When I wrote about the [bad domestic effects] that a globalized economy can have on our lives, I wasn’t thinking directly of threats to health — but that’s exactly what the recent recalls of Chinese products sold in this country force us to face. Tainted toothpaste is one thing, but it’s almost unimaginable that after all these years, we are actually again dealing with the threat of lead exposure in children’s products — thanks to the greedy bastards at Mattel. Today Mattel CEO Robert Eckert [apologized] for the danger his company introduced into American households by blaming it on a bad subcontract. Whew! Don’t worry Mom, it was just a bad subcontractor — you know how that can be.

It’s amazing to watch the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — when companies operated with practically no oversight or regulation — playing out all over again thanks to “globalization”. Businesses flock to nations without labor unions or meaningful regulations to manufacture their products at a fraction of the cost it would be in an industrialized nation with responsible policies in place and then pocket the (huge) savings. While, no doubt, crossing their fingers and muttering a prayer skyward in hopes that they don’t end up harming customers back home. Mattel’s prayers weren’t answered today — but maybe ours were. Maybe this incredible fiasco will finally force craven politicians to start demanding meaningful safeguards on outsourced manufacturing or even — shock — institute significant levies and penalties on companies that play fast and loose with our safety. Who knows — the risk of such costs might actually convince American businesses to keep their manufacturing in America.

UPDATE 8/15: Bad news about Chinese manufacturing is [good news] for the few remaining made-in-America toy companies.

UPDATE 8/19: A new post that details the moral cost to us all of current toy industry standards, [Made in China: What Price Profit?]

Michael Moore’s latest opus, Sicko, opened here in New York City yesterday and, as one would expect, was very warmly received. The venue — a theater nestled cozily between Lincoln Center and the Ethical Culture School — was a bit surprising, though. The Upper West Side of Manhattan is the mothership for liberals in this country — a safer space for the ultra-liberal Moore could hardly be imagined. In fact, the middle-aged woman I sat next to (who was practically hopping in her seat with anticipation) declared, “He should be here, after all, we’re his people!” One might have expected Moore, ever the provocateur, to have chosen a more controversial spot to debut his take down of the US health care system like, say, Oakland California — home of the Kaiser Permanente health maintenance organization (which comes in for special attention in the film) — but maybe he had something else in mind. More on that in a moment.

Sicko is not a documentary so much as it is a political polemic, though like a documentary it makes its case through presentation of personal histories of people who have suffered extraordinary hardship at the hands of the for-profit health care system we “enjoy” in this country. Likewise, Moore uses interviews with people living and working in Canada, Britain, France and (most dramatically, Cuba), to promote the virtues of socialized medicine. And make no mistake about it, Moore wants socialized medicine. He states it flatly in the [Prescription for Change] that is posted on his website:

1. Every American must have full, uninterrupted health care coverage for life.
2. Private, for-profit health insurance companies must be abolished.
3. Profits of pharmaceutical companies must be strictly regulated like a public utility.

For Moore, there is a fundamental moral flaw in a health care system designed to maximize profits of the providers of treatment (especially the drug companies) and of the insurance companies that are supposed to fairly dispense payments for that treatment. Whatever its virtues on paper, in fact such a system ends up hoarding profits at the expense of sick people who must pay exorbitant sums out-of-pocket to try and get the care they need. Or die trying.

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A year ago [I was wondering] what effect Condi Rice would have on the Cheney-Rumsfeld alliance. A year later, we know. Frontline on PBS has produced an hour-long documentary entitled [Endgame] that details the unbelievably incompetent war strategies of the past 4 years and discloses Rice to be the principal sponsor of the “surge” — a strategy that finally vanquished Rumsfeld. As Colin Powell famously warned Rumsfeld during the manic run up to the war, “you break it, you own it.” Well now it appears that Rice has inherited ownership.

From the start, there was no strategy from the Pentagon for dealing with the possibility of an insurgency and the only real strategy (if it can be called that) was to exit Iraq as soon as possible. Repeatedly caught unaware, the Pentagon and White House lurched hither and yon, all the while ignoring what appeared to be an apparently successful strategy happening right under their noses. In May of 2004, acting on his own, outside the game plan from Washington, Col. H.R. McMaster had secured the city of Tal Afar through what he called “Clear-Hold-Build” — a strategy of using sufficient troops and force to clear insurgents from the city and then maintain troop levels to maintain security while rebuilding could take place. But more than a year would pass before this news would make its way back to the White House. Leading her own military reconnaissance — in a bold challenge to Rumsfeld’s power — Rice had Philip Zelikow scout Iraq in the fall of 2005. He reported back to her on McMaster’s apparent success and, in October of that year, she made an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where she promoted a new strategy of “Clear-Hold-Build” in a stunning repudiation of Rumsfeld’s leadership. It was the beginning of the surge and the beginning of the end of the Cheney-Rumsfeld lock on power.

