Flit(tm)

A Very Worthy Site

If you enjoy good letter writing, if you especially enjoy correspondence cons, you must read The Lost Art of Correspondance. Her most recent prank? Kim Jong Il's getting a letter of support, but not really.

Go, read it now.

Minor Outage

Hmm. It looks like the system was down for a time. Oh well, I can't complain about the hosting price...

Train Brakes

Brian Crozier over at Transport Blog muses about train stopping ability a subject that I didn't know much about but this referenced article makes all clear (it pays to read comments). One improvement that presents itself immediately to me is to combine the current air pressure brake signalling system with some sort of electronic communication. Currently, it can take many precious seconds for the back car on a freight train to get the signal to start applying its brakes. The article supplies an example figure of 16 seconds. If there were a parallel electronic system that could achieve sub-second response times, stopping distances would be improved, though how often that would make a difference and would the expense be worth the savings is beyond me. No doubt a trial lawyer will be making that argument at some future date in some tragic case.

Another issue is that brakes are monolithically set so that they do not skid, whether under load or empty. Adding intelligence to the braking system in the form of a type of rail car ABS system would also increase stopping power. The cost of such systems versus the improved braking performance would have to be weighed as well as what happens when you have a bunch of old and new cars mixed together. Anyway, it's an interesting intellectual exercise. Unfortunately, such innovations are unlikely in the US as the dead hand of government regulation has been killing off railroad innovation for over a century.

Population Assumptions II

Poliblogger notes that Greenspan is bullish on mortgage debt. As I've noted before, secular trends in rising real estate prices can be upset by shrinking populations. If a new black death were to sweep the world, dropping worldwide population by a third, housing prices would crater for a long, long time as excess housing stock was absorbed.

But plague and war are not the only way that population can drop as the EU is finding out with it's sub-replacement fertility rates. Greenspan's a very bright fellow but I think that he might want to make the implicit assumption in his analysis explicit. The growth of mortgage debt is only a good thing if the US does not fall into negative population growth.

Political Tiering

Programmers create additional 'tiers' of programs in order to reduce complexity and separate out certain bits so they can be independently adjusted. The overall complexity of the system is much higher, but because you are only dealing with one chunk of the system at a time, the actual problem you have to deal with at any one time becomes smaller and more manageable.

One of the reasons that you separate out things is not just complexity but the commingling of things that really should be separate. One example is presentation and business logic. You can make a program that has everything all hooked together in one huge monolithic file but this inevitably means that changes to one or the other either do not get done properly, and it's usually the most important part, the business logic, that suffers.

A similar process has gone on in politics in the past. It was an important innovation for the king to separate and create a distinction between his private purse and the public purse, the state jewels and his own private collection. An independent judiciary is another such 'tiering' sort of solution.

Some of the hallmarks of something that needs to be pulled out and specialized into its own tier is that the issue is important, it keeps popping out in seemingly random ways, across disparate conventional areas and few are talking about the issue holistically and sensibly. Population policy is just such an issue.

We run huge portions of our public expenditures on the assumption Ponzi scheme style of assumption that the next generation will always supply a wide enough base of new participants to keep things going. We funnel huge portions of our savings into land and houses, assuming that there will be a sufficient increase in the population base to raise prices and pay for our retirements. We are frightened of too fast an increase in 'their' population so we flood the third world with more condoms than life saving antibiotics. Abortion, too, is very much a population issue as the enduring controversy over whether abortion has been targeted for [note: link has some disturbing imagery] racial or other 'eugenics' reasons.

I probably have strong opinions on all, or at least most, of the individual issues that collectively would make up the population tier. That's not what I want to talk about here. What I'd like to suggest is that population policy be pulled out into its own tier, that public policy actions that will narrow the base of future generations be explicitly linked to a need to reform public expenditures and private savings that depend on a certain rate of population growth, or such population growth reduction measures be balanced by other changes that will raise the future population base.

This is a highly complex problem and past mismanagement has led the entire first world to the brink of a projected collapse in the mid-21st century. The very least that we can do is to stop pretending that this collection of issues is not actually connected.

It's the May, Not October Bombing I'm Worried About

The blogosphere seems to have started worrying about a repetition of the Madrid strikes in the US. The phrase "October Surprise" is back again doing new duty. But I'm not worried about an October surprise at all. The tendency of US voters to give the US president a boost in popularity in time of crisis is too well known for such a bombing to be likely.

Instead, worry about May. In an April-May-June bombing, the rallying effect (which will last for 3-4 months) will have dissipated and the negative effect on the President's rating regarding his handling of homeland security will assert itself. If we can get into the late summer without a successful operation in the US, we're largely home free from any chance at an effective Al Queda attack. They still might bomb, they still might kill people, but they won't have much chance of changing an election in a way they like.

And changing election results is the bottom line because the US has elections more than any other country in the world. I've seen years with three elections, without runoffs or cancellations. The spring has school board elections, the summer has its primary season and late fall we have regular elections growing up in Westchester County, NY. With many state and lower elections on a one year offset of the federal cycle, voters have a yearly chance to speak their mind.

Now imagine if all those elections became realistic targets for terrorist strikes. This nightmare is what spaniards are likely not to understand about US annoyance with their 11th hour, post bombing, change in electoral preferences, much as most US people don't understand how central trains are to the EU lifestyle since the US has give or take 1/10th of the population density of Europe and a correspondingly less used train system. Election bombings are a special US nightmare for as long as we hold near continual elections. Changing the system would very much transform the US for the worse.

Gay Marriage Opposition Cannot Be a Defensive Line

I think that Andrew Sullivan has something when he talks about the foolishness of making gay marriage the new demarcation line of what is permissible and what is not. But I don't really see gay marriage as the point at which to draw a new line and 'defend' marriage. Gay marriage is the rally point to gather up a winning coalition and go through the entire institution of marriage and review what the heck we're doing with it. It is a cost on society. It imposes burdens on singles. It is supposed to provide some sort of benefits but the majority of people don't understand what they are. Marriage is a mess and the homosexuals are right when they say that if we are satisfied with the current state of marriage than we might as well let them in.

But I don't know anybody who is truly happy with the current state of marriage. We spend an awful lot of time, money, and energy patching the poor results that the last few rounds of marriage reforms have done and the cost is terrible in broken relationships and social pathologies. So let's not leave the mistaken impression that it's about excluding gays and nothing else. Gay marriage is just the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Automated Wall Builder

This should kick up the problem of automation eliminating jobs a notch. A UCLA researcher is getting the bugs out of an automated house building robot that is, essentially a 3d printer working on a building scale and in concrete.

The US, with it's residential preference for wood frame housing is not likely to use it much for standard homebuilding but it should prove popular in Europe as well as commercial construction in the US.

HT: Rex 2.0

Bear Hygiene

People don't manage their Truth Laid Bear entries very well. NZB does read the comments and make changes but there's a lot of dead wood floating around. Sometimes, in my wanderings, I'll find a blog that isn't listed on the Ecosystem and add it or find one that should have been changed or deleted and comment on it. This isn't, strictly speaking, charity. I've got an eye to using the ecosystem data for some of my own projects so I actually care about the deadwood. What most people seem to not realize is that it's an open system. Anybody can suggest any changes and if NZB agrees, they happen.

Ignoring Modern Science

One of the things that has always fascinated me is how much scientific evidence was there for the taking to the ancient world and nobody ever noticed. Anybody looking at a dew drop on a blade of grass had the basics of magnifying lenses staring at him in the face yet it too millenia for anybody to notice. There are lots of other examples of 'obvious' advances being either ignored or relegated to the sidelines like chinese gunpowder that was mostly used for fireworks and the greek steam engine that was only used as a childrens toy in classical Greece.

Before we get too cocky about those foolish ancients, we have our own problems. What does it say about us when you have a major dimming of the sun going on around us for decades and a published paper addressing the subject isn't even noticed? And now all those models on global warming get to be revised (again!) based on scientific information that was out for years prior to the original computer model formation? What does this say about the state of global warming science? What does it say about the IT ability of scientists to process information into relevant knowledge?

There's unmined gold in the scientific literature. There's quite likely a lot of it.

HT: MonkeyX

Yay For Stem Cell Research! I

What's a pro-life libertarian doing cheering on stem-cell research? Well, when it's adult stem cells and it provides an actual cure, I'm all for it.

Imagine that, you don't have to kill embryos to get a workable permanent treatment for baldness using stem cells. In fact, if you were to use embryonic stem cells, results would likely be worse. Think of that, the next time somebody tries to sell the tripe that only embryonic stem cell research is worthwhile because adult stem cells aren't as flexible.

Who's Next For Election Bombings

Andrew Sullivan believes either the UK or US is next for an election eve bomb. But if Spain was chosen for the twin sins of being former muslim territory and being part of the coalition of the willing the next obvious candidate by those criteria would be Romania which holds national elections this fall. While Romania's status was always... complex with regard to the muslims, no doubt they view that territory as theirs as much as Spain is regarded as part of a lost Dar al Islaam.

A Message to Future Electorates

My fellow voting citizens of the free and semi-free world. You are a potential lab rat for terrorists. Spain's horrific Madrid bombing was the first iteration of a renewed terrorist experiment. The question they want answered is "what is the effect of high explosives on the ballot box?" Until the destruction of the terrorist's nihilist death cult, they are likely to continue the experiments.

Such experiments are costly to them and for them to continue, they need positive results. There is only one result that is entirely negative for them, no change whatsoever in voting behavior. That is the only result that will likely end the rain of bombs just in advance of elections.

This is not something that a government can manage, only its citizens. It is not something that can be easily managed in the white hot passion of events, with blood in the streets and bodies everywhere. Such things are only possible ahead of time, by calmly and thoughtfully asking yourself what you would do at the ballot box in the face of such a disaster. What statement can you make that will discourage such events in future, both for your own elections, and elections in other nations.

I don't pretend to give you any sort of partisan political advice. Your beliefs will guide you. But unless we all band together and agree that we will simply not react to such provocations more will die, and there is no guarantee that next time it will not be your neighbors or your family who suffer.

Terrorists want to change our behavior and are willing to use explosives to do it. You have the ability to resist this in a way that the government does not. You have a responsibility to exercise that ability for the sake of all of us.

The Indecent Left

The problem of the assumed moral superiority of the Left is fairly widespread. Unfortunately, a great many people believe that past moral crusades of people wearing the leftist label has earned leftists a presumption of good intentions and good will.

This presumption, unfortunately, has relaxed the intellectual standards that leftists use as the minimum level necessary to avoid embarrassment. The results are sad. You can bash the Bush administration for missing the boat and not spotting that something has changed but professional corruption or more specifically professionals engaging in a corrupted policy process where economists are putting out propaganda, not analysis does go beyond the pale.

It happens time and again. It is not enough that the center-right is mistaken or their solutions don't work. They want to starve people, kill them, burn down churches, and stage domestic coups. And because of the banked up good feeling of a great many honest, middle-of-the-road americans, they have often gotten away with it in the past. Such charges, and the lack of repudiation by others in the left, are marks of the rise to prominence of an indecent, immoral left. They will say any charge, repeat any lie, if it staves off their collapse due to their intellectual bankruptcy. The only thing more horrifying to these people than being outside the halls of power is having to sit down and rethink basic premises of what an honest left should be about now that socialism has been proven a mistake.

How Many Swing Voters?

One of the great unanswered question regarding Spain's election is how many people swung? That is to say, what is the difference in voting patterns between that predicted by reliable polls just before the bombing and the actual poll results. This is the percent of the vote that the terrorists can convince to move their way with a bombing. The electoral reality is that you want your base to go out to vote but what usually moves elections is this swing percentage.

It is also the safety margin for Spain's next election. If the conservatives are leading with less than this percentage, it pays for terrorists to repeat their performance with a bomb right before polls. If it exceeds it, they've just created another Bush, but one with an explicit electoral mandate to go all out against them. Unfortunately my spanish is practically nil and I don't have access to such polling figures so I can't personally calculate the numbers. However, I wonder what the major media's excuse is for not reporting them?

