When Apple rolled out the iPad, I squinted at the screenshots on Gizmodo that included the iBookstore, and noticed immediately that Apple was planning on charging $3 to $4 more per e-book than Amazon charges for the same titles. (I strongly suspect that iTunes' bookstore will go over about as well as Amazon's MP3 store.) I was wondering how they were planning on getting away with offering fewer titles and charging more per title.

Well, I guess now we know.

For those of you who weren't paying attention when the blogosphere lit up over it this morning, Macmillan has been putting the screws to Amazon in what had been, until late Friday night, quiet contract negotiations; New York Times technology blogger Brad Stone just posted the details ("Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement," 1/29/10). Apparently Amazon has concluded that Macmillan has stopped negotiating in good faith, that Macmillan hopes to put the Kindle e-books store out of business by taking its business to the iPad in two months when it finally ships. If so, Amazon is calling their bluff: Amazon yanked all Macmillan titles, e-book and paper, from Amazon.com Friday night. For how long? Who knows?

John Scalzi, who's sold books to Macmillan, is watching his potential royalties from Earth's biggest bookstore drop to $0/day, and is unsurprisingly appalled that Amazon is refusing to cave in. Cory Doctorow, for whom being anti-DRM is a matter of religious principle and who therefore would be expected to hate Amazon even if they cured cancer, unsurprisingly hates Amazon.

I'm going to take Amazon's side on this one, and if you look at the NYT blogger's post, you can see the outlines of why. And if, like me, you'd read Ben Bova's Cyberbooks novel years ago, which predicted all of this, you'd have seen this coming, too.

When you buy a $20 hardcover or a $10 paperback, the author gets a few cents to maybe a buck out of that. The publisher gets a couple of bucks out of that. All, and I mean all, of the rest of that price covers the cost of getting that physical object manufactured, shipped to the distributor, distributed to the bookstore, stocked at the bookstore, and sold to you. To that end, Amazon made publishers what seems to me to be an entirely fair and reasonable offer: we will (against our will) cave in and give you digital rights management if that's the only way to persuade you to let us sell e-book copies of your books. (Amazon is already nudging publishers away from that position, as made the news about a week ago. Apple had to offer music publishers the same deal to get iTunes launched; just as iTunes dropped DRM once the music publishers stopped fearing iTunes and embraced it, there's every reason to assume that publishers will drop the encrypted wrapper around what turn out to be plain old open-format ".mobi" ebooks at Amazon.)

And ... and here's the contract sticking point ... Amazon cheerfully pays the same wholesale price per copy sold that every distributor of paper books pays, 50% off of hardcopy cover price. In exchange, Amazon gets the same privilege that every retailer gets, the privilege of setting the actual sale price to whatever they want. For almost all $20 or so hardcovers, Amazon is paying publishers like Macmillan $9.99, and selling the books to the public at wholesale cost, to promote the Kindle, the Kindle app on smart phones, the Kindle ebook application for Windows, and (most importantly, to them) the Kindle e-book bookstore. For your average $10 paperback, Amazon is paying publishers like Macmillan $4.99 or so, and setting the price (depending on the book) anywhere from $6.99 to $9.99, with occasional sales on backlist from authors they're trying to promote as low as $0 to $2.99. And as far as they're concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, Macmillan and every other publishing conglomerate have no more legal or moral right to dictate Amazon's price to their customers than they have to tell Books-a-Million or Borders how much they have to sell the books for. (The US Department of Justice would, probably, look in fact rather harshly askance at any publishing conglomerate that engaged in price-fixing behavior at the consumer level.)

As far as I can understand Macmillan's argument, I think it goes something like this. Macmillan knows that the average book-buyer has no idea who gets what slice of their $20 hardcover book, and doesn't care; they just know that if they want to read that book while it's still in hardcover and aren't able to borrow it from a library or a friend, it costs them $20. Macmillan also knows that fewer than 10% of all bookbuyers have a Kindle or a smartphone with the Kindle app. What they appear to be afraid of is that if the other 90%-plus find out that Amazon sells their favorite hardcover author's latest book for $9.99, they'll think that that means that the hardcover ought to cost that much, too; that they'll boycott bookstores until prices come down to that; that bookstores will then demand a sharp cut in the wholesale price because customers will no longer pay more than $10 for a hardcover; that Amazon will demand the new wholesale price and continue retailing e-books at the new, lower, wholesale price; that consumers will conclude that Amazon's new, lower wholesale price is what books "should really cost," and the resulting death spiral will kill the industry.

And so, what they've demanded, and what Apple is enthused to give them if it lets them kill a competitor for their late-to-market ebook reader, and what Amazon considers not just bad business practice but actually morally and/or legally wrong so they won't give in no matter what it costs them, is the right to set Amazon's (and Barnes and Noble's, and Apple's, and any other e-book provider's) retail price, paying the e-book vending website 30% of the price. I sincerely hope that this was merely a starting offer on that price, by the way, since among other things, since if they're planning on gradually raising the e-book price to equal the hardcover price to keep from cannibalizing hardcover sales, it'd be a sharp hike in the wholesale cost (from 50% to 70% of cover) to the ebook vendors. But even if it werern't an indefensible raise in the wholesale cost, even if they offered to keep the current 50/50 split, it'd still be wrong, wrong, wrong of Macmillan and the other two companies (yes, there are only three publishing conglomerates who own almost the entire book publishing world) to even try to collude to set, and raise, consumer prices. Period.

Thank the gods that Amazon is standing up to them. They have my full support in this.

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Edited to add: Macmillan has given their side of this dispute. It exactly confirms my suspicion that this is all about Macmillan's demand that they, not the retailer, be allowed to set the retail price of a book, their demand that anybody who discounts a book below their preferred price must die. This makes it even easier for me: I sincerely hope that it's Macmillan, not Amazon, that goes out of business.

OK, I know that some of you would prefer that I write more about current events, history, economics, and books, and drop the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online games) writing. And those of you will be disappointed when I devote an awful lot of column inches, sometime very very soon, to Star Trek Online. But before I even do that, something just showed up today in the parts of the blogosphere that cover the MMO industry that I feel like I want to comment on, too, something I felt very strongly about even before people started linking to blogger Serial Ganker's three-part series on "WoW Tourism:"

1. "Why WoW Tourists Don't Exist,"
2. "Denying the Correlative," and
3. "Why WoW Clones Really Fail."

The background to this argument is that the last couple of years, an awful lot of companies have lost hundreds of millions of dollars each trying to build the MMO that would do to Activision/Blizzard's World of Warcraft what it did to Sony's Everquest, namely, to for all practical purposes replace it, and then to grow the whole MMO industry. When these companies raised, between them, what must be closing in on a billion dollars, it seemed like an entirely plausible idea. There were lots of people still not playing WoW and complaining that it just wasn't their kind of game, plenty of people in WoW complaining about how done they were with it and wishing that something new would come along. And the industry was under the (entirely mistaken) impression that building a game like WoW is mostly a one-time expense, albeit a large one, after which you cut down to a maintenance budget and the millions' of people's $15 monthly payments just roll in with no more significant effort on your part.

And with no exceptions yet to this date? Over the last three years all of those companies' games have crashed and burned, and hard. None of them ever got anywhere near WoW's numbers, none of them even got to half a million, let alone the over 10 million subscribers that Blizzard has. Three of them, Paragon Studios' City of Heroes and Sony's Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest 2, managed to stop shrinking at a couple of hundred thousand players and stay relatively profitable. One of them, CCP's EVE Online, has stayed profitable while taking half a decade to grow to a couple of hundred thousand users. The ones who budgeted around the assumption that they would rapidly grow to over a million subscribers and never shrink have either already died or or are visibly dying on the vine. The vast majority of that nearly billion dollars has gone where all the money poured into dot-com Superbowl advertising went, where the woodbine twineth, never to be seen again.

One of the standard industry narratives is to blame the customers, calling them "WoW Tourists." What they mean is that people weren't being truthful when they told pollsters and market researchers that they were open to replacing WoW with another subscription MMO. All they really wanted was another MMO that was roughly as good as WoW to play for one or two months and then drop like a hot rock and return to WoW the next time Blizzard shipped an expansion, something to play a couple of times and never return to during their short stretches of being bored with WoW.

Serial Ganker caught the MMO industry bloggers' attention by writing a long and impassioned argument that WoW tourists don't exist. He offers no evidence for this but his own opinion, which can be summed up as: hardly anybody who left WoW has ever returned to WoW (all evidence to the contrary). What he says is happening instead is that a tiny subset of former WoW players and people who turned down WoW for one reason or another have been desperately thrashing around for an MMO to replace WoW, not just for them but in the public's consciousness as "the MMO that everybody plays." That small, relatively fixed-size group of players has been migrating steadily from MMO to MMO, from Asheron's Call to Anarchy Online to Dark Age of Camelot to Neocron to City of Heroes to Star Wars Galaxies to Warhammer Age of Reckoning to whatever and on and on and on. And according to Ganker, the reason some few of them returned to WoW, and the rest of them keep migrating, is not because they always intended to return to WoW, but because compared to WoW, all of those games suck.

This is so wrong-headed I barely know where to start.

First of all, the myth of Blizzard's "polished MMO," the myth that they didn't release WoW "until it was ready," is a myth protected by a gauzy haze of nostalgia, emotional identification with the brand, self-justification on the part of people who don't want to think about how much money they've given Blizzard over the last six years, and just generally rotten memory. Blizzard didn't wait until WoW was polished and perfect before they shipped it. They did what every MMO developer before and since (except for EVE and now STO) has done: blew completely past their development deadlines and budgets, got to the point where they were running out of revenue to cannibalize from Starcraft to funnel into it, and were in danger of their underlying technology going obsolete if they didn't ship it now, so they did. The first couple of months it was up, they desperately raced to patch it into even vaguely playable form. And the results were so ugly that for most of the last five years, people being dragged into WoW for the first time have been explicitly and enthusiastically told by old-timers to completely skip the overwhelming majority of the content that WoW released at launch, to get some higher level friend of theirs to guide them past it or to power-level them around or through it, to get to "the good part," which is to say, probably less than 1/6th of the content in WoW, which everybody then plays over and over again. If the vast majority of the content in WoW weren't not merely unpolished but actively crappy, Blizzard wouldn't have just invested a ton of money in Cataclysm, a near total rewrite of and/or replacement for a big chunk of WoW's original content at launch.

With the exception of NCsoft's Tabula Rasa (whose internal development team problems are now the stuff of industry legend), every single triple-A (big budget) MMO that has shipped since WoW has been in at least as good a shape as WoW was when it shipped. Several of them have been in better shape than WoW already was at the time that they shipped, all myths to the contrary. Blizzard has gone to industry conferences to try to talk other companies out of wanting to compete with them, by spreading the idea that before any MMO could even think of competing with WoW, the developers would have to make it as big as WoW already is and as polished as WoW already is, which would take spending as much on it as WoW already has, on the order of half a billion dollars. Don't believe it. There's a standard computer industry term for when an executive for the industry leader tries to convince both competitors and potentially lost customers that it's not safe for them to try alternatives to the brand leader: F.U.D., which stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Don't fall for Activision/Blizzard's FUD about how a successful MMO would need to be in development for 8 or more years and cost half a billion dollars before the first dollar of revenue came about.

So why have the last three years been so brutal to the MMO industry? Two words: network effects. That two-word phrase was coined early in the history of the telephone, to explain why some technologies don't really become powerful until there are enough people who have them. After all, if there are only two telephones in the whole world, telephones are pretty useless. The more people in the world have telephones, the more useful it becomes, to you, to have a telephone. Now let's use that original coining of the phrase as a metaphor. Let's suppose someone were to conclude that the existing telephone network stinks, that a better one could be built. It's not hard to imagine. A new, built-from-scratch telephone network could have better audio quality, for example. It could have better addressing than increasingly random (and even random-length) strings of digits. It could have built-in directory lookup. It could have better privacy protection. It could be designed from the ground up to be lower power consumption or even more reliable. So, okay, suppose you invent such a phone system, but it's not interoperable with the existing telephone network -- how many people are going to buy it? Maybe there are thousands of people out there who hate the phone companies. (Insert the obligatory quote from "The President's Analyst" here yourself.) Even if they all quit, who's going to give up their existing phone to follow them to The New Phone System?

Why do 10 million people play WoW when 80% of it is crap and they're all bored with the remaining 20%? Because that's where all of their friends are. Network effects.

Where I do agree with him is that if there is ever going to be a Next Big MMO, one that gets above a million subscribers and keeps growing, it is not going to be by stealing away WoW's satisfied customers. Where I disagree with him is that it's not going to happen by making something that's vaguely similar only even better. That's been tried. It doesn't work. No, it's going to be by appealing to vast numbers of people who have computers capable of playing an MMO, and the discretionary income to pay a subscription fee, to whom WoW never had any appeal. Some of those will be people who weren't willing to play WoW even if all of their friends were already playing it. But there aren't enough people immune to peer pressure to fund a triple-A MMO. No, if there is subscriber money out there to fund a hundred-million-dollar MMO, it's going to have to come from people who don't even know very many people who play WoW, people who have so little contact with that world of Tolkien fans and Dungeons and Dragons fans and people who go to Renaissance Fairs and the Society for Creative Anachronism that they never even hung out with people who were interested in that. And the industry now knows that, they got the message; in all likelihood, Funcom's Age of Conan (like WoW, only R rated!) will go down in history as the last stupid attempt to build a generic fantasy MMO good enough to steal WoW's subscribers. No, really, even if there are developers out there crazy enough to take another jousting run at that windmill, there aren't the investors willing to fall for their pitch again, and there won't be unless Activision/Blizzard does something so awful or so dumb that millions of people boycott them at the same time. (Although it wouldn't have to be any much dumber than to simply stop investing in improving the product, is my guess. If Blizzard goes more than a year between expansions, and then hints that they're getting out of the WoW expansions business, then go and talk to the money guys about investing in a WoW-killer. But not before.)

But yeah, back to my main point: potential MMO subscribers who barely know anybody who would play WoW, do such people exist? Maybe. Which is why for the last three years or so, the industry has watched with bated breath every time a science fiction MMO has shipped.

Why science fiction? Because historically, the science fiction market is much, much bigger than the fantasy market. If you're looking for successful multi-media billion-dollar franchises in fantasy, you're stuck with ... well, what? D&D, as ubiquitous as it is, has never made that kind of money. Tolkien was a big deal for a genre fiction author for a decade or two, and then Jackson's movies made money, but who made money off of Tolkien's intellectual property in the mean time? The Adventures of Hercules and its spinoff Xena: Warrior Princess made money for a couple of years. And lately Harry Potter's been big. All of that combined, though, would rattle around loosely in the incidental merchandise revenues of any one of the big three science fiction franchises of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stargate. Star Trek has been making big money for somebody every year since 1966; even during the lean years of 1970-1978, it was making steady money for Paramount Studios and almost single-handedly propping up the UHF TV market (which is why so many of us who grew up in those years know every frame of it by heart). Star Wars and its spinoffs has made big, big money for George Lucas and his media partners every year since 1977. And while Stargate has never been as big as those two, it's been profitable on movie screens or on TV every year for the last twelve, at times supporting two TV series simultaneously while the original was still in heavy syndication.

Nor would it necessarily have to be science fiction. Despite Sony's horrible track record, everybody's watching to see if they ever manage to release The Agency, their James Bond meets the A Team spies and mercs MMO, if only because the amount of money that's been made over the years in that genre; James Bond alone probably out-earned any two sci-fi franchises not counting Star Wars, and by dint of having started earlier may have even out-earned that, too, adjusted for inflation. Comic book superheroes haven't been a reliable money maker, but they have been a perennial one, and that's why there was money available to invest in two already-released big-budget superhero MMOs with a third one still in development. So far, at least the argument goes, the only reason that there aren't 20 million people or 50 million people all over the world subscribing to some science fiction, or spy, or superhero MMO (without even disturbing Blizzard's customer base, because the market for any of those genres is easily two to five times bigger than the market for Tolkienesque fantasy), is because nobody's figured out how to make a genuinely immersive and yet mass-entertaining game out of any of those genres.

(Although watch this space; I'm going to make the argument that Star Trek Online maybe actually finally has.)

My reply to jblaque's impassioned LiveJournal post "An Abdication of Responsibility," 1/20/10:

Lyndon Johnson didn't get the Civil Rights Act through Congress by leaving it to them to display leadership, and signaling that no matter what passed, he would sign it.

Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act through Congress by walking up to wavering members of his party and putting them in a grip that congressmen and senators called "the full Johnson" (look it up). If he grabbed you in a full Johnson, it was his way of signaling you: "Cross me on this at your peril. Cross me on this and people in your district will suffer, and I will make sure that they know that it's because of you. Cross me on this and the volunteers at your headquarters will all go home. Cross me on this and the party will fund a challenger in your next primary. Cross me on this and nobody from your constituent service department will have their calls answered by any executive branch office. If knowing all of that, it's worth it to you to cross me on this, because you think the voters are that much on your side that they'll sacrifice every pork barrel project in their districts, every federal favor they need, and blame me rather than you for it? Well, that's your choice. But don't think for a second that I'm bluffing."

Franklin Roosevelt had Blue Dog Democrats in his Congress when he passed Social Security. Harry Truman had Blue Dog Democrats in his Congress when he passed Medicare. Lyndon Johnson had Blue Dog Democrats in his Congress when he passed the Civil Rights Act. Richard Nixon had Country Club Republicans in his Congress when he passed the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Environmental Protection Act. None of them got stabbed in the back by their own party members, let alone stabbed in the face the way Obama has been, because Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon knew something that Barack Obama doesn't seem to know. The President of the United States is the god-damned President of the United States, and the symbolic anointed and titular head of his political party, and neither of those are powerless positions from which you wheedle and beg as if you were negotiating from a position of weakness.

Sadly, no Democrat is afraid of Barack Obama.

I would start, frankly, with Joe Lieberman. He's the safest of safe targets, since he isn't even a Democrat any more. Now that he flatly can't be the 60th vote, he should kiss his beloved Homeland Security Committee chairmanship adios. Period. It's also long past time for the President to put the word down to the military academies, to the Social Security administration, and other executive branch offices that they shouldn't exactly rush to answer calls from Senator Lieberman's office. It's also long past time to find at least one of Senator Lieberman's beloved pet projects somewhere in Connecticut and declare it a waste of federal tax dollars, something that must be cut from the budget as a matter of principle, and send talking heads out to all the talk shows saying that it's time to get serious about cutting the budget, starting with this wasted spending in Connecticut. Never say why you're doing any of these things aloud, it doesn't need to be said. If asked, change the subject to some vaguely related subject that you'd rather talk about. You're the President of the United States, Mr. Obama. You can do that.

Make an example of two or three of the Blue Dogs, and the next time you sit down to negotiate, see if they don't negotiate in better faith, and if the next time they promise to vote for your bill if they get one concession, they keep their word this time instead of breaking their word and coming back for another bite of you.

Perhaps I've mentioned this before.

If you've never actually engaged in political action, if you've never volunteered for or worked for a party, you may be under the impression that the two parties are both monolithic blocs, that all Democrats believe "what Democrats believe" and that all Republicans believe "what Republicans believe." It's not so, and it never was so. Both parties are coalitions of smaller parties, smaller interest groups, united in opposition to each other. There's enough cultural overlap, enough values overlap, between the constituencies in each party that it's hard to draw the exact borders between the constituencies, and thus count them, but even the naked eye can see the difference between a Country Club Republican and a Social Conservative and a Nativist (racist isolationist), even the naked eye can see the difference between a Progressive Democrat and a Civil Rights Activist and a Blue Dog Democrat.

After a very short time of being politically active, there's a term I came up with to describe tiny little constituencies that bring just enough volunteers or money to the table to be given lip service to, but not enough volunteers or money to the table to dominate even the smallest part of the party, either party. These are constituencies that the people who run the party consider "outside of the mainstream," as "fringe" or "extremist" constituencies; they perceive that the cost of giving their "fringe" anything that they ask for as a condition of their support for the party, a cost measured in fear of alienating "mainstream" and "swing" voters, greater than the cost of making promises to their tiniest constituencies and then breaking those promises.

The term I uses for this is a "fuck you" constituency. As in, "fuck you, Nativists, what are you going to do if we break our promises to you and grant amnesty to Mexican illegal immigrants? What are you going to do about it, vote for the Civil Rights Democrats?" As in, "fuck you, Progressives, what are you going to do if we increase corporate welfare spending instead of breaking up the giant monopolies, if we cut taxes on the rich instead of bringing back truly progressive income tax rates, if we rule out single-payer before the negotiations even begin? What are you going to do about it, vote for the Country Club Republicans?" As in, "fuck you, Social Conservatives, what are you going to do if we promise you prayer in schools and outlawed abortion and lift not a finger on it when we're in power? vote for the Lifestyle Liberal Democrats?" As in, "fuck you, Civil Rights Activists, what are you going to do if we promise to help the Black community but instead continue locking up black men at 9 times the rate we lock up other drug users, what are you going to do if we continue helping employers abandon and banks foreclose in neighborhoods with over 50% unemployment? What are you going to do about it, vote for the Nativist Republicans?"

And your average American, having been taught by the talking heads on television that the Blue Dog Democrats and Country Club Republicans are the only serious grown-ups in American politics, the only people who actually understand how the world works and that the other constituencies, like the Progressives and the Reformers and the Civil Rights Activists and the Social Conservatives and the Nativists are all immature, ignorant, and/or dangerous radicals, likes this system just fine. They nod with satisfaction as the Ivy League educated, corporate funded Blue Dogs and Country Clubbers maintain the fiction that their way of looking at the world is the only valid one, and ridicule the other candidates out of the primaries, narrowing both parties down to a solid, reliable core of pro-corporate candidates in favor of maximum military intervention. They still differ from each other as to which corporations should be taxpayer supported and funded, the liberal ones or the conservative ones, and they differ as to which wars the US should make an excuse to join in on, the wars that serve liberal causes or the wars that serve conservative causes, and those differences matter a great deal to the Blue Dogs and to the Country Clubbers.

That leaves your "fringe" constituencies with only two plausible options. They can stay in the party, donate their money, show up to volunteer, work the phone banks and the Get Out The Vote efforts, and vote on election day, while continuing to make the case, inside their parties and to the broader American electorate, that they are right, no matter what the Ivy League universities teach, no matter what the corporate media selected talking heads say. Or they can throw the race to the other side, to punish their own side for lying to them, by closing their wallets and staying home. Those are the same two choices, whether you're a TEA Partier who isn't on Dick Armey's payroll or you're a Progressive: let them keep lying to you and hope that some day they come to realize that you're right, or punish your own side for lying to you.

My preferred blog for massively multiplayer online roleplaying game coverage, Massively.com, just linked to an article by Tobold called "I don't like bananas." Here's what I said about it, over on Massively.com:

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Wasn't it Abraham Lincoln who said of a play he didn't like, "If this is the sort of thing you like, you'll like it"?

MMO journalism is a bear to do well, because not all MMOs are aimed at the same audience, and it's not always obvious from what a reviewer says what their actual tastes are. If someone really loves harsh consequences PvP, and they say that game X is great and don't get around to mentioning that it has harsh consequences PvP, that's a problem. If, on the other hand, someone hates harsh consequences PvP, reviews a game with harsh consequences PvP, and says that the game is awful while making excuses for why he or she doesn't like it without bringing up their pre-existing prejudice against harsh consequences PvP, they're doing the audience just as much of a disservice.

I bring up harsh consequences PvP just because it's the oldest argument in MMOs. The same thing could be said just as easily about fantasy versus sci-fi, or theme park dark ride versus player-driven sandbox, or instanced versus open world, or solo-friendly versus forced teaming, or stats-driven versus equipment-driven, or transparent game mechanics versus opaque, or whether more effort should go into art and music or more effort should go into flawless game mechanics, or consensual PvP versus open PvP, or predictable grind versus surprise changes in game mechanics, or any of a half dozen or more other design choices that people can have strong preferences about.

So yes, as it relates to games journalism, I'd like to see someone say things like, "game X is high fantasy, which I'm a sucker for," or "I don't like game X, but I may not be giving it a fair chance because I don't like high fantasy and this game is high fantasy," or even better "game X is high fantasy, which I usually like, but not this time" or "I don't normally like high fantasy, but I like game X." Or substitute in, for "high fantasy," either side of the many design choices above.

And yeah, Tobold is definitely right. For every single one of those design choices, there are at least a couple of hundred noisy people, and for some of them tens of thousands, for whom it's not a matter of taste, it's an article of their personal religion. Some people like a game with a single combat mechanic that they can grind away at (for example) and can accept that other people want more variety than that. Some people need variety, but can understand why others would prefer more predictability in their game play. But there are also people for whom grind isn't just a matter of taste, it's evil pure and simple from beyond the 8th dimension, kill it, kill it, kill it with fire. These people are tiresome.

But sometimes they do have a point, because of thrice-cursed "network effects," the fact that some services increase in returned value the more people use them. If you hate fantasy, hate consensual PvP, hate gear-driven, hate solo-friendly, and you want lots of other people to play with? Right now you're hating life; the MMO that made those decisions is the one that everybody plays right now, "because that's where all my friends are." Having to play a game you hate just because that's the one your friends all want you to play is a bitter pill to swallow, so it's not just tribal loyalty to their own brand preferences that makes some of the losers in those arguments so bitter.

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Addendum: To save you the trouble of asking? In order I listed them above, that is to say, no particular order: no-consequences PvP with above-PvE rewards, sci-fi, theme park, instanced, solo-friendly, stats driven, transparent mechanics, willing to forgive some clunky game mechanics in the short run if the art and sound are wonderful enough, consensual PvP, and not the same thing over and over again even if a few surprises are unpleasant.

What? Why, yes, I do play City of Heroes, why do you ask? And yes, I am enjoying Star Trek Online. (More on that later, probably.)

If you got your education in an American or European school, you haven't thought about Haiti much, especially if you're white. In fact, if you're white, and you haven't done a lot of reading on the colonial history of the western hemisphere, I'd offer 9 to 1 odds that within a couple of weeks, you'll go back to not thinking about Haiti again for a longish time. For a moment, though, I'd like you to think about that history, remember (or learn) a couple of things about it. Here's why: the immediate disaster will be over by the end of the day, for all practical purposes. Disaster recovery teams are deploying throughout Port au Prince, and frankly, at this point, just about everybody who is going to die from the earthquake is already dead. It has stopped getting worse. So now, while a few people still care, is the time to think about what happens next. (The odds are, what happens next is "nothing," and Haiti goes back to being "the land where children eat mud.")

The observation has been widely made that ordinary cities don't collapse from an earthquake the size of the one that just hit Port au Prince, and ordinary countries have better and more widely dispersed disaster recovery teams of their own. Haiti, though, is special, and there's a reason for that: From 1804 to the present, during all but a few years, it has been the official policy of Washington DC and of every European capital that Haiti must fail.

A capsule summary of colonial history is essential at this point. Basically everywhere south of US Interstate highway 70, that is to say basically everywhere south of the 40th parallel north, the European colonial pattern was the same, and still shows. The intent of the European powers was to use their military superiority to carve the agriculturally viable and mineral-valuable parts of the New World into estates, haciendas, plantations for white nobility. To that end, everywhere south of I-70, what they sent were:

• a very tiny number of white families of noble birth, or who were owed favors by royalty and elevated to nobility,
  
• a not much bigger number of white technical specialists, such as doctors and clerks, who understood that their whole reason for being there was to provide services to the nobility, and ...
  
• a substantial white army, whose job was to subjugate the natives and make them the slaves of the nobility.

This didn't work as well as they would have liked, because part of Europe's military superiority came from the fact that anywhere from 1/3rd to 9/10ths of the natives were dying off of smallpox and tuberculosis. So the surviving native slaves were supplemented in numbers by, and encouraged to interbreed with, African pagans who had been sold into slavery to the white people, mostly by African Muslims. When "decolonization" happened and these former colonies achieved their independence, basically nothing changed almost anywhere in the hemisphere. The same few white families who had been granted ownership of everyone and everything continued to own everyone and everything. The same slightly less few upper middle class white families continued to send their kids to college to be the white professionals and bureaucrats who ran those countries for the white owners of the countries, and to be the military officers who ruled over the mixed poor-white and brown/black foot soldiers who keep the brown/black poor, the descendants of the slaves, in thinly disguised slavery.

But Hispaniola, the island of which Haiti is the western half, started out special. By the time it was safe enough for the nobles to move in, there were exactly zero inhabitants left to enslave. When the native population of Hispaniola realized that they were going to lose, they fought to the death, and the last surviving women, children, and the elderly committed mass suicide rather than have their children grow up under European rule, and if I were a praying Christian, I would pray for their heroic, martyred souls every Sunday. So even before the island got divided up between the French and the Spanish, the slave caste of Hispaniola was 100% black, not the mestizo brown/black mix that most Americans think of when they think of "Hispanics."

But Haiti got even weirder, by western hemisphere standards, because it didn't get its independence from France by having its white population rebel against European rule and enlisting their slaves to fight "for freedom." No, Haiti is the only country in the western hemisphere to win its independence from Europe against the wishes of its white minority, to win its independence in a slave revolt. And that is why, unlike every other country and state south of the 40th north line of latitude, when Haiti got its independence, the entire white population of Haiti fled, taking everything they could pry loose with them. And, even more to the point, that is why it became official US policy all the way back during the Jefferson administration that Haiti must fail, a policy that has remained to this very day under every US president but two, Carter and Clinton, and under every British prime minister since then until now, and under every French president until the current administration: the world must never see, the world's poor must never see, the world's former and current slaves must never, never see a slave rebellion that works. Period.

To that end, the US and all European nations declared war on Haiti as soon as it won its independence, and stayed that war upon the promise of a terrifyingly high danegeld: the Haitian people had to pay back France the full market value of every acre of property in Haiti and the full slave market value of every Haitian citizen, or else be the victims of a threatened genocidal war by the armed, mechanized might of the white world. They paid it. It took them until 1948, it took them working their fingers to the bone every single one of them and shipping every penny they earned by exporting all but starvation-level food overseas to do it, but they bought themselves. And were poised to succeed.

And, well, we couldn't have that. What if black Americans were to see a thriving, prosperous black country, just 70 miles off the Florida coast, doing just fine without any white rulers? The result could be unthinkable levels of violence, maybe even armed revolution. So in 1957, just as Haiti was starting to recover from centuries of deprivation, the US backed the private army of would-be dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and gave him clear marching orders: he was to sink Haiti back into debt that it couldn't pay. The Duvaliers, and their successors from within his private murderous army, have consistently used weapons sent to them for free by the US government, and backed by invasion by the US Marine Corps whenever that wasn't enough and democracy threatened to break out, to force the Haitian government to take out hundreds of billions of dollars in loans in the name of the Haitian people, and give at least 80% of that money to the Duvalier family and their followers. And every time they get close to paying it off, every time it even starts to look like some day they might pay it off, the Duvalierists (still!) take out more loans, and steal that money, too. Less than 20% of that money was used to build the roads and bridges and railroads and factories and food processing plants and schools and firehouses and other infrastructure that a modern economy needs. It was, quite intentionally, nowhere near enough: the Haitian people were told, on pain of re-invasion by the US and its allies, that they could not have any of those things until they paid off the Duvaliers' loans, loans that they will never be allowed to pay off.

So when the earthquake hit, they had almost none of those things, and the few that they had were shoddily built because that was all they were allowed to spend, and they died by the tens of thousands: murdered by America's fierce determination to kill them rather than let them succeed.

Nor will they be allowed to succeed after this, if our political class, yes, including Barack Obama, are not challenged: almost all of the "aid" we're sending to Haiti is in the form of more IMF loans. And as anybody who's studied the history of the International Monetary Fund and its "emergency stabilization loan" program will tell you, those loans come with murderous strings attached: none of that money can be used to build any of the public infrastructure or train or hire any of the government workers that would be needed to raise Haiti out of desperation and anarchy. It can't be used to hire teachers to teach the Haitians to compete in a global economy. It can't be used to build roads for them to get their goods to the port, it can't be used to improve the port so that more countries can buy their exports, it can't be used to hire and supervise truly professional police or the independent oversight boards and judges it would take to make it safe for Haitians to invest in and run their own businesses, that loan money can't be used for any of the things. It can only be used to fund the expropriation of more food from Haitians' own mouths, more assets from the island if any can be found, plus every dollar of those loans, back into the hands of the American and European governments and banks that lent it in the first place.

