A strange loop.

« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 »

December 24, 2004

"Moderation"

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

\"\;

If you have the least bit of interest in political labels and their consequences, you should read this post by Francis Porretto. Seriously.

Comments

Post a comment

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember info?

Posted by jeff at 12:00 AM | TrackBack

The Problem of Faction

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

\"\;

Michael Totten points to one bad Republican example, and Mark Lindsay points to another. These are a great illustration of why politics produces strange bedfellows.

The Republicans basically kicked the most egregious religious nutters to the sidelines during the 1990s, which is the only reason they were able to gain such broad support among the electorate. Similarly, the Democrats now need to kick the MoveOn/Michael Moore anti-US wing of the party off to the side if they are going to come back to broader-based support. But even so, you can't kick those wings of the parties completely out, because you need their votes. So Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter sit together at the Democrat Convention, and President Bush meets with people who want to ban books they don't like.

But where does this arise? Consider this contrived example: you have an electorate of 11 people, and there are 10 issues on which they each have political opinions. These opinions are either 'yes' or 'no', where 'yes' indicates that they favor one opinion on that issue, 'no' indicates they disfavor that same opinion. This system has no compromisers, which complicate things but do not change the essence of the analysis. (For example, if the issue is "abortion should be legal up to the time of birth for any reason whatsoever", yes would agree, no would be the antithesis (abortion should never be legal) and eh would favor some kind of conditions under which abortion should be legal and others where it should not. We don't allow 'eh'.) Here's a chart of opinions on issues for this 11-person electorate:

	issue 1	issue 2	issue 3	issue 4	issue 5	issue 6	issue 7	issue 8	issue 9	issue 10
person 1	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
person 2	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
person 3	no	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
person 4	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
person 5	no	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
person 6	no	no	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
person 7	no	no	no	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes	yes
person 8	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	yes	yes	yes
person 9	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	yes	yes
person 10	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	yes	yes
person 11	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	no	no

Let's start with simple politics. Person 4 and person 8 start political parties based around their views. In order to get their views enacted into law or policy, they have to win elections. So how do they form their parties?

For person 4, person 3 and person 5 are natural allies, differing on only one issue. And if person 4's issues of primary interest are on the right, then the disagreements are on less important issues at that. Person 1 and person 2 are somewhat more extreme, but their votes could probably be counted on. They'd have to be thrown the occasional distasteful bone, but they would otherwise be useful. Since person 4 is further to the left than they are, person 4 would be the lesser of two evils for person 1 and person 2. Person 4 would want to get person 6's or person 7's vote at least, then, in order to win, but those people will be somewhat suspicious of person 4's views, which are further to the right than theirs.

For person 8, there is the mirror image problem, just reversing left and right and altering the people in support or opposition to them on various issues. So we get two parties, the Top Party of person 1 to person 5, and the Bottom Party of person 7 to person 11. In the center is person 6, and persons 5 and 7 will sometimes shift away from their party depending on circumstances.

But how you hold together these parties depends upon the issues, too. If the populace can be largely convinced that issues to the right are more important, and if they only voted on their issues, the Top Party would win handily and consistently. The reverse holds for the Bottom Party with issues on the left. If the big issue is issue 3, Bottom would win with 8 of 11 votes. If the big issue is issue 8, Top would win with 8 of 11 votes. Each party will therefore endeavor to make their issues be perceived as the most important issues on which to vote.

But you can't just take that at face value, because once the parties form, there is a party loyalty issue as well. For example, person 7 doesn't agree with person 8 on issue 7, but they feel that issue 6 is very important to them. As such, they cannot agree with Top party, who are universally opposite person 7's stance on that issue. So they have to accept disagreement with the rest of their party on issue 7 to get their way on issue 6. And this happens across all issues, so it tends to drive the perception of difference to higher levels than the actual differences suggest.

The key disagreement, the political battleground consuming all attention, will be around issues 5 and 6 for the votes of persons 5, 6 and 7. And that is why we have purple states with very small differences of aggregate opinion, but a lot of people seem to feel we're on the verge of civil war. It's also why right-wing nutjobs meet with Republican presidents and left-wing nutjobs meet with Democrat presidents.