To My Spanish Friends

If you are a PP supporter, well, now you know how George HW Bush supporters felt in 1992. We couldn't imagine it either. Yet we survived, the nation even went through an economic boom, and two years after an ignoble defeat, the legislature was completely in Republican hands for the first time in over four decades. I wish you luck and effectiveness as the loyal opposition. May you be spared the Spanish equivalent of Bob Dole's presidential race.

If you are a Socialist. I suggest that you look to your north and east to the fate of Gerhard Schroeder's SPD. He too, was not supposed to win his last election, yet on a tide of strident anti-americanism, he rode a temporary wave of emotion to victory. Since then his party has suffered setback after setback and will likely be eviscerated in the next round.

Democracy is like that.

It's been about 30 years since you've become a free nation. No doubt there will be changes in policy with the new government. Just know this, that there are friends in America. Friends who will wait patiently and hope for good times together no matter what political color the present or future administration may have.

I believe that the people of Spain have made a tremendous mistake. It is a mistake that, I fear, will only be undone with further Spanish blood. It is the kind of error that the US has made in the past and, with similar foolishness, will likely make in some future. The chain of errors that started in Beirut was not redeemed until we declared War on Terrorism two decades later. It was a bloody, costly series of errors. May the Spanish electorate not be so stubbornly stupid.

Reigning in Your Own

I like Wretchard's blog and I generally support the positions that he takes but there's something wrong with the latest essay at the Belmont Club. Animal models are well and good for making analogies to human situations. George Orwell took this form to great heights in his classic Animal Farm but there is a terrible danger of dehumanization in using such models.

The major problem with his article is that it frames the situation in a self-defeating way. The idea of a human form of Ichneumon Wasp with islamist killing parasites being made secure by a paralyzing fifth column of postmodernists, cultural relativists, and assorted other tribes of the left is to give these people a subhuman quality that is intrinsically evil and impossible to reform. Kill them all is the instinctive response. But is that what we want? No.

What we want is to fracture them against each other. A kill them all response unites them. What we want is to reform and peel off those we can to our own side. A dehumanizing message gives them no common ground with us. We can no longer befriend the bug, the assassin, the parasitic demon.

What we need is something better, much better than this message, but unfortunately Wretchard is very talented in his walk down the wrong road. Glenn Reynolds has graced him with an instalanche and the killer bug, intrinsically evil meme has already gone 'round the world.

What we need is to demonstrate to the leftists that they can turn away from the codependent enablers of the islamists and turn back to the noble cause of battling for human liberty when it counts. The left, too much of it anyway, seems to have forgotten that the center-right is its electoral opponent but those who believe in slavery, in unequal rights based on religion, in conversion or death, those are the enemy. No matter how far fetched the idea of a restored Caliphate ruling triumphantly over the entire world, this is their goal and it is not a goal that any honest leftist can tolerate in any shape, way, or form.

What we need to demonstrate to the islamists is that Islam does not honor the suicide. It condemns the apostate to hell. And the leadership of Al Queda and the rest of the terrorist breed are not true faithful but betrayers of the faith, members of a nihilistic death cult that is abhorrent to God. Following them means losing any hope of salvation and paradise.

And what we need to demonstrate to our fellow war-coalition members is that while dehumanization may be momentarily satisfying to our most base emotions, it is destructive to the cause and it strengthens the hand of the terror masters to reclaim their waverers. The Islamists and their leftist enablers are members of the culture of death. You cannot fight death with death, only with life. That's a hard challenge for even the best of wordsmiths. I hope that Wretchard rises to that challenge next time he takes up the subject.

Taking Lawsuits Off the Table

The cheeseburger bill is going forward. This bill is aimed at directing the plaintiff's bar away from doing it's "infinite number of monkey's tapping at an infinite number of typewriters" imitation in the hope of ending up with a successful lawsuit. In a precedent based legal system like the US has, this sort of closing off avenues to sue is vitally important. The US has a huge number of lawyers and they either have to keep busy filing lawsuits or they starve. The idea that you can claim damages from McDonalds when you overconsume their products is a mockery of justice but you don't need to win more than once before a precedent is set and that sets the stage for further wins, snowballing into a major cash drain on the fast food industry and a huge change in societal behavior created by lawsuit.

Letter to the Paper IX

Over at Tacitus.org Trickster talks about the election effect of terrorists trying to time their attacks to move the electorate in ways that they wish. The comments section, by the time I got to it was long and involved and had a lot of discussion over whether the War on Terror was truly better conceived as a war or as an intelligence/law enforcement operation. On that subject, I wrote a response:

Moving things back to the war/law enforcement portion of the discussion, I suggest that both sides have largely missed the boat on what it means to adopt different models. At the first screening, military and law enforcement models classically involved different personnel called armed forces and police respectively. In a terror war, such distinctions largely become meaningless because neither force has enough people by itself to take care of the job properly. Anybody who doesn't integrate and use both forces is criminally lax in addressing the threat using either model.

An integrated, full on law enforcement response would have a suspension of the posse comitatus laws with regards to terrorism and placing the military under the rubrics and rules of the law enforcement world. A military response would militarize law enforcement and loosen their restrictions and suspect protections, largely after arrest. Both would end up having the full force of the State's coercive powers aimed at an unusual threat that does not fit into normal categories.

So do terrorists gain the right to confront their accusers when their accusers are deep cover intel agents still active inside their organization? Yes for law enforcement, no for military models.

If a terrorist is caught and tried, does Miranda apply or can interrogation proceed without counsel? Yes Miranda applies for law enforcement, no for military models.

If four terrorist are driving down the road and you can kill them all with a missile off a UCAV but can't capture them do you hold off firing the missile? Yes for law enforcement, no for military models.

These and many other use cases change behavior depending on the model the government has chosen. So when Kerry stands up and says he views this as law enforcement he's saying intelligence should have further restrictions put on it that would eviscerate humint, all interrogations at Gitmo should have lawyers present, and those terrorists we blew off the face of the earth in Yemen? Well that was a crime and there should be prosecutions for wrongful death.

To say otherwise (that law enforcement does not require these changes) is to say that secret evidence should become admissible in your civilian criminal trial and you no longer have a right to counsel when interrogated by the police after arrest. Avoiding such changes also means that JAG officers become part of the fire loop in very unsatisfactory ways. I believe we lost two occasions to have OBL meet his maker for this very reason during operations in Afghanistan.

Civil libertarians should be scared stiff about the idea of having a winning effort against terrorists that is not a war. Instead of having erosion in specific areas regarding terrorist acts, you'd have a generalized erosion of civil liberties across the board.

Mass Transit Anyone?

Philip Carter, over at Intel Dump covers some of the difficulties of securing mass transit systems. Mass transit has always been a poor fit for the US since it has so few people per square mile in comparison with Europe. It makes sense in a few places, significantly the Boston-Washington coastal corridor and the similar megalopoli on the west coast and the Great Lakes region but relatively little sense elsewhere.

With the US' 9/11 tragedy being airborne, and Europe's major tragedy being focused on trians, it looks like the security professionals are going to be battling out transportation security for a long time with US experts twitching about airplanes and their European counterparts worried about trains. I don't envy the Europeans their end of the job as the difficulties are formidable.

The classic response when you have a concentrated set of targets that are difficult to defend is dispersal. But what would be dispersal in a transport context? It would mean increased reliance on cars and other autonomous systems to get around. This creates huge issues since everybody has been pushing for people to go the other way and have been engaged in city planning to implement those elite preferences.

Right on Law, Wrong on Policy

Steven Den Beste just put up a conventional analysis of the relevant legal issues facing California's courts on the upcoming gay marriage cases.

We deeply disagree on policy (and I won't go over that again) but he's got it mostly right on the legal issue. I'm much more pessimistic about the California courts though. This should have been put down on straightforward legal grounds by now and it hasn't. It is quite possible that there will be an outbreak of penumbras and tortured legal reasoning that will lead to California being unable to keep anything illegal. As a libertarian, that theoretically pleases me. As a practical man, I'm horrified at the idea that courts are likely to start running willy nilly through the legal code throwing out random chunks without any serious consideration as to the political compromises that led to the current legal balance.

Unfortunately, I think that Bill Quick is likely going to be right on at least some of the State Court majorities and though SDB's legal reasoning is sound, it doesn't much matter when you have a black robed legislature.

More Sprawl Please II

I regularly read the City Comforts Blog because I think that we can do better in how we construct our physical space. The author of City Comforts and I have an on again, off again email correspondance going between us. Surprisingly, he was somewhat on my side in my paen to sprawl as a solution to agricultural overproduction.

It seems his major objection to sprawl is that the commercial strip malls are not very walkable and are simply built in a manner that makes them very unfriendly to pedestrians. As somebody who has actually walked these things, I think this is not, at heart, an unreasonable criticism. The problem is how to find a solution that is practical.

Essentially, most of these commercial zones are mostly reached via passenger car and this is unlikely to change anytime soon barring a knockoff of the Segway that undercuts its price by a large amount. So what's being asked for is a reconfiguration of what is so far a very viable commercial public space model to accommodate what is a very small minority of potential users, pedestrians.

The only way that I can see this going forward is to create either a new mode of transport, either Segway or something very much like it, or creating a very low cost way to create and maintain pedestrian walkways, something like the moving walkways in the Isaac Asimov book Caves of Steel but built for all weather outdoors use with low maintenance. The distances are large, usage is low, so costs explode to maintain conventional pedestrian transportation. I think the moving sidewalk is a lot further off into the future. Getting a cheap Segway might not be so far off though.

In consumer electronics and other established economic sectors, certain price points are well understood. You introduce something above that price point and only a few people will buy it. They're generally called early adopters and have the combination of loving new things for their own sake and plenty of disposable income. But if you get enough early adopters, you can scale up production and lower prices. Once you hit the magic price point, everybody wants one.

But what is that magic price point for a pedestrian like transporter that will make pedestrian style sidewalks economical in sparse suburban commercial construction? And when will Segway style vehicles hit that price point? Once you have the answers to those questions, you've generally solved the problem of architects making pedestrian unfriendly commercial malls in suburban sprawl developments.

Architects, once they know that a new mode of transportation is either here or predictably coming within the lifetime of their development, will accommodate it without much debate. Let's say the magically patent unencumbered $599 Segwee is projected to be three years out. Why would anybody design a shopping mall in 2004 that's designed to last 20 years in its current configuration without taking into account a major new shopping reality that's going to be around for 17 of them?

Thus the problem of unwalkability has a simple technological solution and those who care about such things deeply should, by all means create studies to find the price point and assemble prizes for the first person to create a Segway like device that hits that price point.

Letter to the Paper VIII

Thomas Lipscomb's NY Sun article on how John Kerry resigned from VVAW over at Outside the Beltway. The affair is a shocker, if true. This shouldn't be left to wander around in the fever swamps and it should be easily debunked if John Kerry is telling the truth that he did not attend the fateful four day meeting.

Clearly VVAW was being monitored by the government. It's quite possible that the FBI files on this radical group can exonerate John Kerry. If he's telling the truth, Kerry can likely provide corroboration of his actual location during those four days in November, 1971. If he's lying, it's important to uncover that too.

Discount Blogger commented on the Outside the Beltway article and thought that this is automatically right wing character assassination. I left the following in comments over there:

After reading the article and the comments at outside the beltway, I've come to a somewhat different conclusion. Kerry, at age 27, had some significant difficulty spotting violent, treasonous nutcases but when push came to shove he resigned which speaks well of his ultimate judgment.

The question really is what are you supposed to do when you belong to an organization that has a significant minority (a lone nut wouldn't have caused Kerry to resign) that believes in political assassination.

Clearly, they knew that they were being spied upon by the government. They had to move twice to avoid that spying just to debate the assassination plot. So, assuming that the two eyewitnesses who place Kerry at the meeting are correct, and the three sources affirming the assassination plot are also correct, does this have as much relevance to judging Kerry fit for the presidency as to the pacing of George W. Bush's National Guard service?

I think it does. The presidency creates the most microscopic public examination of a person's history and character available on the planet. This is fit for probably the most influential executive position on the planet. The meat grinder is always toughest for first time presidential contenders like Kerry.

If Kerry wasn't there, there should be corroborating witnesses for that time period. They should be produced and it should be done as soon as possible. This is a four day time period we're talking about when Kerry was already a public figure. At the very least, the FBI records of the meeting should be released. If the evidence shows he wasn't there, fine, case closed and it's despicable right-wing mudslinging.

