Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

What really happened to Strauss-Kahn???

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

I”m a little behind on my reading, so I only just became aware of the New York Review of Books piece speculating on what may or may not have been a conspiracy against Dominic Strauss-Kahn. In convoluted detail, Edward Jay Epstein insinuates a plot that makes the wildest Kennedy assassination conspiracy seem plausible. By all means read the original. But I’ve gone ahead and written a little synopsis below, and tried to clarify a point or two. Enjoy.

What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?
Was the IMF head merely the victim of a licentious and vindictive hotel maid? Or was he the target of an international conspiracy? And what about his BlackBerry?

May 14, 2011 just wasn’t shaping up well for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the IMF and a contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France. A day that started out with a little light-hearted fun would end with charges of rape, and result in the indignity of an entire month under house arrest in a luxurious Manhattan townhouse.

It all had something to do with his Blackberry. Unnamed sources(1) say that Strauss-Kahn had been warned that Sarkozy’s operatives were reading his messages. Had his BlackBerry been compromised? Could Sarkozy be planning to use its contents to engineer a scandal? Rather than being a minor side issue in the events that followed, the Blackberry was obviously key to the whole business.

But about that alleged sexual assault. The trouble began when Strauss-Kahn (I’ll call him DSK from now on to save typing) was stepping out of the shower prior to checking out of the Sofitel Hotel. We know from electronic key records that Nafissatou Diallo, a maid, had entered his room between 12:06 and 12:07, and from phone records that DSK was speaking to his daughter on his BlackBerry by 12:13PM.

What took place in those six to seven intervening minutes is a matter of dispute. Diallo says that DSK sexually assaulted her and forced her to perform oral sex. DSK at first denied that any sexual encounter occurred. Faced with DNA evidence he remembered that, wait a minute, yes, there had been a sexual encounter, but it was consensual. In fact it may have been that Diallo, filled with passion at the sight of his 62-year-old penis, had actually seduced him!

Whatever happened in that room, at 12:28 PM the hotel security cameras show DSK departing to have lunch with his daughter, and the restaurant camera shows that he arrived at 12:54. At 2:15 DSK got in a taxi to go to the airport.(2) Almost immediately, he discovered that his BlackBerry was missing.

In the meantime John Sheehan, director of safety for Sofitel’s parent company Accor, was driving to the hotel and, according to his phone records, called a number with a 646 prefix. What was this mysterious number? Relying on years of investigative experience, I dialed it. A man with a heavy French accent answered and told me it was Accor.

Why would an employee call his company office? Could it have been to inform his supervisor of the situation? To check for messages? To cancel an appointment? Or could there be a more nefarious reason? What we do know is that at that very moment René-Georges Querry, Sheehan’s ultimate superior at Accor, was arriving at a soccer match in Paris where he would be seated in the box of … President Sarkozy!(3)

Back at the hotel, Diallo (remember her?) has reported the alleged assault, and the police are called at 1:31. There is so far no explanation for why hotel employees delayed the call that would lead to a scandal involving the possible future president of France. It is not even clear that they cared about French politics. What is clear is that they made the call just three minutes after receiving a message from Sheehan. We do not know whether the message was, Call the police already, you idiots!

What we do know is that immediately after the police are called, two men leave the hotel’s security office, high-five each other, and break into what appears to have been the Electric Slide. Then they transition into what was almost certainly the Funky Chicken. From 1:33 to 1:34 they do the Boogaloo. Finally, they seem to have begun the Beguine, a dance once popular in France!

Charges were eventually dropped against DSK because prosecutors said Diallo had proven to be an untruthful witness. She told them she had not entered any other room after the attack, when in fact key records showed that she had entered Room 2820. It is not clear why a maid who goes in and out of hotel rooms all day long would not, after a traumatic sexual assault, remember the completely inconsequential act of having gone into another one.

