Flit(tm)

Libertarian Nomination I

The Libertarian Party has nominated Michael Badnarik as its candidate for the presidency of the United States. For the first time in my voting career I can't vote for a Libertarian Presidential candidate.

War is the most important responsibility of the state. It is the protection of the polity against outside enemies in its most elemental form. The following (from Badnarik's campaign site) simply disqualifies him in my eyes:

Michael doesn't have enough information to know whether or not the United States should be there or not, however he strongly suspects that the real motivation for being there is probably economic rather than ethical.

HT: Hit and Run

Battlefield 'Net VIII

Reading Strategy Page's latest (again, no permalink) on the battlefield net, one thought kept cropping up in my mind. Does the thing have an accessible API and what are the 3rd party application opportunities for it?

A battlefield PDA in this generation handed out to squad leaders and sergeants will be a really cheap piece of occupation tech four generations down the road handed out to native families because it's the cheapest way to provide connectivity and plug them into the Core. The satellite phone may morph into something cheaper or we may get really cheap satellites in the meantime, who knows? In any case, we're not likely to see the original manufacturers make the transition without third party software. One route might be military intelligence wanting to take a few of these and give it to their higher quality assets among the natives. Then, as software comes on line for intelligence work, some people figure out that it's cheap enough to hand out to all intelligence assets. The PR/education corps will see enough of these among the natives to start giving lessons in freedom via FAQ and cheap web apps on a variety of subjects and somebody is just going to open up the whole net to the general public in a country in forcible transition courtesy USAF.

This is something similar to what happened to the Internet and what will happen with Internet 2. Technology is rolled out to a select few and people who used to qualify or almost qualify for access agitate for their inclusion on the list and, with pull, they get it. This just extends the number of people who almost qualify and the process starts happening again.

EZ Shareholder Activism

An article at Innocents Abroad demonstrates a gaping need for a changeover in how stockholders are empowered to vote. The problem is that corporate governance gets to be too much trouble if you are an index investor or highly diversified with a great many small positions all across the market.

The problem has a solution but only if stockholders get into the current century in the exercise of their voting rights. What is needed is a group of corporate governance improvement organizations that can solicit voting rights from shareholders. Let's say that you think that stock options should be expensed (I'm not taking a position pro or con on this and the example could easily be reversed). If you could assign stock expensing votes on all your holdings in a short amount of time, you would be much more likely to do so rather than going through your entire portfolio, identifying which companies aren't up to snuff and composing a shareholder proposal that you personally present at the yearly shareholder meeting.

Essentially, it's an information technology problem, something that isn't really all that difficult to solve. All that needs happen is for some big wheels to come up with a universal system that anybody with a governance idea can plug into and make all public corporations plug in too.

Wretchard Starts to 'Get It'

I've written frequently in the past about post-westphalianism, the breakdown in the consensus that war shall only be conducted between states and that statecraft shall largely respect the strictures of national sovereignty. Possibly the biggest disconnect (and it still amazes me) is that both sides in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) have renounced Westphalian geopolitics and nobody really has examined what that means and will mean as westphalianism continues to break down in the years and decades ahead.

Wretchard is starting to examine a part of the consequences. He's discovered that there is no more front line and that politics and war have lost almost all distinctiveness from each other. The total war that was rejected in horror at the end of the Thirty Years War will come back with a vengeance, something that few understand even today. The jihadists have opened pandora's box and we must follow suit into the madness they have unleashed or condemn ourselves to eventual defeat as we sell our birthright of freedom away to stop the terror that cannot be stopped within the strictures of westphalian geopolitics.

The US has several handicaps in this brave new world of post-westphalian war (PWW). PWW is total war using all forms of warfare and all arms of society. The US is constrained by current law not to organize and take part in religion and the press while at the same time, neutrality acts prevent private US organizations from organizing these areas of society to conduct the fight. The first amendment must be eviscerated, letters of marquee and reprisal must be updated to the modern world, or we must abandon the concept of the private sector being restrained from conducting its own war and foreign policy. These are the only three ways out that I see for the US. The first solution is abhorrent to american principles, the third would lead to a great deal more chaos and violence than we are likely prepared to tolerate in the US and the 2nd? The 2nd is intriguing but needs so much work that we're nowhere near ready to take that step.

These are all very profound changes for the US, so profound that we may not survive them. But the alternative, as will become clear in the coming years, is to have terror creep into this country, both by immigration and local conversion and recruitment and wear us down into submission.

Spilling the Blood of Tyrants and Patriots

A new militia called the Black Flag seems to be taking shape across Iraq. Anti-Baath, anti-terror, this militia seems to be willing to cooperate with the police and the international coalition occupying Iraq but impatient if the police and the coalition forces do not take action on their information.

It was from a group like this (actually a worse one) that Menacham Begin started his career in politics, culminating in the Israeli prime ministership. We'll see how things evolve but I'm not so sure that armed groups, as long as they're willing to submit to the new Iraqi government as it gets stood up, are necessarily such a bad thing. To the contrary, they show the oft-spoken idea that Iraqis are too passive and uninterested in defending their own liberty to be a lie.

Reader Mail I

Mark LaRochelle writes:

As  I pointed out to you nearly two decades ago, China may find it more efficient to export surplus males rather than import females. Look for aggressive military expansion as a means of depleting the surplus male population.

Several problems with that scenario:

1. High status males who have all the women they want are growing increasingly connected to the world economic scene. Think of them as medieval scottish noblemen with english lands. Their financial position (and also societal status) is largely put at risk by military aggressiveness. Every year of economic reforms increases the numbers and influence of this group.