But if he was there, at the very least he's been lying in a significant way about his past political history. That says something about John Kerry that should be relevant to voters and it should say something about how deeply journalists need to fact check John Kerry's other statements about his political past.

Market v Political Economic Innovation

In Brownian Notions, YHN posits a potential left/right alliance over electric/hybrid vehicles. It's likely not going to happen because the fault lines aren't where he thinks they are. The following thought experiment demonstrates the effect.

I'd love to see the US turn to solar power.
I'm against solar power.
The above two statements are part of a sane, consistent ideology.

I would love to see the US use solar power because I see realistic future scenarios where such power sources are less polluting, less labor intensive, and cheaper than current energy sources. I also see solar power as a method of reducing the number of ideological compromises we currently make with repressive dictatorships because these repressive dictatorships sit on top of large energy sources.

I'm against solar power because the only reason that such questions are even asked is in a political quest for economic subsidies extracted through the tax system. Such subsidies are distortive and prevent or delay the emergence of a truly useful solar power system.

The actual left/right fault line is the usual question of the use of political coercion to achieve economic desires. As all libertarians believe, I'm mostly against such things, especially where there are free market paths of achieving the same goals.

Getting back to electric/hybrids there are certain circumstances where such things make sense and in those scenarios the market will produce vehicles that use that sort of powerplant. Distorting this market via subsidies wastes an awful lot of money that could have been used for other things and would have created a better world in ways that are too complex to put on a bumper sticker and are, because of the subsidies, unknowable alternative futures.

Such 'strange bedfellows coalitions' exist because each side, for its own reasons, is willing to give up something of its desires in order to achieve a goal that is largely common. If free marketers are to give up subsidies, what is the left half of this coalition supposed to be giving up?

Xenophobia v. Restrictionism

I'm an open borders sort of fellow. Being a gradualist, I don't favor just opening them without taking adequate precautions and wartime is not the best time to start such experiments as a practical matter. But as an end state, I'd like the world to get to the point where borders are a minor formality.

There are people who never want that to happen. They're commonly labeled xenophobes. I've even met a few who consciously and purposefully embraced the label for themselves. They are a somewhat small group in my personal experience. Much larger is the restrictionists, the people who think that immigration, in moderation is fine, but the rate of immigration should never exceed the rate of assimilation.

I'm not to unhappy with that idea in principle as a sort of mid-term state on the road to my happy minarchist ultimate society. Keeping the ideology of liberty alive as a persistent majority until we can get government small enough that it doesn't much matter and hemmed in enough that it can't break out of its restraints is an important practical necessity.

The major real world problem lies in another cultural force, multiculturalism, which is absolutely opposed to assimilation. They want a salad bowl instead of a melting pot and preferably without dressing at all. No blending of flavors for them in their worldview. They have been awfully good at reducing the incentives to assimilate and thus the reductionists want to reduce immigration to match the new lower assimilation levels.

And that's where they lose me. Instead of fighting to increase assimilation. They act as if the battle is lost. Instead of even mentioning it to keep it on the political agenda, they simply assume assimilation is a policy area that is beyond their control so they exclusively concentrate on reducing immigration.

What makes things worse is that this tactic is self-destructive. The major difference between the xenophobes (who are almost universally ignored) and the reductionists is in the reductionist willingness to raise immigration if assimilation capability is likewise raised. But by not mentioning assimilation, it is awfully easy to tar reductionists with the xenophobe label.

So why am I ranting on this particular topic? I'm having this very conversation with Mark Krikorian and this is something of a recap of our email. He's a reductionist and seems as if he would be willing to talk more about assimilation if he got some support. So I'm looking at pro-assimilation ideas that reductionists could love and would move them to ease up the pressure against higher immigration quotas.

Discuss

Technosexuals

Can we quit it with new sexual lifestyles? Apparently not. The technosexual is apparently a metrosexual with a gadget fetish (get your mind out of the gutter, not those gadgets). PDA, WAP, he's not only fully accessorized, he's techno-jargonized. Just what the tech world needs, more posers.

I'm just waiting for the four horsemen.

HT: Good Morning Silicon Valley

Manufacturing Jobs

If I understand things correctly, the number of manufacturing jobs that exist worldwide is shrinking. Automation is killing them off faster than increased consumption produces them. If that's the case, I would expect that if you have x% of the manufacturing in your country, all things being equal, you'd lose x% of the worldwide manufacturing job loss. The political policies that a country adopts in a shrinking job environment would need to be adjusted to the reality of worldwide manufacturing job loss so if you would expect that 20k jobs would be lost in a given year but you lost 5k then that's a pretty good year for those 15k that didn't lose their jobs even though they normally would have. This is similar in principle to the seasonal adjustments in unemployment that are done to take into account that certain parts of the year have unusal numbers of hirings and firings.

So why isn't anybody doing this sort of adjustment? Even if you can't quickly get reliable worldwide figures, you'd think that they'd compile the numbers as they come in to get some sort of measuring stick to keep expectations properly aligned with reality. The truth is, it would be a public service. People, by continually hearing about the secular reductions in worldwide manufacturing jobs, would no longer be tempted by xenophobic rants. They would also make better career choices and fewer of them would be caught in the nasty position of losing a job in a declining industry where there is always a surplus of qualified labor in the field.

It's a mystery

Ignoring War Crimes

I just got through reading an interesting article on Strategy Page regarding the arrest of five terrorists who killed two americans and their iraqi interpreter. One thing absolutely bothered me about the article. There was no recognition, no notice that wearing somebody else's uniform is a war crime. This is a big problem.

We cannot become desensitized to the idea of the enemy committing war crimes. If we do, we might as well get rid of the Geneva Conventions entirely as they would become worthless, one sided pieces of paper of no use to us. At the very least, we have, as civilians, an obligation to note and mention that what was done was a war crime. We cannot give that up without descending a step down a very slippery slope.

Wounded Counts

It puzzles me that I know how many wounded there are in the Madrid bombings, the Iraq casualties are often split into wounded and dead. I can't remember the Bali bombing figures but I recall that they also included wounded but I can't recall ever hearing much about the 9/11 wounded counts and a couple of quick google searches doesn't lead to much enlightenment either.

Isn't that odd? Is it intentional or am I just seeing phantoms?

Spain's Always Been A Target

I am a bit miffed about the fact that everybody seems to have developed an awfully comprehensive case of amnesia regarding Al Queda's long sought goals regarding Spain. This is a problem that seems to be afflicting the right as well as the left so it's not motivated by partisanship. Long before the election of the current center-right government, Al Queda said it wanted to retake all muslim lands and repeatedly, specifically mentioned Andalusian Spain.

I can only speculate that there is something of a demented psychological defense mechanism at work that wishes to wrest control of events from the Islamists and make this about us. It is something that we did that provoked hostility, enmity, and the current attack. If Aznar wasn't heading the government, if Spain hadn't gotten involved in Iraq, the hostility towards Spain that Al Queda has would not be different in character. They would still want the king dead, the Spanish Constitution torn to shreds, and a sharia regime imposed on that land as part of a restored Caliphate.

There is nothing that Spain can do about that sentiment among Islamists. All it can do is to take action to kill the ideology that gives birth to such undying enmity and while that long-term strategy is working to reduce the number of believers via police and military action as much as possible.

Changing positions on Iraq will not spare Spain. It would not spare any of us.

Update:

Lileks gets it.

If I Was a Spaniard in Chicago

I'd be truly ticked off.

I caught the Chicago CBS affiliate newscast and its meagre offering on the tragedy of Spain was so self-centered and isolationist as to seem to be a parody. The newscast was like that stuck up rich girl who, looking at a sea of human suffering is only focused on "but what does this mean for me and my needs." Instead of spending time telling where flowers and other condolences could be sent locally (Chicago has a consulate) they just passed right over that, and any other, basic bit of decency.

At least they managed to call the ETA terrorists.

Update:

There is a book of condolences available at the Spanish consulate that can be signed today until 2PM and Monday-Wednesday next week during the same hours. Contact information for the consulate is below:

180 N. Michigan Av.
Suite 1500,
Chicago, IL 60601.
(312) 782-4588

Class Action Bonanza?

An article over at Clayton Cramer's Blog on condoms has opened my eyes to some interesting Democrat coalition fissures. It's a case of the free love feminists against the trial lawyers.

It seems that HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that is not stopped by condom use. rates vary widely from 1% to 88% depending on the population. Men are asymptomatic but women with HPV can get cervical cancer. California already has warning labels but Democrats are balking at making them a national requirement.

The problem is that cervical cancer fears from a disease that has no effect on men might make women have far fewer sexual partners, restoring female chastity to some extent. This makes free love advocates and feminists on the left very unhappy. On the other hand, tobacco litigation experts have got to be salivating over the idea of a product that is known to cause a crippling and sometimes fatal disease but carries no warning label.

If it weren't a life and death issue, the political implications would be highly entertaining to watch as they play out. Unfortunately, people are and will be dying because of this political fight so a lighthearted mood is highly inappropriate. The bottom line is that condom mania is just not an appropriate attitude if what you really care about is public health.

France/Spain Connection?

I haven't seen any news speculation about it yet but it does seem strange that France would have a train bombing blackmail plot one week and Spain would have a huge set of train bombings the next week. Synchronicity is possible but I do hope that the police are at least considering a connection. If there is a connection, it's hard to see what sort of national groups would do both deeds.

Hopeful Islam? I

Over at Winds of Change, I find this link to an incredibly encouraging story about an educational movement in Islam to modernize it and to seek rapprochement with judaism and christianity.

This is the sort of development that will truly allow us to get off the color charts and the clash of civilizations maps, simple people establishing schools, engaging the radical islamists and the violent militias and claiming that they are insufficiently islamic, with enough knowledge and education to back that claim up. This is an islam that does not have to be warred against but debated with. It is something that can live and thrive in the modern world and we can reach an agreement with it.

May many more such initiatives come about.

Maybe Not So Funny After All

Virginia Postrel has an amusing article on someone who inherited Chris Rock's phone number. Go read it, it's a blast. Now, imagine this, celebrities change their phone numbers reasonably often to avoid stalkers or enthusiastic fans so this can happen but it's not a very frequent occurrence.

Terrorists change their phone numbers all the time. And some of them are sloppy about phone security. Imagine it isn't Chris Rock's number you've gotten but somebody more famous at the post office than in the pages of Variety. You start getting calls asking seemingly innocent questions and two weeks later you find yourself pulled in for an FBI interrogation, you're always getting searched at airports, or you have odd reports from your friends and acquaintences that people are asking about you and what interests you have.

All of a sudden it stops being funny, doesn't it.

Cultural Separation?

Wretchard is worrying about cultural separation over several informative posts.

The idea that a multicultural society is going to splinter and spin off into separate worlds is not a new one. Any culture that is as large as the United States has significant potential for such centrifugal force to create mutually incomprehensible subcultures. What does the flinty farmer in the hills of New Hampshire have in common with the surfer dude on California's beaches? Very little. But I think that Wretchard's pushing the idea a bit too hard, assuming we need to have a consensus of shared cultural experience, not just enough core common values to agree on in order to form a coalition type of a country.

The truth is that we never have been entirely united under one common culture. There were always regional differences and while the rise of broadcast TV has rubbed away a lot of the older linguistic differences, new differences rise in job, activity, or outlook subcultures. Slacker culture, geek culture, engineer culture, these are all new differences that are rising up to replace the fading hatreds of Wisconsin cheese heads v. Illinois FIBS.

Another thing that is likely to work against the separatism trend is the ability to share culture over the Internet. I looked at a paragraph in Wretchard's latest and couldn't figure out what QRF stood for. A bit of googling and I found out that its both a D&D models company and an acronym for a Quick Reaction Force.

While christians may be tempted to withdraw from society, this is profoundly against christian tradition, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. Christianity is an evangelizing faith and most people, at heart, know it. You can't spread the news if you only interact with current believers. It is this central evangelizing feature of christianity that reassures me the most that we're not going to truly see a christian/secularist split in the US.

