Happy New Year to All

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.

Bee, Fish, Ewe, a Mare, Egrets, Moose

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The Problem of Faction

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.

BBQ Pork and Baked Beans

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.

"Moderation"

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

Pro-War Entertainment

Jim Miller posts about Frank Capra's Why We Fight, a series of excellent WWII propaganda films, which also turn out to have been good historical records. Miller also notes a potential movie plot that Hollywood could use, which would both support the war effort and make a bundle of money for the studio that produced it. I have some other suggestions.

How about a TV series following a National Guard platoon over the course of a year's deployment in Iraq? Showcasing what's actually happening in Iraq could be the background, but the entertainment possibilities are endless. In addition to numerous action scenes in combat, there would be lots of humorous moments available as well. In a way, M*A*S*H - though anti-war in general - was very pro-soldier and actually managed to show a lot of the aspects of the Korean war in a fairly honest light; there is room for such a series today, with a different focus. Even a transport unit would have a lot of potential.

How about a movie of the battle of Falluja, or the hunt for Saddam, or even the (so-far unsuccessful) hunt for Osama? How about a movie about the Thunder Run and the battles of Objectives Moe, Larry and Curly? How about a series following an SOF unit through the invasion of Iraq or inside an unnamed Muslim country harboring terrorists? There's even an opportunity for a massive renewal of the James Bond franchise, with terrorist bad guys instead of Communist bad guys. Could the producers of, say, Lost be induced to make a show following a small group of people under extreme duress? What about a movie about a journalist's struggle between his country and what he's always been told is a duty to be utterly objective?

I think that Hollywood may have moved so far to the Left as to be unable to root for America in wartime. If that's the case, will there be a supplement, to make the shows that red-state America wants to see? Will we simply cede our cultural products to those most intent in our culture's destruction or degeneration, or do we have the ability to find within ourselves patriotism without blind nationalism, and to express the best of ourselves - along with the worst - in film?

I Blame Ashcroft

So, it appears that Mars is experiencing global warming, too. Hmmm...clearly, not signing Kyoto is to blame. No, I'd better blame Ashcroft: he already gets the blame for every lame law the Congress passes that he, you know, enforces; plus now that he's leaving, last one out the door takes the blame.

Chica-GO

Well, our time in Chicago is coming to an end, after 9 months. I will dearly miss it. Steph tells why (more here). It's odd: I've never liked cities; I've always preferred the country, even to suburbs. Yet here I am in the heart of one of the largest US cities, and I love it.

There are more green spaces here than in Dallas, and the presence of the lake means a lot of fountains. There are more parks in a smaller area than in Dallas. You can live downtown here: there are restaurants, places to buy things (everything from Sears to specialty boutiques - no Wal Mart or Target stores, though, downtown), universities, museums, a zoo, Wrigley Field and more and more and more - all within a relatively small area, that you can easily get around walking or taking the very safe and convenient public transportation. It's as if all of the good attractions of the DFW area were crammed into an area the size of DFW airport.

And the weather is much, much better.

I'm going to miss Chicago.

Too Much Not Enough Involved

Expat Yank makes a fine point that I've thought about myself from time to time: even if the US were to go isolationist and pull back its forces from around the world, it would not be sufficient to silence America's critics. After all, keep in mind what Bush was criticized for in his foreign policy before 9/11: disengagement from the world. President Bush on assuming office began to pull the US out of the toughest situations abroad, declaiming any "peacekeeping" role, and in particular utterly rejecting the concept of "nation building".

Yet we were not praised for our farsighted wisdom in letting others do what they want, but were instead derided for disengagement. Even now, when we are engaged broadly in the Middle East and (lesser known) Africa and Asia, we are criticised for not being in the middle of the Israeli/Palestinian problem, and for not having already solved every problem in sub-Saharan Africa, and for ignoring any number of problems in the world. And at the same time we are castigated for being too involved in the world, for taking on problems that should be left alone.

It comes down to this, and this alone: anti-Americanism is no more rational than anti-Semitism, and nothing that the US can do or not do will silence our critics. John Kerry can make, should he be elected, any policy changes he wants, and our critics at home and abroad will smile as they stick the knife in, rather than frowning as they stick the knife in. This actually is very liberating: we can take the actions we need to take to defend ourselves, to remake the world, and to help our allies, and the volume and vituperativeness of the criticism will not change. Effectively, we are immune to criticism on foreign policy, so long as we remember that our critics are responding to our existence and our status, not our actions.

Morality and Mind

There's an interesting discussion on morality at Steph's place, and an interesting trio of posts at the Glittering Eye, Brad DeLong's site and Matthew Yglesias's site. They aren't really closely related, but they are interesting when taken together.

Don't Piss Off Paladins

After all, paladins specialize in righteous indignation.

Hatred is Corrosive

From the Left (too many examples to link to a representative one) or the Right.

Remember

Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.

But fear naught.

Have Heart

Jim Miller notes the difficulties that Republicans in parts of California face, and seems fairly pessimistic about it. I'm not, really. See, I lived in Oklahoma when it was a Democrat lock. In fact, it was considered a one-party State at the time. Some of the interesting things that happened that I personally observed:

I was denied the opportunity to register as an Independent. I was (illegally) told by the election worker that one had to register as a Democrat or Republican. When I expressed interest in instead registering as a Libertarian, I was told "that's not even a real Party." I decided to register as a Republican. The election worker (again, illegally) refused, and I ended up going to the county courthouse to register (as a Republican).

I worked for the State Republican Party (as a low-level telephone fundraiser - OK, I was telemarketing. It was a youthful mistake) during a gubernatorial campaign. A few weeks before the election, the Democrat-controlled legislature approved, and the Democrat Governor signed, legislation making poll-watchers illegal. This legislation differed from the legislation passed just prior to the previous election by only a few wording differences. That law had been found unconstitutional right after the previous election. I learned that the Democrats had done this every election for decades, and that every such law had been found unconstitutional...after the election.

I learned a lot about vote fraud. At one point, during the same election cycle mentioned above, there was a scandal where 30% of the ballots in one district - all marked identically and using the same pen, which differed from the kind of marker present at the polling place, and all of which voted for Democrats (not a straight ticket: each Democrat was individually marked) - were thrown out. The lone Republican on the county's electoral commission was convicted of the fraud and sent to jail.

Anyway, Oklahoma is now as dependably-Republican as anywhere in the US, and the same could happen elsewhere. In the meantime, all it takes to make things easier is a few high-profile lawsuits or a single big mistake by the Democrats, and the dam is broken. Places like California and Illinois are not as solidly Democrat as they appear, and eventually there comes a tipping point. (This also happens in the other direction, where for example the NorthEastern states went from Republican- to Democrat-controlled in less than a decade.)

In short, strict one-Party rule is not indefinitely sustainable at even the State level in the US.

Always Fight Back

The lesson of 9/11, and the lesson of Breslan, and the lesson of the many beheadings in Iraq, is this: always fight back. The one relatively bright spot on 9/11 was the saving of the Capitol, by a few unarmed men and women who rushed their captors rather than letting them proceed. In Breslan, the terrorists were maybe 20, and held 1000 captive. Perhaps 300-400 of the captives were adults. Why did they not rush the terrorists? Certainly, some of them would die, but the scale would have been smaller than it ended up being and fewer children would have died.

These are not yesterday's terrorists, who would kill one or two people and then negotiate some kind of ending where most people got out alive. Now they want to kill, as gruesomely and frequently as they can. Fight or run, don't just take it. Die with your boots on. What could they do worse than beheading you, which they will likely do in any case?

Learn it, and learn it well: when terrorists attack, you are better off fighting back barehanded than letting them carry on. Even better would be to be armed, and fight back from a position of strength.

pacifist-anarchist-vegetarian revolution

Ith from Absinthe and Cookies has a good find.

The Case Against College

In general, I think college/university has the potential to be of great benefit in one's life. However, the case against that generally begins and ends with the idiots that all too frequently get hired to teach at them. (hat tip: Transterrestrial Musings

Nyet

No way can this be Constitutional.

Tax Cut Effect

Here is some interesting information on tax burdens and how they fall. That's right: the top 20% of income earners pay 82.1% of the taxes, while the bottom 40% not only don't pay taxes, but because of credits actually get money (on net) from their "taxes".

Perhaps the Democrats could stop whining about the "greedy rich" and just say "thanks for paying all of this money and not taking up arms to end this confiscatory and tyrannical system". Or even just "thanks".

Self Defense

It seems to me that if (in the UK) defending your family gets you arrested, eventually people will take matters into their own hands. It is human nature to defend yourself and your family against attack, and not only are governments unable to be everywhere at once to provide such a defense, they are unwilling to allow for the exceptions where they don't get there in time. Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6 - and eventually people will start just killing attackers and disposing of the bodies. After all, why would police suspect you when you didn't know the attacker in any way, and were at home at the time?

The police (in Britain in particular) need to wake up to the fact that they are there to aide citizens in their defense of themselves and properties, not to prevent that defense.

Bad Experiences

Francis Porretto has had, sadly, a bad experience with being generous. On a similar (but much less personal and painful) line, I've found the same behavior (of becoming hardened to others in apparent need) in myself while I've been in Chicago. Being in the Dallas suburbs does not expose you to very many homeless - well, to any homeless in fact - while being in downtown Chicago it is an unavoidable part of just walking down the street.

When I first got to Chicago, I was pretty generous: I can afford to be, and the apparent need is great. As I continued being exposed to this several times per day, however, I realized a few things. First, you see the same people panhandling over and over again, in much the same places. Second, you can divide the panhandlers into groups. Third, the head is right: what you subsidize you get more of.

I have stopped giving money to the bums, who are capable of working but don't. Their stories no longer move me: I've become hardened to that. I generally don't give money to the mentally disturbed: Chicago has a lot of resources for helping people who cannot help themselves. About the only group I still consistently give money to are people on the street with young kids: I have so far (thankfully) been unable to become inured to that.

I regret the calluses I've developed. But I have them nonetheless.

Spokesman

Is it too much to ask that someone hire Mike Hendrix for spokesman at Homeland Security or the White House?

Memory

It is odd that the media which gave us wall-to-wall endless coverage of the Abu Ghraib abuses considers images from 9/11 too sensitive for American viewers. Little Green Footballs does us all a service by reminding us.

Oh, No No No

I'm in the middle of The Wine-Dark Sea (book XVI of the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. I will finish all 20 books in the series. We have A Sea of Words - Dean King's backgrounder on Napoleonic naval warfare, British sailor slang and the Royal Navy of the time. And now this? Did I mention I don't have any time?

Glass Hammer

I hold Francis Porretto personally responsible for my current annoyance. You see, I love prog rock, but I have four kids and thus no time to listen to it in peace. But when you get a recommendation like this, you at least have to check it out, right?

So I did. Tragically, they have a single, So Close, So Far, available for download.

So I did. It's good. It's really, really good. Now I have to go buy their album Shadowlands, on which this track lives.

So I did. And if it's as good as the single, they have more albums.

Look, I don't have time for this!

Note to Self...

Don't get Mindles Dreck annoyed at me. This post demolishes just about every common Leftist trope the Democrats are spouting these days, in a thoroughly convincing manner.

I Cannot Pretend/That the Heartache Falls Away

Here is a heartbreaking post on surviving 9/11. (Hat tip: Little Green Footballs) It's from a woman whose boyfriend was at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and lost his wife in the attack. If you think this is a "pretend" war, or that the war is about oil, or that the attack is in the past and should be forgotten, then you should certainly read this.

It's the Economy

Steven Den Beste has an interesting, and typically long, post about the trade deficit, why paper money is accepted, and how hard it is to control complex systems like the world economy.

The part of that which most interests me is how money acquires and retains value. Barter is easy enough to understand: I have something you want; you have something I want; let's trade.

But barter is not a useful monetary system outside of very limited cases. For example, take an economy 10 people where one wants something no one has, one has something no one wants, and the rest are involved in a series of interlocking relationships of supply and demand. How does this balance? How do people find how to get what they want with what they have? What incentive is there to produce something that's not currently produced, when only one person wants it, and what incentive is there to consume what the one person has, when he can't discount it and you can eventually get it for free by letting him starve to death? Worse, what if I have a pig, and want a comb. Either I butcher the pig, which immediately reduces its time-value to me (since it won't keep long now) and future value (since it won't get any fatter now), or I find someone who can give me lots of little things for my one pig, so that I can trade one of the little things for the comb. Then what do I do with the other little things?

Using precious metals as a store of value was useful, because it was tangible. For the same reason, you could use acres of land as your store of value (except that land is not particularly portable, while precious metals are). Ah, you say, but you can trade in titles for land, can't you? And the titles are both portable, and as valuable as the land they confer ownership of. As long, that is, as someone is willing to use armed force to protect the land from claim jumpers, and enforce contract in court should you try to keep the land after transferring the title.

At that point, a title is just paper money backed by a commodity, as our paper money used to be backed by gold or silver (you can see examples of both in the money museum in Chicago's Federal Reserve Bank). And unlike precious metals, property rights must be defended by the government to have portable value. And since it is the promise of the government to protect the titleholder's right to the land that makes the title valuable, why do you need the land?

Really, this is what the value of our currency comes down to: US paper currency is valuable because the US government is willing to accept it as valuable, and to exchange it for other items of value as necessary, and to repay every debt ever incurred by the United States. (The US has never defaulted on a debt.) In other words, what you give in exchange for a house or for lunch or for labor is nothing more than a government promise that it regards certain pieces of paper as valuable.

I still find that amazing.

The Danger of Anecdotes

I wasn't going to write about Farenheit 9/11: I don't have time to scorn Michael Moore the way it is needed. But something from The New Republic (Hat tip: Pejmanesque) got me thinking. here is the quote in question:

Moore's argumentative strategy, however, rests on tricking audiences into believing otherwise. Having laid out his mostly unconvincing cases against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and having presented compelling scenes of Lipscomb grieving, military recruiters preying on the ignorance of teenagers, and congressmen fleeing questions about their children's military service, he pulls an intellectual sleight of hand that goes by so quickly--and indeed, that sounds so logical--that many viewers won't realize they've been tricked. In a voiceover, he says (and I'm paraphrasing pretty roughly here): I've always been amazed that in America the poor and working class do most of the fighting. That is their gift to us. And all they ask in return is that we don't send them to war unless we absolutely have to. The logical connection between the two thoughts here is patently absurd. (Is Moore implying that it's okay for the poor and working class to do most of the fighting as long as they are only sent to fight in necessary wars? Would it be okay to fight unnecessary wars if the military burden were properly balanced?) But it's also central to Moore's argument. He needs to be able to place his movie's best point--the brazen immorality of Lipscomb having to grieve her son while elites make no similar sacrifice--in the service of his larger argument, which is that Bush's wars have been unjust. So he eloquently conflates them, pumps up his soundtrack, and hopes viewers don't bother to think about what he's actually done.

I am sad for Mrs. Lipscomb's loss: it is the most terrible thing I can imagine to lose a child. Several people I know - including a couple of my closest friends - have been and/or will soon be in combat postings, and none of them are poor, though they also can't be classed as "the elites". But what about Pat Tillman's mother? Doesn't she disprove the case that it's only the poor fighting and dying in this war? Pat Tillman was nothing if not among the country's elite, by income and public acclaim if nothing else.

And if one anecdote can prove Moore's case, it only takes one to disprove it.

A Reason to Watch Star Trek Again?

Two of my favorite science fiction TV series are Babylon 5 and Star Trek.

Babylon 5 is one of the best TV shows ever done, set in one of the most compelling science fiction universes ever created, with some of the most interesting characters ever put on TV. Yes, it's science fiction, but that's almost beside the point: the story is universal. Despite being set in space, in the future, with magical new technologies and thoroughly alien races, the story was real - it was plausible. The characters acted like people really act, and the events of the plot interacted with the personalities in believable ways.

Star Trek also created a compelling science fiction universe, though it always suffered from shallow characterizations. The original series had some excellent shows, exploring themes of race (Let This be Your Last Battlefield) and human relationships (The City on the Edge of Forever) and unintended consequences (A Piece of the Action) and so on in a very entertaining way. With the arrival of Star Trek: the Next Generation and its follow-ons, the stories got progressively less interesting, though, and even the universe got boring. (The Cardassians and Bajorans? Please! How unimaginative!) The preaching got out of hand as well, such as in the Next Generation, where at one point religion of all kinds was simply mocked out of hand. I have an idea, let's insult our viewers! That would make us really cool!

I watched exactly two episodes of Voyager and only one of Enterprise. They were interesting ideas, crippled by the insipid writing, unimaginative stories, retreads of past plots and utterly uninteresting characters and situations. It had become unreal - unbelievable - plastic.

If anything can revive Star Trek at this point, it is the creation of compelling story lines in an interesting universe with characters we can care about and events that don't always turn out for the best. If anyone can revive Star Trek, that person would be the creator of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski.

(hat tip: Peeve Farm)

An Enemy With Dozens of Heads

Apparently the Catholic Hierarchy is worried about Madonna embracing (a probably very twisted and unrecognizable) Kabbalah, and about Paganism as well.

[T]he Vatican is holding a special summit with Catholic leaders from around the world, hammering out a way to deal with so-called “New Age” religions and fads that pose a “threat” to Christianity.

(hat tip: The Wild Hunt)

Here's a better article on the topic.

the greatest challenge may be in England and North America, "where the New Age began ... and where it has become such a part of everyday life that we don't notice it". That makes it harder to attack, he says: "Where one sees a threat, it's easier to battle it."

This is an enemy with dozens of heads: the version of the Jewish kabbalah espoused by Madonna, the Enneagram personality-reading cult, ancient Egyptian occult practices, Sufism, the lore of the Druids, Celtic Christianity, medieval alchemy, Renaissance hermeticism, Yoga, Zen Buddhism, and many more.

The report acknowledges the strength of the Enemy Within: "In Western culture in particular, the appeal of 'alternative' approaches to spirituality is very strong .... New forms of psychological affirmation of the individual have become very popular among Catholics."

[snip]

New Age is getting a grip on Christians because many are failing to find authentic spirituality in the Church. They are failing to find, as the report put it, "the importance of man's spiritual dimension and its integration with the whole of life, the search for life's meaning, the link between human beings and the rest of creation, the desire for personal and social transformation, and the rejection of a rationalistic and materialistic view of humanity."

While one of the two "pontifical councils" involved in taking up the challenge is that for "inter-religious dialogue", suggesting that the New Agers be dealt with on a similar footing to Muslims, Jews, and indeed Anglicans, the Pope himself appears to see the issue as a simple matter of right and wrong.

"We cannot delude ourselves," he says, that "this return of ancient Gnostic ideas" "will lead toward a renewal of religion." It is, he said, "a way of distorting His Word ... in distinct, if not declared, conflict with all that is essentially Christian".

OK, just to be sure I'm clear, the position of the Vatican is:

Must be crushed	Pagans and those who follow "new age" religions and various other non-Judeo-Christian religions, peacefully practicing their beliefs.
Must be engaged in dialog	Muslims, many of whom have been searching through groups of people in Saudi Arabia and Iran looking for non-Muslims, then brutally murdering them on the spot

So, basically, Islam is compatible enough with Catholicism to be engaged in dialog, because it poses little threat of drawing Catholics away from the Church, while various forms of Paganism are so threatening to the Church, because they offer a spirituality the Church cannot, that they must be stamped out.

I think I'll just leave off without comment here.

I Would Have Expected Survivor

Or alternately 'Eye of the Tiger Lily'...

I can't wait to see how Stephanie reacts to this.

Looking Back on Ronald Reagan

I was a young boy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. While I was more interested and more informed about current events than most kids my age, I wasn't old enough to understand much beyond the emotional feel of his time in office.

My memories really begin to kick in around 1984. I remember the zeitgeist - the Olympics and Mary Lou Retton, Bruce Springsteen and "Born in the USA", and the ever-present shadow of Soviet Communism and the fear of nuclear war. I remember the fierce pride and patriotism that Americans felt; I remember feeling it myself. I remember a roaring economy. I remember a sense of how special we were as a nation and a realization of how important our role in the world was. I remember how we cherished that notion. And I remember Ronald Reagan.

I remember how we as a country took our cues from this man. He was a patriot in the truest sense of the word. He so obviously loved this nation beyond description and was unashamed to show it. He was an optimist of the highest order. He saw America as something extraordinary, yet with its greatest days still ahead of it. It was infectious.

I don't remember the '70's. I was barely more than a toddler when Reagan was first elected. I don't remember the presidency of Jimmy Carter. All I know is what I have long since learned - the malaise, the wretched economy, the defeatism, the idea of America in decline. It was something I could not have imagined in the '80's, can hardly imagine now. Ronald Reagan ended such pessimistic thoughts.

Ronald Reagan was the president of my childhood. He defined the presidency for me. He was the yardstick by which I measured others until early adulthood. I had always liked and admired Reagan, believed him to be a great president. As I grew up, I learned history and was able to combine that with logic and reasoning. I was able to look back on the 1980's from a different, more informed perspective. That was when I truly understood his greatness. I now understand where those feelings I had as a child came from. I can see where we were when he was elected and where we were after his second term ended. I have seen the presidents who followed - George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. I have learned of the presidents of our past. I have seen where Reagan fits in the pantheon. I realize that men like Ronald Reagan come along sparingly. I realize how lucky I was to live during his presidency, how lucky we all were as a country to have him in our highest office.

Ronald Reagan is the face of Republican conservatism. I love and admire the man as a political hero of mine. I appreciate his service to this nation. I mourn his passing. I celebrate his life. I give thanks for all he accomplished.

We have witnessed the passing of a true giant and a truly great American. As President Bush said, "That is worth our tears." I have shed several this week. But like Mr. Reagan, I believe our greatest days are still ahead of us. And that is worth a nod to the Gipper for helping to ensure those days are yet to come, rather than "a thousand years of darkness."

Godspeed Mr. President, and thank you!

Blogs as News

Someone tried to get their news solely from blogs for a week. As I noted here, blogs are not quite ready to largely supplant traditional media. However, this bit bothered me:

Rubel could do no clicking through to articles cited in the weblogs, only read what bloggers wrote.

Well, yeah, given that bloggers tend to accrete stories, building commentary and news on top of other news and commentary, you won't get much if you don't click through! It's not much of a study of the medium if you don't understand what makes the medium what it is.

President Reagan and the Terror Wars

President Reagan is sometimes said to be the first President to retreat in the face of Islamism, after the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. It's not an unreasonable case. But consider this:

What would the Terror Wars look like without President Reagan's successful efforts to destroy the Soviet Union? It's possible that absent the support of the US, the mujaheddin in Afghanistan would have been defeated, and perhaps al Qaeda as such would not have arisen. It's also possible, though, that al Qaeda or some similar group would have come up, and been supported by the Soviet Union. And if the thought of a fanatical Islamist terrorist group supported by the Soviets doesn't scare you, then either you've no sense of history or no imagination.

"What if's" are always dangerous, and one should not draw too much heat from them. Nonetheless, I'm quite glad that President Reagan made the latter scenario impossible.

Humor in a Serious Time

Karmic Inquisition has a fine post on how important the ability to laugh at ourselves is, particularly in a very serious time such as now. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Adam's thesis (that we don't laugh much at ourselves), though certainly there are some people who are 60's retread humorless drones wrapping themselves in any ideology which will piss off their parents and others who are shrill self-indulgent fit-throwers dressed up as comedians.

