Flit(tm)

Gay Marriage: Child Raising Outcomes?

I just came across an analysis of social science studies regarding homosexual parenting and it turns out they are of horrible quality. Poor hypothesis generation, bad sampling, no or inadequate control groups, statistical mal and mis feasance the list of problems stretches out for 149 pages of heavily footnoted scholarly fisking. None of the 49 studies examined survives as valid sociological research using standard best practices techniques. The report is titled No Basis and seems to cover studies through 2001.

Dishonest, Greedy, Pigs Will Kill You

Iran's Bam earthquake has exposed a building and land scam that overrode scientific opinion, engineering judgment, and greatly increased the death toll of the recent quake. Bam had been wracked by major tremors in 1911, 1950, and 1966. It was viewed as too dangerous to rebuild and the government halted the issuance of new building permits. With the fall of the shah and the change in regime, dishonest land speculators and corrupt mullahs colluded to override all good sense and Bam grew explosively with the mullahs claiming that the Hidden Imam would protect the city.

The advocates of government intervention like to go on about market failure. But here, the problem isn't a lack of regulation, it is that there is no recompense, no way to get at the people who have caused this tragedy because they have all the power, all the money, and all the guns. The imams control everything. The truth is that the builders and imams are dishonest, greedy pigs who feel no pity for the suffering and no guilt over the dead. And it doesn't matter what system, free market or state regulated is used they will still be there trying to make a quick buck and damn the consequences.

The only cures are civic virtue and independent risk assessment. Civic virtue to keep the public guardians honest and independent risk assessment (whether by public engineering board or private insurance company) to let all know what the true risks are in building.

I think that private risk assessment is better not because there is some inherently higher state of virtue in the private world. Instead, it's better because it is so much harder to monopolize and distort a private system, especially when there is government oversight for honesty. In Iran, who oversees the mullahs that made all that death and destruction possible?

Pentagon's New Map Sighting

I've regularly touted Thomas Barnett's New Rulesets.project as a model to properly understand US long term strategy in the post 9/11 world. Now, it appears that Wretchard is also on board with the assessment that this is what we're up to. Unfortunately, he lumps in all of Europe as standing against that vision. In this I hope he is wrong and fear he might not be. There is a new Europe and I think it might not be wedded to the old paradigms as much as France or Germany currently are.

Reestablishing Foreign Policy Consensus

A society that has a regular changeover of governments both within a party and between parties is handicapped in foreign affairs if there is no consensus between all major parties on certain basic features of foreign policy. This solution has traditionally been adopted in the US but currently seems horribly broken. George W. Bush has broken the prior consensus in his declaration of war on terrorism and the Democrat party has refused to go with him, with most of the candidates for the nomination stuck in one form or another of implacable hostility to President Bush's new direction after 9/11.

But we will have to remake our consensus if we are to succeed, no matter what form that consensus takes ultimately. Here is an interesting article that hints that there is a considerable portion of the Democrat party that is on board with the War on Terror and will withhold votes until the Democrat party gets on board too.

This has got to be an awfully hard time for foreign analysts of the US. There is no consensus, asking what the US will do radically depends on the electoral shifts of the 2004 campaign. The US cannot be depended on to maintain its commitments until the consensus is reforged so everybody, friends, enemies, neutrals, has to work extra hard to hedge and consider, what ifs. Of course, with so much at stake and in delicate flux, the temptation arises to try to influence the elections in the US to be more congenial to some outside interest or another. It's a temptation that would be foolish to give in to.

A Conservative Use of Vomit

Taken from Lilek's year end bleat:

I know this: if 9/11 had never happened, Afghanistan and Iraq wouldn’t be on the radar of those who wake up perpetually inflamed with global injustice. They’d be fixed on Israel and genetically modified food. Would there be rallies in the Western cities demanding the end to the Taliban and the Baathists? Of course not. And that’s what history might well remember. God forbid, but they might end up reduced to a footnote about a rally in Paris in the year before a hijacked jet took out the Louvre. I’d like to think no one in the west would write “well, we destroyed their museums, and now they destroy ours.” But you know someone would.

One can only hope that Christopher Hitchens would meet that author in a pub the night the article hit the stands, and that Hitch would stagger over, draw himself up, fix the scribbler with a baleful look, summon the necessary arguments and facts . . .

. . . and throw up in the idiot’s lap.

Finally, a conservative response to the antiwar's 'vomit-ins'.

UN Weakness

In the back of my head, something's been bothering me about the UN's actions in Iraq. In fact there were several things bothering me but at least one was something I couldn't put my finger on. This story helped me figure it out. The assassination of Archbishop Michael Courtney, Papal Nuncio to Burundi led me to think about how they will replace such a highly experienced diplomat. It's quite likely that they will follow the same procedure that they use for picking a bishop. You make a list and start at the top. A phone call, a terse introduction, the offer is tendered and the respondent has to answer on the spot, yes or no.

Then it hit me. Unlike the UN, it wouldn't even occur to the Vatican to withdraw from Burundi due to an assassination, even a multiple assassination incident like a bombing, just as it didn't occur to the US to withdraw from Beijing after the embassy was stoned or even after a more serious assault, like the Boxer rebellion. Embassies and missions are withdrawn for political reasons, not generally because of threat of force by rebels.

The UN ran from Iraq but the embassies are all pretty much open. This is the UN's Beirut, their Mogadishu, their moment of shame for which they will have to pay in future with interest, just as the US is paying now in Iraq.

The UN will have to prove it won't cut and run or it will be permanently crippled. The only problem is that I can't see a reasonable future where it will be capable of doing so this decade or even the next.

Can the PA Make Payroll?

Debka again, this time with a report that the PA's treasury has been stolen by Arafat and there is no money to make payroll on January 1, 2004. If it's true (and I'm lugging my usual Debka rock of salt on this one) this essentially means that Arafat is guilty of treason. You can't just steal the national treasury and claim to be just a regular elected politician. Palestinian Authority corruption has a long and sad history but this is the icing on the cake.

In some ways I hope that it is true because it would expose the PA as fraudulent, a Potemkin village covering an Arafat dictatorship. If paychecks come from Arafat's personal funds (personal stolen funds, that is), there's nothing left. You might as well make him a crown and a throne, he's king in an absolute monarchy. "L'etat, c'est moi".

