Flit(tm)

Letter to the Paper LXI

The international gun control movement keeps working on gun grabbing with an eye to eventually killing off the 2nd amendment. It's a King Canute enterprise because the technology for distributed manufacturing is coming and guns are inevitably going to be on the list of things to build right along every other tool. Once every man can be a gunsmith simply by hitting print on a computer, the foolishness of control efforts via law instead of via personal responsibility will have been fully exposed.

A culture of responsible use will never grow in a regime where weapons are unavailable. Upcoming technology (home replication machines) will make it technically feasible to make primitive and eventually quite sophisticated firearms with plans inevitably available for free over the Internet. This is going to make any sort of international treaty regime impossible to enforce as home replication machines are also obvious technology for poverty reduction in the 3rd world.

The first self-replication of a home replication machine in May 2008 was a warning shot that has so far not been heard widely. The rep-rap project is a worthy one but they aren't kidding when they say that it's a disruptive technology.

The only solutions left are to embrace poverty and deny access to replication as well as guns or to create a culture of responsibility that can handle this upcoming disruptive technology. Cultures of responsibility take a long time to take root without an opening blood bath. We might have enough time at this point if we start soon but it is pretty obvious that the same international gun controllers who want to end-run the US' 2nd amendment protections are not going to accept this idea with open arms.

The Mandarinate Strikes Out

The left is having minor orgasms over L.F. Eason III who retired rather than fly the flags at "his lab" at half staff in honor of recently deceased Senator Jesse Helms and in obedience to gubernatorial proclamation. Why did he do it? He repeatedly states in interviews that he felt "a strong sense of ownership" over the lab.

A government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people is not a government where the employees act as if they own the place. When you get this attitude, you end up with mandarins who slowly hollow out representative government by introducing and then nurturing the idea that the bureaucrats can do as they please, training their putative political masters to no longer insist on obedience and accept that they to have become supplicants to the bureaucrats.

We're nowhere near even halfway along in the process. Every once in awhile some gasbag like this Eason character steps out into the light and gets swatted down. But what's truly disturbing is that this is a problem that affects politicians of all stripes and nobody makes an issue of it. The DoD rebels against Clinton and the right quietly averts its gaze. State rebels against GWB and the left practically cheers them on.

It's gone on long enough that routine disobedience to political direction has become entrenched. People don't bat an eye when they talk about this or that political appointee being "captured" by their department and becoming the bureaucracies emissary to the President instead of the President's man directing the bureaucracy. It's a gathering storm, more serious than Iraq, though the slowness of the political disease's progression gives us a lot more time to ponder the problem.

In the meantime, two cheers for the governor of North Carolina who didn't put up with this. It could only have been better if they had not straight off offered early retirement.

Is the PRC, our future food savior? II

It isn't just the EU's frankenfoods phobia that makes African lives miserable by manipulating their agricultural practices. The EU's collective shudder that somebody somewhere, might be saving lives by spraying DDT does the same thing. Uganda's the latest to feel the EU's displeasure as their organic crops are blackballed for indoor malarial spraying away from the fields.

If the PRC is smart, they're already negotiating to secure Ugandan markets for agricultural exports to the PRC. The PRC will want high yields and be less interested in indoor spraying of DDT and other practices that don't actually affect the crop. As Europe continues to fuss, they will find africans less willing to listen and more willing to turn to alternate markets, reducing the damage european phobias do to the global agricultural market.

HT: Instapundit

Is the PRC, our future food savior?

One of the things that infuriates me about the EU's "frankenfoods" phobia is how their resistance to genetic engineering impoverishes the African farmer. Africa ends up with low yielding seeds and Europe doesn't hold itself morally accountable for the resulting poverty. But the chinese don't care about GM and if the PRC takes an interest in African agriculture on a scale with its present interest in mining and timber, African leaders will no longer need to kowtow to irrational EU fears and will be able to increase yields using GM seeds. That will significantly increase both global food supply and energy supply through biofuel acreage.

HT: Thomas Barnett

Letter to the Paper LX

I'm going to our eparchial assembly in a bit but I decided to take a quick dip into the Catholic blogosphere first. Mark Sheas disappoints as usual when he's talking about the Bush administration because he has no understanding of the underlying dynamics or issues and is relatively uninterested in developing same. Just for old times sake I dropped a mini primer on our actual foreign policy developed by this administration.

Our actual foreign policy for some time under this administration has been to promote 'regional sheriffs' to do much of the heavy lifting and to defuse the possibility of the world ganging up on the US in order to balance our power (this balancing phenomenon happens every time a dominant world power emerges) and drag us down. For Asia we have three major sheriff candidates, India, Japan and the PRC.

