Flit(tm)

Bring the Troops Home From Where?

Driving through downtown Chicago today, I saw a protest marching by Buckingham Fountain. It was small, as such things go, maybe 30 people and I only had time to read the biggest sign which read "BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW". My first reaction was annoyance, the signs had caused traffic on Lake Shore Drive to slow down and back up and it probably delayed my arrival home by 5 minutes.

Thinking more about it, I wish that I could have asked them if they wanted the troops home from South Korea, Japan, Germany, and the dozens of other places where we base abroad. No doubt their major focus is on Iraq but read at face value this was a protest by the tie-dyed left that was blatantly isolationist. Isn't isolationism supposed to be the province of the loony right wing nuts?

Space Elevator Progress Note

Space elevators have been a recurring feature on this blog because it's the sort of disruptive technology that can upset an awful lot of pessimistic predictions about the future. If you can knock two zeroes off the cost of lifting a pound into orbit, many things change, from realistic energy from orbit to space manufacturing, to military implications, cheap, safe access to space changes an awful lot. This isn't even counting the inevitable spinoffs of large scale carbon nanotube production at the strength levels necessary to make the cable and beamed power systems to energize the lifters.

The Liftport Group has long listed April 12, 2018 as their target launch date for a space elevator but now Dr. Bradley Edwards is predicting that it will only be two years to develop carbon nanotube fiber strong enough for the elevator ribbon. That's a real milestone to watch. If the ribbon appears in that time frame, I'd say that it's time to stop scoffing at the possibility and time to start thinking through the consequences of this disruptive technology because it's going to happen.

Partisan Lows

I always thought that the absolute low for vicious partisanship was reached in the campaign against Andrew Jackson. I recall a caricature of him sitting down on a pile of skulls with his sword out and embedded in the pile. Now, via Andrew Sullivan, I find we've sunk to identical depths in the campaign against George Bush. The Nation owes the nation an apology for running such trash. Unfortunately, it's likely to only get worse as the campaign unfolds. The ability of the sane left to restrain these lunatics seems woefully underdeveloped.

Chaos Theory & Economics

SDB's recent wide ranging post on chaos theory got my creative juices flowing as I also have long been fascinated by chaos theory. In the pedantic column, the base of chaos theory is rightfully included in mathematics (I believe) though people seem to have discovered it in observing various disparate phenomena, from weather prediction to stock market behavior, to economics. The formulas they derived to talk about it really don't vary so a base science like math is a good place for it. Your mileage may vary.

One of the things about chaos theory and economics that I find highly useful in policy is how chaos theory affects statist economics. The natural order of things in economics seems to be a slow, secular form of progress with high variation, the boom and bust cycle. The busts, in particular, have very cruel and nasty results and a major form of human effort into the science of economics is how to ameliorate or end the bad effects of the busts. One of Marx's basic predictions regarding capitalist society is that the boom/bust cycle will grow ever wilder, to the point where the whole societal system cannot stand the magnitude of the economic perturbations and something else will arise to take its place, that something else being communism.

This kind of chaotic system perturbation is seen in biology in the way that heart attacks happen. Of course, like heart attacks, this is something that you want to avoid.

The empirical reality of a century of various economic experimentations across the world has given us a body of knowledge that demonstrates that Marx's analysis was fatally flawed. Any interference in correcting the busts seems to have two side effects. It reduces the booms, and it lowers the slope of the secular path in an unpredictable manner. You manage things too much, too long, and the secular upward path turns into a secular downward path and the natural virtuous circles of the economy turn into vicious circles as the country goes down the drain.

But "there is a lot of ruin in a nation" and free market advocates have long had poor records of predicting when, exactly the bad effects will come out. This is because, like everything else in the system, the side effects appear chaotically. But appear they will and it is a remarkable betrayal of the intergenerational societal compact to just kick the can down the road.

But we're all guilty of doing it.

We've fairly well enough established that total government control of the economy leads to horrendous negative effects. The two ideas left are lassez faire economics buttressed by a private charitable safety net and lightly managing the economy in order to pluck the economic goose but still get enough golden eggs to maintain the secular upward trend.

The problem is that politically, the temptation is always to pluck just a bit more in order to gain political advantage over your electoral rivals. Inevitably, this intersection of political interest and economic danger leads to US style stagflation and today's eurosclerosis.

For today's budding statist, the trick is to push out the economic bad news until after your political career is over. FDR's new deal is breaking down decades after he passed away and was enshrined as a great president. LBJ's great society ended up being a net negative to poor people sometime around Ronald Reagan's second term. Few curse him for the harm he has done to the poor and disadvantaged of today and tomorrow. The distance between cause and effect are too much for political purposes but the link is real.

Trumping the Guantanamo Habeas Ruling

Eugene Volokh worries about enemy litigation as a consequence of the Guantanamo detainees being granted habeas corpus rights. The ruling, as I understand it, can be trumped by legislation and I would do so in a two part law.

1. Deny jurisdiction to lower courts. If the USSC desires enemy combatants to have habeas rights, fine. Let them do the work. By denying jurisdiction to lower courts (a rarely used constitutional power of Congress), the problem of a flood of habeas petitions is limited to the body that created the mess.

2. Define as an impeachable offense the wrongful granting of habeas to combatants. Furthermore, if they're found in future on the battlefield, dead or captured, this shall be considered sufficient proof that they were combatants at time of the habeas hearing.

The power to impeach justices and the power to deny jurisdiction are not areas which are readily addressable by the Court. Since the only ones being impeached under the law would be Supreme Court justices any pronouncement they make has conflict of interest written all over it.