What can you do about it, what can I do about it? Probably not much. Withdraw your consent; it's probably not enough, but it's better than nothing. Just about every year, one or more members of the US's Black Congressional Caucus introduces a Haiti debt relief bill, a bill to cancel all of Haiti's foreign debts and to require that all future aid to Haiti be in the form of grants, not loans. But since this idea is "radical" and "out of the mainstream" (that is to say, unacceptable to America's wealthy elite and to the graduates of the universities, funded by that wealthy elite, who run the country on behalf of the wealthy elite, since as Dr. Chomsky pointed out back when he was still sane, that is what the word "radical" means in politics), calling your congressman and your senator and asking them to support debt relief for Haiti probably won't do any good, not so long as our political class consists almost entirely of people who were taught oh-so-carefully that loans are better than grants.

You can argue to them that since none of the Haitian people were allowed to benefit from those loans, and since any further loans will be stolen before the benefits get to the Haitian people, that it's morally wrong to expect the Haitian people to pay them back. Maybe that argument will carry water, now that there are piles of corpses to show your congressman and your senator. But probably not. Any bills to enact this are unlikely to come to a vote in the next three weeks. And within three weeks, everybody not actively engaged in keeping the Haitian people down will have, once again, forgotten all about Haiti.

I have this minor character flaw or quirk: sometimes I make jokes while not caring if anybody in the room will get them. I make them just for me, with a faint hope of being pleasantly surprised when somebody actually does get them. (It happens. I have a fascinating and mildly disturbing story about one such incident, but that's for another time.)

Star Trek Online is in open beta. It rocks. I would have bet a large sum of money that it was impossible to make a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game feel like Star Trek, and it succeeds in spades. I will probably even go so far as to buy the one-time offered Lifetime Subscription for this one.

Which leaves me scrounging for character names for my Federation character and my Klingon Empire character. Here's where I'm at now. One of these, I will be pleasantly startled if any of you get without Google searches. The other, I figure a third to half of you will get without the Google searches. I don't care. I tell these jokes for me:

United Federation of Planets Starfleet: Sebas Tian Droste, a Deltan tactical officer, now captaining the USS Anita Berber. Once I outgrow my Centaur class light cruiser, I'm leaning towards science vessels.

Klingon Empire Defense Force: Lester Lee Ghoti, a Terran former Orion Syndicate pirate with an engineering background, now captaining the IKV Band from Argo. Once I outgrow my B'rel class Bird of Prey, I'm leaning towards Raptors.

(I can say, first hand, that it startles people when you jog through the Great Hall of Warriors on Qonos as a human in civilian clothes, no matter how scruffy and villainous you look.)

"It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error, but a single erroneous belief runs through all of the successive delusions of the past decade. With few exceptions, both left and right seem to think that history is a directional process whose end point - after many unfortunate detours - will be the worldwide duplication of people very like themselves." John Gray, "The End of a Dream," New Statesman, December 10, 2009. (h/t nytimes.com: "Idea of the Day: A Decade of Big Bad Ideas," 12/14/09)

As previously mentioned, this was yet another year that the landlord needed to wreck big parts of my apartment for major repairs. One long-standing side effect of that is that it has screwed up my bookshelf system since July. I only got around to working on it this week, and after several days of struggling with it off and on, I still have four replacement shelf pegs to cut, and then about 50' of books to re-shelve.

And you know what? If I could push one button to export my LibraryThing list over to Amazon, have them debit my account the roughly $3,000 it would cost if everything was available in digital format, and port the whole mess over to the Kindle, I'd dump the physical copies of just about everything but a couple of rares and the picture books like a hot rock.

I love books. Books were my closest friend growing up, maybe my only real friend. Reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 gave me nightmares of The Firemen breaking into my room to burn all of my books, for three nights running. And from about age 10 to about age 40, I derived significant emotional satisfaction from being able to look around at the walls and see almost all of the books that contributed to my understanding of the universe. But I am sick of having to move around hundreds of pounds of books however often. I'm tired of cleaning them and around them. And I've long since gotten to the point of resenting the several square yards of living space they steal from me.

It feels like minor blasphemy for me to say this, but while I still love writing, I've had it up to here with books.

I live in an inner-ring working-class neighborhood in north St. Louis County, Missouri, don’t drive, and thus spend enough time walking around my neighborhood that I don’t need to check a real estate website to know how many vacant houses there are in a 3 block radius of me, how many for sale signs, and how old those for sale signs are: things have turned around significantly in the last year, right where I’m at, on the residential real estate front.

There weren’t very many completely abandoned houses, to start with. All but one of those has been occupied; the last one is undergoing extensive rehab work; judging by the nature of the construction debris, they’ve redone all the walls and floors on the main floor and are putting in new gas appliances now, expensive enough that whatever speculator last bought it at auction clearly expects to get a good price for it. Last winter, there were For Sale signs in the neighborhood that had been up for anywhere from 8 months to a year and a half; now, for sale signs come back down within at most 2 months. I don’t think it’s abandoned properties being banked for “better days,” either; there are cars parked in the driveways or at the curb.

I don’t know what to make of it, because major improvement in the housing market is not showing up in the regional stats from the local Fed. And it can’t be because the local economy has “stabilized,” given that we just lost 60% of the workforce at another major employer today. So I know I can’t generalize from it to the entire St. Louis region, let alone the whole upper midwest, let alone the country. But my one neighborhood seems to be doing a lot better than the statistics would suggest, and I don’t know what that means.

I could formulate hypotheses, of course; one that jumps out at me is the possibility that inner ring suburbs like mine may be picking up as people foreclosed out of exurban McMansions look for affordable places to live. But I don’t have the means to experimentally verify any hypothesis. So all I have left is my eyes, some shoe leather and what’s left of my knees to walk around with, and an unsatisfied curiosity.

The US Department of Labor Statistics' monthly unemployment report is out, including their monthly "Employment Situation Summary." You may have seen the headline number, the U-3 "official unemployment rate," which came in at 10.2%, which is a full 3/10ths of a percent higher than economists were forecasting as recently as yesterday. The less misleading "Alternative measure of labor underutilization U-6" (available elsewhere on their website), which counts everybody who is available to work, needs a full-time job to pay their bills, and doesn't have one is now up to 17.5%, or more than one out of every six. John Williams' Shadow Government Statistics calculates that if you added in (for example) people like myself who are involuntarily retired due to disability, but who could work if there were jobs that needed us badly enough and who would rather work than draw the dole, the actual number as calculated during previous depressions and recessions, it's at 22%, or more than 1 out of every 5. And still accelerating.



So it's not terribly surprising that Congress passed a 20-week extension to unemployment benefits, passed it by wide bipartisan margins and without debate or hesitation, and the President is expected to sign it today, the same day the bill hit his desk. That makes this a good time to talk about how Unemployment Insurance works in the US ... and, more to the point, how and why it doesn't work.

If you still have a job that draws a paycheck, and you look down at the automatic deductions, you'll see that one of them is for Unemployment Insurance, and from your perspective, it works just like any other insurance plan: you pay a regular premium, and if disaster strikes, you draw a benefit that's supposed to help you recover from that disaster. In this particular case, you pay it to your state department of labor, which gets matching funds from the federal government to help keep premiums affordable, but the basic principle remains the same: it's a mandatory, but subsidized, insurance program. Costs and benefits have long been calculated based on the assumption that when one job ends, it typically takes most people less than three months to find another job. So since the government doesn't want to force you take a job in a much lower tax bracket and get stuck there for years the same day you get laid off, they pay you just enough money to keep the wolf from the door for the one to three months it should take you to find a job that pays a similar wage, a job in the same pay range.

Unfortunately, the Labor Department currently calculates the average time to find another job of any kind, let alone one in your same pay range, at 26.9 weeks, a hair over six months. Almost six million of us have been searching for 27 weeks or longer, with still no luck. Two million of us were about to pass the 79 week mark. So, for not even the first time (remember, it wasn't originally 79 months' coverage), the federal government is offering to let states extend the number of consecutive months of unemployment insurance benefits you can draw, paying for it by federal deficit spending rather than by raising unemployment insurance premiums. At this point, I think we can safely say that this is no longer any kind of an insurance program. It's a dole, plain and simple. And worse than that, it's the worst possible kind of dole: one that cripples the recipients.

You see, here's the most important thing to know about this: studies have shown over and over again that if you go past 26 weeks unemployed, you are most probably never going to find another job in your prior pay grade. However many years of education you have, no matter how many years of experience you have on your resumé, they mean nothing: you're a minimum wage clerk or a burger-flipper again or a day laborer or a telemarketer, at best. No employer will give you credit for any education or job experience if there's a six-month gap in your resumé. So how will employers respond, even if the economy recovers, to people who have a 99 week gap, that is to say a twenty three and a half month gap, in theirs?

I'm not saying that the right answer would be to cut off the benefits, replace them with nothing, and throw people (and their kids!) out into the street to starve. What I am saying is that what we're doing only postpones the inevitable. The recipients will never not be on the dole if we just keep extending the benefits. What we need to do, if we ever want them to go back to being productive taxpayers and supportive members of their families and of their communities ever again, is put them back to work.

Unsurprisingly, we are not the first generation of Americans to confront this problem. I'm going to refer you to the single flat-out absolutely best book I've read all year, Nick Taylor's American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work. At the top of the reasons that Roosevelt, and his WPA director Harry Hopkins, insisted not just on any make-work jobs but on jobs that used the same skills people already had was that they understood that some day the Great Depression was going to end, and on that day, we were going to need people who were still physically healthy from working, still in the habit of showing up for work, and just as importantly, still sharp in their skills, still current in their fields: everything that somebody who spends 99 weeks doing nothing for a living but going out a couple of times a week to fill out increasingly-pointless job applications won't be.

It's long past time to stop putting bandages on the gaping wound that's spurting the arterial blood of American worker readiness and competency and stitch up this wound in the body politic. If no employer can or will hire those people, it will have to be we, the taxpayers, who do so until private employers are ready to and can. It is long past time to stop giving out charity, to stop paying out dole, to put Americans back to work.

My first science fiction convention was Archon 5, in 1981. It was at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, Tanith Lee was the guest of honor (for all that she almost never left her room), and I turned 21 that weekend. Since that time, I haven't missed an Archon, no matter where I was in the country at the time.

I woke up Friday with what they now euphemistically call "flu-like symptoms."

So much for that 28-year streak. *shrug* No big deal, really. I hate to say this, but I increasingly question whether or not there's still any point to having science fiction conventions, any more. With a major science fiction series premiering Friday night on the ghastly-renamed SyFy channel, with two science fiction movies opening this very weekend (it has been an incredibly good year for small science fiction films) bringing the total first-release science fiction movie count, just in theaters locally to ten, with this week's release of a science fiction themed video game (Halo 3: Orbital Drop Shock Troopers) having qualified as something of a minor cultural event, with no dealer's room even at WorldCon or DragonCon being able to compete with Amazon, Ebay, and Etsy, and given that the midnight movie at the local art-house theater this weekend is John Carpenter's They Live, I'm left with two questions that I don't have good answers for. First of all, given the ratio of science fiction content at the convention to science fiction content outside the convention, is there any good reason for a science fiction fan to attend a regional science fiction convention? If you were going to answer "for the people," you've merely set up my second question: what, exactly, does it tell me about someone to know that there's some science fictional content that they enjoyed?

If I weren't sick, I would still have day-tripped on Saturday, if only for the one or two out-of-town friends I've met through science fiction fandom that I only see at Archon, and if only because the Archon Grand Masquerade costume competition is a live theater event as good as any other comparably-priced show in this man's town. I'll certainly go next year, not least of which because, with St. Louis's science fiction convention actually moving back to bleeping bleep St. Louis after way too expletive-deleted many years, it'll be a lot easier and cheaper for me to attend; it'll be asking a lot less of me, both physically and financially, to attend. (Although I admit that I rather eagerly, and dubiously, await an explanation as to where they're going to stuff the dealer's room and the costume competition in that tiny little hotel complex.)

But I find myself oddly un-heartbroken at the break of a 28-year record, given how good a reason I have not to make it.

(P.S. Don't worry about my health. I'm in otherwise excellent health, mental health issues and my knees aside. I imagine I'll feel like warmed-over excrement for the next several days, but as someone with blown knees, that will be less different from my daily life than it might be for some of you. I have enough over-the-counter meds in the house to treat the likely symptoms of any flu. I have enough food in the cabinets, and enough restaurants that deliver, that I'll hardly miss meals between now and when it gets better. Having desert camped, I know how to recognize dehydration, and know to fight it. Having read the warnings about what the few people who don't live through this year's flu have in common, I know to monitor my fever frequently if I develop one, and Medicare will cover my hospital costs if it spikes. I'll be fine. I didn't post this to elicit help or sympathy, just to apologize to the few people who see me in no other circumstances for my absence over in Collinsville this weekend.)

To be honest, I had a hard time paying attention to anything President Obama said Wednesday night after he said this, let alone taking him seriously on the subject. From near the beginning of his speech:

"There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada's -- (applause) -- where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everybody. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end employer-based systems and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.*

"I've said -- I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both these approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn't, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch."

And what I say, then, is, I believe it makes more sense once you've said that to put it off until we have an actual Democrat, or gods help us even a liberal Republican like Richard Nixon, in the White House. Someone who would actually support Medicare for All, instead of some god-awful patchwork of public-private partnerships that's going to be an even bigger handout to already malevolent and wealthy corporations than Medicare part D and TARP were.

If nothing else, I insist that this makes more sense than the President's approach because the President's approach just plain flatly will not work. Contrary to what he claims, the reason that medical expenses in the US are skyrocketing is not inefficiency and waste. Nor, contrary to what the Republicans are claiming, is it malpractice insurance; this was solved at the state level two years ago, and malpractice insurance rates are down across the board. The main reason that health care costs have skyrocketed is honest-to-gods scarcity. And that scarcity is entirely artificial. And his approach does nothing to address the artificial scarcity of doctors, or the artificial scarcity of newly (wrongly) patented drugs. And the other reason why health care costs have skyrocketed is flagrantly corrupt profiteering in both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Come back to me, either after the President has smartened up or after we get a new, smarter President with a plan that does these things:

1. It should flat-out ban private health insurance. Private health insurance companies, without exception, cost 17% more than government-run systems do. They try to gain lock-in of doctors, hospitals, and practices and thus competitive advantage through incompatible billing and other paperwork systems. They have more layers of bureaucracy than even the most bloated bureaucracy in Washington, and they pay their managers way more, dozens or hundreds of times more for the top layers. They rake off yet more to funnel to stock market speculators who provide no health care at all. And because they're stuck competing for the scarce resource of medical specialists, they don't negotiate prices at all well, getting into bidding wars with each other over the most profitable specialists, which ends up driving up costs. The supposed "competitive efficiency" that we have repeatedly been promised that was supposed to make up for all of these administrative and overhead costs just plain doesn't exist. That the insurance companies keep insisting that any kind of a public plan, even one like Obama has proposed which would receive no subsidies and be funded entirely by its competitively priced premiums, would put them out of business is all the proof we ought to need that they should be put out of business. There. There's 17% savings, right away.
   
   And unlike private insurance companies, a government that takes your premiums and then denies you the benefits you paid for is accountable in the next election. If taxpayers paid for coverage and then got cheated out of it, it'd be a national scandal. But if you pay your premiums to Aetna, Cigna, or Kaiser Permanente and they then manufacture bullcrap excuses to deny you the benefits you paid for, all you can do is cry ... and no, this bill isn't going to change that, either. It'll just make them come up with new excuses to deny coverage. And they're highly incented to do so; they're not answerable to anyone when they do, and it's the only way they can keep raking off the maximum possible amount of all of that lovely free money that President Obama proposes to require us to give them.
   
   
2. It should at least double the number of students admitted to medical and dental school, immediately. This will, within 8 years, bring doctors' salaries in the US down to where they are in the rest of the developed world, about 30% lower. There's another 30% savings, right away. Even if this was the only thing we did, it would solve the problem. People are entirely right to worry that increasing the number of people who can afford a doctor, without increasing the number of doctors, means more people will die on waiting lists to see a doctor. And if we what we have now were all of the doctors that it's possible to have, that would provide some economic justification (if not moral justification) for rationing who can and can't see a doctor. But medical schools turn away as many qualified applicants as they accept, because the AMA and the ADA have flatly opposed letting the number of doctors and dentists who graduate each year increase at the same rate that the population has increased. Solve that problem, and Republicans' entirely slanderous hypothetical "death panels" don't have to ration health care: nobody rations something if it isn't scarce.
   
   At its heart, Obama-Care is about price controls. It isn't supposed to look like price control because it's supposed to increase volume and decrease costs at the same time it (entirely unsuccessfully) attempts to control prices, but it is still a price control scheme. Price controls don't bring costs down. Eliminating scarcity, not dictating prices, is how you bring down prices, and all of the scarcity in our health care system is artificial. All of it.
   
