Flit(tm)

Correspondence: Jonah Goldberg

In regards to your recent column I think you're not giving Bush credit for what he's doing. Beyond the political grandstanding problem that you rightly point out will likely afflict an investigation into the intelligence failures of the CIA et al there is another problem, one that you yourself have fallen prey to and it seems to be a common failing in the US. The destructive temptation is to go off half cocked, to call for heads on pikes all around and to destroy careers and lives without first going to the trouble to not only understand that something is deeply wrong, but the specific problem that needs fixing and who materially contributed to that problem.

Do we have the answers to these questions? Are you confident that we are not going to besmirch and destroy the reputations of honest patriots in the intelligence bureaucracy whose major fault is being less adept at the CYA internal blame game? I'm not confident of that and the idea of rushing to the head of the mob and storming the intelligence castles without knowing precisely what we're doing fills me with a certain dread.

There is a 9/11 commission which will report soon. After it reports, resignations will likely be in order and those resignations will not cause the damage to our government they would have caused if they would have been demanded before the results of the commission are published.

It appears that there will likely be a subsequent investigation into systemic failures in intelligence gathering. It is vital that an investigation is as sober and as free of grandstanding as possible with investigation first, trial afterward, and only then a verdict. The verdict has already been reached by many. Is it really just pique that President Bush resists giving in to a witch hunt mentality?

Campaign Finance

On the bright side, the news media is honest. They actually believed the idea that if you are miles ahead in fundraising, you are a shoe-in for election. This explains their reaction to Dean and their virtual coronation of him before Iowans started to pay serious attention to the race.

On the even brighter side, the news media was completely wrong. The best funded candidate didn't win. He didn't even come in second. Dean's implosion has got to give Mitch McConnell, campaign finance reform's enemy number one, a real sense of satisfaction. When there is a serious discrepancy between fundraising prowess and attractiveness as a candidate, the money didn't save Dean much as it doesn't save most people in Dean's position.

On the dark side is the virtual certainty that most news media didn't notice the puncturing of the underlying assumptions behind McCain Feingold and will be just as sure next time that funds are everything, and are very likely to be wrong once again.

Renaming Suicide Bombers

Samizdata has an article out on renaming suicide bombers to something more useful. Unfortunately, most of the suggestions tend to minimize the bombers' humanity. My own reply below:

The renaming impulse is all wrong and actually helps the islamists. Instead of minimizing their humanity we should be emphasizing it and noting that the theologians who support this are supporting a faith of nihilism and death that, in Islam's own tradition, marks them for intense pressure culminating in fatwas that call for their own deaths. If they're not human, it lets the imams who try to recruit people into that mindset off the hook and in business.

I don't have an actual new name but something that I'd be happy with would make and emphasize the svengali/koresh/stockholm/Jim Jones aspect to the whole thing. By Islam's rules, they should be slitting these imams' throats for persistently encouraging this sort of thing. I'd be more than happy for them to stop short of that and reform but if it takes some slit throats to stop it, I'm ok with that.

Go over and suggest your own reforms. I think it's urgent that the islamic world come to its senses and realize that these imams encouraging nihilism under cover of Islam are, literally, satanic. And that term is used in a context that is technical, not pejorative and covers theology that was established in the time of monotheistic unity, ie prophets upon whom Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all agree on.

Believe it or not, this is the only strategy we actually have for eliminating the threat of suicide bombings. No spiritual warfare, and there will never be an end to the tactic. Unlike thuggee, we can't just jail all the muslims, nor should we want to.

Thank You France: International Plague

The PRC is probably the most problematic country when it comes to infectious diseases. It's got both a large territory and a huge population. And it's been cursed with a secretive government that is embarrassed by its public health failures which has the perverse effect of making them much worse. As diseases emerge, they often emerge in the PRC and the delay in instituting traditional public health clamp downs means that the cost and body count go much higher than is necessary, but apparently not for much longer.

The Pasteur Institute is recognized around the world as a leader in health and it will be extending that expertise into the PRC when it opens up a branch there with a mixed french and chinese staff and promises of autonomy and an institutional policy that "will respect Pasteur values" which has always put health first embarrassment second.

This is a major step towards guarding against the worrisome prospect of international plague outbreaks. It's always nice to see the french showing what they're capable of doing on the positive side. They're not all bonehead ankle biters. May they get a leadership that reflects that reality, and soon.

Taking Advantage of Amnesia

This David Frum diary entry got me to thinking. A correspondent suggests that the nature of intelligence might be of such ambiguous character that getting things as wrong as they seem to have been gotten in Iraq is a pretty common circumstance, that intelligence is more like reading tea leaves than any hard science.

What occurs to me is that with a couple of hundred years of history, it should be relatively easy to take important episodes of US intelligence where the decision makers had as ambiguous evidence as existed in Iraq and present such scenarios for people to issue their own judgments and see how well they did. This wouldn't work in a very historically literate populace but the historical amnesia of modern US popular culture works to advantage here. Think of it as something similar to America's Army but for intelligence analysis.

Encryption Provocation

The Internet was conceived as a messaging system for the reliable transmission of war orders in the middle of a nuclear conflict. The killer applications that actually promoted it to worldwide must-have were e-mail, ftp, and the web which made it an electronic replacement for the post office, parcel post, and mass media, respectively.

The point of the history is that you never know when you make a basic tool, what higher level application will develop to take advantage of your basic technology and turn your scientific curiosity into a new global essential. One of the things that private key infrastructure (PKI) makers have long pondered is what would make their products universal. After all, who likes to have their mail read? But year in, year out, the vast majority of e-mail users are content to send the electronic equivalent of postcards to each other. The minor hassle of encrypting mail has not been worth it outside authoritarian states that have enough freedom so there is e-mail but are bad enough that there is a broad need for secrecy as a weapon against the government. With the fall of the soviet bloc and the subsequent spread of freedom, that justification died down.

