Flit(tm)

Antitrust v Fraud

Minarchists don't particularly like antitrust law. There's no reason for it other than to punish bigness and all the bad things that companies get away with doing are either grossly destructive of shareholder value (selling below profit to destroy a competitor) and thus a violation of fiduciary duty or are achieved through fraud or other crimes which prosecutors simply do not take on because they are either afraid or bought.

Unfortunately, the regular prosecutorial system has failed us in the case of Microsoft and so I'm, reluctantly, not so mad about the recent EU antitrust decision as some business groups are. It's a case of a bad actor deserving what little punishment they get.

I don't disagree that Microsoft has been a godsend for an awful lot of people. But when their developer community was promised that they would have an even playing field with internal developers, it tilted the entire industry toward Microsoft. Later, when Microsoft admitted that this was a lie, people should have gone to jail. The amount of money that shifted into Microsoft's pockets from this one illegality, this fraud, far eclipses the sins of Enron and Arthur Anderson, both companies that could likewise point to doing an awful lot of good but were destroyed for their sins.

When Microsoft issues an operating system, there is a promise made to their developer community that Microsoft is a partner. You pay them money for the tools to develop your software and there is an understanding that both sides will work together to interoperate as well as possible. Microsoft has violated this trust in the past, purposefully changing their operating system so that major competitors in the applications space are embarrassed and incur extra cost to work around the roadblocks that Microsoft puts up. This is both a violation of contract and a fraud. When you know that if you challenge Microsoft in their application space, you run a strong risk of having the OS shift under you specifically to break your application, most people will be deterred from even trying. This is the major reason why when MS gets a dominant share in an application sector, competition in that sector dies.

The failure of government prosecutors to challenge Microsoft and force them to obey the normal rules is what has made a very good software company into a business monstrosity, a monopoly that everybody is scared of. But how do you fix things? Antitrust is an ill-fitting bandage, with its solution being break up the too powerful entity into smaller chunks that prosecutors can tackle. But nobody even seems to have the stomach to do that, just creating consent decrees and issuing fines.

The cure, in my opinion, is jail time the next time Microsoft engages its dirty tricks division. The lie of equal access to the Win32 API is already exposed and its developer community is drifting away to Unix variants because they now know that the deck is stacked against them on Windows. But until prosecutors gain the technical ability to quickly, and effectively prosecute criminal fraud cases when the fraud is conducted in computer code, we've got a major problem in the free market system.

Gratitude is Overrated

All Fred Barnes wants is a bit of gratitude. He outlines all the difficulties of Iraq, the traps, the pitfalls, and the inevitability of eroding US influence. He does not think we will win in Iraq but knows at least one professional who he respects who holds that success is possible.

The problem that galls him is Iraqi ingratitude. I'll take it, and with pleasure, if the payment for that ingratitude is stable Functioning Core membership. Barnes is taking his eyes off the prize. It isn't gratitude or good feeling that the US and the rest of the coalition is playing for, but the conversion of Iraq into a Core state and the conversion of all its neighbors into, at the very least, border states where their people will constantly look over the border and see that, for people just like them, success is possible, tyranny is not inevitable, and the autarky of the Non-Integrating Gap is the recipe for ruin.

Everybody likes to be liked. I'll take ingratitude and a society of proud, honest men who can stand on their own two feet and help their brothers find freedom without a never ending parade of US interventions.

Occupation Tech II

I've written previously on this subject and talked up the simputer. Well, now it seems to be available, and not just in India. This is not precisely the configuration I would recommend for an occupation network but it's pretty close, closer than I've seen anywhere else, and the price ($240) is not bad for the number of units you're going to have to distribute. The CDMA/modem circuitry is going to have to get replaced with something that can work with airborne wireless access points but it should be a wash in terms of manufacturing cost and you're going to have to get some sort of distributed power recharger to go along with it.

We're still a long ways away from getting this up and running in an occupation/peacekeeping situation but we're getting much closer than we were even a year ago.

HT: Slashdot

Where's Kerry's Quick Reaction Team?

One of the worst things to have is supporters who step over the line. You can't really control people from declaring their support for you but what you can do is repudiate their actions. Kerry has an obligation to step up to the plate and clearly declare that people who use their fists to express their support are unamerican thugs who have no place alongside him.

