Flit(tm)

Gay Marriage Practicalities

Michael Friedman of Fried Man asks an eminently sensible question, what are the practical legal consequences of gay marriage? Some of the ideas he presents there I already had thought of but one surprised me, the idea of retroactive common law marriage. Oh what a mess that would be.

Of course, if the facts don't matter. If you are just going to tear things up and enter a brave new world without properly examining things first then, oh well, who cares if the courts are clogged, justice is denied, all sorts of effort go into sorting out the mess and the whole system is swamped, leaving the most vulnerable (children of divorce) even more out in the cold than before. Who cares about them anyway? They don't make good campaign workers and don't contribute to politicians.

Gay Marriage Sophistry

Evan Kirchhoff's completely gone off the rails as he wonders what's wrong with City Hall issuing invalid marriage licenses. The power of the purse is the fundamental ability of the legislature to control the executive. The executive violates the law anytime they spend even a penny that is not authorized by the legislature. This is at the very heart of our political system and you monkey with this at your peril.

If the executive can make illegitimate expenditures in principle where are we to draw the line? How much money can the executive spend in contravention of the legislature? Do I really need to spell out how stupid and self-destructive this thing is to our free society?

Facts Must Matter

It's entirely disheartening to read about The Tyranny of the Facts in Transport Blog. In certain policy discussions, facts not only matter, they are paramount. Not understanding the facts can and does get people killed. Ask the families of the Challenger astronauts whether facts matter.

The idea that facts do not matter is something of a misframing of the true situation, that facts are relatively defenseless when unbuttressed by principles making sense of those facts. Everybody who looked at a dewy lawn throughout history knew, at some level or another, the fact that dew drops bend light and enlarges the view of the blade of grass the dew drop is on. When the fact was treated seriously and organized in a collection to create a theory, a principle if you will, its power became manifest. But the fact was always there just as the facts are always there, sabotaging and undermining our lives as we proceed with them using deluded theories that do not conform to them.

You can sail the middle of the ocean with bad charts saying where the coastline reefs are and it doesn't much matter. But if you approach the coast and do not have someone up front to take soundings, if you incautiously plunge ahead based on your false charts (your false principles) you will take the bottom out of your boat and sink quickly like a stone.

So let us all adopt a sensible principle to take soundings, look at the facts, and resolve to order our principles in accord with them, as we know them.

Letter to the Paper IV

City Comforts has the current lead in the race for the most unthinking and simplistic endorsement of polygamy yet:

Oh my. Do you actually think at all about the reasons against polygamy or does your 'whatever floats your boat' principles override any examination of the reality of polygamy?

The truth is that polygamy is almost always one man multiple women and that setup tends to profoundly affect civil order for the worse. Large pools of men who have no realistic hope of ever getting wives are a recipe for revolution.

To make any sort of accommodation to the polygamist, you have to think carefully about all the negative consequences, tote up the price that society will have to pay to survive the legalization of the institution and then make an informed decision.

The history of the harem is long and has been examined, though not lately. The only recent article I know of was an issue of National Review years ago (can't find it on the web). The bottom line was that high status women and low status men lost in this social arrangement. From a civil order perspective the high status weren't such a problem but those low status men...

He has comments off on this post (and no wonder) so I'm posting here.

Update
Apparently I get results because the original post has been pulled.

Young and Irresponsible Bush

One of the things that commentators like Phil Carter don't take into account in nit picking George W. Bush's record is that between those days and today, President Bush has explicitly said he had an epiphany that turned his entire life around. This "come to Jesus" moment was well discussed in the 2000 campaign and President Bush has himself said that he was "young and irresponsible" in those years.

When you take into account that the American people have already been told about this reformation, that he far larger lapses in character have been factored into the people's judgment of him before he was elected the first time and the entire episode becomes the picayune irrelevancy that it always deserved to be. Really, which is worse, skipping a couple of make work guard drills and then subsequently drilling more often to back and fill in his absences or driving drunk and stopped by a policeman? I think that the latter is clearly the worse offense but the people were told and elected him anyway.

There is an awful lot of overuse of the "youthful indiscretion" excuse in the US' political class but if anybody deserves a pass, its a politician who has had a well known reform moment, turned over a new leaf, and stuck to his new principles thereafter. GWB's record in his first term deserves close scrutiny. Voters can differ on his record. But a man's who has publicly and sincerely reformed does not deserve to have his pre-reform past thrown in his face to the exclusion of his post-reform behavior.

Iran Abrogates the NPT?

StrategyTalk has an item on Iran that includes the following gem:

The Islamic conservatives who control the nuclear power program announced that they would sell nuclear fuel freely on the world market, in defiance of world opinion or international nuclear regulatory organizations. 

If true, and unrepudiated, this is an abrogation of the NPT and would mean the end of the IAEA enforced regime of controlling nuclear power/weapons via treaty. This is a challenge that will either consign the UN to a "League of Nations II" status or mark an opportunity to rehabilitate their reputation. Hopefully, this will end up fizzling and everybody will claim mistranslation.

Spend, Michael, Spend! II

A Hit & Run item on Eminem's quest to buy Michael Jackson's Neverland renews my hope that the deposed 'King of Pop' will soon become just one more uninteresting (because now he's poor) has been and we can all go on with our lives without hearing about his latest insane plan.

Foreigner's Election Temptations

William Murcheson's recent Washington Time's piece on the signals Kerry is sending foreigners got me a bit concerned. Putting myself in the shoes of said foreign interests, the question arises whether I would abide by the restrictions on foreign donations for US electoral politics in such a crucial US election?

Certainly, the history of our last major excursion into funds coming in via the PRC during the Clinton years did little lasting damage to the PRC's DC standing. So what's to stop them from doing it again? What's to stop others from following the PRC's lead? The election will be long over by the time such crimes are uncovered and, if the right candidate wins, there will be gratitude, if the wrong one ekes things out, there is an old american tradition of magnanimity in victory to draw on.

So, especially with campaign finance systems in flux and untried new laws creating all sorts of interesting opportunities, wouldn't today's Johnny Chung just open up his own 527 committee and skip the country when the investigators finally catch up with him? What's the practical reason not to do this?

Newspeak Dictionaries

Diane Ravitch's Wall Street Journal commentary on text book bowdlerizing gave me the creeps. It is distinctly orwellian, 1984 writ small. I think I'll put her book, The Language Police on my reading list. The problem is one of texts. In a classic dead tree publishing situation you simply can't afford to have multiple versions so there is a choke point which creates this horrible tendency to create a lowest common denominator text. These texts detract from the richness and variation of our society and homogenize the next generation to a bland sameness consisting of cardboard caricatures of their own history and culture.

There are technical innovations coming down the pike that will help with this and they can't come soon enough. Electronic paper will sever the link between the physical production of books and the content of those books. You'll be able to create individualized texts for surprisingly small subsets of the country and load them on physical carriers that are the same nationwide. 8th graders will all have a 250 page history text but it won't all be the same history. Benedict Arnold's brilliant NY campaign against the British might be more prominent in the upstate New York communities where it took place whereas the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion would get more coverage in South Carolina with Arnold's treachery being covered more than his heroism.

The content that is chosen will more closely reflect local values. The damage from bowdlerization will be limited to those who choose to inflict it on their children, and things will likely just get better.

Unfortunately, technological innovation is unpredictable and even when electronic paper arrives, the dead tree versions will be with us for years afterward as schools retool their texts over long cycles. So The Language Police is likely to have relevance for quite some time.

Gay Marriage Update IV

In my plowing through my RealClear Politics backlog, I see that Bill Maher has decided to open up his dim bulb on the subject of love and marriage and state intervention in same. I don't especially have a problem with his observations but it's clear that he hasn't thought this through by the way he breezily advocates the idea that the state get out of the marriage business. He's talking about shifting over a thousand federal and state laws around (and who knows how many county and municipality ones, nobody's bothered to even count those), controlling the ripple effects so any bad side effects don't swamp the good ones of reducing government, and does it with the easy breezy manner of someone who thinks such major surgery on the legal system would be painless.

I know he's a comedian but he also likes to style himself as something of a social critic. I know high school children who make better in-depth analysis than he does. Would it have killed him to devote even two lines to the difficulty of extracting marriage from the clutches of the state?

Unfortunately, Maher is not alone, nor does he even represent the worst of this trend. Whatever people decide in the end, changing and shifting marriage is major, societally risky change. It shouldn't be entered into lightly.

Unemployment's Dirty Little Secret

EJ Dionne's sounding a warning over free trade but unfortunately, he keeps the lid on much of unemployment's dirty little secret. Most companies are peopled by employees who look around and see the dysfunction, the waste, the abuse of resources that mark bad management. If they've paid attention any time over the last three decades they know that this means that this company is going to either:

a) go broke
b) be bought
c) have some sort of scandal which will result in a), b), or both
d) ship jobs elsewhere in an attempt to lower costs rather than change practices
e) most likely all of the above

In other words, the average american worker today has all the tools and inside knowledge necessary to figure out that he's living on a flood plain and the weather report section of the farmer's almanac doesn't look particularly good.

Some organize a new business while they're working for somebody else and move on. Others improve themselves and change careers to a well-paid service job that's in shortage, like nursing. Others arrange for their labor to no longer be sold as an employee but as a consultant. But the large majority just sit there and let the tidal wave hit them because they choose not to see the warning signs and, eventually, they have to come home and say that the factory's closing, not their fault really, as John Edwards points out in that stump speech, "they did nothing wrong."

In reality, the problem is that these workers did nothing, and that's what's wrong. If you're employed, evaluate your company as an investor would. If you wouldn't invest your money in your firm, you shouldn't invest your labor either. If you move to another money earning opportunity on your own schedule, you're going to get the best opportunity you can, quite possibly increase your family's economic position, and be much less likely to be caught in a family threatening economic jam.

People's labor investment decisions ought to be re-evaluated as often as their stock investment decisions. Such things can be made into an semi-automated process and need not consume people. After all, how did the day traders do, in the end?

The truth is that it is comfortable not to think about such things, that the company will give you a job to do for the next few decades. I wouldn't invest my money like that and I won't invest my labor like that either. And if this style of labor evaluation becomes prevalent, it will revolutionize the world (in a very good way). Companies dance to the tune of the financial analysts because they influence the company's access to life giving capital. But a company's labor force is life giving too, it's just being negotiated for the most part by a bunch of analytical incompetents. It doesn't have to be.

Business Intelligence Logging

One of the great future innovations that is coming down the pike for administrator types like me is the day when full logging systems become cost effective to run. Right now this isn't normally done except when something happens outside of normal events. The reason is simple, it's cost prohibitive in the three areas of processor time necessary, space used for the logs, and analysis tools/time necessary to wade through the resulting data.

All of this is changing:

Processor time shows few signs of slacking off from its blistering progress pace. It's gotten so bad that processor makers like Intel are starting to seriously branch out into creating new applications that will justify buying their new processors.

Space prices are collapsing as well with both magnetic and optical media dropping pretty quickly.

Finally, the business intelligence tool makers are getting better at creating tools that are simple to use and solve the problem of drilling down quickly and getting useful results out of massive data sets.

At some point, somebody with the appropriate programming skills but without the requisite budget will want business intelligence tools enough to either write it himself or hire some inexpensive programmers to write the tools for him. He won't care for the tools as a money maker in and of themselves. Viewing them as a cost center, he'll open source it to reduce his maintenance costs and we're off to the races.

Hats Off Dad

I've met a few amazing people in my lifetime with something of a strange ability to make decisions and predictions, seemingly based on nothing, that had a very high degree of accuracy. Universally, they have been unable to explain it properly so I would understand what they are doing and how I could replicate it.

I always said that I would never allow myself to get into such a position, that I would concentrate on figuring out the mechanics of my analysis sufficient to explain, at least to my own, what's going on. As I get older, I find my own analytical abilities develop and mature and see now that I was a bit of a fool to think that the problem wouldn't crop up.

Sometimes, not always but sometimes, there is a very real observer effect, especially in personal social predictions and family acts of leadership. You say "this shall happen", but if you explain why it will happen to one of the participants they will change their behavior, invalidating your prediction, ruining your plans. Things are balanced that finely that you must leave them just so and no more or less will do.

So hats off to my Dad and all the other wise old men who I pestered with questions on such subjects in my youth. I'm starting to get it now.

Net Abuse, Net Cops

This is a comment I left on Argus

Given an IP number, you can find out who it is assigned to, in this case Research Machines, PLC in Great Britain. There is an email in the RIPE record in the link for reporting abuse emanating from that IP address. Given good logs at Research Machines and a time stamp of the abusive posting, they would be able to identify, and deal with, a case of actual abuse.

Not everybody keeps good logs. I don't think the post referred to in the story is actually abusive. But you should know that Internet traffic is not anonymous. It is pseudonymous and people can be tracked if you have good administrators who leave no un-logged holes. Our networks are like a spider web and the administrator can always make a meal out of an annoying bug traveling his domain. We usually just don't feel like it for our own reasons.

Most people don't understand exactly how much net freedom depends on administrator feigned and actual incompetence. It is a mostly untold pro-liberty story. An administrator can log everything, lock down all computers, require positive authorization for all traffic in and out of his net. All this is there because there are actual businesses where this is a requirement and it's cheaper just to roll out one version and have it turned off by default. Letting our bosses know this exists is generally at the discretion of the administrator. Turning it on is generally at the discretion of the administrator. Initiating felony prosecutions is generally at the discretion of the administrator.

And usually we don't turn it on, we avert our eyes to the petty crimes we witness and we clean up your electron trail in a way that won't get us in trouble. Every administrator has his own personal code of morality on these things and I don't think it wise to share mine but I will say that there have been times when I broke into employee mailboxes and times that I refused (same company, actually my interpretation of the relevant legal codes was what carried the day over a VP's demand).

The difference between anonymous and pseudonymous internet access is the insertion of an administrator somewhere along the traffic chain who refuses to log, refuses to track, and refuses to give up his secrets. Long may this net regime reign.

Kerry's Heroics, Kerry's Shame

I would offer the following up to those who might be a little confused about what is the proper way to treat a military figure such as John F. Kerry. The US has had heroes who flew higher than Kerry, and subsequently fell further than he did too. The figure I have in mind is General Benedict Arnold.

Kerry is not a traitor (unless Kerry has some heretofore undisclosed scandal rattling around in his closet) but his prior heroism should give him as much a pass on his subsequent perfidy as Gen. Benedict Arnold's. Now, it's a little known fact that in upstate NY there are plaques and memorials to Gen. Arnold. He's remembered much more fondly there than in any other part of the country because his heroics were largely there and largely affected that part of the country (then again, so did his treason) so here is my offer.

Those who were affected by Kerry's heroics should feel perfectly fine in supporting him, even crossing party lines to do so. Those affected by his perfidious flacking for the N. Vietnamese side (with false charges of massive war crimes) after his military service should feel perfectly justified in opposing him on those grounds as well. Either side should feel free to get as hot under the collar about it as they please but no blows, please.

The electoral balance of such a fair judgment, I suspect, will not sit well with the Kerry campaign. Tough.

Malaria: US Unindicted Coconspirator? II

Ah, back from church. On our way there, I asked my wife about the story (she being the medical half of the family). When I asked her about the efficacy of chloroquine, she said that it was still ok for a few spots where there wasn't extensive resistence like some parts of latin america. She then said that she'd never prescribe it for an american because there would be too much legal liability to risk it. When asked whether it was appropriate for Africa where there was resistence, she simply said no.

What are we paying for, malaria medicine or do gooder self-esteem? If it's the latter, it's both a stupid waste of money and a public health crime.

Malaria: US Unindicted Coconspirator?

National Review has a very disturbing article on the current malaria treatment debacle in Africa. In a heavily documented J'accuse letter published in the Lancet.

If the accusations are true, and I believe that they are, US citizens, through USAID's badly conceived political pressure to override scientific recommendations are morally guilty of malaria's drug resistant resurgence in Africa.

