Neo-Libertarian

2005-09-13T21:04:00.000-04:00

All right, it looks like all my tedious work is done and I can now announce the blog has moved to another domain and is hosted by powerblogs. The pay service is a big benefit, providing the blog with categories and autotrackbacks, among many other features. And cosmetically the blog is now available partially integrated with the neo-libertarian site at blog.neo-libertarian.com.

2005-09-13T14:16:00.000-04:00

LDP Victory in Japanese Election

The Liberal Democratic Party strengthened its majority in the elections for the lower house from 249 to 296. The majority needed is 241. Along with the Komeito Party, their centrist-Buddhist partner, the LDP's ruling coalition is up to over two-thirds of the lower house. The head of the Democratic Party, the presumptive opposition party, admitted defeat and resigned.

Results?

Well, Japan isn't really a two-party or multi-party state at this point. Of course, that's a very narrow, Western-focused way of looking at the situation since the LDP itself is split into at least half a dozen major factions and the views of minority parties are regularly taken into account. People are free to vote as they wish and elections are fair, it's just that the LDP has won all but a few elections since the 1950s. It lost in the 1990s a few times and it looked like Japan would have several competitive parties but the multi-party factionalism outside the LDP was less capable of ruling than the single-party factionalism inside the LDP. It's also important to remember that Japanese politics is incredibly non-ideological compared to other liberal democracies, and except for Ichiro Ozawa (in the most superficial comparison, he's Japan's Reagan or Thatcher). I'd say Japan's democracy is just fine, if - like all things Japan - different from everyone else.

Beyond that, this is another validation of Koizumi. One of Japan's most charismatic politicians, possibly their most charismatic Prime Minister ever, his popularity is still strong. This is a vbalidation of him because the election was a fight between Koizumi and his internal LDP opponents. He ran candidates against some LDP rebels and Koizumi's candidates all won. Koizumi is still going strong.

Policy-wise, this was a victory for Koizumi's fight to privatize Japan Post. He lost a vote to privatize the world's largest financial institution when members of the LDP went against it. He revoked LDP support for these party members (even in the upper house) and called a snap election for the lower house. A month later, he gets a big win and against the rebels. The meaning is clear: voters support his plan to privatize the postal finances.

Of course, it would be nice if he could go further in liberalizing the economy, which is still a structural mess with most of the burdens of state socialism - inefficiencies everywhere, weak companies and weak business models protected, bad loans forgiven or covered, and good businesses and hard workers forced to prop up the bad ones through the economic design. Beyond that, the government exercises enormous influence, de facto and de jure, on the economy. Still, at least privatizing Japan Post is something.

A lot of analysts in the US are looking at it from the US foreign policy standpoint and what it means for Bush and Iraq. That's fair for US media to drive it back home, but the election wasn't really about that. Just like with the UK and Australia, a good US ally and supporter of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan was reelected because he was a good politician who was good on the other issues. Iraq was not what won this for Koizumi and it probably wouldn't have lost it for him. Iraq just wasn't an issue in this election, and if Iraq were a defining moment of these elections then we'd probably see PM Kennedy (UK), PM Latham (Australia) and a Koizumi defeat today.

It's a good thing for Bush and his Iraq policy that his allies are reelected (save Aznar in Spain) but let's not confuse that with any sort of specific mandate for the policy. If anything, it's simply a message that foreign feelings about Iraq are insufficient to shoot down an otherwise decent PM.

But the best part of the Japanese election is that a difficult reform is being pursued to help the Japanese economy, and that reform is being met openly by the voters. Best of luck to Japan in liberalizing with the LDP government.

2005-09-13T05:12:00.000-04:00

E-mail to Instapundit

Over this piece in the NYT.

I have to strenuously disagree with your interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in your third question to Judge Roberts in your NYT piece. The "born or naturalized" line is without a doubt NOT a definition of personhood, but rather a way of specifying which persons "are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." "Born or naturalized" is a modifier of "all persons," the same as the qualification that they be "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" in order to be citizens.

If the first sentence of Section 1 were a definition of persons then it would be open hunting season on immigrants (the non-naturalized) and foreign diplomats (those not 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof'), who would be reduced to no more rights than an embryo or fetus, rules of comity aside. Such is thankfully not the case.

2005-09-11T23:03:00.000-04:00

Literally

Sen. Landrieu:

"These guys [in the National Guard] are carrying the weight of the world literally on their shoulders."

Really? The third planet from the Sun is no longer being held in orbit by inertia and gravity but by some guys with M-16s and humvees?

Literally is the adverb form of literal. It means you are speaking without exaggeration or metaphor. Learn it.

2005-09-10T15:03:00.000-04:00

3-Line Popularity

As it turns out, tons of people have taken the 3-Line Quiz and reported their scores. A plug on NationStates by Adriana brought in some reports and what appears to be possibly several hundred test-takers over a few days. I have maybe 3 dozen score reports, so I could now post a compilation of them. I'm not sure whether to count each person's three scores separately or linked together. It would be most interesting to see the combinations that are uncommon.

I'm more interested in refining it based on these test runs. I might need to adjust the questions to be clearer so that they're not overly narrow or overly broad. Still, an important part of the test is the preconceptions that a taker has; if I ask a certain question broadly then somebody's negative or positive interpretation of it betrays their biases on the issue.

The 4-line quiz is next. I need to rescore the questions a little bit, then I'll spend three years of my life doing the whole code by hand. I think I'll limit it to five rankings per line instead of seven, so that way I'll have fewer combinations I have to go through in the coding process.

After getting the 4-line done I might unify the 3-line into just one quiz for all three lines. Eventually I could try and run it all into one big 100-question test but as it stands the "7 Line Quiz" is awfully far away.

My main goal for the quiz at this point is to refine it sufficiently to give me a good idea of the test-taker's views. Then, in conjunction with a more conventional, policy-based quiz and the 4 Line, I'll be able to author Intelligence Reports for and about people. I'll send it out to some famous bloggers, see if they're interested in having an Intelligence Report written about them. They take the tests, I'll read them, look over some of their blog posts and be able to write a decent Intelligence Report.

If it works well and some big-time bloggers post their IRs with links here, then I'll start doing it for a small fee, largely in order to offset my bandwidth and hosting costs (I have thus far declined to put up ads or a paypal link). I'm not going to go into it with the expectation that I'll profit any off of this, or even break even, but I expect it to be fun.

2005-09-09T21:08:00.000-04:00

Flight 93 Memorial

The memorial for Flight 93, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania en route to DC, is called the Crescent of Embrace. You can guess why:

In case you didn't know, the Crescent is essentially the symbol for Islam in the same way the Cross and the six-pointed Star are symbols for Christianity and Judaism, respectively. In Muslim countries, the Red Cross is called the Red Crescent. I would not say it's appropriate to mark the graves of these dead with a memorial that's shaped like a symbols that the terrorists (as well as many others) worshipped. Maybe including the crescent alongisde symbols of all religions would be a way to do a sort of holding-hands type thing, but otherwise it's not what we should be shooting for.

Maybe it was a coincidence and the architect didn't realize that the crescent is a symbol of the killers (as well as the symbol of many victims of terrorism) and that standing alone it seems to send a pretty startling message. After all, the crescent is a pretty basic geometric shape, just like a six-pointed star is (many-pointed stars are common in Arabic architecture for their mathematical and visual properties, and would suggest no affiliation with Jews). The red for the maple trees that form the crescent could be explained as chosen for their striking color. Still, it's a big frickin' red crescent laid out around the site where 40 passengers and crew were killed for people that worshipped in the name of the Red Crescent.

Whatever the reason, I think it would be a good idea to change the memorial to something with different symbolism. Maybe they could complete the crescent into a circle and use many different colors of trees.

I followed Charles Johnson's link to the Forest Service to comment. When I tried to send it in, it said the requested URL was not found on this server. So I guess they disabled it or it doesn't appear or something. Anyway, here's what I said:

"I am concerned that the shape of the memorial for the 40 souls lost in Flight 93 has unintended symbolism. The choices of a crescent and red trees, though each innocent enough, means that the memorial will be a red crescent. The international symbol of Islam is a crescent, and red is often associated with it (as in the Tunisian flag, or the Red Cross-affiliated Red Crescent organization). Leaving to one side the vast majority of Muslims that wished no ill will toward those lost, a red crescent is still a symbol that the terrorists would have identified with. Perhaps a full circle with many different colored trees would be a less controversial memorial that's no less effective in commemorating the lost."

2005-09-09T20:33:00.000-04:00

Krauthammer on Katrina

As usual, Krauthammer provides a nice broad picture of the problems behind the response to Katrina. It seems to me the biggest problem is that the Mayor and Governor didn't order evacuations and that politicians and bureaucrats subsequently prevented (and continue to prevent) the Red Cross and private citizens from helping out in the city proper. I suspect it has a lot to do with bureaucratic processes and control (see Coyote here and here) but their rationale was that giving food and water to the refugees in the Superdome and Convention Center would encourage them to stay there, and that letting the Red Cross go in to help would make people want to return.

Apparently they're willing to see people undergo health risks (including death for the very young and very old) of not having clean water and sufficient food on the premise that refugees will make an informed decision to stay or go based on where the Red Cross provides aid. That is an awfully flimsy reason to risk lives.

The city should have been evacuated, the charitable should be allowed to help, and the state should have had a plan in place. The fact that they had to take valuable time (including Blanco's apparent need for 24 hours to decide whether to give Bush command control) shows they were flying blind. They needed a plan and they didn't have one.

2005-09-03T23:28:00.000-04:00

Chief Justice Rehnquist 1924-2005

The Chief Justice has died tonight. Born in Milwaukee, he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1971 and took his seat in 1972, replacing Harlan. In 1986 he was elevated by Reagan to be Chief Justice, replacing Burger. Along with Salmon P. Chase, he was one of two Chief Justices to oversee a presidential impeachment in Congress. He was battling thyroid cancer.

2005-09-01T22:52:00.000-04:00

Katrina and Climate Change

Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing horrible damage to New Orleans were not caused by climate change. First of all, the reason the damage is so extensive is the flooding of the area; climate change is not responsible for New Orleans and the Mississippi River delta being extremely low-lying areas. But neither the intensity nor the frequency of the hurricanes are likely caused by climate shift.

Hurricanes were more intenses and more common in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Right now we're just swinging back to above the mean, but when we find the mean of below-average and above-average, we'll come out with: average. This is just a natural cycle of hurricanes, and historically they could be worse, with worse hurricanes coming more frequently. Let's all be thankful that's not the situation right now.

What's interesting is that one contention of environmentalists is that El Nino will worsen with global warming, but El Nino is a hurricane killer. If we wanted to stop hurricanes, global warming would actually improve our lot (assuming that it would worsen El Nino).

More annoying is that some people (such as Jürgen Trittin) are giving that stupid movie "The Day After Tomorrow" credence as a climatological model. The ridiculous science of the plot is thus:

Global warming causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a "superstorm." The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Temperatures drop 100 degrees an hour in Canada. Hurricanes ravage Belfast. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could.

The entire plot, line for line, is simply impossible. It would require halting the rotation of the Earth, repealing the laws of thermodynamics and the law of gravity, as Patrick Michaels said in the USA Today quoted above.

Katrina had nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with the natural cycle of storms in the world. It's regrettable that it happened and that such a tremendous loss of life has ensued, but that doesn't mean we have to find a cause and a bogeyman. Blaming Katrina on Bush not signing the Kyoto Treaty is like tribal elders blaming a drought on not sacrificing enough virgins to the gods of rain. It might be satisfying to reinforce your view of the world, but it's useless for fixing anything.

2005-08-27T16:30:00.000-04:00

Don't Overplay Your Hand

I was reading a piece about invading Iran on Chicago Boyz, basically a hypothetical or a thought experiment more than a real examination. It was intended to focus on the argument that attacking Iraq made us less able to attack Iran, and I found this part thought-provoking:

What're people going to do, accuse us of imperialism

It seems to me that by calling the Bush Administration fascist, imperialist and murderous, the hand has been WAY overplayed. If the Administration were to do something ACTUALLY fascist then the legitimate complaints could get lumped with the bad ones. It weakens the arguments.

Just like taking pills builds up a tolerance and a partial immunity, overplaying a political hand continuously for five years weakens your arguments and the influence they have over the audience.

Now, of course it actually doesn't make sense that attacking Iraq made us weaker in dealing with iran. If anything, the Libya effect acts to persuade the Iranians to stop fucking around and get on board, while the military board is FAR more favorable with access through the Iraq-Iran border, as well as the less accessible Afghanistan-Iran border. In a way, the Western powers overplayed their hand on nuclear proliferation by talking about it for years and years but not backing it up when it counts. The US action against Iraq, not just bombing but an actual invasion, definitely restores credibility behind a US threat.

Remember, Iran, Saddam was convinced up until mid-March, 2003 that France, Russia and Germany would stop the US invasion of his country. Don't think that the US would be scared to blow up some reactors if in two, five or ten years you're still non-compliant and threatening the world (Israel did it to the Iraqi Osirak reactor in the 1980s). Of course, here's hoping that diplomacy will pull out some really victories here.

Still, better a definitive military solution that fixes the problem than a feel-good diplomatic situation that only facilitates proliferation (exactly what happened in the 1994 Agreed Framework deal with North Korea).

The real reason some people think Iraq puts us in a worse position to attack Iran is that they see things in terms of victimhood. The US attacking Irq is a non-victim thing to do, so we're not in a good place to do more non-victim things. Cindy Sheehan, however, lost her son and that allows Maureen Dowd to bestow upon Sheehan the power of "absolute moral authority" for her victimhood. Certain people don't see it in terms of effectiveness or of overreach, but in Kindergarten terms of reference like meanies, bullies and so forth.

This sort of perspective would say that our victimhood gained by 9/11 was spent on the Taliban, overdrawn by Iraq, and that iran is just too far from our reach. It's not based in military strategy, since if anything we'd have more trouble holding down the no-fly zones over Saddam and invading Iran from Afghanistan, and it's not based on effectiveness, since even a horrible, violent quagmire in iran would still allow us to bomb their nuclear facilities. I really don't want to go to war with the Iranians, because I have many hopes for reform and a little hope for diplomacy. However, let's not assume that Iraq made us worse off in dealing with these guys.

Iraq gave us teeth to add to our threats, and it shows that even against a brutal insurgency and a chorus of negativity from allied countries we can make good on our threats. Libya's learned its lessons, and it's not going to help Iran's position to have a US ally on their border. Now what we need to do is hold up the carrot to balance the stick: dropping the sanctions and engaging in normal relations if they drop all the nuclear work and join the NPT.

2005-08-27T04:14:00.000-04:00

Ruffini Straw Poll

The results of the Ruffini GOP straw poll are out. He had a list of a good 15 or so potential candidates, and then a second vote that included four fantasy candidates or the option of standing with the original.

In the original, I voted for Brownback of Kansas. First off, he's the brother-in-law of my second cousin (the brother of my mom's cousin's husband, which I think works out to second cousin's brother-in-law) so I have some familial connection. Honestly, though, I voted for him based on a few things that have nothing to do with family. He was elected to the House in the class of 1994 (heady times, those) and in 1996 he won Bob Dole's vacated seat. He definitely strikes me as a major idealist all around (he's one of the Republicans that self-termlimited and won't run for the Senate again in 2010), and he's clearly a pretty intelligent guy with a penchant for symbolism. He's pretty big on Christianity (he became a Catholic in 2002) but he's good at hitting messages with a more universal appeal. Mostly, I like him because he's pro-life and he favors more action with regard to genocide in Darfur. I'm not stuck to him, I just think it's a tragedy that it's such a non-issue.

Brownback will probably get backing from Santorum, a Senator I'm not particularly wild about, and he's already been pre-endorsed by Pat Robertson, which is not a particularly positive note. I suspect that Sam and I have profoundly different views on how a lot of the world works (though not so profound as my differences with most Democrats) and I might not be able to back him in good conscience down the road.

Giuliani won the straw poll strongly, with Allen coming in second. The four fantasy candidates, Condi, Cheney, Jeb and Fred Thompson, came out in that order in a lineup against each other and the regular candidates. Condi won in pretty much every formulation and in every group, which is funny for someone that never ran for office and has so many unknown positions. Actually, it's probably because of her many unknown positions that it's so easy to maintain popularity across the moderate-conservative divide, allowing every to see that she's intelligent, independent and accomplished.

I voted for Fred Thompson because his movies are awesome, as his persona, and because in the few media appearances where I have seen him he's always thoughtful, articulate, discerning and earnest. Very likable guy, as far as I'm concerned.

I was definitely not going to vote for Tancredo, and it would take a long, long campaign of endless socialism from the Democrats to get me to vote Tancredo instead of libertarian or write-in.

I don't have too many specific grievances against Pataki, except that he's pro-choice and just seems so dull and blah.

Huckabee is a poor choice, given his abysmal ranking from CATO on the Governoir's report card for fiscal solvency, and his recent foray into fighting childhood obesity (teen anorexia/bulimia is a far more real danger than fat kids).

I am still tempted to vote Hagel for his experience and his good record on fiscal issues, but I'm really off-put by what appears to be a real lack of interest in democracy-promotion as a foreign policy.

McCain would be awesome for his foreign policy, which in many ways is more passionate and intellectually rigorous than even the President's, but his domestic agenda would be more muddling and populist (BCRA, anyone?) aside from being pro-life and pro-tax cut.

Bill Frist seems like a good guy but I don't really get a strong sense of what he'd do in office.

Romney wouldn't be horrible, but aside from political triangulation being Massachusetts, Michigan and Utah I don't know what he'd campaign on.

I kind of like Allen, and he seems energetic, but I'm waiting to hear more from him.

I'm perpetually uncomfortable with Newt given what I know of his personal life, but he is a pretty well-spoken and visionary guy otherwise.

Rudy doesn't really have very defining domestic stances, and seems to me more like an empty vessel into which socially moderate bloggers inject their complaints about the GOP conservatives.

The whole affair only serves to remind me that it's WAY early in the process from a voter's point of view, and that none of them are close to perfectly matching my politics.

In conclusion, no to Tancredo, yes to Fred Thompson.

2005-08-27T03:03:00.000-04:00

September Elections and the Free Liberals

The German and New Zealand elections are both coming this September, and the situations are roughly similar. Both are social democratic incumbents seeking third terms despite rocky terms in office and both electoral systems are mixtures of proportional representation (PR) and member districts (MDs). The German Christan Democrats and Free Democrats are essentially populist conservatives and free liberals, roughly akin to the New Zealand National and ACT parties. Of course, the German CDU is more conservative than the the Nationals, and the New Zealand ACT is pro-Iraq war while the German FDP isn't so much.

Germany will probably see Angela Merkel as Prime Minister in September, hopefully leading a coalition with the FDP. The Free Democrats aren't my personal favorite for foreign policy (no German party has anything like a foreign policy platform befitting a would-be permanent member of the UN Security Council) but they are the only ones backing anything remotely like an American-style free-market system. Were I German, I'd send my party vote to the FDP. It's been considered that a grand coalition of the CDU and SPD might come out of the election, with the Greens, Left and Free Democrats left to the side. Here's rooting for another CDU-FDP government.

New Zealand is looking like Labor ("Labour" they call it) will win anothe term. Things could change, of course, and it's quite doubtful Labor could pick up an outright majority. More likely, Helen Clark will work together a makeshift coalition like she has now, with support of variuous fringers like the Progressives, Greens, United Future (formerly a Christian-centrist party) and New Zealand First. It's possible she'll enter into an alliance with Winston Peters' political self-indulgence the New Zealand First party, in the process giving him all sorts of concessions about spending, welfare, nationalization and of course limiting foreign influence (it's a sort of centristy nationalist grouping with awkward appeal, since Peters himself is a native Maori). That would greatly suck. It's also possible that National might pull ahead enough to get NZ1 to side with them, but that'd take a pretty decent electoral showing.