Well, now we have a new villian that will likely drive people to the widespread use of encryption and it's an unlikely villain, big music pushing its IP rights beyond what people instinctively feel advances the arts and sciences have led to a sagebrush rebellion of file swappers opting out of paying for music. And the more that the RIAA and other national artistic associations push, the more that encryption becomes a necessity in the free world. The demand will likely grow to the point where encryption becomes a system level service that is interoperable across computing platforms.

At that point, with the ability to encrypt everything by default, the computing world changes drastically. How that change will play out is anyone's guess. That it will be important and play out differently in different fields is an easy prediction.

HT: Good Morning Silicon Valley

Freedom != Anarchy

Glenn Reynold's links to an important article by Amir Taheri. In it Taheri notes that a great number of people identify Iraq as sliding into anarchy and becoming chaotic. On the contrary, Taheri points out that what arabs view as chaos are really the normal workings of a free society. In fact, Iraqi politics is a great deal more polite than some mature free societies are.

I've noted before that the enemies of freedom always try to label it anarchy and chaos. In fact, I have a series proposing a Department of Anarchy to enhance and institutionalize the pro-freedom impulse. It's both encouraging that Iraq is showing visible signs of a boisterous and healthy political culture. It's sad that so many other arabs seem afraid of the consequences, as if they do not trust themselves to take their place among nations as free people.

Elections 2004 Personal Preference List

I just took this quiz on which presidential candidate I'm most compatible with (Democrats and Republicans listed only). The top of the list was expected, Bush but the % agreed was surprising as were some of the choices lower on the list. I never would have guessed I'm more of a Clark voter than a Dean man. The biggest surprise for me? Sharpton didn't come last, but that's only because I always seem to forget that Kucinich is still running.

My results:
Score Candidate
100% Bush
47% Lieberman
35% Edwards
31% Clark
30% Dean
28% Kerry
27% Sharpton
10% Kucinich

HT: Daniel Drezner

Mormon Insanity

Coldest day in the year, it hurts to breathe outside, and I've got two mormon girls going door to door and endangering their health. It's way below zero today and they're going to get hurt. Whoever sent them out on a day like this is irresponsible or crazy.

The Cure For Left Wing Architects

Over at Samizdata, this article provides a good overview at the effects of the current architectural process in tilting towards statist politics.

Architects are planners. Forgive me yet another obvious assertion but the point is that there is little that the architect imagines cannot be planned. If you can design a house, you can design furniture for that house or the city in which that house is located, so goes the thinking. If a chair, a house, a city, why not an economy?

I think that, to a great extent, the problem of zoning and the problem of leftist politics is a problem of the primitive state of the architectural specification document. A vague, simple request "build me an office building for 500 people" becomes a veritable blank slate for the architect to imagine that he can behave as a little Stalin, redrawing border at whim, a miniature Pol Pot moving entire populations to his decree, the power is positively giddy and the blank sheet of paper is a good analogue for the vision of mankind as mere modeling clay to be shaped to the architect's desire.

In order to keep down the negative externalities of maniacal architects and aesthetically twisted and nasty, vengeful owners, zoning was instituted. But wouldn't the process of societal accommodation be furthered by opening up the spec document instead? Wouldn't the aesthetic impulse be better spent on the front end in presenting an architect with a rich document that will sail through the neighborhood approval process rather than a spare document that creates the illusion that the community interests are only a barrier that must be crossed in the political process of plan approval?

There may indeed be an architectural vocation, but imagining the task of creating community as being like a Michelangelo working on his statuary does violence to the communitarian essence of architecture. Instead of the artist in the salon, architects would do well to look at Wikimedia's construction style. I am amazed at Wikipedia and will occasionally contribute minor improvements where I can. For the most part they are accepted but I've been ruthlessly excised where I've transgressed.

There is no reason for a community not to build and rework their physical infrastructure in a similar manner. Certainly moving cement and wood around is a great deal slower and more expensive than slinging electrons around but the same voluntary community spirit would produce good results. And it would certainly be more participative, more efficient, and less expensive than the complicated zoning board process that plagues so many decisions currently.

Indispensable Leaders Give Me the Creeps

Jay Nordlinger's Davos Journals finish up today and he spends a good bit of time talking about Musharref, naming him an indispensable leader. The idea of indispensability always worries me. In a nuclear armed nation, it positively creeps me out. It wouldn't take more than a few seconds for an average politically engaged US citizen to think of 5 americans who could run the country without being a disaster. This sort of bench strength makes assassination a somewhat stupid tactic and largely the province of the insane. There is no rational reason to kill a president if you haven't created any measurable instability if you succeed.

This basic fungibility of leadership is highly protective both of world stability and of the personal safety of political leadership. Bush gets assassinated and replaced by Cheney. And what, pray tell, will change for Al Queda? There wouldn't be very many good results at all so why bother?

In a nation that has an indispensable ruler, much less a worldwide block with such a leader, the lack of bench depth increases the utility of assassination. Musharraf goes and it's a mystery who would follow him. It's not like India who have leaders springing from recognized political blocs who will likely carry on similar policies after a leadership change. Pakistan, and Russia too for that matter, lacks a well known bench and a stable institutional base that would continue present policy. It is only when the major parties accept a basic consensus of what national interest and national policy should be that the world can breathe a bit easier.

I would love to hear of a survey of Pakistan's elite to see what is the leadership bench in Pakistan. One of Musharraf's tasks in preparing for a return to democracy would be encouraging the development of a very good, very deep bench that is willing to coalesce around a predictable core foreign policy of consensus national interest. It would be a tremendous step forward for Pakistan that would both enhance the country's international standing and its internal stability.