In any case, we'll know more in two or three days.

German Attitudes

The attitude of germans toward the present and future prospects is remarkably pessimistic. The survey is quite remarkable. They feel that everything is going horribly wrong yet one of their biggest complaints is that the freebies are no longer so free. They also put a priority on more leisure and few think to work more and save more to build things up for the next generation.

What manner of system is so horribly self-absorbed that they don't see that they are going to hand off a much poorer country to their children?

Letter to the Paper I

In my daily slog through the news, I sometimes write the author or the editor in commentary or correction. I figured, why not publish here as well.

To: g.younge@guardian.co.uk
Re: Why Democrats must not abandon the old stronghold

There was a glaring factual error in your article, Why Democrats must not abandon the old stronghold. The 2000 census has adjusted the electoral totals. Gore states lost several votes because of population shift so it would not be true that somebody who won Gore's states would be just four votes shy of the Presidency.

But beyond not understanding the current composition of the electoral college, the article is a throwback to a widespread '70s bigotry of assuming that the only reason for the south's move rightward is race. It is not. The Democrat party has completely lost its credibility on religious issues, abortion, and gun rights. This disproportionately affects the Democrat party's results in the south and west, the very areas that have been picking up population (and electoral votes) in recent decades. While you may disagree with southern attitudes about God or guns, it is irresponsible to write an article on southern political trends and ignore these facts on the ground. You've served your readership poorly. Agree or disagree with the Republican party but be a professional about it and get the story right. Misleading your readers won't help them understand the US.

Can Bigots Pass Non-Bigoted Law?

This article at Law.com reviews the US 11th Circuit Appeals Court decision to permit a felon re-enfranchisement suit to proceed to trial. The District Court had granted summary judgment to the state of Florida. Key to the finding was racist commentary in the 1868 Florida Constitutional Convention.

The Court opined: "We conclude that an original discriminatory purpose behind Florida's felon disenfranchisement provision establishes an equal protection violation that persists with the provision unless it is subsequently reenacted on the basis of an independent, nondiscriminatory purpose,"

According to an Orlando Sentinel article, Florida revisited the issue and passed a similar voting ban in 1968. The District Court had granted summary judgment on the grounds that no evidence had been presented that the 1968 law (the one actually being challenged) had racist intent.

Now the likelihood of ultimate success of this class action suit is low but what's unsettling about the 2-1 majority opinion is that the logic would permit any law adopted during the time of widespread racism (which was never just in the South) to be challenged on these grounds. Trials are long, expensive, uncertain affairs. The 11th Circuit has just handed defense lawyers all across the country a tool for making them longer and more expensive.

It's also a decision that will likely bubble to the surface in odd ways. For instance, most state bans on money going to religious schools were passed in a fit of anti-catholic bigotry when public schools were dominated by Protestants. These "Blaine amendments", as they are known, are odious stains on US law that should be gotten rid of. But the logic of the decision would paint the ACLU, AFT, NEA, and a raft of modern liberal supporters as sectarian bigots. And much as I would like Blaine to be buried, spreading the charge of anti-Catholic bigotry around this widely isn't the way to do it.

HT to How Appealing

Palestinian Incompetence

Debka.com is one of the trickier sources to use. They sometimes get things right far ahead of others and notice things that go unnoticed elsewhere. Other times they go into flights of fancy that are breathtaking. So take an appropriate amount of salt and check this article out.

The note that struck me as most reliable and most worrisome for anybody seriously interested in solving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is this:

Moreover, Egypt has put a hard question to Arafat: Two separate security teams stand guard inside the mosque around the clock - one posted by the Wakf Muslim religious authority that administers the mosques on Temple Mount and one deployed by the Palestinian leader’s own Fatah group. “Where were they when our foreign minister needed them?” Egyptian officials asked Arafat. “Why was it left to Israeli security to rescue him?”

Since Israel is Debka's specialty and it would be fairly easy to find out who posts security guards at the 3rd most holy site of Islam, I'll leave aside the usual hefty pinch of salt in this instance and take up this issue of Palestinian competence in security matters. Either the guards are competent and were withdrawn, leaving the foreign minister to be abused as a political point, or the guards were simply incapable of crowd control at one of their most high profile locations during an important visit.

The former case, that this was done on purpose, shows a depth of political miscalculation that is profound. Nobody will trust palestinian security assurances in future and this will provide humiliation after humiliation in future. No matter what the politics of a country, a foreign leader cannot take the risk that they will be ambushed in a similar fashion. For those who can afford it, they will bring in their own security. For those who don't have the funds in their budget, Israeli security will be their only practical option. And if you can't trust Arafat to keep your person inviolate, how far can you trust him on other matters?

The second case, that this was just incompetence, has its own problems associated with it. What is the point of the Palestinian authority if it is incapable of providing security? Why should anybody treat with the current government if they cannot deliver peace which, in the current situation, is essentially the restraint of radicals?

It would be nice to hear that the security personnel responsible for this screwup had been sacked and that a complete reorganization of the relevant Palestinian Authority security section was underway. At least there would be hope for improvement in the future. However, the PA is so opaque in its internal operations that it's almost impossible to tell what's really going on there.

On purpose or accidental, ultimately both scenarios are expressions of incompetence in the PA. And because they have successfully resisted efforts to make the PA transparent, there isn't even a viable way out for them to show believable contrition and reform. It's an incompetent mess.

Abuse of Authority

Adam Smith Institute's Dr Madsen Pirie has an article up on the small tyrannies of development officials, in this case a "planning officer". This officer did not like the red pantilies roofing material in the plan and tried to make Dr. Pirie believe that it was mandatory to change to blue slate. After some investigation, it transpired that the planning officer didn't even have the power to mandate roofing material. It was a matter of taste.

What's going on here is an abuse of authority. Dr. Pirie seemed at a loss as to what to do about this "pocket Hitler". The problem spans the Atlantic. Sonny Bono's congressional career, according to his own rendering, started off when an abusive bureaucrat wouldn't let him put up a sign to advertise his business. In frustration, Bono ran for mayor, won, and fired the man.

Clearly, Sonny Bono's option is not for everyone, yet all too often we all run into self-important bureaucrats who want to go beyond the law and just make our lives miserable.