I truly hope Kerry doesn't win for many reasons but he has a basic obligation to keep alive the tradition of peaceful politics in the US. That means denouncing violence when it breaks out.

Condolences

Thomas Barnett (of Core and Gap fame) is at his father's death bed. As he blogged it with comments open, maybe it might be a good idea to put any condolences you care to offer there.

Taking The Palestinians Seriously

Steven Den Beste's current salvo regarding palestinian complaints about Israel's policy of targetted killings is right on the larger point of the sheer chutzpah of their outrage but, like the original miners in the Old West, leaves some wealth behind just sitting in the tailings.

The gold sitting there out in the open regards the subject of war. The palestinians, essentially, are complaining that the Israelis are not adopting the proper form of hypocrisy (you know, the one which would permit them to get exactly what they want) but rather are adopting a form of inconsistency that allows the Israelis to maximize their own gain on the international stage.

But hypocrisy is hypocrisy and it would do well for the Israelis to abandon it, though it would be tough sledding for awhile. The cause of the hypocrisy is the nature of Hamas and the rest of the intifada groups and what is their legal status both in the wider international system and in Israel itself.

The natural tendency would be for Israel to be in a state of war with palestinian groups that are committed to violence against it. This would put the members of these groups and their leadership in a state where they had the rights given to combatants under the laws of land warfare. It would be a tremendously clarifying stand and would both change international behavior and Israeli behavior. The idea of collective punishment would go right out the window, for example, but it is unlikely that in a true war situation the leadership of these groups would last very long. And without effective pro-violent leadership, it's quite likely that things would be very different in the palestinian territories today.

So why are we not seeing a declaration of war against the violent palestinian factions? Our old nemesis, the Peace of Westphalia, with its principle that war is a thing only between states, stands in the way. In fact, there was, a few years back, an injudicious statement (which I simply can't find on the net) where some high Israeli official said that they were at war with this or that group. This line of reasoning was immediately shut down because the Israeli consensus was, and probably still is, pro-Westphalian.

But Israel, I believe, is slowly learning that Westphalianism is impractical for it to continue to survive. The only question is when they're going to jump in support of the US and UK positions that Westphalia is dead and war, at least in the Gap, is possible between a nation state and a sub-national group.

I think that when this realization happens (and I hope it is soon) it's going to really fall in the pot. The other shoe will drop and everybody is going to realize just how big a change has been going on in the international system. They can either acquiesce to that change and live in the new world or the international system is going to fracture.

We're going to be living in interesting times for the foreseeable future.

Who's the Biggest Brigand of Them All

Samizdata is noting that the CPA is preserving evidence of corruption in Iraq's oil for food scandal. The big question is who stole the most out of the mouths of starving Iraqi children, Iraqi Baathists or their partners in crime on the UN side of the ledger. My money is that the Baathists end up being the biggest beneficiaries because they are more concentrated and were able to control events more but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise because I don't think they'll win by much.

But what do you do about the corrupt in the 'international community' who siphoned off so much on their own initiative? What kind of appropriate penalty will restore confidence in the system? This is far worse than the Arthur Anderson scandals yet the penalties available to the UN are far less. So where does that leave us? With an awful lot of potential prosecutors facing some very unpleasant choices. If they don't turn over the rocks and expose corruption, they're helping to wreck the UN system. If they do it, they create an obligation to punish these people or they'll weaken the system even more but there are currently few ways they can effectively reach the miscreants.

So what will they do? Stay tuned...

It's Spring!

Ah, spring has arrived in Chicago. I aired out a room and forgot to close it overnight without ill effect. This morning I woke to birds chirping, and yesterday I said, for the first time in 2004, it's too warm for my winter coat.

Forget the calendar, that's the sort of thing that makes spring.

Clinton's Al Queda Plan

Let's assume, for a moment, that the Clinton administration did have a secret plan. This plan has long ago been overtaken by events so why not declassify and put it out to the 9/11 commission? Why isn't anybody in the Clinton administration demanding publication of the plan if the plan would prove that they were serious about terrorism? Is there any reason to keep such a thing secret?

