Okay, this here blog's taking a wee vacation (as if you couldn't tell). For now, I'm helping run The New Republic's new enviro blog, which still needs a name—The Vine? The Weed?—and may just be a temporary thing to coincide with our recent environment issue, but who knows.

Speaking of which, I've got a longer piece in the new issue of TNR on the big fight within SEIU that's going on right now. It's interesting, and I do think the debate at the heart of the feud is substantively quite important, and speaks to broader issues of what unions are for, and how they could survive and grow. I tried to lay things out as fairly and as clearly as I could, so... check it out.

Depressing: "Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends."

"Hey, what's with the dearth of great free content 'round these parts?" Well, sorry, I've been waylaid with the flu or worse. "Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair / Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch," as Milton put it. But all's well now, so onto business. Michael Gazzaniga's forthcoming book, Human, has this entertaining history of the "animal courts" that were sometimes held in Europe during the Middle Ages:
The source is E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906). Now, Gazzaniga recounts this all to argue that "our species has had a hard time drawing the line between" humans and other animals—that we're frequently in the habit of ascribing agency to other species. But this long review of Evans's book offers a very different read of the medieval animal courts: "Goring oxen were not to be executed because they were morally guilty, but because, as lower animals who had killed higher animals, they threatened to turn upside down the divinely-ordained hierarchy of God's creation." That seems more likely, no?

Why is green tea so popular in Asia while black tea is all the rage in the West? Tom Sandage's A History of the World in Six Glasses proffers a theory:
So there you have it. But why is black tea safer "even when adulterated"? Surely it doesn't have the power to neutralize the "dubious substances" on its own, right?

Pulled up from The New Republic's archives, a great 1997 piece by Wire-creator David Simon that recounts, among other things, an amusing shoot from his first TV project, Homicide:
Well, it's a good show all the same.

Yes, I know. Any discussion of either Kingsley Amis, hangovers, or (especially) Kingsley Amis' thoughts on binge drinking and its consequences must include Lucky Jim's peerless description of a particularly wretched hangover. So without further ado:
Now that that's out of the way, Alexander Waugh has written a whole essay on Amis' (rather extensive) views on drinking. "Beer drinkers," Waugh observes, "have bellies, gin swiggers sallow jowls, and wine, port, and brandy drinkers a 'Rudolph conk,' formed by a rosaceous labyrinth of tiny, luminous blood vessels assembling itself on the nose." Amis was a whiskey man himself and his telltale, Waugh offers, was the "Scotch gaze," a phrase that may be familiar in Aberdeen, but seems to be beyond the ken of Google. Ah, well. Amis, who was very often hilarious, insisted that hilarity and drink were "connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way," but I actually found this passage of his extraordinarily sad:
Well, I won't belabor it, but read the whole thing if you need a break from Eliot Spitzer, or Democratic delegate counts, or whatever else is going on.

Every time some public official gets caught with his pants down in a brothel, Scott Lemieux e-mails me to say I should dredge up stuff I've written in the past on the question of whether prostitution should be legal or not. Well, okay, I doubt I have that much to add, but seeing as how Eliot Spitzer's just been busted for "arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month," and seeing as how I am trying to make a good-faith effort to revive this little blog, why not take the low road and cannibalize some old posts on the subject?

The moral questions surrounding prostitution are thorny (is it ever freely chosen? is it always coercive?), so let's set that aside and just note that criminalization creates a host of practical problems—and usually makes the sex trade more dangerous. One recent study by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh found that many police officers rape prostitutes on a fairly regular basis, holding the threat of arrest over their heads (as do gang members offering "protection"). And, in the underground market, condoms are used only 20 percent of the time, versus the near-100 percent rate you see in legal-but-regulated Nevada brothels.

There's also something to the criticism that many attempts to stop sex trafficking end up hurting women who join the sex trade "voluntarily" (yeah, those are scare quotes). The International Justice Mission, for instance, a Christian organization that helps the Thai police bust brothels, frequently "rescues" women who don't actually want to be freed. "We need to make money for our families," one woman said after a raid in 2001. "How can you do this to us?" It's not as if those women can go find cushy office jobs instead. Most of them are faced with an array of bad options, and having the state insist that they pick one bad option over another doesn't necessarily improve their lives. (Of course, this may not be as true for the $5,500-an-hour prostitutes that Spitzer seems to favor, but who knows?)

So there's that. But I'm also not totally convinced that we should do what many sex-worker advocates in Nevada are calling for and decriminalize the business entirely. Now, these advocates talk and listen to actual sex workers and know infinitely more than I do about this, but there's at least some basis for hesitation. In 2003, the Scottish government, looking to revamp its own prostitution laws, did a massive report on different policies around the world, and discovered that legalization-plus-regulation comes with its own set of problems.

The study found that, as you'd expect, legalization often led to a dramatic expansion of the sex industry: In Australia, brothels proliferated to the point where they overwhelmed the state's ability to regulate them, and became mired in organized crime and corruption. In many countries, child prostitution and the trafficking of foreign women also increased dramatically. More importantly, surveys found that many sex workers still felt coerced and unsafe even after decriminalization. In the Netherlands—often held up as a model—a survey done in 2000 found that 79 percent of prostitutes were in the sex business "due to some degree of force." Back home, I'm not sure how well Nevada's legalization scheme has worked. Here's a study showing that women in regulated brothels face significantly lower levels of violence, although here's evidence that conditions are still frequently horrific.

I used to think the most promising approach was Sweden's. There, prostitution is considered "an aspect of male violence against women and children" and treated as such. Legislation, passed in 1999 as part of a broader "violence against women" bill, partly decriminalized the selling of sex while making the buying of sex illegal (pimping was already outlawed). On the other hand, prostitutes are still punished in various ways—known sex workers can lose custody of their kids, for one. And although the bill provides funds to help prostitutes who want to get out of the business, many sex workers say the aid is inadequate. Worse, because prostitution is not supposed to exist, there are now fewer drop-in health centers available for sex workers.