Perhaps this is a job for the department of anarchy?

Democracy is For the Long Haul

James Pinkerton believes that democracy shouldn't be for everyone. He picks out Jordan as a country that has a relatively moderate king with a relatively moderate government that is riding herd on a populace that would elect a government much less to our liking. Pinkerton's making a couple of mistakes here.

Unrepresentative governments infantilize the people. The people don't have to be responsible so they can spout off and advocate all sorts of foolish things that they won't have to deal with the consequences of. Democratization in a country like Jordan is likely to take a path somewhat like the UK with a constitutional monarchy riding herd and gradually ceding power, making sure that the people grow up and take responsibility for their actions. Errors will be made by any newly freed people but with a wise king, these errors will be small and not fatal to Jordan's future.

Democracy is a system that provides long-term benefits, not necessarily short-term ones. The US may be unhappy with the Schroeder govt. in Germany but it would certainly prefer the pain of such a Chancellor to an undemocratic Germany which would be nothing but trouble and with no end in sight.

Having a prickly, democratically elected government is not such a bad thing over the long haul if that prickly government peacefully yields the reigns of power to a new government after it has lost its mandate in free elections. Dictatorships just kick the can down the road so the problem will be solved by the next generation. Saying "liberty in Jordan would not spell progress for the United States" is admitting that all you're talking about is today and tomorrow. Next year is beyond your calculation and the next generation is beyond your conception.

The security problems we face are bad enough now but technological progress means that they are just going to get worse. We need to think beyond the next quarter or even the next year. Democracy across the globe is the right long-term solution. If we keep to that, we keep faith with our own founding fathers.

Thank You France?

It was too good to last. Now that the accusations are recriminations are breaking out over the Air France potential terror strike I can only hope that the right lessons will be drawn. The French are obviously using the law enforcement model and we are obviously using the military model. This is guaranteed to produce friction and, regrettably, the French are likely to cling to the law enforcement model for as long as they can. This, unfortunately, will render all major parties tainted during the inevitable backlash when the Louvre no longer exists or the Eiffel Tower comes down.

They're cutting their own throats. It's just a matter of time until they come to the awful, destructive realization of their foolishness. May they get off as lightly as a 9/11 when their moment of tragedy comes. They are not likely to. By then, the nihilist jihadi will have had plenty of practice on us.

Thank You France

It's important to neither be Pollyana nor Cassandra with regard to the US' old allies who have been part of so much disagreement and friction recently. France's gesture of cooperation regarding possible Al Queda penetrations of some of its Paris-Los Angeles flights over Christmas was done well, as a real friend should. For that and every other friendly gesture, noticed or unnoticed, we should be thankful.

Christmas

At this joyous time of the year, the 2nd most important holiday of the Christian calendar, it's become somewhat traditional to issue puffy wishes of joy filled with sweetness and light to all.

I say hogwash.

Christmas is a time to celebrate and take down our masks of indifference to religion, to put away our fears of offending others and concentrate on being our christian selves and loudly proclaim the truth. Christ is born on Christmas day. Bow down as the shepherds and the Magi did and recognize Him come to save us from sin.

Christmas is the start of God's fulfillment of his longstanding promise of a Messiah to save us from the consequences of Adam's sin. That promise culminates in Easter but Christmas is the start of these fateful events. Love each other as he loved us all. Celebrate his coming with joy, laughter and gift giving. Remember that Santa Claus, at his root, has always been Saint Nicholas.

So wish all those 'happy holidays' fudgers a merry Christmas and marvel at the miracle of Christs birth, always keeping joy in your heart. Be yourselves and if you get greetings from somebody who is celebrating something else with all his heart take their sincere happy wishes with a smile and a silent prayer that by next Christmas they too, will have seen the little star of Bethlehem and will join you to proclaim the miracle of Christ's birth.

The Anti-Totalitarian Net: Fantasist Debunker

In the network of today and the future, the great battle is, and will be, who owns what. If I own my own computer (in the sense of having control over what it does), if I generally have the right to put packets onto the network and have them delivered uncensored, there is a great future for the net as a moderating force in human interaction.

While it is true that any fool can stand up on a virtual soapbox and yell his head off, if you make statements of fact, you can count on people looking them up, checking you, and calling you on your mistakes and falsehoods if what you say isn't, strictly speaking, reality.

Extremists often carry along other people using a heady mix of emotional exhortation and a confident portrayal of reality that is often at odds with the objective truth of what is going on in the world. You can't do much about the histrionics and rhetoric but modern technology allows debunkers a critical advantage. By creating FAQ lists demonstrating how common distortions are used to mislead, extremists are forced into the same unatractive choices that spammers now have with the advent of bayesian filters. The old stuff is quickly debunked and nobody they debate is falling for it anymore. New stuff is quickly debunked at a pace that exceeds their ability to churn out believable, functional distortions of reality that serve their purpose.

Eventually, everybody, more or less, is forced to deal with the world as it is and not a fantasy world that does not exist. This is something that tyrants and their wannabes are, and should be, profoundly uncomfortable with. The extremists are dangerous mostly when they can peddle their theories faster than they can be debunked. Few will follow demonstrated false prophets and extremism will become less and less of a threat as long as we continue to take that threat seriously.

The Anti-Totalitarian Net: Preface

Arnold Kling writes with disdain at the idea that the Dean movement is a smart mob. He further says that such things simply do not exist. With that, he stumbles badly.

You really have to go back to the apes to understand what's at stake. Ape groupings vary in size based on a formula related to brain size. Humanity is about 50% higher up on this formal than the most organized of the primates. But human group sizes only get up between 100 and 500 before they start to go wrong and the most common value for organizational success (even in the modern world) is 150 before you have to sub group. Ape group structures break down before that point with the best organized apes having groups numbering in the 70s (derived number).

Looking at the comparative evolutionary success of humanity compared to the primates and it becomes obvious that anything that can up the numbers by even a bit becomes a world shaking deal. Thus smart mobs become highly important. If you can add even another 75 people onto your functional group size by taking advantage of the asynchronous nature of much of modern communication, you've created a gap between current best practices and the new bench mark as big as the current gap between us and the apes.