What Rush Doesn't Get

On my way to the hospital today, I was tuned in to Rush's program and I caught him complaining about how he couldn't understand how adding a benefit could slow down the growth of government. The analysis is simple if you measure the right things but there's a great deal of double counting in the current medicare debate and I think that's the source of Rush's confusion.

Coronary bypass surgery costs somewhere between $22k and $24k. If a senior has heart disease, the US government is currently on the hook for it and pays for that very expensive operation. On the other hand, a lot of those operations can be eliminated by the use of drugs, which seem to cost an average of $220 a month or $2640 per year. That's a considerably cheaper solution, especially when you consider that in the 8-9 years you're putting off an operation and saving money, some seniors will die of other causes (reducing expenses) while among the surgery crowd others will need a second operation because their arteries clog again. For seniors, there's a fairly high economic value to not front loading your expenses.

What the government does by putting taxpayers on the hook only for the more expensive operations is they encourage the wasteful use of the surgeon's knife rather than the more efficient pharmacist's prescription. This is a cost distorting incentive that has been around since the pharmaceutical revolution started to kick into high gear and pills started to heavily displace operations in normal medicine.

Where fiscal conservatives get tripped up is that while they correctly estimate growth in the government expenditure of pills, they do not believe that any cost savings will be coming down the pike on medicare funded surgical procedures. Cost savings have proven illusory before but the entirely natural reluctance of patients to go under the knife will lead to a pretty big uptick in medical (pill based) management.

Primary care physicians will also have an incentive to limit their surgical referrals. Surgical money does not go into their pockets, but into the pockets of the referred surgical team. There is no incentive for over referral, in fact, there is a negative financial incentive to do so.

Rush isn't alone in mistaking the costs. What I believe is going on is that the Bush people decided that Medicare could better serve its customer at less net cost while simultaneously becoming more compatible with future privatization by adding the drug benefit. Having that plus plan choice plus HSAs makes the bill that was signed into law a long term win for those who want a smaller government.

Baby Blogging III

I don't pretend I'll ever truly understand women. As I went in the OR, I get one little death threat and that's it on the unhappiness parade as she get's sliced and fileted (otherwise known as a cesarean section. She wanted me there with her though I can't figure out why.

Well, she made it through the operation and hopefully will forget to "kill me later". She usually does, God bless her.

Baby Blogging II

Cut her up, sew her up, take a baby out in between, I never feel I'm as useless as when I'm in the operating room with my wife. I really have only one role (besides taking a bit of abuse). If things were to go very badly, I have the job of saying who lives, and who dies. That's it, my minor errand in the affair, judge of who shall live and who shall die.

Thank God I was useless.

Baby Blogging I

Alma Lutas, born 9 lbs 2 ounces (4.153Kg) joined the family today at 02.58 CST. Healthy, beautiful, and remarkably good tempered. She's my littlest girl and I love her.

Enough gushing. More serious baby blogging to come.

Gone To Hospital

Baby's breech, previous c-section, for those who believe pray for our health.

Bush Confusion

This Spinsanity item debunks a Dean charge that President George W Bush kicked 84k students off the Pell Grant program. What happened was that in 1992, under President George HW Bush, the current president's father, a law was passed to annually update certain state tax data that's used to determine eligibility for Pell Grants.

The Clinton administration never implemented the law, though they did not have any legal right to do so. With the new administration coming in, they decided to end this illegal defiance and did an update from the 1988 (!) data that had been used to that point. Accumulated changes meant that the old inaccurate formulas gave roughly 84k students who shouldn't have had Pell grants participate in the program. Dean called the entire affair the consequences of Bush tax policy. In a way, he's right. He's just got the wrong Bush.

Public Health Disaster in the Making?

This rather alarming warning about a 1918 level flu virus mutation. In this season of worrying about terrorist attacks, it's essential that we don't forget that a natural little virus can out kill a conventional world war.

So, are we any better prepared than in 1918? Do we really want to solve our pensions crisis by letting so many of the pensioners die? Apparently, the life expectancy of the US dropped 10 years with that one major flu outbreak.

The 'on the other hand' problem is panic. We've gone decades without a major outbreak. Starting a panic could lead to economic problems and a lot of scared, angry people who have little to really worry about.

HT: RealClear Politics

Current Democrat Delegate Counts

In voting for president, its often useful to remind yourself, it's the delegates that count.

CNN has a 2004 delegate count page. The rankings might surprise you. Kerry's gaining, but despite two first place wins, Dean's actually winning the delegate race right now based on his strong showing in reeling in superdelegates. This won't hold up forever but if Kerry doesn't get enough of a financial bump to properly contest the next round of primaries, he very well could fade.

Keep an eye on the delegates.

Personal Stress Reaction

There will be random strangeness occurring over the next three days here. Stop in anyway, you may find it entertaining but sometime during that time period, I'll be welcoming a new addition to my family. If the ultrasound's right, it'll be Alma Lutas (no middle name) coming to joing her big brother and sister George and Maria (also no middle name)

Sometimes stress causes me to write, sometimes it shuts my muse right down, it's extremely variable. And then the subject matter gets even more variable as my mind flits from subject to subject. Oh my, I've actually made a posting link to the name of this blog. I never thought that would happen.

See what I mean by the variability thing?

Approving Constitutions

Steven Den Beste is shocked and appalled over this article describing referenda as a gamble that does not guarantee a positive result.

I'm inclined not to be so panicky. I think, instead, that both methods of passing judgment are flawed, though SDB's favored solution of referenda is closer to right than the EU elite class's reliance on parliamentary passage.

