Flit(tm)

Inductive Shrinking the Gap

You can go about things from general rules and move towards specifics. That's called deduction and is how Thomas Barnett's presenting the grand strategy I predict will become our new bipartisan consensus in foreign policy. But there is an alternative direction, inductive reasoning, going from specific examples to grand strategy. It's on display in Thomas Friedman's latest column:

Indeed, listening to these Indian young people, I had a déjà vu. Five months ago, I was in Ramallah, on the West Bank, talking to three young Palestinian men, also in their 20's, one of whom was studying engineering. Their hero was Yasir Arafat. They talked about having no hope, no jobs and no dignity, and they each nodded when one of them said they were all "suicide bombers in waiting."

What am I saying here? That it's more important for young Indians to have jobs than Americans? Never. But I am saying that there is more to outsourcing than just economics. There's also geopolitics. It is inevitable in a networked world that our economy is going to shed certain low-wage, low-prestige jobs. To the extent that they go to places like India or Pakistan — where they are viewed as high-wage, high-prestige jobs — we make not only a more prosperous world, but a safer world for our own 20-year-olds.   

This is the same fundamental insight that Barnett has distilled but Friedman is reaching through in discrete vignettes. A group of palestinian "suicide bombers in waiting" here, a group of Indian "1st worlders in waiting" there. Connectivity to the first world creates neighborliness and security for the US.

Stirring Up Religious Hate

I'm absolutely taken aback by the naked religious hate imbued in this article on Gibson's Passion. It has a clear tone of regret that Protestants are no longer iconoclasts, smashing Catholic Cathedrals and whitewashing their murals. Why only a century ago, upright protestant elites were sneering and looking down at those blood drenched papists with their florid counter-reformation art.

What's wrong with you people? Why don't you hate each other anymore? Don't you see that Gibson's artistic style is too lush and fancy for Protestants to do anything but hate and smash? You're wimps for not taking up the hate of your forefathers!

Astounding.
And sad.

Mel Gibson, notoriously, belongs to a stripe of Catholicism that is extraordinarily conservative and traditionalist. Whether he thinks this Pope is legitimate or that Peter's seat is empty is not, to my understanding, definitively settled.

Such Catholics are generally most up in arms about Vatican II's initiatives in ecumenism. One of the most unremarked ironies of the entire event that is The Passion of The Christ is that he is, in his most conservative and traditionalist way, making more headway in Catholic/Protestant understanding than entire commissions of theologians and interfaith committees that have grappled with the subject since the heady days of Vatican II. Whether this progress would have happened absent those committees and commissions is a long and complex exercise speculating in alternative histories but the progress that Gibson is forging is remarkable and notable.

We might just be getting past our hates without giving up our faith. No doubt, Christ would smile.

Iraqi Refugee Crisis

I received the following extraordinary email:

The graphic you posted for Iraqi applications for asylum to Germany raises an important factor weighing on Mr. Blair's support for the Iraq war. I have never heard any mention of this. I don't know why.

In (roughly) December 2002 the number of these asylum seekers turning up in the UK was getting completely out of hand. The majority were Iraqi. Many were temporarily held in detention centres (read:hastily contructed prisons) pending processing, which was getting backlogged by up to 2 years. Then some of these people burnt down the biggest such centre, creating a not unexpected media frenzy. Almost all the refugees were penniless and were not capable of integrating quickly. They were also being forced to distribute thoughout the country (although they all wanted to stay in London), and so most of the country saw the effect first-hand. This was a gift of an issue for the Conservative opposition, and Blair was in a corner. Moreover, it wasn't going to go away, and could well cost him the next election.

After sitting it out for a couple of weeks, he then made the amazing claim that he would set in motion plans to reduce the total number of applications for asylum by 50% within 6 months (no-one believed he could even stabilize it). This was viewed as a laughable, King Canute-like statement. But he did it - and the rest is history.

It's certainly an interesting precedent. If you create too many refugees, you are going to end up with the Desert Rats lounging in your presidential palaces while you end up in a spider hole. It's certainly not WMD as a cause of war but why not? Anything to shrink the gap.

Who Gipped Kerry

Prof. Bainbridge is shedding crocodile tears over Michael Ovitz's supposed stiffing of John Kerry. While Janet Jackson gets a $2,137 meal with Ovitz, Kerry just gets a $137 meal.

This might be trouble, but not like you probably think. Kerry isn't getting stiffed, he's possibly slightly over the limit. The Senate bans gifts that exceed $50 with a $100 yearly limit. If anybody gipped Kerry it's the people who think that a Senator can be bought with a meal at Spago.

Kerry has a Gerald Ford Moment

Gerald Ford, famously, was hurt badly when he declared Poland to be a free state. Will John Kerry be similarly hurt now that he has declared Haiti a democracy? He should be but probably won't for two reasons, one with a hidden sting. First, it's much further away from election day so it's likely that this will all be forgotten by the time labor day rolls around and the general public starts paying attention. The second reason is the more dangerous one. Because Kerry probably isn't going to get called on this in any serious way (outside the blogosphere), he's much more likely to make this mistake again, and with countries that have more influential emigre populations. Sometimes it doesn't pay to have the media on your side. You can afford to be sloppy too much of the time so your professional standards as a politician tend to slip.

The Harm In Gay Marriages

I challenge anybody who advocates gay marriages to produce someone on either side of the issue who foresaw this:

In another development related to the weddings, the Social Security Administration has told its offices nationwide not to accept marriage certificates from San Francisco as proof of identification for newlyweds looking to make name changes on Social Security cards.

A woman in San Francisco who gets married has lost the ability to have her name changed on the basis of a county emitted marriage license. It doesn't matter if she's married a man or a woman, she's lost that right. But the judges continue to declare "what's the harm?" and refuse to file injunctions.

Rod Dreher is the first I've seen to dare breath the big problem. Liberal elites who refuse to enforce the law are engaged in a creeping coup according to him. I wouldn't quite go that far yet because of the severe consequences such an act would bring, but that's the risk. Doing this through the judiciary instead of the legislature is going to lead to a loss of faith that the people actually govern here. In an armed society this is insanity, worse, it will destroy our current order without even working.

