Regional Bloggers

The Guardian rounds up some regional bloggers in the UK. What about the US? What are some good regional theater blogs?

Israel's Three State Solution II

A while back, I proposed that Israel's best chance for security peace would be a three-state solution; separating Hamas' Gaza and Fatah's West Bank in terms of the peace process, so that Qassams from Hamas won't be a deterrent to Fatah's peace process with Israel.

Since then, of course, it has been clear that Netenyahu doesn't particularly care to make peace with Fatah. Still, if some electoral miracle brings someone genuinely interested in peace around, the three-state solution will still be the best way forward. And it doesn't seem so preposterous to me as it once seemed, especially once I saw this in the BBC:

What could be the impact [of the Aid ship events] on the peace talks?

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said peace talks with Israel will continue. Proximity talks, mediated by the US, resumed in May after a two-year break.

At least from the perspective of the Palestinians, who I presumed would be the harder sell on the "three-state solution" idea, they're effectively acting separately from Gaza. If Abbas wanted to link their fates to the Gaza Strip, now would be the time to press forward, on their advantage -- maybe meet with Turkey, maybe withhold further talks until aid ships are allowed to progress.

Instead, Abbas is looking after his own people in the West Bank. His own incentive structure is to continue to serve his constituents, which are the people of the West Bank and it appears he's already making decisions with regards to them.

Change III: Detritus of the Past

The Economist has an article about possible trends in the future of the architecture business. Will we have cities that are based around auto-piloting cars as living spaces? Or will we have walkable cities with robotic delivery systems?

The note that The Economist leaves us on, as they always, do, cuts against the grain of the rest of the article:

But perhaps the whole exercise is misconceived. Cities are perfect examples of the sorts of system that emerge from unplanned preferences even as they seem to demand large-scale planning. The question is whether the patterns of that emergence can be shaped by changing the objects of desire, or whether it is necessary to change the desire itself. If the former, then experts in beautiful buildings and sleek aluminium have a chance. If the latter, the question becomes a whole lot harder.

Leaving aside The Economist's tendency to finish an article telling you why it probably isn't as important as they spent the preceding paragraphs telling you it was... the whole problem with utopian futurism is that if you want to build a model in real life, you have to answer the question -- what happens with the detritus of the past?

The problem goes beyond people's desires. The problem is that if you look at the world around us, very little of it was actually built in our lifetimes. I'm in Orange County, California right now; most of the city was built in the 1970s, and that's considered extremely new on the urban timescale. New York City is even older -- a city of ghosts. And yet, if you compare it to world cities, its a spring chicken.

But every generation only adds a little of what is new to a mass of what is old. The key changes to history come from some small new thing that manages to change the shape of the old things around it. For instance, the transcontinental railway managed to reshape the geography of the Mid-West even though most of the prairie folks still lived in pre-Industrial Revolution towns and life-styles.

So a successful dream of the future is going to have to plan for the detritus of the past. You can't bring the future command-economy style. Unless of course you are China. But you can figure out how the new thing can change the old thing, so that the changes will be magnified. They say that car culture is ending. But if you want to propose a vision of the future without cars, you're going to have to account for the layout of suburbs, the infrastructure of freeways, the many people whose lifestyles are built around cars. You're going to have to deal with the detritus of the past.

That's why, to quote William Gibbons, "The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Where Does The NEA Money Go? I: Proposal

Alright, so, the last Pitching Arts to Conservatives post has really become, specifically, "Where Does The NEA Money Go?" This is a question I thought had a simpler answer, but after some questions have been raised about the charts and what they actually mean, I want to delve deeper into the issue and see if I can tease out more information.

So, to recap: with two different sets of data that were arbitrarily selected, two different pictures emerged. One picture was the NEA giving money to CA and NY and kind of neglecting everyone else. The other picture was the NEA giving money fairly evenly, but with the least-populated states getting disproportionate money.

Problems:

1. Both sets of data were from the Stimulus Bill. I don't know how the Stimulus Bill's money was distributed, but seeing as it originated from Congress rather than from the NEA, there's the possibility that it isn't representative of the NEA's normal funding in the course of events.
2. The per capita basis of comparing arts funding may skew as the population gets smaller -- $50k in Montana is roughly .10 per capita, whereas it is less than .01 per capita in California. If there's a theoretical/logistical floor to NEA spending, then states at the floor might seem over-represented if per capita is used as the measure.