More on this later.

Vertical v. Horizontal Thinking

One of the great intellectual divisions is between vertical thinkers, specialists who go into depth in a single field, and horizontal thinkers, those who gain the essence of many fields without delving into the depths of any. Each have their advantages, each has their flaws. The advantage of vertical thinkers is that when you need the answer to a question in the field, you are much more likely to actually get a correct answer. The great advantage of horizontal thinkers is that you are much more likely to ask the right questions, and to be able to ask questions that bridge fields and stitch the disparate answers together.

What's the point of this little lesson? Horizontal thinkers are like yeast. You don't need a great deal of it but you can't make beer without it (and what bread you make will generally be awful). The way our government is organized, it's largely divided up into functional specialties. But what if a problem comes along that falls into multiple specialties? What you end up with is a tug of war where each department tries to pull in as much of the problem into its purview so it can gain power (measured by budget) over its rivals.

What a way to run a railroad.

blogads rates

I wonder how do people set up their blogads rates. Is there some sort of rate guide? Is there data available? Would it be worthwhile to compile something independently by parsing the rate sheets and the blog traffic in TTLB?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Is it Right to Cheer Your Co-Ethnics? II

I've talked about jewish responsibility for communism before. The problem is complex. Dissecting Leftism has a post that's somewhat on point. It shows how taking collective responsibility can go overboard and lead to horrible consequences. Whatever the truth about jews dominating the marxist movements of Hitler's young adult years, the jewish community's responsibility should never have gone beyond stern words of verbal disapproval and dissociation from people who personally refused to take up their responsibilities.

Hitler saw a horribly violent evil spreading throughout Germany via marxism. He made the fundamental mistake of fighting evil with evil but the error was in his evil means, not the idea of fighting an evil itself.

The Muslims Race to the Bottom

Muslims apparently are racing to the bottom. That's racing to the bottom of the US' next to invade list. The best line in the article comes from a Sudanese human rights lawyer "I have more freedom because of the war in Iraq.”

Repressive governments are quietly trying to take themselves out of the category of needs an invasion and into the category where diplomacy, aid, and change over time is the preferred US strategy. In this, it is not only Iraq that is important (to demonstrate what happens if you foul up the US bilateral relationship) but just as important is Libya (which demonstrates that even the wackiest of rogues have a way out if they convincingly step on the road to reform).

In this, Libya is likely the more important of the two because it provides the carrot side of the carrot and stick metaphor, the direction that we'd like the Non-Integrating Gap countries to go to. But Libya would never have happened without Iraq.

Baby Blogging IV

The hospital where Alma was born offers a baby website. It's now up. And no, she doesn't look like this anymore.

Spend, Michael, Spend!

Will spendthrift Michael Jackson put control of the Beatles catalog in the hands of a bank (and then straight onto the Internet)?

The phenomenon of the rich throwing away their wealth is very, very old but its virtually ignored by the "rich are getting richer" crowd. People do throw their money away. Inflation and heirs eat away much of the rest.

Then again, what I really would like to see is the Beatles Catalog hit the iTunes Music Store.

Eugene Volokh's Stupid Math

Eugene Volokh goes into all sorts of mathematical gyrations to try to prove that there is some sort of basis for Prof. Brandon's prejudiced remarks. Now I don't understand why he's doing this as he's no fan of the idea but he does it anyway.

Since we're in the realm of pulling numbers out our ears, perhaps a little reality might be in order. There is an interesting fact regarding Democrat and Republican voters. Republicans form a normal curve and Democrats don't. Democrats predominate both on the very high end of educational level and the very bottom as well.

If such a distribution can exist in reality between Democrats and Republicans, there is no reason it could not exist between conservatives and liberals? Furthermore, if such a curve can exist ideologically based on education, is there any mathematical reason such a curve cannot exist based on intelligence in an ideological bent? Of course the answer is no, no reason at all.

The assumption tripping up Prof. Volokh is that ideological allegiance is a simple phenomenon. In reality, I've noticed that smart people tend to be conservative or liberal for different reasons than stupid people. The motivations tend to work independently of each other as well so there is no reason why conservativism couldn't have a compelling case that makes sense to the less intelligent while also having a (different) compelling case that makes sense to the super-intelligent.

Very Late Movie Review

Believe it or not, I just got around to seeing Return of the King (thus the bloggus interruptus of the past few hours). First, on the odd chance you haven't seen this move, go see it unless you're under about 14 or so. If you are, read the book instead and catch the movie later on DVD where it won't overwhelm you.

Since there have been wagonloads of copy written about the film, both the high points, and the obscure points, there isn't much to say other than hats off to all the makers, the players, the computer wizards, they said it couldn't be done.

You proved them wrong.

Blogs Buying Blog Ads: Why?

Instapundit is one of the blogs you just have to study if you are going to have any hope of turning serious money as a blogger. He's got the links. He's got the circulation. Analyzing the Instaman's methods is all to the good for the aspiring blogger/capitalist. But one thing on that site puzzles me. There's an ad there for another blog, the Chicago Report. Now this is a pretty good blog in itself but its got nowhere near the traffic levels necessary to bring in the kind of income that would justify spending hundreds on advertising on Instapundit. It would be like advertising your local pizza joint on CNN.com. Sure, you'd get some traffic, but would that make back the money you laid out on the ad?

Instapundit's blogads price sheet is one link away from the front page and is as follows:
1 week - $375
2 weeks - $600
1 month - $1000
3 months - $5000
1 year - $20000

The Chicago Report ad has been up at least a week so they're putting out hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars to get...

twice as much traffic as I get for free.

As of this writing, I've got 3500 visits this month and they've got 7000. You can't get much money for that sort of traffic and Chicago Report's Blog Ads price sheet shows it:

1 week - $20
2 weeks - $30
1 month - $80
3 months - $200
1 year - $1000

Amazingly, Chicago Report does currently have two ads running, both decent blogs that are either getting comp'd or are advertising as a vanity project.

I don't understand the idea of spending hundreds of dollars to get back tens. Chicago Report has good production values, good writing (though I do disagree with some of it, just look at their comments) but I can't make sense of their business plan.

So what am I missing?

Soft Xenophobia

The Bit Bucket has an article on the soft xenophobia of the more reasonable immigration restrictionists. I'm in a bit of a quandary. I agree that the soft xenophobia is there but I'm also unhappy about the other part of the article:

The fact that Californians don't do things like Washingtonians--or that Oregonians are annoyed by the presence of Californians--doesn't necessarily make Californians' presence in those states a social cost. And (aside from the purely pragmatic consideration of avoiding an electoral backlash) I don't see why advocates of liberal immigration laws should take those "costs" into account when evaluating immigration policies.

In the computer field, this sort of sentiment is often rendered "it's a feature, not a bug". But for some people, such 'features' are bugs. Who gets to decide? Unfortunately, the article smells of "we know better than you and we wil decide", an attitude that I am deeply suspicious of.

Ultimately, public policy is determined by the public and the xenophobic have as much right to participate and should have their voices heard as much as xenophilic integrationists like me (ie I'm in favor of a rich melting pot experience with lots of assimilated immigrants). Ultimately, the xenophobics cut off their nose to spite their face but in a free country they have the right to do that and we should give them enough societal room to accomplish the task as long as the blood spatter doesn't reach the more sensible among us.

Ultimately, in a free society, costs are determined individually, not collectively. You can ultimately overrule unreasonable cost perceptions but these perceptions must be recognized as existing and be given some status in a free and just society. Interests must be accommodated peacefully or they will eventually mutate and become unhealthy.

The Multiple Levels of War

Steven Den Beste is probably right that Al Queda will probably not simultaneously nuke 30 US cities. Where he's wrong is that he thinks this matters.

If you look carefully, you will note that the name "Muslim Brotherhood" crops up now and again in discussions about Al Queda. If you look at the history of what normal civilized people have been worried about from terrorism, much of what was feared would come out of the Muslim Brotherhood of decades ago actually came to pass not from that organization, but from Al Queda. The fear was right, the organization that did it was wrong. So any analysis of a particular threat by a particular organization is, at some level, pointless.

Some people dropped out of the Muslim Brotherhood, others use its umbrella for peaceful reform purposes, and others moved over to Al Queda without changing their violent, reactionary beliefs one iota. The organizational letterhead used to in the planning and execution of death cultist strikes against civilization is fundamentally unimportant at the strategic level (though it can have local, tactical importance in breaking up particular plots).

The fundamental problem is the nihilistic death cult that is popping up in several variants around the world and which attitudinally bind a number of seemingly disparate movements together. North Korea has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with a lack of respect for the dignity of human life. At a certain point, Wretchard's feared scenario of multi-city nuclear bombing will likely take place by a branch of the death cult unless the entire cult is discredited and destroyed across the entire globe.

The danger of SDB's analysis is that it plays into a repeat of the international security community's dismissal of the December 1994 GIA hijacking and attempted destruction of the Eiffel Tower. Al Queda's being dismantled so the nuclear proliferation problem is still bottled up and relatively safe, right? Wrong.

Even if Al Queda entirely disappeared today as a functioning organization, thousands who had undergone training and hundreds of thousands who are influenced by the cult would still exist. The non-muslim variants would be affected even less. And a new organization would rise up to become the new focal point, taking the best of Al Queda's strategy and tactics and personnel and increasing the death cult's threat.

No doubt, one of those things that they would take would be the major nuclear strike scenario that Wretchard speculates on and SDB dismisses. Eventually, they'll get it right. They might get it right slower than we would, less effectively than we would, but they eventually will get it right and millions will die. We can't be comforted with the fact that our actions will delay it so that it will not be us that die but our children or grandchildren. That's just not good enough.

The Challenge of Culture: Failing Via Isolation

Donald Sensing's current article on culture generated some really frustrating comments that advocated turning off the TV and dropping out of the current culture. That's, at best, a half baked solution. I should know, I tried it. For over a year I literally had no TV. I got all my news off the Internet and radio, mostly the Internet. I read, I paid attention to my new wife. It was a decent existence, I thought, but what it wasn't was engaged. I was, to a great extent, absent from the spiritual battle over american culture. And when I returned, I noticed the difference.

When I left TV land, things weren't quite as crass, when I came back, it seemed like every other show had an occult or vampiric link to it. Now my father was born in the heart of Transylvania and I was born on its edge so I understand the schtick but the current iteration was a little too admiring of the evil side of things for me to be comfortable with it. And the general level of intelligence dropped. It's still dropping but if you haven't at least dropped out for a year, you can miss the gradualness of the process.

There are technical innovations, filtering content, that permit the erection of a wall between you and the sewer. But that's not enough for an ultimate solution. What needs to happen is for us to demand something better and be willing to spend our money on that, be willing to lead the cultural elite not just with the negative stick of a boycott but the positive carrot of increased profitability if they do good things.

Part of that, I fear, will require us to remake the distribution networks of culture in a way that destroys the monopolies that the current gatekeepers enjoy. Hollywood, the RIAA big five, the broadcast networks need to be forced to create new business models that destroy their ability to impede highly rated shows like 'Touched by an Angel' because the people who watch them are not the 'right people'.

Literally, the demographics of people who are most likely to care about christian morality are valued less than those who do not have the experience, and tend not to have the judgment, to include serious moral standards in their cultural consumption habits.

This is going to create some very odd bird alliances. The countercultural hackers who wish to create technological systems to end-run our current cultural gatekeepers are the most likely allies we have in this battle. They often don't understand christianity, sometimes are even explicitly hostile to it, but their free code ethic and hostility to the corporatist control machinery will create an atmosphere where the consumers of culture will actually be the customers and that is a situation in which serious christians will have a favorable playing field to engage in spiritual warfare.

Moral degradation and deviance will always exist as long as free will does. Some will choose the wrong path, however much we may try to persuade them otherwise. But there is no reason that such fare has to be tolerated in our own homes. There is no reason that we have to accept this bystander view of our culture where the broadcaster is the vendor and the customer is the advertiser, not the consumer.

Creating a world where the cultural consumer is the customer is the best current option for freedom minded faithful. This gets the free market working in our favor, not at cross purposes to what we want. The market will respond to our needs, but only if we are the customer. Withdrawing from consuming culture does not get us to this position. At best it is a temporary spiritual retreat that arms you with a more objective perspective about how bad things are.

Russian Stability II

Earlier I mentioned some questions that I thought would further a loyal opposition. Clearly, at least one of the topics I raised is an actual election year issue

My Question:

1) If, God forbid, you were suddenly struck down, are you comfortable with the level of leadership you would leave behind in all major parties that no matter who won, Russia would be led by a responsible figure that the nation could survive? If no, what is your plan to take us out of this dangerous situation?

Putin's response on the subject:

Putin reiterated his stated opposition to prolonging his time in office, limited to two terms. But he indicated he would choose a preferred successor, saying that the task of any top leader ``is to propose to society a person he considers worthy to work further in this position.''

That attitude is not nearly good enough for Russia. I keep hoping that someone will push Putin for reforms in this area. The truth is that while a party leader cannot pick his opposition directly, he can move the statistical center of the electorate in such a way that anybody who has a serious shot at national office must take sustainable positions on the major issues confronting the country. Putin has a responsibility to lead Russia's electorate to such conclusions so that no matter who his opposition picks, no matter who his own party picks, Russia will survive, even thrive, no matter who wins the election.

Choose Your Game Wisely

In any international relationship, the participants get to pick the rules of the game. This is a crucial phase in relationships and needs to be decided wisely.

It appears that Russia is considering reviving the Great Game of win/lose power competition in Central Asia and its european periphery. For ordinary people, this game most resembles a high stakes game of poker. If true, this is a tremendous mistake. The reason is simple, the US can outbid Russia at any time, winning any single contest by simply outspending it.

The US, in contrast, seems want to play a different sort of game, a kind of competitive team sport where there is the competition between the team and its opponents as well as internal competition. American baseball and football with their intra-team partnerships and competitions for playing time and positions is a close analogue.

The US approach sets up two sets of winners. All participants on the winning team win, and there is a separate hierarchy of winners inside the team culminating in the most valuable player. Rivalries inside the team can be intense but you get ahead in this game via both personal advancement and group advancement.

Which game ultimately gets picked can shift from time to time and the rules inside the game can also morph. But the difference of which rules get picked is profound. It is the penultimate level of international organization, right below intentions and interests and needs to be monitored carefully. The Russians have been making some worrisome moves lately.

Peggy's Paragraph

Peggy Noonan's asking for Bush's election paragraph. Here's my offering:

We're at war. We have a serious, positive strategy to prosecute and win the War on Terror. Our opponent does not. Without such a strategy we will eventually be worn down and lose this war, and in the process losing our precious freedoms. A closely divided Congress can be held up on any issue by tiny groups of legislators of either party obstructing vital legislation until they are paid in pork. Winning the War on Terror requires swallowing those outrages which will persist as long as the Congress is closely divided. We need larger majorities.

Spinsanity Inanity

John Kerry, among others, has signed a letter arguing against the passage of a constitutional amendment to the Massachusetts state constitution defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. Spinsanity is arguing that the AP unfairly labeled this as a pro-gay marriage letter. If John Kerry had signed such a letter a year ago, this interpretation would have been accurate but there are only three ways this can go after the state supreme court ruled that gays were being harmed by current practice and their recent advisory opinion that a civil union bill would be insufficient and a marriage bill was required of the legislature:

1. The legislature passes an amendment defining marriage as purely heterosexual. Gay marriage is defeated
2. The legislature and executive decline to enforce the judicial decision. Jacksonian executive supremacy is resurrected. Gay marriage is defeated
3. The legislature obeys its master, the judiciary, and passes legislation as per the judges' diktat. Gay marriage becomes law in Massachusetts

The letter's text clearly shows Kerry is against option 1. The AP title implies that Kerry's preferred outcome is option 3. If that reading is unfair, the only alternative is option 2, something that is both a stretch given Kerry's past record and something that would be clearly disastrous for his presidential bid.

