Passing notes

I previously blogged about a quote from Louis Masotti that I referenced many times when I was a college debater. My junior year affirmative case concerned police use of deadly force and my colleague and I noted that police shootings often spark riots. Masotti speculated about the dangers of mass riots in a 1969 book. We made use of his hyperbole. 

I mention this because my spouse's fall 2023 Northwestern alumni magazine notes that Masotti, a retired faculty member, had died. His Chicago Tribune obituary is behind a paywall, but I found this brief bio. 

Incidentally, that same alumni magazine noted that Jerry Springer had died. You probably know who he was because of his longrunning TV program. Springer had a law degree from NU. 

Disclosure: I taught political science classes as a term faculty member at NU from 1989-1991. My American League fantasy baseball league had its origins in the debate squad room there and I'm still friends (and league competitors) with many people who met in that context. 

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ISA 2016

Looking back at the archives, I forgot to blog about the ISA conference in Atlanta during mid-March. While at the conference I  caught up with some old friends, watched the first round NCAA Kansas basketball victory, drank some good local beers, and served as a discussant and/or chair of three different panels.

I also delivered a paper, "Popular Culture and Public Deliberation about Torture" that needs a good deal of work even though it is too long. That link takes you to the working draft at academia.edu.


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More Gendered IR

Somehow, I missed this comment from General Stanley McChrystal, from an interview in Foreign Affairs in the March/April 2013 issue:

If you look at the role I had in Iraq, it is sexy, it is satisfying, it is manly, it scratches an itch in the American culture that people like.

The interviewer, Gideon Rose, had just asked the General to respond to people who say "I like the Iraq Stan McChrystal of raids and drones and targeted strikes, but I don't like the Afghanistan Stan McChrystal of clear, hold, and build and counterinsurgency. I want to deploy the first but avoid the costs and difficulties of the second."

The headline for the interview is "Generation Kill," which was also the title of an HBO miniseries in 2008. That show was about the 2003 American experience in Iraq.

I didn't watch the show, but this video seems to get at the gendered message:




This is a follow-up to last week's post.

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Breaking Bad Deadpool

Earlier this week, I participated in an on-line draft for political scientist Steve Saideman's "Breaking Bad" Deadpool game. Let's begin with a description of the game:

I have twelve players and twenty four characters (at least as far as I can count) who may or may not live to see the end of the Breaking Bad finale.  This means that in the draft (to be explained below), everyone will pick two characters that they think will survive.  Three points for those characters that are alive when the show is over--if the show makes a leap forward in time and has only one character alive, so be it.  One point if they are in a coma or near-death like situation that is unresolved.  Oh, and to make it interesting: -1 point for the first character to die in the final eight episodes.
Oh, and for a three part tiebreaker: you will have to email me at the end of the draft the name of who you think will be the last person killed, how they will be killed and by whom.  

So, this is the list of characters Steve provided for the 12 participants in his  "Breaking Bad" deadpool:

Walt/Heisenberg
Skyler
Walt Jr./Flynn (dying under either name counts for both)
Holly (the baby--yes, we have no humanity--Walt lost his, and we lost ours when we rooted for Walt)
Jesse
Hank
Marie
Saul
Steven Gomez (the DEA sidekick)
Ted Beneke
Skinny Pete
Badger
Todd (formerly of Friday Night Lights)
Andrea, Jesse's former girlfriend
Brock (Andrea's kid)
Lydia
Bogdan (the guy who used to run the car wash)
Kaylee (Mike's grand-daughter)
Group Leader played by Jere Burns--from Jesse's addiction treatment group
Gretchen Schwartz (one of Walt's former business partners)
Lawson (Jim Beaver, the arms dealer)\
Old Joe (the guy with the wrecking yard)
Huell, Saul's bodyguard
Declan, the new drug dealer

I encountered two big problems when I tried to partake. First, Steve did not receive my draft list email until the morning after the draft. I was going out on draft night, so knew I couldn't make live picks. Fortunately, I checked into the results board mid-draft and discovered the problem, so my draft card wasn't a total disaster. More on that later.

Second, I missed this proof-of-life warning: "Folks who never show up in the final eight get bumpkus/zip/zero/nil."