December 23, 2004

Up and Down

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

If you're curious about the rather iffy availability of the blog lately, there are reasons. First, upgrading the server's OS had a couple of issues. In addition to the problem with PostgreSQL I mentioned before, I found another problem a couple of days ago.

It seems that the DNS configuration files changed rather dramatically between the last version and the current version. The changes weren't actually installed, because I had already customized my DNS quite a bit. This resulted in the DNS server crashing - but not until after it had come up saying it was OK. If you reached my backup DNS, you found me. If you reached my primary DNS, you didn't. Bleh. This is fixed.

But there is another problem: Lachlan. My server is plugged into a UPS so that it will survive a power outage. (There are lots of thunderstorms in Texas.) The UPS is under Steph's desk, next to the server. The power button on the UPS has a light on it. Lachlan likes to make the light go on and off. Sometimes he leaves it off. I'll fix this over the weekend (I'm going to use cardboard and duct tape :-), but in the meantime the server will just go down from time to time.

Sorry.

Fighting Comment Spam

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

This is probably the most useful article I've yet seen on fighting comment spam on MT weblogs, a topic near and dear to my heart.

December 21, 2004

Forgery?

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

CBS (a dishonest, sleazy, biased and partisan purveyor of "news" if ever there was one) is probably not this crazy. I hope they're not this crazy. If their 60 Minutes hit piece on President Bush is based on forged documents, it will be the end of CBS as a viable news organization: with the Internet commentariat - particularly the blogs - at such a high level of competence and presence now, CBS will have frittered away the one asset required of a reporting organization: trust that the presented facts are not invented, even though they may be spun or misrepresented. I wouldn't give a snowball's chance in hell of Dan Rather keeping his job if he pushed this story and it's really based on forged documents.

Of course, I'm constantly disappointed by people's lack of ability to feel shame, so even if it's true it might blow over almost unnoticed outside of the blogs.

Stupid Companies

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Aubrey has a post on stupid customer service practices. Here are a recent few annoyances, and a kudo:

I used to have Sprint, and couldn't remember why I hated them so much after using AT&T for a few years (they were expensive, but I never had a problem with them other than cost). Besides, AT&T didn't have the i500 Palm/cellphone. Ooh, and Sprint's plan was cheaper, too, as long as I was on the 2 year contract. OK, then, I'll sign up.

Now I remember why I hate Sprint. They have cancelled my service every single month that I've been with them. Usually, this happens about a week before my bill is actually due. Once, it happened twice in a 2-week period. (Note: I've not once been late on a bill to them, with the exception of the first month, where I didn't receive a bill at all.) Usually, dealing with them is slow and inefficient, because they can never tell me anything of use. This is especially so since their website is never current on the invoices/minutes, so I cannot even try to determine the problem myself. They have also messed up every single service change (including adding a second phone) that I've done, and in the bargain have ended up costing me more than twice what I expected.

Cool phone, though.

The other stupid customer service tactic goes out to all of the credit card companies out there. Or at least, all of mine. Note to companies: calling your customers and demanding payment for "past due" amounts when the bill was mailed the day before does not endear your customers to you. Adding in the next month's charges to what is "past due", demanding immediate payment over the phone without a chance to check records, and not keeping track of the fact that payment was made to you by phone over a week ago (sometimes it's just easier since they've already gone to the trouble of calling) is not good. Oh, not that I'm totally innocent here: starting up a new business means that I have been late one some of my credit cards - but I'm still not sure why they then think they should call me on months when I am not late. Not that I'm bitter.

And now the kudo: I recently started using ATA for flying back and forth between Dallas and Chicago. I get better prices than using Travelocity or Orbitz, and their customer service is excellent. Their planes are well-maintained and clean, and also quite comfortable. They have a lot of flights scheduled between Dallas and Chicago. Pity they don't fly more places out of Dallas. This wouldn't work for booking flights and hotels together, but it suited my present need wonderfully.

