Month: January 2013

From the briefs filed in the impending Supreme Court case in California's Prop 8:

Paul D. Clement, a solicitor general under President George W.
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Bush and now representing House Republicans, argued that marriage should be only for men and women because only straight couples can 'produce unplanned and unintended offspring."

By contrast, if gay people want to have a child, "substantial advance planning is required."

So planned children are – bad? And unexpected, possibly unwanted children are – good?

And that’s a sound legal argument against gay marriage?

According to Clement, yes, because "unintended children" born and raised out of wedlock "would pose a burden on society." As of 2010, about 40% of U.S. children are born out of wedlock, 10 times the number of 50 and 60 years ago. No one calls them "illegitimate" or "bastards" any longer, and their birth does not send their parents racing to the altar in order to shield the child from now-nonexistent shame – and to save "society" from the burden of supporting them.

I'm going to pause while you re-read that until you can figure out what in the hell they're even arguing. If at first glance it makes no sense whatsoever, do not adjust the contrast. You're perceiving things correctly.

You're used to me taking potshots at right-wingers for lacking ideas other than "Cut taxes" and "Fire cruise missiles at it." This, however, is not an example of people who are out of ideas. These are people who have a vast number of ideas, and all of them blow. These are people scrambling for something to plug the leak while their boat sinks. If it isn't time for full blown panic, it's close to it.

Recently I've noticed a trend – hearing people talk about these issues regularly over time gives me an interesting perspective on how the goalposts and talking points shift – toward perhaps the last plank of the anti-gay marriage platform that could reasonably be called a legal argument: the idea that gay marriage presents some demonstrable harm to society, and government can regulate such things in the public interest. It's really not hard to make conservatives turn purple when they toss this line at you; "So the government should ban things that could be argued to harm society. Like giant sodas? Guns? Violent movies? I thought you guys were against the nanny state."

Unless they're willing to take the football and run with it on that point, proudly championing the idea that government exists to criminalize that which might cause harm, they're really out of ammo in this fight. That's not to say that the Supreme Court will rule against them – Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy have a history of basically writing editorials as opinions on this issue, and who knows what Appeals to Tradition they will cite this time. But that's pretty much all they have left. Religious arguments. Moral arguments. Appeals to tradition and public opinion (which is quickly realigning against them on this issue). As far as their ability to build an actual case against legalizing gay marriage, this is shaping up to be a spectacle of mediocrity.

They might be out of gas, finally.

I have always considered and continue to consider gay marriage a Full Faith and Credit Clause issue; if one state issues a civil license, the Constitution plainly states that it is the obligation of other states to honor it. Your Vermont drivers' license is valid in Oklahoma, and so is your New York marriage license. The legal principle at work there changes not one bit when a state redefines marriage. Every state, for example, has different rules about the age at which people can marry without parental consent. Marriage is something people made up that governments see an interest in making an enforceable, legally binding contract. Its definition has changed and will continue to change. That we even have to waste time debating this is indicative of how thoroughly convinced religious conservatives are that their beliefs and the law are one and the same.

(Just a quick note: I felt like we all outgrew the previous name of the annual award given to the worst example of a human being, so it has been re-named in honor of perennial finalist and one-time winner Joe Lieberman. I'd like to take a moment to recognize Senator Lieberman for his long career of being a d-bag. If you're having a rough day, sit back and remember that Joe Lieberman is no longer an elected official. That's something.)

Election years are absolutely lousy with assholes, and the selection process for this award is a veritable embarrassment of shitheads. This year we met Jerry Sandusky (and his facilitators), E.L. James, Gotye, Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, Peggy Noonan, and perennial favorites like David Brooks, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum. How does one choose a single name from that pantheon of human detritus? This isn't even accounting for bleedingly obvious choices like Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh, and Eric Cantor pretty much any House Republican. And that's not even expanding the search outside of the United States.

I was very tempted to offer the award to Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (oh, go ahead and just try to guess which party) for running on a jihad against the nonexistent problem of "voter fraud"…and then using public funds to travel to the RNC and to a voter suppression conference administered by an association of right-wing lawyers. Then I strongly considered Karl Rove, who challenged Budd Dwyer for the title of Most Emphatic Suicide on Live Television on election night. In reality, though, it was way too entertaining and enjoyable to serve as a year defining act of assholery.

Though I dislike the idea of giving the award to more than one person, the honest choice for 2012 has to be the GOP Rape Caucus – the candidates for the House and Senate who decided that the best way for the GOP to stay ahead of the social and demographic changes in the electorate is to take really, really batshit insane positions on abortion. Furthermore, if there's anything women voters (or non-voters) love, it's when a gray, wrinkled, dour-faced 65 year old white guy explains to them what rape is along with his special theories on the workings of the female reproductive system.