Make Them Pay

Hugh Hewitt opines that the media wants Iraq to fail and is betraying their stated principles of objectivity in order to fight against the victory of US foreign and war fighting policy. While this is morally odious, my bad opinion isn't likely to sway any journalists. However, denying this copperhead media the financial fruits of credibility and influence in society is their most crucial weakness. If nobody's listening, nobody will pay to advertise and their broadcast licenses and printing presses will get sold at auction in bankruptcy proceedings.

May that day come soon.

Keeping Your Word Dividends

I've always felt that no matter how we did it, honoring our word and ending the occupation was the crucial element in the Iraqi operation to depose Saddam. The first evidence is in that this is true. If Iraqis can't rule Iraq better than the US, then the imperialists are right and we might as well rule the world for the good of all.

The imperialists are wrong. We'll see evidence of that in Iraq in the coming years and, hopefully, the pro-imperialists in the US will be shamed into silence over the spectacle of free people ruling themselves despite their "cultural difficulties" that supposedly make that impossible.

Foreign Policy Brickbats

It's pretty clear that Foreign Policy Magazine has little love for George W Bush. A recent e-mail I got from them had the following items:

Imperial Amnesia
Europe's Quiet Leap Forward
Bush's Willing Enablers
The Metrosexual Superpower
Iraq's Excluded Women
Counting Civilian Casualties

And that's just in the free (or free registration) content. All the articles downplaying US accomplishments, hyping alternatives to the US and knocking George W Bush and his administration directly.

While I could get into a point by point rebuttal of a lot of the hot air that passes for serious criticism (I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you to find turmoil in a country with an active, foreign sponsored insurgency), It would make this post far, far too long. Rather, I think that what's really eating at the FP folks (and much of the rest of the left and right establishment) is that George W Bush has upset an apple cart that is so fundamental to their entire world view that, at all costs, his decision must not be confirmed by the next president of the opposite party. I'm speaking of Bush's decision to embrace post-westphalianism as the underlying logic beneath US foreign policy in his administration.

These people are not dumb. They simply hold that countries do not declare literal war against terrorist groups. War is reserved to interactions between states and has been since the Peace of Westphalia. In fact, when an Israeli cabinet minister declared that Israel was in a war with Hamas, he was savagely attacked and the Israeli government had to repudiate the idea. Since this happened after President Bush declared that we were in a GWOT, declaring war on all terrorist groups, the lack of condemnation in the US case is telling. They know that if they try to pull that kind of direct full court press on the US they will fail, uniting the country behind the President and his strategy.

Instead, they have opted for a death by a thousand cuts. Serious people with serious resumes write protest letters. Serious magazines devote article after article showing how GWB is an awful president and ruining the world. No good news gets reported, no risks are ever judged to have paid off. Only bad news, all the time, will be fit for print until this idea is dead and buried.

Unfortunately, the establishment has no realistic answer to the question of how to stop the terrorists without the framework of war. They would just prefer to keep the insecurity and dying to a sustainable level and value stability over problem resolution. In short, they are morally bankrupt and float in a sea of innocent victim's blood. They are the collective authors of the nasty bargains we have made to keep corrupt autocrats in power all over the world.

There was a time when such a bargain, compared to nuclear annihilation, seemed the lesser of two evils. In todays world, it is the greater of evils and must be named, shamed, and put aside as unworthy of our consideration.

The task of reforming the international system to unwind all the corrupt bargains of the past is huge. It can't be done all at once successfully. In fact, the terrorists' only hope of victory is for the US and allies to take on more than they can chew at once and strike in the zones of weakness that will inevitably form.

This struggle is the great challenge of our generation. And you won't hear about it for quite awhile on the evening news. They, after all, are not observers in the struggle, but participants.

Like Eisenhower confirmed FDR's New Deal, Nixon confirmed LBJ's Great Society, and Clinton confirmed Reagan's vision of America, GWB's foreign and domestic policy must not only succeed, but succeed in such a way that the next President from the opposing party will leave the heart of it untouched. There are two ways to avoid this. You can have an alternative intellectual framework to offer and implement when elected, and you can make the achievements of the policy so disreputable that agenda-less drift in wartime is preferable. It is that latter alternative that is what FP and all of the EU ankle biters are after.

Burch on Lutas on Burch on Energy

B-)

Greg Burch answers my critique on the idea that Beijing will quickly become cleaner thanks to the birth of the hydrogen age. He rightly points out that the PRC government has enormous resources to dump into a vanity project to clean up Beijing smog. This is the option of virtually every totalitarian government out there. They can always rob 5 peters to pay 4 pauls.

What I had left out of my prior analysis was a very big assumption that, being implicit, might have been missed. The assumption is that the PRC leadership is in a huge bind, racing somewhat ahead of a disaster of popular disappointment and revolution. The problems of their rotten banking sector, pervasive corruption, lack of jobs, huge economic drains of State Owned Enterprises, and just general lack of legitimacy makes the exercise of shifting money out of current uses to a pollution cleanup that doesn't make economic sense very dangerous to regime stability. The PRC apparatchiks are already juggling just as many balls as they can handle and I think they're just about out of the ability to add more glamour projects that don't make economic sense.

As the PRC grows rich, clean technology will become worth it for them. Until they get rid of their unemployment problem and/or other regime threatening crises, it isn't likely to happen.

Ding Dong, the Occupation's Dead

Every terrorist assault from here on out in Iraq is now an attack on a sovereign, independent nation. The transitional government is in place. The elections are going to go forward. The security situation will continue to get significant "Coalition of the willing" support but the Iraqis are running their own show.

