blog of kaiyen

BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | South of Scotland | Bomber publishes appeal documents.

So…as if it weren’t controversial enough that Scotland released the terrorist behind Pan Am 103, now he has released documents that “prove” his innocence.

Newsweek had a mini-article – the stuff they have in the front now, that are analysis but not a full blown article – about how Scotland asserted itself with the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi as a legit international state.  It wasn’t clear whether it was a good move or not, just that at least Scotland pushed forward their existing compassion for convicted felons with terminal illnesses.

For all the times that I have been tired of rhetoric, especially lately, where it feels half of what the administration says is because it needs to say it, not because it’s what should be said…I am behind all those that have condemned this move.  I have two reasons.

The first is personal.  I do remember Pan Am 103, even though I was only 10 when it happened.  No, I did not quite get the fact that this was a terrorist act, or what it meant that someone had done this in the name of something.  What did hit me was that someone had meant to do this.  And why would anyone want to do something so terrible?  Selfish reason, I guess, to let my own pre-teen shock be a factor.  But it’s my blog so..

The second has to do with a book I read a few years back called “Explaining Hitler.” *  The book put forth the following notion – is Hitler on the spectrum of morality within which we all exist, but on the very, very extreme edge?  Or is he actually off the chart (meaning that we exist in a “normal” range, though with some pretty crazy extremes nonetheless)?

I think that the same question can be asked here.  Megrahi is at least at the far extreme, IMO.  I don’t think he’s off the chart, if indeed Hitler was, and I don’t think he’s as far over as Hitler, either.  But the point is that there is a spectrum, and if Megrahi is towards one end, then maybe Scotland’s political history of compassion shouldn’t apply in this case…

*NB – I don’t think anyone will ever be able to explain or help us really understand Hitler.  But Rosenbaum tried to examine each of the arguments for what forces created such a…I’m loath to say “monster” in general but maybe it’s right this time and their validity in terms of history, etc.

NB^2 – I am not saying that this book is “the” book on the topic.  Just one that I read.

Under the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State Dulles pushed forth a nuclear policy known as MAD – mutually assured destruction.  It’s a rather frightening approach, but the idea was that if we had enough weapons with enough range and power, we could basically ensure our safety by raising the stakes so high that no country – not even the Soviet Union – would ever dare start a nuclear exchange.

Eisenhower’s and Dulles’ strategy had some particular flaws – their pursuit of a MAD policy lead to one particularly powerful bomb that, should it be dropped from a bomber aircraft, the explosion would be so large that the plane would not be able to get out of the fallout zone even at maximum airspeed.  It was also instituted early enough in the nuclear standoff that neither side had truly considered how to conduct diplomacy and brinksmanship in such a situation.  MAD led quite directly, in my opinion, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is easily the closest we ever came to being blown off the face of the earth.  This has some interesting parallels to our current situation with Iran and North Korea and their respective nuclear programs.

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Twice now, while watching the Daily Show I’ve wanted to get up and write something about the idiotic, stupid, waste of time that is this whole affair with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.  Why did the President of the the whole freaking United States have to make any comment whatsoever on the actions of the police on a charge of disturbing the police in Cambridge, MA?  Now I see this on CNN:

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Beer choice at Obama meeting touches off new debate « – Blogs from CNN.com.

So the President invites them all to have beer, the white house has to releases press reports on what types of beer, and some Democrats are UPSET ABOUT THE TYPE OF BEER CHOSEN?  What the heck?

If the President make a comment about the possibility of racial profiling, that might be okay.  But the bottom line is that no one knew what actually happened at the time the POTUS made his statement that the police acted “stupidly.”  Heck, I didn’t know, and he seemed to know even less than I did.

What I want to hear from the President is how he intends to fund universal heatlh care long term (and no, I don’t think he’s trying to kill old people, sheesh).  I support it entirely, but I want to know how we’ll handle those costs in the future.  And I want to hear about how Treasury and the Fed will work to unwind themselves of all this debt and the increase in the monetary base over the next few years.  About whether the stimulus is enough or not (is it just me, or have people begun to forget about the stimulus and some of the major macroeconomic issues at play here?).

