Flit(tm)

SDB Update

Steven Den Beste has a rare update announcing some endorsements made by others regarding the 2004 US presidential election. I think it's pretty safe to say SDB's not a Kerry fan.

Imagine Catholics in 2005

Reading through this piece on whether it's acceptable in good conscience for a Catholic to vote for Kerry, one thought kept going through my head. If this self-professed Catholic who says he believes life begins at conception but denies any actual obligation to support life in the abortion struggle wins the presidency, and wins a large section of the Catholic vote along the way, even granting the far-fetched notion that the pro-life stand of the president is unimportant, that Congress will never let strong pro-life justices through the confirmation process, that the executive cannot significantly alter the number of abortions that happen, Kerry's election would be a serious blow to Catholic doctrine lived out seriously. It would still be an option for those quaint and silly enough to follow it on their own but it would be like Catholic doctrine on contraception is today, massive disobedience among Catholics to Catholic doctrine. And the change will flow from the one unanswerable question, "but what about John Kerry"?

The hierarchy is right to be seriously worried about the election of John Kerry to the Presidency on a pro-abortion platform. It's sad to see so many Catholics blind to the dangers and the need to re-impose a stricter fidelity to our common faith.

Kuttnerian Idiocy on Flu Shots

Robert Kuttner embarrasses himself in a recent article on the US flu shot availability problem. It's a mix of bad economics, anti-capitalist agitprop, fear mongering, and most amazingly pro-indentured servitude. Talk about a target rich environment for criticism.

First things first, the reason we have a shortage of flu shots and other countries do not is that the FDA has higher standards for flu vaccines, thus fragmenting the market into "vaccine good enough for the US" and everybody else. The extra regulatory burden isn't trivial to meet so you can't just swoop down and buy from the rest of the 1st world when something goes wrong here anymore than you can ship gasoline into Chicago from out of area when the local refinery has a hiccup and prices soar (thank the EPA for that particular market fragmentation). Canadians do not have a flu vaccine shortage because they didn't adopt absurdly high standards over other first world nations and not "thanks to their national health system". If they were to suffer a vaccine production mishap, they can dip into the wider market in a way that the US, with its extra high standards cannot.

What profits are to be had in the US vaccine market are largely soaked up by legal bills as trial lawyers have circled the industry picking off one participant after another. Here is Kuttner's one good idea, cutting down the lawsuit opportunities by act of Congress.

But even here, Kuttner gets it wrong as out of control torts are sucking the lifeblood out of America across the board. Their pernicious effects regarding vaccines just happen to be more visible. His idea would only apply a one issue band aid on a very deep wound in our legal system. General tort reform has long been a Bush administration goal but no credit is given here by Kuttner to Bush administration foresightedness and trial lawyer pig headedness. The trial lawyer-in-chief in Congress is, of course, Sen. Edwards who is the number 2 on the Democratic ticket this year.

Things go downhill from this bit of half-right thinking. Kuttner wants to force companies to participate in making vaccines. He wants to be able to compel their labor and force them to sell at a particular price. He labels this level as a "normal profit", something that is likely to neither be normal or profitable.

But imagine the precedent here. Just because there are insufficient market participants in markets on which people's lives depend, the government has the right to compel labor from companies engaged in related production. You might as well say that software coders could be forced into defense production work at "normal profits" or "normal wages" no matter that they have no interest in the field nor would the money be equivalent to what they are making elsewhere for the same effort. Doctors could be forced into the VA system, whether they liked it or not. After all, just like the pharmaceutical companies, without public research and government licenses, Doctors wouldn't be where they are today.

But wait, there's more. In an early paragraph the specter of avian flu makes its appearance. It has nothing to do with this year's flu crisis but casually tossing around the idea of mass human casualties after railing at Bush administration incompetence is about as subtle as interspersing pictures of jews and rats. It's just vile.

The bad economics shows up in the staggering assumption that government is a superior allocator of scarce resources than the private sector. The fact that this has been disproven time and time again for decades does not seem to have made an impression on the writer who seems to be in an economic time warp back to the interbellic years when the Reds were on the march.

He also plaintively asks "Do we really need Cialis, and Levitra and Viagra?" as if price competition created by new market entrants were an entirely foreign concept to him. In fact, yes, we do need them for both health and economic reasons.

The economics I've covered above but there are people who have a real need for help who cannot take one or two of these drugs without dangerous side-effects that do not show up in the third. Some small number can't take any of them safely and effectively and await further new entrants into the market for their conditions to be relieved by the pharmaceutical revolution.

Robert Kuttner doesn't care about these people. They're a minority of sufferers interspersed throughout the healthcare population and are not very united. Kuttner doesn't care about who he'll delay cures for as long as the choice of where pharmaceutical research money gets to be more politicized, more socialized, more nationalized.

Can we have a rousing verse or two of the Internationale? Go ahead, start without me. I'll just be off to the side being sick. Don't mind me...

Big Government Conservatism: A Lifecycle

Reading about Bush's Republican Revolution, especially his creation of big government conservatism as a major thread of the modern conservative movement. I think that a great deal of the concern that many small government conservatives and libertarians have about big government conservatism is misplaced. It, like Republican radicalism, is something that is legitimately kept in conservatism's cupboard, to be taken out when needed, but the circumstances when it is needed are very few, and far between. The last time we needed Republican radicals before their current run starting on 9/11 was back in Lincoln's day in order to defeat the scourge of slavery.

Big government conservatism is something like a live virus vaccine. Sure, it can give you the actual disease of socialism and government tyranny just like big government liberalism but this particular strain is weakened by two features that will save us, if we play things right, measurements and standards.

Measuring the results of a government program and terminating government expenditures that don't actually deliver results are probably the easiest selling offering the center-right has offered to the people in decades. Who wants to waste money when you can spend it better elsewhere? But here's the twist. If small government conservatives are right, if the libertarians are right, the number of programs that properly measured, actually deliver for the american people are very few and far between. A stringent insistence on measuring success and killing programs that fail the people is a sure ticket to a smaller government if the small government ideology actually maps well onto reality. The emergence of the evidence for such failures can take a few years but the harvest in pruned failures after that will be continual and long-lasting, a process of successful government cutting that will play out over decades.

The big government part of big government conservatism is something that is likely to die out as the measurement and accountability parts of big government conservatism strip away the self-serving lies and obfuscations propping up failed programs. That doesn't mean that small government conservatives should wait for inevitable collapses. We need to fight to make sure that programs that fail are killed, free market alternatives are given equal billing with pseudo-free market alternatives as next stage replacements, and push big-government humpty dumpty off the wall as soon as possible.

Personal Note

Apologies for the low output on the blog lately. I've been having very high output in my (most) personal life. Since Wednesday, a GI bug has been getting me down. So far, I've dropped 9 pounds but hope to be turning the corner soon.

Depending on Delusion I

26% of Palestinians believe that 9/11 was an Israeli plot to get the US wholeheartedly on their side. Now that Osama bin Laden has released a tape that clearly talks about how "we" took down the towers, what do they do? How do they integrate this new information into their worldview? This is a fundamental problem with the Islamic tendency towards delusion, you get a lot of very embarrassing moments where you have to revise everything you've been saying the past three years on the most important geopolitical issue of the day.

When such people are on the fringes, they just lose credibility and are simply not listened to. One quarter of the population is too big a proportion to do that with so you end up with people denying their past statements, their records, and a general understanding not to pry too closely into actual past history. Once that happens too often, historical analysis becomes a heavily sown minefield that is almost impossible to discuss. You lose the ability of the past to teach its lessons because you remind the majority of its shame in participating in past delusional episodes.

Frankly, I don't know the way out. What's sure, though, is that any analysis of present or past in Islam must take into account this enhanced incidence of delusional thinking. If it doesn't, no matter how compelling its conclusions might be, you're being led into your own false path.