The early transfer complicates plans by the terrorists to have some great big bangs to try to make out that America's cutting and running. Poor terrorists (heh) they've got to come up with new plans and with new justifications.

HT: Flit (my eventual blogfather) there were several rounds of jokes about how the Conservatives would never get their act together sufficiently to challenge the Liberals and that Canada had become a one party state.

'Nuff said.

Where I Defend Michael Moore

Pay attention because this won't happen too often. Michael Moore is likely to have his free speech stifled this summer and fall. His odious movie, Farenheit 911, looks to get entangled in the campaign finance restrictions of McCain-Feingold, interfering with his right to promote his work. This is a sad, disgusting spectacle and utterly predictable.

Michael Moore's beliefs and mine are miles apart. But he has a right to peddle his views, no matter how mistaken, even in wartime. To not be able to advertise his movie because such advertisements would fall too close to an election is a very disturbing sign that the 1st amendment (and with it the health of our electoral system) is dying on the vine. It is all our responsibilities, as citizens, to ensure that we revive our system of free speech.

The Nameless Beheaded

We're not apt to forget Paul Johnson anytime soon but I wonder how much would have changed if we had ever known the names and stories of the people beheaded by muslims in Chechnya (warning: beheading videos at link). If we don't know the ones who came before, we should know the ones who come from here on in. The Russian dead deserve no less notice and recognition from us than Kim Son Il from South Korea.

Will they get press coverage in the US equal to the dead from other countries? I hope so but it's not very likely. The Russian experience in Chechnya is where we may yet end up if we are not very careful.

Do You Have an Obligation to Tell the Truth to Police?

The recent Supreme Court case declaring that laws requiring that we identify ourselves to law enforcement are constitutional has got my gut bunched up. Like the convicted defendant, this provision is much more likely to be used against non-war related defendants than prospective terrorists. What most of the negative commentary on this case glosses over is that not all states have legislation requiring this and there is no examination of which state constitutions might grant protection from official harassment via request for identification.

Freedom lost one in this case. That doesn't mean that the game's over, nor that it's irrecoverable.

Clean Energy Won't Clean the Third World (Any Time Soon)

Greg Burch is in Beijing and notes the ungodly pollution in that city. He links finding a replacement for oil, a new source of energy, with cleaning up the city. Here he's in error. Beijing will become clean as it becomes rich, not as new sources of energy come on line. The reason is that the rich are the leading edge and the poor form the trailing edge in the adoption of just about every technology. Very new technology has yet to recoup its R&D costs so it is invariably expensive. It often also requires ancillary expenses (in this case a new energy distribution system) that make its adoption even more likely to be concentrated among the rich.

Even if hydrogen with fuel cells were to cross over and become cheaper than oil used with internal combustion engines (ICEs) ICEs would still abound. As long as it's cheaper to continue to operate old equipment rather than purchase new equipment, the old polluting stuff is going to stay in service. Even new purchasers in poor countries that can afford the new technology will be leery of being an early adopter because they know very well that they are living in a trailing edge country and that their maintenance expenditures are going to be sky high for much longer than they would be in the first world.

Thus, you're going to see adoption first in the 1st world and then a filter down effect. Since energy competition is going to be a major factor in the transition period, we're going to see progress on price in one area creating a ceiling on prices in the other. As hydrogen drops, oil for ICE producers will find that there is only a certain amount they can charge without losing major customers to hydrogen fuel cells, customers who will never return. This shrinking market will constrain their ability to raise prices and we should see gasoline prices trend downward along with hydrogen as new energy comes on line (pace energy pessimists, I know you don't believe it's going to happen, but for this scenario, it's an assumption that it will).

Cheaper gasoline will reduce the incentives for those on the trailing edge to move to hydrogen. In short, Beijing and 3rd world capitals are going to be the last to be clean because they're going to be the last to adopt the new technology.

Using Immigration as a Foreign Policy Tool

In a followup to my earlier piece I privately corresponded with Mark Krikorian over the need for immigration restrictionists to make their arguments from net costs, not gross ones.

Unfortunately Mr. Krikorian has yet to be convinced and gave an almost rote repetition of the great (but gross) costs of large scale immigration of poor people. He did give a good link on immigrant ingratitude but Steve Sailor isn't quite getting at the problem that I usually address, the problem of the core and the gap. My latest salvo is below:

You are pointing out real, true costs of immigration, some which could be ameliorated via changes in public policy. I find it very puzzling that you would not want to make those changes in the very real immigration overhaul that should happen in the nearest possible future.

Most of the costs, from a conservative perspective, are ones that ought to be reformed anyway. Welfare reform may have added urgency due to immigrant abuse of it but it needed reform irrespective of the level of immigration. Linkage provides leverage for faster reform.

Regarding the foreign policy benefit of letting people into this country, the effect is greatest among immigrants who come, work, go home, and build a business there, not here. A middle class business owner may not be an advocate for economic freedom and the rule of law but, really, do you want to propose that on net that group won't strongly trend in this direction?

You also mistake the character of the foreign policy benefit. The existential challenge of the US in this age is not to be liked. To be liked is the cherry on top of the whole enterprise. The real problem is that we have a huge portion of the world that is disconnected from the functioning core of civilization. In that gap, the group of countries that are non-integrating, the pathologies of the world concentrate and periodically erupt. Yet no matter how poor the gap is, there is money, there is ability. There will always be people able to pry into the chinks in our armor and create ever larger attacks, killing and terrorizing us more until we cut ourselves off at the knees and drop to their height.