2. This is not a black and white situation. Importing females is the reality of today. Whether this will be paired with expansionist military activity is an open question but it's not realistic (IMO) to deny the day-to-day reality of female imports. I think that a militarily aggressive streak will emerge in the PRC but you can send an awful lot of conscripts into UN peacekeeping slots without risking your global connectivity, a connectivity that is supporting the survival of the current elite. The PRC has an obvious interest in mid-east resources as well as african resources. A militarily aggressive PRC could simultaneously earn good guy kudos all over the world by being Kofi Annan's blue helmet wet dream.

3. The timing is wrong. The PRC is vulnerable to resource interdiction in a way that was even more profound than Imperial Japan. Their resource supply lines are longer. The PLAN is relatively weaker than the Imperial Japanese Navy was the day after Pearl Harbor vis a vis the US Navy and relevant allies. For the PRC to get away with striking at a Phillipines, Thailand, Indonesia, etc. they need a PLAN that can maintain their energy and raw material supplies sufficient to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. By the time that happens, we're well past the explosion date of their demographic time bomb. All the "near peer" analysis by DoD that I've been exposed to (all public stuff, no big deal) has the PRC becoming a real threat no earlier than two decades from now.

4. Russia is unlikely to be happy. Russia is likely to be the only natural resource source that the PRC could draw on without credible fear of the US Navy. But Russia is paranoid scared that the PRC's expansion will come north and that they will replicate the Mongols, rolling up Siberia in a drive westward. Russia is not going to underwrite the PRC's needs to the point where they can win and become strong enough to take Siberia. Russia would apply to join NATO first, and would be accepted in a heartbeat. That gives the PRC a very nasty nightmare with NATO on its northern border.

5. Nuclear proliferation would explode across Asia as the small nations on the PRC's border became nuclear powers in order not to become a new Tibet. These are engineer rich societies and many have enough money to build their own nukes or buy them from N. Korea. With private suborbital rockets being developed by teams from several nations (X Prize), it wouldn't be too hard for the designs to be licensed and weapons to be carried as cargo. Goodbye Beijing. Beijing knows this and will simply not become aggressive enough to trigger the nuclear proliferation explosion. It's a hard limit to their moves.

My prediction is that we're going to see a combination of effects. The PRC will build up its military but will also build up its ability to absorb foreign women. Neighboring nations will become rabidly anti-chinese because of this female poaching and any militarily aggressive moves will be to protect long-established chinese ethnic communities in these nations. PRC contributions to UN peacekeeping missions will undergo a secular increase. The big invasions that everybody fears will not happen but regional instability will increase with unpredictable results. A for instance, what are S. Koreans going to do in reaction to N. Korean wife/prostitute imports into the PRC?

And Now For Enemies on the Right

Thanks to Damien Penny I've finally confirmed what I've sadly suspected for some time. Pat Buchanan has become a domestic enemy of the United States. I think it's a vain hope that this is a forgery or that he was just having a bad day. Buchanan's already had too many bad days to get the benefit of the doubt.

He simply is making common cause with islamic conservatives who nod sagely as honor killings go on virtually unpunished, as women are mutilated, homosexuals are killed, and religious heterodoxy gets death sentences from religious courts, sentences that are all too often fulfilled.

If the "peace Democrats" are to once again be Copperheads, we are left to our own devices to come up with a proper name for the likes of Pat Buchanan. Or is it just better to have done with it and put him in the Copperhead basket as well?

Just Got Back From Hospital

No, not for me, my younger daughter needed some imaging, which was given under anesthesia (otherwise it's impossible to get a 4 month old to sit still). We get results tomorrow.

Can Military Women be Disciplined?

An article over at Master of None brings up an alarming question. Can women be disciplined as men are in today's US armed forces? If female soldiers have a built in disciplinary shield marked sexual harassment this would be a very dangerous long-term situation for both the effectiveness of the armed forces themselves and the safety of the armed forces to the larger civil society that created them. The military must be utterly disciplined or we risk falling into the problems that so many other nations have had, military coups. Discipline always slips in minor ways at first but once the culture of equally disciplined soldiers sharing a common rule book has been cast away, it is inevitable that other groups will want to carve out their own protected fiefs, and almost inevitable that one of those protected fiefs will eventually go bad.

The time process is very long on such things but if female soldiers are being held to a different disciplinary standard, the process is well underway.

Can Military Women be Disciplined?

An article over at Master of None brings up an alarming question. Can women be disciplined as men are in today's US armed forces? If female soldiers have a built in disciplinary shield marked sexual harassment this would be a very dangerous long-term situation for both the effectiveness of the armed forces themselves and the safety of the armed forces to the larger civil society that created them. The military must be utterly disciplined or we risk falling into the problems that so many other nations have had, military coups. Discipline always slips in minor ways at first but once the culture of equally disciplined soldiers sharing a common rule book has been cast away, it is inevitable that other groups will want to carve out their own protected fiefs, and almost inevitable that one of those protected fiefs will eventually go bad.

The time process is very long on such things but if female soldiers are being held to a different disciplinary standard, the process is well underway.

Arbitraging Instability

ParaPundit is on to a very big story but he doesn't quite understand what a tiger he's got by the tail. He thinks that the PRC will export their female shortage to North Korea by massive purchases of North Korean brides.

What he's missing is that there is no reason whatsoever for the PRC to be either especially attracted to N. Korea or limit their female poaching to that benighted land. Anywhere there are females who are within the available price range is a potential source of bought brides and forced prostitutes. You just have to map out the economics of it to see how this can be a regional problem and even a worldwide problem if sex selection abortion continues in both the PRC and in India, another country that is on the anti-female abortion express ride to social instability.

Once you see how this female shortage is going to be arbitraged away, the question is whether the resulting shallower shortage, spread out over many more countries, is going to be sufficient to cause regional stability problems and if so, how much? When the low hanging fruit of the N. Korean "market" is cleaned out, single PRC men are not going to stop looking. Look for all the PRC border states to see pressure for their poorest and most desperate females to cross the border.