Still, it is a new world since 9/11, and part of being able to make jokes about a world is understanding it. It was a long time between the imposition of the Cold War and its realization, during which the subject of Nazis and Japanese as humor material was gone, but Soviet jokes didn't mean much. It will probably be some time before terrorism and Islamic radicalism are funny, and the atmosphere of threat we are under now makes self-deprecation somewhat unsatisfying.

But humor is also an endless mine of hope, and will not be absent long.

Love is Like Oxygen

Via Pejman Yousefzadeh, this Telegraph (UK) article on scientific investigation of love's effect on the brain is fascinating:

The first intriguing finding is that there is a lot of overlap between the brain areas activated during feelings of romantic love for a partner, and those involved in maternal love for own children. The brain cells implicated are the same as those we know become active whenever an extremely rewarding activity is being undertaken. These are precisely the same neurological locations which are implicated when we consume food and drink we like, take drugs like cocaine, and when we are given monetary rewards. So love is indeed like a drug.

However the key result was that it's not just that certain shared areas of the brain are reliably activated in both romantic and maternal love, but also particular locations are deactivated and it's the deactivation which is perhaps most revealing about love.

The article also has a lot of interesting comments on parental love.

All That Could be Done

Ronald Reagan, in his second-most famous speech, said: "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

In Reagan's most famous speech, he said: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

And the lasting legacy of Ronald Reagan will be simply this, that he did do all that could be done, and in the end destroyed a monstrous and pernicious tyranny.

Rest in peace, Dutch. And thank you.

UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh has a fine roundup of online reactions.

Well, Yeah

Best of the Web points to this AP article about the Sacagewea dollar. Apparently, the House is working through a bill to change the design. As the article notes, though, "Coin experts say the new design approach probably would spark collectors' interest. But they don't think it would help the coin become a staple of commerce. For that to happen, the dollar bill would need to be eliminated."

Well, yeah. Is this hard? Few machines which accept cash accept the $1 coins, because they are rare. They are rare because they are only barely useful. They are barely useful because you can't, for example, use them in vending machines and such. If the $1 bill were to be eliminated in, say, three years, there would be a rush to refit parking lots and vending machines and the like, and the $1 coin would be used. (And after living in Canada for a while, having $1 and $2 coins and no bills smaller than $5 actually seems more sensible to me. The combination is more useful and actually easier to carry around.)

Changing the design of the coin won't make it useful.

Better Than I Could Have Said It

The Left has become the Right: the descendants of the original anti-Fascists (and in some cases the anti-Fascists themselves) have begun supporting the Fascists against the classical Liberals. The Progressives and the Socialists and the Communists have aligned themselves with the jihadis and the dictators and the genocidaires against the force in history which has done more to raise the poor out of poverty and to provide justice and social equality for all people than any other (capitalism + individual liberty, personified in the United States). There is a huge political realignment under way - in some ways it's been under way since the end of the Cold War erased the old divisions. I've tried to discuss before (here, here, here, here - oh, just go look at my archives; it's a topic I frequently address) - in the course of addressing specific issues - why I use the term "the Left" to refer to all of the above forces, but the invaluable Wretchard at Belmont Club has defined the confluence better than I ever could have.

Go read.

Who needs to give it that old college try?

From the May 27 New York Times comes this story about stagnant graduation rates at colleges and universities.

This is what caught my attention:

As growing numbers of Americans enter college, most colleges and universities have failed to ensure that those students will graduate, according to a study released Wednesday by the Education Trust in Washington.

When did it become the job of colleges and universities to ensure that students graduate? Isn't that the responsibility of the students themselves? And how does one ensure that students graduate? Is this a call for even more grade inflation? Should we just give students a degree and skip the entire educational aspect (such as it still exists) of college.

The trust also recommended that states link their financial support for colleges to the progress their students make and their graduation rates.

The practical upshot of this proposal would leave my questions answered with an emphatic yes. A college degree is quickly becoming meaningless as an indicator of achievement or ability.

China, France, Germany, Russia

Lileks:

I wonder if I’m alone. I love current events and politics,, I’m fascinated to see history roll along before my eyes, and I’m sick to death of it. All of it.

In a word, no.

Language and Moral Bankruptcy

Francis Porretto writes about the power of words, which dovetails with something that I've been thinking about a lot recently: the philosophical bankruptcy of the Left.

The basis of Leftist philosophy today is a strange mixture of remnants of philosophies no longer much believed: classical liberalism (in very, very small doses), Marxism, Luddite-like rejectionism, mercantilism, anarchist rejectionism, fascism, and so forth. These are held together on the Left by the overarching technique of "political correctness". Political correctness is no more and no less than an attempt to control what may permissibly be thought. It is an attempt to grab power by making people unaware that power is at issue.

One symptom of this is the continual attempt to define problems out of existence. If niggers are enslaved, they must be called colored. If colored people are segregated, they must be called black. If blacks are perceived as poor and crime-ridden in aggregate, they must be called African-Americans (unlike people who are Caucasian and emigrated to America from Africa, who must never be called African-American). The chain goes on.

The same process has happened with crippled/handicapped/disabled/differently abled. And the reality is that these continual redefinitions are not an attempt to prevent offense from words and symbols. Originally, the goal seemed to be to delete the concepts of race, ability, gender, talent, intelligence and any other differentiating factors among humans. Even impoverishment has undergone this kind of wordsmithing. These attempts, though, failed utterly at everything except adding new "offensive" words, and thus required new words for a new attempt - the old words were poisoned, and the new ones reduced semantic usefulness, rather than improving it.

But the real world doesn't go away just because we think differently, and some people still can't walk because their spines were crushed in some horrible accident, or disease atrophied their muscular tissue beyond repair. Since these people are different, there needs to be a word describing the difference, and new words will always be invented when the old ones become too tainted for polite conversation. I think that the point where the Left actually realized this came in the early 1980s, with the rise of political correctness (sounds so much better than "thought control", doesn't it?).

Political correctness marks the end of attempting to eliminate differences by eliminating language which describes those differences and the beginning of a new use of language as a weapon: an attempt to remove elements utterly from polite conversation, replacing them with words which assume the Leftist position and implicitly denegrate any other position. Try, for example, having an argument about whether or not a cripple can be a firefighter, in which you may not use any term to describe the cripple other than "differently abled". Now, if I am arguing that the "differently abled" are not less able, just differently able, and you are arguing that the difference in abilities is such that the "differently able" cannot use a hose, enter a burning building or perform many other necessary tasks - I have the advantage. I can use short sentences and shorthand words and thoughts, where you have to explain your position in detail. Since people are naturally wearied by explaining in detail time after time (bloggers seem to be an exception to this rule), eventually I can make you - or the audience - give up and leave; thus I win.

It is, again, simply a grab at power by shutting down attempts to communicate ideas that are antithetical to the Left.

But what is the object of this? What power is there to grab? Well, the Left's philosophy - such as it is when cobbled together from a mix of competing and barely-understood ideas long discarded in their essentials - holds that all power belongs to healthy, normal, adult Caucasian men who are businessmen, politicians or military officers (collectively, the patriarchy, oppressors, or many other epithets). It's not really possible, in this world view, for a Negro to gain power, because they don't meet the criteria of being Caucasian; or for a woman, because they don't meet the creteria of being a man.

But if you can define "the oppressors" in such a way that all of the criteria for belonging are either ineligible for discussion, or are implicitly epithets, then you can force a distinction between "them" (the opressors) and "us" (everyone else).

And that is why anti-globalisation neo-Luddites are joined by Stalin-worshippers and watermelon environmentalists at anti-war rallies, carrying signs that say they support soldiers who murder their officers; or at "pro-choice" rallies, carrying signs that oppose men in general. It's why the Left attempts to elevate being crippled over being healthy, being gay over being straight, youthful irresponsibility over adult responsibility, every non-Caucasian race over Caucasians, workers over businessmen, Leftists politicians over all other politicians (and Leftists over non-Leftists, for that matter) and so forth. It's why "enlightened progressives" will call any black conservative far more vile names than they use on any other person.

In the end, the goal is to take the money and power the Left believes belongs to people like, well, me, and to distribute it amongst their supporters, thus buying power for themselves.

The one, small, almost insignificant problem with this is that history shows quite plainly that power doesn't belong exclusively to the current "them": wealth and power and success and responsibility and bright prospects go to those who are willing to accept responsibility for their behavior, and the consequences of that behavior. And since the entire attitude of the Left is about excusing themselves for not having power, criticizing others who do have power, and then attempting to take unearned power for themselves, the Left will never obtain lasting power, even if every one of the current "them" is killed outright.

In the end, even absolute power would not be enough, because the failure to accept responsibility for the outcome of their behavior would result in the loss of that power. This is, in a way, what happened to the Arab world, where a culture of blaming others (engendered by a fatalist attitude inherent in Islam) stagnated Arab culture as soon as it suffered major setbacks. It's what happened to the Soviet Union, where Stalin set the situation up so that failures never happened. And it will happen to the West, too, if the Left wins the war of ideas currently being waged.

Dress #3

Brian Tiemann has some questions, but has forgotten to include a choice: the correct answer to each question is whatever will increase the chances that the person reading it will vote against President Bush in November, will agitate against the US, or will otherwise act in the way that the manipulative people forming these "theories" want them to.

History Then and Now

In the constant pursuit of materials for homeschooling our children, Steph finds a lot of great resources. For example, here is an American history written in story form in 1917. Here is the author's preface:

DEAR PEGGY,

Four years have come and gone since first you asked me to write a Story of the United States "lest you should grow up knowing nothing of your own country." I think, however, that you are not yet very grown up, not yet too "proud and great" to read my book. But I hope that you know something already of the history of your own country. For, after all, you know, this is only a play book. It is not a book which you need knit your brows over, or in which you will find pages of facts, or politics, and long strings of dates. But it is a book, I hope, which when you lay it down will make you say, "I'm glad that I was born an American. I'm glad that I can salute the stars and stripes as my flag."

Yes, the flag is yours. It is in your keeping and in that of every American boy and girl. It is you who in the next generation must keep it flying still over a people free and brave and true, and never in your lives do aught to dim the shining splendour of its silver stars.

Always your friend,

H. E. MARSHALL

(emphasis added)
And here is Henrietta Marshall's description of King Philip's War:

You remember that the Pilgrim Fathers had made a treaty with the Indians when they first arrived. As long as the old Chief Massasoit lived he kept that treaty. But now he was dead, and his son Philip ruled.

You will wonder, perhaps, why an Indian chief should have a name like Philip. But Philip's real name was Metacomet. He, however, wanted to have an English name, and to please him the English called him Philip. And by that name he is best known.

For a time all went well. But very soon Philip and his tribe grew restless and dissatisfied. When they saw the white men coming in always greater and greater numbers, and building towns and villages further and further into the land, they began to fear them and long to drive them away. And at length all their thoughts turned to war.

Friendly Indians and "praying Indians," as those who had become Christians were called, came now to warn the Pale-faces and tell them that Philip was gathering his braves, and that he had held a war dance lasting for several weeks. In the night, too, people in lonely farms awoke to hear the wild sound of drums and gun shots. But still the English hoped to pacify Philip. So they sent him a friendly letter telling him to send away his braves, for no white man wished him ill.

But Philip returned no answer.

Then one Sunday while the people were at church and the houses were all deserted Indians attacked the little town of Swansea, burning and plundering. The next day and the next they returned, tomahawk and firebrand in hand, and so the war began.

Other tribes joined with King Philip, and soon New England was filled with terror and bloodshed. The men of New England gathered in force to fight the Indians. But they were a hard foe to fight, for they never came out to meet the Pale-faces in open field.

At first when the British began to settle in America they had made it a rule never to sell firearms to the Indians. But that rule had long ago been broken through. Now the Indians not only had guns, but many of them were as good shots as the British. Yet they kept to their old ways of fighting, and, stealthily as wild animals, they skulked behind trees, or lurked in the long grass, seeking their enemies. They knew all the secret forest ways, they were swift of foot, untiring, and mad with the lust of blood. So from one lonely village to another they sped swiftly as the eagle, secretly as the fox. And where they passed they left a trail of blood and ashes.

At night around some lonely homestead all would seem quiet. Far as the eye could see there would be no slightest sign of any Redman, and the tired labourer would go to rest feeling safe, with his wife and children beside him. But ere the first red streaks of dawn shivered across the sky he would be awakened by fiendish yells. Ere he could seize his gun the savages would be upon him. And the sun when it rose would show only blackened, blood-stained ruins where but a few hours before a happy home had been.

Yet with this red terror on every side the people went on quietly with their daily life. On week days they tilled their fields and minded their herds, on Sundays they went, as usual, to church, leaving their homes deserted. But even to church they went armed, and while they knelt in prayer or listened to the words of their pastor their guns were ever within reach of their hands.

One Sunday, while in the village of Hadley the people were all at church, the Indians crept up in their usual stealthy fashion. Suddenly the alarm was given, and, seizing their guns which stood by their sides, the men rushed out of the meeting-house. But they were all in confusion: the attack was sudden, they were none of them soldiers, but merely brave men ready to die for their homes and their dear ones, and they had no leader.

Then suddenly a stranger appeared amongst them. He was dressed in quaint old-fashioned clothes. His hair and beard were long and streaked with grey. He was tall and soldierly, and his eyes shone with the joy of battle.

At once he took command. Sharply his orders rang out. Unquestioningly the villagers obeyed, for he spoke as one used to command. They were no longer an armed crowd, but a company of soldiers, and, fired by the courage and skill of their leader, they soon put the Indians to flight.

When the fight was over the men turned to thank their deliverer. But he was nowhere to be found. He had vanished as quickly and mysteriously as he had come.

"What did it mean?" they asked. "Who was the strange leader? Had God in His mercy sent an angel from heaven to their rescue ?"

No one could answer their questions, and many decided that indeed a miracle had happened, and that God had sent an angel to deliver them.

This strange leader was no other than the regicide, Colonel Goffe, who, as we know, had for many years lived hidden in the minister's house. From his attic window he had seen the Indians creeping stealthily upon the village. And when he saw the people standing leaderless and bewildered, he had been seized with his old fighting spirit, and had rushed forth to lead them. Then, the danger being over, he had slipped quietly back to his hiding-place. There he remained hidden from all the world as before, until he died and was buried beside his friend.

Autumn passed and winter came, and the Indians gathered to their forts, for the bare forests gave too little protection to them in their kind of warfare. When spring came they promised themselves to come forth again and make an end of the Pale-faces. But the Pale-faces did not wait for spring.

The Indians had gathered to the number of over three thousand into a strong fortress. It was surrounded by a marsh and the only entrance was over a bridge made by a fallen tree.

This fortress the New Englanders decided to attack and take. So, a thousand strong, they set out one morning before dawn and, after hours of weary marching through the snow, they reached the fort. Across the narrow bridge they rushed, and although many of their leaders fell dead, the men came on, nothing daunted. A fierce fight followed, for each side knew that they must win or die. Shut in on all sides by impassable swamps there was no escape. But not till dark was falling did the white men gain the victory. The ground was strewn with dead and dying, and in the gathering darkness the remaining Indians stole quietly away, and vanished like shadows. Then the New Englanders set fire to the wigwams, and, taking their wounded, marched back to their headquarters.

This was a sad blow to the Indians, but it did not by any means end the war which, as spring came on, broke out again in full fury. But gradually the white men got the upper hand. Instead of attacking, the Redmen fled before them. They lost heart and began to blame King Philip for having led them into war, and at length he was slain by one of his own followers.

Soon after this the war came to an end. But whole tracts of New England were a desert, a thousand of the bravest and best of the young men were killed. Many women and children, too, had been slain, and there was hardly a fireside in the whole of Massachusetts where there was not a vacant place. Numbers of people were utterly ruined and the colonies were burdened with a great debt.

As to the Indians their power was utterly broken, and their tribes were almost wiped out. Except the Mohegans, who had remained friendly throughout the war, there were few Indians left in south New England, where there was never again a war between white men and Indians.

My how things have changed. Here's a description of King Philip's War from a more modern source:

KING PHILIP’S WAR : THE CAUSES

Colonists’ hunger for land, as well as the heavy-handed treatment of the Wampanoag and other Native People by government officials, led to one of the most disastrous wars in America’s history.

Governor William Bradford died in 1657; Massasoit, the principal leader among the Wampanoag, died in 1660 and was succeeded by his son Wamsutta, called Alexander by the colonists. With the passing of the first generation, which had forged an uneasy alliance, the personal bonds which had helped to create a working peace ended.

The two cultures’ different ways of life and concepts of land use had caused tension for many ears. A continuing problem was the trampling of Native cornfields by colonists’ livestock. While colonists were legally responsible for damage, such laws were difficult to enforce in remote areas such as Rehoboth and Taunton. Increased competition for resources (particularly land for planting, hunting and fishing) caused friction between the two groups. Changes in the regional economy, such as collapse in the fur trade, led many Native People to support themselves by selling their land. With other governments (Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut) all competing to establish their territories, Plymouth wanted exclusive rights to purchase land from the Wampanoags.

KING PHILIP’S WAR : THE WAR

In 1662, in an arrogant attempt to exert control, the Plymouth Court summoned Wampanoag leader Wamsutta to Plymouth. Major Josiah Winslow and a small force took Wamsutta at gunpoint. Soon after questioning, Wamsutta sickened and died. His death greatly angered the Wampanoag.

Wamsutta's brother Metacom (also called Philip) succeeded him. Plymouth’s continued unyielding policy toward Native leaders, as well as the events surrounding the murder of Sassamon, a liaison between the two groups, caused the breakdown in relations that led to war.

In 1675, hostilities broke out in the town of Swansea, and the war spread as far north as New Hampshire, and as far southwest as Connecticut. Not all Native People, however, sided with Philip. Most Natives who had converted to Christianity fought with the English or remained neutral. The English, however, did not always trust these converts and interned many of them in camps on outlying islands. Also, some Native communities on Cape Cod and the Islands did not participate in the war. Native soldiers fighting on the side of the colonists helped turn the tide of the war, which ended in 1676 when Philip was killed by a Wampanoag fighting with Captain Benjamin Church.

KING PHILIP’S WAR : THE EFFECTS

King Philip’s War was one of the bloodiest and most costly in the history of America. One in ten soldiers on both sides was injured or killed. It took many years for Plymouth and the other colonies to recover from damage to property

The outcome of King Philip’s War was devastating to the traditional way of life for Native People in New England. Hundreds of Natives who fought with Philip were sold into slavery abroad. Others, especially women and children, were forced to become servants locally. As the traditional base of existence changed due to the Colonists’ victory, the Wampanoag and other local Native communities had to adapt certain aspects of their culture in order to survive.

Both accounts are biased. In general, though, the first is far more dispassionate, while the second strikes me as strident and accusatory. The beauty of this, though, is that we can let the kids see both accounts (and other, more dispassionate accounts) and form their own opinion.

One Thing Missing

Lately, I've seen a lot of people commenting on the blogosphere as a replacement for mainstream media. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.

The media as a whole serves several discrete functions:

• information gathering
• information filtering
• analysis
• opinion molding
• opinion modeling
• entertainment

There are other functions the media provides, but these are the most critical.

Information Gathering and Information Filtering

Information gathering is the process of actually finding information, while information filtering is the process of determining which bits of information that you have collected are meaningful, rather than trivial. Information is all around us, but most of it is not meaningful except in very specific contexts. For example, if a city council passes a resolution against US involvement in Upper Slobonia, that is certainly information. However, it's meaningless in and of itself (though it may be meaningful if virtually every city council in the country does so, as it would be an indicator of public opinion).

The major media actually does not do a great job at these functions, mostly due to laziness as far as I can tell. For example, no one saw the Savings and Loan crisis coming. Why not? Because the reporters who could have gathered the information in the records offices of the SEC were too busy attending press conferences and parties and listening to what was being talked about to actually go dig up the information. What information did come to light tended to get filtered out as isolated failures or financial difficulties, because there were not enough data points being gathered until the crisis was already upon us.

That said, the major media do a far better job, at present, of information gathering than the blogosphere. There is no blog equivalent to the AP or the staff of the NY Times. Blogs excel at finding information in print - especially information published on the Internet, filtering it and disseminating it (see especially Instapundit), but the gathering of raw information is still all too rare.

Analysis, Opinion Molding and Opinion Modeling

Analysis is the process of taking filtered information and placing it in a broader context. Opinion molding is the process of forming the opinions of others; editorializing is a subset of this process. Opinion modeling is the process of showing how a particular opinion fits into a broad philosophy.

This is the strong-point of the blogosphere. Blogs are often amazingly good at analysis. For examples, see USS Clueless and Belmont Club. By contrast, this is the weakest point of major media, frequently caught completely unaware by events either because their bad filtering prohibited good analysis, or unacknowledged biases led to faulty analysis.

Blogs are less efficient at opinion molding than the major media, primarily because while blogs - a mostly written medium - can convey logical arguments with great skill and effect, they are seldom able to obtain the emotional impact of and image and an anecdote. For example, I recently saw a CNN report with an Iraqi mother crying over her dead baby, killed in a cross-fire between US soldiers and Ba'athist insurgents. It takes a long time for any but the most hard-hearted to get past that image to the logical argument that she shouldn't have been holding her baby deliberately between US troops and Ba'athists firing on them, in order to make it harder for US troops to effectively fight the Ba'athists (especially because CNN didn't actually mention that she was doing so).

Opinion modeling is something else blogs do very well. Blogs generally are explicit about their philosophy, while major media tend to deny that they have a philosophy. Still, it is no accident that sources like the BBC or Reuters make their bias apparent; they have an editorial philosophy and it infuses everything they do. They do tend to deny that they have such a philosophy, though. Good blogosphere examples of this are Daily Kos and Eject!Eject!Eject!

Entertainment

This is a toss-up. The major media are very good at entertaining - they see it as a part of their mission and frequently skip every other aspect of reporting to be entertaining - regardless of cost to truth or anything else.

On the other hand, blogs are very entertaining for people who enjoy reading - especially politically-active people in the context of blogs which replace news media - but not as good at reaching people seeking mass-market entertainment.

I think that the blogosphere could eventually be a valuable channel for news and a significant competitor to major media, if a few steps are taken:

• There needs to be some equivalent of the wire service, which feeds raw information into the blogosphere for digestion. Due to the bias in news gathering, filtering and presentation, the existing wire services are inadequate to the task.
• There needs to be blogging software which includes information management as well as content management, or an easy way to link content management and information management software together, in order to uncover unsuspected links when filtering information.
• There needs to be some extension of blogs into short video presentations and photographic presentation.

The one essential change is the need for some form of information gathering. I don't know how this would arise, except as an emergent property of individual blogging preferences. It's certainly possible that blogs would largely supplant major media in some ways, but if so, it's some ways off.

Lighten Up, Already

People are apparently taking The Day After Tomorrow way too seriously. In the end, it's just a movie by the director of Independence Day, and bears about as much resemblance to reality.

City and Country

Michael Totten sums up my recently-discovered opinion almost perfectly:

The way I see it, the suburbs combine the worst of the city with the worst of the countryside. In the suburbs you’re stranded as if you were way out in the sticks, but you also get traffic. You have no choice but to get in a car to go anywhere, just as if you lived in the middle of nowhere. But you get none of the peace, quiet, and expansiveness of the woods, or prairie, or desert, depending on where you live.