But looking past the creation of smart mobs to the claim that the Deaniacs are one. It seems highly dubious that they actually are. It's much more likely that they have tapped into the hype of smart mobs and envisioned that they are one. This does explain something about the Dean phenomenon, the lack of traditional Democrat coalition building. A mob is not a coalition. A mob is consensus. As Arnold Kling is somewhat worried about, sometimes the consensus of the mob is radical and dangerous, the mobs numbers making it difficult to stop.

I heavily doubt that consensus can be extended to the point of getting a majority of voters. Paradoxically, if consensus sweeps too many factions into its monoculture, Madison's Federalist #10 starts playing out in very unpleasant ways as a large republic without a mosaic of bickering factions too small to create a persistent majority on all issues will soon descend into the tyranny of the majority.

I don't think this is going to happen but I believe this is the fundamental source of Arnold Kling's unhappiness.

Why I hate Internet Explorer I

I'm at a system right now that only has IE to browse the web. I had a nice article about how the whole US drug reimportation thing is developing, links, and some small amount of independent research to gain some perspective on how big this problem could get. Trivia fact for the day, there are 3094 functioning counties in the USA plus around 50 oddball entities usually called independent cities and also including Yellowstone Park which is the only cross state border entity listed in the nation. Anyway, the browser crashed, I hadn't saved a draft, and I have renewed my hate/hate relationship with IE.

Christian Politics

It's hard to tell where to start with regard to Mark Kleinman's flawed analysis of christianity and politics.

He goes wrong in the very first sentence in that christianity is not an ethnicity. There are many ethnicities that take pride in their christianity but no ethnicity, that I am aware of, that kicks you out of the group if you are not one. From this unpromising start much foolish and ignorant opining follows.

To love your enemy does not require you to not imprison him, depose him, or even kill him. What it does do is require you to take action against your enemy in a spirit of love that, if/when he repents, you will not descend into mindless revenge but take your sincere new ally and get beyond the conflict that has tried your strength to that point. Mr. Kleiman may believe in vendetta unto the end of time but it is neither practical nor christian to do so. Perhaps he didn't recognize enlightened self-interest wrapped in 1st century mediterranean philosophy. I can only hope.

But not only is he completely missing the point of loving your enemy but also the point of I Corinthians 1:18. The christian is playing a different game than the atheist. It is the same game that the jew and the muslim are playing (though they believe that there are different rules). The game is uniting with God in eternal Paradise. The goals are different, success metrics are different, and successful tactics are different because it fundamentally is a different game. That's the point of the passage. If you're not playing the game, you will perish or, more accurately, your soul will lie in eternal Hell. Different games are being played on the same playing field and this confuses many, evidently including Mr. Kleinman. This is strange because the very next paragraph he lays the monotheist game of souls out fairly well. He just doesn't connect it to the text properly.

Mr. Kleinman finds it hard to reconcile the idea of a good God with a punishing God. Did his father never send him to his room, give him a stern lecture, or a warm bottom? Punishment is an inescapable part of good parenting. Children will make mistakes and test limits. It is their nature. Without punishment, there is a significantly lower chance of learning and correction of bad behavior. As many indulgent parents have learned, the kids don't thank you for it later either.

In the Eastern Catholicism that I practice, there is no distinctive purgatory. The doctrine of purgatory is merely a portion of hell that you can get out of. And while it is a distinctly minority position, some of the church fathers did hold that it was remarkably presumptuous to limit God's forgiveness even on the question of the Devil himself. Who God forgives is His business. No doubt he would want Hell to be empty (as Mr. Kleinman speculates) and even the fallen angels returned to his good graces but there's that whole free will thing that takes matters out of his hands. He granted free will freely and knew the price of that gift.

Mr. Kleinman really goes off the rails when he states "Christians are the professed adherents of a foreign dominion, serving a King whose authority is not recognized by the Constitution of the United States. It's not even obvious that people with such divided loyalties ought even to be allowed to vote, let alone have their voices heard in public discourse." This is profoundly unfaithful to american history, tradition, and common good sense. The Declaration of Independence formally started the revolution that ended with the Constitution, firmly placed God at the top of the authority chain, endowing humanity with inalienable rights which governments (including the US government) respect. When human governments do not respect those God given rights, government becomes illegitimate and rebellion licit.

The truth is that a free society, whether under a constitutional monarchy, a democratic republic, or some other system, calls on the christian to play a different role in civic life than a tyranny. Render unto Caeser, meant pay the tax in Jesus' time because that's all that Caeser rightfully required. But a free society requires more from all its citizens. It requires their judgment, their moral sense, and their active consent.

Christians are called to evangelize and be a light unto the nations. This is something that is both done through preaching and through daily action. Living your life well, helping others, contributing to society is a basic duty and there is no conflict between voting, participating in public counsels, even governing, and being a good christian.

Then we get to the case of Cardinal Martino. Part of what makes loving your enemy hard to implement is that you love his victims too. Cardinal Martino's error was not in feeling compassion for Saddam. It was in feeling insufficient compassion for his victims, the entire nation of Iraq. The millions who lived in fear, even then, of Saddam's eventual return were in a sort of anticipatory hell. In love for them, how should Saddam's capture be handled? How do you balance things?

Saddam could have, should have, been captured secretly and nobody should have been told if things were counted in military/intelligence terms only. Who knows who would have shown up with how many more incriminating documents if they thought Saddam was still free? Who knows how many people narrowly escaped capture because they were warned and fled ahead of the search and capture teams? How many people will die because of those uncaptured Baathists?

But Saddam's capture was handled in a fairly sophisticated manner. Secrecy until confirmation and then video footage that would highlight that the nightmare was over and that people no longer had to fear Saddam's return or that the Coalition had the wrong man was what we got. If we didn't minimize future net deaths, my estimate is that we got pretty close. And for the price of a bit of grooming and swabbing, millions slept that night in peace and joy. Most of them were in Iraq but I can say with assurance that the Iraqi diaspora had their hearts eased as well. Whether the balance of compassion was set up correctly is a grand topic that theologians might debate for the next hundred years but to show selective compassion only for your enemy is not Christian and undeniably unjust.

In his update things do not notably improve. His attempt to define ethnic christianity fails. The jewish parallel does not hold. If you are an atheist you can still be a jew. You cannot be an atheist christian.