So for the AP to have been wrong they had to have been too nice to Kerry and were really trying to positively spin a glaring sign of a man unfit to be president. I rather think that the AP was right, though it seems to have retracted its correct characterization (wimps).

No Chairs, No Sales

Virginia Postrel is lamenting the loss of chairs at a Borders she used to haunt. It's not that difficult to issue a complaint that will carry weight. Just let a manager know that...

No chairs, no sales!
[[chant to the cadence of no justice, no peace]]

They do care about this sort of feedback, especially if you let them know you're blogging about it so it's not only a customer incident but a press incident.

Disingenuous Bush Bashing

Phil Carter over at Intel Dump sniffs at President Bush's guard service "Not exactly exemplary service for the guy that we now look to for leadership as Commander-in-Chief, but maybe he's a late bloomer."

Yes, maybe he is but how would we know without a more recent record to demonstrate it, like, oh 3 years of good wartime presidential leadership? Supposedly he's writing a larger piece on the subject of how this is still relevant nowadays and I'll be fascinated to see if he manages to square the circle. I have strong doubts he'll pull it off.

Military/Civilian Divide

I generally like David Brooks but I have to agree with Bruce Rolston that it is vitally important that the Commander in Chief, while head of the US military, is the user of society's sword, and never conceives of himself as part of the sword.

There is a grand tradition of civilian oversight and rule over the US military. The military (as I am learning from my current reading) does horribly badly when not led well, or at all, by its civilian leadership.

There is a 2nd book hiding in The Pentagon's New Map a highly disturbing picture that I was not aware would be in the book but provides a critical eye into the reasons why a free society's sword should not, can not wield itself.

Light Morning Blogging

We're off to set up a business banking relationship. Tenacity is the key, I think, to a great deal of success. In the end, we did not abandon Citibank but found a reasonable person within it and they're just a bit further away.

If you're in need of a business banker and you're around Oakbrook, IL, you won't do much better than Brandy Sladek.

Where are the Pharma Corporate Raiders?

The New Yorker has an intriguing article on Big Pharma's pipeline problem. The idea is that R&D doesn't scale (though how he would explain 3M is a mystery) and that pharmaceutical firms should adopt the current Hollywood studio system, becoming distribution houses and money suppliers.

What really puzzles me is that if it is true, we have a classic case of the parts being greater than the whole and dismemberment would lead to huge profits for any corporate raider willing to take on the challenge. So why aren't there any doing just that?

That one's a real head scratcher.

To Boycott or Not to Boycott II

Evan Kirchoff continued the MTV conversation with me in his latest post. I think that his objections don't stand up too well. First, boycott's are not always economic negatives. The Last Temptation of Christ spent very little on advertising because they knew there would be protests, boycotts, and massive interest generated by those acts so they skimped on advertising and did great ticket sales anyway. Banned in Boston was a sure-fire sales promotion tool for decades.

The mere existence of a boycott does not mean that the boycottee will be ashamed, shamed, or even suffer a net financial loss. This is historical reality. Badly designed boycotts backfire to the financial and reputational benefit of those subject to them.

The problem of coercion is being brought up through the back door and needs more detailed treatment:

Secondly, I don't agree that what they're doing is necessarily "healthy" or "freedom-friendly". Among other things, they're apparently attempting to get cable companies (local monopolies in some areas) to remove MTV from the channels they offer. I don't think this is especially likely to occur (although I can imagine more modest goals that could succeed), but I fundamentally disagree with them about the morality of the attempt. It's not "censorship", since the government's not involved and all proposed actions are within the context of the marketplace. However, it does amount to a form of cultural bullying. This may be a fuzzy line, but at some point there's a difference between declining to watch something and trying to apply economic leverage to prevent a much larger group from being able to watch something. BoycottMTV.com is begging this question by tossing around words like "sewage" and "trash" -- who could have a legitimate reason to want to watch "trash"?

A boycott recommending the non-purchase of a product is in some ways the negative version of a testimonial. What is being hinted here is two things, that negative opinions are somehow less legitimate than positive ones and that because the negative testimonial comes from more than one person, it somehow has less legitimacy than if the opinion is an isolated, individual one.

But a cultural judgment is also being passed that providing that good, that TV channel is worth withdrawing patronage from the provider. This is where Kirchoff engages in a little sleight of hand. The tail generally does not wag the dog. Boycotts are powerful only when they are large, and many times not even then (see Southern Baptists v. Disney for a current example). Often a boycott group that is too small is not just ineffective, it is ignored as an insignificant asterisk.

Where boycotts are effective are when enough patronage is controlled by those participating to hurt the bottom line or, in the case of a monopoly, are large enough to carry a vote stripping that monopoly right. But if the stripping of that monopoly is done to permit a second, competitive cable carrier to compete, I can't see where the harm is in that.

Finally, I have to say that the idea that there is no reason to consume trash is an insult to trashy romance novels, Jerry Springer, and other entire genres of entertainment that are sold explicitly as having little to no redeeming social value. Trash has sold, and sold well in the past, the present, and will likely sell well in the future.

The question today is whether you can live your life and raise your children fully engaged in society without being forced to bring this into your house? Ultimately, technology is coming down the pike which will make this debate moot. Until then, we're likely to continue to debate how much in the shadows the disreputable forms of entertainment will have stay.

Get Educated

Nicholas Kristoff goes in the right direction with his education reform column today. Yes, we need to improve our educational system. But you can't improve what you can't measure. Without objective success metrics, improvement will always be elusive. And if people are trapped in a school and bureaucrats are politically protected, the poorest, least influential in society (and yes, some of the middle class too) will not be able to gain decent schooling.

What's worse, we have a crying need to back and fill, to offer opportunity to those who have already gone through this broken system, gotten their ersatz diplomas, and are handicapped in life with poor math, logic, and science skills.

In my day job, I'm familiar with adult education. All IT people are (or should be). If you aren't constantly reskilling yourself, you can kiss your marketability goodbye as new versions of software come into vogue and your outdated knowledge of only a few years ago is no longer enough to land a contract or a decent job. In fact, in between hunting down that next contract, blogging, and taking care of my family, I'm continuing my education, a process that I do not foresee ending until I assume room temperature.

Some of this education costs me money in course fees, some in books, but a growing amount of it is in free articles on the Internet written by people, for their own reasons, who share their knowledge with others. In part, the blog entries that I put here are part of the same phenomenon. Kristoff could have greatly increased the effectiveness of his column if, at the end, he had thrown in a link to a page teaching the solution to the math problem he presents at the beginning. It would have cost little, a few extra characters per page load, perhaps 15 minutes in reportorial research in finding such a page, and would have added little to the rhetorical value of the piece. But it would have caught a few more people up in the hunger and thirst for learning about math and would have educated a great many more about the specific problem presented.

Sustainable Free Market Rail?

And they said it couldn't be done. Apparently Thames traines are running in private hands and subsidy free. This occurred in six years. On May 1, 1971 Amtrak started service with the same goal in mind, private rail providing unsubsidized service. It's been 32 years and they still haven't made it.

When the inevitable happens and Amtrak, once again, asks for an additional bailout, Congress would be more than wise to give the Thames people a consulting contract to work out the kinks in the Amtrak business plan, and perhaps steal away a few good managers as well.

HT: Live From the Third Rail, Transit Blog

The Pentagon's New Map

If you thought I've been obsessive about Thomas Barnett and Core/Gap analysis up to now, you 'aint seen nothing yet. The book's coming out and I'll be hyping it through the publication date and likely beyond.

I like this guy. I like this guy's sense of humor. It's a geopolitical analysis book that has managed to work in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October, Nostradamus and Planet of the Apes by page 12.

That's impressive.

Oh, and his analysis is straight on too. But if you've been reading me for any length of time, you already knew that.

Blogging Goodies!

I just got my first bit of blogging related swag. Yeehah.

Oh, I'm perfectly willing to do book reviews and anything else that would get me advance copies...

Who'd Run IAEA Better?

Frank Gaffney is unhappy with Mohamed ElBaradei. From his official IAEA biography, it's pretty clear that Dr. ElBaradei's post carries a four year term and will expire at the end of 2005. It would seem that any criticism of the IAEA chief should, at the very least, touch on a few candidates who might be better able to serve the international community's interests in safeguarding against nuclear proliferation for as long as possible.

It's all well and good to criticize the current head of an obviously fallible organization but you can't beat somebody with nobody. Now is the time for replacement candidates to start to emerge and to build up enough steam that a third ElBaradei term isn't a foregone conclusion.

Camps and Counter-Camps

Donald Sensing notes a Washington Times article on camps training islamist militants for insertion into US sleeper cells.

What's missing is the idea of struggling for these men's hearts and souls. There is a great opportunity of a hotline of muslim imams who would be able to bring these men in from the cold, preach to them, and arrange for them to have a reconciliation with the US government. There is nothing holding back such an organization from forming and putting up notices in every mosque in the US. It would be a tremendous blow if we could lower the cost of rooting these people out to our pennies in re-education to their dollar in training them in the first place.

The Department of Homeland Security could make an initiative to imams offering to respect confidentiality and providing a legitimate way for these people to get clean papers and stay in the US (surely monitored, but legal). From a muslim perspective, these misguided souls must be saved and brought back to the true, more tolerant islam that they have abandoned for a false vision that will condemn their souls.

So why doesn't this organization exist? Why isn't it generally known? Why aren't they active nationwide wherever there are muslims to guard against these inserted agents? All we can hope is that moderate muslims will organize and that the DHS will enable it by offering a way out for these sleepers.

Bush's Military Service

I find the entire discussion of George W. Bush's military service to be somewhat bizarre. After all, GWB has been Commander in Chief for three years and change now. You would think that he would be judged mostly on his most recent term of service, but no. Instead 30+ year old service records (which end up largely bearing out the President's story) are more important to decide whether he is fit to continue the job he's been doing for coming on four years now.

Would you retain somebody in a company with years of experience doing a job based on their college transcript or would you evaluate their actual job performance? The man was in the Guard, he did his hours and got an honorable discharge at the end. It's becoming more and more clear that for some in the partisan press, this is a witch hunt. But who dares stop it?

HT: Phil Carter's Intel Dump that provoked this rant

Can We Pass It All?

Andrew Sullivan opines>:

My agenda: means-test social security, scale back Medicare, abolish agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare and move toward a flat tax that the super-rich cannot evade. That's one good answer to the Dems' itching to raise taxes again. We can do it all - if only we stop wasting so much on people and special interests (of left and right) who do not need the help.

In a theoretical world, AS is right. Where he goes off the rails is that he is completely ignoring the problem of the current makeup of the Senate and House of Representatives. With such narrow margins, every vote can be held hostage by a very small number of legislators who must be paid off in pork to gain their vote. I do not see any way around that fact. A closely divided Congress will have this dynamic no matter who will be in the White House and no matter what their agenda is. The only cure is to either change the partisan makeup of the members of Congress so that party discipline can push through more votes without promising pork or change the voting rules so the current balance is not so closely divided. The former is much easier than the latter and the people will have an opportunity to solve the problem in November.

To Boycott or Not to Boycott

Which market niches should remain unfilled? That's the question being pondered by Evan Kirchoff over at 101-280 in response to the creation of BoycottMTV.com. It's an interesting debate here because both sides agree that government restrictions are not the answer.

I have to side with boycott MTV on this one. If libertarianism has any distinction from libertinism it is in the ability of people who wish to maintain and promulgate moral standards to freely espouse and associate with similarly minded people for the purpose of advocating their ideas of morality. Evan Kirchoff thinks that this is a bad idea because the moralists might win, and win too easily.

I find this unpersuasive. I have no doubt that there are hardy capitalists who have robust business plans that will survive boycotts to present the kind of degenerate smut that is in penthouse, much less MTV. My sympathy for them is somewhat limited. Aw, they have to adjust their business plans to create new revenue models, poor babies.

I think that they should not be prevented by the state from their consensual business but I think that moral disapproval, where felt, needs to have healthy freedom-friendly outlets where it can express itself otherwise it'll come out in unhealthier forms like a rock through a window or worse.

Ultimately, the solution is to sever the link between advertisers sponsoring programs and make the advertising relationship between the advertisers and the consumers with consumers being paid to watch ads and buying up the programs of their choice with the ad credits they have earned.

German Brain Drain

Besides keeping military conscription so they can afford to staff their hospitals Germans have other labor problems. The economic system is apparently so tilted against achievement and quality that the best and brightest are packing up and leaving.

This phenomena is not new but the pain it causes is cumulative. When on brilliant mind is no longer there to inspire the next generation at University, it's something of a blow, but when people start thinking that the best are all leaving, a perverse social pressure starts and if you're committed to staying, you start to be viewed as an odd bird, a patriotic odd bird but definitely an odd bird. And if you stay, you are no longer surrounded by other first rate minds but by their left behind 2nd's and 3rd's.

The funny thing is that to maintain this situation takes active efforts on the part of the German State. Even a young immigrant like me sometimes feels the pull to go back home (in my case, Romania) a pull that must be counteracted by severe beatings rendered in the form of regulation, xenophobia, high taxes, and a rigid society. You can't do much about the xenophobia and societal rigidness but high taxes and intrusive regulation are entirely within the government's powers to ease. Yet they don't, or at least only at a glacial speed.

Containment in Ruins, But There is a Replacement

Wretchard is right when he says containment is in ruins but he mistakes the timeline and that throws his analysis off.

I've been spreading the knowledge and arguing that people pay attention to Core/Gap analysis for some time now. This idea came out of this important observation

This image has broad implications including the fact that the nuclear genie is going to get out of the bottle and it's going to do so at the individual level. This observation was made in 2000 during the late Clinton administration and has been aggressively pursued during George W Bush's administration. The fact is that we were, slowly, starting to identify the new threat picture before 9/11 and 9/11 radically accelerated an existing process for finding responses to this problem of not only stable nation states getting nuclear weapons but sub-national units and even individuals playing significant roles in the US' threat picture, that would include the WMD threat picture that Wretchard claims we are only now starting to flail around to address.

The problem with the replacement is that only now have we developed it enough to start bringing on board a broad coalition. Iraq was necessary for the creation of this coalition to be possible because we had to ensure that the world, especially our current and future allies, knew that we would do the work with or without them and that more of their interests would be disrupted by not participating than would be by participating.

Prior to Iraq, it would be inconceivable for so many countries to sign on to the idea of completely reworking the international system. The forces for the status quo would be enormous. Post-Iraq, there is no status quo and you're either on the reform bus or you're getting run over by it if you try to stand in its way. The hard task of creating a new order in which we will not destroy ourselves is underway but the enormity of the changes and the massive resistance that will materialize when this plan comes fully out into the open currently precludes any official kickoff.

In the retail trade, they call this a "soft opening" and the circumstances require such action. That doesn't mean that we should ignore the fact that we are not flailing around without a response. We are not reacting, but acting and the work goes relatively well.

Provoking Fitna

One of the ways to disarm Al Queda is to demonstrate that it is not a muslim organization. It's ability to recruit fanatical muslims would be destroyed by the idea that muslims following them are going to Hell. Over at joyfulchristian, we have a note not only remarking that we are making progress but that our news media is so bad at its job that they haven't noticed.

Fitna is a complex term that includes the idea of provoking muslim to fight muslim, improper combat, and temptations that draw people away from God. By provoking Al Queda into displaying their contempt for traditional muslim values, we're creating a situation which dries up their ability to recruit. But this effect is greatly affected by mainstream media's ability to notice that this is what Al Queda is doing and to transmit this information world-wide.

There is no betrayal of media values toward truth and justice to accurately report Al Queda's hypocrisy in provoking sectarian strife. Their failure to do so is mostly incompetence and inexperience in covering this sort of thing. Where it is not (paging Al Jazeera, paging Al Jazeera), their failure to expose this anti-muslim action is a major news story in itself.

