The real lesson from WikiLeaks

Now that WikiLeaks has exposed yet another massive trove of secret government documents there is a lot of talk about how this is illegal and WikiLeaks ought to be shut down and it's staff prosecuted. This is, I think, misdirected. If WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were arrested and prosecuted, this would not, I suspect, stop the leaks.  There are plenty of other anarchists around who would pick up the task and carry it along, and there are plenty of misguided or disgruntled people who would supply them with sensitive information.

The real question, I think, is why was someone able to download such a massive collection of sensitive documents in the first place.  Clearly the government's security is pretty bad.  A disgruntled employee ought to have been able to download and leak, perhaps, at most a few documents directly relevant to their work.  So why was someone able to download such a massive collection?

There is no way to put the genii back in the bottle. In today's world, if it can be downloaded electronically someone will download it. Once it is downloaded, it can be on the net in minutes, visible to the whole world.

The issue that ought to be getting attention now is what does the government need to do to disseminate it's sensitive documents in a manner that cannot be so easily downloaded or copied.  Certainly one step would be to build a system that unambiguously logs each download and identifies who did it. That would be a start.  Another step would be to make such documents available in a form which can only be read on a screen, not downloaded onto a thumb drive or DVD (though digital cameras make that a stopgap measure at best).  I'm sure creative people can think of other effective means of making such wholesale leaks at least more difficult, if not impossible.  Clearly whatever the government is doing now is insufficient in today's modern digital and net-savvy world.

Recommended: Things Fall Apart

Walter Russel Mead has an interesting post on his American Interest blog: Things Fall Apart.  He argues that not just in America but all around the world, political leadership is not up to the challenges we face these days.  He discusses the problems faced by the EU, China and Russia in particular.  Interesting and worth thinking about.

Recommended: I'm an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard

The Daily Beast has an poignant article entitled I'm an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard. Whether it is a true story or not, it makes a strong case for passing the Dream act, to allow motivated, educated illegal immigrants who are good citizens, pay their taxes, and obey the laws to become American citizens.  Despite all the Republican rhetoric about keeping immigrants out, this country has always benefited from the steady inflow of good minds and highly motivated workers who come here, either for better opportunity or to escape repression elsewhere (remember, we won World War II in part because some of the best German minds - especially the Jewish physicists - came here to escape the Nazis.).

Recommended: Still The Best Congress Money Can Buy

Frank Rich has written an article Still The Best Congress Money Can Buy in the November 27, 2010 New York Times. In it he makes the point again that there is just too much money involved in government, and especially in the elected offices in Congress. Certainly from the outside it looks like this last session of Congress made sure the major sources of Democratic campaign money - Wall Street, big corporations and unions - got some fiscal relief, even if the rest of us didn't. That surely had something to do with money.

He references John Cassidy's New Yorker article What Good Is Wall Street?  Cassidy's article makes the point that I have made at times, that our best and brightest are drawn to the big money in socially-acceptable gambling on Wall Street, rather than to productive activities that actually create something of worth to the society.

None of these observations are new, nor is it clear what, if anything, can be done to remedy the situation. The very elected officials who might change the laws to solve the problem are in fact the beneficiaries of the status quo, and so certainly aren't about to kill their own golden goose.

Recommended: Against All Enemies

Richard Clarke's book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror is not a new book (see listing in the booklist on the sidebar, under 2004), but worth reading all the same.  Clarke was a major player in defense and intelligence matters in a series of administrations, from Reagan's to the second Bush's. In this book he lays out, from his perspective, what we did right and what we did wrong in those years.  As in his more recent 2008 book Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disaster, he  is not happy  with how our government is running.

What I took away from this book is (1) how insular and parochial the FBI and the CIA have been, to the serious detriment of our nation, and (2) how often the private manias or prejudices of a few key people bias and distort our national policy.