Michael Moore is a Piker

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Moore may think he can do propaganda, but this is well-done propaganda. Stirring, martial music; an appeal to liberal values antithetical to every desire of those making the propaganda, but the mouthing of platitudes to which the Left in the West is much dedicated; ignoring defeats and setbacks of the insurgents and terrorists - actually, ignoring the fact that most of their attacks are on Iraqis - while playing up destroyed trucks as major successes: this is very, very well-done propaganda. Too bad our professional propagandists, the movie companies and authors and musicians, are generally opposed to working on behalf of the West, of America, and of realization of actual liberal values.

(hat tip: Little Green Footballs)

December 19, 2004

Calvin/Nazgul

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Mark points to the funniest send-up of LOTR that I've seen in a long time. It's Calvin and Hobbes doing the scene with Eowyn and the Witch King at the Pelennor Fields.

Gotta Ban Something

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

What would you guess would be the emotional impact on a 10 year old girl of being hauled off in handcuffs in a police wagon to the local police station? That happened to a girl in Philadelphia who had scissors in her book bag at school.

School district and police officials said yesterday that they were following state law and procedures in dealing with students who have weapons on school property. They say that those rules demand police be called and that procedures call for handcuffing suspects regardless of age or crime.

Porsche Brown's mother, Rose Jackson, was outraged.

"My daughter cried and cried," Jackson said yesterday. "She had no idea what she did was wrong. I think that was way too harsh."

[snip]
School district officials acknowledged that the girl was not using the item as a weapon or threatening anyone with it. The scissors were found Thursday morning during a search of students' belongings after something was discovered missing from the teacher's desk area, Gallard said.

The scissors, however, qualified as a possible weapon under a long-standing state law, and the school followed proper procedure by calling city police, he said.

Porsche will be suspended for five days, and the district will then decide whether to expel her to a disciplinary school or allow her to return to Holme, he said.

City police, meanwhile, decided not to charge her with a crime because they determined that she had no intent to use the scissors as a weapon, said Inspector William Colarulo, a police spokesman. In fact, police believe she had the scissors to unwrap a new CD, Colarulo said.

He defended the police officers' decision to handcuff the child and take her to Eighth Police District headquarters. All suspects, regardless of age or crime, are handcuffed, he said. "The officers acted in good faith," he said.

You know, if legislators want to ban dangerous things at school, they should ban thinking. Ah! Now it makes sense!

Classification of Democrats

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Dave Schuler of the Glittering Eye reminds me of something I've been meaning to blog about. I spent the first 3/4 of 2004 in Chicago, and the rest (so far) in the San Francisco Bay area. Though both are utterly controlled by Democrat Party establishments, they are completely different places politically.

The San Francisco Democrats are less Democrats than unabashed Lefties, basically moonbats as far as I can tell. They will support any loony cause - the more anti-freedom and anti-wealth the better - and have a tendency to march in the streets and burn things. There is a clear line of blame drawn here: any Jew in Israel; any other Jew; any American Republican; any other American. Any problem can be blamed on one of the above groups by matching them, in order. Hence, Wolfowitz is, in the Bay Area, somewhat worse than Satan (who I suspect many of the more fringe Lefties here would classify as "misunderstood"). Being here around the election was, er, interesting.

The Chicago-area Democrats are patriotic, corrupt, actually concerned with the plight of their fellow man (though not too good at judging consequences), and mostly harmless. Their the kind of people I picture as the party of Truman, Roosevelt and "Scoop" Jackson, and can be more or less trusted to run the country, at least to the degree that anyone could be so trusted. Demonstrations downtown are fairly constant around the Federal buildings, but small-scale and polite (and mostly conducted by quite old people). While I was there, the demonstrations tended to be straight anti-war affairs, without a lot of far Left weirdness.

I don't know what the NorthEastern Democrats are like - though the Kennedy family, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis give me suspicions.

I don't really have much to say on this; it's just an observation.

Budgeting

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Somehow, I don't think Newsweek is very serious. After all, the money you spend on insurance against a house fire could be spent on food. The money you spend on health insurance could instead be spent on educating your children. And, yes, the money we spend occupying and reforming Iraq and Afghanistan could be spent on day care centers or hiring firemen.