With the growing ease of creating WMD of all types and the utter simplicity of creating mass carnage even without WMD (see the Padilla plot for mass death via gas explosion in apartment buildings for a practical example), the US must resolve this challenge or utterly abandon any hope of fulfilling the most basic function of government, protecting the lives of its citizens.

We must use every tool, even if it depresses wage growth, even if it threatens certain industries with powerful competition (for example our sugar industry quota system has got to go). The most basic function of government must come first. We are vulnerable, highly vulnerable, to the most simple attacks. That our enemies either do not know this or are too disordered by our offensive operations is great good fortune and hard work that is not something we can depend on in perpetuity.

Immigration, in this context, can be a powerful tool for connection, for shrinking the Gap. This may create legions of people who cordially hate the US as LA residents hate NYC but who do not bomb NYC. I used to live in NY. I can take it. I suspect you can too.

Ah, Interview Day!

Today's the big day. My wife is going for her citizenship interview (thus the low level of posting around here lately as I gave her too much information on various subjects lightly covered in the BCIS interview). I still remember all the crazy days that started off with our meeting, educating her in the fine points of why she never, ever, ever wants to get a "J" visa and going through all the crazy paperwork hassles that immigration puts you through.

We're finally at the last hurdle, and when she passes (as I'm sure she will) she'll be taking the oath as soon as possible (though I don't know if Chicago provides for same day oaths).

Promoting Virtue II

SDB just put up his promoting virtue piece and has sufficiently adjusted his model of three women that I withdraw my previous suggestion to bump it to four. RTWT

It was SDB's original construct of Alice (where I thought he was too hard on the poor girl) that I was worried about. There is a rare case that is utterly impossible to create via human external action. This is the case where there is simply no temptation, not even in the most appealing circumstance. Alice, Betty, and Cathy can all shift to this fourth state, called sainthood by Christians. The historical ranks of the saints are mostly drawn from the Cathys of the world who work up to it but the Alices can have it from the start and the Bettys can reform and stick to it.

As I said, it is an utterly useless state when thinking about the promotion of virtue as there is no human method to prevent fleeting temptations that are not acted on, only divine intervention can accomplish that. It is the end state that all should aspire to and far too few actually achieve.

A society of saints makes a lot of things we normally worry about irrelevant. Saints don't lie, cheat, steal, or shirk so even the most defective of economic and political arrangements can work in a society exclusively made up of saints. Of course, utopians are always populating their imaginary societies with saints as it makes thinking up novel social arrangements much easier.

But in the real world, there is no reliable method to produce them. You just hope for them and try to shift as many people over to Cathy status as possible because the chance of Cathy moving to sainthood is somewhat larger and being a Cathy is a pretty good thing in itself.

NY Times to Clinton: You've Used Up Your Free Bites

Bill Clinton just got a wakeup call from the NY Times. He's no longer the head of the Democrat Party, he no longer gets a free pass since his fate can no longer sink the party, and he's made a lot of enemies over the years.

I've never had a lot of sympathy for clinton but this review is of a brutality that had me wincing in sympathy without even realizing it.

Ouch.

A Question for the Readers

Does anybody know how to price out a round trip to Baghdad? e-mail me if you have the answer.

Testing, Testing

For those who participate in comments, you already know that Bruce Rolston shut down Flitters. Now I have to figure out how to tie off the bloody stump on this end.

Please bear with me.

Promoting Virtue

Steven Den Beste's Singapore article provoked a bit of thought and some private conversation. SDB thought that his thoughts (yes, he does it long in email too) was easily adapted to a post and asked whether I wanted to put my own take up here so he could play off me.

Starting from the idea of Singapore being a society that intensely promotes virtue, I wrote:

Let me give you the story of two wives.

One does not look at other men because she loves her husband The other does not look at other men when she can be caught but lusts after them and fantasizes about sleeping with others.

Which woman is the more virtuous? Which woman's virtue would be safer if challenged (ie she came into a situation where she could sleep with someone without being caught)?

I suggest that virtue via state action is akin to the second woman. It is a hollow thing that is all too frail. It is not more intense at all. It just is more overbearing.

I would suggest that you would get a lot further with talk of reform by talking about replacing inefficient and ineffective government efforts to promote virtue with more effective and efficient private ones. Take a moment to look from the eyes of your poor opponent in such an argument. How would he counter it? He can only insist that public efforts be maintained where they are more effective. He lays himself open to the step by step destruction of his position as public controls are demonstrated to be worse than private social consensus.

One of the great secrets of the monotheistic concept of free will is that God knows that puppets are of little worth compared to those who freely choose Him, freely choose virtue.

I'll leave SDB to elaborate his own theories but he expands out my model to three wives (when the article goes up, I'll link to it here). I like the extension but saw what I thought was a rough spot and expanded to four. I'll save that (brief) note for later.

Update: SDB's article is here

Pissing on Reagan's Grave

For those that have forgotten (or never knew) Ronald Reagan was a pro-life politician. He was very strong in his beliefs and would not even make the smallest philosophical concession in the proposition that life begins at conception. Free standing, embryonic stem cell research funding, had it come to his desk in the form of legislation would have been vetoed and given a scathing veto message to take back to the Congress.

The Chicago Report notes that the ghouls have decided to dance on Reagan's grave and relieve themselves on the freshly turned earth by renaming stem cell legislation "in honor" of Ronald Reagan. It's a disgrace. Unfortunately, it's likely going to be repeated across the country if pro-life activists don't get the truth out about Reagan's history on life issues.