Bin Laden Alive, Supports Anybody But Bush

A new tape seems to have definitively answered the "is he dead" question in the negative. Bin Laden's alive, more than a bit grayer, and while not specifically endorsing Kerry, seems to clearly be an ABB (anybody but Bush) kind of guy (maybe he's a heartbroken Deaniac).

Vote accordingly.

Voting for Idiots

Eugene Volokh thinks that ballots should be accessible to even below average intelligence voters. That's fine, as far as it goes. I happen to agree that if you're a little slow, you shouldn't basically have your vote error rate so high that members of your IQ level are basically voting white noise. How far down the intelligence scale does that go? You've got to test ballots, like you calibrate standardized tests. So what's the appropriate minimum IQ that the ballot should be tested for?

The nasty thing is that you can't really answer because the entire concept is incredibly politically incorrect. There's some real life history behind being gunshy about such questions because lots of states used to have literacy tests and those tests were applied discriminatorily against racial minorities as a disenfranchisement tool, mostly against Republicans. Those sorts of literacy tests have been banned decades ago, and rightly so. But I wouldn't be surprised if the fear of being associated with such a base practice out of America's darker past has stopped election board officials from doing the easy thing, simply picking an intelligence standard, let's say an IQ of 75, finding a bunch of people with an IQ of 75 and asking them to fill out the ballot. If the error rate is below a certain amount, the ballot design passes and is used for the election.

At that point, "partisan ballot design" charges go out the window. If you tested the ballot, it fell within the error rate specs, you've got yourself a nice, scientifically based safe harbor to protect yourself from litigation. At a certain point of low intelligence, any ballot is going to be too complicated to fill out. You have to draw the line somewhere. Why not set a standard, test the things before they go into use, and where you still get error rates higher than normal, you can at least eliminate poor ballot design as a culprit.

Inducing Strategic Despair Amongst the Delusional

Anybody that has read Bernard Lewis' excellent book What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East knows that Islam has been on a long downhill slide for centuries. A civilization that could have easily eradicated christianity were it not for its own internal divisions distracting it has become one of the most backward on the planet. A great contributor to this long slide is a sense of self-deception. Muslims were on top, they must still be on top, and only dark, diabolic conspiracies keep them from their rightful supremacy. Only sharp, undeniable physical reality, a Napoleon invading Egypt, the inability of anybody other than a western power to dislodge Napoleon from Egypt, and all the other undeniable expressions of islamic decline disturbs this ongoing charade of superiority and then only temporarily. The charade resumes quickly and the islamic world climbs deeper into delusion.

All this came to mind in reading Dr. Barnett's analysis of a recent article entitled What the Terrorists Have in Mind. It's something of a communications analysis piece, comparing the despair of jihadists in 2002 with their current state which can best be described as hopeful bravado. What it does not do is set any sort of context beyond the one cycle of sharp setback during military operations in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and the development of optimism since.

Dr. Barnett analyzes the piece from the point of view of the goal of inducing strategic despair. This is a normal thing to do because strategic despair is generally what makes the other side quit before you kill every member of that side. Given the generally delusional nature of islamist opinion on geopolitics, that God has anointed them to be first in the world, that we outside of Islam are intrinsically lesser creatures I think that any analysis of inducing strategic despair must explicitly take into account the long-term delusional nature of their group think. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn, I believe, is that inducing strategic despair among the islamists is going to take longer and be harder than among a more rational enemy.

The pattern of false propaganda to whip up the troops and whip up the people was most recently and openly on display in the pronouncements of "Comical Ali", Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf in talking about victory after Iraqi victory but the battlefields kept getting closer to Baghdad. But why were his pronouncements viewed with such mirth? You could measure progress on a map. In a consolidation campaign, there few pins to put on maps, external reality is difficult to measure, and so delusional pronouncements cease to be comical. In fact, they can have the very real positive effect of staving off strategic despair.

Dr. Barnett suggests that we need to take the whitebread look off of the current international coalition. I think that there is far more hope than he thinks in the very article he analyzes.

It is remarkable, for example, that the Pakistani Sunni extremist group Lashkar-e-Tayba appears to be shifting its sights away from its longtime focus on Kashmir and toward Iraq. Probably the largest militant group in Pakistan, it has used its online Urdu publication to call for sending holy warriors to Iraq to take revenge for the torture at Abu Ghraib prison as well as for what it calls the "rapes of Iraqi Muslim women." "The Americans are dishonoring our mothers and sisters," reads a notice on its site. "Therefore, jihad against America has now become mandatory."

Does it make sense for an Indian prime minister to do this now, before a US election which could leave his freshly arrived troops holding the bag as a new Kerry administration pulls out? Of course not. It would make a great deal more sense for India to answer a call for help from a new Iraqi government in early to mid 2005 if India could be assured that the US was not going to simply substitute Indian troops for its own and that there would be a real increase in coalition forces. Russia's traditional relationship with Iraq could also be renewed by them participating in a new force on the Iraqi government's request for aid on the same conditions, that the US not do a 1:1 substitution of their forces for its own.

The fundamental question is whether Russia, India, and all the rest of the potential New Core partners hate George W Bush enough to act against their country's best interest. If that is the case, the very idea of Core, a system of countries that are inextricably linked by mutual connectivity, is in doubt. If so many countries are willing to cut off their noses to spite George Bush, why would Core ties mean anything over momentary passions of all stripes?

The Next Iron Lady?

Yesterday, I kicked one of this election's sleeping dogs what are we going to do when Schroeder inevitably gets his butt kicked out of power. Today, here's a good candidate. Is Angela Merkel going to be the next German Chancellor? It's still unclear, but it's quite likely somebody from the article picture is going to be taking the oath of office, if not her, then Edmund Stoiber who lost to Schroeder in a squeeker the last time around.

Depending on local election results, it's possible that Schroeder is going to fall a mere 7 months from now. Then, the FRG is going to be led by a party that owes more to Thatcher than to Bismark. How would a Kerry presidency handle such a development? I can't say for sure but probably about as well as he has with our current relationship with Poland (for those not paying attention, that's very bad). A Bush presidency would have a much better ability to handle the changes a pro-reform CDU government would mean in our bilateral and multilateral relationship with the FRG.

Arab Liberals Stand Up

I've long believed that when arab liberals step up to the plate, we're going to be well on our way to winning the WOT. While there have been small signs of their awakening before, here's one that's very welcome news. The idea of a court to take on imams promoting hate and terrorism is not something that would fly in a country with a 1st amendment. But what it would do is be a powerful blow against the culture of incitement that affects all too many Islamic mosques and other organizations. Since it would be an indigenous response, we can safely let our participation be of happy observer (and possibly covert protector of the judges from inevitable assassination plots).

It's stuff like this that makes me think that Islam is not irredeemable and, though theologically unsound, does not have to share the fate of thuggee.

What to do About Germany?

In all the US election hubbub, one of the least educated analyses has been with regard to Germany and it's upcoming 9/2006 elections. The SPD, led by Gerhard Schroeder, is disintegrating before our very eyes. Only by reaching deep into nascant german jingoism and anti-american emotion was he able to pull out a narrow victory the last election and it's all been downhill since then for his party. The SPD has lately been racking up a number of important firsts and mosts, most seats lost, first time to lose certain seats in the modern era, the SPD looks like nothing we've seen in the modern era unless you cast your US educated eye back to the disintegration of the Whig party.

Currently, trans-atlantic relations are dominated by odd couples. The center-right President Bush's closes ally is the center-left Tony Blair. France is our greatest antagonist inside the EU, calling most loudly for our humbling (and long before President Bush came on the scene) and center-right President Chirac has his own political odd couple going with center-left Gerhard Schroeder. But it is highly likely that Schroeder will be out in 2006, leaving France without a vital partner in its US bashing and thus largely impotent. So in the final two years of the next term, the US president will have a good opportunity to restart relations with a new FRG government dominated by the center-right CDU/CSU who wants to steer clear of the reflexive anti-americanism of its SPD predecessor. Have you heard anything about this likely change? I haven't.