Obama, IMO, has proven that he is bad, plain and simple bad, at extemporaneous comments.  And that he makes comments more often than he should. Of all the things a President should  be doing, apologizing for a “poor choice of words” is not one of them.  He just shouldn’t have made that comment in the first place.  Obama needs to learn when to shut up and just say “no comment until things are clear.”

This is just so frustrating.

Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version | vanityfair.com

First – I got this off someone else sharing it on facebook.  Sometimes this whole social networking thing is useful.

I wanted to comment on Palin’s resignation when it first happened, because it made so little sense and, on a more superficial level, if one listened to the speech itself one wondered what kind of speech writers (or even proof readers) she had. 

Vanity Fair had a little fun with “editing” her speech, but overall this stresses the importance of having good speech writers.  There are great speakers – those that can deliver a stirring, moving, and motivational message – and there are great writers – those that create the spirit of the message through the deft use of the right words built on a solid foundation of proper grammar.  sidenote:  it is amazing how good grammar has such an impact on most listeners and readers – something as simple as that can raise any letter, speech, or other message to another level, yes shouldn’t we all know good grammar?  I certainly violate those rules all the time.

Of course, there have been great speakers and speech writers – I would have to think that Lincoln was one, though I guess, having never heard him speak myself, I cannot say for certain.  I don’t know how much of Obama’s speeches are his original writing versus editing and crafting from speech writers.  But I do know that Ted Sorenson did a lot of writing for John F. Kennedy, and I also know that JFK could deliver one heck of a speech (the Peace Speech is some powerful stuff, and if you listen to how he delivered important yet somewhat dry messages such as those surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis, one certainly leaves, even today, with a sense of the situation’s gravitas).  It’s quite possible that JFK wrote an original that ended up as the majority of the speech, and that he was in fact a great writer as well.  But the bottom line is that few orators don’t utilize the skills of others to craft a truly magnificent message. 

And less than great orators with less than stellar speech writing skills with which to start can come off as awkward to even the most casual of listeners.

I have had this thought in the back of my head for a while now and it’s now formed into something that I want to articulate into something here.

Another comparison that has been made constantly is that Obama has followed Lincoln’s precedent and created a cabinet that is a “Team of Rivals.”  Also the title of a great book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, the reference is to how Lincoln’s cabinet included many of his biggest rivals in the Republican party, including William Seward, the favorite going into the convention, as Secretary of State and Salmon Chase, who had an undying and almost heartless pursuit of the presidency even for the 1864 election, as Secretary of the Treasury.

However, if you take even a slight look at things, Obama’s cabinet isn’t a team of rivals.  You can’t even create a team of rivals today.  Seward and Chase were major players to be nominated for the Republican ticket.  The process was of course extremely different than today – there isn’t a big campaigning process that lasts for a year and covers the entire country.  But at the convention, via the means utilized at the time, they were really #1 and #2, with Lincoln eventually taking advantage of the split to get the nomination.  They were true rivals.  

Who played those roles for Obama?  Well, he had a major rival, sure – Hillary Clinton.  No question there, and she is going to be the Secretary of State, as was Seward.  But can you really call Joe Biden or Bill Richardson, both of whom put their names in the ring for the 2008 nomination but dropped out very, very early, “rivals?”  Is he really building a cabinet in a way that is different than past presidents – getting the right people around with the right skills?  (The Panetta nomination is still about Obama picking someone with the skills that he feels are right for the CIA, whether everyone else agrees or not).  

One thing that is definitely similar but the timing is way off – Lincoln helped create the Republican party in the several years before 1860, and his cabinet helped solidify its leadership.  Seward hadn’t even moved from the Whig to Republican party until relatively late in the game.  

In a sense, Obama’s campaign was the culmination of the rebuilding of the Democratic party.  At the least, after Gore lost in 2000, things were pretty much in disarray.