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Esther Dyson (foreground) leads a panel on Navigating the New Media System

The 4th annual Personal Democracy Forum was held recently here in New York. The [list of speakers], including Thomas Friedman, Eric Schmidt, Esther Dyson, Seth Godin and Robert Scoble, was the proverbial Who’s Who of the digerati. They gathered before packed audiences to comment on the role of technology in “flattening” archaic political structures and transferring power to the grassroots — Democracy 2.0, you could say. I attended a few of the sessions and came away with these impressions…

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Lawrence Wright is a fascinating guy. A staff writer at the New Yorker and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written books on topics ranging from false memory syndrome to religious biography to the idiosyncrasies of twins. He co-wrote the 1998 Denzel Washington movie The Siege — about what would happen if Islamic terrorists succeeded in bringing a catastrophe to our shores — and which led, in a tragic way, to his writing [The Looming Tower], for which he was today [awarded the Pulitzer Prize].

Shortly after The Siege was released it was denounced by radical Islamic groups for slandering them and fomenting hatred. In an example of irony utterly lost on them, one of the ways they showed their displeasure at the perceived slander was to blow up a theater in South Africa that was showing the film. People died and a young girl was crippled for life. Wright carried his own wounds out of the experience and, following the fully realized catastrophe of 9/11, determined that he would know who these people were, to find as many as he could who were as close to Bin Laden as possible and learn their motivations. The Looming Tower was the result — an attempt to dimensionalize the images in the Wanted posters and provide us at home with a better understanding of who we’re facing.

Last week a group of Columbia alums and I attended Wright’s spoken-word performance of what he learned called “My Trip to Al-Qaeda”. Subtly staged by director Gregory Mosher, Wright stood in a spare office setting and discussed the people he had met and what they had told him as images of them and their handiwork was displayed on a screen behind him. What Wright took away from the experience was an understanding of the pervasive despair and sense of humiliation that people in the Arab world experience following decades of social lassitude instilled by autocratic regimes and repressive religious doctrine. The result is a nihilistic, anarchic death cult — of which Al-Qaeda is the most prominent exponent — that seeks to destroy the status quo and all who benefit by it without having a clear idea of what comes after the destruction. It was a dire story he told.

In a question and answer period following the performance, someone in our group asked Wright if the narrative of hatred and nihilism that motivates so many radical Islamists could be countered by another that offered hope. Wright was not optimistic, narratives arise organically — they can’t be imposed. As we’re learning in Iraq.

Enough with the cutesy posts about saints who visit my AdSense list. Nasty reality intruded this week with the latest dust-up over Ann Coulter. As you surely know by now, she addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and referred to John Edwards as a faggot. At least that’s how it’s being parlayed in the media — as a homophobic taunt. That’s not exactly what happened. She was making a flat-footed reference to the public lambasting of Isaiah Washington for using the word “faggot” to describe one of his co-stars on Grey’s Anatomy, indirectly commenting on political correctness and also trying to say something snarky about Edward’s wishy-washy policies. If anything it showed her utter tone-deaf approach to comedy and, perhaps sensing this, she was careful in Q&A to say that neither she nor Republicans were anti-gay. On the contrary, gays should support Republicans because they are for tax cuts and law enforcement and, “gays make a lot of money and are victims of crimes.” Like I said, tone-deaf.

You should see the [entire performance] before you read anything else anyone says about it.

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I was going to write something trenchant about Hillary finally announcing her candidacy, but, as ever, the Weekly World News has it covered. Running alongside a yeti is just the kind of bold move that will keep the Republicans on their toes!

If you’re not familiar with this paragon of journalistic science you should check out their site where you will find breaking news that the la-de-da “mainstream press” just doesn’t have the guts to print.

My favorite story: Parent Vanishes During Peekaboo Game

The New York Times has finally gone to the rats. Far be it for me, a guy who pretends to be an escapee from a lab maze, to complain, except an article they published ["Nice Rat, Nasty Rat", link broken] — another in a seemingly endless series about genes and behavior — is a little more absurd than most. Somehow they go from a finding about genetic factors in animal domestication to suggested causes of “human domestication”. I think that used to be called… society. Presto! Ten thousand years of history, philosophy, politics and literature are reduced to the suggested impact of “a single gene that affects the timing of neural crest cell development”. Spare us.

In a [recent post] I wailed about those who try to reduce complex human characteristics and behaviors to simple genetic factors. Since I wrote, the New York State Court of Appeals [denied rights] to homosexual couples — their decision turning largely on a notion of essential qualities lacking in gay people (namely, ability to procreate and parent), and last week a [particularly bizarre] resurrection of the debate over whether people are born gay lit up the blogs. From hypothesized “God genes”, that give rise to religious experience, to genes that make us engineers or gamblers, the search is on for the keys to our nature. But it is the obsessive debate over genetic determinants of sexual identity, specifically homosexual attitudes and behavior, that is perhaps the most persistent example of the desire to reduce people to a fundamental biological essence. Not since the Nazi obsession with eugenics and its relation to the “Jewish problem” have we seen such obsessive attention to what determines the characteristics of a class of people. The difference is that, this time, it’s the Left that embraces the idea of essential difference — with the attendant risks — and it’s the Right that argues for a more inclusive anti-essentialism.

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