Same-Sex Marriage in the Supreme Court

Today and tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments for and against California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

This Court is famously conservative. But the Court is not totally isolated from public opinion. Its decision could be on broad or narrow grounds; previous decisions have tended to be broader than expected.

The concern trolls are comparing this decision to Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision. Too broad a decision, they say, would result in a backlash. So they hope for an incremental decision of some kind, so as not to épater les bigots.

bmaz argues against the concern trolls. I'll agree with him, and add one more reason, although not the kind that usually sways the Supreme Court: the country needs a big decision of some kind, and this might as well be it; some clear statement that allowing people their own loves and domestic arrangements is the right thing. We've had a lot of incrementalism in such matters for what seems like a very long time. There is a time for incrementalism, and I've often argued for it. But too much feels like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the mountain, or being bitten to death by ducks.

Sarah Kliff presents a load of nice graphics that say that if the Supremes get it wrong this time, they'll simply be ignored. I'm pleased with New Mexico's unique color in that map of the United States; it's possible same-sex marriage has been legal here all along. The lawyers are working that out now.

So I'm feeling good about this. John Roberts has shown that he has enough respect for the Court and his position on it not to follow his personal reactionary instincts. And hey! there just might be a backlash if the Court does decide to go with those instincts. I'm willing to concern troll that side of things.

Bits and Pieces - March 24, 2013

Ronald Dworkin on what makes a religion.

Bringing development and sustainability goals together.

The most important thing that has been written in the past few years on cancer care.

How the "job creators" think about themselves.

A treaty to regulate trade in conventional arms.

Crappy security on the internet.

Looking at the future of energy with BP and Exxon Mobil.

Bits and Pieces - March 21, 2013

Once I started talking to the guards at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, I found that they are very interesting and committed people.

Wondering about the K's and W's of commercial radio stations in the US?

Photos of the 1970s in New York City.

But it's not the ancestor of today's birds.

What I Got Right And Wrong About The Iraq War

Ten years ago, I was not yet blogging. But I had an opinion about the accusations against Iraq. Bits and pieces of it might still be excavated from dead or dying discussion forums. I’ll expand here. I have to start by going back further than that.

The 1991 Iraq war had served up a big surprise for those of us following nuclear issues: Saddam Hussein’s electromagnetic separation project. Who’d have thought that would be the technology in today’s world? Which, of course, was a good reason for the Iraqis to go for it. After all, it helped enrich the uranium for the Little Boy bomb exploded over Hiroshima.

But after that program was dismantled and the equipment destroyed, the sanctions and overflights imposed on Iraq seemed to preclude a restart of any nuclear weapons projects. Biological and chemical agent programs might have continued at a low level, but the country was in dismal straits.

And then came the United Nations inspections. The request for volunteers went out to the national laboratories, and I thought about it for a while, but decided that my life was exciting enough.

A place like the Los Alamos National Laboratory has its own kind of grapevine. Some information filtered into the grapevine from the UN inspectors.The common wisdom, based on that and other information, was that Hussein might have some small and residual bio or chem weapon capability, but nuclear? No way.

So when the war drums began to beat after 9/11, I dismissed them. I looked at the supporting evidence.

The aluminum tubes seemed to me unlikely to be used for centrifuges, but I am not fully informed on centrifuge specs. Reports from sources I considered to be knowledgeable were that they were for rockets, and that sounded about right. I had met people from Oak Ridge who were experts in centrifuge design, and I knew that they contributed to intelligence assessments.

Then came Judy Miller and the New York Times: intelligence assessments say that the aluminum tubes are for centrifuges. I read the articles carefully, looking for mentions of assessments from the Department of Energy. I never saw them. But, I guessed, the multiagency assessments must have included them, and the Oak Ridge guys knew what they were doing. So maybe---???

Even if that maybe came down on the side of centrifuges, I thought, it would be some time before Iraq could have a nuclear weapon, so issuing ultimatums and pulling the inspectors out so that the US could bomb Iraq seemed unwarranted.

