So….I didn’t really think McCain would pull the Ayers thing tonight during the debate. I figured that, having warned Obama that it was coming, there would be no surprise. Moreover, before the debate, and even before it came up during the debate, I thought Obama was trying to lure McCain into bringing up the Ayers thing so that he could stomp it down. I think McCain knew that too, so he tried to slide it into a spot where Obama wouldn’t be able to respond, but Bob Schieffer sprung the trap for Obama.

Here’s how it went. After some general commentary on negative campaigning by Obama, McCain interjected:

McCain: Well, Bob, you asked me a direct question.

Schieffer: Short answer, yes, short answer.

Schieffer was warning him that they were running short of time, so McCain attempted a drive-by-shooting about Ayers that would run the clock out.

McCain: Yes, real quick. Mr. Ayers, I don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist. But as Sen. Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship.

We need to know the full extent of Sen. Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy. The same front outfit organization that your campaign gave $832,000 for “lighting and site selection.” So all of these things need to be examined, of course.

At that point, time was technically out, meaning they were planned to move on to a new topic and question with no chance for Obama to respond, but Schieffer steps in to create time for Obama’s counterpunch, which of course Obama was prepared for.

Schieffer: All right. I’m going to let you respond and we’ll extend this for a moment.

And then BAM! the trap snaps shut:

Obama: Bob, I think it’s going to be important to just — I’ll respond to these two particular allegations that Sen. McCain has made and that have gotten a lot of attention.

In fact, Mr. Ayers has become the centerpiece of Sen. McCain’s campaign over the last two or three weeks. This has been their primary focus. So let’s get the record straight. Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago.

Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan’s former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.

Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican- leaning newspaper.

Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House. So that’s Mr. Ayers.

Now, with respect to ACORN, ACORN is a community organization. Apparently what they’ve done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn’t really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names.

It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved. The only involvement I’ve had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs.

And that’s how its done, folks.

In response to Obama’s comments about being surprised that his relationship with Bill Ayers was not brought up during the second debate, McCain says,

“I was astonished to hear him say that he was surprised I ‘didn’t have the guts’ to do that, because the fact is, the question didn’t come up in that fashion,” McCain said of the last debate. “I think he’s probably ensured it will come up this time.”

So what’s going on here? Is Obama goading McCain into attacking him or is McCain trying to get Obama to waste his time preparing for an attack that doesn’t come? Surely, the tactically oriented, military veteran Sen. McCain is not giving up the advantage of surprise. At the same time, the highly strategic, steady Sen. Obama is not likely to be brashly inviting a dangerous attack that he is unprepared for.

Back in August, after nice account of Obama’s strategy, Deannie Mills makes what is looking like a very accurate forecast

By the time we get to the last couple of rounds of this fight, Obama is going to come full-on into his own…And when that happens, most of the country WILL be watching. They’ll see a tired old man throwing ineffectual, wild punches…And they’ll see a fighter in his prime, dancing away from the ropes, landing the knock-out blows.

I see in the news and blogs tonight that a group has hacked into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email and posted some of her photos and messages. What were they thinking? A blog on Wired Network reports,

FBI spokesman Brian Hale said, “The FBI is aware of the alleged hacking incident involving Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and is coordinating with the United States Secret Service on the matter.”

Supposedly, the hackers were interested in this because, ” Palin has come under fire for using private e-mail accounts to conduct state business. Critics allege that she uses the account to get around public records laws, as the Bush administration has also been charged with doing.”

Nice. So they hacked the email of one of the most protected people in the country. Its hard to condone this kind of activity, regardless of the suspicions about Ms. Palin. I would assume it was done by irresponsible and reckless people trying to make a name for themselves, although they will probably find themselves in jail now.

Yahoo apparently has little to say on it, and its unclear whether the success of the attack is Yahoo’s fault or not. According to SC Magazine, a publication about IT security, web-based email accounts are not difficult for professionals to hack. Dedicated hackers can use a variety of methods, such as running programs that try every possible combination of passwords, or using sniffers installed to capture keyboard strokes. It appears that in Palin’s case, the hacker may have been able to request a password reset by answering security questions using publicly available information.

Well, I’ve just got to put a shout out here to Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, for using the term “networked democracy” in a recent article. I’ve had the piece in my cyberreading stack for a few weeks and just got to it. The article snapped me out of my fascination with the U.S. presidential election and back to what this blog was really about–the potential of the internet to foster democracy.