The idea of Christianity as being the sum total of what is in the Gospels is the protestant doctrine of "only scripture" or "sola scriptura". It is not a majority opinion, by any means. To take it as normative without a bucket of caveats is misleading at best. It is even worse in the case of Prof. Bainbridge who appears (according to Mr. Kleinman) to be a Roman Catholic.

But if Christianity means a set of beliefs, then it's perfectly possible for an outsider to say whether someone's remarks indicate that he holds those beliefs. It should be no more offensive to say that "X is not a Christian" in that sense when he rejects the love of enemies than it is to say "X is not a Kantian" after X argues for a consequentialist ethic.

The particular doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church is not only that the Bible is the Word of God but that the miracle of Pentacost that created the Church established a chain of bishops that had the power to decide which texts would go into the Bible and never lost the power to modify, tweak, and add to the equally valid Tradition that is complementary to Holy Scripture.

Thus, Prof. Bainbridge (if he is an RC, I didn't independently check) can only be judged as faithful by this larger body of work, of which the Bible is a relatively small part. You have to toss in the ecumenical councils as well at a minimum and probably the canons as well. Drawing a jewish parallel, it would be like judging the Torah without the rabbinical commentaries. For muslims, it would be like into account the Koran without taking into account the hadiths. But here I myself may be treading in unfamiliar waters. Suffice it to say that Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition for a Catholic are equal in validity and to pick and choose between them in evaluating a Catholic's fidelity is profoundly misguided.

Mr. Kleinman can stack himself against two millenia of monks, bishops, theologians, and canon lawyers and claim that he has discovered that, as an outsider, as someone who has not gone through all the relevant documents, christians should be out of politics and arguably should be stripped of the vote. Christians, faithful christians cannot wield coercive power according to Mr. Kleinman. Perhaps when he's actually read enough to know what he's talking about, he will have the decency to recognize how wrong he is.

There are a billion Catholics that he owes an apology to. There are hundreds of millions of Orthodox who have the right to an equal amount of outrage. There is a chance that there is a storefront church down the street from his favorite Starbucks that might vaguely resemble his indictment of the entire, varied, body of christianity but I wouldn't count on it.

HT: to Chuck Karczag for bringing the original post to my attention in email. If my cousin would only tell me where he's blogging these days, I'd give him a link.

A Hypothetical Fantasy

I just read Stephen Den Beste's take on France being shut out of negotiations. It was excellent, as usual and provoked a silly little speculation. What if every French Government spokesman was telling the truth?

Now that would be subtle wedge politics! Don't tell France's President, Prime Minister, or Foreign Minister but do tell their Defense Minister on strictest confidence which was kept. Could the way out for France be made any clearer?

I don't trust translated statements going through a few hands before it gets to me but the prospect gives me the giggles and is plausible, if not likely.

Occupation Tech II

An article in Newsday demonstrates the power of sitting down and trying to understand the people who make up a country you've invaded. But there's also another lesson there, so far unremarked in prior commentary. The technology that Lt. Col. King is using to keep track of tribes could be done so much better and his work could be so much more effective if he were properly supported by a more extensive technology effort.

LTC King is using a palm pilot to keep track of what he finds out about the various tribes. But does that database get regularly injected upstream to the center and filtered back down to all the rest of the officers who could both use that information and could contribute to it? From the story it seems not.

An extensive wireless occupation net would permit this sort of information interchange and more. But while generic Palm software could do a reasonable job, there's no reason why specialized software couldn't be created that would do the job much better. Palm software tends to have fairly fast development times too so we're not talking about something that would necessarily have to wait for the next go around either.

The Pentagon has a lot of whiz bang technology that can trickle down to the civilian sector (the Internet itself being a prime example). Iraq is a practical example of how the technology flow can go the other direction. We civilians have some ability to see that tech flow towards the military broadened and strengthened.

Sanity On the Left?

I will probably disagree with Rabbi James L. Mirel much more often than I agree with him. But he does good work in this article promoting civility in political discourse. There's been too much misuse of language. Nazi, communist, traitor, evil, these are all terms that have meaning and need to be used precisely. When they are just words you fling at those you disagree with, it both makes civic progress more difficult while legitimizing the absolutely real holders of these labels. In other words, it's a two-fer dose of stupidity.

I have a feeling that I have a somewhat higher tolerance for strong language than the good rabbi but the rhetoric is too often crashing through even the lowest of civilized floors. We need to clean up our act without compromising our principles.

USA 2004: Now With 40% Less Free Speech

Robert Robbopines about the recent USSC ruling on campaign finance reform and comes up with a statistic that floored me. The new law illegalizes 40% of the spending on politics that the two major parties spent on elections. Assuming this is correct, the implications are large, and severe.

Let's assume, for the moment, that McCain-Feingold simply took the law and matched it to bedrock common law morals. This means that in 2000, 40% of expenditures of both major parties were dirty. I highly doubt that 40% of Enron's expenditures fell into this category, nor did Anderson's misdeeds amount to 40% of the money it handled either yet our criminal justice system placed huge penalties on both corporations, practically destroying them as unacceptably corrupt.

If the Democrat and Republican parties really engaged in such corrupt practices, neither of them deserves to be on the ballot in any state. We should tear them both down and start over.

Furthermore, Republican prowess in getting hard dollars means that this 40% is unlikely to be distributed evenly across party lines. Democrats are probably higher than 40% with Republicans dragging the average down. There is partisan advantage to be gained here so why aren't Republicans weilding it?

This is nonsense only because McCain-Feingold is not legislation that goes after corrupt practices or even substantially after corrupt practices. I would argue the same need to start over with new parties if the figure was 33% or even 25%. McCain-Feingold isn't about getting dirty money out of politic. You can tell this by the dog that doesn't bark. The idea of splitting off from corrupt Republicans or Democrats is very much a fringe phenomenon. If McCain-Feingold was actually what it represented itself as the dog would bark and the parties would be destroyed. Americans are not a corrupt people and they wouldn't tolerate having parties this dirty running the country.

Once the corruption angle is taken away, all that is left is limits on free speech. Welcome to the new USA, now with 40% less free speech. I predict that somehow, to nobody's surprise, the new version will be far less filling.