Anyways, in the coming days I'm going to track down the data to try and measure a few different hypotheses as to how the NEA money winds up being distributed:

HYPOTHESES

1. The "Money Follows Artists" Theory -- Ian Thal, in the comments, as well as my mother both raised the question as to whether states that have more artists or art organizations will be favored by NEA grants. This would line up more with the first set of data than the second one. This probably means comparing NEA Funding (stimulus/normal budget; raw and per capita) to number or artists (from Census data) and number of art organizations (from...?).
2. The "NEA Fills In State Gaps" Theory -- J. Holtham, on the other hand, raised the question in the comments as to whether the NEA is predisposed to give more money to states that support their arts less, which is one theory that might explain the second set of data. I am skeptical of this one, but I want to examine it. This means comparing NEA funding (stimulus/normal budget; raw and per capita) to State arts council funding (raw, per capita, and percentage of state budget).
3. The "NEA Gives it to Big Cities" Theory -- My original theory was that arts funding concentrates in big cities, which the two charts don't really directly reflect well. This means comparing NEA Funding (stimulus/normal budget; by Congressional district) to population density (by Congressional district).
4. The "NEA as Pork" Theory -- Also related to my original theory, the idea that NEA funds are distributed to make Congresspeople happy. I am almost completely sure that the normal NEA distribution is not this way, but I am curious about whether the Stimulus bill was determined this way. This means comparing NEA funding (stimulus/normal budget; by congressional district) to total earmarks (by congressional district).
5. The "NEA as Liberal" Theory -- A minor theory of mine as to why the first set of data gave NY and CA an advantage over TX, NEA funding (stimulus/normal budget) to CPVI (a dataset that I can find immediately!)

I think those are the major theories that I want to test with the numbers. I will probably go one-by-one over the next week or so, depending on how much work it is to find each of these data sets. If anyone wants to comment with good sources for this data, I'd be much obliged.

(UPDATE: In lieu of the CPVI set, I'm going to try and get the Social/Economic Liberal/Conservative scores that FiveThirtyEight.com just used. It gets me a little more fine investigation of the leanings of state voters.)

Court Commentary: Berghuis v. Thompkins

The Court handed down a big ruling today in Berghuis v. Thompkins about the Miranda Rule. SCOTUSblog:

...the Court held, by a vote of five to four, that suspects must explicitly tell police that they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal investigations. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was longer than the majority opinion and drew particular notice. The L.A. Times’s David Savage describes it as her “first strongly written dissent,” while Tony Mauro of the National Law Journal characterizes it as perhaps “her most important writing since joining the Court.”

In the case, the defendant (Thompkins) was being questioned in a murder trial. For three hours he said not a single word -- he held absolute silence. In the third hour, he was asked whether he would like to pray to God for forgiveness for his crime, and he responded, "Yes."

Thompkins' lawyers argued that the "Yes" could not be used against Thompkins in the court of law because he had, in those three hours, been absolutely silent -- thus asserting his right under the Miranda Rule to remain silent.

The court ruled against that, saying that in order for you to assert your right to silence, you need to verbally and deliberately invoke your right to silence. Even if you are silent for three, five, twenty hours, if you speak you are waiving your right to silence.

Unfortunately, there are no protections to prevent law enforcement officials from simply waiting you out, barraging you with questions, and generally bullying until you break under the pressure. Granted, it's not forced confession like torture, but it still may lead to false confessions from those prone to break under pressure.

I agree with Sotomayor's passionate dissent. Note, by the way, that Sotomayor is the only trial judge on the Supreme Court. The other justices come from non-criminal Trial backgrounds, and so they perhaps have less direct experience with criminal trials, and the way that the protections afforded to the defendant protect them from abuses of the law.

In the world of the more esoteric, it may seem like a no-brainer that if a criminal says something they are waiving their right to remain silent (and it does seem in keeping with the way the Miranda Warning is phrased --- RTWT, btw, there's some fascinating distinctions between different nations and their equivalents to our Miranda Warning). But in practice, any right that you have to assert will be tailored to the educated and intelligent criminal; the poor and uneducated will not know.

