Syria – III September 11, 2013September 11, 2013 CBRX James Valente: “What ever happened with CBRX?” It had a 1-for-8 reverse split, so if you had 800 shares before (suggested here a couple of years ago at $2.50) you now have 100 (with a basis of $20). With the stock now at $8 and change — aren’t you glad you bought it with money you could truly afford to lose? Even so, Guru reports: “They are profitable! Consensus is they’ll do 0.56/share in EPS (royalty revenue growth from partners coupled with almost no operating expense). Could grow to a $1 in four years. You can hang on. I don’t see any product excitement, but this could chug along. ” BOREF A nice overview here in the current Flight International. Also: a presentation by Wheeltug‘s CEO scheduled for Tuesday in Toulouse to the Royal Aeronautical Society has had to be moved to a larger venue — the symposium room (which fits 100 people) proved too small for demand. Which is noteworthy, because Toulouse is home to Airbus. Both these data points (and the CNBC interview linked to a few weeks ago, not to mention its letters of intent with 11 airlines) suggest that WheelTug may be well past the “kooky” stage. Indeed, its two competitors — to this layman’s eye — are at the “clunky” stage. Their solutions to the eTaxi challenge range from needlessly large and complex (Safran/Honeywell, which has signed no customers yet) to the gi-normous (what appears to be a street-sweeper size robot thing that may be an even less elegant approach). None of this guarantees success. But at a $60 million market cap — less than a fourth what this gorgeous Cezanne fetched — WheelTug’s sparsely-but-publicly-traded grandparent, Borealis, continues to strike me as an extraordinary lottery ticket. By now, I’d guess any of you with money you can truly afford to lose already have your 50 or 500 shares. Newcomers to this page should use “limit orders” if they decide to hop on, as even small orders can move the price significantly when no limit is specified. SYRIA I have a friend who, with best of intentions and purest of hearts, when faced with a difficult decision, says, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” That’s not necessarily helpful, but it sure resonates with a lot of us these days as we think about Syria. Or did, at least, before the potentially wonderful development where, just maybe, Russia will join the world in requiring Assad — and Assad has seemingly assented — to cede control of his chemical weapons (which the day before he didn’t even acknowledge having). Yes, it’s a huge challenge to secure and destroy them all, made more so in the midst of a civil war. But if Russia is pressuring its ally Assad to cooperate and the US is pressuring the rebels to cooperate (and why would they not want to see chemical weapons taken off the table?), then the “only” folks who might actively work to screw this up are Al-Qaeda and related groups . . . but presumably, they’d like to mess with or acquire those weapons no matter what action we take or fail to take. So to me, this is extremely good news . . . and conceivably the beginning of further cooperation that could help broker peace talks — but at least a way for us not to have to lob hundreds of missiles into Syria: a red line was crossed and now, although we didn’t kill anyone (least of all innocent civilians), there were consequences: we confiscated Assad’s chemical arsenal. Lots could still go wrong, and the Syrian civil war rages on, and boy is there room in the world for miscalculation and catastrophe. What else is new? But maybe this wrenching decision — should we strike Syria or not — has been sidestepped. It sure feels that way. And that would be great. An added benefit has been the quality of debate the situation has produced. Even in Congress. It wasn’t just Frank Luntz writing focus-tested talking points for the Republicans to recite, many of them misleading, and Democrats doing our typically less-than-perfect best at refuting them with talking points of our own. (If only Frank would write ours! Which at dinner one night years ago he told me that for $5 million a year he’d be happy to do. He has no particular party allegiance. He’s just good at this stuff.) So if you have the time and are not already sick of this, you might want to listen to Chris Hayes, and then read Kevin Kinsella. Both of these were written before “the Russian deal” was put on the table. Presumably, their thoughts (especially Kevin’s) may now be different. But when a lot of us were at the “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!” stage just a few days ago, here’s how two very bright people of good will expressed their opposing views. First . . . A must-watch case against military action is made by Chris Hayes here — even as he acknowledges that his own father, “an ex-Jesuit community organizer and a true moral beacon in my life,” disagrees. Six minutes. And now . . . What a left-leaning California venture capitalist friend sent his Senators and Representative before things took their unexpectedly hopeful turn: Dear [ . . . . ]: I have not been vocal on much of the Congressional agenda over the years – since most of it involves domestic politics where it is usually cathartic to thrash out the various partisan points of view. But in foreign policy America must speak with one voice and that voice is the President of the United States. You are probably inundated – like most of Congress – with heavy constituent sentiment against the strike on Syria. However, I need to express my strong contrary view to you about the Syria situation. To cut to the chase, if you do not vote to support President Obama on this issue, I would most likely never support you again and I would most likely work to have you defeated. I feel that strongly about