The flaw with referenda is that it is the voice of the mob and the mob can be misled by slick confidence men into making unwise decisions. This is less true than it was in 1789 at the passage of the US Constitution but it still does have some truth to it. But politicians are often elected not for their judgment but for their ability to milk the state teat for all its worth on behalf of their constituents and damn the national interest. Can such a politician be seriously relied upon to do what is right and good in the case of a momentous decision like the adoption of a constitution? I don't think so. They are at least as flawed an arbiter of such questions as the mass of people and even more dangerous.

You can see the bribes offered to the people. Their mass distribution means that they will probably be discovered, before or shortly after the referendum. But politicians who are money oriented can be swayed in much quieter ways.

The solution is a third system which is to convoke a constitutional convention, electing people with the sole task of passing judgment on the constitution. No doubt that this will include a good portion of the political elite but a "Senator Pothole" who concentrates on road repair and other such practicalities will likely be left off the list selected by the people. Other figures who are important intellectually but usually are not tempted to enter the political realm might also become delegates. Laurence Tribe and Robert Bork will never make it to the legislature but I can see them making it to a constitutional convention.

Constitutions are special documents and deserve special consideration. Just ramming an approval through a national legislature is not satisfying but neither is the blunt yes or no of a referendum. There is a third way out but nobody in Europe seems to be interested.

The Limits of Economics

This voluntary cannibalism thing just bugs me. Besides posting on the idea of human ownership, I'm bothered with the idea that ultimate ends are a proper study of economics. Economics is essentially the science of resource allocation. But ultimate ends are not resources, only means are.

I started off by leaving this in comments to the economics of cannibalism story:

Another argument is that economics does not apply to the subject. Economics is the rationing of resources. That a person's time is a resource is fairly well established and subject to the rules of economics. That a person is a resource to be disposed of according to economic rules is not established in the least. Are people means to an end or ends in and of themselves. If they are ends, cannibalism cannot be properly the subject of economics.

People's acquisition and expense of resources are all in service to an ultimate end and that end, when traced back as far as it will go, is usually some pleasure or usefulness to a person or persons. Thus, much of what is economically analyzed as ends are merely subsidiary ends, means to a greater end. There is no greater end than people, no means that they can be properly spent using purely economic analysis. This is why we don't have widespread human medical testing, for example, even though it would save countless lives and accelerate medical progress. Societies (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan) who organize such programs are viewed with horror because they have transgressed into treating ends as means.

The entire premise of the thread is just wrong. Cannibalism has no economics.

There is a thirst for seamless explanations. It partially explains the enduring appeal of the communist as opposed to the capitalist enterprise. Capitalism is an economic system that tends to be paired with certain political and social systems. Communism is a seamless garment that explains politics, economics, and social relations. But the difficulty of creating such a seamless construct, a theory of everything, has meant that so far nobody has succeeded in coming up with such a thing. If somebody ever did, it truly would be the end of history. There would be nothing left to fight over.

Economics is an important science. But unless you turn it into a religion, it does not answer all of life's questions. It certainly doesn't answer the problem of voluntary cannibalism.

Who Owns You?

Who owns you? Do you own yourself or are you the property of someone else. There are three mainstream western answers.

1. Libertarian: You own yourself
2. Authoritarian/Secularist: The state owns you
3. Monotheist/Religious: God owns you

The third is actually most flexible because God, through the provision of free will, is the most absentee of landlords so being owned by God isn't, in the normal course of affairs, very much different than being self-owned. Being owned by the state justifies all sorts of statutes, some wise, some not so wise. And being self-owned is generally fine for everyday use though you do get into some difficulty around the margins where people are calmly, rationally discussing the circumstances in which it is ok to eat someone else.

I'm a follower of the third alternative, God owns me, in a way that's heavily influenced by the idea that He's given me free reign to develop myself in a direction of my choosing short of very broad limits. These limits mostly consist of self-harm.

I would suggest that the further down the road to self-ownership you travel, the more circumstances you will find that present viscerally horrifying things that this model has no way of dealing with. Now such a reaction could be that one is just too squeamish but it can also be that your native common sense is telling you something that your intellectual framework just isn't built to handle and that it's your intellectual framework that needs to give.

HT: Brownian Notions

Acts of War

If Canada sent thousands of agents into the US to influence our elections, it would be illegal. If they persisted, no doubt war would be declared. It would be a clear regional threat to national security and a fit topic for the UN Security Council to address and authorize action.

So why do things change when it is "thousands of Iranian-sponsored operatives all over your country" and the country these agents roam over is Iraq? Certainly the importance to the world's economy of Iraq's and Iran's combined oil might raise this to a level of general worldwide concern.

If it were just money, things would be bad enough but it's likely that Syria's advocacy of a "Lebanon strategy" has landed in some willing ears. Whether Syria itself is pursuing the strategy is unclear, that somebody is doing it is perfectly obvious.

In June, Iraq will regain its sovereignty. The UNSC, no matter how badly it feels about the United States, will likely have this issue of foreign attempts at political and military takeover land in its lap shortly thereafter. Is there even a shred of hope that the UN would answer the call?

Fixing Corruption

From John Ashcroft's Davos speech as commented by Jay Nordlinger:

And third, information. Simple information, he says — mere information — is a powerful enemy of corruption. He cites a striking example from Uganda: Only 28 percent of the money was getting to the schools for which it was designated. Then the government had the bright idea of publishing, in the local papers, the amount of money allocated to each school. Miraculously, the amounts actually reaching the schools climbed to 90 percent. So the mere publication of information caused the money for schools to triple.

There's much more worthwhile stuff there but I thought I'd mention just this one because the implications are profound. In a country racked by cynicism and corruption just publishing the actual figures of how much money should be getting to the school shamed and frightened the thieves into cutting their thefts.