Defining Islam

A story in Dhimmi Watch got me thinking. Turkey's prime minister Erdogan made a very strong statement when he stated that there is just Islam, that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. So when Al Queda blows up and kills muslims by other means, calling them apostate, that means that those dead (some of them Turkish) are either apostates or Osama bin Laden is. It's a pity that nobody asked the good prime minister that. The next time somebody says that there are no such things as moderate and radical muslims, somebody should ask. I would be fascinated by the answer.

Defining Brownshirts

Academia has always had a problem throwing out the brownshirts. Academic freedom cannot survive organized campaigns of violence and intimidation but cast the net too wide and you get official repression of dissenting view. With the controversy over Prof. John Yoo, it's starting to become evident that where to draw the line is once again going to be a problem.

What Prof. Woo did is provide legal advice, exploring whether or not the Taliban or Al Queda fell under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions provide lots of different protections and they should be viewed as something of a reward for honoring the restrictions in warfare that qualify you for them. According to the petitioners, because Prof. Woo did not interject observations unrelated to the question (whether torture was ok), he should be drummed out of academia.

The petitioners are still (barely) on the civilized side of the brownshirt category in my opinion. How much further they can go before they cross the line would be an interesting question. With the long-established pattern of criminal conduct against conservatives at university being accepted by faculty and staff all over the nation, I don't think this will be an intellectual exercise for very long.

Update: If you're not that familiar with the torture memos, Prof. Yoo had a recent defense of them in the LA Times.

Immigration Cost Analysis

Over at NRO's The Corner, Andrew Stuttaford misses the point of Bush's new immigration initiative. I always pegged the immigration initiative as a twofer, neither of which is what Stuttaford thinks the initiative is about. The reasons to support the initiative are that it will increase the proportion of people coming into this country via legal means and thus dry up the protective camouflage that terrorists sneaking into the country need and that it is a more effective means of foreign aid than traditional government disbursements.

The first is a pretty clear benefit but the latter requires a bit of explanation. Large corporations have long known that if you want to train people to behave in significantly different ways (to counter a national culture, for example) it is very useful to take them out of their normal environments and train them in an environment where the desired behavior is the cultural norm. Once they've gotten used to that norm, they are much better equipped to maintain their new behaviors when they go home.

This dynamic works the same whether the training program is a formal bout of instruction or it consists of the informal lessons in capitalism and freedom that all immigrants get in the US. So Stuttaford's observations of lower wages for americans needs to be tempered by the real benefits to our foreign policy of trying to lift other nations out of tyranny and poverty. The relevant facts are as follows:

On the cost side:
How much money has been lost in wages by the excess immigrants who would not otherwise be in the US?

On the benefit side:
How much foreign aid money would we have had to spend to get the equivalent good effect of the people who go back and, with their new found wealth, fund pro-freedom politics in their own country, inspire others who have never gone to the US to fight more for their own freedoms, and generally enhance the probability of a government and culture that is happy with the US?

If you only examine the gross cost without also throwing in the benefits of the plan, it's neither a useful, nor persuasive, analysis. Stuttaford's (and the LA Times' article on which they arebased) error is twofold.

On the cost side, noncitizens are not a monolithic category. One example is that our pathological tort system has driven out enough domestic doctors that we cannot run our medical system without importing doctors. You could close the borders down very tightly and you'd still need to import doctors.

There is also the phenomenon of permanent residents who simply haven't applied for citizenship. My parents became citizens after 10 years, my wife will be doing it after 6. Since Hispanics seem to have very low voter participation rates, I strongly suspect that they also are not jumping quickly on the citizenship process and there are plenty of people who keep renewing their green cards many years after they qualify for citizenship.

The benefit side is completely unexamined, both from a security standpoint, and as a more efficient form of foreign aid. This isn't to say that the numbers absolutely would justify the program. But without the relevant numbers and an honest examination of them, all we have are dressed up, adult versions of playground arguments.

Instilling Virtue

Steven Den Beste has an interesting article up highlighting correspondance with Daryl a correspondent from Singapore. They speak to each other about law and order but it seems wrong somehow. To my eyes, the discussion is less about revolution and more about virtue and how to instill it. Normally, I'd run this in email to the fellow in Singapore but since I can't seem to find his email...

Virtue, in the both Singapore and the US, is of concern by the state. But the liberal values of the US make instilling virtue largely something that the people do while in Singapore, the state works intensively in the field of promoting virtue. While this has good effects in some areas, it lays waste the entire field of intellectual exploration and creates a group of people who are much more vulnerable to cultural change by exposure to new ideas. Singaporeans may show higher levels of virtue in their controlled environment but they must stay small, stay inside that environment for the system to continue to work.

In contrast the virtue promotion system in the US is much more resilient. It will never achieve the high levels that a Singaporan style system can achieve but it can survive assault much better. I can't imagine how Singapore would handle the gay marriage situation that has arisen in the US where elements in the government are violating laws and issuing tendentious court decisions. I can't imagine it would be resolved without violence whereas I can hardly imagine it ending in violence in the US.

Both systems obviously are viable in the short run but I think that Singapore's the one that's really in trouble. It's handicapped intellectual class will continually need to import the results its freer colleagues are creating because they will continue to fall behind without reforms giving them more freedom. And they will be vulnerable to intellectual movements that are incompatible with the state system they have chosen because the third raters who remain in Singapore and work under the censorious government rules will not be able to forever reconcile Singapore's unique system with the progress the rest of the world is producing.

Singapore will have to change. I just hope that it's a gradual, peaceful shift.

The Little Dutch Boy

I've been looking for a story, a simple story, that would help explain my attitude towards government v. private effort in solving problems. I think I've come up with something.