I've lived in the suburbs pretty much all of my life, until this past January. Since then, I've been in downtown Chicago. You can get anywhere in downtown Chicago without getting in a car. And it's faster to get places. And there are so many places to get to: world class museums and an aquarium, the boat rides, the lake shore walk, the Miracle Mile shopping, art galleries, parks, Wrigley field, etc.

On the other hand, when you're downtown, you don't have a yard to go to, and sometimes getting to, say, a Target can be an experience, since they don't tend to be built downtown. There's also a cost implication to being downtown; everything is generally more expensive than in the suburbs or the country.

The advantage of the country is the peace and quiet, and the ability to know your neighbors (even the ones who live a few miles away) pretty well. (The city is anonymous, and the suburbs nearly so.)

The advantage of the suburbs over the country is that it's easy to buy mass-market goods cheaply. The advantage of the suburbs over the city is that you can let the kids run around in the (small) yard without having to take the whole family out to the park.

All in all, I think the country within an hour's drive of a mid- to large-sized city is ideal, followed by an active downtown like Chicago (and unlike, say, Dallas, which is pretty much just corporate), followed by the suburbs.

Sign Me Up

Expat Yank links to an Italian blogger's comments about Italy's direction in the Terror Wars, which includes this:

This country,this Left,this "right", this Europe did not understand what this Defensive Global War on Terror is about.

They did not realize this because they still live in the dream that one day it will be America that will rescue us.

Yet,America and the Americans are rightly suspicious of the Europeans and they would not come to rescue us if something bad happens to our Old Continent.

It will be the Europeans themselves who will have to rescue themselves.

Unlike Oriana Fallaci, if someone offers to me the American Citizenship, i will accept immediately.

It's hard to renounce to one's nationality.but when your country surrenders to the Evil, you have no othet option but join the American Dream.

OK, I have no idea what the requirements are for immigration, but I would be willing to sponsor anyone who loves the idea of America enough to come here.

Lot o' Links

Instapundit has some good stuff right now:

Dust in the Light looks at Jimmy Massey, perhaps the next John Kerry - in a bad way.

Chrenkoff has a roundup on the stories you're not likely to see in the news: it's the good news from Iraq, and there's a lot of it.

Random Thoughts

Courtesy of Monday's Best of the Web Today, this New York Times headline:

Bush, at a Commencement, Hails 'Honor' of U. S. Troops in Iraq

Absolutely disgusting (but highly illustrative of the Times' opinion) use of scare quotes.

I hear "Super Size Me" is getting rave reviews at Cannes. From what I gather it's a documentary about Michael Moore, but you might want to check with someone on that.

And should I feel bad, or is it just representative of my age, that upon hearing of Tony Randall's death, the first thing I thought of was this. Homer on deceased trucker Red Barclay: "He called me greenhorn. I called him Tony Randall. It's a thing we had."

Being in the Minority

Some things don't tend to go together:

Pagan and conservative
Pagan and monogamous
Pagan and "thinks environmentalists are full of crap"
Pro-gun non-gun-owning Texan
and so forth

Yet I'm all of these. But I'm not in nearly the minority that these guys are.

The Moral Judgement of the Village

One way in which modern society is vastly, unimaginably different from that of even 100 years ago is in the degree to which people are concentrated in urban centers. Until well into the industrial revolution, the vast majority of the population lived in small villages, while only a relative few lived in cities.

One characteristic of crowded cities is that everything that's contagious spreads much quicker than in the less-populated countryside. This is true not only of the massive epidemics of polio and influenza, but also of the ideas and experience necessary to end those epidemics. Indeed, to a very large degree, the rate of spread of ideas was so much increased by urbanization that industrialization can be said to have brought on the information age more by spreading human knowledge than by the technology that industrialization provided.

But there's something lost, too, in the city. There's an anonymity here; reputations are less meaningful in the city. No one knows you, and committing an atrocity in one neighborhood will not necessarily condemn you two streets over. Would you do business with a thief, or socialize with a pathological liar? Yet, in the city, how do you know who are the thieves and liars?

That's one of the benefits of the village: have you ever known the moral judgement of a village to be wrong? The aggregate opinions of informed people tend towards accuracy and usefulness. That's why it's so important for a free society to be educated and aware of national and local events. And it's one of the things that the Internet is restoring to us.

Now, those who are interested in events can see them happen, and in context, and can see where our media repeatedly lets us down. Because of this ability to form communities of expedience, it's possible for information and opinion flow to lead rapidly to consensus and accurate moral judgement. And this should truly scare the entrenched elites - including the media - because by and large they've been lying to us for decades, and now we're finding out just how much. It's a small matter of time until the media is seen - correctly - as no better than tabloids.

The global village is coming; it just doesn't look like what we expected.

Idiots

Brian Dunn asks: "Sometimes I wonder if there are comparable fools in the ranks of the Islamists who argue that it is foolish to attack us since it will just make us mad and recruit more Tommy Franks to kill them all. It should only be fair. Why should we have all the idiots on our side?"

Idiots die in a state of nature, either by literally dying or by figuring out that you can't act like an idiot and live. We have a lot of idiots because we have a few brave souls willing and able to go into the heart of hell for the rest of us, so that we can remain in an oblivious state of peace while the demons howl at the gates.

The Truth Is

When Steven Den Beste takes a week off, I get giddy with anticipation, because he always seems to follow up these periods with a world-beating rant, introducing some clarity to some situation. Like this one. Den Beste takes on a variety of positions based on misdirection, one after the other.

UPDATE (4/30): Brian Tiemann makes a similar point.

Duties

For an exhibition of moral courage and ruthless intellectual honesty, note Francis Porretto's position in Duties. And in particular, if you are Catholic, I recommend that you read this; it will at least inform your thoughts.

Sources for Understanding the Terror Wars

I have gotten a couple of emails asking for source material on some of the posts I've written, and to the best of my ability have provided it. The reason I frequently don't have many links in articles laying out broad patterns and situations is that I don't think from a single incident. Instead, I tend to read a lot of material, view things on TV, talk to people and let all of that filter through my brain. Eventually, out pops a conclusion and supporting material, but without references or links. For those, I have to go back and look it up (possible, but time-consuming, especially finding the disconfirming evidence that I've discarded for one reason or another). This may be the best "one stop shopping" for pulling together a picture of actual events and trends in the Terror Wars.

While I will still be happy to answer requests for specific information about a specific post, I wanted to provide a general reading list of sources that inform my views.

The traditional news media frequently have nuggets of information buried in their stories, but you have to ignore their analysis. I read a lot of bits and pieces from different sources, rather than reading exhaustively through any given source. The traditional media is the least useful source to me overall, but the most useful sources for war and economic news among them are the Wall Street Journal, Ha'aretz, the Guardian, the BBC, al-Jazeera, and (ugh) the New York Times. Let me stress again, though, to ignore the analysis and editorializing that is in the articles; it's frequently more indicative of the reporters' biases than the actual situation. And in the case of al-Jazeera, the BBC and the NY Times, swallow a case of salt with much of the coverage.

To see what the Arabs and Muslims are saying about us to themselves in Arabic, rather than to us in English, there is no better source than MEMRI. MEMRI translates news articles, speeches, sermons, and even cartoons from Arab/Muslim sources.

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs does an excellent job of culling many sources to find information about the jihadis' plans and intentions, the mood and behavior of Arab/Muslim societies, the activities of the "anti-war" groups and so on, and infrequently presents hopeful news. I used to think that this was bias against hopeful signs in the Arab world, but eventually I've come to believe that it's just that there aren't a lot of hopeful signs right now. By the way, don't read his comments; they tend to attract extremists and are a waste of time for serious observers.

Dan Darling at Regnum Crucis does a lot of work building up the structure of jihadi groups and the relationships between them.

Jihad Watch does something similar to Little Green Footballs, but with a narrower focus and more analysis.

Good filtered analysis comes from USS Clueless (mixed in with a lot of other things he analyzes), Winds of Change and above all Belmont Club.

Well, that should be enough reading material for a while.

UPDATE: Oops, almost forgot to include StrategyPage.

The Course of Human Expansion

Pejman links to this post which shows how anatomically modern humans expanded from Africa throughout the world. It's a really cool article.

Talkin' 'bout my Generation

Yes, I am a child of the 80s:

(I got 132.5 points, if you're comparing.)

Perspective

Lilesnet offers some interesting time comparisons (partisan, but fun):

It took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51-day operation.

We've been looking for evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq for less time than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.

It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard than it took Teddy Kennedy to call the police after his Oldsmobile sank at Chappaquiddick. (All the while, Mary Jo Kopechne was not being rescued.)

It took less time to take Iraq than it took to count the votes in Florida!!!!

Argument and Rhetoric

Francis Porretto has an article (about how webs of information are limited by their most limited nodes - and how this applies to various ways of passing information) which bounces at one point off of this post of mine (about fundamental problems with the Internet's structure). Now, I'm going to bounce off on yet another tangent from Francis' article:

Here we can see the significance of the anonymous denigration or offering of falsehood as fact. An honest, courteous man would never do such things. He wants his arguments to stand on their merits; if the merits are insufficient, it's best for all that the argument be refuted. But he who is less than honest or courteous will have no qualms about spreading falsehoods or slandering his adversaries under a cloak of anonymity. Concealment of his identity spares him both retaliation and the accumulation of a record of bad faith: advantages in any information war.

This points out the difference between argument and rhetoric, and the essential weakness of rhetoric.

In an argument, each participant wishes to reach a conclusion suitable to all. The process for doing this is a logical sequence of ideas, and each party to the argument attempts both to establish his logic and to refute the logic of his opponent.

There are situations where no definitive conclusion is possible, because each party to the argument has equally-valid logic, but the premises (that is to say, their assumptions which are not subject to logical refutation) for their arguments are incompatible and either the premises are not subject to evidentiary examination, or no evidence is at hand: an impasse. An honest disputant in an argument, whose premises are subject to evidentiary validation and fail of that validation, would be required logically to submit to the falseness of his argument (though not necessarily to adopt his opponent's position).

Rhetoric is, at its base level, just a set of verbal tools for making arguments well. However, if this rhetoric is coupled with lack of principle, the dishonest participant can totally undermine the possibility of reaching conclusion: his goal is neither to persuade nor to agree, but to get his way regardless. This is very common in political contests, for example, as the current example of Richard Clarke should well show. This unwillingness to lose the argument, coupled with a weak argument or provably-false premises, in addition to earning Noam Chomsky his livelihood, leads to the argumentative fallacies of ad hominem, tu quoque and others. (The fact that these have Latin names should tell you how old such rhetorical tricks are.)

In the end, those who are wedded to honest argument would tend to dismiss those who just want to win, regardless of merit; after all, they will be proven wrong in time, so why worry? Well, we have to remember that logic is not taught in schools, and reason is hardly considered a noble virtue any more (or, if it is, it's certainly more observed in the breach). The real game of the dishonest rhetoric is to avoid losing the argument today; and so we get this. The same issue, a year after it originally appears, finds the dishonest making opposite arguments, and claiming that their opponent was wrong all along.

And then you get this, a comment that came in today on an old post of mine:

you're brainwashed about the Palestinian/Israeli issue. to say this:

"For a perfect example of why no compassionate person should ever consider giving fiscal, moral, politcal, legal, or even rhetorical support to the Palestinian cause, just read this, and consider that the Palestinians believe that Israeli children are legitimate "military" targets, because they could one day grow up to serve in the Israeli Army."

you express a wholesale ignorance as if you've never freed yourself from the psychic leash of CNN, Fox , seeBS etc. this is the most heavily denied subject in the US because Israel is umbilically tied to US tax money.

It gets worse from here. As best I can follow it, the argument path is:

1. I am wrong about Palestinians targetting children, because
   
2. Palestinians are not free to choose their actions,
   
3. because Israel refuses to let Palestinians randomly slaughter Israelis when they can do so without randomly slaughtering Palestinians.
   
4. This is proven because Japanese kids who are bullied and overworked commit suicide.
   
5. So, the solution to the Israeli/Palestinian issue is "an army for peace that would swoop in and force a solution" by compelling Israel to accept attacks on them until Israel has raised the Palestinian standard of living as high as the Israeli one.

If there's an honest argument there, I can't find it.

Tax Refund

InstaPundit has some responses on what people did with their tax refunds. I kept my new company afloat for another month, to give receipts time to catch up with expenses, thus helping to continue the employment of three (highly-skilled) people.

Top that.

It's Gonna Take a Miracle

Bill Whittle writes a new essay.
And then a miracle occurs, and people choose to face the harsh reality of the world with logic, reason and dispassionate observation rather than hiding in the warm, dark comfort of magical thinking.
And we face the future together.

Actually, I have been coming closer and closer to the belief that mankind falls apart unless we are in danger of dying on a fairly-constant basis. As long as we are protected (and I for one would like to stay that way) from the harsh reality, we can indulge in all kinds of comfortable fantasies, "cowards, bound up in ego, boxed in narcissism and wrapped in bitterness and failure."

Connect the Dots

Read this, then read this.

Then She Told me a Story, About Free Milk and a Cow

It is only relatively recently that love became (at least in Enlightenment-influenced societies) a primary motivation for marriage. (Let me be clear: in societies not based on Enlightment values, love has not become a primary motivation for marriage.) That doesn't invalidate love as a motive for marriage, but it does bring into question why marriage would exist otherwise.

The answer is actually pretty straightforward: marriage provides concrete benefits to both partners, and concrete evolutionary benefits.

The concrete benefits to the husband are that he has an object for his natural protective and provider traits (and thus is made happy, and proud, by having someone to protect and provide for and by protecting and providing for them) and a better chance of having sex (especially past the prime of life). The concrete benefits to the wife mirror those of the husband: she has someone to protect and provide for her - particularly when she is incapacitated by childbirth and early childcare - and also has a better chance of having sex (especially past the prime of life). Both spouses also benefit from companionship, a pretty universal human need, and other psychological benefits (married people are still, apparently, happier in general than non-married people).

The evolutionary benefits of marriage are that children are more likely to survive for two reasons: the children are provided for and protected, and families are a great mechanism for accumulating wealth (which has a positive impact on survival to adulthood and on ability to find a good spouse in adulthood).

Over the long-term, the evolutionary benefits are such that people likely to choose marriage (barring societal conditioning against doing so) are more likely to increase their share of the gene pool than people unlikely to choose marriage.

What is happening now, though, is a societal suppression of many of the reasons for marriage (and not just in Scandinavia). The prevalence of easy divorces, and the availability of abortion, have both significantly weakened marriage as a societal institution, and it is likely that socially redefining marriage to include homosexual couples, groups and whomever else can make an equal-rights case for "the right to be married" is going to weaken the institution further.

It should be noted here that I believe that civil divorce should be more difficult, but certainly not impossible, that abortion should be available on demand to adults whose foetus is not yet at the 50% viability point, and that (from a civil, not religious, standpoint) any group of two or more consenting adults should be able to form a contractual relationship equivalent to marriage (including the protections against testimony against a spouse, which will need to be evaluated in depth for reasons I hope are obvious).

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Anyway, the point is that the institution of marriage as it's known in our culture today is weakening further, and is likely to undergo another major change.

You heard me, another major change. In this country, only something like 100 years ago, nuclear families were rare, and were the result of unusual forces. Typically, they were the result of epidemics wiping out the extended family, in-migration from other countries where only the nuclear family came, or colonization of the frontier. The usual model was the extended family, with elders mostly caring for and educating the children; the adult males providing for the elders, women and children; and the adult women bearing and nursing children. The dissolution of the extended family had far-reaching effects (consider: the need for public education, the emergence of nursing homes, the need for women to be able to vote and work - and these are just the edge of the issue), and these effects are only now stabilizing.

But now, the nuclear family looks as if it will dissolve as the norm (there are still extended families in the US, but they're very rare). The interesting question to me is not how to prevent this, but what will replace nuclear families.

I doubt there's much to really argue about in the foregoing, but now I'm going to hop off into speculation, so get ready to be annoyed, offended, intrigued or bored (your choice).

---

Human social institutions exist for one reason only, and at the behest of one group only. They exist to for women to obtain protection and provision for themselves and their children when they and their children are incapable of living without help.

The fundamental, overriding imperative of women is successfully to raise children to adulthood, who themselves then have children. (The evolutionary success of any individual is measured by the number of grandchildren, because that accounts for how many of the individual's children survived to adulthood, and passed on the individual's genes to another generation.) In order for women successfully to raise children, given that they will be incapacitated for large parts of their productive adult life, women require social institutions to make that possible, and desire social institutions that make it easier.

The social rules that grow up around relationships (from tribal hunter/gatherer cultures where all adult males were responsible for supporting all of the tribe's women and children, to early agricultural settlements where monogamous attachment in pairs first became prominent, to extended families of various kinds, to the nuclear family) were always based on providing women with care during their periods of pregnancy and nursing, and providing women and children with protection and sustenance always.

While such social rules benefit women directly, men also obtain benefits. In addition to social approval, men get to indulge their desire to protect and provide. But, more importantly to most men (at least when they're young enough to be in prime breeding age), women have the power of withholding sexual favors. Chastity before marriage as a social rule, for example, was enforced by the denial of women to provide sex before marriage, not by the rules of the Church. (For very good practical reasons, too; go read Les Miserables to see what women with a child could face in the absence of a man to care for them.) Given that there is a limited number of attractive young women willing to have sex with any given man without asking for a commitment in return, men have a pretty strong incentive to live within the social structures that women build up to protect themselves and their children.

I do believe that it's at least somewhat likely that the combination of birth control, ready divorce, and the societal redefinition of marriage might well make nuclear families as rare in 100 years as the extended family is today. But absent horribly repressive measures (such as the most extreme Islamic creeds impose on women), some new institution will arise to take over the functions of the family, protecting women and children and increasing wealth. What this institution will be is anyone's guess (science fiction has provided us with almost as many ideas as has a careful study of history), but I can almost guarantee that the primary shapers of the replacement to marriage will be young, heterosexual women.

Here Endeth the Lesson

Andrew Olmstead offers a concise explanation of why government-mandated costs to businesses reduce employement.

He doesn't go far enough.

Consider the following additional factors:

• Government regulation costs money. Construction businesses have major outlays on environmental impact statements, for example; but there are many other examples. Perhaps the biggest cost regulation incurs is the cost of having lawyers dedicated to discovering what regulations the company is required to comply with, and what regulations do not apply. With new regulations published daily, this can be a fairly time-consuming (and thus costly - lawyers aren't cheap) process.
  
• The tax code costs money for compliance. If you think doing your 1040A is complex, try doing a corporate tax return. With the new auditing rules in the wake of Enron, WorldCom, et al, it is now imperative that company officers understand the books in some detail, even if they are not involved with the financial affairs of the company in the normal course of business. Otherwise, they risk damaging lawsuits. And corporate officers' time is not cheap. In fact, it's more expensive than lawyers' time.
  

I could go on, but it would get boring and technical pretty quickly. Suffice it to say that any cost placed on a business by the government can have one of only three effects: it can increase costs to consumers, reduce employment, or reduce profits.

Of course, the hope of most people who advocate government regulation and government-mandated costs is that profits will be reduced instead of the other possible effects. But this is naïve. If a company's profit margins are larger than a certain amount (about 5% for most settled industries, and about 15% for most insurgent industries), competitors will come in at a lower profit margin, and thus a lower price, and steal the market. If a company's profit margins are sustainable, a lower profit margin must be raised. Otherwise, the company is in serious danger of going out of business in the trough of the normal business cycle, or in the event of any of a number of catastrophes. Or, alternately, the company will be able to sustain a cash position that would protect it from the downtrends of the economy, but be unable to attract investment and thus unable to grow.

Each of these cases leads back to one inevitable conclusion: profits cannot be reduced below a certain level over the long-term, and thus increased government costs can only decrease employment or increase costs to consumers.

Further, in this globalized age, government costs can only marginally increase costs to consumers (in most industries). If costs rise, then imports from countries with less regulation or cheaper working costs become more enticing to consumers, and drive out domestic competition. "Drive out domestic competition" means, in the bluntest terms, that companies will either move operations overseas or go out of business.

In other words, in the current world economy, government-mandated costs - direct or indirect - must reduce employment.

Here endeth the lesson.

Medium-Core

I saw this libertarian purity test a couple of places online, and you know I just had to take it. I scored 52, which means:

You are a medium-core libertarian, probably self-consciously so. Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much.

Well, that's why I started the blog, after all, so my friends could catch a break from me talking so much about politics and governance.

Being a Mom

There are some amazing things about moms. Like, for example, being able to recognize a 6-year old as her daughter, whom she thought dead in a fire when 10 days old:

PHILADELPHIA, March 1 -- A 10-day-old girl thought to have died in a 1997 fire was actually kidnapped by a woman who set the blaze to cover her tracks, police said Monday. The birth mother contacted authorities after seeing the girl, now 6 years old, at a birthday party and recognizing the child as her own.

Delimar Vera was thought to have perished in the 1997 blaze in her family's home. No body was ever found.

In January, the child's mother spotted a little girl and was certain she was her daughter, police Capt. John Darby said. An investigation prompted DNA tests that confirmed the mother's suspicion, police said.

After the DNA confirmation, the child's mother "didn't know whether to cry, to yell or to scream," Officer Manuel Gonzales said. "She just stood in shock."

Police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Correa, 41, of Willingboro, N.J., on charges of arson, kidnapping and conspiracy. She remained at large Monday; a telephone listing for her could not be found.

"This child, now 6 years old, who has been raised by Carolyn Correa as her own, is not her own," Darby said.

The girl's mother, Luz Cuevas, told WPHL-TV she recognized the child from a dimple on her face. "I said to my sister, 'Look, she's my daughter,' " Cuevas said.

The girl was placed in the custody of New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services. It was not immediately clear when she would be reunited with her birth mother.

Heroism and Free Will

There's a great discussion at One-Sixteenth on Frodo, heroism and free will.

Twenty Songs

So I have seen on several blogs now an interesting exercise (with some variations): put your MP3 player on shuffle, and list the first 20 songs. Here are mine, from my "general music" list, which excludes holiday music (mostly Samhain/Halloween and Yule/Christmas), spoken word works, comedy and the like, but still manages to contain 4842 songs:

1. They Dance Alone (Gueca Solo) - Sting
   
2. From The Inside (acoustic) - Def Leppard
   
3. Brainscan - HooDoo Gurus
   
4. Tears - Rush
   
5. Don't Hide Your Love - The Rembrandts
   
6. Miss America - Styx
   
7. Interstate Love Song (live) - Stone Temple Pilots
   
8. Magical Wave - Kitaro
   
9. The Only One I Know - The Charlatans, UK
   
10. Sadeness, find love, sadeness (reprise) - Enigma
    
11. Come a Little Bit Closer - Fleetwood Mac
    
12. I'm no Angel - Dido
    
13. Pacha Mama - Mike Oldfield
    
14. Kommotion - Duane Eddy
    
15. Metaphor on the Floor - Art of Noise
    
16. As the Sun Sets over London - Jools Holland
    
17. Your Haunted Head - Concrete Blonde
    
18. Kiss of Spring - Bel Canto
    
19. Kick - INXS
    
20. Constant Craving - k.d. lang

Actually, this is fairly representative of my collection. No metal, no blues and no folk; but other than that representative. I didn't really expect that, given that it's such a small proportion of the overall collection.