ACT is looking, as usual, like it won't even win seats in parliament at all. Of course, it's looked that way every year then it bumps up right at the end. They're making a hard push to win an electorate so that they're not totally subject to meeting the 5% party hurdle for entrance to Parliament. Were I a Kiwi, I would party-vote ACT as well as support whatever candidate they ran in the local electorate.

Person for person, ACT probably has the best MPs in New Zealand. It would be a shame to lose the lot of them, given the work they do both in keeping the government honest and in influencing the issues up for debate. They've been so successful at the latter that the ACT positions on welfare, taxes, Waitangi and so forth that were almost obscure a few years ago are parroted by most of the other parties. And unlike the german FDP, ACT is a force for a more deployable, more effective New Zealand military and would be a more reliable ally with Australia and the US (though bear in mind Clark eventually sort of sided with the US by sending very few soldiers to Iraq, at one point limited to a single Kiwi).

Even if the CDU and FDP win, I don't see the US endorsing a German permanent seat on the UNSC. Aside from the politics of adding along India, Brazil and Mexico along with Germany, I think the Germans really shot themselves in the foot by going gaga over obstructionism in 2002. They are not as reliable an ally as they ought to be given our otherwise close connections (trade, military and otherwise). It would really suck having to deal with China, France and germany as permanent members, threatening to veto everything we ever did. The one thing Germany would bring is being one of the least anti-Semitic countries in the world.

If National makes it to government with ACT, we could see a few things. One, no more Kyoto in NZ. It's already unpopular after an unexpected economic boom turned NZ from an anticipated net gain under Kyoto to an anticipated net-loss under it. Not enough Kiwis believe in the cause of Kyoto to spend money on it, because it only passed with the assumption that it would give the government a nice big check for having more carbon sinks (forests) than carbon production. Two, the nuclear ban on ships in NZ harbor would be lifted. It's already been shown that AUckland hospital is FAR more of a radiological hazard than ships at dock in NZ, and a Cold War-era protest makes no sense after the Cold War's ended, so the only reason left is to spite the US and France. The prospect of reactivating the ANZUS alliance (Australia, New Zealand, United States) is more valuable than petty spite, but so is the free trade deal to follow; the nuke ban is the single largest obstacle preventing New Zealand from getting free trade with the US like Australia has, and the US isn't going to move on an NZ-FTA until the ban is lifted.

Germany and New Zealand have been stuck with selfish, conniving, manipulative opportunists of the social democratic persuasion. It won't be a shoo-in, but here's hoping that united center-right parties can bring some common sense back to both of these countries.

2005-08-27T01:47:00.000-04:00

Permanence and Honesty

I think one of the single greatest obstacles to ethical and honest behavior is aninability to be properly critical of oneself. Learning to judge one's ideas, beliefs, actions and statements objectively is a wonderful way to expect fairer standards of others and higher standards of yourself. This can be applied to groups, clubs, businesses, countries, religions, or any other method of clustering together individuals.

One of the biggest reasons why self-criticality is unattractive is permanence. This isespecially prevalent with regard to groups and institutions that are effectively permanent. I wish to focus on two types: national and ethnic groups, and longstanding institutions.

A national or ethnic group has little incentive aside from honesty and intellectual consistency to admit its mistakes. The exception is when a mistake is extremely obvious or when another group (like the US military) forces you to admit wrongdoing (like the Japanese in WWII). Most of the lies or disagreements are about history, who was right, who started it, who did what, who deserved it, and so forth. The Japanese don't like to mention the Rape on Nanjing (which is also a function of the Japanese tradition of ancestor-worship, and of effectively absolving all dead of sins), andother groups don't like to remember their mistakes and crimes. The operative fallacy is collectivism and identity. If you draw your worth from an ethnic grouping, then a tainted ethnic grouping is a negative worth; if the group is bad, it reflects negatively upon you.

The problem is permanence. Very few ethnic or national groupings (except American and some others) allow as regular practice converts and recruits. Marriage and adoption aside, if you're born X then the Y group doesn't think you can be Y. The permanence generally works the opposite way: if you're born X then you die X. This creates a strong incentive to make X ethnicity more valuable and not to admit too many negatives. You can't just drop X and become a Y or Z if X becomes associatedwith some past injustice.

Permanence - tradition - is a major factor in denying the truth and in avoiding objectivity about the actions of one's group.

The second group is institutions, by which I mean major ones. Essentially, I'm referring to governments and to orthodox religious institutions like the Catholic Church, and to branches of each like the military. The US military is notorious for being obsessed with its image and hiding scandals (though not with any particular skill or speed) and in basically trying to make itself look good. The biggest sign of this is that career officers that become anything approaching whistle-blowers are WIDELY presumed to have completely ruined their careers. The US military is in some ways crippled by this obsession with not disrespecting its image. Governments, too, have this impulse, but since disparate factions run governments there's a stronger opposite interest to expose mistakes and blame it on the other party.

The Catholic Church's problem with this issue is in, of course, the pedophilia scandals. The problem is of course confounded by the signature virtues of Christianityand Catholicism, namely forgiveness and confession, but it seems to me that this is more than just forgiveness. The pedophilia scandals of the Catholic Church are really about cover-up, otherwise why would all of these incidents be secret? It's an image thing, and it goes to the root of the institution as a permanent covenant between God and man (if I have any grasp of the theology).

Thepermanence of the Catholic Church contrasts with the less central role played by the Protestant churches. Those denominations change, sort and shuffle with times, and the internal factions and individual churches can move about. Although the lack of criticality is a problem general to people, it's less prevalent in institutions when they can be redefined or regrouped more easily.

Governments, ethnicities and major institutions like militaries or longstanding churches are all nearly permanent by design or in effect. They cannot be replaced easily, nor can deep-seated changes be cultivated quickly.

If a business, for example, commits some error in judgment or in its business model, it disappears. Enron was bankrupt by the end of November, 2001 and otherbusinesses caught in scandal and corruption fall as quickly. The guilty people hid from blame, but the people who did nothing wrong felt no real compulsion to protect Enron's reputation - why should they hide the truth when they did nothing wrong and when they could easily (job market cooperating) replace the impermanent Enron with another employer? Investors pull out, employees quit or are fired, and the capital and labor is moved into other businesses as soon as it's available. The military, the government, and ethnicities normally don't go out of business in the same way. We wouldn't just decide that this military is flawed and fired the entire Pentagon and all the soldiers.

It might be the case that an ethnicity incapable of dealing with the past or with a tainted history would fall out of favor with its members, who might leave outright or simply pay little or less attention to ethnic pride. But since ethnicity is often used (wrongly) as a proxy for describing its members, it would go right to character of the members if an ethnicity were widely known to have engaged in bad acts.

It might also be the case that a soldier or a Catholic, driven by a sense of duty or ethics, would forgo the potential backlash or bad press and openly acknowledge any wrongdoing colleagues have committed. The hypothesis, as it were, is not meant to be ironclad, nor is it meant to apply forever, everywhere in perpetuity. In general, however, the behavior of groups of people toward relatively permanent institutions will tend towards uncritical boosterism; more replaceable, less permanent institutions will be more prone to honest (and dishonest) criticism.

The permanence, in effect or in design, encourages a lack of self-critical behavior. The degree to which an institution is permanent or difficult to replace is the degree to which, ceteris paribus, its members will be influenced to dishonestly defend its reputation.

The assumption I could draw from this is that flexibility, individuality and decentralization of society (not just of government) encourage a more rigorous honesty. None of this is ironclad, of course, since there will always be other motivations for people to lie or to tell the truth. However, I submit that societal centralization and tradition in general are often formidable enemies of honesty.

2005-08-23T18:43:00.000-04:00

Robertson on Chavez Assassination

Pat Robertson said on his show 700 Club this of Hugo Chavez, the anti-democratic President of Venezuela:

We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.He said that we should assassinate Chavez, largely because it's more effective and far cheaper than going to war. In principle, I agree, but I don't think Chavez currently qualifies.

Targeted killing of enemy leaders should be an openly stated goal of the United States. In my opinion it should be done in cases where there is some sort of congressional authorization, and only after the person in question refuses to surrender peacefully. We should admit to taking out the leader after it's done, because there's nothing to hide, and before it's done it should be clearly stated that not surrendering leaves him open to being killed. It requires more nuance than this, and ultimately it would be hard to kill leaders because they'd know to either surrender or go into hiding.

I don't think Chavez should be killed, though. It's quite likely that the election irregularities are the visible signs of him stealing the elections. The massive protests from what appears to be a majority of the country - business, labor, media, professionals - sugfgests that his only supporters are the rural poor. His actions in nationalizing land and business, including the oil industry and seizing lands together equivalent to the size of Belgium, betray his opinions on privacy and individual autonomy. His friendship with Castro, Saddam and the FARC terrorists in neighboring Colombia, not to mention the two separate coup attempts he led in the early 1990s against his own country, show his anti-democratic biases. His plans to re-establish Venezuela as a quasi-fascist "Bolivarian Revolutionary" state and to establish an anti-NATO, anti-US military coalition out of South American states show his deep-seated anti-US, anti-Western biases.

But he isn't fighting a war and he isn't committing genocide. He definitely needs to be out of power, but I don't think military action is justified. We shouldn't go to war with Chavez, and so we shouldn't use soldiers to kill him. Although targeted killings of enemy leaders is far quicker and cheaper than war, we shouldn't take that to mean that it should be done with far less evidence or cause than a war would require.

So, I agree in principle that we should use targeted killings, but I don't believe Chavez yet qualifies for such an action.

2005-08-23T03:10:00.000-04:00

Buchananite or Kossack?

A commenter on DailyKos:

Pat Buchanan's 1999 book was entitled A Republic, Not An Empire, and was about substantively the same choice. Of course, considering Buchanan's work with Nader against markets and trade and his general leeriness of corporations and business, we shouldn't be surprised when the left starts returning the admiration.

2005-08-22T15:37:00.000-04:00

The Ethics of Torture

Set aside for a moment domestic laws and ratified international agreements regarding torture. Forget the implications of torture with regard to public or world opinion. When is physical torture ethical and when is physical torture unethical?

I have a simple jumping-off point: torture is not inherently unethical. Torture itself is morally neutral and can even be used in the service of both moral justice (inherent good) and pragmatic deterrence (instrumental good). We must again set aside everything but the act of torture; slippery slopes, bad press, criminal prosecutions are all irrelevant in this academic bubble. Torture can be good and torture can be bad, because torture is nothing more than a certain type of violence. Torture and violence are neutral actions. Of course, both of them can have tremendously bad consequences if used lightly - but again, forget the slippery slope for now.

Let's say that we have a terrorist whom we know is a terrorist. Just to be clear that this is a bad guy, we'll say our hypothetical terrorist both planned and undertook lethal actions against innocent men, women and children for being of the wrong nationality, race or faith.

Torturing this terrorist is a moral good when it serves justice; a lot of people don't like vengeance, but I'm personally a big fan of vengeance. Yay, vengeance. In my view, it is inherently good to punish the terrorist for the murders he committed, up to and including taking his life.

Torturing the same terrorist is an instrumental good when it deters or prevents future terrorist actions. This is why state torture generally exists: to beat information out of people. I'm not aware of the track record on how often good information can be physically tortured out of someone, but that sort of consideration would be critical to determining how instrumentally good torture would be; instrumentally-good torture is contingent on getting usable information to prevent further harm, or to deter terrorists for fear of being tortured.

Of course, what the terrorist and his ilk do to innocent people is also torture. Chopping off the heads of journalists and diplomats is decidedly torture. They are particularly brutal and will commit their torture against wholly innocent people for the sake of media coverage. Their torture is inherently bad because it is performed against innocent people.

That's the key to being inherently moral: the target must be deserving. The actor is irrelevant; the target is everything. A terrorist torturing a terrorist is inherently good, and a FBI agent torturing an innocent civilian is a moral bad. This brings us into the intent and thoughts of the torturers. It's my opinion that the act is separate from the actor's thoughts. Someone who enjoys torture on a visceral level (perversion, sociopathy, psychopathy, etc.) is an immoral person, whether or not the torture is moral or not. One terrorist could torture another terrorist out of a personal desire to kill a human being, making him an immoral person, while the act of torturing the targeted terrorist would be good for reasons of justice and vengeance. For the reverse to occur (good actor, bad act) would require a case of mistaken identity on the part of a well-intentioned torturer. Mistaken identity is perhaps the best argument in the case against real-world torture.

It's all well and good to confirm that violence, including torture, has its positive uses. If we lift the academic bubble, however, we can see that it's potentially quite dangerous to allow.

First, torturing people not convicted of crimes leaves open the very real possibility that an innocent person is being tortured. This is a problem, because there is no inherently good torture against an innocent person. Moreover, it's hard to get good intelligence from an innocent person (natch). And of course, the potential backlash from torturing someone later proven conclusively to be innocent would be severe.

Second, torturing guilty people might eventually lead to torturing people merely suspected of guilt, or to torture being accepted in everyday domestic crimes. Torture has long been a part of the police arsenal in many countries, and even in some liberal democracies the line against torture (including the protection against self-incrimination) is not nearly as strong as it really ought to be. This is the slippery slope argument.

Third, there's again the pragmatic question of whether torture is the best or even a good way of getting information. It's very possible that a beaten and bloody suspect will simply lie and give up bad or dangerous information in order to spare himself. Desperate people, especially desperate murderers that hate you and your 'people,' aren't great sources of information. The experts could better speak to this question than I could, however.

Fourth, we have a longstanding tradition, rightly so, of protecting the criminals and miscreants in our charge. They are fed, clothed and sheltered, given the right to legal recourse and appeals, and have the right to confidential interaction with their lawyers. I would not feel comfortable losing any of these rights, even for convicted murder-rapists. There's another question whether foreign combatants captured in period of war or conflict are covered by some or any of these protections, of course. The biggest pressure to use physical torture is against those held abroad (including Guantanamo) as terrorists or suspected terrorists.

Fifth, of course, is the potential backlash at home and abroad that torture would produce. It's no fun being told what to do or changing actions to avoid bad reactions, but if the underlying action is a mixed blessing then something like bad press is a pretty good reason. After all, if it ends up encouraging hatred of our country or if it ends up weakening our other foreign policies (like liberalization and democratization) then it's an instrumental bad.

I simply don't think it's appropriate for the state to engage in torture. If the state is going to exact vengeance, it should be done through incarceration and the death penalty, and after trials, appeals, counsel and all the rest. It's unnecessary for vengeance, so if it's justified it must be for pragmatic reasons. I'm not convinced that better information comes from a torture policy than from other avenues, nor am I delighted by the potential backlash or the slippery slope possibilities. I think the value of being a role-model nation is far greater than any supposed increased intelligence assets we may garner. The military conflicts we're fighting are important, but the political struggle to democratize the Middle East is the real conflict.

State torture itself is not automatically immoral, but it is a danger that risks the lives and liberties of innocents and threatens to undermine our primary foreign policy objective with regard to democratization. We should strongly restrict physical torture of those detained by our forces or our allies, avoid turning over captives to notorious torturing groups, and limit ourselves to more subtle and effective methods of gathering intelligence.

2005-08-21T19:23:00.000-04:00

Religion in the Iraqi Constitution

Many people are concerned over the drafting of the Iraqi constitution and the role given to religion within it. I know why they're worried, but I think it's a relatively poor indicator.

It would be wonderful if a non-sectarian, non-religious constitution came out of Iraq. Religion has no need to be included in a legal document. It's entirely appropriate in a declaration like our Declaration of Independence or something along those lines. A declaration simply states what's going on and what we value. A constitution is a framework for the bounds and authority of the state, and the rights and avenues for redress open to the populace. Religion can be a valuable inspiration, but it's not particularly useful to codify explicitly sectarian values in law.

However, if the constitution does come out with religious gobbledygook about Allah being the supreme source of law, or the inspiration and reliance on the sharia, it's not immediately the end of the world or even of the democratic reforms in Iraq. The Egyptian constitution says the same thing: "Islam is the Religion of the State. Arabic is its official language, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia)." Egypt is no picnic of a government, being deceitful, authoritarian, socialist and dictatorial, but it is one of the more secular countries in the Arab world. In fact, one of the main justifications that Mubarak and his supporters use to justify their anti-democratic rule is to ask democrats whether they want to let the Muslim Brotherhood into power. The constitution might say one thing, but that doesn't mean the government or the society is controlled by radical Muslims.

It might be something done for political purposes, it might be done out of habit and tradition, it might be done to undercut religious opposition, or it might be a sign of much more troubling things to come. I'm definitely rooting for a nonsectarian Iraqi founding document, but if one fails to emerge I don't think we should overreact to what it might mean. Let's not focus on what their rhetoric is, good or bad, and instead make sure that they protect the rights and privileges of their citizens.

Whatever happens, women got to vote in the last election. I don't think things are looking rosy for the religious zealots in Iraq, no matter what flowery phrases they might get inserted in the preamble.

2005-08-21T02:01:00.000-04:00

Sheehan's Insanity

I earlier blogged that the President is under no obligation to meet with Cindy Sheehan but that he should anyway in order to call her bluff. I don't think that's still appropriate. If Cindy Sheehan is willing to apologize for, retract and/or condemn some of her worst statements, then I think it would be appropriate. Meeting with the President might even be a good way to tempt her into distancing herself from her absurd comments.

First and most prominently, it's not always fair that people are associated with support from politically controversial strangers, but the right thing for a public figure (Cindy Sheehan has courted the press, she's effectively a public figure) to do is to make clear her position. David Duke's support should be clearly supported or denounced. Duke specifically held her up as an opponent of the Jewish war and Jewish media. She should make clear her feelings on that endorsement. Additionally, this would be the point to make clear just what she meant in saying thatr her sent was sent to die "for Israel." That's an effectively anti-Semitic comment and she needs to clarify just what she meant. If it turns out she does condone (not agree with, but condone) anti-Semitism in thought or rhetoric then the President should not meet with her.

Second, she said America was not worth fighting for and has made statements saying that our entire history is dishonorable. If she's actually anti-American and not just misquoted then the President should not meet with her.

There's one thing to meet with a grieving mother making crazy statements to the media in order to respectfully disarm her "protest." After all, it's not like she's going to convince him to stop the war. It's another thing to meet with her when she's doing it in service of hatred or bigotry. Moreover, meeting with her sends a message; it's unfortunate that meeting with a crazy grieving mother sets a mild precedent for other crazy people, but it's much worse to set a precedent that you can make fun of an ethnicity or this country because of that pain and still meet with the President. It's not a bright line distinction, but it's a sufficient one.

And thirdly, Sheehan's remark insulting the President's daughters was just uncalled for. From Sheehan's original account of their meeting he was nothing but respectful of her loss. She has no reason to insult his children in that manner. Suggesting the President should be willing to risk his own children, though a character attack, is a valid rhetorical point (though not a convincing logical one, since a man could be a hypocrite in his actions but correct in his words) but there was no reason to insult the twins. She should apologize for that comment. Nobody in this debate has insulted her son and there's no reason to insult his daughters.

Sheehan's unlikely to apologize. She sounds just unhinged. She brings in the Jews, the neocon-PNAC agenda, the war for Israel sake; she calls a combat KIA 'murder,' calls the president's daughters names; she insults the country by saying it's not worth fighting for and then she wants to meet the President again in order to bitch and complain about it all. Sorry, that's just bonkers. It was bad enough when she just had bad opinions and was merely bordering on what a broad cross-section of Americans would call inappropriate.