Letter to the Paper VII

I figured that my message of condolence and commentary on today's tragedy in Madrid should be seen by Spanish eyes. I wrote the following in comments to Inside Europe: Iberian Notes:

First of all, no matter what else, my heart and prayers go out to the suffering people of Spain. As you stood valiantly and faithfully by us, we will stand by you. You have earned our gratitude, may we earn yours as true brothers in arms and partners in civilization.

As for who did this, who cares? From a policy standpoint it matters little. It is only important in what language the translators must speak and which direction the forces of order must be pointed.

The bombers are barbarians, nihilists who want death and destruction and they must be stopped before they gain WMD as the british eventually stopped the horrific threat of thuggee in India. This is the true face of the culture of death and we all must drive it back.

Regarding whether to adopt a military or police response, I suggest that everybody slow down and understand the consequences of what is going on. To adopt a military response is to overturn the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and all the treaties and international understandings that built on that foundation.

That Westphalia die is the position of George W. Bush. This is also the position of Tony Blair. In fact, Blair is more explicit in citing Westphalia's death than even Bush.

Whatever the eventual decision of Spain is (and I'm with Bush and Blair on this one) it needs to be thought through to understand and respond properly to the profound consequences of choosing one or the other path. Both paths have significant risks to the very survival of Spain.

Viking Pundit Gets Suckered

It never fails, every election cycle, right after the nominations are settled, most people in the US turn off politics. They shut it out and let the skeleton crew of interested and obsessed fight it out over the period before Labor day when they wake up and pay attention in order to make the final decision. It's in this period, the period that doesn't count for most voters, that the vast majority of pro-republican stories run.

You can count on it like clockwork yet Viking Pundit is running an article marveling at the alternative universe he finds himself in. He suspects he's landed in an alternate universe. He hasn't the frontloading of the Democrat party nominating process has also front loaded the wave of positive stories for Republicans when few are paying attention.

What's misrepresentation?

If you say one thing yesterday and another thing today is that misrepresentation? That's the problem that I have with this Spinsanity title "Kerry joins others in misrepresenting his platform". After all, can't you have grown from one position to another? Or might you be lying both times? Or might you even be confused and not know what's going on? To say that Kerry is misrepresenting his position is to engage in a very particular set of spin. It says that his official position papers are his actual position and that when he strays from that, he's actually misrepresenting himself.

This might be too cruel or too kind but it would only be right by merest happenstance because Kerry's positions on so many issues seem to be in flux. For a site like Spinsanity that is devoted to cutting through political spin, such a candidate is a real challenge and it looks like they haven't thought through this problem. When you have a position and somebody else claims it is something else, that's clear misrepresentation. But when you do it to yourself, that's very often going to be something else.

Hollywood Passion Sequel

With all of Hollywood looking for ways to hitch their wagon onto the runaway fiscal success that is The Passion of The Christ, I got my own idea after reading one more Hollywood Reporter item. The Moses led the tribes of Israel for forty years as they wandered the desert and little by little they were challenged and strengthened with periodic eliminations often based on criteria that the participants in these challenges simply didn't know ahead of time.

It's a fourty year long version of Survivor where there's ample room to make stuff up as the Old Testament obviously is glossing over a lot of what happened during that time period.

Royalties may be sent via paypal to dbrutus@mac.com

Acting White

The most annoying thing about blacks for me has always been their self-destructive habit of equating successful behavior with "acting white" and characterizing such behavior as a brand of race treason. This sabotage of black success turns out not only to be powerful but to be a sociological equilibrium point, that is, a stable state that is hard for a group to shift out of.

This phenomenon is probably the largest challenge of race relations today. Whites want an end to affirmative action because they perceive this sort of limiting behavior as not their fault but that they pay a price in continuing reverse discrimination. Blacks have not been very forthcoming in admitting that some of their lower performance on a wide variety of statistics is due to their own contempt for those amongst them who "act white" and succeed.

Things get even more complicated in that nobody seems to have a clue as to how much of the difference in performance is due to "acting white" destructive behavior and how much is due to problems legitimately rooted in racial discrimination today or discrimination in the past. Lots more work has to be done to study this phenomenon to achieve a just balance in phasing out assistance to make up for problems that are rooted in black america's own chosen behavior.

HT: Fried Man

Russia's Chechnya Victory

StrategyPage is noting Russian progress in Chechnya. No permalink and its short so here's the item below:

March 9, 2004: In Chechnya, rebel leader Magomed Khambiyev and an aide surrendered to Russian forces. Khambiyev was the right hand man to senior Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov. The war in Chechnya has turned into a civil war, with more and more Chechens backing the pro-Russian government. Most of the police are now Chechen, although Russian commandoes do most of the patrolling and raiding (of rebel camps) up in the mountains. 

Turning this from an outsider v. local conflict to a civil war is a major step forward for Russia. It becomes progressively more difficult for rebels to rail against the nasty foreigners when they're shooting at more and more chechens and there are fewer and fewer visibly russian faces in the administration. Retaining the loyalty of that chechen administration will require a somewhat hands off policy and significant material support from Moscow but that's likely all that the great mass of chechens ever wanted in the first place.

There seems to be a way out of this for Russia with an unambiguous win. For the US, the big opportunity is to learn whether there were any Russian innovations which we could pick up in standing up a friendly local government and offer some advice in exchange on some ways we would do (and are doing) things better. The main benefit is the military to military connectivity though, not any mutual incremental benefit in solving such problems.

Abortion Irregularities

After reading a rather disturbing article on the sad state of abortion effects research, I have a modest proposal. There shall be no differential between the notification of women who abort and the notification requirements of any other medical procedure or pill. After 3 years either the notification requirements of abortionists shall rise to the level of other procedures or the other procedures will be freed from their notification requirements.

The truth is, today, that there is a reporting differential, there is a research differential, and abortion doesn't come under the same rules as anything else in the medical world because it has a rabid band of fans who view the normal cautions and restrictions put on other medical treatments as violating a woman's right to choose. But is there some right to lesser notification, lesser information, less informed consent than any other procedure or pill? I don't think so. So let's free up the rest of surgery, the rest of the pharmaceutical world. Let hospitals save money by not printing up and tracking all those forms, let no lawsuits go forward based on a lack of information.

It's the only consistent thing to do.

Friendly Canadians

The Funny Farm crew is paying homage to the Canadian military and their... friendliness.

And yes, it's work safe.

The Kerry Weathervane

In writing up a comment on Kerry's candidacy I came up with the image of Kerry's policymaking process being akin to a weathervane. Sometimes the weathervane points this way, sometimes that. And sometimes it spins so rapidly around you can't tell where it points. But what is the wind that blows the weathervane? It can't be a core of philosophical beliefs. There would be no policy straddling with those. And it can't be just classic finger to the wind political polling. Kerry wouldn't have such out of mainstream voting records for the ACU and ADA. There's something there that motivates him but I can't tell what it is or whether this mysterious force would lead Kerry to make good decisions if he ends up working from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for the next four years.

Update: As of this writing, I just got a notice that Nickspace is moving to a new location. You may find the link above at the old site for now or perhaps the new one.

The Germans Invaded Pearl Harbor?

One of the funniest moments in Animal House was Bluto (John Belushi was a comedic genius) rousing his fellow fraternity members with an impassioned speech exclaiming:

Bluto' s inspirational speech: "Over? Did you say, 'over?' Nothing is over until WE decide it is! Was over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"

Boone: "Germans?"

Otter: "Forget it. He's rolling."

Lileks is having a Bluto moment:

But Kerry? It reminds me of the cover in ’84 after the Democrat convention: it had a picture of Dukakis, looking confident and secure. The cover said “THE DUKE.” It played right to the emotions of his supporters: we are not entirely unenthusiastic of his candidacy, Reagan is insane, and our guy has a great nickname that makes us feel cool when we say it! Landslide loss.

Dukakis ran in 1988 against George Bush, Reagan's Vice President.

But don't stop him, he's rolling.

Martha Stewart & Saddam Hussein

Martha Stewart and Saddam Hussein are usually examined in two different worlds. But there are a few relevant similarities that we should take into account. She's the queen of domesticity who was nailed for lying about an illegal stock transaction that she was never convicted of making. Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iraq who was nailed for not complying with UNSC 1441 and lying about the stocks of WMD that nobody has found.

So, a simple question comes to my mind. How many of you out there are comfortable with only one or the other being taken down? And why, if both of them have their underlying offenses currently unproven, do they deserve differential treatment in your mind?

Discuss.

The Nature of Electrical Markets III

I wrote last August about creating a new smart grid that would allow people to have quick access to pricing information and for smart appliances to have profiles that would adjust their consumption downward during price spikes. I had no idea until now that a first generation effort in just such a grid was happening right next door in Chicago. The first year's results are in and even with very primitive IT tools (phone calls and a web site you manually visit), people are happy with a smarter grid because it saves them money.

This success is likely to drive early adoption of a smart grid because it is a month to month reality, unlike the catastrophic scenario of teams of terrorists taking down the grid every few days. The methods of control are very primitive. Fortunately, the IEEE has a working group that is likely to be able to provide help, IEEE P1547 specifically P1547.3. The same sort of information that a central utility would tell a distributed power generator (the explicit target for P1547) it's time to turn on or shut off would be the same sort of information useful for a consumer to decide whether to shut down or leave running their various energy consuming appliances.

According to the minutes of the last meeting, P1547.3 is currently scheduled to come up for a vote in December of 2004. This puts the engineering of a smart grid IT system in the realm of practicality starting mid 2005. The smart grid is coming and the evidence is showing up in out of the way, practical forums like the IEEE.

Lia Roberts 2004 I

Lia Roberts, I can safely report, is not overly impressed with herself. If you ask the Nevada Republican Party about her they will give you a contact number. She's still personally picking up that number. John Kerry style politicians have staff for that. She doesn't, even though she could afford it. She'll be in Romania through April 4 so things might change as her run gets more organized but its nice to see a well financed candidacy for such an important post where the candidate isn't in a bubble surrounded by a nearly impenetrable barrier of staffers.

As of March 1st she's no longer the head of Nevada Republicans though no doubt President Bush will still take her calls. Resigning a party post is normal and expected under the circumstances. Still the Nevada Republicans are getting 5-10 calls a day from press and romanian-americans asking for information about her run. As time goes on, I expect that number to increase.

The fundamental problem for romanian centrists and sane right wingers is that until Mrs. Roberts' candidacy, they had no obvious practical place to turn to for the 2004 presidential election. The left will likely be uniting around the current prime minister, Adrian Nastase while the xenophobic right will rally to Corneliu Vadim Tudor (or as his detractors like to call him VC Tudor). That left a broad swathe of the romanian electorate up for grabs, still reeling after the monumental stupidity the center right engaged in in 1996 by creating an electoral "Contract with Romania", promising to resign if they didn't fulfill the contract terms, and then, to a man, going back on their word.

Lia Roberts is not implicated in that long ago mess. She was busy heading up the Nevada Federation of Republican Women at the time. The question is whether she will be able to cobble together a coalition sufficient to get her into the 2nd voting round where broad style coalitions quickly form up for the last push to the Presidency.

Libertarian Purity Test

Even though my score is quite different from Matthew Yglesias' 21, I too agree that the questions on the Libertarian Purity test should be redone. I also think the scoring section needs work as well as it seems designed to showcase the idea that the movement is filled with extremists who want to repel those of more moderate persuasion.

My score, if anybody is curious, was 134.

Battlefield 'Net II

The battlefield Internet is moving forward and it looks like it will progress along the same style 'S' curve as the Internet itself into a full fledged occupation net that covers all aspects of an occupation. The new innovation is multilingual chat and this makes possible simplified cross-linguistic communication even when people aren't speaking the same language.

This development can take the grand strategy of Thomas Barnett and rewrite it small in the day to day activities of future US military interventions. With a solar rechargeable simputer like device deployed across the population, information connectivity is pretty quickly achieved because simputers are designed so that you don't need previous computer experience or even literacy. With these two innovations combined, you get near instant connectivity. At first, you just hand them out and announce that security notices, where to get food, and where to get jobs and money will be sent through these systems. You maintain a parallel classic announcement system for notices that can get people killed but quickly move over money, job, and resource announcements through the electronic systems.

