Undernews For 22 January 2009

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22 January 2009

THINKING ABOUT OBAMA
Sam Smith

Once again I'm in trouble and once again it has little to do with politics or ideology. I just don't think right about Obama.

Most people of power are inherently deductive thinkers. They have learned a set of respected principles by which those of power can continue to have power by applying these principles to the facts they find around them.

These principles change from time to time, which is why we have things like the op ed pages of the Washington Post that helpfully inform us, for example, when the age of the "free market" is over and it's okay to quote Keynes again.

Sometimes key principles have to be dispensed with in a less elegant manner, such as the "domino theory" of the Vietnam war or the "weapons of mass destruction" that took us into Iraq.

And sometimes key principles prove a bit shaky at which time it is fitting and proper to have them undergo thoughtful reexamination by approved theorists as is happening now with the "war on terror." These theories are typically either reconfirmed or replaced with others, preferably of three or less words.

In each instance, the key element is a theory that is presumed to be true, even if lacks empirical confirmation.

For example, in the case of Barack Obama, one theory is that he will be a great president because he is our first black president. Everyone is either too polite or too enthralled by the theory to ask such simple questions as: would this be true if our first black president were Clarence Thomas?

Another theory is that he will be a great president because he is a great man, a subset of the theory that history is the purview of great men [sic], which overlooks the role of chance, culture, the environment, and lesser souls such as those who created the decline in the birth rate or the anti-slavery, women's, labor and environmental movements.

Another theory, particular popular among the Washington elite, is that he will be a great president because he preaches centrism, even though there is no historical evidence that centrism produces anything much more than the status quo and even though, in America's case, most profound and progressive improvements have been the result of a raucous and irrepressible left.

I don't buy such theories. My learning disability is not that I'm of the wrong political persuasion, but that I think inductively. In other words, I move from evidence towards the theory rather than the other way around. While there are some academic fields where inductive reasoning gets respect - social history and anthropology, in which I majored, being among them - it is widely thought of as unprofessional empiricism at best, conspiracy theory at worst.

In fact, the term 'conspiracy theory' was invented by elite media and politicians to denigrate questions or critical presumptions about events about which important facts remain unrevealed.

The intelligent response to such events is to remain agnostic, skeptical, and curious. Theories may be suggested - just as they are every day about less complex and more open matters on news broadcasts and op ed pages - but such theories should not stray too far from available evidence.

Conversely, as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions and doubts as a "conspiracy theory" is a highly unintelligent response. It is also ironic as those ridiculing the questions and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior to the doubters. But they aren't because they stopped thinking the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible answer.

There is the further irony that many who ridicule doubts about the official version of events were typically trained at elite colleges where, in political science and history, theories often take precedent over facts and in which substantive decisions affecting politics and history are presumed to be the work of a small number of wise men [sic]. They are trained, in effect, to trust in theories and benign confederacies. Most major media political coverage is based on the great man theory of history. This pattern can be found elsewhere in everything from Skull & Bones to the NY Times editorial board to the Council on Foreign Relations. You might even call them beneficent conspiracy theorists.

Homicide detectives and investigative reporters, among others, are inductive thinkers who start with evidence rather than with theories and aren't happy when the evidence is weak, conflicting or lacking. They keep working the case until a solid answer appears.

The inductive thinker considering Obama is naturally drawn to things like his record and his statements on various issues. I compiled these over the campaign and came up with around 30 issues with which progressives might disagree. However you might argue each case, one fact is indisputable: the media did not let the voters in on the secret. Thus, most of the one million plus enthusiasts on the Mall during the inaugural celebration were cheering a theory rather than facts, supported by the almost universal absence of the mention of actual issues when the fans were interviewed by roving TV crews.

In philosophical terms, Barack Obama might be called a beneficent conspiracy theory, a black helicopter come to save rather than endanger us.

