Prejudice does not stop being prejudice despite being popular or widely held. And constitutional rights do not loose their force even if they are applied to people, beliefs and behaviors that make many other people squeamish. That’s really the entire point of the bloody thing. Fundamental rights are not subject to popular opinion or the vote. That’s because they are fundamental rights.

Those who would say otherwise are just opportunistic jack-wagons. And I think the general reaction to their odious arguments is best summarized by the great orator, Sean Connery:

Facts being stubborn things, those conclusions could not be ignored forever and as more mature hands took charge, climate change was officially included as a security threat in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. The QDR concludes that changing weather patterns “may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”

Aerial view of flooding in Pakistan's Nowshera district. (AFP via news.com.au)

Whether the cause is global warming or not, more weather-driven disruptions are occurring, such as drought-driven wildfires in Russia and a recent drought in Mexico that may add millions to the numbers seeking to immigrate to the US.

Despite the localized chilly weather last winter, 2010 is going to be the hottest year ever all over the world. Whether one wants to believe in global warming or not and whether one thinks that it is driven by human activity or not is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Sure, a stalwart skeptic might say, “This is just a bad year.” Or, “Globalized media just means that we hear about all the little things where before they might not have made the news.”

Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City was flooded out in 2008 and has been condemned. (Photo: Lisa Peperkorn)

Mmkay. But what happens if it happens again next year and the next? This is the third year in a row we have had major flooding on several Iowa rivers. Places where there were once parks, housing and commercial development on the banks of the Raccoon River in Des Moines and the Iowa River in Iowa City are now basically unusable flood plains. The facts on the ground are getting pretty hard to ignore.

In the lead in from this song on the album (accessable on the band’s MySpace page link above), is someone reading from one of my favorite Lincoln speeches, the Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?– Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Which, I suppose could be used as a rallying cry by both political parties at this juncture. OR could be seen as an caution against the kind of divisive and rancorous politics being practiced today. It’s also a pretty pithy rationale for a thorough going review of the defense budget. Which, if one is genuinely interested in deficit reduction (as opposed to just posturing about it) is the number one, non-entitlement program you are going to want to look at.

Back in the glory days of TV news getting an exclusive usually meant an entire day’s advantage over the competition; what with just the one daily evening newscast. If teased appropriately a good scoop would add viewership to that evening’s newscast but mostly it was a prestige moment that helped build the network’s news brand. So, a good scoop (or more rightly consistently being able to get scoops and exclusives) had a positive business impact, but much less immediate and tangible than newspaper scoops.

But what is a scoop/exclusive worth in the Internet age? At best a media outlet will have the story to itself for a few hours before it is cited, cross-linked, and tweeted all over the world by other outlets. Granted, an exclusive will drive some traffic to the website and might, might, MIGHT drive some advertising click-throughs. But people who are looking for a quick read on breaking news are highly unlikely to take the time for a diversion into web advertising.

No, the only real business driver for working a scoop in 2010 has to be for the prestige of it. It is purely a brand-building exercise.

If that is the case then the aim should be to get the story right AND first, or to be in-depth AND first. And if being first is not possible (say for an afternoon newspaper with a 9 a.m. deadline) then it seems the business case would say that being right and/or in-depth would trump the now very ephemeral advantages of being first.

Being first with a bullshit story is probably worse than not covering it at all. It ruins the news brand. Unless your “brand” is focused on whipping up a particular market segment and reinforcing their existing belief structures. Then it’s fine. But it’s not really news, its commentary and opinion

It seems to me that the business aim for entities in the actual news business — especially for web-only outlets — should be quality and depth of reporting that will create stickyness and build the brand. Stickyness is web-speak for having viewers stay on your site for more than a few minutes and view more than just the one page that you might have entered by via an external link. Better yet, to be compelling enough to entice people to come back and be regular readers or god-forbid, actual subscribers to an actual newspaper.

I guess none of this is really earth shattering. Unless you run the Clinton Herald, our local newspaper. In which case your local beat is consistently scooped by the Gannett outlet, The Quad City Times forty miles downriver. The Times also does a better job of driving traffic to the website with a full twitter stream of breaking news (the Herald tweets maybe once a day) but more importantly the Times has all of its news archived on the web site unlike the Herald which still seems to think that if it’s not ink on paper delivered to the door then it doesn’t count.

The Herald consistently embargoes content on the website to drive people to the paper edition. If I miss a local story in the dead-tree edition and it doesn’t make the cut to the web page three or four days after publication? I have to physically go to the friggin Library. Which I’ve done. Once.

What I’m getting at is that it just doesn’t make a lot of sense that if you have a near-monopoly on the local newspaper business and are, in the claims of the publisher, “consistently one of the most profitable papers in the company,” to be consistently lagging your competition from down-river. Gannett, like all major publishers has a huge debt-load (unlike the privately-held CNHI, the Herald’s parent) and is always cutting budgets to the bone. Considering the minor marginal costs of placing additional, non-print content to the website and driving traffic and adding value with Twitter feeds, it would seem like a no-brainer.

Dolph Lundgren (yes, him!) has a masters in chemical engineering and was a Fullbright scholar at MIT.

Brian May, original member and lead guitar for Queen, was an astrophysics student in London before joining the band. His latest project is a collection of found stereoscopic images of late-19th Century England.