Government Sponsored Obesity

Apparently, high fructose corn syrup is making america fat. Russell Robert's solution of banning the sweetener though is simply unacceptable. I'm quite confident that if we just lifted those nasty sugar quota limits, we'd have the problem licked in no time.

Controlling Your Information

A CEO is going to meet with a long-time corporate rival. Within hours, the rumors are flying that there are secret negotiations but secrecy was absolute. How did reporters find out so quickly? It turns out that a reporter bribed somebody at major cell carriers to track the cell phones of industry CEOs and using a bit of GPS magic discovered that the two CEO's cell phones were within 10 feet of each other and they were in a conference room in a hotel without any industry events going on.

This is the kind of location detection conundrum and opportunity that is starting to appear with new gadgets. If you can talk to it, and it's smart enough, any bit of electronics can tell you where it is. And if you don't know that's part of the feature list, you can be broadcasting your location even though you don't want to.

Now often being able to broadcast your location is important but the key is having such broadcasts being under control. I don't particularly see any interoperability standards that will allow individuals to control all the technology that might snitch on them. There's a crying need for such a thing.

Letter to the Paper XII

Here's something I let off at The Chicago Report debunking the idea that Clarke is unassailable and the Bush administration should just give up on fighting back:

One of the things that makes it so annoying about complaints regarding the changeover between the Bush and Clinton administrations is that everybody is overlooking the toxic effects of the changeover sabotage. I'm not just talking about porn in the printers and broken W keys on keyboards. There were a bunch of last minute policy orders and regulations that were simply done to please core Democratic constituencies but would be impossible for any administration to sustain as in the national interest. This included foreign policy where Clinton did a last minute signing on the ICC even though it had been repudiated 95-0 in the Senate even before it went out for signature and ratification.

In other words, it was dead but the Clinton administration thought it was OK politically to embarrass the US worldwide by signing on to such a treaty knowing that it would have to be repudiated by Bush, and soon. In such an atmosphere, what confidence could the Bush administration have in anti-terrorism? Was it real or was it just another policy booby-trap? This would have explained a great deal of delay in getting serious work done on terrorism under the Bush watch.

The Bush administration took one in the shorts for the country in their early effort to 'change the tone' in Washington. They purposefully didn't keep very good records of the damage and have avoided charging the Clinton administration with policy sabotage. It is unlikely that they will be officially going after them at this point on those grounds. They've got too much invested in the let the dead bury the dead policy they came in with.

But we shouldn't forget that the sabotage happened. It was real, and it had both silly and substantive elements to it. In an administration where the highest priority was terrorism and where they viscerally knew that lives were on the line, they would never have done such counterproductive things. This, more than any administration statement demonstrates the fraud that Clinton and his administration truly cared about national security.

Battlefield 'Net IV

Winds of Change has a good article on the networked military. The section on adoption highlighted a related point, the difference between intellectual knowledge of the value of such systems (which probably every military in the world has by this point) and acceptance of the system:

"What I should have spent the entire time focusing on was the small screen attached to my door," Charlton said after the war. "It had been accurately tracking my location as well as the location of my key leaders and adjacent units the whole time."

But four days into battle, amid the Iraqi sandstorms, the Bradley crew finally turned on Blue Force Tracking. The computer's imagery and Global Positioning System capabilities let them use Blue Force Tracking similar to how pilots use instruments to fly in bad weather.

"The experience of being forced to use and rely on Blue Force Tracking during a combat mission under impossible weather conditions completed my conversion to digital battle command," said Charlton, commander of 1-15 Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division, in Army documents."

The US has the money to waste massively deploying unused IT systems. That's the fundamental difference between it and most of the rest of the world's militaries. The others, even if an elite truly understands and wants to deploy such systems, have such stringent material limitations imposed on them by circumstances, economic and political, that they simply do not engage in the front-end expense necessary to saturate the military with technology attempts at the next generation battlefield network. Many militaries, even first world ones, don't even keep up with the US on a 'bullets fired, miles driven' basis and that's an even more central measure of maintaining troop readiness.

