faces today goes by the name of "rust."

What's at stake isn't the wheel wells of your Ford Falcon, it's the global food supply.  A old threat that has long been dormant, wheat stem rust has returned.

Biologists warned Thursday that a virulent new strain of a previously controlled plant disease had emerged in East Africa and could wipe out 10 percent of the world's wheat production if its spread is not halted.  The disease, wheat rust, caused huge grain losses and even famines in the first half of the 20th century.

Is America the world's greatest country?  Well, consider this list.

The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American.

Sure, none of these things is really an important measure of a nation, and even taken as a whole the Ferris-Wheel/Shopping Mall Index isn't likely to convince anyone that America has really slipped.  But the point that Fareed Zakaria makes in his Newsweek column is that all these things -- and the list could be a lot longer -- are indicators of a new status in world affairs.

But while we argue over why they hate us, "they" have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

With something like 195 nations in the world, 65% of them have been growing at a rate faster than the US.  The next set of "world companies" are emerging in nations that Americans have, and still do, looked on with disdain.  Whether it's finance or science, health care or education, America isn't leading the way -- it's not even pointing the direction.  Instead, we're on the sidelines, trying to squeeze the grip of our still considerable military leadership ever tighter, only to have more and more of our influence slip away.

There are directional changes that could have been made to make America a moral and intellectual leader in this new structure, but instead we've been running on bluster and bombs.  Now, for the most part, America is simply being ignored.

Zakaria's right to say that this is not the disaster it might seem.  First of all, though from the cable news pundit point of view this world looks suddenly scary and dangerous, it's actually a lot less frightening that it was in decades past.  If we notice more terrorism, it's only because we're looking for it and reporting on every incident.  It's because we have an administration that makes sure to pin the word terrorist on everyone who ever contemplated running a stop sign.  It's the same phenomenon that makes us see a surge in crime because a child who goes missing in Salt Lake City gets immediate 24/7 coverage in Des Moines and a college student lost on vacation becomes the centerpiece of national news.  There is no enormous threat out there.  There's no organization, no nation, and no coalition that threatens to contend with the United States.  Terrorists can do in the United States.  China and Russia simply aren't interested -- they're too busy selling us electronics and oil.

As the GOP works hard to scare us to death (and gets assistance from the ringing of 3AM phones) we are as safe right now as we are ever likely to be -- even though the actions we've taken as a nation might justifiably be seen as a kind of death wish.

But while Zakaria is quick to point out that the Republican fear mongers are blowing gun smoke when it comes to the threats we face on the battlefield, he's equally quick to join the hallelujah chorus when it comes to defending the economics of globalization.  The US has lost jobs, lost skills, lost whole industries, and become debt-bound both at the national and personal level.  Somehow, this is taken as a good thing.  

Over the last 20 years, globalization has been gaining depth and breadth. America has benefited massively from these trends. It has enjoyed unusually robust growth, low unemployment and inflation, and received hundreds of billions of dollars in investment. These are not signs of economic collapse.

That same period, and the last seven years in particular, have seen stagnation in the median wage, a loss of nearly two million jobs, loss of real purchasing power for the average consumer, and sharp rises in the cost of basic commodities.  It would be nice to think that the "rising tide" was sweeping in to lift all boats, but for many people it seems that the tide was actually stored in an American bucket -- a bucket that's been shot full of holes by our economic and diplomatic missteps.

Low, low prices at the local big box and trading manufacturing jobs for those that include the phrase "do you want fries with that" do not a great economy make.  Over the last weekend, anyone visiting one of my favorite places in LA, Dutton's Bookstore, would have found that it, like the US, was in the midst of furious activity, with all hands on deck and customers pouring through the door to enjoy low prices.  It might have been the very model of the US economy that Zakaria describes.  Unfortunately, it was a going out of business sale.  

On top of the troubles that are plaguing us now is the knowledge that we do not enjoy an unbounded system.  Food riots in two dozen countries, and $123 oil are only the first signs of what will happen as more and more contend for less and less.  These fights may be handled with Euros now, but when it comes to basic commodities, it's doubtful that the pocketbook alone will rule.  There's also the secondary effects generated by increasing demand -- global warming, increasing desertification, general pollution.  These problems are likely to be cause of future conflicts, and globalization makes them all kick harder.

What's more, the happy talk of millions lifted from poverty into the waiting arms of consumerism is really little more than talk.  That worldwide tide hasn't exactly been coming in evenly.  In most countries -- hell, all countries -- what's been happening is that more and more of the resources are being accumulated by a very small percentage of the people.  As in the US, the average wealth has increased, but the median wealth is a very different story.  Around the world, inequality between the richest and the poorest has been moving sharply higher.  Historically, that's been a big flashing red light on the road to instability.

Finally, if the last twenty years have proved anything, it's that capitalism is not the exclusive partner of democracy.  Authoritarian governments have shown that they too can play the greed game.  Western exploitation of Africa has long demonstrated that bribery and cronyism can actually out compete regulation and law in the marketplace.  Governments unconcerned with such non-monetary concepts as safety, workers rights, and the environment have done quite well.  Globalization has been placed in the service of governments with no interest in democracy, who have discovered that consumerism can be a far more effective means of controlling the populace and squeezing out opposition than any propaganda film.  

That America has no current or dawning military threat is to be cheered.  That some number of people across the planet are no longer bound to poverty is to be celebrated.  That the United States no longer sets the rules in the game must be accepted.  But globalization seems to be providing rapid increases in demand, rapid increases in inequality, rapid increases in prices, and no matching increase in freedom or democracy.

Rather than being worried about the arms stored in distant caves, we need to be more concerned about the food available in distant kitchens.  The latter will have much more to say about the future security of America, and the storm of globalization that we've unleashed may well be more dangerous to our survival than every militant on Earth.

Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that by the turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its great, historical mission—globalizing the world.

So the "great historic" accomplishment of the United States turns out to be not acting as a beacon for freedom, or demonstrating the worth of democracy.  It's teaching the rest of the world to consume as we do.

If that's true, it would be better for all of us if that tea had never gone into Boston harbor.