this. Why do I feel this way? Only pedantic fools (like Vladmir Putin) question the overwhelming evidence about the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. There is no question that the Syrian regime used sarin gas against its own people. That is not the issue. The issue the neo-isolationists seize upon is, “It’s not our fight. Why should we get involved?” American isolationism is a strong part of our country’s psyche, from the earliest days of the Republic when we were admonished by George Washington of the evils of foreign entanglements. But our protection by the two great oceans ended when we were attacked on December 7, 1941. But what if the isolationists in the Senate had not defeated US membership in President Wilson’s hand-crafted League of Nations after World War I and that body had prevented Hitler from occupying the Rhineland in 1936. What if the League had stood for the integrity of nation states so that irredentist ideologues like the Sudeten Germans could not dismember Czechoslovakia – and involve that hapless British Prime Minister Chamberlain in the scheme? 9/11 above all showed us again that the great oceans offer no protection. Yet, the knee-jerk isolationist impulse rises to the fore as it has so many times before in our history with disastrous consequences. But the isolationists just want to hand pick their analogies – however misplaced – that serve their purpose: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. but they don’t mention Grenada, Panama, Kosovo. In fact, brief boots on the ground or no boots on the ground, seem to have served the US and the world’s interests very well. The isolationists prevented the US from helping even Britain in the early days of World War II. The fact is that the Lend-Lease act was a legal contortion by the Roosevelt Administration to get around severe isolationist-led congressional strictures on helping belligerents. We didn’t get full on board against the monstrous ideology of National Socialism until Pearl Harbor. Europe had been completely overrun by May 1940. And just how did letting Hitler overrun all of Europe work out for us? Read the just published third volume of Rick Atkinson’s magnificent World War II trilogy, The Guns at Last Light, to see the blood and treasure expended to take back the continent of Europe after the US had stood by from September 1939 until December 1941 – more than two years before only an attack by Japan brought us into the war. Go to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam where I just visited last week. She and her sister were gassed at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, one month before the British liberated the camp. How did the Isolationist-caused delay work out for them or the other 6 million Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals and political opponents of Nazism? Sadly, history so often shows us that the fight gets brought to us anyway and the flames are a lot higher than if we had put it out earlier. Isolationists are always right, of course….until they are wrong – and then they couldn’t be more disastrously wrong. Can we or should we get into every fight to right the world’s wrongs? Of course not. We indeed are not the world’s policemen. But we are the world’s 911 Marine force when there is something that can easily erupt out of hand and threaten our vital national interests. Here we are talking about not only the horror of chemical weapons but also Iran possessing nuclear weapons. And perhaps that is where the sheep and goats need to be divvied up. If as an American, you are just fine and dandy with Iran having nuclear weapons, then oppose the Syria strike – because we will surely show Iran that they can crank up those thousands of centrifuges and move full speed ahead enriching uranium to make bombs. And they will gladly start up their heavy water reactor to make plutonium weapons. The isolationists carp, “What happens next? What if Assad uses chemical weapons again? What if this, what if that?” It is impossible to decipher all the permutations of outcomes of doing practically anything, even crossing the street. But one thing is very predictable, viz., tyranny runs downhill and it needs to be blocked at every path and its direction reversed at every opportunity. Should we have a tougher agenda in Syria…including regime change? Probably. But if we take out enough of his military assets, regime change will happen of its own accord. In the end – whenever that is – Assad has to go. So we probably shouldn’t be overly concerned about when. So we’re stuck with unpredictability. But it cannot paralyze us to inaction in the face of this outrage. No one can answer all these “what if” questions, let alone the president. The better question is: What if we don’t act? Syria’s regime under the Assads has been horrific from the get-go. In 1982 when the Muslim Brotherhood began an uprising in the town of Hama, Assad Senior surrounded the town with Syrian artillery for 27 days and shelled it into oblivion. From 20,000 to 40,000 civilians were estimated to have been killed. Now we are confronted by the son’s ruthless regime which launched a poison gas attack on his own people killing 1400, among them 400 children. Do we let him get away with it? Do we send a signal to every brutal dictator in the world that anything goes … chemical, biological, nuclear weapons? Much has been made by the neo-isolationists about the legality of striking Syria. 