The question that is reasonable is not, "How does this compare to other items in the budget?" (and note: they did not compare to other items in the budget larger than $87 billion, such as Medicare), but "How does this compare with national needs and goals?" Unless Newsweek intends to say - and they might - that we'd do better fighting the war on terrorism by using Federal money to fund community health care than we would by spending the money on the occupation and reformation of the nations at the heart of our enemies' territory, then these comparisons are meaningless. Worse than that, they do not even attempt to make a distinction between valid uses of Federal money (such as defense) and invalid uses (such as spending money on individual AIDS patients).

UPDATE: Yay for MT bugs. I don't know why the date was changed on this post when I deleted a spam from it, but there you have it. Since I don't know the original date, and am too lazy right now to look up the date on the referenced Newsweek article, it'll just stay here.

December 17, 2004

Eliminating Spam

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Steven Green points to this John Dvorak article, and asks: "can some of you smart network-type people tell me if any of these ideas [for reducing spam technologically] are doable without needing an entirely new email system and software"?

I'm not going to go into detail on all of Dvorak's proposals, but I will say that he misses the point, for an entirely good reason. The Internet was built as a survivable network, meant in fact to survive nuclear strikes on some of its nodes and still keep going. It was also designed to assume security: all of the users would have to be authenticated by a node before obtaining access to the network, and all of the nodes were trusted. This was an excellent architecture in 1988 (when I first got onto the Internet), because all of the users were accountable for their actions - to their employer, or their university, or their government agency, etc. As a result, abuse was a minor problem (mostly incoming freshmen at colleges) and easily dealt with. But the system dealt with abuse - the human part of the system, not the network part. You could actually be shamed off of the Internet back then. Removing the human enforcer of netiquette and good practice was like giving the government the power to raise almost unlimited revenue from a very small proportion of the population: corruption and abuse exploded. Open source routing - where everyone passed traffic by the shortest route, so that my traffic could go right through IBM's internal network if that was the fastest way to the destination - was the first to go, replaced by a few backbone networks, with the multiply-connected large private networks protected by layers of firewalls and large IT staffs. (This increased the brittleness of the network at the same time that it increased security.)

So how do we fix this? We cannot build a safe, secure and reliable system on top of an inherently insecure, self-regulating and untrustworthy network. We would have to build a new network from the ground up. And to do that, we'd have to scrap everything except the physical layer - the NICs, wires, routers, bridges, modems and so forth would be all that's left. The intelligence of the network would have to change, some of it drastically.

The first problem to solve is design: how do you create a secure, trusted network, which at the same time still allows connections from anywhere to anywhere, using any protocol, as the default? How do you do this without either excluding people or forcing a central controlling agency (brittle, arbitrary and powerhungry as any bureaucracy) or limiting the ability of people to use the network in reasonable ways? How do you manage traffic in such a way that the network can be flexible, without overwhelming small companies who are multiply-connected by passing external traffic through their networks? How do you provide authentication and authorization, in other words, to a global network using only local resources?

It turns out that if you are willing to start with a blank page, it's not that difficult. The major issue to be solved is trust: how do I know whom I'm talking to? Since you don't want a brittle network, that will fall apart when something happens to a small number of nodes, the only trust model that works is to authenticate yourself to some local authentication source. For example, an ISP or a company would provide a directory which lists all of their users, and contains the information necessary to trust that user. Each node, then, has to trust its neighboring nodes. (This is already the case today, in that you cannot establish a physical connection to another node without being their customer or their provider, or entering into an agreement to do so.) Each node would need to cryptologically authenticate itself to its neighbors, and vice versa, and each user would have to authenticate themselves to their node. No node would pass traffic that did not include its partner node's connection key in the message portion of the packet, and no node would alter that information.

On the good side, this lets any traffic be traced back to its source. You cannot fake traffic as being from a node that you are not from, because the network will not pass on the message unless it has authenticated the upstream source - that is, you - and your information is in the packet header. Therefore, you could put preceding node information in the header, but it would be bogus and the trace would effectively stop being verifiable at you, the sender. On the bad side, this would dramatically increase the amount of traffic on the Internet (by increasing the size of any given packet) and would slow down all traffic, bandwidth being equal, because of the overhead of nodes authenticating to each other and the larger byte-count of a given data set.