State of denial

Now that the Democrats have suffered what is by any measure a shattering midterm defeat in the polls, the interesting question is: what will they do about it?   A rational person, faced with this situation, would do some serious soul-searching, try to figure out what they did wrong, and make such changes as seemed likely to correct their errors.

Are the Democrats doing this? Not that I can see. As near as I can tell they are sure that everything they did in this past Congressional session was just fine, and the problem was either (a) the economy, or (b) the President's failure to"sell" their successes, or (c) the conservative press's distortions. The most obvious option (d) - that their liberal policies were unpopular with a majority of the nation - doesn't seem to have occurred to them. Surely, they think, it must have been someone else's fault, not their own. 

Well, they have two years to figure things out. If they continue in this state of denial for the next two years, I'm sure the 2012 elections will reinforce the message.  Politicians who forget to listen to their constituents tend to get weeded out.

The re-election of Nancy Pelosi as the Democratic minority speaker doesn't bode well for them in the long run - it suggests that the party is in the hands of a powerful few who simply didn't get the message. And of course the Congressional delegation is now more liberal than ever, having lost most of the few moderates it had. So I suppose they will keep proposing ultra-liberal legislation, most if which can no longer pass because of Republican gains in the House and Senate, so not much will get done in the next two years.  But of course the Democrats are still the party "in power", since they still control the presidency and the Senate, so in 2012 they will still get blamed for everything that is wrong,or that hasn't happened.

I am remained of the saying "there are none so blind as those who WILL NOT see."

Recommended: I Think We Lost The Election

P.J.O'Rourke has a delightful piece in the Nov 22, 2010 Weekly Standard: I Think We Lost The Election. He thinks that we (the American public) will have won an election when every political office is filled by someone who really doesn't want to be there. I think he is right.   Reminds me of a delightful new word my wife happened across recently:  empleomania - manic need to hold public office.

One way to Mars

NASA is studying a one-way Mars mission, which would send astronauts to Mars to establish a permanent base there, without a return mission.  This is of course much easier and less expensive than a full round-trip mission. But the announcement that a one-way mission was being considered has brought a good deal of criticism from the public, as being inhuman and unthinkable.

Now it happens that I have gotten interested in genealogy in my old age, and have been tracing my family roots back into the very early days of settlement on this continent, and then to the immigrants who left the Old World to come here.  I can’t help but think that to many of these early immigrants and settlers, theirs was a one-way trip into an unknown wilderness probably about as deadly as Mars. Yes they had air and plants and game to live off of, but they also had hostile natives, unpredictable weather, unknown geography, and a myriad of other unknown and unfamiliar things to deal with, and they did (enough of them, anyway) survive and plant their civilization on this new continent. 

 

Before them, of course, there had been all manner of peoples – Vikings, Chinese traders, Polynesian explorers, Spanish and Portuguese adventurers ,  etc – who had set off on one-way trips to the unknown. Many didn’t survive, but some did, and prospered in new lands.  To any sane person, Cortez’s invasion of the powerful civilizations of mesoamerica with a pitifully small army would have looked like a one-way trip, and a short one at that.

I would hope that the spirit of adventure that founded our nation hasn’t dried up to the point that we as a people aren’t willing to undertake risky adventures to expand our horizons.  Going to Mars on a one way trip isn’t everyone’s burning desire (I wouldn’t choose to do it), but there will certainly be some among us who are motivated by the spirit of adventure, the thrill of being the first, or burning scientific curiosity.  I would hope this nation wouldn’t deny them the chance simply because some of us are a little squeamish.

Stephen Hawkings is correct, we do need eventually to spread off this planet if we are survive as a species. There is ample geological evidence that mass extinctions happen periodically on our planet, from asteroid strikes or other causes, and there is no reason to believe these processes have stopped. Mars is only a small step in this endeavor, but it is a necessary first step, and we ought to take it.

Recommended: Pretty in Pink? Obama's Dark Night of the Soul.