189 countries have signed the treaty banning the use of chemical and biological weapons. Do we just sign treaties and ignore them? What is the point of having a treaty at all? The UN is just a polite debating society. And It was deliberately constructed so that the Five Permanent Members of the Security Council can veto anything that they perceive to threaten their respective vital (or not so vital) national interests. Russia certainly and probably China would use their veto to squash the Syria attack. So the mantra of getting UN approval is just nonsense. Russia who sells arms to Syria, has use of a Mediterranean port of Syria’s (the only one outside the former USSR) and who provided nuclear technology to Syria and sells them massive amounts of weapons has “unclean hands” and, in every legal system I know of, it would have to recuse itself. Not Putin – each of whose domestic political opponents ends up in jail charged with some crime. So now, what exactly is the point of seeing if the UN will act? It won’t. Remember If Russia had not been boycotting the UN Security Council in 1950 (because the US would not agree to unseat the Nationalist Chinese in favor of the Chinese Communists at the UN), the UN Resolution to turn back the overrunning of the Korean peninsula by Kim Il-sung would have been vetoed. How would that have worked out for us? It is the US role to lead because we are the Indispensable Nation. Because we are the Last Best Hope on Earth. That’s why we act. Of course we are war weary, but when a nation needs to stand up to tyranny, we live in a world of midgets. The United States of America stills needs to stand up. At the end of the day, Americans have to ask themselves, Is there nothing so outrageous – gassing children to death in their cribs – that we will not go to war for? If not us, who? If not now, when? So, I hope you will stand with common sense, decency and responsibility and show some leadership to your constituents, not just be a weather vane in the wind, tacking with every shift of public opinion. Sincerely, Kevin J. Kinsella At the time — had I been in Congress and had it come to that — I would have voted with the President. And the Secretary of State. And the former Secretary of State. And Chris Hayes’ father. And Kevin Kinsella — albeit, with misgivings. With luck, we may never get to see how that would have turned out.
Health, Education, and Weather September 10, 2013December 27, 2016 NBIX Its drug failed yesterday and the stock dropped in after-hours trading from $16.70 to around $11. Still better than the $2.60 we paid for it three years ago. Guru thinks it might fall further before — perhaps — at some point getting its groove back. Others think it’s now a bargain again. I no longer own it. KYTH Suggested here at $22.70 in May, it touched $32 last night. I hold on — with money I can truly afford to lose. EDUCATION Yesterday: heath care. It looks as though Obamacare, for all the hysterical opposition to it, is going to make America better . . . just as the first Clinton budget — which evoked predictions of doom and not a single Republican vote — kicked off eight years of tremendous progress. Today: education. Specifically, an assessment of the President’s latest education initiative from my friend Zac Bissonnette (Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents): . . . Obama’s plan to rate colleges based on affordability and then use those rankings to target federal aid is smart, and he’s brave for pushing for it; you can tell it’s a good idea because the higher education establishment hates it. It’s still in the early stages, and the notion of colleges losing federal money because of low affordability ratings is a long way off. But the goal is to shift higher-education funding away from schools that make America worse and into schools that make America better. That’s revenue neutral, and conservatives and liberals and everyone else should love it. THE WEATHER You know the famous, faceless unknown “they”? Who do so much? (“Why do they do it that way?” “What were they thinking?” “They don’t make ’em like they used to.”) Like — say — the folks who name hurricanes? And, now, winter storms? My friend and your fellow reader, Bryan Norcross, names them! In this case, he’s “they!” I get excited just having his cell phone number. I’m that close to the center of power. (“I hope,” as Ugarte says to Rick in Casablanca, “you are more impressed with me now.”) Anyway, there’s a movement afoot, in the form of a two-minute video millions of people have now seen, to get Bryan and the other “they’s” involved in this to come up with different names. Watch. It’s fun. And — oddly — important. # Don’t miss the president tonight. These are consequential times.
Healthcare.gov September 9, 2013September 7, 2013 How do you build the capacity to handle tens of millions of visitors at once? I can’t imagine healthcare.gov will not have problems October 1, when it’s supposed to go fully live with actual prices you would pay for various insurance options. Look at how hard it was to get Burning Man tickets when they went on sale — and there were only 70,000 people trying. But even if the first few days of October prove challenging for healthcare.gov as Obamacare finally rolls out for real, it will be worth the hassle. And you don’t have to wait until October 1 to explore the site. For example, this section explains how Obamacare improves your health care security — even if you’re already covered. The truth is, almost everyone will get a better deal from Obamacare, one way or another (not least because it will improve the overall health of our citizenry and our economy), which — there being no free lunch — is made possible in two main ways: First, income above $250,000 will be taxed a little more heavily (though at nothing like the rates that prevailed in, say, “the good old days” of the Fifties), which is why Obamacare, even with all its extra benefits (like free preventive care) is projected to shrink the federal deficit. Second, lots of provisions in the bill push the system toward more efficiency. And boy, is there room for improvement. It will be a long time (like: never) before we get our health care spending in line with the rest of the modern world — because the rest of the modern world has some variant of single-payer government health care, which we understand to be evil in some way. Pity the miserable Canadians. Pity the miserable Europeans. (This site purports to show a “happiness” index, and we rank ahead of all those countries!