From the Depths to the Light

This is a true story. You may not believe it but this is my son, an extraordinary boy of 5. As usual he did not want to go to sleep. He hopped up on a stool and was trying to get to an icon we have put on his bedroom wall. It is a classic western icon of Jesus pointing to his sacred heart (it's a classic rendition with crown, thorns, flames and blood). George tells me he wants one. He further explains that he wants a real one. So I tell him to get into bed, I pull down the icon and explain to him, in very abbreviated form, Genesis, original sin, Calvary, the three days in Hell, the freeing of the imprisoned spirits, the Resurrection, and how Jesus' sacrifice completed a very long, complicated plan to redeem mankind from that original sin.

Wide eyed, he took it all in very calmly and repeated that he wanted his own heart like the flaming heart of Jesus. I told him that only God could give him that and that he should pray and talk to him frequently. Only God could do it. He seemed content and ready to go to sleep.

I found out a few minutes later that his window was open and went to close it. He turned, informed that he had decided, and said that he wanted to help God so that men would know Him. Then he turned and seemed to go back to sleep.

It was a false sense of finality. In the middle of writing this, he burst into my home office and informed me that we needed to house for God, informing me, in his most serious five year old manner, that there needed to be a place with doors and a lock that no man could come in but that God could come in because he would have the key.

We still haven't got him to sleep yet, but I'll close this note here about this extraordinary episode. God is still alive in the hearts of little boys. With all the scary, mad things going on in these times, it is a true note of hope.

Administrative interruption

I'll be light blogging for a bit. A death in the family is making it impossible to concentrate properly.

The Nature of Good Cop/Bad Cop

If you watch TV, you've seen it a thousand times, a pair of police interrogate a suspect, one pretends to be off the wall, dangerous (the bad cop) and the other pretends to be in a slowly losing fight to restrain him and follow the rules (the good cop). So who can play bad cop to our good cop on the geopolitical stage?

The answer seems pure simplicity, nobody can because, if we put our mind to it, there is nobody out there that we cannot restrain. OTOH, we are perfect for the bad cop role. So in any coalition in the near to mid-term future, we're going to wear the black hat of the good cop/bad cop tactic whenever we play that gambit. It's just a fact of life that comes from geopolitical unipolarity.

There's only one real problem with this. Americans viscerally hate to wear the black hat. We like to think of ourselves as good guys and strive to create policies that get us what we want while staying on the white hat side of the fence as much as possible.

This uncomfortable facet of unipolarity is going to chafe at the american political psyche. Eventually the results are going to show up in electoral results but there is no real alternative to wearing the black hat that we control other than retreating and losing. So what's the solution? A multipolarity based on other major power centers growing up and gaining stature rather than trying to achieve parity by bringing down the US to their level. Look for the US to embark on campaigns to encourage the EU and other potential powers (think Nigeria in Africa) to grow up, though things will never be put that baldly.

Fighting the Last War in Foreign Affairs

Sometimes I read a long article, vehemently disagree with it, but know that the huge length of the thing means that it's quite likely that I won't be able to effectively grapple with it in all its glorious idiotariansim. Such is the dilemma I face with The Sources of American Legitimacy in Foreign Affairs.

It looks, has the length, and appears in the proper outlet to be a serious look at the problem of US legitimacy but it is no such thing. It is a hatchet job that assumes facts not in evidence, promises more than it actually delivers, is completely blind to new solutions being necessary for new (for us) problems and like a little lost child takes comfort in old, worn rag dolls.

The big fact not in evidence is that the US war in Iraq is illegal. Iraq was in a very strange state of legal limbo as the Safwan Accords were signed and the UN took up the task of disarming Iraq and defanging it of its horribly poor habit of killing innocent people. The state that we were in was the same state that we have been at with N. Korea, a state of cease-fire. To declare that cease-fires, by simple virtue of a decade of longevity become binding peace is ahistorical childishness. One example should suffice to explain how such a legal position would open up cans of worms that simply should not be opened.

The 1877 Russian theft of half of Moldova from Romania during a war which Romanian forces were on the same side as Russia was later undone in the terrible chaos of the Bolshevik revolution when the people of Moldova petitioned for reunion. Romania did not conclude a final border treaty during the inter-bellic years so, when the correlation of forces was right and the only power who could intervene would not do so, Stalin simply took it back.

To argue that the inter-bellic defacto borders were equivalent to de jure borders (the interlude between violent episodes was longer than in Iraq) is to give support to Romanian irredentism to land that is the present state of Moldova and some segments of Ukraine. I have no doubt that there are plenty of other irredentist passions that would be furthered by such a ruling which is why nobody ever dares make the charge formally. It would make such a hash of things that such anti-Bush polemics are only deployed for effect, stated as conclusion without too much examination of how that would really affect the international system if applied as a matter of law and not just ad-hoc justification to restrain US action.

The US, UK, Australia and all the rest of the major Coalition powers, withdrew from the preceding cease-fire of the UN sanctioned war started in 1991 but never ended. In fact, one of the early activities of the Iraqi foreign ministry after elections will be to conclude peace treaties with countries who fought in 1991 but did not take part in the concluding round of the war. Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, all will spend a significant amount of time negotiating treaties on the very real fact of international law that Iraq is still technically at war with Egypt et al.

So if we were already at war, the hurdle for restarting combat operations becomes the much lower "did they break the cease-fire" instead of "are they an imminent threat". The precedential value becomes much lower too as the number of states with which we're still technically at war is pretty much limited to N. Korea.

At one point, the idea is mooted that the strategy of preemption (nastily labeled preventive war, a big no-no in current international law) has prevented us from working out a grand bargain with North Korea. We already had a grand bargain. It was called the 1994 framework agreement. North Korea was cheating on it before the ink was dry on the signatures.

So preemption is supposed to be preventing a new grand bargain. But what evidence do we have that this treaty will be any better than the one a decade ago? There is none, so other than a distinct shortage of canapes and diplomatic soirees that surround such grand bargain efforts, the downside seems distinctly limited on the N. Korean front. Keeping them terrified that they could be next allows the PRC, S. Korea, Russia, and Japan to play good cop to our very, very bad cop. And really, given the imbalance in military force structure, who could play bad cop if we decided to take the good cop role? We are the only potentially unrestrainable actor in the world today so we're destined for bad cop roles.

A huge gaping hole in the article is the focus on the idea that the only way to become legitimate in the international system is the methods used in the Cold War period. Once the US is out of the occupation business in Iraq, it will become more and more clear what the point of the whole exercise was and how it is a good thing. The benefits of an arab democracy that threatens all the old lies about arab incapability to live successfully in the modern world will not only vastly improve the Middle East but will also improve our position in the world as anti-american lies are revealed for what they are and the truth of US good deeds comes through to anybody with eyes.

In this alternate model, legitimacy will not be reclaimed by returning to old tactics for a new world but by demonstrating that our deeds regarding freedom match our long-standing words in support of our ideals. Those words had been empty for decades when it comes to the Middle East and it is our 60 year lack of legitimacy in supporting our words with deeds that is the big legitimacy deficit that we have to make up.

Would the suggested tactic of returning to the strategies of the past solve this 60 year legitimacy deficit? Clearly it would not because our past behavior is what created the legitimacy deficit in the first place.

Oil-for-food has been exposed as a bribery program, designed to buy support in world capitals in order to stymie any sort of multilateral application of force for a definitive solution in Iraq. We already know that UN multilateralism was doomed by the extensive bribes paid to stop such actions. The details have yet to be formed into indictments but the broad outline is already clear.

Who is naive enough to believe that Iran, Syria, Libya, even N. Korea are more honest and upright in their dealings with the international community? Who doesn't at least suspect that there are other bribes being passed to keep effective action from reaching out and deposing other rogue regimes?

