A Curious Constitutional Loophole

I came across a curious Constitutional loophole today. I was pondering Hillary Clinton's candidacy, particularly what role Bill Clinton could play in her administration. Could he become Secretary of State for example? My first thought was no, because the Secretary of State is in Constitutional succession to the Presidency, and that would mean he might get a third term, which would be illegal under the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.

Or so I thought. When I actually looked into it, the story was subtly, and significantly different.

It turns out that the 22nd Amendment bars a person from being elected president a third time. Note the emphasis: elected. It does not say that a person cannot succeed to a third term.

This in turn brought up a rather amazing prospect. Hillary Clinton, if nominated, could nominate her husband as her Vice Presidential running mate.

The Twelfth Amendment bars anybody ineligible to serve as President from the office of Vice President. However if Bill Clinton is eligible to succeed to the Presidency, he is certainly eligible to serve. He just cannot run for the office.

While I am not a huge fan of Bill Clinton, the prospect of a Clinton/Clinton ticket is rather breathtaking. It would probably be bad politics, but if Hillary announced her intention to nominate her husband for VP, I'd become seriously interested in her candidacy, if for no other reason than to see how this turned out.

The New Beatitudes

Different times call for different virtues, and so:

Blessed are the wealthy, for theirs is the Kingdom of the Influence.

Blessed are those who exult, for they shall have self-satisfaction.

Blessed are the aggressive, for they shall seize the Earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for advantage, for they will dine on the substance of the meek.

Blessed are the vengeful, for they will be shown cruel pleasures.

Blessed are the corrupt, for Divinity will not impede their business.

Blessed are the warmongers, for they will be called patriots.

Blessed are those who persecute because of covetousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Influence.

Blessed are you when you insult people, persecute and falsely say all kinds of evil because of greed. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward on Earth, for you persecute as they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Paul Potts -- The People's Tenor?

Paul Potts, winner of the Britain's Got Talent award, is the latest YouTube phenomenon. If you haven't seen the video, you should check it out here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=9oxTy7KIAaA.

It's a great story: a doughy, uncharismatic, down on his luck cell phone salesman turns out to have a huge hidden talent. Set aside the fact he's not actually untutored, nor entirely undiscovered, having sung as an amateur in some significant productions. It's too good a story not to be true.

His fans started out comparing Potts to Pavarotti -- perhaps the only opera singer they can name -- and now they're starting to say that no, he's actually better than Pavarotti. They'll admit they don't know anything about operatic technique, but while Pavarotti is clearly more proficient, they find him too cold and unemotional.

So of course now monocles are popping out and falling into tea cups all over the place. “Mr. Potts is the sort of bog-standard tenor to be found in any amateur opera company in any corner of the country,” sniffs one critic in the New York Times. The death of opera is predicted, as hordes of untutored philistines flock to opera peformances.

OK, let's take a deep breath here.

Fans of Paul Potts -- Paul's performance was by professional standards technically mediocre, but pretty good for an amateur. I won't bother to disabuse you of your ideas about Pavarotti's supposedly coldly unemotional singing, since it is pointless. You will change your tune in time.

Now opera "experts" who are raining on the Paul Potts parade. The idea that opera will suffer because it will somehow be more misundertsood than it is now is ridiculous. And the prospect of opera houses being overrun with ignorant new fans is actually a rather splendid one.

I also more than half suspect that you've forgotten what opera is about. It's not about technical perfection, it's about the sheer thrill of seeing somebody getting up in front of an audience and attempting something extremely difficult and appallingly risky, yet doing it with real feeling.

The only test that really matters is the goosebump test.

Of course, Paul Potts does not have Pavarotti's bottomless well of vocal power and rock steady pitch at dynamic extremes. Yes, he does not have the artistic nuance of the great professional tenors. And yes, Paul Potts' pitch wavered as he strained against his vocal limitations and yet... isn't that what a great performance is about? Someday there will be a computer program on which you can dial up any historical singer. It will return a performance in Pavarotti or Caruso's voice and style, except with perfect repeatability and inhuman perfection. But it won't be operatic.

I thought that Potts' performance was fresh and sincere, and technically good enough to carry that sincerity. It's not enough to make Paul Potts my favorite singer, but it did the job. Bog standard though it may be, but it was an operatic performance.