   
3. Speaking of scarcity, patents are an entirely legal way of enforcing scarcity. And that's why the government should immediately fund comparative effectiveness research for all patented pharmaceuticals. Where the drug companies can prove that their treatments are actually more effective than the drugs that are in the public domain, they would be allowed to bill Medicare for All for them. Where they can't, those drugs should just flatly not be covered until and unless the patient has tried the public domain alternative first. To pick an especially egregious example, we could have saved an awful lot of people an awful lot of heart attacks if more arthritis sufferers had been told, as we now know, that Celebrex doesn't work any better than aspirin for 999/1000 arthritis sufferers, and we would have all saved a ton on our insurance premiums if we'd known that, too. Or leave the heart attacks out of it: the best comparative-effectiveness study out there, the gold standard, is the one that compared plain old so-cheap-they're-free diuretics to "state of the art" patented blood pressure medicines, and found out that for every single patient tested, the diuretics controlled their blood pressure better. Where the science actually shows that the patented medicines work better, we should be finding some way to make them affordable for every patient that needs them. Where the science shows that the patented medicine works worse than the public domain alternative, we should be prescribing the public domain alternative and funding it, no matter how high the patented drug's manufacturer's advertising budget is.
   
   
4. And speaking of patents, while we're at it, reform patent law. The metabolites of a drug with an expired patent are not a new invention. Adding time-release coating to a drug with an expired patent is not a new invention. Adding an extraneous ion or two to the end of the molecule that doesn't actually interact with the targeted cells, just to change the brand name, is not a new invention. Patent law requires that an invention be non-obvious before it qualifies for a patent; on all of the above, the courts have just plain gotten the law wrong. It's long past time for Congress to clarify the law.

That? That would be health reform. It would extend life and health for all Americans, and it would do it at a cost of 25% to maybe even 60% or 70% less than we're spending now. And it would do it without forcing people to just hand the insurance companies however much they ask for, and leaving the taxpayers on the hook for the "tax credits" to cover the difference between what Washington lobbyists decide you could afford to spend and what the insurance companies conspire to charge -- something that, not incidentally, candidate Obama and Senator Obama promised to oppose, that now President Obama boneheadedly supports.

As I said to someone else this morning, Democratic primary voters turned down John Edwards because he was too combative, too uncompromising, and too liberal. So instead we ended up with Barack Obama, who won't fight for anything worth fighting for, compromised away single payer before the negotiations even began, and has consistently been, on economic and health care issues, perceptibly to the right of Richard Nixon. I'm with Howard Dean, who said weeks ago on Rachel Maddow's show:

"It‘s just about—it‘s about money. It‘s about money, because when you have 72 percent of the American people thinking that they should have the choice instead of Congress, this is about money. And the insurance industry gives out of a lot of money. And, you know, this is going to be a hell of an issue in 2010 because—you know, honestly, what‘s the point of having a 60-vote majority in the United States Senate if you can‘t produce health insurance reform out of it? I don‘t—or excuse me, health care reform. You can get health insurance reform.

"This bill is going to cost a lot of money and isn‘t going to do anything if this compromise, this so-called compromise is true. This compromise does nothing except it will reform insurance. That‘s a good thing to do, but they ought to strip the money out of it because we reformed insurance like this in Vermont 15 years ago. It‘s a fine thing to do, but it doesn‘t insure more people. It‘s not worthless because it makes it fair, but it‘s not health care reform, and nobody should pretend that it is."

But then, I'd think so, wouldn't I? I voted for Dean in the primaries. And I'd do it again. I'd trust Howard Dean with health care reform; unlike Barack Obama, Howard Dean knows what he's talking about and his heart and his head are in the right place. Give me Howard Dean in the White House, or somebody else more like him than they are like Barack Obama, and then I'll be ready to talk about health care reform.

---

* Footnote: Straw man argument. And not for the first time. They let you graduate from Harvard Law, arguing like that?

I hope that those of you who care about the economy have been following my advice from long ago to read Simon Johnson's and James Kwak's blog (with Peter Boone), "The Baseline Scenario." But there's a point that's come up in their blog a couple of times in one form or another, and Simon Johnson said it succinctly in an online Q&A on the Washington Post website today:

"This is the key issue. Spotting bubbles is very hard - one person says 'bubble' and another says 'new fundamentals are emerging' ...."

See that? That right there? That's number one. That is how you spot bubbles.

The single most reliable way to predict a bubble is when the business press, passing along what mainstream economists are telling them, say that the reason you can believe that we're not in a bubble is that "new fundamentals are emerging," or in other words, "the old rules don't apply any more because (fill in the blank)." Any time you hear that, dump the investment. And any time you hear that, Congress and the Executive Branch need to take emergency fast action to, in the vernacular of finance, "take away the punch bowl at the party."

For one thing, it's never true. The fundamentals of economics haven't changed in 300 or 400 years; no weird new equation or minor change in technology or shift in consumer preferences is going to revise either human nature or basic natural laws. Period.

Secondly, it's one of those things that only ever shows up on page 1 of the Business section of the paper, let alone on the front page, when everybody (including journalists) wants it to be true and there are critics pointing out that what's happening now, whatever it is, violates important laws of finance and can't be sustained. Why would journalists side with the finance industry over impartial observers on the subject of the finance industry? Contrary to what you may have heard, it's not because business-page reporters are being bribed, either with meals or gifts or stock tips or even "access," to say what the finance industry wants; reporters are perfectly willing to pile on when the prevailing wisdom changes. No, reporters report what they do, during a bubble, because "everybody knows" that the finance guys are right and the "pessimists" (read "realists") are wrong, and reporters don't create common wisdom, they ratify it.

But that at that point, reporters have bought into the assumptions underlying the sales pitch for fraudulently inflated products is a symptom of the third reason you can know that when somebody says "new fundamentals are emerging" and they get believed instead of mocked, and it's this: all bubbles are, in effect, pyramid schemes. And all pyramid schemes collapse for the same reason: they run out of suckers. And if the people selling the fraudulently inflated products have gone so far down the economic ladder as to be selling them to newspaper reporters, who are famously not wealthy people, then you know that we're running low on suckers. The only place left to go after them are working-class black Americans and poor rural whites, which is why every 20 years or so since 1870 it's been them left holding the bag when the bubbles collapse.

My high school economics teacher told me a story that I haven't been able to source, but it goes like this: future founding SEC chairman and former gangster Joseph P. Kennedy was one of a tiny handful of investors who dumped all their stocks just hours before the stock market collapse that began the Great Depression, and that aroused entirely plausible suspicion that they somehow had insider knowledge that the market was going to tank. When he was asked how he knew to dump stocks, here's what I'm told he said: on his way into the stock exchange that morning, he'd stopped to get a shoe shine, and the bootblack tried to offer him a "hot stock tip." As he was walking away, he said, it occurred to him that if even street urchins think that they have "hot stock tips," then there are too many fools in the market, and it's about to collapse. As I say, I haven't been able to source the story since then, but even if it's not literally true of J.P. Kennedy, the insight is relevant, and it's because of the other 100% reliable way to spot a bubble that's close to bursting: when the "Greater Fool Theory" catches on all over again.

I've mentioned before that modern economics allegedly begins with the realization that nothing has an innate, "real," absolute value, that "the value of a thing is the price it will bring." But even economists who claim to believe that dearly love their mathematical models that offer various frequently-reliable, long-term-proven ways of calculating the reasonable price of anything. Those models don't all agree, but they often cluster. No item can be "really worth" more than the ultimate customer of it can afford to pay, for example, and no investment can "really be worth" more than the rate of inflation plus a premium based on how risky it is; rules like these are centuries old and never wrong. So early in any bubble, the people who crunch these numbers will point out that the prices that are being paid for whatever the bubble is in are inconsistent with these models, with what they call "the fundamentals." Now, here's the part to pay attention to: when finance guys are asked why the fundamentals are out of whack (because nobody will ever ask them why the prices are out of whack), listen for the moment when the majority of them, and especially the most popular of them, start saying that it doesn't matter what the investment or the item is "really worth" if there will be someone willing to pay even more 3 months from now when you're ready to sell. That argument should always set off alarm bells in your head; the more often you hear it, the more desperate you should be to be out of that market. Because they're admitting that you are a fool to buy it at that price, but reassuring you that 3 months from now there will be an even greater fool willing overpay by even more than you overpaid, and that never works very long.

What Ben Bernanke wants is a simple, quantifiable, mathematical rule that says when the some line on a graph that measures some unambiguous, easily defined number that can be read from the marketplace crosses some hard-and-fast threshold on the graph, that's when we're in a bubble; then and only then should financial regulators demand greater collateral and higher cash reserves, then and only then should the Fed think about cutting off cheap credit. Having defined the problem in this way, he gets away with saying that "nobody can predict" if they're in a bubble or not. And other economists, even economists who don't even like him like Simon Johnson, let him get away with this because they're in the same line of work that he's from, economics, and that's how they want regulation and legislation to work.

But it's not the lack of a mathematical rule that makes stopping fraudulent investment bubbles difficult, it's the lack of political will, and even more so, the lack of popular will. Remember, in December of 1996, even laissez fair Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan correctly identified the bubble in Internet technology stocks, most of which did, in fact, turn out to be one form or another of fraud, by noting that "irrational exuberance" in the pricing of those companies' stocks (meaning a total disconnect from any plausible estimate of their worth) was beginning to take over. He could have cracked down then; he had the legal authority and the official responsibility to do so. Why didn't he? Because as soon as he said that the stock market tanked, hard, and millions of people who were invested in the market called their congressmen and demanded Greenspan's head on a pike, and he was forced to back down and apologize and "clarify his remarks" the very next day. See, here's the thing. Once people start making "guaranteed" returns on investment that are greater than the inflation rate, the last thing they want to hear is that what they're doing is participating in a form of the long Con. They believe that earning return on investment above the inflation rate at no risk is their God-given constitutional right as American investors, no matter how impossible that actually is, and they will always scream bloody murder when anyone "infringes" on that "right," even after the nay-sayers were proven right the last time.

And, well, this is a democracy. People who are deeply invested in a fraudulent investment bubble get to vote, too. If one isn't stopped before it reaches half or more of the voters, half or more of the voters will always and consistently demand that they get given their punchbowl back, demand that the party go on. All you can do, when you see that happening, I guess, is to get out before the inevitable crash.

Unless, of course, we start demanding that our Fed Chairmen be people who know to stop that kind of thing long, long before it gets popular. But where on Earth would we find one of those, let alone an uninterrupted string of them?

All families are weird in their own ways, but my parents were weird in a perhaps more uncommon way than most: neither of them was, in any meaningful way, parented. The Man of Concrete's parents were alcoholic brawlers who spent most of his childhood in jail; he and his sister fell through the cracks and he, at the age of 8, had to become the parent of his 10 year old sister. Even younger than that, Mom's parents sold her into a life of domestic slavery and (I strongly suspect) sexual abuse. I mention this not to elicit sympathy or disgust, but to elicit curiosity about one fact: this means they came to parenting about as close to tabula rasa as it is possible to come. Parenting was entirely theoretical to them, something they'd heard about from other people, something they'd seen in movies, something they'd read about in books, but not something that either of them had experienced themselves. And so they made some ... interesting ... decisions about how they would parent their children, decisions that gave relatively-crazy me and my relatively-sane sister both interesting advantages that almost nobody else has, and also interesting disadvantages that almost nobody else can identify with.

For now, though, I want to concentrate on one of the advantages. (Or, well, at least I consider it an advantage.) It came up in conversation the other night when I finally got a chance to show phierma and cos_x most of one of my favorite documentaries of all time, Mark Achbar's and Jennifer Abbott's 2003 The Corporation. And when we got to chapter (PDF) 11, "Basic Training," on the subject of the use of child psychologists as consultants to the advertising industry, specifically about training children to nag their parents into buying things that the parents don't want to buy, that I turned to cos_x, the only person in the room who had actually raised children that age. And in the course of that conversation, I was very vividly reminded of just how special The Man of Concrete really was, because I have yet to meet anybody else who was parented in the same way on this exact issue.

You see, it started with one flatly simple rule: there was only one 100% certain and reliable way for either my sister or myself to flatly guarantee that we would not get something, and that was to ask for it more than once. Period. And Dad made very nearly absolutely 100% certain that there were to be no exceptions to this. We were raised from a very early age to understand that we were going to be held to a higher standard than inferior people were. We were told that there are people who nag other people into giving them their way -- bad people. Inferior people. People too stupid to win their argument any other way. People not like me and my sister. And, we were told, there are people who give in when they're nagged, who give people what they want against their will, coerced by the nagging -- bad people. Inferior people. People too stupid to insist that an argument be rational instead of merely repeated, people too weak willed to stand up for themselves, people so averse to pain that they'd set themselves up for future blackmail-by-nagging by setting a bad precedent, by giving in. People not like our parents.

Twice, exactly twice, per year we were allowed to ask for things: we were allowed to ask for one reasonably-priced item for our birthdays, and we were allowed to ask for a list of a certain number of things (I forget how many) plus a short list of alternates or fall-back choices for Christmas. We were asked what we wanted for our birthdays about a month out. We were asked what we wanted for Christmas when the Sears "Wish Book" Christmas toy-advertising circular came out. Any other time? We learned, and learned the hard way, that it wasn't even smart to ask for something once, let alone twice. My parents were quite generous people (considering the gaping top-secret hole in the budget they had), and not just to my sister and to me but to everybody in their lives. But you never, ever got what you nagged for, and were pretty unlikely to get things you just asked for if they thought that you were trying to emotionally manipulate them into buying it.

Instead, we were given an allowance, a moderately generous allowance by the standard of the working-class neighborhood we lived in, and told that that was the family's maximum possible affordable budget for indulgences for each of us: all of our toys except birthday and Christmas toys, all of our candy except Christmas candy, had to come out of that money. We could spend it however we wanted, but we both learned, very early (I want to say no later than age 5) and very thoroughly, that when it was gone, there just plain was no more.

(In later years, that rule very slightly relaxed, but only slightly: we were allowed to borrow against future allowances. But only under very narrow circumstances: we had to demonstrate, with documentation, that we needed the money now because what we wanted to buy was only going to be available for a limited time or because the price was going to go up between now and when we could save up the money. And until we'd paid off those loans, there just plain was no allowance. The only way we could get money above what was budgeted for allowance was by doing very specific chores, and the only chores that counted towards that were chores that my parents were going to have to pay someone else to do. Failing that, it was up to us to do chores for any other family who was willing to pay us. To get more money that was budgeted to us, we had to either save the family money or we had to bring money in from outside the family. Period. No exceptions. Not for any reason. Not at any age.)

I also remember quite clearly that the first time my sister or I bought something based on a TV ad and it sucked, it was treated as a teachable moment. The first time I complained that the toy I bought wasn't nearly as cool as the TV made it look, a Very Big Deal was made out of it, both parents involved, to make 100% sure that this stayed memorable to me, and it still is 40+ years later. They both wanted me to see, and understand, and remember, two very important things. First of all, they wanted me to understand what personal failing, what personal sin I had committed: I had let the TV nag me into buying it. They reminded me just how many times I'd seen that commercial before I bought the toy, how I hadn't bought the toy just because I saw it and thought it was cool, but because somebody else had yelled and played manipulative emotional tricks on me until my resistance was worn down. I was told not to feel too bad for falling for it this once, since I was only a kid and some lessons you have to learn the hard way, but to always remember from now on: this is what happens when you let someone nag you into doing something, you always regret giving in.

And secondly, and just as importantly, they made me repeat back the implied and explicit claims that the commercials had made for this particular toy, what the commercial had lead me to believe that the toy would do for me. And then they asked me, in minute and extensive detail, claim by claim, whether or not the toy had delivered on its promises. I remember becoming very emotionally agitated, I remember really intense cognitive dissonance, I remember really wanting to blame myself for obviously having remembered the TV commercial wrong, and then I finally broke through: "you mean they lied to me?" Yes, Brad, both of them said, in a voice that brooked no contradiction and in a tone that made it clear that what they were telling me was very, very important for me to remember: people who are trying to sell you things will lie to you. I remember asking them, "How can they get away with that? I get in trouble when I get caught telling a lie! Why don't they?" Four decades later, after two and a half decades of studying business law, consumer protection law, and free speech law, I still think that that's an interesting question. But the sense of personal betrayal was intense and lasting.