We Pass Each Other on the Stairs

Steph has a great post about how anonymous living downtown in a large city can be.

Excellent Advice for Parents

Donald Sensing offers excellent advice for parents of all kids, not just little girls:

Here is what my wife and I have taught our daughter, after consulting with law-enforcement officers I know:

• Under no circumstances of any kind will we send a stranger to give you a message or take you with him. Any stranger who claims he has a message from us is lying. You are immediately to run away; do not answer him or hesitate. Just run.
  
• It is not merely okay to be rude to persons who make you fearful or suspicious of their intentions, it is required. Your safety is paramount.
  
• To get help in a crowded place like a store or mall, go to a woman first. A woman is more likely to help a scared girl than a man is. But if a man is all there is, go to him. A police officer is best, of course, but do not sacrifice help at hand looking for better help elsewhere.
  
• In any event, crowds offer safety. Do everything you can to get attention on you. Yell, knock things over, call for police.
  
• If a man or woman physically attempts to take you away, fight back instantly and loudly. Become a screaming, clawing banshee. Fight dirty! Immediately hit and kick everywhere you can, especially go for eyes and groin. If s/he is wearing glasses, rip them away. Yell for help at the top of your lungs all the while. Yell specifically, "This is not my dad (or mom)! I'm being kidnaped!"
  
• Remember that your entire objective in fighting back is to be released. If the abductor drops you - hopefully from pain you have inflicted - immediately flee and get help.

You cannot child-proof the world, so you must world-proof the child.

The Power of Information

Bigwig at Silflay Hraka provides us with an example of the power of information networks such as the Internet. This kind of research will make political influence harder and harder to conceal, over time.

Where Have I Been?

You can make maps of the States and countries you've visited. I saw this the other day on Peeve Farm, but now that Steph has written about it (here and here), I guess I'll have to.

So here are the States:


create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide
And here are the countries:


create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

UPDATE: Brian corrects my memory. No, plane stops don't count.

I'll Help Dig

Seriously, man, you don't even have to tell me the hooker was dead when you got there. Just tell me where to dig, and I'll help bury this abomination.

(If you don't want to follow the link, it's about postmodern literary theory losing some high-profile adherents.)

Ouch

Remind me not to get on Wretchard's shit list.

Lies, Damned Lies and Polls

Steven Den Beste has a fine article on how polls can be so, well, wrong. The book he mentions, How to Lie with Statistics, should be read by anyone who ever tries to understand not just polling, but also medical prescription claims and environmental claims, and for that matter any claim that relies on statistical evidence instead of actual enumeration.

Common Sense

Yeah, that figures. Then again, pretty much any blogger has a better-than-even chance of getting this result, I'd think.

(Thanks to Michael Totten)

What Leftist Media?

Pejman catches partisanship at the New York Times - not that that's difficult, but it was an artful catch nonetheless.

Talk About Corporate!

So I'm currently on a contract in downtown Chicago, across from the Board of Trade, in an area with many large banks and the Federal Reserve. One of the banks in the area has a ticker that runs the time, temperature, and change in the DJIA from yesterday's close. For some reason that just cracked me up.

Are They Made with Real Girl Scouts?

The Girl Scouts came by today, selling cookies. We are going to be out of town when the cookies would arrive, so we declined to buy any for ourselves. However, they do have a program where you can cookies and have them sent to the troops deployed overseas in war zones. (All you have to do is circle the number of boxes you want.) Cookies on the way, guys.

Dennis Miller, Ladies and Gentlemen

Dennis Miller, in a NY Times interview:

Mr. Miller is also not a traditional conservative. "I've always been a pragmatist," he said. "If two gay guys want to get married, it's none of my business. I could care less. More power to them. I'm happy when people fall in love. But if some idiot foreign terrorist wants to blow up their wedding to make a political statement, I would rather kill him before he can do it, or have my country kill him before he can do it, instead of having him do it and punishing him after the fact. If that makes me a right-wing fanatic, I will bask in that assignation."

Mr. Miller said he remained socially liberal. "I think abortion's wrong, but it's none of my business to tell somebody what's wrong," he said. "So I'm pro-choice. I want to keep my nose out of other people's personal business. I guess I fall into conservative when it comes to protecting the United States in a world where a lot of people hate the United States."

Yep. Agree 100%.

Weirder Than Them

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a reader with a conundrum:

I received an email from 15 year high school student named Sam Burke who is a bit perplexed about how to counter the arguments of moonbats he runs into in high school. He describes some of the things they debate and then goes on to say,

So by now we're insulting each other's parties, pointing out the evils of each other, until those dreaded words escape my enemy's lips: "Well...Bush is some communist Nazi bent on conquering the world for his own evil schemes!"

Remember how I mentioned the quotes that leave me paralyzed in silence?

Well, this is one of them.

...Anyway, all I request is a good comeback to these random bursts of ignorance, something just as good - no, better! - To leave THEM silent instead, not from stupidity either -- but silent from the truth.

Hawkins notes that you can't use logic to convince someone away from an illogical position (or they would have come away from that position on their own), but asks for advice on how to convince someone in such a situation. Much good advice is given in the comments. (In particular, if a person is capable of logic, the Socratic method is an excellent choice.)

Here's mine:

Resort to being weirder than they are. For example:

"Well...Bush is some communist Nazi bent on conquering the world for his own evil schemes!"

Yes, of course. But they're my evil schemes, too, and now that you're on to us I'll have to bring your name up at the next planning session. (adopt a cheerful voice) Watch your back. (smile in as sinister a way as you can, then walk away)

or...

Did you know how easy it is for us Conservatives to have to have someone killed? I don't have any real reason for asking.

With any luck, you can drive them over the edge into incoherency.

Eat the Rich

Via Bill Hobbs, I see a Heritage Foundation report on what it means to be poor in America. Here is a good summary portion:

As a group, America's poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

While the poor are generally well-nourished, some poor families do experience hunger, meaning a temporary discomfort due to food shortages. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 13 percent of poor families and 2.6 percent of poor children experience hunger at some point during the year. In most cases, their hunger is short-term. Eighty-nine percent of the poor report their families have "enough" food to eat, while only 2 percent say they "often" do not have enough to eat.

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

Of course, the living conditions of the average poor American should not be taken as representing all the poor. There is actually a wide range in living conditions among the poor. For example, over a quarter of poor households have cell phones and telephone answering machines, but, at the other extreme, approximately one-tenth have no phone at all. While the majority of poor households do not experience significant material problems, roughly a third do experience at least one problem such as overcrowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty getting medical care.

Compare that to this:

• More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished—799 million of them are from the developing world. More than 153 million of them are under the age of 5.
  
• 6 million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger.
  
• Of the 6.2 billion people in today's world, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day.
  
• In developing countries, 91 children out of 1,000 die before their fifth birthday. By comparison, in the United States eight children in 1,000 will die before turning five years old.
  
• Each day in the developing world, more than 30,000 children die from mostly preventable and treatable causes such as diarrhea, acute respiratory infections, measles or malaria. These diseases are far more deadly to children who are stunted or underweight.
  
• 12 million people die each year from lack of water, including 3 million children from waterborne disease: 1.1 billion lack access to clean water; 2.4 billion live without decent sanitation; and 4 billion without wastewater disposal.

Just What IS the Unemployment Rate Anyway?

Pseudo-Random Thoughts points to an NRO article by Bruce Bartlett on how the two measures of unemployment are diverging. These two measures are the household survey, which asks people if they are working, and the payroll survey, which asks businesses how many people they employ. No one knows exactly why these two indices are diverging, with 8.5 million more people saying they have a job than businesses say they pay. Bartlett does make some suppositions:

Economists generally consider [the payroll survey] to be a more accurate measure of month-to-month changes in national employment. However, there is evidence that during cyclical upturns, such as we are in now, the payroll survey misses many new business startups, causing it to understate employment growth. Eventually, the Labor Department finds these businesses and adjusts its data upward...
[snip]
There are a number of technical reasons why the two surveys will always report different figures. Among these are that people with more than one job may be counted twice in the payroll survey, and that the self-employed are counted only by the household survey.

More interesting to me than that the measures differ is that they are diverging more and more. I suspect that I am a factor in this divergence. There are some people who will never be counted by the payroll survey: the self-employed or those working on a 1099 basis. This segment of the workforce is growing.

The Purpose of...

Belmont Club has a post and a followup about a misguided analysis by The Guardian of international events. In the post, Wretchard writes:

The object of war is peace. If that sounds Orwellian, try this: the object of work is leisure. The object of saving is spending. The purpose of fighting is to stop fighting.

And in the followup, a reader suggests:

Is it not also true to say:

The object of war is victory
The object of saving is accumulation
The object of fighting is domination

If the object of war was peace, there would never be another war. If all saving was spent there would never be capital accumulation, and if all fighting was to stop fighting how would bullies ever get the idea that fighting was a winning strategy?

With all due respect to both, the object of war is peace without surrender; the object of work is leisure without destitution; the object of saving is spending without debt; and the purpose of fighting is to obtain what you want or require, when it is not available any other way.

If peace is more important to the citizens of a nation than liberty and self-determination, they will have peace at the cost of the loss of their liberty and right to self-determination - and possibly a much higher price - unless they are lucky enough to be protected from predation by a powerful patron. For the Canadians and the Europeans, and to some extent any westernized nation, they are fortunate to have the US around to fight for them. The alternative would be that they would have to give up the philosophical basis of their politics, or be conquered.

A Matter of Interest

A necessary, but insufficient, condition of Liberty is the ownership of private property. If you cannot own property and dispose of it as you like, then you are unable to ever attain independence from others (the State, your boss or your lord or what have you). Without the independence to choose what you will do, without the possibility of your actions causing offense which offense in turn causes you to lose your livelihood, you are not free. You are not free, because you must constantly tailor your actions to not offend those who have power over you, by dint of being able to deprive you of your livelihood. And of course, once a person has that kind of power over you, it becomes terribly easy to offend them, because they don't have any incentive to not be offended, and every incentive (human nature being what it is) to exercise that power.

However, the mere ownership of property is not sufficient to Liberty. In order to be at liberty to do what you will, you have to be able to dispose of property as you will. That is, you need to be able to acquire, sell or give away, allow to lapse or in any other way manipulate your property. Otherwise, you are at the mercy of those who regulate the way in which your property can be used. They have the power to deprive you of your livelihood by depriving you of the ability to obtain wealth from your property. (Note: in a very real sense, your time is your property as well, and the labor you invest in can create wealth just as the improvement of land can.) Even barely-intrusive regulation has a chilling effect on Liberty, and the more intrusive the regulation the greater the effect.

From these simple observations arises the concept of the free market. A free market is one in which a person may take posession of (and in some cases create) property, use it, give it away, sell it or in any other way dispose of it, and in which no outside entity interferes as long as the transactions are between private individuals. The closer to this ideal a market is, the freer it is. The US once had an almost entirely free market domestically. This is no longer the case, but our market is still relatively free, even compared to Europe or Japan (which are much more regulated, but still freer than most of the world). History provides no example I can find of a country maintaining Liberty (or even representative government) without a relatively-free market; nor is there any country I can find which has had a mostly-free market (even at the level of China today) for 50 years which has not become a free country, with a representative government and respect for the rule of law.

This actually brings up both a long-term solution to the problem of terrorism, and a problem to be solved first. We talk continually, it seems, about bringing "democracy" (by which is usually meant some form of representative government) to the Arab/Muslim world, in order to remove the conditions that foster terrorism. But what we really want to bring is free markets. Without those markets, it will be impossible to sustain a truly free society, because eventually some group will begin to gain power over others, and that power will concentrate. Without a core of independent people who can resist the powerful without losing their livelihood, a society would eventually slide back into despotism of one form or another. With free markets, though, the ability of people alone or in groups to dominate a society and remove its people's liberties is much diminished. Bringing free markets to the Arab/Muslim world, then, is the long-term solution to the problem of terrorism.

But there is a problem with bringing these markets into being: Islam forbids usury, as Christianity once did. Without the ability to charge interest, many of the types of transactions necessary to a free market are simply impossible: you cannot borrow money to start a business or buy a house, for example. Assuming that the power of the religious authorities of Islam cannot be made to define usury as a high level of interest, rather than any interest at all, some solution has to be found which will allow the charging of interest in fact, if not in name, in Islamic societies.

I am insufficiently versed in economics and Islam to determine what that solution might look like, but it seems to me that we don't have a long-term solution to terrorism until we have a solution to charging interest in Islamic societies.

Outsourcing

Kim du Toit has a post in which he discusses the movement of jobs offshore, and suggests learning a trade as a counter to this tendency. A tradesman, in most cases, cannot be relocated overseas. While I don't take issue with his recommendation, it seems to me that Kim misses another possible way of surviving this transition.

I suspect that a lot of this outsourcing wave we're seeing right now is a part of an ongoing change that started in the 1980's, and that Kim hinted at in his post:

Let's be frank, here: the Corporation Man died in the 1980s, when layoffs and restructuring became common during corporate mergers and acquisitions. Now, in addition to all that, we are seeing functions exported.

You don't owe your company anything: not loyalty, not fealty, not anything. And you were not the one who broke this compact: they did it.

The starting point of the change was that the dominant work model was the "Company Man", and the end will be with the dominant work model being the "Free Agent".

When the large corporations broke the implied work contract of the post-war (WWII) years - do a good job and you're here until you retire, whereupon we'll take care of you until you die - they did not want the break to go both ways. That is, they wanted to be able to get rid of employees at will, while employees were expected to remain loyal and give up any amount of potential job improvement elsewhere until the company wanted them gone. This hybrid model actually held sway during the late-80's/early-90's, mostly as a result of inertia in the workforce, among those who hadn't been laid off.

But as the economy boomed in the mid-1990's, workers in knowledge industries and highly-trained work (such as computer systems administrators and paralegals) realized that they could advance much faster by job hopping. At the height of the tech boom, it was rare to retain a good admin for more than 18 months: companies would raise their pay fast enough to hold them. Once the company no longer owes you anything - and will replace you with a just-out-of-college tech at 1/2 the pay rate as soon as they can - why would you stay at a place for maybe 5-10% raises over a year or two, when you could go to the company across the street for a 25% immediate raise, and move to a third company a year later for another 25% raise?

The recession inhibited this activity, because it hit the tech industry particularly hard. However, there is a lot of pent up capital spending which is just starting to come out of companies, and it will likely be a banner year to be a good, experienced system admin or other high-end technical specialist. However, this is a problem for companies, because it means that their labor costs are going to start increasing again at a fast clip, probably in about 2 years from now.

It is largely for this reason that large companies are shipping as many jobs as they can overseas: why pay $60/hour plus benefits for a developer, when you can do it in India for $15/hour with much lower benefits? The $20/hour or so of frustration costs (co-ordination and management travel and the like) don't bring the cost back up to that of a skilled local worker.

Let's take a hypothetical software company. If all of the programmers are overseas and not employees of the company, a large chunk of management goes away. All that is left is sales and on-site service and support, and the financial and HR and management overhead for that. Well, the financial services and HR work can also be largely outsourced, and that leaves only the services portion and a small management cadre. The company has gotten smaller, and yet its sales and profits don't change. This cycle will continue until the company is optimized.

So what do the high-performing employees do with this situation? Increasingly, they become self-employed. Can't find a job at Microsoft? Compete with them, by starting a small software company. Can't find a job at Lockheed? Compete with them, by founding a small aerospace company. Too busy blogging to start a company? Learn to sell your writing to publications and for-pay websites. Or you can take a partnership approach: you pay me corp-to-corp to develop software for you, and your costs are lower. In the meantime, I can work at home, from anywhere, which lowers my cost of living to where I can compete with the cost of someone in India (once overhead is figured in), and I'm not exclusive to you so I can have several clients, and thus maintain my level of income. There is no reason that manufacturing cannot come back in this country: it just takes people to start small manufacturing companies and find a way to sell to the retailers.

What do the lower-performing employees do with this situation? Learn a trade, or go work for the government (it's a growth industry).

In any case, the end result will be that more and more people will be self-employed, and the economy will go on growing, and there will be changes in the job market, but not a huge increase in unemployment. Michael Moore can be counted on to spin it as a horrible thing, though (particularly because it will be the death-knell of unions).

Requires More Thought

Pejman had a link to an "ethical philosophy selector." Here's how I came out:

1. John Stuart Mill   (100%)  
   
2. Kant   (93%)  
   
3. Epicureans   (90%)  
   
4. Jeremy Bentham   (78%)  
   
5. Jean-Paul Sartre   (77%)  
   
6. Prescriptivism   (65%)  
   
7. Ayn Rand   (64%)  
   
8. Thomas Hobbes   (60%)  
   
9. David Hume   (54%)  
   
10. Nietzsche   (54%)  
    
11. Spinoza   (53%)  
    
12. Cynics   (42%)  
    
13. Nel Noddings   (42%)  
    
14. Aquinas   (41%)  
    
15. Aristotle   (41%)  
    
16. Stoics   (39%)  
    
17. Ockham   (29%)  
    
18. St. Augustine   (18%)
    
19. Plato   (16%)
    

I'm not sure I agree completely with the rankings (Hobbes is too low, for example), but this clearly indicates that I need to read more philosophy in any case.

Two Excellent Articles

Michael Crichton examines environmentalism as religion:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Meanwhile, Orson Scott Card questions whether Democrats can rise above domestic politics even when it comes to national survival:

Watching the primary campaigns among this year's pathetic crop of Democratic candidates, I can't help but think that their campaigns would be vastly improved if they would only rise to the level of "Death to the Republicans."

Instead, their platforms range from Howard Dean's "Bush is the devil" to everybody else's "I'll make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the devil." Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general public.

There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America.

But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It might--because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the message that the Bush presidency is a failure--even though by every rational measure it is not.

And the most vile part of this campaign against Mr. Bush is that the terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him--which means that if Mr. Bush does not win, we will certainly lose the war. Indeed, the anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning that lies ahead of us.

Osama bin Laden's military strategy is: If you make a war cost enough, Americans will give up and go home. Now, bin Laden isn't actually all that bright; his campaign to make us go home is in fact what brought us into Afghanistan and Iraq. But he's still telling his followers: Keep killing Americans and eventually, antigovernment factions within the United States will choose to give up the struggle.

It's what happened in Somalia, isn't it? And it's what happened in Vietnam, too.

Hat tip for both: Porphyrogenitus.

I think it's sad that the Democrats are rapidly becoming the CPUSA, reincarnated, with extra spicy anti-semitism thrown in. And really, with the stand the Democrats have taken on the war, the only way to ensure that you'll be able to vote for a Liberal in the future is to vote for a conservative today. (Actually, the prominent "conservatives" in the US are not really very conservative in any case.) What a terrible ruin the party of Truman and JFK has become.

WTC Reconstruction Begins

Bite me, Osama bin Laden.

Mmmm....Farscape

One of the best, if not the best, science fiction series will return to television, in some form or other. Three cheers are in order.

Sex

Stephen Green at VodkaPundit gets it right, while talking about people's reactions to the gay marriage issue:

I like sex a lot.

And not just doing it, either. I like pretty pictures of pretty girls in (and out of) pretty clothes. I like the little whiff of sex you get from perfectly innocent flirtation. I like teasing emails from my bride. I like songs about sex. I like getting reminded of sex I'll never have again, when I walk past the counter of some long-forgotten perfume at the department store. Even better, I like the promise of the sex I'll be having later this week, when I walk by the counter that sells Melissa's perfume. I like those random sex thoughts that pop into my head when I'm trying to get some work done.

I like sex as a married man, and I liked sex with women whose last names I wasn't entirely clear on, and I liked all the sex in-between. I like to make love, and sometimes I just like to fuck. I like sex jokes and sex talk and sex sex sex sex sex sex sex.

Now, before you go thinking I'm some oversexed freak (even though you'd be exactly right), there's a lot of sex stuff I don't like. I don't like leers or wolf whistles or grab-ass-without-an-invitation. I don't enjoy sex as a power game. I don't like the risk of unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. I don't like anything dealing with anybody either too young or too drunk to make an informed decision – anything that smacks of rape, really.

And I love women. Girls. Babes. Broads, chicks, skirts, fillies, whatever. I'm a leg man, an ass man, and a breast man. I love that line that runs from just behind her earlobe to just off the center of her collarbone. I love the small of her back and the inside of her wrist and the palm of her hand. Ankles, backs of knees, insides of thighs. Short hair, long hair, curly hair, or straight. The little hairs on her arms that stand up when you touch her just right. And the scents! There's not a place a clean woman doesn't smell good (and a healthy, sweaty woman doesn't smell better) – and no two places on no two women smell quite the same. Or even on the same woman. Variety is the spice of life, and endless variety can be found in just one person – if you know how to look.

Polemical Primer

I found this polemical primer in a post at Winds of Change. I just needed a place to keep it. You should read it, though, if you're interested in how to win political debates.

Wow - It's the World!

It's really strange: all this time I've been on contract, I've seen more news on TV (Fox and CNN mostly) than I usually get. And I feel much less informed than I normally do.

Oh, I know about the charges against Michael Jackson, and the maneuvering in a half-dozen other trials of note - or at least of notoriety. I know about the various protests against Bush in Britain - although the reason behind them, the logic involved, and in fact the whole point of the protests somewhat escapes me. These must be the dumbest guys Britain can scrape up, because they've produced some very intelligent people, BBC News apparently excepted.

But I don't have a good feel for what's really happening of interest. I was going to say that we should have a news channel that takes a historical view of every story, and tries to fit it into what people will care about in a hundred years (still, in fact, a good idea), but I realized that the blogosphere already provides a great deal of that context. I missed you guys.

Hey, Cool!

I just noticed that Belligerent Bunny Blog is back!

Breast or Bottle

There is likely nothing more heated than general policy questions about raising children and keeping them healthy. Everyone who has children has a stake in such debates. Among the most heated of these debates has to be whether it is preferable to breast or bottle feed.

There are more than two sides to this debate. There are breastfeeding activists, for whom any formula feeding is evil. There are women who feed their babies formula for convenience, and are fine with that. There are women who feed their babies formula for lifesaving reasons, because they are unable to feed their babies otherwise. There are women who feed their babies for convenience, but cannot face that. Some of these women are pretty defensive about formula, and mixing them with the breastfeeding activists can be volatile.

Steph strikes the right balance, I think. Of course, I would say that, because she is my wife and these decisions involved me. That said, life isn't fair, and it is unalterably true that the life of an infant depends upon his mother, and my role in these decisions was decidedly minor. So go read Steph's article.

Childish Politics

Peeve Farm has an interesting post about how easy it is to come up with cute Lefty slogans, but how much harder it is to refute them or develop equivalent conservative or libertarian slogans. There is a reason for this, I think, and that reason is...reason.

It appears to me that there are certain default positions - intuitively arrived at if no external education intervenes - which are common across a large fraction of mankind. I think of these as being childish positions: most children would arrive at this position without external prompting. This is not meant as an insult, and many of these positions actually survive the application of logic, reason and experience.

The problem is that many of them don't. Part of the reason for this is that we have evolved socially and mentally in a very different environment than has existed for the past 150 years, and our modern world presents many problems that our intuition has not evolved to solve. The notion of fairness that seems common to humans, for example, is equality of results: a child doesn't expect to be treated differently than their siblings by their parents, regardless of the actions of the children involved; indeed a child who feels that their parents show preference to a sibling would be highly resentful. Adults, though, generally realize that a person who does not work hard does not make as much money as one who does work hard. We begin to learn that our actions have consequences.