Legitimacy, in the end, is not only a question of the US measuring up to the international community, but also a question of which parts of the international community do we want to measure up to? We never were legitimate in the eyes of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, or Fidel Castro. But do we want to be? This aspect of legitimacy is completely unexamined here in Foreign Affairs. Perhaps it is oversight, perhaps it is a welcome bit of shame but it certainly is important to pick your enemies as well as your friends and we have, for too long, been too unselective. The article's authors seem to wish that we continue the trend.

A France that allows itself to be bribed into supporting Saddam is a France that does not deserve our consideration regarding Iraq because, on this matter, they decided to be on the other side and we do no service to our own legitimacy or the legitimacy of the international system to go along with the farce that Saddam's coalition of the bribed deserved any consideration in their role as undercover paid mouthpieces for evil.

But even in the case of France, they are not bribed on all subjects. They defend their interests honestly in many cases and, a fair examination of the record of this administration indicates that outside Iraq, France is not being stymied at every turn when it is advancing its own interests positively and not just seeking an excuse to engage in US ankle biting. It is this Bush nuance that is unremarked by so many of the President's critics. Since nuance isn't included in the narrative they've chosen for his administration, every time nuance shows up it is underplayed or completely ignored in their accounts.

So we are on a different path, new strategies and new rules for a new strategic situation. The rap on the military is that they always want to fight the last war. This piece shows that the foreign affairs brahmins are just as stubborn and hidebound. They do what all fossilized relics of a past system do, pound away at the standard bearers of the new order in order to unjustifiably prolong their own dominance in the field. This is why you see so many distinguished elder statesman from so many foreign policy schools act against the Bush administration's foreign policy. They all are too comfortable with the old battlegrounds and are very unhappy with the prospect of accepting the fact that 9/11 did really change everything.

Sinclair and Shareholder Primacy

Professor Bainbridge wrongs the cause of shareholder primacy in his analysis of Sinclair over the showing of Stolen Honor.

Bainbridge quotes Tom Smith extensively on the matter to the effect that the Sinclair effort is a textbook case of shareholder activism gone amok. In fact, it is just the opposite.

The threat that Bill Lerach and the NYS controller issued was, essentially, to beat down Sinclair's share price via politically motivated selling and judicial action below Sinclair's normal market clearing price. This is a profit opportunity in big screaming capital letters. Yet nobody came to Sinclair's rescue to the benefit of their investors.

No similarly sized market player came and announced that they would be glad to take the money of the pensioners of the State of NY in favor of their own fund holders at bargain prices. If the pension funds of TX, OK, and GA did that, the NYS pension fund threat would evaporate and people in the pension system in NY would start complaining that their agent, the controller of NYS was not acting in their interest. In a better world of shareholder activism, significant chunks of the pension system funds would be taken from the controller's control over the affair.

The Lerach threat of lawsuit was toothless as Prof. Bainbridge himself noted except as an invitation to actual shareholders to sell stock. With a major seller appearing and preannouncing a major sale and no major buyers stepping up to the plate, Sinclair capitulated. But it is the imbalance between activist sellers and activist buyers that caused the problem, not the existence of sellers and buyers acting outside their obvious economic interests. Furthermore, the entire affair is mischaracterized as a war between agents and shareholders but it was not because the true owner of the money isn't the state of NY but rather the pension holders who have imperfect control over their own agent. It was a fight between one form of agent (corporate directors) and another (fund management directors).

Shareholder activism is imperfectly done in the US today and there is a political imbalance among activists that is of concern. That imbalance is at least partially caused by Prof. Bainbridge and others like him who, I suspect, get a much more favorable hearing on the right than on the left.

No matter how much people tut tut over the crass shareholders exercising their rights to buy and sell as they please, some are going to do it on non-economic grounds. It would improve things if we institutionalize the practice and have activists on all sides in that fight. Otherwise we are going to get repeat after repeat of this sort of browbeating from the left.

Bush Chargeable Offense

David Adesnik over at Oxblog has discovered that the Republican Presidential ticket is up on religous charges. President Bush and VP Cheney, being Methodists, are subject to a religious discipline that I'm much less familiar with than the Catholic Church's procedure that's been started (3rd party assertion of heresy in the Archdiocese of Boston) on John Kerry. Nonetheless, it appears that a petition charging both halves of the Republican ticket is circulating inside the UMC (though not very far in it as Rev. Sensing was unaware of the beast until I wrote a note to him a few hours ago and you'd think they'd try to circulate widely amongst their clergy on this sort of move).

As a Catholic, I'm reluctant to comment definitively on the subject. Earlier in the campaign some have opined that Kerry's heresy problems wouldn't jump over to the three Methodists in the race (both Republicans and VP candidate Edwards are Methodists).

Green also noted fundamental differences between Protestants and Catholics.

"Policy positions of Methodists are just the opinions of Methodist leaders and in no sense binding on individual Methodists," said Green, who also works as a political scientist at the University of Akron in Ohio. "In contrast, the policy positions of the Catholic hierarchy are not just their opinions, but the official position of the church and binding on all Catholics."

While a lot of Methodists may not agree with Bush, Green said -- adding that many also do -- Methodists would "never argue that he is violating (official) teaching."

It is probably a bit of both. Some people would very much like to have
political issues be binding on parishioners--but of course, this cuts
both ways, since the UMC's positions are not strictly liberal or
conservative. Surely there is also a political motive: to embarrass Bush
and Cheney in the same way that Kerry has been embarrassed by the heresy
trial.

As for the internal discipline trial, I have a strong hope that I can lure Rev. Sensing out of his retreat for a short professional comment so that somebody who knows what he's talking about can quickly inform the wider blogosphere about the facts. Here are some of my own questions.

While President Bush sets policy, the vice presidency is a post which gives its holder really only two choices, support the policy of the President (implicitly or explicitly) or resign. This is pretty much the case for the rest of the executive branch as well. Assuming this is not just a political hit piece, what does this say about UMC faithful participating in the civil service or in the non-civil service executive? How far away from direct cooperation do you have to be before you would not be committing a "chargeable offense"?

The letter of complaint states that the US has violated international law in its war in Iraq. The US has not been found guilty of any such crime, nor is it likely to be found guilty as the only competent body to declare such a thing is the UN Security Council. What sorts of criminal codes are recognized by the UMC that violating them constitutes a chargeable offense? How are such things decided?

Some of the statements in the complaint seem, to these eyes, factually false. Is false accusation itself a chargeable offense? How does the UMC decide the facts, ie which side is factually accurate in cases where public policy is under contention and the facts are not agreed to?

In the middle of writing this, I found that Rev. Sensing had responded. Here is the entirety of his response:

The worst sort of political hackery, and the two authors are manifesting their severe ignorance to boot. I hardly know where to begin. One, it is theoretically possible to charge a layperson with violations of the BOD, but it is impossible to enforce a conviction. Unlike the RC, there is no priestly or pastoral discipline that can be enforced on a layperson. There is no such thing as excommunication, no such thing as penance, etc.

There is no provision at all that I am aware of that compels a UMC layperson even to respond to such things, much less submit to them (or even notice them). Besides, they can always simply resign from membership, which makes the whole thing moot.

This is a fantasy ideology exercise.

Wish I could write more, but have no time today. Thanks for the link.

10.3

I recently wrote that I broke down and ordered OS X 10.3. Well, it finally arrived and I installed it today. First impressions:

1. It's tightened up the UI quite well, making a lot of small improvements that individually don't count for much but collectively are worth $40.
2. The improvements in mail are real and feel very nice. Thread identification is done very well (it highlights related subject lines when you click on an email). Upgrading was seamless, it just asked if I wanted to upgrade and a few seconds later was done with all the back end work. It's a $20 value.
3. Safari has the aforementioned general tightening up and miscellaneous improvements to its credit. There might be more but I'll give it a value of $10
4. UI scripting takes a great leap forward in this version. The ability to script any program that uses native widgets is a huge step forward here. In 10.4 it's going to be opened up to those without programming talent but I've got a little bit of that so I get to use it now. A $60 value for the programming savvy
5. X11 is now out of beta and comes as an optional install. For those who know the joys of Fink, this isn't that big a deal but taking all the work out of installing X Windows certainly is nice. I'll call it a $30 value
6. XCode is a major improvement. Being able to automatically compile over multiple machines is great. $75

I'd go on, but the major point is already demonstrated, it was definitely worth the money.