The irony is that I suspect he knows this, because he has achieved his success in part by being an inductive reasoner in practice and a deductive one in rhetoric. Cleverly ignoring Mahalia Jackson's warning against being a "saint in church and a devil under cover," Obama is street smart in his walk and ethereal in his talk. And in the latter, he is blessed by being able to draw on the grand theories of both the white Ivy League and black theology. It is this combination of intellectual and Christian theory that appeals to those inclined to faithfulness.

I learned about the Ivy League approach when I attended Harvard. Later I would write:

"Whatever intelligence I possessed did not seem the sort required to excel at Harvard. Long afterwards I would figure out that much of what Harvard was about was a giant game of categories, in which real people, real events and real phenomena were assigned to fictitious groupings such as The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, or the Freudian Tradition. To those immersed in this game, the imaginary assumed a substance of its own; as classics professor John Finley is said to have remarked, 'Sometimes, I fear my son thinks that life is real.'

"I had come to Harvard full of passion for phenomena I could see, feel and touch; now it was implicitly suggested that these were childish things to be put away. The educated man concerned himself primarily with what they meant, with which other phenomena they belonged, and what theories could best explain their existence in the first place. I didn't want to spend my life putting things into little boxes; I wanted to take them out, turn them over, examine them closely, do something with them, and tell others what I had found.

"If you were brazen enough to think inductively, that is to say to examine evidence and consider what it might all mean -- in short to use one's innate capacity to imagine, to dream and to create -- you risked being regarded ignorant, or at least odd. You were, after all, being educated to digest grand principles, major paradigms and random certainties and then to sort and file all of life's phenomena by these convenient categories.

"In such a cataloging system, the accidental, the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent, the culturally unfamiliar, and the unique often got misplaced. I had come to Harvard with some vague notion that it would teach me how to use my own intelligence better, that I would learn how to educate myself. I didn't understand then, and wouldn't until many decades later, that the American establishment wasn't really all that interested in that sort of thing.

"From the intellectual epicenter of Cambridge to the political apex of Washington, education was something one received, rehearsed, and regurgitated. You didn't play with it, experiment with it, and you certainly didn't make it your own -- even if, like the shape of Harvard Square, it turned out not to be as officially described. Life at Harvard was thus several steps removed from life as I knew and hoped it to be."

The dean of freshman, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr, once said to me, "You people from Germantown Friends School look so good on paper. Why do you do so badly here?" It was a fair question; a number of GFS graduates were on probation and one had dropped out.

It took me decades to understand and appreciate the difference in two systems of learning, for at my Quaker high school I had been given few grand theories. Instead, in the 1950s I had been introduced to how the world really worked - for example, an 8th grade English course that included a segment on the secrets of advertising, a 9th grade course in anthropology and a 12 grade math course that explained the Boolean calculations of computers I wouldn't see for 20 years. The Quakers themselves were refreshingly devoid of grand theories - once a debate in Friends meeting over the divinity of Christ, for example, was gently diverted by one of the elders - but the respect and encouragement of critical thought and examination was far greater than I would find at Harvard or in the media I would late join.

Part of the problem with the grand theory approach to politics is that politics isn't a science. The deductive premises of science can be constantly tested, reviewed and dumped if necessary. In politics, these theories are not sanctified by the confirmation of experimentation and analysis, but primarily by the effectiveness of the propaganda those projecting them.

Besides, as Benjamin Franklin noted, you don't need to know the law of gravity to realize that a plate will likely break if you drop it on the floor.

The problem with inductive reasoning in politics is that you seldom come up with definitively accurate answers. But the same is true of deductive reasoning. The difference is that with the latter, it is easier to pretend that it is true. With inductive reasoning you are constantly reminded of the weakness of thought; with deductive reasoning it is too easy to become a prisoner of myth.