German Indentured Servitude

In an overall excellent article on the new FRG military reforms comes this shocker:

But this is a classic example of that old rule that when a committee starts out to draw a horse, it produces a camel. The hands of committees of politicians are all over this. Struck had initially spoken of scrapping the German draft, but this plan retains it, pleading that the next election of 2006 should precede such a decision. The reality is that the Health minister, whose hospitals depend on the 90,000 young Germans who choose voluntary welfare service rather than a military uniform for the conscription term, blanched at the thought of the costs of replacing them.

Martin Walker, the Washington Bureau Chief of the UPI has a great story there. Essentially the draft is a specialized form of indentured servitude. It is required to gather people for the highly dangerous job of risking life and limb for your country. General western opinion is that even this dangerous task is better done via a committed staff of volunteers. To maintain a system of conscription in order to fill personnel slots in the health care system reveals a deep economic and moral bankruptcy. It says, we can't fund our own health care without enslaving people to serve as involuntary workers and we don't care what the moral implications of this involuntary servitude is.

Battlefield 'Net

The battlefield data network has often been highlighted in military science fiction such as David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series. But now this seems to be transitioning into current military science fact. The essential (but stubbornly not permalinked) StrategyPage provides a good description of the Small Tactical Arms Recognition Equipment (STARE) system that is moving into the US arsenal. A good STARE data sheet is available in PDF as well (this time from SMDC).

Eventually, Chief Wiggles is going to get his turn in the "how do we do this electronically" development cycle and I suspect that instead of meeting informants at a gate in future, the US will seed occupied zones with wireless internet access devices and airborne network points. Such devices will be distributed with FAQs of curfews and other occupation orders, occupation etiquette such as what to do if you're stopped for a search and how to make the process the quickest and least unpleasant it can be, and various programs for receiving food and other necessities. But the same devices also give the ability to report illness and injury, request compensation for US military damage, and do occupation currency transfers to help restart the local economy. From a military intelligence perspective, it will allow established informants to report in without leaving their homes and will cause no shortage of worries for insurgents because these things will be cheap and will be everywhere.

I've written about this stuff before under the heading occupation tech and it's likely the most neglected part of military transformation. The US is barely starting to wake up to the need to reconfigure and focus on occupation operations in destroyed or failed states. The IT implications of this are large and they have both strictly civilian and dual use implications.

Virtual Currencies

101-280 points to a fascinating new service in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) add ons, a foreign exchange market. Right now it's a little acorn but it's likely that low commissions and specialized facilities will permit this initiative, or a future competitor, from unseating ebay and the other general goods online markets from their dominance in the virtual goods trade.

Essentially, the trade in virtual goods and currencies is a highly specialized form of trade in entertainment goods. The essence of buying a korean soap opera or a 100k purchase of Star Wars Galaxies credits is the same. It's just that the liguidity of SWG credits, being produced as well as consumed, is much higher and the follow on trade will be much higher because, unlike the soap opera, SWG is an artistic endeavor that is a collaborative process. People not only consume the art, as art, but also play small or even large roles in creating it.

There does not seem to be any enforceable legal restraint that MMORPGs can do to prevent such virtual goods trading. The only thing that I can see that would handle the game balance problems that such trading would create would be to make a more realistic economic system with a high charity component that fades out as you gain resources, especially if you gain them quickly. Poor and new players get lots of things out of pity 'on the house' so to speak. But accumulate treasure and everybody is nickle and diming you on everything, the tax man is taking a hefty chunk, and things get expensive. It would be a way of asserting balance without going into motive, why did xyz player give up their incredibly valuable weapon to Mr. nondescript new player? It becomes irrelevant as an army of merchants, beggers, toll takers, and other NPCs descends on the newly wealthy like a piranha school on a bleeding cow in the Amazon.

Gay Marriage Update III

Stanley Kurtz has an excellent article on the history of gay marriage in the Scandinavian countries and the impending dissolution of the institution of marriage in Scandinavia.

One thing that struck me is the utter failure of christianity to go on the offensive in propagating the institution of marriage. Christianity is a faith whose charge is to spread the word throughout the world. You would think the dissolution of marriage into a sea of cohabiting couples would create alarm, organization, and a counterattack not only to gain back the territory lost but spread and deepen the christian message. Instead, the scandinavian churches have largely failed to even hold the line, much less create any sort of gain for their message. They reveal themselves as impotent and hollow institutions badly in need of regeneration and renewal.

What Made the British an Empire?

Bruce Rolston brings up more than crucial point in the US Republic/Empire debate in his recent post fisking David Frum. A great many people who declare the US an empire actually do believe that the US is merely on the road and use the formula as a sort of shorthand.

I think that Bruce may be underexposed to moonbats because, unarguably and from personal experience, I can say that there are people who think that the US is an actual empire today. It would be useful to have some sort of way to verbally segregate these people from the "on the road" contingent (who I freely admit is likely to make up a large majority of empire worriers) so they are not easily confused. The moonbats profit from any confusion and they don't need encouragement.

Further down in the article, he talks about the British Empire's distinct lack of crucifixion fetish and the lack of roads lined with executions in progress as object lessons to the colonials. This is all very true but it really begs the question of what were the essential characteristics of membership in the empire and does the relationship between the US and a country like Turkey share any or all of these essential characteristics.

In my own list, I would have to put in first place the lack of a foreign policy. If a territory leaves foreign relations to others as a matter of law, it is no longer an independent state but a member of a larger entity. Another thing that would be high on my list would be a lack of control over your borders. If you can't stop the roman legions from going in and out of your territory as they please, you're part of Rome.