Intra-Arab Imperialism

... or the tale of the flag.

Debka, as I've noted before, has a spotty reputation for reliability but when their primary facts are easily checkable, they put out some very good stuff like this. The flag is there, there's no really good explanation for it but Debka's, and you'd never have seen such an item in your regular reading unless you're already in the ME or you get it indirectly from Debka like those reading this article. Two Gap states in a pissing match, but it could roil the oil markets if Jordan's territorial aims get more than symbolic.

In this corner I give you the Hashemite dynasty, contender in the upcoming Saudi wars of succession. Now who are the other contenders?

Starting A Religious War

Whatever John Kerry hoped to do to strengthen the Democrat Party's "God Squad", he's apparently done more to piss them off, taking positions that are sure to offend both serious Catholics as well as Protestants who know their theology and their history. The remarkable achievement that we have in keeping sectarian violence out of the US is based, at least in part, on political leaders who are either knowledgeable enough to successfully manage to address God without ticking anybody off, or knowing their own ignorance well enough that they don't try and stay out of the theological debates. Kerry does neither and that's a threat to social peace that nobody needs.

Catholic Wars

Over at Mirror of Justice the abortion vote gauntlet has been thrown down by Michael Perry. His challenge:

If you disagree with me--if you think that, Father Langan and Ms. Steinfels to the contrary notwithstanding, a faithful Catholic cannot conscientiously vote for Kerry, and, moreover, that there is no room for a reasonable difference of judgment about whether a faithful Catholic can conscientiously vote for Kerry--then please tell me and the other readers of this blog precisely where, in your view, Father Langan's and/or Ms. Steinfels' arguments are not merely arguments that you reject, but unreasonable arguments that any faithful Catholic must, in good conscience, reject.

Diversity for diversity's sake is not a Catholic value, yet Ms Steinfels makes it seem like one. There should be no pro-Satan division in the Catholic electorate, were he on the ballot. Once you admit that there are limits to diversity of admissible Catholic opinion in public life, the question is where you draw the line, where does realistic compromise shade into material cooperation with evil in the voting choices of a Catholic?

The yearly abortion death toll (that is controlled by US politics) of 1.3 million american unborn, an unknown number of foreign unborn (due to US executive orders generally passed in Democrat administrations), and a prospective further increase in the death tolls via destructive embryonic stem cell research is not Ms. Steinfels most important issue, the WOT is. In fact the killing of the unborn which will top 5 million during the next president's term absent a pro-life change in the law and culture is down in the asterisks, not on her numbered list. I actually do not protest against this ordering of priorities. Her important issues do not have to be my important issues for her to be a good Catholic though I find her priorities to be disturbing and would urge her to rethink them as she's focusing on issues where fewer lives are at stake and minimizing attention to the big issue of life.

When you start to ignore reality, minimize the influence the President can have on abortion in order to excuse the grave error your chosen candidate expresses on the subject, that's where things get a bit more serious.

Catholics will never convince their fellow citizens that fertilized eggs are protectible human life

About Kerry, I have come to the following conclusions: He will be no worse than Bush

One segment is the pro-infanticide academic movement led by Peter Singer from his bioethics chair at Princeton University. When Sen. Kerry talks about medical experimentation following the highest ethical standards, you can be sure that Peter Singer will get a voice on such bioethical councils in a Kerry administration. Singer has come out in favor of human infanticide up to the 6 month after birth on the grounds that a human child is less aware than a dog that can be put to death without legal consequence.

The second worrisome segment is the pro-human experimentation movement which advocates the end of animal testing and replacing that testing with human volunteers, irreversible coma patients, and prisoners. The efficiency and efficacy arguments in favor of such experiments are actually quite good. We've never been able to figure out how to replicate some of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese human experimentation in animal models and some have broken the old WW II boycott on that data in order to get some good of it (this would be quite similar to the Bush policy on stem cell lines, actually).

Presidents set tones, they use their bully pulpit, and they pass executive orders in their daily work to move the culture along. Their impact on the judiciary can be strong or not depending on whether they have litmus tests. A Kerry presidency will not nominate any orthodox Catholic believers to the federal bench. That is an astounding litmus test which has the effect of being anti-catholic bigotry. The Republican tactic has been to nominate strict constructionists which tend to be, but are not always, pro-life. This increases the percentage of pro-life justices while avoiding the political version of a nuclear confrontation over every circuit court nominee.

In short, Ms Steinfels would like abortion to go away so she can get on with supporting her candidate who will provide what she thinks are good things as he stacks the body parts high on the conscience of our nation. It is mostly a sin of omission, of being unable to look at the reality of Kerry's life issues stands for fear of being forced to take a stand against him. The refusal to examine your conscience, to hide away the sinful consequences of your actions is something that no Catholic can endorse. We must all eventually face our internal demons and defeat them to hope to gain Paradise.

Now, on to Fr. Langan's essay (.doc format). Here, the problems are somewhat different.

While Fr. Langan is quite correct that the philosophical reasons against abortion are necessarily emphasized in a pluralistic society's debate on abortion while theological motivations take a comparative back seat position compared to a state where Catholicism is the official religion, this bind both sides of the debate equally. This does not mean that the moral authority of the Pope and the bishops cannot profitably be deployed even in a pluralistic society. This is especially true when they are moral giants, not pygmies in pointy hats.

But even here there is a problem. If we must look over our shoulders at what will the atheists, the Baptists, the Jews, the Hindus think before we exercise internal discipline, we might as well throw away the canons and just hire pollsters, a great many pollsters. As Catholics, we cannot be ashamed of who we are and succeed in our mission. Internal to our own faith we must maintain our right to discipline our own believers in accordance with our own rules.

Fr. Langan's second observation is also flawed, but it is a flaw that is like many of Ms. Steinfels errors, within the broad bounds of acceptable Catholic discourse. Abortion is not a monolithic subject as any even moderately careful observer can readily see. While first trimester abortion legislation is impossible today, partial birth abortion clearly was not. In fact, the measure was and remains quite popular. It is this salami slicing approach to the culture of life that is likely to get us to the desirable end state of a fully implemented culture of life with broad support for it throughout society. Again, this is tactics, only worrisome if it becomes part of a larger mosaic of friendly fire, undercutting pro-life effectiveness.

Fr. Langan's third and fourth observations start to get on thinner ice. The theological objection to abortion is that it is the taking of innocent human life. The philosophical objection to abortion is that it is the taking of innocent right's bearing human life. Once you recognize that abortion kills a rights bearing human being, due process, balancing tests, and the whole machinery of equal justice under law swings into play and the vast majority of convenience abortions will fail the balancing test, saving the lives of those unborn children. Failing to apply his own point one to points three and four could just be poor argumentation and not "throwing the fight" so let's move on but keep an eye out to see if there's a further pattern.

Fr. Langan's Fifth point has such thin ice that he is in peril of falling through the cracks. The idea that push back, even violent push back, can justify the denial of individual rights to the most helpless among us is astounding. The concept reminds me of a story I once heard regarding the British fight against suttee. Upon coming to a village about to toss a wife upon the funeral pyre of her husband, the visiting englishmen stopped the proceedings. The local headman protested saying that the englishman needed to respect their local customs to burn brides. The englishman responded that he would do so as long as the village respected his local custom of hanging wife burners. Civilization cannot long endure where the application of its rules is conditioned on there being no strong words against its restrictions. Catholicism has never been civilization hostile.