Evan Heit, in the Cambridge Handbook Of Computational Psychology describes the process well:

"How do you make a prediction about the unpredictable? Inductive reasoning is about drawing conclusions that are not certain or logically valid, but still likely. Let's say you are buying a new CD for your friend. It's impossible to know with certainty what she will like, and it doesn't seem that the rules of logic will tell you which CD to buy. There's no correct answer. Nonetheless, you can make an informed guess, and indeed she will probably like the CD that you buy. The more you know about her taste in music, and which categories of music she likes and does not like, the more likely it is that your prediction will be correct. Our everyday experiences are filled with predictions of this nature - we use inductive reasoning to make likely but not certain predictions about how people will act and about things we have not seen, e.g., that when we open a door to a room, the room will have a floor and ceiling. In spite of the uncertainty, we manage to be fairly successful in our predictions - we can buy gifts that our friends will enjoy and avoid walking into rooms without floors. When it comes to making predictions about the unpredictable, computational models are in a similar position to people. Because the judgments being modeled are themselves uncertain, it's unlikely that models of inductive reasoning will be perfectly correct. Any computational model of inductive reasoning could probably be improved by taking account of more knowledge or more principles of prediction. Nonetheless, current models of inductive reasoning already do a fairly good job."

So if I do not react to Barack Obama the way you would like, do not consider me cynical. It's just that where others see a god, I see a politician; where others feast on adjectives, I dine on facts and where some find faith sufficient, I prefer the Missouri motto that some say stems from an 1899 speech by Congressman Willard Vandiver, when he declared, "I come from a country that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me."

PAGE ONE MUST
AMAZON CUSTOMER COMMENTS ON THE PLAYMOBIL TSA CHECKPOINT

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital. The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillance society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillance System set for Christmas. I've heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I'll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interrogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush). this)

Thank you, Playmobil, for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it's a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times. Little children need to be aware that not all smiling faces and uniforms are friendly. I noticed that my child is now more interested in current events. Just the other day he asked me why we had to forfeit so much of our liberties and personal freedoms and I had to answer "Well, it's because the terrorists have already won". Yes, they have won. I also highly recommend the Playmobil "farm fencing" so you can take your escorted airline passenger away and fence him behind bars as if he were in Guantanamo Bay.

My family was planning a vacation to Europe, so I purchased this item to teach my twins about what to expect at the airport and hopefully, alleviate some of their anxiety. We also downloaded the actual TSA security checklist from the American Airlines website and then proceeded with our demonstration. . . Worst of all, since the suitcase did not actually open, the baggage inspector made a call to the FBI and ATF bomb squads which then segregated the family's suitcase (which btw was the only suitcase they provided for our educational family experience) and according to the advanced TSA regulations, had to blow it up, (since they could not otherwise mutilate the luggage, break off the locks and put one of those nice little advisory stickers on it), which we had to simulate out in the backyard with a few M-80s and other fireworks. The girls started crying. They became so hysterical by the whole experience that we could not even get them in the car when the time came to actually take our trip, and so we had to cancel the whole thing at the last minute, losing over $7,000 in airfare and hotel charges that we could not recoup do to the last minute cancellations.

We've now spent an additional $3,000 to pay for the girls therapy and medication over the past year since this incident occurred, and the psychologists have told us that this will affect them for life, so much for their college fund and our retirement. Then, to top it all off, when we tried to use to Playmobil phone to call the company to ask for reimbursement, as you might expect, of course the damn thing didn't even work; neither did our efforts to e-mail them using the computer screen on the baggage checkpoint; and our real-life efforts to contact them to obtain re-imbursement have also likewise been ignored.
UN OFFICIAL CALLS FOR PROSECUTION OF BUSH AND RUMSFELD
AFP - The UN's special torture rapporteur called on the US Tuesday to pursue former president George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture and bad treatment of Guantanamo prisoners. "Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation" to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak said, in remarks to be broadcast on Germany's ZDF television Tuesday evening. He noted Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture which required "all means, particularly penal law" to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.