Dust off the 3rd amendment II

Toyota's apparently working on the idea of a resident chip snitch in our cars and has shown off such a device in one of its concept cars. Fortunately, a great many ideas do not make it out of this stage but a great many ideas do. As I've said in the past such devices are a very obvious 3rd amendment violation. They are not a search, they house a parasitic chip in your vehicle (or other bit of your property) that serves the interests of the state instead of the interests of the owner.

There is also a great deal of risk of this sort of thing in the home with the introduction of trusted computing as advocates for that sort of system also create a bit of a home snitch that mandates a government presence monitoring your actions.

The Free Market Problem of Network Abstraction

It is extremely common to use abstraction as a tool to simplify complex computer networks. For networks of any appreciable size, it is highly common to simply draw a cloud shape for the majority of parts not under examination, slap a label on it and move on talking about the local bits that you actually care about. The biggest of example of 'cloud technology' is the Internet.

Abstraction is useful in that it permits us to talk about things too complex to hold in our heads if described in its actual detail but the risk of abstraction is that the stuff that is left out might just be important. For the politico-economic analyst talking about the Internet, 'cloud technology' is a nasty enemy. It leads people to a great amount of fundamental error. It is perfectly proper to say that no one person owns the Internet. It is absolutely false to say that nobody owns the Internet, as false as saying nobody owns IBM or Microsoft. Yet people do it all the time.

The Internet is a set of agreements between the various private property holders to, broadly, carry signals between each other both as endpoints of traffic and as pass-throughs, intermediaries. It is all contractual, all perfectly capitalist/free market friendly, yet because nobody can hold the sum total of these agreements and they are negotiated and consummated automatically, some act as if they do not exist and speak of the Internet without taking into account its private, consensual nature.

ICANN some say, runs the Internet. They do not. What has happened is that a critical mass of the property holders who actually own pieces of the Internet have agreed for ICANN to create rule templates to speed the progress of negotiating new contracts between the various owners of the networks.

This has broad implications for net governance and for appropriate reaction to misgovernance. I believe that it is inevitable that there will be a point where somebody who is writing these contracts and embedding them in router firmware will fundamentally err and attempt to push the owners to do something that a viable portion of the Internet infrastructure simply does not accept. When that day comes, the Internet will fragment. In software development terms, this sort of fragmentation is called a fork (think fork in the road). When the Internet forks, it can fork in a way that preserves interoperability, simply changing contracts in the rebel portions and ensuring that bits can pass between the two new networks or it can fork ugly and traffic interconnection will either become slow and congested or fail outright.

The truly funny thing is that from a political standpoint, if there is a comprehensive engineering solution to fork with minimal cost, the incentive is to never push things so far that a fork will ever come about. The 'internet leadership' will mostly consist of determining where the collective owners of the Internet, the shareholders if you will, want to go and to rush ahead of the parade and pretend that they are choosing the direction.

Iraqis Vote With Their Feet

Davids Medienkritik has an interesting update on the old observation that to cut through the political spin and BS on whether a society was getting freer or not, just look to see how the people vote with their feet. He assembled Iraqi refugee applications to the FRG over time. Surprise, surprise, very few wish to leave Iraq today even though they plausibly could make the case for religious repression all over the country. And given the German government's position on the US' actions in Iraq, would a pure political asylum request be turned away? It's doubtful but Iraqis aren't even trying it.

The chart in the article is below:

Update: I made a mess of things and linked to the wrong article (though the other one, an article on media bias is fine too). The link is fixed now.

Jewish Anti-Communist Resistence

In my previous posts touching on jewish responsibility for communism, I implied that there was such a thing, that the high proportion of jews in communist revolutionary movements implies something of a responsibility to clean up this mess similar to the generally accepted german responsibility to keep a weather eye on neonaziism . Well, who cares what motivates it but there are jews who rise up to that responsibility.

The post-communist cleanup, sadly, is least developed in the West, where many people have yet to come to grips with the reality that they spent a significant part of their lives excusing and even advocating a horror that rivaled the nazis. Every time I see a book, an article, or some social initiative to further that cleanup we take one further step away from the abyss.

The Physicality of Christ's Suffering in The Passion of The Christ

Andrew Sullivan claims that Mel Gibson's theology is creepy and he has a "psycho-sexual obsession with extreme violence". I've yet to see the film but AS seems to have his own obsessions in rejecting Christ's passion as a physical event. The truth is that there are many roads to understanding Christ. Some of these roads are more intellectual, more analytical, others are richer in ritual and habit, while others focus on physicality.

Which road you take, as long as it is sound, does not matter as much as the final destination. In a world filled with horror, cruelty, and public executions, a brief description is surely enough. If you've seen a crucifixion, you understand it and don't need to go into the details of a particular instance to understand very well what kind of suffering is going on.

But that's not 21st century America, a nation so removed from the reality of roman style law and imperial brutality that such a depiction is entirely new to our experience. It shocks us and brings us to a profound knowledge of the reality of the physical suffering that Jesus Christ underwent.

If such graphic violence were to be made into a habit, it would be disturbing and wrong because we would risk becoming inured to it, no longer shocked because we have seen it all before, and once again we lose the reality of the event.

The calibration of the human spirit should neither find evil and violence entirely foreign and outside of its personal observation, nor should it become too intimate with it and used to such depredations. For Catholics and other apostolic christians, we have our experts, the church hierarchy, to deal with such fine points and if Gibson had truly gone too far, you would be hearing condemnations from the pulpits and not recommendations to see it from high church officials.

I can understand Andrew Sullivan has a bone to pick with the Church because of its position on homosexuality. But I think that his difficulty with his Catholicism is a bit more than he lets on. Perhaps he should ask why so few hierarchs are opposed to this film if it reeks so much of a deranged creator going beyond the bounds of proper artistic interpretation?

Shrinking the Gap: Libya

It looks like Libya is gaining even more prominence as a model for integrating the Gap with carrots while Iraq remains the model for doing it via stick. Now that the travel ban is lifted and diplomatic relations are well on their way to being restored, investment, reform, and all manner of connectedness will open up Libya, creating pressure for it to be more than a 'former pariah' but a real member of the core, accepting the general rulesets that will allow it to create a positive environment for investment and other international connections which lead to real stability and widespread wealth.