The only positive (and it's a very small one) is that this is going to vastly increase genetic mixing in east Asia and will possibly have a small effect in lowering racism, a perennial problem for outsiders.

Poli-Cooties

Reading about the Martin campaign kickoff it seems there seems to be a Canadian disease floating around the great white north. With the incumbent prime minister acting as if the US has cooties, it seems to me that he is put in a bit of a pickle. Anytime the US gets to some new social science innovation first, any canadian who advocates imitation to keep up, or adoption and improvement, can be tarred with the libel of betraying canadian values. Or at least that's the logical conclusion of PM Martin's apparent campaign strategy. Such a strategy of reflexive anti-americanism has not stood Gerhard Schroeder in good stead and is more than likely to turn around and bite Martin even sooner as Canadian dependence on the US is much greater than the FRG's.

It really is sad that the incumbent liberals can't seem to come up with something better than updating the kindergarten taunts of cooties.

Cool, I'm a Baritone Today

Usually I'm a tenor but a nasty bit of something brought home by my son has turned me into a very deep baritone. A cranky, sore throated, deep baritone. I've been fighting this off for about three days and it's getting nasty. Blogging will be variable. The crankiness tends to increase output but all other symptoms tend to work the other way.

Stop back later anyway.

Twelve Ministries

One of the things not likely to be highlighted by many in President Bush's speech of last night is that since my last note on the subject another four ministries have been handed over to Iraqi control for a total of twelve ministries. I bet you didn't notice the strong media coverage of this good news either. And it's not like reporters would even need to exit the Green Zone to find this out. I'm sure that press releases were dutifully issued and dutifully ignored by those who have an interest in spinning negative news about the transition to Iraqi rule.

So if you're depending on news sources that verifiably aren't giving you important good news about Iraq, why are you wasting your time and money to continue to patronize them?

How to Humiliate the US

Iraqi, and arab, humiliation seems to be a continuing issue. I've written previously about how to handle Iraqi humiliation. But for those who want more, a thought occurs to me. Run Iraq, run it as a free state and run it better than the US ever did, than the British ever did. Expose their efforts as 2nd rate and humiliate the West with your competence, with your brilliance. Go ahead, do it and not only restore your own pride but make the "democratizers swallow theirs.

Walking Again

A new study has shown incredible promise by combining three new spinal cord injury treatments in one triple treatment. Taking cells from the rats' own bodies, researchers were able to create a huge improvement, allowing 70% average mobility for all the experimental rats. It's very good to see an improvement in patient prognosis free from all the political controversy that seems to accompany so much biotechnological progress these days. Hopefully, they'll be able to translate these rodent results into human studies very soon.

HT: Slashdot

Social Shock, Libertarian Style

Clayton Cramer commits a minor libel of libertarians when he blames us heartless libertarian types for not being in favor of social adjustment spending. The problem is that he downplays two issues. First, social adjustment spending, like just about all government spending that libertarians want cut, isn't somehow better or more effective when it is done via the government. The only functional responses he noticed at all were private efforts that were proceeding without government assistance. The government, huge and bloated as it is, is not taking care of the people in the rural community devastated by the closing of the local logging industry.

The second issue is that the local logging industry did not die a natural death. It was knifed in the back by government. This sort of knifing drastically accelerates and makes social change more jarring and less predictable. There is reason to think that a property regime more in line with libertarian principles would have balanced economic and environmental interests better, managing the decline of logging in a way that would have created more replacement jobs on a longer, slower glide path for the accomplishment of the wider social goal of preserving the environment. The majority would not be denied, logging would have slowed down and ceased in the area anyway in a libertarian regime but it would do it in a different, less disruptive way.

Fixing what ails rural america is an important goal, and I'm glad Clayton Cramer is going to focus on this underexamined issue. But government solutions are very unlikely candidates to solve the problem in truth, rather than erect another permanent bureaucracy that is committed to managing the problem, not solving it.

Calling All Moonbats

If Kerry actually goes through with the idea of not formally accepting the nomination at the convention, the tinfoil brigade is likely to be looking very carefully at the DNC bylaws. At stake is the right to continue to dip into the money pool raised for the primaries and not touch the general election funding until later in the campaign. This is major league silliness but some people are taking it seriously so before the rush, somebody really ought to ask the FEC what is the triggering event before we get too close to the convention and pure partisanship reigns.

Then again (putting my own moonbat hat on), maybe Kerry's maneuver is a blessing in disguise. Why not just not accept the nomination at all and just go forward in the "primary" portion of the election cycle through to election day? That would be one way to get rid of the odious public finance portion of the presidential election.
B-)

Silly I

For something on the lighter side, Nununce!

Protecting Oil Infrastructure

There is an awful lot of oil infrastructure out there in the world and a great deal of it (as insurgents in Iraq prove frequently) that can be destroyed at acceptable risk. There are two ways of protecting the infrastructure. One is the brute force approach, station a man with a gun to guard every 25 yards of pipeline and oil refinery in the world. That's not practical. Another way is to make sure that there aren't any pieces of infrastructure that are high value targets. Sure, you can take out some oil port facilities, and that will reduce the amount of oil that the US can import but such a disruption only matters if our strategic oil reserves can't make up the difference and the reserves will run out before the repairs can be finished.

This is the real reason why Kerry's election year calls to drop gasoline prices by tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) are so fundamentally irresponsible. The more the SPR is filled, the fewer attacks on oil importation facilities make sense. The emptier it is, the more tempting the facilities are and the more likely we will have our oil import terminals bombed. The economic and environmental catastrophe that would ensue is bad enough no matter the level of the SPR. If you live near such a facility, you might quietly ask your local police and fire officials about how bad it could get. Be prepared to be shocked by the answer.

A few cents on the price of a gallon of gas are a small price to pay to keep such vulnerable targets low value for the jihad brigade.