What's Mainstream

Howard Dean is right when he brings up the question of what is mainstream in US foreign policy. The answer he gives, sadly for Democrat electoral chances, is wrong.

George Bush's foreign policy is a departure from 60 years of bipartisan foreign policy. It is a radical shift and to pretend otherwise is to not be a serious analyst of the situation. But is it out of the mainstream? Or is it more correct to say that the bipartisan foreign policy limits and rituals of the cold war era have been abandoned by the mainstream in an astonishing display of presidential leadership with Howard Dean being the standard bearer of a liberal reactionary impulse to stick with the past.

The fundamental question is whether 'everything changed' after 9/11. For those who think that it did, sticking with the old bipartisan consensus looks and sounds as foolish as delivering goods with a horse drawn wagon in the age of the internal combustion engine.

But is this undeniably radical current in the US the new mainstream? I'm sure that there is frequent polling done on this by both major parties and the answer is in doubt, thus the clear choice of foreign policy solutions in a Bush v. Dean major party contest.

Is our foreign policy framework a virtual Augean stables requiring a herculean effort to make ready for a new age? Or is our traditional foreign policy consensus from 1945-2001 still the right long-term framework for handling today's challenges?

My answer to that is clear. A Dean administration based on the same old, same old principles he currently advocates would be a disaster of the first order for the United States. Whether that view, or its polar opposite is the prevailing sentiment of voters in November is very much up for grabs.

Voting to Kill Canadians V

In one venerable political tradition, politicians only care for themselves and their constituents. Anybody who can't help or hurt their quest for power is just SOL as far as they are concerned. Rod Blagojevich obviously believes this otherwise he would not be forging ahead with a proposal to permit a 'pilot program' of drug reimportation. The creation of drug shortages in Canada as Illinois hoovers a big chunk of Canada's supply (Illinois, by itself is something over 1/3 of Canada's total population) is simply not on Rod Blagojevich's humanitarian radar screen.

Unlike other governors, Blagojevich is politically constrained not to act in defiance of federal law. Atty. General Ashcroft is currently prosecuting his Republican predecessor and the Democrats in Illinois have (for the first time in many years) an advantage in the corruption race. With Gov. Blagojevich under indictment, this advantage would quickly disappear and unlike Gov. Ryan's sins, this wouldn't be venal bribery that takes years to trace to the top but something that would be a slam dunk conviction in time for the election season. The Ryan prosecution innoculates the Bush administration from the charge of playing politics with the Justice Department.

Other politicians, not so constrained by their local culture of corruption catching up to them are going to go ahead in defiance of Washington. They may not have the population heft of Illinois but if enough of them act, this is going to go on the State Department's plate, like it or not.

click here for the full series.

The Embarrassing Cardinal II

It seems that Cardinal Martino is being chided by the Vatican for engendering confusion between the Cardinal's personal opinion and the Vatican's official position on the capture of Saddam Hussein.

The Vatican has issued a reasonable statement, tactfully rapping a 'prince of the Church' over the knuckles without excessive humiliation. It makes one wonder about all the intemperate commentary that simply assumed that the Cardinal must have been relaying an official position. Retractions anyone?

Libyan WMD: Negotiating Tactics

I don't know if they do things in the UK as they do in the US but reading over Steven Den Beste's analysis of the Libyan WMD renunciation process gave me the feeling that I've seen this before. Finally, about halfway through the article it hit me. They were acting like a traditional car dealership would in the US. The person who you actually can talk to is never 'authorized' to give any solid promises but acts as a runner and a filter to the 'real' negotiator who accepts or vetoes offers, most of the time giving negative responses until near the end when he makes an appearance to sprinkle the holy water and a smile at the consummation of the deal.

It is a specialized form of good cop/bad cop applied more to contract negotiations than legal interrogations and it is very efficient at creating an unlevel playing field where large concessions on the one side are matched with small concessions on the other. The game is eventually ruined by the creation of a crop of car buyers who are educated and understand all the tricks and simply refuse to play the 'car buying game'.

This is where the analogy breaks down. Libya is not a car buyer and the Coalition of the Willing is not a dealership, except perhaps in passports to the Functioning Core.

The nature of the game thus lives somewhat between good cop/bad cop (where the bad cop is often the brooding, threatening presence in the room, this role being played by the US armed forces) and the dealership (where the "manager" is the absent god who can putatively make decisions but won't negotiate directly, this role played by the 'scary' GW Bush) models.

Hopefully, this successful model will show a viable way out for the rest of the Axis of Evil, both for the remaining named portions (N. Korea & Iran) as well as those other countries that are exactly like them but were never publicly put on the list (as Libya was).

In the end, achieving Functioning Core status is the goal. Participate in the global economy, create a multitude of international connections between your citizens and the rest of the world, and empower them sufficiently that these internationally dependent economic players must be given a seat at the domestic political decision-making table. Once enough players are unwilling to destroy their own foreign holdings and power positions, you're no longer a threat no matter how disagreeable you may be on a particular issue cough Germany cough or even string of issues cough France cough.

Libyan WMD: Libya's effect on the US

Could it be that the Bush administration's attitude toward the UN's weapons inspection infrastrucutere was substantially altered by the Libyan secret negotiations on its own WMD? Imagine for a moment that you are George Bush. You know that Libya has WMD programs because the Libyans are telling you so. No doubt, you make sure that somebody makes an analysis of exactly how Libya has been fooling the UN inspection system and how worthless that system is to actually protecting your national security through the NPT and the chem/bio disarmament convention. You've come up with the conclusion that any of two dozen nations could be in violation of these treaties and the enforcement groups would never know it.

What do you do? Who do you trust?

I think that Libya has certainly influenced US policy on Iran. US and UK attitudes toward Iranian WMD policy have been markedly different than the rest of the world and evidence that Libya has got clean away with having a program (much as Romania did under Ceausescu) means that the enforcers have learned nothing sufficient to stop an unending series of replays of the scary case of Romania who was successful at making weapons grade nuclear material in small quantities. If there was anything that the old communist system was good at, it was super sizing industrial processes to gargantuan quantities.

Fortunately, Romania had a revolution and the new government was willing to trade bomb capability for a power-plant complex (Cernavoda 1-4). Thanks Canada! Likely Libya is negotiating a similar deal. Is it rational for a country to assume that fortune will always smile on the side of civilization?