This late in the game, there are a good number of states already in the bag and a lot of polls have come and gone.  This seems like a good time to check on the performance of the various polling organizations so far in state level Democratic contests.

For the results on this table, I've consulted the final results from each state as well as polling data from Pollster .com and Real Clear Politics.  I've only included primaries that were polled by at least two of the major pollsters.  I've dropped results from pollsters who didn't poll a significant number of states (more than a couple), even when that meant bumping Gallup or CBS.  And I've only included polls that happened in the last week before the election.  Here are the results.

In the center of this table is the actual results for that state.  Of example, in Iowa Senator Obama won by a (rounded) 8% while in New Hampshire, Senator Clinton won by 3%.  The values indicated for each pollster are for their relative performance vs. the actual results.  In Iowa, Strategic Vision said that Obama would win by 3, but he won by 8, so their prediction was 5 to the Clinton side of the line.  In New Hampshire, Rasmussen predicted that Obama would win by 7, but Clinton won by 3, so they were 10 to the Obama side of the prediction.  In several instances (including Iowa) several predictions fell on the same spot, so I've bumped a poll one space left or right just to make it visible.  I've tried to randomize these moves so that everyone got treated fairly on a visual basis, and when it comes to the numeric analysis, I used the raw numbers so this nudging has no effect.

One thing that's immediately obvious is that the "polls show more votes for Obama than he gets" effect does not seem to exist when polls for all states are considered.  If anything, more polls lean toward Clinton in the run up to election day than Obama.  This is aided by pollsters like Mason-Dixon, which has been "pro-Clinton" in their analysis for every state but one.  Strategic Vision erred to the Clinton side of the line in every contest but New Jersey.  Insider Advantage had numbers that were more pro-Clinton than the actual results in every state.  Rasmussen and Survey USA both come in close to neutral, but still lean to the Clinton side.  Among the pollsters examined, only Zogby tended to give a more pro-Obama number than the actual results.

Pollster	Avg. Err%	Leans Toward	States Called
IA	10.1	C + 10	6/6
M-D	9.2	C + 5	4/5
Ras.	8.0	C + 3	12/18
SUSA	4.7	C + 3	11/13
SV	9.1	C + 7	4/4
Zogby	9.8	O + 3	6/9

Comparing the average error between last prediction and actual results, the "lean" of the poll toward one candidate or the other, and the rate of prediction of winners gives some interesting results.  

Insider Advantage leaned toward Clinton on every prediction and had the highest error rate in predicting final results.  However, they still managed to pick the winner in the six contests for which they had data in the final week.

On the other hand, Rasmussen, while much more neutral when it comes to leaning toward a candidate, managed to miss in 6 of the 18 contests they called -- a 33% error rate in selecting the winner, and that's generous considering that among the states they called were such gimmes as Illinois and New York.  

Only Zogby managed to match that final result for awfulness of prediction.  In fact, as anyone who has watched the results this year might have noticed, Zogby has been miserable both on the numbers and the results. They've managed to miss in 1/3 of the primaries (to give them some credit, their correct picks aren't bolstered by New York or Illinois) and come close to Insider Advantage in the overall error percentage.

Survey USA has been close on the numbers in almost every case.  One of their misses came in the close contest in Texas, where they called it Obama by one.  The only real screw-up of the year for SUSA was their call for a big Clinton win in Missouri.  Were it not for that that call and (like everyone else) underestimating Obama's landslide in South Carolina, SUSA would be sporting an amazing batting average.  The number of states where SUSA has been extremely close to the final result shows that in many cases their model of the electorate was dead on.

So, how does all this apply to the upcoming contests in Indiana and North Carolina?

North Carolina has been tracked by Survey USA, Insider Advantage, Rasmussen, and Mason-Dixon.  Here are the values as they stand and adjusted to reflect the "lean" indicated in previous contests.

Pollster	Actual	Adjusted
SUSA	Obama +5	Obama + 8
IA	Obama +3	Obama + 13
Zogby	Obama +8.0	Obama + 5
Ras	Obama +9.0	Obama + 12
M-D	Obama +7.0	Obama + 12
Avg.	Obama + 6	Obama + 10

Indiana has fresh numbers from fewer sources, which is surprising considering the closeness of the contest.  In any case, here are the actual and adjusted values.

Pollster	Actual	Adjusted
SUSA	Clinton + 12	Clinton + 9
IA	Clinton + 4	Obama + 6
Zogby	Obama + 2	Clinton + 1
Avg.	Clinton + 5	Clinton + 1

Do I believe the adjusted numbers?  Well, since Insider Advantage and Zogby have the highest error percent and Survey USA has the lowest, I'd personally give it extra weight.  Call it Obama by 8 in North Carolina, and Clinton by 4 in Indiana.

Now I'm going to sit back and hope that SUSA used the same model for predicting Indiana that it used in Missouri.  If it's any comfort, the SUSA/Zogby numbers on Indiana look very much like the Missouri prediction on Super Tuesday.  So maybe this will be the second time SUSA took a hike into the weeds.  Don't hesitate to check the numbers.  Any time I'm allowed to do this much math in one sitting, it's an invitation to disaster.

Every person injured, every person killed, has a mother, has a father, has siblings, has uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends.  And they all have memories.

That's one good reason why 100 more years of this is 105 years too long.  

The U.S. military on Saturday fired missiles at a target about 50 yards away from the general hospital in Baghdad's Sadr City district, wounding more than 20 people and destroying ambulances, hospital officials said.

Of course, the military was aiming at a building occupied by "a criminal element," and by all accounts that building was destroyed.  The building happened to be a chapel used by the hospital workers.  

But does it matter that there was no intent to hurt civilians?

This kind of incident certainly isn't new.  It's hardly even news.  Air strikes in this conflict have by now taken out weddings and schools, convoys of government officials on their way to a conference, and a countless individuals that just happened to live in the wrong neighborhood.  Of course it's accidental.  of course it's regrettable.  But if it was your family, would that matter?  Would it matter if your children?