Rolling Back Failed Social Experiments

Let me share a guilty secret. I have a grudging admiration for the utopian communists. They didn't really know what they were doing but they wanted to make things better. They tried their solutions out in the real world on an experimental scale. When the experiment didn't work, they stopped long before a gulag appeared to allow things to continue. Compared to Marxian systems, that's a giddily happy outcome.

I was reminded of this reading Robert Robb's piece on gay marriage and how it affects traditional marriage. He compares the current fight to the old fight over easy divorce and you really ought to read the whole thing. The point that struck me was how far we've sunk from the utopian communists. Since the evidence is overwhelming that the christian orthodoxy that lost the no fault divorce fight was right and the liberals were wrong the one thing left to do in that failed social experiment is to stop it.

This is a large reason why people on the anti-gay marriage side have so little faith in assurances that gay marriage will be rolled back if it turns out to be a disaster. We have the disaster staring at us in the face and we show no sign of rolling back our previous experiment with easy divorce.

So the next time you get a gay marriage advocate talking about rollback if there ever was failure, ask his position about divorce and rolling it back since it is a failure. The resultant sputtering should be highly informative

Incest Legalization

Clayton Cramer notes a pro-incestual marriage proposal in New Zealand. So far, New Zealand seems to be in no danger of running out and acting on the presentation but if you agree with the arguments regarding gay marriage, it's hard to construct a long-term successful defense on the grounds the gay marriage advocates have left. Health effects of male homosexual sex are worse than genetic abnormality in incest. Incestuous marriages would be fertile, so as long as everything is consensual, why not?

I can say why not, but not without using arguments that also keep gay marriage illegal. Anybody out there able to do better?

Unforgivable Desecration

Juan Cole ladles the "woe is us" on pretty heavy:

Even if the shrines were not damaged, you can't imagine how much Shiites don't want to hear phrases like "American tanks and AC-130 gunships pounded insurgent positions near two shrines in the center of the holy city of Karbala early Friday . . . " I cringed when I saw it. I don't see how Iraqi Shiites are going to forgive us for this. Ever.

Perhaps he should ask christians how they have forgiven muslim fighters invading the Church of the Nativity. The ire in the christian world to that military desecration seems to be a realistic model for what is likely to happen regarding Shiite outrage over anti-Sadrist operations in Najaf and Karbala. Near does not mean in and it's pretty obvious that if only military considerations were being taken into account all the shrines (which are being used as strong points by Sadr's Mahdi army) would be leveled by now. The fact that the worst damage in most of them is the mess that the muslim cartridges make as they clatter on the floor after firing shows an extraordinary level of sensitivity to Shiite religious feelings. We're spending our blood to protect their buildings. I find it hard to believe that a billion muslims will tip over from their previous, more friendly attitudes to a more hostile one because of this.

Strange American Reform

I've been reading stories from the left and the right on prison reform, especially regarding rape in prison for years. In the category of positive unintended consequences, one of the things that the horrible events over at Abu Ghraib seems to be provoking in the US is a strong impetus to accelerate prison reform in the US. The prison guard history of some of the MPs has shined a very unflattering light on the darker corners of that profession and americans don't much like what they see. It's not a central point, and doesn't lessen guilt on iota. But it does illustrate a sort of political hygiene ethic in american politics in that when abuses are discovered, it's not only the direct problem area that is the focus but related areas as well.

Divine Border Conditions

Donald Sensing today refers to an older post of his which asserts that the God of Islam is not the same God that Jews and Christians worship. I have to stand in disagreement with the good Reverend because he ends up oversimplifying the criteria by which we must understand border conditions. A Catholic and an Orthodox mutually recognize that they each worship the same God. Their sacraments are valid. The differences between them, the borders that define the two faiths center on the role of the Pope (if you're Orthodox and want to argue I'm wrong, first go convince Patriarch Theoctist of Romania and then get back to me) in the Church.

But if you get much beyond Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism (though the latter is getting more dubious by the day) sacraments start not being recognized. The authority of most protestant ministers to conduct sacramental service is not considered valid by Catholics because the necessary conditions are not fulfilled. Every church has its own rules as to who is close enough so that the differences are viewed as administrative, and which differences are viewed as too big to be merely administrative.

Beyond that, the subject of Rev. Sensing's note, is the level of difference at which point you are talking about a different God. Again, the level of difference is somewhat arbitrary. Rev. Sensing's idea that both christian and muslim ideas about God cannot be simultaneously true is useful for him, but it is not a universal standard. The choice is one of sharpening differences versus blurring differences. Blurring differences between christianity, judaism, and islam permitted the victorious muslim conquerors to set up dhimma treaties with their christian and jewish subjects. This is a process that let sephardic jews and a variety of eastern christians survive, albeit in a second class status while living in muslim lands.

These communities, which exist to this day, are virtually forced to concede the commonality of their deity with muslims or they set themselves up for slaughter. For them, such blurring is not just a potential way to bridge differences, it is life and death.

But even for those of us who are not under muslim domination, we would do well to have a care in casting Muslims completely out of the family. Unless we, as christians, are really going to embark on a crusade to convert muslims, our duty to evangelize must come in the form of a softer road, persuasion. And that persuasion is made easier by the idea that it is the same God, wrongfully worshipped, rather than a different God, rightly worshipped.

In that vein, I'm more than ready to concede the sameness of the muslim and christian God. The differences are great and it's sometimes tempting to declare that they are not the same but it would serve little purpose but personal satisfaction to deny the muslim claim that they are the same.