Eliminating the Habits of Defeat

Blacks, Indians, Romanians, (among many others) all seem to have the habits of defeat imprinted on their souls. For blacks, it is the legacy of slavery and the distortive culture war they had between Du Bois and Washington, Indians (which the article linked above about them started this whole note but I didn't want to pick on them or have others think I was) are both distorted through conquest, in India's case the twin conquests of Britain and the Muslims while the Romanians have the multiple conqueror problem of the Ottomans, the Russians, the Hungarians, the Austrians, and even the Serbs.

All of these issues leave highly dysfunctional habits behind them, embedded in the culture and persistent across generations. Surviving multiple generations of conquest as a viable culture is incredibly distorting. Head bowed and on your knees are a necessity of survival but so is stubbornness in maintaining your separate culture and not just being absorbed into the conqueror's society.

In this sort of intellectual construction, jews are the ultimate victim, though a very odd one as they chose which conqueror to live under and culturally resist over the course of thousands of years. The creation of Israel is the ultimate post-colonial society, in a way as the people now on top (jews) have the longest history of repression and subjugation of any member of the United Nations. It certainly seems to have inherited the chip on the shoulder against its former masters, but the world used to be the master of jews until they got their own land, annoying but true.

Anyway, back to the Indians:

One of them said “You don’t know what problems your country is causing the rest of the world.” After listing many countries that are by our side and have no problems with our actions, I suggested to them that this is just a simple matter of bringing murderers to justice, so what is the problem with that? Another answered “We don’t have the ability to protect ourselves. We can’t just go into another country and root our terrorists.” This is the first time I have heard this line of reasoning. It sounded to me like they feel forced to be nice to murderers so the won’t be targeted by them. They are afraid we stirred up a hornets nest and are cowering in wait of the sting. Am I wrong?

Taken aback, I had trouble responding to them. In the final analysis, I’m thinking we pay a certain price for justice sometimes, and these folks I played laser tag and bowled with all afternoon have no heart to pay that toll.

I think that it is impossible for India to rise to true great power status until they get their heart straightened out and create a culture capable of "paying the toll" of justice. They may have everything else (and if they don't have it already, they're rapidly getting it) but they'll always be vulnerable to old wounds and manipulable by their history until they work this out and reconcile themselves to it.

How Much Nonsense Does it Take to Discredit?

Over at Samizdata, they're noting Paul Ehrlich's 1968 prediction that India would never be self-sufficient in food. Six years later they were. It got me to thinking, why do certain figures seem to maintain credibility even though they have made ludicrous statements and predictions in the past while others who are guilty of far less foolishness lose their credibility and aren't ever treated seriously again?

It doesn't seem to follow any pattern of rhyme or reason though there are a few trends. The media seems to play a great role in enabling the rehabilitation of tattered reputations. It isn't absolutely necessary but it is quite useful if you happen to share a mindset with the media. I think that in this fashion, credible institutions can loan out a bit of their credibility and permit the discredited to make a recovery.

But having the mainstream media against you, while a handicap, is certainly not determinative as Richard Nixon proved in his several comebacks. So while access and good relations to the media is important, it is not determinative of the ability to make such comebacks. But what are the alternative factors?

The entertainment factor has to be one. I can't imagine shaman style punditry groups like the McGlaughlin Report would survive without being great fun. The prediction accuracy level there is horrible. I call them shaman style because they often seem to do as much good as a shaman (who mainly works through the psychological trick of the placebo effect). It's a wonder that nobody tracks these people's prediction accuracy record to give them a nonsense score exposing their level of craft v. blowhard. But nobody does it.

That's not exactly true. Donald Luskin and other "truth squad" efforts do go after certain figures, in Luskin's case, Paul Krugman. These efforts are narrowly tailored but deeply examine and attack credibility. There are other efforts like the Media Research Center that are broad but not as deep going after general inaccuracy creeping in via ideological bias.

All of these efforts seem to be about throwing things at the wall and seeing what will stick. There isn't any sort of public effort that I can find that examines all the variables of credibility and reputation so that you can achieve an effort that is simultaneously broad and deep. Note to aspiring academics, your thesis could be here.

If You Have to Ask...

Matthew Yglesias is polling his readership as to whether he's been castrated. Apparently he's opened up his world a crack and found out that some people find american women quite disturbing in that they have devoted an extraordinary amount of energy into attacking masculine traits. He claims to have been entirely unaware of this issue prior to now.