Three men in particular drove home this point in 2012. First, Todd Akin rejected exceptions in abortion legislation for rape because women cannot become pregnant from rape ("From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. I think there should be some punishment. But the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.") Never before has the phrase "maybe that didn't work or something" been more indicative of a person's intellectual underpinnings. Richard Mourdock, running in a slam dunk Senate race in Indiana, then decided to tell everyone that pregnant rape victims should be forced to have the baby. Now there's a popular stance! Then Joe Walsh, running in a safe Illinois congressional district, told us that abortion is never necessary to protect the life and health of a pregnant woman. Tell us more, fellas!

Just so we're all clear, these three old rich white guys want to stand before rape victims and tell them you have to have that child. Because I said so. You take it from here, Joe Pesci in Raging Bull:

You've heard of Akin and Mourdock, but they were hardly alone among GOP Senate candidates in 2012. Turns out that 12 of the 33 opposed rape/incest provisions in abortion legislation. Akin and Mourdock became the poster boys for today's Republican: a reactionary, sanctimonious Know-Nothing trying his damnedest to drag the United States back to the 18th Century.

Their actions are in keeping with the smug, self-satisfied, and unctuous tradition of Joe Lieberman himself. Truly they are assholes of year-defining proportions.

Recently I was asked why a parent should pay to send a child to my current university when there are so many inexpensive degrees now available online. I repeated the standard, albeit completely honest, reaction among academics at traditional brick-and-mortar institutions: If you want to buy a degree, go to University of Phoenix. If you want an education, go to a real college.
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Online education excels at offering the cheapest, easiest route to a degree. But that's it. Cheap and easy are the positives. The downside is learning next to nothing. If you simply need a degree to get a promotion from G-8 to G-11 at the Department of Such-and-Such, then online courses are ideal for you. If you want to learn stuff, they're not. It has its place, but it's important to be realistic about what the process does and does not do well.

Back in 2007, Boeing was the subject of many glowing tributes among business journalists and other ooze-secreting MBA types for their revolutionary approach to building the 787 Dreamliner. After decades of the aircraft industry building and re-building the same basic designs in different sizes, the 787 was going to be an evolutionary leap. It would use plastics and carbon fiber in place of metal, electronics in place of hydraulics, and other weight/space saving technologies. Another novel aspect of its design was that Boeing was essentially going to crowdsource it and build it "efficiently" (i.e., on the cheap). It cut development costs with H-1B visas, cut production costs with outsourcing, and allowed its contractors to freely subcontract to further reduce costs. The 787 is truly the Plane Globalization Built.
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Rest assured that the numerous emergency landings and the worldwide grounding of the aircraft that have been delivered (several years late) is unrelated.
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Thankfully the internet's memory is as long as mine, and here you can enjoy an example of the kind of praise heaped on the company for the innovation of farming out the job of building the components of an exceptionally complex machine to – wait for it – over 900 contractors and subcontractors when all was said and done.

Boeing says 70% of the 787 has been outsourced; rival Airbus is relying on subcontractors for about 50% of its A350 plane, now in development. "This farming-out of the airplane's construction is revolutionary," says Richard Aboulafia, vice president at Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm.

Revolutionary! Contracting was done with American, Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Australian companies among others, and each of these subcontracted the actual labor to the usual suspects – Eastern Europe, China, Mexico, South America, and the like.

Unfortunately Boeing is starting to realize that outsourcing and cheap labor are good at making really inexpensive disposable goods. Consumer electronics. Clothes. Shoes. Toys. It's not so good at making the most complex machines ever devised by mankind, which happen to have a very low tolerance for system failures. If your Reeboks fall apart or your Blu-Ray player craps out, you're probably going to be irritated. If the electrical subsystems on an aircraft stop working, you're probably going to be dead. Yes, aircraft like this have redundant systems and not every failure results in a catastrophe.
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But we're not talking about a new iPhone here, where the attitude in development can be, "Just release it and we'll shake out all the bugs in the first year."

The issues with this airplane should not be overblown, but they should not be interpreted solely as problems with one product from one company. This is an important example of the limited benefits of outsourcing and other "globalization" practices. As I've said many times before, it makes things cheaper. That's what it does. That's all it does. It does not make things better, safer, or even necessarily faster. It's merely a way to pay fewer people in high-wage countries as a means of maximizing profits. The idea that Boeing would assemble a bunch of components made by hundreds of different contractors into the most technologically advanced airliner in the world shows how little value is given to quality and safety in comparison to penny-pinching.