I learned, over the decades since then, that if you ask a salesman, in any venue, "does your product do (fill in the blank)?" he or she answers the question 100% truthfully -- but not the question you asked. The question they hear is, "do you want me to buy your product?" and the answer to that question is always yes. It's just like when you catch a child with their hand in the cookie jar and ask them, with the crumbs still on their fingers, if they stole a cookie. They always answer truthfully the question that they hear: "do you want to be punished?"

These were emotionally painful lessons. When my sister got old enough to get her own allowance and I saw her falling for TV commercials, I tried to spare her this pain. But no, my parents were right: you can't be told these things. You have to learn them yourself. But once I had that taste of it, Dad also regularly went way out of his way to remind me that (in particular) there are no good deals that are advertised on television. Television advertising is expensive. That cost gets built into the product's price tag. Which absolutely guarantees that somewhere out there, and your friends will probably tell you where if you ask, and if not, it's up to you to do the research and find it: somewhere out there is someone who sells a product that's just as good, and it costs half as much, because they're not spending untold millions of dollars per year on TV advertising. Only inferior people let themselves get nagged and otherwise fooled into paying twice as much for the same product.

(He also unambiguously felt the same way about enclosed shopping malls, pointing out quite accurately that mall rent is twice what strip-mall rent or free-standing store rent is, and you pay the difference there, too. I've run into rare exceptions to this, chains where the national headquarters sets the same price for both free-standing stores and mall stores, but it was still a good rule of thumb.)

He especially wanted me to understand, and reminded me often, that there are never any good investment deals on television. Any time I brought one up, whether some mutual fund or brokerage, or some franchise deal, or whatever, Dad would invariably ask two questions. "First of all, Brad, why would they tell you? They don't know you. They don't care if you make any money or not. If they knew of a good deal, they'd tell their friends; they sure as heck wouldn't tell you. And secondly, Brad, if it's such a smart thing to invest money in? Why are they investing their own money in TV ads instead of in that?"

I've had it explained to me, in painstaking detail by several people who care about me, that the anti-nagging indoctrination my sister and I received as children is so weird that it produces behavior in us that no corporation or its employees know how to deal with, behavior that strikes them as anti-social, defiant, self-harming, and counter-productive. And it probably does. But I'll say this: it also made us both very hard to cheat or to rob. I think this'd be a much better world if more people had grown up with parents as relentlessly and ruthlessly anti-nagging as the Man of Concrete and his wife were, and I constantly feel sorry for people who fall for scam after scam because their parents didn't teach them the real, important, facts of life.

Happy birthday, felax!

Did you know that if you stick an electrode into the pleasure center in a rat's brain, and then give it a lever to activate that electrode, that's all it will do, without food or water, until it dies?

Of course you knew that. Everybody knows that, because the scientific finding goes back to 1954, and it's been a staple of science fiction, a cliché since almost immediately thereafter. Larry Niven gave it a name, back in the 1970s, and Spider Robinson popularized it: wireheading, addicting yourself to electrical current by stimulating your pleasure center. So of course you've heard of it, same as I had.

And we were wrong. As Emily Yoffe documented in an article for Slate.com yesterday ("Seeking," 8/12/09), later researchers doing the same experiment, both on rats and on humans, noticed that neither the rats nor the humans were showing any signs of actually enjoying pushing the button. It wasn't their pleasure center that was being activated, after all, it turns out. It was their curiosity center, inducing a compulsive need to keep finding out, each new time, what was going to happen after they pushed the button! And because it was electrically stimulated curiosity, not natural curiosity, it couldn't be sated by actually finding out what was going to happen when they pushed the button again; they had to keep doing it again and again and again, because who knows? Maybe next time it will do something different. In humans, it goes on until you take away the button. In rats, it keeps going until the rat starves to death, because hey, if the rat stops now to go get a bite to eat, it may never find out what would have happened if it had pushed the button one more time.

To borrow one metaphor from Yoffe's article, and to add a few of my own, have we found the entire explanation for why a cat would rather chase a laser pointer's dot around the room than actually catch it? for slot machines and three-card monte? for Wikipedia and TV Tropes?

I can't breathe. OK, I can breathe, but not well, and I may tear up from the pain any minute now.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a three-part series of editorials on NYTimes.com right now: June 13th's "Too Poor to Make the News," July 11th's "A Homespun Safety Net," and August 8th's "Is It Now a Crime to be Poor?" Hat tip to king_felix for the link to the 3rd one, but it's the second one that hit me hard, near the end:

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I’ve never encountered the kind of “culture of poverty” imagined by the framers of welfare reform, but there is a tradition among the American working class of mutual aid, no questions asked. My father, a former miner, advised me as a child that if I ever needed money to “go to a poor man.” He liked to tell the story of my great-grandfather, John Howes, who worked in the mines long enough to accumulate a small sum with which to purchase a plot of farmland. But as he was driving out of Butte, Mont., in a horse-drawn wagon, he picked up an Indian woman and her child, and their hard-luck story moved him to give her all his money, turn his horse around and go back to the darkness and danger of the mines.

In her classic study of an African-American community in the late ’60s, the anthropologist Carol Stack found rich networks of reciprocal giving and support, and when I worked at low-wage jobs in the 1990s, I was amazed by the generosity of my co-workers, who offered me food, help with my work and even once a place to stay. Such informal networks — and random acts of kindness — put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame. ...

At least one influential theory of poverty contends that the poor are too mutually dependent, and that this is one of their problems. This perspective is outlined in the book “Bridges Out of Poverty,” co-written by Ruby K. Payne, a motivational speaker who regularly addresses school teachers, social service workers and members of low-income communities. She argues that the poor need to abandon their dysfunctional culture and emulate the more goal-oriented middle class. Getting out of poverty, according to Ms. Payne, is much like overcoming drug addiction, and often requires cutting off contact with those who choose to remain behind: “In order to move from poverty to middle class ... an individual must give up relationships for achievement (at least for some period of time).” The message from the affluent to the down-and-out: Neither we nor the government is going to do much to help you — and you better not help one another either. It’s every man (or woman or child) for himself.

---

And suddenly I couldn't breathe, because of a flashback to Ronald Reagan's first term, when I first realized that life in Britain and here in America had become a survival horror cliché, when I first began using the metaphor of "human sacrifice" to describe what we, as English-speaking people, have become, and it is this:

Take a good look at your family members and the people in your neighborhood. A third to half of them are dead. And that's if you're from a middle class or upper-middle class neighborhood; if you're from a working class neighborhood, call it three quarters, if you're from a poor neighborhood, 90%. Write them off. Let the dead bury their dead. You must escape, and claw your way into a good job. Once you get into that good job, take a good look around you: one third of your fellow life-boat members are dead. They will be gone, cast over the side, within a year or two. Write them off. Let the dead bury their dead.

If you are to both succeed and to live with yourself, you must, must, must learn to never grieve. You must, must, must convince yourself that if you succeeded, and anybody else didn't, that there was nothing you could possibly have done to save them. You must also convince yourself that it was because of your innate superiority and your superior hard work that you succeeded and they didn't; if you can't find evidence that you were superior to them, that they had flaws that you don't, that you worked harder for it than they did, make that evidence up ... and then, having settled the matter, forget that they ever existed. You are the saved, in Heaven; the damned are your former co-workers and partners and friends and loved ones and family, in Hell; Heaven can never be Heaven so long as you remember that you ever liked or loved them.

And if you fail, either fail to make the cut or fail to destroy any last shred of the empathy or compassion that is your birthright as a vertebrate, let alone as a human being, do not fear for the comfort or happiness of those who succeed. They, too, have learned to blame, learned to claim credit, learned to feel no compassion. They, like you, have learned well: they will not grieve.

Frank Schaeffer, Jr., on the Rachel Maddow Show ("Nazism is Not a Metaphor," 8/7/09):

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"What's really being said here is two messages. There's the message to the predominantly white middle-aged crowds of people screaming at these meetings, trying to shut them down, but there's also a coded message to what I would call the loony toons, the fruit loops on the side that's really like playing Russian Roulette. You put a cartridge in the chamber, you spin, and once in a while it goes off. And we saw that happen with Dr. Tiller. We've seen that happen numerous times in this country with the violence against political leaders, whether it's Martin Luther King or whoever it might be. We have a history of being a well-armed, violent country. And so, really, I think that these calls are incredibly irresponsible. ...

"When you start comparing a democratically elected President who is not only our first black President but a moderate progressive to Adolph Hitler, you have arrived at a point where you are literally leaving a loaded gun on the table and saying, 'The first person who wants to use this, go ahead, be our guest.'

"Now, all these people, when something bad happens, will raise their holy hands in horror and say, 'Of course we didn't mean that. We were just talking about being American. It's American to protest.' B.S. They know exactly what's out there. There is a whole public out there that went out and stocked up on ammunition and guns, thinking Obama would take away their weapons. One such person shot down three policemen in Pittsburgh. I'd like to know exactly what Glen Beck, and Fox News, will say the morning after someone takes a shot at our President, or kills a senator or congressman. And if it's one of the people who, we find a little note in their car or the literature or their television watching habits who's tied to these people who are stirring the pot, or tied to these foundations that people like Dick Armey are running and trying to use insurance company money to make these fake grass roots movements, then we'll see what happens. But at that point, we'll be in a new zone, and it'll be too late.

"So my warning to my old friends on the right, and those who read my book Crazy for God know that without the work of my father and C. Everett Koop and myself there would have been no Pro-Life Movement, no Religious Right to be fomenting these things from, it's the same cast of characters: I came to a place in my life where I realized that I'd made a big mistake. Now we've crossed a line where hate and vitriol have gone to a place that is anti-democratic and anti-American. ... We've arrived at a point where enough is enough.

"So these people are hate-mongers, and they are distributing a kind of information on two levels: one, the lies about the health care system requiring euthanasia and all this nonsense, and on another level, as I say, leaving a loaded gun on the table, they're calling our President 'Hitler,' they're spreading this rhetoric, they're spreading these lies. It isn't just a question of being bad journalists any more. These are bad Americans, and they are putting all of us at risk."

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I'd embed the video of this segment, but LiveJournal doesn't seem to support embedding MSNBC clips. Please, go to rachel.msnbc.com and watch the rest of Rachel's show from last Friday night, if you didn't already (and why not?) and if you can (please!) spare the 45 minutes or so.

I'm delighted that the mainstream media have made a point of repeatedly telling us that the L.A. Fitness Club mass murderer, George Sodini, was motivated by his hatred of women over the fact that he hadn't gotten laid since the Reagan administration. Okay.

I'm less thrilled that I had to find out from Joan Walsh over at Salon.com, days later, what all of the newspapers knew, from looking at his blog, but decided not to tell us. Once she gave me the old (now taken down) URL, it was easy enough to pull it up out of the Google cache, and you can see it for yourself.

1. First of all, he was laid off back in May, apparently. I'm not surprised; it was the first prediction I made. As in the movie Falling Down, most of the time you can trace the triggering event behind a mass murder or a spree killing to one of two things: a divorce with a nasty child custody battle, or a lay-off. I'm not saying the media should have made a big deal out of this, and I'm not saying that his employer is responsible for the slaughter. And I hope it's obvious that I'm not saying that unemployed men are justified in venting their anger on women, only that the public needs to be warned that some of them, probably quite a few of them, do. With the monthly unemployment numbers coming out in a few hours, we could use a reminder that spiraling unemployment has a human cost, too, in the rising number of angry people who feel that they have no prospect in life, who feel that they have nothing left to lose, who feel that they might as well take someone else down with them.
   
   Economists both progressive and libertarian are, as far as I can see, uniformly predicting a long "jobless recovery," with the real unemployment rate hovering at or just below 25% for years now. People could stand an early warning that this means that we are all in danger of violence from those who aren't surviving. There are not enough cops in this country to protect us, especially to protect women, from the level of chronic slaughter that we'll see for as long as the (pointless, useless, politicized for the last several decades) official unemployment rate is above 6%. For many reasons, but not least of which to stop the slaughter, we have got to put Americans back to work.
   
   
2. More importantly, I'm actively angry that not one mainstream news outlet thought it was relevant to point out that Sodini started thinking about doing this at the peak of the 2008 election season, and began formally planning it on November 5th, and that the first reason given for why he intended to murder a large number of white women women was for race treason: because, like President Obama's mother, they were too busy having sex with black men to be available to white men like him.

I have long since lost track of how many right-wing, racist and/or anti-abortion, terrorist attacks we've had since the election. The newspapers and the network TV anchors are not doing us a favor by trying to hide this fact from the public; I know it's upwards of a dozen, not even counting the two Democratic congressmen who've gotten death threats in the last couple of days. I've said it before and I'll probably have occasion to say it again and again: "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" (PDF) is turning out to be the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" of 2009.

As usual, I've waited a nice, long time to see if any additional facts came out after the arrest of (and consequent dismissal of charges against) Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and to see what other people, supposedly wiser than me, had to say about it. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering if anybody, anybody in journalism, in the blogosphere, in academia, or in politics is capable of actually thinking, because an amazing amount remains unsaid. And since most people have failed to notice some of the most important details, if they were ever told them at all, and most of the people who have seen all of the details failed to think clearly about what most of them meant, it should hardly count as surprising that virtually everybody is full of crap on this subject ... except, ironically, the one man who's drawn the most grief over the incident, President Barack Obama, who got this one thing mostly right.

As with all disputed incidents, the place to start is with the facts that are not in dispute. Here are the facts that neither Dr. Gates, nor the neighbor who called the police on him, Lucia Whalen, nor the arresting officer, Sergeant James Crowley disagree on. Upon returning to Cambridge, Dr. Gates was driven home by car service; the driver was also black. Dr. Gates couldn't get the key to work on his front door, so he and the driver entered by the back door, and forced the front door open from the inside. Whalen, seeing two black men enter the house after failing to open the front door, called 911; while Dr. Gates was on the phone, Sgt. Crowley pulled up and asked him -- not ordered him, asked him -- to step outside. Dr. Gates declined, found out that Crowley considered him to be a burglary suspect, and angrily went to get his ID. Gates says that he gave Crowley both his Harvard ID, which contains a photograph plus his name and title, plus his Massachusetts driver's license; Crowley says that Gates gave him only the Harvard ID first and said, "don't you know who I am?," then had to be asked for his driver's license. Both agree that Gates then got really angry. Both then agree that Dr. Gates asked the sergeant for his name and badge number, as (neither disputes) is his right under Massachusetts law. Dr. Gates says the officer refused and walked away; Sgt. Crowley says that he gave the officer his name and number and Gates wasn't listening. The officer alleges that among the things Dr. Gates yelled was something about "your momma" and that Dr. Gates was behaving threateningly. The officer further alleges that Gates, who had by then followed the officer out onto the porch, was in danger of inciting a riot (the standard for charging someone with disorderly conduct under Massachusetts case law) among the bystanders, who consisted of the officer, his backup, the neighbor who called 911, and one other neighbor who was standing on the other side of the street with a cellphone camera. Because he allegedly believed that the 2 witnesses were about to riot, Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct.

I'm sorry, but the president got this one right the first time: Sergeant Crowley, however sterling his record to date, handled this one stupidly. President Obama won't go as far as to say that James Crowley is an idiot, but I will: Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley is an idiot, proven so by his own admissions.

Let's give Crowley the benefit of the doubt about part of this, just once, as a thought exercise. Let's suppose, even though he clearly isn't telling the truth about the disorderly conduct charge, and even though nobody has ever heard Dr. Gates say "your momma" in anger to anyone, let's imagine that he might have been telling the truth when he alleges that Gates, at least at first, only handed him his Harvard ID and asked, "Do you know who I am?" This is not a stupid question from a prima donna, this is an entirely legitimate question, because Henry Louis Gates isn't just any random black homeowner. He's a black homeowner who has lived in the neighborhood that Sgt. Crowley patrols for 18 years. But he isn't just any 18-year homeowner, he's an 18-year homeowner who has been a department chief at Cambridge's single most important employer for that whole 18 years. And he isn't just any senior management employee at the towns's single most important employer, he's Henry Louis Gates: MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellow, author or co-author of thirteen books and star, writer, and/or producer of eleven documentaries or documentary series for multiple networks, award-winning and heavily advertised on TV. I'm extraordinarily bad at recognizing faces, and I'm pretty sure I would have recognized Henry Louis Gates, ads for his specials have been on my TV almost as often as Billy Mays was.