She's gone past all that to have all sorts of crazy things to her name. I've heard she disputes that she said some of the things, and if so I retract all the relevant comments; if she has been misquoted I am sympathetic because there's little in this world so pernicious or lasting as a falsified anecdote. I really suspect that most or all of it is legitimately attributed to her, however.

If for some reason the President does decide to meet with her, I have several suggestions. One, include her in a meeting with other parents, so she doesn't monopolize the meeting. Two, have it be a meeting that was already scheduled, so she's not forcing a major change. Three, squeeze her in at the end, briefly, so that it doesn't detract unnecessarily from the experience of the other parents (and so they can simply leave if they don't want to hear it). Four, ideally the meeting will be at least three weeks away, so that her protest until then has no point and the coverage will die down, and will be neither in Crawford nor in the White House so that it doesn't require inviting her into his home. And five, listen respectfully, don't insult her, and answer with a concise defense of the war, a defense of this country, and an indictment of the terrorists.

Of course, at this point I'm not sure it's quite so good an idea to deal with her. I still think it would silence them because (quite stupidly) their one demand is for her to get a second meeting with the President. I don't see a lot of benefits to her from geeting a few minutes to rant about the Jews and the evil Americans to the President, and I do see benefit in him politely but firmly refuting her statements. It would be unfortunate for the President to meet with a woman that's made anti-Semitic and anti-American statements and who needlessly insulted his daughters. I absolutely don't blame him for not meeting with her even if she does apologize completely for all the boneheaded, bigoted or moonbatty comments she's made.

I guess I just appreciate the potential for contrast. There's Sheehan on one side, totally controlled by emotions, totally aligned with far-left political consultants and media representatives, talking about how evil the Jew-neocons at PNAC are, how they controlled the US into going to war for Israel, and how America deserves to lose. Then there's Bush on the other side, being decorous and resolute, reasonably pointing out that the terrorists attack people of all races and faiths, that they attack without cause, and that the blame must lie with the murderers and not the murdered.

2005-08-19T22:19:00.000-04:00

Democrats Need Coercion

Apparently Democrats need coercion because they can't get away with their boneheaded ideas without lawmakers forcing rule changes on the economy. At least that's the first thing that popped into my head when I read what Air America tried to do to avoid paying for its mistakes. Plagued almost from the beginning by funding shortages and trouble with creditors - including a scandal involving an overdue substantial loan from the nonprofit Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club - in May 2004 apparently the management of AIr America dodged their debts by simply moving into a new shell corporation. It was the same management, but they tried to transfer the assets without transferring the liabilities. That's just dumb.

Of course, it's not directly related and just because people with a leftist bent run Air America doesn't mean leftists in general are this way. Still, the parallels of being tragically bad with money and unable to accept the consequences are funny, if not particularly enlightening.

2005-08-18T00:18:00.000-04:00

Equality in the Military

I just had a passing thought that relates to the military, especially to female officers. Rather than distinguishing men and women with different standards, uniforms and address, maybe it would help promote unity if they were treated the same.

It's probably a bad idea to have coed showers and bathrooms, but I think expecting every soldier to fit the same weight and fitness training standards is an obvious step. Currently, there's a very explicit form of affirmative action going wherein there are widely different standards for men and women. This is part of the reason why keeping women out of combat might be a pragmatic good, since the military requires so much less from them. It's unfortunate that women are expected to be inferior to men, which helps perpetuate (not without merit) the idea that women have less of a place in the armed forces than men.

But beyond that step, which would almost certainly take an order from the President or an act of Congress to enact, the same uniforms and address should be used. Giving female soldiers and officers skirts and blouses, even relatively tough cuts and designs, helps set them apart from the men. Addressing them as "ma'am," even though it has a firm basis in language and history, can also serve to separate. I don't know how necessary or effective it would be, but maybe addressing female officers and male officers the same way could help to streamline some of the problems in the forces.

Of course, other issues of menstruation, sex, pregnancy and rape aren't going to go away because they're intrinsic to being women (although pregnancy and menstruation can be controlled through protection and chemistry). The problems of sexual harassment and of male soldiers compromising missions to save female soldiers aren't going to go away with uniform changes or adjusting the language involved.

However, given that the tradition of keeping women out of the military used to be longstanding and has now been done away with, it seems trivial to keep language or uniform traditions when there's at least a plausible reason for doing away with them. The least we can do is not keep sub-standard soldiers just for the sake of appearances. We don't change standards in order to make sure weak and slow people are represented in the military.

2005-08-17T20:59:00.000-04:00

Barone's Blog

Michael Barone's blog is only a couple weeks old but it's already full of insightful commentary. Barone has a good grasp of politics and has a great track record, including publishing biennial editions of the Almanac of American Politics (the most recent one just came out). His blog is well worth reading, and so it's now going to the blogroll in the left column.

2005-08-17T20:47:00.000-04:00

Nuclear Power

If you're worried about global warming, carbon/methane pollution, or the cost of oil/gas, then let's get some more nuclear plants in construction. More research would also be really great (especially if they ever prove cold fusion as possible).

It's great for the people scared of global warming, because it doesn't throw carbon, methane and other heat-trapping elements into the sky. Personally I have my doubts about some of the features of global warming theory, mostly focused on our inability to really prove much of anything about it, but it's moot if we move to nuclear power.

For those concerned about the negative effects of air pollution, nuclear power's negative pollution is more easily contained and controlled. I'll concede that disposing of nuclear waste is definitely an issue, especially given lengthy half-life issues, but I'll take pollution we can handle, transport and bury over pollution that's simply thrown up into the air. Nuclear waste is one of the biggest problems connected to the source, but I'd argue that it's more controllable and ultimately safer (I'll leave storage in Nevada aside for now).

Nuclear power is also not closely dependent on oil prices, which in the last decade have fluctuated from well under $20 a barrel to over $60 a barrel. The price of oil reflects a lot of factors, like the high demand in China, but it can also be skewed both by Middle Eastern politics and by various government interventions. The price is likely to be somewhat more stable and to be lowered as technology makes production and safety measures cheaper.

Personally, I think the benefits of nuclear power are many. Aside from powering the general grid, it could also be used to produce hydrogen fuel cells. Electrolysis is the process of running electricity through water to make hydrogen and water. When you recombine hydrogen and water you produce water and electricity. That means that running a car on hydrogen and oxygen produces only water as a side effect. The problem is that it takes power to separate the water, so hydrogen fuel cells are more like a way to make energy portable rather than directly produce energy. Using nuclear power to create hydrogen fuel cells could be a way to make cars run cleanly and efficiently (pollution and global warming aside, most people consider cleaner, nicer-smelling cars to be more valuable than the alternative). It would require redesigning the fuel tanks of cars, as well as getting the fuel cells to consumers (possibly direct delivery at first, then eventually just through fuel stations).

I don't think the benefits are obvious enough or alternatives' drawbacks critical enough yet to make the market support the change at this time. Especially since it appears there's still a large amount of oil left, other factors than oil-supply shortage would have to be the decisive one. I would think that techno-geeks and guilty, wealthy Democrats would be a good market for fuel cell cars; people with the means and interest in buying a fuel cell car for environemntalism or pure technological novelty. This is of course all just conjecture.

The appropriate policy response, however, is to slowly phase out all the energy meddling of the government - both the subsidies and industry supports that distort the market positively and the unnecessary, burdensome regulations that negatively distort the market. Eventually I suspect that the advantages of nuclear power will give it a greater role in providing both home and automotive energy.

2005-08-17T18:56:00.000-04:00

I Can't Stand Ethanol

Ethanol is one of the dumbest things the federal government lays its hand on. Yes, I know every Senator wants to be President one day and Iowa is the first caucus state, but does that mean Iowans are incapable of sticking with USEFUL products and innovations?

With the energy costs of planting and harvesting, transporting and refining the corn to make ethanol it actually costs MORE energy to make ethanol than it produces on its own. Yes, the energy is going to force an extra four weeks of Daylight Savings Time on us (two weeks extra on both ends) and cost the airlines billions and travellers hassle time in being unsynchronized withour neighbors just to save a comparatively light amount of energy, but they continue to lavish subsidies on ethanol to cancel out those gains. Absolutely absurd.

This is why a planned economy is ludicrous. Not only are we all forced to foot the bill so that 100 Senators can avoid pissing off Iowa, but instead of the federal government being punished for making a bad investment, the administrators of the country's wackiest investment fund (the General Federal Revenue) are rewarded when they start campaigning 3 years and eight months before the next election.

Frankly, if corn producers in Iowa and elsewhere want to make ethanol - which is expensive, dirty, degrades engines and costs more energy to make than it produces - then they can damn well pay for it themselves. I'm not asking them to pay for my products and pretending that they're getting great benefits out of it. Ethanol isn't worth the cost and doesn't provide sufficiently marketable benefits.

2005-08-17T02:48:00.000-04:00

Avoid Yahoo! Chatrooms At All Costs
By Adriana [Guest Blogger]
adrianicalism@gmail.com

Never debate in a Yahoo! political chatroom. A few weeks ago I found myself yearning for an angry anonymous internet brawl. Every so often I get a hankerin' to undermine the political beliefs of my fellow man. For some reason I decided to try Yahoo!. I found the voice chat feature especially cool. Yeah, instead of typing an excellent point that destroys your opponent's entire philosophy and then noticing your point got lost somewhere in between the porn bots and the fifteen year old posting the URL to his blog, the voice chat guarantees that you're heard. I also mistakenly thought that voice chat would ensure some minimum level of civility. In text chat your heart-felt and well-intentioned arguments tend to be misinterpreted. And forget about making a sarcastic remark. Boy, was I wrong.

I announced to Political Lobby 3 that I am a libertarian, that I believe in free markets and free people. Not really a controversial statement, I thought. Some ignorant southerner--an insult I liberally scattered throughout my subsequent conversations with him--saw my self-description and called me a "communist." A communist? I don't know, maybe I'm a little behind on my reading of the Communist Manifesto, but I am fairly sure 'communists' aren't down with 'free markets.' After repeatedly telling him that I'm a capitalist, that I oppose all coercive taxes, that I support free trade, that I'm against government interference in any sector of the economy, he shouted "commie!" one more time at me before putting me on ignore. He didn't actually, they never do, but he soon left the room after suggesting that I am a woman of loose moral standards. (He said that I'm a "whore" who is probably going to get pregnant in a year and have an abortion. So much for southern hospitality.)

I saw him again later that night and I tried to pin him down on the definition of "communist." He avoided the question, of course, clearly not knowing the meaning of the word, and resorted to attacking my age. Yes, apparently if you're 22 years old, you don't have the knowledge or requisite life experience to comment on, well, anything. I responded,"Yeah, I'm only 22, and it's sad that a 22 year old knows more about communism than a 50-year-old man." He started to brag that he fought in Vietnam as a marine for my freedoms - blah blah blah. Once he actually showed an interest in libertarianism, he said that I was a "silly and naive little girl" for objecting to government safety nets like Social Security, welfare, and health care. That's right - he called me a "communist" just before defending socialistic programs. I gave up trying to reason with him on any adult level after that.

I realized a few things from my Yahoo! chat encounter. 1) Drunk and uneducated older southern men like to frequent political chatrooms on weekday nights. 2) There aren't a whole lot of wacko conspiracy theorists in this world, but the few that do exist all seem to congregate in chatrooms. 3) I'd like to buy the world a dictionary and keep it company. 4) Sometimes I underestimate the intelligence of others, but I met some seriously bright and well-informed folks who actually taught me a bit. And finally, 5) Yahoo! chat contains some of the most vile, disgusting human beings on the internet. If you really need to sound off, join a message board for your own sanity.

2005-08-16T22:16:00.000-04:00

The "Grieving Mother" Status Doesn't Excuse Blaming Israel

Cindy Sheehan, in mid-March:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy … not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.Look, everyone feels sympathy for the relatives, friends and spouses of soldiers that died in combat zones. But sympathy doesn't elevate bad ideas into good or even neutral ones. The best sympathy does is to soften or silence our criticism of grieving relations that say stupid, bigoted or untrue thing. And example would be when Mrs. Cosby blamed her son's death on racism, and saying that the Slavic immigrant who killed him must've learned his racism in the US because there is none over there.

Sympathy can get us to ignore it when somebody says something inarticulate or awkward, bigoted or cruel, because we realize that under normal circumstances they might not have said it aloud or even have thought it. But sympathy doesn't lend any credibility to a dumb argument.

When she blames Israel as the source of terrorism against us she gives an unhelpful and anti-Israel view of the world more credence. When she asserts that we fought Iraq for Israel, and repeatedly refers to the neocon PNAC agenda, she sounds like a frothing anti-Semite. Unfortunately, anti-Semites seem to agree with that view of Sheehan. Aside from Michael Moore's support, Sheehan's anti-Israel comment garnered her the support of David Duke (renowned racist and former Klansman). Here's Duke's blog entry giving a point-by-point description of how this is a Jewish war for Israel against America's interests.

I don't know that Sheehan hates Jews, but I do know she clings to the same irrational arguments that bigots like David Duke and Jew-hating terrorists use to make their points. She didn't say anything specific about Jews, but she mentioned the major points - she blamed the US and Israel instead of the terrorists, she said this was nothing but a war for Israel, and she asserted that a neocon cabal led by PNAC was behind the conspiracy to 'murder' her son. Taken together, the neocon/PNAC reference is an allusion to Jews controlling the government.

When somebody makes a reference to a Jewish person as a Fagan or a Shylock, they don't need to be explicit to be understood as anti-Semitic slurs. By the same token, when somebody says that the neocons at Project for a New American Century are controlling the government to wage war for Israel, and that America and Israel deserve to be terrorized and bombed over our allegedly joint foreign policy, it's not unreasonable to connect the dots and see an anti-Semitic conspiracy of sorts.

Maybe she's just spouting off theories she read on the Internet or something and she would be genuinely disgusted by bigoted explanations behind the war (that could very reasonably be opposed without the slightest tinge of hatred for Jews), in which case she ought to be perfectly clear about it. It's possible somebody might reference Fagan only for the stingy aspects and not realize that it's a longstanding anti-Jewish slur, and it's possible that somebody might talk about a PNAC conspiracy to send Americans to die fore the world's only Jewish state, but I'd say the assumption in both cases leans toward anti-Semitism.

Either way, what she said is wrong even if she herself is Jewish. It's bad logic, it's bad policy, it's bad IR and it's just idiotic. The terrorists have it out for us no matter what, they aren't going to stop, and they haven't stated a point at which they will stop fighting, killing, bombing and murdering. The same people fight in Chechnya (some of the 9/11 bombers were on their way to fight in Chechnya when an AQ recruiter stopped them in germany and invited them to training camps in Afghanistan) and in Sudan and in Kashmir, and none of those things are about Israel or America. Wholly irrational.

Again, the lefties should be careful about giving too much of a platform to Cindy Sheehan or she'll become something like the Jane Fonda of the war in Iraq.

2005-08-16T16:46:00.000-04:00

New London's Punitive Measures

Apparently the national backlash against eminent domain in the wake of Kelo v. New London, including efforts in many states to limit or restrict its use, didn't get back to New London, CT. In addition to seizing the land of residents in order to give it to Pfizer for a corporate park, New London is now charging the residents back rent. The logic is that they lived on city property for the five years they were fighting the eminent domain. That's just punitive, whether or not it has any legal standing.

One resident is going to be charged around $300,000 in back rent, and the Kelos are going to be wiped out by a $57,000 bill. Not only that, but by state law the residents are getting the 2000 rate in compensation, not the 2005 rate (real estate is a lot more valuable right now). This is not necessary. I don't know how legally credible it is, but this seems obvious as a case of punishing people that tried to fight city hall.

If the legal case is weak, then I would hope some group or philanthropist will simply give the residents money to pay off the bills. In order to recoup the losses there could be an Internet fundraising drive. I don't think we could make the hundreds of thousands needed, but it's not right that these people will be bankrupted after being evicted.

Another good target for Internet fundraising would be to get the city officials tossed out at the next election. I'd put up some money for a good challenger candidate in New London that promises not to toss residents out of their homes for the sake of tax revenue.

2005-08-16T00:26:00.000-04:00

From Wilson to Sheehan

Okay, so when Roberts was nominated some lefty bloggers said that it was a move to stop criticism of Rove over the Wilson-Plame business and the like (a satirical 'Rove' memo from one of the Huffington Post's eighty bajillion bloggers pops to mind). What's interesting is that the Cindy Sheehan business has actually been taken up as the cause of the week by raving lefties. She is the mother of a fallen Marine who decided that her earlier positive visit with Bush was actually a negative one, that she needs to get another visit with the leader of the free world for some reason, and that America and Israel are to blame for terrorism.

Silly me, I was blaming the people that strap bombs to jets and metros terrorism. Thank you, Cindy Sheehan, for explaining to me that the root of terrorism against the US is actually a 2003 invasion of Ba'athist Iraq. I guess Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the rest were just shrewdly attacking us in 2001 in order to preemptively respond to an invasion that hadn't happened yet. Your grasp of human nature and international relations astounds me.

If the left really thought the Rove-Plame-Wilson story was going anywhere, why did they drop it? Well, because it had so many holes shot through it. The evidence looks like Rove didn't do anything and he's allowed any reporter to discuss it, waiving his confidentiality as a source. Moreover, Wilson's supposed debunking of the African uranium story ha been itself debunked; there is good evidence of Saddam trying to buy uranium from Africa. Bringing up the story again just shows that there was good reason to think Saddam had weapons.

The story was very weak but momentum and the anger of the left kept it going, especially since reporters are extremely invested in a story about reporters and sources. When it was bumped by Roberts it was actually good for everybody because the left just looked stupid pushing the story as Rove's downfall when the most conclusive part of the affair was that Saddam WAS trying to get uranium from Africa.

The Cindy Sheehan story isn't that much better, though. She veers close to very dangerous waters when she blames America and Israel for being attacked. The balance of the story is lost:

- her original description of the meeting with Bush was very positive, but then much later she said it was a negative meeting
- her family disagrees with her and thinks the son would not appreciate what she's doing
- she can't be reasonably cast as a simple grieving mother, given that she's using political consultants, press representatives, and even doing television ads
- she's way overplayed her hand on opposing the war by blaming America and Israel, which is very unpopular and damaging with most Americans, including moderate opponents of staying in Iraq

The longer the story goes on, the more pro-war people can point all this out. It will be very hard to overcome these mistakes because they're so hard to undo. If she changes her story and tries to partially recant her blaming of the US and Israel then she just looks like a politician, like her handlers and spin doctors have come in to do their work. It's a weak story on balance.

That said, there's still a real emotional appeal to be made and they're also going to pursue the populist thing about waiting on the road to talk to Bush. That'll keep the story going and they'll be waiting for Bush to speak with her. What do they really hope to gain from her speaking to him? It's not like he's suddenly going to reverse promises made to Congress, to allies, to soldiers and above all to the Iraqis and withdraw. What's he going to do, address Congress about his orders to withdraw the troops and suspend aid to Israel, then explain that some fallen Marine's mother told him to? Come on.

If I were Bush or his advisors, my suggestion would be to let the proxies make or not make the four arguments I listed above (the changed story, the son's opinion, the professional entourage, and blaming Israel) and to avoid any of them. They should mention that Bush already did have a meeting with her and that both sides thought it was a very positive one. Then they should schedule her to be included in a meeting -one that's already been scheduled- with Bush that includes the friends and relatives of other fallen soldiers. She can be squeezed in as part of a pre-arranged function in order to voice her concerns.

The president should thank her for her concerns and repeat his sorrow over her loss; then he should tell her that the terrorists are committed to our destruction, that their hatred has been boiling over at least since 1993 and arguably back to 1979, and that they are not rational people that will stop if we stop. They are the kind of people who murder over nothing but ethnicity, who butcher relatives for being gay, who slice up women for the crime of being raped, and who are so politically repressive that the dissent we've taken for granted for centuries is only now becoming a possibility there, and then only because of the efforts of our brave soldiers and of Arab dissidents.

