James Fallows

On reading it through after hearing it, this is another carefully crafted speech. More so, I would say, than Obama's first inaugural address. But these two parts got my attention the instant I heard them:

1) Lash and sword. This inaugural address, like nearly all previous ones, began with an emphasis on the importance of democratic transfer-of-power. For instance, the first words of JFK's address in 1961 were, "We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom." But Obama introduced the familiar theme with this twist:

Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of [our founding] words with the realities of our time.  [Note: this preceding sentence is the one-sentence summary of the speech as a whole.] For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob.  They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. 
 
And for more than two hundred years, we have. 
 
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.  We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

I like the precise logical concision of contrasting "self-evident" with "self-executing" truths. But "blood drawn by the lash" is an impressive and confident touch. It was of course an allusion to a closing passage in what is generally considered history's only great second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln's in 1865 (right):

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Half-slave, half-free was an allusion to another of Lincoln's most famous addresses, his "House Divided" speech from his campaign for the Senate in 1858. (And Lincoln's phrase "house divided" was his own allusion to the Book of Mark.) 
 
2) Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. I thought the allusion in this passage was eloquent on many levels:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

The rhetorical and argumentative purpose of the speech as a whole was to connect what Obama considers the right next steps for America -- doing more things "together," making sure that everyone has an equal chance, tying each generation's interests to its predecessors' and its successors' -- with the precepts and ideals of the founders, rather than having them be seen as excesses of the modern welfare state. 

This was the most sustainedly "progressive" statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage.

I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on. As has often been the case, Obama confounded expectations -- mine, at least. Four years ago, when people were expecting a barn-burner, the newly inaugurated president Obama gave a deliberately downbeat, sober-toned presentation about the long challenges ahead. Now -- well, it's almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to use the power of the presidency on the causes he cares about. If anyone were wondering whether Obama wanted to lower expectations for his second term ... no, he apparently does not.

For background, please see these three past items: first (illustrated at right), second, and third. They compare the play and headlines of stories in three major papers -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal -- and together suggest what was to me a surprising conclusion. Namely, that the WSJ's news coverage, which for decades has seemed independent from the Journal's editorial pages, is increasingly conforming with the editorial line. My China-beat buddies will recognize the term "harmonization" for this reining-in of unauthorized views.

If you haven't yet seen Sophie Schmidt's chronicle of her recent high-level visit to North Korea, by all means check it out. It's full of atmospheric photos like this one (from her site) and acute observations.



Part of what she reports reminds me very much of China back in the early days of its opening up. Eg:

I can't express how cold it was... The cold was compounded by the fact that none of the buildings we visited were heated, which meant hour-long tours in cavernous, 30-degree indoor environments. It is quite extraordinary to have the Honored Guest Experience in such conditions: they're proudly showing you their latest technology or best library, and you can see your breath.

Part of it is like nothing most of us have ever seen or experienced before. Schmidt, who is in her 20s, made the trip in the company of her father Eric, of Google, and former ambassador/governor Bill Richardson. Very much worth reading.
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Routine disclosure: my wife and I first met the Schmidts when Sophie was a young girl, and we've been in touch and have followed her accomplishments since then. But this will be interesting to anyone.

This morning's assortment, on the kitchen table. The NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ all have page-one reports about the House Republicans' decision not to force an all-out fight on the next extension of the federal debt ceiling. The Post's story is on the bottom of its front page, which is why you don't see its masthead.

This morning I was on the "Domestic News Roundup" hour of the Diane Rehm Show, on WAMU in Washington. The topics naturally started with the latest gun-safety proposals and went on through Chuck Hagel, the economy, the Dreamliner, and so on. 

This panel, and the rest of the media nearly always misses two points that are critical.  

      - Daily gun deaths [not the big massacres] are the real killer.  

      - The shooters are most likely to be either pissed off and jealous or perfectly rational with a heavily distorted value system, not mentally ill.  And mental health experts state whenever they can that it is very hard to determine which patients will become violent. Most will not, and that is certain.

The neglected mental health workers are glad to hear that they can get some attention and funding ... and the NRA is glad to put the blame on, of all things, lack of government funding for mental health.