But even if we give the officer some tiny shred of remaining benefit of the doubt, let's assume that he didn't trust himself to identify Dr. Gates, or even that he watches so little television and reads so little news that he had never heard of him. Once Gates gave him that Harvard ID card, Sergeant Crowley could now see with his own eyes that the man he was questioning was Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He then asked him for proof that he lived at this address? He was continuing to accuse a 59 year old cripple with multiple Ph.D.s of maybe having broken into somebody else's house to burgle it? Do a lot of wealthy elderly crippled Ph.D.s engage in daylight home-invasion burglaries in Cambridge, and I just don't know about it? Is this something the officer had any plausible excuse to be thinking? No? Then he's an idiot.

Damn straight Gates was angry. It didn't even happen to me, and I'm still angry about it. Oh, and trivia that I didn't know: Gates has especial reasons to be angry when this happens to him, it's happened before. The reason he left Duke University to move north, 18 years ago, was that in the deep south he ran into constant, repeated problems with white people who just flatly refused to believe that a black man owned a house as nice as the one he was living in, and he got sick of it. So here it is 18 years later, and a black man is President of the United States, and he's being called a possible burglar, despite his age, appearance, and almost two decades in the community? What is he supposed to think that the cop is thinking?

No, I know what the cop was thinking. He asked for that proof of address before he thought about what he was saying. But he couldn't bring himself to apologize, because to a certain kind of cop, ever apologizing for anything is "showing weakness." Many cops live in mortal terror of "showing weakness," since potential perps* civilians outnumber cops about 450 to 1, so they think the only way they can be safe is if every potential perp civilian lives in fear of all cops at all times, defers to all cops at all times on all issues even when the cop is clearly wrong. So Dr. Gates asked for his name and badge number. That was a threat, and the cop knew it: a threat to file a complaint, and probably file a federal lawsuit alleging infringement of civil rights. It's a threat I never make, anymore; I learned at a tender age that it escalates the tension, puts the cop on notice that he needs to start destroying evidence now, and is entirely pointless since you can get that same information from the dispatcher, even if you have to subpoena it to do so -- but it is a threat that Dr. Gates was both legally and morally in the right to make. Cops don't like being threatened, even when they're in the wrong and the other person has every legal right to threaten them. So he tried to put that complaining potential perp civilian in his place by cuffing him and dragging him down to the station, and then falsified a police statement to cover himself.

So even if he's not a racist, he clearly is a bully and an idiot.

If he goes ahead and follows through on that supposedly-accepted invitation he got from the President of the United States to sit down, over beers, with Dr. Gates and let the President mediate this between them? Something that probably isn't the President's job, but Dr. Gates is a long-time personal friend of his? And Crowley wants any chance of getting to keep his job, let alone his pension in a false arrest and civil rights infringement lawsuit that Dr. Gates is entirely within his rights to file? The first words out of his mouth need to be something on the close order of, "I was wrong. I screwed up. What I did was stupid. I won't do it again. Please forgive me." And if he's not man enough to say that, he's a disgrace to his uniform and his badge and his oath, no matter what his career record says.

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* Footnote: I heard it once said that within a year on the job, every cop learns to divide the world into three categories: cops, perpetrators, and potential perpetrators. And that within five years on the job, most cops drop the 3rd category.

There's one criticism that nobody from either party is making of the Obama/Pelosi health care plan, not the Republicans, and not the Blue Dog corporate Democrats, either, and it would, ironically, be a fair complaint. You see a teensy little hint of it in the oft-heard argument about whether or not there's anything in the plan that would actually reduce costs. That's important, because if we increase the customer base by increasing eligibility, but we don't reduce the cost, then the total cost of healthcare just plain has to go up. Period. But so far, that argument has taken the form of arguing about whether or not preventative medicine saves lifetime costs (and contrary to what Obama and Pelosi would have you believe, experiments in this area have not been conclusive), arguing about just how many dollars can be saved by upgrading and standardizing billing and patient records systems. What's missing from that argument is the single most obvious question: why does it cost so much in the first place?

And, frankly, if there weren't a massive political taboo about answering that question, if the answer to that question weren't deeply Forbidden Lore and completely off-limits in polite company, the answer would be quite obvious, because it's the same answer as every other time you ask the question about why any other fill-in-the-blank is so expensive: demand is high, supply is low. Well, then, you ask whenever demand is high and supply is low, why is the supply so low? Here's what nobody, from either political party, has the guts to say to you: because the dominant cost in the health care industry is set by two of the most untouchable, politically powerful price-fixing cartels, the two most corrupt unions in the entire country: the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association. Even the similarly collusive and equally greedy price-fixing cartel that is made up of the tiny number of CEOs of pharmaceutical companies lives in awe of the clout, and the brazenness, of the AMA and the ADA.

Here is what nobody has the guts to tell you, for fear of what would happen to them if they did. Back in the 1970s, the ADA and the AMA decided that there was something morally wrong about having doctors and dentists earn a middle class salary. And, they concluded quite rightly, there was a reason why attempts to price-fix the salaries of doctors and dentists weren't working: there were just too many doctors, and far too many dentists. The barriers to entry to the field were too low. So what they did about it was adopt a political position of absolute and total opposition to any expansion of medical schools or dental schools. In 1970, the US population was 203 million. Now, the US population is 309 million, slightly more than 1.5 times as high ... but thanks to the unceasing efforts of the ADA and the AMA, we graduate the same number of doctors and dentists per year that we did back in 1970.

They say that if they didn't restrict the number of classroom openings in medical school, too many unqualified people would become doctors. But the number of medical scandals hasn't declined as admissions standards have climbed, as medical schools mobbed with 50% more applicants per seat than they had in 1970 get to be more picky. No, on the contrary, even with the tougher admissions standards we have today, you can be entirely qualified to enter medical school, you can demonstrate through your grades and your test scores in pre-med that you are entirely capable of becoming a doctor ... and get turned away, in favor of someone more qualified. But saying it that way doesn't change the fact that you were still perfectly qualified to be a doctor, and would have made a perfectly good doctor, as good as any doctor that's graduating today, and maybe even better than some, but you won't be; at best, you'll be a nurse practitioner, or a medical technician.

Confronted with this ... which they almost never are ... the medical associations would argue that we must restrict the supply of doctors per capita, of dentists per capita, because if neurosurgeons couldn't look forward to a salary of $950,000 per year or more, nobody would want to become a neurosurgeon, because if dentists couldn't look forward to a salary of $175,000 per year or more, nobody would be willing to become a dentist. (And yes, those numbers are after operating expenses, including malpractice insurance, and long after the medical school loans are paid off.) They insist, contrary to all evidence, that there is nobody who'd be perfectly willing to save lives for, say, $500,000 per year, that nobody would be willing to repair teeth for a measly $90,000 per year. Which is deranged, or else they wouldn't have to be stopping people from trying to do so, so they can support those salaries! Nor can they erase the historical evidence that, back when medical schools and dental schools were expanding as the US population expanded, there were in fact no shortage of perfectly happy, perfectly comfortable middle-class dentists and upper-middle-class surgeons; indeed, the great advances in heart repair and transplant surgery were made by surgeons who made a great deal less than today's doctors do.

Greg Mankiw, the tireless (and tiresome) supply side economist, recently blogged that all the proof he needed of how the superior American health care system is the best in the world can be found in two readily available facts. First of all, he pointed out, American doctors must be the best in the world, or else they wouldn't be getting paid twice as much! And secondly, if American doctors weren't the best in the world, we wouldn't be able to deliver the quality of health care we do with half as many doctors per capita as every other industrialized nation! This tells you all you need to know about the intellectual rigor behind supply-side economics: the man who literally wrote the standard textbook on Chicago-School economics (a) thinks that American health outcomes are as good as the rest of the industrialized world, when our actual statistical outcomes are closer to third-world levels, and (b) he isn't enough of an economist to realize that the reason doctors doubled their salaries, relative to inflation, isn't because they became twice as good, but because (as he himself knows) they became twice as scarce.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, as (arguably) one of the very last of the Baby Boomers, I was told that part of the promise of America was that no matter what color you are, what gender you are, what neighborhood you were born in, or what your parent(s) did for a living, if you did the work, if you learned the material, if you proved that you were good enough, there was nothing you couldn't do. And maybe, in the 1970s, that was almost sort of true, or at least more so if you were white and male. But in the intervening time, we allowed powerful price-fixing cartels to set quotas for just how many people, regardless of whether or not they did the work, regardless of whether or not they learned the material, no matter how good they proved they were, would be allowed to become doctors or dentists. Once those quotas are filled, ideally with privileged children of the upper-middle class, everybody else who was capable of being a doctor gets shunted back down to become a nurse practitioner, a physician's aide, a medical technician. Once those quotas are filled, ideally with the somewhat privileged children of the middle class, everybody else who was capable of becoming a dentist gets shunted back down to become a dental assistant, a dental technician, a dental hygienist. In other words, only half of our qualified people are allowed the artificially scarce privilege of being real doctors or real dentists, so that the person working on the $15,000 a year telemarketer's teeth can be guaranteed a salary ten times as high, so that the person stitching the replacement veins onto a $90,000 a year computer programmer's heart can be guaranteed a salary ten times as high. All of the missing doctors and missing dentists who might have done it for half as much (and still lived quite comfortable lives!) must, instead, serve as the barely-working-class, chronically emotionally abused servant class of the doctors and dentists.

I don't care if we import enough doctors and dentists from overseas to double their numbers. (I had the good fortune to have my dentist before-last be a Russian Cold-War refugee, and don't let anybody tell you that there are no med schools as good as ours; she was a better dentist than almost any other dentist I've ever had work on my teeth.) I don't care if we do it the more reliable, and maybe safer, and certainly less internationally politically explosive way by doubling the number of medical and dental school classrooms, even if we have to temporarily import doctors and dentists to teach in them. All I know is this: whenever anybody, any politician or spokesman or journalist or think-tank intellectual or author, from either party, either pro-reform or anti-reform, talks about health care, the question you ought to be asking them the first is: "what do you plan to do to increase the amount of health care available in the United States?" Because you can't solve even the tiniest of the problems with health care costs, let alone the main problem, if you don't increase the supply. That's just basic economics.

It's finally here! Jess Bachman over at WallStats.com has come out with this year's "Death and Taxes!" I put my order in the first day: being able to put the whole Obama administration's budget request for all discretionary spending, 2009 and 2010, up on the wall in a single, entirely readable, very informative 24" x 36" poster is worth every penny of the $24 he charges. Bachman, who does info graphics for a living, has a side business in economic infographics via his site, WallStats.com, and this one is his flagship product, from back when the site was called TheBudgetGraph.com. He takes two months every spring to take the current year's budget request, pull out all of the spending over which Congress and the President have any year-to-year say, and categorize it, then categorize it within each category again.

I love having this thing up on the wall of my living room in a poster frame. The first time anybody new realizes what it is, they do one of two things: look for some government program they depend on personally, or look for some government program they despise. Almost entirely without exception, they are stunned to the point of being slack-jawed to find out that they were nowhere near right as to that program's size relative to the rest of the federal budget. And this is a long-standing burr in my saddle: Americans have always felt entitled to complain about how much or how little the government spends on this, that, or the other thing without having even the slightest idea how much it actually does spend.

You can see the whole thing, with really easy to use Flash-based pan-and-zoom technology provided by Zoomarama, at wallstats.com/deathandtaxes. And this year, he even made it available to be embedded in blogs, like this (if it works):



It's pretty self-explanatory, if you look at the legends. Military spending is mostly on the left, civilian spending is mostly on the right -- except where civilian agencies are forced to absorb part of the military budget, where the part that's military is also marked. (See, for example, the Energy Department, which is almost entirely cleanup of radioactive waste at old nuclear weapons plants; all other energy research and development spending is a sliver of that.) A couple of the ways the Obama administration changed the budgeting rules complicated this year's chart, and I'm not entirely happy with the choices Bachman made:

1. Remember when the Obama administration canceled the "War on Terror" and replaced it with "Overseas Contingency Operations"? Bachman went along with this, which eliminated one of the larger circles on last year's chart, the one for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, military spending line items get a percentage in gray, at the end of the line, saying how much of each number is related to those wars. The only place the old number still shows up is as a tiny little summary, buried deep in the lower-right corner under the big Department of Defense circle: Baseline DoD spending = $534B, up 4%; Overseas Contingency Operations total = $130B (on top of the $534B), down 8%; Total = $664B, up 2%. Bet you didn't realize Obama was asking for an increase in military spending? Drill down on the chart, you can see who the actual winners and losers are in the DoD. But back to my complaint, it's now left up to you to do the math, and visualize, that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq total roughly 20% of all DoD spending, or 11% of all discretionary spending. The old way of showing it made that a lot clearer.
   
   
2. This year also has a lot, and I mean a lot, of supposedly one-year changes to the budget, under the stimulus bill. Given my druthers, I would have broken that out as its own separate circle, but since it's all going to existing departments, I can sort of see why Bachman included it in each department's individual subtotals. But what makes it more confusing, though, is that he wanted badly to show that some of the huge increases are (again, supposedly) only temporary, so what he did was created an entirely hypothetical "what the 2010 budget would look like if it were exactly like this only without the stimulus" number, and shows that as the first percentage on the line, not the second, putting 2010 before 2009. Confusing. So where you see something like (to pick one at random) "Federal Railroad Administration 2.701 Billion +35% +595%" (presumably thank you to the former Senator from the state of Amtrak), what it means is that in 2009 Obama has asked for $2.701B for that department, which is up 595% what they got last year. But if you take out the stimulus spending, it would have only been up +35%. I think that's a very confusing way to display that information.

But my personal favorite part of each year's diagram, the one I start out with, turns out to also be relevant to today's political news, the Obama press conference on health care overhaul. This is Jess Bachman's inset, in the lower right corner, that includes all federal spending, not just the discretionary budget, and shows all federal income inside that chart:



If it's not obvious to you how to read that, it's basically a pie chart inside a pie chart. The outer ring of bubbles show the size of the only really big items in the federal budget: $901 billion to the military, $696 billion to Social Security retirees, $520 billion to "other" executive branch departments (which will be clearer in a minute), $477 to unemployment insurance pay-outs, $452 billion to Medicare (retiree health care), $290 billion to Medicaid (health care for the poor), $176 billion in interest on the national debt, $57 billion to the Veterans Administration, and $24 billion to the other two branches of government. The reason for that $520B "other" category is that there's nothing else in the entire federal government budget that comes anywhere near the size of those numbers, it's all a bunch of individual chump-change numbers that total up, among the hundreds of them, to that one number. The inner ring of bubbles is where the money comes from: $1.05 trillion in personal income taxes, $939 billion in money that comes in (supposedly) just for Social Security (FICA taxes) and Medicare (insurance premiums), $221 billion in corporate income tax, a bunch of tiny little chump-change taxes, and $1.405 trillion dollars in new borrowing.

Here's how this is relevant to today's political news story. I prefer to total up Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA into one larger administrative category: Health Care. What the resulting table looks like is:

	Spending	Percent
Military	$1,050 billion	28%
Health Insurance payouts	$749 billion	20%
Retirement Insurance payouts	$696 billion	19%
Unemployment Insurance payouts	$477 billion	13%
Interest on National Debt	$176 billion	5%
Everything Else	$544 billion	15%

Thus confirming the old truism: we don't have a government. We have an insurance company with an army. And what President Obama has joined former presidents Clinton, Nixon, and Truman in warning us is that that $749 billion is the fastest growing, most out of control part of the federal budget, and it has been since, well, at least since the Truman administration; by comparison, even the rate of growth in the military/industrial complex (that President Eisenhower warned us against) has been tame. The same people who've been screaming and howling about out-of-control deficit spending need to be made to understand (or, in the case of some of them who know better and have just been lying): we cannot save the US dollar, we cannot cut the deficit, without getting a whole heck of a lot better price for the health care we're buying with tax dollars than $749 billion and rising. Seriously -- look at those rates of growth. Defense, +1%, even in wartime. Medicare +8%, Medicaid +22%, VA +13%, even during a recession. The status quo is just flatly unsustainable.

Looking at this chart, it should also go without saying, it's as plain as the nose on your face, that even if we zeroed out every single other government department, not just the earmarks but the whole freaking departments like the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, customs and immigration, education, agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control, national parks, all maintenance on government buildings, the entire federal courts system and every employee of Congress altogether, it would shave only about 1/3rd off of the deficit. We're not going to "trim the fat" or "eliminate waste, fraud and abuse" our way out of the deficit, not even if 100% of what every other department spends is "fat" or "waste, fraud, and abuse" in your opinion (and you're wrong), if we can't substantially cut health care industry profits and defense contractor profits. Period. It's that or raise personal income taxes and corporate income taxes, across the board, by about double.