It's commonly supposed that GWB's going to run on Iraq and Democrats have planned accordingly. Is any one of them even thinking about how they will react when their critiques are all trumped by Bush's Libyan success?

Sistani Shows Maturity

Well, it looks like a way out has been found without humiliating anyone or yielding to balloting in an easy to cheat environment. Elections will not have to be done before handover and it looks like a caretaker government will be set up in Iraq to oversee the first elections without setting off a civil war.

There should be major celebrations over this. It's a huge step forward in Iraqi political maturity and a brightening of prospects for a free and stable Iraq. Any bets on how much the media will celebrate this?

Out Of Band Advertising

Business Pundit notes a new company's foray into an idea I've previously speculated on being paid for advertising.

Advertising that is directly beamed at the consumer has several advantages all around. The customer list changes from the consumer, the FCC, the broadcaster standards and practices board, and the advertiser's sales team to the consumer, the ad delivery service's standards and practices board, and the advertiser's sales team. This is a nice pro-libertarian moment as it removes the government from the list and the two standards and practices boards will have different clients of their own (the broadcaster's one is also worried about the FCC and losing its license).

Since the ad consumer becomes a more prominent percentage of the customer, more effort will be devoted to satisfying him. Since entertainment and the income to pay for that entertainment are now decoupled, I predict a staggering increase in pay per view content that tracks the spread of this pay per ad model. Your income goes up, you end up spending some of that on entertainment, and you get the bonus that it's no longer so formulaic that they time scene endings for TV commercial insertions.

Hydrogen's getting cheaper

Hydrogen just got at least 59% cheaper. A new process has been discovered that has dropped the 'best price' for hydrogen creation down from $3.60/kg to $1.50/kg. What's more, the process does not require pure ethanol but works just fine with much easier to produce and transport diluted ethanol. In fact it works better in the presence of water.

One place where the linked article gets horribly wrong is in the stress this will create on our food supplies.

Overall, he says the University of Minnesota research sounds promising, even if some hurdles remain.

One such hurdle:It would require at least 40 percent of the cropland in the US to produce enough ethanol to power the nation, according to the new NRC report.

This is a feature, not a bug. One of the worst challenges we face in maintaining and expanding globalization is agricultural subsidies. If 40% of US farmland were taken out of food production and put into energy production, it would be a huge boon for international relations, as would a similar devotion of crop acreage in the EU states. 3rd world nations would be able to earn a decent living in agriculture and be able to hold their head high and pay their own way instead of being shut out of what would normally be their markets and have to take handouts in the form of foreign aid.

Pentagon Report on Global Warming

Some time ago there were media reports on a Pentagon study regarding the security implications of global warming. Much emotion ensued but the actual report wasn't on the Internet. It is now and the actual report link is here. Contrary to a lot of the speculation at the time, the study is largely aimed at a few options that are anathema to the conventional global-warming priesthood, geo-engineering, adaptation, and pro-active increases in the ability to adjust to changes.

Now it makes perfect sense why the text wasn't released at the same time as the scare stories.

Reasonable Data Center Searches I

I've been bothered by the item I wrote about yesterday on a data center search that removed data wholesale and impacted an unknown (but probably large) number of individuals and businesses not covered by the search warrant. This is exactly the sort of thing that outraged the colonists and created the fourth amendment in the first place.

So how should a data center search be conducted?

If somebody gets shot on the sidewalk in front of your business, you're not going to be doing much business until they clear the police tape away. That's not an unreasonable accommodation to the needs of law enforcement. An unreasonable accommodation would be to have them haul off the front wall of your store for blood spatter analysis instead of taking samples and photographs.

I think, for the US at least, a reasonable accommodation might be for large data centers to have a requirement to keep law enforcement apprised of what hardware they are using with what storage capacities. The information could be held by a judge and only opened up to the police as part of mandatory prep for a search. Thus the information provided can't be used for competitive business purposes, just in aiding a search to minimize disruption to innocent parties.

The police (local, state, federal) then have an obligation to come on site with high speed data copying gear of requisite capacity, a server set to respond to all relevant IPs and ports with relevant applications that explain the situation and the rights of innocent data holders and how they can monitor the situation for privacy violations. If there is a need to sieze physical drives, leave the data center (if they are not the actual target of the investigation) with some adequate loaners that they need to replace inside a reasonable period.

If you set things up well enough, the service outage shouldn't be anything more than a particularly ill-timed back hoe taking out a fiber optic cluster, something annoying but not particularly business threatening. Knowing what web site to visit, judge to call, and address to letter write or visit, means that people are apprised of their rights and they can address their worries in a timely fashion.

Any data taken should be held by a judge and turned over on the basis of meeting the criteria of the original search warrant and further data of other accounts should only be investigated if a separate search warrant is justified in the traditional way and the person to be searched is notified.

With the original case resolved, all irrelevant data not used in the case should be destroyed or given back to their original owners as if it were the fruit of an illegal search but without the civil suit rights that would attend an actual illegal search.

Is the PRC a Core Member?

From the analysis below and the fact that the PRC fits the profile of a Country B (accumulating debt instruments in order to gain the ability to use economic friction as a weapon) there might be some tension developing between my concerns about a country B and between my enthusiasm for Pentagon's New Map which puts the PRC in the functioning core and not the non-integrating gap.

I believe that there's a difference between core states that are what Barnett calls 'old core' and have been in the core for some time and 'new core' states which are newly arrived. Core behavior is both government policy and deeply ingrained social habit. Old core states have both while new core states have only the former. There is, justifiably, a natural fear of backsliding and it remains a strong possibility that some mainstream political currents in new core states will remain pro-gap for quite some time after the country objectively is inducted to the core.

Until those social habits have had a generation or two to become deep tradition and until all major political factions embrace core values making backsliding highly unlikely, it is prudent to continue to game scenarios where a new core state backslides, especially in cases of economic shock assaults that do not involve actual warfare. New core states have turned over a new leaf in their civic lives and international roles and they are to be applauded for it when it happens and new relationships should be forged. But that does not backsliding an impossibility and we should not forget it.