Mr. Newmark gives a quick run down of a few of the relevant areas, including:

1. Barack Obama’s cutting edge use of social networking
2. Governmental sites that are enabling more efficient and widespread interaction with government
3. The potential of the internet for gathering charitable contribution to support various causes. For example,

• Yellow Ribbon Fund, which helps injured servicemen
• Adopt A Platoon, which provides assistance to deployed troops
• Any Solider. which channels support to soldiers in harm’s way

Another interesting website that I heard about in the spring is FreeRice, which is a kind of vocabulary flash card game where 20 grains of rice is donated for each correct definition.

4. The potential for establishing a better government watchdog functions. Examples include

• The Sunlight Foundation and MapLight.org seek to highlight the role of money in politics
• Pass223.com and Congresspedia.org provide information about the activities of government
• Legistorm provides a database of legislative salaries, gifts, travel expenses, and more

These are just a short list of sites that are now available for monitoring what is going on and making better decisions about who to elect and how to interact with government.

The venerable Jon Stewart captures a whole slew of double-talking pundits

You can turn on the TV and get pretty much any opinion you want. Nowhere is this more true than the coverage of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. You might get good information from it, but it does little good to trust any particular pundit. The recent utterings of Karl Rove starkly illustrate the point.

In the video below from a few weeks ago, Karl Rove says that if Obama picks an inexperienced person as a running mate, it will be a “political choice, not a governing choice,” and Obama would not be “thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of the President.” Rove continues to claim that making such a decision would be putting the responsibilities of being President second to winning an election. The implication is that such a choice would show lack of judgment or concern for the well being of the country.

Previous comments notwithstanding, now that McCain has made the political rather than governing choice, Rove says “its brilliant.”

While the controversy over He Kexin and possibly underage Chinese gymnasts at the 2008 Olympics might soon be water under the bridge, to me it is an important indicator of what we can expect from the Chinese government on the world stage. After all, the popular perspective is that they wanted the 2008 Olympics to be just that—a demonstration of their significance in the world.

Before some of you get worked up, we can also acknowledge that other governments, such as the United States, have their fair share of problems. But this post is not about who is better; rather, it about the high probability that not only did the Chinese gymnastic team cheat by using underage competitors, but the Chinese government was involved in provided false documentation for them.

That said, age falsification in particular is more associated with a communistic governments than democratic. There is a list here of known age controversies in gymnastics, and you can see all the countries involved are associated with communism. Moreover, the last country involved in an age controversy was China.

So here is the case against He Kexin, from roughly the most important point to the lowest:

• A passport showing He Kexin’s birthday as 1992 is issued in February 2008 and presented to the International Olympic Committee as verification of her age
• Reports by Chinese newspapers and rosters from competitions in 2007 and 2006, respectively, report her age as 13 and her birth year as 1994.
  
• Verbal introductions by coaches also give her age as younger
• Uncovered spreadsheets of the Chengdu Sports Authority show her birth date in 1994
• There is a past history of deception, most recently by China at the 2004 Olympics.
  
• He Kexin’s very young appearance
• Investigations by various newspapers and Stryde Hax show an attempt at concealment
• The ages of at least two other gymnasts on the Chinese team are suspect
  
• Chinese internet sites that mention the controversy are quickly taken offline
  

To me, it is pretty clear that her age is really 14, which means that a fraudulent passport was presented to the IOC. I have hard time believing that the team’s coach or even the Chinese gymnastics association would have taken the risk to arrange for a fake passport on their own, so that pretty much implicates the Chinese government.

Part of the strength of a rational case is the failure of other explanations to hold water, so let’s take a look at those:

“If you can’t believe an official document, what can you believe?”

The IOC’s traditional defense has been that the Chinese gymnastics association gave them a passport and that’s the standard of proof. Lu Shanzan, the Chinese coach, says

“Surely it’s not possible that these documents are still not sufficient proof of her birthdate,” he said. “The passports were issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The identity card was issued by China’s Ministry of Public Security. If these valid documents are not enough to clarify this problem, then what will you believe?”

That is a problem, but its also a circular argument. The coach is trying to say that government documents are universally valid. Its a government document, so it has to be valid. The truth though is that government documents are sometimes falsified by the issuing government. I would advise the good coach to refer to the case of Yang Yun.

“He Kexin and her parents are indignant.” 

Of course they are. They’re indignant because they’re on the hot seat. Everyone accused of a crime acts indignant. This means nothing.

“It was a paperwork error.”

China’s deputy sports minister, Cui Dalin, would like to have you believe its a clerical error.

“Cui Dalin told a press conference that officials transferred He Kexin from a local team to the national team at an inter-city competition last year. He said the discrepancy between He Kexin’s stated age and actual age occurred during the process of registering the move.”