* And if you set all the sliders to zero, except health care, to isolate just the health care element of happiness, we still rank ahead of all of them!** ) But we don’t have to accept the tyranny of communist Canada to at least narrow the gap, because that gap is so wide. Right now, the modern nations spend 9% to 12% of GDP on health care — to our 17.9%. Yet their outcomes are generally better. And the Republicans in Congress are fighting desperately to keep it that way. It’s almost all they can think about, having now voted 40 times to repeal it. They urgently want to repeal it or defund it or just find some way to be make sure it doesn’t work. Just as they block the effort to put people to work modernizing our decaying infrastructure. And work to discourage young people from voting. Their singular focus and great success of the last few decades: lowering taxes for the wealthy, whom they see — incorrectly — as “the job creators.” Anyway, Obamacare is coming. Check out healthcare,gov to see how it might affect you. It will have problems; but — as President Clinton explained so well last week in Little Rock — the thing to do about that is just get together and fix them. What a concept. *Except five **Except nine.
The Pacific Crest Trail September 6, 2013September 3, 2013 This column speaks to our insane failure to maintain national infrastructure. Better to keep people unemployed, apparently, than raise the needed tax revenue as we always used to until Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush made lowering taxes for the wealthy our top national priority. Afraid of bears, I hand the microphone to the estimable Nick Kristof. Beauty and the Beasts By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF August 31, 2013 DURING an August vacation with my family, I enjoyed lodgings so spectacular that not even Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could ever buy or rent them. The scenery was some of America’s finest: snowcapped mountains, alpine lakes, babbling brooks. The cost? It was free. We were enjoying some of America’s public lands, backpacking through our national patrimony. No billionaire can acquire these lands because they remain — even in a nation where economic disparities have soared — a rare democratic space. The only one who could pull rank on you at a camping spot is a grizzly bear. “This is the most beautiful place in the world,” my 15-year-old daughter mused beside a turquoise lake framed by towering fir trees. She and I were hiking 200-plus miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, joined for shorter bits by my wife and sons. We imbibed from glacier-fed creeks, startled elk, and dallied beside alpine meadows so dazzling that they constitute an argument for the existence of God. At night, if rain didn’t threaten, we spread our sleeping bags under the open sky — miles from any other human — and fell asleep counting shooting stars. You want to understand the concept of a “public good”? It’s exemplified by our nation’s wilderness trails. In some ways, this wilderness is thriving. Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling book “Wild,” about her long backpack on the Pacific Crest Trail, has inspired hordes of young women to try the trails. Reese Witherspoon is starring in a movie of “Wild,” made by her production company, and that will undoubtedly send even more out to feed the mosquitoes. The talk of the trail this year was of a woman named Heather Anderson who shattered a record by backpacking from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail, without support, in 61 days. That’s nearly 44 miles a day over tough terrain. She says she graduated from high school at 200 pounds and found purpose — and lost 70 pounds — on the trails. On this trek, she had encounters with five rattlesnakes, eight bears and four mountain lions. (For more on Heather Anderson’s extraordinary journey, visit my blog at kristof.blogs.nytimes.com.) Yet America’s public goods, from our parks to “Sesame Street,” are besieged today by budget-cutters, and it’s painful to hike some trails now. You see lovingly constructed old bridges that have collapsed. Trails disturbed by avalanches have not been rebuilt, and signs are missing. “Infrastructure is really crumbling,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, herself a backpacker, told me. She notes that foreign tourists come to visit America’s “crown jewels” like Yosemite and are staggered by the beauty — and flummoxed by the broken toilets. It’s even worse at the Forest Service, which is starved of funds partly because firefighting is eating up its budgets. The Forest Service has estimated that only one-quarter of its 158,000 miles of trails meet its own standards. About once a year, my family hikes the spectacular Timberline Trail, constructed in the Great Depression around Mount Hood in Oregon as a public works project. But one section washed out in 2006, and it still hasn’t officially reopened. What our ancestors were able to create when we were a poor country, we are unable to sustain even now that we are rich. That’s not because of resources. It’s because they were visionaries, and we are blind. Wallace Stegner called our national parks America’s “best idea.” The sequester, which I would call “America’s worst idea,” was supposed to save money, but when sloping trails aren’t maintained