Let's say, though, that we were to use that or some similar measure of trust to guarantee that the network was trusted. Now, we still have a whole host of problems to solve, because the IP spec would have to be rewritten at a pretty fundamental level. This means that the NICs would need updated firmware, or for cheap cards that have their firmware burned into the hardware, the whole NIC would have to be replaced. Then, you would have to rewrite the network stack to take account of the new protocol. You'd have to rewrite all of the protocols like UDP, FTP, SMTP, POP, NNTP, LDAP, SSH and the like. Some of these would be huge efforts, while others would need few or no changes. The OS network stacks would have to be rewritten for each OS, and some applications would need to be rewritten as well, if they deal with the network information at a low level.

All in all, it would be a huge load of work, and not likely to get done as an organized effort. The better way to do it would be to set up such a network privately, amongst friends as it were, and expand that to their friends, and their friends, and so on, and so on... And if you were to gateway to the global internet, you'd lose a lot of the benefits right there.

So in practical terms, I don't think it's going to happen.

Happy New Year to All

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

I just wanted to say Happy New Year to everyone. May your next year be more blessed than the last, and all your hopes come to pass.

December 16, 2004

BBQ Pork and Baked Beans

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

I've never posted on Carnival of the Recipes - heck, I've never posted recipes, but what the heck: here's dinner:

BBQ Pork

pork shoulder roast - about 4-5 lbs (I used a 7 lb. pork shoulder this time - you just have to adjust the amount of sauce and vinegar mix)
3 cups cider vinegar
cayenne
onion flakes (optional)
6-9 peeled garlic cloves
peppercorns
BBQ sauce
hamburger buns
butter
cheddar slices if you wish

Put the pork shoulder in a large pot, along with a cup of the cider vinegar, water to cover and about a dozen peppercorns. Bring to a boil, then simmer covered about 3 hours.

Before the 3 hours is up, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and combine the rest of the cider vinegar, the cayenne (to taste) and the onion flakes (if you want them).

Transfer the pork shoulder to a greased or oiled roasting pan (be sure to use one that lets the fat drippings get away from the meat). Stuff the garlic cloves into the meat. Pour a little of the vinegar mix over the top. Roast for 3 hours, basting every 15 minutes with the vinegar mix, and turning over completely half-way through.

Transfer to a pan or large bowl, pull the pork (use two forks to shred it all), and mix with BBQ sauce. You can make your own; I use a most of an 18oz bottle of Stubb's Bar-B-Q Sauce. (Wonderful stuff!)

Near the end of the cooking time, butter and toast the buns. Serve the pork over the buns open-face with cheddar, or just make a sandwich.

Baked Beans

Lg. can or two normal cans of pork and beans
bacon
catsup
brown sugar

Drain the pork and beans. Put them in a large pyrex bowl or some similar container (you want something that you can serve in, too). Smooth the beans. Add a layer of bacon. Add a layer of catsup and smooth it down. Add a layer of brown sugar. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Because of the temperature, you can cook this at the same time the pork is cooking.

Serve with a salad.

OK, so it takes six hours: it's worth it.

December 15, 2004

Securing the Right to be Who You Want

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Questing Cat has a very good post on how he's thinking about the world and his place in it. (QC is deployed in Iraq, FYI.) If anyone ever claims that our soldiers are brutal Gestapo maniacs, point them here.

Innocence and guilt. A simple process in America, or so it would seem. If someone has done wrong, then they are guilty, if they have not, then they are innocent. But here, that seems to carry weight which can not hope to be born. Every action you take here makes you guilty in the eyes of some one. When cultures around the world can gather at there TV sets and watch your every move, and judge you solely on the actions they see, then of course, you are guilty to someone. There are stories down here of a soldier killing a local child so burned and in pain from an IED that he didn't think he would live. A mercy killing. There is much talk in the news of a soldier putting a round in a body, or a casualty, or whatever, while clearing a house. What is claimed as a murder of a helpless person. I have, on occasion, known of an incident where a soldier engaged for all the right reasons, right down the line. But the target was wrong. But now the whole world can see it. And for them, judgment waits.