Who's Establishment?

There seems to be a desperate campaign on to demonstrate that liberals are not the establishment. It really is funny in a way. After their long march through the institutions, after decades of dominance not only in the official halls of power (that at least have elections for potential changeover ever two, four, or six years) but the unofficial ones of the media, lobbyists, academia, and intellectual salons, liberals, having suffered some partial reverses are campaigning as if they are already wilderness toughened and ready to 'take back' america.

In fact, they're only starting to go through the process of melting away the dross that adheres to any movement in power, the intellectual self-searching that accompanies defeat and regrouping for a shot at the brass ring. A quick run through the great issues of the day and the liberal answer almost entirely consists of either conventional banalities or frightening moonbattery.

There is no equivalent to William F Buckley on the left, an erudite liberal who spends much of his energy in stripping the movement's crazies of any influence as WFB did to the John Birch Society, and later, the Objectivists. Sadly, all political movements need such a figure because the nuts are ever with us and they are remarkably diverse in their ideological madness.

The Long Death of Westphalian Politics

A new element of the long term US strategy has been unveiled.

President Bush's Greater Middle East Initiative will ignore sovereignty issues and reach into middle east societies to support liberal reformers inside their own country. He's currently unveiling it to Europe and there seems to be some cautious willingness to come on board in a partnership where "there's work enough for everyone." What's being ignored is the institutional tearing of Westphalian assumptions of sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs.

This initiative has some chance at success but win or lose, the implications for the permissibility of interfering in the affairs of other countries is profound and hardly noticed (or at least noticed publicly) at all by the present leadership of the international system. That's something of a shame as these assumptions weave through an awful lot of the current international system including the UN Charter and a great many bilateral and multilateral treaties. When will the adults in the foreign policy establishment start to address the precedent aspects of this?

HT: Instapundit

Stalling Your Way to Economic Wisdom

The great Wal-Mart profit demolition machine is running out of steam. It's aggressive price cutting tactics have lately been hurting its own bottom line so much that its stock is lagging and it is embarking on a new policy of raising prices to increase margins and profitability. This will also allow more of its competitors to survive in the face of competition with the retail behemoth without resorting to legal maneuvering to "save our local stores" via zoning and other restrictive practices that have been popular with stunned competitors who did not see a way to fairly beat the giant in the marketplace.

This is just one example of wider phenomenon, the use of panic to provoke government intervention in the marketplace. In combination with the tendency of government to be a one way ratchet, it's what's fueled the explosion of government intervention all across the West.

A popular tactic is just to stall, delay, study, and hope you can keep it up long enough for the panic to subside and solutions to be worked out in the private sector. Once that happens, government solutions are no longer necessary and you can deal with the next panic.

Can a Lack of Charity be Genocide?

Another loose Vatican cannon? I wonder. I'm highly skeptical of the idea that reducing AIDS drug costs are anything but charity. Furthermore, I find it rather puzzling that a lack of charity can be genocide.

Certainly, you hope that people will be charitable, that they will give of themselves as much as they can to help the poor and unfortunate. I can even see sharp words and disapproval over someone's lack of charity. Genocide accusations are so over the top that I really wonder whether the Curia is becoming lax in disciplining loose cannons.

Serbia Anarchy Watch

A charming note remarks the surprising coincidence that Serbia had no government in December and also the highest economic growth in five years.

But how was January?

Unfortunately, the Serbia anarchy watch will not go on much longer as they now have a functioning parliament.

Carbon Nanotube Breakthrough II

Carbon nanotubes are incredibly useful and revolutionary stuff. Rapid enough progress on them could do magical things, even make President Bush's space initiative actually come within budget. So, it's always worthwhile to keep an eye on carbon nanofiber progress. But keeping an eye on the actual process of making these structures has been impossible up to now. They are so small that the actual process of their construction was something of a mystery, until now.

Hat's off to the Danes for figuring out how to observe the creation of carbon nanofibers in real time and in detail, allowing researchers in the field to no longer work blind but see what's going on in their experimental process.

This is the kind of enabling research that is likely to kick up the rate of future progress in this field, and in nanotechnology in general.

HT: Slashdot (warning, some material in comments may be adult)

Patriot Act Catharsis

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGHHH!

Yes, I support the war on terror. Yes, I think that tightening up the money laundering regulations is a good idea in wartime when the enemy is multinational terrorism. But does Citibank have to be so bloody disorganized about what they will or will not take as proof of business address? Citibank has my banking records dating back since I was a teenager, that's a decade and a half of customer relationship data.

My wife's only banking relationship with any bank has been with Citibank and that's about five years. All we want is a simple business checking account as my wife is going to do some charity medical work and will have an office in our church to do basic prescription writing and low level primary care. We're not paying for space, we're not paying any utilities, and the local branch banker won't deviate one iota from her check list even though she has the power to do so. She doesn't even bother to check our banking records to see the longstanding (and lucrative for them) relationship we have with them.

The Patriot Act must go. The day after the freaking war is over, it's got to go.

Letter to the Paper III

I just wrote NRO's Bruce Bartlett on the subject of Medicare costs. He has an article on the budget up:

Right now the taxpayer is on the hook to treat elderly heart disease via medicare much as it has been for decades. Up until this administration the only thing we paid for was surgery, by far the more expensive of the treatments. Now that we have a drug benefit, we can encourage medical management which is both better from a patient perspective and is less expensive. But classic medicare and the medicare drug benefit are two different budget items. How is it we can be spending massive new monies on medical treatment without having a lowering of expenses for surgical treatment?

I smell a Washington accounting mess. Would you address this?

What Happened to Kerry's Decorations?

Kerry famously threw some of his military decorations over the White House fence. Were they just swept up and thrown away? Or were they preserved? I'm curious on this point as I examine Kerry's past record. I think that President Bush should try to bury the past of Vietnam and offer John Kerry his ribbons back and any of the other ribbons and medals tossed over that fence by military anti-war protesters who have changed their minds. They could make a nice ceremony out of it in the fall....

Here's a page that gathers a bunch of accounts both pro and contra Kerry (though the majority are contra).

Turning the Cover Story Around

The folks over at Dhimmiwatch are always on the lookout for the appearance of dhimmitude, the subservient attitude that militant islam demands of its non-muslim subjects. Dhimmitude is not just a legal status in a caliphate population, it is a psychological attitude that presages defeat at the hands of muslim aggressors throughout history. It is the attitude that Al Queda wants to instill in us.

Now the Chicago Tribune note referenced in the above item is supposed to be an example of dhimmitude because it buys into a cover story that true Islam is not aggressive. Now I'm a bit more agnostic than the Dhimmiwatch folks but only a little bit. The cure for such arguments is to assume the cover story is actually the truth and strictly demand performance by the true believers to act in accord with the cover story. If there really is a fight for the soul of Islam, all well and good, we want to know all about it and demand that all muslims in our nation fight on the right side against the death cult islamists who want to enslave us.

But if it really is a cover story, close examination will force these people to either repudiate the cover story or enact it into reality despite their true beliefs. And if their behavior is the same as if they were sincere, I'll take it as a win and keep an eye on them so there is no backsliding. In a generation or two, they'll even forget that it's an act.

Al Queda Nukes

Don't worry, be happy. The suitcase nukes story has been around for awhile (at least since 1997). It gets trotted out every once in awhile to make people nervous but the Russians, along the way, have already spilled the beans on the reality of these weapons. They are highly complicated pieces of machinery that needed highly specialized and difficult maintenance done to them each year or they became inert and each of them has a remarkably small amount of fissionable material in them. The only people who could maintain them were the old USSR military and the US, (and only maybe the US).

What Al Queda did was pay far beyond the going price for fissionable material for a worthless system. They would have spent their money better by buying up a medical waste firm and diverting nuclear material from there for radiological bombs because that's all they have if there is any truth to the piece at all.

Reading Balance

It's important not to get stuck in an echo chamber conducive to your personal ideological predilections. Though this is pretty easy for me as the amount of Romanian Catholic libertarian technology minarchist literature is pretty thin on the ground, I do go out of my way to include others as long as they seem relatively civil. Now that I'm working in the medium of blogging, there is a sliver of a chance that I might even have something of an effect with my responses so why not?

Matthew Yglesias just hit my reading list on the strength of his earnestly clueless assertions that the US has no discernible foreign policy and that we're not really going after all terrorist groups. It's so breathlessly absurd that I eagerly await his next observations just to see what will come out of his mouth and he seems personally decent enough that I won't pop a blood vessel at whatever it might be.

Oh, and by the way, the foreign policy of the Bush administration is to create a world scene where the non-integrating gap (economically isolated nations) is eliminated and terrorism is a thing of the past.

Good News, Good Politics

Incumbents profit politically from good news on their watch. It's just a fact of life in a society that elects its politicians. But Juan Non-Volokh is raising a bit of fuss over the new medicare ad campaigns that the administration is launching.

He admits that it is good policy but seems uncomfortable that it is good politics. There are fairly well developed rules over mixed cases like trips that are both political and government related. A formula determines how much the politician's campaign has to write a reimbursement check to the government. But constituent communications which simply inform people of new changes in law are only indirectly beneficial to a campaign. They are the good record that the incumbent runs on. They are not, in and of themselves, campaign messages that should be paid for privately. If such things had to be paid for privately, or even a portion privately, the entire system would grind to a halt as people were less and less well informed about what the law was and how they could take advantage of this or that new provision. By that reasoning, the individual members' campaigns should pick up a portion of the publication costs of the Congressional Record.

Russian Stability

There are two roads to stability. The first is to just rule forever. This is the authoritarian model and creates all sorts of problems because of two little inconvenient facts. People die and political ambition is not limited to the current ruler. The second road to stability is the western democratic model of competing schools of thought around a national consensus with deep political bench strength. This has the disadvantage of being messy and very hard to quickly and broadly shift in a new direction.

An article over at SiberianLight over a Russian constitutional initiative to allow Putin to serve as President until 2018 got me thinking once again about these two models. The authoritarian model is tremendously weak in the transitions of power. There is no guarantee of continuity between authoritarians and no really good succession strategy. For every Kim Jong Il, there are dozens of Nicu Ceausescus and Uday Husseins.

The problem is when the national consensus is centered around horrible, self-destructive ideas. The bickering and back-and-forth semi-stasis of the bench model is a good way to lead the country down the drain if change cannot be effected fast enough.

So, getting back to Russia, which model is best seems to be a hybrid, starting at the authoritarian model and morphing to the school/bench model as the authoritarian moves the political class' consensus to the general area that marks long term viability for the nation. This does not answer the question of whether the term lengthening idea is a good initiative or not, but it does give some good pointers on how to question Putin and try to hold him accountable to keeping to that road of traveling from de-facto authoritarianism to school/bench.

President Putin:

1) If, God forbid, you were suddenly struck down, are you comfortable with the level of leadership you would leave behind in all major parties that no matter who won, Russia would be led by a responsible figure that the nation could survive? If no, what is your plan to take us out of this dangerous situation?

2) In your opinion, is the center of gravity of the Russian political class' opinion in a place that would promote the long-term growth of Russia or do you believe that significant intellectual leadership is still required to institutionalize ideas that will make Russia prosper for the long haul?

3) Are you satisfied with the level of civic-mindedness in the average Russian citizen? Do you think they have gotten enough beyond the communist attitude of waiting for solutions from above or do you think they need to become more involved in local civic life as part of what Edmund Burke called "little platoons" that organize to make life better? And what are you going to do to further encourage such civic organizations?

SiberianLight thinks that Russia today reminds him of Chile. Hopefully, it will have an even better ending.

HT: The Argus

Intelligence Commission Membership Picking

This NY Times opinion piece entirely misses the point. If this commission were entirely populated by former heads of intelligence services and Bush I cabinet officers, the cry wouldn't be a lack of stature but that it was obviously a coverup.

You can nit pick the formation of any commission in the US because the US has such a deep bench of political and government talent that there are always credible alternatives. This particular commission may or may not be the "best" personnel possible but it doesn't need to be. It's certainly in the top 10% of the possible members and that means it'll be good, fair, and serve the country well.

And that's all that's really needed.

HT: Balloon Juice

Letter to the Paper II

Samizdata had an article on the futility of determined words v. determined guns. I believe they underestimate the power of words, though the direct point is dead on. A determined despot will not be disloged merely by speeches.

The importance of opinion and speeches is a bit understated in this item. The truth is that the allegiance of armed forces is up for grabs in a civil war and the speeches and nonviolent actions are important to the calculus of violence because it is swaying an unknown number of armed and militarily trained men away from the mullahs.

The effect of such actions is discernible in Iran's military table of organization where for some time now, the hard line forces have been relying on foreign troops to do their dirty work and less and less on the regular army. It would also be discernible in treason trials and officer removals in Iranian armed forces, of which there have been plenty.

So, directly, is speech effective against guns? It is not. But speech can be effective in turning the guns around and the correlation of forces can shift without the wider world being aware of it, leading to the peaceful transfer of power without actual violence.

So will Iran continue to be ruled by foreign mercenaries and a minority of Iranians under arms? It's difficult to tell from North America but that's what is going on inside the country.

New Year's Resolution II

I just got teased in e-mail over a minor punctuation error. My correspondent speculated that I was getting tired due to my New Years resolution to post an average of 3 a day.

When I responded to him my post count was 247 over 38 days for a total of 6.5 posts per day. With this post my average goes to 6.526316 (according to my handy dandy OS X calculator).

Boy am I slacking.

Gun Grabbers, I Dare You

In the interpretation of some gun control organizations, if you are not a member of the militia, you don't have the right to bear arms. But who is a member of the militia?

The state codes generally have a military section. Many moons ago, a research assignment had me go through the NY State military code. Art I Sec 2.2 states:

The unorganized militia shall consist of all able-bodied male residents of the state between the ages of seventeen and forty-five who are not serving in any force of the organized militia or who are not on the state reserve list or the state retired list and who are or who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States, subject, however, to such exemptions from military duty as are created by the laws of the United States.

Now compare and contrast with the text of the 2nd amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

By the NY State military code, women who are not in the organized militia (they're covered separately), are not in the militia at all and you can make the argument under that interpretation that they have no right to bear arms.

I would love to see somebody try to enforce that interpretation. I really would. Then again, I'd also love to see somebody try to revoke all gun NY gun permits where the holder is older than 45.

Other states have better language. Indiana Code IC 10-16-6-1 states:

Sec. 1. Under Article 12, Section 1 of the Constitution of the State of Indiana, the militia consists of all persons who are at least eighteen (18) years of age except those persons who are exempted by the laws of the United States or of Indiana.

Who would have thought that in a comparison of NY State and Indiana that NY's military code would be the more sexist and ageist of the two?

Keep Your Powder Dry II

Professor Bainbridge is crowing that he gets results and suggests that I'm wrong about Bush keeping his powder dry. He uses as evidence the naming of the intelligence committee and Bush's 1 hour interview tomorrow on Meet the Press.

But the start of the conversation was about Bush's millions. I would suggest that neither action will dent Bush's campaign balances in any significant way. The commission and appearance will both be on the taxpayer's dime as they should be. President Bush may be starting to get ready to go on offense, but I suggest that the spending will still be kept almost nonexistent until the nominee of the Democrat party is known.

Celibate Priests and Pedophile Witch Hunts

I recently discovered Clayton Cramer's blog and generally liked what I read. He goes off the rails with his innuendo laden post on the recent papal call for fairness in suspected cases of child abuse. Cramer mischaracterizes the message which was that justice for the child should predominate but that we should not forget fairness to the accused. He makes it sound as if it were solely about the rights of the accused instead of a minor caution that a hunt for justice should not descend into witch hunt.