The actual effects of the law are still murky. Prosecutions of male buyers and johns went up dramatically, and street prostitution in Stockholm has dropped by two-thirds since 1999. But it's unclear whether the sex trade was simply pushed underground, as was originally feared. Official statistics give conflicting answers. Some studies estimate that the total amount of prostitution has remained unchanged, although one Stockholm non-profit estimated that about 60 percent of prostitutes took advantage of the social service funds and succeeded in getting out of the business. My sense is that there's just not a lot of reliable data here.

For an anecdotal take, Petra Östergren interviewed a number of Swedish sex workers who agreed that prostitution had been forced underground. Many now have to work indoors, alone, and are ripe for exploitation, especially by "rent pimps." A 2004 report by the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, comparing the Swedish and Dutch approaches, argued that many Swedish sex workers are now "more difficult to reach by the support system," and their reliance on pimps—who can help them avoid police detection—"has probably increased." The Norway report seems bullish on legalization, but notes that even in Netherlands, a "gray market" has emerged, beyond the eye of the state, where trafficking and coercion remain prevalent.

So, yes, our currently policies are grotesque, but honestly, I don't know what the ideal alternative is. I'd lean toward legalize-and-regulate as the least-bad option, although the idea of providing generous support for women who want to get out of the sex trade sounds like the best idea on offer. But if Sweden can barely manage it, good luck putting anything like that in place in the United States.

I can't say I have fail-proof advice for any storekeeper confronted with a pack of noisy (or even dangerous) teenagers congregating outside his door. Calling the police doesn't always work for long. Changing social mores isn't what you'd call a quick fix. Nicely asking them to loiter elsewhere...? Er, no. Still, there's plenty that's disturbing about the "mosquito" solution:
Yeah, no doubt treating youths like cockroaches will encourage them to behave. How could it not? The author also wonders whether teenagers will eventually get used to the sound, as their eardrums are dulled by loud music and the like. It sounds curmudgeonly, but I can attest. My hearing is pretty dismal (mostly I blame Steve Albini) and I could never pick out high-pitched whines of any sort. And why are adolescent eardrums so sensitive, anyway? What changes when you turn 20?

Why does traffic sometimes jam up on a road for no reason whatsoever? Japanese scientists from the Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow (really) asked a bunch of people to drive around a circle at constant speed. Watch as jams materialize out of nowhere and then "ripple" back through the circle like a shockwave:

         

Here's the article. One theory: "I suspect the trigger would either be a particular driver who was more nervous than the rest, or a particular location on the circle where the capacity was slightly lower." The first makes sense—a quick tap on the brakes by one motorist can reverberate down the line until everything grinds to a halt. I wonder if it'd be possible to create a computer-guided "conveyor belt" for cars in certain high-jamming areas—on LA freeways during rush hour, say—to maintain a constant distance between cars. Think of the productivity gains! Though presumably most drivers would be loath to give up the feeling of control, even if you don't actually have much control being wedged in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Maybe it's just late at night, but I had to watch this video several times before I fully got it: "An abridged history of American-centric warfare, from World War II to the present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict." Totally mesmerizing, if a little nauseating:

         

Why, just last week, I was muttering to a co-worker that the use of "they" and "their" with a singular antecedent would someday, decades hence, be totally kosher. (That is, saying something like, "Whoever swiped my stapler better show their face"—rather than "show his or her face.") I guess I'd assumed the construction was relatively new. But it's not! Turns out, both Shakespeare and Jane Austen were quite fond of it. And hey, if it's good enough for those crazy kids...

Both links come via Geoffrey Pullum's vivisection of a recent David Gerlenter essay in The Weekly Standard, which had argued that the singular "they" was foisted upon us by 1970s-vintage feminists intent on castrating the English language. Whatever; here's an image:

                  

Evidently not:
In theory you could assign a number to every discrete "odorant molecule" out there, though what a dreary wine-tasting guide that would make. Speaking of, I had forgotten all about the hilarious wine-tasting session in Brideshead Revisited: "It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle." "Like a leprechaun." "Dappled, in a tapestry meadow." "Like a flute by still water." You get the idea.

The Charlotte Observer offers up a day in the life of Celia Lopez, an immigrant worker at House of Raeford, a poultry-processing plant in North Carolina:
Well, lots of jobs are unpleasant, some even brutal, but this particular company seems to be more savage than most. The Observer's six-part series reports that House of Raeford has frequently concealed injuries inside its plants from inspectors and routinely ignored the—mostly Latino—workers who grouse about debilitating pain. Several workers were hauled back to the line hours after surgery, so that the company wouldn't have to report time lost to injury. (One OSHA official was scathing: "This is abuse. I don't know what else to call it.") I was wondering why more workers didn't file grievances with their union, the UFCW, but apparently most immigrants are afraid to join, and membership is only around 30 percent.

Most people simply aren't natural-born killers. That's the thesis of Dave Grossman's On Killing, anyway:
After Marshall published his study, the military decided to revamp training so that it wasn't just teaching soldiers how to shoot, but how to kill. Human-shaped targets replaced the paper bullseye. "The firing rate among combat troops rose to 50% in Korea, and to 90% in Vietnam." But PTSD cases soared, and, in the last three decades, the military has further transformed its tactics—a greater focus on guided missiles, on bombs dropped from 30,000 feet—so as both to limit casualties and to distance soldiers from the physical act of killing; to make it, in a way, less difficult.