The ugly daily fight for ground in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City unfolded Saturday at a small mosque next door to a hospital, damaging the hospital and all its ambulances, and near a group of children who were injured by the violence as they gathered tin cans to sell for salvage.  

The first hit came after a night of clashes in the neighborhood, when the Americans fired at least three "precision-guided munitions" in the area of the Sadr General Hospital at 10 a.m. The target was a small building next door to the hospital that neighbors said was used as a rest house and place of prayer for hospital employees, pilgrims and neighborhood residents.  ... Doctors and nurses ran screaming as the blasts blew out hospital windows and shook the building, said one doctor, who asked that his name not be used.

About an hour later, at the front line between the southern part of the neighborhood that is held by the American and Iraqi military and the northern section that is held by Shiite militias, the group of children was hit, according to a child and one adult who was injured there and brought to the Sadr hospital.

Remember Silvio Berlusconi, Bush's Italian pal?

Bush: We welcome the Prime Minister as a good friend ... He understands the history and the values that our two countries share."

Well, yes, it does appear that Silvio has an interest in history, in particular a fascination with the 1930s.  Now that Berlusconi's conservative party has once again taken control of Italy, they've been sharing their history lessons with the country.  First, there was the election of one of Berlusconi's lieutenants as the new mayor of Rome.

On Monday night, the area around Rome's city hall rang to chants of "Duce! Duce!", the term adopted by Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, equivalent to the German "Führer". Supporters of the new mayor gave the fascist Roman straight-arm salutes.

Does Godwin's Law still apply if people are proudly waving the banner of fascism?  While one Berlusconi lieutenant was celebrating his mayoral victory, another was reminding the opposition that not following the new government didn't mean just getting a beating at the ballot box.

The prime minister-elect's closest ally, Umberto Bossi, the Northern League leader, kept up the intimidating rhetoric, arriving for the first session of Italy's parliament warning of violence if the centre-left did not go along with his plans for federalism.

"I don't know what the left wants [but] we are ready," he told reporters. "If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand."

And if there was any doubt at all about where this is heading, Berlusconi put his signature on the official fascist embrace.

Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy's leap to the right by declaring: "We are the new Falange." Although he took care to wrap his remark in a classical context, his choice of words appeared to be a nod and a wink to his most extreme supporters. The original Falange - the word means "phalanx" - was the Spanish fascist party, founded in the 1930s, which supplied Francisco Franco's dictatorship with its ideological underpinning.

Once again Bush has demonstrated the kind of keen human insight that he got from peering into Vladimir Putin's baby blues and discovering him to be "straightforward and trustworthy."  It's clear that in sitting down with Silvio, Bush partnered with a man who's determined to bring fascism back to Italy, even if it requires violent suppression of opposition. Either Bush was completely taken in by two men who were determined to put in place non-democratic nationalist governments run by threat and cronyism, or he was sympathetic to those positions.  Neither choice is particularly comforting.

Earlier, Bush had bragged of his partnership with Berlusconi.

The people of the United States and Italy love freedom. And we know that freedom must be defended.

We also understand that defending freedom requires cost and sacrifice.

Having helped to secure a foothold in Europe for neo-fascism, what future sacrifices might be needed to ensure that Italian freedom is retained?  

I hear there's a good beach at Paestum, down in Salerno.

In his classic popular science series, "Connections," James Burke looked at how events and people were linked together in unexpected ways.  Generally, these events were spread out over centuries and continents (such as how the discovery of a certain kind of slate in Middle Eastern rivers led to the atomic bomb), but in one instance, Burke focused on an event that happened in a matter of minutes.

It happened on a November evening just as people were filing out of their offices in cities along the East Coast.  As millions started for home, something that seemed very tiny happened inside a small metal box 400 miles from New York City.  Inside that box, two small pieces of metal came into contact.  Within twelve minutes, 80,000 square miles of the most densely populated areas of the US and Canada were without power.  Thirty million people were affected.  

What happened was the closure of a single single back up relay, at a single power station, on the Canadian side of Niagara falls.  It wasn't really a "failure," just a miscalibration.  The relay tripped because power demand had momentarily spiked on a line leading into Toronto, and when it tripped power was pushed onto another line, causing that line to overload, which pushed still more power down the next line, and so on, creating a cascade that left some people in the dark for more than 13 hours.  People hundreds of miles away died because someone at that power plant hadn't properly calibrated that breaker to handle rising demand on the system.  

That was in 1965.  In some ways the system today is better.  In some ways it's much, much worse.

What happened that evening illustrates how systems that are enormously costly and massive, can still be incredibly fragile and subject to the failure of a single part.  There's a famous antecedent that John Glenn, moments before he was about to become the first American in orbit, realized that he was sitting on a billion dollars worth of low bids.  It's good for a smile, until you realize that what was true for Glenn then is even more true for all of us today.

Whether it's a bridge in Minnesota or body armor in Iraq, we live in a world constructed by low bid.  That's not just true for items built by government contract.  For decades, business has focused on efficiency, on the elimination of all redundancy, on "right sizing," on "just in time" on "zero inventory."  One of the economic indicators we've been trained to look for each month is the measure of labor productivity, the amount of output achieved for each man-hour of input.  In the United States, productivity has soared over the last decade, as automation, outsourcing, and just-in-time have worked together to make US workers much much more productive.  

Want to know why corporations are able to sit on huge sums of money, but the average worker's pay hasn't increased?  It's because they can get by with fewer of us and still get what they need.  Not more than they need, of course.  Just enough.  Corporations have been proudly "cutting the fat."  Flexibility and robustness are not the goals for a corporate society that rarely glances beyond the end of the current quarter.

The trouble is, fat does something other than cause unsightly bulges in your favorite outfit.  Fat is storage.  If bears were to "cut the fat" before heading into hibernation, they'd be really thin -- as in skeletons -- come spring.  

There's a familiar fable from Aesop about an industrious ant and a fun-loving grasshopper.  All through the good times, the ant toils away, packing food into the larder.  While the ant works, the grasshopper goes whistling along, frequently making fun of the hard-working ant.  Then the ant sneaks up and slices the lazy bastard's head from it's thorax with one clean... wait, that's not how it goes.  It's more like this:

"Why don't you blow off work today and come to the beach?," says Grasshopper.