every year or two, they erode and require major repairs that cost even more. Republicans praise the idea of citizen volunteers and public-private partnerships. But our agencies are so impoverished that they can’t take full advantage of charity. Mike Dawson of the Pacific Crest Trail Association says that volunteers could provide about 250,000 hours repairing the trail each year. But the Forest Service doesn’t have the resources to organize and equip all the volunteers available, so it will be able to use only one-third of that free labor this year, he says. That’s crazy. All this is symptomatic of a deeper disdain in some circles for the very idea of a public good: Who needs a national forest? Just buy your own Wyoming ranch! This fall will probably see a no-holds-barred battle in Washington over fiscal issues, and especially the debt limit. But, in a larger sense, it’s a dispute over public goods. So, considering how ineffective Congress is, perhaps we should encourage all 535 members to take a sabbatical and backpack the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m not sure we’d miss them for five months. And what an entertaining reality show that would make! It would also have a serious side. Maybe when dwarfed by giant redwoods, recalcitrant politicians would absorb a lesson of nature: We are all part of something larger than ourselves. Perhaps they would gain perspective and appreciate the grandeur of our public lands of which they are such wretched stewards.
Syria – II September 5, 2013September 4, 2013 Many thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post, for which I am grateful and which I have condensed here. My “answer” to most of them is largely to say, well, when I listen to the Kerry and Obama clips linked to yesterday, I come to a different conclusion . . . though, as a result of your input, with more qualms than before. (Anyone without qualms in this situation sees the world too simply. Here are columnist Matt Miller’s six qualms that leave him unsure which way to go. Well worth the quick read.) But in addition to referring you back to the case made by the Administration, I’ve interjected a few thoughts of my own: Paul F. deLespinasse: “What good would it do us, or the people of Syria, if the U.S. engages in a ‘limited’ strike by cruise missiles? [THE WORLD, OF WHICH WE AND THE SYRIANS ARE A PART, WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THE INTERNATIONAL BAN ON THE USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE ENFORCED, DISCOURAGING THEIR FUTURE USE.] . . . If Congress understands America’s true interests, it will not support President Obama’s desire to bomb Syria. But in any event, Obama—for whom I do not regret voting even though he has made mistakes—should be commended for recognizing his constitutional duty to get Congressional authorization before engaging in acts of war where no emergency requires immediate action.” Lee Salomon: “Is the President simply proposing punishment for unacceptable behavior [YES, I THINK HE HAS MADE THAT CLEAR], or are we throwing our weight on to one side? Sen. McCain suggests his support for the President’s proposals only if they serve to tip the balance to the other side. But, what will be the result? Can the “opposition” actually form a functioning alternative government? There is no organized ‘other side’. Will Syria become Somalia? These are uncomfortable questions which the Administration is not addressing. It is avoiding these questions by suggesting that they don’t require answers since we aren’t going to be in Syria with ‘feet on the ground’, nor will we be there very long. Can anyone with the slightest knowledge of our military history believe this? I think, Andrew, that your Democratic Party loyalties have gotten the best of your caution. Or, to put it another way, if this enterprise were a business, would you buy its stock? [IT’S MOOT, BECAUSE ALL MY CASH IS IN BOREALIS. BUT JOHN BOEHNER — NO DEMOCRAT — HAS.]” Russell Turpin: “Why not strike Syria? Because the argument ‘to punish Assad’ is inadequate. Showing that Assad has used chemical weapons begins the case for military action, but doesn’t finish it. What practical purpose will the military action accomplish? Regime change? No, that’s not suggested. Swaying the course of the civil war? No, it’s not even clear that’s wanted. Then, what? Is it simply a slap on Assad’s wrist? That’s not worth the lives of the people who will die. Just as dead as those who were killed in that chemical attack. But this time, by our hands. [BUT WHAT IF THE GOAL IS TO LET THE ENTIRE WORLD — NOT JUST ASSAD — KNOW THAT CHEMICAL WARFARE, HAVING BEEN PROSCRIBED BY LONGSTANDING INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT, WILL NOT BE TOLERATED?]” Doug Mohn: “I’m still listening and am undecided. I believed Colin Powell last time and am not so trusting this time. [BUT WE KNOW BUSH WAS LOOKING FOR AN EXCUSE TO INVADE OIL-RICH IRAQ LONG BEFORE 9/11 AND THAT TREMENDOUS PRESSURE WAS PUT ON THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY TO COME UP WITH A RATIONALE. THAT SEEMS VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE CURRENT SITUATION, NOT LEAST BECAUSE AN INVASION IS CATEGORICALLY RUED OUT.] Here is a point-by-point rebuttal of the case for military action. [THE FIRST “POINT” IS THAT IT MAY HAVE BEEN AS FEW AS 100 CHILDREN HIDEOUSLY GASSED TO DEATH, NOT 426. SO . . . WHAT? EVEN IF TRUE, HOW DOES THAT CHANGE THINGS? I DID NOT FIND THE POINTS IN THIS LINK SUFFICIENTLY PERSUASIVE.]” Michael M: “I didn’t watch the speeches. Yes, chemical weapons are terrible, but it’s not our fight. [WATCH THE SPEECHES. KERRY AND OBAMA ARE NOT UNTHOUGHTFUL, UNINTELLIGENT MEN. THEY HAVE LISTENED HARD TO EVERY POINT OF VIEW; PERHAPS YOU SHOULD TAKE THE TIME TO CONSIDER THEIR CONCLUISION BEFORE REACHING YOUR OWN.]” David: “You say: ‘I can’t see how anyone could listen to both John Kerry’s presentation and then the President’s and fail to agree with his decision to impose consequences on Syria.’ Noam Chomsky disagrees because the US is obligated by international agreements to get the agreement of the UN, which it has not done. [THIS ONE DOES GIVE ME PAUSE; BUT IT WOULD MEAN THAT ANY ONE MEMBER OF THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL COULD IN EFFECT NULLIFY A NEARLY CENTURY-OLD GLOBAL TREATY. I THINK IT’S REASONABLE TO GIVE THAT TREATY MORE WEIGHT THAN WE GIVE THE WILL OF VLADIMIR PUTIN.]” Richard: “Why is it worse to kill people with gas than with bombs or guns? Why is it ok to kill children with drones while aiming at suspected terrorists? How about landmines – the US refuses to sign on to a ban? Genocide in Rwanda? Any number of other mass causes of death that have done and are doing much more harm? It’s quite possible the increases in refuges from fear of US bombings will result in more harm than are alleged by chemical weapons. The moral compass is a bit too selective for my taste. [WE HAVE NOT ALWAYS MADE THE RIGHT CALLS — PRESIDENT CLINTON COUNTS OUR INACTION IN RWANDA AS ONE OF THE KEY SHORT-COMINGS OF HIS ADMINISTRATION. AND I DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE LAND MINE TREATY, BUT NOTE THAT CHINA, RUSSIA, INDIA AND PAKISTAN ARE AMONG THE COUNTRIES THAT ALSO HAVE NOT SIGNED ON. MAYBE WE SHOULD SIGN ON ANYWAY — IT IS FOR SURE WORTH PERIODIC REVIEW. BUT IN THE CASE OF THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS TREATY — WHAT WE’RE ADDRESSING HERE — VERY FEW NATIONS HAVE FAILED TO SIGN.” Matt Wilbert: “I’m afraid I am one of the people who does not agree with you, the Secretary of State, or the President on this issue. I support the Administration on most issues, and the GOP on basically none, but the case for striking Syria is so remarkably weak that it is surprising to me that the President even proposed it. Here are a few objections. 1) The logic is bad. Yes, we all agree that countries shouldn’t gas their own people (or anyone else for that matter.) But just because something is widely considered reprehensible doesn’t mean the answer is military force. But the argument seems to be that if we don’t attack Syria, we are letting their actions go unpunished. Are there no sanctions against Syria? Is Syria not a pariah among nations? There are punishments other than modest cruise missile attacks. 2) The justification is insufficient. International law doesn’t permit countries to launch attacks against a country to enforce the protocols against the use of chemical weapons, if those conventions even apply to domestic use. The Security Council could authorize some kind of action, but it won’t. That could be written off as Russia protecting an ally, but there is little international support for this kind of action even within western democracies. I can understand when people think that a particular situation trumps normal legalities, but in this case the US is trying to reinforce international “norms” by violating international law. That seems self-defeating. 3) The proposed measures are inadequate. Yes, we could undoubtedly cause lots of damage to things in Syria if we wanted, but no one has explained how military action with no actual ground presence could possibly protect civilians from chemical weapons. No doubt we could protect them by invading the country and removing the current government, but no one wants to do that for obvious reasons. In fact, most people, including the Administration, are at pains to explain how limited the strikes will be, and how little danger they will pose to any American. Unfortunately, this means they will also pose remarkably little danger to the Syrian government. 4) It isn’t in the US national interest. It simply doesn’t matter to the US what happens in Syria. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a humanitarian interest, nor that we shouldn’t try to bring an end to the conflict, nor help the refugees or the countries hosting them, but the US doesn’t have a vital interest in the outcome of the conflict and the argument that we have a vital interest in maintaining a prohibition against the use of chemical weapons simply isn’t credible. We have not responded to chemical weapons use at various times in the past, nor even to arguably more important norms like the prohibition of genocide. 5) Bombing is always a questionable approach to helping the people of a country. First, it tends to kill a lot of those people. Second, it probably won’t succeed in replacing the government. Third, if it does manage to cause or support of change of government, very often the new government isn’t much of an improvement. Anyway — and in sum — I think this is one time when the President has made a significant error in judgment, and I am hoping that Congress, either through wisdom or dysfunction, rejects his request for support of this folly. [THIS IS AN AWFULLY THOUGHTFUL EXPOSITION. ONE PIECE IT DOES NOT ADDRESS, HOWEVER, IS WHETHER — HAVING TRIED TO DISCOURAGE THE USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS (SURELY A WORTHY GOAL!) BY DRAWING A ‘RED LINE” (EVEN IF YOU ARGUE THAT IT WAS AN INADVISABLE MEANS OF REACHING THAT GOAL) — WE NOW JUST SAY OUR RED LINES ARE NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY. DOES THAT ALONE HAVE POTENTIAL COSTS? MIGHT THEY OUTWEIGH THE POTENTIAL COSTS OF THE LIMITED CRUISE MISSILE STRIKE?]” Sue Hoell: “Really? You really want me to share my thoughts? (1) President Obama has been talking about taking out Assad for the past two years. It seems like the sarin gas accusation is a flimsy excuse to do what he has been clamoring to do for