But what about Iraq? Obviously there are plenty of high-altitude strikes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but there's a great deal of up-close fighting—and killing—too. Spencer Ackerman has a (typically) smart piece in The Washington Independent today about the rise of counterinsurgency advocates inside the U.S. Army, who believe that, for a variety of strategic reasons, many of the trends of the past three decades need to be reversed. I don't know if they're right or wrong on the merits, though I guess I am curious about how Grossman's work fits in here.

David Hajdu recreates a few choice scenes from the great comic-book scare in the late 1940s and early '50s. Parents and sweaty councilmen feared that leafing through a comic book would "stimulate sadistic and masochistic attitudes and interfere with the normal development of sexual habits in children." So:
The craze culminated in the Senate subcommittee hearings of the early 1950s, in one of which Estes Kefauver held up the cover of Crime Suspenstories #22, featuring the severed head of a woman held aloft by an ax-wielding maniac. EC Comics founder Bill Gaines replied that a certain amount of blood was actually in good taste. ("A cover in bad taste," Gaines explained, "might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it.") In any case, a few years later rock 'n' roll became the bogeyman du jour threatening to rot the pristine mores of youth, and everyone mostly forgot about comics.

Kevin Drum points to a new Esquire profile of Admiral William Fallon, which includes this remarkable anecdote:
Now, I assume the ideal situation here would be for military commanders from China and the United States to stay in close contact, so that they can defuse tensions and avoid incidents that could escalate into something unpleasant. But then where would the defense contractors be? So not only do we get the Air Force and Navy hyping the China threat to justify a fresh generation of nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, but anything that so much as smells like détente gets castigated. Thankfully, Fallon stood down the shriekers in this case, but those are some screwed-up incentives.

P.S. Plus of course there's this business about Fallon getting pushed out because he might resist a military action against Iran.

The rough consensus among climatologists these days is that, if we want to stave off the worst effects of global warming, we're going to have to stabilize carbon concentrations in the atmosphere at about 450 parts per million by mid-century (we're at about 383 ppm now). That means whopping emissions cuts, especially in the United States and Europe—but also in China, India, and elsewhere.

It all sounds so drastic, no? Except that a new OECD report calculates that reaching that goal could be done for cheap: The world's GDP in 2050 would be about 2.5 percent below what it otherwise would be if we did nothing. In other words, instead of being three-and-a-half times richer than we are now, we'll be like 3.4 times richer. (Figuring out how to distribute the costs fairly will be tricky, but hardly insurmountable.) So that right there is Al Gore's secret plan to impoverish us all.

Another theme in the report is that climate change isn't the only environmental problem in town. Water scarcity is becoming a bigger and bigger issue around the world, as Georgians and Arizonans no doubt know. So are various threats to biodiversity. Air pollution is choking China and India. The main point of the report, though, is that these things really can be tackled for a low price. And last I checked, the OECD isn't some radical hippie commune.

Meanwhile, this Bloomberg write-up notes that air pollutants cost the U.S. economy some $277 billion each year in health-related expenses. A friend half-jokingly mentioned to me the other day that you could probably do more to reduce health care costs by passing a cap-and-trade bill than by pushing for health care reform (not least in light of this recent study showing that increases in CO2 can worsen the adverse respiratory effects of ozone and other air pollutants). Who knows if that's true or not, although it probably would do wonders for public health if a climate bill provided incentives for, say, people to move to urban areas and walk and take public transit more.

Via Maud Newton, the image archives at the new Reanimation Library in Brooklyn (which collects outdated and discarded books from thrift stores, stoop piles, and throwaway centers) has a lot of nifty pictures. A particularly horrifying one from The Handbook of Doll Repair and Restoration:

          

Another (a poster? a campaign ad?), from a book titled Civil Air Patrol:

          

"If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented." So say the writers of The Wire. Radley Balko likes the sentiment, but has a practical concern: "[J]udges and prosecutors often set perjury traps that pick would-be nullifiers off during the voir dire process." He suggests laws that would force courts to inform jurors of their right to acquit no matter what the evidence says, if they think the law is unjust or immoral. (Which most drugs laws certainly are.)

Is that a good idea? Back during Prohibition, juries nullified alcohol-control laws "possibly as often as 60 percent of the time." But the practice has a more depraved history too, as when Southern white jurors could barely stifle a yawn anytime a pale-skinned defendant was accused of killing a black person. Since the late 1960s, though, courts have employed all sorts of strategies to prevent nullification, though they obviously can't ban it outright. Admittedly, the fact that Robert Bork deemeds nullification a "pernicious practice" makes me vastly more receptive to the idea.

Very clever. Very clever, indeed:

          

From Wikipedia: "ChindÅgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, ChindÅgu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions, would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment, that effectively it has no utility whatsoever." There's an entire society and everything.

This is a great catch by Lisa Heinzerling. So, last week, EPA head Steven Johnson finally explained why he had rejected California's request to set its own, stricter tailpipe standards last December. His 48-page report argued that global warming endangered the public health of all Americans, and hence, California wasn't facing the sort of "extraordinary and compelling conditions" that would justify it being allowed to do its own thing.

Now, that's probably untrue. The increased risk of water shortages and forest fires due to climate change are likely to hit California harder than most other states. Also, according to one recent study, "global warming currently causes greater respiratory and cardiovascular disease in California per person than in other states through its impact on air pollution."

But set that aside. California's almost surely going to win this legal battle eventually. The fun part is that, under the Supreme Court's ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA last year, the EPA is required to start regulating carbon-dioxide emissions as soon as it makes an "endangerment finding." And what do you know, that's basically what Johnson's report was: It says that global warming is "unequivocal" and threatens to endanger public health. Granted, Johnson's trying to deny that that's what it was, but it sure looks and quacks like one...