Dr. Dre is a huge astronomy buff and is working on an instrumental concept album to be titled, “The Planets.”

Naturally just like the gay marriage “strategy” the party’s elected leaders will pretend to be scandalized and run to distance themselves from these “outside the mainstream” initiatives. All the while while enjoying the benefits of the extra two or three percent on their bottom lines.

via Joshua Green at the Atlantic:

The idea that this helps Democrats is based on the demographic profile of who shows up to vote for marijuana initiatives–and wouldn’t show up otherwise. “If you look at who turns out to vote for marijuana,” says Jim Merlino, a consultant in Colorado, which passed initiatives in 2000 and 2006, “they’re generally under 35. And young people tend to vote Democratic.” This influx of new voters, he believes, helps Democrats up and down the ticket.

The legalization movement appears to be gaining steam. As many as a half dozen states could consider the issue this fall. If the correlation Merlino describes really exists, then Democrats will have an advantage in those states. Does it?

Political scientists disagree about whether gay marriage bans helped Republicans, though a growing body of scholarship suggests that they probably did. So far, nobody has measured marijuana’s effect at the polls. But Stephen Nicholson, a leading expert on ballot initiatives at the University of California at Merced, told me that he plans to. What’s more, he sees an intriguing precedent in the nuclear freeze initiatives of 28 years ago, which he has studied. “In the 1982 midterms, 10 states had ballot initiatives on the nuclear freeze,” Nicholson told me. “This had a significant positive effect on Democratic candidates.”

Green has a bit more on the phenomenon/possible strategy in a slightly longer article here. And there is a full cover story in the National Journal this month on the growing movement to revisit marijuana’s status as a controlled substance. But you’ll need to subscribe or run to your local library to read that one.

As a tactic would it be dirty and underhanded? Sure. But they called Karl Rove a genius for doing the same thing with gay marriage. This might actually do some social good. Win-Win I say.

In re: McCrystal. A couple of things that should pop right out as the nut graphs of this whole affair but that (typically) have been totally buried by the media in the whole scandaliciousness frenzy surrounding the Rolling Stone article by , Michael Hastings. One, Rolling Stone still does some awesome journalism. Two, mainstream media=total failure.

The sense of wonderment that pervaded on most of the TV puditocracy, e.g. “How is this guy ever going to get access again?”

Access isn’t the point because he’s now got the story of his life. Fuck access. See John Stewart.

And it was an outstanding bit of journalism. The “scandalous” stuff was really in the first 500 words. The rest of the article is a very illuminating piece on Gen. McCrystal — a soldier’s soldier if ever there was one — and our strategy in Afghanistan. For those of you who can’t be arsed to read 1,200 words of the most important journalism of 2010 here are the nut graphs of the Hasting’s piece:

The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on,” says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fucking losing this thing.”

Later on:

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. “Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan,” he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. “It’s all very cynical, politically,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. “Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there’s nothing for us there.”

Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. “Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem,” says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. “A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we’re picking winners and losers” – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.

Of course, Stanley McChrystal is not in charge any more is he? And what we are not getting right now is any kind of rational debate on exactly what the fuck we are planning on with regards to an exit strategy for a war that has drug on for one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-NINE years and shows no sign of being over inside of a decade.

It seems to me that in our hate and fear of Al Quaida is holding hands with with a whole series of national neuroses that we can bundle up under the label, Vietnam Syndrome, e.g. support the troops at all costs, keep the faith, the illusion that winning only requires enough will power and the right strategy, etc. ( Read the article for why all of this is relevant in regard to Gen. McCrystal in particular but for the current generation of military upper brass in general.)

Looking at Vietn… sorry, Afghanistan through those lenses we have totally overlooked the really important thing about war in general; it is supposed to further the national interest.

A U.S. Marine, from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmser in Helmand Province of Afghanistan May 18, 2008. The Marine was not injured. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic)

Outside of finding and killing some murderous douchebags hiding out (mostly in Pakistan) in caves and mud huts — a job that can be done by a few handfuls of drones, spies and special operators — where is the national interest in spending hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of dollars and thousands of lives here?

Hundreds of billions of dollars. Do you have any idea what we could have done with that (borrowed) money? For the war in Afghanistan we could have built a coast-to-coast high speed railway. We could have sent every graduating senior in America to four years of college for the past nine years. We could have had free freakin’ healthcare for everyone.

5 COMPLEXITY IS THE NEW REALITY

Even if you don’t accept the ecological metaphor, there’s no doubt that our emerging information environment is more complex – in terms of numbers of participants, the density of interactions between them, and the pace of change – than anything that has gone before. This complexity is not an aberration or something to be wished away: it’s the new reality, and one that we have to address. This is a challenge, for several reasons. First, the behaviour of complex systems is often difficult to understand and even harder to predict. Second, and more importantly, our collective mindsets in industry and government are not well adapted for dealing with complexity. Traditionally, organisations have tried to deal with the problem by reducing complexity – acquiring competitors, locking in customers, producing standardised products and services, etc. These strategies are unlikely to work in our emerging environment, where intelligence, agility, responsiveness and a willingness to experiment (and fail) provide better strategies for dealing with what the networked environment will throw at you.

Another bullet point: Disruption Is A Feature, Not A Bug.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/06/betting-on-longshots.html is funny and serious about how we underestimate the probability and cost of low probability events