Here in tea party country, my cousin, the local outspoken liberal, is afraid to write to the paper about guns.  Me, too.  We are rightfully afraid of being shot.  After all, the gun nuts don't have to be mentally ill to pull the trigger, just pissed off, and Limbaugh and Beck have that service covered.

This is an opportunity to mention again Dina Rasor's powerful article about the toll of the "daily gun deaths" as opposed to the too-frequent but not-quite-daily newsmaking mass killings. Previous discussion of it here.

Good news from our friends at TSA: they are getting rid of the hated (by me) Rapiscan "backscatter" screening machines like the one shown at right. These are the scanners in which you stand between two big, opaque boxes, raise your hands, and have X-rays shot at your body. The systems measure the "backscatter" radiation that reflects back from hard and soft surfaces on your body and clothing. Radiation in such backscatter systems is much weaker than medical X-rays, which are of course meant to go right through your body. Still, it is ionizing radiation, which is guilty until proven innocent in terms of possible health effects. 

(Please see update below.) The Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" is a beautiful airplane in some serious trouble right now. You should read our Megan Garber's look at the news yesterday. But also please check Patrick Smith's overview yesterday at his Ask the Pilot site. (Smith has re-launched the site in expanded-and-even-better form after its departure from its previous home at Salon. Here's Smith's earlier take on what is nice about the Dreamliner; and here's my snapshot of the plane's interior, showing the headroom and so on, from its demo visit to National Airport in DC last spring.)



Smith makes the point that repeated battery fires in the 787, and the subsequent grounding of the fleet by the FAA and other airlines and authorities around the world, are obviously terrible news for Boeing. But so far the defect appears to be specific and correctable -- a problem with the lithium-ion batteries Boeing has chosen for the plane --  rather than some mysterious, unbounded threat that could undo the 787 project as a whole. For a fascinating book about how one such mysterious problem destroyed an entire aircraft project and ultimately much of a national aircraft industry, see Sam Howe Verhovek's Jet Age, about the British Comet airplane that pioneered the commercial jetliner industry before its came to grief. Patrick Smith explains why the 787's current predicament seems different:

This is a huge and costly black eye for Boeing and its customers. But it could be a lot worse... The grounding came preemptively, before anybody was seriously hurt or killed. It's also helpful that the problem, as we understand it thus far, is eminently fixable. Burning batteries are serious, but this isn't a structural defect that'll wind up costing billions.

Leading up to the 787′s launch, all of the talk was focused on the uniqueness of plane's carbon-fiber construction. Any serious failure on that front could have doomed the entire 787 project to failure, and possibly dragged all of Boeing down with it. But to this point, composites have been a nonexistent issue. These other problems are nothing by comparison, and a year from now I suspect all of this will be forgotten.

In addition to the carbon-fiber issue, the other "fundamental" question about the Dreamliner has been whether Boeing erred in outsourcing so much of the plane's manufacturing and design. Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times went into this in depth in a celebrated article two years ago; I also address it in China Airborne. Even Boeing officials now concede that the company farmed out too much of the crucial work of making the plane. Thus it exposed itself to unexpected delays, problems in matching up parts and systems produced by different suppliers, design decisions that were out of its immediate control, and other challenges

These are exactly the limits-to-outsourcing that Charles Fishman discussed in his recent cover story. If you'd like to read a fascinating, dissident inside-Boeing account of these decisions and early warnings of their consequences, see this PDF of a 2001 presentation by Dr. L.J. Hart Smith, which I also discuss in my book and whose cover page is shown below.


UPDATE For informed comment on the battery problems and what the episode reveals about Boeing's relationship with the FAA and with its own union employees, see this Leeham News dispatch. 

As I mentioned two days ago, tech people I take seriously are themselves taking seriously the threat of computers being hacked through a vulnerability in Java code. For the record, some updated info:

A few days ago I mentioned the glider pilot in South Carolina who was handcuffed, arrested, held overnight in a cell, questioned by the FBI and DHS, and finally released after 24 hours all for doing something (a) that was completely legal and (b) that he had no reason to believe was not legal. I offered this as one more entry in the ongoing chronicles of the security state: I'm very well aware that this and much worse has happened to a lot of people, and that the novelty in this case was that the "possible terrorist" was a septuagenarian white man from the professional class.