Asked about chances to bring legal action against Bush and Rumsfeld, Nowak said: "In principle yes. I think the evidence is on the table." At issue, however, is whether "American law will recognize these forms of torture."
NOW, PEAK WATER
Leo Lewis, Times UK - A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind's expanding "water footprint" could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water. The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term "peak ecological water" - the point where, like the concept of "peak oil", the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite. . .

Humans - via agriculture, industry and other demands - use about half of the world's renewable and accessible fresh water. But even at those levels, billions of people live without the most basic water services, Dr Gleick said.. . .

David Zhang, a geographer at the University of Hong Kong, produced a study published in the US National Academy of Sciences journal that analyzed 8,000 wars over 500 years and concluded that water shortage had played a far greater role as a catalyst than previously supposed. "We are on alert, because this gives us the indication that resource shortage is the main cause of war," he told The Times. "Human beings will definitely have conflicts over this."

Although in theory renewable sources of water were returned to the ecosystem and their use could continue indefinitely, Dr Gleick said, changes in the way water was exploited and how its quality degraded meant that methods of processing it would become more expensive.

UN calculations suggest that more than one third of the world's population is suffering from water shortages: by 2020 water use is expected to increase by 40 per cent from current levels, and by 2025, according to another UN estimate, two out of three people could be living under conditions of "water stress".
HARRY REID SCREWS UP AGAIN
Brad Blog - Can still-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid do anything right? It wasn't enough that he blew two years of his mandate, since the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, with his usual pathetic dithering. It's not enough that following the 2008 election he rallied his fellow Democrats in the Senate to announce they'd not allow the seating of anybody chosen by beleaguered IL Governor Rod Blagojevich to fill the seat of Barack Obama, only to fold pathetically (and correctly) to allow the seating of Gov. Blagojevich's choice of Roland Burris to fill the seat of Barack Obama.

Now, in his second prominent act as Majority Leader since the election, as AP reports, he's considering going ahead with the seating of MN's Al Franken, despite the fact that Franken's opponent, former Sen. Norm Coleman, is allowed, by state law, to challenge the results of the election --- which found that he lost by 225 votes --- in a court of law before the election is certified by the state's SoS and Governor. Can Harry Reid do nothing right? . . .

I've seen nothing in Coleman's election contest to convince me that he'll find the votes needed to overturn the results already certified by the state canvassing board. In fact, the bulk of his seemingly desperate lawsuit consists of complaints that re-litigate -- or even "re-re-litigate", to paraphrase a Franken attorney --- decisions and findings already carefully and transparently determined by bi-partisan state authorities previously.

And yet, Coleman deserves his day in court to make his case, if he can come up with one. Similarly, Franken deserves his day in court, where he has filed to dismiss Coleman's suit, as well as filed for dispensation from the state to be seated "provisionally" in the U.S. Senate. If the courts allow the latter, then great, let Reid move ahead, seat Coleman, and take whatever political heat for it that may come his way. If the court dismisses Coleman's case . . . then Franken will soon enough be seated without a cloud hanging over his office for the next six years.

But for Reid to, once again, go out on a limb, for exactly the wrong cause, reminds us just how ill-served Democrats continue to be with Senator Reid in charge of the majority.
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Sam Smith - On Inauguration eve I returned home after midnight and, two blocks from my Capitol Hill home, noticed four soldiers on patrol in cold weather gear huddled together in the dark drinking coffee. Leaning against one of the men's boots was a large bag labeled Dunkin' Donuts. The men were standing on the corner of 8th & A NE in the same block as my office a long time ago. I recalled the last time I had seen soldiers on that street. It was right after the 1968 riots. The scene was familiar but how its meaning had changed.
NSA ENGAGED IN MASSIVE SPYING ON JOURNALISTS

MSNBC INTERVIEW
Raw Story - Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

Tice further explained that "even for the NSA it's impossible to literally collect all communications. . . What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata . . . and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected."