It's not like she's going to assassinate him and she's not going to do anything more than words. If she uses the opportunity to insult the President then it just makes her look cheap. Bush doesn't have to meet with her, given her rhetoric, her status as a proxy of crazy leftwing types, and the fact that he already had a meeting with her. But I believe if he included her in a meeting with other parents it would undercut even the paltry populist and emotionalist arguments going right now, and it would give an opportunity for the President to prepare a concise, respectful, but forceful response in support of the War on Terror.

The long-term risk is that a lot of crazies would suddenly think they could consume all the President's time with their crazy theories. There are a lot of people in the country with all sorts of beliefs about aliens and the CIA and the Jews and so forth and making the President personally interact with all of them would be a waste of time and would present a security risk. By including her in a meeting already arranged for the benefit of others, it sets a far weaker precedent; she didn't get her own meeting, she got five minutes of somebody else's meeting.

And can I just say that if I died as a soldier or contractor overseas and a relative or friend of mine tried to manipulate the situation to do something that I would have fiercely opposed had I been around to do so, I'd be fiercely pissed off. That is not cool at all unless you acknowledge the opinion as your own. She's trying to use her son and herself as victims and martyrs when in reality it appears the son believed iun what he was doing. The disrespect in this situation comes from the mother until she acknowledges that her son would have or might have disagreed with what she's doing.

In conclusion, the left should be careful about embracing a political amateur as the cause of the week because they tend to say very unpolished things and can come off as crude and insensitive. They can't make their case on arguments or policy, so they've reduced themselves to cheap emotional pleas.

2005-08-15T23:05:00.000-04:00

Predictions Are Harder Than Explanations

After something in politics has happened, it's relatively easy to give an explanation for why it happened. It's more valuable and more difficult to predict trends and events before they happen.

Before Roberts was nominated, the prediction was that a fight was all but inevitable due to the structure of the actors in the fight and the nature of the disputes lately. The various interest groups, especially on the left-wing, raise money largely based on their utility in opposing right-wing judicial efforts. If they disappoint and can't stop Bush's nominees, they lose their value. The Republicans were sold to a lot of social traditionalists as valuable in bringing about a more restrained or more conservative judiciary. If they disappoint then they won't be replaced as the left-wing groups might be, but certainly they stand to lose support that translates into greater turnout and greater contributions. The emotions of the issue and the long-standing fight over nominations culminating in the filibuster fight really pointed toward a great SCOTUS fight. After all, if the Democrats fought that hard against appellate court nominees then they'd have even more of a reason to fight a Supreme Court nominee.

Now that Roberts seems, so far, to be largely impervious to serious controversy (to the point where lefties get burned testing the waters with inappropriate personal attacks) the question is predicting what will happen next. Let's assume that Roberts confirmation goes ahead pretty smoothly with the support of 70-odd Senators, the left-wing groups are embarrassed by attacking inappropriate subjects and being forced to recant or withdraw, the document business doesn't really go anywhere after the White House has already offered up so many privileged documents and Roberts takes O'Connor's seat on the Court. Will this make the next appointment (following Rehnquist or maybe Stevens) to the Supreme Court, in all probability done by President Bush, more likely to be contested or less?

First of all, the environmental factor will be short-term reduced. Everybody is mad at everybody, or at least the left-wing and the right-wing are both angry at each other, but in the short term a pretty peaceful confirmation can tend to calm things down. However the underlying problem would still be present and unresolved. Moreover, the groups with their expectant donors and reputations for divisive rhetoric would still be their without a fight. The right would have a prize but the left would be even further embarrassed after losses in 2002, 2004 and Roberts. The right has the real objections to how the Supreme Court operates (all the left really decries at all is Bush v. Gore) but the left has been whipped into a mouth-frothing frenzy the last five years and they really aren't going to slow down without some victories.

It seems pretty clear that Roberts' successful confirmation is more the exception than the rule. If anything it will lessen the immediate hostility while contributing to the anger of the left in future showdowns. Moreover, Bush's next pick is going to have to be a mute in order to have as slim a record as he or she will need to be confirmed.

The best thing the left can do is hitch a ride and endorse Reoberts. He's going to pass and they have nothing to stop him. If something shows up that makes it easy to stop him they can switch positions and say new and disturbing information has come to light that blah blah blah. Otherwise, endorsing Roberts would give them something great: the ability to more credibly claim that all their objections to other nominees are reasonable. Any criticism that their kneejerk opposing nominees in order to oppose Bush could be better deflected. Roberts would be a token conservative that they accepted.

Of course, this would be deceptive and calculating, but that's superior to their current position, which is simply deceptive.

2005-08-14T22:02:00.000-04:00

The More Things Change

From the 1912 Progressive Party campaign platform:

Remember that at the time the Lochner line of Supreme Court cases held a great many state laws as invalid violations of substantive due process and the liberty of citizens. Progressives were the main force to interfere with people's lives, socially and economically, so they REALLY did not like that line of reasoning.

In an unrelated part of the same platform, I liked this bit:

Their general position on conservation, of course, was a bajillion times more sensible than the modern Democratic no-to-antyhing stance.

2005-08-14T00:40:00.000-04:00

Idealism for Iraqis

Orin Kerr has an interesting idea about the debate over Iraq. He says that, assuming everyone in the debate wants the best for the US and Iraqi democracy, the division over the wisdom of the war in Iraq will bring us different interpretations of the same two options of staying or leaving now. Some people will believe that if the US stays the results will be good (option 1) while others believe staying would be disastrous (option 2). Some believe that if the US leaves now the results would be positive (option 3) and others think it would be horrific (option 4). The following is a comment I made to his post.

I don't think I've heard many people believably advance the idea that 3) is a likely outcome. The real debate is between anti-war people, who rank pessimistic leaving over pessimistic staying, and pro-war people, who rank optimistic staying over pessimistic leaving.

Although personally the aspect of the war more interesting to me is whether the Iraqis are seen as irrelevant or valuable. Most pro-war people, genuinely or not, characterize the Iraqis as valuable to defend. Most anti-war people characterize the Iraqis as irrelevant (not worth American dollars or soldiers). The opposite would be pro-war people unmoved by any Iraqi hardships before or after Saddam, and anti-war people who claim the Iraqis would benefit from withdrawing US intervention.

It's easy for somebody pro-war to claim to care about the Iraqis, since it costs nothing (except ethical consistency, if the beliefs are not sincere) to use it as one of many arguments for the war. It's very difficult for somebody anti-war to claim to care about the Iraqis, since in all likelihood the Iraqis would be all kinds of screwed-over if we left too soon (echoes of 1991 and the hundreds of thousands of Shi'a murdered when the US let Saddam put down the uprisings).

The combination of my four-choice-set and your three-choice-set (if 3 is excused as too improbable to be genuinely believed) is that the pro-war side has all the idealism. Since most of the leave-now arguments rely on pessimism about the war and not idealism about leaving, the pro-war arguments about fighting for freedom and democracy win the idealism award in that match-up. And since it's so difficult to claim to be motivated by love of humanity or liberty by consigning Iraqis to chaos, theocracy and terrorism, the pro-war people can easily continue to tout the benefits to regular Iraqis and again win the idealism contest.

Of course, simply being idealistic doesn't make you right, but the opposite (a stunning lack of ideals or idealism) suggests that baser interests like partisanship or amoral self-interest are at play.

2005-08-12T21:25:00.000-04:00

Man Fired For E-Mailing Misogyny From Work (tip to the Captain)

Michelle Malkin's take on the Cindy Sheehan business (the mother who's alienated her family by blaming President Bush for her Marine son's death in Iraq, even though in a visit with Bush nine weeks after the incident she was all positive on the encounter) attracted a great deal of abuse from the anti-war, anti-Malkin types. Recall that a week or two ago a leftist blogger made a taxonomy (so-called) of right-wing blogs that credited her as an affirmative action hire who has succeeded largely due to having breasts (he was a little cruder). Well about eight steps of crude misogyny beyond that is a man who had this to say to her via e-mail (as toned down by Captain Ed) :

"YOU STINK you nasty C*NT! Eat S**t and DIE bitch!!"

Unfortunately for one Patrick Mitchell, formerly of the Ogletree Deakins law firm in LA, e-mails are not anonymous and use of work internet resources to send hateful, sexist comments completely unrelated to work are not tolerated. Much credit to the law firm for firing Mitchell, a legal secretary, and to managing stockholder Gray L. Geddie, who called Malkin to give sincere apologies for the "vile" e-mail.

I wish I could say that creepy-level internet sexism from 'normal' adults surprised me, but it doesn't. From my own experiences online I can verify that sexism, including deeply disturbing borderline-rapist sexism, surfaces often in the face of an intelligent and controversial female figure. Some guys just expect women to be cute and not intellectually threatening (typing in pink, cursive fonts with lots of smileys and exclamation points), and when they see themselves losing several exchanges in a row they resort to sexist name-calling, misogynistic stereotypes, sexualization of the opponent and even threats of rape.

The Internet doesn't promise to be good, only more direct.

UPDATE: Malkin herself has a nice illustration of the same effect here about Katherine Harris' appearance on Hannity and Colmes.

2005-08-12T09:43:00.000-04:00

Stop Overusing 'Big'

If your argument relies on finding and labeling your opponent as 'Big' this or 'Big' that then it's not a good argument. Big Business, Big Media, Big Money, Big Tobacco, Big Government - any usage where the big has to be capitalized to Big is just a lame attempt at populism. Alot of the time people do it from habit or just to make an argument appear stronger, but relying on an extremely vague appeal to emotion is a logical fallacy. If your argument doesn't work without the Big then doesn't work with it.

And by the way, 'Big Money' (saw it just a minute ago at DailyKos) is especially stupid. At least come right out and say 'the bourgeoisie.'

2005-08-11T23:31:00.000-04:00

Jimmy Carter: Whining, Lying, Bitter Jackass

I still don't like Jimmy Carter. First remember that his foreign policy was supposed to be based on morality despite shining examples to the contrary like the Carter Doctrine and support for the despotic Shah. Then recall that his moronic domestic policies were uninspiring and dangerous, ranging from establishing the separate Dept of Education as a political favor to teachers' unions for their electoral support to his incredibly uninspiring non-solutions to the national malaise of the time.

After his presidency he played diplomat at times when nobody asked him to, often violating, abusing or ignoring the poilicy goals of the Administration in power. He again showed the lie of both his claims to honesty and human rights when he complimented Kim Il Sung as 'vigorous and intelligent' and said they were not an outlaw nation - even though North Korea is a Stalinist regime that's murdered tons of its own people, criminalized refugee emigration, killed a tenths of its population through famine and established a system of at least ten death camps. Way to strike a blow for honesty and morality, asshole. And the deal Carter struck despite lacking any authorization? It was the disastrous Agreed Framework that (in application) allowed North Korea to get free electricity on the US' dime while continuing to develop nuclear weapons. By the way, it's now admitted to being a nuclear-armed state, and defectors have told us their strategy for a conflict with the US is to nuke our bases in Japan and South korea in order to cause enough US casualties to make us withdraw. Really effective, Carter.

Jimmy Carter's also been having fun speaking out against the US and the war in Iraq, said the conflict was based on lies, and urged the closing of Guantanamo Bay. Great sense of balance there. He criticizes gitmo and Iraq but praises Kim Il Sung and Castro. Again: asshole.

This piece today from George Will shows that Carter is also something of a fibber and a gossip.

And by the way, his one real success, the Camp David Accord, was only found amidst the wider failure of his six-sided talks and notably failed to come to any real decision about the Palestinians, but was also largely brokered due to the intentions of Begin and Sadat. Good job, Jimmy. You managed to take five hostiles and scratch out a peace treaty between the two sides that wanted peace independently of your talks. Glad to see that all the violence in the region is all over and the controversy behind us.

Jimmy Carter: don't believe the hype.

2005-08-10T15:58:00.000-04:00

Davis-Bacon Act

In a discussion of the Davis-Bacon Act on labor wages and a John Stossel piece against it at QandO, the negative effects against unskilled and poor laborers are highlighted. What's left unsaid is that the exclusionary effect was the intent of the legislation.

The debate on the bill was full of comments about migrant workers, cheap labor, unskilled labor and so forth that were being transported from the South to perform basic duties in Northern jobs. At the time, the vast majority of such workers, especially in the South, were black. This was part of the debate as well, though usually the masked terms like 'cheap' and 'migrant' labor were used. Representative Clayton Algood came right out and said that cheap "colored" labor transported in and housed in cabins for the duration of a job were in competition with "white labor" throughout the country.

The point of Davis-Bacon was to keep black workers from dominating certain construction industry positions and from competing with white laborers. It gave unions a great deal of power both since the 'prevailing wage' was often explicitly the union wage (in areas where 30% of the relevant workforce was unionized) and because they had control over the apprenticeship process and the trained labor. As mentioned at QandO, when you're forced to pay expert wages, you're going to want to hire expert laborers. Union men were hired and had to be paid union wages, and the union membership process was often quite racist and even ethnically determined (Irish unions, Italian unions, etc.).

2005-08-09T17:51:00.000-04:00

Rule of Ambiguous Socialism in Congress

Political sword-brandishers have blocked the attempt by a Chinese entity to legally purchase Unocal, an oil company based in the US, when a false controversy caused CNOOC to drop its bid. The clearest losers are the shareholders of Unocal, who in aggregate lost a billion dollars (Unocal is going to Chevron for $17.6 billion now). But the victims of the process are the free market and the ethical consistency of the United States government.

The free market operates under the assumption that individual property owners will do as they wish with their own assets and that in the end more efficient and prosperous outcomes will result than if a small number of central authorities made the decisions. A number of factors aid the free market. The biggest is that a person with interest in an endeavor will seek to maximize the benefits to himself. Less acknowledged but also quite important is the diffusion of authority from a small grouping like a parliament or a price control board to all the individual actors in an economy; if some of the actors make mistakes, it won't harm the others, but if a central authority makes a bad decision everyone else has to pay for it.

In this case, the excited fears about China - a country with whom we are not at war and engage in theoretically normal trade relations - petitioned the government to intervene in the free market. They wanted to violate the rights of the buyers and sellers for a political reason, even though no crime was even suggested. The free market doesn't always come to the right decisions and it's not guaranteed to even come to the best decision; it is designed to come to the most just solution, wherein the actual agents of a financial transaction are the only ones with say over what is to be sold and for how much.

How can the US argue for free trade when we oppose it in such high-profile circumstances? This seriously damages our credibility and when we go to the table in WTO negotiations or future FTA wranglings we'll be chained to another instance of blocking free trade. It makes it appear as though free trade is an excuse to get US interests into other countries without allowing reciprocal access for foreign businesses - exactly what the anti-globalization far-left already argues (the anti-globalization far-right argues more the opposite, that it lets foreigners have an unfair advantage).

The real tragedy is the idea that somehow blocking CNOOC acquisition of Unocal was a threat to national security. Unocal is largely an Asian operation already, so it made sense that the Chinese would want Unocal to fund their economic expansion. Unocal only accounted for less than one percent of US oil consumption. If the Chinese stopped Americans from buying that relatively tiny amount, how could that really be considered a national security risk?

Better yet, let me ask which is more reasonable: 1) Chinese economic interests, in the middle of a continuing, progressively-larger economic expansion that has enormous demands for basic materials like energy and cement, decided to buy a largely-Asia-based oil producer that's based in the US, or 2) the Chinese government, in a fit of secretive and malignant deception, decides to spend billions of dollars in order to deprive US consumers of less than one percent of their oil consumption, even though the demand would easily be met by other energy companies?

The Chinese government has a criminal past and a shady present, but we ought to be encouraging the growth of an economically vibrant China as a precondition for a strong middle class with democratic aspirations. I think blocking the sale had nothing to do with national security and everything to do with dividing the world almost arbitrarily into enemies and allies. China is not our friend, but that doesn't mean we should see every Chinese act as one of aggression, or that we should try and spite the aspirations of the Chinese people, who are NOT our enemies.

2005-08-09T17:16:00.000-04:00

Website

I've updated the World Report section of the website which was plagued by dead links. Few of the reports in it are complete, but it's no longer the neglected slum of the website.

2005-08-08T00:41:00.000-04:00

Huffington Post, DailyKos, Democratic Underground

Going around various online hangouts for the political left is a very interesting and enlightening foray into the minds of leftists. It's useful to see what animates people. I look especially at what they choose to communicate - and not to communicate. They all have their different focuses (Huffington Post is elitist, DailyKos is hyper-activist, DemocraticUnderground is raving rartisans), but I've come up with a few basic observations that often hold true when reading over a large sample from such sites.

#1 The ENEMY! There is almost always a personified enemy. This is also true of places like Free Republic or LGF comment sections, but it's significant that your stock partisan leftists like to see a personified enemy. They even like to build up individuals into mega-enemeies, even when it doesn't fit the facts. Nixon, Bush, Reagan, Giuliani, anybody who can be forced to sit as proxy for all the evil things every imagined right-winger supposedly once considred doing will receive rhetorical lashings. I find this habit disturbing wherever it crops up, first because it usually involves a fair amount of anger, hatred and vitriol, and second because it usually involves an incredibly narrow-sighted view of people in order to turn the scapegoat into pure evil. Hopefully nobody is comfortable with the practice of projecting extreme hatred at scapegoats, fueled by ignorance or untruths.

I don't know about you, but I like my true enemies to be actions and concepts, and people are only evil inasmuch as they do evil things.

#2 The story. There's got to be a story. There has to be a good guy and a bad guy and the good guy is all good and the bad guy is all bad. The good guy usually can't do anything without help from outside himself, whether it's from a friend, a community, or a political group. The bad guy is devious, greedy, insensitive and inhumane, and he does not seek redemption in the end. The story need not be true or plausible, it only has to send the right message and be both trite and coerced.

#3 The hyperbole. Both the enemy and the story are usually found with the hyperbole. The enemy's hyperbole is that he deceives everybody or that he bought everybody's loyalty, he's dumb as a board or his father gave him everything. The story's hyperbole is usually something like a protagonist that's orphaned, poor, outsourced out of a job, and Hispanic, or a black single mother fighting against all odds, or a single female struggling to make it in a man's world, or a simple peasant farmer forced to work in a textile factory. The hyperbole underpins the whole experience, because if you're too stupid to get who's good and who's bad, the hyperbole really socks it to you.

Of course, the hyperbole should insult the intelligence of people who hear it for the same reason. It should also insult the stylistic tastes of anyone forced to listen to the story about the beautiful young, outsourced, lesbian, Hispanic, black, Asian single mother working eight jobs just to decide between paying for heat and paying for food, who also happens to be handicapped but not in an unattractive, let's-pull-the-plug sort of way, who is then forced to confront the ugly, fat, sexist, racist, homophobic, evangelical, white, anglo, domineering father, mega-corporate executive who starts wars for money and forces people to buy deadly products they don't want but who is defeated by the government regulators without repenting or reforming.

I'm forced to exaggerate the exaggeration to a ridiculous degree simply because the hyperbolic stories I've read are already so unashamedly exaggerated.

#4 The team. It's astounding how often 'we' and 'us' are used in these venues. The constant reassurances that a group of people support the speaker or that the speaker supports that group comes off as an emotional dependency. It's almost as though the identification with a group is the goal in itself. I think a lot of leftists seem to just want to be in the good-guy group, to the point where it's more important than being actually good, independent of the group.

