what on earth are those little boxes behind the podiums for

I'm not quite sure whether I was supposed to have taken this picture or not (actually, I think it's the latter), but nobody's on stage or anything so whatever.  In any case, I was at the debate on Tuesday - and these are the things you notice when you're there but don't see on TV:

1. There's a guy running the thing (always from out of view of the current live camera) who sometimes seems a lot like the guys who run bar/bat mitzvahs in the way he tries to pump up the crowd and get us to clap a lot.
2. Romney and Gingrich both prayed visibly before the debate starts while the candidates were all lined up in the little area behind the CNN cubes.
3. Bachmann, without fail, powerwalks onto the stage exactly five seconds before they go live at the end of a commercial break - all the other candidates have been there for a minute or so already.
4. The edge of the stage has lights which point backwards at the candidates and flash various colors to tell them when their time is up.
5. The debate audience was organized with Heritage/AEI people (i.e. the "intellectual conservative" establishment) sitting in the orchestra level and people affiliated with the various campaigns sitting in the balcony which extends around the hall (the candidates' spouses and close friends/advisers were in boxes at the front of the balcony).  Whenever Ron Paul spoke, nobody in the orchestra seats clapped - everything came from the balcony, and most of that from those affiliated with the Paul campaign (though there was this one guy right behind me with the Huntsman campaign who clapped for Paul a few times).
6. The only candidate to stay on stage for more than a minute or two after the debate was over was Ron Paul, who took a couple pictures there with, I believe, his grandchildren.
7. If I'm wearing a suit and sitting in the Huntsman area, people assume I'm with the Huntsman campaign.

is this turning into a worldpolitics blog oops

In 2009, Nobel-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa stated in no uncertain terms that one particular outcome of yesterday's Peruvian presidential election would be thoroughly unacceptable:

I am unwilling to believe that my compatriots will be so foolish as to put us in the position of choosing between AIDS and terminal cancer, which is what [the choice between] Humala and Fujimori would be.

That is, unfortunately, exactly what happened.

First, a bit of background. Peru represents one of South America's clearest success stories over the past decade, with rapid economic growth and modernization and an avoidance of the sort of populist quasi-dictatorship that has ensnared Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and to a certain extent Argentina. Its two greatest hurdles over the next decade will be extending that prosperity to the poorer interior and avoiding the sort of drug violence that some of its neighbors have at various points succumbed to, all without falling victim to the same spiral of autocracy.

The major candidates for yesterday's election were:

Ollanta Humala, with 32% of the vote
Keiko Fujimori, with 23%
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, with 19%
Alejandro Toledo, with 15%, and
Luis Castañeda Lossio, with 10%

Three of them could be described as mainstream. Unfortunately, they are the last three, knocked out of contention for the June run-off between Humala and Fujimori: PPK, who is an Oxford/Princeton educated economist and former Peruvian Prime Minister with American citizenship; Toledo, who is a Stanford-educated economist and former President; and Castañeda, the ex-mayor of Lima.

Humala is exactly the kind of populist Peru does not need right now. He was endorsed by both Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in the last election (in which he lost in a runoff to Alan García, who is forbidden by the sort of rule common in dictator-weary Latin America--but always simply ignored or repealed by the dictator--from serving consecutive terms). He ran on the tickets of the Nationalist, Socialist, Communist, and Revolutionary Socialist parties.

Some of you may have recognized the name Fujimori. Keiko is the daughter of jailed ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who led a repressive (but economically successful! that's good enough, right?) regime from 1990-2000. He was put on trial in 2009 after a chase that saw him flee to Japan, be arrested at a Chilean airport, and attempt to run for Japan's parliament while under house arrest in Chile in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid extradition. He was eventually convicted of multiple human rights abuses, particularly related to a paramilitary death squad he operated while cracking down on Shining Path and Túpac Amaru guerrillas.

Keiko is running on Alberto Fujimori's record and has vowed to pardon her father if elected (though she may be currently wavering on this promise).

There are your (well, Peru's) choices.

Good luck.

president wilson's war

We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick...
          --Woodrow Wilson, Fourteen Points

Last week I was planning to write a post laying out a consistent set of foreign policy principles based around the ongoing events in the Arab world that would nonetheless attempt to be a departure from the well-intentioned but generally inept Bush years.  But Obama just did that, at least most of it.  What he has managed to do is to draw a line between political and military objectives, a line between air support and ground presence, and a line between protecting civilians from al-Gaddafi and directly forcing him out.  In general, though, he emphasized the particular facts of the situation in Libya over generally applicable principles:

In this particular country – Libya; at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale. We had a unique ability to stop that violence: an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves. We also had the ability to stop Gaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.
To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and – more profoundly – our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.
Moreover, America has an important strategic interest in preventing Gaddafi from overrunning those who oppose him. A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful – yet fragile – transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power. The writ of the UN Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling its future credibility to uphold global peace and security. So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

Whenever we undertake to help a people in their struggle against a dictator we cannot forget--at the risk of inciting the specter that is Iraq--that everything we do we must do for the people of that country and only with their support.  Take heed of Nick Kristof when he notes:

I opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion because my reporting convinced me that most Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein but didn’t want American forces intruding on their soil. This time my reporting persuades me that most Libyans welcome outside intervention.

In a sense, we are merely reconsidering Wilson's policy of multilateral intervention in support of ideals rather than just interests--as we finally live in another era like Wilson's, with rising powers but no looming enemy; wars, lowercase, but no War: no World War, no Cold War, and (soon) no War on Terror.

Is this policy idealist?  Absolutely.