Little can describe the rhythmic chaos that ensues during a firefight. Engagement in Iraq is constantly sought, rarely expected, always prepared against, and brutally fought. That is the life that soldiers lead here. And state of mind is a soldier by soldier thing.

Politics. The world is full of ideas. Everyone has them, and it is part of the ego that one wants your ideas heard. Personally, I have always felt it would be best to finish my time here before I began to talk about right and wrong. Maybe with this experience I could find people whose writing I could follow. Who would give me direction? Learn from others. I hate the thought of telling others the course of things I have no concept of, and there are a million things out there to argue over. So many people totally self interested. God knows I am. I have spoken from here on a number of occasions on things I believe would benefit me and my kind. I fully realize I've gotten ugly about it too. But really, my interests are somewhat uniform among a fairly large group. I think all soldiers want armor when we have to go out in sector. I think we all want the Iraqis as placid as possible when we have to roll through their towns. And by a larger extent, I think this benefits all. We are the sons and daughters of America, and I know everyone wants to see us home. Well, at least most of you.

What I don't understand is how belief in a few issues that are not represented allows people to thoroughly dispense with the government around them. I once knew a girl who sowed an American flag patch to the seat of her pants because she was a democrat and George Bush was elected president. Therefore, America was not in her good standing. I guess it is my army brainwashing, I took offense to that. Often, I think the country at home will be like that for a long time. Divided on one side or the other. As much as we all have our views, I still accept us as one country.

[snip]

There is much in this world I can spend a life time trying to understand. The subtleties of pacifism and war. The lines between good and evil. The struggle of the soul for acceptance. There is much I could spend lifetimes debating. But I am simple person, with a complex life. I look and say simply, "Do I agree with that?" And go from there. I try hard to keep my view from warping to fit my statements. I try not to draw judgments that are irreversible. And I always try and afford courtesy to those around me. Even when I am fully armed. Even when we don't speak the same language. Even when I don't understand. I am not always a saint, and I have my moments, but mostly, I want the best for all.

Iraq has that chance. It has gotten there through one of the hardest times in its history. It has long to go before it can begin to be the countries that Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait are with no effort. There much that has to change for it represents itself, defend itself, and look after itself. Even then, I doubt its culture will much resemble the States. And I am glad. This country is its own. Let Germans be German, French be French, and Iraqi be Iraqi. I may not always like them, but they earn the right to be what they are. And here, we secure that right.

Go read the whole thing. Really.

December 13, 2004

You Can Find Blogs on Any Topic

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Some time ago, Steph had asked me for a program which would allow her to organize recipes, find recipes that fit the ingredients she had, figure out diet information, plan meals for the week and make shopping lists. Finding nothing out there on the Mac, I started working up a design, but didn't get past the design, data storage formats and other lower-level items - no working code. Today I had a few minutes, and decided to check again if someone has saved me the work of writing it. Yes, yes they have: MacGourmet. (There's also an associated blog.)

Not knowing anything about the product ( I know the company from SQLGrinder), and not seeing a complete list of features at their website, I decided to look around for information, and found Kitchen Contraptions, a blog about kitchen gadgets. Some recent posts?

An in-sink dishwasher.
A review of a Zach & Dani's coffee roaster (We actually have one of these, but for some reason no coffee to roast at present. Not really a problem for me, but I'm not quite sure how Steph has gone this long without fresh-roasted coffee.)
A radio with satellite radio built-in, and actually using a wooden cabinet instead of fake woodgrain stickers.
An automatic pot stirrer - this actually looks like a really cool idea if you have a lot of sauces and gravy going at once, like at Thanksgiving.

You can find a blog about anything.

Iraqi Judges and NATO's Near-Worthlessness

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Roger Simon points to Andrew Apostolou's NRO article on why we cannot depend on the support of NATO in Iraq and elsewhere. I've been coming to the conclusion that NATO is fundamentally broken after their Cold War mission disappeared, and Andrew presents more evidence in that direction.

Meanwhile, Roger Simon also has a post on the lack of help from NGOs and European war-crimes experts in helping prepare the Iraqi judiciary. Certainly, this is an area where you would expect the NGOs and Europe's most virulent human rights supporters to come together and help: train judges to handle the trials of men who likely murdered 300000+ of their subjects? But no, apparently not. Which is further evidence towards the proposition that the NGOs and European tribunals are also fundamentally broken.