Cramer also unjustifiably criticizes Roman Catholic priestly celibacy. As a member in a part of the Catholic Church where celibacy is not mandatory, I have a bit more experience than most catholics in the pros and cons of married v. celibate priests. Both have their place and have both positives and negatives. In my church, the last time the balance tilted in favor of unmarried priests was in 1989, which was the year the last Romanian dictator fell.

Married priests can be threatened with damage to their spouses and children in an assault that is, by definition, unavailable against celibate priests. The rule of celibacy is a general rule adopted by rite and is a worldwide affair. If you want married priests, accept the headaches that go along with them, and swap over to a Catholic rite that has them. The idea that the celibate clergy is a useless anachronism is a horrible denial of the suffering going on among faithful celibate priests in the PRC and other countries where the Catholic Church is under active persecution. Married priests are often excused some trials as they have families to care for while celibate priests soldier on.

As for there being something peculiar to the Catholic faith and priestly organization that promotes or attracts or causes pedophilia, such statements would only be reasonable if priests were being convicted at higher rates than rabbis, ministers, or imams. As far as I know there are no such studies demonstrating this and there was certainly nothing cited in the article justifying it. It's all character assassination and innuendo. Who was the childhood priest when John Geoghan was a young boy? Was he a pedophile? Is there any evidence to back up this charge?

It looks like the papal admonition to avoid witch hunts is necessary after all.

Israel's Wall: Unexamined Consequences

Steven Den Beste is back to his in-depth long format posting, this time on Israel's project to build a wall between itself and the palestinians. What a relief, after his uncharacteristically brief posts on the M2nd and the 3rd, I was worried something had happened to him.

SDB nailed the topic dead on. Palestinians will be forced to new directions and new tactics by the wall but he missed one set of players in Israel today, and they too are winners, foreign workers. With the restrictions made possible by the wall, Israel will lose access to its most convenient cheap labor force. Israel will become an even more attractive destination for Romanians, Bulgarians, filipino, and other poor nation's migrant workers from unskilled labor to highly skilled trade work, palestinians will be replaced, largely with poor country labor.

But what will that shift in incomes effect on the politics of the nations where Israel is getting their labor? As more and more remittences start coming in from Israel, how does that play out in bilateral relations with these countries?

Israel has something of an opportunity here, if it chooses to take it. If it will create legislation that accommodates the needs of these workers and conditions such legislation on upgraded bilateral relations, Israel might find that it has growing influence on the world stage.

In contrast, with palestinian organizations spending more of their munitions on each other, their support in the oil rich arab world, what there is of it, will likely decline. Muslims killing muslims is fitna, a real no no for muslims. The mosques will not ring with sermons in favor of the palestinian cause when they are more known for fitna than jihad.

Should America Refuse a Free Lunch?

The Economist advocates Let the dollar drop. Sure, no problem, but what to do about asian economies who, not having learned the proper lessons from the Asian currency crisis, are repeating their mistakes by propping up the dollar and lowering their currencies' relative value?

To my mind, this evokes the idiocy the Japanese perpetrated on themselves by purchasing inflated US assets in the 1980s. Buying up Rockefeller Center looked like a great move back then but six years later they sold it to locals at half the price. So, this time they prop up our currency, give us lots of free stuff in exchange for over-priced debt at record-low yields. And when the bubble breaks and they are holding paper that's lost a great deal of value and the US quickly gets its fiscal house in order, what then? The problem with the bubble wasn't the bubble, per se. We had our own problems with the savings and loan bad debt crisis in the '80s. The problem was essentially a cultural one, an unwillingness to face the shame of failure and just get rid of the consequences of past foolishness. In Japan and the rest of east Asia there are still leftovers of their bubbles. The US has long since moved beyond the S&L failure as debts were settled at a loss and assets liquidated and moved to hands that could turn a profit on them.

But other than making sure that the US economy is supple and can recover from the inevitable snapping of artificial trends what, exactly, is the US supposed to be doing? Its currency is manipulated up, its free trade ideology and international obligations block it from restricting imports. Without increased stimulus, the US economy would today be in a deflationary cycle. And what alternate stimulus is currently available besides deficit spending? We're pretty maxed out on tax cuts. Interest rates are at record lows and inflation is barely 1%. What policy option is left except spending like a drunken sailor and preparing for the downstream consequences as best we can?

Airline Security Militia

Glenn Reynold's item on a felon who snuck onto a plane and was noticed and caught by passengers brings up two words that grace the law books of every state and the federal government "unorganized militia". The whole of the people are the ultimate security force and it is a largely unexamined topic of how much they are awake, alert, and form a functional part of the national security structure that protects the United States.

At the very least, this is a subject that needs a lot more thought.

A New Arabic Word

Jihad, hirabah, this War on Terror is slowly giving me a slight working knowledge of arabic. Now I have a new word to add fitna. This is the highly discouraged practice of muslims warring on other muslims. These words are all under linguistic assault with Al Queda issuing newspeak dictionaries to justify their shifting wartime tactics.

The terrorists have grave need for these newspeak dictionaries because even under the traditionally martial norms of Islam, what Al Queda is doing is far outside the bounds of normal muslim behavior. It is the linguistic and theoretical innovations of Al Queda that are most threatening, not their current ability to bomb, shoot, or knife their enemies (including us). They are not particularly efficient at that, after all, but over time an infinite number of terrorists will accumulate serious, even fatal harm. It is the generating capabilities that Al Queda is building up via, in part, by muslim newspeak that is the currently most unaddressed threat.

Family Moments

Something cute and happy, a photo album of my children.

HUMINT II

Ralph Peters enlarges on my previous remarks on our Human Intelligence (HUMINT). He takes a much more negative view but we're both on the same track, who exactly was it that caused the intelligence agencies to require a 13 year rebuilding plan in HUMINT, of which we are 55% done (we're in the 7'th year, according to George Tenet).

I disagree some with Ralph Peters in that I don't think a 55% progress report is passing, or even close to acceptable for the USA. We're improving, and that's the message I took away from Tenet's admission but it's a self-admitted failing grade. You can't expect, nor would I forgive, a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) who too boldly waved red flags and announced to our enemies that come on in the waters fine, our spies are mostly greenhorns and incompetents. That's just asking for trouble. But the 13 year rebuilding plan is sufficient notice for those with eyes and ears to note what is going on.

Most of all it is a call to not go into the field with machete drawn and silver platter ready to sport heads. If we're in the middle of a planned rebuilding cycle, this is something that needs strong oversight but not cries for blood on the editorial pages.

Japanese Trade War?

The DPRK's third largest trading partner is Japan with whom it maintains a trade surplus. According to this article the Koizumi administration is about to pass legislation enabling it to start economic warfare in the form of trade sanctions and a remittences freeze. The DPRK is the only likely target at the present moment and of the large korean ethnic population in Japan, approximately a third support Pyongyang with remittences, a hefty foreign currency earner for the DPRK.

With Japan so used to being on the other side of trade war threats, it should be a useful learning experience for americans to observe how Koizumi uses this new Japanese policy tool. It is not only helpful in the upcoming second round of six party talks on the DPRK's nuclear program, it also will provide a window into japanese thinking and that's an opportunity that should not be passed up.

Curing the WMD

That's Washington Monument Defense, not Weapons of Mass Destruction, though both are used in much the same way. The latter keeps invasion at bay, the former, budget cuts. Both are deployed at politicians eager to maintain their independence.

The WMD which Master of None's Michael Williams terms Washington Monument Syndrome is deployed every time popular will exhibits a preference for budget cuts. The most painful and visible cuts possible are adopted first in order to cure the people of such extravagant ideas as having a smaller government. Budget cuts hurt is the message and the real message is that the politicians will make them hurt if the plebes show up at the gates. Of course, publicly the message is that closing down the Washington Monument was the only spare money available in the budget.

The cure is simple, if unimplemented. Budget information needs to be accessible by the people, both revenues and expenses in as detailed a form as the legislature gets it (aside from secret expenditures, of course). Collaborative software needs to be created that will allow people to present alternatives to the current budget to achieve particular savings levels or to sign on to other citizen sponsored plans. Once savings are found and people show popular support for particular cuts that would not be as painful, politicians will have lost their excuse to use the WMD to defend their pork expenditures.

The beauty is that lots of people know exactly where the pork is hidden in their little corner of the world, whether that's geographical area or functional expertise. Given an opportunity to expose it, there would be a great deal of energy expended on exposing these unnecessary expenditures to the light of day.

All that's needed is for citizen software writers to create such a system and for government IT people to adopt an open standard for sharing budget figures. This is not rocket science. It's much easier than that.

Dean's Contributors Haven't Deserted

It looks like the faithful haven't given up on Howard Dean. His Wisconsin fundraising drive (700k by Sunday) was fulfilled in one day. He's now raised the bar to double the ad buys.

Is this throwing good money after bad? I'm sure the Deaniacs will say no but we'll know after Wisconsin. If Dean and Edwards just don't give up it may be that they can keep Kerry below 50% of delegates. Now won't that be a fun convention to watch.

Minus One Weasel?

We may be on the verge of a true opportunity to reassess (for the better, this time) US/German Relations. Chancellor Schroeder, as is traditional in the FRG system, is also leader of the largest governing party. Gerhard Schroeder has just announced that he is stepping down from his political post and it is quite likely that he will soon step down from the Chancellorship.

Anti-american posturing has only carried Schroeder so far and it looks like the CDU's prediction that Schroeder would not serve out his term, that his histrionic demonization of the US will come back to haunt him, is bearing fruit. May the German people find a leader more interested in leading the FRG into a true German way than in opposing for opposition's sake.

Ignoring the UN

One of the raps about the Bush administration is that it ignores the UN and only goes to it when it is convenient to want a resolution giving it political cover. It amazes me that anti-Bush partisans are not getting pilloried about this very same issue now.

From their perspective, mandatory resolutions of the UNSC were violated. Multiple mandatory resolutions were violated. By the terms of the UN Charter, that sets you up for Great Power intervention. You deserve to lose your regime if you cross the UN on a mandatory UNSC resolution.

For honest UN advocates, the line should be that the result was right, Bush and Blair should be praised for defending the UN system, but they get points off for sloppy paperwork and should work on that. This is a line that, as far as I can tell, is being adopted by almost nobody.

The double standard, the hypocrisy and deceit is appalling on the part of the anti-war left who supposedly believe in the UN. The proof is already in that Saddam deserved to be invaded based on evidence acquired thus far. If not, you might as well just tear out the section of the UN charter describing mandatory resolutions and use it for toilet paper. Which, as the good recyclers they are, most of the anti-war left is doing right now.

Damn the Nation and Jump to Conclusions

When George Tenet asked for patience and forbearance on the part of the american people to wait for the actual facts to come in he was warning against exactly the kind of irresponsible bloviating in today's NY Times editorial.

Sadly, the NY Times entirely misses the point. It ignores reports that indicate that it is reprising its cold war "useful idiot" role and plunges ahead, unwilling to heed the warning signs that maybe it's being played for a sucker and it should moderate its stance to take into account that possibility. Perhaps it will be luckier than in previous times when it has given more credence to those opinions it found comfortable than those opinions that were ultimately found to be correct about the nature of this nation's enemies.

WoT Solidarity

The Russians just got hit by Chechen separatists in Moscow. It was a subway bomb that killed almost a hundred people (so far).

There seems to be something of a disconnect in solidarity among some. There are plenty of people who sympathize and stand in solidarity with Israel against palestinian terrorism. We need to be just as strong in solidarity with Russia against Chechen terrorism. Whatever the past, or even present difficulties in our relationship with Russia, these people deserve to know it is not just the government of the US but also the people of the US who stand with them against this barbaric, unholy evil.

The Benefits of Pollution Markets

European scientists have invented smog eating paint. Now in the classic green model, such paint would be mandated by government rule, costs would rise, inspectors would be appointed, and it would be an awful mess in fighting to get the stuff up on actual surfaces.

With the idea of pollution markets (as the US has advocated since GHWB's presidency) the scenario changes. You prove you have x gallons up on an exterior wall, you have a pollution credit worth X dollars. This makes an incentive to subsidize production up to X-1 dollars, which will lower the paint cost and increase sales. If the some coal plant in West Virginia wants to subsidize a house painting bill, even the most anti-green homeowner will take the deal.

The bottom line is that the paint will be far more widely deployed with less hassle and we'll have a cleaner environment using a market mechanism that most of the green movement had the vapors over when it was established.

HT: Oxblog's Josh Chafetz

Status of Human Intelligence Branch

More Tenet:

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

It will take an additional five years to finish the job of rebuilding our clandestine service, but the results so far have been obvious.

This is the best indication that I've seen that this intelligence inquiry issue is seen as deadly serious by the CIA. To say that we're five years away from rebuilding our HUMINT (Human Intelligence) to a decent level is the nearest I've ever seen to a bend over and drop your pants moment.

One thing that I think we should all demand from any intelligence review commission is what the heck happened that decimated HUMINT to the point that you need a 13 year program to build it back up? Have all of those destructive inputs ceased?

Missing Aluminum Tubes

More on Tenet's speech:

Regarding prohibited aluminum tubes, a debate laid out extensively in the estimate and one that experts still argue over, were they for uranium enrichment or conventional weapons? We have additional data to collect and more sources to question. 

Moreover, none of the tubes found in Iraq so far match the high- specification tubes Baghdad sought and may never have received the amounts needed. Our aggressive interdiction efforts may have prevented Iraq from receiving all but a few of these prohibited items. 

If the tubes were for conventional munitions that were legal, why have they not been found? On the one hand, they could be in the parts of Iraq's conventional military arsenal and not inventoried yet. But if that were true, there could be a great many other sanctions prohibited things hidden there and waiting to be found. On the other hand, these tubes could have been spirited away as part of Iraq's emergency exit plan in case of imminent invasion in accordance with Soviet doctrine (let's not forget that Iraq was a Soviet client state and generally followed Soviet military doctrine).

So which is it? Who knows yet. Eventually we'll figure it out.

Biological Delivery System But No Biological Weapons?

George Tenet has made a significant speech on the intelligence. Here are two paragraphs that should be headline material all around the world:

The question of intent, especially regarding the smaller unmanned aerial vehicle, is still out there. But we should remember that the Iraqis flight tested an aerial biological weapons spray system intended for a large unmanned aerial vehicle. 

A senior Iraqi official has now admit that their two large unmanned vehicles, one developed in the early '90s and the other under development in late 2000, were intended for the delivery of biological weapons.

Does it make any sense at all to have a biological weapons delivery system but no biological weapons? Think about it for a minute. I've said previously that we should be waiting for final reports. This sort of item is a great reason why.

Primary Documents: John Kerry & Vietnam

John Kerry served in Vietnam. He was honored with some of the highest honors this country gives for his actions there. When he came back from his military service, he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He participated in something called the Winter Soldier Investigation. He went to Congress to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding that investigations and he made grave accusations against this country in that testimony.

The Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI) was subsequently followed up with an official investiagation by the Naval Investigation Service (NIS) on the request of Senator Mark Hatfield. No charges were brought out of that investigation but apparently several phonies were uncovered. The full story can be found here.

If Kerry is going to stand largely on his character, on his biography, his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is fair game in judging him fit for the Presidency. Does he still stand by that testimony? Should he?

Computer Commodities

I recall years ago when I was just seriously starting out in the consulting business, I noticed somebody putting together a PC in a cube on a Monday. By Tuesday, there were two of them scratching their heads and trying to get the darn thing to work. Wednesday there were three people working on it and Thursday it was finished. There were probably 15-20 consultant hours put on this 'custom' system which had both a CD burner and video capture card.

(All together now) Oooh.

Looking at the umpteenth Dell catalog to hit my mailbox today I'm looking at the systems and realize that the game has changed tremendously since then. For what a decent consultant like me charges, you can get an entire new desktop for the labor price of a day's worth of troubleshooting. In fact, for bottom end systems, a day's labor = two desktops.