In The New Yorker, Jim Holt channels French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, who has a theory that our brains come with a built-in sense for numbers, but not for doing mathematical calculations like multiplication or long division. That stuff is unnatural:
A "double terror." I like that. From this, Dehaene goes on to suggest that maybe first-graders shouldn't be forced to memorize times-tables until they puke, but ought to be given calculators so that they can learn "the meaning of these procedures." This debate always gets heated, but I can't say I feel strongly. I've got my times tables under control, but it only really comes in handy when I'm resizing images for blog posts. By contrast, I have a very smart friend in private equity who still balks at 11 X 12 and 8 X 9 and the rest. But who cares? (I should say, however, that the finger system for multiplying by 9 is great fun regardless.)

Another coffee-table tidbit: In Chinese and Japanese, number systems are base-ten, rather than our slightly screwy system (for instance, we say "eleven" rather than "ten-one," as it is in Japanese). As such, the average Chinese speaker can hold nine digits in her head, rather than seven for English. French is particularly horrible on this front ("four-twenty-ten-five" is the way you say 95), and despite having been drilled repeatedly, I will never be able to do long division in French in my head. That doesn't bother me.

Let's see if I can't resuscitate this here blog with a short little book review. Judging by the blurbs, Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood—about a sociologist who spends a year as a police officer in Baltimore's Eastern District—is going to be marketed to people who watch HBO's The Wire. And that's apt: There's plenty that's familiar here, from the slang ("hoppers," "real-PO-lice") to the descriptions of how drug corners are run. You can read the book's first chapter online. But the book also hits a lot of new terrain.

The police subplots of The Wire emphasize the futility of current drug-war tactics. Moskos agrees, and suggests that most Baltimore cops share this view, although many seem to believe the answer is more arrests, rather than fewer (morality and "asserting control" are often seen as higher goals than reducing crime). But The Wire's main characters are detectives in Homicide and Major Crimes, people investigating stuff. Moskos focuses on patrol officers, and has a slightly different argument about the ineffectiveness of much of what they do, day-in and day-out. Some background:
So, here we are today, and a patrol officer's top priority is to respond to any and all 911 calls ASAP. Problem is, a hefty number of calls are "bullshit calls"—pranks or people dialing in to harass enemies—or drug calls, wherein an officer pulls up to a corner, the dealers take a walk around the block, and return when the cop is gone. Stops and arrests are made, but less often than you might think. (Officers routinely take longer to handle a drug call just so that they can remain "out of service" and finish paperwork or eat lunch or avoid "bad" calls—a dead body, say.) Obviously there are serious 911 calls, too, but Moskos contends that there's way too much chaff:
That makes sense at a glance, especially if it's true that "motorized patrol... has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction." But wouldn’t people start complaining if the police weren't responding to all 911 calls as quickly as possible? This seems like a political issue. I wonder if there are cities out there that have tried this.

More: Peter Moskos responds in comments with some additional points that are very much worth reading.

The New York Times offers some pointers for anyone thinking about becoming an undercover police officer:
There's also—and this is the point of the piece—the temptation for corruption. Looking around for more info, I came across this website (which may look amateurish, but hey, it does cite scholarly sources...), which offers even more advice on getting started: "A typical pattern is to bring the undercover officer in as an acquaintance, business associate, or girlfriend/boyfriend of an informant, and then to distance themselves from that informant." All good advice, no doubt.

To nudge this all in a more serious direction, this follow-up Times story on the issues that arise when police rely too heavily on informants is great: "Petty crime is often tolerated in exchange for information. Detectives can be duped by an informant's agenda. While cases of corruption are rare, it is fairly common to have more 'give' in this delicate give-and-take." Ethan Brown runs down more problems here, noting that the rise of mandatory minimums and the power of judges to reduce sentences for "snitches" gives defendants overwhelming incentives to lie, especially in drug cases. It's hard to quantify how often such lying occurs, but one study found that 46 percent of wrongful death-penalty convictions involved informants saying untrue things.

Update: Actually, Alexandra Napatoff's Slate essay from 2005 is an even better overview of this topic: "The backlash against snitches embodies a growing national recognition that snitching is dangerous public policy—producing bad information, endangering innocent people, letting dangerous criminals off the hook, compromising the integrity of police work, and inciting violence and distrust in socially vulnerable neighborhoods." (Although I do think these issues should be separated from the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, which mostly seems to be about simple witness intimidation.) Of course, cops are never just going to do away with informants, but Napatoff argues that there's, at the least, ample room for more transparency.

You know, solar power sometimes gets a bad rap. By that, I mean: Few people believe it will ever play more than a bit part in the grand U.S. energy drama going forward. All the scientists are saying we've got to slash emissions in the United States 50 to 80 percent by mid-century, and most onlookers say, well, that means either we'll have to dream up some way to capture and sequester carbon from coal-burning plants, or do what John McCain says and go full speed ahead with nuclear power. But nuclear and "clean" coal are the only things that can provide most of the energy we need. Wind and solar? Pfft, too small. Too unreliable. And so on.

So, on that note, this Scientific American cover story on "A Solar Grand Plan" was fascinating. The authors (we'll call 'em Zweibel et. al.) argue, fairly convincingly, that the technology exists either right now or will in the near future to build a massive solar-power infrastructure that could supply 69 percent of America's electricity—and 35 percent of its energy—by 2050, which would cut CO2 emissions by 62 percent. (This assumes we electrify our transport with, say, plug-in hybrids.) Bear in mind, this is probably a conservative estimate—they're ruling out massive technological leaps, for one. But it's a grand vision all the same.

Yes, there are caveats and technological hurdles. The authors estimate that the efficiency of photovoltaic cells would have to rise to 14 percent—although current modules are at about 10 percent, so this isn't an insurmountable leap. Also, it would take about 30,000 square miles to install all those photovoltaic plants—and we're probably talking about the Southwest. That's a lot of wilderness to plop down on top of, but it's less space than the coal industry uses, when you include mining. Also, fewer mountains pillaged. And photovoltaic plants don't need much water, which is a bonus for the parched West. (Nuclear plants, by contrast, are water-guzzlers.)