I was also dubious about the claim that once Saddam Hussein was gone, the people of Iraq would naturally form a democratic government with no problems. Some of what was said by people by Paul Wolfowitz used the Baltic States after the Soviet Union as an analogy. But I had spent some time learning how Estonia left the Soviet Union. I interviewed people who had participated in the process, including then-President Arnold Rüütel, in the hopes of writing a book.

[I never wrote the book; the story is well told by the film “The Singing Revolution,” and parts of it are treated in several book chapters, but I think a book is still needed.]

The transition depended upon an informed populace who had some experience of democratic rule. It ran over several years, from street protests allowed by perestroika to forming political parties that couldn’t call themselves that, to the Supreme Soviet’s declaring sovereignty (not independence!) and renaming itself the Parliament of Estonia and then to independence quickly declared as the coup unfolded against Gorbachev. As people participated in those actions, they learned more about governing. It wasn’t a matter of waking up one day and finding the government gone, much less was it done during a war.

I cringed every time the comparison was made. How could people so allegedly smart not be able to see the enormous historical differences?

Then there was Colin Powell’s presentation. I had some experience working with aerial photos when I managed environmental restorations. I thought the evidence was thin – closed trucks may be carrying anything – but, again, was not an expert in the area.

Perhaps there was something I was missing – something classified – that made the case more persuasive. So I wasn’t too vocal about my misgivings, although I would offer them up when given a chance. And I didn’t have a blog for a platform.

Some time after the war was started, several years, it became obvious why Miller and the New York Times didn’t mention the Oak Ridge or DOE intelligence assessments. They said that the tubes were unsuitable for centrifuges. In fact, that was in the original National Intelligence Estimate. The public didn’t know that until much later.

And we have seen that democracy is indeed not so easily achieved. There were, of course, no WMDs beyond a few buried chemical shells, rotting in the sand.

So I had been right. I have become more wary of what the government says, particularly in regard to matters that could lead to war. I look for confirmation outside the government.

I couldn’t have stopped the march to war all by myself, but if all those who felt as I did had spoken up, maybe it could have been slowed, might have been stopped. So now I am more vocal, particularly in areas that I know something about and that could lead to war. Or other damage to my country.

Here’s some ten-year commentary from others. The neocons are unrepentant, and I link only one summary of their comments because we’ve heard them before. Whatever went wrong wasn’t their fault.

Others who supported the war have been more forthcoming.

David Ignatius says he owes “readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense” and calls the war “one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history.”

Ezra Klein:

But at the core of my support for the war was an analytical failure I think about often: Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support -- an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration.

Relevant documents, including the National Intelligence Estimate, from The National Security Archive.

Others who didn’t believe Iraq had WMDs.

What it was like to oppose the war.

The Lowy Institute Interpreter (I love the header photo!) has a symposium on many aspects of the war.

Numerous articles at Duck of Minerva.

Addendum (3/22/13): Short reactions from several people who were for or against the war. What I find shocking is that three of them refer to the large numbers of people (presumably the people they mostly talked to) who believed that Hussein did indeed have WMD (ill-defined, but apparently sometimes implying nuclear weapons).

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Looking back, it is hard to remember just how convinced many of us were that weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Leon Weiseltier: Those of us who supported the Iraq war ten years ago because we believed that Saddam Hussein—who had already used chemical weapons—possessed weapons of mass destruction must forever ponder the fact that he did not possess them. That we joined, or helped to establish, a near-universal consensus does not exonerate us from the unpleasant truth that President Bush took the United States into a major war on fraudulent grounds.

James P. Rubin: At the time no one really doubted the intelligence reports showing Iraq with substantial stocks of deadly viruses, germs and toxins (By contrast, the nuclear threat, “the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud,” was irresponsible scare-mongering by the Bush team).

Convinced. Consensus. No one really doubted. Wow.