There are similar notions about religion, economics and interpersonal relations which tend to take hold unless education or experience intervenes. Statism, for example, cannot survive any serious study of history; nor can Communism survive any serious study of economics. For that matter, logic and experience argue that welfare (a fairly central piece of the Peeve Spot post) has benefits over the short term, but massive costs over the long-term, if that welfare is sustained and large. Similarly, progressive taxation makes intuitive sense (the rich people have more money, so they can afford to pay more), but the counterintuitive notion of flatter taxes actually produces more revenue (ever notice that even the die-hard Left in Congress doesn't propose returning to a 70%+ tax at the high end?) is actually the correct one, if your goal is to raise revenue as efficiently as possible while not destroying the economy.

The best cure-all for incorrect intuition is education. This is one of the places where our public education system has failed miserably: it tends to reinforce our incorrect intuition, rather than to correct it. The second-best cure-all for incorrect intuition is logic and reason, but again this is not taught well in schools. The last resort for learning these lessons is experience, but experience has two flaws: it's frequently painful to acquire, and for some things (such as evaluating different economic systems) it takes more than a single lifetime to gain sufficient experience. As a result of this failing on the part of public schools, and the fact that most Americans are products of public schools, and the fact that colleges are increasingly dumbing down, and the further fact that most people never learn how to educate themselves; as a result of all of these acting in concert, it is very easy for an American or European to grow up basically uneducated. (Never, as Mark Twain asserted, confuse schooling and education.)

The result of this is that you tend to have two very vocal extremes, on the Left and the Right, who are philistines at best. These groups push for some of the most hare-brained schemes to become official and national policy: statism, isolationism, restrictions on liberty and the like. But most of the people fall in the middle, and by and large the dividing line between moderate conservatives and moderate leftists are those issues they have chosen to become educated about.

It would take more than a human lifetime to be educated about everything, so we pick and choose what we educate ourselves about. Those people who tend to educate themselves about economics, foreign policy, good governance and the like tend towards conservatism or libertarianism. Those people who do not (who choose, for example, to educate themselves primarily about sports, fashion, entertainment and the like) tend to remain in the somewhat leftist column, because that is where their intuition leads them.

I believe that this has also been a big reason why the country has been moving towards a more moderate-conservative view over the past 20 years, and particularly over the past 2: Viet Nam and the malaise afterwards forced an education on a great many people, and 9/11 has compelled an even more painful evaluation of ourselves and our society. This is why, since 9/11, there has been a large number of shifts to the right, most famously by Christopher Hitchens: forced to evaluate classical liberalism and the Enlightenment against statism and religious repression, honest classical liberals have gone from moderately (or even quite far) left to centrist.

But it is so much easier to chant, isn't it? Even if it is childish.

Ummm...Unclear on the Concept?

In this Editor and Publisher interview about at SFGate.com, there is some pretty clear evidence of lack of clue:

4. Is the Internet news audience becoming fragmented by political ideology? Why and what's the long-term impact? Will this affect print newspapers in any way?

VK: We've undoubtedly lost some of our audience to Web sites that specialize in politically tinted news. Not that it hurts us that much, but it makes political polarization even worse if people only read the opinions they already know they're going to agree with.

A lot of readers don't believe there's such a thing as journalistic objectivity and seek out news sources according to politics. During the Iraq war, some readers from outside our market area wrote to thank us for being an antidote to the TV networks' pro-war coverage, and I'd have to write back and say thanks, but as a news Web site we don't take sides. We reflect San Francisco's attitudes with colorful liberal columnists like Mark Morford, but we have conservative columnists too.

I suspect that print newspapers are also losing readers to overtly political Web sites and places like Fox News.

Actually, this is interesting on a couple of levels. First, it is interesting that the editor being questioned apparently equates "politically tinted" with "not Leftist." I suppose that's not too surprising considering that this is coming from San Francisco. Still, it's disappointing that the editor - symptomatic of a large part of the media, apparently - does not understand that the audience is not leaving a pristine and politically untinted source to find opinions that they agree with already. Rather, they are trying to find more balance and a position more realistic. You see, when a person can say, with a presumably straight face:

During the Iraq war, some readers from outside our market area wrote to thank us for being an antidote to the TV networks' pro-war coverage, and I'd have to write back and say thanks, but as a news Web site we don't take sides.

That is a little scary, really. It means that he doesn't realize that they were taking sides, and people noticed. Some of those people happened to agree with them, but others (the ones leaving SFGate and the rest of the Lefty media for FoxNews and other more balanced sources) don't agree with them.

The second interesting bit in the answer to the question is this:

... it makes political polarization even worse if people only read the opinions they already know they're going to agree with.

I agree with this. It does make polarization worse if people only read the opinions that they already know that they are going to agree with. The question I have is, coupled with the other statements about people choosing other news sources, that deep down the editor knows that most people don't agree with his opinions, but he just doesn't care? That is certainly the way this came across to me.

Really, I think that the editor is dead wrong: there is no such thing as politically unbiased news about the US and its actions at home and abroad from almost any source. The reason why is, there is no disinterested source. We are the 500lb. gorilla: US actions and policies affect virtually every nation on Earth, and most of all affect the ruling classes and intellectualist elites of every nation on Earth. As a result, there are no disinterested parties when it comes to US policy and national events.

I think that it is still possible for Americans to be disinterested about much of the world - particularly those places who are neither like us nor our enemies (sub-Saharan Africa comes to mind). But I'm not convinced that anyone can be disinterested about the US, because so large of a percentage of the world's population has a stake in American policy and actions.

Class Act

This is the difference between the Germans and the French: the Germans have class. Even though the US and Germany currently disagree over some things, we still fundamentally remain friends. I'm not certain that the US and France have ever been of like mind, really.

That's Different

That wouldn't make sense, because that would be the Times' money being lost. It's completely different when it's public money. For some reason I can't think of right now. Read this Krugman column on taxes; then you'll understand. Ignore the lies and bias...drink the kool-aid...

Class Sizes

Joanne Jacobs reports a study which finds that lower class sizes (in this case, lowered from 28 to 20) don't have a large impact on student learning, and that other changes can have a larger impact. I'm certainly in favor of finding the most efficient ways to help kids learn, and there may be other interventions that do work. However, I wonder if this research is really complete enough?

After all, there's ample evidence that a ratio of 3 or 4 students per teacher is dramatically more effective than 30 students per teacher, even if the teacher of the smaller group is less qualified. I wonder, though, where the drop-off point is, where it is no longer better to increase class sizes. Just given human attention spans, time in the day, and such factors, I suspect that that point would be at less than 10 students. Clearly, there is no way to afford enough teachers, even less-qualified ones, to maintain that ratio in government schools.

However, I can think of two things that would improve the situation. First, there is no reason that the ratio needs to be constant across grades or educational needs. Fifty honors students, given a goal, a promise of tests, and the resources (books, supplies, etc) appropriate to the task, can learn just about anything in a year, with only one teacher to guide them. (While, for example, it may not be possible for one teacher to have more than 2 or 3 special-needs children and make any progress with them.) By giving students as much responsibility as they can handle, rather than treating all of them like little sponges incapable of learning on their own, more teachers would be freed up to deal with those students who need the additional help.

A second idea would be to reduce the number of children a school. If the schools were to allow homeschooling families to obtain up to, say, $1000 of educational supplies, books, curricula and the like through the school each year (or maybe some amount per child, instead of a fixed amount), this would provide a powerful incentive towards homeschooling for those on the fence. Since this would be a fraction of the money that the district is getting in tax revenue for that student, the additional money could go into hiring more teachers for the remainder of the students. If the average is 25 students per teacher, and only 5% of the children in a district would be homeschooled because of this, that's 50 kids - two additional teachers - in a 1000-student school. If the allowance for supplies were $1000 per child, that would be $25000 cost to get a new teacher - significantly less than the $80-90000 cost otherwise (assuming Texas-like first-year pay of $40000+, insurance, benefits and the like). Not a bad deal.

Of course, that would mean a reduction in power of the teachers' unions, which are more based on the number of students in school than the number of teachers, so that probably wouldn't fly. I don't see why the first idea would be unpalatable though.

Personal Responsibility

The Noble Pundit has an interesting post on how personal responsibility relates to good governance.

That Figures

If you know me - Hell, if you just read the blog! - and know Heinlein's books, you'll already know this:

You belong in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. You
value freedom above all else. You would fight
and die for your family and your home.


Which Heinlein Book Should You Have Been A Character In?
brought to you by Quizilla

Meaningless Elections

It has been said that the key to making democracy - more particularly representative democracy - work, is to make sure that election results are nearly meaningless. After all, if having your side lose the election means that you end up in prison or have to watch your family be killed while your house burns in the background, any rational person will make damned sure that the results of the election are determined well in advance, and will go to great lengths to ensure that the vote is ignored. The alternative is worse.

One of the great strengths of America at its founding, and for its first century, was that elections were nearly always meaningless. The most that would happen is that a few policies or political appointments would go against you, and you'd get another shot at changing the situation 2 or 4 or 6 years later. In fact, probably the only presidential election whose result really mattered prior to the 1930s was the election of Abraham Lincoln. Had the election gone the other way, it's likely that succession would have been allowed, and both sides knew that going into the election. This is why the Southern Democrats made clear in advance that a Republican presidential victory would mean civil war. And Lincoln's victory triggered that war, almost certainly, just as a Democratic victory would have likely resulted in a separation without civil war, and likely would have made America into a continent more like Europe, with armed borders and contending, rival states entering into frequent (if smaller) wars.

But that was the exception, because let's face it: the stakes were small. There was a minimal government, with very limited powers, which basically could undertake foreign policy, regulate actual commerce between the States, and settle inter-state legal or policy disputes. That was about it. The real power - the ability to change people's lives, power over policies and power to achieve - these were to be had at the State and local levels, to the extent they could be had at all. And if you lived in a State and it went to the dogs, you could always move to another State if you couldn't win back power later.

But FDR changed all that. By the end of his time in office, as a result of his policies during the Depression and WWII, and then with the beginning of the Cold War during Truman's presidency, this had all changed. Suddenly, in a span of less than one generation, the Federal government had begun to batter down the powers of the States, arrogating them to itself. The Federal government took direct control of a large proportion of national wealth through direct taxation (thank you the Progressives!), and used it to create large and unkillable programs like welfare, social security, medicare/medicaid, a large standing Army (arguably a good thing, given that we couldn't really step back into isolationism after WWII), increasingly intrusive regulations on business and personal conduct and the like.

By 1955, beyond any shadow of doubt or possibility of reform by changing the party in office, power was concentrated in the Federal government. The loss of political, financial, and Constitutional constraints on Federal power were gone. (Respectively, these were removed by direct popular election of all Senators, the power of direct taxation, and Supreme Court decisions that allowed the Federal government to do almost anything under the names of interstate commerce or national security plus the arrogation of legislative power to the courts.) Now, when an election was lost, it could mean a decade of losing elections because of redistricting. It could mean a loss of billions of dollars - which soon will be trillions of dollars due to the way our government and economy are both growing. It could mean judges who would effectively determine law for decades at least, without the ability to appeal short of Constitutional Amendment. It could mean moving the country towards socialism, or towards corporatism - with virtually no Federal office holders believing that the economy should be a truly free market. For a businessman, it could mean the difference between expansion and bankruptcy. For an individual, it could mean choosing between rights to behave socially as they wish, or economically as they wish.

In other words, elections had by the mid-1950s become important. Deadly important. And when elections become that important, they are important enough that some will choose to violate any rule or principle, to cheat and to steal and to lie, to do anything to win.

I think that this must have fallen hardest on the Democrats, because they had been effectively in nearly-complete control for almost a hundred years in the South, and more than 50 in the North, by the time that the I became interested in politics in the 1980s. With such a legacy of power, it was difficult, I think, for Democrats to give that up.

Yet the country was becoming more conservative. In the aftermath of Viet Nam (which was somehow transformed into a "Republican war") and Watergate, the public was willing to give the Democrats a virtual blank check to run the country. The result was the narrow election of Jimmy Carter, which almost certainly would have gone the other way if not for vote fraud in Chicago, which Gerald Ford (wisely, I think) did not challenge, because it would have been too divisive.

But the Carter presidency was a disaster. People remember the Iran hostage crisis, but forget much of the rest of the state of the US at the time. Interest rates were sky-high, making home ownership all but unaffordable - and moving (if you had a home) impractical. Inflation was equally out of control, and the value of the dollar was dropping like a stone. Abroad, we had given up control of the Panama Canal early, and for little benefit to ourselves, and without ensuring that the Panamanian government could actually operate the canal. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and many analysts thought that the USSR would have a warm water port and control of Persian Gulf oil within a decade. Our military was so undermanned, underequipped and demoralised that we were expected to lose any potential war in Europe, and the transition to a professional military, which was just beginning, had not had time to show its promise. The most common term used to describe the state of the US was "malaise."

In the aftermath of this disaster, Ronald Reagan was able to tap into the fundamentally optimistic nature of Americans. Reagan delivered, too: by the end of his first term, the military buildup that would eventually defeat the USSR without firing a shot was well under way; the economy had recovered and was growing dramatically (despite later Democratic attempts to declare the 1980s as economically disastrous, because of huge layoffs as the economy became more productive - note here the rise of Michael Moore); interest rates and inflation had been tamed; marginal tax rates and stifling regulation had been reduced; a series of minor wars, well and cheaply won, showed that the United States was capable of military victory; environmental quality was improving; standards of living rose dramatically. It was a good time for America.

The Democrats, who had been veering Left ever since the 1972 election, paid for Carter's failure in spades, as the country moved increasingly conservative fiscally and on foreign policy. For 12 years, the Republicans gained increasing control at all levels of government. And then, something close to unbelievable happened: a minor-state governor with unexceptional policies and views, but exceptional drive and political savvy, managed to defeat a sitting president in the wake of one of America's more astonishing military victories and in a growing economy. I think that the real reason for George Bush's loss - the cause of the checking of the country's move to the Right - was that the social conservatives overreached. People like Pat Buchanan and Billy Graham scared the fiscal and foreign-policy conservatives enough that they didn't show up to vote, or more likely they voted for Perot.

Bill Clinton was ruthless, charming, uncompromising, brilliant, nihilistic, passionate, petty, cunning and vindictive. He was able to play on the fear, uncertainty and doubt lingering over the just-ended recession and the overreach of social conservatives, and to convince voters to give him a chance. But Clinton, too, overreached - almost immediately. His policies on gays in the military satisfied no one, while his tax increases and attempt to socialize medical care scared almost everyone. At the same time, the Republicans publicly and visibly began to ostracize the social conservatives, to remove them from the decade of control they had had over the Republican Party's policy decisions. (To a large extent, this came about because of Pat Buchanan's challenge to Bush in the primaries, which likely cost Bush the election - it did far more damage than did Perot's fitful candidacy. The Republican moderates were furious.) The combination of Clinton's too-far-Left policies and the Republican reformation led the Republicans to control of the House and Senate for the first time in some 40 years, and restarted the country's rightwards drift.

I believe that it was in the wake of the Gingrich-led Republican resurgence that the Democrats decided not to lose again, at any cost. In one way, this was good, as it led to, for example, Clinton moderating his policies, and adopting welfare reform and a balanced budget after they were forced upon him. In another way, though, it has led to some terrible consequences.

In gubernatorial elections in Florida, Lawton Chiles' campaign phoned senior citizens on the eve of the election to tell them that the Republican gubernatorial candidate was going to cut their Social Security. While this was impossible for a governor to do, nonetheless the tactic worked. In Oklahoma, the then-Democratic legislature would pass unconstitutional bills just before each election to ban poll watchers, thus facilitating vote fraud. These laws would be thrown out right after the election, but a new law would be ready just in time for the next election anyway. In more recent campaigns, Democrats have substituted candidates after legally-imposed deadlines with the complicity of Democratic State judges. The Democrats have announced who would be appointed to fill a vacant seat if the Democratic candidate - who had died just before the election - were to win, campaigned all out for that outcome, and chided the Republican candidate to stop campaigning against a dead man. (Bet they wish they could take the Carnahan election back now, eh?) The Democrats attempted to rig the 2000 election in Florida, again with the complicity of Democratic State judges, against all law and precedent, then screamed that the Supreme Court selected George Bush to be President, because the Supreme Court ruled that the Florida State Supreme Court was not the Florida Legislature and could not arbitrarily determine the rules of the election after the election had been held. In Texas, the Democratic legislators have twice walked out to prevent a proper redistricting, which they had initially prevented (in the aftermath of the 2000 election) by forcing the issue into a court of their choosing.

These are just the most visible examples, among many. The thing is, though, that Republicans shouldn't get too smug. The only reason that I can see that Republicans have not done the same, is that the Republicans are the ones who are winning. But even during the Clinton presidency, the Republicans were making gains in Congress and in State governments. As high as the stakes are now, as much as the government controls and decides, it wouldn't take many years of declining influence for the Republicans to fight just as dirty. If you don't believe me, consider the extremist social conservative elements (almost exclusively Republican) and their battles over abortion (up to and including the murder of OB/GYNs who perform abortions) and putting Christian monuments in public courts.

By taking power away from the people, and away from the States, and concentrating it in the Federal government, the stakes have been raised too high to allow for a gentle loss and a peaceful handover of power, too high for there to ever be a time where the next election isn't being fought. But I think that all of this came about because of a lack of faith in the people. If we don't trust people to make their own fiscal and personal decisions wisely, or States to make regulatory decisions wisely, and instead insist on government control of every aspect of life, then we reasonbly conclude that power must be concentrated as much as possible. And this is the foundation of the policies of both major parties. The Democrats want to control our fiscal behavior, and the Republicans want to control our social behavior. With all of the power of unlimited government behind them, how could they pass up the opportunity to rule?

But that's the thing, really. We Americans shouldn't be electing rulers. We should be electing representatives and governors and presidents. And the very first and most important duty of those people should not be to accumulate control, but to shed it. The purpose of government is to protect the citizens so that they can create the economy and society they want, not to mandate the economy and society they must accept. To do otherwise is very, very un-American.

And in the end, this is why I have stated that there should be a Constitutional Convention. A country with faith in its people, with a government that has the powers the people want it to have - no more and no less - would have meaningless elections. And that's a good thing.

A Nice Fisking

Ryan at Tasty Manatees is taking apart a recent opinion piece by Madeleine Albright.

An it Harm None

Do humans have the right to judge other the morality of other humans? If they do, do those sitting in judgement have the right to believe others should die for immoral acts or intents or beliefs or unknowing complicity or group affiliations, and by extension the right to celebrate the deaths of those others, or at least to not deplore the outright murder of those they feel are morally unforgivable?

There are no movements or philosophies or theologies that I am aware of that, as a practical matter, deny humans the power of moral judgement over others. Even among Christians, where there is a sound theological basis for such a view, there is no mainstream movement that I can find which argues that humans do not have the right to make moral judgements about others.

There are certainly those - I believe the Quakers qualify, for example - who believe that any deliberate taking of human life is morally wrong. Those people, I suspect, are few and far between, and can be separated out in that they would not - given a gun and an easy shot at Adolf Hitler, Iosef Stalin, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Bill Gates, J. Paul Getty, Richard Nixon, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Christopher Columbus, Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan - kill any of them, and in fact would attempt to prevent others from doing so. There are very, very few people in that mold.

So the question becomes, if you believe that humans have a right to make moral judgements, and that some people are so beyond redemption that they must be killed, what makes it reasonable to kill another person? I suspect that most people would agree that the commission of sufficiently immoral acts - genocide, mass murder of political opponents, oppression of the masses, waging wars of aggression on other countries, murdering and eating children, killing people for fun, or whatever your personal moral code finds unforgivable - makes the killing of the actor reasonable.

There are a smaller number, but still a sizeable number, who believe that the intent to commit a morally unforgivable act is sufficient reason to work for the death of the one who so intends. For example, would you kill Hitler in 1937, to prevent the Holocaust, if you could? (For those who are fans of Hitler, insert any other name and intended future act.) I suspect most people would say that it is reasonable to kill another not as justice for a past act, but to prevent a future act.

The number of people, though, who would kill someone for their beliefs alone, is rather smaller. Certainly, some would say, merely being a Fascist, or a Communist, or an Islamist, or a Conservative or what have you, is sufficient reason to be killed. But not many would say that - or at least, not many would go so far as to say that belief alone is sufficient reason to be killed.

Very few would likely agree that unknowing complicity - indirect causation - is sufficient reason to kill. For example, even if you would kill Hitler in 1937, would you kill Hitler's father when he was a child? How many generations back would you go?

Most imcomprehensible to me, though, are those who would kill any Democrat, or Republican, or Muslim, or Jew, or American, or Catholic, or furrier, or meat plant operator, or Negro, or Caucasian, or rich person, or man, or woman, or homosexual, or UN worker, merely for their membership in that group. There is such a long line between saying, "some in group X act immorally ostensibly out of membership in the group, which reflects badly on the group," and saying "some in group X act immorally ostensibly out of membership in the group, and therefore any person in the group is culpable for those actions and is thus a legitimate target for killing."

That is why Trent Telenko and M. Simon (see the comments) have lost me over the UN bombing. I think that the UN is a deeply unprincipled organization - by design - and that in any such organization there are those who would take advantage of their opportunities for personal or political gain. Indeed, some in the UN and its associated NGOs have been complicit in acts which are beyond my moral limits of tolerance - genocide, tyranny, murder, rape, terrorism, slavery and more. That this is so, while the UN nevertheless fails in its primary mission (ensuring international peace) in the aftermath of the cold war, is a fine reason to withdraw from the UN, argue for its disbandment, and in every way refuse to support it. It is not a reason to cheer when a truck bomb demolishes a UN headquarters, killing a large number of people, most of whom probably had no connection to support for terrorism except for the extraordinarily tenuous bonds of membership in the class "UN workers."

If you argue that September 11, or the bombings in Israel, or similar acts are unforgivable, because the victims - or the majority of them - were innocent, then you cannot cheer for the death of innocent UN workers and be morally consistent.

Humility is a Dish Best Served

I am not frequently accused of being humble, or of keeping my opinions to myself. OK, I'll wait for a moment while friends and family get in their laugh at the understatement. Better? Fine. Anyway, I suspect that this is likely true of most bloggers. However, it is always wise to not get too steeped in one's reputation.

Phil Carter of Intel Dump is well-recognized and well-read for his analysis of and insights on military policy. He has written for several rather well-regarded papers. However, he got a bit ahead of himself today:

I should be clear: I allege no plagiarism or dishonesty here. I borrowed from Fehrenbach, and I certainly didn't come to my own conclusions about everything I wrote about. The accepted norm is to borrow good ideas where you find them, whether it's in the Washington Monthly or the Weekly Standard.

Therein lies the irony. Sen. Hutchison's politics are quite different from mine, and probably quite different than the average Washington Monthly reader. I find some irony in the fact that a Republican senator from the President's home state would seize on ideas in a liberal magazine to criticize the foreign policy decisions of the Bush Administration. But I guess that truth is often stranger than fiction.