The biggest question, though, is storage. The sun doesn't shine all the time. And batteries are still too expensive and inefficient (though who knows what advances are on the way). Zweibel et. al. suggest that compressed-air energy storage is the answer—in which the electricity from the solar plants compresses air into underground caverns, which then, during off-hours, is released to power turbines. One surprise: The authors estimate that there are enough such caverns around the country—many near metro areas—to do this. We'd also have to install a new system of high-voltage direct current lines to bring the power from the Southwest to the rest of the country.

All that won't be cheap. Between now and 2020, the government would have to spend at least $420 billion on subsidies, infrastructure, and so on. After that, if all goes well (and, hell, it probably won't), the solar industry would be on its way. On the other hand, the annual expense involved would be less than current farm subsidies, and the total spending would be about what was needed to build the country's high-speed telecommunications infrastructure over the past four decades. So it's not like this is totally outlandish or unprecedented—if Congress auctioned off all the pollution permits from the Lieberman-Warner climate bill, it could easily raise the money needed. Plus, after a while we'd be saving money—no more fuel costs.

Anyway, I'm not saying the United States should go out and do this tomorrow. But it's at least a way of thinking about how the U.S. could go carbon-free without giving massive subsidies to the coal industry or nuclear industry (both of which could well cost even more—especially when you count the waste disposal, security, etc. needed for McCain's proposed nuke-o-rama.) Personally I'd prefer a more distributed energy system, whereas Zweibel et. al. only see 10 percent of electricity coming from PV cells on rooftops, etc., by 2050, although, obviously, as the technology advances that would change. But like I said, a lot of this is about giving a sense of what's possible beyond the "clean" coal/nuclear drumbeat.

Over at Salon, Joseph Romm argues that affordable plug-in hybrid cars are only a few years away—even if we don't see a breakthrough in battery technology. That's a bold prediction, but it'd be a huge deal if it panned out. Right now, in terms of weaning the United States off oil—two-thirds of which goes toward transportation—plug-in hybrids are far more promising than liquefied coal (suicidal), corn ethanol (still too destructive), cellulosic ethanol (too far off), or hydrogen fuel-cell cars (way too far off).

The tantalizing bit here is that, according to one recent Energy Department analysis, we could, in theory, replace 84 percent of existing cars and light trucks—180 million vehicles—with plug-in hybrids without building a single new power plant. (That assumes the plug-ins would charge during off-peak hours and feed back into the grid during the day.) Even if that didn't happen, greenhouse emissions would still drop considerably in a plug-in world, even if the cars were being powered by dirty coal plants, although obviously the green ideal is to have the cars powered by carbon-free sources—nuclear or renewables. As a bonus, by providing distributed energy storage, plug-ins would actually make some intermittent energy sources like wind (which mostly blows at night) more viable.

Anyway, it's one of those grandiose visions that seems to be getting less far-fetched by the day. The city of Austin is already taking a hard look at the idea, as is Israel. The catch, of course, is that plug-ins would require a higher price on carbon and a fair bit of government support to become viable, though probably less support than biofuels need, and presumably less effort than it takes to police the oil supply in the Middle East.

(Note: I posted this a few weeks ago on The Plank, but I'm reposting here because, well, hell, why not? Plus it dovetails nicely with the post above.)

A few weeks ago, I was wondering whether the scattered news reports I was reading about states rethinking their insane prison policies actually added up to a trend. Well, here's a report from the Sentencing Project that says it does. Last year, nine states set up oversight committees to look at sentencing, prison overcrowding, indigent defense, or reentry services. Seven states liberalized their parole policies. Four "eased policies that treated juveniles as adults." Three "relaxed sexual offense laws related to consensual acts conducted by teenagers."

That's a start, isn't it? As a bonus, "between 2004 and 2006, 22 states enacted sentencing reforms targeted at reforming prison populations. That said, last year Pew estimated that a countervailing wave of "get-tough" policies would lead to an increase of nearly 200,000 inmates in the next five years—bringing us up to 1.7 million people in state and federal prisons by 2011. That means prisons will grow faster than the population at large. So, for now, a few oversight committees are nice gestures, but they're not going to cut it.

(Oh hell, I guess I'll link to Glenn Loury's great Boston Review article—discussed here—in case anyone's wondering why on earth they should care about an overbloated prison system.)

David Wheeler argues that the World Bank should stop financing coal-fired plants in the developing world, start taking global warming seriously, and impose an internal carbon tax on all its development projects, with donors in the developed world making up the difference. That makes sense to me—just because Kyoto doesn't cover many developing countries doesn't mean nothing can be done to curb their emissions. Of course, you need donors to pony up, but didn't Bush say something about a clean-energy fund in the State of the Union?

In a related vein, Walden Bello argues here that the Global South isn't monolithically against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, although the evidence is sparse. Mostly, it's a nice history of some of the grassroots environmental movements that have bubbled up in the developing world over the years. This part is interesting:
I had no idea. Christina Larson wrote a great Washington Monthly piece about an analogous situation in China: Beijing's worried about pollution (and even climate change), but it doesn't have the power to regulate the spewage from the provinces, so the government has given the green NGOs a little slack in hopes they can work their magic. But once you let the civil-society groups go it can be hard to pull the lasso tight again. Or something.