He apparently missed the girls rule/boys drool T-shirt and song kerfuffle, the general shifting of schoolyard rules to discriminate against games boys traditionally play, the decline below parity of male representation in US colleges, and books like The War Against Boys.

Now I'm not really going into the merits of the argument here (I'm on culture war overload over the gay marriage thing). I'm just wondering where the heck has he been that he's simply been unaware of the controversy. What a blinkered, ignorant life he must lead.

What Would Happen to An Honest Russian Pol?

Let me draw out a thought experiment. It's 2004 and next week somebody in Moscow invents the new Rubik's cube. A week later, his good buddy invents the next Tetris. They become near instant billionaires, all honestly, by the end of the year. by the end of 2006 they've decided to invest some of their wealth into creating an honest political movement that will compete with the security services dominated Putin followers so that elections in 2008 will have a choice.

So, assuming that there are no skeletons in their closets, they have paid all their taxes, and they are proposing a sane ideology, what would happen to them and their dream of a new Russian political pole? Such a movement would be a tremendously positive step in one sense, because it would provide a serious alternative to the current administration without giving in to corruption or bringing back any failed totalitarian retreads.

There are two major possibilities. First, Putin the thug emerges and in a campaign of dirty tricks and skullduggery destroys them and hounds them out of the country. This is the fear that people who believe in the idea of Russia backsliding into a new authoritarianism are worried about.

The second possibility is a bit more hopeful. Putin, the believer in the dictatorship of law, emerges from the Kremlin and runs a clean campaign on his record and probably clobbers them anyway but the new movement gains considerable parliamentary representation and draws a lot of strength away from the crazier elements of Russian politics.

So which scenario will likely happen? It's hard to tell. The truth is that Putin's spy dominated government is plausibly undercutting the rotten remnants of the old system, both Soviet and Yeltsin era. If they are just cleaning out the corrupt rich and laying the stage for the development of new, honestly earned fortunes, they will hold power for quite some time and eventually be beaten by some of the clean parties they make possible. But we won't know the reality of it until new Russian political movements without ties to dirty politicians and dirty money emerge to challenge Putin's commitment to law and order in the electoral process.

Bine Ati Venit America!

Apparently, the rumors are turning into fact and Romania looks to become the major SE European basing hub for US forces. This is important, not only because it will improve things in terms of US cost structure to forward deploy troops but it will also improve things in Romania. Romania is a classic border state, perennially on the wrong side of the line between the core of civilization that must be defended and those peripheral areas which are nice to have but nobody much looses sleep over losing. With a significant US military presence, a large number of romanians are going to come into day-to-day contact with people who have first world expectations in terms of adherence to 1st world civilizational norms. Providing a tilted playing field where the honest tend to win and the guys with connections, the shady operators work at a perennial disadvantage will be a welcome change for the country.

Looking For a Freeware GUI Style HTML Parser

One of the things that would be quite useful for me is to have the ability to set up automatic pulls of data that can be subsequently imported into a database for further manipulation. I know that there are commercial products that can do this. There are also freeware libraries that do the heart of the job. What I don't see is something that will take non-standard HTML and pull out the data with a nice GUI interface that I can use and script well.

Anybody out there have any experience in this sort of thing?

Replenishing Seed Corn

Part of the problem of the Iraqi reconstruction is that so much of what is wrong with Iraq is replenishing dangerously depleted 'seed corn'. While actual seed corn is also a problem, most of what I'm talking about is the maintenance and improvements that are both difficult to spot in the normal order of business and which dictatorships habitually try to make people believe are not important. The dictatorships do this in order for them to rob these accounts and create their 'miracles' of efficiency and national pride with the money. By the time the infrastructure becomes totally dilapidated, it can be decades later.

This is not unique to dictatorships. The most obvious example of this in the US is the collapse of the West Side Highway in New York City due to many years of delayed maintenance and other neglect. It took over a decade for NYC to climb out of its maintenance hole and some claim that it hasn't fully climbed out to this day. Certainly, the West Side Highway was never fully restored. The problem (and it's largely unsolved as far as I can tell) is how to make such normal maintenance tasks both visible and a sign of bad government when they start to be robbed?