These are policy people, who probably are unashamed of their lack of knowledge of scientific and technical aspects of those claims. But they might be expected to know that the Department of Energy analyzes quite a bit of intelligence from precisely those aspects. They might have wondered, as I did, what the DOE analysis said about the WMD claims.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Bits and Pieces - March 16, 2013

So Richard Nixon talked the South Vietnamese into leaving the negotiations so he'd have an issue to work against Lyndon Johnson. And today we have the Republicans refusing to do their jobs in Congress because we have a black president.

And here's what we can be proud of as a result of all those taxes we don't have to pay.

The VIDA survey of the gender of authors of articles and reviewed books in literary magazines. Not pretty.

It's The War On Terror, Stupid!

Rand Paul did a good thing last night by filibustering on the subject of killing Americans on American soil by drones. It may open up the discussion. Unfortunately…well, there are a number of unfortunate aspects.

Helmut and I have discussed writing a series on the issues raised by drones. Unfortunately, there are many ways to look at them, and the discussion is freqently muddled by conflation of those aspects.

There’s a creepy, science-fiction feeling about drones. Impersonal, death from the sky, or maybe only surveillance. If that comes out to “only” for you.

Drones are being used, covertly, to pursue US goals in Pakistan and other countries. The goals of the action are covert or poorly defined.

Drones are the newest weapon of war, one more step in the attempt to remove participants from danger while wreaking death on the other side.

Paul’s filibuster was aimed at a single, narrow question: can the President decide to kill Americans on American soil?  Unfortunately, Rand Paul is a racist who holds the adolescent-boy fantasy of Libertarianism, which puts him on the Other Side from the liberals who have mostly been the ones complaining about the uses of drones. Being against drones puts him on the Other Side from conservatives who are invested in the War on Terror. So he is being excoriated for all that today on my Twitter feed.

There have been a great many misuses of federal power in the name of the War on Terror, from humiliation by the TSA as a requirement for air travel through torture at black sites and the continuing detention of prisoners at Guantanamo to various aspects of drone warfare. It’s time to stop all this and start acting like the great nation we would like to think we are.

The question of whether Americans can be killed on American soil is part of that, a very small part, with the wrong slant: but what if they target meeee? Get beyond that, kids. There are more important issues here, like what kind of country you want to live in. Figure that out, and the meeee question goes away. Or becomes something you have agreed to live with, depending on your answer.

There are a ton of issues about drones that need to be considered, but until we decide we want to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we’re not going to get any useful answers.

Spring Is Coming

Robins don't leave the area in winter in New Mexico the way they do back East. They wander up and down the mountains. So mid-winter, we will get a flock of robins in the yard. Or whenever.

I particularly liked this group of four today: two males front and back, two females to the side. The females are particularly pale. I thought earlier that one of them was a Townsend's solitaire, which I was lucky enough to see at the birdbath yesterday.

The real sign of spring was the rock squirrel I saw today. They go into torpor over winter, don't quite hibernate. And they destroy anything containing chlorophyll and dig holes.

And daylight saving starts this weekend.

Op-Ed in Globe and Mail

Canada's international newspaper, The Globe and Mail, asked me to write an op-ed on Iran's nuclear program. Here it is.

And I should apologize to Phron's readership. I've been writing fairly regularly at Nuclear Diner, and other aspects of my life have been getting busier. But I have been neglecting this page. I was just about to write a post here when the e-mail from the Globe and Mail came.

Bits and Pieces - February 11, 2013

What's wrong with evolutionary psychology.

Photos of snowy Moscow.

Dan Drezner is automating his blog posts about Iran. I've been thinking of doing this, too.

A US - Iran interactive time line from the New York Times.

If you really want to get down into the Iranian nuclear weeds, I'm working out carefully what we know about the Parchin facility now deadlocking the IAEA and Iran. There have been some ugly fights over what we know and what it implies. Here's the latest of three posts, with links back to the earlier ones. Four or five more posts to come.

How Gun News Has Changed

Joe Nocera this morning gave us a roundup of last week's gun news. The news of various deaths and injuries by gun, that is.

When the NRA declared January 19 Gun Appreciation Day, most of the news was about the accidental shootings at gun shows across the nation.