And by the way, you haven't been up front with the newbies about when their opinions stop being unsophisticated tripe and start to be worth listening to. The answer is never. No real fan of opera agrees with any other fan's opinion. So you can stop intimating that the newbies should start aping the opinions of their betters.

The fact is, the new Paul Potts fans have grasped the gist of opera remarkably well. It's about performances that send chills down your spine, and larger than life, archetypal stories that reach deeper down than reason. Paul Potts' story may be somewhat exaggerated, but it is quintessentially operatic. How could we have missed that? We can accept the plot of Turandot, but suddenly we become sticklers for plausibility?

So, fans of Paul Potts -- welcome. I expect your views and tastes will change over time, but enjoy that time nonetheless. And when your turn comes, remember to be kind to the newbies.

What is Privacy?

Scott McNealy once famously said, "You have no privacy. Get over it."

I doubt that even Mr. McNealy believes this. Mr. McNealy would not like it if somebody continually accosted him while he tried to go about his business (what lawyers would call the tort of intrusion). He wouldn't like it if people tapped his phone. He wouldn't like it if somebody tried subvert his relationships by spreading falsehoods (or worse, cunningly chosen truths).

We all cherish our privacy. Unfortunately we're often asked to trade off privacy for some other thing, say money or national security, without really considering what it is we're giving away. The philosophical definitions of privacy I have seen tend to be too complex, miss important elements of the privacy, or both. On the other hand, the simplest definitions don't give much real guidance. Justice Brandeis defined privacy as "the right to be left alone." While this is on the right track, it doesn't really capture the full spectrum of rights.

Privacy is not just about being left alone, but about the right to control our engagements with other people. Who you choose as your friends is clearly a personal matter and interference with this choice is clearly a privacy intrusion.

After considering this for a while, I believe that every privacy concern boils down in some way to the issue of autonomy or self-direction. This is most easily seen when it comes to issues of intrusion. If you are in a public place, you must expect to be seen and observed by others. But if somebody begins to follow you around as you go about your business, they cross the line. They're interfering with your freedom of choice of places to go and things to do.

Autonomy is also behind other privacy concerns, but in less obvious ways. The neighbor who makes loud noises interferes with your autonomy of attention. The person who spreads misleading facts about you interferes with your ability to control your reputation through your own choices. The person who goes through your trash in order to find out about your private habits places curbs upon those habits.

Privacy is not autonomy in the sense of absolute freedom; it is about freedom to make choices in light of reasonable consequences of those choices. Therefore, I would offer this as a definition of privacy:

Privacy is the right of an individual or group to be free from unreasonable interference in the conduct of their affairs or in their thoughts.

I believe this covers every form of privacy concern there is, as well as the normal excpetions and trade offs to privacy. In every case, issues of privacy turn out to be issues of freedom, and exceptions to privacy turn out to be reasonable consequences of our freely chosen actions -- or at least they should be.

I started to think about privacy again after reading some posts by people who were struggling with the question of whether privacy was really needed in a free society. I believe that privacy in fact defines a free society, both in the way it limits intrusions of others in our affairs, and in how it limits our expectations to be free from the consequences of our actions.

Lloyd Alexander 1924-2007 An Appreciation

Sometimes prospective writers consider writing juvenile literature as a way of breaking into the business. Writing for children well is a lot harder than it sounds.

Young readers do not have patience with long, rambling setups where the author clumsily expounds everything he thinks the reader might need to know, before letting his characters do anything. It's important to get things moving fairly quickly.

On the other hand, this advice can be taken too much to heart, with frenetic but ultimately dull results. It is possible that some authors, after the layers of exposition have been stripped away, don't have anything interesting or important to say.

But a few, a very few, have the gift to produce true children's literature. John Bellairs. C.S. Lewis. Katherine Patterson. And Lloyd Alexander.

What puts Alexander among the greats of this field is not easy to put your finger on. Craft and economy, certainly these are requirements to create passable works. But this doesn't capture what makes a children's author great. I've heard some say that Alexander's works are founded in a profound and humane philosophy. But while I think such a philosophy might be created from the raw material of Alexander's writing, it is only a by-product of Alexander's true gift.