Once they are in use for such basic things, you've got a communications pipeline into every home in the occupied zone. Tell the truth faster, more complete, than your opponents propaganda can circulate and you win the propaganda war. Provide the information tools to promote the formation of burkean 'little platoons' and you give a leg up to civil society formation. Create reporting modules so that people can inform the military about rebel movements and hideouts without leaving their homes and rebels can no longer intimidate locals into silence.

Monitor the packets that travel across the network and you'll catch rebels trying to piggyback on your system (with airborne wireless access points, they'll never be able to take over all of it). Create economics modules for trading, education modules for learning the habits of freedom, history modules to learn their own history without the cult of personality the previous dictator is likely to have created during the previous regime.

It's an information matrix that is not very useful for the creation of an empire but will provide a very effective information substrate if what you're after is planting a liberty tree.

Update: Ooops I ommitted the link to the story that made me write this article in the first place. It's corrected above and also the link in this update.

Apple Lapped Microsoft

Apple Computer over the long course of its competition with Microsoft got lapped by it 7 times. That is, Microsoft increased it's stock price beyond Apple's split, and passed Apple again. One of the interesting aspects of the dot.com bubble is that Apple actually lapped Microsoft. When the crash came, Microsoft regained its price lead. It did so, at least, until last Thursday when Apple once again has regained its pricing position over Microsoft. 1 down, 6 more to go.

War on Terror Stamina

Steven Den Beste thinks that we are in danger of accelerating the development of a truly effective islamist movement if we take the cure halfway, much as foolish patients have endangered millions by creating drug resistant bugs by not following their doctors orders. If we halt the War on Terror before we actually win it, the Islamists will come back, stronger and more virulent than before.

I see the danger. He's right that such a halfway course of action is problematic at best. Unlike him, I also see a solution to hand and have been advocating its adoption for some time. You win the struggle to maintain a War on Terror that is likely to stretch generations by creating a consensus foreign policy position for both major parties, one that prosecutes the war in a way that is acceptable to a durable majority of both parties.

I am referring to Thomas Barnett and The Pentagon's New Map. In fact, beyond this effort, I can't find any practical effort to create a bipartisan durable intellectual framework that would survive changing party control of the Presidency and the Congress.

If Barnett's right, we have a workable map and an intellectual framework from which to work from that will survive the vagaries of the ballot box. If Barnett's recommendations are not capable of selling on both sides of the aisle, it is vitally important that something else be found to fill this policy niche. It's a matter of national survival.

A little birdie told me that advance copies of this book might just be circulating through the Kerry campaign. Certainly, this strategy seems to have heavily influenced Bush administration strategy. I'm going to be interested to see whether Barnett style reasoning starts permeating the Kerry candidacy.

UN Legitimacy

Lack of UN approval has been cited as a problem in Iraq by an awful lot of people. Kerry would have worked really, really, really hard at getting the UN on board so we could have the maximum amount of legitimacy.

But, as the UN bombing soon proved, not only do we have different criteria than the UN on when military action is called for, we have different criteria on installation security and how many casualties are required before we tuck our tail between our legs and scamper for the exits.

I would truly be interested in Kerry's response to a hypothetical where France, Germany, and the UN all blessed the Iraq operation but afterwards turned tail and ran at the very beginning of the occupation due to very light casualties. Would that change the legitimacy of the operation and when and how would it lose legitimacy. And if it remained legitimate, why does it remain legitimate? Is their initial assent a permanent stamp of legitimacy?

If an initial assent maintains legitimacy throughout the operation, UNSC 1441's last chance provisions along with Saddam Hussein's proven lies subsequent to this mandatory UNSC resolution would seem to provide just such initial legitimacy. If initial legitimacy doctrine doesn't apply, wouldn't that mean that we should have turned tail when we lost a chopper or two in the Sunni Triangle? Does it mean that Italy should have withdrawn after its horrible losses in their barracks bombing disaster?

Why are we there now after taking many more losses than the UN took before it withdrew because of military danger? Would we still be there if it had been a Kerry presidency?

More Sprawl Please

I've been noticing that more and more of my intellectual output consists of unlikely paired blog postings. By maintaining an eclectic reading list (which will not be my blog roll else you could do the same thing yourselves) I get to do things like combine a whine about libertarian hopelessness on land use issues over at City Comforts and the net negatives of fair trade practices to conclude, more sprawl please.

First, the City Comforts item, which goes on and on about the impracticality of libertarian land use policy, which is laissez faire. The article bothers me because I always find, in actual circumstances, such difficulties that pro-zoning and pro-takings people bring up are usually either unrealistic, or unjust. But if you enter into the trench warfare of example via example, you've given up deduction and entered into the land of inductive reasoning, a difficult and time consuming method of reaching a conclusion on large social policy goals.

The Adam Smith Institute's article on the economics of fair trade coffee and its negative effects left me feeling a bit warmer. Fair trade coffee is likely to create larger coffee production overall as new producers enter the market and the persistent overproduction of coffee will lead to persistently strong calls for subsidy and protection. The general point is made that the free market needs to be unleashed in a fit of agricultural creative destruction.

The combination of the two leads me to think about the destructive effects of sustainable growth ideology on the supply of agricultural land. If we're in persistent oversupply of farmland, the best thing to happen would be a growth in the incidence of developers buying up farmland and taking it out of production with new suburban or urban development. In other words, sprawl is the free market solution for too much farmland and zoning and other non-libertarian land use controls that are anti-sprawl are contributing to the barriers that 3rd world farmers have to lift themselves out of poverty and misery.

So shame on you, Seattle for your cruel and heartless anti-sprawl provisions.

Liberty Trees

Andrew Sullivan nails one when he comments on the reemergence of Iraqi politics. I speculated that the US is attempting to plant an Iraqi liberty tree instead of creating an american empire back in July of 2003.

Today Sullivan notes:

SISTANI SHIFTS: The violence in Iraq - even the horrifying sectarian mass murders last week - have failed to derail the tortuous political process. That's hugely good news. It's not surprising that there should be last-minute renegotiations, brinksmanship and the like in forging a new constitution in a fissiparous country. That's called politics. It hasn't been practised in Iraq for many, many years. Its emergence - however imperfect - is wonderfully good news. Instead of lamenting this wrangling, we should be encouraged. What we're seeing is something you simply don't see anywhere else in the Arab-Muslim world: negotiation trumping violence. This isn't a path to democracy. In important ways, it is democracy. The first true post-war victory is ours - and, more importantly, Iraq's.

For people stuck in the paradigm of empire and pax americanus such brinksmanship is evidence of failure. For those who think in terms of planting liberty trees, (which seems to include Sullivan) the exact same evidence is a success. Does anybody want to place bets on what US political factions fall into each of the above paradigms?

The Passion From Eastern Eyes

Romanians are mostly eastern christians, overwhelmingly Orthodox with a light sprinkling of byzantine catholics (of which I'm one). I've asked several what they think about The Passion of The Christ and what I found is bad news for Mel Gibson, capitalist, but pretty good news for Mel Gibson christian.

I don't think The Passion of The Christ is going to do very good numbers in Eastern Europe. The reason is the utter incomprehension of those (non-american acculturated romanians) who I've talked to who've seen the film, to understand what the big fuss is all about. The attitude is best summarized by a classic phrase from one friend "It's like they've never seen a crucifixion before."

This movie is jarring and inspiring for those who have either forgotten or never really internalized what the Passion was all about, the base brutalization, suffering, and death of the most perfect being ever on this planet who, though without sin, paid for all our sins. If you've already internalized this. If you already know this in your bones, Mel Gibson doesn't have a lot to teach you via this movie and a country filled with such people will not go to see this movie in large numbers.

And you know what? I think Mel, the christian, wouldn't mind that result at all.

Martha Stewart

A simple reminder to all those right wing commentators who are bemoaning the fact that Martha Stewart was not convicted on the underlying stock trade count but only on the 'lying' charges (obstruction et al). Al Capone was sent to prison on a tax count and Alger Hiss was convicted only of perjury, never of spying. There is a long and distinguished legal history of people 'getting away' with the crime but not the coverup. Whatever your conclusions on Martha Stewart, the mere fact that she was only convicted of lying about a crime she was not convicted of does not exonerate her in any way. You might be right that there is an injustice but you have to provide something more for your position to be reasonable.

2 of 5 Say Westphalia's Dead

Of the 5 UN permanent Security Council Members, 2 of them have now enunciated policy that kills the sovereignty and non-intervention principles of the Treaty of Westphalia. President Bush's declaration in this year's State of the Union speech has already attracted my commentary but I just noticed that Prime Minister Blair's recent constituency speech in Sedgefield does the same thing:

So, for me, before September 11th, I was already reaching for a different philosophy in international relations from a traditional one that has held sway since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648; namely that a country's internal affairs are for it and you don't interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance.

You can make a case that President Bush's abandonment of Westphalia is a neocon, right wing aberration born in inappropriate reaction to 9/11. Blair's rejection of Westphalia is explicit, it predates 9/11, and is issued from the world leader of the '3rd way' movement. This demands more thoughtful treatment by those who are knee-jerk anti-Bush, anti-Republican, or anti-US.

Westphalia's dead. The principles it enunciates can't withstand the rejection of even 2 of 5 permanent Security Council members. When those two are a defacto majority of the planet's military power, there's little hope that Westphalia's non-interventionism will be resurrected anytime soon.

Letter to the Paper VI

Hellblazer writes that I'm not only whiny because I don't like the idea that 9/11 is only ok to bring up in Democrat campaign materials, but that the RNC is the real free speech villain because they are trying to get MoveOn.org campaign commercials pulled as they violate the new rules of McCain-Feingold.

Here's the reply I left in his comments:

The position that I've had has always been that the campaign finance rules were idiotic and that full disclosure and unlimited free speech are the best rule for the US political system.

That being said, after an incredible multi-year demonization campaign, largely run by left wing and Democrat partisans (though some Republicans, most famously John McCain, were leaders in this), the law has changed and everybody's required to follow the new rules.

The truth is that Democrats shot themselves in the foot with McCain-Feingold, as a matter of practical partisan politics. That they did so in the pursuit of an outrageous violation of the US Constitution's guarantee of free speech (yes, I know the USSC doesn't agree) makes it all the more delicious that they find themselves in a practical bind because they are unable to raise as many hard dollars as Republicans. Now the 527 committees are a game that both sides are playing, just like the soft money awfulness that arose out of Buckley v. Valeo. But these new committees have to follow the rules. They can avoid the restrictions (like individuals can avoid taxes) but they cannot evade them (in tax terms that's an audit, a fine, and maybe jail time if you're blatant about it).

The truth is that the law has changed in the past year. For a lawyer to claim that it's relevant that such commercials were legal under the Buckley v. Valeo rules is simply not relevant. Commercials that run now have to comply with the law after McCain-Feingold, the FEC rulings implementing it and the USSC affirming its constitutionality. If you don't like your free speech infringed (and I agree that this infringement is outrageous), you should have the law changed.

The worst result possible is to have one or both sides violate the law instead of changing the law to conform with the well understood limits to government action regarding free speech that ruled from the founding into the 1970s. That's what MoveOn.org is trying to accomplish. That's what the RNC is calling them on. And if it takes a few pulled TV licenses to create a new majority coalition to repeal McCain Feingold's free speech limitations, so be it.

Oh, I forgot to directly quote the MoveOn.org's lawyer comment. Here it is:

"The federal campaign laws have permitted precisely this use of money for advertising for the past 25 years," he said.

Again, the point of McCain-Feingold was to make certain things that were legal for the past quarter-century illegal. I hope they aren't paying this lawyer much. Even if he's pro-bono, he's being compensated too much.

Who the Heck is Lia Roberts?

"Who is Lia Roberts?" is something that I keep hearing, in one form or another, in the romanian emigre community. I once had the pleasure of hearing her speak before a romanian crowd and I understand US politics enough so people are asking me. For those outside the tribe, Lia Roberts is the State Chairwoman of the Nevada Republican Party. She is a dual citizen (as am I) and has announced that she will be running for the presidency of Romania and plunking down a $15 million dollar campaign war chest to finance her campaign. This is a big deal in Romania as the 2000 races for the presidency saw expenditures run from $1M-$5M. Dick Morris is advising her and President Bush seems to look on her candidacy with approval (a wise move given his own race in 2004).