And, specifically, every point I've made above, and every other observation you'll make poking and zooming around, and showing it off to other people when they see it on your wall, demonstrates exactly why I say that each and every one of you should make sure that you Congressman and both of your Senators have copies of this up on their walls, and why a copy should be in every classroom, and library, in America: there is no way to argue rationally about any of this with people who don't even know the basic facts.

P.S. One last tidbit for your entertainment, this one more explicitly political: Bachman also dabbles in infographics for a personal-finance website called Mint.com, and collaborated with them on this lovely little YouTube video:

Campaign for America's Future blogger, history whiz, and policy genius Sara Robinson talked me into reading David H. Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America about a month ago. It's a vaguely interesting book, if (I think) less useful than Robinson pitches it to be. Fischer's basic premise is that the pre-revolutionary United States was colonized in four distinct waves, each of which consisted almost entirely of people from one of four historically, culturally distinct regions of England, and that most of our regional and political subcultures are derived from the regional cultures of those four parts of England: not just politics and religion, but also dialect of English, marriage customs, child-rearing customs, diet, popular names for children and for landmarks, and so on. It's entertaining, but mostly fluff. But one part of it did stick with me, and I thought of it again when I read Rich Perlstein's Newsweek column for July 10th, "Beyond the Palin: Why the GOP is falling out of love with gun-toting, working-class whites." (h/t David "Orcinus" Neiwert)

You see, one of Fischer's contentions is that because of the way the various regional cultures of Great Britain clashed with each other historically, all descendants of Britain and its colonies are in love with the word "liberty" and use it as their central rallying cry, even though (and this is the important part) they don't mean the same thing by it. They recognize that there are a lot of individual liberties: liberty to do this or that, liberty from this or that, whatever. But the four different folk-cultures Fischer identifies each considered one of the many kinds of liberty to be the number-one essential liberty: no matter how free you are in any other way, you're not really free unless ...

• To the Puritans who settled New England, you weren't really free unless you had the liberty to enforce comformity with social norms, either by shaming people into complying, or expelling those who can't be shamed. The most essential liberty is the feeling of safety you get when you're among people who are the same kind of people as you.
  
  
• To the Cavaliers who settled the lowland coastal South, you weren't really free unless you were free to own slaves. The most essential liberty is the right of the best people, however that's defined, to own the lesser breeds and force them to do what their betters want them to do.
  
  
• To the Radical Protestants who settled the Chesapeake Bay, you weren't really free unless you had the freedom to say, do, or believe whatever you wanted in total safety, even from people who disagree. The most essential liberty is the right to be protected, via the power of the state, from other people forcing their beliefs, their culture, their way of life on you. And here's the part that's especially relevant to what Perlstein wrote the other day ...
  
  
• To the "Scots-Irish" Borderers (who were already being called "rednecks" back in Great Britain) who settled the Appalachians, you weren't really free if there was anybody who was allowed to snub you, to look down on you. The most essential liberty is the liberty to be just as rude to the wealthy people who own all the land in the county, and to the people you owe so much money to that they for all practical purposes own you, as you would be to the meanest, poorest drunk.

And ever since Richard Nixon invented the "Southern Strategy," and certainly ever since Ronald Reagan perfected it, that's been the Republican coalition in a nutshell: people who expect to be free to own other Americans keep the votes of most of the people they own by remembering not to talk down to them. Hence the spectacle, that used to be seen all over this country as recently as 10 or 15 years ago, of wealthy bankers and state governors and federal legislators going to agricultural county fairs, if they wanted to keep their money and their political offices and all of their power, wearing proletarian clothes and eating messy food with their hands and stomping around in animal waste and affecting to be "just common folks." Don't underestimate the power of that coalition. Or the danger it poses to those of us who have no interest in being owned. On the other hand, never under-estimate the political utility in showing rednecks just what their wealthy Republican overlords really think of them.

As the list of announced movies coming out in 2009 was being finalized, an awful lot of you were truly excited about three of them. So was I. But probably not the same three. Lots of you were excited about the Abrams' relaunch of Star Trek, the Transformers sequel, and the 6th Harry Potter movie. One of those I wouldn't cross the street to see if it was completely free, and the other two you couldn't pay me any sum of money to voluntarily sit through. (I am just that thoroughly done with remakes, sequels, and franchises.) No, the three movies I was the most excited about, breathless for them to open, were Dreamworks' "Monsters versus Aliens," Duncan Jones' "Moon," and Peter Jackson's "District 9." Well, I finally got to see Monsters versus Aliens at the local dollar theater last weekend, and it was even funnier than I'd hoped it would be. District 9 doesn't come out until next month. But Moon finally made it to the Plaza Frontenac theater in St. Louis last night, and even without seeing District 9, I'm pretty sure I've seen the best science fiction movie of 2009. And I'll tell you why: I think I've seen the best science fiction movie of the last ten years. Maybe the last thirty years.

It's the mid 21st century, and most of Earth's problems have been solved, directly or indirectly, by one company: Lunar Industries, Incorporated. They maintain a base on the far side of the moon where automated machinery scrapes the lunar soil for Helium-3. When they fill a Helium-3 fuel tank, it gets shipped back to Earth via magnetic catapult, where it powers the fusion reactors that provide 70% of the world's energy supply in an entirely safe, clean, and renewable way, providing the power to irrigate deserts for farmland, providing the power for nearly all of the world's transportation and industry. Of course, somebody has to man the base, to repair anything that breaks down, to transport full tanks of He-3 from the mining rovers to the launch vehicles, and so forth. And transporting people back and forth is expensive and slow. So Lunar Industries hires one guy at a time to work a three year hitch at their lunar base, with no company but GERTY (brilliantly voiced by Kevin Spacey), the emoticon-faced artificial intelligence assigned to care for him and keep him safe. When his three year shift is over, he shuts the base down temporarily, seals himself into a cryogenic capsule that gets loaded onto the slow space ship home, they send up another guy in the return capsule, and mining continues.

Actor Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, who is just two weeks shy of getting to go home. It's been a rough three year shift, because while he was still in transit from Earth, a solar storm knocked out the satellite that was supposed to relay signals around the curve of the moon; the only way he's had to communicate with his bosses, let alone with his wife and daughter back home, has been via recorded messages, relayed via a research station in orbit around Jupiter whenever they can spare the bandwidth for him. So he's been feeling extra isolated, and it's driving him just a little bit crazy. That's making him just a little bit sloppy in his work, which causes an accident ... one that reveals that there are several lies embedded in what I've told you so far. He's in a lot of trouble. (Warning: Trailer contains significant spoilers.)



Sony Pictures Classics hasn't been doing much to publicize this little $5 million movie; I've only seen one trailer for it, and no advertising at all, not even in front of other science fiction movies where it would have made sense for them to advertise. A few aging journalists paid it a little bit of attention because there was one trivia news "hook" that caught their eye: director Duncan Jones is David Bowie's son, who literally grew up on the set of "Labyrinth." But when I caught the New York Times' interview with Jones about his then-upcoming movie, the David Bowie link was the least interesting part, to me. What really caught my eye was that Jones didn't credit his father's work as the inspiration, but (in order mentioned in the article): "Alien," "Outland," "Silent Running," and "Blade Runner." That was enough for me: anybody in movie-making today who remembers the truly great science fiction movies, and even the mediocre ones, that came out during what seems to me, in retrospect, like the golden age of science fiction film between Kubrick's pretty but over-rated "2001" and Lucas's movie that ruined science fiction film forever ("Star Wars," of course) instantly gets my attention. Especially Silent Running, which I still consider one of the five best science fiction movies ever made. And this movie genuinely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath, as well as in the same breath as other greats from the same time period like "Escape from the Planet of the Apes," "Westworld," and "Soylent Green."

If, like me, you look at today's science fiction movies (and even much of the TV), where a gazillion-dollar special effects budget and a soundtrack full of explosions, plus gratuitous chase scenes, boob shots, and toy tie-ins, substitutes for any attention to acting, writing, pacing, plot, science, technology, or (gods forbid) thought, and think, "Wow, they just don't make them like they used to," you absolutely must track this movie down and see it, see it in a theater on the big screen, see it even if you have to travel to do so. It's absolutely worth it.

"Obama ousts AmeriCorps' IG who investigated friend," Ann Sanner and Pete Yost, Associated Press, 6/12/09.

Sacramento Mayor and former NBA star Kevin Johnson, a personal friend of the President, stole over $350,000 from the federal government's AmeriCorps "volunteer" program, and has agreed to pay it back. The investigation also turned up four separate teenagers, at least two of them legal minors, who accuse Kevin Johnson of using that money to try to get away with sexually molesting them. Inspector General Gerald Walprin of AmeriCorps was scathing about this in his May 13th, 2009 "Special Report to Congress from the Office of the Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service" (PDF), which seems to have been prompted by the decision of AmeriCorps to let Johnson continue to receive AmeriCorps funding once he's made a token partial repayment and taken a few classes.

You don't get away with treating a personal friend of the President of the United States as if he were accountable for his actions, apparently: President Obama announced today that he is firing Walprin: "It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general. That is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general."

Nice friends you have there, Mr. President, and nice job of looking out for taxpayers, let alone children. I think I'm going to be sick.

Early Friday evening, a crushing weight was lifted off of my chest. The Tiller assassination hit me on a lot of levels, some of them personal, some of them political. But one in particular was weighing heavily on me: from where I was sitting, evidence of a cover-up by the Wichita police was inescapably clear, unambiguous, and 100% certain. This isn't something that I have the luxury of feeling surprised by, either. If you've read anything by any abortion provider, clinic employee, or clinic volunteer, or if you've spoken with any of them about this as I have, one thing you hear from very nearly all of them is this: cops don't care what happens to an abortion clinic or to an abortion provider. A disproportionately large number of the police chiefs in this country are, themselves, anti-abortion. But even the rest of them would quietly and secretly be delighted if the protesters and the terrorists they inspire managed to shut down their town's abortion clinic, because to a police chief, an abortion clinic is an "attractive nuisance."

So many people are willing to go to such illegal lengths to shut one down that there is no police department in this country that can afford what it would cost to fully investigate every crime against an abortion provider or an abortion facility. So even the best of them wish the problem would just go away, and the easiest way for the problem to just go away would be if the abortion providers and clinics moved out of their town, and became some other police department's problem. So while I wanted to scream with rage at the screen when I read that the Wichita police chief rushed to tell reporters that Roeder acted alone before Tiller's body had even been removed from the church, so early that even if it was true he couldn't possibly know that, I couldn't make myself feel surprised or shocked. At most, I was shocked that he was that sloppy and careless about giving away the fact that he had no intention of investigating to see if Roeder had any co-conspirators; shouldn't he at least have been ashamed to reveal that so early?

None the less, a substantial chunk of the anger that was gnawing at me and robbing me of my ability to sleep for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time was coming from my entirely justifiable fear that the rest of Roeder's terror cell were still at large, were still free to conspire against additional doctors and clinics, and once they found another willing patsy to do the last bit of dirty work and take the fall for them, they would kill again, and that none of the people whose job it is to do something about that were going to do so. So it came as an overwhelming relief when I found out, Friday evening, that the US Department of Justice had just put out a press release reading, in part:

The Department's Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas have launched a federal investigation into federal crimes in connection with the murder of Dr. George Tiller. The federal probe will consist of a thorough review of the evidence and an assessment of any potential violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) or other federal statutes. ... The FACE Act was enacted by Congress in 1994 to establish federal criminal penalties and civil remedies for violent, obstructionist or damaging conduct affecting reproductive health care providers and recipients. "The Department of Justice will work tirelessly to determine the full involvement of any and all actors in this horrible crime, and to ensure that anyone who played a role in the offense is prosecuted to the full extent of federal law," said Loretta King, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division."

Thank all the holy gods, because this is something that the Wichita police department very deliberately, in the first few hours after the assassination, tried to prevent. In the first few hours after the shooting, they repeatedly told reporters that this was a crime by a Kansan with no links to anyone outside of Kansas, against a Kansan, within Kansas, with no part of the crime taking place across state lines, and therefore there was no federal jurisdiction. They didn't explicitly say "feds, back off," but they were pretty clearly unhappy that the BATF and the FBI responded to the 911 call from Dr. Tiller's church. And that left me very, very angry because if the Wichita police department was the only one that investigated this crime, I was pretty sure we were never going to get an answer to any of the following questions:

1. Tiller was famous for never going anywhere without at least one armed bodyguard. Only a fairly small number of people knew that there was one exception, that he didn't bring his bodyguard with him to church. Given that Roeder lives in Kansas City, who did the surveillance that turned up this tidbit, and how did it get to Roeder?
   
   
2. Furthermore, Tiller would only have been vulnerable on Sundays that he was an usher. Any time that he wasn't ushering, he would have been embedded in a crowd to big for Roeder to get through to get to him. Did Tiller usher every service? If not, how did Roeder know that Tiller would be ushering this service? Who knew that in advance? Most of the people I assume would know are pretty clearly above suspicion, like the deacons and the other ushers, but who prints the programs for Tiller's church?
   
   
3. And here's a really ugly one. Even as an usher, there was only a very narrow window of time when Tiller and the other ushers would be alone in the lobby. Two minutes earlier, and the lobby would have been too crowded for Roeder to reach Tiller with a gun. Two minutes later, and the lobby would have been empty. And church schedules don't run on split-second accuracy; the start of a service can vary by 10 minutes or more. Judging by the photographs of the building that I've seen, there's no way for someone in the parking lot to see how full the lobby of the church is, so how did Roeder know exactly when to walk in, how did he know the exact minute that if he walked in there would be nobody between him and Tiller, unless someone in the congregation text messaged him with it or otherwise signaled him? Remember: months ago, Roeder himself suggested, on the Operation Rescue chat forums, that someone from that group infiltrate Dr. Tiller's church.
   
   
4. When Roeder was arrested, reporters photographed his car, and visible on the top of a pile of papers on the dashboard was an envelope with the name and phone number of Operation Rescue "senior policy adviser" Cheryl Sullenger, who served a two year prison term in 1988 for the attempted bombing of an abortion clinic. Sullenger, who says that her violent days are behind her, has given at least two, maybe three conflicting stories to reporters about her contacts with Roeder. Was that phone number on the dashboard of Roeder's car after the assassination because he called her before the assassination? Or after? And what did they discuss?
   
   
5. Within an hour of the crime, the description of Roeder and his car, with license plate number, were released to the media. Reporters found out where that car was registered and went there, and asked the neighbors if they'd seen that car. According to early press reports, the neighbors knew instantly who they meant, because the house was a local nuisance. So many people were constantly coming and going from that house, day and night, every day of the week, that the local neighbors bitterly joked that it needed a revolving door. Some, but only some, of the gatherings of people sounded like worship services. Question: Who were those people, and what did they know about Roeder's plans?
   
   
6. Another complication: Roeder supposedly no longer lived at that address. It turns out that Roeder moved out of that house months ago, and was living across town in another part of Kansas City. So why was his car still there almost every night? Who does own that house, and what are they using it for?
   
   
7. Roeder was arrested slightly over three and a half hours after the shooting, on the outskirts of Kansas City. According to Google Maps, it should have taken him only two and a half hours to drive that far. Where was he during the missing hour, and who was he with? Police say they fanned out and checked every hotel and motel in the area, and he wasn't there. His car was being looked for by every patrolling police car. Who hid him? Or did one or more police officers see him and let him pass?
   
   
8. And given the relatively low number of interstate highways leaving Wichita, how did he get as far as Kansas City, especially if he didn't leave Wichita for an hour? Why didn't the cops catch him on his way out of town?
   
   
9. Furthermore, given that Roeder saw one of the ushers photograph him, and given the likelihood that he saw the same usher photograph his car as he left the parking lot, why was Roeder driving towards his home in the Kansas City area? Did he really think he was going to get away with it? Or was he heading that direction to distract police attention from Wichita?
   
   
10. Roeder spent a lot of time unemployed, recently, and at the time of the shooting his reported income was $1100 a month. But a third of that was being garnished to pay off a credit card he had defaulted on. And supposedly he lived alone. So how in the heck was he affording the gasoline to drive 150 miles each way from Kansas City to Wichita every day for Tiller's trial, when Tiller was accused of performing illegal late-term abortions on viable fetuses without medical necessity?
    