I never really took that warning into account. Indeed, my solution to the first problem was simply to post my complete rank ordering of possible picks on the comments board mid-draft:

Kaylee 

Brock 

Bogdan 

Group Leader played by Jere Burns

Gretchen Schwartz 

Lawson (the arms dealer)

Saul

Holly

Marie

Old Joe 

Andrea

Walt Jr./Flynn 

Ted Beneke

Huell

Skinny Pete

Badger (aka Brandon Mayhew)

Hank 

Jesse

Steven Gomez 

Declan

Walt/Heisenberg

Skyler

Lydia

Todd

And now, for the results of the draft:

Players	1st pick	2nd pick
Noah	Jesse
Brandon	Saul	Bogdan
Rob	Kaylee	Steve Gomez
Rodger	Gretchen	Lawson
Chip	Holly	Walt
Kristy	Todd	Ted
Caitlin	Skyler	Group leader
Will	Badger	Declan
Kelsey	Huell	Brock
Wendy	Hank	Skinny Pete
Sara	Marie	Walt Jr.
Matt	Old Joe	Lydia

Blue means likely to live and be relevant, red means likely to be dead (using Nate Silver's prediction machine). 

I've got some serious proof-of-life problems with my picks. Steve doesn't mention that Gretchen Schwartz is Walt's ex-girlfriend. Or that she hasn't appeared on the show since April 2009.

Lawson the gun-dealer has been on the show a couple of times in the last two seasons, but actor Jim Beaver strongly implies in a recent interview that he was not invited for additional filming for the last half of season 5.

But there's hope.

First, Gretchen. In a NY Times story from mid-May 2013, actress Jessica Hecht apparently revealed a potential spoiler:

Jessica Hecht was filming in Albuquerque last year, reprising her role as the lost love of Walter White’s youth on the concluding season of “Breaking Bad,” when she got a call from Lynne Meadow, the artistic director of Manhattan Theater Club, asking how soon she could be back in New York for a reading of a new play

Look around on the internet, and you'll find speculation that Walt's cancer is back, which might cause him to connect with his former lover and colleague. Also, some people have suggested that the Walt Whitman poetry book Hank finds in the last episide may have been a gift from Gretchen. The inside note is signed GB. Walter's last name is White and some say her maiden name was Black [White plus Black = company name Gray Matter]. Of course, Schwartz is German for black, so this idea about her initials may just by hooey. Worse series creative force Vince Gilligan says dead meth scientist Gale Boetticher gave Walt the book.

Dunno about all that fun stuff, but I think we'll see Gretchen again.

Second, Lawson the gun dealer appears prominently in the opening sequence of season 5, selling Walt an M60 machine gun and ammunition. This remarkable opening scene was a flash-forward to a time period that we have not yet viewed. Walt has a full head of hair and a beard, along with a false New Hampshire ID and a different vehicle from those we've previously known. This must occur some months into the future after Hank finds the poetry book.

Like Checkhov's gun, the M60 is almost certainly going to figure prominently in the resolution of the series. I'm hoping Lawson himself will re-appear in an extended re-play of that transaction. Potentially, no new filming would have been required for this to happen.

Still, my challenge is significant. These long-lost or minor characters have to appear in the upcoming episodes -- and then they have to survive. This is my tiebreaker scenario:

Last person killed: Walt
Killed: gun battle
By whom: law enforcement

I'm looking forward to the final half-season, which begins August 11.


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TV Zombies?

Should parents allow their young children to watch television or play around on the internet?

Hanna Rosin described fears of the so-called "zombie effect" in her recent Atlantic article about the "touch screen generation":

Most parents can sympathize with the disturbing sight of a toddler, who five minutes earlier had been jumping off the couch, now subdued and staring at a screen, seemingly hypnotized. In the somewhat alarmist Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think—and What We Can Do About It, author Jane Healy even gives the phenomenon a name, the “ ‘zombie’ effect,” and raises the possibility that television might “suppress mental activity by putting viewers in a trance.”

Should parents be worried? Rosin offers this reassuring info:

These findings have been largely discarded by the scientific community, but the myth persists that watching television is the mental equivalent of, as one Web site put it, “staring at a blank wall.” These common metaphors are misleading, argues Heather Kirkorian, who studies media and attention at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A more accurate point of comparison for a TV viewer’s physiological state would be that of someone deep in a book, says Kirkorian, because during both activities we are still, undistracted, and mentally active... 

By now, “there is universal agreement that by at least age 2 and a half, children are very cognitively active when they are watching TV,” says Dan Anderson, a children’s-media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Hoorah! We didn't ruin our children. TV is like reading a book!


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Outsourcing

Middlebury Political Scientist Allison Stanger was on "The Daily Show" earlier this week discussing her book about outsourcing in American foreign policy.