Lloyd Alexander's gift is that he writes as somebody who still experiences things like love, anger, pride, and loss in the vivid springtime colors of youth. Even so, he understands them with the gravity of experience. He is Taran and Dallben at the same time.

My feelings on Lloyd Alexander's death are not entirely ones of unmixed sadness. Wonder is what predominates. That he could continue to write over so many decades without the well running dry. That he could have run such a long race and died within two weeks of his wife of many decades.

It pleases some people to think that age gives them an automatic claim to wisdom, or at least authority. They are fond of saying things like "if I only knew then what I know now." Lloyd Alexander teaches us by his example and through his writing, to turn that dull and absurd notion on its head. What we should be saying is, "if we only knew now what we knew then." Only then can we unlock the secret of seeing the world and the people in it as new, and abounding in possibility.

I cannot feel very sad in a world so full of hope.

Genesis Revisited

This is reworked slightly from a Slashdot post.
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Did God create man in His image, or is that something we tell ourselves that to cover for the undeniable fact that we were scraped together at the end of the Creation project? If J.B.S. Haldane is right it's possible we're just the leftovers after the main project deliverable was complete: implementing every imaginable variation on the the concept of "beetle".

And if that weren't enough to kick us in the anthropocentric nuts, objectively speaking we aren't even in the same league as termites, as measured by biomass or biodiversity.

So, there must have been some severe editing of the Creation story, particularly Genesis 1:25 - 1:31, which may originally have gone something like this:

25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

26 And God said, We have checked our deliverables punch list and Creation is complete; and seeing it was will too early to Quit, God said, Let there be Slack; and God saw the Slack, that it was good, and God separated the productive phase of the Project from the mindless consumption of excess Resources.

27 And the Slack was fruitful of Diversions of surplus Resources; so God said, Let Us celebrate; and the Celebration begat the Kegger, and the Kegger begat Beer, and Beer brought forth all manner of amusing indiscretions. And God saw that these where more or less Harmless.

28 Then God noticed that the Project had this left-over mud, and this He fashioned into a Man; but there was not enough fuel left over to fire the clay, so when Man was half-baked, He breathed upon Man; and the Spirit of Alcohol moved upon the Deep.

29 Then Man opened his eyes, and looking on God asked, Are You Me? And God said No. Then seeing abundance of the Fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, the cattle, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, Man asked, Is all this for Me? And God said, Well, It's really more about the Creeping Things. Then Man noticed he was Last Born, man said, Then I must be the Apex of Creation. And God said, Actually, you are only the half-baked leftovers from Creation, but by studying Creation you may in time become full-baked. Noting the firmament, how it was set above the waters below, Man said, Then it's a good thing for Me that I'm sitting here at the Center of the Universe; but God said, That is a Rather Tricky Point. And Man thought that this was Raw Deal, and set out to Improve on Matters.

30 So Man said,let there be Denial, and so that there is something to set Denial upon, let there be Self-Serving Rationalization; and Man saw these Made Him Feel a Little Better. And seeing this Denial was still shaky, Man said Let there be an Official Version of Events and over this I will set Institutionalized Religion, and upon Religion let Denial be propped; And lest Religion be shaky, let it bring forth Conformism, Bigotry and every manner of Officious Narrow-Mindedness. And Man saw these were an Improvement.

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good, except for the bits that came after the Beer which in retrospect looked somewhat Doubtful. And Lo! Slack had used up all the Resources and He needed to Fix the Problem On the Cheap, God said, Let there be Muddling Through; Let there be Counting On Things Working Out in the End. But these did nothing but prop up the Official Version of Events, so God said, let there be Doubt; let Doubt bring forth Mule-headed Skepticism. And God saw these were an Ugly Kludge, so God said Let there be Irony, and let Irony bring forth Satire; yet even these were not enough, and seeing He was over budget anyway, God said, Let there be Hope. And God saw it was Good Enough. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
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One Year Later: The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq

It's coming up on the one year anniversary of the white house publishing it's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq". This is a document that every American ought to read, because it is supposed to tell us how we are going to win the Iraq war. And it appears that "win" is the only acceptable exit from Iraq. To mark this anniversary, let's review the strategy and how it has served us so far.