    
11. Furthermore, Roeder's employer is given as Quicksilver Airport Delivery. Roeder had a past conviction for transporting a partially assembled pipe bomb, and was a known past associate of the local chapter of the Montana Freemen white-supremacist militia. Shouldn't a job at an airport have required a background check, and if so, how did he of all people pass one?
    
    
12. Where did Roeder get a gun, if he was so broke? Who armed him? What did Roeder tell that person about why he wanted a gun?
    
    
13. And one really, really big and ugly one: if Roeder only has $10 in the bank, why was he so fiercely determined to get a judge to set bail? Who did he think was going to put up that five million dollar bail for him?
    
    
14. And finally, in light of all of the above, can anybody think of any non-sinister reason why the Wichita police department was in such a hurry to conclude that Roeder was a "lone nut" and in such a hurry to chase off the federal investigators?

Maybe, now that the feds are involved, we'll get some answers. But I already know this much for a fact: Scott Roeder did not act alone.

Before you comment, please read this blog's updated policy on commenting about abortion. Thank you.

Not quite five years ago, I predicted that Wikipedia would be remembered historically not as an encyclopedia, not as a news service, not as a popular Internet destination, but as the beginning of a change in the way we talk to one another that will be credited, by historians in the future, with having saved civilization. (See "Make Wiki, Not War," July 17th, 2004.) In particular, what I was lauding Wikipedia for was two interlocking principles: "Edit Boldly" and "Neutral Point of View." Since then, I'd add one other, implicit in those two, now explicit as a WikiMedia Foundation policy: "Assume Good Faith."

What that means, both to me and in practice, is this. When an issue is unsettled, each side makes their argument, with citations to neutral, generally accepted to be reliable sources wherever the facts are in dispute. (Hence the more famous and widely parodied Wikipedia policy, "[citation needed]".) But where Wikipedia differs from previous attempts to settle arguments is that if you think that the other person has made their case in a way that is dishonest, inflammatory, propagandistic, or in a way that assumes bad faith on the part of the people the author of that part of the article disagrees with, you are explicitly encouraged to delete that argument. If you have the skill, you are encouraged to try to replace it with a more honest, less inflammatory, more neutrally phrased, good faith statement of the same principles, the same theory, the same interpretation of the facts. But you don't have to. If you delete it, and don't replace it with something better, it is up to them to restate their case in a way that fits Wikipedia policy. Or, if they disagree that what they wrote wasn't neutral enough in point of view, they can revert your deletion. And you can revert their revert. Keep doing this for a little while, and maybe someone else will come in and propose a compromise that you can both agree is fair, whether or not you both agree with it. If the revert-war goes on long enough, the software will alert an editor who will lock the whole page and force both (or all) sides into a separate discussion forum, out of sight of the main page, to argue it out until they can agree on how both sides will be able to present their arguments. And I sincerely and truly and genuinely believe that if all of civilization adopted these rules of debate, it would save civilization.

I am not the WikiMedia Foundation. I haven't even bothered to edit Wikipedia in months, I think, and longer than that since I did more than fix an occasional typo. This web page is not Wikipedia. It's my personal LiveJournal. So I'm going to rule, here, in place of the Wikipedia editors, on what is and isn't Neutral Point of View on the abortion debate in America. You may not like what I'm saying here. You don't have to. It's a big Internet. Blogger, Blogspot, LiveJournal, Facebook, Yahoo Groups, they'd all love to give you your own forum for free, and on your own forum, you can discuss abortion (or not) by any set of rules you choose to impose, or without any rules at all, as long as you're within the Terms of Service of your forum provider. These are my rules:

I am ruling both the terms "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice" to be misleading and propagandistic. These terms may no longer be used as terms of debate in the comments on bradhicks.livejournal.com. If you use the term "Pro-Choice" to describe your side of the argument, I will contradict you and ask you to stop doing so here. But because the term "Pro-Life" goes even further and ascribes bad faith, and because it incites violence, I will go even further: those who describe their position as "Pro-Life" will have their comments deleted. Repeat offenders to either policy may have their LiveJournal or OpenID accounts banned from commenting; they may still comment anonymously, but those comments will remain hidden until I personally clear them.

(I'd settle for disemvoweling people who persist in using the banned terms, but LiveJournal doesn't support it.)

Let me clarify that if you are quoting a published source, or a public figure, for the intent of passing along what they said, you may quote them. For now. If this permission gets abused as a way of getting around the intent of this policy, I will revisit it. This restriction applies to arguments you are making in your own name (or under your own pseudonym) here.

What's wrong with "Pro-Life?" First of all, it's just flat-out dishonest: if a fetus is not viable outside the womb, it is not alive, any more than Terri Schiavo was still alive when they disconnected her life support. (If you only oppose abortion after fetal viability, see "what's wrong with both," below.) Secondly, it assumes bad faith: it casts anybody who disagrees with the "pro-life" side of being in favor of killing living people. Thirdly, it is inflammatory: it is exactly this kind of rhetoric, accusing abortion providers (and doctors who prescribe birth control pills, and pharmacists who fill those prescriptions, and doctors who fit their patients with IUDs) of being professional assassins and the women who buy those birth control pills, use those IUDs, and procure those abortions of being people who hire hit-men to kill other American citizens. Even if that is what you think, you may not say that here, because I do not consent to having the comment section on my blog used for you to recruit more assassins like Michael Griffin, Paul Hill, and Scott Roeder. Persuading those people to do your killing for you is something I will, from now on, be exactly zero tolerance towards. Nor is this my policy only with regards to this blog. If you say the words "pro-life" in my presence, I will respond to you exactly the way I would respond if you called someone a "nigger" or a "faggot." I will (as politely as I can manage) ask you to please not use that term in my presence, as I find it offensive.

If you oppose abortion under all or nearly all circumstances, there is an accurate term for that, and that term is "anti-abortion." If you wish to argue for the anti-abortion side and are unwilling to use that label, or some equally fair, equally unpropagandistic, equally uninflammatory label for you position, you may do so without any challenge or hindrance from me ... anywhere other than in the comments section of this blog or in my presence.

What's wrong with "Pro-Choice?" First of all, it's incoherent and misleading. Abortion-rights advocates aren't arguing that people should be allowed to make any choice they want. Not even the staunchest "pro-choice" advocate would argue that it is also a woman's choice if she wants to set a church on fire, or shoot the President of the United States, or send money to al Qaeda, or serve heroin to third graders. This is about one particular choice. But even that's misleading, and in a way that's misleading in an entirely unhelpful way, because this isn't about the "choice" of abortion. It's about the right to an abortion. And that right is, frankly, an inalienable one, even more so than Life, Liberty, or the Pursuit of Happiness, and that is because if a woman is determined not to carry a fetus to term, no force on earth can make her do so. If you believe that women should have that natural right as a legal right, you are not "pro-choice." You "support abortion rights," and I will thank you to use that terminology from now on when commenting in this blog, or any equally accurate, equally descriptive, non-inflammatory phrase that (as I'm also demanding of your opponents) grants good faith, as much as possible, on the part of people who disagree with you.

I stand by that "as much as possible," though, and it's why I'm not going to react as strongly, either in person or in the comments sections of this blog, to people who absent-mindedly or ignorantly or impolitely use the term "pro-choice" after I've asked you all not to. What this has to do with the phrase "as much as possible" is that it is undeniably true that unlike the term "pro-choice," the term "pro-life" has been used to solicit assault, arson, and murder. Therefore people who use the "pro-choice" term will get a little more benefit of the doubt from me, a few more chances to change their ways before they get put in the comment moderation queue.

What's wrong with both of them? And frankly, I have another reason to want to ban the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" from my presence and from the comments on this blog: they both assume a false dichotomy. By way of introducing my point, here, let me excerpt a Gallup Poll, taken regularly ever since Roe v Wade, quoted from PollingReport.com's abortion page:

---

"Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?" (Margin of error: ±3%)

	Legal Under Any	Legal Only Under Certain	Illegal In All	Unsure
Apr 1975	21%	54%	22%	3%
Jul 1980	25%	53%	18%	4%
Apr 1990	31%	53%	12%	4%
Apr 2000	28%	51%	19%	2%
Jun 2005	24%	55%	20%	1%
May 2009	22%	53%	23%	2%

---

36 years of hard-core propaganda from both the abortion rights side, and the anti-abortion side, and they haven't moved the public debate in that whole 36 years. Within the margin of error of the polling, we remain exactly where we were when the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade: 20% who think that Roe v Wade doesn't go far enough in granting abortion rights, 20% who think that abortion should be illegal under all or nearly all circumstances, and (and this is the important part) a clear and unambiguous and unshakable majority who support Roe v Wade.

And, ironically, most of them don't know that. Because both sides' extremists, both sides' radicals (and I use both terms not as perjoratives but as descriptives, in this case, in the literal sense of "people whose views are outside of the mainstream"), as a propaganda tool, keep trying to persuade the vast majority who don't want to be dragged into this argument that there is no middle ground, that they must either support abortion rights unambiguously and in all or nearly all cases, or they must oppose abortion in all or nearly all cases. Nobody has coined a term for them. What's more, because nobody on either side of the propaganda war over abortion has any incentive to do so, nobody is telling them that what they want, really, is already settled US law. Pollsters have long known what a solid majority, not a plurality but an actual majority, of the American people want: they want abortion in the first 12 or 13 weeks of pregnancy, when the fetus more closely resembles a transparent soccer ball the size of a pinhead than it does a person, to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. They want abortion after about 24 to 26 weeks, when the fetus could survive on its own if delivered via emergency c-section, to be illegal unless the baby is already doomed to die or the woman's health is in grave risk. And the vast majority of the American public have not made up their minds, even within themselves, let alone as a body politic, about the time period in between. They would like to hear an unimpassioned, reasoned, practical, legal, sane discussion about where to draw the line, and what exceptions to allow, in between. If you describe the compromise that Roe put in place, which allows abortion from week 14 to 26 in general but allows a wide variety of restrictions on the procedure, like waiting periods and mandatory counseling and restrictions on where and how the procedure can be performed, a pretty solid plurality, maybe even a majority, are okay with that. If the American people weren't being lied to every day about what Roe v Wade actually says, Roe v Wade wouldn't even be controversial.

And if you're one of those people? If that's what you support? Then when someone tries to make you choose between anti-abortion and abortion rights and doesn't allow you a middle ground, when somebody tries to tell you must choose sides between "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice?" Don't take the bait. Stand up against the extremists on both sides and clearly and unambiguously and directly state: "I support Roe v Wade."

One-Time Limited Exception to the Rules: Because I know that this is a controversial change, I know that some people will be even angrier and even more likely to take their traffic somewhere else if I don't at least allow them to make their case for why I'm wrong to impose this restriction. So I will swallow my bile and for a limited time, let's say the next week at most, I will allow you to violate the rules against describing yourself as "pro-life" or "pro-choice" in the comments to this one last journal entry. Still, you may only do so subject to the following restrictions: you may do so only for the purpose of defending why that and only that label is acceptable. You may do so if it is so that you can explain why you think that your preferred label of "pro-choice" or "pro-life" is neither dishonest nor propagandistic nor inflammatory; if you can't do those three things, don't bother. And you absolutely will discuss this in a polite way and without insulting each other, or I will delete your comments and whole comment threads if necessary. If there is any part of that that is unclear, you can contact me off-list and ask, or you can take your chances; nobody will be comment-deleted for first offense, let alone comment-banned, for this post only, and only from now until next Saturday.

And, I will say it once last time, you may disregard these rules as much as you like, as long as you do it anywhere other than here.

Discuss.

I didn't spend all of those years studying First Amendment law, or all of those years doing volunteer civil liberties work, without learning a thing or two. Which is why David Kravets' "U.S. Manga Obscenity Conviction Roils Comics World" (Wired "Threat Level" column, 5/28/09) came as exactly no shock to me. I'll bet quite a few of you can't say the same.

For those of you who don't want to (or can't) click through to the original article, let me summarize: in 2006, a (now) 39 year old Iowa manga collector named Christopher Handley ordered half a dozen volumes of "lolicon" manga from a retailer in Japan. They were intercepted by a US Customs Service inspector, and Handley was charged with importation and possession of child pornography, specifically "possession of any type of visual depiction, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct that is obscene." Yesterday, on advice of his attorney, he plead guilty to all charges. He faces a prison term of up to 15 years, a fine of up to $250,000, plus 3 years probation, and he will spend the rest of his life listed on the convicted sex offender registry.

No, we don't know what books he ordered, but according to the US Department of Justice press release ("Iowa Man Pleads Guilty to Possessing Obscene Visual Representations of the Sexual Abuse of Children", 5/20/09), "in May 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intercepted a mail package coming into the United States from Japan that was addressed to Handley. Inside the package was obscene material, including books containing visual representations of the sexual abuse of children, specifically Japanese manga drawings of minor females being sexually abused by adult males and animals. Pursuant to a search warrant, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) searched and seized additional obscene drawings of the sexual abuse of children at Handley’s residence in Glenwood."

I will also tell you that either Handley's lawyer Eric Chase is either grand-standing, or else he's flatly incompetent to practice First Amendment law, if it's true that he told Wired, "It’s probably the only law I’m aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can’t tell them." Lawyers who specialize in obscenity cases, both pro-civil-liberties and anti-pornography, track jury verdicts and can tell you with nearly 100% reliability whether what they're looking at would be ruled obscene by a jury, and yes, I'm telling you right now, no jury has ever not indicted and convicted for visual portrayals of children having sex. The same is equally true of equally graphic portrayals of bestiality, necrophilia, urolalia, scat play, rape, or simultaneous sex and torture. To anybody who actually knows what they're talking about, this isn't even controversial, and if Eric Chase didn't know that, and didn't research the case law enough to know that, Handley had an idiot for an attorney. Or, alternatively, he does know it, but is counting on you not to know it.

If Handley had a case, that case would have depended on an "artistic merit" defense; under US obscenity law, no image is obscene if it has "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." (1973 Miller v California.) The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund says that they consulted on the case and lined up expert witnesses to testify to the artistic merits of "lolicon" manga. Apparently Chase, and Handley, concluded that the jury wasn't going to buy it. They may well be right; at least one past jury in a high-profile, well funded, well defended case made it clear that if the subject matter is offensive enough, they don't care how famous the artist is or what the critics say about the importance of the work, it's still obscene.

Told you so. Lots of you didn't believe me, but I did tell you.

---

P.S. Note the date of the interception of Handley's manga. The US Customs Service, and presumably thereby the US Postal Service, have known what retailers in Japan sell this stuff to American buyers for at least three years. Can your library survive a search warrant? If not, you've got work to do. Hope you own a cross-cut paper shredder and an indoor fireplace. Otherwise, you're betting the rest of your life that they won't pick you to be the next person they make an example out of.

You might keep being lucky. There are a lot of lolicon manga collectors in the US. Only one of them has been convicted, so far. Is it worth it to you to keep betting those odds? If so, be my guest. But if you are going to do so, may I politely suggest, not as a lawyer but as someone who studies the history of these things? Shut the hell up about it. Tell no one, especially not through an online email service or web forum or blog, no matter how good you think your anonymity is (because it isn't), that you are doing so. Because that's just asking for it. When prosecutors are looking to hand out search warrants, people who brag about their crimes in public are the first ones they target.

Unless, of course, you have a martyr complex and want to be a registered sex offender for the rest of your life, because taking a stand As a Matter of Principle is that important to you. If it is? Again, be my guest. If you're that determined to be a martyr, though, don't expect me to stand up for you.

P.P.S. Every time I write about anything like this, people think I'm standing up for the law or defending the prosecutors. I'm not. If it were up to me, you could collect drawings (or even pictures or movies) of anything you want. I don't write this stuff because I'm anti-porn, or anti- any "Forbidden Lore." I write this stuff because ignorance of the laws you live under appalls and offends me. I write this stuff because I'm tired of self-entitled idiots who've never participated in democracy in any way stubbornly and naively insisting that the law is whatever they want it to be, that juries have to agree with them about what should and shouldn't be legal.

If you want to enjoy an illegal hobby, it behooves you to know the law and your chances of acquittal if you're caught. If you want your illegal hobby to be legal, you've got work to do. Saying stupid crap like, "yaoi and hentai and lolicon manga are entirely legal because they're just lines on paper" doesn't make it true, it just makes you someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. If you want all lines on paper to be legal, your nearest ACLU would love you to donate and volunteer. You're not going to achieve that goal by whining about it in your LiveJournal, nor on mine. I'm just saying.