Readers weigh in. First:

Shocking -- and yet another event that further convinces me that the sort of Big Brother we're facing is more like Terry Gilliam's Brazil [right] than the ominous near-omniscience of 1984, Minority Report etc.

From Michael Ham:

I think it's worth pointing out that that the aggressive (and to my mind, egregious) actions of DHS and the FBI are perfectly legal--indeed, they could have locked the pilot up indefinitely in a prison (a secret prison, if they chose) with no access to lawyers or due process.

That's allowable if they suspect him of terrorist inclinations, thanks to the PATRIOT Act, which the Senate recently continued with no discussion at all. In fact, it would be perfectly legal for Obama to have him killed on suspicion (a "signature strike"). Once dead, since he's an adult male, the Obama administration would identify him as a militant: any adult male killed in a drone strike is ipso facto a militant--this is explicitly in accordance with the doctrine of the Obama Administration.

When I say "perfectly legal", I mean that Obama does it and it cannot be considered in court (just as the US kidnappings and torture of innocent people cannot be considered in court), because the Obama Administration uses the state-secrets loophole to keep these things out of court: no recourse for injured parties.

From Mark Huddleston, the president of the University of New Hampshire:

Thanks for spreading the word on this nonsense to the non-aviation community.

I used to fly out of Delaware, and, post-9/11, worried about being shot down for inadvertently trespassing on the (admittedly well charted) new no-go areas around the Chesapeake, my once-favorite VFR  meandering area. I basically quit flying VFR. This is the (il)logical extension.

From a reader in California:

First, did the local officials understand how gliders function?  You know, using thermals to get lift which requires them to circle.  Also, a cursory inspection of the glider would show nothing dangerous and I doubt crashing into the plant would do anything more than disintegrate the glider without endangering the plant.

Second, is it legal to refuse to release someone in custody until they sign a promissory note not to sue?  On it's face, that appears to be an admission of wrongful arrest (or what ever the legal term is as I'm not a lawyer).

Finally, I assume he didn't have a gun with him or there would be hell to pay for abridging his 2nd amendment rights.  Just kidding!

From Lee Harrison of the University of Albany:

I'm a sailplane pilot ... got my privates in gliders in 1971, didn't get a power ticket till '73.  I like flying sailplanes more than I like flying power, and I own a Ka-6 (antique wooden and fabric sailplane from the early 60s, nothing like competitive today, still safe and fun to fly). [Ka-6 photo at right.]

You can bet this story has gone through the soaring community like wild-fire.... There must be some sort of acknowledgement that this was nuts, some sort of progress on it not happening again.

The idea that someone would use a sailplane to attack a nuclear plant is NUTS!  And the idea that someone intending to attack a plant would circle over it is nutty too...  For the record, I keep my sailplane at Saratoga Airport (5B2) where there is vigorous soaring activity, and the Navy's Milton training reactors are about 5 miles SW.  We fly over those reactors all the time; indeed when they are operating they often generate useful and reliable lift.  And there's never been a problem, they are entirely blase' about it

In Europe, particularly the low countries (Belgium, Holland, northwest Germany) it's completely routine for sailplanes to use the updrafts from power plants, nuclear or fossil, and nobody worries about it.  ... Scariest damn flight I've made as a passenger was riding in a Duo-Discus (high-performance two-seater) with an ace Belgian soaring pilot as he set out insouciantly on a jaunt -- with a cloud base at about 1 km, crappy erratic lift, and over thickly settled land with damn few places I'd have wanted to try to land that sailplane.   He knew exactly where all the power plants were, knew we could use one later in the afternoon to get that last lift to get home .. and did.

Ta-Nehisi Coates beat me to the punch* in quoting the magazine's official statement on the "sponsored content" advertorial from the Church of Scientology that was on our site for about 12 hours yesterday. Because it's important, here's that statement in full:

We screwed up. It shouldn't have taken a wave of constructive criticism -- but it has -- to alert us that we've made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way.  It's safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out.  We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge--sheepishly--that we got ahead of ourselves.  We are sorry, and we're working very hard to put things right.  