"I'm putting away food for times when food is short," says Ant, "you should too."

"Screw that" says Grasshopper.  "We have plenty of food, and if we ever run short the magic invisible hand of the market will make sure that more appears."

In the story, hard times come -- as they always do -- and Grasshopper's empty hindgut causes him to repent his slug abed ways.  The end.  Or he might hire Blackwater to shoot Ant and occupy his hill in the name of peace, democracy, and capitalism.  

Considering the amount of work we do, we might well sympathize with the ants, but societally, we're grasshoppers.  In fact, we've built a whole "Grasshopper Planet" in the name of efficient global business.  It's a system that glorifies short-term profit over long term planning.  It's a fat-free, no plan for a rainy day, system, and it's supporting six billion grasshoppers.  Though you wouldn't know it from looking at American waistlines, globalization has shaved the fat from planet Earth.

Like a metal bridge slowly being eaten away by the passage of water and time, the supports of this system grow more delicate by the day -- on purpose.  Competitiveness and fragility have become synonymous.  

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich brought together many of the threats then facing society in his book, The Population Bomb.  Ehrlich looked at humanity through the lens of the same dynamics that limit the population of deer on a plateau, or  the number of fish in a pond.   Though the population of human beings has doubled since Ehrlich's book first appeared, no species can expand forever.  Sooner or later the population will be controlled, perhaps by choice, and if not then by war or disease.  Or famine.

Famine is one of those words that these days only seems to appear in Sunday School and on the early morning commercials run by charities who can't afford a slot in prime time.  Thanks to the "Green Revolution" that drastically increased the productivity of farm lands between the 1940s and 1960s, the amount of food produced across the planet is enough to support a population that's grown from three billion to closing on seven since The Population Bomb appeared.  When famine occurs, it's usually a demonstration of greed and idiocy (such as that shown in Hubert Sauper's award-winning 2005 film, Darwin's Nightmare in which fish are being exported to Europe and America from a lake surrounded by starving people), rather than a real lack of input to the world food system.

Real famine -- the kind that acts as a check on that ever-growing population, the kind that lays waste to whole regions -- can't occur these days.  Not so long as our fat-free, just-in-time, right-sized food distribution system works perfectly.

Oh, and not only does that system have to work perfectly, but the other systems -- the one that supplies oil to the agricultural nations, the one that provides shipping, the political systems -- they all have to work perfectly, as well.  All these systems are so intricately intertwined, that tipping a pebble anywhere can start unanticipated avalanches.  

Say for example, you decide to put some percentage of corn into the production of ethanol.  It sounds like a good idea.  There's the possibility of reducing dependence on oil, of reducing greenhouse gases, and of providing a market to corn farmers many of whom are already getting trimmed away by that "fat reduction."  Only putting corn into ethanol can limit the amount that's exported and increase the price world wide.  And if farmers are encouraged to put more land toward corn, they put less toward wheat and soybeans.  So an increase in corn prices can ripple across the food supply, causing an increase elsewhere.

Or say you're newly arrived in the middle class and for the first time you can afford to eat just a little more meat.  Meat that puts ten or twenty times the strain on the system as delivering that same food energy in the form of grain.  When a lot of people reach this point in a short period, as is happening in parts of Asia, systems that have long provided "enough" start to fall behind.  

Or say that the currency used in most of these commodity transactions, the standard by which prices are set, starts to become unstable.  Prices for future international trade are no longer predictable, as the factors of weather, pests, supply, and demand are joined by a simple inability to determine what the dollars being delivered in return for grain are really worth.

When things like that happen, countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, which have long exported rice elsewhere, put a ban on exports.  Things like that can result in food riots in 37 different countries in the space of a month.  

When it comes to the world food supply, it's not one little "box" that's overloading, it's several at the same time.  And all this is happening as increasing population is already straining the limits of the system in many countries.  The result is a crisis.

In those countries where people spend 15% of their cash on food, a doubling of prices means you get a little grumbling, and some restrictions on how many bags of rice you can buy at the local big box.  It also means  less available for other things, resulting in an economic slowdown.  Every dime that goes into basic foodstuffs, is a dime not being spent elsewhere.

In those countries where people spend 30% of their cash on food, a doubling of prices means real hardship.  It means kids go to work instead of getting an education.  It means businesses fail and houses are lost.  It means that people make the kind of decisions that will echo through generations, limiting their ability to rise above poverty.  It means the arrow of economic progress is thrown into reverse.

In those countries where people spend 60% of their money on food, a doubling of prices means that children go hungry.  If it goes on long enough, people starve.  It means famine.  Famine not in midst of plenty, but famine in the midst of "just enough."  Only that just enough is just too far away and just too expensive.

Of course, famine is not the end of the chain.  This is the fortieth anniversary of The Population Bomb, but from famine can come war, disease, and all those other limiting factors that Erhlich wrote about way back when.  All the systems are interconnected, all the systems are fragile, and if we think that the effects of any disaster can be limited to somewhere "over there," we've not just cut the fat, we've cut the sense.

On Grasshopper Planet, every day is just-in-time for collapse.

Update [2008-4-27 17:7:28 by Devilstower]: in the comments, Fatherflot pointed out that much of the Connections series can be viewed on YouTube.  Thanks.

Prices for homes are down again, and the decline shows no sign of stopping.  But not all homes are equal in the falling market, and there's a new factor that's helping to determine which areas fail and which areas thrive.

But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And a pattern is emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.  The ones with short commutes are faring better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what has long been inexorable — urban sprawl.

As President Carter came out his meeting with Hamas, there were varying opinions about whether his visit had made significant diplomatic process.  However, one thing was very clear.  When asked, Jimmy Carter said that the administration had not warned him against meeting with Hamas.  Then Condoleeza Rice said that he had been warned.  

Rice said in Kuwait on Tuesday: "We counseled President Carter against going to the region and particularly against having contact with Hamas."