According to Tice, in addition to this "low-tech, dragnet" approach, the NSA also had the ability to hone in on specific groups, and that was the aspect he himself was involved with. However, even within the NSA there was a cover story meant to prevent people like Tice from realizing what they were doing.

"In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them," Tice told Olbermann. "What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year -- and it made no sense. . . I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me to fire me."

When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, "An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists."

"To what purpose?" Olbermann asked. "I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?"

Tice did not answer directly, but simply stated, "If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything." He added, however, that he had no idea what was ultimately done with the information, except that he was sure it "was digitized and put on databases somewhere."

Tice first began alleging that there were illegal activities going on at both the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in December 2005, several months after being fired by the NSA. He also served at that time as a source for the New York Times story which revealed the existence of the NSA's wireless wiretapping program.

Progressive Review, 2000- NICK FIELDING AND DUNCAN CAMPBELL, SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON: Spy agencies in Britain and America eavesdropped on Diana, Princess of Wales and Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister, as part of a global system of monitoring communications, according to former intelligence officials . . . The officials also revealed that charities such as Amnesty International, Christian Aid and Greenpeace were secretly spied on. Overseas targets have even included the Vatican: messages sent by the Pope and the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta have been intercepted, read and passed on to Whitehall intelligence officers, the sources say.

Code named Echelon, the monitoring system is part of a worldwide network of listening stations capable of processing millions of messages an hour. At least 10 Echelon stations operate around the world. Canada, Australia and New Zealand participate, as well as Britain and the United States. Former intelligence officials have spoken out after a decision by the European parliament to launch an inquiry into Echelon's operations. Officially, the British and American governments continue to deny the network's existence. Wayne Madsen, who worked for 20 years at America's National Security Agency and other agencies, said last week: "Anybody who is politically active will eventually end up on the NSA's radar screen" . . .

"I just think of Echelon as a great vacuum cleaner in the sky which sucks everything up," said Mike Frost, a former Canadian intelligence officer. "We just get to look at the goodies." Frost, who retired in 1992 after 20 years' service, has also revealed that Canada's equivalent of GCHQ was used by Margaret Thatcher to monitor two cabinet colleagues. "She wanted to find out not what they were saying," Frost said, "but what they were thinking" . .

Progressive Review, 1998 - A story in the London Daily Telegraph confirms what TPR and a few other alternative news sources have been reporting for some time: that the National Security Agency routinely eavesdrops on telephone, e-mail and fax communications around the world. A recent report of the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament notes that "within Europe all email telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency transferring all target information from the European mainland by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York moors in the UK." The report continues:

"Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like MEMEX to find key words."

The Daily Telegraph notes that:

"The NSA, the world's biggest and most powerful signals intelligence organization, received approval to set up a network of spy stations throughout Britain. Their role was to provide military, diplomatic and economic intelligence by intercepting communications from throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The NSA is one of the shadowiest of the US intelligence agencies."

Today, the practice continues albeit in modern garb. According to the Computer Fraud and Security Bulletin, the National Security Agency is already spying on the Internet by "sniffing" data at key router and gateways hosts. NSA is also said to have made deals with Microsoft, Lotus and Netscape to prevent anonymous e-mail or encryption systems on the Net.
GAZA A BIG FAILURE FOR ISRAEL
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, Israel - On the morrow of the return of the last Israeli soldier from Gaza, we can determine with certainty that they had all gone out there in vain. This war ended in utter failure for Israel.

This goes beyond the profound moral failure, which is a grave matter in itself, but pertains to its inability to reach its stated goals. . . We have gained nothing in this war save hundreds of graves, some of them very small, thousands of maimed people, much destruction and the besmirching of Israel's image. . .

The initial objective of the war was to put an end to the firing of Qassam rockets. This did not cease until the war's last day. It was only achieved after a cease-fire had already been arranged. Defense officials estimate that Hamas still has 1,000 rockets.