Fr. Langan's Sixth and Seventh points are true but only in a limited sense. You do not finish a mountain climb by running downhill. As a good Catholic that is open to diverse methods and tactics one should keep an open mind. But there is a fatal error of omission here. One should not open one's mind so far that one's brain falls out. To accommodate diversity while maintaining fidelity to God's word, there must be some bright lines that cannot be crossed and remain in the pro-life camp. By speaking only of the need for flexibility without the corresponding need for backbone, Fr. Langan mis-frames the situation in a way that is very friendly for pro-choice politicians to pretend to pro-life virtues.

When compromises are demanded, there must be some sort of realistic pathway to get from the compromise position to the end goal. I have yet to see such a thing on the subject of federal funding for abortion, promoting abortion abroad, promoting coercive family planning, all of which Bush is good on and all of which Kerry is weak on.

Fr. Langan reverses himself in his Eighth point. Where is the flexibility to consider single issue voting as a possible strategy among the menu of strategies? Or is flexibility, not true flexibility, but merely code talk for reducing the prominence of abortion in Catholic voters' electoral calculations? Frankly, I think it would do the US political class a world of good if, for one election, in a predefined jurisdiction, Catholics voted single issue on abortion just to fire a shot across the bow so that we are taken seriously.

Fr. Langan and I find ourselves in agreement in the need to evenhandedly apply our efforts across parties in furthering the pro-life agenda. Each party should be cut an equivalent amount of slack. And thus we dispose of his Ninth point.

Fr. Langan is back to his misleading ways in his Tenth point as he assembles the straw man accusation of partisan politics and gleefully wacks it into submission. It's a pity that he misunderstands (or is that misstates?) the relationship between political activity and the internal discipline surrounding the administration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The political benefit accrues to the politician who can say, subtly or blatantly as circumstances require, "I'm one of you, support one of your own" and it is this message that drags the Eucharist into politics, not any discipline for wayward politicians. The political hogs have long fed at the trough of false legitimacy and now that their stream of free gravitas is being threatened with a shutoff they are squealing like stuck pigs.

Fr. Langan's penultimate point Eleven is simply removed from reality. Instead of persuasion and authority being in opposition to each other, the more effective persuasive efforts become, the more likely authority's statements of prohibition will be more listened to. One shortcuts the other. Properly done they shouldn't fight each other. First lay out the rule, then lay out a section of the long persuasive argument to lead someone to life. Once you've persuaded someone past partial birth abortion, past abortion as birth control, past abortion as avoiding inconvenience, the repeated lesson that the incomprehensible, short, authoritative prohibition worked well on all these cases, perhaps we don't have to go through the other dozen cases. The false choice that you either persuade or you prohibit creates a mental construct that disallows any synergy between the two and diminishes the effectiveness of both tactics.

Fr. Langan's final point seems to take back all of the flexibility he promised in points Six and Seven. It is black or white, persuasion or authority. Law, or individual conscience. The truth is that in a federal system with easy transport, authority will likely impose legal restrictions in some jurisdictions at the fall of Roe v Wade and persuasion will wither abortion rates in other jurisdictions. In both cases, the Church would do well to work on the weaker part of the complementary strategies.

Finally, I hope that it is clear that I find neither of these Catholics to have written essays entirely without merit. But that does not mean that they are entirely right, nor that there are no elements that are not just wrongly argued but unacceptably far afield. When you have constructed a regime where a little meaningles, private lip service allows the most pro-choice politicians to claim that they are good Catholics (with the attendant bonanza of votes attached) as they work mightily to thwart meaningful improvement in abortion legislation and even promote measures to make things worse, you've materially cooperated with the evil that they do.

Too Cute by Half II

M & R Homiller rightly noted that we had corresponded on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment earlier this year (early March, in fact) and I disparaged the idea in Too Cute by Half I. I had some vague memory of the incident but regret not crediting him immediately in my recent post on the subject. Mr Homiller suggests that I've changed my position. I really haven't. The problem was that back in March, such a petition would have been properly viewed as an aggressive attempt to smear John Kerry, reduce his electoral chances, and be viewed as a dirty trick. It would just have been one more bit of election year rancor. With the same questions being raised in a much more prominent forum, it's likely not to go away and the problem must be defanged with the maximum amount of discretion possible.

A lame duck session, a solution discreetly proposed on the suspensions calendar, something hidden away where it will cause the minimum possible fuss yet protect against further distractions is best. Doing the same thing prior to the conventions, prior to the fall campaign, prior to the vote of the people, that is just not the same thing and I continue to oppose such maneuvers.

In the end, the effort to keep the lid on might fail, but that does not mean that we should not try. The danger of blackmail demands this prudence.

Best Actor Putdown of the Day (Outside Team America)

mASS BACKWARDS contributes to the anti-pretentious actor comedic genre.

Honest Science

Can't sleep, so what to do? Blog! I recently wrote about the collapse of the hockey stick, how a central bit of evidence to support global warming has gone belly up, exposed as mathematically fraudulent. Here's another good article, this time by Crumbtrail that outlines the scientific concerns from honest global warming advocates who want to prove their theories but are sane enough to recognize that bad science does them no favors. It rejects science that is agenda driven from any direction, calling on scientists to leave the spin and the advocacy to the politicians.

Hear, hear.

Is Kerry Disqualified?

The US Constitution's 14th amendment has a section disqualifying those who turn on the US:

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

Cramer's thoughts are derivative of Prof. Volokhs so I'll concentrate there. Where I disagree with the good professor is that he believes that Lt. Kerry's Paris trip was not that significant and it's the case that his domestic criticisms are what really matter:

Kerry, the argument goes, gave "aid or comfort" to the North Vietnamese by opposing the war, and by apparently meeting with a North Vietnamese peace delegation in Paris in 1971. One or both of these things (probably the former much more than the latter) may have emboldened our enemies and sapped our soldiers' morale, thus giving the enemy aid or comfort.

If John Kerry wins the election (and I pray he does not), this will come up in a growing crescendo over his four years in office. It won't be healthy for Kerry's term in office, for either party, for the country itself, but that doesn't mean that it won't come up and it doesn't mean that the people raising the issue won't have the law on their side. Too little is publicly known about Kerry's activities in Paris to be sure. And if French Intelligence recorded the conversation or even does a very good fake, this is something that they could use to extract concessions out of Kerry to avoid impeachment.

There really is only one cure. For the good of the nation, one order of business in a 2004 lame duck session (the session is already scheduled, I believe) would need to be for Sen. Frist and for Rep Hastert to introduce a bill conditionally removing any potential disability under the 14th Amendment for Kerry's 70s activism on Vietnam. It would set a tone of reconciliation while closing a potential opening for international blackmail and tinfoil hattery.

Catholic Jurisprudence v Catholic Law

Michael Williams pronounces the recent Kerry heresy trial developments a low down form of Vatican Double-Talk. He's wrong in this but it's not surprising as the understanding of how, exactly the Church is organized. It's a topic that's ably covered by a recent book, All the Pope's Men, a tome that, among many other public services, notes that left, right, or center, americans simply don't understand the Vatican at least as much as the Vatican doesn't truly understand America and the mutual incomprehension leads to an awful lot of unnecessary error.

The essence of the problem as I see it is that the letter writer seems to be claiming that in US terms he was issuing a parliamentarian's advisory opinion but it was received both as that and also as a judicial document that was on the express route to the Pope's personal desk who is head of legislature, executive, and judiciary in the Catholic world.

Now legislative work deals with general rules. Judicial work deals with individuals. It is legitimate to keep such things separate and when you are writing as a judge to think, act, and write differently than you would as a legislator or executive even without changing your core beliefs one iota. In fact, the US separates these powers out to ensure that in the normal course of business these things never get mixed.