Today, Carter had an explanation for this discrepancy: Rice is lying.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter on Wednesday accused Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of not telling the truth about warnings she said her department gave Carter not to speak to Hamas before a Middle East trip.

No matter what you think of Carter's visit, there's one thing that indisputable.  Jimmy Carter tells the truth, even when -- maybe even especially when -- it's politically dangerous.

On the other hand, Condoleezza Rice has a record of twisting the facts way, way, way past the breaking point.  Her demonstrated integrity involves eight years of misdirections, misstatements, and outright lies.

"No one in the State Department or any other department of the U.S. government ever asked him (Carter) to refrain from his recent visit to the Middle East or even suggested that he not meet with Syrian President (Bashar) Assad or leaders of Hamas," [a statement from the Carter Center] said.

Is there still anyone, anywhere this side of Bill O'Reilly who is silly enough to believe Rice over Carter?

It's no longer news that oil is above $100 a barrel.  In fact just yesterday the New York Times had an article on how oil had topped $116.  By the end of that same day, it had edged up to almost $120.  And the big news is there is no big news.

What was striking about this latest milestone was what didn’t happen: there was no shortage of oil, no sudden embargo, no exporter turning off its spigot.

Odds are the slope will continue up from here.  However, there's a fair degree of speculation and concern over international stability built into the current price, probably something on the order of $25 a barrel.  Just think of it as the Iraq War Oil Tax.  That speculative cost could collapse suddenly.  Oil prices just might even fall to $70 or lower -- a price that itself would have seemed high a very short time ago.

But it won't happen for long, it won't mean that those predicting peak oil are wrong, and it won't mean that we can joyfully go back to our SUVs.  Not only are there environmental and national security concerns of continuing our dependence on oil, oil prices will go higher.  Why?  Because there are so more straws being jabbed into the pool.

Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries. To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

"This is the market signaling there is a problem," said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, "that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies."

Here's an important point: don't expect any announcement of "huge new oil fields" to solve this problem.  

First, most new fields fizzle.  Putting one or two exploration wells into a formation and projecting a zillion barrels of oil does not make them actually exist.  The largest oil field ever discovered... gets discovered about every six months.  So whether it's off the coast of Brazil or freshly exposed by melting ice in Greenland, the truth is none of these fields is likely to live up to its publicity.

But let's say they do.  Let's say someone discovers the next Ghawar.  Problems solved?  Not at all.  it will take years to bring any new field into production.  By that time, many existing fields -- such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay and Mexico's Cantarell (and maybe even the actual Ghawar in Saudi Arabia) -- are likely to be out of business.  Oil fields come and go quite rapidly, and the truth is that the rate of discovery now is way down from where it was a few decades ago.  Much more production will be moving out of the market than will be moving in, and unless trends are drastically reversed, demand will continue to increase.

We can not drill our way out of this problem.  We can't refinery ourselves out of this problem.  We can't produce ourselves out of this problem.

So we build nuclear plants, right?  A few new nukes and crisis averted.  Only we can't solve this problem that way.  Not by building nuclear plants, or coal-fired plants, or even sowing a thousand wind farms.  Oil is a transportation issue, not an electricity-on-the-grid issue.  To reduce our need for oil, we need to reduce the number of multi-ton vehicles used to shuttle individuals between homes and offices.  

And that's the very good news.  Because consumption of oil is, at its heart, a social issue.  There's no Second Law of Petrodynamics that states every human being must have 20 gallons of high test to get through the day.  Sure, it will be great to have plug-in hybrids and full bore EVs on the road, but we don't have to wait until then to tackle this problem.  We can choose to end the oil crisis, and it involves no technological breakthroughs at all.

The solution lies in making choices as boring as picking up that fluorescent light bulb.  The answer is conservation.

• Drive less.
• Take public transit.
• Walk.
• If it's too far to walk, use a bike.
• If it's too far to bike, and there no public transportation, car pool.
• If you can't car pool, use a smaller, more efficient vehicle.
• If you have a long commute, move closer to work.
• If you can't move closer, take a closer job.
• If you can't get a different job, see if you can telecommute.

It really is that simple.  Which of course, doesn't mean it will be easy.  We're accustomed to jumping in our personal battleships and cruising the highway at speeds just less than supersonic every time we get a craving for a Slurpee.  Making significant changes to oil consumption requires a sacrifice of one of the things Americans value most: convenience, and no one -- not government, not industry -- can really do as much as you can by simply parking it.

Sure, it's going to be painful.  There's a big temptation to deliver a nah-nah-nah, since many groups (including our own Energize America) advocated for an increase in the gas tax back when gas was much cheaper, with the resulting funds to be put directly to development of public transport and addressing issues that would reduce the need for oil.  Even on Daily Kos people screamed that not one penny was acceptable.  Now gas is closing on $4, the economy is being squeezed, and every dollar is going to Exxon instead of a solution.  Plus you have J. Sidney "Whiplash" McCain III suggesting that the existing gas taxes be suspended, so we can enjoy an infrastructure debt that makes the Iraq War bills seem laughably small.

There's a lot left to do.  We have to rethink a delivery network that's focused on trucks, even over distances where there are more energy-efficient alternatives.  We have to get serious about the use of rail transport for both goods and people.  We have to break the habit of flying for meetings that could be done over the phone or on the web.  We have to put leaner, greener, lighter vehicles onto the road in place of the heavy oil burners we use now.  If, sometime far down the road, we actually have enough electric vehicles out there to affect demand on the grid, we might even need to build a power plant.  But not yet, and certainly not first.

If you've been waiting for that call to sacrifice, the one that Bush never gave after 9/11, here it is: drive less.  Want a good starting target?  With gas rationing during World War II, each family was allowed four gallons a week.  Let's start there.  See if you can ration yourself -- before the price at the pump does it for you.

Hendrik Hertzberg's New Yorker article has what may be the best summary yet of ABC's miserable debate performance.  

Call it the case of the Walt Disney Company v. People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (and of the United States, for that matter). Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time.

ABC has defended the issues raised as being of "real importance."  After all, it's not as if anything else was going on, right?