The Conceit of Frictionless Adjustment II

My Angry Economist correspondent has continued in his errors. He declares " All that country A can do is say "thanks for the products" and move on" which is simply not true. There are lots of things that a country can do that are non-economic responses. They may be smart or dumb but it is simply incorrect to declare them inexistent. Country A (the US in this case) could:

1. Hold daily press conferences announcing how much the country B government is costing each country B citizen by selling below cost.
2. Impose a travel ban on various high ministers of country B government or impose travel documentation innovations that would drive the point home.
3. File a WTO complaint demanding market access.
4. Take direct physical action.

This last can be anything from a Godfather like severed horse head in the Chairman's bed to an imitation of Russia's style of communication with Eduard Shevardnadze (they blew up his limo and immediately sent a diplomat who remarked publicly on the fragility of some armored cars). Now I happen to believe that the last option would, most of the time, be criminally stupid. But this doesn't mean that it doesn't exist as a possibility any more than non-Westphalian war has not been a possibility since 1648. It was always there but until GW Bush invoked it, nobody much did it. If we were doing analysis of noneconomic responses and Country A was Russia, I would definitely put option 4 on the table because the Russian government probably will whether we game it or not.

Of the options I outline above, 1 and 2 are both entirely noneconomic and I would say worthy of serious study, 3 is a mixed political/economic response, and 4 is entirely noneconomic but almost certainly stupid.

Now on the issue of self-inflicted damage by way of dumping Treasury Notes, again, the problem is framed incorrectly as an economic one. A nation that dumps isn't somebody trying to make a profit. A nation that dumps in the way that I described is trying to wage asymmetric warfare.

How many shells, planes, and soldiers would be required to do net $1T in damage to the US (gross damage to US minus gross damage to the attacker)? Now how much would it cost you to do net $1T in damage to the US by dumping Treasuries (gross cost of Treasuries minus gross revenue in selling them)? If the second figure is smaller than the first, it makes sense to buy US debt instead of investing in your military. After that, you just need to figure out how many Treasuries it will take before you can send a diplomatic note to Washington to do X or we dump Y bonds on the market and pop your interest rates up 2 points every three months until you give in. They would calculate to a very fine point how much adjustment we can take in how short a time and be careful to be able to impose change on us past the point where the US can maintain social cohesion. The US could eventually get out of the trap but we would have to yield our interests as much as if we had lost a small war.

There is a further incentive to adopting this financial way of war. A bomb, once purchased, is a depreciating asset. It must be maintained, guarded, and will eventually go bad if not used. A Treasury Note is an appreciating asset. As it expires you make a small profit and just buy another one. So if you never get around to pulling the trigger, holding debt is superior to holding arms. It is an appreciating asset and doesn't make anybody else nervous. And if your target is blinded by narrow focus economists, it doesn't even make your target nervous.

Diversification is valuable. It's valuable for investors. It's valuable for borrowers too if you're big enough that you might be worth putting a credit squeeze on.

Why we really need to get off oil II

To keep pace with an ever growing world economy, oil producing countries have to always increase production just to keep pace. The New York Times has a story about the impending failure of Saudi Arabia to do just that. Saudi Arabia is more than just another oil producing country. It's been the center of a decades long strategy of keeping the Middle East producing the energy the world needs.

If Saudi Arabia becomes just another middle tier producer in tomorrow's energy picture, not only will the energy picture change but the world's geopolitical strategy for the Middle East will change. Right now it's early enough in the process that we should be having a bipartisan political discussion of what to do, where will we find new sources of energy, how will this affect the compromises that we've been forced to make in the past regarding Saudi Arabia, and other ancillary issues.

Do you hear it? That's the sound of that conversation not taking place.

Here's a few topics that should be covered during the 2004 campaign and beyond:

1. When do we get to stop ignoring the fact that radical Wahhabism is being pushed by Saudi Arabia's oil money into US mosques?
2. How high are energy prices going to rise before the next energy giant emerges?
3. Will this giant be in the Middle East or will it be a high priced producer like Canada?
4. If the Middle East drops in strategic importance are we going to use that as an opportunity to stop pussyfooting around about reforming them into normal countries or are we going to let them sink into an extension of sub-saharan Africa, poor, and ignored?
5. Which alternative energy sources are going to become price competitive to oil at the new long-term equilibrium after the collapse of Saudi production?
6. Will alternatives to oil remain competitors with their own full energy stream or will the 'hydrogen economy' absorb them all to become the replacement competitor to oil?

These are just a few of the points we should be discussing instead of TANG attendance slips and Swift boats. It's a shame that our mainstream media isn't up to making this sort of thing the centerpiece of our national political conversation.

Cyber Search Abuses

Samizdata has a useful article highlighting an amazingly broad search that resulted in the seizure of an entire data center. The problem is that there are likely many innocent users who were not included in the search but who are likely going to have their personal and corporate secrets put under government scrutiny based on the coincidence of being in the same 'data neighborhood' as an accused criminal.

Here's my comment on the Samizdata board:

The unanswered question here is how much of an obligation to the innocent does the FBI have to not interrupt their daily activities. I think that this duty is quite large and there were technical measures that the FBI could have taken to lessen the disruption to innocent parties.

In a seizure of this nature, I certainly could see taking a server off-line for a couple of hours, copying its drives, and putting it back up. I think that the police should have an estimate of the order of magnitude of data that needs to be copied and that they have a requirement to bring sufficient rapid copy data storage on site when they execute such warrants so that such copies can be made.

I further believe that the FBI should not have access to the data thus copied. I believe a judge should be appointed (not the original search warrant judge) and should grant access based on user permissions with each account being a separate warrant. XYZ account did this? sure, you get access to all data he had read/write/execute permissions on. ABC account isn't on the original warrant, you have to make a new probable cause presentation before you see the first byte. Once the crime is adjudicated, dropped, or a certain time limit passes the data in state custody has to be wiped.

Thus, the search fails in two ways. It was unnecessarily crude in inconveniencing the innocent and thus, unreasonable. It is also broad beyond imagining, a classic updating of the old colonial area searches that created the 4th amendment in the first place.

No doubt there is a crying need for legislative intervention to manage this properly.