That ad was a mistake in both concept and execution. I am sorry that we ran it in the first place, which we and others will always remember as an error; but I think the quick response and forthright statement reflect the best parts of the magazine's tradition. I am saying all of this as a loyal and long-time Atlantic employee but as an observer of rather than participant in this recent drama. (That is, I had nothing to do with any part of this: the origin of the ad, the decision to pull it, or the drafting of this statement.) Every person and every institution makes mistakes. We've recognized, admitted, and tried to correct this one, and we'll do our best to learn from it.
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* On the other hand, I'm on an actual airline flight as I type and post this. My rare escape from United reminds me that other airlines offer Gogo-in-flight.

I'm skeptical about many of the "worst virus ever!!!" warnings that storm across Internet-land from time to time. But the latest advisory, about a potentially very serious vulnerability in the Java plugin for all major browsers, has gotten my attention. Mac users: keep on reading. This applies to you too.

• In Firefox, select "Tools" from the main menu, then "Add-ons," then click the "Disable" button next to any Java plug-ins.

• In Safari, click "Safari" in the main menu bar, then "Preferences," then select the "Security" tab and uncheck the button next to "Enable Java."

• In Chrome, type or copy "Chrome://Plugins" into your browser's address bar, then click the "Disable" button below any Java plug-ins.

• In Internet Explorer, follow these instructions for disabling Java in all browsers via the Control Panel. There is no way to completely disable Java specifically in IE.

In the mailbox over the weekend, from someone I do not know. For previous "glamorous life" entries see here, here, here, here, here, etc. The subject line on this latest message was "Expert Available - The Amazing Kreskin."


Hi James,For the record, once back in the 1980s I saw The Amazing Kreskin perform, and it was appropriately amazing. I suppose there's an unavoidable falloff in amazingness when you get into public-policy issues.

Through the year before the Olympics, while we were living in Beijing, I used to do daily views-out-the-window as a guide to the challenge the air-cleanup-people faced. For instance, here was a downtown area a few weeks before the opening ceremony:

I've been watching lots of football this weekend -- yes, it's a violent and damaging sport maybe on its way out, but these games have been great -- and have been fascinated by a very arresting series of ads. Here's one sample, of which I encourage you to watch at least the first 10 or 15 seconds:



Two things immediately drew my attention to the ads. One is that until the end I couldn't figure out what company they were for. My first guess was IBM, and in fact they would work perfectly as an IBM campaign. Second was GE, or possibly Intel or Cisco. Maybe some insurance or financial firm? In fact they're for Verizon, as you've already seen on the labeling above.

The other surprise was that music. Distinctive, and instantly recognizable. With the very first bars it was clear that this had to be either Philip Glass, or someone the ad producers had hired to sound (within copyright limits) just like Philip Glass. As I listened a little more, I realized: Yes, this is the actual Philip Glass. And I know that because of the very powerful political and cultural connotations that go with this piece of music.

What Verizon is using, to illustrate an ad about a house burning down with people trapped inside, is Glass's "67 Cities." This was the music for the parts of Errol Morris's film The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara describes the U.S. firebombing campaign at the end of World War II that  incinerated between 50% and 90% of the population of 67 Japanese cities. If you don't happen to have Fog of War on hand, here's how the music was originally used:



It's great music, but ... wow! A company is using a very famous composer's relatively famous music about a firebombing campaign to illustrate a house burning down! This is either impressively brassy or amazingly oblivious.

Glass's music goes with some of the other ads in the series too, as you'll see below. Again, wow.

Fog of War came out ten years ago. I hope Verizon's explanation is: Yes, we assumed everyone would get the references, and would appreciate the extra, humane power of showing people being rescued from an inferno, rather than dying inside in the events that originally inspired the music. I hope their answer is not, "Fog of what??"   



