Mel Gibson and the Problem of Public Privacy

So Mel Gibson has been exposed (once again) as an intolerant, sexist, abusive person. A recording of a phone conversation with his former girlfriend is now Out There on the internet and one can listen to Mel spill molten verbiage into her earpiece while she calmly refutes his charges. All I can wonder is, So what? What business is this of ours? This is private stuff. People lose control. Between each other, with strangers, but more often with those closest, people have moments when the mouth ill-advisedly opens and vileness falls out. The question is, does this define us? Are we, in fact, only to be defined by our worst moments? That would seem to be the case for people like Gibson. The reason, I think, is that for most of us, the Mel Gibsons of the world have no business having shitty days and acting like this. For most of us, there is just cause for having these kinds of days and attitudes, because for most of us the world is not our oyster and we do not have the luxury of squandering time, friends, and money. Mel Gibson is wealthy and famous and, at one time, admired. He ate at the best restaurants, appeared on television, gave interviews, has his picture on the covers of magazines. Is seen with other people, regularly, who fall into that category of Those Who Have It Made.

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When does Afghanistan officially qualify as a “quagmire”?

We've now been in Afghanistan longer than we were in Vietnam, with a similar amount of progress. American casualties are again on the rise, along with the power of the Taliban. The new general in charge, General Petraeus, assures us that he will continue to try to minimize civilian casualties, so long as that doesn't interfere too much with his plans to bomb the hell out of the country. Our rules to protect civilians were a bit too "bureaucratic" for his liking--not that they actually worked, in any case. The now-infamous Rolling Stone profile of General McChrystal has this to say:

In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent[!] from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
The Rolling Stone piece mysteriously left out the next part of McChrystal's statement. Here's the full quotation (emphasis mine):
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

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The state of the Afghanistan occupation

Frank Rich sums it up at the New York Times, provoked by Michael Hastings excellent journalism at Rolling Stone:

The war, supported by a steadily declining minority of Americans, has no chance of regaining public favor unless President Obama can explain why American blood and treasure should be at the mercy of this napping Afghan president. Karzai stole an election, can’t provide a government in or out of a box, and has in recent months threatened to defect to the Taliban and accused American forces of staging rocket attacks on his national peace conference. Until last week, Obama’s only real ally in making his case was public apathy. Next to unemployment and the oil spill, Karzai and Afghanistan were but ticks on our body politic, even as the casualty toll passed 1,000. As a senior McChrystal adviser presciently told Hastings, “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”
Why are we in Afghanistan? I haven't yet heard anything other than vague metaphors. According to the White House,
So make no mistake: We have a clear goal. We are going to break the Taliban’s momentum. We are going to build Afghan capacity. We are going to relentlessly apply pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same.
Apply pressure on al Qaeda? Give me a break. According to the CIA, there are fewer than 50 al Qaeda in Afghanistan. As far as "breaking the momentum" of the Taliban, consider this retort by Jon Stewart, beginning at minute 4:
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In more recent news, say goodbye to $3 billion of our tax dollars, freely walking out of Afghanistan. Not that you'll ever prosecute corruption under Hamid Karzai:
Top officials in President Hamid Karzai's government have repeatedly derailed corruption investigations of politically connected Afghans, according to U.S. officials who have provided Afghanistan's authorities with wiretapping technology and other assistance in efforts to crack down on endemic graft.

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Fool me once…

The events since the BP well exploded and began spewing oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico have forced President Obama's hand. No politician wants to be the one to catch the Peak Oil hot potato, but it looks like it's landed right in Obama's lap. In his Oval Office speech the other night, he came the closest any president has yet to frankly discussing the challenges we face (emphasis mine):

So one of the lessons we’ve learned from this spill is that we need better regulations, better safety standards, and better enforcement when it comes to offshore drilling. But a larger lesson is that no matter how much we improve our regulation of the industry, drilling for oil these days entails greater risk. After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean -- because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked -- not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor. The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight.

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Why Can’t They Just Stop the Leak?

I've been watching the Gulf Oil leak reports with a technical eye. They report that citizens have sent in over 100,000 suggestions on how to stop the leak, and more on how to clean it up. It's so simple: Just plug it. But I'd wager that the bulk of the suggestions are innumerate; they have no comprehension of the scale of the problem. As though the oil leak is like oil dripping from a car. This is a column of oil at least 2 feet wide and thousands of feet long already moving fast and under pressure. Stopping it is like stopping a freight train with the engines running. And doing it in one of the the harshest environments man has ever tried to work in on this planet. Many of the clean up suggestions, even the ones based on home testing, neglect to consider the scale. What might work in a sink is not practical to do to an ocean. BP has already consumed most of the world's available dispersant Corexit™ in an attempt to keep much of the oil suspended in the water. Sawdust? Hay? Hair? There isn't enough on all the heads in America. People, please do basic arithmetic before sending in suggestions. I heard one fairly clever suggestion from a brother-in-law: Freeze it with liquid nitrogen. My instincts first boggled at the immense cost of doing it. But then I considered and replied with a more convincing argument: Consider wrapping a fire hose in dry ice. All you get is a hole in the dry ice because any cooled material is moved down the pipe before it can slow the flow. I looked up some more details when I got home: Nitrogen won't even evaporate at the the pressure down by the wellhead. I think it's great that people are thinking. But it also shows the world how distinct thinking is from reasoning.

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