Why, in the waning days of World War II, did the Germans spend so much time and energy building V-2 rockets to rain down on London? The rockets were mildly deadly, true, but ineffective, and building one V-2 meant building fewer fighters jets—fighters that, while perhaps lacking in sexiness, were critical for bogging down Allied bombing raids. Why build one at the expense of the other? Freeman Dyson finds one possible answer in a new Wehrner von Braun biography:
It's still not exactly clear to me whether interservice rivalry is ever in any way efficient. Here's a 1957 Time story about the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force all jostling—much like in Dyson's story—to build their own missile programs. Much overlap ensues: "With the services competing hotly, the U.S. had upwards of 40 assorted missiles under development by 1950, when Defense Secretary George Catlett Marshall called in Chrysler Corp.'s gruff President K. T. Keller to bring order out of the chaos." Having all the services making basically the same damn thing jacked up costs enormously, outweighing whatever benefits competition might bring.

So, another (maybe dumb) question: Would the U.S. defense budget be much smaller and more streamlined if all three services were collapsed into one? That way, if, say, the military decided it needed to focus on counterinsurgency, you wouldn't have rival services demanding, and getting, nuclear subs and strike fighters at the expense of more soldiers. (As Fred Kaplan notes, the fractions of the Pentagon pie that go to each service hasn't budged since the 1980s.) Or are there actual benefits to having rival services? There was some discussion of this in this TAP roundtable on Rob Farley's proposal to abolish the Air Force, although the consensus was that "rational" budgeting will probably never happen.

It seems like every week a news story will surface about how horrifying labor abuses in China are proceeding apace. After awhile, it all starts to blend together, since nothing ever changes. But this recent booklet from the Albert Shanker Institute, documenting the growing outburst of wildcat strikes and demonstrations around the country, is worth highlighting. The vignettes are compiled from interviews that labor activist Han Dongfang has done with Chinese workers over the past decade, through his radio show broadcast from Hong Kong. Han, whose personal story is riveting in its own right, gave a talk in D.C. this week where he estimated that strikes, many involving thousands workers, now happen daily in China. Is that a big deal? It might be.

None of these demonstrations involve China's "official" union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (which usually just orders the rabble to get back to work). In his talk, Han mentioned something I'd never heard: Although the ACFTU claims to represent 90 percent of Chinese workers, most of said "representation" consists of sending out a fax to newly formed companies, getting back a fax with some names scribbled on it, and putting the form in a filing cabinet. Indeed, the fact that many NGOs are now providing legal aid to workers and doing things the ACFTU should be doing means that state union is increasingly irrelevant.

Later, I asked Han to what extent the government tolerated these NGOs, and his reply was surprising: Labor violations have gotten so bad over the last two decades (in the Pearl River Delta manufacturing area, 40,000 fingers are broken or lost each year), that even many officials can no longer stomach it. "I don't believe people can be completely heartless," Han insisted. So the government is starting to sanction NGOs that assist workers, so long as they don't challenge the ruling party. Incidentally, Christina Larson of The Washington Monthly reported a similar dynamic vis-a-vis green activists in China—environmental degradation has gotten so severe, and Beijing so unable to rein in pollution in the provinces, that civil society groups have been given a freer hand.

Han was particularly eloquent about connecting the lack of bargaining power among Chinese workers with many of the country's other problems. Teachers, for example, have very few rights—especially in rural areas. So, not only are low pay and coerced contracts a recurring phenomenon, but, because teachers lack any sort of organized strength, the education budget, which is usually handled at the township level, frequently gets raided to pay for other priorities—a local industrial park, for instance. As a result, parents can't pay for their children's education, which in turn leads to child labor, and so on.

What was fascinating was how Han alternated between justified pessimism and sustained optimism. He was ambivalent about China's new labor contract law coming into effect this year—will it even be enforced?—and doubted that the Olympics would call attention to worker abuses. But he then observed that "labor rights violations have gone beyond anyone's wildest imagination" and that officials really are getting worried. Moreover, massive worker demonstrations simply weren't happening as little as a decade ago. One of the biggest questions, Han noted, is whether anyone can channel those wildcat strikes into "something systematic."

Last month, James Verini had a great piece in Vanity Fair about Aristotle, Inc., one of the premier political data-mining firms in the country. (As Richard Viguerie tells it, "It's not just that their list [containing detailed information on 175 million voters] is good—they're considered to have the only list."):
Back in 1999, Dana Milbank wrote a TNR piece on the dawn of the "customized campaign," describing Aristotle as a tiny startup working with AOL to "create ads that appear only on the screens of those computer users the campaigns wish to reach." Since then, the firm's matured considerably: playing a starring role in Bush's '04 win (allowing the campaign, for instance, march into union neighborhoods in Ohio and locate voters upset about gay marriage); tilting the 2001 mayoral race in Los Angeles for James Hahn at the last minute (really); and helping Viktor Yuschenko uncover election fraud in Ukraine's 2004 election.

Sadly, we never learn which candidates in '08 have the best micro-targeting shops (most of Aristotle's clients are Republicans, though I believe that many top Dems now use Catalist). We do know, however, that techniques have advanced far beyond what happened in the last election: "Obama and other candidates now have the ability to custom-tailor cable-television ads down to the Zip Code in Iowa, or send a canvasser to a voter's doorstep armed with a computer-generated picture of that person's political personality." Freaky. Of course, those all-seeing databases do raise concerns about privacy and "political redlining"—campaigns are better able to ignore voters who either don't donate or vote in dependable blocs.

One interesting bit comes when Phillips explains why he's so secretive and rarely blabs to the press: "It doesn't benefit our clients for them to see a newspaper story about how great our technology is. Every campaign that we work with wants you to believe that it's shoe leather that wins the race, or great issues, or the love of the people, but the fact of the matter is a lot of it is the nitty-gritty organization."

Okay, start with an easier question: Is McCain sincere about tackling global warming? As the story goes, he was first quizzed on the subject eight years ago in New Hampshire, and, after pleading ignorance on the matter, studied up and became a convert. He's reportedly close to Fred Krupp, the head of Environmental Defense, who has a history of reaching out to Republicans with green leanings (and, occasionally, trusting them long after they've ceased to deserve it—as with George W. Bush).