Is it realist? I respectfully submit that it is the only realist policy given our interests and those of the countries which matter to us. Realism is about actions which support your country's national interest because they lead other states to act in ways beneficial to yours.  We can restore our standing in the Arab world--both among its leaders, who matter a great deal, and among its people, who matter even more--and it will bring us immense benefits as the region grows in influence.

But above all it is liberal.  It is a policy that stands for the preservation, defense, and expansion of liberty all the way to the most oppressed patches of this earth in accordance with the desires of the oppressed people themselves.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Fist Crushing a US Fighter Plane, Tripoli, Libya

Two years ago, Mu'ammar al-Gaddafi made the following outburst at an Arab League meeting in Doha, Qatar:

I am an international leader, the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims and my international status does not allow me to descend to a lower level.

From the independent Jordanian newspaper al-Arab al-Yawm, translated by the CIA (I don't think I'm supposed to publish this...):

Prophet Muhammad's first accomplishment after he entered the city of Mecca was to destroy the statues that the idolaters before Islam had worshiped, and now "after 14 centuries, the sons of the Arab nation who have learned the lesson from their noble prophet, are marching to destroy the human statues that are almost worshiped by some lackeys in order to procure presents and material gifts."

There will be more, and more legitimate, posts on the Arab 1848 in a few days, but let me leave you with this, the first three sentences of Reuel Marc Gerecht's book The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East (written this past summer and published, with truly impeccable timing, last week):

How powerful is the idea of democracy in the Middle East? Could the region actually be at the beginning of a democratic wave, as potentially momentous as the nationalist upwelling after World War II? Could democratic convulsions even become the defining theme of the Middle East during Barack Obama’s presidency?

college and other things which take up time

i'm a week (aka eight labs) behind in parallel (as far as i can tell, so is everybody else), haven't started the paper problem set, just started the webassign, and haven't started history or english, let alone multi.  i'm probably also forgetting something.  (it's true that nothing but the webassign is actually due until tuesday, though, thanks to the anthro field trip)
and even though i spent saturday quizbowling i have more time this weekend than i do either of the next two.
basically, junior year is bad enough without spending weekends on college visits.  /screams

things

things that are awesome:

• majeskeeeeeeeeeeeeee
• anthropology
• osborne lectures
• quizbowl
• QI

things that aren't awesome:

• da brick
• parallel
• multi homework
• not being in optics, compphys, or history of science
• christine o'donnell
• paper problem sets
• webassign policies

anything not on these lists may or may not be awesome

...wow is this what passes for a post in the midst of junior year
OH WELL it's all you get

school of engineering and applied bureaucracy

i'm guessing you don't want to hear about my fun, fun time mired in the bureaucracy of The Nation's Capital (TM) - suffice it to say that took the greater part of last week.
not that you want to know about the other parts of my internship either
but you know what YOU HAVE NO CHOICE
or i guess you could press back or close your browser or something
ANYWAY ask any programmer what the worst programming language ever created is and half of them will say COBOL.  the other half will say Visual Basic.  (the snarky ones will say INTERCAL though).  i am spending the next month of my life in Visual Basic.  and not a nice modern version, either - Visual Basic 6.0, released by Microsoft in 1998.
so, what is it that i'm doing exactly?
well, NASA's going to launch, in 2011, a satellite whose mission is simply to measure (and create pretty charts of) the salinity of the world's oceans.  now, how the hell can a satellite know how salty the oceans are - it's not like saltwater looks any different from freshwater to a human eye or even a spiffy multispectral camera?  from the mission description paper:

Salinity remote sensing is accomplished by measuring microwave emission from the sea surface in terms of a parameter called brightness temperature, in Kelvins (K), and correcting for other natural emission sources and sinks. Ocean brightness temperatures are related to the dielectric properties of seawater, and at lower microwave frequencies, these are modulated by salinity. The frequency 1.413 GHz (L-band) is sufficiently sensitive to salinity to make viable measurements (Klein and Swift, 1977; Swift and McIntosh, 1983) and is legally protected for scientific purposes (radio astronomy and Earth remote sensing) from radio interference. The dielectric model function, commonly known as the “Klein and Swift” was derived more than 30 years ago from rather antiquated seawater dielectric measurements, yet has proven to be quite accurate relative to recent experiments (Wilson et al., 2004). A comprehensive new set of seawater dielectric measurements at 1.413 GHz are now being done to update the model (Lang et al., 2007).

"Lang" refers to a certain Professor Roger Lang at George Washington University, and "et al." refers to a couple of grad students and, for this summer, me.  my job is to streamline the process of taking these measurements (the key word here is "comprehensive;" this has taken four years and will take four more; anything we can do to speed up the process helps).  unfortunately, the current software being used to automate the measurements was written four years ago by a GW undergrad as his senior project (something like that would never happen at TJ now would it).  he wrote it in VB6.  we now have to live with the consequences, since i for one am not going to rewrite the whole bloated thing (and nor will any of the grad students, for that matter).
but it's worse than that - what this program does consists of two main functions: it controls the measurement apparatus (a network analyzer to measure the actual dielectric properties and a multimeter to record temperature readings from thermistors) using an even more godawful language (think assembly but controlling a network analyzer whose manual is a thousand pages long) and it combines all the measurements into nice little excel spreadsheets with a bunch of pretty graphs using macros (for an example of the idiocy of the existing program, look no further than the fact that it produces spreadsheets which have time along the horizontal axis (skipping three-fourths of the columns for good measure), necessitating that the data for a single experiment be split among three unwieldy spreadsheets)
doesn't this just make all of you want to go into academia right now