N. Korea's submission to the PRC is a recognition of their status as local sheriff and so the US pulls back on threats encouraging the sheriff dynamic. But who is the sheriff in the Middle East? There are no candidates right now. The closest we have is Iraq itself, a sheriff that is years away from being ready. But their armed forces emergence into competent, even-handed action against militias gives a bit of hope that a decade from now they will be able to emerge as sheriff. That has something of a protective effect on Iran.

In short, while some were chanting about no blood for oil and even about bronze aged barbarians, we developed our first real foreign policy that fit the post-cold war age under this administration. It's even marginally more moral than our previous cold war realpolitik because the playing field is still tilted for the local sheriffs to be free states and to encourage liberty in their regions. In 20 years the historians may even notice.

It's going to get burnt anyway

It's pretty safe to say that Dr. James Hansen is not my favorite scientist. But I do find myself in curious agreement with one part of his recent testimony and DC talking tour, that we're not going to stop oil from getting burnt anytime soon. "Practically, I don't see how we can stop putting the oil in the atmosphere, because that's owned by Russia and Saudi Arabia" he said and there's a great deal of truth to that. The second part of his idea is that we could stop coal use, "what we could do is stop the coal" in his words. That's nonsense on stilts. The same problem, that the fossil fuel is under the control of countries not much interested in sacrificing energy use for the prevention of global warming is just as much a problem for coal as for oil. Wikipedia's got the stats. They don't paint a picture of a world where we could "stop the coal".

The US controls 256 billion tons of coal in proven reserves. The next three reserve leaders, Russia, the PRC, and India control 157, 114, and 92 billion tons respectively for a total of 383 billion tons and none of these three are any more likely to stop mining coal than Saudi Arabia is likely to stop pumping oil.

The PRC is currently pulling coal out of the ground at better than twice the US rate (2300 v 1000 million tons per year) and will not exhaust its reserves for half a century. Russia is mining more sustainably. It's reserves will last centuries at its 300 million ton rate. India's extraction rate of 450 million tons will exhaust their reserves in two centuries. So even if we stop mining entirely, coal will not be stopped. It will not even be significantly ameliorated as mining elsewhere will likely pick up as coal prices rise. We'll just have swapped our well regulated coal plants for 3rd world coal plants that, on balance will be dirtier.

Now Hansen is obviously not stupid and the necessary numbers to demolish his claim are publicly available and easy to get at. So why did he spout such nonsense? It's difficult to say why. Maybe he just didn't think things through. Maybe he wanted to inject a note of sanity into environmentalism by getting them to swallow the idea that oil control is impossible and he's just letting others take the reputational hit for extending the logic out to other energy sources. Maybe he really does think that we can control coal mining in a way that we can't control oil drilling. Essentially the choices are thinking that Hansen is outrageously sloppy, breathtakingly cynical, or economically ignorant.

Not a pretty picture.

Imagine You're an Iranian Revolutionary Guard

Imagine you're in the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. It's a pretty lonely thing to be. If your family looks like Iran, only 3/10ths of your relatives is happy with your career choice. And you've got all sorts of people calling you a criminal. Mostly that happens while you're putting a beat down on some uppity ethnic minority or long-haired hippie westernized college kids. But recently, you got called a criminal for doing your job for your country. You do a bit of non-uniformed work in Iraq, striking direct blows at the Great Satan, prepping the way for a full blown insurrection so that those bastard Iraqis can't get off the mat and ever come back and invade again and it all goes to hell. The operation is a failure and your own ambassador to Iraq is calling you and yours a bunch of criminals that needed to be put down like a rabid dog in the street.

What does that IRGC soldier think? And the next time that they need an insurrection put down, will he still enthusiastically answer the call?

Best Recent Quote

From Jerry Pournelle talking about Vista, "Poor Microsoft. They can't even do operating systems any more..."

HT: Instapundit

Earthquake Blogging

I slept through last night's midwest quake but my wife woke up. I'll get it this morning as I am in charge of writing up our nonexistent office disaster recovery plan that's supposed to complement our pretty good data center disaster recovery plan.

Oh fun.

It's not the first time I've slept through a 5 magnitude quake. I did it once on the east coast when I lived in Westchester county, NY.