Plus, I'll admit, going into Michigan of all places and talking up fuel-efficiency, as McCain is now doing, takes some chutzpah, even if he is just doing it to woo independents. (Observe, however, that McCain has been notably silent on the fight over new coal plants in Michigan, which speaks poorly for his green bona fides.) He's also taking his lumps from Mitt Romney and National Review on the issue. So, yeah, I do think he's fairly sincere. One might even wonder if a McCain presidency, combined with a Democratic Congress, offers the best chance for a bipartisan-yet-still-half-wdecent emissions-reduction bill to get enacted and stay enacted. (Think Schwarzenegger and health care in California.) I'm skeptical, but it's not an outlandish argument.

That said, McCain's policy proposals are... far weaker than anything we've seen from the Democratic front-runners. Whereas the Dems all put out cap-and-trade plans with emission targets in line with what climate scientists are urging, McCain's website is vague on details. The cap-and-trade legislation he sponsored with Joe Lieberman in 2003 was a nice (if modest) gesture for its time, but, this year, McCain has opposed its successor, the watered-down Lieberman-Warner bill in the Senate, because it doesn't lavish enough money on the nuclear industry. We can debate the merits of nuclear handouts all day, but it's a lame reason to oppose the biggest cap-and-trade bill going, and is enough to make one question how "sincere" McCain will be when it actually matters. (Much like how, in 2005, he talked a big game on preserving habeas corpus but later folded like a lawn chair.)

So, substantively, there's less than meets the eye. One thing I do like about McCain, though, is the way he frames the issue—and here Dems could take lessons. Barack Obama, for instance, loves to emphasize the "sacrifice" required to avert global warming, which seems Carter-esque in its tone-deafness. By contrast, here's McCain's preferred delivery:
That sort of optimism would make Nordhaus and Shellenberger proud. Now, if McCain snags the nomination, he'd likely neutralize the Democrats' traditional advantage on the environment, as Bush did in 2000 by pretending he cared. But if there are still concrete differences between McCain and his opponent, then, as Dave Roberts points out, Al Gore could potentially step in by endorsing the Democratic nominee—unless, of course, McCain puts out an equally effective climate change proposal, etc. Gore's stature here is presumably big enough that he could unblur whatever differences exist.

This is a few years old, but nifty as hell: Photographer Douglas Levere went around and re-shot many of Berenice Abbott's famous photos of New York from the 1930s. You can see some of the photos side by side here. Sometimes only a little's changed: a facade here, an elevated track there. Sometimes entire buildings have sprouted up. My favorite is the bakery on Bleecker Street that's still around today—even the way the bread's arranged in the window is the same as it was in 1937, but the buildings seen in the window reflection seem to have changed completely.

Ah, and there's a newer exhibit called Paris Changing, too. Different photographers, same concept. Now someone just has to do one for Washington, D.C.

Last December, in Gall v. United States, the Supreme Court gave lower courts a bit more discretion to depart from federal sentencing guidelines if the circumstances warrant it. The case itself involved a judge who let a convicted ecstasy dealer off lightly with probation, rather than the recommended 30 months in jail, because the deal had occurred a long time ago, and the man had cleaned up since then. SCOTUS backed the judge, and the whole thing sounded like a good, liberal outcome. At least if you think sentencing has gotten waaaaay out of hand.

Lately, though, Doug Berman's been piling up evidence that, in the post-Gall world, many judges may depart from the guidelines by handing out higher sentences. That doesn't seem too surprising: Academics may agree that federal sentencing guidelines are absurdly high, but a great number of judges don't think so (most federal judges, after all, are Republicans). Indeed, some reformers originally backed the 1980s guidelines in order to rein in excessively punitive judges (although the guidelines themselves turned out to be extremely harsh, too). Odds are, given more leeway, judges will be somewhat more lenient on crack defendants, who get an especially raw deal, but tougher on many others.

Basically, the only way we're ever going to get lower sentences (and fix our over-swollen prisons) is if Congress steps in. Speaking of which, here's an interesting story. Jeff Sessions of Alabama is one of those former "tough on crime" Republicans who's supposedly seen the light on America's prison crisis, and went so far as to co-sponsor the Second Chance Act, a modest but relatively liberal bill giving grants to states to fund prisoner re-entry programs. But now that the legislation's all ready for passage—heck, even Bush supports it—Sessions is putting a hold on it. What gives?

Sessions' stated reason—that he's worried about funding duplicate programs in a few cases—seems flimsy. One theory: he's worried about re-election this fall, and Alabama voters don't like this soft-on-crime business. A more, er, cynical theory: Republicans are planning to attack Obama for being a squishy liberal on crime should he get the nomination, and don't want to give him cover by passing this bill. Of course, maybe I'm just a paranoid nutter, and Sessions will lift his hold tomorrow. Also, as Jeralyn Merritt's round-up shows, Obama's not actually that squishy on criminal-justice issues, though he's probably about as liberal as one could hope any mainstream Democrat to be on this front.

There are about 1.6 billion people around the world who don't have electricity. Not only is that a catastrophe in its own right, but environmentalists worried about global warming might fairly wonder what'll happen if and when all those people do get power. An explosion in fossil-fuel consumption, over and beyond what we're already seeing? Well, maybe not. This new report from the World Bank suggests that, for many of those 1.6 billion, renewable energy may actually be the most cost-effective option for generating electricity. Really.

The logic goes like this: It's true, without a carbon tax, building a coal plant is often the "cheapest" option for large-scale power needs ("cheap," that is, if you ignore the pollution and climate-change costs). But that's not true for rural folks who live off the grid (about 500 million people) or in smaller, isolated villages (a good chunk of the rest). For these communities, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydro, and sometimes even solar are more economical, even before you start thinking about green concerns.

