Dementia: the Reagan Administration and Right-wing Policies

President Reagan had Alzhemier's disease (a form of senile dementia) during his second term (1984-1988.) Some people reported symptoms earlier.

Let's look at this for a minute: for at least half of Reagan's term, the chief executive was incompetent to be President, though perhaps only at times. The country was rudderless. And there were plenty of people in the government who liked it just fine. They could do whatever they wanted and know that they would never be called to account for it.

When the histories are written, perhaps Reagan will be the mad president. I am put in mind of the history of mad kings and emperors. A quick consult with my wife, something of an expert, gives me the names of Henry VIII and George III. And, yes, the people around them were quick to take advantage, implementing self-serving, often disastrous policies.

On Reagan's dementia:

• Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, "Worrying About Reagan," http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/worrying-about-reagan
• David Corn at Mother Jones, "How Close Did Lesley Stahl Come to Reporting Reagan Had Alzheimer's While in Office? Very Close," http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/reagan-alzheimers-family-feud-lesley-stahl
• Blogger Avedon Carol, it may have been for all his Presidency, http://sideshow.me.uk/sjun02.htm#12at1524

Conservatives, when you say there's no difference between the parties…

…what I hear is that your side f—d up real bad, and you don't want to admit it.

"And it's one, two, three, …

… what are we fighting for?"

So in that speech which, as usual, no-one seems to have listened to, Obama asked for an expansion of Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to Da'esh. He also asked for an expansion of surveillance and to add firearms ownership to the secret terrorist watch list (the "no-fly" list), thereby expanding secret extra-judicial federal authority.

This is the leader of the good guys?

Juan Cole, slightly more optimistic than this cranky old bird, nonetheless comments:

What Obama did not say is that these various measures aren’t all that effective and will only have an impact over several years. Bombing a territory from the air with no ground force to take advantage of it is about as close to useless and a military tactic can get. US training programs have not been effective. Daesh’s kind of terrorism is hard to disrupt, since they attempt to appeal to lone wolves rather than running direct agents. As for peace in Syria, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Whether this message of patience and steadfastness will be enough to assuage anxieties is not clear. And more important than anxieties are the war lobbies, fueled by campaign cash to hawks in Congress, which demand really big wars that are good for their business.

Me, I've got that 1914 feeling. There is so much desire for a war, or rather there are so many factions that each their own little wars. Da'esh, of course. Assad. We have our own home-grown warmongers. China wants oil and the South China Sea. Putin wants more. The fascists are rising in the USA and Western Europe. Now, all these factions want different "little" wars, but take all those "little" wars and put them together, and maybe we get one big war.

"And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates, …" — Joe McDonald, "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag"

General Clinton

(A cranky comment I made over at Crooked Timber.)

It occurs to me that, if we could get Hillary Clinton on our side, even a bit, she might just be tough enough to take on the people who are destroying the USA. I love Sanders’ vision, and he is a skillful politician, but the wheels are coming off US democracy. Perhaps, after all, we need General Clinton.

Could Hillary Clinton’s feminism be brought into conflict with her corporatism?

On the Uses of Political Leadership, a Critique of Division on the Left

You're out of power, you're being treated horribly, you're angry, and you can't reach your real enemies. So you attack the allies that are in easy reach.

It is cowardly. It makes it easy for your enemies to divide and destroy you.

The conservatives are right. We are undisciplined. Faced with a challenge, we turn to fighting among ourselves.

This election looks like it is the Democrats and the progressives to lose, and we may lose it because we can't direct our anger at our real enemies.

Book Review: Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice

Benforado, Adam. Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. New York: Crown, 2015. 379 pages.

Unfair is a broad survey of current psychological research relevant to the US criminal justice system. Underpinning it is a terrifying reality: the criminal justice system, as it has grown since the foundation of the USA, is not founded in reality, but rather in a series of guesses about human thought and behavior. Life and death issues are being decided by unchecked, often invalid, methods. I have read other books that cover some of this material, but I have not seen any other book that brings together so much of it.