Weekend Silly Season is Open: Schlock Mercenary

Along with my blog reading list, I have something of a lighter one. For my military and military minded readers, here's one of the best, Schlock Mercenary. It's military science fiction and generally work safe (just as long as laughing out loud won't badly impact your career). If you have some time, read it from the beginning.

Libyan WMD: UN Effectiveness Questions

Could anyone, exactly, explain to me the UN's role in finding Libya's illegal WMD programs? No snickering please, I'm serious. The UN gets a significant amount of money to help enforce the international WMD treaties. In the case of Libya, what did the world's money buy it? And if the answer is less than satisfactory, how can it be changed and improved? Finally, why haven't I heard a thing about this from the mainstream media?

The Baathist Rout

The Belmont Club has a great post on the military consequences of Saddam's capture with substantial documentation regarding revanchist forces he lead.

The most important concept was that right now the limits of the US haul of fighters and backers will be limited by the speed at which they can exploit the embarrassment of intelligence riches they have. These items have a very short shelf life and it is quite likely that US and Iraqi forces are very busy right now and will continue to be so for the near future.

Godspeed.

Sharon's Disengagement Plan

Get ready for a long hot summer in Israel. Sharon's recent speech outlines a huge stick that will be wielded if Palestinians do not undertake their portion of the US Roadmap plan to the satisfaction of Israel. The security fence construction is being accelerated. Far flung jewish settlements in the occupied territories will be evacuated/relocated. And Israel will make a unilateral defense line separating palestinians from their best hope of a functioning economy, jobs in Israel.

This is a bit of heartburn that the Bush administration could well do without and the brickbats have been flying in all directions after the speech. Enough vagueness was left in the speech to keep Sharon's coalition from immediately imploding. No settlements were named as ones too far out to be defended.

The big question is what will happen when Arafat can no longer complain about being occupied and has to actually govern territory. His democratic mandate has long ago expired. Without Israeli troops wandering across territory nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority, what remains of his excuses for not submitting to elections? Sharon has rolled the dice and provided a highly unattractive plan B to the US Roadmap's plan A. How this bold move will settle out over the next few months is anybody's guess.

An Atta/Saddam Debunking?

Newsweek is running a debunking of the Telegraph story I previously commented on.

The debunking, like the original memo, leaves enough holes so that the issue has to remain in doubt. If the FBI doesn't know whether Atta flew to Vegas, how do they know that he didn't take a short trip for a three day training session in Iraq? The debunkers don't say because it's inconvenient to their case. At the same time, they do have a point that there are an awful lot of fake documents flying around Iraq these days. This easily could be one of those.

The cure is patience and a demand that these things be verified or debunked definitively by professionals in the field of document analysis. Has handwriting analysis been done on the memo (it's in longhand)? Who did it and what were the results? No national security secrets would be compromised by answering these questions so why are neither the Telegraph nor Newsweek pressuring the US government or the IGC to release the relevant information?

When Do You Judge Intelligence?

The 1990s opening of the former Soviet Union's intelligence archives resolved a great deal of Cold War controversy. Yes, Hiss was a spy. Yes, the nuclear freeze movement was heavily penetrated and influenced by the KGB, etc. Between the time these controversies were first raised before the public to the time when they were definitively resolved, years and decades intervened. Countless barrels of ink were spilled on both sides of the argument writing all sorts of insightful truths and rank nonsense.

Today, we have a similar situation with the War on Terror. Where are the WMDs? Can you explain the intelligence failures? One tack to take is the one President Bush used in the recent Diane Sawyer interview "What's the difference?". This is a coping mechanism for the persistent fact that intelligence estimates are often mistaken that identifies hostile intentions as the key to deciding whether or not to act.

The Washington Post gives a thumbs down to this method. They have something of a point but they do not give anything near proper deference to the facts of the present case. As I noted earlier today the case of whether Saddam had WMD is not actually closed. The Kay report that has been issued to Congress is an interim report and no final conclusions have been drawn of whether or not intelligence estimates were, in fact, wrong in any particular.

An intelligence blunder of massive proportions can destroy careers, set an agency back years in the weight their intelligence product is given in the halls of power and can make them too timid in providing anything of value except the most certain of conclusions. In short, it can wreck an agency.

Some agencies should be wrecked. They might be so far gone that the painful process of a wholesale restructuring would lead to an immediate and long lasting net benefit for the country. But shouldn't the guilty verdict be in hand before we start work on the hangman's scaffold?

I've made it clear that I'm all in favor of firings once the evidence is in and checked. Official incompetence and malfeasance cannot be excused when lives are lost. But we should never lose sight of justice and the cost that unjustified accusations can extract both personally, and nationally.

Seeing Eye Dogs & Gay Marriage

I know people who have great dogs, nice, friendly, really great personalities. They aren't allowed in stores, busses, or many other places. Growing up, I often saw other dogs in White Plains, NY who were allowed to do all those things. They were seeing eye dogs. They too were nice, friendly, with great personalities. But these dogs got to be with their owners an awful lot more than other dogs did. They were privileged and their privilege was enshrined by law and by the police.

Now there was no reason that other dogs could not be allowed into stores, etc, if the owners wanted to make a private rule accomodating them. But nobody was allowed to keep the seeing eye dogs out.

Is this justice?

Are not regular dogs participating in the same quality of dogness as these special privilege dogs? Why must their activity be circumscribed by particular private arrangement? Why must they suffer this awful discrimination and be separated at critical moments from their pack leader (owner)? Where is the basic sense of decency and fairness of it all.

Taken out of the human realm, the answer for this type of question is clear and people can more dispassionately analyze things. People with seeing eye dogs get special legal privileges because these dogs are useful tools to impart a recognized public good, enabling blind people (and those with other handicaps) to reduce their dependence on others, including the state, and live out more normal lives. The difference in effect justifies a difference in behavior.

An equal protection lawsuit seeking to let people with personal pets have the same rights as people with seeing eye dogs would rightly get laughed out of court. Their only hope would be demonstrating some sort of equivalent public benefit but reality shows there is none.