Inflation and Information Costs

The Angry Economist has a thoughtful essay on inflation and what it actually means. One thing stuck out at me, the flat statement that people viscerally do not wish to have productivity lower wages so a Federal Reserve or like institution is absolutely necessary to inflate the currency and keep prices from deflating. This is an unusual economic proposition to say the least. People usually have desires for such abstract things as a unit of account not as absolute values which must be provided but as relative values which can be trumped by a competing desire that is worth more.

Now a central bank constantly runs the risk of mis-inflating and distorting the relations between debtors and creditors by inflating things unexpectedly fast or slow, advantaging one class over the other. This is a real risk that carries tremendous consequences as any student of the Weimar Republic would know. Inflation can lead to political unrest and war in the most extreme cases and often leads to poverty and destitution for people who are caught in its terrible grasp. But the defenses against inflation are a daily cost for all of us as we calculate whether to accept inflation risk or lay that off to some insurance agent who will either provide a lower return (like TIPS bonds versus regular Treasury bonds in the US) or pay off on an actual inflation policy.

So what is the nature of this fear of shifting things to a mechanistic system where wages drop but prices drop more due to productivity? Why is adopting such a system worse than living with the caprice of government officials who manipulate the wealth of the nation to fulfill their own ambitions? And how bad would the costs of those political decisions have to be before the nation says, enough, we'd rather have a static money supply and dropping prices? Could the next Weimar short-circuit the rise of the next Hitler by shifting to such a system? Or would worldwide mayhem and mass casualties really be a price people are willing to bear to preserve their inflating unit of account?

Genital Mutilation

It's definitely a new world we're living in. Apparently, the Georgia legislature is considering legislation to ban female genital mutilation. Since such things are most often practiced by arabized muslims at the initiative of the parents, no exceptions are made, not for consent, not even for piercings. After passing one house without debate or dissent, the question was raised regarding non-muslims who engage in the practice as a sexual decoration/aid. And the culture wars resumed as the legislation's sponsor's jaw dropped to the floor.

Frankly, I can't see how to get around the coercive power of the traditional muslim family. At what point can a girl pierce her ears with parental consent? Should there be a different age of consent for other body parts? Is that more selective ban going to hold up in court or be tossed out as anti-muslim and, more importantly, is that going to stamp out the practice or just move up the age at which it is done from young girl given no say to young woman given no practical say?

The Pre-9/11 Mindset

One thing puzzles me about the line of defense that the Clinton administration alumni are using, that there was a pre-9/11 mindset that blocked stronger action against Al-Queda:

The commissioners on the Sept. 11 panel asked the same question over and over: Why didn't the Clinton administration take stronger military action against al Qaeda's Taliban refuge in the 1990s, when the Sept. 11 plot was being hatched?

Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright's consistent response was simple: "You have to go back to the pre-9/11 mindset." By this she meant that before Sept. 11, stronger military action was politically impossible; thus the blame for the Clinton administration's failures to act preemptively against al Qaeda rests on everyone, not specifically on the commander in chief.

Why is it that the pre-9/11 mindset existed for Clinton but did not exist for Bush? Why aren't Madeline Albright and company eviscerating Clarke's accusations that Bush dropped the ball and was insufficiently aggressive before 9/11? Wouldn't the logic of their argument carry through that it is grossly unfair to insist that President Bush should be blamed anymore than President Clinton should be blamed for failing to take action in an atmosphere where decisive action was politically impossible?

Don't expect the mainstream media to ask such questions of Clinton alumni, nor should you expect good answers even if the questions do get asked. It's smoke and mirrors hiding a political hatchet job with attacks coming from multiple angles, designed to trip up President Bush no matter what he does to counter them.

Ethics Bait and Switch

Juan Non-Volokh notes a silly NYT article on the Scalia recusal mess. The new 'wrinkle' is that the authors allege that Scalia's purchase of a round trip ticket of which he only ended up using the return leg of the ticket was ethically wrong.