The electronic key record contained another unexplained anomaly. At 12:05 a key card belonging to an employee whose job it was to retrieve room service trays was used to enter DSK’s suite. The employee, according to his account, entered the suite to retrieve a room service tray. What reason could he possibly have had? Neither do we know when he left the room (he says immediately), or if he was perhaps in the room at the time of Diallo’s encounter with DSK (he says no). Perhaps he was hiding under the bed, or behind the drapes. For all we know from the key card records, he may still be there.

DSK’s BlackBerry is still missing, and records show that its GPS circuitry was disabled at 12:51, which my unnamed expert says would have required detailed technical knowledge. At the very least, turning off GPS would require a person to go to Google, search for “Disable Blackberry GPS,” and then follow a complex process involving choosing the “Disable GPS” option on the phone’s menu system. Who, with the possible exception of a French intelligence operative under direct orders from Sarkozy, would be capable of this technological feat?

Meanwhile, several mysteries remain. Was there anyone in room 2820 besides Diallo during and after the encounter with DSK? Was there more than one anyone? Were there a dozen or more mystery figures, and if so, was one of them Leonardo DiCaprio? One thing is clear: we do not know for certain that Leonardo DiCaprio was not in that hotel room that day.

A final question must be asked. Will I be able to convince my editor that this collection of random facts strung together by insinuating questions is in fact a piece of investigative journalism? Actually, that one we know the answer to.

1 These statements were confirmed by sources who prefer to remain anonymous. They may or may not consist entirely of DSK’s defense team, feeding me selective information they obtained from the prosecutor during discovery.

2 I can be so precise because these surveillance tapes have this little time thingy in the corner. Want to know when the salads arrived? 1:20PM. The bill? 1:54. Of course I could have simply said that DSK had lunch with his daughter and then caught a cab. But the precision about ultimately unimportant details allows me to give the impression that I’m building a carefully constructed theory of what happened, and it fills space.

3 See how it’s all beginning to fit together!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Politics | No Comments »

The belief bubble

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

I’m coming to this party late, but I wanted to write something about the great “epistemic closure” debate, sparked by Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.

A couple of weeks ago, Sanchez suggested that US conservatives have sealed themselves in a self-reinforcing bubble of belief. Enabled by conservative media outlets such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show, conservatives have locked themselves in an echo chamber, Sanchez says. Opinions, and even facts, from the outside world are discounted or ignored.

The tendency to pay attention to information that confirms your beliefs and to ignore contradictory information is called “confirmation bias.” Everyone has it, to some degree.

(I observed it in myself just yesterday. Faced with a paper that suggested cutting taxes is better for a stalled economy than stimulus spending, I went looking for economists who disagreed. If the paper had confirmed my beliefs by championing stimulus spending I likely would have accepted it at face value. You can probably come up with your own examples).

But even if everyone does it sometimes, psychology suggests that conservatives as a group might be more vulnerable to Sanchez’s “epistemic closure.” A study a few years ago found a number of personality differences between conservatives and liberals. One of the most striking is that conservatives are much less tolerant of ambiguity and complexity than liberals. If so, they might be more tempted to restrict their information sources to those that won’t challenge their beliefs.

But are conservatives in the real world more closed off from other views than liberals?

This recent paper suggests that they’re not — even in the age of the Internet, most conservatives, and most liberals, are still exposed to a range of opinions and news sources.

Inevitably, the debate has generated partisan sniping. How could it not? Accusations of ideological distortion can always be turned back on the accuser: “You only think my thinking suffers from ideological distortion because of your own ideological distortions.” To which there is no satisfactory answer, I’m afraid. Unless you’re talking only to people who share your ideology.

If you want to dig into this subject a little more, here’s a take by Jaime Weinman at Maclean’s. Jonathan Chait at The New Republic weighs in here. And Jonah Goldberg of the American Enterprise Institute has this to say.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Politics, psychology | No Comments »

PhDs in punditry

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

At Salon, Gene Lyons writes about the absurdity of politicians and pundits contradicting scientists on climate change.

So what’s next? A series of essays by Sarah Palin about the Large Hadron Collider and the mysteries of dark matter? An MIT lecture series by Rush Limbaugh regarding the thermodynamics of black holes?