Its starting to sound like they are throwing in the whole kitchen sink here. The problem with this theory is He Kexin’s age was reported as younger not once but many times over the course of approximately 1.5 to 2 years. Moreover, it was reported in public ways. If it was wrong, it would have been noticed and corrected long ago, not suddenly in the 6 months before the Olympics started.

“She actually put her age as younger to compete in a previous event.”

I love this one. The TimesOnline reports a Chinese sportsman as saying

in his youth he had once changed his age to participate in competition with younger players. “It used to be very common, but it is getting less and less so,” he said.

So…you admit you lied before…so we’re supposed to believe you now?

“Americans are just upset they didn’t win.”

Complaining about the other team when you don’t win is what the Serbians did by filing a protest because their swimmer got beat out by 1/100th of a second by Michael Phelps. In that case, there were cameras everywhere and electronic scoring. There was almost no way it was wrong, and filing the protest just let them avoid realizing they had lost for a little while longer.  But when there is strong evidence of an infraction and an investigation is launched, that is doing due diligence to maintain the rules.

As you can see, the counter arguments are weak. Unfortunately, I fear the IOC is going to act like the Bush administration and delay this until it dies down and then sweep it under the table. But, in the interests of keeping the Olympics going, maybe they won’t. To do that though, they are going to have to get past trusting the “official” documents from the Chinese government. Rather, they need to get some historical documents like birth certificates and grade school reports and submit them to outside forensic analysis to test their age and authenticity.

No politician ever claims to be be soft on crime. Quite the reverse: All politicians call for the legal system to be tough on crime. One result of this, at least in the United States, has been, over the last 30 years, to create a push for stricter and more mandatory sentencing laws. While tightening up sentencing seems on the surface like an obviously good thing to do to, in reality it is not so clear. 

One hidden impact of increased sentencing has been to put more people in jail, thus straining the prison system.  The result? Pew Center Research indicates that 1 in 100 Americans are in incarcerated, the highest of any nation. The report said the United States leads the world in number of people incarcerated, far ahead of even the much more populous China.

And the more people who are in jail, the more money that is needed to support the penal system. States spent more than $49 billion on corrections, the Pew report said, which is up from $11 billion 20 years before.

In many cases, such as in Wisconsin, the cost of mandatory sentencing was never seriously considered and came as a shock. This report from 2004 nicely details the various impacts on not only space, but medical costs, parole officers, drug rehabilitation programs and job placement programs, to name a few.

The Pew Center report noted that prison growth and higher imprisonment rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or a corresponding increase in the nation’s overall population. Instead, it said, tougher sentencing measures, such as the three-strikes law, are leading to longer prison stays. “States are paying a high cost for corrections — one that may not be buying them as much in public safety as it should,” said Susan K. Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States, in a news release. 

Finally, the report gave some further startling numbers regarding the number of people per hundred who are incarcerated by gender and ethnic group (based on 2006 data):

• Men ages 18 or older: 1 in 54
• Hispanic men ages 18 or older: 1 in 36
• Black men ages 18 or older: 1 in 15
• Black men ages 20-34: 1 in 9

To me, these are shocking stats. I’ll have to explore them further in a later post, but, on the face of it, the situation is quite dire. Rising health costs threaten to create a vicious circle by forcing money in fixed budgets to be reallocated to basic needs at the expense of programs that enable convicts to lead productive lives after their sentence. It also comes at the expense of other much needed programs, such as education. In fact, the Pew report notes that prison budgets between 1987 and 2007 jumped 315%. This was a 127% increase even when adjusted to 2007 dollars. During the same period, higher education rose just 21% in adjusted dollars.

One often hears the mantra, “keep it simple.” Yet, in our complex world, issues like globalization, global warming, and terrorism have so many variables and dynamic interrelationships that they defy human understanding. Often, desiring to make a difference, some kind of difference, business leaders and politicians, among others, often insist on simple, easily comprehensible explanations and solutions. They decide based on commonsense and gut feel. Such simple explanations lead to simple solutions that in turn enable a shift to action, which relieves the mental tension of struggling with an overwhelming problem. Unfortunately, the obvious answers often have counterintuitive and debilitating hidden impacts.

Several stories of this type have been in the news recently. What these stories often have in common is that decision making in both political and business organizations is too often done by small group of leaders or experts—and sometimes by vociferous, impassioned blocks of citizens—who believe they can determine the proper course of action based on their superior judgment. However, complexity requires a different decision making process, because the human mind is inherently unable to fathom true complexity. (For one example of a different way to participatively make decisions, see social systems design.)