Right now, I'm leaning towards getting my paperwork in order so I can vote for her this fall. But she hasn't closed the deal yet with many, even in the romanian-american community that could be a source of money and definitely will be where a lot of romanians will turn to for advice about this unexpected development in politics. I figure this to be an issue to cover and a place where I might make my own real contribution to the evolution of events in the real world so be prepared, this blog is likely to significantly up its romanian political level.

Avoiding the End of Europe

Wretcherd points to an excellent AEI speech by Niall Ferguson on the decline and fall of Europe.

It's all very well and good but there is no Hollywood ending here, not even the hope of a concrete plan of action to reverse the tide. In other words, Europe is doomed in its current economic, ethnic, and cultural configuration and there is nothing to do but to wait for the arrival of the minarets.

Horsefeathers

There is nothing inevitable about the decline of Europe, even in countries that are currently rushing headlong to demographic decline and death. There is a fundamental difference between choosing to face the wall and die and having that be your own alternative.

Christianity is a cultural heritage for Europe's post-christian millions but, more than that, it is a choice. There is an unspoken assumption interwoven through most (including this) "Europe is declining" stories that note post-christianity in the EU, that is that christianity is a spent force. Looking worldwide, this is a laughably inaccurate observation. All sorts of christian churches are gaining not only through births in the 3rd world but through active conversions including most if not all the classic christian faiths of Europe.

Another choice that is presented as an inevitability is a low birth rate, largely an artifact of abortion and birth control. This is a radical choice but it is ludicrous to think that there is no choice and it should not even be presented as a possibility.

A third choice is in assimilation. The US has a much larger assimilation capability than most EU states yet even the US needs to work on assimilation. Europe has its own choices to make in this field.

None of these choices are likely in the next electoral cycle but none of the threats to Europe are likely to come to a head in the next electoral cycle either. The first step is to note the problem. The second step is to define solutions that would work. The third step is to choose and implement the best solutions available. By simply taking real public policy choices off the table a priori, those who are currently projecting a decline in the EU are doing Europe a major disservice. A grave problem such as the death of nations deserves the widest possible discussion regarding the widest possible set of solutions.

If nothing else, the Poles of America will fund and retake Poland as will the Germans of America and so on. They will have the money to do so (European economic decline remember?) the numbers to do so (US has a higher birth rate than many EU states) and the faith to do so (spiritual renewal in US christianity is a subject of history and the present day). If the prospect of sharia and the islmization of Europe does not drive Europeans to take action, the reality that eventually their American cousins will eventually come back is likely to do it.

Go Europe!

How to Tell North Korea's Favorite

North Korea, bombastic, crude, dissembling and enraging it may be but it's leadership is not stupid. They know that George W. Bush would like to settle the issue of their nuclear program but if they wait a year, George W. Bush may no longer be President.

N. Korea has two options, it can rush into an agreement with President Bush if they think he will give them a better deal or, if they think a President Kerry would serve their interests better, they can keep the door open to negotiations while ensuring that nothing much happens until the new administration opens for business in January, 2005.

There are no circumstances which Kerry can directly influence the direction of negotiations and there are no circumstances where it would pay for Bush to delay a success in negotiations past the elections. Thus, the US side is very predictable in its actions. The only thing that will vary is North Korean behavior based on North Korean political evaluation of the two potential US presidents from 2005-2009. North Korea's evaluation of who would be worse for their repressive dictatorial regime will be crystal clear. So far, it seems the dictators prefer President Kerry.

Update:

The Financial Times is playing this same 'kremlinology' style game of observing the North Korean's preferences and has an article observing that John Kerry is getting very good press in N. Korea.

Hizb ut Tahrir: Turning?

The Argus notes a possible case of violence by Hizb ut Tahrir. Things are very unclear at the moment whether this is a put up job or a real turning point where they abandon non-violent tactics but it strongly bears watching.

National Movie Industries Don't Deserve Protection

Evan Kirchoff has an analysis of The Passion of The Christ from a movie business perspective. Key graf:

The stunning fact here is that Hollywood failed to notice that there was about a billion dollars (remember that the movie hasn't yet been released in the major world centers of Christianity: Africa, the other Americas) lying around for the taking. That demonstrates a mindboggling sampling bias in the market research of an industry whose interest in reliable data is at least equal to that of the Kerry campaign. If something this big can be completely off our sociocultural radar, then our radar sucks.

But it's not only Hollywood's radar. Is there a national cinema in the world that couldn't have put on this production? It's not like there's some language or cultural advantage to the anglosphere. This is the ultimate in foreign films, shot entirely in aramaic with a bit of latin sprinkled on top. Maybe Vatican City might have a natural language advantage but they don't have serious studios.

Every single movie industry that asks for protection from the big bad americans from here on out should have the box office grosses from The Passion shoved under their noses and asked "why aren't you just making films that are good?" They no longer have an excuse. The lie that Hollywood has seized the cultural high ground upon which it is possible to make movie gold is exposed as an utter illusion. The national movie making groups are guilty of being too much like Hollywood, not too little like it. The only thing they refuse to share is Hollywood's deep visceral desire to make movies that people want to watch. The only reason that Hollywood is the only film industry being beaten up is that the others are seen as not really mattering.

This too is a lie and a blind spot. I wonder which national cinema will be the first to prove it?

Extremists Tactics Link

One of the great, scary things to come out of the neo-nazi movement is the concept of leaderless resistance, the idea of simply putting out ideas and having people come up with their own ways of implementing the ideology in blood in the streets.

US right wing extremists are fans of the idea and supposedly the OKC bombing was an example of it. The ALF/ELF use the same sort of tactics on the left with people independently adopting the label in their actions. And now, from StrategyPage comes this:

While the idea of al Qaeda "concentrating on Iraq," is attractive, the truth is that al Qaeda is no longer an organization as much as it is a bunch of like minded people all over the world. The numerous al Qaeda "members" do what they can in the areas where they live.

This seems to fit into the broad idea of leaderless resistance and provide an intellectual framework within which all such movements should be confronted. There's no reason not to concentrate on finding a generalized formula for defeating leaderless resistance movements.

Defeating Bunkers

Strategypage (still no permalinks, darn it) has a story on bunker busters and the difficulty that the offense is currently having against the defense. I recall that the oil and gas folks have been experimenting with laser powered oil drilling rigs. A little googling shows that they've gotten very close to deployment with civilian systems based on Reagan era SDI patents coming into operation by 2007.

I don't think it takes much of a genius to see the full circle potential. Take an airborne laser, combine it with orbital beamed power, and you just have to maintain air superiority for the length of time it takes to drill down, using a system that "can slice through rock like a hot knife through butter." There isn't a country in the world that can challenge us in the air and this is likely to continue for some time. With such a system, we wouldn't need nuclear bunker busters.

Beamed power is currently a NASA priority and due to deploy a decade or two down the road. Putting a military application on it would certainly enhance funding and speed up deployment.

Electing Judges

I love talking to acculturated Romanians about politics. They show surprise at so many things that it really brings to life the exceptional nature of the US government. I was speaking to a romanian ethnic political science graduate student. She was hearing all sorts of high level poli-sci terms but nobody had ever sat her down and given her the basics of how things worked and she was missing a lot of the subtext of lectures. So while I was occupied in fixing the DSL line that, among other things, lets her surf the web, we talked US political basics. She absolutely couldn't understand how the US judicial branch survives with elected judges.

People don't understand the law, she maintained, how can they choose good judges? The reason, I replied, dated back to colonial days where certain judges simply made stuff up as they went along. After the revolution, the newly independent americans decided that they would never have that happen again and would elect judges in order to be able to have an ultimate check on a judiciary run amok. On the way back home, I recalled that a great many people opined that the old danger of a judiciary that just made stuff up was long gone with the british and it was time to do away with an elected judiciary.

They all swore it would never happen again.

Look around and tell me with a straight face that you can say that today. Whether it's the US Supreme Court permitting gross violations of freedom of speech in politics, pro-gay rights judges ignoring the law and permitting gay marriages to go forward in San Francisco by refusing to issue an injunction, or any of a dozen abuses that have angered both left and right, it's becoming clear that the time is come that we start electing more, rather than less judges.

Is 9/11 a Legitimate Campaign Issue?

I have to take some issue with today's WSJ editorial on 9/11. It leads off with an inaccuracy:

September 11, 2001, marked the worst foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor--the bloodiest ever on the American mainland. It's certainly been the defining event of George W. Bush's Presidency. But according to Democrats and their media echo chamber, it now shouldn't be a campaign issue.

This is patently false because it's not what the Democrat party and their presumptive nominee John Kerry have been claiming. Instead what they are saying is that Democrats, including John Kerry, can fault President Bush for any problems leading up to or following 9/11 and even claim that he is not doing enough in the war on terror. The Wall Street Journal is complicit in perpetuating a fraud, that the upper echelons of the Democratic party have any appreciable reserves of good faith. What they want is to take 9/11 off the table for Republicans only, making it illegitimate only for them to raise the issue.

Free speech for me but not for thee is a recipe for the end of civil society. The irony that such attacks are likely to be largely funded by George Soros is a bitter turn of events.

Question for Arafat

This excellent article on Iran's Great Game provided a lot of thought but this article will just note one item, the import of palestinian bully boys.

Can there be an importer without an exporter? Is anybody even bothering to talk to Yasser Arafat and get his official position on the Iranian elections and the evident use of palestinians as storm troopers for a no longer illegitimate regime?

There are a bunch of ways that the question could be asked and how Arafat could respond. The key is that Arafat is not used to such questions and he is not used to people taking him seriously as a democratically election national leader. So what could be a better way to expose him on an issue that has no possible links to Israel, requires him to at least pro-forma condemn one of his terrorist activity supporters, and provides the EU with something more than the same old, same old script coming out of the West Bank?

Sidebar

In blogging, I've been concentrating so much on the writing that I haven't done much about formatting or creating the sidebar that I truly want. Most of the links to the left are leftovers from Flit's original links though slowly the two sidebars are diverging.

I'm including a book list, starting with The Pentagon's New Map. I've always been susceptible to the libertarian disease that you should, "just go read this book". I know that it's not the most effective way to convince an awful lot of people but I've got the itch so this new section will somewhat scratch it.

Simple Question I

If the Federal Republic of Germany's people wish to turn their back on the anti-americanism of the current FRG government, they only need to elect the CDU which has quietly maintained its credibility as a philo-american political movement.

If France's people wish to turn their back on the anti-americanism of the current French government, who do they elect?

Free Borders Foolishness

At some level, even Libertarians recognize that borders are necessary to preserve societal identity. This is why the LP doesn't generally permit outsiders to vote in their primaries nor does it endorse the practice of multiple-party endorsement (also known as cross-endorsement). The Libertarian Party, with its ideology of free movement of people across borders, instinctively knows that if it practiced what it preached, it would get swamped and lose its ideological identity. It would continue as a corporation but it would be subject to takeover.

The same is true for states and is the bottom line on decent, non-xenophobic immigration restrictionism. For the restrictionist who is not motivated by bigotry, the problem has to come down to whether these immigrants will gain the ability to swamp natives and destroy the society that currently exists. For the United States, this is a real problem because traditionally it has been very easy to become a voting citizen and there is little that cannot be changed in US law with a persistent enough majority.

The reason that people come to the United States is that they want a better life than they can realistically get for themselves or their children (the latter is more common than you might think). Very often though, immigrants bring with them the seeds of cultural, economic, and political attitudes that made their own country such a mess and, given a quick vote and no change in attitude, they will vote that way. They don't generally intend to destroy the society they have sacrificed much to join but that's the way they vote.

This isn't just a theoretical exercise for me. I know plenty of immigrants who seriously do not understand the US. They do so in different ways. Some are fearful of 'the jews', others of economic exploitation, others just are really unhappy with US culture and all its liberties. It varies widely and I will betray no confidences.

With time and assimilation, such attitudes soften, often completely reversing. The american experience often changes opinions as observation convinces people that though they may not understand it, all these crazy innovations that shouldn't work, do work and they work better than back in the old country.