The war's second objective, the prevention of smuggling, was not met either. The head of the Shin Bet security service has estimated that smuggling will be renewed within two months.

Most of the smuggling that is going on is meant to provide food for a population under siege, and not to obtain weapons. But even if we accept the scare campaign concerning the smuggling with its exaggerations, this war has served to prove that only poor quality, rudimentary weapons passed through the smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt.

Israel's ability to achieve its third objective is also dubious. Deterrence, my foot. The deterrence we supposedly achieved in the Second Lebanon War has not had the slightest effect on Hamas, and the one supposedly achieved now isn't working any better: The sporadic firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip has continued over the past few days.

The fourth objective, which remained undeclared, was not met either. The IDF has not restored its capability. It couldn't have, not in a quasi-war against a miserable and poorly-equipped organization relying on makeshift weapons, whose combatants barely put up a fight. . .

Israel's actions have dealt a serious blow to public support for the state. While this does not always translate itself into an immediate diplomatic situation, the shockwaves will arrive one day. The whole world saw the images. They shocked every human being who saw them, even if they left most Israelis cold.

The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law. The investigations are on their way.

Graver still is the damage this will visit upon our moral spine. It will come from difficult questions about what the IDF did in Gaza, which will occur despite the blurring effect of recruited media.

So what was achieved, after all? As a war waged to satisfy considerations of internal politics, the operation has succeeded beyond all expectations. Likud Chair Benjamin Netanyahu is getting stronger in the polls. And why? Because we could not get enough of the war.
AVOIDING SEX ON FIRST DATE GIVES WOMEN BETTER MATES
Margaret Davis, Independent, UK - Mathematicians have proved what women have been counseling their friends for years: a woman increases her chances of getting a "good" man by not sleeping with a partner straight away. They used a numerical model to show that better partners were willing to date for a longer time before having sex, but "bad" men were more reluctant to hang around.

Professor Robert Seymour, of University College London, said: "Longer courtship is a way for the female to acquire information about the male. By delaying mating, the female is able to reduce the chance she will mate with a bad male. A male's willingness to court for a long time is a signal that he is likely to be a good male.

"Long courtship is a price paid for increasing the chance that mating, if it occurs, will be a harmonious match which benefits both sexes. This may help to explain the commonly held belief that a woman is best advised not to sleep with a man on a first date."The research is published in this month's Journal of Theoretical Biology. Dr Peter Sozou, of Warwick Medical School and the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, said: "The strategic problem a female faces is how to screen out bad males, and this is where long courtship comes into play. A male is assumed to always want to mate with a female, but a good male is more willing to pay the cost of a long courtship to claim the prize of mating."
HOW MANY ON THE MALL?
1.8 million - Mayor Adrian Fenty

750,000 - 11:49 am, 45 minutes before swearing in according to Arizona State University professor Steve Doig. Excludes parade route and city streets.

1 million - Washington Post. Excludes parade route.

1.2 million - Carl Holmberg, retired assistant chief of the U.S. Park Police, includes parade route.

1.27-1.65 million - HIS Jane. Excludes parade route.

1.4 million - DC police. Excludes 300,000-400,000 on surrounding streets and 72,000 on parade route.

1 million - Clark McPhail, a sociologist who has been analyzing crowds on the mall since the '60s.

1.2 million - LBJ Inauguration

From Washington Post and elsewhere
PAYING FOR EX PRESIDENTS
Bill McGinty, KHQ, Spokane, WA - In 1958 Former President Harry Truman was living solely on his WWI army pension and told Congress he couldn't even afford postage stamps for "official business." Congress immediately responded with the Presidential Pension act of 1958, giving Truman a retirement salary of $25,000, benefits and a staff.

Today taxpayers are supporting our former presidents to the tune of more than $2.9 million. Their yearly salary pension is $191,000. Aside from that, each gets a staff; that staff costs you, the taxpayer, $96,000 per president. Among the amenities we pay for is rent for their office space - President Clinton's rent in Harlem is $516,000 a year, while the first President Bush spends $69,000 a year on "equipment" and Jimmy Carter spends $83,000 a year on "other services". The spending doesn't stop there.