The story of the little dutch boy is pretty well known by everybody. Boy walks around, sees water coming through dike, sticks his finger in dike and saves town from flood. Townspeople eventually come to his rescue and replace him with a permanent fix.

This is a very heroic story of courage and doing what it takes in an emergency when nobody else is around to fix things, even if your solution is not the best for the long haul. If water coming through the dike is a generic problem, the little dutch boy's brave solution is government action. It works but it's a patch. Even he knows that he can't stay there forever but he'll bravely stick it out until help arrives with a better solution.

Big government types see the little dutch boy and says "hey, good solution. Let's stick with that". Instead of fixing the dike with a better fix (private action) they stick with the patch because it's less effort than shifting to a permanent one. They institute a line of little dutch boys so they can swap off, sticking their finger in the dike.

It's a really stupid idea, no? But that's the entire point. Problems have to get solved. Government solutions, when they're the only game in town, are preferable to disaster. But the spirit of adopting them should always be the little dutch boy's heartfelt happiness when he no longer has to do it anymore. In the real world, the townspeople have to fight him, kicking and screaming, to get his damn finger out of the dike so the permanent fix can go in.

Invisible Cloaks, Invisible Walls

John Cole couldn't think of a legal, moral use for an invisibility cloak. That kind of bothered me and as I was reading another article on the subject, a completely above board use came to mind. Translucent walls would make an excellent improvement in the eastern christian iconostasis.

Another use will be in the fashion world. One thing that is not made very clear in most articles about this technology is that the realistic image projected out does not absolutely have to be what is on the other side of the body. Imagine images that subtly enhance the body image that you would otherwise project. That will be the subtle end of the spectrum but combine this technology with a punk rock sensibility and the sky's the limit.

This Could Have Been Iraq

The OmbudsGod has the goods on Hans Blix:

Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix cast doubt on Wednesday on charges that Iran engaged in a civilian energy programme to make a nuclear bomb, saying there was no direct evidence. – Reuters, November 12, 2003

Iran on Saturday said it would reject international restrictions on its nuclear program and challenged the world to accept Tehran as a member of the "nuclear club." -- Associated Press, June 12, 2004

Drumming Someone Out of Academia

Juan Non-Volokh comments on Prof. Yoo's troubles at Berkeley. The problem seems to be that Prof. Yoo worked for the Bush Justice Department and issued a controversial memorandum on torture. This, according to student petitioners requires recantation or resignation. Juan Non-Volokh appropriately skewers the petitioners, demonstrating that even when granting the most favorable possible view of the facts, resignation is not an appropriate punishment and would damage academia more than cleanse it.

One thing that is not examined is what is the appropriate reaction regarding petitioners who assault academic freedom under a specious claim to improving academia? Should it instead be the petitioners who "repent or resign"?

The Billion Smartasses of Catholicism

Steven Den Beste has a very wide ranging article on the concepts of ethics, identity, and property. At one point, he talks about the discovered ethical problem of tissue and identity transference and how this leads to very unpleasant answers for christians. I suggest that this is an unlikely situation because of the billion smartasses of Catholicism.

An explanation is in order.

The Catholic Church runs one of if not the biggest school system on the planet. Like all schools, each one of them has their share of smartasses who ask questions like this because they're bored and they want to play "stump the teacher" or in this case priest. Over the centuries, there have probably been billions of smartasses posing an uncounted number of impertinent and improbable questions. Sometimes they just get the brush off, but surprisingly often not and there is a huge body of scholarship that resides in the bowels of the Vatican containing the answers to a lot of very unlikely questions, many posed by that great inspiration to research, the billion smartasses of Catholicism.

I claim honorary membership among the BSoC as poor Fr. Clinet can probably attest to from Heaven. Even though I never attended catholic schools, I made up for it by asking questions later. When I discovered Catholic Answers I really felt I'd discovered a little slice of Heaven. Even today, I'm looking with great anticipation as the Catholic Church takes all of that collected knowledge and documentation and (too slowly!) puts it up on the web. I've found it of invaluable use to differentiate between media spin as to what the Catholic Church's position is and the actual position. The two are not often in agreement.

But back to SDB's essay. Because he places his dilemma in the realm of science fiction, he seems to believe that this is some new uncharted realm. However, a much more mundane situation nearly fits the same challenges, the case of amnesiacs. If you have a murderer who becomes an amnesiac and the new personality is holy, do the prior sins count against him during final judgment? Since such cases have undoubtedly come up in the last two millennia plus the BSoC has undoubtedly posed the question numerous times, I feel confident that somewhere there are entire volumes devoted to such questions.

But I find the very idea that memory is necessary for guilt to be highly unsatisfactory. Imagine SDB's mad scientist did not go around switching brains but rather made a machine which could produce targeted amnesia. If an assassin is trained and has every one of his murders wiped from his memory, is he guilty of murder? He doesn't remember doing a single one. How satisfactory would a world be where this assassin would not be guilty?

Check.

Fixing Military Reporting

As I was just finishing off my previous note it struck me that what the media really needs is a set of credible people who watchdog their military coverage and embarrass them into hiring some people who are competent in matters military. This isn't for any sort of ideological reasons but just so they have sufficient expertise to competently exercise their news judgment.

But who would do it? It struck me that we've a set of groups who are perfectly capable of pulling it off, veteran's groups. If some local VFW posts start embarrassing the local media because they're running AP or UPI pieces that are shamefully incorrect on the basic facts, the local outlets are going to start giving the wire services an earful. A report card grading system could be instituted, the military reporting competence index with an award show yearly. I'm sure that CSPAN would cover it.