#5 What's not said: the principle. What is tragically under-emphasized is an objective principle that could apply to any situation and hence could be used against a person of any party (or race, sex, religion, etc.) objectively. A political exposition should flow from principles to lead to the solution. Without stating the principles - those things we want to accomplish - the search for a solution is disorganized. The result is often confusing or even contradictory views of different subjects, like emphasizing near-absolute liberty of action for women getting abortions, but emphasizing the need for government ownership of retirement accounts. Picking and stating simple principles that can be applied outside a unique situation is often missing in the places I've mentioned. They're cast out to make room for more hyperbole.

Overall, the image I'm left with is rhetoric tailored almost exclusively to emotional self-validation. We're good, they're bad. I'm good, he's bad. The enemy is critical to the dichotomy, the hyperbole strengthens the differences, the team gives approval that the good guy is good, and the story is the difference itself. A principle would only get in the way by forcing one to admit that people don't always neatly fall all on one side of an objective principle.

Naturally, not everybody at these places is like this and even the people who are like this are not solely or completely like this. I wish only to make the point that it seems to be a factor in the political identification of many leftists to create enemies and stories in order or fill the void left by a lack of objective principles.

2005-08-07T02:41:00.000-04:00

NCAA and Indians

The NCAA apparently came out again Native American-themed mascots for teams. The argument of the people against using American Indians as team mascots is that this is offensive:

While this is not:

2005-08-03T05:19:00.000-04:00

EU Anti-Trust

I heard a radio story about the EU trying to encourage more civil torts for anti-trust cases against businesses in Europe. Their complaint was that the regulators can go after big-names like Intel but smaller violators get away with being overly successful ('uncompetitive') and more civil litigation could stop it. The statistics cited showed that the US has far more civil anti-trust cases than the EU. What I found intriguing about both the EU position and the NPR reporting was how the position of business owners, stockholders and potential business owners was totally absent except as 'victims' of uncompetitive practices. The pack of lawyers chomping at the bit to sue the pants off of any company in the EU that expands too quickly, too far or too long didn't ring any bells as a major future impediment to growth - and to job creation. It was surreal, like a report from the 1970s or earlier that somehow doesn't realize that making life difficult for businesses CAN have consequences to the success of businesses.

The problem in the EU is that the state is the biggest violator of competitive principles. Various EU governments nationalize industries and technologies and keep private competitiors either weak or illegal. Canada's even worse, where private health care is (or was, before the Quebec court ruling) flatly illegal in most cases.

It's almost a parody how the old lefties see business as something to be controlled, punished and deterred, rather than a series of voluntary transactions among colleagues and interested parties that need only be honest and peaceful. I'm almost surprised that Democratic politicians don't have "Get Tough On Capitalism" pin buttons.

2005-08-03T05:03:00.000-04:00

Berlin At It Again

The Checkpoint Charlie memorial in Berlin was torn down right after the Fourth of July. Now left-wingers in the Berlin city government have a second outrageous tourism goal: bring back a Soviet-era statue of Lenin that stood in East Berlin. The Medienkritik story that brought this to my attention included a Reuters segment quoting a German tourism expert. The expert called Berlin's Communist period the most asked-after by tourists. Well, then, why the hell did they knock down the Checkpoint Charlie memorial without setting up a replacement? Surely they don't think that tourists are interested in glorifying the Communist period.

2005-08-03T04:33:00.000-04:00

US Car Companies

If American auto producers would stop worrying about 'employee discount' schemes and start fixing themselves, then they'd be in good shape. As it stands they're pricing themselves out of business. Ford, GM and Chevy are all now in a price war. By focusing their advertising more and more on prices, they're not earning the prices they do charge. If all you're talking about is how cheap your cars are, then why shouldn't the cars be even cheaper in six months? They need to earn the prices they do charge instead of only charging less. If I just wanted a cheap car, I'd buy a Geo Metro or something.

US manufacturers have long been struggling in many car markets, including compact pickups, but now they're having trouble competing with Japanese models even in full-size pickups. Ford dominated the roads, not just in pickups but with its pickup being the most common of any car type. Now there's real competition from Japanese models.

More than that, auto manufacturers need to look long term at being freed from inflexible structures of the past. Pension agreements and union rules are burdening the airline industry and the auto industry. The Japanese have a lot of structural problems that burden them with inefficient practices, but good designs go a long way.

The US automative industry has a lot of factors in its favor, but without some creativity and flexibility, they're going to continue fighting more and more difficult price wars.

2005-08-03T01:27:00.000-04:00

From Medienkritik

2005-08-03T01:15:00.000-04:00

Stupid Old People

I really have a problem with old people. Old people are scared of teenagers, especially in groups, probably because teenagers aren't slow moving, boring and silent. What really pisses me off is when old people feel entitled to welfare (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) or how they ask for an AARP discount EVERYWHERE. Fucking entitled old people. Then everyone wonders why younger people are cynical and disaffected. Entitlements and politics are tilted toward giving old people undeserved respect and attention.

Sorry, I'm not an Asian; I don't worship old people. Old people that I don't know should be fucking glad that they're breathing. I'm glad to help people with decreased faculties of any age, but old people don't deserve respect just for NOT DYING. If anything, I'm fucking tired of subsidizing old people's spending. Politicians and the media help build up these sacred cows by always bending over to old people and eventually the old people believe it.

Sorry, I'm not going to give old people respect because they happened to be three years old during the Great Depression. Oooh, real hardship there. What were they going to do, commit suicide? That's a real accomplishment, not dying.

Rant over.

2005-08-03T01:06:00.000-04:00

"Over There"

The first television series about the war in Iraq has its good points, but I really don't see myself enjoying the show. The ability of the show to portray violence, cursing and the like were exceptional and will probably merit watching at least portions of future episodes. The writing is pretty cheesy at times and relies on a lot of warmed-over writing techniques (nicknames, cliches, heavy use of stereotypes, etc.). A few of the details about strategy are both original and realistic, but there are tons of mistakes of all shapes and sizes. The soldiers are restrained when they should have obliterated a terrorist holdout. They fire when no targets are apparent, even though for some reason they're supposed to be pinned down. They're un-reinforced and pinned down when they should have had lots of backup and heavy support. They move together in close line formations over open ground instead of spaced out and one at a time.

I'm sure a lot of these decisions were made in ignorance in order to craft a certain scene that the writers wanted to portray, but it's misleading when the show presents itself as a no-holds-barred look at Operation Iraqi Freedom. It also goes to great lengths to make the soldiers seem like they were roped into the military. I am worried about the bias to spin the war as more difficult than it is; many media outlets are drawn to making all wars seem like their fictionalized account of Vietnam.

I'll probably catch a few more episodes to see what it's like, but the stereotypes, bad strategy and MSM editorializations will almost certainly get in the way.

2005-08-02T20:51:00.000-04:00

Coyote on Roe

There's a good piece at Coyote Blog about Roe v. Wade and its position in modern constitutional law. He makes some excellent points about the contradictory (hypocritical) way Roe was decided.

Of course, technically Roe isn't in force any longer. Casey is the reigning caselaw in the matter, and it reworked the standard to be even more confusing. Now not only is abortion jurisprudence an awkward dab of narrowly applied, selectively used liberty, but it's protected under a standard of "undue burden" instead of "strict scrutiny." The difference isn't entirely clear except that, in theory, it's a little looser and allows a few (politically popular) regulations without really reducing access to abortion.

I have to say that I think Roe is a horrible decision because it's nothing more than a cynical attempt to enshrine abortion rights within a framework otherwise hostile to liberty. I think the Ninth Amendment ought to be far stronger in application, literally as strong as the other amendments, and that the privileges and immunities clause needs to be brought up alongside it. But I have to disagree on abortion itself.

Personhood is not bestowed at birth and nothing in the Constitution says so (although it does say birth determines one's state of residence, it does not say birth bestows personhood). Until there's a constitutional amendment denying personhood to those yet unborn, conception - the point at which a human is created - ought to be the point at which personhood rights exist.

But otherwise I agree that unenumerated rights are still rights. The Ninth Amendment was added because the framers believed in an unenumerable liberty. Liberty is anything you have the right to do that doesn't infringe on the rights of others. That comes from Locke's descriptions of natural law and Mill's harm principles. The biggest argument against a bill of rights was that it would suggest that any unlisted rights were somehow not valid or less valid as rights. The Ninth Amendment says that unlisted rights are equally as important as the listed ones. The listed ones are just there establish a basic framework.

2005-08-02T04:19:00.000-04:00

Bolton Recess-Appointed to the UN

Democrats are foaming at the mouth that the President recess-appointed Bolton to the post of UN Ambassador. You can almost hear the same arguments they cooked up during the filibuster deal; they want to appeal to history, to the Constitution, to fair deliberations and they want to sound high-minded when they do it. Of course, the Constitution is the place where recess appointment powers were spelled out:

"The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session." - Article 2, Section 2

Presidents use recess appointments all the time, so it would be hard for the Senators to condemn the move; every Senator wants to be President, and he'd be hard-pressed to run a whole presidency without a single recess appointment (part of what moves senators to up or down confirmation votes is knowing the nominee could get recess-appointed later). Justice Brennan was originally recess-appointed to the Supreme Court; were his decisions during that period any less valid because he had to wait for Senate approval? Will Ambassador Bolton not represent the President's views just because the Senate took too long to get to an up or down vote? No and no.

Bolton is going to do his job just fine. It's absurd that Democrats want a UN Ambassador to handle the UN with kid gloves at a time when the organization's deep-rooted scandals, corruption and irrelevance are coming to light. You don't give a UN reform job to a kiss-ass diplomat who loves the status quo any more than you would ask a corrupt small-town Alabama sheriff to oversee the civil rights office of the Justice Department in 1965. Finding someone to make the UN feel happy in this time of systemic scandal and organizational impotence would be akin to finding a fox to guard the fox den.

We need a sheepdog to hold back the foxes at the UN and the wolves in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. Bolton seems to have a natural predilection for speaking his mind even when it's unpopular. This is the time for just such a person to be abrupt, up-front and abrasive about the UN's innumerable shortcomings.

2005-08-01T18:29:00.000-04:00

Karimov Kicks US Out of K-2

The Karshi-Khanabad airbase (otherwise known as K-2) in Uzbekistan, near the Afghan border, is a very strategically important center for US operations in central Asia. It's a good spot for refueling, for assisting military operations and for moving humanitarian relief into Afghanistan. It's relatively close to China (with Tajikistan in between) and it's part of the Russian near-abroad, being just south of Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, the Uzbek regime has told the US it has six months to leave K-2.

Although both China and Russia were uncomfortable with US presence there and Putin likely put pressure on Karimov to expel the American soldiers, it seems as though recent squabbles over the authoritarian Uzbek leader Islam Karimov caused the ejection. In May a government crackdown on an opposition protest in Andijan sparked international controversy over the firmly anti-democratic position of Karimov. Coming off of successful post-Soviet democratic protest movements in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbek crackdowns were especially disheartening.

The US is scheduled to hold diplomatic talks with the Uzbek government within the next few days about Andijan, political liberties and democratic reforms. Additionally, several hundred refugees from the Andijan crackdown were airlifted from Kyrgyzstan to Romania under UN auspices. The various pressures on human rights issues likely contributed to the pullout order, in addition to Moscow's urging. Of course, Tashkent was (and still is, to some degree) pursuing closer relations to Washington as a counter-balance to Moscow in the first place, so Putin's requests for emptying K-2 were very likely not a primary motivation here.

This is actually good news. Before Rumsfeld and others in the Administration were trying to hold back criticism of the Uzbeks over Andijan because K-2 was such a valuable strategic resource. Now that the Uzbeks have pushed the US out, the decision is moot and there's no more K-2 to lose; we can push the Uzbeks on what is an atrocious record of stomping on liberties and they have no base to hold over us.

My suggestion would be to locate democrats and reformers in Uzbekistan that would be qualified to run a transitional or successor government without resorting to authoritarianism themselves. These democrats could then be supported through demonstrations and rallies, as happened in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

Karimov made our decision for us. We have no pragmatic reasons to get in the way of doing what we ought to do: oppose this authoritarian's abuse of power.

2005-07-31T02:41:00.000-04:00

Democratic Self-Identification

The center-left of US politics continues to be broiled in confusion, misdirection, unfocused aggression and hilariously overstated confidence amid a sea of bland messages and mindless themes. The Democrats don't stand for anything, yet theu're proud to be Democrats; they have no idea what their message should be, but are convinced that if you elect them everything will be right with the world.

The fact that the Democrats continue their confusion about who they are and what they stand for should of course beg the obvious question: "why don't they know who they are?" The reason is simple. They suffer from the long-building, deep-rooted philosophical dearth of the American center-left over the last century-plus.

Historically, the progressives started a lot of the things the modern left loves and a lot that it hates. The progressives, more Republican than Democratic, were very focused on reform of all types - political reform, social reform, economic reform, journalistic reform, etc. They had a surprising unity of vision and purpose; they could reform various practices in society to help the good and eliminate the bad. They were the ones who lobbied to ban prostitution on the logic that it was an immorality that damaged women and broke up families. They also worked for fire code and business regulations in order to make modern living and working safer. And when they passed minimum wage laws and work-hour laws it was supposed to help people live safer and more moral lives, including providing single women with sufficient income to avoid resorting to prostitution.

In other words, the progressives had a unified political agenda undergirded with moral purpose and direction. They did not have an especially developed political philosophy, however. This meant that the progressives ranged in partisan affiliation, political pet causes, and in their orientation toward some issues. For example, they approached segregation and Eugenics with the same reform-minded enthusiasm, with many progressives pushing positions that would today disgust most of those style themselves 'progressive.' But the larger impact of a philosophical dearth would be felt later on.

As the center-left continued on it has become a hodge-podge of Jacksonian populism, progressive interventionism, FDR bureaucratization and 60s radicalism, in addition to the other various influences on it). It is not a political or social philosophy, and now it is not even a unified political agenda. It has even deteriorated beyond the point where it could represent identity politics for particular social groups (like race, religion or economic stratum). The center-left in the Democratic party, as I've said before, is little more than a shopping list. Jim Carville called it a 'litany' but that's being optimistic. It's not just that the Democrats lack a good theme to tie everything together, it's that they're drawn by fulfilling the budgetary requests of different interests instead of any unified political agenda.

So when it comes to selling a shopping list of budget earmarks to the voters, it's both a tough sell (except for the people who want to protect their spot on the list) and a difficult place to regroup from. Sure, political socialization will make sure there are Democrats around with no budgetary compulsion to stay loyal to the party, but it's hard to pull swing voters and independents when you don't stand for positive things. All you have to is being not as bad as the opposition.

The Democrats need to connect with a political philosophy, or at least a coherent agenda. Why bother trying to reform the Democrats if you're not trying to resurrect any message? Right now, everything is on the table. Some have suggested loosening the party's abortion stand, which would no doubt improve its gains with some groups like unions, the South, Hispanics and the religious. Others have talked about guns, gay marriage, social issues in general and tried to ramp up Democratic efforts to ban violent or sexual video games. If they're trying appeal to more socially conservative voters, then it must be to save their foreign policy or economic agenda. But they very successfully revamped the economic agenda under Clinton and the DLC to strongly embrace free trade, liberalization and take a much more centrist line (at least post 1994). Others suggested that Kerry should embrace a stronger line against terror and for the Iraq war in order to win the presidency.

Why would a political group entertain the idea of deemphasizing or dumping certain aspects of the platform except to save the others? If you had to cut your monthly spending to balance your budget, you'd cut frivolities in order to save the basics like food, shelter and health. If a military commander made a decision to sacrifice men or equipment it would only be to save the mission or to save others. A politician should only remove agenda items in order to save the core agenda; Democrats have all suggested dumping different parts of the agenda, and the only overarching goal seems to be victory at election instead of legislation.

A further analysis from a libertarian point of view could really help explain the problem. Committed Democrats can give impassioned overviews of their agenda, with one point related to personal liberties and the following point related to economic security. Especially humorous and contradictory is when a Democrat will oppose the Patriot Act with Franklin's line about those trading liberty for security deserving neither but then turn around and discuss the dangers of the marketplace and explain why government control over retirement will protect us from an uncertain world.

The Republicans have their own problems with message and unity, but the Democrats are more fragmented and far less driven by political philosophy. The Democrats have been going on momentum from the New Deal, from the Great Society and from Bill Clinton, and haven't been working on future agendas. The Republicans have been working in think tanks for decades turning instincts into ideas and turning solutions into legislation. The Democrats have been caught not doing their homework but in the aftermath they can't even figure out which subject they're supposed to be studying.

Until and unless the Democrats can come up with something like a unity of purpose and a reason to exist, they're going to struggle in efforts to sell themselves or to redefine themselves.

2005-07-26T04:48:00.000-04:00

Alogogenesis

Kids across the country learn about Louis Pasteur and his work on abiogenesis, otherwise known as spontaneous generation. Although his rabies vaccine is simple to remember, it's his work with germs that led to his immortalization as the process that makes milk drinkable - Pasteurization. His study of germs disproved one of the common misconceptions among doctors, scientists and learned experts of his time. They believed you could get something from nothing.

Specifically, they thought that bacterial growths were generated out of nothing, and that a covered broth would spawn bacteria or insects. Various intelligent doctors helped disprove the various forms of spontaneous generation theory, but Pasteur's work is most often credited with the accomplishment,especially as applied to unseen microscopic creatures like germs. These experts showed that you cannot start with a boiled broth and end up with a germ-laden broth sample without unfiltered access to the open air; they showed that you can't get something from nothing. This is the principle of omne vivum ex ovo - 'all life from egg.'

Abiogenesis was disproven because it takes the building blocks of life to produce life. Unfortunately, the equivalent for diplomacy and trade policy has not yet been fully accepted. Many discussions of foreign policy do not accept the premise that it takes the building blocks of freedom and democracy to produce them.

When we look at the crimes committed by various governments around the world, we should react with outrage and look for ways to express our anger, ways to alleviate the suffering these policies have caused. Unfortunately, the natural human instinct to do the former often overrides the much more pressing issue of the latter; we get so caught up showing our anger that we suggest reactions that often are not effective solutions or are even detrimental to solving the situation.

The trade embargo and its various manifestations is primarily my focus here. It may feel satisfying to punish a government by denying their country access to American goods and consumers, but does it do anything substantive? The Cuban embargo is embarrassingly ineffective at removing the tyrant Castro from power. If anything, we solidify his grip by isolating his people from American citizens, money and ideas.

Dictators, rather than running from openness, thrive on isolation, alienation and control. They go to great lengths to keep media, businesses and foreigners away from areas they want to control. They can't go around killing or imprisoning everybody, especially Westerners, so they need a closed society to do a lot of the front-line work to keep control. The fewer Westerners running around taking pictures, asking questions, spreading ideas and spending money, the easier it is to tell the people lies, mistruths and deceptions. Dictators thrive on closed, backwards, isolated populations that can be manipulated more easily. It is the educated, the informed and the successful that they fear.

Rather than focusing on self-expression of our outrage through crude, inexact embargo-derived policies, the US should embrace policies that fight tyranny at the source: closed civil societies. Our hope should be to educate, inform and enrichoppressed people. Unfortunately, restricting trade tends to do the opposite on all three counts.

It's valiant and admirable to call out China for its abysmal record on Tibet or religious minorities, or to criticize other nations like Cuba or South Africa for abusing their people, but we should not use trade restriction as a policy tool.

We cannot expect a tyranny to become more open and democratic when we enact policies that will remove democratic Westerners from the country. How can the political version of abiogenesis make any sense? Illcall it alogogenesis; abiogenesis means non-life-creation and alogogenesis means non-reason-creation or non-principle-creation. Without the logic, rationale, or principles behind democracy being preached, proselytized and explained to the oppressed peoples around the world, how can we expect them to undertake democratic change?Democracy, like bacteria, will not simply develop in a vacuum, and certainly it would not be aided by a vacuum we force onto the situation.