Mexico may be lobbying for an amnesty or more guest workers but they'd get an awfully lot further if they took the bold step of saying that mexican ethnic migrants, temporary or permanent, would do very well to learn the way they do things up north and ask that assimilation assistance and even enhanced assimilation requirements be paired with increased mexican immigration.

Restrictionist Follies

I've found Mark Krikorian to be a generally civilized immigration restrictionist. He answers his mail (I've corresponded with him) and is generally thoughtful in his positions. I just can't understand how he misses the lay of the land on immigration. The solution to restrictionist concerns is, and has always been, in bludgeoning high immigration advocates with the fact that assimilation is badly broken and needs to get fixed at least as much as the visa regime needs to get fixed.

His recent item in The Corner lays the essential facts out cogently but he doesn't make the final necessary step to create a durable majoritarian synthesis between civilized restrictionists, the increased immigration crowd, and the economic interests who want an increase in the labor force. It isn't about immigration at the fundamental level. It is about assimilation and preserving a broad consensus that will retain and even improve America as the best country on the planet.

Political Hygien: The Left Can Do It

Matt Yglesias provides a nice example of how to clean up your own side's excesses and why it's vital that it be done.

He takes a stab at Paul Krugman for essentially going over-the-top and going for guilty by association/blood guilt (your uncle had business dealings with his cousin therefore...). I'll quote the reasons why:

Moreover, there's plenty of perfectly legit Bush-Saudi and Bush-Mideast hijinks in general that really can be established. When you throw something dubious and over-the-top into the mix, though, it's hard to take other charges seriously.

I happen to believe that Bush is currently the best choice for election to the Presidency. But it is incumbent that both left and right elevate the debate and maintain civility, not just for the sake of the country but for the sake of our own success.

Population Assumptions

One of the assumptions interwoven into our financial lives is the long-term appreciation of real estate. The common phrase "God isn't making any more land" to imply that buying property now will lead to appreciation and a nice retirement nest egg decades later only holds true if population increases over those decades.

The opposite is also mostly true. God isn't destroying much land either. Sure, you have a Krakatoa or an Atlantis every once in awhile but that's a fluke if it happens during your lifetime. If the population drops in absolute numbers and also ages, you end up with a secular lower demand for land. This has huge implications for the real estate market and how to create retirement nest eggs in the 2050 and beyond period where world population is supposed to stabilize and then shrink somewhat. I'll barely miss this trend but my children won't.

Long-term fortunes have always depended on stable rental income. Great merchant houses have often arisen over history but they always buy land to hedge their bets once they have accumulated their fortunes. But with land a depreciating, not appreciating asset, the whole financial calculus of buying a house building equity and using that equity for a retirement nest egg goes out the window.

And, tick tock, tick tock, nobody even worries about it.

Fusion News

It seems that sonoluminescence might end up being a real source of energy. Sonoluminescence is the long-known phenomenon that sound waves in liquids can cause random light flashes in air bubbles. The effect was first picked up in cavitation studies. Current studies seem to show extremely high heat being created and neutron releases indicative of actual fusion. The equipment necessary for the study is orders of magnitude less than classic fusion with the most recent work being done on about $1M of equipment (including a Macintosh fx computer!).

Right now, they're looking to scale things up to see if they can get a chain reaction going. Every time one of these things (possible radical advances in energy technology) pops up, it could be nothing, or it could shake up the world and create new realities that change everybody's daily life and the entire geopolitical system.

Linguistic Alternatives

I found myself pondering the term "Useful Idiot" after reading this article in Balloon-Juice. There is a fundamental problem with the term in that it originated and takes the point of view of the tyrant. For a citizen in a free society, the phrase has no inherent core meaning without transporting your self-view, however momentarily, to that of a dictator. And once you arrive in that dirty place, there is only a feeling of disgust and cynicism that after these idiots have outlived their usefulness, they too will go to the wall.

But taken from the point of view of the lover of liberty, useful idiots may still be idiotic but they are certainly not useful, nor is there any future plan for their execution or imprisonment. The species needs another label, something that puts, not the dictator, but the son of liberty at the psychological center. If hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue, useful idiot and other such borrow terms from the slavemaster's dictionary are the compliments that free men pay to tyrants.

It is an unnecessary compromise. We should rid ourselves of it.

Gay Marriage: Baseline Documents I

In previous articles, I've mentioned that somewhere between 800 and a thousand laws are affected by marriage in the US. According to this GAO report in 1997 it seems that I've grossly undercounted. There are at least 1049 federal laws that deal with marriage in the US Code (in the last 7 years, they might have increased). State, county, and municipal codes undoubtedly provide many more laws that would need to be adjusted and reviewed.

The GAO report is available on their offical website here, in PDF format.

As far as I can tell, this also does not include common law privileges like the spousal privileges in the Federal Rules of Evidence.

Some treaty law is included in federal marriage law, a wrinkle that I've yet to see examined in any way, reasonable or unreasonable including significant language regarding spousal rights to indian treaty lands. Since each tribe has their own traditions and beliefs and individual treaties with the United States, I somehow doubt that this is going to play out simply.

A Banking Ace?

Ace Hardware is an interesting entity in business. You see them everywhere but they're not a corporate monolith like Home Depot or Loewes. In fact, they're a dealer owned cooperative enterprise. Ace comes to mind when I hear about David and Goliath stories like this one about the advantages that big banks have over small banks in their online operations.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing stopping these small banks from building their own Ace. They could pool their resources and create a internet banking services infrastructure that was modular and could easily fit whatever IT the banks were already running internally. They would get more services for less money and have a legitimate shot at beating the big boys online as well as at their brick and mortar locations where locally owned and operated banks already excel.

It's quite likely that they would also be able to leverage a great deal of unpaid programming talent. Bankers all over the world would likely be willing to make contributions to such an effort if it were open source and code verification costs would be lowered as large customers sent their own programming talent through the files, auditing and verifying for free the robustness of code.

Right now, all these banks are reinventing the online banking wheel. They have a built-in advantage in the physical world with their superior local knowledge and connections but that doesn't count for much in terms of online services. With a pooled effort, such banks would be able to increase the quality of their online offerings at a fraction of their current spending.

Too Cute by Half I

I had my own entry in this category earlier so I understand that such things can be done in fun or as a fantasy. Here's one that just hit my mailbox where the writer says "In case it isn't clear, I'm dead serious about every word of this.":

A Petition to the United States Congress on behalf of John F. Kerry

Whereas section 3 of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution states:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

And whereas John F. Kerry, United States Senator and contender for the office of President of the United States, did swear an oath as an officer of the United States Navy to support the Constitution of the United States, and did subsequently organize and participate in street demonstrations which comforted the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), whose forces were then in actual combat against the forces of the United States, and which had the affect of aiding them in the defeat of the Republic of Vietnam, then allied to the United States, Mr. Kerry is ineligible under the Constitution for the office of President and for the office of Senator to which he was elected by the people of Massachusetts.

Whereas Mr. Kerry served honorably in combat against the enemies of the United States, and whereas his subsequent actions were protected by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, both as free speech and as an exercise of the right to petition for redress of grievances, and whereas Mr. Kerry’s actions do not rise to the level of treason, defined in Article 3, Section 3 as requiring adherence to the enemies of the United States, and testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, as well as providing both aid AND comfort to these enemies, I hereby petition the Congress to exercise its power under the Constitution to remove Mr. Kerry’s disability to hold office under the United States. Furthermore I ask that Congress formally establish the precedent that all other persons who actively supported the enemies of the United States during the war in Vietnam by street demonstration or similar act, but who were not convicted of any related crime, will also have such disability removed.

The problem starts with the assumption of guilt. This is simply unamerican. I happen to think that what John Kerry has done regarding war crimes accusations is despicable and that depending on further evidence, it is possible that he might have violated his oath and committed treason to the United States. However, you just don't assume such things.

The presumption of innocence is too important to be thrown overboard for mere political advantage and prosecutorial discretion is an important ancillary principle of US law. If the full time professionals think that it'll do the country more harm than good to prosecute, I am willing to go along with that. Those that disagree need to petition for a prosecution. If they're feeling forgiving afterwards they can petition for a removal of the disability. This is worse than the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. It's not verdict first, trial afterwards. This is clemency first, then verdict, then trial, a most bizarre and uniquely destructive concoction.

I suspect that the "Too Cute by Half" title is going to get a workout during this election season. It's too bad.

Iraki WMD Update: Not Closed Yet

Douglas Hanson writes an article expressing how very premature and wrong it is to come to any conclusions regarding Iraq's possession of WMD based on the evidence of his own eyes from the inside of the operation to hunt down the facts of Saddam's WMD operations.

The bottom line, the searches have not been done properly, there was insufficient coordination between elements of the hunting groups, and the case is still not closed. with only 10 of Iraq's 130 known major weapons storage facilities having been searched and extensive evidence of records destruction generally acknowledged, an objective description of the events anonymized to prevent bias would read something like this:

A massive criminal conspiracy was alleged in an organization. After being investigated and convicted for wrongdoing the organization agreed to special monitoring and to regularly open its records and premises for examination as a condition for continuing operations. Those promises were erratically kept over the next decade.

Finally, prosecutors raided all the enterprise's facilities and found massive record destruction, very close mouthed employees, and evidence of witness intimidation. On the matters of the warrant, after approximately 15% of the facilities were searched, conclusive evidence on some but not all of the warrant's charges was found. The major charges have had little or no substantiation to this point, the searches continue.

Given these facts, would anybody care in the slightest that not all charges had been proven? Would anybody claim that the biggest charges, had been disproven? Would anybody demand that the investigation end right now as it is obvious that nothing will be found on the most serious charges?

Once you take the politics and the emotion out of it and merely look at it as an anonymous crime story, we could be talking about the Teamsters here. And in that more dispassionate framing, the Bush critics look awfully irresponsible.

Al Queda's War On Muslims I

The massive bombing casualties in Baghdad and Karbala are a clear sign that there will be no end to muslim deaths in Iraq until Al Queda's infrastructure is destroyed and sufficient well trained and experienced local forces are available to both secure against attacks and take away any excuses that some might still have that Al Queda is an anti-occupation force.

Such a large operation could not have been done without a support structure in place locally. But if the inter-confessional war that Al Queda clearly wants to break out actually happens, that infrastructure is likely to grow, destabilizing Iraq and raising the possibility of a regional war.

In the end, the solution will be a general muslim determination that muslims killing other muslims to provoke further war against muslims earns the perpetrators a place in hell. A useful exercise that outsiders can further is to encourage all imams to pronounce on the issue and to advertise those who are pro-fratricide and who support them.

God, Lincoln, and My Presidential Ambitions

I'm informed by Richard A. Heddleson in email that, contrary to my previous pessimism, my response to the question "Is God on the side of the US" is not disqualifying at all. Abraham Lincoln apparantly shared my opinion and said "My great concern is not whether God is on our side, my great concern is to be on God's side."

Yeah, me and Honest Abe, we're like peas in a pod.

So now all that stands in the way of a Lutas presidency is a pesky constitutional amendment and any appreciable skill at political campaigning.

Piece of cake.

B-)

Renewed Marriage Assault: The Single Strike Back

In an illustration of how other groups against the privileged marriage position of heterosexual monogamy will try to latch on to any success in legalizing gay marriage, the single have ramped up their longstanding criticisms of marriage.

The criticism of singles of the privileges of the married are of long standing. The marriage penalty in the tax code, for example, is the legacy of a previous generation's assault on the 'pro-marriage unfairness' of the original US tax code. The original 'marriage bonus' allowed a single earner two parent family to greatly reduce their tax liability vis a vis a single household. When two income families became more the norm, the tax code became unfair for the married and it took decades for elimination of the marriage penalty to be put into law.

The problem of preference of the married over the unmarried is one that needs to be addressed in any discussion of civil marriage. What are those that are privileged contributing that makes the preferential treatment deserved? The same arguments that gay marriage advocates are busy trying to discredit are the ones used in justifying the privilege over the single in the first place. Yet I haven't seen any gay marriage advocates seriously address how they are superior to single people and why they should be privileged in law over them.

If the conservative vision of gay marriage that Andrew Sullivan trumpets is to have any meaning whatsoever, gay marriage advocates have to come up with some way to defend the new dividing line that they advocate. Otherwise they are just a useful stalking horse for the ultimate elimination of marriage by covert and dishonest means.