For companies who wish to get organized and minimize costs, the lesson is clear, you need to control your desktop configurations and buy in lots, create OS and applications images using Norton's Ghost or one of its competitors and segregate your data so that you can change out desktops as easily as you change light bulbs.

Up to now, it's mostly been the big companies that have used imaging software to control costs and the software environment. But the differential between desktop (and even small server) prices and labor costs to achieve a custom solution, is growing to the point where imaged solutions are going to spread all the way down to even small companies in the 10-20 seat range.

Can a State Ban Marriage?

In the US view of rights, a right is something that is recognized, not granted. The people are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Government may recognize them, support them, but if it oppresses them, the people have a right to rebel. So, looking at things that way, is there a right to civil marriage?

I'm not asking whether this would be good, smart, stupid, or evil. I'm asking whether the government's positive steps to recognize civil marriage are a constitutional requirement in any state or under the US federal constitution?

This question has two relevant implications. If you answer no, it is not a constitutional requirement and states can ban all marriages, then the position that gay marriage is a civil right is injured. But if you answer yes, states have to marry, you directly kill one of the fairly popular alternatives in the gay marriage debates, take the state out of the question entirely. The heart of things really is why does the state inject itself into marriage?

Discuss

Dog Pack Attack

After reading this article over at Clayton Cramer's blog detailing the growing menace of dog packs and in the spirit of America's Army here's a suggestion for the NRA and the rest of the pro-gun rights NGOs, make a video game out of it.

Create a few animal/human interactions that require the use of a gun, make some of them big enough that some of the clip restrictions make a difference to success and create a database of actual incidents so that people can look things up and see how close their vacation spot is to that dog mauling 9 months ago or the moose stomping two years ago.

The concept could use some refining but the general need to educate people about gun ownership is very similar to the army's need to educate people about its subculture. It would be a shooting video game with a redeeming social purpose and would create a lot of awareness for the cause for relatively little money.

Intelligence Investigations

OK, now the US and UK are both on record that they are going to investigate their pre-war intelligence assessments of Iraq. That's fine and a good step. But where is the UN investigation, the French investigation, the FRG investigation? All these entities were at least as off on the violations of the UNSC resolutions as the US and UK now appear to have been. So why does there seem to be silence?

As far as France and the FRG are concerned, they are NATO powers and the competence of their intelligence arms are at least tangentially of concern to their allies. Do they know something about their intelligence estimates that the rest of us do not? Or have they lost the capacity for self-evaluation and self-improvement? I wonder.

Putting an End to the Freak Show

Peggy Noonan's most recent Wall Street Journal column laments the return of the pre 9/11 freak show. Seriousness is gone, we're obsessed by trivialities again, she worries, and it's all downhill again.

I'm certainly not encouraged by the entire affair but I think Noonan is missing a few things. The major cultural transmission entities that make up mass media are all gasping for air. They're losing customers, there are technological alternatives building to break their distributional monopolies, and these two factors combined say something very healthy about the american people, if not the american elite.

The RIAA and the entire music distribution mafia is breaking down. iTunes with its music store is just one example of the revolution to come. As music is freed from its physical media and internet distribution becomes the norm, the arbiters of taste and culture that have currently dominated will no longer be able to distort the market with lowest common denominator music. Movies will follow the same path of narrowcasting and segmentation. There will be low brow culture, but it will not dominate.

The proof that it will not dominate is the draining away of consumers. I do not purchase as much music or see as many movies as I used to. I spent a year without TV at the beginning of my marriage in order to get closer to my wife (who I had not known all that long before we got married). When we finally got a TV we were both shocked at how much more degraded the entire spectrum of programming was from what we remembered a year prior. It was just stupid, idiotic, and tinged with just enough evil to make much of it creepy.

But it's not just me. The statistics kept by the networks and the RIAA both show that their market is shrinking. This leaves an opening for new entrants to provide what people want. In the past, high barriers to entry would prevent the market from shifting rapidly but today technology is rapidly lowering market barriers. The US Army is going to be driving the adoption of IPv6 starting a bit later this decade and IPv6 with its Quality of Service (QoS) packets enables unregulated, low cost net broadcasting.

We're on the verge of a new era in cultural expression. If we work hard to prepare for it, it may just end up being a positive experience.

Rule of Law Warning Light

Byron York has a column in the Hill that should have honest patriots worried regardless of their partisan affiliation. The topic is the "we wuz robbed" North Dakota Senate election of 2002. For those who have forgotten, the Republican challenger lost that election by 524 votes and there were sworn affidavits of hundreds of false voter registrations among many other Democrat illegal actions.

In the end, Sen. Tim Johnson kept his seat, nobody has been tried, much less convicted for the scandalous behavior, and it looks like nothing has changed in North Dakota law or practice to prevent a repeat as Thune tries again against Sen. Daschle in 2004.

What is really worrying is York's implicit call that the rule of law isn't working and that if the other side is cheating we might as well join them:

For their part, Republicans should have learned a valuable lesson from that race. And the lesson is: Cheating works.

Bring in lots of lawyers from Washington, New York and Los Angeles. Intimidate the honest, well-meaning elderly ladies who work at the polling places. Observe the rules governing polling-place behavior when those rules work in your favor. Break them when they don’t. If your candidate wins, ignore the inevitable charges of misconduct from the other side.

If authorities treat the loser’s evidence as they treated the Republican case in 2002, the whole thing will end up a murky mess, which you can then claim as total exoneration.

And the best thing is, while the other side complains, you’ll have your man in the Senate.

This is a call to lawbreaking. It's despicable and, in an atmosphere of poor electoral law enforcement, inevitable.

Map Stupidity

And here I thought that only the Balkans spawned stupid "Greater" (insert favored nation here) maps that did nothing but piss off neighbors are raise the likelihood of war and scare off international investment.

Nope. It turns out Koreans can be idiots too.

So Where's the Program?

It's an old phrase "you can't tell the players without a program". IraqNow has a post up that shows this applies to Iraqi insurgencies, in spades. The news media are making a fatal error by lumping all the insurgent forces into one movement.

They are not one movement. Thus you have military men, who do make the distinction, who refer to one particular insurgency as being crushed and the media cries gotcha because the aggregate activity of all insurgencies has not gone down.

Somebody needs to write a program naming the players so the media can keep proper score. Wait, isn't that the media's job in the first place?

Hat's Off

When James Lileks has a craw full of bile, step back to get out of blast range but pay attention. It's a beautiful work of art. Just go read it.

Patrick Stewart is immolated with class, grace, and style. John Kerry and the Democrats are ground to a bloody, twitchy detritus. I like it.

Gradations of Evil

Song Dae Ri has been judged an accomplice to the evil North Korean regime and is being denied asylum. Mr. Ri, a low level trade official, will be executed if deported.

This brings up a fairly difficult moral question. The truth is that the refugee board is correct when it says that Mr. Ri is complicit in crimes. Anybody who participates in the North Korean government is complicit. But this does not mean that Mr. Ri should, as consequence, be forced back to certain death in North Korea. This is disproportionate punishment, unfair and cruel in the extreme.

So, what to do? I would suggest that Mr. Ri might be given a sort of probationary asylum. He could be required to submit to judicial oversight and to present an effective plan consisting of a certain number of hours a week of constructive work educating people about the realities of North Korean life and the political system in which he was complicit. After the probationary period, he could go through the normal process of a refugee. This would provide atonement for his complicity, an actual contribution to Canada, and would not burden Canada with an unnecessary orphan, his son, who has already lost his mother to the executioner and has won Canadian asylum.

Bush Guard Attendence Checking

There seem to be a great many people on the left side of the ideological spectrum who are all hot and bothered by the issue of GWB's National Guard attendance or non attendance. As many former guardsmen have attested, record keeping is and has never been the Guard's strong suit. But how bad is that record keeping? Nobody's bothered to find out. If there exists some actual disinterested researchers out there instead of partisan spinners in white lab coats, here's one method.

Do a randomized study of the quality level of record keeping. Find 300-500 randomly picked guardsmen of that era and geographic region who did some of their duty in other units and figure out how much of their paperwork is still available after all these decades. If you can't verify a good sized chunk of them, it's a good bet that GWB's guard records are just one in a long line of casualties of military clerk foul ups. If everybody else checks out, the stories of lost records would look a lot less credible.

Anybody want to lay odds nobody ever bothers to do the study?

Failed Imagination

Samizdata has a great article on the Fixed Quantity Fallacy, the idea that there is only a fixed quantity of (insert good or service) and once those are supplied, the market is filled and that's it. Every other supplier is out of luck.

The point about the Fixed Quantity of [fill in the blank] Fallacy is that people facing a price plummet spot one consequence immediately which is a very definite win-lose situation, but they fail utterly to spot the other massively more huge benefit, which is an equally definite and far bigger win-win situation.

That's it, in a nutshell. A failure of imagination, a conspiracy of little minds is the cause of the fear of change, the fear that trade will take away job, the birth of protectionism that protects the few at the cost of the many. This pattern repeats again and again, in industry after industry, company after company, country after country. What is its source? What is the cure? Now that's a bit of innovation that would cure a great many ills; a pity nobody's imagined it yet.

Taxes Are Addiction Breaking: Right

Jacob Sullum has a great observation on the hypocrisy of the "tobacco is addictive" brigade. He notes that the same people who were in the forefront of the fight to declare tobacco is addictive advocate a $2 per pack tax that they now predict will cause 5 million addicts to drop smoking.

In non-libertarian longhand, this is nonsense because addictive substances are highly price insensitive. If you're a true addict, you don't much care how much it costs. You'll do what it takes including turning to a life of crime to get your fix. But smokers, apparently, are a new kind of addict, an addict that responds to incentives just like it was a normal habit. What a sad con. We don't need the attitude that anything is justified as long as it helps get rid of that demon weed. We've had that enough with industrial hemp politics.

Keep Your Powder Dry

Professor Bainbridge is worried and wondering what George W. Bush waiting for? He's got almost a hundred million in the bank and has no presence on the air, is not fighting back against Democrat attacks at all.

The answer seems to be at least partially outlined in my previous article. GWB's waiting for all his opponent's chips to be on the table, for the also-rans to be chased off the table and then he'll place his bets. It's quite possible to wait too long. Dole in 1996 is a case in point. But we're nowhere near that point yet. This is the highest stakes poker game on the planet. My bet is that Lucy will still pull the football away successfully.

GWB: What Harvard Does to Conservatives

A good article on the Harvard Business School and how it has left its mark on President Bush. It's an interesting reminder that anybody who declares that GWB is an idiot is also declaring that Harvard graduated an idiot, that a Harvard MBA can be bought, that influence can be peddled, that maybe others who have come out of the program are similarly unqualified. This is the kind of nasty innuendo that I suspect has played its part in forming GWB's attitudes towards affirmative action and the 'soft bigotry' that comes with those programs.

It's informative and you should read the whole thing as it not only gives insight into the President but also the entire class of Harvard MBAs who run so many of the world's premier companies.

Terrorists Looking to Thermobarics?

Apparently thermobaric munitions are becoming popular with terrorists in Russia and there is speculation that they will start cropping up in terrorist attacks in the US according to an expert at Battelle.

I read that sort of thing in your inbox and all I can think is that it's not about the weapons used. Weapons don't do anything but improve success rates and efficiency. Modernity will always supply more effective and efficient ways of accomplishing our goals, no matter what our goals are. The battle is and has always been about goal setting and convincing others to abandon goals that require the use of such weapons.

Out Microsofting Microsoft

The People's Republic of China is going to mandate proprietary wireless network standards. The technical reasons for this are patent nonsense. There is a security problem with the international encryption standard. It's really only good enough to keep honest people honest. But the globally adopted solution has been to run secure traffic over end-to-end encrypted links that are secure and can be changed if there is a fault found in the encryption scheme.

The PRC effort very much reminds me of Microsoft's continual efforts to undermine international standards on protocols by leveraging its control over the worldwide PC desktop market into protocol dominance. In the original article, a false choice is presented between hardware link encryption and no encryption at all.

The truth is that international standards are adopted, and take so much time to adopt because everybody has to be consulted to go forward. If the PRC succeeds in dictating worldwide adoption of its unilateral standard, it will gain the ability to manipulate IT companies' dictating hardware changes on its own schedule and for its own reasons. The PRC will be able to give its own favored firms advanced access to standards and give these companies months of crucial time to get a jump start on satisfying new technical standards.

This is the same reason why Microsoft has made protocol and file format differentiation such an important part of their business strategy. If they call the tune, they can always halt a competitor's momentum by changing an underlying technology and forcing them to devote engineering resources to solve that problem instead of adding to their competitive advantage and Microsoft can keep on repeating that strategy until it succeeds at little cost to itself.

It's ban enough that Microsoft continually tries to kneecap other firms with its market power. Having a nation state do it is an entire order of magnitude worse. As a sovereign power, they aren't subject to the same anti-trust pressures that Microsoft is and they can print their own money to get out of most financial difficulties from bad business decisions. It's not a widespread phenomenon yet, but if the PRC decides to go wholesale down this path, it marks a troubling turn for the world economic system.

Worry About Muslim Fatalism

Andrew Sullivan is taking a bit of flack about his recent columns on the trampling deaths at the Hajj. Sullivan's right to be bothered by the 'so what' attitude but I think he needs to think a bit deeper about what fatalism's relationship is to the Islamist death-cult.

It's not indifference to human life that is a problem with fatalism. Fatalism is an indifference to the idea that you, as a person inside the system, have any responsibility, or even ability to affect things for the better.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats' words are very much on point, those written above, and yes, the rest of them too.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What rough beast indeed?

African Prussians and Other Horrific Tales

Tacitus has a powerfully moving tale explaining Rwanda's genocide. It's work safe and not very graphic but the last 4-5 paragraphs moved me so much I had to leave the computer for a few minutes and immerse myself in a computer text I'm slogging through. It's profoundly disturbing to understand that we lived through this. We could do something about it. We didn't do it because it was inconvenient.

Rwanda is apparently the Prussia of Africa, orderly, rule conscious, intensely interested in doing any job right. With such features, it possibly has one of the brightest futures in Africa. But it was so rule bound that even the victims of massacre wanted to do their job right. The only ones who didn't play their part are the white knights of the West. We did not come over the hill to save the day. It will always be our personal shame that we did not.

Fixing Media Cultural Degradation

Petrified Truth has a short item on the whole Superbowl half time show controversy. He finds it odd that a radio rant against violating nudity standards in the middle of the day on the most watched TV show of the year is interrupted by a commercial for a male sexual aid.

Both problems can be solved with one innovation. The viewer needs to become the customer. Right now, believe it or not, you are not a customer when you watch a program. You pay no money, so you get no input. The federal government, who can pull a broadcasting license, is paid attention. Advertisers who actually send a media outlet money, are paid attention because they are customers.

In essence, anybody who cares about cultural standards should be against free TV. It creates a situation where morals are most closely influenced by those twin paragons of morality, politicians and large corporate interests. In the days when the current TV system was created, it was too expensive to extract micropayments from viewers. Even cable TV has very broad granularity compared to what it could have if modern information system techniques were applied to mass media revenue models today.

Advertisers still want to advertise though so I suggest that instead of paying for broadcasters to beam ads to our TV sets that we may or may not see, they pay us to actually watch them. It would be a win-win situation with advertisers being able to target much better while we would actually get to see ads for products that we actually care about and can enjoy entertainment that isn't distorted by a need to run ads in-line, within the program.

Broadcasters, for their part, would have a new set of customers. They would no longer have to please advertisers, they would just have to please viewers. This, no doubt, wouldn't change many programs cultural aspirations. One thing it would do, would allow people to create zones where raunch and cultural garbage are simply not tolerated because people will want their money back.

Instead of participating in boycotts to force advertisers to complain, people will gain the right to complain themselves and be treated as customers, not inconveniently sentient parts of the machinery to please the true customers.