First of all, let's dispense with the obvious fact it's the slide handout from a PowerPoint presentation. Since there is no Dale Carnegie "Fighting An Insurgency in a Foreign Country" PowerPoint template, let's assume this presentation summarizing of the actual strategic process.

Many of the assumptions in the report haven't panned out (e.g. the potential role of Syria), but that's normal in any plan. The real problem with this document is that it doesn't actually lay out any strategy for victory in Iraq.

The document has much that is valuable, plausible or at very least worth considering seriously. It tells us what have done so far; say what we are doing right now; it identifies various adversaries and players on the strategic landscape; and specifies what we hope will happen with those players in the future. In addition these future goals are themselves strategic steps in the wider "War on Terror" and "Freedom Agenda".

But notice there is a missing piece. Can you spot it?

What's missing is how we are going to make our strategic goals in Iraq happen. Now granted we can't reveal all of our strategy. Much of that information would give our enemies an advantage. However, there are aspects of the strategic situation which are obvious and which require a public response. For example we know that at one point there was an "ink spot" strategy which was supposed to address the fact we didn't have the forces to pacify the entire country at once. This was the same strategy pursued by Lord Howe in his New Jersey campaign of 1776-1777 (see my essay on this). You pacify individual spots, then you spread the spots (like a tomato sauce stain on a white shirt) outward by fighting at the edge.

This was the last actual strategy for victory the administration, and it was a bad one.

Here is another consideration: We have the most powerful military in the world. Much of that power comes from two things: its extreme mobility, consisting of both speed and coordination; and the almost unimaginable lethality of each of its units. But we take that highly mobile, highly lethal military and force them to stay put in the middle of a bunch of civilians, where they can't do what they do best and every mistake has the potential to kill civilians and spark local and international outrage.

Surely addressing this problem needs to be part of our national strategy. There is no reason to hide this problem; on the contrary its so obvious that by ignoring it, we create more problems for ourselves. It is true that you "go to war with the army you have." But that's the very reason we need a strategy.

Another thing: there are no meaningful, measurable milestones for progress on the goals laid out.

Granted, we don't want a fixed timetable for withdrawal, but surely we can envision a sequence of events that will lead to redeploying our troops, even if we don't put a date on those events?

"We'll stand down as they stand up" isn't good enough, for several reasons. First, we aren't saying what we're going to do that's going to enable the Iraqis to "stand up", if they haven't been able to do so yet. This is not to say that the work we've been doing is worthless; on the contrary. It's just that every good thing we're doing is offset by other bad developments, resulting in a standstill on the progress towards victory or withdrawal. This could be the very definition of bad strategy: when the impact your accomplishments are easily neutralized.

We should remember that we have not pacified the country yet, so standing down as they stand up means that the country will remain dangerous and unstable for the residents and remaining troops. That's even supposing that the new Iraqi forces are exact one to one replacements for coalition forces, which is doubtful. We might even need to send more troops before we start removing them.

Even if we take Iraqi forces standing up as a given, surely we aren't going to stand our guys down on a battalion by battalion basis (about a thousand soldiers at a time). As significant groups of responsibilities are taken over by the Iraqi forces, we can redeploy our forces who perform those functions. What are those functions? The problem is that we don't have any signposts at that point the way to victory.

I think the inescapable conclusion is this: we don't really have a strategy for victory.

We do have goals, and we're working like hell to make them happen, but that isn't enough. The good things we accomplish somehow need to become more than the sum of their parts, and for that we a strategy that puts us in control of the future. The phrase "adapt to win" really means reacting to what the enemy does, and letting that become our strategy. Letting the enemy determine our strategy multiplies their forces immeasurably, because they can choose the time and place of engagement. Every attempt to harden our forces against them will fail, because in the absence of any meaningful threat they have the leisure to study our efforts and react accordingly.

A strategy should be a road map to victory, or at least withdrawal on terms that are acceptable to us. Without that road map we face the prospects of endless stalemate or defeat. Endless stalemate is equivalent to defeat, except that it costs far more and there is no next time in which we can come back and win.

I believe withdrawal on favorable terms is still possible, but withdrawal of any kind is better than none.