There is a twofold bait and switch going on here. The first is in the article itself when they compare the cheapest round-trip fares (which are always restricted) with the cheapest unrestricted one-way fare which is not usually the cheapest one-way fare. The second bait and switch is on the subject of ethics. Frankly, I don't care if Scalia takes a few extra napkins at McDonalds for his glove compartment. Strictly speaking though, this is an ethical lapse. The relevant standard (and where this discussion started off at) was an ethical lapse that was worthy of recusal, ie getting paid for not doing your job because of a conflict of interest.

There's no recusal worthy ethical lapse here, not even close. Did the airline specifically omit to enforce the ticket contract provision and charge Scalia the difference between the round-trip ticket and the one-way ticket in order to influence the justice on a court case in which they are not a party to? It's ludicrous to think so.

But we're in the land of extra ketchup packets from McDonalds here. It might or might not be a perfect ethical move but since when is perfect ethics at this level something we ask of our public servants? Now if the airline does not invoke its rights to raise fares under its contract, waiving that term, does that make Scalia's move ethical? How about if the airline invoked it and Scalia paid extra but didn't put that fact in his memo? What if the lowest comparable one-way ticket was less expensive than the round-trip ticket (sometimes they are) and the airline didn't nullify Scalia's round-trip ticket because then they would owe him money? In a purely speculative article with little to no actual reporting done, we're not even sure whether even the faintest wiff of an irrelevant ethical lapse was committed.

In short, it's just a hit piece. Move along, there's nothing to see here but the paper of record pimping its reputation out to partisan hacks.

Dick Morris' Optimistic Blowout

Dick Morris is starting to think that a blowout is the likely result in November. I doubt it. If we were in a normal election under the old rules of campaigning he might have a point. Kerry is showing signs of fatal weakness. He has trouble explaining certain votes on basic issues and he apparently did not choose some of his political associates very well in his youth.

But what Morris is ignoring is that this is not a normal election. The rules have radically changed regarding election speech and the newly potent 527 committees are going to be cranking out the political venom with no accountability available until after the election. So if Bush pulls away come Labor Day, by mid October look for a flood of Democrat Party dirty tricks and shady expenditures designed to skirt the law and kneecap the Republican campaign.

This isn't over yet. It's barely begun.

Remembering the 'W' keys

When George W Bush came into office, there were a number of juvenile pranks played on the incoming staff. From destroying the W keys on keyboards at the White House to cutting phone lines to more serious vandalism like proposing last minute policy changes that were unsupportable by any US administration but would cause trouble with core Democrat groups when they inevitably were rolled back, this was a very contentious transition. In classy style, the Bush administration kept few records of the petty stuff and refrained from too much finger pointing about Clinton's last minute antics. But it did take a few weeks to undo the physical sabotage and several months to go through a thorough review of all the policy and regulatory sabotage.

So why is this ancient history of dirty tricks relevant today? Isn't it time to move on? Not so fast, as the period in question is crucial to the Clarke accusation that the incoming Bush administration was rudderless in the early part of the administration with regards to terrorism and that there was a secret Clinton plan handed over during the transition that the Bush administration refused to act on.

Given a civilized transition, this would be a serious charge. But nobody is looking back at the horrible partisanship of the transition period and asking the question, would it have been reasonable to accept a Clinton plan on much of anything, much less the vital issue of terrorism at face value? If one of Clinton's little policy jokes was embedded in this supposed plan (the Bush administration denies there even was a plan) it could have had long-lasting negative effects for the country.

I wonder whether Clarke, who must have seen the chaos from both sides as both a Clinton and Bush staffer, thinks of that period.

Battlefield 'Net III

Winds of Change has a good article on the current and future battlefield net. The ability to communicate with each other has achieved critical mass and people understand how much more lethal they can be, and with how much fewer casualties, if they are pervasively networked and digitized.

One extremely important implication is that it is quite dangerous for allies to fight alongside US forces and not be integrated into US information systems. But other militaries don't seem to be getting it, either intellectually, with spending authority, or both. As the difference grows in the effectiveness of a networked soldier versus a non-networked one, the rough logistical equality of supporting both means that the military value of allied troops who don't climb on board to the new network centric warfare is dropping and likely will continue to drop. This creates a deep political problem in nations that are still mired in the idea of a large conscription based force.