If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come. In the seven weeks since the previous Clinton-Obama debate, the death toll of American troops in Iraq had reached four thousand; the President had admitted that his "national-security team," including the Vice-President, had met regularly in the White House to approve the torture of prisoners; house repossessions topped fifty thousand per month and unemployment topped five per cent; and the poll-measured proportion of Americans who believe that "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track" hit eighty-one per cent, a record. Yet for most of the next hour Gibson and Stephanopoulos limited their questioning to the following topics: Obama’s April 6th remark about "bitter" small-towners; whether each candidate thinks the other can win; the Obama family’s ex-pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.; Clinton’s tale of sniper fire in Bosnia; Obama’s failure to wear a flag lapel pin; and Obama’s acquaintance with a college professor in his Chicago neighborhood who, while Obama was in grade school, was a member of the Weather Underground.

Even though in his conclusion Hertzberg credits McCain with more sense of honor than he's demonstrated over the last eight years, the whole article is worth a read.  ABC?  That's worth a miss.

Not can a "smart person" be president, but an intellectual.  There's a difference.  Bill Clinton attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, but no one would have pegged the McDonald's-munching Clinton as an ivory-tower egghead.  George W. Bush attended both Harvard and Yale, but I think we're safe in saying that the word "intellectual" could not be attached to him with all the barbed wire in Texas.  Flipping backwards through the list of presidential candidates, the last guy who had the sign "intellectual" hanging from his neck was probably Adlai Stevenson.  Kennedy probably deserved it, but I'm assured that the "dreamy" factor offset any tendency toward sustained Latin discourse.

But after several rounds of selecting presidents by the beer test, can we instead vote for a candidate who doesn't hide her/his smarts?  Megan Daum has a discussion of the downtrodden intellectual in her LA Times column.

With political discourse reduced to screaming contests and actual news eclipsed by exclusive and shocking footage of celebrities without makeup, we've become not only impatient with but downright opposed to the kinds of ideas that can't be reduced to a line on a screen crawl or a two-sentence blog entry.

What's more, a lot of people who harbor an intolerance for complexity see it not as a character flaw but a cognitive virtue. That's because they've fallen into the trap of believing that complicated ideas ("complicated" now constituting anything that requires reading, watching or listening to in its entirety) are the purview of the "elite."

Most of the vitriol being levied at Obama these days boils down to his shocking refusal to mouth the standard phrases all politicians are supposed to say, the ones that seem to make up 110% of John McCain's vocabulary.  Listening to Obama requires that you engage more than political cruise control and actually think about what he's saying.  Can we put up with that?

But even if Obama is not an intellectual in the classic sense, there's no doubt that he's absorbed the trappings of erudite rhetoric. He offers up ideas that don't lend themselves to sound bites but require some sustained attention. And according to the media and the political spin machine, that's proof he's snobby and out of touch.

One of the things that strikes people who've spent any time in Europe is that Europeans tend to be almost universally bookish.  By that I don't mean they travel around with a copy of Proust tucked under one arm, but if they've read past the cover page of Remembrance of Things Past they're not afraid to toss their own two euros into the discussion.  That doesn't mean for a moment that Europeans are one neuron smarter than Americans, only that they don't seem convinced that knowledge is something you should feel bad about.

America suffers from a national schizophrenia on education.  Everybody thinks it's a good idea to get an education, but displaying that education is looked on as a sin.  Knowing how to do a better job for the country and explaining it with clear and thorough reasoning, rather than offering up ignorance spiced with tired stock phrases and pithy platitudes, may ultimately turn out to be disqualifying.

Fortunately this isn't true at Daily Kos.  Intellectuals aren't afraid to show their light here.  For example, within five minutes, someone will be along to explain how I misused schizophrenia.

Worried that NASA's plans for getting men to Mars are going to take too long or cost too much?  Don't fret yourself.

If you can't take people to Mars, you can certainly bring Mars to the people.  

This is a place where "moving mountains" is no longer a figure of speech. Here, among the steep green Appalachians, mining companies are moving mountains off their pedestals to get the kind of coal that Washington needs.

...

"It used to be West Virginia," said Vivian Stockman, an environmental activist. "And now it's Mars."

Remember Ron Paul?  You know, the Republican answer to Mike Gravel.  Paul won supporters on the left by being anti-war, and his Libertarian positions picked up folks from such diverse camps as those favoring legalized drugs, those wanting more diversity in their private arsenals, and those who felt living in this reality was just a scooch too restrictive.  On almost every issue, Paul had a different position than self-styled "maverick," J. Sidney McCain III.

Paul is still officially in the race, and even though McCain is now assured of a win at the Republican convention, the Paulites are taking the kind of tough, principled stand that Republicans take every election year... by declaring that everyone must abandon Paul and get behind McCain.

The subtly-named group Join or Die! declares that we stand at a crossroads in American history.  This is a time for revolution!  This is a time to hold the Republican Party accountable!  And they're going to demonstrate that revolutionary fervor by completely abandoning everything they've claimed to believe since the start of the Paul campaign.

Good work, Paulistas, I knew you had it in you.

David Brooks wasn't the only fan of the most recent debate.  Bill O'Reilly liked it too.  

But the New York Times has produced a sterling defense of Brooks' position that trivia is what you really want to know about the candidates.  

David Brooks is no longer alone in defending the ABC moderators of Wednesday’s bloodbath. Carl, one of the bloggers at the liberal-leaning site the Reaction, feels that "the debate was clearly structured to try to draw some drama out of the proceedings, to put both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the hot seats about something and to let people see how they handle the stresses and strains of the campaign trail. In that respect, it was a bit of an eye-opener, from nearly all accounts: Hillary Clinton handled herself like a pro, while Barack Obama could barely contain his frustration and contempt."

I have to admit that I was unfamiliar with "The Reaction," which is probably my fault more than theirs, since I don't read as many blogs as I should.  So I went over to the site and found this.

Admittedly, I did not watch the debates last night (Go Rangers! Go Mets!), but how many debates have we had on the issues since December of 2007? 20? 30? 300?

Have any of them drawn any type of sharp contrast between the two candidates?