This last point brings us to our first difficulty. Can Luxembourg meaningfully stop the US from crossing? It cannot do it physically, to be sure. Any resistance would largely be symbolic. But that's true for most nations in the world. Is Canada part of the US empire because it could not win a war against the US? Clearly it is not. It would be the legitimateness of the resistance, as recognized by everybody including the US, not its ultimate success or failure that determine whether it is today a member of a US empire.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of the empire/republic debate. I strongly suspect that Bruce Rolston and I are on the same (republican) side. The moonbats that are out there have the advantage that they are obsessive on the topic and can churn out an awful lot of words. It is no inconsiderable advantage and, I suspect, is what prompted David Frum's original point.

I don't reflexively defend Frum. I think that he's dead wrong on the national ID card and on Palestine. The existence of a thriving death cult is a grave national security threat because there is no guarantee that the object of that death cult will stay limited to other targets (Israel in this case) nor that intellectual arguments in its favor would not spread to the wider world and replicate itself. But on the empire question, I think that his argument is largely with the moonbats, not the more responsible "on the road" crowd. In that anti-moonbat posturing, I would support him.

A Minarchist Approach to Homelessness

Let's say that this program actually solves the problem of homelessness for the mentally ill and drug abusers who dominate the hard core of those permanently without shelter at a reasonable cost. Currently the program is funded by a mishmash of public and private funding sources.

The problem with public funding is threefold. Political pressures to cut spending may yield across the board cuts that hamstring a program. Isolating a working charitable institution from such pressures is a positive step. But even with stable funding enshrined into law, it is neither right, nor just to force people who may be on the brink of homelessness themselves to pay for such an effort. But worst of all, public funding brings along with it a restriction on the obligations you can require of participants in the program. I can easily see how the ACLU might bring a lawsuit that a rent paying publicly funded housing unit cannot lock out its residents as the Ohio program does.

A superior solution would be to establish a fund that would invest and out of the profits of those investments pay for these housing units and the staff required to keep them properly running. Those who would seed this fund would know their own finances and could afford their contributions. Societal generosity would create the conditions for a decent program to continue without having to worry about political support and the legal limitations that public funding sometimes brings would be eliminated.

Update:
I should have posted my source material, Dean's World

Bush's Bodyguard of Lies

Churchill is famous for having said during WW II that "the truth is so precious it must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies." The deceptions surrounding war are often crucial to its successful prosecution.

George W Bush has obviously taken Churchill's observation to heart. The serious press and independent analysts have often turned to the task of figuring out what the overarching strategy is. Those on the left have concentrated on the idea that there is no strategy, that Bush is an idiot. I beg to differ and have, in various articles, laid out my idea that Thomas Barnett's Naval War College work is the public face of our government's decision to adopt a grand strategy that must be serialized. That, even with our awesome power as the strongest military supported by the strongest economy in the world, the task is too big for such a strategy to be outlined publicly.

There are still coalitions of other countries possible that could make our task much more difficult, even impossible. They must not become alarmed, to think we really mean to do what we would have said which essentially to upset all the apple carts of the national and international exploiters.

But Steven Den Beste's current effort points out a sad side effect of this necessary dissembling. It shatters the possibility of national consensus. It creates a situation where the left, which would naturally support such a grand project, has come largely to despise and oppose it because they do not understand that it even exists. It leaves me with my only nit to pick on SDB's essay. He says:

But I disagree with Annelise on the actual cause. She thinks it is poverty which is the problem, and correctly judges that our current policy doesn't address it. I think the problem is failure, and that our current policy is exactly right.

SDB is right when he says that failure is the problem and I took a slightly different tack at the same problem with my liberty tree series. But he is not right when he says that poverty is not addressed by the current plan.

Free men do not stay poor except by choice and by personal disaster. And the number of people impoverished by choice is usually limited to the religious communities of monks and those beset by natural disaster are only temporarily thrust into poverty and are given a helping hand via charity. Poverty is addressed by providing for the tools to liberate people from the tyrants who have done so much to keep them poor.

Our nation cannot forge a consensus over this project because it is not publicly proclaimed. The project cannot be publicly proclaimed because it would fail if it were declared. The only out is for the government to hint at what we wish to do and for outsiders to carry the torch, to help forge the consensus. This is the small task that the keyboard jockeys of the blogging world can materially contribute to progress in the War on Terror.

Romanian Moms on the March

Sometimes Burke's little platoons can rise up from the most unexpected places. About Kids is a romanian language forum that deals with standard problems that any parent all over the world can understand and sympathize with. But there are some specific problems that pop up that are unique to Romania.

How much is the proper bribe to get the cleaning staff to actually change your hospital bed sheets is just one example of a whole host of 'gratuity' questions in this poor country with a largely socialized medical system. You would laugh at it, if it didn't break your heart to read about people who don't have money for heat type away at their work accounts and describe the bribe schedule they needed to meet for proper delivery care in the "universal health care" system.

A romanian after her first trip abroad, looks at home with newly opened eyes, remarking that she never realized how stressed everybody was, how grey her surroundings were, how sad everybody looked, until she saw a society (she went to the UK) in the west. Imagine going to the gray skies, wet London and seeing a quantum increase in smiling cheerfulness and a colorful surrounding.

And as the complaints pile up of diverted funds, a lack of political accountability for government misdeeds, and the generally horrible conditions that young parents have to face, they're starting to talk about organizing because they know that when there is money for four programs but five compete for that money, it's their program that's going to go underfunded or completely unfunded.

Why there is no money is, of course, that three of those programs shouldn't exist in their current form and the tax money that could theoretically pay for all of it is siphoned off, to a great extent, in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for overlooking accounting irregularities.

but there is little accountability because politicians are elected on party lists. It is impossible to vote for some members of a party but not others. It's all or none and all of the political turkeys are high up on the lists.