Evergreens: Personal Heritage

I was born in Romania. I love the place, a love that was born in the tales and lives of the communist era exile community in New York. I weep for Romania, a place cursed with everything necessary for success but a decent political class capable of running an honest government. The corruption there is degrading, morally corrosive, and sucks up much of the capital necessary for rebuilding what should be the gem of eastern europe and what it doesn't absorb, it mostly scares off.

I don't write about it much in my blog because it's depressing and, frankly, my audience is generalist and based in the US for the most part. It is not so interested in the small details of a small country perched between a glorious future and the abyss.

So why are you reading this? Steven Den Beste's to blame as his talk about France's pathologies have drawn me to a basic insight. As far as corruption goes, Romania is France without the money that came of being on the western side of the iron curtain.

Romania does have an advantage, though. It's centuries long history of being at the meeting point of three empires Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian, the necessity of prostrating in three directions at once drove it down to a much more base level than it is today. Corrupted, exploited, divided, it somehow rose and resurrected itself to encompass and surpass the old borders of the Roman province of Dacia to include the ancient lands of the free dacians. By conventional thinking, such a purposefully debased people should never have been able to manage such a feat. It should have been russified in the NE, reduced to impotent dhimmi minorities in the SE, and magyarized out of existance in the West. It didn't happen and the reason why is vitally important to the Pentagon project of eliminating the non-integrating gap and thus making america safe in the long term.

The reason, I believe, can be reduced to an exercise in national mythmaking that lasted centuries, and to some extent continues to this day.

Matthew Yglesias Hates Puppies

This isn't what you think. It's not a hit piece on Matthew Yglesias, nor even a commentary about dogs. It's about debate and me violating a cardinal rule which goes something like "if you see your opponent shoot himself in the foot, don't stop him from reloading and continuing".

Matthew Yglesias has himself confessed to his canine dislikes so that isn't in dispute. What he doesn't seem to realize is that hating dogs is right up their with disliking babies, motherhood, hot dogs, and apple pie. It is used as a marker for the general humanity and good soul of an individual. In other words, the smart ideological debating opponent would be sure to troll for as much anti-canine sentiment as possible because for a liberal, hating dogs makes all his arguments for humanity and compassion seem just that extra bit inauthentic.

However, I'm just a softie some days so, Matt, if you can't bring yourself to love the beasts, at least stop embarrassing yourself and leave your subsequent readers blissfully unaware of your antipathies. It doesn't serve your cause well.

I Agree With Barney Frank

Well, even stopped clocks are right twice a day. VodkaPundit points to some very good anti-Newsom positions taken by some interesting personalities, including Con. Barney Frank, a person with whom I can't ever recall agreeing with on other issues. But there he is, supporting the rule of law.

Congratulations on taking a proper and (in 2004) courageous stand against your personal interests. I hope to see more gays reigning in the incipient lunacy that seems to be breaking out among way too much of the gay rights movement. The rule of law has got to trump our policy preferences as long as we have free and fair elections.

Evergreens

Every once in awhile I stick something into Moveable Type's Draft category. Most of the time it's something that will hold, is not time specific, or it's incomplete. I like to call such items evergreens and they are a source of inspiration for further writing.

I just went through some recent evergreens and found a few just sitting there complete that I've forgotten. In future, I'll stick evergreen in the title to distinguish them from my usual stream of consciousness punditry.

Gay v Conservative: Andrew Sullivan's Internal Struggle

A new article by Andrew Sullivan talks about the need to reduce government redistribution to improve tolerance of diversity. The goal, in the end, is to make "marriage becomes less explicitly religious as a social institution and more explicitly civil" as he puts things.

The problem is that there is remarkably little examination out there of what are the civil requirements of marriage and why are we doing civil marriage at all. If there is any reason to provide licenses and contractual advantages, it is not to legitimate love, a sense of acceptance or belonging. None of these are valid state purposes to spend money on or rearrange our legal, economic, or social affairs with the force of law behind them.

If gay marriage has any merit behind it, it is in a shared sense of love to our partners (no matter the morals of choosing that particular partner). The question really becomes why should love be supported in the civil structure, especially in such an extensive manner (hundreds of laws, remember?) as we do for marriage.

Gay marriage really hasn't passed that test and its advocates have not even begun to make the case. Conservatism and gay marriage are not reconciled by a mere propensity of gay marriage to reduce the redistributive impulse in society. There must be a positive case made civilly why such marriages strengthen society. All the love and shared hopes of people in the world don't justify it.

The Conceit of Frictionless Adjustment

The Angry Economist graciously responded to my commentary in an update on his post. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite get the problem.

There are two reasons to create a trade imbalance which impoverishes your people and enriches your partner. One is because you need to put an enormous number of people to work in order to avoid bad political outcomes and the second is to create such a preponderance on debt held by you that you can crash your partner's economy at will and extract a never ending stream of concessions to avoid that fate.

In either case the move requires economic adjustments, adjustments that are not cost free. I would suggest that the costs do not even ramp up cumulatively but rather are exponential in nature. The price of going from 3% unemployment to 8% unemployment is not pleasant but the price of going from 50% unemployment to 55% unemployment might just be revolution.

I want to be clear. I don't think that the right response is to engage in protectionism or otherwise engage in economic warfare. The PRC has numerous faults and pressure points that are not fundamentally economic. They are a society that trades extensively in 'face' or status and are thus vulnerable to non-economic responses. They have an execrable human rights record. They have territorial ambitions in Taiwan and elsewhere. They are vulnerable to a free flow of information.

The problem that the Angry Economist suffers from is a textbook economist conceit. Friction is difficult to measure and pops up in unpredictable ways. Economists tend to assume frictionless environments and that is usually an acceptable shortcut because friction is a byproduct of interactions and a small enough effect that it is usually swamped by the interactions that are studied.

This goes wrong when friction is, in fact, the main effect. I am suggesting that it is possible to create an attack based largely on friction, depending on the friction being cancelled out in conventional analysis until it is too late and you've achieved a position where you can create friction on a scale that causes a collapse.

When such a novel approach is adopted, it's like crossing over from newtonian to einsteinian physics. Small effects that are negligible in the old system become large enough that they can no longer be treated as close enough to zero to be ignored. In the economic system, I suggest that friction has become just such a factor.