It's Not the Crime, It's the Coverup I

Clayton Cramer's noting that Kerry's campaign is trying to get witnesses to lie to the media over whether Kerry was present when an assassination plot was debated at the VVAW to kill US Senators in favor of Vietnam. Now Kerry helped to defeat this idea from becoming VVAW policy before resigning over the issue according to eyewitnesses and FBI record indicate that Kerry was there but Kerry maintains that he wasn't. The reason is that his absence would excuse him from any obligation to report the conspiracy to law enforcement.

Clayton Cramer thinks this entirely destroys Kerry's viability as a candidate. I'm not sure he's right. It could be worse than that and deny him the nomination even though he has a majority of delegates pledged to him.

Let's swallow the Kerry spin for a moment that his presence is only a historical footnote. What is the campaign doing trying to get witnesses to lie instead of telling the truth? What else is there in his biography that has been covered up successfully?

Barnett on Clarke

Possibly the best analysis on Clarke that I've seen to date (and while I'm not commenting much, I'm reading a lot) is by Thomas Barnett on his new blog.

Key 'graph:

My bottom line is this: until we break up and reconfigure the antiquated, Cold War-style long-range force structure planning system, all our strategic analysis inside the Pentagon will remain a slave to this process, thus preventing any serious reordering of our intelligence structure, its collection methods, and the processing and prioritization of analysis. The end product in this vast Pentagon planning pipeline remains a high-end, great power war-oriented force, and so the system continues to feed a view of the world that fits that desired end product. Check out the current threat analysis that justifies the Pentagon’s long range acquisition plans, and you will see China looming behind every “big bet” analysis. Al Qaeda and the GWOT are really nowhere to be found in this vision of the future, because they do not justify the preferred force structure.

This ultimately puts the ball in my and your court my fellow americans who read this. Ultimately, the things that get acquired are run through Congress and we're responsible for them and the pork barrel big ticket military purchases that they force on the Pentagon. He who pays the piper calls the tune and Congress has the power of the purse.

Now there's an election year analysis that would be welcome out of the 9/11 commission. Don't hold your breath on it's actually happing though.

A Question for Sharon

A question for Israel's Prime Minister:

Prime Minister Sharon, The UK has explicitly repudiated the Treaty of Westphalia which is the bedrock of the idea that you cannot declare war on someone who is not a state. The US has implicitly repudiated the same principles by declaring War on Terrorism. Do you agree that the time is past when only states can war and are you at war with Hamas?

Under the laws of war, Yassin was a legitimate target. But without a war, Israel's moral position grows cloudier. What was the estimated casualty figure if a capture strategy was used?

Clarke

I wasn't there so I can't really comment much on the catfight currently going on over who said what in internal debates inside the administration. I can only say one thing that I know is valid. Grow up!

The truth is that there's a reason that internal debate is supposed to stay inside the administration. Especially when a big event goes on and you need to build a new policy direction from scratch (the very thing that happened on 9/11) you want to start off with a period of letting loose with the most off the wall ideas. You want to create a climate of being able to toss out all sorts of thoughts and proposals and winnow them out later.

What you don't want is a bunch of people who are intensely image conscious and won't speak up and provide an idea rich terrain from which the best will be refined and eventually implemented and the rest quietly discarded without damaging any reputations. And regardless of whether Clarke is telling the truth or not. The kinds of accusations that he's making, that internal debates went along nonproductive lines but were not implemented in policy are almost tailor made for sabotaging the intellectual problem solving process. You couldn't create a better method of stifling innovation and problem solving creativity if you tried.

Again, it doesn't make any difference if he's right or wrong on the facts in his tell all tome. He's still materially impeding the policy process for this, and future administrations of either party and that makes him a self-interested, mercenary, huge jerk.

Zambia Learning to Play the Immigration Game

Apparently, Zambia is providing support to white Zimbabweans fleeing Mugabe's persecution. They apparently don't mind a white face if it comes with a reputation for producing a great deal of food and export income for the country.

The long-term benefits will accrue to those in Africa who are willing to embrace the talented who are politically inconvenient elsewhere and are willing to work hard and build a better future. But the entire continent will benefit as everybody sees how such an open policy pays off over the long run.