I have been extremely loath to write any post about the upcoming inauguration, mostly because I feel like there are far too many people that know so much more than me – and not just the analysts and journalists, but also even some of my classmates in school, friends from college – that I’ll just look like an idiot.  

As a history major, I have never subscribed to the idea that any event at a particular time is unique, and that past lessons are largely irrelevant.  I say “largely” because I can’t imagine any historian not agreeing with the whole “those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” mantra.  At some point history is relevant.  But I have run into some through my intellectual travels (ie – dinner with friends) where the point has been made that the circumstances surrounding one event in history make it so unique that it is not applicable to current events (or other events in the timeline of history).  So Waterloo happens just once and is not relevant other than as a concept.

A lot has been made about President-elect Obama’s incoming administration and the comparison to Abraham Lincoln’s 150 years ago.  The “Team of Rivals” where Obama and Lincoln both built cabinets composed of his biggest political rivals, the national crises each has/had to face while entering office, and of course even the fact that both are from Illinois.

However, while these are not only already over exaggerated and hyped up at least for the sake of media and today’s tagline-hungry population (myself included to an extent – I certainly read the headers on my RSS feeder a lot, even when I think the article looks good), the differences are, in my opinion, so different that it merits consideration as a unique situation, where one cannot even compare the tremendous challenge facing Lincoln fairly.

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Stimulus must build stronger nation, Obama says – MarketWatch

“I have confidence that not only are we going to be able to create jobs, but we’re also going to be making a down payment on some critical areas that, as the economy recovers and the private sector starts investing again, we’re going to see some long-term benefits and long- term savings,” Obama said at a press conference in Washington.

Obviously I don’t have the full text of the speech, and I am acknowledging that any news source is just one source, written a specific way.  But…on the one hand, I’m really glad to see intelligent, long-term thinking applied to this topic.  We must plan ahead.  We must lay down the groundwork for the future so that we will avoid this.  We must rethink what we are doing now.  Yes, we need to think this way.  I completely agree.

On the other, it’s kind of sad that a speech has to be made saying that a $775 billion plan needs to be more than a quick fix.  I know this is a big problem and any dollar amount should be more than a quick fix.  But as was mentioned in both my marketing and econ classes last night, a big part of stimulus is getting cash in the hands of people.  Cash in the hand is easy to understand.  Cutting interest rates as a way of reducing the cost of capital and therefore improving the liquidity status (essentially) or ability of individuals is a bit harder to understand…which means that talk about long-term needs to be done very delicately.  So far, the quoted items make it sound like Obama did a good job.

Anyway.  Random thought.

Crip Chronicles: I Guess I’ve Been Holding My Breath…

I only today found out that one of my former colleagues at Stanford had a blog of her own.  I’ve always known her to be intelligent and witty and funny and a lot of other great things, and she is one of the people whom I always intend (but often fail) to find when I visit campus.  Every single conversation I have ever had with her has been a good one.  I am honestly pondering how accurate of a comment that is right now and stand by it.

So, it is entirely hilarious and appropriate that her blog is titled the “Crip Chronicles.” 

And it is not at all surprising that I am honestly, truly moved by what she writes in the linked post.

I kept meaning to write this earlier – the day after our election, when Barack Obama was elected to office – but things have been busy.

As a very quick note, it has been interesting seeing how after the election, a lot more has been made of the fact that he will be the first African-American president ever.  Yes, it was brought up before, especially in the context of how the “you can do anything you want in America” would have a whole lot more meaning should he gain office.  But for the most part people and pundits talked about how the issue was the best person for the job, the person most capable of fixing the economy, etc.

But just hours after he was declared the winner it was all about race.  Very interesting.

Even more interesting was that on CNN’s “best political team” of analysts, the one African-American among them, when asked about the significance of the election, talked about how it was really about the voters picking the person they thought was best for the job.  The other four analysts all talked about race.

Obama was just projected by CNN as the winner of the presidential election.

Perhaps the most impressive footage I’ve seen this whole time – these last 3+ hours – is the choppy, pixelated stuff from Kenya, where they are celebrating.

The world is flat, it’s getting smaller, and this election is an historic one..