According to NPR, criminal justice professors from right to left have been against the ruling; the people in favor of the ruling are law enforcement officials. One officer quoted in the NPR story said on air that the ruling is good because it would make things easier for police.

There's the bias: is easier for police always better for the community?

My Mind 5/30-7/4

My 500th Post! And happy Independence Day!

How I was keeping my mind clean this week:

• INFOPORN: The history of modern communciation.
• Libertarians! They're so funny!
• Lest we forget: Uruguay are lucky fucking bastards.
• To paraphrase McCrystal, "When we understand this chart, we'll have solved our energy crisis."

How I was keeping my mind fit this week:

• Neurology 1: the writer who couldn't read.
• Neurology 2: alcoholism and the pre-frontal cortex.

Important facts:

• Disease may lower average IQ in a nation.
• Good news: government deficit is mirrored by private savings.
• Oh hey guess what, filesharing didn't kill artists or innovation.
• When to buy, when to rent.
• New York State has successfully prosecuted people who scam older people as performing hate crimes.
• How your Google works.

Things to watch in the future:

• This one is big-ticket: Our old friend J. Holtham/99 Seats is co-founding an African-American Theater Festival. Color me excited! It's one thing to do the self-interested thing and self-produce, it's another thing to share that gift with your community.
• England may vote to rewrite its election laws. I'm always excited when people re-examine the structure of their government, and England's voting has some room for improvement.

I Have Hope for Israel

I feel really strange writing this, because most of today, I was feeling the lowest about Israel I've felt in years -- and believe me, I've been feeling really damn low about Israel lately. The nation that my parents left when they were my age is unrecognizable to them, and so far, not a single one of my fears has proven unfounded. There is no low expectation that they have not exceeded.

But this gives me hope:

Two Turkish activists were reported to be among those killed in the flotilla. Ankara warned that further supply vessels will be sent to Gaza, escorted by the Turkish Navy, a development with unpredictable consequences.

Combined with this:

Note that the flag on that ship was Turkey, a NATO member. Will Turkey demand invocation of NATO's Article 5?

The reason I've had such incredibly low hopes for Israel is because there hasn't been anyone with any leverage over Israel. And the reason is because, for whatever reason, Israel has both the Democratic and Republican party establishments by the balls. It is debatable whether they control American popular opinion in the same way.

The United Nations, as toothless as it is, is also by extension neutered by the United States, and by its own irrelevance. So no help there.

Turkey, however, has its own special relationship with the United States. They can, for instance, wish away genocide when it feels like it. Why? Because of their key role in Iraq, where they have occasionally invaded. Previously in history, Turkey and Israel have had a cordial but distant relationship. But the Netenyahu government has gone out of its way to drive them away:

After summoning [Turkish] Ambassador Ahmet Oguz Cellikol for a tongue-lashing, [Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister] Ayalon put him in a low chair. He deliberately failed to display the flag of Turkey next to Israel’s flag on his desk. And — listen to this — he didn’t smile at the Turk, as required by diplomatic protocol.

People in the know tell me that you’ve got to tongue-lash ambassadors with a smile. If you don’t, you risk a diplomatic incident. Ayalon not only failed to smile at Cellikol but, in case the Turk missed it, he told the media. Look, Ma, no smile! No Turkish flag on my desk, either! The chair — well, the ambassador could hardly have missed sitting on a chair so low he needed a periscope to look up at Ayalon — but just in case, the Deputy mentioned it to the press, too. No point in humiliating ambassadors who don’t notice.

If it is true that Turkey is going to involve itself rather deliberately and personally in this conflict, then I think the game changes. If they bring the Turkish navy into it, then they carry the weight of the rest of NATO into it. Because if Israel comes into conflict with the Turkish navy, then it is automatically a war with NATO.

Now, the United States could try to weasel out of their obligations. But if they do, then the other NATO members are going to have great cause to no longer involve themselves in Afghanistan. If the US decides not to come to the aid of a NATO member, as its treaty requires, it will basically declare NATO null and void.

So suddenly, there's an involved player with actual leverage over Israel, via its leverage over the international community.

We'll see if it amounts to anything, but it gives me hope of a way out of this rabbit hole.