It seems like an embargo targeted against a human rights abuser would be a valuable contribution to the cause, but the democrats in tyrannical countries need allies rather than seclusion. We need to push the cause to the people, talking about democracy, freedom, free press, free speech, free exercise, free thought. When we withdraw Americans from dictatorial nations we lessen the pressure on their contradictory systems. It would be just the solution to undertake if we wanted to protect the tyrants, because in the long run freedom begets freedom.

If we want countries to become free, we should use freedom as our weapon: free trade, free speech and free press are the arsenal we should use. We cannot build open countries from closed policies, nor expect good democrats to spontaneously generate from authoritarian nations.

A wide-open trade policy with un-free countries should be step one in pushing the contradictions within these systems; instead of sheltering them from the light of day, we should be visiting, witnessing and speaking out. Closed borders do not help the victims of foreign tyranny. We need to encourage interaction and discussion in order to fight these regimes in the war of ideas,a battle where we always have the advantage.

UPDATE: Now available on the website here under issue articles.

2005-07-26T01:59:00.000-04:00

'Did the Iraq War Cause The July Bombings?'

Idiotic. Did invading Nazi-held Europe on D-Day lead to the Battle of the Bulge? Just stupid. Yes, we're engaged in conflict with the Islamist killers and as a result they're going to use ongoing and past conflicts as rhetorical flashpoints to rally their side to action, but that doesn't mean the conflict was ineffective or in bad judgment, nor does it mean that violence could have been avoided. We were already being engaged in violence by these same groups, whether we responded or not. It's ludicrous to think that it's all a response to the war in Iraq.

It's a conceit of dumbass Western journalists that somehow the war in Iraq is a point of contention for the Islamists, while the war in Afghanistan, the existence of the state of Israel, the Australian-led campaign for East Timor, or the 1991 Gulf War are not. This is editorial revisionism; the journalists oppose the war in Iraq, so they want to cast it as the cause of further violence, but few Westerners would openly oppose the existence of Israel or the war against the Taliban or the 1991 Gulf War so they can't blame these for the war.

As John Howard said a few days ago, the Islamists cited the Australian role in freeing East Timor (Catholics) from the brutal occupation at the hands of Indonesia (Muslims) as a primary motivation behind the Bali bombing. Yet few Western mainstream journalists would argue that we should've continued to let Indonesia brutalize the East Timorese.

By the same token, the Islamists in Sudan killed approximately 2 million black Africans (Christians and animists) mostly by forced famine during the North-South civil war. In the Darfur region the Janjaweed militias, almost certainly aided by the Sudanese air force, are wiping out black non-Muslims to the tune of 10,000 lives a month, and many more raped and beaten, not to mention the many others forced to flee for their lives. None of these people is guilty of anything related to the war in Iraq, but are decidedly guilty of not being Muslims and not being Arabs.

It's madness to try and ascribe rational motives to this ideology any more than we would ascribe rationality to the Final Solution. It would be beyond foolish to try and explain - let alone justify - the Nazi genocide; it borders on the bigoted to indulge the hatred of the Nazis by elevating them to reasonable thinkers with misguided plans. They were not reasonable men, they were twisted by hatred, pushed by momentum and stripped of their humanity by unquenchable desires for some imagined racial perfection. In the same vein, the Islamo-fascists who now threaten the free world are not reasonable men with exaggerated methods. They are nihilistic killers who use culture as a rallying point to bring together lost, despondent or listless souls who are more interested in committing to any cause than committing to a good cause.

Like the Nazis, the Islamo-fascists are far less an ideology and far more a personality disorder. Do not try and divine some rational political agenda from their hatred; they are bigots, killers, homophobes, misogynists and nihilists who attach themselves to Islam as a proxy for true ideology.

2005-07-26T00:49:00.000-04:00

Judiciary Cmte Document Requests

The Democrats are again asking for documents written by a judicial nominee while serving as counsel for the executive branch. The strategy used against Estrada's nomination revolved around documentation stemming from his work in the Secretary General's office. The White House cited attorney-client privilege and did not release many of the requested documents, giving Democrats the barest of pretexts to continuing filibustering Estrada. The Democrats are asking for similar documents relating to Roberts' work in the Secretary General's office, but they haven't been threatening filibuster over it.

Let's be clear: work product related to the Secretary General's office often falls under attorney-client privilege with the executive branch, and that's extensively protected in US law. Just like religious, spousal and medical privacy protections, the attorney-client privilege is well protected and widely accepted. In this case, every living Secretary General, Democrats and Republicans, came out strongly against the use of privileged documents in blocking Estrada's nomination, saying that it's both private and necessary to preserve the ability of the SG office to function.

Attorney-client privilege must be preserved. Democrats should not be allowed to use SG documents, something they know they will never be given full access to read, as an excuse to filibuster a nominee.

Fortunately, it looks like Roberts will be fine. A number of Democrats have voiced positive comments, and Feinstein even today gave positive reviews of a conversation she had in a meeting with Roberts. Others, like Lieberman, have also been positive. I think Roberts is going to be confirmed.

The question for me is whether he's going to be a reliable vote against abortion. It's unfortunate that extracting a promise from a nominee to vote against abortion would ethically require a recusal on the issue in court. I am concerned that Roberts will end up another Souter, but at this point there's little to do but hope that his intelligence, credentials and professionalism will, in all honesty, lead him to make a decision I like. I wish I felt remorse about being so explicit, but I don't. When we're talking about critical moral issues like abortion, slavery, segregation, etc. that have such an overwhelming constitutional imperative it's hard for me to pretend like any position is morally or politically equivalent to another.

2005-07-25T15:00:00.000-04:00

Whatever Happened to Post-2004 Federalist Democrats?

A lot of academics and pundits liked to speculate that after the losing 2004 election the Democrats and especially the left should embrace federalism. They point to state funding of stem-cel research, the Terri Schiavo incident, and other examples as reasons why the Democrats are slowly embracing left-federalism. Of course, these were all examples of opportunity, not of genuine ideological change. Sometimes opportunism can be around long enough to allow genuine thought to develop. But this is not the case for Democrats today.

Witness the Roberts confirmation debates. Not only is the subtext of the abortion debate the issue of state choice over abortion, but the qualifications of Roberts (and other jurists) have been affected by the debate of whether the nominee is a member of the Federalist Society. Senator Leahy asked Edith Brown Clement ten different questions about the Federalist Society. Roberts was reported to be a member, then that story was shown to be false, but now a possible honorary position on the steering committee is being reported. If the Democrats were really interested in a genuine embrace of federalism, I doubt they'd use membership in the Federalist Society as an identifier for being potentially too conservative.

2005-07-25T03:49:00.000-04:00

Anti-War Blind Cynicism (tip to FD)

The Buchananite faction of the libertarians have decided to attempt to cast as much doubt as possible onto any aspect of the war. Their negativity at times ignore facts and at other times is grossly overblown.

First of all, the continued argument that there was no Iraqi conenction to Al Qaeda has been disproven repeatedly by Stephen Hayes. The Baathist-Al Qaeda connection has been shown; there were multiple links between AQ and IIS operatives, including joint missions, diplomatic cooperation and even listing Osama as an IIS asset as early as 1993. It's a token of blind ignorance of the anti-war left that there was no AQ-Iraq link. The fact is that the Iraqis were linked to many terrorist groups and to many notorious terrorists, Al Qaeda included.

Second, the unabashed negativity about the prospects for democracy in Iraq are as unattractive as they are pessimistic. While it's true that the Iraqis still have a ways to go before they get a working democratic government, it's also true that the US doesn't have all the answers yet. Raimndo and Knappster criticized a number of provisions in the Iraqi bill of rights, but apparently they forgot that every one of their criticisms of the Iraqi constitution is a problem in Western democracies as well. Western governments often let 'greater good' or 'public morals' rationales disrupt individual liberties, Western courts often seal records for various reasons, and conscription and firearms licenses are pretty much the standard for democracies and non-democracies.

The problem is that even after a stunning electoral outcome that all the naysayers predicted would fail, after working out a collective government that's ethnically inclusive when all the naysayers foretold of civil war, and after the crafting of a bill of rights that's very roughly equivalent to many democracies around the world all they can complain about is the fact that it has a lot of the same problems other countries do.

They conveniently don't put any real weight on the fact that the Iraqi bill of rights repeatedly and explicitly bans all physical and mental torture. It guarantees a fully independent judiciary and the prsumption of innocence. The Iraqi bill of rights even has a guarantee of private ownership.

Of course, somebody should point out to Raimondo that his 'critique' of the Iraqi constitution is actually of the old draft, not the new one. Many of the more problematic sections were edited or removed entirely, including an anti-Israeli populist tossback.

In a wider sense, the anti-war people in general should not be so harsh and dismissive of opportunities for democracy in Iraq. Nobody should expect a perfectly functional, perfectly libertarian constitutional republic in Iraq to be established by Aprial, 2003. These things take time, especially since democracy is so foreign (thus far) to Arab political culture. Lebanon and Iraq are the two closest examples to Arab democracies (Turkey is Turkic, Israel is Jewish, Iran is Persian) and believe it or not it takes some effort to fit together old customs with new politics. We have decades and centuries of parables, cliches and traditions to back us up, from free speech and trial protections to simple adages about voting and writing your Congressman.

We've been expecting a lot from the Iraqis, and so far they've performed quite well. I realize it plays into the perfectly closed view of the world that many anti-war people have to doubt every aspect of the Iraq war but a reasonable person would have to agree that the good outweighs the bad and that the progress currently being made can be built on in the future. Or I suppose we could resort to sensory-abusive propaganda, selective evidentiary foundations and ridiculously exaggerated expectations in order to innoculate ourselves from any serious philosophical self-examination.

2005-07-23T00:28:00.000-04:00

Behold the 4-Line Quiz

Judging from the site tracking device, the 3-Line Quiz is currently one of the more popular aspects of this site, and is one of the more often linked. Therefore, I will eventually make a big coding push and put it all on one big honkin' page. Until then, I've come up with the 4-Line Quiz. Unlike the 3-Line, which deals with political philosophy generally, the 4-Line is designed to cover foreign policy more narrowly. The quiz is essentially done but the coding is going to be long and tedious.

But for now, I've got a working PNG of the quiz lines. I reserve the right to add/remove lines, rename or revalue them or whatever else. Since I've already written the quiz, I probably won't change anything soon.

The diagonal and vertical lines are not meant to be interchangeable with the 3 Lines (except the capitalist-socialist one, of course) but I did try to match them up to some degree. The pacifist-militarist one is mostly based on traditional stereotypes of left-wing and right-wing, so it was easy to do but hard to accept (because the stereotype itself is largely meaningless on any real philosophical debate).

Because I don't think I've asked the right balance of questions, I won't post the quiz. I will, however, link to the SelectSmart selector I made on the same subject. The selector doesn't relate directly to the 4 Lines, and instead rates you against various philosophical identities. It can be found here. The 3 Line quiz is listed all over the place, and can be taken here.

2005-07-21T19:42:00.000-04:00

Zero-Sum Economics and the Political Left

The economic left in more or less all cases has a belief (or fear or suspicion) that economics is fundamentally a zero-sum game. In contrast to a positive-sum game where everybody can benefit at the same time or where the overall winnings outweigh the losses, a zero-sum game requires that every winner produce a loser. This means that rich people, in effect, take a 'bigger slice of the pie' and must necessarily take their excess by leaving others with less. This is the foundational perspective for most ideologues of redistributive economics, not the much better-marketed 'helping the disadvantaged' line they like to give. It's the source of hatred for the rich; if the rich didn't take more than their share, there would be more for the poor.

But the flip-side of a zero-sum game is that it is also not a negative-sum game. A negative-sum game means that the losses outweigh the winnings. Both positive- and negative-sum games are often referred to as non-zero-sum games. The opposition of a zero-sum game, which many economic leftists believe in, is a non-zero-sum game - whether it's a positive- or negative-sum game.

Think of it like the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy); the total energy going into a system must equal the total energy coming out of it, and cannot be created or destroyed. Energy is not destroyed but transferred. (Physics geeks, ignore entropy and the second law of thermodynamics for these purposes).

So for economics, while the zero-sum people think that a positive-sum economy is false because the gains of the rich hurt the poor, they also think that a negative-sum economy is false because money will simply be reallocated. I'll give an example, and for these purposes I'll shorthand 'leftist' meaning someone who consciously or subconsciously believes in a zero-sum economy.

Our leftist despises the rich because every dollar they have is a dollar the poor don't have. A positive-sum game is beyond his one-dimensional,authoritarian mindset. At the same time, a negative-sum economy doesn't even occur to him as a possible consequence of his redistributive schemes. In 'fixing' asset inequality by giving poor individuals and poor businesses more goods and assets, our leftist could be disproving the zero-sum economy with a negative-sum result.

The rich individuals and businesses lose immediately from the redistribution. But the economy overall (recalling that 'economy' is a metaphor for market transactions within a given universe or space) could lose if the redistribution results in lost productivity or jobs. The bad businesses have been saved in order to protect their employees, but now the bad businesses have a greater share of the economy and are behaving less competently than would better businesses. Their bad decisions could result in lower growth or stagnation, lessened innovation and general inefficiency. After all, without bankruptcy acting as a recycling function on the economy, the resources of inept businessmen are never sold off to adept businessmen.

In other words, the leftist believes in a zero-sum game, so tries to 'correct' a positive-sum game, but also because he believes in a zero-sum game, he doesn't see the threat posed by a negative-sum game.

While many real-world leftists are not so obtuse or philosophical about zero-sum economics, they still make many assumptions based on some perspective that money is not created by the rich nor is it squandered by socialist budgets. The same viewpoint that discounts creation of wealth also discounts destruction of it.

The more practical problem is that people stuck in a zero-sum view of economics are grossly incompetent at diagnosing economic problems or at prescribing economic solutions. Yet because of their warped perspective, they're forever drawn to making policy recommendations. And why not? They see constant problems as the rich take more than 'their fair share' and see few problems with their wealth-squandering policy proposals.

We all need to acknowledge several things, starting at the basic level, that taken together prove we operate in a fundamentally non-zero-sum economy.

1) If A buys a widget from B, then both are better off or they wouldn't undertake the trade. This is exemplified every day when customers visit restaurants, stores and other establishments that don't charge more than the product is worth (by definition, or again, the customers would leave) and yet are able to stay in business or even turn a profit. If the zero-sum view were correct, then either B is selling the product for too little or too much, and between A and B one MUST be a loser and one MUST be a winner. That is not the case.

2) If C redistributes money from expertly-run company D to disastrously-run company E, then in all likelihood the money will not be used as efficiently. Company E will likely produce products lower in quantity or quality (or both) than Company D. Company D and consumers are worse off, and the benefits garnered by Company E are lower than the benefits that would have been garnered by Company D had C not redistributed anything. Since this is ahypothetical, we can assume that E is as embarrassingly inept as D is astonishingly adept. If the zero-sum view were correct, then no matter how incompetent Company E might be, the scenario would have to result in the same net benefits and wealth. That is also not the case.

3) Even if a situation does arise where the winnings and losses balance out, that does not prove that the economy is a zero-sum game, since it would be hypothetically possible to find such a situation within a non-zero-sum universe.

Accepting the premise that the economy operates on non-zero-sum rules, we can come to several conclusions. First, wealth can be created by individual effort, because wealth can be created. Second, the possession of greater-than-average wealth does not take away wealth from others, because there need not be a loser to match every winner. Third, bad government policies can be net-negative, because wealth can be destroyed. With this knowledge, we can understand that wealth does not deserve jealousy and that government intervention against the market can easily do more harm than good.

Proving not just that government interventioncan but usually does cause more harm than good is another topic altogether.

UPDATE: This article has been published on my website here, and is listed under issue articles here.

2005-07-21T15:52:00.000-04:00

John Howard Gets Plus Five Cool Points (tip to Instapundit)

Partial transcript of joint Howard-Blair press conference from NRO:

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

(Emphasis mine; typos and errors not mine)

Trying to say that the Iraq War causes terrorism is putting the cart before the horse. How can a 2003 invasion of a terrorist-supporting tyrant incite terrorists to violence in 1993 (WTC), 1998 (embassies), 2000 (USS Cole) and 2001? Apparently the terrorists decided to preemptively retaliate. At least wacko Professor Ward Churchill argued that the cause of Islamic terrorism was the UN embargo that's blamed for the death of many Iraqis; of course, that would put Iraq at the center of the war on terror, so not a lot of lefties rely on that argument or even mention it.

2005-07-21T00:58:00.000-04:00

I Can't Stand The Ignorance

Armando at DailyKos is incredibly persistent that Roberts state a clear position on Roe and he blogs as much several times (here and here just on the current first 12 Kos posts). He ignorantly frames the issue like this:

Obviously Armando isn't a lawyer or he'd realize that a judge that has stated his opinion on a case before him or likely to come before him is obligated to then recuse himself when the case does come around. Apparently he didn't read the news when Scalia ran off at the mouth about how the Ninth Circuit Newdow case on the Pledge of Allegiance was a bad ruling; Justice Scalia recused himself from the case, so when it does come up only 8 Justices will be voting on it.

If a Justice nominee made a promise in public or in private to vote for or against a constitutional right to abortion then he or she would be ethically obligated to recusal. It destroys the principle of impartiality. Even if the Justice were able to sidestep recusal without serious questions about ethics and impartiality, the Justice would be tightly bound to stick within the confines of a promise to the Senate committee; the implication would be that the Justice lied if the statement to the Senate didn't sync up with the actual opinion given. It's an ethical nightmare and potentially a legal one if the decided-against party were to try for impeachment articles.

But absent that, it's inappropriate for a Justice to state an opinion on a case likely to come before his or her court. It's right there in the federal canons. Simply phrasing the issue as "hiding something" versus honesty is childish and ignorant, and such people should do more research before expressing opinions about procedural matters. And again, the fact is that Ginsburg and all the other Justices were quite coy about their answers, avoiding statements to the Senate that might ethically require recusal.

2005-07-20T18:56:00.000-04:00

Two Observations About The Roberts Discussions

First, I find it very interesting that many pundits and cable news contributors, when discussing the potential judicial ideology of Judge Roberts, mention his friendliness and approachability. It implies that in order to be as extreme as Scalia or Thomas would involve being irascible, cranky, mean or reclusive. Dick Cheney as a Representative (for WY) was widely considered a friend to most other Congressmen, even though he regularly found himself in single-digits minority on votes like school lunches and gun control. I've heard rumors about big-time moderates that cast them as selfish, egocentric assholes. Certainly everyone should realize that personalities and politics often don't overlap.

Second, in yet another flaw of using Communications, English and Journalism majors to write articles about law, politics or economics, the media coverage seems to be tilted toward giving one- or two-sentence descriptions of his former cases without going into the law. They describe the situation and the ruling and whether he was joined by his colleagues, but give little about the larger legal issues. While it might seem topical to a communications expert to describe that such and such issue or regulation met with such and such a fate, it offers little insight into Roberts' judicial philosophy. So he struck down X or upheld Y or dissented on Z - I have little idea why he made these rulings, and more to the point even less idea what he'd do to set new precedent. But they have to have something to talk about and all they have is old rulings.

Journalists and AP staff writers know story structure and the five Ws but they're not experts in other subjects; it's crazy to assume that if you teach somebody how to write they'll be able to make a coherent story out of it. It would be better to find people with a little background in the subject they're covering and then make sure they know how to write. Writers with little subject matter expertise have trouble so they tend to be over-reliant on press releases.

My guess is that Roberts is something like Rehnquist, that he'll be pretty decent on federalism but somewhat skeptical of the 9th Amendment. My hope is that he'll rule against Roe and Casey but it's hard to say with this information. What I can say is that he seems honest in his decisions and willing to rule against his personal feelings in ordser to follow the law. He's obviously qualified from his experience and education.