Now how do you adjust to such economic friction bombs? What are appropriate responses? I suggest grin and bear it is only a small improvement on a repeat of Smoot Hawley and that we should look for better solutions.

War Thoughts

Is the palestinian struggle with Israel, a war? This is a definitional problem that is incredibly important. The entire idea of an armistice line from the 1967 war having any meaning depends on the idea that the palestinians are not fighting a war with Israel and that Israel has no justification for adjusting borders based on palestinian aggression.

But if Palestinians are fighting a war, it is a war that they are clearly losing and Israel has every right in the world to adjust borders based on the results of the conflict. To challenge that right is to challenge virtually every border the world over.

The problem that Israel faced was that the last time the international system seriously took account of non-state warfare was in the 30 Years War. It's been a long time since the Peace of Westphalia.

But is Israel bound by those Westphalian definitions anymore? If you take George W. Bush at his word, "The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States - and war is what they got" means that they don't because we (the US, a state) gave them (Al Queda, a non-state terrorist group with territorial ambitions) war. The precedent is there if Sharon wants to take it up and Europe would be caught in a bind if they protest Israel's following american precedent too strongly.

I've said before that this State of the Union speech was highly consequential. I doubt if Israel will not take the opportunity to take advantage of the new rules. The only question is how and when will they do it?

Response to Terrorism: War v Law Enforcement

Tacitus sports a message by Bird Dog on why it is important that our 9/11 response be a war response.

He gets savaged in the comments. Here's my response in support of him:

One of the most basic differences has yet to be covered here, the difference in penalties.

Killing a civilian on purpose as a criminal act - 25 yrs to life in prison for 1st degree murder, lots of appeals and release on many technical grounds.
Killing a civilian on purpose as a military act - war crime, death penalty, limited appeals process, and technicalities won't save you so easily from the hangman.

The entire strategy of most terrorist groups center around what are known conventionally as war crimes. To declare war, really declare war means a lot of business for the hangman or the terrorists radically change their tactics.

If terrorists change their tactics for fear of the war crime convictions, that's a great victory. It means King David Hotel and Cole type attacks targeting our military forces, not strikes at the Sears Tower.

This is one aspect of things that most people don't really understand but hopefully the Gitmo tribunals will jumpstart the educational process. When war is declared, you change judicial codes from the normal US code to a much more sparse, and spartan code generically called the "rules of war". Terrorists largely center their campaigns around strategies and tactics designed to violate the rules of war. They do so because they have been confident until now that they will be judged by the civilian codes, not the war codes. They are now mistaken and they need to understand how much that mistake will cost them.

There are other reasons why it's good to use a war response but I think that this one is the least appreciated.

The Bankrupt Borrow Money

It's an often unappreciated fact that a company entering bankruptcy proceedings almost always takes on additional debt during reorganization. If you've got no money and you aren't just going to suddenly cease operations, you've got to have an orderly process to resolve the situation so people still have to get paid for showing up to work and the people actually running the bankruptcy process have to get paid. So most bankruptcy judges will authorize debt as part of a plan to emerge from bankruptcy.

The United States of America is bankrupt.

We've got huge, insurmountable future obligations that simply cannot be paid with any reasonable future demographic scenario. The taxes necessary to theoretically make good on our "entitlements" promises would crush the economy and still wouldn't collect sufficient funds in the real world.

So, we need to reorganize. We need to adjust our future obligations while our credit rating is still good, and we need to transition entitlement programs to the non-entitlement category.

There's an election season coming up. I know that the Bush administration has a plan for entitlement reform. It's a tried and true formula that has been successfully used in other countries like Chile to go from defined benefit pay-as-you-go to defined contribution plans with private investments. John Kerry, during the traditional summer period of issuing position papers needs to present a plan at least as well structured. To duck and avoid the issue is more than just bad policy, it's a disaster for our country.

The results of timidity in reform can be seen on display in Donald Rumsfeld's 'Old Europe'. Government paralysis spreads with more and more areas being put off limits to reform, militaries atrophy and shrink in both size and effectiveness, foreign policies become little more than craven appeasement to enemies who are too stubborn to be overcome by what little leverage is left.

The US cannot fall into that mindset and survive the next century. Bankrupt though it is, it is going to have to borrow money. The only thing is that the only bankruptcy judge available (the one that approves such expenditures) is the US voter, a figure that has huge conflicts of interest. There is no good solution anymore. We've thrown all those away with delay. Now, it's just buckle down and do what's right or we will all drown.

Andrew Sullivan's Tax Challenge

Andrew Sullivan wants a war tax but isn't very happy about it and is asking for alternative ideas. Well, here's mine. But first, some facts:

1. The reason we aren't economically tanking right now is that Asia, especially the PRC, is irrationally buying up our sovereign debt for their own reasons. They are likely to continue doing so.
2. We have created a nightmare of unsustainable generational obligations (entitlement programs) that could only be met by banning the pill and condoms, recreating an America with an average family size of 5-6 kids. The only successful model for dealing with this sort of problem is to migrate to private accounts and spend a significant amount on transition costs (in our case, about a trillion dollars).
3. We used to have a 2% telephone tax to pay off the Spanish American War. It had a sunset provision of every two years. It was finally put to rest by the Gingrich Congress.

So we have two potential revenue sources, cheap borrowed money so PRC workers don't rebel against their communist masters and a 'temporary' war tax that is likely to last into the next (22nd) century. Since the PRC, Japan, and all the rest are going to distort our debt markets by bidding up the dollar no matter what we do on the war tax, I say let those countries who desperately need to keep their currencies low vis a vis the dollar fund things to get us out of our financial jam.

The PRC is likely to continue its policy of unreasonably swallowing US sovereign debt for the foreseeable future as it has hundreds of millions of workers to keep happy and it won't be able to keep up without an astounding amount of exports. It's running along the high wire without a net and can't afford to stop buying Treasuries.

Yes, the deficit will explode. But right now we're facing national bankruptcy and a little thing like war spending isn't going to do anything more than push the default date a little, this way or that. The big monetary killer is Social Security and other mandated programs. They need to be made as similar as possible to their private counterparts and partially or wholly privatized as quickly as possible.