For my own part, I wouldn't mind being able to run commercial free during most of my TV watching and every once in awhile flipping to 'the commercial channel' to fill up my account. I wouldn't even mind paying to fill up that account if I had no better use for my money. I suspect that people will turn against free TV as soon as they realize that free of payment is intimately linked to free of meaningful influence on broadcast content and free of respect due your moral standards.

Measuring the Deficit

The Columbia Journalism Review blog is rapping knuckles at the NY Times over how they're reporting the federal budget deficit. The NYT was using a straight dollar figure unadjusted for inflation, the CJRB said that as a percent of GDP was a better measure and showed that we are nowhere near the peak year of 6.0% of GDP.

I very much agree that %GDP is the relevant figure. A credit card bill that would ruin me might be the normal run of the mill figure for Paris Hilton or Donald Trump. What you make influences how much debt you can take. But the CJRB misses a story. The figures that CJRB uses exclude wartime years. But you only do that during peacetime. If you're in a war, you have to throw in the debt figures for WW II and other war years. We didn't get to over 100% debt to GDP in WW II with under 10% deficit to GDP figures.

We thus get back to the big foreign policy question of the day, are we at war. The CJRB does good work by chiding the Times for its dollar deficit reporting. But it has its own bias showing when it implicitly throws out wartime deficit figures.

Joe's Out Where Do His Delegates Go?

Joe Lieberman has has left the building. His quest for the presidency is over. The only currency he has now are the 25 delegates he had declare for him. With Edwards, Dean, and Clark all staying in, it's quite possible that at the convention where these delegates go might matter if Kerry can't close the deal and get his delegate count above the magic 2161 level.

Current Delegate Count

And we have a new Democrat leader. Yes, it's only today that Kerry moved into first place in the race that counts, the delegate race.

You need 2161 delegates to win. 426 delegates have either been assigned via votes or are superdelegates who have declared a preference for a particular candidate.

The rankings are:

John Kerry is clearly in the lead but he's got to do better to end this fight before the convention.

What's Your 'E' Point?

Thomas Nugent has a nice Laffer Curve analysis up on NRO. In between taking whacks at Kerry for being unforgivably retrograde in economics, he made the interesting point that the optimum point, marked 'E' on the curve, differs from individual to individual.

So why isn't there some sort of quiz to find out your individual 'E' rating? What factors go into figuring this out?

With all the silly and inane quizzes floating around on the Internet, you'd think someone would have put one together on this one. As far as I can tell, you'd be wrong.

Facts of Life Database

A logistics article in StrategyPage just reminded me of a phenomena that I've noticed quite a bit. Things that are taken for granted often change without us ever knowing it. In the article, it was the troop carrying capacity of railroads. In academia, it might be the long discredited marxist theory that a particular piece of literary criticism is based upon. In energy analysis it might be your attitudes about alternative energy and what to do about energy supplier political instability.

Just about every decision relies on underlying facts that people often take into account and then forget that their entire plan or argument depends on those facts staying within certain parameters. In simple situations, you can keep it all in your head but when things get complex, nobody really understands the full implications of basic facts changing until an extensive (and expensive) review process goes on figuring out exactly what other things are no longer true since this new factor arrived on the scene.

This doesn't just help in after the fact adjustment. It also helps in future policy planning. I've lately taken up the hobby of talking about gay marriage. I know from reading that there are hundreds and hundreds of state and federal laws that this policy decision touches. I don't know what they are. I don't know what the motivation was for making marriage a factor in those laws. In other words, I (and everybody else honestly looking at the subject as well) am cast adrift without more than a visceral understanding that this is a very big deal that shouldn't be cavalierly changed, willy nilly, without working out all the consequences. I also get a sick feeling in my stomach as I see the shallow level of analysis on both sides that obviously isn't going through and figuring out all the consequences of such a potentially society shifting adjustment.

So what if you could make a plan, create a system where all your major underlying assumptions would be explicit? What if you could set alarms for a range of values and have some sort of group monitor those values for a small fee? If they values go out of range, an alarm would go out and you wouldn't have the embarrassing (and possibly disastrous) situation of a perfectly good plan being silently rendered useless by changing facts on the ground.

State Department Warnings

With all this fuss over the recent Hajj tramplings I thought I'd see what the State Department had to say about it. The answer was, nothing. There is no warning that the Hajj has been marred many years by trampling deaths. This is a death level that would have led to a change in management at any simple club or sporting facility, much less a yearly world-wide religious event if it were held up to US standards. But, of course, the State Department has a long history of giving Saudi Arabia a pass on being held to the same standards we hold our civilized allies to.

I wish they'd drop the double standard. Yes, Saudi Arabia is an important country. We don't want to tick them off. Providing a two line description of the crowd control situation for the Hajj is the bare minimum protection the US government owes to its muslim nationals. And they're not getting it.

Clarification: When I say 'civilized allies' I'm talking about the sick double standard that divides our allies into civilized and uncivilized categories and applies double standards to our evaluation of them with less expected from people like the Saud family.

I leave the debate over the value of arab and islamic civilization itself to another time and place.

Government Business Limitations

Dr Eamonn Butler writes the following over at the Adam Smith Institute Blog:

The problem in aviation is that European airports are mostly owned by the state. And we're right to be concerned about how state money is used: we've had enough of governments messing up markets by subsidizing things in order to buy votes. So we need strict rules against subsidies.

This is dead on. In economics, if a manager provides a payoff to a customer to the detriment of the shareholders, this is a breach of fiduciary duty and a crime. A government businessman's duty is to provide a service to the benefit of the public. But if he lowers prices, is it a subsidy via the treasury? Is he doing it to run a sale to make a greater profit on higher volume? You can't tell the difference and the government businessman has all the incentive in the world to please key electoral blocs with subsidies and give difficult to prove discounts to connected special interests. This is a systemic failure of the government run economic model and I wish the people on the other side of the Atlantic all the luck in the world in their efforts to privatize their airports.

Private Nukes

ESR has an article on his concern for legislation banning private nuclear weapons.

SIGH!

Even taking the most expansive view of the 2nd amendment, there are certain restrictions on weapons ownership that should be in place. I wouldn't mind a short sighted man with a shotgun for home defense. I would mind somebody short sighted driving a tank around the neighborhood without corrective lenses. He would not be "well regulated".

The more powerful the weapon, the more dangerous you can be with it if you aren't careful, the more restrictive ownership of that weapon can be in a legitimate pro-liberty reading of the 2nd amendment (discussions like this are the reason why I'm not an anarcho-capitalist). There is no more powerful weapon than a WMD and a nuke is in the first rank of risky weapons.

The policy of the United States is that there are only a few states that are stable and trustworthy enough that their possession of nukes doesn't scare the pants off us. Our policy with the NPT treaty is that even a stable, free nation like Canada shouldn't have nukes. With this reality, private nukes are off the table. When you have an individual who is more trustworthy and competent than a national political system filled with checks and balances and who actually wants a private nuke actually exists, wake me up. Until then, talking about private nukes is just libertarian bait to make libertarians look extremist and foolish.

ESR fell for the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

Why Do Liberals Howl Over Small Budget Cuts

David Bernstein notes that the NY Times and Washington Post are making a very big deal over the elimination of 65 programs and the trimming of 63 others to produce a 0.2% cut in the federal budget over the baseline (which already has a natural positive slope built into it).

I think what he fails to see is that liberals view little government programs as acorns from which mighty oaks can grow. Instituting a program is always the hard part. After that, human nature in the bureaucracy leads to continual efforts to enlarge each of these acorns in order to further the careers of the bureaucrats running the programs. Individually, it's all small beer but sow enough acorns and you end up with a socialist (or social democratic if you swing that way) forest filled with significantly sized programs that are difficult to uproot. Taking out small programs is like taking out the seedlings. It is only insignificant if you are shortsighted and imagine the effects only in the next few years.

For the suburban minded, skip the oak metaphor, and imagine the programs as young crabgrass plants. The growth patterns might be a bit more appropriate.

Clean Up Timing

There's a lot being written now about the US intelligence situation and the need for resignations and reform. Here's a typical offering by Peter Brookes, a former intelligence agent. In fact, its better than most because Mr. Brookes actually leaves open the possibility that our current state of knowledge is not complete, that before the ISG finishes its work, we shouldn't come to final conclusions. But what could be made better in the article, and is utterly lacking in most such articles is any sense of a time line of when it would be appropriate for changes to be launched. That would be after a full investigation of the causes of the failure and a comprehensive plan to make our human intelligence systems as good as our overt military is.

By this point, people at the CIA, NSC, and the rest of the intelligence apparatus are hunkering down like a battered wife and waiting for the kicks and punches to come flying their way. The problem is that there seems to be no sense of the history of how our intelligence services got into their current jam. Without some sort of reasoned planning process that creates a consensus within which our agents can operate fearlessly we are going to continue to be surprised by phantom threats we see too easily and all too real threats that we ignore to our national peril. It would be nice to see such wisdom come from both parties. Some days, it would be nice to see it coming from one party.

Microsoft Explained

I present here, the best article I've seen in quite a while that explains why Microsoft is so distrusted by its competitors and why there is such fear and loathing in tech land directed at the Redmond giant.

Microsoft has, as a matter of policy, done exactly as William Safire describes the NSC attacking the USSR. Beyond the usual FUD jousting and trash talking of competitors' products that normal competition entails. Microsoft has been rumored to, and the rumors have been proven in court, tailor its code to break its competitors' products in a way that throws the blame on the product, not on the Microsoft sabotage.

Unlike the USSR, competitors are not engaged in any sort of theft or underhanded dealing. They took in good faith that Microsoft was not committing a fraud and that its documentation was accurate, its legally binding contractual promises of working with its partner/competitors on interoperability were legitimate, and that they could treat it like any other technology company.

Microsoft has broken faith so many times that nobody believes them anymore and so even judicially ordered compulsory licensing schemes for Microsoft technology generate few takers.

One other thing that Safire's Cold War story brought to mind. The story itself never came out to the public until long after the USSR was dead. DR-DOS may have eventually won its owners a nice $40M settlement but as a product, it died a long, long time ago. Microsoft banks $40M in a matter of hours. For it, paying a fine years down the road is nothing.

Ignoring Ceiling Prices

You can see some of the most uneducated analysis arising from the simplest mistakes. The geopolitical effects of resource prediction cannot be done properly without analyzing economic ceiling prices. A sad case in point is this analysis over the coming US/China war over oil.

The truth is that the entire article depends on the idea that there are no major new supplies of oil available and that the nations of the world, especially superpower US and the rising economic giant PRC, are on a collision course due to that competition. It is a patently false analysis because it completely ignores huge energy deposits that become available at higher prices, potential competition that constrains ME nations in their capability to raise prices.

The competition between the US and the PRC over influence will exist. It is unlikely to produce war as long as the PRC is content to purchase its energy and not invade nations to steal it away. The idea that it is necessary for the US to use its geopolitical muscle in order for the PRC to behave rationally and invest in a diversified energy stream is both patronizing to the PRC and would be a foolish waste of US resources.

The US, if it needs to make an effort at all, needs to work towards making the price of abundant alternative energy systems fall below the market price of oil and have the oil age end at a relatively low energy price. Which alternatives these will be is unclear but striving mightily so that only we have to kowtow to dysfunctional arab oil principalities is not a positive outcome for the United States.

Forging Bipartisan Foreign Policy Consensus

George Bush cannot be beaten unless the Democrat nominee attacks Bush's foreign policy from the right, according to Walter Russell Meade. Another way to describe the situation is to say this is the forging of a new bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. Neutralizing Bush's, Republican's strength on foreign policy requires Democrats to outflank Republicans on this issue in order to get elected to the Presidency and the Democrat party will make this sacrifice by adopting Bush's strategy.

Electorally, this throws 2004 into partisan doubt but it also makes the election irrelevant for foreign observers. If George W. Bush becomes the moderate choice, all those left wing european politicians praying day and night that the american people remove this wild cowboy will be unpleasantly surprised if they get their wish as nothing, from their perspective, changes with a Democrat in office.

I don't think that the Democrats will be able to execute this outflanking maneuver well enough to pull it off in 2004. But their eventual win by this method will have the benefit of recreating the traditional US political situation of small changes, left or right depending on who wins the election, inside a wider context of foreign policy consensus. This makes the US much more predictable and stable, comforting our allies and dismaying our enemies.

Puzzled

Putting aside the main point for a second, an example Stanley Kurtz uses in his most recent gay marriage in Scandinavia article puzzles me. He refers to this article about pro-gay flags flying above two Norwegian parishes. From Kurtz's article, it appears that the Lutheran churches have a bishop who does not want those flags flown but the council has acted in defiance of his lawful authority.

What puzzles me is why those who represent orthodox christian views on the subject allow themselves to be bullied by a local majority of rebels. At least two council members were against it. The solution is simple to my eyes. If I were in such a position as a church council member. I would simply enter the church, take down the flag, pack it up and mail it to the bishop with the following note.

Dear Bishop XYZ,

Enclosed, please find one flag paid for with parish money that I took down from our church. I understand that you have forbidden this but since it's your parish, it's your flag so I leave it to you to do what you see fit with it.

I will continue to send any such flags I find flying illegally to you until you either lift your prohibition or put a stop to this foolish rebellion. Parish discipline is your business. Being faithful to your authority is mine.

Yours in Christ,

In NYC I knew a tough as nails priest who went through Romania's communist repression (he's since passed away). He would have understood my actions. In Chicago I knew an even tougher priest that went through the same hard prison camps. He would have thought I was being too civil. That's the school from which I took my faith. That's the kind of faith that is needed to take back a church.

I can't understand how the orthodox believers are tolerating it. I simply can't understand it.

The Benefits of Patience

Michael Ledeen's got a great record on advocating freedom in the mideast. In NRO he writes that he personally knows of some stories about WMD movement to Iran that were never properly investigated (evidence that was refused to be seen and locations that our people refused to inspect). This is the stuff of nightmares for information ministers and press secretaries, all the foundations necessary for conspiracy theories that will last for decades.

This is just one more example of why it is necessary to have an actual report, an actual detailed accounting of what was examined, what was rejected, and why was it rejected. There may be perfectly good reasons why the evidence that Ledeen is aware of was not true. But we don't have the report. We don't have the official side to the story. All we have is an ungodly urge to rush to conclusions and start firing people.

Could we possibly take things seriously and have the patience to do things right? Are we really so short of entertainment that we need to botch investigations to give room for conspiracy theories to thrive? The chips need to fall where they may for the nation to be served well but they should at least fall first.

Gay Marriage Q&A I

Prof Larry Ribstein has an interesting post laying out some of the basic questions on marriage. He phrases it in the context of the presidential race but these same questions could be asked of any of the partisans. It would be interesting to get all of the major players in the debate to answer the same questions and put up all the answers next to each other, voting guide style.

The questions aren't easy to answer and I'm not just going to throw up a glib, short response. I'll think it over and respond a bit later but read the questions yourself. You might find some issues you hadn't even considered up until now.

No Blood, For Oil

Iraq Now has a nice rundown of the major Russian and French individuals and institutions who were bribed by Saddam to support him during the sanctions period. He's absolutely right that the silence from the left is deafening. Sure, it's still early. For the purposes of national policy and international justice we should be waiting a great deal more before anything punitive should be done in response to this flagrant lawlessness and policy whoring.

But when has the left recently been eager to wait until all the evidence is in? Shouldn't they at least acknowledge that these are tremendously serious allegations that implicate large swathes of the anti-war coalition and that they should be investigated to separate out the corrupt opportunists in their own ranks? Don't they even care at how much they were made into chumps by a bunch of dishonest political prostitutes?

Why should anybody listen to them at all when they cry out about right-wing wrongdoing when they show themselves to be utterly indifferent to any messes that aren't easily identified with their political opponents? I don't have an answer to that. But all decent left wingers should. Too bad they apparently don't.

