Draw Breath

I'm about to leave Atlanta Georgia for the long trip back to Belfast (via Newark). I flew in on Wednesday evening to attend a very interesting conference on Democracy and Extremism, populated mostly by political scientists. It was all very interesting and I learned an enormous amount. I gave a paper on the Parades Commission (generally on my predelictions for thinking of conflict resolution in Northern Ireland in a regulatory frame) and was part of the opening round-table on defining extremism (my contributions being to say that I'm not convinced that there are that many extremists in Ireland and a rather long ramble on the possibilities and profound difficulties involved in distinguishing between actions in conflicts and actions in relatively stable democracies).¹

Anyway, this morning was interesting. I wandered with a few fellow participants to the Martin Luther King National Historic Site.

There are two interesting articles in today's Times, suggesting at major extensions of domestic law in response to globalisation. The first reports on the US Supreme Court's decision (though in odd circumstances) to allow a lawsuit to go ahead, under the Alien Tort Claims Act (see also here), of companies that collaborated with the Apartheid regime in South Africa. If lawyers establish that these companies knowingly assisted the South African regime in breaching human rights, they may be liable for millions of dollars.

Second, there's an article on the implications of corporations being found responsible for bribery in both developing and developed countries. It's always one of those things denied by the sorts of twats who advocate cutting aid to developing countries because of corruption: corrupters are just as guilty and they tend to be a lot closer to home. Certainly, the BAE probe was depressing, but corruption is very much coming onto the agenda. Again, the Alien Tort Claims Act may be start to be employed in interesting ways here. In which case, private action will emerge as one of the major sources of regulation of globalisation.

Evening Extra was full of an inordinate amount of people blaming the government for snow. They strangely decided to include a reading of one person's off-the-shelf text saying 'if they can't predict snow in an hour how can they say anything about climate change?' Answer: because there's a difference between weather and climate, as any fool should know.

Anyway, enough kvetching. The highlight of the show was good friend Mel punditifying on post-Iowa prospects for New Hampshire. A nice brief discussion, only marred by Karen Patterson asking the inevitable 'who's going to win the presidential election?' question. Hear Mel struggle to find a polite version of 'how in hell should I know?' here at about 2:13.

Update: Mel has some interesting things to say over on Accountability Bloke. 

There was a bizarre feature in yesterday's Guardian on political advertising in Iowa. Nothing particularly controversial about the content, but I was struck by the strange scientific claim behind the piece. The thrust was: Iowans are subject to lots of ads from caucus candidates. No shit. But wait: apparently the Guardian knows this because they "commissioned a survey of a local TV station and found that in one half-hour period eight political ads were aired."

Is it just me but doesn't that read a little bit like: "watched television for half an hour"?

It gets better though. There's a comment on the survey method at the bottom of (the online version of) the article: "Dean Treftz, a reporter with the Daily Iowan, campus paper at the University of Iowa, listed the advertisements broadcast over a 30-minute period on his local TV station." So the first passage, strictly speaking, out to read: "The Guardian got a student to watch TV for half an hour and he wrote down stuff that happened."

Also, the half hour coincided with the early evening news.

High level content analysis indeed.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a depressing piece on the proposed solution to the sub-prime crisis. It makes a gloomy companion piece to this article from the FT in August, outlining the various frauds (criminal and not) surrounding this shoddy saga.

Unlike the Enron debacle, if this one shakes out into a full-blown crisis (as it well might), there'll be no getting away from systematic failures of surveillance, governance and the like. Or to mix a couple of metaphors, when there are more bad apples than good, you start thinking that something's wrong with the basket (hat tip to Meditations71 for passing on the SF Chronicle article).

There's a strange debate going on at the moment over the US Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual (pdf). One Ralph Peters objects to its (as he sees it) over-emphasis on politics, while Dave Dilegge responds by taking issue with various parts of Peters's analysis (hat-tip Mark Grimsley).

I'm certainly not qualified to comment on any of these debates in depth, although I do object to Peters's misconception that we academics only cite examples that support our arguments. We undergo a peer-review process specifically so that we can't do that. Anyway, I have a feeling that Peters also misunderstands the 20:80 military-political ratio cited in the report. He says that progress can't be made without squashing the more unruly of the natives (perhaps that's just a little bit of a misrepresentation). So, he concludes the military aspect of counter-insurgency is far more important than the ratio gives it credit for.

Perhaps Peters ought to have a peek at the British Army's report (pdf, with thanks to Will Crawley for the link) on Operation Banner. As I recall, one very significant aspect of this report is the army's (revisionist perhaps) self-conception of holding the line and containing the violence until politics could actually kick in and resolve the problems. I suspect that that - not some totting up of various actions on a war-war/jaw-jaw balance sheet - is what the 20:80 conception refers to.

I'm sure, like me, you spend most of your waking hours speculating as to why it is that Boeing is doing so much better than Airbus. Of course, to a large extent it has to do with the weakness of the dollar and with the spectacular governance near-meltdown of EADS, Airbus's parent company.

But don't underestimate the power of government intervention. There is of course the thorny issue of who pisses highest (or lowest) on the subsidies wall (see also here and here).

And then there's all that military revenue...

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John Quiggin has a good post over on Crooked Timber discussing the need for the Democrats to put an end to the Iraq debacle as soon as possible. Since a direct motion to end the war probably wouldn't work, Quiggin advocates that Congress repeat the tactic that brought Vietnam to an end: simply stop paying for it.

This leads to a sub-debate in the comments on whether the emerging Vietnam <=> Iraq consensus has any merit. It probably does. Still, I'm concerned at the idea that the ending-the-war options are the same for the Democrats now as they were then. I think that things are much much worse for them this time around.

Good post over on Brad deLong's blog that gives a parallel perspective to the one I gave here.

According to the people deLong quotes, we have to see the subprime crisis in the context of new modes of banking, rather than in the more traditional terms of banking that have held up until now.

I've spoken before about the evidence on how SUV drivers, having exported the risks to people outside their cars, tend to drive more recklessly. Not that this makes SUV drivers a particularly unique demographic: for instance this graph suggests that, if anything, the introduction of mandatory seatbelt-wearing led to a worse situation than would otherwise have been the case in terms of overall deaths: the reduction in driver deaths was more than matched by a the growth in pedestrian and other deaths. As the study from which the graph was taken says, "to compel a person to use protection from the consequences of hazardous driving, as seatbelt laws do, is to encourage hazardous driving."¹

So. What has this got to do with the ongoing subprime crisis? Well, they're both stories about risk.