As these programs become partially, then wholly privatized, the new dispensation will create huge new pools of capital to fund businesses and grow the economy, increasing national income and reducing our debt burden as a percent of GDP. Then, in a few decades when the great PRC transition is over and the PRC wants to unwind its dollar position, the US will have the wherewithal to redeem those notes as they will have been converted into stock market investments and will have created sufficient taxable wealth that redemption will be possible without collapse.

But what if we raise taxes with inflation at about 1% and Asia, especially the PRC committed to pumping up the dollar? Classic free market ideology that dates back to Adam Smith advises that we don't retaliate with a trade war. But at the same time, this is a purposefully distortive policy on the PRC's (and others') part. So how will we handle the deflationary distortion as we raise taxes?

Letter to the Paper V

The entire Kerry/Winter Soldier Investigation thing has been bothering me ever since I wrote my earlier piece. I decided to jot this off to the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

Dear Rabbi Hier,

I watch and read with concern that Presidential contender Sen. John Kerry has recently (this year) taken the position that US soldiers in Vietnam committed horrific acts during that war that contravened the laws of war but, because these acts were known and condoned throughout the US military command chain they were not guilty of war crimes (though, perhaps their superiors were). To my knowledge his most recent explicit statement in support of this idea came in a taped interview on CNN's Inside Politics on February 19, 2004. A transcript can be found at the address below:
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0402/19/ip.01.html

Sen. Kerry's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 23, 1971 can be found at the address below:
http://pages.xtn.net/~wingman/docs/kerryst.htm

I quote:

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

end quote

There is a terrible principle that must be defended, that war crimes can never be legitimized by the orders of superiors, much less simply having superiors condoning these acts. Irrespective of whether the testimony gathered by the Winter Soldiers Investigation are true or not, this is an assault on the very logic that has been held for decades in the case of the nazis and their horrific actions.

If Sen. Kerry thinks that soldiers raped, killed, desecrated bodies and committed other war crimes yet there should be no responsibility, no trials for the perpetrators of these acts, then it is no longer true that there is no statute of limitations on war crimes, merely a convenient line which can be moved this way or that depending on who is in power. If you pick the right side, if you have enough power, you can get away with atrocities and never be called to justice.

Now I happen to think that Sen. Kerry is wrong, that the Winter Soldier Investigation is riddled with falsehoods, some of which have already been uncovered. But Sen. Kerry's position, no matter what the actual facts are, has moral implications and they demand to be addressed.

What do you say?

Who knows what they'll say but I'll relate any responses I get.

Legitimate Reasons to Hate Outsourcing

The Angry Economist thinks that reactions to George Mankiw's endorsement of outsourcing are a litmus test of economic literacy. I think he's mostly right but is missing a significant point. Not everything is economics and a large portion of the discomfort with outsourcing derives from noneconomic sources.

A society is not all dollars and cents but is also based on social relationships that have value outside an economic system. The adjustments that must be borne in a dynamic economy create social costs and there is nothing wrong with being unhappy about the situation. The solution is in easing transitioning costs to new jobs and creating social support networks so that flexibility is enhanced. You can have a heart and assist transitions into new fields without being economically illiterate.

Another point that is appropriate is that outsourcing related job losses are not entirely related to comparative advantage but to an artificial economic intervention on the part of other countries to absorb surplus labor by importing jobs and exporting wealth to the US.

Now Adam Smith was right to say that if your neighbor is chopping off his nose to spite his face, it ultimately makes no sense to do the same. But the political interventions of others to lower their currencies and artificially maintain trade surpluses with the US result in more adjustments than would otherwise be the case in a normal free market international system.

These are unfriendly acts and while not a legitimate cause of war, should not pass by without notice and without reaction by our foreign policy establishment. The key is to keep the reaction outside the economic sphere so we do not chop off our own noses out of spite.

Shrinking the Gap: Foreign Aid

The US is further demonstrating that Core/Gap principles don't just apply to military initiatives but are applicable throughout US foreign and security policy. The US is conditioning aid in order to set up incentives controlling the worst of Gap abuses. These incentives make traditional aid bureaucrats uncomfortable. "Critics are warning that the account may produce inequities, leaving some of the most economically needy countries to compete for much smaller amounts of traditional aid."

President Bush campaigned, in part, in 2000 by railing against the soft bigotry of low expectations. This is largely an international version of this.

Run Ralph Run

Ralph Nader is running for President as an independent. While this is awesome news for Republicans everywhere it should also be good news for those opposed to campaign restrictions on free speech. There is a great 'good for the gander' set of moments to be minded here. Ralph Nader's power base has always been his nonprofit organizations that are not traditionally considered partisan political but are widespread and influential. Will the FEC regulate the Nader's 'PIRG empire as part of his campaign organization? It's way too early to tell but the schadenfreude just keeps going and going on this one.

Rule of Law Warning Light II

It looks like California is belatedly realizing that a horrible precedent is being set in San Francisco and will be asking that the city obey the law. One of the things that really sends a shiver down my spine is the idea of introducing "fait accompli" as a principle of law in the US.

The conservative group that lost its bid for a restraining order on Friday had argued that the weddings harmed the 61 percent of California voters who in 2000 supported Proposition 22, a ballot initiative that said the state would recognize only marriage between a man and a woman.

Judge Quidachay suggested that the rights of the thousands of gay and lesbian couples who have traded marriage vows in San Francisco over the past nine days appeared to carry more weight at this point.

Try and take that reasoning and apply it to water rights in the Klamath basin and elsewhere across the West for example and you will see how destructive things can get and rather quickly.

War Crimes

What an interesting idea John Kerry has about war crimes. The actual perpetrators are innocent!

WOODRUFF: Two other very quick things, Senator. One is, it's been reported that, well you're aware of this, Vietnam veterans upset with the fact that when you came back from the war, you went to Capitol Hill, and you testified in so many words against the kinds of things that U.S. soldiers were doing over there...

KERRY: Yes, I did.

WOODRUFF: To the Vietnamese.

KERRY: Yes, I did.

WOODRUFF: They are saying, in effect, you were accusing American troops of war crimes.