The Catholic Church does not have a separation of powers doctrine. The organ which delegated the writing of this letter does the religious version of legislative work and judicial work. In such a structure, it's not double-talk to insist on knowing which hat you're supposed to be wearing at the moment. For an american unused to the possibility that one person can be have such multiple roles, it is an easy error to either not specify which role is demanded or not insist enough on the point that legitimate confusion results.

In this case, I think that Marc Balestrieri's real mistake was that he thought that it was possible for a letter in such a case to do double duty, to be both judicial and legislative document, fit for trial, and fit for a dissertation. And in a US context, he wouldn't be wrong. A parliamentarian's statement can be submitted at trial to buttress the prosecution. But if the parliamentarian's current job list includes being part of the appeal structure for that very case, it would be highly improper for him to comment. That's why we don't do such things in the US and why we so often piss off the Vatican when we think that they are organized as we are organized.

The fundamental problem is that there is no remedy for a Vatican version of Dredd Scott. The horrible logic of infallibility means that when something is pronounced on infallibly, you can never, ever take it back. To run such an ancient institution infallibly (in the Vatican sense which, again, americans most often don't get) would take a miracle. And that, I guess, is the entire point of the thing. It does take a miracle. Along the way it takes a lot of careful parsing and work to prepare the road for those miracles to continue.

Internal/External Polling

Why do candidates have internal polls? Why don't they trust the public polls? If candidate sponsored internal polls are providing campaigns with better information, why aren't public pollsters catching up and asking the same questions? It's not like they don't know what questions are being asked. Media organizations are filled with former campaign people. There is a big revolving door effect between the two types of institutions.

So what do the candidates know that the public does not from these polls and what would it take for the public to erase the information gap?

War Polling Implications

Putting aside the presidential race for a moment a new poll has huge implications on the War On Terror (WOT).

Where the poll got interesting was on the war. 69% said the war on terror was a real war as opposed to a figurative war. The Republicans were most likely to feel that way at 87% and the Democrats least likely to feel that way at 56%. Independents were at 65%. Interestingly, this quesiton really captures the 9/11 mentality, I think. When asked if the war was being waged too aggressively, not aggressively enough, or just right, surprisingly 32% said not aggressively enough with 35% saying just right. Only 25% thought it was being waged too aggressively. When asked which candidate would "more aggressively fight the war on terrorism," 61% said George Bush and only 25% said John Kerry.

The question in the poll that stood out was "do you think it is more important to win the war in Iraq or end the war in Iraq?" 46% said win and 46% said end. Republicans at 69% said win and only 23% of Democrats said win. Among Independents, 46% said win and 45% said end.

What I truly wish would be that this section of the poll gets expanded out and run internationally. The expansion would ideally detail both the consequences of WOT being a real war and answer the question of who started and who can stop this war.

Did the WOT start when George W Bush proclaimed it or did prior Al Queda attacks start it? If a new president stops fighting the WOT as a war and takes a law enforcement approach, does that mean that the war is over or do underlying facts have to change in our enemies before the war can be over? What has to happen, who has to give up for the war to end? And, most provocatively, do the people know and understand our enemies' war aims, what we would have to do for them to declare victory?

I suspect that if the poll were taken among the political elite and among the general population, a huge, yawning chasm would appear in their responses. In this bifurcated nation between the people and the powerful, it would be President Bush on the side of the people, with the powerful's champion being Senator Kerry.

Revising Poverty Statistics

There seems to be a new understanding that poverty is becoming disproportionately a problem of the recently arrived. The large amounts of new immigrants coming to the US are driving down income statistics and masking real improvement among those who have been awhile.

Why not add a simple question to the income stats asking how long you've been in the country? It would allow researchers to track how incomes improve as immigrants integrate into the US economy. It would allow progress in resident incomes to show up even if an influx of poor immigrants swamps the overall income statistics. After all, if you're investing in new entrants who will get jobs and rapidly climb the economic ladder, their initial income statistic effect should not weigh as heavily as the poverty of a permanent underclass that has little mobility, year to year.

Raising Your Own Retirement Age

Brad Delong is worried that Congress will inevitably allow people to borrow from their retirement accounts, some of that money will never be paid back, and the taxpayers will be back on the hook, having given tax preferences for the money once and still having to pay for that person's retirement again. The solution is simple, just back load some penalties. If you don't pay back your retirement account loans, add some years to the individual's retirement age. People will still take out loans but withholding government subsidized old age goodies saves the taxpayers money and provides a punishment that fits the crime, added work responsibilities to compensate for financial irresponsibility in retirement accounts. You could even change the enforceability of private retirement goodies in the courts, shifting "senior citizen discounts" and private pension payouts out by the requisite number of years. In short, the DeLong objection could be met in the normal legislative process in a way that is consistent with social justice.

HT: Marginal Revolutions.

Pessimist Propaganda on Hydrogen

Nature has picked up a paper(pdf) by the Oswald brothers published in the journal Accountancy.

I can't recall the blog I first read describing the paper but it looked fishy enough to write and protest that the numbers weren't right. Jim Oswald did respond and his response made it very clear that whatever they were talking about, they were not talking about the hydrogen economy as most people conceive of it.

1. The calculations are for hydrogen burned in internal combustion engines (ICE), not hydrogen fuel cells. Virtually everybody views the hydrogen economy as a fuel cell economy with hydrogen run through the cells to directly create electricity, not burnt in cylinders that drive pistons, that turn a wheel or drive a generator.

2. Like all other ICE type motors, hydrogen ICE are limited in efficiency as they are Carnot heat engines. At realistic temperatures, fuel cells can have 3x the efficiency of ICE. This means that even with hydrocarbon created hydrogen, you lower pollution with hydrogen as everybody except the Oswalds in this scenario look at it.

3. The Oswalds deliberately and artificially narrowed the available sources of hydrogen to nonpolluting sources that are commercially viable today with no technological progress allowed for, nor any thought to how rising petroleum costs would make other sources of hydrogen become viable as energy prices rose.

4. Energy is lost in transportation with the shorter you go, the less you lose. Hydrogen is likely, on average (and certainly for the US & UK) to be produced closer to home than our current oil supplies. This effect is unaccounted for.

When all the constraints and fudges are made explicit and clear, the Oswalds' paper is a somewhat useful teaching tool to drive home the point that a totally clean hydrogen economy is going to be hard work. But that's not how Nature interpreted it and it's not how most people will read it who know nothing but the buzzwords of a "hydrogen economy". While the Oswalds are honest enough to freely admit their constraints when asked, they're not doing their duty to the truth in bludgeoning even science journalists to get the story right about the narrowness of their actual claims.

Wikipedia Citations

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, two items, one by Eugene Volokh and the other by Orin Kerr note the problems of citing Wikipedia, based on accuracy issues for the purpose of court briefs. Another problem is Wikipedia's malleability. One has to be careful to not only cite the correct URL but also some sort of time stamp or version stamp as an entry that supports you when you looked it up, can make the opposite point four hours later.

Another issue that is not raised by the two legal scholars in their objections for court usage is that there is no bar to simply editing a particular article to make it say what you want just prior to citing it. Without some sort of longevity measure on the data in a Wikipedia entry, Wikipedia's usefulness in any sort of judicial proceeding is dubious.

But this does not mean that the collaborative encyclopedia model is beyond saving, just that the current technology platform that Wikipedia is running on lacks at least two features that would meaningfully extend its usefulness to the courtroom.

Both articles had me thinking one thing though. Did either of them fix the Wikipedia errors they spotted? Why or why not?

Heresy Trials II

A small update by way of Catholic Light on John Kerry's heresy trial. The Catholic Church obviously doesn't want to inject itself into the US presidential campaign in this fashion but the unofficial response received strongly strengthens the orthodox Catholic hand in this long term confrontation between themselves and pro-choice Catholics. In short:

If a Catholic publicly and obstinately supports the civil right to abortion, knowing that the Church teaches officially against that legislation, he or she commits that heresy envisioned by Can. 751 of the Code.