Gay marriage advocates are trying the same sort of thing as our hypothetical pet owners but they further demand that they don't have to prove equivalent state benefit. Andrew Sullivan acts as usual when he opines:

What I simply don't understand is why a woman as obviously as sensitive and humane as Morse nevertheless believes that excluding loving gay couples from such an experience is not only a good thing but a vital thing for people already in such marriages. Are gay people not also human? Can they not also put a joint life before personal gratification? Why does Morse simply assume that homosexuality is about "self-centeredness"? Morse doesn't actually provide any such arguments. She just seems to take it for granted that this is a zero-sum game, that including gay people in the profound experience of self-giving is somehow destructive of her own relationship. I don't get it. I don't see it. And her utter indifference to the actual lives, loves and relationships of gay people - does she know any, I wonder? - undermines her otherwise compelling moral sense. That's a shame. Gay and straight people have a common ground of understanding when it comes to marriage: we are all human. We all need and benefit from the experience of love and self-giving. It ennobles, sanctifies, elevates. Why does someone like Morse insist that gay people cannot be a part of this?

It's all about the emotional needs and wants of the couple. But marriage, as a state institution, is not about anything but public benefit. And before anybody bothers asking, yes, I have known monogomous gay couples who were pretty obviously committed to each other. Should the state have supported their relationship in some way? That's an interesting question. Should the state have mixed them in and given them the state status as heterosexual married couples? Absolutely not.

Why I Love Macs II

Evan Kirchoff explains a great deal about why Microsoft has always been an "almost great" company. The money quote

It is, however, typical for Microsoft to choose to focus intensely on something, carry a solution to within striking distance of greatness, and then wander away distractedly like a bird spotting a shiny object. This is not a company that sweats the small stuff, or any stuff below the mid-sized.

Exactly.

Macintosh, on the other hand, is a brand whose greatest value proposition is sweating the small stuff. Now that it's plunked itself at the heart of the Unix world (Mac OS X is at heart an implementation of FreeBSD for PPC), it's going to be interesting to see how their sweat the user interaction details will work out with Unix' traditional attitude of sweat the technical details but not the UI.

Inspector v. Spymaster

Who do you trust to get it right? The inspector is Hans Blix, in charge of various Iraq inspections. The spymaster is Mihai Pacepa, who was in charge of writing some of the standard WMD hiding plans for Soviet bloc countries (of which Iraq, doctrinally, has remained).

The real surprise for me has been that nobody seems to have been asking the IGC whether or not there has been evidence uncovered of a hiding plan consistent with Pacepa's claim that such plans were standard operating procedure. Or, if those questions have been asked by the press, nobody's reporting the answers.

Supporting Citizen Oversight of Legislation

Hellblazer writes here an anguished cry over the horrible budget process. His politics aren't necessarily my cup of tea but this is a situation that transcends party politics. Both parties do the same sad omnibus bills filled with unwise and unnecessary goodies (Democrats, most recently in 1992-1994, Republicans right now). Stuff like this disappears when exposed to the light of public opinion but the legislation is so big and it's so hard to figure out who did what and when that shining the light on these bad practices is hard to do and expensive.

But this, at heart, is an information systems problem. I've long thought that something tailored to the political process that functioned something like CVS for version control would be a useful bit of citizen oversight. After that, you just need someone to be ballsy enough on final passage to require an actual reading of the bill.

You run a diff (a listing command that highlights the differences between two versions of the same document, short for differential) to spot all the last minute pork that's been inserted and you light up the US Capitol switchboard like a christmas tree before they're halfway through the reading. Put a thousand calls in on the same subject demanding a no vote on the pork and you have a very cowed legisltor.

435 legislators can't stop the shenanigans. They don't have the tools or the manpower even if they want to do it. 10k of volunteers could if they had access to the legislation and version control to spot the last minute funny business. The tool is probably 40% written already in various open source repositories.

Note: I'm not talking about party here. This isn't about party. It's about taking control of out of control spending.

Robotic UN Field Personnel?

One of the major problems with current UN operations in Iraq is that the UN is in Cyprus and they are unable to go out into the field, to speak to and talk to people who are not able to get to a telephone. There might be a solution for this dilemma in development. If you add a satellite communication videoconference setup, you might have something that is mobile enough to get out and about without risking your life and if the robot is attacked, it could always send out an position and condition SOS on military frequencies.

I'm quite sure that Sony would be willing to part with the technology for Qrio for such a prestigious role. It certainly would bring them lots of visibility as long as they could figure out how to power the thing in primitive conditions long enough to be useful.

Wanted: A Department of Anarchy IV

The main objection in discussion I've had on the idea of a DepartmentofAnarchy has been on the line that it is not original and has always been stymied by the natural forces that create "captured" departments, that sad process where the watchers become sympathetic to the watched to the point where they are in desperate need of treatment for their full blown Stockholm Syndrome.

The solution (now that it's stewed around the back of my head for a few months) seems simple, make the Department be headed by an elective officeholder. Of course this makes the actual creation of such institutions harder but it does give the people the ability to renew the institution as officeholders get 'captured' and no longer serve as effective promoters of efficiency, justice, and freedom.

What is Saddam Hussein

Is Saddam:

1. The political leader of the legitimate government of Iraq
2. The military leader of the legitimate government of Iraq
3. The political leader of a legitimate party in a civil war
4. The military leader of a legitimate party in a civil war
5. The leader of a gang of outlaws, political, spiritual, or military

I'm not a lawyer but in my research and reading I haven't been able to tell definitively what Saddam is, nor have I found any sort of treatise that outlines how people who are in one condition change to become another. It is actually possible that Saddam Hussein has occupied all five roles in 2003. It's possible that he's occupied more than two of the five simultaneously if you tote up the perspective of different permanent members of the UN security council.

Wouldn't it be a blast if somebody asked that? Wouldn't it be even better if it was settled in time for the next push to dethrone a tyrant?

We're Still a Republic

James Pinkerton's most recent article simply assumes an Imperial US. He really should read up more on history. The descent of Republican Rome into Imperial Rome did not hinge on Roman boots going past their original borders. Rome as republic was quite active militarily. What converted Rome from Republic to Empire was the erosion of the polity, a lessening of republican spirit, and a strong leader that was capable of moving the nation from one system to the other.

The scope and audacity of his assumptions is breathtaking. With some measured analysis, it's clearly unsustainable.

Benjamin Fra