Barone Reviews Barnett

A friend of mine sent me an email link to a US News Michael Barone column reviewing Thomas Barnett's ideas about Core/Gap. Barone 'gets' much of Barnett's thesis, missing badly only on the PRC. The line between Core and Gap can be viewed sharply, and for simplicity's sake, mostly is. But if you look at the map that Barnett is referring to, in small print, you see that it's not a black and white line but a "95% confidence" line. Barnett recognizes that it's possible for the line to move in either direction, positively (adding states to the Core) and negatively (losing "New Core" states to the Gap). What Barnett is saying is not so much that the PRC can't turn into a strategic threat but that for it to do so, it would have to cross back over to the Gap (possible but hard) and strike before its military fell to pieces from lack of money to maintain it.

Barone brings up the specter of WW I where globalization I countries traded a great deal but still went to war. But the more apt comparison isn't WW I but England and Scotland. Today, it is not that Germany and the US trade (though we do) our economies are more interlinked than that with German firms buying up American ones and vice versa. The pain of disentangling a corporate structure that is half in enemy territory is a powerful incentive to exert yourself on behalf of peace. And, as time goes on, this intertwining of fortunes will increase, making war even less likely.

On the Care and Feeding of Copperheads

The American Copperhead is a North American poisonous snake renowned for striking without warning.

It's also a political label:

The Copperheads were a group of Northern Democrats who opposed the American Civil War, wanting an immediate peace settlement. They were also called Peace Democrats. They were against emancipation, formed groups to persuade Union soldiers to desert, and helped Confederate prisoners of war escape. The name Copperheads was given to them by Republicans, explicitly comparing them to venomous snakes that strike without warning.

At the same time, we need to do better than Lincoln, who suspended habeus corpus and arrested Copperheads to influence an election. The nation survived but the incident is rightly viewed as a blot on our national honor. We must not fall into that trap again.

Do Americans Really Not Understand?

Victor Davis Hansone writes:

Americans do not grasp that should a constitutional government emerge in Iraq, al Qaeda is faced with an enemy far more formidable than the United States. The old false choice between strong-armed dictators and Islamic fascists will start to crumble with a third option that says to the Arab Street: “Look to your own elected government—that is, yourselves—not the United States or Israel, when the sewers back up and the power fails.” So, yes, what happens in the next two or three months is the most critical event since September 11.

All over the Middle East autocrats are very adept at blaming outsiders for their own failings. The US is one of the top targets of blame. A democratically elected Iraqi government will still have people who blame the US and Israel first but they will have to suffer periodic challenges from both people who say that they can successfully stand up to the perfidious jews and those who say that the whole thing is nonsense and covering up personal failure, taking responsibility for the success or failure of government domestically. Over time, this will produce the most reasonable government in the Middle East, possibly bar Turkey.

Copperhead Fedayeen

The Llama Butchers are spreading a meme, calling domestic supporters of Al Queda Copperhead Fedayeen. I think that'll eventually get shortened to simple Copperheads and I think they might be a little over broad in their criteria, they bring to my mind an important point. There are domestic supporters of the enemy on our shores. Who are they, and what should be done with them as they are uncovered?

At the far end of the scale, they are traitors an will go to jail for it. But there are lots of aiding and abetting that is done that fall far short of treason. And there are lots of people who don't particularly care for Bush who are very much part of the loyal opposition yet would be vulnerable to a charge of being a copperhead. So how do you differentiate? What's the criteria of being a copperhead and what are the legitimate defenses against being falsely smeared with the label?

This is an important topic and I'll probably return to it as I get my own answers but I think that a key part of it is to talk to those on the left who are most vulnerable to being swept up in any future hysteria and to engage them in nailing down a reasonable and workable method of short circuiting any action that goes overboard before the next terrorist mass carnage event demonstrates just how restrained the US has been after 9/11.

Kerry Shifts on Abortion?

Bush's official blog is poking at Kerry's new abortion statements but I think that it's more aimed at the bishops than at the electorate. Kerry might have decided that he needs to at least feint pro-life to toss his hierarchy supporters a bone so that there is no unified opposition to him in the Church. He doesn't need to get all the bishops on his side but even having a few will greatly reduce the ability of the orthodox bishops to move forward in a way that affects Kerry personally.

Communion Controversy

The controversy regarding pro-choice politicians being banned from Holy Communion has got to puzzle the Orthodox. The Orthodox and Catholic Churches are so close that they recognize each other's sacraments for Holy Communion, a real rarity in the christian world. But Orthodoxy has always had a more stringent set of requirements to gain Holy Communion. My wife, who is Orthodox, is used to having to fast a minimum of seven days prior, confess her sins right before, and only then does she qualify. The Orthodox fast is a vegan fast, with no meat, egg, or milk allowed and you're supposed to reduce your calorie intake as much as you can.

The idea of going up every week for Holy Communion is viewed in the Orthodox world as something for the really hard core old folk and monks. Go to an Orthodox Church sometime and you might end up seeing nobody, or just one or two people come up for Holy Communion. Frankly, I think their bishops are going overboard but it's their right to do so. Each individual bishop, Catholic or Orthodox, can set criteria for qualifying to take Holy Communion. Some are more lax, others more strict. It is incredibly presumptuous for the laity of any stripe to lecture bishops on an intrinsic part of their job. For Catholics who are being challenged by their bishops to follow standard Catholic teaching on abortion to challenge this fundamental episcopal right is appalling.

One of the more interesting framing aspects of this controversy is the mainstream press' attempt to spin this as a partisan problem. Catholic pro-choice politicians exist in the Republican party. I have yet to see any news story that is sympathetic to Kerry's side of the story talk to any Republican pro-choice politicians who come under this decree just as much as their Democrat colleagues do. Republican pro-choice pols must remain invisible for now, otherwise it becomes clear that it's not a partisan issue and the hierarchy does not actually have it in for the Democrat party.

Stealing Elections, PRC Style

Gweilo Diaries shows that the PRC can show modern US machine politicians how to really steal elections. They're threatening public figures into resigning and fleeing with their families if they are pro-democracy, and threatening voters mainland families, prompting many phone calls of relatives pleading to vote pro-Beijing in order to escape persecution. That might be something your everyday banana republic might try but they have a disturbing twist, they are insisting that Hong Kong residents take their completed ballots and take a picture of them with their cell phone cameras showing how they voted and send them in order to save their families.