The book is twelve chapters grouped into four major sections: Investigation, with chapters on victims, detectives, and suspects; Adjudication, on lawyers, juries, eyewitnesses, experts, and judges; Punishment, on public attitudes and prisons; and Reform, broken into “The Challenge” and “The Future.” Each chapter is a monograph, addressing a single aspect of the problem.

The chapters are written more-or-less as legal arguments addressed to the court of public opinion, and therefore in plain, easily accessible English, with striking examples — I bet Professor Benforado is a kickass trial lawyer — but there is a huge amount of research behind them. The printed bibliography, which is abbreviated, is 75 pages long, and the full bibliography, available online, runs 304 PDF pages.

The book goes from evaluation of victims, through interrogation and the idea of criminality, and on through the system of trials and sentencing, giving horrifying examples of failure at each stage. For instance, we have this on parole board judging:

An analysis of more than a thousand rulings [of two Israeli parole boards] showed that the judges were significantly more likely to grant prisoners parole at the beginning of the workday or after one of the two food breaks — ruling in favor of prisoners about 65% of the time — than they were at the end of the day or right before a break, when favorable rulings dropped almost to zero. Moreover, factors like the severity of the crime and the amount of time the prisoner had already served — which should influence the judges’ decisions — tended not to have an impact on rulings. The time of day seemed to be the important thing.

I have only two quibbles with the book: (1) the very accessibility of the language and the design of the book conceals the erudition behind it and (2) the reform suggestions are very thin. There are no footnotes for the reader who wants to follow up on particular examples, though a search of the online bibliography will bring them up. There are not even running chapter heads, which makes it more difficult to refer back to particular arguments. This probably explains why the book has gotten few editorial reviews; it is not taken seriously enough.

The final chapter of suggestions for reform is a scant 29 pages, and very thin. Problems without solutions make many readers uncomfortable, and any courtroom case wraps up with an argument for action, but I wish, nonetheless, for a different conclusion. That chapter could easily be another book, and perhaps it should be.

These quibbles notwithstanding, this is an important and well-researched book: go read it.

Links:

·      Buy the book at Powells.com, which treats its workers decently.

·      NPR interview with Benforado

·      Book page at Benforado’s own site

Grebacle, Three Months On: Failing at Court Politics

Grebacle = Greek debacle

So Syriza caved in, the Eurocrats are looting Greece, and the Greeks are in a for a generation of poverty.

Yanis Varoufakis, Greek Finance Minister at the time, “I was warning the Cabinet this was going to happen [the ECB shut our banks] for a month, in order to drag us into a humiliating agreement. When it happened – and many of my colleagues couldn’t believe it happened – my recommendation for responding ‘energetically,’ let’s say, was voted down. […] out of six people we were in a minority of two.”

Looks to me like the Syriza leadership got cold feet. They also seem to me to have lacked imagination: they couldn’t imagine that the Germans would cut them off, even after it happened. I also think Syriza didn’t understand what a high-stakes negotiation would be like, and the ways the party with the upper hand acts to wear down the opposing side. Rulers need courtiers, so that they can maintain their energy and self-confidence in hard dealings. Even with good friends around me and adequate sleep, I would have trouble staying on track when faced with 14 hostile opponents. There apparently were only six members of the Greek negotiating team, which wasn’t enough. Add to that, the Eurocrats set a grueling schedule. Varoufakis comments: “I no longer have to live through this hectic timetable, which was absolutely inhuman, just unbelievable. I was on 2 hours sleep every day for five months.” After a few days of that the Greek team must have been negotiating like a crew of drunks—it is no wonder they brought back a poor agreement.

As to future Euro exits, I think that unless the Eurocrats adopt Keynesian policies, they are inevitable. Other countries will study the Greek debacle and learn from it.

The Greeks lost to their own failed leadership. We have the Greek public both wanting to stay in the Eurozone and wanting the austerity eased, and there was no way Germnay would every accede to that, but apparently no-one bothered to tell the Greek public, to present the choice and say, "We can have the Euro or control of our own economy, not both." And so Greece was sold.

Months down the road: in Portugal a coalition with a 62% majority has not been allowed to form a government. Who is in charge in the Eurozone? Apparently German bankers.