We are paying for President Bush's subscription to the Wall Street Journal which costs $242 a year . . .

Former President Bill Clinton seems to spend the most across the board. His phone bill from the records KHQ received from 2006 cost taxpayers $104,000. We also pay for the satellite TV in his office, complete with eight separate receivers and all the movie channels that come with the "entertainment package". Your cost? $1,800 per year.

Congress regulates and approves this money for our former presidents, all of which have a net worth in millions and tens of millions. In retirement, President Bill Clinton's speaking fees earned him more than $40 million in addition to the $12 million his book deals have put in his pocket since he left office.

If you are wondering why President Jimmy Carter hasn't been mentioned much, it's because he spends far less. In 2008 he spent $518,000, less than half of President Clinton's 1.1 million, the first Bush 41 fell somewhere in between.
GITMO TO CLOSE, BUT DETENTIONS TO CONTINUE
Anti-War - A newly drafted executive order by President Barack Obama will fulfill a campaign promise to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The order will, once the new president gets around to signing it, require the facility to close within a year. The facility where detainees were held often on little if any evidence was a symbol of America's post-9/11 hysteria and the excesses of presidential power during the Bush Administration. Its closing will remove the symbol, but a clean break from the policy remains elusive.

The detentions will continue, they will just do so at a handful of yet-to-be-determined military bases in the United States. The Obama Administration has enough support across Europe to allow it to release some of its most embarrassingly innocent detainees into third party nations, and it intends to try some, in a method different from the Bush Administration's war tribunals, but likely far short of the domestic legal system.

Yet that new legal system isn't even in place yet, and its unclear what the Obama Administration intends to do with those detainees that it doesn't intend to release, yet which had such flimsy evidence that even the Bush Administration didn't dare to try to charge them with any crimes. The short answer is likely that they will do what the Bush Administration did, just in a less conspicuous place, and with a lot less of the baggage that their predecessors had.

CRASH TALK

MSNBC - Wall Street is losing faith in Washington's efforts to fix the financial crisis. As bank losses pile up and bank stocks plunge, investors have an urgent question for the new Obama administration: What's the plan?

Timothy Geithner, Obama's pick for treasury secretary, had few answers as he began confirmation hearings Wednesday. He told lawmakers that two goals were to "get credit flowing again" and overhaul the $700 billion bailout, but he offered few details. . .

"The size of the problem is growing faster than the banks' ability to handle it," said Joe Battipaglia, market strategist at Stifel Nicolaus. "We're halfway through the bailout money, and the banks are in worse shape than they were six months ago.". . .

The fear is that both banks are so big, so blended into the global financial system, that their collapse could trigger a catastrophe. The most troubled banks are "going to definitely go down" without more government help, said Jonathan Macey, a law professor at Yale University who wrote a book about a bailout of Sweden's banking system during the 1990s.

"And they may go down with it," he added. "The pace of these bank losses is outrunning the infusions by the government.". .

In a report last week, Goldman Sachs estimated that financial institutions and investors worldwide will ultimately absorb $2 trillion in losses on U.S. loans - but have recognized only half those losses so far.

William Greider, Nation - The most complex barrier to recovery is globalization and its negative impact on the economy. Given our grossly unbalanced trade, we have kept the system going by playing buyer of last resort--absorbing mountainous trade deficits and accumulating more than $5 trillion in capital debt to pay for swollen imports, while our domestic economy steadily loses jobs and production to other nations. Renewed consumer demand at home will automatically "leak" to rival economies and trading partners by boosting their exports to the US market--which subtracts directly from our GDP. This is the trap the lopsided trading system has created for recovery plans, and it cannot be escaped without fundamental reform.