Over the next few posts, we’ll take a look at a few situations that on surface suggested change for the better but also came with unforeseeable impacts. I’ve inaugurated the category “Hidden Impacts” for this, and the cases will show that sometimes the “no brainer” is not as simple as it looks.

In a detailed article posted to the blog Climate Change and Sustainability, Lester Brown makes some startling claims about the state of the world. He contends,

This troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before. The challenge is not simply to deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as in the past, but rather to quickly alter those trends whose cumulative effects collectively threaten the food security that is a hallmark of civilization. If food security cannot be restored quickly, social unrest and political instability will spread and the number of failing states will likely increase dramatically, threatening the very stability of civilization itself. 

This dire warning is in part based on the number of alarming food-related incidents that have occurred since September 2007, which have led Mr. Brown to further assert that, “Food riots are now becoming commonplace.” While it is not yet convincing to me these incidents are thus “commonplace,” Mr. Brown does give a reasonably well articulated perspective on the problem in terms of both increasing demand and decreasing supply. A summary of his view is given below.

Increasing Demand

• The addition of 70 million people per year to the earth’s population
• The desire of some 4 billion people to move up the food chain and consume more grain-intensive livestock products
• The recent sharp acceleration in the U.S toward the use of grain to produce ethanol for cars.
  

Decreasing Supply

• There is little new farmable land available without clearing tropical rainforests, which has seriously negative impacts on the environment.
  
• New sources of irrigation water are even more scarce than new land.
• Agricultural productivity is increasing more slowly in recent years.
  
• Rising oil prices are increasing both production and transportation costs.
• Climate change is disrupting normal agricultural production.
  

In systems thinking terms, Mr. Brown is asserting that there is a reinforcing loop that creates an increasing food shortage due to an indefinitely burgeoning population and constrained supply. However—while it is  undeniable that we are currently in a global crisis precipitated by rising costs for food, energy, and core metals—this is an old argument that has suffered many withering criticisms. Thus, any argument for global economic collapse based on rising commodity prices and increasing population has got to address existing positions, some of which have been around since the 1700s. These positions introduce balancing loops to what seems to be a rapidly escalating reinforcing loop.

1. In a sharp rebuttal of the Malthusian assertion that increasing wealth inspires greater fertility, the evidence of history is that fertility in wealthier countries approaches near zero and can even become negative. (For example, Russia is facing population decline.) Data and estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, shown in the graph, show that the global growth rate year over year is declining. Ultimately, world population is expected to ultimately peak and perhaps even drop off a little by 2070. Thus, world population growth is eventually limited as societies reach higher stages of development.

2. As illustrated by Julian Simon’s victorious bet against Paul Erhlich, commodity prices tend to be brought back into line by the market. While there can be dislocation of prices for an extended period of time, and many people can suffer greatly during that time, there will ultimately be an adjustment of the prices downward. In fact, Simon claimed that eventually prices would be lower.

3. Moreover, while population growth is currently outstripping food supply, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations forecasts that food supply will be more the sufficient by 2030. This suggests that the gap between supply and demand is actually decreasing.

4. Finally, the recent sharp rise commodity prices may significantly related to monetary policy and global commodity speculation. The U.S. Dollar has been falling, and worries about the stock market are thought to have caused a flight of dollars into commodities, driving up the prices of oil and gold in particular. Speculative interest in these products is probably driving up the prices of other agricultural commodities. When other investment opportunities become more favorable again, there could be a dramatic flight out of those speculative positions.

So, while food insecurity is a major problem that needs serious attention, it is stretching the facts to call it the harbinger of the end of civilization or a dire threat that requires the complete transformation of society. Catastrophe theories often assume that present conditions will continue on their current trajectory unabated, when in fact the self-organizing nature of modern society means that humanity is always reacting and adjusting to present conditions. 

That said, key organizations and citizens around the world need to take steps to manage the current dislocation of commodities prices. Market mechanisms will likely respond and help bring down the prices as people begin to find alternatives, explore other options, and find ways to improve production. Governmental policy changes and interventions may also be needed. But, in the macro sense, the problem is not likely to engulf the world, although it might threaten weaker governments. As the Foreign Policy blog Passport suggests, wealthier countries can probably weather the turmoil. It is weaker governments, such as those in the Middle East, that are the most at risk. The concern, then, is that those governments will falter, and there could be a subsequent ripple effect to the rest of the world, potentially creating a collapse of the global economy.