The penalty for knowingly doing this is what Roman Rite Catholics call automatic excommunication.

Now I'm from a different corner of the Catholic Church. It actually has alternate canons and (at least according to my own bishop) lacks the concept of automatic excommunication. A bishop has to go and wrestle with a sinner and his conscience before you get to the point of excommunication. The idea of excommunicating yourself as a sort of paperwork saving device is one of those things that make me glad I'm a Romanian Rite Catholic where if my bishop thinks I need to be knocked on my butt for being a bonehead, he's quite capable and willing to do the deed himself (and, in the past, has though not on this serious a scale).

Sometime in the next decade, what is unofficial today is very likely to turn official and a good 5%-15% of the voting population is going swing with it. Even at the low end, that's going to be a huge change in voting patterns that will just devastate the Democrat party while inflicting no small amount of damage on pro-choice Republicans as well.

Moral Monsters

John Kerry's moral obtuseness knows no bounds. Kerry's recent radio address states that "we’re not doing everything we can to help Americans realize this dream" of medical experiments leading to cures for a variety of conditions. Of course we aren't and it's a very good thing we are not.

One of the great truths of medical experimentation is that experimenting directly yields better and faster results than experimenting indirectly. If you wish to cure a canine disease, experimenting on rats may yield a cure, but it would be a quicker and surer road to a cure to run direct experiments on dogs themselves.

This truth remains valid when it comes to finding cures for humans. The closer we come to human experimentation, the more rapid our progress would be. But if we get too close, we become moral monsters. It is not a theoretical problem, but one faced by many serious researchers both in current experiments on embryonic stem cells and past experiments dating back to WW II. The Nazis and the Imperial Japanese ran direct human experiments in concentration camps in Europe and Manchuria.

Like all experimentation, some of the data was nonsense, but some of it was quite good. All of it was monstrous. Toss a subject into freezing water, how quickly does he die? Who dies faster, women or men? If you toss a group in and they huddle for warmth, how does that affect the death pattern? I won't even get into the chemwar experiments in Manchuria as those were mostly about improving weapons effectiveness but the Nazi hypothermia experiments yielded such good data that they have never been surpassed. They cannot be surpassed because we recognize that throwing people into freezing cold water to kill them is too direct an experiment and there is no other way to gain that kind of exact data.

John Kerry claims to be a good Catholic. He claims that he believes that life begins at conception. He states that he will pass policies and orders and promote legislation to kill what he himself believes is human life in direct human experimentation, and worse, destructive human harvesting in a production line of death. He believes that somehow he can continue to uphold "the highest ethical standards" while taking human life.

What is worse is that in moving the line into what he himself believes is direct human experimentation, he gives us no moral guide to distinguish ourselves from the nazi and imperial japanese human experimentation. At the very least, he owes the country an explanation of how he will go to sleep at night knowing that according to his own personal moral code, he is sanctioning and financially supporting what we so strongly condemned at the post WW II Nuremberg trials.

What makes destructive tissue harvesting from a fetus any better than destructive tissue harvesting from a coma patient? You can sort out a coherent moral and ethical system from George Bush's record. You might not agree with it, but you know what it is. He stands with those who would use the nazi hypothermia data, not with those who would accept excess hypothermia deaths and maintain a boycott of the data. But he's against tossing more people into freezing water on the government's dime. In stem cell terms, he won't fund more killing but if you want to do it on your own, that's OK by him.

For John Kerry, there is no stated line in the sand, no defensible position where you know that political expediency will not put you or a loved one under the knife in future. Even for those who deny the humanity of the fetus, this lack of a clearly stated limit is a scary thing for the serious thinkers amongst his supporters. But there seem to be all too few serious thinkers, just an awful lot of moral monsters in a hurry for a cure and not much caring how we get one.

HT: Balloon Juice

DenBeste Can't Give Up Blogging

For those who don't regularly check in to his site anymore, he's got a special item over at the USS Clueless that is positively brief, for him. It's very counterintuitive to think that Gallup's famously optimistic Bush September polling results were actually a plot to set up Kerry for an October comeback story line that would have Kerry cresting on election day and taking the presidency.

As always, a provocative item.

Do Events Harden or Soften Presidents?

Dr. Barnett's making a pretty good bit of advocacy for Kerry here. I'm on the other side of the fence, finding it impossible to conclude anything other than disaster for a Kerry presidency, both in foreign and domestic affairs. But that is for posts past and future. This post will verticalize a bit of Barnettian sprawl. Horizontal thinkers like Dr. Barnett run through ideas and concepts in such a machine gun fashion that you can examine one of their posts in depth and tease out a dozen in depth threads. This is the process I'm dubbing verticalization, This bit of verticalization is about the following paragraph:

Events tend to harden presidents, not soften them. Bush is about as hard as he can get with his certitude and his baggage, as are the major players in his administration. It's time to reset the political rule set known as party control of the Executive Branch.

1. Carter got a bit harder toward the end of his first term as events shook him out of his earlier convictions, particularly the invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis in Iran.
2. Reagan, I would say, got softer in his second term than he was in his first. He saw his uncompromising politics yielding results and he made some generous offers on the way to burying the Soviet bloc in order to avoid creating another Versailles type treaty. Reagan also got softer on tax policy, not aggressively defending his earlier supply side ideals
3. Bush 41, started soft and got softer and regretted it. He abandoned his line in the sand tax pledge. He's a wash on foreign policy, leaving things much as he found them in terms of his policy hardness.
4. Clinton was a complicated character. In some ways you can make the case that he hardened over time, especially with Yugoslavia but you can make a countervailing case that he softened after the disaster in Mogadishu that left us with our tail between our legs, running from muslim gangs.

While this is a pretty small sample size, the trend line seems to be that Republicans soften over time and I would expect Bush 43 to maintain that pattern. If the hardened by events pattern holds anywhere, it would be for Democrats. The unyielding nature of Reagan I led to our partners giving in to him once he got his second term. They couldn't afford to wait an american president out for another four years. There is no reason that I can see for that dynamic to apply any less to the current generation of "american cowboy president" than it did to our last one.

Letter to the Paper XXXII

Kofi Annan proves once again that he's strictly amateur hour. With a plethora of investigations flying, Annan has an institutional obligation to the UN to make sure that no matter what happens, the UN is not destroyed by the facts as they come out. He fails miserably by siding with France and Russia ahead of the true facts being discovered and does his very best to undercut the believability of any UN investigators clearing anybody of wrongdoing. What follows was the comment I left on the link thread.

This is one more piece of evidence that Kofi is simply not professional. There are investigations flying all over the place and ahead of the full facts coming out, Kofi Annan is already putting his own reputation and the reputation of the office he holds on the line to assert something that has not been proven. I would feel disappointed that a town mayor would have so little sense to prejudice ongoing investigations, some of which are undertaken by people he's signing checks for. For the Secretary General of the UN to do so is just disgusting.

For the record, here's what the Sec. General should have said. "These are serious charges. I personally know many of the personalities who are accused and my observation has been that they are not capable of such actions. That being said, it is crucial that independent investigations proceed to the conclusions that the facts lead them to. The guilty must be punished, the innocent must be exonerated, justice must be done no matter who it embarrasses, even if it embarrasses me."

Iraq Insurance Market

According to Iraq The Model, for the past 10 years prior to the invasion there was no life or theft insurance available. You couldn't get your car insured, nothing. Premium income just wasn't enough so the state owned insurance company just stopped insuring things and shut down. Well, now in the "unstable", "dangerous", "chaotic" Iraq, insurance policies are once again being issued and honored.

Iran Alternatives

Andrew Sullivan asserts that regarding a nuclear Iran "Our options are limited. We can't invade another country; surgical bombing will almost certainly miss its target; so we are left with sanctions and/or incentives." He's got most of the op