two years. (2) Why has Obama been so eager to take out Assad? Because Assad and Iran are allies and Western petroleum companies are chomping at the bit to take control of Iranian oil and adjacent shipping lanes? (3) There is no proof that it was Assad who used the sarin gas rather than the US-armed and trained mercenaries, Israel, Saudi or Qatar agents. (4) Assad has no reason to gas his own people. He has plenty of reason to gas mercenaries armed by the West to overthrow his government and kill Syrians. Why shouldn’t he use all weapons he has at his disposal to stop the mercenaries from continuing to create havoc? (5) Why is it so unthinkable for sarin gas to be used in Syria, when it was OK for the US to drop Napalm and White Phosphorus on people in Viet Nam and to overlook Saddam gassing Iranians and Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war? (6) Why is it OK for the US to police the rest of the world but decline to provide needed infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, food, housing, to the rest of the world? Because killing people is easy. Caring for people is much more challenging.” Vote Vets‘ Jon Stolz (writing to his list): “After careful consideration and an overwhelming response from tens of thousands of veterans, military family members and supporters, we have come to the difficult conclusion that VoteVets cannot support military intervention in Syria. There is no doubt that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a horrific tragedy, and very likely a war crime. But if our goal is to eliminate Assad’s chemical weapons cache, then missile strikes, alone, won’t achieve that goal. And If the goal is to give Assad a deterrent against using them again, missile strikes don’t achieve that, either. . . . Above all else, we must not ignore the warning of our senior military leaders, like we did in the lead up to the Iraq War. In a letter to Congress several weeks ago Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey’s words speak for themselves. ‘We can destroy the Syrian air force,’ he said. ‘The loss of Assad’s air force would negate his ability to attack opposition forces from the air, but it would also escalate and potentially further commit the United States to the conflict. Stated another way, it would not be militarily decisive, but it would commit us decisively to the conflict…'” # The world is a desperately challenging place. The fact that we have made terrible errors in judgment in the past (among them, I would argue Vietnam and Iraq) does not mean we should fail to face each new decision — even the really difficult ones — on its own merits. Or that we should withdraw from the world. John McCain would have had us take far more action (did you see Rachel Maddow’s map last night showing all the places he’s advocated military engagement?); some argue we should be taking none. In so many of these things, given the evil and chaos and self-interest in the world, there is no good choice, only the least bad choice. (Noah Stern passed on to me Matthew Yglesias’s excellent “The Case for Doing Nothing” in Slate calling out this notion. ” … we can brush [our concerns] under the table with the thought that there are no good options, which makes it OK to endorse some shoddy ones. Except, in this case, it’s total nonsense. Obama has an excellent option. It’s called ‘don’t bomb Syria.'” But even if you come out where he does, I think it’s fair to criticize his argument for giving insufficient weight to the downside of doing nothing. And to this question of whether we must all agree that one man — Putin, in this case — has the moral authority to override enforcement of a long-established global treaty.) Having thought some more about this, thanks to the responses above and others that were similar, I’m still with the President and Secretary of State (and Boehner and Pelosi and France). But so long as anyone chiming in has taken the time to hear out the Secretary of State and then the President, I totally respect their coming to a different conclusion. Meanwhile, if the President, hearing all this debate (as it will be expressed in Congress), encounters new facts or arguments that change his mind, that’s fine with me, too — though I’m certain he and his team have already thought very long and hard about the least bad course to take.
Syria September 4, 2013September 3, 2013 I can’t see how anyone could listen to both John Kerry’s presentation and then the President’s and fail to agree with his decision to impose consequences on Syria. The President asks, “What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?” Yes, we have a lot to worry about if we go ahead with this. But how can we not? My guess is that at least some of those who oppose this action have not taken the time to listen to the case as they laid it out. Then again, I’m old enough — and just barely wise enough — to know that some of you, having listened carefully, likely will somehow reach a different conclusion. I hope you will share your thoughts.