Given that the Senator has been arguing in favor of expanding the military since well before Phil's March article - indeed, since well before 9/11 - this statement is a little over the top. Isn't it just possible that Senator Hutchison, who is quite involved in defense policy in the Senate, came to the quote independently, particularly given its wide usage? Somehow, the idea that one has to read "a liberal magazine" to recognize that the force was cut too deeply is annoying to me. Good ideas can come from all over the place, and the fact that two people who think differently come to the same conclusion is not really surprising, assuming that the conclusion is logical.

Aftermath

We are in the aftermath of the Cold War, and it is time for us to recalculate how global security is to be maintained. The institutions of the Cold War - the UN, NATO and other standing multinational alliances, proxy warfare, and the spectre of Mutually Assured Destruction - were sufficient to the task of keeping the world from descending into a third world war, by providing the incentives and methods to step down before a hot war could start between major powers.

Those institutions, though, are simply not up to the task of dealing with today's challenges:

• The UN - in the guise of the IAEA and the NPT - are incapable of stopping states from developing nuclear weapons - even near-absolute pariahs like North Korea. The spread of chemical and biological weapons is even broader, and these are very dangerous against cities or in confined areas (for example, Israel is very threatened by these weapons, because it is so small, and so close to enemies which have at least chemical weapons).
  
• NATO has proven to be unable to cope with security problems in their own backyard, unless the US decides to be the prime mover. As a result, the crises in the Balkans in the 1990s spiralled out of control until the US decided to intervene. This is not surprising, since NATO was really designed as a defensive alliance against invasion, rather than as a European guarantor of peace.
  
• No organizations or mechanisms exist to try to solve the problem of terrorism. Indeed, member states of the UN have used this as a tactic against other member states in order to keep just this side of overtly attacking their neighbors (think Syria and Israel, for one example).
  
• The UN has proven incapable of restraining agression between states. In the few cases where inter-state aggression has been challenged, the challenge has come from the US, using the UN, and would have happened without UN sanction. (Indeed, in the cases of the recent Iraq campaign and Kosovo, there was no UN sanction.) I cannot think of any examples of successful UN-sanctioned interventions which did not involve the US, unless the British action in Sierra Leone was conducted under UN mandate.
  
• The UN has proven incapable of preventing genocide and massacres, even when their troops were ostensibly protecting the victims. (Search google for 'un peacekeepers massacre "failed to prevent"' and look at the shameful roster.)
  

What is needed is a new framework for securing the world. The outline of such a framework is beginning to emerge.

One pillar of a new security regime would be local intervention by regional powers. The US would provide the backing force to ensure that the interventions didn't fail. The Australian interventions throughout Oceania are an example of how this can be done. The US is also really pushing the West African states (via ECOMIL), particularly Nigeria, to take up regional security in West Africa. This is how the Liberian operation is being handled, with a relatively-small US force on the ground, and a much larger force offshore, supporting the ECOMIL intervention.

It is up in the air whether Britain would be a power in its own right or part of the EU. If Britain elects to remain independent, they most likely would retain some global role. I don't see the EU, though, engaging in any activities outside of Europe and maybe North Africa. At least it can be hoped that the EU can be convinced not to sponsor and aid terrorists and dictators.

South Africa, Brazil, India, Iran (after its regime is changed), Turkey, the EU, and Japan all need to be brought on board to this philosophy, and helped in its implementation. Together with Australia and the US, this would allow for a spread of free-market, representative, and secular government to bring long-term stability, on the backs of the regional powers to create the short-term (5-10 years) conditions for that stability to arise.

The regional powers, acting in concert with the United States and with each other, would be able to create and enforce the peace, spread good government and good economics, and in general lift the prospects of much of the world's population. In the circumstances where this is not enough, the US could intervene decisively, and undertake the 20-year plus projects (as it did with Germany, Japan and South Korea, and is now doing in Iraq).

For those states which are in-between, neither failed nor free - including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Vietnam, some of the African countries, and so on - the US and regional powers could apply economic and military leverage (both cooperative and coercive, as needed) to push them in the right direction. In particular, these states are likely capable of doing a great deal in the fight against terrorism and WMD proliferation, and many of them could liberalize without falling into anarchy, though their lives may literally have to depend on it first.

I believe that this kind of arrangement could result in a generally-stable world in the long-term, with the threat of international terrorism and WMD proliferation decreasing over time and the threat of international wars declining even faster, although Africa would remain a basket case for quite a while, I suspect. Of course, in the shorter term, the world would have to be made deliberately unstable, and that will be strongly resisted. The old arrangements of the UN and NATO and similar alliances would dissolve, with coalitions of the willing - generally the regional powers and the US, with maybe a few other states along - coming together as needed instead.

I think that this is the outline that the British, US and Australians are pushing towards, and I hope for success. The alternative - nuclear terrorism - is too horrible to contemplate.

Viacom Sued for Bollixing up Star Trek

OK, this is too funny not to draw attention to:

through its actions and inactions, Viacom has let the once
proud Star Trek franchise stagnate and decay. Viacom has released only
one "Star Trek" movie since entering into agreement
with Activision and has recently informed Activision it has no current
plans for further "Star Trek" films. Viacom also has
allowed two "Star Trek" television series to go off the air
and the remaining series suffers from weak ratings. Viacom also
frustrated Activision's efforts to coordinate the development and
marketing of its games with Viacom's development and marketing of
its new movies and television series.

The complaint goes on to state: "By failing and refusing to
continue to exploit and support the Star Trek franchise as it had
promised, Viacom has significantly diminished the value of Star Trek
licensing rights including the rights received by Activision."

(Hat tip: Tacitus)

Distributed Defense

Terrorism is not an enemy. Terrorism is a tactic. Terrorists are enemies, and we are tracking them down and killing them, depriving them of finances and bases of support, and generally making their life miserable as best we can. We are, as far as I can tell from what I'm able to find in the press and in conversations with people who are involved, doing a pretty good job of that.

We appear to be failing, though, to get homeland security right. Partially, this is because we are acting like threatened cats: puffing ourselves up to look bigger and scarier than we really are. Hence the inconveniences at airports, many of which add more to the appearance of security than to its actual efficacy. Partially, too, this is because we don't know what we are doing yet. There are a lot of lessons to learn. And partially, this is because we are facing an unprecedented threat: any of the uncountable soft targets in our very infrastructure-dependent society can be attacked by a small number of determined people, with easily-acquired and concealed weapons, at the time of their choosing.

Large, complex and distributed systems - whether deliberately-created like our electrical system or created as a side-effect of something else like our cities and towns - are the result of competing forces. There are four major forces to consider, particularly in deliberately-created systems: scalability, redundancy, managability and cost. Scalability requires local control; redundancy requires excess capacity; managability (or, more often, the appearance of managability) improves with centralized control; cost increases with excess capacity and overheads incurred to put layers of management (or accountability, if you want to phrase it a bit differently) on top of a distributed system. Cost also includes non-monetary costs, particularly in non-deliberate systems. Obviously, any such system will be a compromise.

Our government (itself a large, complex and somewhat distributed system) is, like all governments I am aware of, highly centralizing: all problems are taken to the highest possible level, and the solutions generated there are filtered down to the lower levels. (I realize that this is not how we were supposed to be, and it's not how the Constitution envisions things, but think for a moment about the Federal government's power over education alone - one of the most local issues possible - and tell me that I am wrong about the reality.) This is because being able to put the finger of blame on a guilty party (or a plausible scapegoat) requires centralization, and this is more important in the government than anything else, including the efficacy of any particular program. This is even true of the Department of Defense during wartime - look at the headhunting for who was "at fault" for the pause in operations during the sandstorms of the Iraq campaign's second week.

It so happens that a natural emergent feature of free-market democracies is a tendency to create very distributed systems. This arises out of people having similar entreprenurial ideas, which then grow together over time as they mutually reinforce. The resulting systems, as they tie together, are often chaotic, spread over large areas, with no central locus of control and typically an unusual amount of excess capacity. Such systems are very vulnerable to terrorist attack, because the critical points of the system are so numerous that it is impossible to defend them all all of the time, yet a successful attack on any one will cause great damage. Note that this works for the population as a whole in democracies as well, where freedom of movement and freedom to choose where you live combine to create a difficult-to-control pattern of population. Will the attack come on a bus? At a mall or a supermarket? At the theater? Which one?

In some systems, particularly those with high up front costs to enter the market, and low marginal costs to operate, the tendency is towards corporate monopoly. The government tends to regulate in such a way as to increase accountability and extract either politcal points or revenue or both from the system (both of which are disincentives to running a system that is not as lean as possible), rather than to decrease central control and add excess capacity. Finally, the profit motive leads costs to be cut on any system wherever possible, and excess capacity costs money.

The result of all of these tendencies is that a single bit of equipment at a single switching station at the right place on the power grid can shut down power for several states, and a single pumping station at a single pipeline, chosen correctly, can leave a major metropolitan area without water. Any large, complex, widely-distributed system has such vulnerabilities, and any such system is virtually impossible to defend. Winds of Change has an article listing several such systems and linking to analyses well worth reading. They also link to an article which has a quote which sums up the problem:

As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilisation, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights. - Jose Ortega y Gasset from The Revolt of the Masses

Actually, though, it is possible to build complex, widely-distributed systems which are capable of withstanding terrorist attacks, or even nuclear attacks. In fact, the Internet was designed to survive and retain some capability during a nuclear attack. It should be noted that the Internet was originally known as ARPAnet, and was created by the same agency that thought up the idea of a futures market for predicting terrorist attacks.

The way that the Internet was intended to work is that each network would be connected to multiple other networks, and the traffic would flow freely through all of the networks. This ensured that there were multiple paths for data to travel. If Dallas were offline, the packet would be automatically routed around Dallas. If the network segment between two points was overloaded, a more circuitous route would be taken to equalize the load. This model was abandoned, however, when companies took over the Internet to all practical purposes, and it was abandoned for two reasons: cost and security. You see, how do you explain to the boss that it's a good idea to route someone else's traffic through your network, and to let them do the same? Wouldn't it be better - cheaper and safer - to allow internal traffic out any connection, but not to allow outside traffic in unless its destination was inside the company itself? And if you filter the traffic through DMZs protected by firewalls, so much the better, because that makes it more difficult to have your systems hacked.

The problem is, though, that this dramatically reduces connectivity, because your traffic will only flow out through the connections you have to your providers, and along their networks to their destinations. And of course, it wasn't long before the backbone providers cut their costs by combining capacity into larger (usually shared) cables for long-distance hauls, and putting switching for several providers all in the same few locations, so that they could exchange traffic with each other in order to connect the whole Internet. As a result of the corporate actions to seal off their networks (effectively making themselves leaf nodes, even if they were leafs on multiple branches), and the backbone providers' actions to limit their costs and increase their interconnections with other backbone providers, I suspect I could eliminate about 75% of the US Internet connectivity by attacking just 2 to 4 NAPs. In fact, it might be possible to do most of this just by attacking MAE-East. There's nothing inherent in the technology which prevents us from adding the additional wire capacity, switching locations and routing to make the Internet impossible to take down except in a purely local sense. There are cost and control reasons that prevent us from doing it, though.

The electrical system has similar problems, as we've recently had demonstrated yet again. The energy distribution system has similar problems. The water system has similar problems, although they would be more difficult to fix, because of the limited sources of supply. This would require the government to focus on scalability and redundancy, allow for further decentralization of resource control and management, and offset the portion of the costs which would not be commercially recoverable (rather than mandating a hidden tax on businesses to comply with regulations). Sadly, the natural tendency of government is in the opposite direction.

For defending the people, though, the problem is somewhat different, because you cannot "add redundancy" in a meaningful sense. You must defend the population. The government is certainly doing a good job, as far as I can tell, going after the current and emerging terrorists, but it has not taken some critical steps to allow the population to defend itself. The government realizes that it cannot be everywhere - certainly that is a point that Secretary Rumsfeld has made more than once - but it has not taken the step to trusting the people to defend themselves, and encouraging them to do so.

And this is where the Bush administration has failed us in homeland defense. The administration is attempting to defend all of these systems by itself, and in general is doing so the way a government would: it is trying to increase controls and accountability, without concern for costs, scalability or redundancy. Worse, the government is actively interfering in a great many activities (mostly gun-related) that people could undertake in their own defense. Since these kinds of actions are the kinds that would be naturally appealing to a conservative administration, this makes the situation doubly-damned.

I first saw the key to solving these problems stated by Glenn Reynolds:

So the snipers that paralyzed and terrorized the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are caught now. But it's worth thinking about how they were caught. After repeatedly slipping through the fingers of law enforcement, John Muhammad and Lee Salvo were caught because leaked information about the suspects' automobile and license number was picked up by members of the public, one of whom spotted the car within hours and alerted the authorities - blocking the exit from the rest area with his own vehicle to make sure they didn't escape. "You can deputize a nation," said one news official after the fact.

Yes. With proper information, the public can act against terrorists - often, as we found on September 11, faster and more effectively than the authorities. The key, as Jim Henley noted, is to "make us a pack, not a herd."

The problem is that this goes against the very grain of intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and so on. Within bureaucracies in general - and doubly within intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies - information is power, and power isn't something you want to share. And if you deputize a nation, doesn't that make the official deputies just a little bit less special?

The problem with this mindset is that it's all about bureaucratic turf, and not about getting the job done. Otherwise we'd have learned the lesson long ago.

To coin a phrase: indeed.

The actions the government should be taking in homeland defense should be focused on giving individual citizens the power to defend themselves and their infrastructure.

For the infrastructure, excess capacity beyond what the market may support normally must be built in, and this capacity must be linked through a highly-redundant web of distribution channels. In some cases, such as with the water supply, the necessary work can be done entirely by the government, since it is governments (mostly local, in this case) which control the existing systems. In other cases, such as with the electrical systems, the government needs to give incentives for building in additional capacity and distribution channels to make the systems more robust.

For the population, the government needs to encourage the population to arm itself with handguns and long arms; to offer training in spotting bombs, recognizing vulnerabilities, emergency medical care, planning in advance for contingencies and the like; and to give us the information we need to understand and react to threats. Note: the government should not try to control or direct these activities, just to encourage them. If the government were to pick a one-size-fits-all solution, we'd be no better off than we are now.

For example, when the DC snipers were on the loose, I marvelled that we didn't have pairs of armed citizens on every street corner, with more patrolling the spaces between. At the very least, such an active defense would have made the snipers' jobs more difficult, and might have forced them out of the area entirely. We don't have a militia in this country any more, but we need one. A pack, not a herd.

UPDATE (8/19): Armed Liberal comments, and I have a brief response in the comments section there.

(And no, the National Guard is not a successor to the militia; it is a state-controlled reserve force for the Federal military, with additional duties for disaster relief.)

A Lesson the French Could Learn

My friend Nathan is a wargamer. He particularly enjoys large and complex games, with a good range of strategic thinking necessary to win. A story he tells has to do with such a game, World in Flames. World in Flames represents the time leading up to WWII, and all of WWII, all over the world. Nathan, playing France, had been very careful in setting up his power in the Mediterranean in the mid-1930s, and when Italy started to get a little too adventurous, he moved. Positioning a large force off of Italy just South of Rome, Nathan told the Italian player - who knew his capital was going to be taken, his army cut in half, and his navy eliminated if he fought under the prevailing balance of forces - to remove his army from the border with France, and by the way give up Sicily and Naples, too. The Italian player asked what Nathan would give him for these concessions, and Nathan's answer was, "Nothing." When the Italian player - incredulous - asked, "Why not?", Nathan's answer was classic: "I don't have to."

And that is the first story I think about when I read things like Steven Den Beste's post on maneuvering at the UN. The real France could learn a lesson from Nathan's game, I think.

Pundit, thy Name is Arrogance

In the interests of providing as much embarassment as possible to rude and unthinking assholes, I link to this. It's interesting that Mr. Fumento feels so insecure that he has to insult a blogger for disagreeing with him, and that he must appeal to authority based on his title and where he was published (as opposed to, say, arguing the merits). If Rich is so insignificant, then why does Mr. Fumento feel the need to attack him for disagreeing? How educational.

Authority

The Raving Atheist responds to a comment I made in response to a post of his that - well you get the idea; go read his post, and the chain becomes apparent.

I just wanted to add three quick notes. First, I didn't read Braue's material that Megan referenced. I'm not that interested in Talmudic law per se. I'm more interested in the structure of arguments, and the flaws I detected in Raving's argument. It seemed to me that he was making an appeal to a specific axiom set in order to refute an appeal to a different axiom set. I disagree with him that Megan was rejecting Talmudic law outright; or at least, I disagree that her comments show that she was so doing.

Secondly, I conciously recognize that the process of logic is the best way to conclusively and non-violently settle an argument. (This belief is itself axiomatic - and could be wrong, if a better way can be found.) Logic is not a belief system per se, but a set of tools to deduce or induce new meaning or information from meaning and information already known, including whatever axiom set you start with. Natural Law has an axiom set, certainly, and the belief in the axioms of Natural Law appears to coincide closely with a receptivity to using logic to settle arguments, or at least reduce them to axiomatic conflicts, because it arose directly out of logical philosophical study. Nonetheless, it is not only Natural Law that allows or encourages logic, and indeed most Western philosophies and religion do so (though some are late converts indeed). This is why Steven Den Beste and Donald Sensing, both using logic, but each starting from a different point, can come to different conclusions, and each respect the other's reasoning.

Finally, I'm not sure where "the claim that everyone has axioms that make sense to them and nobody’s in any better position than anyone else to know what the truth is" comes from what I said. I would agree with a similar statement, though: everyone has axioms that make sense to them, and it is impossible to logically disprove those axioms, though it may be possible to logically disprove the belief systems based on those axioms (for example, by finding inconsistencies).

There is a difference between truth, which is what actually is, and belief, which is what is assumed to be. All beliefs arising from axioms are logically equal, because each starts with an unprovable set of axioms. It is possible to construct logical belief systems from unacceptable axiom sets. I don't think that it is possible to prove anything once you get to the point of axiomatic disagreement, which is not the same thing as saying that I accept all axioms as equally valid. Eliminating all self-contradicting axiom sets, I still think that some axiom sets are superior to others. Any axiom set that allows for, say, slavery, is in my opinion fundamentally flawed. I cannot logically prove that, however, because eventually an argument over slavery comes down to the axiomatic question of whether or not a person has a right to control his own life. Any axiom set that arises from a negative answer to that question is, in my opinion, morally flawed. But there is a difference between morally flawed and provably false.

I'm Actually Not Surprised

Mrs. Du Toit and Dean Esmay are agog at this Samizdata post.

Communist leaders plan to amend China's constitution to formally enshrine the ideology of Jiang Zemin, the recently retired leader who invited capitalists to join the Communist Party. Despite sweeping economic and social changes, the political status of China's entrepreneurs is still ambiguous.

There have been no details of the possible changes although foreign analysts say they include the communist era's first guarantee of property rights. Certain amendments are still needed to promote economic and social development [emphasis in original], said the party newspaper People's Daily. It said the changes were meant to cope with accelerating globalization and advances in science and technology.

Jiang's theory, the awkwardly named "Three Represents," calls for the 67 million-member party to embrace capitalists, updating its traditional role as a "vanguard of the working class" and for the constitution to formally uphold property rights and the rights of entrepreneurs.

Actually, it doesn't surprise me one bit. I've been arguing for years that China is likely on the road to becoming a free capitalist country, which is why I said this in March: "those nations which adopted Western values (including Israel, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan - and possibly including China)".

Before I get into why and when I came to this conclusion, I should disclose that I lived in Taiwan for 4 years, though I was young enough that I mostly remember the NCO club, where I won a prize for the best joke ("Why did the elephant sit on the fence? So he wouldn't fall into the hot chocolate." -- I told you I was young!), the one-handed monkey in the cage outside the ground-floor garage of the Hai Shan guest house, the pigs in the alley behind it, picking up tile pieces with my Dad near where they were building the apartments, our dog, the nuns at the Catholic kindergarten, breaking my arm - in other words, no hint of politics. Even the language is fairly completely gone now. I don't claim special understanding of China from this.

When the Tiananmen Square disaster happened, I was horrified, believing that China's actions were totally without merit or redemption. While I still believe that the killing of students in cold blood - using the PLA against the people for the first time - was immoral and reprehensible, I do understand its one merit, now: China is not Russia. Could you imagine the disaster that would have befallen Asia had China liberalized a la perestroika? China is far more backwards even now than Russia was in the late 1980s, and has less coping mechanisms against disaster. The fault in Russia and much of the rest of the former USSR (and to a much lesser extent the Eastern European countries) was that they went from near-total state control to near anarchy without any intervening cushion or even education. As a result, Russia was effectively taken over by gangsters, and almost fell into civil war and utter disaster. The ongoing fighting in Chechnya shows how close Russia can still be to that abyss.

Had that happened in China, with its 1 billion population, and a still mostly-agrarian and rural economy, the dead would have numbered in the tens of millions - possibly in the hundreds of millions if the society dissolved into another civil war. If nothing else, Tienanmen gave the Chinese leadership - at that time already beginning liberalization - the ability to ease into the process.

The Chinese have never been free. Even in Taiwan, under US tutelege, freedom only really came in the last 15 to 20 years. Hong Kong, under the British, and Macao, under the Portugese?, were too small to provide examples to a country the size of China. In the West, before the idea of freedom became established, there were about 700 years of increasing freedom and the building of institutions to allow a country to stably exist with political and economic freedom. Increasing property rights, rights of trade, limitations of the rights of the nobility, the rise of banking and the middle class, the standardization of rates of exchange and all of the the other myriad items that make it possible to have a free nation, were built up slowly in the West.

The USSR had tried to build up parallel institutions, with similar names but dissimilar attitudes, rights, powers and behaviors. As a result, suddently set free, the system imploded. The same or worse would have happened in China - particularly in the aftermath of the "Great Leap Forward." If you look at China's actions - gradual implementation of a limited free market in a limited area, then expanding both the area and the freedom of the market, putting Western banking structures (including lending, interest and contract enforcement rights) further into effect and the like - well, to me anyway it looks like China is on a 50-year program to become a capitalist, multiparty, probably-federal republic. I believe that the next steps we will see, as the economy grows and the population begins to urbanize, is an expansion of the local voting for councils, followed by the establishment of semi-autonomous provinces (still under the Communist Party) with their own governments and powers. Greater industrialization, driven from the ground up by the opening market and from the top down by divestiture of industries over time, will bring greater wealth, and with it a true middle class. The growth of the middle class and the decreasing control of the central government will bring calls for greater and greater degrees of representation by the people. In particular, it will bring calls for a loosening of the very controls that keep the government in power: control over the press, the religions and so on.

At this point, China will face a crisis, and the Communist Party will have two choices: allow multi-party elections or fall to internal revolution. And because China has not yet faced that crisis, and we don't know what sort of leader will be in power when they do, it's too soon to tell whether or not China will eventually be a free nation.

Canticle

One amazing feature of the blogosphere is that there is a certain tendency for articles on different sites about different subjects to reinforce each other, bringing about a kind of an epiphany.

So today with Porphyrogenitus and Winds of Change. Joe Katzman at Winds of Change is discussing problems with evaluation of intelligence, and when to learn lessons.

There's a reason bureaucrats are seen as ass-coverers whose foremost priority is to ensure that they're never accountable for anything. It's because many bureaucrats really are ass-coverers whose overriding priority is to ensure that they're never accountable for anything. As a corollary, if things go wrong, support for the idea that you predicted it may be helpful in building your bureaucracy's importance at the expense of its rivals.