This is really a turnaround in how gun news is covered and an example of the change that Barack Obama has brought to the nation as president. It's what I wrote about in my recent post: the national discussion, and particularly the media had to change before legislative changes could be made.

Think back: No national paper would have run a column like Nocera's, and the coverage of Gun Appreciation Day would have struggled to link it to Martin Luther King and the inauguration. "In the best tradition of American independence..." Yeah, I can hear it.

Barack Obama: Community Organizer

People joke about President Obama’s abilities at eleven-dimensional chess. I think that Obama has a long-term strategy, more understandable than eleven-dimensional chess. I also think that it’s quite different from much of what passes for strategy in political Washington.

Obama came into office in January 2009 with an enormous number of problems facing the country. He had been dealing with the financial crisis since his election. That crisis was, in a way, the culmination of the financialization of the American economy, which, along with tax and other policy, had hollowed out prospects for the middle class. The country was stuck in two wars that had very little to do with its national interests. Other aspects of the “War on Terror” that damage the perception of the US abroad and damage civil liberties at home persisted long after any utility had disappeared. North Korea had demonstrated nuclear weapons, and Iran was engaged in pursuit of technology that could make nuclear weapons possible for them.

Perhaps the most difficult problem Obama faced, though, was an apathetic electorate and media that depicted that president as the only political actor in the country. Democracy can’t work without the participation of the people.

Obama would have seen that apathy before, as a community organizer. Poor communities are often demoralized or do not know how to fight for what they need. The organizer’s job is to get citizens active in helping themselves. This involves many things: educating citizens on their rights and ways to go about changing their circumstances, which would include the political process; and encouraging the citizens to take action on their own behalf.

Bits and Pieces - January 22, 2013

Jihadica continues its series. Primer on Jihadi Players in Algeria and Mali, Pt. 3: Movement for Tawhid and Jihad in West Africa
Update: Pt. 4 (Final): Ansar al-Din

Photos from immediately after World War II.

Another gun non-owner speaking out.

The many gun metaphors we use every day.

The war in Mali is unlikely to be about uranium resources.

Iran wants everything in exchange for nothing. And maybe won't join another round of talks. This truly is a baffling negotiating strategy, particularly since it is carried out in public. Speculation on its purpose ranges from delay to assure progress in Iran's nuclear program to bigtime cultural misunderstanding. I incline toward the latter. However, as I've said before, Iran might well look to their former neighbor, Saddam Hussein, to see what this kind of bluffing can lead to.

Bits and Pieces - January 20, 2013

Remembering the struggle for racial equality. A selection of videos from the 1960s.

Primer on the jihadi players in Mali and Algeria. Part 1: AQIM. Part 2: Belmokhtar & Those Who Sign with Blood.

The battle against sexist sci-fi and fantasy book covers.

And my latest at Nuclear Diner: Keeping the plutonium from scavengers at Semipalatinsk. The Soviets left a fair bit of plutonium lying around their nuclear test site. The story of how Kazakhstan, Russia, and the United States worked together to secure it has only recently been declassified.

How I Learned to Shoot: A Response to Josh Marshall

Josh Marshall writes for his tribe of non-gun-owners, like me. He gives his story and another really terrible one.

Here’s mine. Our tribe comes in all flavors, all sorts of experiences with guns.

I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs of New York. We just didn’t think about guns. We also learned a defensive situational awareness when we went into the city. We didn’t think about that in that way either, just learned to watch what was going on around us, stay away from certain kinds of places, walk briskly, and evade footsteps that persisted too regularly behind us. That was when I was around twelve years old. It’s served me well in many cities around the world.

My assumption has always been that I didn’t need a gun. I’ve mostly lived in safe neighborhoods, and my imagination doesn’t incline me toward fear of things like home invasion.

I had a male friend at one point who grew up in the country, had been in the Army, and felt strongly that I needed to own a gun. He also thought I’d like guns once I got to know them, so one day he invited me to drive out to the quarry with him for some target practice.