But trying to learn about his ideology from one-liner descriptions of old cases or divining his judicial philosophy from his friendliness is a case of journalists trying to find evidence where little is present.

2005-07-19T21:27:00.000-04:00

SCOTUS Nominee: Judge John Roberts

The President has nominated a judge from the DC Appeals Circuit, John Roberts, Jr., to take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat when she retires from the Supreme Court. He's 50 years old, so he's young. He has a host of academic credentials including Harvard BA and JD, so he's smart. He was a seasoned lawyer for private practice and for the government, including as Solicitor General, and argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court, so he's experienced.

He's been mentioned before as a good pick to avoid a major confirmation fight by Lieberman, but he's also one of the most respected conservative lawyers and jurists in the country. He's not so outspoken a conservative as Scalia or Thomas, but he's very likely a solid conservative in more of a Rehnquist style (he clerked for Rehnquist).

Leahy and Schumer in a press conference immediately following the President's 9 pm announcement seemed to be gearing up for criticizing Roberts without committing themselves. Leahy said the usual stuff that it's a serious, long-lasting confirmation, that it's important and a thorough hearing should be made. But then he also said that O'Connor was a valuable and talented moderate jurist, which is fine by itself but a good setup to try and contrast Roberts negatively against O'Connor.

More ominously is that Schumer said that Roberts should have to answer many questions of a probing nature, and that Schumer voted against him for the DC circuit because he didn't answer enough questions. I've already blogged about my anger at Schumer for refusing to understand the ethical issues behind judicial impartiality, but I think Roberts should be fine using the same statement that Ginsburg used to avoid answering some questions in her hearing.

I think Roberts will be confirmed if only because Lieberman forwarded him as a compromise candidate; that suggests that the Republicans will hold at least 50 of their Senators and get some Democrats. I want to say that the confirmation will be smooth but the leftwing advocates are too geared up for war to back down now. They're going to unleash their full activity and they'll pull Democrats with them. In the end I think enough of the Gang of 14 Democrats will back the nomination that he'll be passed. The consultation with the Democrats meant that the President spoke to 3/4 of the Democratic caucus, so they can't say that Bush didn't consult.

The Democrats want somebody to hate, and if the left moves fast they will be able to demonize Roberts enough to convince lefties that Roberts is evil and should be blocked. But my prediction is a successful confirmation.

2005-07-19T13:18:00.000-04:00

Koreans for America (tip to Malkin)

A protest in South Korea of a memorial for General MacArthur was met by a larger protest defending him and his statue. The protest grew somewhat unruly and even a little violent, and the police had to hold back the participants. It makes a lot of sense that the South Koreans would be appreciative of MacArthur and the US for the successful UN police action in Korea; their cousins in North Korea currently live in one of the worst possible countries on Earth.

North Korea is littered with a series of ten or twelve concentration death camps where people are sent for everything from political dissent to religiosity to engaging in market activities (illegally, almost by definition). The people lucky enough to be outside the deadly prisons are simply in a larger prison that is their entire country. Famine and hunger have gotten bad enough that instances of cannibalism have been reported there for years. It's illegal to leave the country, which doesn't stop thousands from constantly trying to escape to China or occasionally to raft to Japan. Few make it out of the country, and many find that once they do escape to China the red police there try to stop them before they can reach a safe embassy.

In all, North Korea is not only the most unfree country in the world (worse than Saudi Arabia, Sudan or Saddam's Iraq) it is also one of the deadliest per capita: the DPRK communist government has, in the last ten years, starved one person in ten or more than two million out of a population of twenty-two million.

The South Koreans would be crazy if they weren't overjoyed at being saved from the fate of the North. It's interesting that the US is often accused of having a short-term memory, yet it seems that it's the anti-Americans in South Korea (and elsewhere) who have tragic memory loss.

UPDATE: I forgot that I wanted to mention the other countries that helped contribute to South Korean independence and to (still unattained) North Korean liberation. According to korean-war.com: Republic of Korea 590,911; Columbia 1,068; United States 302,483; Belgium 900; United Kingdom 14,198; South Africa 826; Canada 6,146; The Netherlands 819; Turkey 5,453; Luxembourg 44; Australia 2,282; Philippines 1,496; New Zealand 1,385; Thailand 1,204; Ethiopia 1,271; Greece 1,263; France 1,119

2005-07-19T13:03:00.000-04:00

Tom Tancredo: Nuke Mecca (tip to Malkin and the Captain)

Colorado Rep. Tancredo kind of struck me as a populist that doesn't fully think things through. He's been very aggressive about combatting illegal immigration even when it's just Mexican maids and gardeners. I've never felt he fully divided his positions between legal and illegal immigration. And in order to stop remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean (which are an important part of many families' incomes, and are a private matter between a laborer and his overseas family) he tried to put a steep tax on wiring money overseas - without realizing that one of the major wire-transfer companies was headquartered in his district. He just kind of struck me as aggressive without a real direction or travel plan. This latest issue fits in the same vein.

When discussing on an Orlando radio show what the US response should be if we were nuked, Tancredo suggested bombing Islamic holy sites like Mecca. While I understand the anger and frustration one might feel if Chicago or Seattle were to suddenly glow green, it's not a good idea to threaten a whole region and religion with the same treatment. Just as we would be devastated by a terrorist nuclear strike, so too would Muslims and Arabs - and probably most everybody else in the world - be devastated if we glassed Mecca.

Obviously a response to such an attack should be swift, strong and effective, but that doesn't mean we should emotionally lash out at a symbol the terrorists worship. For every terrorist that worships to Mecca, there are probably at least a thousand peaceful Muslims. Unless we're talking about the genocide of all Muslims and most Arabs, which I sincerely hope we're not, then it's a move that should not be considered.

Moreover, besides the political repurcussions it would entail the deaths of hundreds of thousands of worshippers and citizens, possibly millions over time. It might be emotionally satisfying to make somebody else pay for our hurt, but let's make sure that if the time does come we make sure that our rage is focused instead of indiscriminate.

2005-07-19T03:03:00.000-04:00

Seneca Falls Anniversary

In 1848 on July 19th and 20th a women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY. It was one of the earliest major events for the women's rights movement. Believe it or not, it developed in large part because women were being excluded from the abolitionist movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in London during the World Anti-Slavery Convention; the women were forced to remain in the balcony and even had a curtain around them. Funnily enough, similar mistreatment of women in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s helped spawn the women's rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

A long-term contributing factor to the 1840s women's rights movement was the spread of industrialization in America and the growth of a middle class that could afford more free time. With less time taken up by agriculture or housework, women were free to join reform associations, temperance leagues and so forth in addition to increased social opportunities. Many of their groups were focused on condemning prostitution (almost omnipresent at the time, in part because of the industrial revolution and smaller family sizes), alcohol and slavery (with the separation of slave families being a large emotional selling point). When women from these women-only reform associations tried to work in men-founded organizations, the great degree of friction showed them that women weren't all that far about slaves in terms of rights.

Of course William Lloyd Garrison, perhaps the most impassioned and extreme of the abolitionists (he didn't participate directly in politics and he burned the Constitution, saying it was tainted by slavery) was supportive of equal rights with women, as well as abolition of slavery.

We should all appreciate the women's rights movement, who asked for legal equality with men - no more, no less.

2005-07-18T22:43:00.000-04:00

The Usual Suspects on TV

Bad idea. Let's just say that "fairy godmother," "bucko" and "tight ham" (?) make for a bad movie. I actually preferred when they said "frigging."

2005-07-18T21:16:00.000-04:00

Israeli Protests

I heard on NPR that the massive Israeli pro-settlement protests resulted in Israeli police arresting tons of people and stopping several hundred busloads of people from going to Gaza to protest. Bus drivers that tried to drive anyway had their licenses revoked. Let's see if the Palestinian authorities can start showing similar good faith by cracking down on terrorists. I'd say Israel is clearly serious about pulling all the settlers out of Gaza and their very strong (perhaps even too strong) moves to pull out settlements prove good faith. I don't think the Palestinian leaders have done as much in return; I'd credit most of the reduction in violence in Israel (though certainly reduction doesn't mean a halt, as we've seen) to the security fence.

The Israelis are working on their side; it's time for the Palestinians to show they want to build peace or to stop complaining when the IDF comes in to do the job they won't do on their own.

2005-07-18T14:11:00.000-04:00

Co-Blogger Announcement

Due to her boundless intelligence and unparalleled gift for speech my girlfriend Adriana is joining the blog as theorangeevil. She won't be posting at predictable intervals, but she'll always have interesting things to say. I'll let her skill speak for itself.

2005-07-17T19:41:00.000-04:00

Clearing up the Wilson-Plame Business

The Democratic opportunism toward Karl Rove and the Wilson/Plame story is just silly. While I agree that unethical bheavior or violating state secrets are grounds for firings even if not illegal, it's interesting that of all the Democrats lined up to destroy Rove, few of them said much of anything about punishing Sandy Berger when he "accidentally" stole documents from the NARA. Of course, I'm willing to bet hypocrisy swings the other way against Republicans, too - although the media and Democratic actions against Rove are a good ten times more energetic and far more common, showing up on news seemingly more often than the Aruba stuff.

Personally, I'm consistent: I could barely care less about it. I understand it's important, but violating confidentiality has never been one of my pet peeves unless it causes something tangible like losing a mission, losing lives, losing battles, etc. What is one o my pet peeves is when stupid people get away with making false arguments simply because other stupid people repeated them enough to gain acceptance by force where acceptance by reason was not available. So I want to clear up a few things.

First of all, Rove did not commit a crime. The author of the statute Rove supposedly violated told WorldNetDaily as much. Several elements that aren't or arguably aren't present are required to fit the statute. 1) The agent must have operated outside the US within the previous five years. That didn't happen, because apparently she was back in the states in 1997, while the Novak column was in 2003. 2) The government has to take affirmative steps to protect the covert agent's identity. She was apparently no longer working as a covert agent, and let Joe Wilson go to Africa without signing a confidentiality agreement. 3) The statute also requires intent to disclose the identity of a covert agent. Arguably, this did not happen, especially given that Rove has signed waivers letting reporters discuss all their interviews with him on the subject.

Additionally, I found it very interesting that Chuck Schumer, one of Rove's biggest critics here (no doubt because he smells headlines) voted against the bill creating this statute back when he was in the House. Man, Schumer is such an ass. Wants to ban guns, wants to ban violent video games, and wants to keep intentionally outing overseas covert agents legal but make talking about formerly overseas, formerly covert agents illegal if it's Karl Rove doing it. Seriously: Chuck Schumer is an asshole.

But back to the subject at hand. Rove didn't commit a crime. However, Joe Wilson's anti-war arguments now getting a rehashing in the media - supposedly the reason Rove sought 'revenge' against him by outing his non-covert wife - are false. In the 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The lefties have said that this was perhaps THE lie that the war was predicated on. Of course, the war was also based on other stuff like the major terrorists Saddam was believed (and now proven) to have aided or sheltered and the democratization of the Middle East, but that's beside the point. The fact is that Iraq DID try to buy nuclear material in Africa.

The problem is that there were fake documents related to the sale between Iraq and Niger, and that allowed Wilson to make the claim that Bush lied (and let Democrats say "Bush lied, people died" endlessly until their heads explode). But that isn't the extent of the evidence. But some intelligence sources believe the fake document was actually intended to be found and discredited, thus making the nuclear link appear false.

British intelligence has consistently argued that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. The evidence supports this conclusion (for more, check out this year-old NRO piece). So the President was right to include those 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address, because they were accurate.

Not only was Wilson wrong about the Niger link, but he flat-out lied in the process. He said the CIA told the White House that the African link wasn't entirely unsound, when the CIA never did such a thing. He said that he knew the Niger memo was fraudulent because the names and dates were clearly wrong, but he couldn't have seen the memo at the time he was in Africa because the US didn't acquire the memo for another eight months. A Senate invesitgative panel found that he had lied in both situations.

The Democrats rallying behind WIlson reminds me of the Democrats rallying behind Richard Clarke. They want a guy who can symbolize THE FAILURE of the Bush Administration. It matters not what the failure is or even whether it really happened, but the bigger and juicier the better - especially if it means they can try to neutralize the war on terror as Bush's issue. They don't really want to claim it for themselves, because that would entail being even more gung-ho than Bush. They just want to feel patriotic, look strong and not have to worry about security issues anyway. Richard Clarke and Joe WIlson are both cast in the role as disrespected, disgruntled ex-government officials who wisely know THE TRUTH about the lies behind the war and are going to speak truth to power (mostly by publishing fluffy, self-indulgent books and going on the rent-a-speaker lecture circuit) and become the face symbolizing the failures of the Bush White House.

Of course, Joe Wilson isn't nearly as credible as Richard Clarke and his star fizzled after a month or so. If anything Joe Wilson is just a reminder that the Niger-Iraq connection is real. Wilson is a symbol of the Democrats' opportunism and enthusiasm run wild; they've latched onto a known liar as an excuse to go after Bush and to get Rove kicked out. It won't work; Rove will keep his job a while longer (though he might leave before the term is out; eight years is a long time to work for any Administration) and Wilson will be dropped because of his lies. It's hard to indict Bush and Rove of being liars when your mouthpiece is such an unabashed one.

2005-07-17T00:13:00.000-04:00

Aage Bjerre's Pro-US Pizzeria

A Danish pizzeria owner banned French and Germans from eating in his restaurant in the 2003 run-up to the war in Iraq. Denmark sent troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan, but many Danes were upset by the ban. He was fined for discrimination but refused to pay it, landing him eight days in jail. He sold the shop after repeated vandalism and decreased sales. I don't think the average French or German citizen should be punished for the actions of their governments, but it is nice to hear that some people in Europe have a nice view of the US - bearing in mind that bashing America has been a European hobby for a few hundred years, and vice versa.

Speaking of which, there was also a pro-US rally in Denmark to correspond with the President's visit there. (tip to Instapundit)

2005-07-15T18:06:00.000-04:00

Interntional Freedom Center

The IFC memorial on the former site of the WTC towers is still embroiled in a fight over just how the memorial issue should be handled, though it appears just today that they may be forced into considering other locations for it. One of the more extreme suggestions has been repeated by Bill Maher, and is something to the effect of a Why They Hate Us pavilion. It's not clear that the IFC is going to such lengths, but a Why They Hate Us section at the 9/11 memorial would be roughly equivalent to a Why The Jews Deserved It arena at the National Holocaust Museum.

The IFC had been vaguely described as an all-encompassing museum on the history of freedom and oppression. That's a noble and important effort (if done correctly) and I'd be willing to make a charitable contribution to such an enterprise (from a reputable developer). But would we write on a loved one's tombstone how great everyone else is? Do we hear about the wonders of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover at the FDR Memorial?

Bill Maher's idea is tragically stupid and woefully crude. It's unbelievable disrespectful to take what is in effect hallowed ground and turn it into a time to explain why they deserved to die or why the actions weren't unjustified. That would be the equivalent of going to a AIDS clinic or memorial and explaining how having unprotected sex or sharing needles brings AIDS on yourself; but at least in that case, you're being highly inappropriate in an accurate way. But the fact is that the 'Why They Hate Us' schtick is heavily overplayed. They hate us because we have a great country and they don't, we have a great economy and they don't, we have power and influence and they don't, we have different cultural norms and our mores and cultural media are being accepted by many Arabs and Muslims while Arab and Muslim culture are not being accepted by us. They hate us because they are neo-fascist bigots that hate people who stand in the way of gaining power; their hatred isn't our fault, no matter what mistakes or missteps might have been made in US foreign policy. But more than that, the 3,000 people who died didn't do anything to bring this wrath down on them any more than the rape and burn victims of Darfur brought hell down on themselves. Why They Hate Us is an idea both horribly crass and horribly wrong.

But even a step down from blaming the victims, putting broad context to a specific event, is crass. It belittles the event. If somebody complains of a stomachache and you shoot back that there are starving people in Ethiopia, then you are not commiserating, but denigrating. For the purposes of mourning the victims of Islamic terrorism against the World Trade Center, we don't need to hear about the Holocaust, slavery, apartheid or the civil rights movement. Those are all important things to learn about and learn from, and anyone who disagrees is a fool or a bigot. But we don't need to hear about them at the site of the WTC.

A brief segment or exhibit linking the attacks to humanity's endless struggle for freedom against oppression would not only be tasteful but powerful and intellectually stimulating. But it should be a conclusion or a capstone to an actual memorial. You do not mourn someone's pain by only talking about the pain of others. Not only do the organizers realize this fact, they are counting on it. They hope to lose the outrage and sadness Americans feel about 9/11 in a general sea of sadness and inspiration for the whole history of freedom.

By all means, build the IFC memorial as planned - just build it across the street, across town, across the country, anywhere not in the way of a real WTC memorial. The site of the towers should have ample space reserved solely for the victims and mourners of the attacks.

And by the way, I seriously think whatever we build there has to be taller than the WTC towers were. Nothing like an extra ten or twenty stories for an added "fuck you" to the terrorists and their sympathizers.

2005-07-15T17:29:00.000-04:00

Chirac and Schroeder

Chirac and Schroeder are embarrassing, especially to the Western anti-war movement they helped legitimize. Both are playing on fears of change and hatred of foreigners to try and revitalize their pathetically low popularity rankings.

Both leaders may have led the diplomatic opposition to the war in Iraq with the public backing of massive supermajorities across Europe, but their track records aren't doing them any good. Chirac's approval rating is in the 20s, and Schroeder's SPD drew 24% approval in the latest five-party polling. Maybe their low ratings are despite opposition to the war, or possibly being anti-war at a time when Iraq has its own elections is looking less and less idealistic and more opportunistic. My guess, though, is that the war in Iraq isn't that big of a real issue; the people with reasons to oppose the US latch onto it, and the people with no real beef with the US are apathetic.

It is interesting to note that Blair and Howard did very well in their elections despite broad domestic opposition, while Chirac and Schroeder are getting the sort of ratings Nixon got after the Saturday Night Massacre despite leading the even broader domestic opposition to the war.

Schroeder has played up anti-capitalism, anti-globalization and anti-Americanism. His party leaders and allies have described US businesses as 'blood suckers', compared various capitalists to locusts, and even compared a CDU campaign slogan to Nazi death-camp propaganda.

Chirac has also played on fears of capitalism, of globalization and tried to gain from anti-Americanism and anti-Anglicism. He himself went to the humorously immature level of insulting British food (hopefully at least half joking) but more substantially (and far less justifiably) criticized the British social model. De Villepin in his first speech as PM promised that the French social model would not be abandoned. The anti-Americanism of both during the Iraq War run-up is still fresh in the memories of many Americans.

Schroeder and Chirac are frightfully similar in many regards. Though in France Chirac is of the right and Schroeder is of the German left, both attempted half-hearted liberalization programs his country, both used emotions about the Iraq war to gain political credibility, both have suffered major defeats at the polls (the EU Constitution treaty vote for Chirac, since Germany had only a parliamentary vote on it; the Nordrhein-Westfalen election miserable failure for Schroeder) and both are turning up the heat on emotional pleas to an anti-globalization left-wing populist base.

The insults won't work. Chirac and Schroeder, first of all, have been around for a while and there's a real problem for incumbents regarding the public's weariness; it's hard for the citizenry to stomach most leaders for a long time unless it's an office that's less present in their daily lives. Chirac was reelected in 2002 as was Schroeder, but neither was very impressive.

Chirac's victory, approximately 80% of the vote, came because the neo-fascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front was the only opponent in the round two (run-off) vote; in the round one vote Chirac took the plurality with only 19.9% of votes cast. In other words, only one in five French voters (with 71.6% turnout) thought Chirac was the best choice for President - even though he was the incumbent (granted, part of this is due to the eccentricities of the French presidential voting system).