Porphyrogenitus is discussing the ideology of the Boomer generation as it applies to foreign policy, and how Gen-X (or whatever we're supposed to be called these days) differs.

There are things that need to be done, but in many cases the institutions that were built over previous generations to make pursuing the well-being of our society do not seem to be working. Lavishly funded and huge though they are, with complex bureaucratic boxes for all possible tasks and much duplication, they often seem irrelevant where they are not a positive obstacle and hindrance. Reshuffling the boxes, as in the creation of the Homeland Security Department, seems to make little difference. The problem seems to be less one of out-and-out incompetence but rather institutional inertia and misguided or misdirected priorities on the part of the people who staff these bodies, who have taken survival - both the survival of their institutional rice-bowl and of the society whose interests those institutions are supposed to advance - for granted.

For a variety of reasons, our generation does not take that for granted. The airy, idealistic slogans about how things can be solved peacefully with goodwill and mutual understanding and the like that so beguiled the generation prior to ours - the Boomers - cut no mustard with most of us, because so many of us have seen how badly these bromides have worked in our personal lives when foisted on us by our elders. Where they tended to concentrate on idealistic-seeming but impractical causes ("world peace via unilateral American disarmament" and the like) to be solved holistically through the application of a unified field theory political ideology, we have tended to be more practical. Many older Americans are willing to tolerate policies implemented by institutions that don't work, as long as those policies are ideologically (or "politically") correct, and value process (as in "peace process") over results - effectiveness and effect on people's lives are not the priority for them.

Whether or not the war should have been carried to Iraq often seems less important to them than whether a procedure fitting an abstract and generally vaguely defined "multilateralism was followed regardless of results or whether or not doing so would achieve our goals. The debate in the aftermath among primarily "Boomer" politicians is the same - revolving around whether we have gotten "legitimization" from the UN or other international bodies of kleptocrats and thugogracies where Libya and Syria preside over legitimizing what is and isn't a Human Rights violation - and arguing we should involve them further because this would fit their ideological vision. Concern over how involving those who oppose our goals and seek to achieve ends at cross-purposes with ours would affect our ability to achieve what we need to, not only for ourselves but for the people of Iraq for example, is secondary - where it is something they consider at all. This is why the same people can complain about how things are going in Afghanistan, where their "international community" is in charge and the UN is overseeing everything, and demand that the same model be applied in Iraq. The disconnect that we notice is invisible to them.

The connection to earlier posts is evident in this regard: for some the ideal vision of having the "international community" voting on where and how we can fight the war that was thrust upon us, having them determine where we cannot (Iraq) and where we must (Liberia) send our young men is more important than whether this is an effective method, and the question of how those they want to involve in these processes might abuse the "say" they want to give them is unimportant and uninteresting. They will let others deal with the consequences and complications of implementing their vision, and they will accept none of the responsibility for the difficulties that result. For them, idealism (of a certain sort) is combined not with accountability, but with inaccountability. Theory, as usual for them, trumps practicality and empirical reality - if the world doesn't fit the theory, it is the world that is flawed, not the theory, and we must change to fit their vision, consequences be damned - or, rather, left for others to clean up.

The War on Terror is the first crisis the Boomers have faced. Their parents fought and won the Cold War, and suffered the consequences of Viet Nam and Watergate. The Boomers sat on the sidelines theorizing, and cheering on ideological ideals without any sense of personal responsibility. Bill Clinton in many ways was the avatar of personal irresponsibility - nihilism made manifest. Now that the crisis is upon the Boomers, the instinctive habit of many is to return to their youth, and shift responsibilities once more to the grownups. Sadly, the real grownups are not in the international community, but in the generation younger than the Boomers.

On the side of a hill in the deep forest green, Tracing of sparrow on snow-crested brown blankets and bedclothes The child of the mountain sleeps unaware of the clarion call.

On the side of a hill a sprinkling of leaves
Washes the grave with silvery tears.
A soldier cleans and polishes his gun,
Sleeps unaware of the clarion call.

War bellows blazing in scarlet battalions.
Generals order their soldiers to kill
And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten.

Perhaps the War on Terror will inspire the Boomers to remember the causes they once ostensibly championed, or perhaps it will show that they really are and were an empty and hollow generation. Either way, their test of leadership has come, and there is no way they can escape the crucible. The buck stops now, and it stops in the hands of the Boomers.

UPDATE: And just in time, courtesy of The Noble Pundit, are the lyrics to a song I'd forgotten, which pretty much sums up the Boomer tendency I was referring to.

It is Easier to be Evil

Sean LaFreniere had a dream, and it's a dream with meaning, and the meaning is important.

Paying your Taxes

Tasty Manatees has a great post which suggests making people actually pay their taxes, rather than withholding them automatically. I've ranted about this fairly frequently over the last several years, so just go read Ryan's article so that I don't have to start up again.

Stupid People

Michael Totten has a lot of quotes from really stupid people. Or, at least, stupid quotes from a lot of people. My personal favorite has to be:

As for you, the American people, you must start to worry that the performance of your military does not start to give ideas to your southern neighbors. If they continue to perform like they are doing in Iraq , then I for one believe the Mexican Army is a serious threat to your national integrity.

Saudi Prince Amr Muhammad Al-Faysal, Arab News

Um, yeah. Yeah, we should be worried about the Mexican military.

I Feel Like Using InstaPundit's Mannerisms

Heh.

It surely tells you something about the strength of the Administration when sophisticated enemies abroad look to a Democratic replacement as their only hope for survival.

Indeed.

Mark Steyn on Liberia

This is why Mark Steyn gets paid to write out opinions, and I don't:

With Iraq, there was no agreement on what the thing was about: it’s all about oil, said the anti-war crowd; it’s about the threat Saddam represents to the world, said the pro-crowd. But with Liberia there’s virtually unanimous agreement: the US has no vital national interest in the country; its tinpot tyrant is no threat to anybody beyond his backyard; the three warring parties are all disgusting and none has the makings of even a halfway civilised government. For many on the Right, these are reasons for steering clear of the place. For the Left, they’re why we need to send the Marines in right now.

It’s precisely the lack of any national interest that makes it appealing to the progressive mind. By intervening in Liberia, you’re demonstrating your moral purity. That’s why all the folks most vehemently opposed to American intervention in Iraq — from Kofi Annan to the Congressional Black Caucus — are suddenly demanding American intervention in Liberia. The New York Times is itching to get in: ‘Three weeks have passed since President Bush called on the Liberian President, Charles Taylor, to step aside, and pledged American assistance in restoring security. But there has been no definitive word here on how or when.

...

Three weeks! And Bush is still just talking! The Times spent 14 months deploring the ‘rush to war’ in Iraq, but mulling over Liberia for three weeks is the worst kind of irresponsible dithering.

A Future of Prolonged Hardship and Suffering

Here is an explanation, in better words than I could have chosen, for why Kos and Hesiod and the like disgust me:

Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.

Frankly, I'd be less annoyed with the Left if their morality and their positions were more closely aligned.

Credit Where it's Due

If you've read any of my rants about homeschooling vs. public schooling, it would probably surprise you to know that I actually don't have a problem with the concept of public schools. The problem that I have is that our system is mandatory, monopolistic, intrusive, expensive and frequently doesn't work in the most rudimentary sense. However, I'd like to point out a school district that is doing something right, particularly because my local school taxes go to pay for this. The article is from the Keller Citizen, and is not available online, so I will retype it here:

Back to the Books
By LINDA TAYLOR

Keller ISD students are headed back to the classrooms Monday, and for those at Florence Elementary School in Southlake, there will be some exciting and innovative additions to their curriculum, Principal Mark Martin said.

Florence is the first KISD school to begin incorporating elements of a classical education into its regular curriculum. The goal of the program is to teach children how to think and instill a love for learning that will last a lifetime, Martin said.

The knowledge of more than one language is an integral part of the concept.

"Studies have shown that a child who learns a second language at an early age does better in school than one who doesn't," Martin said. "With that in mind, we are introducing Spanish to our students during the announcements each day. Each morning, our head custodian, Gabriela Prado, will introduce a Spanish word or phrase."

In addition to the vocabulary learned each morning, a computer program on the school's computer system will help teachers at the different grade levels teach Spanish.

Martin said familiarity with Latin and a second modern language gives children the ability to determine the meanings of new words by associating them with words from another language.

"Spanish is a very usable language for students in this part of the country," Martin said. "And since most languages such as Spanish, French and English have similarities, students use their knowledge of one to learn another."

Students at Florence will also be introduced to Latin during the school year. Leearning roots, prefixes and suffixes will help students in vocabulary development, Martin said.

"Although Latin is no longer spoken, all of our words come from the Latin roots, suffixes and prefixes," Martin said. "In the long run, this will help our students achieve better scores on college entrance exams. It will also possibly give them an advantage in earning scholarships for higher education."

The various classroom teachers sat down together and created a vocabulary list for each grade level, Martin said. Because this is the first year for this project, he expects some changes to be made throughout the school year.

Another new element welcoming students back to school is a timeline painted along one of Florence's halls. Once complete, the 56-foot-long timeline will depict historical events from cave drawings to the present.

The timeline, which is being painted by art teacher Gina Menasco and Karen Schwab, a parent volunteer, will be used by students at each grade level.

Students will be able to write essays about the subjects they are studying, illustrate them with drawings of their own and place them in the appropriate spot.

"This way, our students can see what else was happening in the world at the same time as the invention of the automobile or construction of the White House," Martin said. "This gives them a sense of how everything is affected by events that occur at the same time."

Martin has high praise for his faculty, staff and parents. He pointed out that this year's additions to the curriculum mean extra work for everyone involved.

"There are certain subjects and skills we are required to teach," he said. "The new things are just a way of enriching the students' education. They are the icing on the cake."

A classical education is difficult and time-consuming for the parents, teachers and students. It takes a lot of work, but provides the best possible liberal (in the original sense) education available. Most of all, it requires parents, teachers and administrators to believe in the capacity, intelligence and willingness to work of the students. This is an excellent start down a very rewarding path.

Bravo to all concerned.

I'll Take 100 Lots on a Suicide Bombing at a Mall

This is a brilliant idea. Futures markets are incredibly efficient ways of predicting events that a lot of people have small knowledge of. Terrorism certainly fits into that category. While I wouldn't rely on this alone, it certainly would be a good bit of information to use as a guide for targetting other resources. Of course, the usual small-minded suspects are wailing and gnashing teeth at the idea that the Pentagon might be trying something innovative, but that is to be expected, and is criticism easily dismissed.

UPDATE: And like far too many ideas, and as in far too many other cases, the whiff of criticism has caused this program to be scrapped. Way to show some balls, Poindexter.

On another note, what is to prevent private citizens from setting up such a market? Charge a transaction fee of a few cents per contract dollar, and the enterprise would most likely be profitable. In addition, it would certainly be useful to the government, since the market is by its nature open information. Setting up the financial background for this shouldn't be terribly difficult or expensive. Man, yet another idea I'd take up if I had more time to work on it. Oh, well, maybe someone else will.

Cultural Imperialism

I thought that "cultural imperialism" had lost its currency long since, but of course the term has been resurrected in the wake of 9/11. I suspect that for most of the people concerned about this, the model that they'd really like to follow is multiculturalism, where each culture is theoretically seen as equally useful and valid. For as many areas as I disagree with the Objectivists, though, they have a point: multiculturalism is just dressed-up, politically-correct racism. Sure, it sounds good, but what the ethos of multiculturalism really boils down to, is devaluing majority cultures as non-authentic, because they are not "pure" in some way. Worse, there is a very exclusionary element, too: we don't want you to be soiled by our culture is not functionally different from we don't want to be soiled by your culture.

People who rail against "cultural imperialism" have missed two very big points: the United States did not steal its culture from anyone, and the people trying to adopt our culture are doing so willingly. Both of these points follow from one apparently not-so-obvious feature of America: our population is drawn from all the peoples of the world. Under the melting pot theory, which was commonly accepted until the late 1970s, the premise was that everyone who comes here could become American. The best parts of each culture - French cooking, English political philosophy, German technical ability, Spanish music - would become part of the American culture, while the worst parts of each - English cooking, French political philosophy, German music and Spanish technical ability - would be left behind. The result was a culture that was universal, because it drew from the best parts of all others, and therefore the American culture also took on a universal appeal.

This is something that for some reason the Leftists simply don't get, and neither do the various reactionaries fighting against the influx of American culture, from France to the Middle East to Africa to Southeast Asia: American culture is the emerging culture of the world, because American culture is the merger of all world cultures. And in fact, this process continues in a feedback loop, despite the attempts of multiculturalists to break it down, with imports from other cultures and with other cultures importing and changing the American culture. This is why in an American arcade you can find a Japanese "dance dance" machine, and in an American bar you can find karaoke, and in Baghdad you can find American movies.

Frankly, I think that this kind of cultural exchange and melding should be celebrated. It may not preserve "pure" cultures, but it certainly makes for a robust and valuable human culture.

Goal->Strategy->Plan->Task

Steven Den Beste brings up a point that a friend and I have tried to make repeatedly, and to anyone who would listen, over the years: first you develop a goal, then a strategy, then a plan, then you accomplish the tasks.

Your goal states what must happen in order to be successful. For example, the US goal in the war on terror is that no group will exist capable of attacking the United States domestically, or American citizens or interests abroad, using terrorist tactics, and that America will continue to exist as a free nation with a representative government. Should the US do nothing, and this aim come about, then the US has achieved its goal. Should the US perform all kinds of actions, which in the end do not remove terrorism from the pantheon of weapons capable of striking at Americans, we will have lost the war, regardless of all other factors.

Your strategy is one of (usually) many possible ways to achieve the goal. For example, the US could have chosen any of the following strategies (and likely others) to achieve the above goal:

• kill or capture all known and discoverable terrorists
  
• destroy the states and other entities which sponsor terrorist organizations
  
• buy off the states and other entities which sponsor terrorist organizations
  
• buy off the terrorists themselves
  
• convince other countries to pursue one or more of the above strategies
  
• do nothing, and hope it will all blow over
  
• destroy Al Qaeda, and their Taliban protectors, and then stop and pursue a different strategy (such as doing nothing, or buying off remaining groups and terrorist sponsors)
  

Each of these strategies has associated costs, monetary and otherwise, risks and benefits, and each has some capability to (at least theoretically) help us attain our goals. In the end, we chose to destroy all the terrorists we could find, and destroy their sponsors, and pressure other countries to help (though we haven't used our ultimate weapon of cutting them off a la Cuba if they don't cooperate to our satisfaction). For the purposes of this discussion, the wisdom of this choice is irrelevant. What is relevant is that this is the strategy the US is pursuing. The strategy will change, though, if it turns out that the strategy is not able to achieve the goals.

A plan is a set of steps which need to be accomplished, complete with the estimates of what resources will be needed to put the plan into operation and how the plan's elements will be sequenced. A plan generally consists of subplans, each a complete plan in and of itself, which are executed sequentially, simultaneously, or if a contingency arises. For example, our subplan for Iraq would have had steps to be executed if Iran intervened, if Syria intervened, if we were stopped short of Baghdad and the like. These are the famous "audibles" that General Franks spoke of. They do not indicate that the plan failed, but that we did a good job of planning for contingencies. (If the plan would have failed, there would have been a stopping point where we consolidated our position and created a new plan. It's obvious when this actually happens.)

Once a strategy has been chosen, there are many ways to make a plan to carry out that strategy. Each of these potential plans are evaluated for their ability to attain the goal, costs and other resource requirements, risks, and side benefits. Our plan in the war on terror over the long haul is not yet clear, but we can see the outlines: first remove Afghanistan as a sanctuary for the Taliban; then remove the terrorist sponsor states, starting with Iraq; then (presumably) remove other potential sanctuaries for terrorism by "fixing" failed states; throughout hunting down known terrorists and strengthening our organizational ability to detect, resist or respond to terrorist attacks. Obviously, contingency plans will be activated as the situation changes (for example, if Korea erupts into war). The plan will change, though, if we learn something which invalidates the plan or if we discover that the plan we have is not a good fit to our strategy.

Tasks are the atomic elements of a plan. They are those things which do not have smaller parts. For example, our Iraq plan had a subplan to get 3ID to Baghdad. This subplan had a plan for taking the bridges over the Euphrates. Each of the subplans consisted of tasks: sieze objectives A, B and C to get to the bridge; then lay down covering fire on any enemy units on the other side of the river; then establish a bridgehead by rushing units across the bridge; then expand the bridgehead; then remove any explosives affixed to the bridge.

The reality is that the President can control the goals; choose the strategies; and influence, approve and reject the plans. The JCS and the SecDef can advise on the goals; develop the strategy options; and select the appropriate plans for the chosen strategy. The operational commanders (like General Franks) can influence the strategies; develop the plans; and influence, approve and reject the subplans. This process continues down to the individual private soldier, who can influence the plans of his NCOs, and carry out the tasks assigned to him.

This is why it is ridiculous for opponents of the President to carp about him "failing" in the war on terror, because something went wrong with one small group of soldiers carrying out the 3rd or 5th or 9th level of subplanning of a particular contingency subplan of the plan for fighting opponent X. It is also why we have a very successful system of winning wars: authority to plan and execute is pushed down as far as possible. This means that the President is responsible for things he cannot control, but at the same time it means that we can react to changing or unanticipated situations without needing one person, or a small group of people, to approve or come up with every action that needs to be taken.

It seems to me that if people want to criticise the President's performance, they should focus on whether or not the goals are appropriate and doable; whether or not the strategy holds the best chance of achieving the goals; and whether or not the President's appointed subordinates are planning and setting policies which will accomplish those strategies. This, on the other hand, is meaningless.

Can We Force a State out of the Union?

So, I was reading this (hat tip: Accidental Jedi), which of course happened in California, and it occurs to me that while we cannot carve up a State without its consent (article IV), and a State cannot secede (the Civil War settled that question), I don't see any reason why the rest of the States could not just get together (in the form of the Senate and the House voting) and boot California right out of the Union. Other than good harbors, and the grousing of the people who'd move back to the US and miss the climate, what exactly would we be losing?

Could we trade California to Canada for the western provinces? Canada's population and economy would go up, and the US and western Canada would end up being a better match for each other than we are for California and eastern Canada.

Just thinkin'...

Link Cosmos

Thanks to Kevin Aylward of WizBangTech, the Technorati Link Cosmos for each post is now available in the "posted by" line of the post itself. Of course, it mostly shows that no one links to my posts, but I knew that already.

The cool thing about this, for me, is it's an easy way to check if anyone is referring to your post without trackbacks.

Feels Good to Me

Something Porphyrogenitus said got me thinking:

I used to encourage every one of my friends to go out and vote, regardless of whether they were informed on the issues or not (indeed, when some would reply to the effect that they didn't feel they knew enough about things to vote, I'd prod them to do it anyhow, exercise their democratic right and duty. This was back when I was a Democrat. I wonder if there's any connection between that and the stance I took then).

I suspect that there is a default "stupid" position for any given question - that is to say, most unthinking people will by and large make the same choice. There seems to be a huge imperative for people not to think through their decisions, but to take them on faith, based on what feels right to them. For example, in the US, there are two positions you can take on religion that will result in fairly widespread affirmation, and which require no thought: Christianity or atheism. In addition, for the rebellious who need negative affirmation (that is to say, what you are doing is taboo, so it must be the right thing to do), there's the Pagans.

In the same way, there is a huge societal disaffirmation of conservatives in general and Republicans in particular, while being a Democrat carries an immediate affirmation from the media in particular. For those needing the negative affirmation, there are the Greens. For those who have chosen the more right-wing Christian sects, and so are not ideologically disposed to the Left or to individual responsibility, there are plenty of Idiotarians on the far right as well.

Note that intelligent people can pick the stupid default for intelligent reasons. There are intelligent and wise Democrats, Christians and Pagans, for example. I'm not yet convinced that there are wise Greens. There are also idiots who choose outside the normal groups. There are plenty of non-extremist Republicans who are not that bright and are quite foolish, for example. Ann Coulter, for example, is deeply intelligent and either quite the fool, or at least she plays one in public.

I think that the basis of decision-making for these people is: do what feels right, while taking no personal responsibility. This makes it easy to be a Democrat (we want to help people, but we're victims and so we can't: you help us all) or a Christian (I'm trying to do good, but we're all sinners by birth so you can't expect me to always do right) or a radical Leftist (everyone should be equal, so we have to punish the people who are smarter, or richer, or prettier, or healthier). It's no wonder that the Democrats, in general, want as many people as possible to vote, while the Republicans, in general, don't.

I may be wrong of course, but that explanation feels good to me.

Random Thoughts

So after being away from work for two weeks, away from blogs for most of that time, and in general taking a real vacation, I've found out - or relearned - a few things:

I get too much email at work, and too much of it actually requires me to do something (as opposed to just absorbing the contents). I cannot decide if this makes me more or less productive than I would otherwise be. My sense is that it makes me more productive, by allowing easier and more complete contact among me and the team and the users.

I am in too many meetings. No contest here: meetings sap productivity. This is the hidden(?) cost of distributed work, in that the more distributed the team (and the more separated from their customers) the more meetings need to be held just to synchronize actions and iron out misunderstandings. A two minute conversation in the hall becomes a one-hour meeting. Over time, this is a real drain on the ability of the doers to do, though it is probably more productive for managers than meeting everyone on an individual basis. This, by the way, is also why I think that foreign outsourcing of technical services is a temporary fad. It's just too expensive in ways that don't fit into the spreadsheets, and over time a good company tends to iron out those inefficiencies.

Reading blogs connects me to the world in a way that watching and listening to the news does not. I have stopped watching television news; it's too shallow, blindered and repetitive. I listen to NPR/BBC in the car, but find it too limited in viewpoint. (Frequently the radio news spends all of its time on an anthill, missing the mountain they're standing on. This beats TV news, which misses both the mountain and the anthill.) Newspapers and news magazines don't tend to have the urgency that other media do, but don't tend to make up for it by treating topics in depth, finding interesting angles, or tackling subjects not sexy or immediate enough for TV or radio.

As useful as they are, and as interesting, and as much as they broaden my perspective of the world, I spend too much time reading blogs. I need to spend more time playing with my children. I hadn't realized how much I had let that slip away, until I spent last week at home, not working and not reading blogs much.

My family is wonderful. My kids take car trips better than they could reasonably be expected to (better, in fact, than Steph and I sometimes did). My wife is the most amazing woman I've ever known. (Example: the kinds of things she does to educate our sons.)

It takes longer for me to fix up the house than it does for the kids to destroy it, and longer for us to clean the house than for the kids to mess it up. I am confident that this ratio will turn around as they grow older.

Light Blogging

There will likely be light blogging for the next ten days or so, as we will be heading off to visit family throughout the South, as well as to see the Huntsville Space Center and the battlefields at Vicksburg.

I'll have the computer with me, but I'm not sure how often I'll actually be online, so there will likely be a shortage of posting.

Making Money

Chris at the Noble Pundit has been putting out essays on his experience as a stock trader. I am going to list them here, mostly for my own reference. That said, Chris has been putting out some wonderful work lately, and you should go read his blog.