December 12, 2004

The Draft

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change wants to open a discussion on the utility of a draft, inspired by two articles at Washington Monthly, Now Do You Believe We Need a Draft? and First Draft. I'll bite.

First, I'd like to express my objections to any draft of any kind, on a matter of principle. Draftees are not like slaves because they are paid, and they are not like indentured servants because they do not enter the condition voluntarily. I do not believe that a draft is compatible with a free society. If you cannot get sufficient people to defend your society against invasion, your society deserves to die. If you cannot get sufficient people to fight your campaigns overseas, it's a sign that your policy doesn't have sufficient support. Compelling people to serve against their will is not a good way to overcome a rotten society or a raft of bad policies.

I should note that I favor a larger military. In fact, I think we need to increase our units of action to the level we had at the end of the Cold War - something like 1/3 more than we have now. This would allow us to undertake a war on the same scale as Iraq, while simultaneously undertaking an occupation on the scale of Iraq. That's no small ability, considering the number of threats we face. Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia (in that order) may all have to be subdued in order to win the Terror Wars. But I don't think a draft would be a good way to do it. And since I'd probably be largely outnumbered on the philosophical point about slavery, let's look at the practical problems instead, focusing on Washington Monthly's proposal.

The core of the Washington Monthly proposal is the focus of the draftees' work, not as conventional combat, but in a defensive anti-terror role:

That terrorists might poison municipal water supplies, spray anthrax from crop dusters, or suicidally infect themselves with small pox and stroll through busy city streets, is no longer considered farfetched. That we might need to draft some of our people to counter these threats---now that's considered farfetched, to the extent that it's considered at all.

[snip]

A 21st century draft would be less focused on preparing men for conventional combat-which probably won't be that extensive in this war---than on the arguably more daunting task of guarding against and responding to terrorism at home and abroad.

One can imagine a similar three-tiered system of youth service in America, with 18-month terms of duty for all citizens age 18 to 25. In this new-style draft, conscripts would have what all Americans now demand: choice. They could choose to serve in the military, in homeland security, or in a civilian national service program like AmeriCorps (there's no reason women couldn't be drafted for the latter two categories). In return, draftees would get GI-bill-style college scholarships, with higher awards for those who accept more dangerous duty.

To suggest that draftees "have a choice" is to trivialize choice: the draftees would inherently not have the choice of not serving at all. Worse, though, is that offering a choice between civilian and military service would undermine one of the authors' key arguments, that a draft without deferments would bring America together. In actuality, it is very likely that the schism in American society would intensify, with "blue state" kids choosing AmeriCorps and "red state" kids choosing the military. The mixing would be less complete than hoped for, I strongly suspect.

The authors don't address the cost of such a "GI bill" program - I suspect it would be considerably larger than the cost of raising salaries to the point that you get the number of recruits you need for any given job - the market actually works. After all, the authors are suggesting what amounts to a "no exemptions" policy:

The best way would be to require all young people to serve. One reason more young people don't serve now is the fear that while they're wearing the uniform, their peers will be out having fun and getting a leg up in their careers. If everyone were required to serve, no one would feel like a sucker.

[snip]

It's possible, however, that the country won't have the need for every eligible young person to serve. What then? One answer is a lottery with no student deferments.

Why not pass a law that says that no four-year college or university can accept a student unless and until that student completes a 12-month to two-year term of service? No lotteries, no deferments.

Let me suggest an alternative that does not compel us to violate our values, and that would provide a better pool of recruits.

If we need additional people to guard institutions in the US, particularly public facilities; act as community watchmen; respond to emergencies and the like, why not hire them? And if we cannot afford to hire enough people or if their duties are less full-time jobs than part-time duties, why not reinstitute local militias? With some forethought given to training and organization, and particularly with some indoctrination introduced into the public schools (don't gasp: the schools indoctrinate kids now, just not in generally-useful points of citizenship), it would be a reasonably-simple and well-precedented way to create a first-responder and community watchman capability sufficient to any purposes I can foresee.