Everybody knows the solution, a constitutional amendment to mandate individual member districts. Everybody also knows that such legislation is not a priority for the currently elected political class. They like the current system just fine.

Hizb ut Tahrir

The Argus has a pointer to an article on HT that does nothing to reassure me.

At best, Hizb ut Tahrir seems to be an organization without a fixed ideological position on freedom or modernity, just a desire to create some sort of constructive opposition to local tyrants. The big bad US is on the enemy list, of course, even though the State Department probably is ticking off every regime in Central Asia by refusing to put HT on its terrorist list.

The problem really is that HT's desire for a Caliphate includes the idea of non-Caliphate states paying protection money, literally. That's not going to fly and by what I've read will lead to military conflict between the Caliphate and those refusing to pay tribute.

The opportunity is that since HT doesn't seem to have thought things through very well, there is a window of opportunity for western muslims to demonstrate their commitment to a different vision of Islam. HT seems to be a group that would grasp at anything that would create better living conditions than what they have at present. If US muslims move in, if they care to move in, they have an opportunity to create an allied muslim bloc that would shield them from the idea that only minority muslims who have been surrounded by the kaffirs could adopt such ideas.

Brain Stuck

I've been writing and writing this weekend and it all turns to crud. I expanded my daily blog list in an asian direction and it's affecting how I think. Asians are so different and unfamiliar to me that I never quite know how they are going to jump (even though I have a very good friend who is korean) and there are so many of them on the express train to modernity that only a fool ignores them and their habits. The problem is that when I think, it interferes with current writing output.

I'm still managing to keep my output above my target 3/day average but its tough. It astounds me that the PRC hasn't flown to pieces yet. It shocks me how cruel and indifferent the people of the ROK are to their relatives and co-ethnics in the DPRK. And Japan's trip into demographic suicide territory is being handled in a very puzzling manner to me.

HSA Note

Husband works for company X which has a health plan and the company's benefits plan kicks in $x for health benefits.

Wife works for company Y which has a health plan and the company's benefits plan kicks in $y for health benefits.

Today, the couple compares plans and one of them signs up for the benefit for the entire family and the other declines the benefit.

Whoever declines the benefit essentially is taking a pay cut in their compensation package because their spouse has a better benefits package. This makes no sense at all for me.

Imagine, instead, that the family has an HSA account. Wouldn't it make more sense for both employers to kick in their company portion into the account and that's that? I have no idea if this is current law, but if it isn't, it should be.

Artist Activism

SoonerThought unleashed a whine about how artists are not becoming active politically. It didn't have any comments so I thought I'd add the following:

Actually, I see some artists really starting to make a difference. Look at actor and new governor Arnold Schwarzennegger bucking California's establishment. How about comedian Dennis Miller whose wry commentary and outspoken attacks on tyranny are worked into his art. And then there's John Rhys-Davies who used his role as Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy to launch an impassioned plea in defense of western culture.

Or is the problem not that there are artists active in social commentary but what they're saying discomfits the left?

Art is not a tool of the left or the right. It is the stuff of dreams, which have no politics though they may have political implications. After decades of dominance, the somnolence of the artistic left is additional evidence that the well has run dry for them.

Jews Killing Christ

Relapsed Catholic notes that the ADL seems to be 2004's largest spreader of the meme that jews killed Jesus.

Now I've actually met Catholics who believe in the blood libel, that jews born today are guilty. They were, to a person, ignorant of both recent Catholic thought on the subject and a good deal of ancient thought among the first Church fathers. Such people are usually bigots first and Catholics second but argument from authority actually works in case the order is reversed. For those who want more detail, you can find a great deal at the Vatican website.

One thing you would find there is the following passage:

At the dawn of Christianity, after the crucifixion of Jesus, there arose disputes between the early Church and the Jewish leaders and people who, in their devotion to the Law, on occasion violently opposed the preachers of the Gospel and the first Christians. In the pagan Roman Empire, Jews were legally protected by the privileges granted by the Emperor and the authorities at first made no distinction between Jewish and Christian communities. Soon however, Christians incurred the persecution of the State. Later, when the Emperors themselves converted to Christianity, they at first continued to guarantee Jewish privileges. But Christian mobs who attacked pagan temples sometimes did the same to synagogues, not without being influenced by certain interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people as a whole. "In the Christian world—I do not say on the part of the Church as such—erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people". Such interpretations of the New Testament have been totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council.

Unfortunately, most of the time that you try such persuasion, it doesn't work because for that person their religion is just a convenient cover. Whatever they truly believe in, it generally isn't christian.

Computer Lifespan

I spent a great deal of today shopping for a new computer for my parents. They have been using my old Power Macintosh 6100 for years and it's finally gotten too painful, even for them. Put it this way, it barely can run AOL 4.

My father has always been a photography buff and my mother has always loved photo albums so I can already tell that iPhoto is going to be a real hit. I was surprised, though, at some of my father's questions. He wanted to be able to pull stills from a movie, to burn his own DVD, was interested in listening to an Apple Store lecture on GarageBand. I've known him all my life and my mom's known him longer but I think we were both surprised at the extent and variety of his interests.

I think that a lot of older people are like that, with all sorts of ideas percolating in their heads but no accessible way to get them out. They have no patience for the technical minutiae of getting a computer to work, they just want to do what they want to do with a minimum of fuss and dependence on outside help. I've always known that the demographic existed. I just never figured out how much my father was a member...

Fixed Now

Thanks to this thread and the fine advice of kadyellebee I figured out what the problem was. The mystery is how float:left; ever got taken out of the style sheet in the first place.

ERROR!

I go out, everything's fine. I come back... UGH!

I've been concentrating on the substance end of things and generally leaving the form alone. It looks like I'll have to reverse that for awhile to get the sidebar lined up again.