The Bar Got Raised

Reading through an analysis of the recent push in Sadr City I found myself unexpectedly not excited. Of course the Iraqi government is going to push through and not give up, of course they're going to have the staying power to bring Sadr City to normality. And then I realized how utterly bizarre my calm acceptance of these statements would have been even a few short months ago. I'd have cheered them on, of course, but I'd have been nervous as hell that they could pull it off. Now, I'm not nervous and the difference is Basra. Basra happened, it was their final exam and now the Iraqi military is no longer a creature wholly dependent on the US and the rest of the coalition but its own animal with its own ideas and interests and an independent capability to carry its government's policy into reality. It's come out of the crib and is toddling around happily bashing the other toddlers when necessary.

This is progress. This is good. This is going to be recognized by the mainstream media (on their own schedule) sometime between November and January or, if McCain's smart, he'll force them to recognize it in the summer so by the fall, Iraq will be a net benefit for Republicans, not a drag.

Iraq came through in time, and now the bar is raised.

Lag Times

It took me about 5 seconds to figure out that Basra was a sort of "final exam" for the Iraqi army. Were they ready to fight? It took me about 2 days to come up with my answer, "yes they are, but they still need lots of work". I found the points obvious enough that I didn't bother writing about them. The NY Times caught up today and agrees with me. After their previous spin of a disaster for Maliki of Tet like proportions became unsustainably discordant with on the ground reality, the NY Times is backing and filling.

The NY Times still isn't quite right. It's simply not correct to say that "The struggle for control of Sadr City is more than a test of wills with renegade Shiite militias. It has also become a testing ground for the Iraqi military, which has been thrust into the lead." Rather Prime Minister Maliki, for the good of his own country, has called this national pop quiz on his military's indigenous capability. That was obvious from the beginning of the Basra push and has shown up in previous NY Times reporting, but why include this misstatement so late?

For me, this is equally obvious but I might as well say it, the NY Times is trying to avoid crossing over into becoming a national joke for the independents who still sometimes listen to what they say. This is the battle for Peoria. It's a battle that they are losing and their stock price and circulation figures show it.

HT: Glenn Reynolds

Reducing Deployment Terms

I heard on the radio yesterday that President Bush is reducing deployment terms back down to 12 months. That's a good step to reduce the strain on our military, one that I've been hoping to hear about for awhile. The 15 month terms were scraping the barrel.

We may get out of this without breaking the army after all.

Hitting the Wall

I support the war, have from the beginning. Unfortunately, we've gone past the line as to what we're trying to do with the resources we have. So far as I understand matters, we just don't have enough of a handle on PTSD cases to let them get back into combat. We seem to be sending them to Iraq and Afghanistan anyway. That's too much to demand. If we need a greater force structure to carry the day, we need to raise the force levels and not scrape this deep into our national reserves.

It's too much.

Bear Stearns By the Numbers

E J Dionne's fatuous analysis of Bear Stearns led me to take a look at their stock chart. Bear Stearns has 118.1M shares outstanding. A month ago they were valued at 80 dollars a share. Over the weekend the Fed forced a sale at 2 dollars a share to JP Morgan/Chase. That's a haircut of 97%. Essentially Bear Stearns stockholders are being told that their thrashing around bleeding cash is worth a "go away" payment of 3%. For E J Dionne, that's Wall Street turning into "a bunch of welfare clients".

The real story is that Bear Stearns executives do seem to have tried to mau mau the Fed but the Fed instead forced a sale whose terms are so harsh that Bear Stearns shareholders may not approve, a threat realistic enough that bondholders (who make out better in the Fed forced deal) seem to be buying up stock and bidding BSC's share price to 5 dollars Monday and almost 6 dollars Tuesday.

It's going to be an interesting episode in managed capitalism but educational only if you pay attention to the details, especially the numbers.

Half a vote? Why not 3/5ths?

After reading about the Democrat's delegate dilemma, this proposal by Senator Ben Nelson (D) seemed to strike almost the right chord:

Meanwhile, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Clinton supporter, raised the possibility of seating his state’s delegates based on the January vote — which Mrs. Clinton won 50 percent to 33 percent — but awarding each Florida delegate only half a vote at the August convention. That would mean that Mrs. Clinton would narrow the delegate gap with Mr. Obama by a net of 19 delegates, rather than the 38 she would have gained under the January result. She trails Mr. Obama by more than 100 delegates, according to most counts.

But why 1/2 a vote? Why not give the Floridian's a little more, let's say 10% more. Giving them 3/5ths a vote would have the added benefit that the DNC could sell access to a unique pay-per-view event, the press conference where reporters ask Barack Obama whether he's ok with counting delegates on a 3/5ths basis. Proceeds could go to a worthwhile charity, say the United Negro College Fund? It would be a train wreck of epic proportions, one that any political junkie worth his salt couldn't look away from.