The Washington Monthly seems to think the idea has widespread support:

But if the chance of universal service was measured by what the American people actually think, a different picture might emerge. In late January, a Newsweek poll found that 14 percent of Americans favored and 38 percent would consider reinstating the draft; only 45 percent would refuse to consider the idea at all. As it happens, that poll did not describe the kind of draft that Rep. Rangel has proposed, one in which young people would be able to choose either military or civilian service. The only poll I know to pose that question was conducted in November 2001 by the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and found that 60 percent of Americans favored a draft that offered a choice between military or civilian service.

It's hard to know exactly what to make of these poll numbers. Among other things, they don't reveal whether those who oppose the draft are more intense in their opinions (as one might expect they would be) than those who favor it. Nevertheless, the polls do suggest that a majority of Americans are at least open to the idea of some sort of draft--more than supported the president's tax-cut-heavy economic plan in early February (46 percent), and more than supported a U.S. ground invasion "soon" (37 percent) rather than giving U.N. inspectors "more time."

Many young people would surely object to such a draft--if "draft" is the right word for it. But none would have cause to feel that their peers were getting an unfair head start on the career ladder, because all prospective four-year-college students would be in the same boat.

I do not believe a draft is useful, nor do I believe it is moral. The Washington Monthly's two pieces on this have made me more - not less - certain of that position.

Bad Congress! No Biscuit for You!

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

Fred Barnes on Fox News tonight said of the intelligence reform bill just passed by the the House and due to be passed by the Senate tomorrow: "This is a dumb bill." I concur. But rather than address why the bill is dumb (Dave Shuler of The Glittering Eye does that nicely), I'm interested in why it is that the Congress would pass a manifestly dumb law, and do it very, very quickly.

From a cynical point of view, this is actually the perfect bill. Why so?

• It looks like Congress is "doing something."
• There is almost no meaningful opposition in Congress.
• It takes away an issue from potential opponents in the next election.
• If it fails, the blame doesn't fall on Congress.
• It transfers power to the Federal government.
• It spends money.

This is why the President and the executive agencies have so many policies, many not ever acted on, and it's why the Congress passes so many laws. After all, once Congress passes a law on any given problem, that problem is no longer unlegislated. Since the Congress' job is to legislate, their job is then done and, from their point of view, the problem is solved, and thus no liability to them. Whether the law solves the problem at hand, or even whether it is Constitutional, is really beside the point: Congressmen don't tend to fail of re-election for voting on a bad law, but they do lose by voting against things.

It's very difficult to take a controversial stand, if you are a politician, because such stands hand ammunition to your opponent in the next election. It's much easier to go with the flow, whether that means straight party-line voting or voting with an assured majority. Here is an opportunity to do both, because the leadership of both parties backs the bill.

Let's say that the US is attacked again. In that case, any given Congressman can simply say that the vast majority of the Congress supported the bill, it was a good bill, it's just that the implementation was flawed. But if that fails, there's a fallback: the bill implemented the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, and how can Congress possibly be blamed for doing what the "experts" said needed to be done - not to mention the 9/11 widows! Either way, the politicians can disclaim responsibility and shift it, either to their political opponents or at least to someone who can't be easily disparaged.

The lust for power should not be underestimated. For Congressmen, power has two requisites: a rationale for why Congress should be able to legislate on a particular matter, and the expenditure of money.

It doesn't really matter to most Congressmen whether or not a law is Constitutional. What matters is whether they can make the law stick. (From their point of view, it's the job of the courts to enforce the Constitution. I will refrain from ranting, but it's a close call.) This requires some rationale, of which the most abused is probably the interstate commerce clause.

But regardless of the rationale, the key is to gain power, and power is directly correlated to the size of the government over which the Congressmen are exercising power, and the number of people dependent on Federal largesse and how dependent they are. As a result, the most commonly-used solutions to a problem are throwing money at existing programs, throwing money directly at people, creating new Federal agencies, expanding existing Federal agencies and adding new powers to existing Federal agencies. This bill has a little of each of these.

So, the faster the better and pass anything! Bummer, though, if you're either a taxpayer or resident in the next major terror target.