The Ooglay Truth

Anti-terrorism needs a nanny state; The worst architect building of the decade; Consider the opposition prorogued; Bye-bye Blue Cross? AND: Modern conservatism, in a nutshell

It’s Official Worst building of the decade, says The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott. It wasn’t even a list—the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal was the only thing ugly and stupid enough to warrant mention on the bad half of Kennicott’s article. | Sam Javanrouh / The Star

Once upon a time, in Bush-era Washington, D.C., I heard James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation lambaste congressional Democrats who called for more security at America’s ports. His argument was a classic anti-government rant: The nanny state is unstoppable! What next, armed men guarding our schools?! It’s preposterous!

Nah. The Christmas terrorist flop on a Delta flight headed for Detroit shows that increased security can have an effect. It just has to be done thoughtfully, and governments need to be held accountable for flaws.

Homeland Security finally admitted that there were significant mistakes in the government’s actions prior to the attempted attack. But what we didn’t hear much about is how the alleged Al-Qaeda militant was forced to hide an explosive device in his underwear in order to get past security. Unfortunately, it worked. But the extreme measures taken to hide the device show that Al-Qaeda doesn’t have confidence that a bomb placed in luggage—as with the Air India bombing perpetrated by Sikh militants 25 years ago—would slip through the cracks. Shoes are apparently out of the question. What’s next—hair pieces?

That "what’s next" argument is the heart of Carafano’s slippery slope. (At least it was—I don’t know if the historian pundit has changed his mind about these things.) But it ignores the basic economics of the argument. Being vigilant at airports means terrorists wanting to bring down aircraft have to be that much more sophisticated. The cost of doing business goes up—better strategists, better equipment, more time to think it through and test the system—and the chances of a successful attack go down. Surely the slippery slope argument wouldn’t hold in 1985, when terrorists could still get a bomb through baggage to kill 329 people. Hell no that argument wouldn’t work—that’s why Al-Qaeda doesn’t waste its time trying to get through security with dynamite in the Samsonite. Or at least, I hope they don’t.

The real question is what good are these watch lists. Out of the literally hundreds of thousands of names on these lists, how many are actual potential terrorists? Does anyone even know that answer? If we don’t, then the lists aren’t particularly useful unless security officials do a very good job of cross-referencing individuals on these lists with a host of other red flags, and respond in a way that actually improves safety. Otherwise, If there’s no appeals process—names get added easily but don’t get removed easily—security officials are inundating themselves with useless data. The watch list wasn’t any good keeping spoiled brat would-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off a plane on Christmas Eve.

Yet the list was pretty good at allowing reckless fear-monger Rep. Peter King (R-NY) to find the then-suspect’s name and broadcast it it on CNN and other news outlets before charges had been laid. CNN’s Ali Velshi—who did quite the job as anchor when the news of the failed plot broke—had to remind King that attaching serious allegations to names before formal charges are laid leaves individuals and news outlets open to libel suits. After all, Peter King, never a stickler for facts, could very well have had the wrong name.

There’s ugly, and then there’s ooglay

The Washington Post has declared ~~the physical manifestation of Daniel Libeskind’s ego~~ the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum the worst building of the decade. From the CBC:

"Sure, there were a lot of Wal-Marts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless," he added.

That’s right. The words ’Wal-Mart’ and ’Libeskind’ appear in the same sentence. We should be used to it by now. The Crystal is the kind of Libeskind middle-brow atrocity that belongs better in Vegas, not a city with an international arts reputation to protect.

One can only hope that the City of Toronto will decide to launch ~~Daniel Libeskind~~ the hideous tangle of metal, along with all the designs for the indulgent and ridiculous L-Tower, into the sun and ban all references to ~~him~~ it in future discourse.

Probably not. Tim from BlogTO writes,

In its defense I will say that the ROM is at least the most talked about building in Toronto. Good or bad, we Torontonians love to be part of the global conversation—any global conversation—and if it happens to be about bad architecture, well, so be it.

Please talk about us—please?

Making things clear

Stephen Harper has, once again, successfully prorogued parliament over the utterly impotent and slightly amusing cries of the opposition, who are about as useless as Michael Ignatieff’s guide to wringing one’s hands while doing bad things.

This is what it’s come to. Pollster Bruce Anderston makes it explicit if you haven’t yet figured it out: The Liberals are completely and utterly irrelevant, and this is Harper’s way of adding insult to injury (besides shutting down an invaluable investigation into Canada’s complicity in Afghan torture). So let’s mark 2009, for all the good it wasn’t, as the year the world finally admitted that Michael Ignatieff and Kanye West were all hype and no good.

It’s about as depressing as Paul Krugman talking about the coming U.S. stimulus flop. In America, the problem is the stupid super-majority rules in the Senate. In Canada, it’s an incompetent former majority party failing miserably at protecting the country from radical, shortsighted conservatives.

Christopher Niemann / The New Yorker

Is U.S. Health Insurance History?

I’m not as optimistic as Kevin Drum and James Surowiecki, but their argument about how community rating might make private health insurance companies redundant is worth noting. Community rating is a part of the new health reform package that would essentially force insurance companies to cover everyone in certain categories equally and for the same price.

My take is that community rating at the national level can eventually lead to only two outcomes: (a) the end of private health insurance completely or (b) the transformation of private insurers into regulated public utilities. Roughly speaking, Option A is what you see in Canada or Sweden, Option B is what you see in Germany and the Netherlands. I’d prefer the former, but the regulated utility model works OK too, and it’s hard to see how you avoid one or the other in the long run.

Drum goes farther than Surowiecki here, and here I think he missteps. I don’t see the mechanism for converting a redundant private health insurance system, where private companies no longer make decisions about medical risk and are forced to take anyone, into a government-run or completely non-profit insurance system. If AHIP gets to keep its billions in profit because it no longer needs any more overhead than administrators and salespeople, that means it gets to keep its lobbyist leverage in Congress. If the reforms substantially improve the quality of care, there might not form a critical mass of opposition to the idea of private profit off of an industry the government could run much more efficiently, especially given the amount of anti-government misinformation that will undoubtedly float around.

Drum might have one ace up his sleeve, however. If all health plans end up being the same, but the only difference is in prices between for-profit outfits and non-profit outfits, the non-profit outfits might have an edge and come to dominate. That wouldn’t be so bad after all: A reform package that damn near eliminates the problem of the uninsured, bends the curve, however gradually, on health inflation, and tamps down on private profit in the insurance industry, which is basically wasted money. But without having more details about how reform will actually play out—and what changes will be made in the coming years—I can’t say I’m optimistic that the insurance industry won’t make that rosy eventuality go away.

Modern Conservatism

Also from Kevin Drum on "the last two weeks in a nutshell":

Conservative response to a guy setting his underwear on fire on an airplane: It’s Obama’s fault! We should declare war on Yemen! We should stop allowing Muslims on our airplanes! We need to connect the dots! We’re all going to die!

Conservative response to providing healthcare to 30 million Americans: It’s socialism! It’s going to bankrupt America! It’s Chicago thug politics! It’s going to kill grandma! It’s going to turn our healthcare system into an abattoir!

Conservative response to regulating the financial industry that almost destroyed America’s banking system: It’s Marxism! It’s going to cause hyperinflation! It’s Uncle Sam’s jackboot on the commerce of the country! It’s the end of innovation! Buy gold!

Conservative response to catastrophic climate change: It’s a hoax from the liberal media. Pay no attention to it.