People are people and the Dems already count too many delegates as less worthy of full voting rights. Either you're in the club and have the vote or you're out. This fractional voting idea is nonsense and historically insensitive nonsense at that.

Democrat Delegate Math

RealClearPolitics provides the raw numbers on the delegates. After subtracting Florida and Michigan, there are 2642 Pledged Delegates in the pool. There are 795 Super Delegates as well for a total of 3437 seated delegates. You need 2025 to carry the nomination apparently (both RealClearPolitics and ABC News agree). This sets up a very strange situation where you need 58.9% of the seated delegates to get the nomination. At present time, with only 52 of Texas' 193 delegates assigned, there are only 752 delegates left to win and Obama has only 1280 Pledged delegates. If he gets all of them, he'll have 2032 delegates, 8 more than he needs to win the nomination. With Texas being called for Clinton, it's highly unlikely tonight that he'll get the nomination absent superdelegate votes and by morning it will be mathematically impossible as there will be only 611 Pledged Delegates left and Obama's not going to have 1414 Pledged Delegates come morning. He only has 1280 right now.

Absent the DNC lowering the 2025 figure or seating Michigan/Florida which puts 366 mostly Clinton delegates on the convention floor, the Democrat Party presidential nomination will be decided by the Super Delegates. The political junkies wet dreams will come to life this summer. The smoke filled rooms are back.

Obama, Rezko, and Connecting the Dots

So now the press is asking "tough questions" about Sen. Obama's relationship with Antoin Rezko. Color me unimpressed over Obama's denials about doing Rezko favors. Rezko isn't an isolated player but rather part of a corrupt machine. "Public Official A", Rezko's major political patron, has now been officially revealed to be Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Smart corrupt officials don't always do simple cash for favor deals, not in a place like Chicago which is crawling with corruption, not if they want to go national and want to be able to pretend to be honest. Smart corrupt officials use middle men. What if Obama wasn't paying Rezko directly but rather paying Blagojevich to pay Rezko? Blagojevich gives Rezko contracts, Rezko raises money and does little favors for Obama like his house deal and Obama votes the way Blagojevich wants and provides other, so far undiscovered, help to Blagojevich and crew.

Or perhaps it's the other way around and Blagojevich is the initiator, offering Obama the services of his pet fixer in exchange for votes and help reeling in the Chicago based black power block.

Once you get past the need for things to be nice and neat and only involve two people, the Rezko situation gets much more serious because the money can flow in nonobvious ways that will take years to unravel, long after the american people will have voted for the next president.

What a fine mess this country is in when the Clinton in the race might be the more honest Democrat.

Fun time at the office

The employer I now work for decided to deploy Sharepoint 2007 about a year ago. Unfortunately for them, they bought neither Essential Sharepoint 2007 nor Sharepoint 2007: The Definitive Guide. As my boss put it, "that would make too much sense". I love it when I work for a company that is actually willing to spend on manuals.

Thermostat Please

After reading this tale of upcoming solar cooling, it seems obvious that we don't have a clue as to major non-anthropogenic inputs into our climate. Were we to drop the political fight to change global industry and arrest the entry of the third world into the first world, we might just instead have enough money to fund and deploy a global thermostat that could adjust effective solar input by a combination of mirrors shifting extra sunlight towards the earth and shades blotting out undesired solar radiation.

It would be a multi-decade project and we'd need some sort of decent formula to decide how to *set* the thermostat but it would have the distinct advantage of short-circuiting the acrimonious debate by changing the shape of the anti-coalition. The new anti-action coalition would be shrunk as we would have one single discrete project that could be dialed to change its effects from subtracting warmth to adding warmth within the course of a day.

In short, it could mean that the costs of early mistakes wouldn't be borne for generations but rather for weeks or months, a much more acceptable solution.

HT: Instapundit

Panic on the Right

When the generals start getting restless, they do things like this preemptive nuclear strike proposal. But why are the generals getting restless all over NATO? Amerca's Gen. Shalikashvili, Germany's Gen. Naumann, the UK's Field Marshall Inge, the Netherland's Gen van den Breemen, and France's Admiral Jacques Lanxade are all serious military players of varying politics. These are not brash, unthinking chest beaters. What possessed them to intervene in this manner and damage their societies' moral standing in the world (and thus their vaunted 'soft power') by proposing an updated, in your face, first strike policy, coupled with a much more active NATO and explicitly decoupling military action from the UN?