No. So what's the point?

So the New York Times defense of Brooks' position lies on a blogger who didn't watch the debate, whose reporting of Clinton and Obama's comportment was secondhand, and who thinks creating drama is more important than talking about the issues.

Not exactly the way you expect to wake up in the Midwest.

A 5.4 earthquake in Illinois has rocked people awake as far away as Indiana, surprising residents unaccustomed to such a large temblor in the Midwest.

Yes, you west coasters may be sneering at our puny 5.4.  But remember the record of this area is enough to make people nervous.

So, did you get rattled out of bed this morning?

Update [2008-4-18 6:32:54 by Devilstower]: And as a complete coincidence, today is the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

What became known as the San Francisco earthquake and fire struck at 5:12 a.m., when the San Andreas Fault gave way, tearing the earth wide open from Humboldt County, near the Oregon border, to San Benito County, a hundred miles southeast of San Francisco. The epicenter was on the fault line just offshore from the San Francisco-San Mateo county line.

Update [2008-4-18 11:44:0 by Devilstower]:An aftershock in the 4.5 range popped through about 20 minutes ago -- just to keep us Midwesterners skittish.  That one is also now up on the USGS map.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, two questions. Number one, do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?

Not only is this a prime example of the facile, despicable questions asked at last night's assault on the whole idea of a presidential debate, it's really not fair.

Here's Daniel Schorr on NPR a couple of days ago.

Who is the real patriot, willing to service his country?  One such man in 1963 served two years in the Marines, then volunteered to become a Navy medical corpsman.  In that capacity, he helped to care for President Johnson after his surgery in 1966.  ... And who was that patriot?  A young, African-American man who went on to become the pastor of a church in Chicago.  That's right, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Who loves America?  Jeremiah Wright loved it enough that while Dick Cheney was getting his string of five deferments, Wright voluntarily gave up his student deferment, left college and joined the United States Marine Corps.  Wright was valedictorian of his class in Corpsman School.  When asked about the sacrifices he'd made, Wright said he was inspired by the words of John Kennedy that he should "ask what he could do for his country."  

And he did that at a time where there were many restaurants in this country that wouldn't serve him food, hotels where he could not get a room, neighborhoods where he could not hope to live, and whole states where he could not obtain justice.  That, damn it, is how much Jeremiah Wright loves this country.  What Stephanopoulos asked isn't fair, because there are very few people who have expressed their love for America as clearly as Reverend Wright, especially when America  -- then and now -- rarely seems to appreciate their dedication.

How about you, Stephanopolus?  Does Jeremiah Wright love America more than you?  How about you, Charlie Gibson?  It happens that you started college at the same time as Wright, and graduated while Wright was attending President Johnson.  From what I can see, the two of you love your country so much, that you're willing to go to any lengths to demean both the candidates and your own profession.

For weeks there had been rumbles that Bush would make a major reversal in his policies on greenhouse gases.  Finally living up to promises that he made prior to the 2000 election, he would get tough on industry to halt climate change.  

President George W. Bush announced Wednesday what the White House calls "realistic long-term and intermediate goals" for stopping the growth of greenhouse gas emissions

First hint that there's not much to this?  The word "realistic."  Whenever the Bush administration uses that word, it actually means "insubstantial."  And in this case "imaginary."

Bush did not, however, propose specific legislation requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Instead he offered a broad goal of reducing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 without specifying how the goal should be reduced.

So what Bush is actually proposing is... nothing.  Nothing at all.  He's setting some goals for 2025 -- goals that don't come close to meeting the greenhouse reductions experts believe are required to slow climate change -- and even then he's not doing anything to meet those goals.  

That's not to say that today's announcement was without a purpose.  

Environmental groups argue the president's speech is political posturing designed to erode support for more strident legislation that will be debated in Congress this June. ... "The president is throwing a Hail Mary to polluters in a last-ditch effort to stave off any meaningful action on global warming. Under the president's plan we'll need a real miracle to save us from global warming," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Just as Bush's "Clear Skies" plan allowed older power plants to increase pollution, and his "Healthy Forests" plan allowed more forests to be converted into wood pulp, this "Climate Change" program is designed to make sure that the climate gets to go on changing, unimpeded by any environmental legislation.

Update [2008-4-16 18:26:25 by Devilstower]: Some reactions to Bush's non-proposal.  

A Siegel at Energy Smart gives an annotated version of Bush's speech which he called "an insult to Americans".

Climate Progress declares Bush a modern Nero.

And Representative Edward Markey spells it out bluntly.

"By the time President Bush's plan finally starts to cut global warming emissions, the planet will already be cooked.

"The President's short-term goal is to do nothing, his medium-term goal is to do nothing much, and his long-term goal is to do nothing close to what's needed to save the planet from global warming."

(A tip of the hat to A Siegel for the links)

It's been more than a year now since Andrew Keen's indictment of the Internet in The Cult of the Amateur. According to Keen, the sad result of recent trends in how information is circulated has been the deterioration of authoritative sources and uncertainty over the relative importance of stories. I completely agree.

Where I disagree is the source of this rising cloud of confusion.  It's not the blogs that have caused faith in the media to decline.  It's not Wikipedia which has led to a diminished respect for facts and research.  The fault doesn't lie with the amateurs.  It's squarely in the court of the professionals.

By this I don't mean to engage in a "Judy Miller Attack," placing the blame on those who gather and report the news.  Keen is quite correct to point out that many -- most -- reporters are both knowledgeable about their subject areas and courageous in their efforts to gather information.  As someone who never held a reporting position higher than $5-a-story stringer to a small town weekly, I feel both awe and gratitude for the people who place their careers and bodies in harm's way to see that I get news from halfway around the world. There are a few bad apples (and sour Picklers) in the barrel, but most reporters are in fact both capable and objective.

That's not enough.  Keen's attempts to defend the traditional media by stating that reporters are good is like trying to sell a Yugo by boasting of its high-quality tires.  