The PRC doesn't even need to send one thug to a polling place.

I'm Getting Stale

I read the same blogs daily with minor changes and detours and I'm getting a bit stale because of that, I think. So I went over to The Truth Laid Bare's Ecosystem and went through all the blogs bigger than me that had updated and saved them as a separate list. I skipped over the ones that were on my regular reading list but included a number that I recognized as rejects from that list that I'd deleted. Hopefully the new material will spark new ideas and posting subjects.

Excommunication

The Corner has an item on politician excommunication. Apparently, the last time it happened was in New Orleans in 1962. Three politicians defied the Archbishop's order to integrate the parochial school system and were excommunicated for it.

Two days later, President John F. Kennedy was asked at a press conference, "Mr. President, would you care to comment on developments in New Orleans where the Archbishop excommunicated three people for hindering school desegregation?"

He replied: "No, the action of the Archbishop related to private acts and private individuals, which did not involve public acts or public policy, so that carrying out the spirit of the Constitution which provides a separation between church and state, I think it would be inappropriate for me to comment on that."

Waving the Bloody Stump

While it is not a new challenge, countering heartrending accounts of people whose relatives are ill and who want ill-considered public policy adjustments has always been a very difficult job. Jonathen Turley doesn't make it easy. I feel badly that his father is ill. I hope that one of the treatments under development to treat Parkinson's comes in time for his father. But Turley's grief has led to some public policy dishonesty on his part and while understandable, cannot be permitted to go unanswered.

Would it do Turley's father any good to have the benefit of embryonic stem cell treatments and start to recover from Parkinson's disease only to gain brain tumors and die of treatment induced cancer? Or would the expensive immunosuppressant drugs needed to do in his immune system enough that he succumbs to an opportunistic infection? The truth is that some of those treatments would derive cells from embryos and some of those treatments would derive cells from the patients and nobody, not Turley, not anybody can say for sure which is the wiser course for government to fund research.

But what is clear is that politicization of the process is hazardous. But politicization comes in many forms, sometimes from the religious right who have moral concerns, sometimes from the secular left who want to promote a lucrative secondary tissue market that abortion providers would be so well placed to take advantage of. It is a tactic of that second sort of bias to pretend that adult stem cell research either does not exist or is somehow less worthy of support. Turley's article is steeped in the conventions of that bias.

At the heart of the controversy is a civil rights issue. At what point in development does a child gain rights? If the point is too early, women are murderers every 28 days if they do not get pregnant and men are mass murderers. But if it is too late then we justify infanticide to get rid of the inconvenient. Secular human rights theory agrees with the great monotheistic traditions that man is an end, not means to an end. Turley assumes the question is settled and he may use these human tissues as means to the end of restoring his father's health. The question is not settled, not in the least.

Iraq Didn't Declare Binary Chem Shells

I just discovered a new blog, overpressure.com which claims Iraq never declared binary chem artillery shells throughout the entire post Kuwait sanctions period, not even in the full, final, and accurate declaration they made just before the invasion. They declared that they had some binary chemical bombs but that those had all been disposed of long ago.

So they had lots of documentation, lots of programs, and now they're starting to uncover actual munitions that weren't covered by the Iraqi declaration. But Hans Blix and the rest of the international community was willing to take this document and use it to start the process of ending sanctions and normalizing relations. That's where we would be today, with Saddam in power, reconstituting his weapons programs, and with some stock of binary chemical munitions on hand without any further meaningful sanctions.

When are the commissions going to get formed into this disastrous failure of the international community? Is it only the US that cleans up its dirty laundry?

HT: IraqNow

Bush Screwed Up

I've been challenged by an old friend to list some of the mistakes of the Bush administration. He thinks I engage in excessive cheerleading to the point where I never admit Bush could be wrong. So, here's a list in no particular order.

1. I think Bush has fouled up explaining an awful lot of things. This includes:
a. marriage
b. his space initiative
c. what the end of the GWOT would look like
d. Alaska drilling
e. and other items I'll probably think of after I hit send

2. I think that George W. Bush has failed to follow up on Social Security reform sufficiently, tort reform is just paid lip service, judicial reform to reign in legislating from the bench is a missed opportunity, and malpractice reform is a no show.

3. George W. Bush has failed to reform the State Department in any meaningful way and this is a serious failure when you have a bipartisan judgment that our State department is institutionally handicapped.

4. The steel tariffs were a mistake.

5. Defending our agricultural subsidy regime is a mistake too.

6. Tenet hasn't been fired yet. In general, too much dead wood is still around in various departments

7. Ashcroft needs to concentrate more on security/crime with actual victims

8. Too little fat has been cut in Bush's budget proposals

9. Greenspan is not God and not immortal. Bush hasn't gotten us ready for the upcoming post-Greenspan era.

10. Bush didn't veto the execrable copyright extension act.

I'll still vote for him come November.

Embracing the Dark Side

The Atlantic is singing the praises of authoritarianism. I don't know whether to get angry or just shed a tear in sadness. It literally is advocating abandoning traditional american virtues of limited government and handing our freedoms over to an isolated set of security practitioners that the legislature will have a hard time reigning in.

Instead of reluctantly ceding our freedoms, temporarily, as a war emergency measure and structuring things so we may climb back up the slippery slope when the crisis has passed, this article, bereft of any traditional suspicion of government power, would sacrifice freedom to purchase security, and does it in the most brazen way I've ever seen a mainstream american publication advocate in my entire life.

This, unfortunately, is the thin edge of the wedge. And unless there is an awful lot of outrage at this trial balloon, expect more and more articles, then legislation, to surface along these themes.