I can see no other explanation than a profound, international vote of no-confidence in the political class of the West by heavily experienced military minds that live, breathe, eat, and sleep the problem of defending us all from violent threats to our liberties and very existence. I am not even sure that the presentation of the plan in Bucharest in April is coincidence. After all, Romania is a very good example of how even dead broke powers with unstable, highly repressive regimes can extract uranium and enrich it while nobody takes the threat seriously. Had Ceausescu managed his internal repression better, Romania would be a balkans "hedgehog" today similar to the Swiss except with nuclear armed Scuds and a sociopath's hand on the button. Romania's Ceausescu era relations with North Korea were always very good. They also had friends across the muslim world.

The 'peace faction' that does not look beyond its own nose will be shocked, outraged, and redouble its efforts to neuter the military so it cannot be used. It's as if they have never heard of feedback loops or their own part in this very pernicious one. Spelling it out explicitly, the peace factions have neutered the political process so even vigorous peaceful competition is impossible. After all, to draw a caricature of Mohammad, write an insensitive book, or film a blaspheming movie draw death sentences from which we have little practical defense. The best we can do is a sort of life-long semi-imprisonment, insecure in our lives and our possessions, never knowing when the knife will fall.

The "peace faction" ensures that persistent, responding, violent escalations cannot happen so we end up implicitly enslaved because, in the real world, others are willing to persistently bring to bear more violence than we are. We shrink from exercising our freedoms because of justifiable fear. And thus we lose them in a practical matter because the muslims (and in their success they will draw imitators) are willing to tolerate periodic violent episodes that spasmodically, ineffectively lash out at them more as a sop to western domestic factions that demand "a response" because a durable majority in so many Western countries has shrunk back from the military buildup necessary to generate "a solution".

The only thing that is left in modern Western political discourse is to make the spasmodic response so terrible, so violent, that in that short political window when the West permits itself to respond at all will annihilate our enemies and form a sort of "solution" after all. And thus the general staff rebellion in the making.

What the general staffs across the West see is the death of Western supremacy of violence. Hillaire Beloc probably put it best when he described that superiority in the time when machine guns ruled the battlefield.

"Whatever happens we have got,
The Maxim gun, and they have not".

Since then (and frankly for some time before), we've always had the best military toys. But that technological line ended with the invention of the nuclear weapon. Once you can destroy the planet, where else is there to go in terms of outright destructiveness? We're trying to continue to improve by enhancing the precision of our violence but in the face of a force that wants terror, imprecision is a feature, not a bug.

Nuclear technology is proliferating and those who want to turn to bombs will eventually get them because useful technology only proliferates in one basic way. The smart people among the chattering classes already understand this but it is not generally understood and does not inform our political discourse across all parties.

The analysis of proliferating technology doesn't change whether its internet connectivity or nuclear weapons. All technology progresses in 'S curves'. All technology has societal influences that shift the S curve to the left or right in time and distort the shape into different styles of S. Sometimes a government will attempt to regulate or even eliminate a technology but it rarely works over the long haul and never works without serious consequences with one exception. There is only one way for it to work in the end, for an even better substitute technology to emerge, drawing away all desire for further innovation in the earlier technology. The crossbow is stagnant technology because of the emergence of the gun, not because of the papal ban on it. In the case of nuclear weapons, that solution is no solution.

The ultimate expression of widespread adoption is in the super-empowered individual. If you have a solution for him, you can apply that solution to disfavored nations whose rulers are evil or crazy as well as the intermediate problem of sub-national groups seeking nuclear weapons. Ahmadinejad and Osama Bin Laden are, as the saying goes "lesser includeds".

There is no solution for the problems of super-empowered individuals but to remove the matrix of disinterested, powerless innocents within which they hide. One can remove them via brute force, as this first strike military plan envisions removing Iran from this world, free the people in the matrix from the conditions that keep them powerless and foster their civic interest as Petreus' COIN warriors are doing, or connect them with economic, political, and societal global rulesets as Dr. Barnett envisions. What you cannot do is hide behind high walls and deep oceans as the nostalgic isolationists such as Pat Buchanen want. The walls are too easily pierced and the oceans too easily crossed, technology has seen to that.

A danger is that the isolationists will figure that out and move towards preemptive nuclear strikes as their fallback position in an unthinking panic. The corollary to the "high walls and deep oceans" school has always been large strikes from behind our walls and oceans if we are too inconvenienced by events "over there". The generals will be there waiting for them, with their first strike plans drawn up and well gamed out.

And the Earth would burn.

HT Belmont Club.