Lyons point is that the vast majority of us simply aren’t qualified to form a scientific opinion on whether or not climate change is occurring, and what the likely consequences are. The ones who are qualified are climate scientists, and their opinion is almost unanimous: Anthropogenic warming is occurring, the speed of the warming is unprecedented, and the consequences for humans will be anywhere from bad to disastrous.

Lyons’ message is the one we need to hear right now, at a time when mainstream scientific opinion is routinely described as controversial, or extremist, or even a hoax.

But I’m interested in one question unexamined in his essay. What role do non-experts have in big societal questions that hinge on scientific issues?

Scientists and the scientifically-minded sometimes complain about the “politicization” of issues that hinge on questions of science. But human action is always political. We balance out harms and benefits, and come to some sort of consensus through a political process. Non-experts have not only the right, but the duty, to struggle with these sorts of questions.

The problem is when we distort or deny the science rather than discuss its implications. Any debate about climate change needs to start by accepting the science. At that point, we can have a political discussion about what should be done. How much damage can we tolerate? How much should we spend to cut emissions? How much to mitigate the effects of warming instead? Who should pay? These are all questions that can’t be answered by science, but have to be answered politically.

Lyons starts his piece with this quote:

The spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. –P.B. Medawar

But I don’t think this is right. I think most people do have the capacity to undertake analytical thought. But to do it they first have to overcome ideology, self-interest, and knee-jerk emotional responses. The climate change “debate” shows that many are unable or unwilling to do so.

Tags: , ,
Posted in climate change, Politics | No Comments »

In the bunker

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

I’d been watching the unfolding “Climategate” story out of the corner of my eye for awhile, but only had a chance to dig into some of the emails a few days ago.

It’s no wonder climate change skeptics and deniers have pounced on the leaked emails from climatologists at the University of East Anglia. The researchers come across as cliquish, intolerant of both climate change skeptics and other scientists who disagree with them, and overly protective of their raw data.

What the emails do not show is that climate change is some kind of hoax or conspiracy, although that is what global warming deniers (such as now-freelance conservative Sarah Palin) would have you believe.

The emails, covering a span of 13 years, were stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, and have since made their way to various sites on the Internet. (Here’s one of the most useful, since it’s searchable).

The email exchanges are among leaders in the climate research field, including Phil Jones (who has temporarily stepped aside as director of CRU), and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.

Although most of the emails are routine back-and-forth over research work, they also include a lot of sniping at other scientists (“The kindest interpretation is that he is a complete idiot …”), at the media, politicians, and of course climate change deniers.

Criticisms have centered on three areas. First, Phil Jones refers to using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a graph on global temperatures. Although it sounds damning, in context the email has a less sinister interpretation. Jones was working on a chart that showed data from a number of different sources. One of those was a series of temperature estimates from tree-ring data which is known to have diverged from real temperatures after 1960. The trick (as in, “here’s a neat trick”) was simply to include the real temperatures from direct observation, so that the chart wouldn’t show a temperature decline which we know never occurred.

(The tree ring data does present a real problem, since we rely on tree rings for making temperature estimates of past centuries. But it’s a well-known issue, much discussed in the open scientific literature. It’s even got a short-hand name, the “divergence problem.” So to say the problem was somehow being hidden is disingenuous. But out of context, it certainly sounds like something nefarious is going on).

Second, Jones criticizes two published scientific papers, and says, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !” In fact, the two papers were discussed in the IPCC report.

Finally, the researchers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to dodge information requests from skeptics. This is probably the biggest real problem uncovered. Clearly, the data they use should be available to everyone. If nothing else good comes of this, a government clearinghouse that makes all data and computer algorithms available to anyone would be a help.

But it’s worth pointing out what the emails do not show. They do not show some grand conspiracy to pull off a hoax. They do not show some liberal/environmental/anti-capitalist/one-world-government agenda being promoted, evidence be damned.