Condolences to the Heterosexual Women of Massachusetts

As I noted previously marriage certificates from San Francisco were no longer being accepted for name change purposes by the Social Security Administration. No doubt, additional proof of marriage will now be required of Massachusetts women who wish to change their names in the traditional fashion. Sorry ladies, you can thank your four friendly Supreme Judicial Court Justices for your new difficulty.

Iraqi Democracy Will Be Weird

Reason Magazine isn't much for cheerleading George W Bush or the Iraqi campaign but this article does good service in identifying a huge culture clash. That Iraqi culture is part of a larger Middle East culture and that it's different is hardly revolutionary but I don't think that many people 'get' exactly how different it is.

For people in America Iraq has been, is, and will continue to be weird. It's a different world there. But there are some constants. Fathers love their children and nobody likes to have a boot on their neck. Freedom and democracy look like a good idea. And when you sit back and talk about what really matters, ordinary people aren't too far apart on goals.

The differences in traditional means will drive us crazy, both us and them. The article talks about the souk culture, how people are, just now, starting the lengthy negotiating session with the US as to what kind of government they will have. For them, all that has happened the past year has only been the preliminaries. But if you try tossing that out in a water cooler conversation in the Midwest, the idea that all this craziness is just round one of a bargaining session in the souk is likely to provoke a very unhappy response.

They do not understand us and we do not understand them. But that doesn't mean that we can't connect, nor does it mean that they are incapable of freedom, democracy, or the rule of law. What it does mean is that the connections between us and them have to be loose. We don't have to get out of Iraq, but we do need to get out of the daily patrolling business. We don't have to compromise on insisting that Iraq's women have freedom and dignity, but we do have to give up any idea that what's going to come out is going to bear any resemblance to Cosmopolitan's vision of the modern woman.

At the same time the challenges for Iraqis are huge. They have this extraordinarily force camped in their country and it is at the same time hyper-competent and utterly hopeless by turns and they can't figure out who's going to come out hour by hour, Gomer Pyle or Sgt. York. They utterly fail to penetrate the fundamental reality of the US government, that it is just as incompetent and foolish as their own regimes, only smaller.

I know how hard that is to swallow. Every time I tell a romanian visitor/immigrant that, they never believe it straight off. They sort of look at me like I'm crazy and move on. I've been doing this for about 20 years and it never changes. About six months later they have enough context to see the US private sector and the US public sector and how they interact and the light bulb goes on. At the short end it's four months, and the longest I've seen it take for someone to understand is nine months.

But these are all people who see the private sector in the US and understand that an enormous amount of the competent part of the public sector is people taking their private sector competencies and adapting it to public sector use. Iraqis in Iraq don't have that ability to immerse themselves in the US and thus they simply don't understand us. They may love us, hate us, or be anywhere in between but their understanding of us does not permit them to predict us. That's a very bad place to start a negotiation from.

So are we doomed to mutual incomprehensibility in perpetuity? I think there will always be some amount of culture clash but as Iraq starts to adopt global rule sets, things should get a bit better. But we will always point at each other and say "that guy's just weird". I only hope that we can say it with a smile a decade from now as we are speaking as friends.

Policing the Media

Iraq Now is doing very good service with posts like this. The idea he is running with is to embarrass journalists with their errors on military matters until they start to address their awful military coverage and get the facts straight. He's got the right idea. It isn't only about ideological bias. The media get the plain facts wrong all too often and then wildly spin from there.

Until people are ashamed of putting out such poor product, we're all going to be in trouble by depending on such voices to inform our opinions on what's going on in the world.

Communion Politics

Andrew Sullivan needs a remedial course in his own faith. His latest in Time is remarkable to the point of being insulting.

In 2004 John F. Kerry has to convince the Catholic bishops that he is not too American.

By "too American," I mean in the sense that religious faith is a personal matter, that it can be sealed off from public life, that it doesn't dictate political views on any one issue or another.

To ignore this is in itself to pile a sin on top of another. For a priest to knowingly facilitate the sin is, in itself, a sin. So the Church is currently cleaning house in several fields and one of them is sacramental abuse, a subset of which is abuse of Communion, a subset of that is the sinful taking of Holy Communion by public men who are in a state of mortal sin and whom the priest at the rail knows is in a state of mortal sin. Andrew Sullivan thinks that it would be "a terrible self-inflicted wound for the Catholic Church to enter the culture war so brazenly in a political year" by actually cleaning up this mess that draws not only the politicians but the priests into sin.

One thing that Sullivan doesn't note but is perfectly true, there are no nonpolitical years in the US. There will be elections this year, next year, and every year thereafter for as far as the eye can see. Catholic, pro-choice politicians will be running on pro-choice platforms and presenting themselves for Holy Communion during their election campaigns every year. What, pray tell, does a nonpolitical year look like? Do you count by number of politicians whose election campaigns you are going upset? And by that count, is this year a more political year than next year when many local, county, and state elections are held? And why should you, as a bishop or priest, care? News flash: Rome doesn't care.

The controversy over communion erupted after a lengthy document on Eucharistic regulation was recently issued. Rome did not time this to destroy John Kerry's electoral chances. Rome can do that much better in other ways if it wanted to. A huge, much footnoted (295 end notes) document that has maybe an oblique paragraph or two that addresses the subject is not how you do such things.

It strains credulity to imagine that if politicians advocate mortal sin as policy to a death toll of millions that the Church should maintain neutrality. The Church will never close the door to repentance and reconciliation but it has an absolute duty to speak out against evil and act within its powers to correct its membership from falling into mortal sin. It doesn't much matter if you, as reader think that abortion is the taking of innocent life or not. The Church does and if it accepts those it characterizes as bearing the burden of all those deaths as not in need of repentance, what sort of moral stature can it maintain on any of its pronouncements?