Part I - Fundamental Analysis (picking good choices)
Part I addendum I
Part II - Technical Analysis (deciding when to enter or exit a position)
Part III - Options
Part IV - The Economy and the Market
Part V - Market Mechanics
Part VI - Mutual Funds
Part VII - Asset Allocation
Part VIII - Bonds
Part IX - Choosing Your Broker

A Flame Beyond Common Understanding

On this date, in 1944, Americans, British, Canadian, French, Polish, and ANZAC troops stormed into northwestern France, along the Normandy beaches between the Cotentin peninsula and the Orne River. Some 130000 troops came ashore on landing craft, and 26000 more came by parachute and glider. About 12000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded or went missing on D-Day- 8 casualties every minute, all day long. Over the next 10 days, some 560000 Allied troops came ashore, establishing a permimeter more than 30 miles long. By the time of the German escape from the Falaise pocket in the third week of August, some 250000 Allied soldiers were killed, wounded or missing. The Germans had lost twice as many.

A chilling first-hand account of the Omaha Beach landing is here (hat tip: Little Green Footballs). Keep in mind as you read this that a company is about 100 men. Able Company was 98% dead, wounded, missing or combat ineffective for the entire day.

Here are the Medal of Honor citations for June 6, 1944. The asterists by the names indicate the award is posthumous.

BARRETT, CARLTON W.

Rank and organization: Private, U.S. Army, 18th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. Place and date: Near St. Laurent-sur-Mer, France, 6 June 1944. Entered service at: Albany, N.Y. Birth: Fulton, N.Y. G.O. No.: 78, 2 October 1944. Citation: For gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, in the vicinity of St. Laurent-sur-Mer, France. On the morning of D-day Pvt. Barrett, landing in the face of extremely heavy enemy fire, was forced to wade ashore through neck-deep water. Disregarding the personal danger, he returned to the surf again and again to assist his floundering comrades and save them from drowning. Refusing to remain pinned down by the intense barrage of small-arms and mortar fire poured at the landing points, Pvt. Barrett, working with fierce determination, saved many lives by carrying casualties to an evacuation boat Iying offshore. In addition to his assigned mission as guide, he carried dispatches the length of the fire-swept beach; he assisted the wounded; he calmed the shocked; he arose as a leader in the stress of the occasion. His coolness and his dauntless daring courage while constantly risking his life during a period of many hours had an inestimable effect on his comrades and is in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Army.

*MONTEITH, JIMMIE W., JR.

Rank and organization: First Lieutenant, U.S. Army, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Colleville-sur-Mer, France, 6 June 1944. Entered service at: Richmond, Va. Born: 1 July 1917, Low Moor, Va. G.O. No.: 20, 29 March 1945. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, near Colleville-sur-Mer, France. 1st Lt. Monteith landed with the initial assault waves on the coast of France under heavy enemy fire. Without regard to his own personal safety he continually moved up and down the beach reorganizing men for further assault. He then led the assault over a narrow protective ledge and across the flat, exposed terrain to the comparative safety of a cliff. Retracing his steps across the field to the beach, he moved over to where 2 tanks were buttoned up and blind under violent enemy artillery and machinegun fire. Completely exposed to the intense fire, 1st Lt. Monteith led the tanks on foot through a minefield and into firing positions. Under his direction several enemy positions were destroyed. He then rejoined his company and under his leadership his men captured an advantageous position on the hill. Supervising the defense of his newly won position against repeated vicious counterattacks, he continued to ignore his own personal safety, repeatedly crossing the 200 or 300 yards of open terrain under heavy fire to strengthen links in his defensive chain. When the enemy succeeded in completely surrounding 1st Lt. Monteith and his unit and while leading the fight out of the situation, 1st Lt. Monteith was killed by enemy fire. The courage, gallantry, and intrepid leadership displayed by 1st Lt. Monteith is worthy of emulation.

*PINDER, JOHN J., JR.

Rank and organization: Technician Fifth Grade, U.S. Army, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Colleville-sur-Mer, France, 6 June 1944. Entered .service at: Burgettstown, Pa. Birth: McKees Rocks, Pa. G.O. No.: 1, 4 January 1945. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, near Colleville-sur-Mer, France. On D-day, Technician 5th Grade Pinder landed on the coast 100 yards off shore under devastating enemy machinegun and artillery fire which caused severe casualties among the boatload. Carrying a vitally important radio, he struggled towards shore in waist-deep water. Only a few yards from his craft he was hit by enemy fire and was gravely wounded. Technician 5th Grade Pinder never stopped. He made shore and delivered the radio. Refusing to take cover afforded, or to accept medical attention for his wounds, Technician 5th Grade Pinder, though terribly weakened by loss of blood and in fierce pain, on 3 occasions went into the fire-swept surf to salvage communication equipment. He recovered many vital parts and equipment, including another workable radio. On the 3rd trip he was again hit, suffering machinegun bullet wounds in the legs. Still this valiant soldier would not stop for rest or medical attention. Remaining exposed to heavy enemy fire, growing steadily weaker, he aided in establishing the vital radio communication on the beach. While so engaged this dauntless soldier was hit for the third time and killed. The indomitable courage and personal bravery of Technician 5th Grade Pinder was a magnificent inspiration to the men with whom he served.

*ROOSEVELT, THEODORE, JR.

Rank and organization: brigadier general, U.S. Army. Place and date: Normandy invasion, 6 June 1944. Entered service at: Oyster Bay, N.Y. Birth: Oyster Bay, N.Y. G.O. No.: 77, 28 September 1944. Citation: for gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty on 6 June 1944, in France. After 2 verbal requests to accompany the leading assault elements in the Normandy invasion had been denied, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt's written request for this mission was approved and he landed with the first wave of the forces assaulting the enemy-held beaches. He repeatedly led groups from the beach, over the seawall and established them inland. His valor, courage, and presence in the very front of the attack and his complete unconcern at being under heavy fire inspired the troops to heights of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. Although the enemy had the beach under constant direct fire, Brig. Gen. Roosevelt moved from one locality to another, rallying men around him, directed and personally led them against the enemy. Under his seasoned, precise, calm, and unfaltering leadership, assault troops reduced beach strong points and rapidly moved inland with minimum casualties. He thus contributed substantially to the successful establishment of the beachhead in France .

The Economic Role of Government

Kevin Drum at CalPundit has posted an interesting article on the role of the government in the economy. I have to say that I agree with everything he said, with one caveat: the government's interventioned should be both limited and defined.

Completely free markets, without any external controls, are economic anarchy, no less than the lack of external controls on social behavior is political anarchy. No less than political anarchy leads often to political tyranny, as the strong sieze all of the real political power, so does economic anarchy lead to economic tyranny, as the rich and well-connected (and, normally, politically powerful) sieze all of the real economic power.

To prevent this, it is necessary to have external limiting mechanisms. The external controls for politics in the US were laid out in the Constitution: no direct taxes (limits Federal government's ability to raise funds, and thus its power); Senate must approve appointed officers and treaties, influences laws and budgets and has the sole power to remove a sitting President (all of which gave States the ability to limit Federal power); the States can call a Constitutional Convention at will; and as a final bulwark, the people have an unlimited right to own military arms. Of course, a combination of amendments and court decisions have limited and in some cases totally destroyed all of these limitations, except for the right of States to call a Convention.

The external controls for the economy were much less thoroughly documented in the Constitution. While power was given to the Federal government to regulate interstate commerce, and certain other powers (like not allowing a State to force traffic to pay excises at their ports just because it transits through the State's waterways) were also granted, these provisions were mainly intended to prevent interstate wars, rather than to actually regulate the economy. The only Constitutional provisions I can think of off the top of my head, which directly regulate the economy, were the ability to collect tarriffs and levy excises, to establish uniform weights and measures and to regulate the value of currency.

While I think that the government needs additional powers, not forseen by the Founders, I don't think that they should be available to the government except by amending the Constitution. Otherwise, the potential for abuse is too great. I think that we could come up with a list of such powers that the government needs:

• establish a central bank - this is probably already justified by the power to coin money (and thus to regulate its value)
  
• regulate the sale of shares in publically-owned companies - the justification being that these companies have exceptional government-granted rights, and thus should have corresponding duties to not cheat the public
  
• prevention of monopolies from using their power to stifle competition, charge prices untenable in a competitive market, or force people to purchase unregulated products or services in order to get the products or services they need
  
• regulation of non-property resources (air quality, water quality and transit, radio spectrum and the like) which are not subject to ordinary market forces (because the abuser does not bear the costs of his abuse)
  
• regulating working conditions to prevent physical or psychological abuse (this would include child labor laws), or to prevent the coercion of workers to doing non-job-related activities (such as enforced political contributions); preventing discrimination based on age, color, gender and so on; ensuring the privacy of information entrusted to companies
  
• prevention of the accumulation of wealth by limiting the amount of tangible property, cash and negotiable instruments to heirs.
  
  
  It would be nice if, for once, we would as a people actually give our government the powers we want it to have, rather than just letting the government assume those powers as it wishes. But I do think that the government needs to regulate the economy beyond the point that the Constitution currently allows.
  Posted by Jeff at 12:22 PM | Link Cosmos | Comments (0)

Fallen Patriot Fund

The Fallen Patriot Fund collects money, and distributes it to families of military personnel killed or seriously wounded during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The fund is part of the Mark Cuban Foundation, and all money is to be disbursed to families. I work for the Bank of America, which is in some way associated with this (at the very least, you can donate at a branch), and I am going to check tomorrow to see if they will match funds. If they will, I will take up a collection, to maximize the matching. Otherwise, I'll just donate individually. You can too.

Religion in Schools

I like Aubrey's take on the issue of religion in schools. Actually, I especially like this quote:

That problem, as I see it, is that public education has a fatal flaw. What we're seing in so many places (religion, sex education, testing, etc) is that the public school system cannot respond to market demand. It must attempt to cater to all needs and all tastes (as well as all the additional crap that has been thrust upon it over the years). What we're seeing here is a frustration of market demand because of the government imposed monopoly in education. If people's demands are frustrated in the marketplace, eventually they will look for other routes to get them satisfied, by force if necessary (either the courts or the tyranny of the majority) if there are no other outlets.

If we'd get past the idea that education must be public, we can start to look at satisfying the needs of each stakeholder. If some people want prayer and bible studies in their schools, that can be handled. If others want 'just the facts', the market will provide for it.

To coin a phrase, indeed.

The Intellectual Property Myth

Aubrey Turner is conflicted about intellectual property, and uses the infamous (at least among geeks) XOR patent. My wife, earlier today, was complaining about the "copyright Nazis" on a homeschooling mailing list who scream "infringement" at everything. This is to the point that a person making a derivative product based on a well-known education-technique book was being taken to task on the presumption that the product wasn't "authorized".

We have created a system where the majority of powers and rights (collectively, let's call them Liberties) were vested in the individuals, with limited and enumerated powers granted to the States and the Federal government by their associated Constitutions. Those powers granted to the government (in our system, governments have no rights, just powers) were basically those necessary to guarantee the people's rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (which includes property rights). However, the Founders recognized that certain additional powers should be granted to the Federal government, in order to create a better society. These powers included the ability to create a postal system (to enhance communications), the power to regulate commerce between the States (to prevent interstate wars over trade) and the power to "secur[e] ... to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", but only "for limited Times," in order "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

The whole idea behind copyrights and patents was to encourage authors and inventors to write and invent. To encourage this, such people were given the sole right to their works, which means that they could make a profit off of the work. But this ability to profit was limited in time, so that an author or inventor could not retire from the profits of one work or invention. Thus, the author or inventor would have to create new works or inventions. In the meantime, the transfer of previous works or inventions into the public domain would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," because now anyone could use those images, ideas, and methods.

You see, "intellectual property" doesn't exist: it's propaganda. Property is something I can deny you the use of. If I take your radio, you cannot listen to it. I have stolen your property. If I sing your song, or copy it to a CD, or give it away, I have not stopped you from singing it, or using your copies in any way you like, or even selling that song and making a profit. Thus I have not stolen from you, because songs are not property in any meaningful sense of the word.

It can still be argued, though, that it is a good idea to allow people a limited monopoly over works of art, books, actual representations of factual data (as opposed to the data itself), and ideas subject to patent. Granting such a monopoly encourages people to create new things. However, these rights must be balanced. Works must fall into the public domain while they are still available, so that they can be used and preserved. Rights must not be extended into areas where they make no sense; for example, it should not be possible to patent a discovery of some naturally-occurring organism, or part of an organism, or way of doing business. Rights should be granted to individuals, and should perish more quickly if held by organizations. Rights should only survive the rights holder long enough to remove an incentive for murder; not to grant a boon to the rights holder's grandchildren as is today the case (life + 70 years is, according to a recent Supreme Court decision, a "limited Time."

In actual fact, I do believe we have gone too far in granting these rights. We have three choices. Either the Supreme Court can strike down laws granting excessive rights on the basis that they do not meet the test of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts" or "for [a] limited Time[];" or Congress could wake up and begin to restore the balance between rights holders and the general public; or eventually people will take it into their own hands to redress that balance.

File sharing on the Internet is a warning shot. It has always been the case that people will seek redress and justice outside the system when the system does not provide them satisfaction. Indeed, that's one of the primary reasons for government to exist. If copyrights are not scaled back, people will begin to violate them wholesale. At this point, it will become virtually impossible to find a jury to convict someone of copyright violations. As far as I am concerned, that is as it should be. The law exists only to serve the needs of the public. When it does not do so, it should be abolished or ignored.

Induction and Magic

Reading first Bill Whittle's Magic and then Steven Den Beste's post of deductive and inductive logic, I reached an understanding I hadn't had before. (Sometimes, it's useful to superimpose two ideas in your brain and see what falls out.)

I think that a lot of the reason people fall for fantasy ideologies (Islamism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, the Palestinian idea of "right of return" and the like) is because of the heuristics we gain as we grow. Specifically, we learn to trust authority (in the form of our parents and teachers); to devalue particularly smart people (who get beaten up at school and don't get as many dates); to value the present, quickly-delivered idea over the old, written, well-documented idea; that humor often holds a deeper truth; and that people who say they care for us frequently do (parents and friends).

Some people never learn that authority figures can often be wrong - and when authority figures are wrong they are no more likely to change their behavior than when they are right; that smart people can in fact be right about complex issues, even if they miss the subtle clues of one-on-one relationships; that cracker-jack slogans on film with MTV-style quick-cuts can direct you away from the truth while well-reasoned and carefully thought-through ideas can be meaningful to you (even if they were written down 250 years ago); that someone can be both funny and wrong; and that people who say they care for us frequently don't.

The place for a charlatan or a person pushing a fantasy ideology to catch new converts is after they have a basic ability to understand reason but before they have a sophisticated ability to reason for themselves. In other words, in elementary school. I wonder if this is not why positions advocated by people like Michael Moore or Susan Sarandon seem like childish drivel and playground logic?

73,374,971!!!?

Bigwig at Silflay Hraka links to a "soulmate calculator". Apparently, I would have to meet 73,374,971 heterosexual women (and Dustbury thinks he's in bad shape!) between 22 and 40 years old to find a soulmate. Apparently, intelligent women with a good sense of humor, optimistic, not unattractive and somewhat spiritual and compassionate, who are not of a monotheistic religion or currently in the middle of a breakup, are fairly difficult to find.

I found mine in high school, and she is the only woman I've ever dated. Maybe I should play the lottery, too...

Understanding Men

Mrs. Du Toit explains women. I thought I'd return the favor.

Men are heirarchichal.

We are object oriented.

We define our schema in a file, whose syntax is very simple, but which requires several reboots and much swearing before it will really take full effect - little bits of old schema definitions end up cached somewhere in memory, and only come out when the right branch of a particular algorithm are triggered.

We are algorithmically driven, and don't deal well with dynamic reconfigurations.

We block on reads.

We cache writes and don't necessarily flush cache until a reboot.

Any time that the tables change, we need an expensive and time-consuming reindexing. If the tables are modified during the reindexing, we have to start over. During the reindexing, we are likely to return stale results, unless the system is down.

Deletes don't necessarily replicate. In such a case, you have to reissue the command.

We theoretically support transactions, but we are not very good about checking the handshake to ensure that everything is in sync before we acknowledge a connection. This sometimes leads to partially-committed transactions which are difficult to back out.

Our logs are an unreadable mess scattered all over the place.

Stack tracing is a futile gesture, returning pointers to long-freed routines (whose interfaces were muddled to begin with).

We take crashes with a grain of salt, as long as the system restarts normally, but we are deeply annoyed with recurring bugs.

In effect, we are Active Directory.

What Kind of Brain do you Have?

Via The Edge of England's Sword, we have a very interesting theory about brains and behavior. My test scores:

Empathy: 32
Systemizing: 67 (!!!)

I suppose that's not too surprising, given my inclinations and skills.

Deporting Immigrants

The Supreme Court yesterday upheld a controversial 1996 law:

The government can imprison immigrants it is seeking to deport without first giving them a chance to show that they present neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, a divided Supreme Court ruled today.

The 5-to-4 decision upheld the mandatory-detention provisions of a 1996 immigration law as applied to a substantial category of aliens who are lawful permanent residents of the United States and who have been convicted of any of a number of drug crimes and other "aggravated" offenses.

Let's face it: this is a terrible law. Even without the stories of immigrants who have lived here since they were a few years old, and who don't speak Korean but are being deported to Korea, the law is lousy just on a surface consideration of its merits. What this law says, is that the US government can decide to hold a person under this law, and in doing so can deny him the opportunity to prove that he should not be held under the law. That's pretty offensive.

On the other hand, the Constitution does not require that a law be sensible or morally upstanding; only that it be passed by the methods given in the Constitution, and accord with powers granted the government by the Constitution. Since it is generally held that these powers include the right to control who can and cannot legally remain in the country, providing that they are not citizens, and since the law was passed in the normal manner, the Supreme Court's decision was a good one. Now that the Supreme Court has so decided, it would be a good idea to get this law amended, rather than letting such an unreasonable law stay on the books.

By the way, a citizen "owns" living in America, while a non-citizen is essentially here as a guest of the government (as Cato points out, so there is a due process argument to be made for citizens that would not apply to non-citizens.

The Souls of Black Folk

The Wall Street Journal has a great piece by Shelby Steele. Go, read. It's really good.

Reverse History Project

I've been thinking for some time about what I see as a great problem in the way that history is taught in the US - and as far as I can tell, worldwide. That problem is that history is not taught either as relevant to the present and future, or as actually interesting. For example, I don't know anyone who was publicly-schooled, including myself, who had a history education that reached past WWII. In my case, everything after the progressive movement in the 1890s-1910s was just rushed through, so that we'd get done with WWII by the end of the year. Most history I've ever been taught, and much of that that I've read on my own, tends to be pretty dry, telling the facts without telling the human stories behind them.

Here's how I think about history. There are questions I want answers to, such as (to pick a current event) why is the Israeli-Palestinian problem so intractable, or why are all of the Arab nations dictatorships. These questions have answers that are in the near past. Actually, the answers to both of the questions I posed goes back to the colonial occupation of the Middle East, and how it fell apart. Each of these questions actually breaks down into several questions, once you have about a three-paragraph summary of the answer to the first question. This continues back through history, with the questions of import to us today stretching back into the mists of time. In every case, that answer has to do with people, and their motivations for their actions, and how they reacted to the world around them.

So, what I've been thinking about doing, is creating a list of important questions that need to be answered, and answering them. The answers would each be at most a few pages long, and at most would cover only a few years of events (at least in the near past) that explain the answer to the question. The focus of the answer would be on the events that occurred, and who was involved, and why they acted the way they did. Each of these answers would then be followed by a list of questions that arise from that answer. Some of these questions would lead to events immediately preceding (in time) the answer just given, while others would reach further back. Multiple questions might lead back to the same answer (a lot, for example, leads back to WWII either directly or indirectly).

The idea, then is to have short bursts of history, focused not only on the events but on the people and why they did what they did, which lead to multiple other short bursts of history.

Note that this would have to be somewhat dispassionate, as inevitably political viewpoints would be caught up in this otherwise, to the detriment of the actual events. This is not for spinning, but for understanding. Also, the focus would be to keep things simple, so that a child could understand, but to neither hide things to "protect" children nor to dumb things down.

So now, my questions for you:

1. Would it interest anyone to read this? How complete would it have to be before it was useful?
   
2. Would it interest anyone to help by asking or answering questions as they have time?
   
3. What questions should I start with? What are the most important things to ask today?
   

Thanks for your input.

Race Preferences

This post includes a great letter from a professor to his students, explaining why it is that he will be deducting points from high-scoring white students, and giving them to lower-scoring black students.

Great Article on Europe

This article, written by a French formerly-radical leftist, discusses in great detail the contemporary failings of Europe. Here's a taste to whet your appetite:

"By the evening of September 11, a majority of our citizens, despite their obvious sympathy for the victims, were telling themselves that the Americans had it coming. Make no mistake: the same argument would have been made if the terrorists had destroyed the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame."

"Europe gave birth to monsters. No doubt. But by the same token, it created the ideas that enable us to analyze and to destroy those monsters."

"Obsessive attention to past abominations has blinded us to the horrors of the present. Repentance is not a policy, and the continent of Europe cannot model its relationship to the past on that of Germany. Neither the status of victim nor that of executioner is hereditary. The duty to remember implies nothing about the purity or guilt of descendants."

"How can we command respect if we do not respect ourselves, if we constantly depict ourselves, in literature and the media, in the darkest colors?"

"When a crisis erupts, we do our utmost to delay. We temper our indignation with cynicism and treat the aggressor and his victim as equals, as though, in light of our own disenchantments, nothing made any difference."

"It is hard to tell what is most hateful in present-day anti-Americanism; the stupidity and bitterness it manifests or the willing servitude that it presupposes toward a superiority it denounces-in order not to change it."

"The "USAers" may experience moments of great solidarity or bursts of patriotism, but they are not made to rule the world like Romans because the "message" of America is self-fulfillment and love of life."

"We Europeans can challenge the dominance of the English language and the finance capitalism of Wall Street (with its extraordinary compassion for the rich), we can easily denounce the ambiguities of the melting pot and the ravages of communitarianism, and we can reject a world made in the image of American society. But then we have to offer in its place something more than mockery and reproof. We must really construct better models of social justice, economic efficiency, and ethnic coexistence. We are far from doing so. We lag far behind the Americans, out of breath. We still imitate their mistakes after they have devised remedies. Some Europeans place their hope in a theory of reverse genesis. America, the offspring of the Old World that has surpassed its progenitor, would witness the birth of a new Europe that would then put the United States in its place. For now, since geopolitics is the contemporary form of fortune telling, this is nothing but wishful thinking. The bitter truth is that Europe lags behind our transatlantic cousin in almost every area. But our possibilities are enormous if we enact a genuine intellectual revolution. Europe is today's largest contemporary political and cultural laboratory; something unprecedented is happening there without its inhabitants' even being aware of it. Europe has to recover its civilizing capacities and its pride, not in blood and battle, but primarily in spiritual conquests. Europe holds its own cards. Either it will build a counterforce endowed with credible political and military tools or it will be vassalized, willingly. In the latter case, an aging and declining Old World will reduce itself to being a luxurious vacation resort, coveted by predators, and always prepared to abdicate its freedom for a little more calm and a little more comfort."

I cannot agree with everything he says, but Bruckner has a lot of great insights into both Europe and America. Read the whole thing. (many thanks to Michael Totten for the link)

If we Needed a Deck of Cards

I wonder if I should try to talk my wife into buying a new deck of cards. (Hat tip: Sgt. Stryker)

Solo-Ops

Here is a site for military wives, with lots of resources and information.