We can have a discussion over whether marriage should even exist as a civil act or not. But it should be an explicit, honest discussion and adjust social policy in a holistic way that doesn't wreck numerous aspects of government policy by accident.

Of Chips and Businesses

Steven Den Beste is back and feeling a bit beset at some of the response he's getting on the XBox's use of the PPC chip. In some small part it's deserved as he's missing a few points but he obviously got an overload of viciousness he certainly does not deserve. Don't the flamers know to ease a guy back into the swing of things?

Regarding the PPC, chip pricing and Apple, things do need to be cleared up, and not just with Steven Den Beste's post but with the original that started things up, an article over at Brian Tiemann's Peeve Farm.

First of all, the original article is too limited to reliably transmit much emotional content at all. Thus I don't think either characterization of "overjoyed (and oversmug)" or "tongue-in-cheek and 'isn't that [w]eird?'" By word count it's a 90% cut and paste from the underlying Inquirer article. It's a real linker not thinker article so it's very thin gruel that SDB is hanging his article on.

But things are a little weirder than the Peeve Farm's noticed. It is quite probable that the custom NT kernel is just updated enough that it'll handle the new hardware. NT for PPC was discontinued at the SP 3 level and according to Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Workstation went completely out of support on June 30, 2003 so if you have any problems with security, functionality, etc. you're just out of luck.

Microsoft Support Lifecycle policies nowadays are pretty well set out and NT 4 Workstation is just not going to be supported. This is not tolerable for a major Microsoft product line so either Microsoft is going to have to tailor an exception to their support policy or they are going to reintroduce multiplatform compatibility to Windows.

I think that NT 4 for PPC is going to be a very limited release and will be replaced by a more modern and secure version of Windows for the PPC as soon as Microsoft can crank one out. This is a major development effort that requires an awful lot of code cleanup and recompiling so why is Bill Gates doing it? You don't just restart a major platform line just for one product, an SDK to a game machine that you're adopting an inferior chip for as an anti-trust exercise to financially keep alive a semi-moribund competitor (Apple) that will not change their way of doing business so are going to die in the long run anyway.

SDB seems to have come to the conclusion that Apple has not evolved recently. In fact Apple has, and in very positive ways. In product after product Apple is demonstrating that it has squared the circle and learned to love open systems without sacrificing the anal retentive control freakiness that makes end users put up with all the disadvantages of a closed system.

Apple's Safari product is a case in point. Safari is actually just a user interface shell wrapped around KHTML. This is the reason that Apple can tolerate the expense of supporting their very own browser, they aren't really spending the money. They find partners in the open source world with whom they can work, who have engineered good products, they move in and create a secret skunk works version to improve things up to Apple standards.

While Steve Jobs is still on the keynote stage creating his latest reality distortion field presentation, the engineers are in the back rooms doing a massive code dump back into the upstream project, confident in the fact that their code is good and will be subsequently accepted and maintained by the open source geeks, creating both lower costs and a positive network effect. Konqueror wasn't widespread enough to have HTML coders specifically test for compatibility and code to it but Konqueror + Safari + whoever joins in is a different story.

The result is lower costs for development with much higher volume because the engineering interfaces that others interoperate with are not the same as program names. If your threshold for rewriting a site to a browser is 10% of the visitor traffic and Apple has 7% of your hits and Konqueror has 4% you write to the common KHTML engine and both groups are happy.

This is not the Apple I first encountered in the mid-80s or even the Apple of six or seven years ago. It is an Apple that is concentrating on engineering aesthetics as its core product and it expresses that through its operating system and application software as well as its Human Interface Guidelines. Apple's best value proposition has always been its UI and aesthetics and the enhanced productivity that flowed from those choices. They've recently figured out how to purify their offerings so that they don't have to give up control but can radically reduce cost and increase volume via these open source partnerships.

But back to the heart of the discussion which is computer hardware. The decision of a chip line ripples extensively. There is tremendous inertia and a temptation to stick with what was tried and true. This is why chip manufacturing companies create extensive roadmaps so their large customers can make their own long range plans to satisfy their own customers over the next decade. Even if a chip line is currently in first place, if your roadmap stops 3 years out and your message is go remake your own entire product line, a lot of customers are going to jump ship, heading for the exists as soon as they can.

This is the true heart of the problem for Microsoft. Intel has been saying for years now that 32bit will stay on the desktop and 64 bit will be for servers only and very highly specialized low volume workstations. Their solution was to keep on with the Pentium line and to switch to an entirely new architecture, Itanium. The entire Xbox 2 saga is Microsoft's delivery of a message to Intel rejecting its strategy because of roadmap concerns.

They saw how Apple hemorrhaged customers and lost credibility when their chip supplier had a roadmap problem. Microsoft cannot afford to get into that same bind because they would lose decades worth of psychological positioning as the default choice for a wide variety of markets. Microsoft doesn't have to be the best, but it can't afford to fall behind Linux too much or it will lose enough customers that it will, once again, descend to the level of just another computer solution provider with a wide variety of products. It can't afford that because so many people utterly despise them for their past competitive behavior and would love to exit the Microsoft product ecosystem if only they could.

Now this is more than just my naked speculation because Intel, itself, has gone back on its roadmap and surprised everybody (but AMD) with the announcement of a Xeon processor that is x86/64, something that they swore they would never do because it would absolutely kill Itanium.

For years Intel declared that x86/64 would only be a slight improvement and would peter out quickly against alternatives like the Power/PPC combination. As recently as October, 2003 speculation was still rife about whether Intel's secret "backup" project called Yamhill really existed. By February of 2004, Intel was claiming that it meant to do this all the time. This is a orwellian revisionism of the highest sort with everybody expected to flush their old roadmaps down the memory hole and forget all of Intel's previous disparaging talk about x86/64 and its limitations. A good examination of the current uncertainties in the Intel camp can be found here.

So Microsoft going to PPC for its XBox 2 and restarting the Windows on PPC production ramp make sense. IBM's roadmap is clear, the 970 is a cut down Power 4 but Power 5 is already out and the 980 will soon be too with further improvements to the Power line to follow. IBM makes too much money from the Power line not to keep on developing it as a priority. With IBM in the AIM driver's seat instead of Motorola, PPC is a safe choice for Microsoft as a backup to a x86 roadmap disaster that is growing in probability.

Now this disaster is not going to happen in the near future. Intel might figure out a way to avoid problems but even a 5% chance of such an occurrence is enough for Microsoft to be scouting for backup plans and the XBox 2 and the adjustments to MS' OS product line to re-include PPC in their lineup are just as good business as Apple's Darwin-X86 project for the reverse challenge, a PPC roadmap disaster.

The low prices that IBM is giving Apple, though, are likely not from any Machiavellian payments under the table or other such things. The low prices stem from the fact that PPC has tended to have smaller die sizes than Intel chips at comparable levels of performance. For the uninitiated, chips are made in groups on a round silicon wafer that is later cut up with individual chips that have tested good ending up in conventional packaging and sold. The cost per wafer is the same whether you make a big chip or a small chip and simple geometry tells us that you can fit more small chips on a wafer than big chips, thus your cost per chip are lowered as the fixed wafer price is spread out among more chips. Each 'bad' chip, also has a lower cost as you are removing a smaller percentage of the wafer's surface from productive use.

So PPC has always had a unit price advantage at similar chip fabrication technology levels. And Microsoft is not the only company to notice that x86 has the potential to have a roadmap disaster. IBM sells an awful lot of x86 gear in competition with its own Power/PPC gear as well using a variety of operating systems. It has its own reasons to gear up PPC because it has its own customers who need to be satisfied irrespective of whether Intel can get past this rough patch or not.

Much of this is covered in SDB's post but he declares that "Apple probably isn't happy, but had no choice" which is really where I part company with him. Apple gets royalties out of every XBox 2 sold as part of the AIM alliance and it did not do so for every XBox. Apple also gets an easier migration off its own hardware if Microsoft supports PPC. Apple might have historically subsidized software production to sell more boxes but it is doing so less than it used to, witness the phasing out of free updates for its iLife suite of programs. It's still bundled with new hardware but it's also sold separately. That's not consistent with the 'old Apple'.

Apple's opening of their architecture came with the end of the hardware ROMs. That event happened many years ago, long before Steve Jobs came back. In fact it happened some time before Apple opened things up to clone manufacturers. It's unlikely that such an old concession to openness would be withdrawn unless Microsoft ponied up some PPC business to IBM. If Apple went back to proprietary ROMs, it would certainly scare off a lot of the open source advocates that are supporting Apple's software efforts for free these days and provide nothing but bad press. It would also create an awful lot of work for Apple and would kill the Darwin project, a key part of Apple's modern strategy where the core OS (Darwin) is an open source project. That core is where most of the interaction occurs between OS and ROM/firmware so making a proprietary ROM but leaving Darwin open would make reverse engineering relatively trivial.

No, Apple has got to be feeling pretty happy right now. They want more PPC customers because they gain profits on every PPC that ships. Their core value proposition would not be too affected by Microsoft's adoption of their preferred chip and the perception that there is Apple in their own world and then everybody else would be dealt a harsh blow. Hypothetically stranded Apple customers could just load Windows on their macs and replace them with other branded PPC machines in future. The great Apple bugaboo, what to do if Apple dies, would finally have a convincing and final answer.

Episcopalians v Democrats: Where's the Money?

Democrats say that only the rich are benefitting from the 'jobless recovery'. Like every other real Church Episcopalians cut across all socioeconomic status but have traditionally been noted as having a healthy concentration of those very same rich people. So with Bush benefits flowing to them, you'd think their church donations would be up. Wrong, they're actually down and Midwest Conservative Journal keeps me up to date on these sorts of things (not being an episcopalian, I'd otherwise be out of the loop).

The Episcopalians claim that contributions are down because of the hard economy but it doesn't have anything to do with their actively gay bishop. Democrats claim that the economy's boom is only concentrated among the rich, a group that features numerous Episcopalians.

So who's right? They both can't be.

I Will Never Be President of the United States

Even if the Schwarzenegger amendment passes I'll never make President. Here is why my future presidential aspirations are doomed. Lileks has a great bleat today in which he dissects a very insightful question:

President Bush has said that freedom and fear have always been at war, and God is not neutral between them. He's made quite clear in his speeches that he feels God is on America's side.

Is God on America's side?

Lileks says that the answer to this one, if you want to actually win the White House, is to say yes and move quickly on to another subject. My impulse would have been different and I'd likely have been clobbered in the sound bite war that would have followed. I would have answered "No, God is not on our side. When we're good and just, we're on His side." Of course, the first sentence would have played nationwide through to election day.

Is it Christian Anti-Semitism if You Aren't Christian?

Wretchard opines that for the majority of christians, those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, anti-semitism is incomprehensible because for most of them, they haven't met and likely won't ever meet jews.

I'm not sure I buy into this. You certainly can point to places in Europe where you are exceedingly unlikely to encounter an actual jew, yet anti-semitic attitudes still persist. But on the other hand, I wonder. The secularization of Europe is common knowledge. The christianity of Europe is becoming more and more a polite fiction in a bow to historical realities and for the tourists. Bigots all over Europe have demonstrated that you can have christian anti-semitism without jews. But the real challenge is what do you call the rage when you not only are missing the jews, but the christians as well?

Khadaffi Threatened With Terrorism?

The Petrified Truth is linking to a story in the Telegraph about Iranian threats to unleash a libyan terrorist group against Col. Khadaffi if he spills the beans on Iran's nuclear weapons program. If true, this is yet another example of non-Westphalian warfare. Iran won't declare war but it will harbor and support and unleash this terrorist group against its newly turned enemy Libya.

Assuming the story is true for the moment (and with the British press you can't be too cautious) does Libya have the right to go to war against Iran?

Metrosexual Jesus and The Passion

Donald Sensing had a very provocative post about the negative effects of metrosexual Jesus, how western churches have created a Jesus that generally looks and acts unmanly. Thinking on this amazing social phenomenon of The Passion of The Christ, I can't help but think that the movie's popularity might, in part, stem from the absence of metrosexuality of any stripe (outside of Satan, that is though maybe that's on purpose).