KERRY: No, I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. And if you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership. I said to the Senate, where is the leadership of our country? And it's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers. I never said that. I've always fought for the soldiers. In fact, not only did we oppose the war, but we proudly stood up and fought for the additions to the GI Bill so that vets would be able to use it. We fought for the V.A. Hospitals. I wrote the Agent Orange legislation with Tom Daschle. I helped with the post-Vietnam stress syndrome outreach centers.

I'm proud of the record of fighting for soldiers and for veterans. And the fact is if we want to redebate the war on Vietnam in 2004, I'm ready for that. It was a mistake, and I'm proud of having stood up and shared with America my perceptions of what was happening.

This is nonsense and historical revisionism of the worst sort. Fortunately, Kerry's actual testimony is available:

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

The FBI has a special section to catch teenage concentration camp guards who did things like this and far less. They are pursued decades later with a justified ferocity. If these american war criminals exist and they are judged not to have committed crimes because they were not even following orders, but violating official policy while being condoned by their command structure, the only decent thing to do would be to shut down the Office of Special Investigations.

But Kerry won't follow up and do this. He won't do it because it would eviscerate his jewish support and cost him workers, money, and votes in some key areas. But his idea of war crime justice requires him to either have war crimes trials for nazis and americans who committed acts that were just as bad or to close the book on such things and make a mockery of the bipartisan 'never again' commitment the US has had for decades.

God Protect Warrior Democrats

If you've read my blog, you know that I believe that there is a crying need for an optimistic, positive grand strategy to replace the outmoded cold warrior think of post WW II. I also think that the leading candidate for this is the new rulesets.project work of Thomas Barnett. He does important work that seems to be highly influential in the Bush administration's approach to the world today. In fact, he's got a book version of his theories which you should preorder right now.

I was lucky enough to get a review copy and have read it. It was better than I hoped, a true call for a decent foreign policy that has the twin virtues of working (so we can escape the specter of perpetual war) and being moral, true to our most cherished ideals. I also found out how consequential some of his analysis has been in the recent history of our country.

I was absolutely surprised to find out he was a Democrat. I suspect that he's going to be in desperate need of a copy of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy : (and Found Inner Peace) as he's likely going to go through a meat grinder of insults and brickbats from the left after this book.

It's not that he advocates anything that an honest Democrat would be constitutionally opposed to. It's that he's had the honesty and courage to say that the Bush administration (outside of some fairly serious communication faults) has pretty much made the right moves on national security and his strategy is largely the correct one. And he's done so in an election year when national security is likely to be the most important issue on the voters' minds.

He ends up being a Scoop Jackson Democrat updated with all the nerve and an updated vision fit for a new century. If there were a thousand like him leading Democrat think tanks, I wouldn't be so worried about this country. Unfortunately he's committed the sin of truth and he's likely to be hounded out of the party for it.

I hope that I'm wrong, that there is still room for sane Democrats with a broad vision for America's security future. I doubt it though. Then again, God's in the miracle business so here's to the warrior Democrats, may they thrive, multiply, and take back their party to a sane road.

Drawing the Line in War

There's been a great deal of bloviating over phantom rights violations in this War on Terror. Then again, cops do still cross the line. There is no requirement in the United States to have identification papers. If you're not engaged in an activity requiring a license, you don't have to have a license with you.

Dudly Hiibel is pushing this principle all the way to the Supreme Court. He was arrested in 2000 simply for not having an ID and ended up being fined $250.

A police officer had the right to stop him. There was a report that he had hit his daughter. A police officer had the right to temporarily confiscate his knife while he was being questioned for safety reasons. He even has the right to temporarily take events down to the station to sort things out in a controlled environment. But he didn't have the right to demand identification papers in order to do a background check absent any evidence of actual criminality.

Given that the police didn't even try to talk to his daughter until she got hysterical at seeing her father cuffed and hauled away, this is no sort of domestic abuse investigation. The fishing style question of "how did you get home yesterday" sounds suspiciously like there's a back story to this episode.

There's a video of the stop along with some audio so it's not just a case of conflicting verbal testimony. Clearly the arrest is over the line and it would still be over the line today. Martial law has not been declared. Rights have not been suspended. If we're even close to the level of threat requiring such emergency measures, no proper legal actions have been taken to invoke such powers (and thus also invoke the accountability for their use at the next election). I'd be as disturbed about the case if it happened post 9/11 as I am about it happening today.

Hopefully, we're going to see a 9-0 decision in favor of Mr. Hiibel.

HT: Slashdot

Voting to Kill Canadians VI

I really would prefer not to have to continue this series but the train wreck unfolds before your eyes. With Pfizer biting the bullet and cutting supplies, they'll play cat and mouse for awhile until either Canada steps in and stops it or Pfizer just withdraws from the country. No doubt, they won't be the only ones.

Canada, no doubt, would love to just break patent protection but if they do, they are more vulnerable to US retaliation than just about any other country on the planet. Something's got to give but I don't think it's going to be NAFTA. In the meantime, misjudgments of drug supplies are going to be inevitable and people will be severely inconvenienced or do without. Hopefully the body count won't rise too high before a solution is reached but remember, this is a train wreck that is decades in the making. Successive governments have been voting to kill canadians for a very long time. Eventually the bill comes due and actual deaths occur.

I only hope the victims aim their anger properly.

Gay Marriage Practicalities II

Stanley Kurtz has a sad commentary on the legal somersaults that gay marriage advocates are going through to get their policy preferences installed by hook or by crook. The judge refused to issue an injunction because of an incredibly small issue, the use of a semicolon. If the word or had been substituted, he would have permitted it, supposedly, but the judge did not permit the request to be rewritten and refiled even though it is patently obvious that the mayor's actions are illegal.

Kurtz' point is that judges are starting to not even bother to pretend that they are anything but political actors in their pet social reform causes. For people on the other side, this makes the act of going by the rules and peacefully submitting to the rule of law a bitter joke. Unfortunately, it's going to do tremendous damage to the system because you can't continually frustrate a majority. Eventually there will be an amendment that will neuter the judges and it will likely be ugly because the judges are smart and will work around anything less than a mandatory legislative procedure to impeach at the slightest provocation.

If privileges and immunities can be neutered, let's not kid ourselves here, a marriage amendment can be too. The key is judges acting as legislators.