Reporting on the Military Competently

Iraq Now is really turning into a nice little news source for things military. The latest gem illustrates how to figure out whether the military dogs really were there on orders from higher ups or this is just a piece of someone's PR campaign that has no basis in reality.

The answers might be classified but there is no reason for journalists not to ask the question and for constituents who have Congressmen on the relevant oversight committee(s) to hammer their lawmakers to get to the bottom of this.

The whole Abu Ghraib scandal has high potential to really do a number on the US military's prosecution of the war. If we've veered off course at higher levels this needs to be found and fixed as soon as possible, not drawn out for political advantage. An incompetent group of journalists isn't helping this process move forward.

Letter to the Paper XXIV

Steven Den Beste get's enthusiastic support on energy from Reverend Sensing. Unsurprisingly, I disagree:

If exposing the fallacy that conservation would be enough is all that SDB were doing, I would join you in cheering him in his efforts. Unfortunately, that is not all that he's doing. He also attacks the idea of creating new sources of energy both as additions to and replacements of oil on any significant scale. This has several bad effects.

First of all, it is inaccurate. We are fast approaching a crossover point where our current energy creation and use infrastructure is going to be significantly changed. SDB's essays are not consistent with this coming reality. GM does not make a habit of seriously considering pie-in-the-sky solutions for its car platform powerplants, nor do major oil companies rush to rebrand themselves on a whim. Have you noticed lately that everybody's an energy company now?

If SDB is right, we might as well elect the "realism" candidate this November, John Kerry, as there are hard engineering limits that make spreading liberty to the 3rd world (and thus a free market hungry for energy) impractical and destabilizing for us.

Fortunately, SDB is wrong on this issue. He realizes the magnitude of the task but fails to understand that people are meeting the challenges. It's a hellishly complicated and difficult thing, to remake an energy infrastructure. By giving the false impression that it's not merely difficult, but impossible, SDB has turned himself into a nattering nabob of negativism.

Withdrawing Constitutional Protections

I recently had the pleasure of a cousin coming to visit me in Chicago. He's in the political game and enjoys talking philosophy and politics. In our discussion on abortion, he drew the line at brain wave activity. If the unborn child thought, it should not be killed without some sort of medical emergency. I praised him for seeking to restrict abortion by that amount and said I'd be happy to get the law to reflect his position, coming back for the rest of the unborn in another round.

*ding* *ding* round two coming up.

Imagine a strange sort of malady. It absolutely flat lines your brain, killing you if you don't have body support. But if you do have physical support to keep your body going, in 10 weeks, you will wake from your profound vegetative state to eventually make a full recovery. During the time which you don't have brain waves, do you surrender your right to life? Why not?

The common sense position is that if you know you're going to come out of this vegetative state with a very high probability of full function, it makes no sense to pull the plug even weeks and months of monitoring and not detecting a single brain wave. Pulling the plug and killing the patient when there is a reasonable chance for later good health and meaningful independent life is simply not acceptable, especially if the reason to pull the plug is convenience on the part of others. Even if the recovery is only partial, pulling the plug is not ethical, nor would the local prosecutor likely find it legal.

So why does a human life that will almost certainly develop into a normal, thinking, rational individual because brain wave activity has not started yet, though it is almost certain to start in a short time?

Letter to the Paper XXIII

Dhimmi Watch asks "where, o where, is this deep knowledge of Islam that will refute the radicals? Virtualy every analysis I've seen from self-proclaimed moderates is superficial and doesn't confront radical exegesis of the Qur'an and Sunnah at all." It's a fair question with a very simple answer. When alternate interpretations are burned, the Koran subtly changed shortly after its compilation, and heterodox muslims subject to death for centuries, the cruel jihadists have an enormous amount of their authority tied up in the idea of an unchanging Koran:

I will attempt to answer this challenge. The first key to disarming Islam is not some sort of alternate Koran. For centuries, any alternate Korans have been destroyed and a myth promulgated that the Koran of today is exactly the same as always, that the book is unchanging. This is a lie which has been disproven by the discovery of early koranic fragments which differ in minor ways from the modern Koran. That the Koran has a history, a history that has been ruthlessly suppressed by religious authorities and secular rulers in the muslim world is a huge deal. It means that it is possible to be an honest heterodox muslim and simultaneously be closer to true Islam than the hidebound imams who preach the cult of death.

If the apostates are those who kill to defend an inauthentic koran, the entire muslim world is turned on its head. These strident apostates have been masquerading as the true believers. Without the authority of the unchanging Koran, they are lost entirely. There is the loose thread that will unravel the Islamist abomination.

Letter to the Paper XXII

Thomas Barnett's got a review of reviews series going and he picked a negative, pseudo-libertarian one this time. I say pseudo-libertarian because I don't believe that libertarianism is properly about accepting brutal foreign tyranny in preference to the risk of domestically losing our souls. I wrote as much in comments:

There are times when olympian judgment is necessary to judge the morality of a particular war. Then there is now. If you have somebody declare war (Islamists, Osama bin Laden), you should take that seriously and oblige the declarer with a war. The fact that we did not led to thousands dead in NY and DC. The war that was declared was a very old fashioned sort of war, non-Westphalian. We haven't had one of those in a very, very long time.

Non-Westphalian wars are incredibly destructive. That's why we stopped having them after the 30 Years War via non-interference in domestic affairs (enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia, thus Westphalianism). But non-Westphalian wars are the only ones that the Gap can reasonably have a chance at winning.