I just wanted to post a couple of items that suggest the issue is even bigger than she discussed on the show.

First, Stanger didn't emphasize the fact that even intelligence agencies are outsourcing their work for higher pay. Tim Shorrock in the September/October 2009 Mother Jones:

more than 70 percent of the US intelligence budget—estimated this year at more than $60 billion—is now spent on contractors. Nearly 40,000 private contractors work for intelligence agencies including the CIA and the NSA, according to Ronald Sanders, a human resources official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; these contractors pull in salaries that average about $207,000 a year—almost double the pay of their cubicle mates employed by the government.

At the NSA, my sources estimate that at least half the jobs are contracted out. (The agency won't disclose the official breakdown.) At the National Reconnaissance Office, the top-secret agency that manages military spy satellites, a full 95 percent of personnel actually work for contractors.

Like Stanger, Shorrock wrote a book about this problem.

Second, though it is not "privatization," it is noteworthy that the US and other affluent states essentially outsource international peacekeeping to poorer countries. James Gibney, in the July/August 2009 The Atlantic:

the top 10 payers of peacekeeping dues (rich countries like the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.) rely on the top 10 troop contributors (poor countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Jordan, Nepal, Ghana, etc.) to do their dirty work...

Gibney calls it a mercenary system, which is what Stanger implies when she discusses privatization.


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Breaking Bad

Since the holilday break in December, I've been watching the first three seasons of "Breaking Bad." Thanks to his naïveté, Walter White, the blue methamphetamine-producing chemistry teacher from Albuquerque played by actor Bryan Cranston, regularly runs afoul of various drug cartels -- including some from across the border.

Thanks to the show's multiple story-lines, the audience knows that White is taking even more life-threatening risks than he knows about. Moreover, his brother-in-law DEA agent also has good reason to exhibit fear.

These drug cartels will stop at nothing to have their way.

In the stack of materials I've meant to blog, I found a December 2009 Atlantic article by Philip Caputo that provides real-life background for the power of the Mexican drug cartels:

Dr. Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute in Mexico City and a senior legal and economic adviser to the UN and the World Bank, concluded in a recent report that 17 of Mexico’s 31 states have become virtual narco-republics, where organized crime has infiltrated government, the courts, and the police so extensively that there is almost no way they can be cleaned up. The drug gangs have acquired a “military capacity” that enables them to confront the army on an almost equal footing.

“This in itself does not prove that we are in a situation of a failed state today,” Buscaglia wrote. He seemed to be suggesting that the situation could change tomorrow—and not for the better.

While narco-republics on the southern U.S. border pose a very big problem, Caputo cites experts who believe that Mexico could become a failed state and thus pose an Af-Pak-like security problem::

In the past year, experts like General Barry McCaffrey (the drug czar in the Clinton administration) and political figures have warned that if the cartels are not contained, Mexico could become a failed state and the U.S. could find itself with an Afghanistan or a Pakistan on its southern border. Such forecasts are hyperbole, but the fact is that drug trafficking and its attendant corruption are a malignancy that has spread into Mexico’s lymph system.

** I'm only partway through season 3 -- AMC will run episodes 5 and 6 later this week, which my DVR will record -- as the network prepares to debut season 4 in July.


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The "Lost" year

In the last 10 months, I watched the entire series run of "Lost," primarily on DVDs checked out from my university library. I caught a few episodes on Hulu.

Why?

At the beginning of the year, Entertainment Weekly named "Lost" the second best show of the past decade. Since they named "The Sopranos" number one and "The Daily Show" third, I wondered if EW knew something about television that I didn't. Both of those shows were terrific this past decade.

When I watched the first few episodes, the IR theorist in me was intrigued by the idea of people living "in a state of nature" (literally) and under apparent threat from unknown outsiders ("others" or "hostiles") -- not to mention polar bears. One of the central characters was named John Locke. Soon, other characters named Hume and Rousseau were introduced. Then more characters named after philosophers were placed into the show. Hmmmm.

Anyway, I've viewed the entire series now and cannot say that I would have been better off watching contemporary films. The storyline was usually interesting and most of the acting was good. Watching "Lost' wasn't that time-consuming. I ended up seeing 10 to 12 episodes per month -- often watching 2 or 3 in an evening. Since they ran 42 minutes each (no commercials on DVD), viewing 3 in a row was like watching a single 2 hour movie.

Thumbs up.


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