Deflation: Now or Later?

A very informative piece in the Economist outlines the US Federal Reserve's dilemma. Low inflation has led to extremely low interest rates and asset prices, especially housing, are moving up. A housing asset price boom could set the US economy on a dangerous path when it bursts, sending us into deflation. But with inflation so low, the cure for an asset boom (raising interest rates) could send us spinning into a deflationary spiral right now.

The Economist ends up suggesting a small interest rate hike. I would have to disagree. If the problem is people overextending their debt then that is the problem that should be addressed. The story of the seven fat years and the seven lean years is instructive. People who refinance now and take their savings in payments in order to increase their equity and get out of debt are the smart players in today's economy.

If you're out of debt, you're mostly out of trouble in a deflationary economy. That message has to go out, it has to go out strong, and it can be done without changing interest rates. Both the Presidency and the Fed Chairmen have very loud bully pulpits. It would be highly preferable for them to use those instruments, to encourage savings and investment and debt reduction instead of cranking up the interest rates when inflation is so low and seems poised to drop further.

Immigration Cost Voodoo

Dana Rohrbacher is bringing up the health care cost of illegal immigrants. He's right to worry about the issue. It's a problem with illegal immigrants as it is with every other black market worker. But the cure for much of this is to bring these workers out of the black market. If you're being paid in cash, your total tax contributions to the system are zero. But if you are pulled into the system, you do pay some taxes. You contribute, and in that contribution lower the problem of uncompensated healthcare.

The problem of uncompensated healthcare given to illegal aliens is real. The cure needs to be more than just merely cutting a check from the Federal Government to the locals who are currently footing the bill. This idea can use a lot of improvement.

Remarkable Progress in Saudi Arabia?

It appears that the highest ranking cleric in Saudi Arabia has taken the occasion of the haj (a very important occasion for all muslims) to deliver a sermon against terrorism. How important this is will become more clear as his words circulate and are translated into more languages but so far it's looking a great deal like progress.

I've always maintained that it is the theologians who will win the war on terror. If hell is the destination of the suicide bomber according to muslim consensus, we will shortly find the practice falling into disuse. If jihad is examined and re-examined to take into account the modern pluralistic world into proper account, even more progress might be made. This, at heart, is a war fought on religious terms. We win a great victory without firing a shot every time a muslim cleric exposes the false theology of our enemies.

Update: The Chicago Tribune also has an article (which is a bit longer than the LAT article referenced above).

Serialization Quietly Moves Forward

I've written before about how the US strategy has been to serialize the conflict, concentrating and bringing its resources to bear in a limited number of fields in order to prevent being spread too thin. This has the side effect of leaving problems that are lower down on the priority chain fester as well as appearing to ignore highly important problems that will wake up too many sleeping dogs.

Winds of Change is noting that we're expelling close to a hundred Saudi diplomats who have been judged as abusers of their diplomatic privileges by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department. The State Department is not saying a great deal about the matter, keeping things low key (and letting the dogs sleep a bit further). It does seem to me that we're shifting along, moving our focus smoothly from our ideological beachhead in Iraq (where we've been busy helping to plant liberty trees) to the big prize, the financial sugar daddy of most of the world's sunni radicals, Saudi Arabia.

So three (very quiet) cheers for serialization and progress.

Avoiding Trash

Donald Sensing bemoans SuperBowl trash and notes "they will examine the ratings, hear the buzz, count their millions and laugh at us idiots who keep tuning in to such crap, time after time after time." I didn't watch the SuperBowl. I lost interest specifically because it's gone down the cultural toilet.

I like to watch football but I don't like it enough to subject myself to the preplanned idiocy. And yes I know that I missed something really special in a world championship game that was decided in the last few seconds. But is it worth the cost? Increasingly I find that it isn't and that the networks are succeeding in driving me away from TV. I'll probably up my TV watching if were to get TiVo or TV went to anout of band commercial financing system.

Right now, there is no raunch dial. I have to let the channels make those sorts of decisions. It doesn't have to be that way. Until there is such a thing, I'll be watching less and less TV. You should too.

German Dead End

Davids Medienkritik has a very good thread on the subject of German anti-americanism. One of the things that popped out of that for me was the concept that the Germans are trying to find their place in the world and avoiding the mistakes of history. The first is a positive goal but carries a lot of baggage, specifically that there is such a thing as having a place in the world that sits vacant, waiting for you to return to it. The second is entirely negative and can only get in the way of Germany's societal progress.

This isn't to say that you should embrace and repeat the mistakes of the past. What it means is that Germany needs to have positive goals that they choose themselves and approach those goals in a way that will yield good results, taking advantage of their history, both positive and negative, in a way that optimizes their achievement of their goals. History is important but it is secondary. When it rises to the status of a primary goal, it becomes unhealthy, a neurotic obsession that will stand in your way instead of aiding you on your quest.

The most frustrating thing is to watch this from outside the culture. You can't give someone self-confidence and you can't pick their societal goals for them either. Americans can see the solutions pretty easily but cannot supply them without creating an unhealthy dependence. So what is a good friend to do?

Getting Back Into the Spy Business

I'm a technology kind of guy. But part of doing my job right is to properly judge when a job is better done in a low tech instead of high tech way. In some way's it's the start of any design job I do, "should I be doing this at all". Unfortunately, this is a question that doesn't seem to have been properly handled in the spying business. The always insightful StrategyPage has an article on the subject entitled "Why American Spies No Longer Exist".

Alas, in the 1970s and 80s, the U.S. Congress decided that it was beneath the United States to deal with criminals and unsavory people when engaged in espionage. Spy satellites are so much cleaner. Plus they are made in the USA, by American workers. None of this exporting millions in cash to bribe some guy with a long rap sheet, who happens to party with some Baath Party munchkins who hear a lot of interesting conversations. You simply can't trust people like that. These amazing satellite photos, on the other hand… That's how everyone got snookered. Establishing enough spies in Iraq to have exposed the WMD scam would have taken more money, talent and dirty dealing than most governments are willing to tolerate. And then there's the media risk. One of your spies gets ticked off and bumps into someone from the Washington Post. Who needs the headaches? It's easier to deal with being ignorant. If no one else knows what's going on, where's the harm? 

I had been thinking of writing something along the same lines but I would have based it on the most extreme and recent of the spy eviscerating bonehead moves, a Clinton administration executive order I recall passing that made recruiting spies with unsavory connections illegal. I couldn't find the text of the thing so I put it on the back burner.

But the Clinton administration was only the culmination of a very big problem that has spanned decades and has afflicted spying policies conducted by both parties. The temptation to rely on technical resources over building human networks has led us to our current, dangerously impotent state of human intelligence.

The real cure is to forge a consensus that spying, though unpleasant and certainly not clean, is a capability that we cannot do without. That consensus has to span beyond the elected officials of both parties to the media and the public at large. How to get there from here is a mystery, but it is a mystery we should all be seriously thinking about.

Economic Ignorance in the Medical Field

I'm on a random blog journey and I stumble across a clueless med student:

After every question, I just wanted to shake them and scream “Single-payer!” (Yes, I have a slight flair for the dramatic.) And I’m not trying to be idealistic. I realize it’s not a golden bullet. I realize health care reform is politically difficult. I acknowledge it. Fully. But how can doctors continue to work on some sort of patchwork system—like suing the insurance companies, like the CMA did with the RICO lawsuit—but not fight for a long-term change? People seem like they’re willing to fight their own fights—but not fight for medicine as a whole, as well as their patients. It almost seemed as if the doctors were more willing to deal with the hassles of HMOs (which they cited as “the reason you never get to see your kids”), but aren’t willing to try another solution, even when it was staring them in the face.

...

But honestly, how much of this “doctors are barely getting by” mantra am I supposed to believe? I’m a medical student, and at the same time, still a member of the public. A lot of the questions discussed “How do we get patients to realize that doctors are hurting,” and “Universal health care does nothing to address low incomes for specialists.” The malpractice issue aside, who’s struggling out there? And I mean struggling. When you’re “struggling” to make car payments on the BMW or the 5-bedroom house, you don’t count. You can live a perfectly happy and satisfactory existence with a measly Honda and cheaper mortgage, can’t you? Isn’t it more the expectation of a certain level of income that’s the problem? Not the absolute income, but the level relative to one’s societal expectations as an all-important doctor? (Sidenote: would specialists and/or general practitioners not be willing to take a pay cut to have reduced administrative workload, increase the time they’re actually practicing medicine, and possibly increase the time with their families?) Maybe it’s my societal naivete of what it’s like to have children and mortgages and responsibilities greater than oneself?

There are two kinds of economic stupidity going on here. First, there is the infatuation with the idea of single payer health systems. I left the following in comments:

"how could any other nation be insuring everyone, have higher general health outcomes, and spend less?"

For the FRG, it's very simple how they manage to get more by spending less. They're using involuntary servitude.

The health ministry has at its disposal approximately 90,000 conscientious objector draftees that it only pays peanuts for. In fact, the German military wants to end the draft but is being stymied by the health ministry because they can't afford to run the health system by paying people to do it without a prison term hanging over their heads.

A lot of public systems advertise low costs and good service but they simply do not deliver. In former eastern bloc countries the system was that the service quality is terrible unless you bribe people. France demonstrated this summer how fragile their health system is with 15,000 excess deaths due to poor healthcare planning running into generous vacation schedules.

The list can go on and on but it all boils down to a double standard. The current system is a mixed free/state system but is labeled free market healthcare and is looked at in its reality, warts and all. Public systems, by contrast, are examined in their platonic, idealized glory and it's relatively rare that you get to see the reality of poor service, slowed innovation, and unsustainability without external support like those poor german draftees.

You can bet dollars to donuts that the pay difference between a draftee's salary and what a free market worker is not included in international price comparisons for health care. Fantasy comparisons like that dominate the discussion of free market v. single payer solutions.

Single payer health systems all break down in different ways but the ultimate truth is that they all break down. In the FRG, it's involuntary servitude and a groaning budget. In France, it's dead seniors. In Canada, it's discreet trips across the border to relieve pressure on long lines for care. The symptoms vary, the disease is the same, government intervention in medical care.

The second piece of economic inanity is a complete lack of understanding of opportunity costs. If you stop your education after four years of undergraduate school, you get to start earning money. But no, doctors go to medical school instead and lose the opportunity to have tens of thousands in income while gaining career experience in some other trade. Not only that, but they usually pay for the privilege without benefit of having the money so end up leaving medical school not only without the money they could have earned but with a huge mountain of debt besides.

Then they go and get a job as a resident, a job that could not be done outside an educational program because it would be illegal. The hours worked, the pure grind would lead to much higher salaries if the job were done by people negotiating in a free market. Thus there are more tens of thousands of foregone income. Depending on your specialty, you could be losing 6 years or 10 years off your earning potential because of your career choice.

Now, a certain number of people will enter the field because they have a vocation and want to help people. But not all such people become doctors. Some are orderlies, nurses, pharmaceutical or medical researchers.

For the sheer lost opportunity, risk and responsibility, you can't beat the doctor. To get enough of them, you have to pay them well. The consequence of squeezing doctor incomes is that people leave the field. The payoff is no longer worth it and they won't pay for medical school for their kids, they don't advise others to get into the profession, and many find other things to do than medicine. If the doctor wanted a Honda and small house lifestyle, he could have had it with better hours, more respect, and and easier lifestyle as a nurse.

HT: Suburban Guerrilla (not what you think)

A Spinner at Large

I just got to Joshua Marshall's recent New Yorker piece entitled Power Rangers. It's hard to know where to begin, the conflict between a leftist sneering at rightists that Clinton was the better imperialist? Or should I first address the orwellian omission of the anti-imperialist right?

In either case, this article is a prime example of the old style of left wing spin. Highlight the right that is most easily defeated and derided and you can safely ignore the inconvenient fact that it is a minority view even inside the right. Be secure in Democrat's anti-imperialist credentials as you slyly have your cake and eat it too quoting Chalmers Johnson's observation that "Bill Clinton was actually a much more effective imperialist than George W. Bush" as if being a more effective imperialist is a sign of merit.

Perhaps, unwelcome reality intruding for a moment, George W. Bush is not a very effective imperialist because he doesn't want to be an imperialist? But that would break the cardinal rule of the partisan spin game, your target can never honestly be advancing the nation's interests in a good way.

The truth is that for the first time in the history of the world, we're entering a situation where 2nd, 3rd, and even 4th rate military powers will be capable of taking out entire cities before any retributive military campaign can be launched. Those relatively weak militaries are often attached to equally weak political systems and they are not reliable, not even conventionally deterrable because the people who rule the country have the bulk of their wealth elsewhere and would be just as comfortable pulling the strings in another land.

You can't successfully run an empire in such an atmosphere because too many players can relatively easily get weapons that make them unincorporable into such an entity. Furthermore empires, by their very nature, create the type of resentment that fuels the desire for weapons of mass destruction among those not part of the favored core of an empire.

Once you mistake (purposefully or accidentally) the new security realities our republic has to deal with a desire for empire building, you can only descend into a comedy of errors. Josh Marshall descends pretty far.

US Cell Phone Madness

It turns out that T-Mobile will give you a new phone if you extend your contract. US cell phone systems are economically different from just about every other country. You pay to receive calls as well as make them and they charge an arm and a leg for service to pay for the phones they are so heavily discounting when you sign up. Now I know. Get a new phone every year as long as I'm satisfied and either replace my beaten up one or list it on e-bay.

Andrew Sullivan's Politics

Jude Wanniski's The Way the World Works is a useful tome in a lot of ways. Among other things it covers the distressingly common situation where what you want electorally is an eagle but all that is on offer from the political mainstream is a chicken and a parrot.

This also comes in handy when looking at political electoral quizzes. Andrew Sullivan went and took CNN's political quiz that determines your presidential compatibility on the issues. Surprise, surprise, he's a relatively sane Democrat. I took the test too with radically different results. The test says more than you might think.

The Democrat party has been going on and on for years about how they're "right on the issues" but have trouble connecting to people. AS' scores show this phenomena in spades. It turns out that for a certain demographic, this is exactly the truth.

It was a pure issues test and he ends up being a moderate, DLC style Democrat in his political beliefs (so much for the idea that he's america's most famous gay conservative). His scores were "Lieberman 100 percent, Kerry 95, Clark 90, Edwards 88, Sharpton 86, Dean 83, Kucinich 76, Bush 61". Maybe I'm a little off base but I worry about somebody who is nodding his head up and down three quarters of the time Dennis Kucinich is speaking. My own DK score was 10% which puts DK in the category of being about as right as a stopped clock.

My full scores were:

100% Bush
47% Lieberman
35% Edwards
31% Clark
30% Dean
28% Kerry
27% Sharpton
10% Kucinich

For me, this indicates that mainstream politics is not really offering what I'm looking for. Mainstream politics is a pretty contiguous arc and the high drop off between Bush and my first Democrat (who I agree with AS is Lieberman) means I'm off the arc somewhere and Bush is my closest point of contact. He's the parrot, the Democrats are variously scrawny and disease ridden chickens and I'm still looking for a winning eagle but willing to settle.

Doze Blogging

With a new baby and with my wife insisting on being the only one to take care of our daughter, I end up "making appearances" when she needs help. She can't walk very well and getting up and sitting down are torture. She almost killed herself climbing stairs (not recommended two days after a c-section) so she's camped out on the couch with our daughter next to her.

I doze asleep at the computer, wake up at a sound and try to stuff enough into my subconscious to create plentiful bloggy goodness for this brand new month. I guess such entries that arise out of such a state would best be categorized as doze blogging, not quite the same as writing while drinking but sharing many characteristics. It'll be interesting to see the results when fully awake, which should next happen about the time my daughter starts sleeping through the entire night.

Update: Well, that was interesting. I didn't get much done but had some very vivid dreams in betweeen playing Gungha Din to my wife's sahib all night.