I'm a libertarian. I believe in reducing government to the maximum extent possible so we're dealing with a campfire, not a forest fire. That being said, when the wolves come out of the darkness, it's time to grab a burning brand and swing away. The scary part of formal Libertarianism has always been the unwillingness of too many libertarians to risk the forest fire to save ourselves. It is raising the forest's health as fetish over the value of our own lives and freedoms.

If we swing our flaming brands too energetically, we may end up lighting a conflagration of tyranny. But baring your own throat to the wolf instead of taking the risk to defend yourself is no solution, not even a libertarian one.

Energy War Redux

Greg Burch wonders why he is being misunderstood about his energy comments. Perhaps this will explain my take on his remarks:

We've got years, perhaps decades, of violent conflict with the Islamic world ahead of us. Sooner or later we'll have to realize that the only thing that is making this necessary is our dependence on oil from the Middle East. The culture that is attempting to destroy us is on artificial life support through the money pumped into the Middle East for oil. If that stopped, our enemy would wither and die, or change.

Campaign Questions I

I just sent off the following to the Badnarik campaign's media email. It's a list of 9 questions that I hope will provoke not only interesting answers but more than a little thought into what exactly a Libertarian candidate should be thinking and talking about during the campaign and beyond:

I would be interested in the candidate's position on the following 9 questions which I will post on my blog, Flit(TM) http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/tmblog/

1. Muslims run a parallel judiciary which, unlike most western religious courts, includes physical punishments for both believers and nonbelievers. The muslim judiciary's judgments (fatwas) can and have had the effect of reducing freedom of speech and artistic freedom. What do you think is appropriate government action to defend americans against these foreign courts who assert jurisdiction over us without our consent and while we stay in our own country?

2. What should the government role be in restraining private individuals from conducting their own foreign policy. And when such individuals inevitably offend foreign governments what should be the federal government's role regarding any attempts by foreign governments at retribution?

3. Lax government prosecution of corporate crimes such as fraud have led to substitute legislation such as antitrust and RICO law. How should government act in order to establish that corporate fraud will no longer be tolerated even in highly complex and technical cases such as Microsoft?

4. If elected, what are the measures you would take to ensure that transition to a libertarian society will be orderly and fair? How will you act in order to minimize injustice during the changeover?

5. Do you believe that the right to restrict copying via patents, copyrights, and trademarks is an acceptable compromise of our liberty? How should a proper balance be struck between copiers, derivers, and innovators?

6. Do you think that marriage should entail civil privileges, on what grounds, to what extent, and to what end?

7. What is the appropriate executive response to courts that base judicial decisions on foreign, not domestic legislation? What is the appropriate response for mixed cases where judicial decisions are rendered in part under the Constitution and in part under foreign law not incorporated via treaty or legislation?

8. If elected, how would you handle the rights of US citizens in space? With the imminent dawn of successful non-government space programs, how far should the US government go in extending constitutional protections to citizens in orbit and beyond?

9. At what point does a human gain constitutional rights and at what point do such rights cease and do you think the lines are properly drawn today?

If I get any response, it will be posted.

Get Rid of 80% of Spam

A new study estimates that 80% of spam out on the 'net today is from compromised MS Windows systems. Spam is now the majority of email messages sent and a huge source of lost productivity and daily annoyance. It's time to start shifting the customers who are highly likely to be compromised out of Windows. If Grandma and Grandpa want to get on the Internet, by all means encourage them. But also encourage them to get a Macintosh.

Future Tech Library

This whole energy innovation thread that Steven Den Beste has written about reminds me of a very basic principle in innovation. There are two kinds of innovation, incremental and disruptive (revolutionary). Incremental advances are the most common. You take your vacuum tube and you make it 3% better. A disruptive or revolutionary technology would be replacing vacuum tubes with solid state transistors.

In the world of incremental technology, SDB's pessimistic world view about the possibility of feasible radical advances is just good sense. Nobody is ever going to build a space elevator out of kevlar no matter how you improve the weave of the stuff.

But there is another world, the world of disruptive technology. It's a world where science fiction turns into science fact because where the author talks about beanstalks made of "unobtanium" a japanese electron microscopist turns unobtanium into carbon nanotubes one day in 1991. And all of a sudden the race is on to realize the high strength potential of this disruptive advance in material science. All of a sudden a hundred boyhood tales from pulp science fiction are no longer mere flights of fancy because material science has caught up.

What I think is missing in the optimists' presentations is in defining their "unobtaniums". If you don't understand that you're really asking for a miracle, you get the idea that making these things happen is just a matter of time. It's not just time but time plus disruptive advances. How much better does energy capture + energy transmission efficiency have to get before solar power satellites become commercially feasible? How low do you have to have sunny location land prices before a terrestrial mirror solar station become practical?

Something complex, like novel energy forms, might well require several different disruptive advances. Solar Power Stations require a revolution in lower launch costs, significant increases in collection efficiency and better orbit to ground transmission efficiency, for example. Core taps require radical improvements in drilling technique both in the ability to drill deep and to drill cheap.

Such advances might be coming from any of several different fields. Laser drilling seems to be the best hope for core taps and that's largely come from impressive work done by defense contractors researching SDI missile defense systems. The oil extraction industry sees laser drilling as a way to improve speed and thus efficiency in deploying very expensive drill platforms.

A few hundred years ago, it would be ludicrous to even try to keep track of all the miracles you need. But, as I've noted before, the rate at which disruptive technologies occur has been accelerating for centuries and it's no longer unrealistic to think that there will be enough new disruptive inventions in our lifetimes to start keeping more formal track of the impractical dreams of today.

Let's take flying cars for instance. We currently have at least 04:13 PM | Comments