Sure, I said, thinking that it would be good to have fired a gun even if I never intended to take on the responsibilities and dangers of owning one. Besides, it was a nice summer day, and I hadn’t been to that quarry before and would enjoy an afternoon with him.

He seemed to be applying adequate safety to handling the guns, which I appreciated. He put the target up on a tuff wall of the quarry. Off-target bullets would be stopped by the tuff.

I was familiar with target safety from having learned archery, which intrigued me as a summer camper and carried through when I became a counselor. Place the target so that no people will be between you and the target or behind it. It’s a good idea to have an arrow stop too.

He started me off with a .22, I think. It was some time ago, and I didn’t pay attention to that kind of detail. I held my arm out in the general direction of the target and missed the paper a couple of times. He explained to me that the little nub at the end of the barrel was for aiming. Ah, just like the tip of the arrow, but much closer, much easier to aim. I hit the target.

I needed to deal with squeezing the trigger and my muscular reaction to the shot. There was no need to correct for trajectory, usually a big part of setting one’s aim in archery. Muscle control was nothing new.

My camp was not particularly wealthy. We had three or four bows, all different, all longbows, not the mechanical monsters that people who now call themselves bowshooters use. I think that by the time I was archery counselor, we had acquired a fiberglass recurve bow that always looked shabby. The recurve intrigued me, but the bow I liked best to shoot was the biggest longbow. We said that the pull was forty-five pounds. I have no idea whether that was true.

How you place your feet, the patterns of tension and relaxation in your arms, your fingers on the bowstring keeping the arrow in place, not pinching, all affect aim. The arm that holds the bow is particularly difficult: you must rotate your elbow out to avoid hitting the inside of it with the string. It is not a natural position. I could usually find the red and the gold fairly quickly.

As I learned how to squeeze the trigger, my shots marched toward the center of the target. I was pleased and quite amazed at how easy it was.

My friend said sadly, “It took me weeks when I started in the Army to hit the paper.” I tried to wipe the excited smile off my face and gave him a turn. He had a bigger gun, a .44, I think, and he took a few good (and loud!) shots. I praised him. He let me try it. It took me a few shots to hit the paper again.

By then, the summer afternoon was feeling a little ragged. We decided to head back, maybe have a hamburger on the way.

It was fun, but not enough to change my mind.


Cross-posted at The Agonist.

Begging the Question

I've long been bothered by evolutionary psychology. Thoughts leave no fossils, the way bones do. So we can know that ancient Egyptians suffered from tuberculosis, or Neandertals from arthritis, but it's much harder to know how they brought up their children.

Behaviors may leave fossils, although the interpretation of them is much more difficult than the lesions of tuberculosis or arthritis. A Neandertal grave with the body carefully arranged and flowers around it may mean respect for the dead or magic to keep death away from the living. Or both, or something we haven't thought of.

Dan Slater this morning provides what may have really been bothering me about the field. I haven't paid enough attention to its methods, but I have noticed, far too often, that its results tell us that men do things pretty well and we should allow them to keep doing what they're doing: following their penises, mostly.

The term "begging the question" is frequently used when the writer finds a question in material preceding. But the older meaning, from formal logic, is that a conclusion is assumed and then used to prove itself. Slater:

Evolutionary psychologists who study mating behavior often begin with a hypothesis about how modern humans mate: say, that men think about sex more than women do. Then they gather evidence — from studies, statistics and surveys — to support that assumption. Finally, and here’s where the leap occurs, they construct an evolutionary theory to explain why men think about sex more than women, where that gender difference came from, what adaptive purpose it served in antiquity, and why we’re stuck with the consequences today.

Assume that men think about sex more than women do. Then gather evidence to support what you've assumed. Then use that to explain why men think more about sex than women do. A very nice, clear example of begging the question.

I'm a chemist, and the matter that we investigate is more easily pinned down than human behavior. Our usual method is to make a great many observations, designed to observe a phenomenon from many sides, then make a hypothesis about what is causing the phenomenon, then designing experiments that will come out one way if the hypothesis is true, another if it is false. We admit all evidence, even when it does not support the hypothesis. In fact, we will usually try to find evidence that conflicts with or undermines the hypothesis. If we don't, another chemist will.