That makes sense. For a tiny village in the middle of nowhere that requires a 500kw load, building a monster coal plant—or installing hundreds of miles worth of transmission lines to the nearest urban area—won't necessarily be the easiest way to bring in electricity. There's also the added bonus that state-owned utilities in many developing nations can be unreliable, and micro-generation is a nice way to not have to rely (too heavily) on a corrupt central government.

Back in 2001, Nick Thompson and Ricardo Bayon wrote a wonderful Washington Monthly piece about how renewable energy often makes more sense for many developing countries than doing what the now-rich countries all did and burn loads of fossil fuels. (They used the example of solar power in rural villages in Ghana.) In some cases, it'd be easier for renewable companies to make inroads in the developing world, since it's not like there's a ton of pre-existing fossil-fuel infrastructure in place. But anyway, it's nice to see the World Bank putting forward a similar argument, only with more charts and graphs.

Back in December, Harold Meyerson wrote about how labor unions are increasingly going global and making alliances abroad. So the CWA will link arms with Germany's Ver.di to organize the German-owned T-Mobile here in the United States. But labor leaders aren't the only folks who can travel abroad: "U.S.-based transnationals [are trying] to bring their union-busting practices to their far-flung activities. At the moment... anti-union U.S. consultants are advising Chinese companies how to get around a mild Chinese labor-rights law that takes effect January 1."

Well, I was curious to learn more, and recently came across a paper by John Logan, a professor at the London School of Economics, on a related subject: As it turns out, not only are U.S. companies bringing anti-labor tactics overseas, but more and more foreign-based firms are calling the Americans for help in fending off their own organizing drives. Along with fighter jets and scrap metal, union-busting knowhow is becoming a major U.S. export—especially to the UK, Canada, and Ireland.

Take The Burke Group, a "union avoidance" firm that's been helping companies like GE, Coca Cola, MCI, and Kmart thwart organizing drives since the early 1980s (the firm claims a 96 percent success rate). In the past five years, TBG has been waging counter-organizing campaigns for clients in Britain, too: T-Mobile, Virgin Atlantic, Honeywell, FlyBe, Kettle Chips. During organizing drives, TBG will help convince workers that unionizing means wage cuts and job loss and, if necessary, will push employers to intimidate or fire organizers. Since British unions have had little experience with this sort of opposition, they've been getting crushed. Utterly crushed:
It's an ugly scene. And notice, it took at least few decades for union-busting to become a billion-dollar industry and permanent fixture on the American labor landscape. Britain's getting there a lot quicker.

Nowadays, a growing number of conservatives are admitting that, yes, okay, global warming is real. But, they add, we shouldn't impose binding caps on CO2 because it's too costly, and anyway, the only thing that will save us is awesome new technology. For variations on the theme, see Newt Gingrich or Jim Manzi. Some of these folks seem to have great faith in Congress's ability to pick out the technologies that will save us, so they suggest that the government should just ramp up R&D spending on mitigation and adaptation and call it a day.

The liberal response is to say, yes, we need some technological advances to avert catastrophic global warming, but to get those, we mostly need to cap carbon emissions and let the market decide how best to adjust. That's the best way to spur innovation. Now, I'm a kneejerk lefty, so I've always thought this was basically correct, but here's a chart putting the argument in graphic form (via ED's excellent climate blog):



What are we looking at here? This is from a Carnegie Mellon research paper looking at patent filings for sulfur dioxide-control technologies for electric power plants. The government had been spending money on research for this stuff for a long time, but it was only in the late 1960s—after Congress passed the Clean Air Act, in all its regulatory glory—that the patents started flooding in. Regulation, it seems, and not R&D spending per se, helped drive innovation.

The flipside of setting new incarceration records each year—at last count, the United States had locked up 1.5 million people in state or federal prison, and 775,000 in jail for minor crimes—is that, each year, you get fresh news reports heralding "the largest exodus of prisoners in American history." Those numbers, in turn, end up swamping state re-entry programs—which are often underfunded anyway—and that means high recidivism rates, which swell the prison population even further, and so the cycle continues. Onward and upward.

Anyway, U.S. News & World Report has a nice feature story on states that are trying to break that cycle. One major obstacle: "Holding a job remains the best predictor of success for ex-cons, and employer surveys have found about 80 percent of ex-cons to be diligent, trustworthy, and dependable. Yet employers are still reluctant to hire them. They risk having employees who can be at worst violent and at best antisocial and reap few benefits in return."

States can try to address that problem through tax credits and regulations, but even that's not a sure bet—on the tax credit front, "small businesses often find the paperwork more trouble than it's worth," and it's hard to bar employers from turning down ex-convicts (New York state tries, but I'm not sure how effective that is). Then there's the difficulty of coordinating job training, housing, and so forth. But Kansas, for one, has launched several re-entry programs that have cut recidivism rate in half. So it's not at all impossible.

In the latest issue of Democracy, Rick Perlstein makes the case that most accounts of George McGovern's landslide loss in 1972 miss the mark:
And, of course, McGovern lost to a candidate who was also campaigning on a pledge to end the war. But what about the whole "acid, amnesty, and abortion" thing?
Perlstein argues that McGovern's substantive positions hurt him far less than his breathtakingly incompetent campaign: The disastrous flip-flop on whether to keep Eagleton on the ticket, for instance, or the 21-year-old novices crunching polling data. Plus, Nixon's dirty tricks were effective, and many prominent Democrats had a visceral loathing for McGovern. (Evidently, Hubert Humphrey—in an anecdote that's in dire need of follow-up—phoned Nixon on Election Night to congratulate the victor and intone, darkly, that "I did what I had to do" to keep McGovern from winning.)

Anyway, I'm not saying this is the final word on the matter, but since the specter of McGovern seems to get summoned anytime a less-than-maximally-hawkish Democrat opens hi