 

Here they are:

From my friends in the tech world I have over the years heard about someone I hadn't ever met, Aaron Swartz. I feel as if I had been hearing about him forever, but it couldn't have been all that long, since Swartz was only 26 years old when he killed himself yesterday in New York. But starting at age 14, Swartz had won a large number of friends, admirers, followers, and mentors, plus a small but important number of enemies, through his combination of tech-world virtuosity and expansive civic and social imagination. 

I really should have mentioned this in time for the long, book-reading-friendly "festive" period stretching from Thanksgiving to the New Year holidays, but, hey, I was reading the book myself then. And Inauguration Day, MLK Day, Chinese New Year, etc are still ahead, and it's still summer reading period in Australia. So:

If you're looking for a good, lengthy, high-end-diversion read, let me suggest The Twenty-Year Death, by Ariel S. Winter. Cover shown at right, when I was reading the book at Thanksgiving time. This is part of the "Hard Case Crime" series that I've discussed over the years, for instance here back in 2008  and here about a year ago. The series is a combination of resurrected noir classics, with 1950s-and-earlier cover art, and original works.

Twenty-year is in the brand-new category, and is quite a tour de force. It is long because it is actually three novels, with an overlapping set of characters. The first is in the style of Georges Simenon; the second, Raymond Chandler; and the third, the immortal (and amoral*) Jim Thompson. The Simenon story is set in France in 1931, and the Chandler and Thompson episodes in greater L.A., in 1941 and 1951 respectively. For my taste, Winter's evocation of each writer's stye and sensibility becomes steadily more effective as the book goes on, so that by the end the Thompson section could fit right along such bleak classics as The Killer Inside Me. If you're in the mood for this kind of thing, this is the thing to read.

This is Winter's first novel. Keep writing!
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* For later discussion: Why I am drawn to the noir writers who portray amoral-and-worse characters from the inside, ranging from Thompson to Patricia Highsmith to Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl. Hmm, maybe this is a question I should not ask.

I am mentioning this story precisely because it occurs in a self-contained little corner of American life that most people would never think of or hear about. But it illustrates some broader changes in American life worth reflecting on.

When you have time, I hope you'll watch the first six minutes of the 19-minute video at the bottom of this item. Or you can read a summary here. The video and story come from the AOPA -- the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which as I've explained is "my" version of the NRA. That is, it is an unyielding and at times unreasonable advocate for what it sees as its members' interests. In this case, I really support its vigilance.

The story in brief: Robin Fleming, a 70-year-old glider pilot in South Carolina, was out for an afternoon's flight last summer. From the AOPA story here's the pilot and his craft, to give you an idea of who and what we're talking about:



He left in the early afternoon. By late afternoon his colleagues at the glider club were getting very worried, because he had not returned as planned. He finally emerged late the following day, having been arrested, handcuffed, held overnight in jail, and questioned by the FBI and Homeland Security officials.

His offense? While circling over a lake to gain lift for a return to his home airport (this is what gliders have to do), he passed about 1,000 feet above a nuclear power plant that adjoins the lake and a nearby airport. This may sound ominous, but, as the AOPA story lays out, it's not illegal and of course has never led to any kind of security problem. In the years since 9/11, pilots have been told to "avoid" nuclear facilities, but most plants are not surrounded by any formal no-fly zones. The two plants I most often encounter when flying northward from the DC area are the famed Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, and the Limerick site outside Philadelphia. Each is very close to a small airport, just like the one in South Carolina  -- you look for similar away-from-residential-zone territory when siting airports and power plants -- and thus the coexistence of air traffic and normal plant operations is routine.

From the piloting world's point of view, the crucial fact is there is absolutely no formal indication of a "no-fly" zone in the area where the pilot got in trouble. Here is the FAA's "VFR Sectional Chart" (via SkyVector) for the scene of the crime. The pilot was circling over "Lake Robinson" in the upper center of the chart. The magenta circle next to the lake, marked with a cross symbol, is the Hartsville airport where the pilot landed, was swarmed by at least a dozen police vehicles, and was immediately placed under arrest. 


And if you skip to the last minute of the video, you'll see a surprise that doesn't involve this glider pilot but does bring you ... James Lipton.