Walter Russel Mead has an interesting meditation on this administration in his piece in The American Interest:  Pretty in Pink? Obama's Dark Night of the Soul. Mead argues that President Obama was never as good as his followers hoped on inauguration day, nor is he as bad as the frustrated far left now thinks he is. Mind you, Mead is not thrilled with the Republicans either (a view I share), but does think the midterm reaction was inevitable once the ultra-liberals under Nancy Pelosi had had their run.  All in all some interesting ruminations.

Recommended: The Second Marriage

On Nov 1, before the midterm elections, David Brooks wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times, The Second Marriage.  In it he argues that, despite the Tea Party members, the Republicans coming into power this time in the House will have a much more modest approach than they had last time they held power, and certainly much more modest than the Democrats have been over the past two years.  He thinks they will focus on producing a series of small, incremental steps to improve the business environment.

There are other writers in recent days who have argued that the Democrats as a party, and President Obama in particular, just don't "get" business.  That they don't understand the fundamental laws of economics. They love to demonize business, without understanding that business is in fact the engine of the entire system. Certainly the past two years seem to support that argument.

At root, economics is all that matters. Without a strong economy, we can't afford either the domestic programs liberals would like or the strong military the conservatives would like.  Without a strong economy our influence and leverage and "soft power" in the world is much reduced. Without a strong economy, people can't enjoy prosperity or economic security. In the end, it is not Washington policy that creates jobs and wealth (whatever liberals may think), it is successful, innovative businesses that are competitive in the world market.

The Obama administration's big mistake, in my opinion, was to divert their efforts and political capital to peripheral things like the health care bill when they should have focused ALL their energy and political capital on things that would improve the economy immediately and make American businesses more competitive in the world market. That means focusing on reducing regulations and Washington bureaucracy that impedes businesses, improving American education, especially for adult retraining in the workforce, improving the health of banks, building or updating infrastructure that directly affects business, and encouraging innovation and the basic science that feeds innovation.  To be sure, they have made half-hearted attempts at a few of these things, but none have been the primary focus of their attention, and none have gotten the sort of funding that their liberal efforts have gotten. (As a wise mentor once taught me: ignore the rhetoric and watch where the funding goes - that tells you what people's REAL priorities are).

One hopes Republicans will do better, though of course their power is still pretty limited, since they control only the House.

Ignoring the obvious

Erskine Bowles, chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton, and retired Sen. Alan Simpson, (R-Wyo.), co-chairs of the Presidential Commission on the Deficit, apparently can't get any kind of consensus on how to tackle the deficit from the rest of the bipartisan commission, so they have made the obvious proposal themselves -- raise taxes and cut spending. Predictably, the Republicans are dead set against any tax increases, and the Democrats are dead set against any spending cuts.

Of course, there is no way to control the Federal deficit except by raising taxes and cutting spending. So I don't know what the Republicans and the Democrats think they are going to do instead. I suppose they hope to stall and stall and stall and hope that they can pass the problem off to their successors without every having to make any hard decisions.

Nancy Pelosi, again predictably, said

“This proposal is simply unacceptable,” she said. “Any final proposal from the Commission should do what is right for our children and grandchildren's economic security as well as for our nation's fiscal security, and it must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare. And it must strengthen America's middle class families — under siege for the last decade, and unable to withstand further encroachment on their economic security.

I don't know why she thinks a soaring Federal deficit is the "right thing to do for our children and grandchildren's economic security", but then logic doesn't seem to play much role in political statements.

Printing money

Associated Press:

The Fed on Wednesday confirmed that it will buy $600 billion of long-term government bonds by mid-2011 in an attempt to further drive down rates on mortgages and other debt in the hope of getting lending higher.

It sounds innocuous - the Fed is buying government bonds.  But what does it really mean?  In essence it means the Fed is printing $600 billion in new money (or its electronic equivalent - they don't really need to print the bills, just juggle some figures in their computers) - that is the only place it can get this $600 billion in additional funds. So what is really happening is that the Fed is creating new money like mad, which is a sure recipe for inflation in the long run.