To put it crudely, Obama's stimulus program might restart factories in China while leaving US unemployment painfully high. In fact, some leakage may occur via the very banks or industrial corporations that taxpayers have generously assisted. What prevents Citigroup and General Motors from using their fresh capital to enhance overseas operations rather than investing at home? The new administration will therefore have to rethink the terms of globalization before its domestic initiatives can succeed. .

Congress can enact the terms now--a ceiling on US trade deficits that will decline steadily to tolerable levels, as well as new rules for US multinational enterprises that redefine their obligations to the home economy. Unlike in other advanced nations, US companies get a free ride from their home government when they relocate production abroad. That has to change if the United States is to reverse its weakening world position. . .

GAZA

Robert Fisk, Independent, UK - For the people of the Middle East, the absence of the word "Gaza" - indeed, the word "Israel" as well - was the dark shadow over Obama's inaugural address. Didn't he care? Was he frightened? Did Obama's young speech-writer not realize that talking about black rights - why a black man's father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago - would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop. .

The friendly message to Muslims, "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect", simply did not address the pictures of the Gaza bloodbath at which the world has been staring in outrage. . . Sure, give the man a chance. Maybe George Mitchell will talk to Hamas - he's just the man to try - but what will the old failures such as Denis Ross have to say, and Rahm Emanuel and, indeed, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton?

AFGHANISTAN

David Montero, Christian Science Monitor - As President Barack Obama steps into the White House and into history, the Taliban have a message for him: Leave Afghanistan. "The insurgent Taliban said Wednesday that US President Barack Obama should learn from the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and pull his troops out of the country to allow Afghans to decide their own fate," reports The News, a popular English-language daily in Pakistan. "We have no problem with Obama," a spokesman for the extremist Islamist movement [said] after the inauguration of the new US president. However, "he must learn lessons from [former US president George W. Bush] and before that the Soviets," Yousuf Ahmadi said by telephone. .

JUSTICE & FREEDOM

Arizona Central - Pinal County supervisors bid goodbye to photo enforcement. Their vote to terminate their contract with Redflex, the company that operates the cameras, came at the recommendation of the county's top law-enforcement official, new Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu. "I'm against photo speed enforcement completely," Babeu said, walking the three-member panel through a detailed PowerPoint presentation. "Here in Pinal, it's failed miserably."

Babeu said speed cameras created dangerous road conditions and offered little financial benefit for the county. He plans to boost traffic enforcement through additional manpower. . . Babeu said total motor-vehicle accidents increased by 16 percent in the same time period, and fatal collisions in the Queen Creek area doubled from three to six. The sheriff said he couldn't be certain that speed cameras were to blame for the crashes, but he believes they were a factor.

MEDIA

Gawker - Update from the Wall Street Journal white-powder scare: The evacuation has been so mishandled that employees were reduced to reading Gawker - or picking up the phone and reporting the story themselves. In classic News Corp fashion, after the initial email went out at 11:45 saying that a suspicious package had been received, they proceeded to evacuate 9 and 11 - the op-ed and executive floors - while making no announcement of any kind to the rank-and-file reporters and editors on 10. Need them to get the paper out, after all. Word started to circulate, but a fair number of people learned that the floors directly above and below them had been evacuated only by reading gawker or nytimes.com. Finally another e-mail went out more than an hour later with the news that 9 and 11 had been evacuated, but instructing others to stand by for further instructions from their managers regarding work. At that point, the 10th floor employees just started leaving - they've now all headed home, still with no instructions or information whatsoever from management.

BELIEFS

A federal judge in Illinois has ruled against a required moment of silence in public schools in the state, calling it "a subtle effort to force students at impressionable ages to contemplate religion." The law, he noted, required a teacher to "instruct her pupils, especially in the lower grades, about prayer and its meaning as well as the limitations on their 'reflection. "The plain language of the statute, therefore, suggests an intent to force the introduction of the concept of prayer into the schools," he ruled.

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