Sullivan wants to preserve Democrat viability at the expense of compromising the Church's moral voice. The Church has enough troubles on that front right now. It doesn't need to make things worse.

Gay Marriage Update VII

The Iron Bloggers are debating gay marriage and it's not looking very good from a technical standpoint. The Chairman obviously is tilted pro-marriage (perhaps he hasn't been exposed to good arguments on the other side) and so the question framing stinks. The challenger is taking the pro-amendment side and is only saved from serious embarrassment by the horrible job that Iron Blogger - Democrat is doing in his opening statement.

What's worst is that there's a 1000 character limit in comments and my fisking of the Iron Blogger - Democrat wouldn't fit. So here it is below in all it's bilious glory:

This is a very poor argument.

The first question reads "Is marriage a sacred institution to be protected by Constitutional means if necessary?"

The answer is that marriage is a sacred institution, and it is already protected by constitutional means. Read the first amendment and ponder the free exercise of religion clause.

Oopsie. Our iron blogger is turning a bit rusty before our eyes. You see he is conflating the two marriages. That's poor form Rusty Blogger - Democrat. Religious marriage is constitutionally protected. The part about social acceptance, love, honor, cherish, all that stuff is constitutionally settled and has been since the 18th century. What we're talking about is the other kind of marriage and you shouldn't be so imprecise.

State (could have said government but state is shorter) marriage is not a sacred institution. It's a set of tax privileges and legal obligations that are granted like every other privilege in the tax and legal code, in order to gain some sort of societal benefit, we give people a privilege (and sometimes oblige them to do things to get that privilege). So what are the things that state marriage gives as privileges and what are the legitimate obligations that the state can impose?

I suggest that separate but equal only applies when you have established equality. You haven't even begun to demonstrate such a thing. You merely assume equality because you haven't established the preconditions to meaningfully measure whether it does or does not exist (hint, it doesn't). The rust accumulates.

Civil unions are a recognition that loving homosexual relations fulfill some of the obligations that we have traditionally obliged marriage partners to undertake and that to the extent that they do so, they deserve some of the privileges of marriage. If there is no equality, there is no problem in separate responses for different categories of relationships.

The problem is that judicial activists are spinning horribly idiotic theories regarding equality and some judges are buying it. The system of checks and balances is breaking down before our very eyes and we don't seem to have the votes to impeach the judges who misread the law but we may have them for an amendment.

The biblical proscriptions against marriage are relevant to the law even in a secular nation because the Bible wasn't written by a bunch of idiots. A great deal of what is in there is good sense and good public policy and there's nothing wrong with taking your cues from the Bible if that's the way you view life. The Bible cannot be mandated as we are a secular nation but neither should it be disadvantaged as a source of wisdom against Dr. Spock or some pop psychologist.

The studies regarding gay parenting are not only few and sketchy, they are horribly biased in the main and universally poorly constructed. Gays are asking for the extension of a set of privileges to a very old institution. The burden of proof is on them and ginning up a few biased, poorly constructed studies does not constitute proof.

The state does not have to have a compelling reason to prohibit gay marriage. Gays have to provide reasonable evidence that their relationships are equivalent to the presently married in providing societal benefits and thus they've earned the right to be included in the 1049 relevant federal laws regarding marriage. This doesn't even count the international adjustments of our marriage related treaties, much less state and local laws.

The argument of separate but equal is an interesting flight of fancy because the north wasn't going to vote for such a thing and it wasn't going to get into the Constitution without some historically free states voting for it. If our rusty blogger and all those against an amendment on these grounds would go for removing such justices on grounds of legislating from the bench, that would settle things just fine without an amendment but I'm guessing he wouldn't go for that. The idea of letting the legal system work is just code for letting judges impose an unconstitutional understanding of the prerogatives of the legislature. Sorry, we're a democratic republic, not a bunch of serfs ruled by judges.

Bumper Stickers For a Sane Islam II

This inspired my creative juices for another bumper sticker.

Honor killings dishonor the Prophet

Female circumcision is anti-muslim

There are probably dozens of ways that muslims can inexpensively, visibly support moderation as true Islam and fight back against extremists. So where can you get such things and why aren't they being sold by muslims to muslims?

Alright, Who's Making Sarin

We all know that there were no WMD in Iraq, right? I mean all the papers have told us that so it must be true. So this means that somebody's making chemical shells and importing them into Iraq. But not Saddam. No, he destroyed all those shells before the Gulf War. We have reams of UN paperwork to prove it.

Nope, no chem weapons here.

OK, sarcasm mode turned off.

From what I understand, we've got our first minor military casualties (2 bomb disposal techs) from chemical warfare since WW I. That ticks me off. The normal caveats apply to the story. It could be a false alarm. There have been a few false positives already. But the drugs they use to treat exposure to chemical weapons are a witches brew of nasty stuff that you do not want to have running around your system unless you absolutely have to. This story bears close watching because if Saddam did bury/export the stuff and we're starting to see it emerge it is both incredibly worrying and incredibly heartening.

The reason to worry is the health and safety of the troops both Coalition and Iraqi (and whatever unlucky civilians get caught downwind of the stuff). This is nasty stuff and rightly outlawed decades ago. But the encouraging thing is that the burial/export scenario was always predicated on the idea that getting caught with the stuff was politically more dangerous than it was worth against protected troops. If this scenario is right and they're digging it up now, it's a desperation tactic and the other side has made the judgment that if the US doesn't funk out and very soon but instead stays the course, they cannot win and any political viability issues for them become moot.

Pulling the WMD out and using them has always been the nightmare scenario of a dying regime. This is why nobody seriously models invading a nuclear power. The end game is depressingly familiar. When the loser is pushed into the corner sufficiently he'll unload all his weapons, nukes, chem, bio, the works because he's got nothing to lose. If that's where we are at, we are likely to have a spike in WMD casualties and soon after, a final victory.