Please be patient (and come back please).

Congrats Bruce

Congratulations to Bruce Rolston who has taken slings and arrows aplenty for "temporarily bringing another, more hyperactive author onto his page" (that would be me). Despite this horrible error in judgment, he earns Colby Cosh's Canadian blogger of the year award for 2003.

Is Bill Clinton Growing Up? II

More evidence of Bill Clinton growing into the traditional role of former president:

Often he talked in vacuities — vacuities well suited to an international conference (and, indeed, almost its native language) — but often he made direct sense. As he did last year, he praised the Peruvian wiz Hernando de Soto as the world's most important living economist — that he thinks so highly of de Soto, whose cause in life is property rights, and what they can do for every human being, speaks well of him. (Clinton also quipped that "some think 'living economist' is an oxymoron.")

And you may be interested to know that any time he referred to the Bush administration, or alluded to it, it was in a complimentary way. He told this crowd — again, a crowd that could use hearing it, especially from this source — that much of what we're doing, successfully, in the War on Terror never makes the newspapers. For example, "cells are rolled up," which you never hear about. The administration has achieved "cooperation with other governments" that is not "inherently sensational" but "has saved a lot of people's lives." You never hear about this bomb found in this container on this cargo ship destined for this port — and "I could give you 50 other examples."

....

But Clinton was very, very impressive — that's a plain fact, Impromptus-ites — and well worth listening to. As Dick Cheney, I believe, said, at the 2000 convention in Philadelphia: So much talent, so much wasted.

* One final word about Clinton, old slippery Bill: Just as you could never be sure whether he supported the '91 Gulf War, you can't be sure now whether he supported last year's Iraq war. You just can't — which is a little weird, don't you think, given that we all have opinions, and this is an ex-president of the United States.

The truth is that you're not supposed to be able to tell the political opinions of former President's of the United States on important matters of controversy. That Bill Clinton is keeping to that traditional script these days is a positive sign.

The Downside to Being Organized Like the Internet

Everybody marvels at the survivability of the Internet. Al Queda's organizational resemblance to same is providing a lot of business for the ulcer medication people. Here's a relevant part of a recent post on StrategyPage:

Al Qaeda was organized, unintentionally, like the Internet. Al Qaeda has no central headquarters or base. It’s members are scattered in cells all over the planet. You can destroy many parts of al Qaeda, and the organization will reconfigure itself. Al Qaeda members are still trying to pull off spectacular attacks against the "enemies of Islam" (which basically includes everyone who isn't a Moslem.) It will probably take a generation for al Qaeda to fade into utter impotence. In the meantime, the War on Terror will be a low level war that always has the potential to show up in any Americans home town.

I think this overestimates Al Queda qua Al Queda's strength and fixes our attention too strongly on an organization that suffers from an unexamined weakness. Al Queda is not just a network. Al Queda is a community and the rules for community survivability derived from the Internet are far less friendly to Al Queda than the rules on network survivability derived from the Internet.

Below a certain magic point, usually called 'critical mass' any Internet forum will start shrinking and inevitably die out. Often, only a dysfunctional shell remains containing some bitter enders who wonder where everybody else went. The same is likely to happen to Al Queda.

The network of nodes will reconfigure but it will not necessarily reconfigure into the same network or even into the same kind of network. After all, are there any ARPANet nodes around? No, there are not even though I would guess that all or most of the institutions that made up ARPANet are still with us and even some of the physical infrastructure that housed ARPANet (racks, cable conduits, copper in the wall) might still be around but ARPANet's dead and has been for a long time (though it survived as a mostly irrelevant zombie for far longer than most people noticed).

So, you're a cut off Al Queda node. Your link to the mother ship is sitting at Gitmo along with 35% of your membership. Do you want to stick your hand into the meat grinder and reconnect to Al Queda? Or would you rather connect to Hizb ut Tahir which doesn't seem to be attracting so much unwelcome attention?

Obviously local response will differ but you can guess that some people will go back to Al Queda, as the conventional view fears, others will join other groups or maintain isolated independence. This choice is a wave of opportunity. More moderate, actually islamic groups can work to bring these isolated nodes out in from the cold. Radical, ineffective front groups can be created to siphon away support and sucker these isolated nodes into total compromise. The opportunities for counter-intelligence/counter-terrorism work are there but only if you have the right intellectual model.

Al Queda's point of critical mass needs to be discovered and the organization needs to be driven below that point and kept there so it will wither. At the same time there needs to be a cleanup crew to deal with the isolated leftovers and not let them contribute to a new organization's growth and race towards its own appointment with terrorist network critical mass.

Being Fair to the French

We chuckle over the idea of France's heavy investment in religious fashion policing. I wonder, however, if they're not going about things in a more effective way than we've been giving them credit.

For a cosmopolitan muslim who is not a literalist, who is flexible, who isn't likely to be taken in by a pro-terrorist imam, the restriction on head scarves is a nothing, on par with a restriction on ostentatious crosses. But for someone who is at risk, they are likely to get offended at the head scarf ban long before they get to the 'clothing by Semtex' stage. It's a self-selection that allows, at minimum cost, the separation of the sheep from the goats.

It's a very different way from the way we would go about attacking the problem in the US. It is an open question as to whether it will work or not. Requiring imams in France to acquire and maintain the theological flexibility to support head scarf optional women's clothing is a compromise of more significance than you might think. The ancient dhimma style agreements are unanimous. The muslim authorities have the right and the obligation to restrict non-muslim clothing styles, not the other way around. If you're an imam who can tolerate a role reversal on that, is it really very likely that you'll be outraged at the insolence of equal rights and the omission of the head tax?

It's an economy of force move and should be understood and monitored as to its result before being dismissed as ineffective.