The media -- newspapers, radio, and television -- is not made up of reporters running on a sparkling field of journalistic integrity.  Those reporters are instead embedded in a machine intended to do the one thing that Mr. Keen sets as the mark of professionalism -- make money.  And the way the media has chosen to make money over the last few decades is, perversely, by devaluing their own product.  The clearest illustration of this can be found in three massive changes that have affected news over the last two decades: the increase in radio pundits, the establishment of the Fox News Network, and the reaction of the remainder of the media to the first two events.

The idea of folks who jabber about politics on the radio certainly isn't new, neither is the ad-mix of news, gossip, advertising, and opinion.  Paul Harvey carried on this way for over seven decades, and acted as a bridge to even earlier practitioners.  Harvey, like his predecessors, mingled ugly disdain for liberals and selectively distorted newscasts amongst his folksy product pitches, helping to lay the groundwork for the Limbaughs and Savages to come.  The critical difference between the newcomers and what's always been there is little more than a switch in balance between the amount of vinegar added to the honey.

But the right wing talk brigade doesn't exist just to build up their own or tear down Democrats. They have, from the moment they first rolled onto the air, existed to tell you that traditional news organizations are no good.  The Washington Post?  Inside the beltway losers out of touch with real America.  CNN?  The Clinton News Network.  The New York Times?  Please.  Do you really have to ask?

Punditry has always aimed as much artillery at the people who deliver the news as it does at those who make it.  There's a very good reason for this.  Before you can convince someone of a lie, you need to make it more difficult for them to check your information.  If you establish from the start that NPR is communist, MSNBC and CNN are slanted, and every newspaper this side of Journal's editorial page should be printed on pink paper, then any exaggeration you deliver becomes the de facto standard.  Impugning the validity of other news sources is the first job of a successful pundit.  They don't seek to be your sources of information by passing along reliable news.  They do so by constantly assailing the legitimacy of other sources until you're left shaking your head at the absolute ignorance of everyone but Rush/Bill/Sean/Ann.

The same principles apply to an even greater degree for Fox News.  Yes, the network exists to promulgate a rigidly conservative agenda, but it can't do that without first informing you that every other source of news is invalid.  Fox doesn't compete with the other networks, it sneers at them. From its motto to its non-existent boundaries between opinion and reporting, Fox exists by being an instrument of destruction to other news providers.  Why do those who watch Fox News continue to believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11 despite that idea having been disproved over, and over, and over?  Because Fox tells them to.  Because Fox's pundits repeat the lie.  Because Fox has convinced them that no other source of fact exists.

Fox News Network alone has done more to devalue the whole idea of news than every supermarket tabloid, every radio ranter, and every blogger combined.

If both the institutions at blame are heavily weighted to the right, that's no coincidence.  Conservative dogma has long held the idea that it must discredit the press by claiming that the Fourth Estate is in fact a Fifth Column.  They have depended on their ability to defame factual sources as a means of easing the way for misinformation since well before the time of Joe McCarthy.  The right has successfully extended this campaign into the realm of science, convincing people that both evolution and global warming are somehow "political issues," deserving of no more attention than alternatives despite reams of evidence.  

The myth of the "liberal media" came long before the blogs. Discrediting the "nattering nabobs" of the press is not a game that originated with bloggers.  Every blogger I know is fully aware that we could not survive without the legwork done by hardworking, professional reporters.  Bloggers are not competition to the traditional media -- though they do, hopefully, act as an occasional check on its excesses.  However, even if the Internet were entirely dedicated to the downfall of existing media, it would be only one popgun in a chorus of cannons.  A large part of the traditional media is dedicated to nothing less than making war on the rest.

Suffering the wounds from that war, the media might have chosen to hold to strict standards and fought back by dissecting the falsehoods being directed against good reporting.  Instead, that job has been left, almost without exception, to the very bloggers Keen blames as the cause.  The reaction of the traditional media was quite different.  

In response to the assault from less factual sources, media both accelerated the already existing trend toward mingling news and entertainment and -- in the most twisted move imaginable -- sought to imitate the mudslingers.  They joined the war not by upholding their standards, but by dismissing them.  And again, they did so for the reason that Keen indicates as the break between amateur and professional: the perception that there was more money to be made on the less truthful side of the aisle.

Rather than fight back against patently nonsensical claims of bias by professional vomiters like Hannity and O'Reilly, the other networks responded by filling their ranks with Becks and Buchanans.  Dazzled by Fox's growing ratings, the other broadcasters became quislings to their own cause, confirming the idea that they were less than reliable by becoming less reliable.

At the same time, both networks and newspapers devoted increasingly fewer resources to "hard news," and turned more dollars toward entertainment features.  The drive to do so affects everyone from the no-longer-so-Gray Lady and the freshly perk-ified Tiffany Network to the 24 hour cable shouting festivals.  As time goes on, they've increasingly broken the barriers between the news and entertainment, a fact reflected in the ever-thickening fashion sections of papers, the mainstreaming of trash like the New York Post and Washington Times, and the unweighted transition from war news to visiting pop-stars in the midst of news broadcasts.

In interviews, Keen has often attempted to dismiss the value of Wikipedia by pointing out that the entry for "truthiness" is nearly as long as the entry for "truth" itself.  Why not apply the same standard to every network that expended more hours on Natalie Holloway than it did on topics with far more impact on American lives and futures?  Which gets more attention in professional media, birth defects or Brittany?  What gets promoted about the candidates, their energy plans, or their preference in beverages?

Keen's contention that the fault of the failing media lies with the amateurs is attractive to those claiming a paycheck to distribute information.  It's a theory that's certainly given him plenty of air time and lots of approving nods.  But the truth is, the "Web 2.0 movement" that he wants to blame is a bystander in this fight.

The media is working very, very hard to make sure that you don't trust the media.  Professionalism defined only by dollars dictates that they chase declining ad revenues through alleys of filth.  News outlets have become devoted not to providing stories that are timely and accurate, but to providing proof that their competitors are slanted and unreliable. It's devolved into a battle in which all sides lose.  And the biggest loser is the consumer looking for a reliable, authoritative source of information.

But it's certainly nice that Keen has given them somewhere to place the blame while they pick each other apart.