The example Slater has chosen is telling, too. Yes, men and sex and why that behavior is justified, again. I haven't done a count, but I wonder how many evolutionary psychologists are women.

Slater goes on to examine the navel of ev psych. Some of the initial male preferences hypotheses are being, apparently, invalidated by later investigations. If those later investigations beg their questions in the way that Slater has outlined, they are no more valid. Although they investigate current behavior rather than imagining how the caveman slung the woman over his shoulder and she liked it. And apparently some of that behavior is at odds with those initial male preferences hypotheses. Horrors!

As I said, chemists try to disprove their hypotheses. If it turns out the hypothesis was wrong, then we devise one more in line with the observations. I guess that finding your hypothesis is wrong when you've used it to prove itself is a worse outcome.

It's nice that people can get  jobs fantasizing about sex and asking others embarrassing questions. But, if this "science" is done as Slater describes, what can we possibly expect to get out of it?

Update: Steven Pinker tweets that Slater has misquoted him. His entire statement is here.

Cross-posted at The Agonist.

The White House Responds to Some Highly-Publicized Petitions

You've probably seen it by now: we won't be building a death star.
Update from Imperial Center, Coruscant.

Another set of petitions, for secession of various states from the Union, was also answered yesterday. Ain't gonna happen, at least not from Washington.

But as much as we value a healthy debate, we don't let that debate tear us apart.

Whether it's figuring out how to strengthen our economy, reduce our deficit in a responsible way, or protect our country, we will need to work together -- and hear from one another -- in order to find the best way to move forward.

Whatta concept! It'll be interesting to see how that works.

Bits and Pieces - January 10, 2013

Did you know that John Boehner usually doesn't bring a vote unless it can pass the House with only Republican votes? The New York Times today suggests he might try democracy.

This seems to happen every few years: killer whales trapped by ice in Hudson Bay. Let's hope some brave humans with chain saws can help them out.
Update: And so the humans did.

Yuval Diskin disses Bibi and Barak. Really ugly stuff here.

An eyewitness account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

John Galt kills Americans. Great title. Serious problem.

New book: Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons. I review it at Nuclear Diner.

Christopher Saunders: The Long Now

For those of you in the New York Area, FOTB (Friend of the Blog) Christopher Saunders will have an exhibition of his paintings at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton, New York. The exhibition will run from January 12 to February 23, and there will be an opening reception on January 12.

More information here.

Bits and Pieces - First of the New Year

Barack Obama is the first president in more than five decades to win at least 51 percent of the national popular vote twice. The first since the Eisenhower landslides. This is a really important point to remember, as the Republicans begin with their incessant diatribes. This is our president, and most of the voters wanted him as president.

There are a number of articles along these lines that I could have linked, but John Judis looks to the longer view. The "fiscal cliff" legislation was a win for Obama, and it weakened the Republicans. I hope to write more about the big picture, but the way things are going today, it may be a while.

Pickpockets and how they do it. The real kind.

A year in fragments from Charles Simic.

Bits and Pieces - Almost New Year's Eve Edition

Los Alamos National Laboratory studies how trees die. I think this project grows out of some of the ecological research I was somewhat involved with. It turned out that the pinyon and juniper trees killed grass and increased erosion.

Idle No More looks like a movement to watch.

Noam Chomsky on work, education, and freedom. I worry about kids being overscheduled, too. When you're on your own, you get yourself into situations that require quick thinking.

The Associated Press and New York Times glibly say, "In Gun Debate, Two Sides Speak Different Languages." I think they're wrong. I think the two sides disagree. There are many things they disagree on, but it's essential not to give up before any disagreement can take place. Likewise, the argument that there are so many guns in the US that they never can be controlled declares action to be futile. We all are part of one country, and we need to agree on how to get along. I'd like to think that my right not to be shot is as strong as someone's right to have a gun.