Google’s ChromeCast September 3, 2013September 3, 2013 WORDS WITH FRIENDS – REVELATION Words With friends and Foosball are the only two things I’m really good at. With Foosball, it’s because I have an enormous home court advantage. Charles got it for me as a surprise and, not knowing anything about Foosball himself, he set it up backwards. The players are all bolted to their rods facing the wrong way. And I didn’t notice at first because it had been decades since I’d played, so over the weeks that followed — this was maybe 7 years ago — I just learned to play backwards. What’s more, the playing field slopes in interesting ways that are second nature to me now but a bafflement to strangers. This summer, I am undefeated. Last summer, I actually beat a former Seattle Seahawk. Football and Foosball are no closer chickens and chickpeas, but it still feels good. With WWF, it’s that I’m good at strategy. And that I play so much, I’ve learned a lot of ridiculous but allowable “words” no one ever uses. And yet there’s this guy I’ve just recently started playing — a smart guy, but c’mon — who, it pains me to say it, usually wins. (Seriously: it pains me to say it.) Indeed, I am way too competitive and self-aggrandizing to have said it, except for what comes next: the revelation. In the midst of a game where he had just made MISTIER for the second time, using all seven letters again, we had occasion to speak on the phone about a business matter. “NODI?” I began, where someone else might have said “Hello” (but he had placed MISTIER perpendicular to NOD, so one of the I’s in MISTIER turned NOD into NODI, which is how he found a place for it). “I don’t know what it means either,” he acknowledged. (My guess: a plural of nodes, like those worrisome nodi on his neck. But I’m past looking these things up. I do know what a RYA is, but who cares? Where does that get me? It’s only use is in Words With Friends.) “Well, listen,” I said. “Before we talk business I have to ask: do you use one of those anagram programs?” I.e., do you cheat? At which point, in an earlier age and a slightly different setting (and before telephones were invented), he would have squinted at me hard, spat out his chaw . . . and the whole bar would have suddenly quieted and grown tense as each of our right hands tightened under the table around the handle of our guns. But in this case he just laughed, took it as a compliment, and said no, “just that thing that tells you how good your word is.” Long pause at my end. Eyes squinting. “What thing.” “You know, the thing with the little Plus sign at the edge of the word that you click and it tells you how good the word you’re about to play is compared to the best you could do.” “What?” “Don’t you have it, too?” “You mean that annoying thing Zynga keeps trying to sell me to get some revenue from the game?” (Which as a Zynga shareholder myself* I hope loads of people buy, but I would never buy because, well, I wasn’t even sure what it was, but I certainly didn’t think it was fair to use some kind of computer aid.) “Oh — I thought everybody used it,” he said, explaining that, because it was part of the game (if you bought it), it was, well, just part of the game. Aha! Now I had an excuse (or at least a rationalization) for my dismal record against him. I felt much better. The Word-O-Meter, as it turns out, gives you no direct help, but it does tell you how close to the best possible score the word you’re planning to use comes. So instead of playing MISTER for 26 points, you might stop, when it tells you that’s a pathetic showing, and spend more time trying to figure out what much better option there might be. Oh! MISTIER!!! And now I have given Zynga its 99 cents (or whatever) and have begun texting my various WWF partners to tell them about my discovery and to ask whether they use the Word-O-Meter, too. “If you sue it, I will. Otherwise, let’s not.” Already, I’ve found another one of my regular opponents who, it turns out, has been using this all along. I had no idea! Anyway, let Alec Baldwin know, if he doesn’t already, and anyone else for whom Words With Friends is an enormous time-waster. *Long story; I’m not recommending YOU buy it. CHROMECAST I’m not exactly sure what this is, but I bought two of them and they’re supposed to arrive tomorrow. Basically, they throw videos from your computer or smart phone up onto your giant TV screen. I think. Here’s one glowing review. And here’s a little more measured review from my pal Don: “Google’s ChromeCast will truly change things once everyone gets on board, but for now you are not missing much. The easiest streaming is from Netflix: on your iPhone just press an icon on the cover art in the Netflix app, and the movie comes up on the TV. Beautiful picture, no pauses or lags, works just like a DVD. Well… almost. With a DVD you can pause at a particular point to scrutinize something in the background, and then forward a few frames. A wi-fi control lag makes pausing at an exact spot with ChromeCast like an arcade game. But the biggest downside I found is that Netflix streaming has nothing I want to watch, no matter what device one uses. Of the 75 of so DVDs in my rental queue, none is available for streaming. There is nothing new, sort of new, or even old that appeals to me. I tried Indiana Jones, Goonies, Risky Business, and dozens of other old movies. Nothing. I think the selection of TV shows may be better … but you won’t find the Sopranos. I was surprised to find I could not even stream PBS shows. You are supposed to be able to stream to TV anything you can play on the Chrome Browser, but I have had limited success with that. (There is a good App called CanIStreamIt at iTunes that shows you what is available on a dozen sites. I hope that app will add a ChromeCast streaming icon to its menu — that would be a huge plus.) “Oh, and the interface is clunky. I always wanted to control TV with my iPhone — it seemed like a natural thing to do. It ain’t. The reality is if you are gaming or surfing, you have to leave that app to go back to the Netflix app to pause or rewind. Google or someone needs to come out with a small wifi remote as an alternative / supplement to iPhone control. Ultimately the future will be TVs and DVRs with built-in circuits to respond to multiple command sources: bluetooth, wifi, and ir. If only Steve Jobs had lived to revolutionize TV! “ChromeCast is definitely a work in progress and at a price ($35) that should sweep away the competition. Availability of films and entertainment will eventually catch up.”