The strong impression I had is one of good scientists trying to do important work in a strongly politicized field. They feel under constant assault by skeptics, by the media, and even by Congress. If they succumbed to a bunker mentality, it’s because they had spent years under heavy shelling.

There are honest climate change skeptics (although they have varying degrees of expertise and judgment). But if you’re interested in seeing agenda-driven arguments supported by fudged numbers and tortured reasoning, you’ll find most of it on the denier side.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in climate change, Politics | 1 Comment »

Canadian identity and the military

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Canada released its revised guide for new citizens last week. After reading newspaper reports I looked at it with some trepidation. It’s not quite as bad as I feared.

Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship is a booklet given out to people applying for citizenship. As much as anything, it’s intended to instill a sense of national identity in the roughly 240,000 new immigrants that Canada welcomes every year (a number that gives the country the highest immigration rate in the world).

That’s a tall order — especially since national identity is the great Canadian insecurity.

Molson had an ad few years ago in which a guy named Joe proclaimed his Canadianess. Although the “I Am Canadian” rant is intentionally overblown and self-mocking, the self-effacing Canadian public took to it as an ironic but genuine symbol of national pride.

The odd thing about the spot is that it spends a lot of time asserting what Canadians are not (“I’m not a lumberjack or a fur trader”), or directly opposes Canada against the US (“I have a Prime Minister, not a President,” “It’s pronounced ‘zed.’ Not ‘zee,’ ‘zed’!).

Without meaning to, the spot put a finger on the main difficulty of forging a positive Canadian identity — the proximity of the United States. When you’re right next door to the world’s largest economy and only remaining superpower, you’re bound to try to define yourself against it. But that’s not easy, since English-speaking Canada and the US share a common North American culture. The accent, the political and economic systems, and even the popular entertainment are similar.

One way of carving out an identity is to play up minor differences — making a big deal of saying “chesterfield” for “couch,” or “toque” for “hat”, for instance. But that’s not especially satisfying.

Another strategy is to stress British heritage. Canada is a constitutional monarchy, nominally ruled by the Queen of Canada (otherwise known as the Queen of England). Prince Charles is currently touring the country, and there’s a small but vocal group of self-identified monarchists who love the royals and defend the institution. Most Canadians, however, don’t seem to care. And if you’re already having an identity crisis, “former British colony” isn’t a lot of help.

So the writers of Discover Canada have their work cut out for them. What they’ve come up with is about as good as you would expect. The tone is self-congratulatory, but not belligerently so. The short history of Canada pays tribute to aboriginal people, recognizes the contributions of the French, but is especially heavy on the English heritage. There’s a run-down of how government works. To its credit, right up front is a strong statement that women and men are treated equally in Canada. Pride in cultural diversity is emphasized.

There are also pictures of the the great outdoors, kayaks, Mounties, the Canadarm, the maple leaf, hockey players — there’s even a short appreciation of the beaver, and what I can only take as a facetious reference to “this industrious rodent.”

The most disappointing aspect of the new guide is the heavy emphasis on Canadian military might and military history. There’s a lot about valorous service and national honor. There’s even what looks like a recruitment ad — military service “is a noble way to contribute to Canada and an excellent career choice.” The statement is followed immediately by the URL for the Canadian Forces website.

In the US this would be unremarkable. In Canada it’s part of a recent drift towards militarism and muscle-flexing. Some of that change might be inevitable for a country heavily involved in a foreign war. But part of it is the result of the ruling Conservative’s glorification of the military.

I think Canada still retains a sense of proportion about its military. Most of us see it as an unfortunate necessity, and respect the men and women who undertake a difficult duty. It will be a shame if Canada begins to see military might as a defining feature of itself.

Since I moved here 10 years ago, I’ve found Canada to be a refreshing alternative to the United States — a US with most of the crazy and stupid parts removed.

In fact, as a naturalized Canadian, I’d like to propose my own motto for the Canadian national identity: I’m not crazy, and I’m not stupid. I am Canadian.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Canadiana, Politics | No Comments »