Schroeder's 'victory' was that, while his SPD edged out the CDU/CSU with 251 seats to 248 (and both with popular votes of approximately 38.5%) the Green Party's 55 seats outmatched the FDP's 47 seats (the Greens were and are the SPD's governing partner, and the FDP is the CDU's presumed governing partner). Barely a victory at all, and it was only Schroeder's opposition to the war in Iraq that manged to salvage even this much for his party. Only days before the CDU was ahead in polls, so Schroeder squeaked out his victory.

My prediction is that Chirac will not be able to run for reelection in 2007 (if he ran in won, his term would be from 1995 to 2012) and that his intra-party opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy, will be the UMP candidate. De Villepin is just too much of a haughty little bastard even for the French, and besides which is a career bureaucrat and has never run for office in his life. Sarko's father was Hungarian and fled the Soviet invasion, eventually joining the French Foreign Legion; his mother was half Sephardic Jew and the daughter of a wealthy surgeon (though Sarko is Catholic). Sarko is currently the Minister of the Interior (making him roughly the third highest in French government) and explicitly and publicly touts the virtues of the Anglo-American market system. Obviously it would be folly to expect him to be a full-blown American capitalist, but compared to many French politicians, even many of the center-right, Sarko's a reliable proponent of capitalism. Sarko is much more favorable to the US in general and a presidential campaign might feature tax cuts and labor market deregulation.

My prediction is that the red-greens will lose in Germany. That's hardly going out on a limb, though. The CDU leader Angela Merkel is already the official candidate for the September elections. Unlike the bulk of the CDU base, she's Lutheran instead of Catholic, and she's from Eastern Germany. She's no communist, though, and she supports more market reforms for Germany. She's often compared to Margaret Thacther, as both are strong women from the center-right. Merkel supported the US in the Iraq war, and is generally pro-US. When the CDU wins, the FDP will almost certainly be their coalition partner; the FDP leader would take the role of Foreign Minister. Guido Westerwelle is a Protestant from the Bonn area (western Germany, near Belgium) and is openly gay. He's been one of the foremost critics of SPD xenophobia and anti-capitalism.

I fully expect to be disappointed by Sarko and Merkel-Westerwelle, both because they'll be less than I'd expected and because they'll be limited in what they can do. But it is nice to know that Chirac and Schroeder will be kicked out and replaced by more reasonable, liberalizing, market-oriented forces - hopefully with a more pro-American persuasion.

2005-07-14T18:54:00.000-04:00

Schumer's Judicial Ignorance

I've blogged before about Schumer's idiocy with regard to judicial nominees answering questions. In the Miguel Estrada business he claimed that Estrada was not answering questions (which is weird, given that Schumer, unlike fellow Senators, declined to exercise his privilege to ask Estrada written questions before the hearings and receive detailed written hearings; other Senators did so). Now Schumer is arguing that that the impending nominee should be asked and have to answer direct questions about specific cases and issues almost certain to come before the Court.

Schumer wants them to answer questions because he wants to either get them on record as being 'too extreme' and supporting Republican answers or get them on record as supporting his answers and thus use that testimony to beat them over the head if they happen to change their minds in actually ruling (it might go to impeachment). This is of course speculation, but it's also due to the arrogance of Senators (who tend to think that their deliberative functions are the end-all be-all of American governance) and the simplicity of politicians. It's especially boneheaded given that Schumer went to Harvard Law.

Apparently he never learned a thing about judicial ethics - even though any idiot can find the federal judicial canon of ethics with a google search. There is a large body of thought regarding what judges can and can't do and what obligations are placed upon them in order to further both the appearance and existence of impartiality.

The relevant portion of the federal canon of judicial ethics is from the third canon, part A6:

A judge should avoid public comment on the merits of a pending or impending action, requiring similar restraint by court personnel subject to the judge's direction and control. This proscription does not extend to public statements made in the course of the judge's official duties, to the explanation of court procedures, or to a scholarly presentation made for purposes of legal education.

The short explanation is that a judge that states a position on a disputed issue coming before the court sacrifices the appearance of impartiality and betrays its non-existence. This is not a rule to be taken lightly; judges that run afoul of this rule recuse themselves from the proceedings, as Justice Scalia did after he made comments regarding the pledge of allegiance case that showed his bias.

Every Justice currently on the Supreme Court refused to answer such specific questions when asked them and the Democrats risk running close to hypocrisy if they try to use it as a way to block a SCOTUS nominee.

I do not believe that Senators are bound by any rule of ethics to ignore the political biases of themselves or of the nominees. I think Senators should be willing to vote down nominees of unacceptable political bent (if it's okay to vote down extremists like Nazis or pro-Confederates for political views, it's okay to do so on other issues closer to the mainstream). But Justices should not answer questions about issues almost certain to come before the Court and they should not be voted down for refusing to give unethical responses.

For all the bitching about history, precedent and the filibuster, you'd think Schumer (a guy who loved playing up the save-the-filibuster stuff) would have an ounce of interest in preserving explicit judicial ethics. An impartial judiciary is more important than requiring 60 votes to confirm judges and more ingrained in our history. If only political opportunism were on his side, Schumer would be up in arms about the need to protect judicial impartiality.

2005-07-13T02:36:00.000-04:00

Pushing The Envelope on The Right to Life

A few short years ago there was precious little discussion of Social Security reform at all, let alone private accounts. Now polling shows that a majority of Americans support personal accounts of some form. It would've been difficult to blame the President for not pushing reform of Social Security, given its reputation as difficult and unpopular to change. Yet he went on a road tour for weeks promoting it.

The problem as I see it is that his performance on the right to life consists largely of two things: 1) being willing to sign pro-life acts of Congress, and 2) opposing federal funding of embryo destruction. While I'm glad that the President signed into law things like the PBA ban and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act ('Laci and Conner's Law') - especially since Clinton repeatedly vetoed a partial-birth abortion ban on fraudulent claims of medical necessity - it doesn't strike me that he had a very big role in either. He's a supporter, but he didn't appear to be the driving force. I don't recall him spending a lot of time as president pushing Congress on the issue or trying to drum up political support. It's hard to get all worked up about the stem cell stance, since it's not about banning stem cell research, but about not federally funding it - a world of difference.

He coasts on the momentum of supporting the pro-life side while not expending political capital on behalf of it. If anything he consumes the political capital of supporting these two issues - which have support in the 60s or 70s - and spends it elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with gaining and expending political points, but it's frustrating to see such a monumentally-important issue ignored.

It's an important time to support the right to life movement because of the SCOTUS nomination the President is about to make. Republican SCOTUS nominations have not been very good to the pro-life movement, with Republican appointees Stevens, Souter, Kennedy and O'Connor all supporting a constitutional right to abortion. In fact, the Court is 7-2 Republican to Democratic appointees, yet 6-3 for abortion rights and 5-4 for partial-birth abortion.

The President should appoint someone serious about the right to life, rather than continuing to walk the fine line of doing just enough to hold support and show some real leadership on the issue. History will remember his actions.

2005-07-13T00:33:00.000-04:00

Western vs. Southern Europe

In continuing his criticism of Fox News' phrase "homicide bombing" as a replacement for "suicide bombing" (a subject of less than mild interest to me personally) Eugene Volokh includes Madrid, Spain in Western Europe. While Spain is fair to include in "western Europe," I'd argue that it is a stretch to include it in "Western Europe." Leaving old-school racial and ethnological studies entirely to the side, let me be more specific for my reasons.

First, "western Europe" and "Western Europe" are as different as saying "West Virginia" instead of "west Virginia." "Western Europe" with a capital W is a specific place - a pronoun. Saying "western Europe" with a lower-case w is an adjective modifying Europe - a western portion of Europe. The Fox article used the pronoun "Western Europe."

"Western Europe" implies a cultural attachment to the Enlightenment and liberal democracy as embodied by England, the Netherlands and so forth. Spain's political culture is probably more similar closer to Greece's, especially since (along with Portugal) they both had two of the most recent dictatorships of the EU countries. Spain has had some philosophers who even question whether Spain belongs in the Western intellectual tradition at all. Don't get me wrong, I'd still say it's part of Western civilization (following, say, Huntington's divisions in The Clash) but I would not say it's a part of the subset of Western civilization known as Western Europe.

The distinction is probably academic minutiae to a law professor, but it's substantive if not relevant to the issue at hand.

2005-07-12T21:08:00.000-04:00

What's Wrong With This Situation?

As we learned this spring, an incapacitated woman can be deprived of water and food until dead on the say-so of her estranged husband. However convicted murderers and rapists cannot be executed if they are comatose, and must be perfectly healthy before we kill them. Who thinks this stuff up?

I understand the need to place moral and legal restrictions on the death penalty, but considering the first step of the death penalty is to make the felon unconscious, it seems like a comatose death row inmate saves the state from an anesthesiologist's bill.

2005-07-09T18:14:00.000-04:00

Hitchens Kicks Ass (tip to LGF)

On the MSNBC show that Ron Reagan, Jr. co-hosts, Hitchens kicks ass in a debate over terrorism. Hitchens points out that terrorists aren't being provoked into attacking us because of Iraq or Afghanistan but have been attacking for years before that. He expertly points out that you cannot elevate this terrorism into reasonable demands or rational actions; they are for their own sake. The attacks are not means justified by good ends (Israel out of Palestine, US/UK out of the Mideast, Russia out of Chechnya, India out of Kashmir, blacks out of Sudan, etc.) but are the ends in themselves. The pain and suffering inflicted is enough to commit the attacks for the monsters who do these acts; they have larger agendas but they need no further justification to do it.

The UK was not attacked because of its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan; terrorists had been plotting a chemical attack on the UK several years ago before either venture. It's certainly reasonable to say that engaging the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan can make the US and UK a bigger target, but we were both already targets. Just because engaging evil potentially makes you more noticeable to evil doesn't mean that not engaging evil is better - and it certainly doesn't make it safer.

The US was already a target before 9/11 when the WTC was bombed, when the African embassies were bombed and when the USS Cole was bombed. The Islamist violence targeted on London or New York or Madrid is not deserved any more than schoolchildren in Beslan deserved to be murdered or young women in Darfur deserved to be raped and mutilated. These attacks are not about capitalism, the West or Israel; the victims of Islamist violence are of every income from the poorest Africans and Asians to the richest Anglo-Americans, of every race from black African to white English, and every religion from animist to Orthodox to Protestant to Hindu.

Hitchens is right to put Ronny Reagan in his place, because it's politically ignorant and historically illiterate to argue that terrorism is committed by rational men committed to reasonable goals. Don't delude yourself into thinking that terrorists commit bad acts for good reasons, because they don't share our views that all religions and races are deserving of tolerance. They are nothing more than bigots with bombs who will use any excuse to perpetrate violence. Separate whatever good goals that reasonable Muslims might have from the self-justified violence of Islamic terrorists.

PS - Reagan is very smarmy and hard to watch or hear. He sounds like a nagging schoolmarm when he says "Christopher." He sounded better when he argued directly instead of by innuendo and inference and sarcasm. He was definitely outmatched by Hitchens and only Reagan's interruptions did anything to stop the hemorrhaging.

2005-07-09T17:51:00.000-04:00

Oliver Stone To Make First Major 9/11 Movie (tip to LGF)

The first major motion picture about the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon will be made by Oliver Stone and will star Nicholas Cage. The story is about the last two people to be saved from the wreckage of the WTC, two NY Port Authority cops, one of them played by Cage. Charles Johnson at LGF and Mickey Kaus are worried about Oliver Stone's penchant for dramatizing historical events to serve his own editorial biases. Let's hope with real-life cops working on the movie, including Officer McLoughlin, the man Cage is portraying, we won't see a blame-the-victim flick.

2005-07-07T15:38:00.000-04:00

Bombings in London

Cowards have bombed the London transit system and injured over a thousand people, with dozens dead so far. London only just won the 2012 Olympics a day or two ago from Paris and the UK is playing host to the G-8 summit. The UK was an attractive target for chaos. Multiple transit bombings, apparently three on the tube and one on a bus, sounds like an echo of the Madrid 3/11 bombings. An Al Qaeda group has taken credit for the murders.

Blair gave a strong speech pledging resolve in the face of the attacks.

It is important that those who engage in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction and impose extremism on the world. They will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear.Both President Bush and President Chirac stood right behind Prime Minister Blair as he made this announcement. Stupid move, Islamist assholes. Getting the French to stand on stage with the British and Americans in a statement on terror sends a very strong message for our side.

They attacked because a) it worked on Spain, bringing about a Socialist victory and withdrawal from Iraq, and b) they're losing in Iraq. It's a sad fact that because the losing side gets more desperate as its ultimate failure looms closer and closer, it gets more bloodthirsty and unpredictable. "The fox is deadliest when cornered." With Iraq clearly moving into the democratic column and the intra-Western feud over the conflict moving from ultra-divisive to a resigned cooperative effort, they needed some chaos and fear again. They needed to put some hurt back on us.

This cruelty will not go unpunished.

2005-07-05T23:14:00.000-04:00

Iraqi Violence Going Three-Sided (tip to Instapundit)

Many nationalist insurgents are in open conflict with the foreign Islamists in Iraq. After assassinations of government officials and tribal leaders and women and businessowners being harassed, the tribal nationalists are attacking the Islamists. According Lt. Col. Tim Mundy in the Telegraph article, the nationalists started targeting their mortar attacks away from the US garrison and toward the Islamists, and when the rounds hit near the base they re-targeted to fire at the Islamists.

It makes sense, of course, that provincial tribal leaders would have little in common with globe-spanning Islamist radicals. The agenda of the first is older than Islam and much more local; they're concerned with their extended family's security and honor. The agenda of the latter is entirely about using violence to bring about an abstract international vision; they want to fight for their vision of social cohesion and values. A lot of times they intersect because they are all largely Muslim and largely Arab. But they have different emphases, different loyalties, different educational backgrounds and in this case, different military targets.

Let's hope that these two facets of the insurgency continue to quarrel amongst each other and ignore the coalition and the Iraqi government. This is a good sign from Iraq.

2005-07-05T22:10:00.000-04:00

Checkpoint Charlie Memorial Destroyed

The SPD-PDS Berlin government succeeded in destroying the Checkpoint Charlie Memorial, which included 1,065 crosses. It's unfortunate that the same political party, now renamed the PDS, was able to preside over the destruction of a monument to victims of East german tyranny. Let's hope that a new memorial to the tragedy and deaths associated with the Berlin Wall can be constructed soon.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, city Senator Thomas Flierl of the PDS was a member of the East German SED government, and was one of the major critics of the monument. In other words, he was LITERALLY part of the government criticized by the monument; it would be like a member of the Confederate government getting a Civil War memorial torn down.

2005-07-05T13:55:00.000-04:00

The Direction of Defense

There's a discussion at QandO on the overall strategy for the US armed forces and whether the two-front war is still as applicable and necessary today as it might have been a few decades ago. I'm reposting my comment to that thread and explaining why I think that being perpetually prepared for a two-front war with a massive conventional army is unnecessary.

We should focus on keeping a kick-ass Navy and streamlining the special forces command. If China started moving in on Taiwan - which it probably won’t, by the way - then the Navy could pester them to stay the fuck back. Groups like Delta, Night Stalkers and so forth can more effectively handle antiterrorism missions around the world than cumbersome armies, but they can also be used to cripple transportation and communication routes for conventional forces.

The last guy to try and beat the US in a conventional matchup, Saddam in 1991, got his ass kicked so bad that a month-long air war and 100 hours of a ground campaign thoroughly destroyed his ability to project real force against us.

We always have the nuclear deterrent and we still have the capacity to produce large amounts of tanks and infantry units if a WWII-like situation somehow came again. What we should be focusing on is 1) a Navy capable of protecting us and of projecting force around the world, 2) Special Forces to be sent around the world by the Navy if necessary in order to destabilize dictators, destroy terrorist camps and harrass major threats, and 3) a huge emphasis on new technology. Technology is one of the most valuable things the military gives us and one of the most sought-after aspects of any major conflict. Developing newer weapons, defenses and detections systems is what we need to focus on - not useless tank columns and more cannon fodder.

Conventional warfare is on hiatus right now. We need to adapt to the way things are today and get ready to project hi-tech force around the globe with unbelievable speed and inhuman accuracy. That’s how we can impress on our enemies our ability to fight.

A two-front war just isn’t that likely. Several minor- and a few medium-scale engagements with terrorists is the current situation. We need to start improving the individual effectiveness of each soldier rather than trying to compensate for individual incompetence with sheer volume (like the Russians in WWII throwing waves of unarmed peasants at the Germans).

Technology and precision can replace the old-style armies just as laser-guided bombs have replaced inaccurate mass bombing.

2005-07-05T00:25:00.000-04:00

Conservative Jurism

Plenty of people preach judicial restraint; conservatives decry 'judicial activism' as a symbolic codeword for all the things they dislike about the modern judiciary. The problem, at least for libertarians, is that the traditional government mantra - restraint, respect for the prerogatives of others, and a hearty reliance on self-crrection - is inappropriate in the judicial setting.

It's a good thing for the government to exercise restraint in dealing with the populace; it's a bad thing for the watchdogs of government behavior to exercising restraint when dealing with abuses of liberty and process. The judiciary has a very large role in the latter and ought not be fearful of its primary task: to stop the government in continued abuses upon our liberties. It would be folly to elevate the court to some mythical level on infallibility, but it endangers our freedoms to force the courts to continually defer to the whims of legislators and bureaucrats.

The courts do not have to defer to the legislatures or even to the voters. They are supposed to be undemocratic, that's their nature. If we wanted the legislatures to run everything then we'd eliminate the Senate, eliminate the Electoral College, reduce the hurdle for constitutional amendments to majrotiy vote of the Congress, abolish the 10th Amendment and federalism and just have a Parliament run everything. We have a complex government set up to divide tasks for a specific and important reason. They are there to check each other and to block excesses or abuses. It's an intentionally confrontational system of government and it's why our system is better than the typical European setup that doesn't even separate the executive and legislative.

Now I don't think the courts have any right to simply make up stuff that isn't in the Constitution or to start writing social policy from the bench. But they ARE supposed to aggressively defend our freedoms, even if other public officials don't.

An excellent article in this month's Reason called Unleash the Judges forcefully makes the point that an engaged libertarian judiciary is nothing to fear. They also rightly point out that it was the progressives and New Dealers that first attacked the court as overly powerful and argued for a very long leash for the states and Congress - on economic matters, instead of social matters. Landmark cases, most notably Lochner v. New York were attacked and overturned as being made up law fit to the policy preferences of Justices. The same criticisms are made today by conservatives.

Overturning the acts of legislatures is precisely what the courts are meant to do. If they were nothing but a rubber stamp on the activities of the executive and legislature then they'd be pointless and we could just fire tham and save on the costs of their salaries. No, the courts have value and are the equal of the other branches. The courts should always be willing to overrule an unconstitutional or illegal act of the legislatures; the popularly representative aspects of government can use the amendment power to make changes.

The separation between conservative, pro-government restraint of the judiciary and libertarian, pro-liberty restraint of the government is what makes the forthcoming SCOTUS nomination all the more important. let's hope that president Bush makes a nomination of somebody willing to use the powers of the judiciary for the liberty of Americans and not to defend the already overindulged prerogatives of arrogant legislatures.

2005-07-04T03:41:00.000-04:00

"They Just Didn't Want To Pay Taxes"

Every so often you'll come across some idiot who thinks he has an ingenious grasp of history and is challenging the status quo, but in reality his uninformed opinions have been rehashed for decades or centuries. One of the most common is that the Founders were simply over-hyped tax cheats and that America was founded on not paying taxes. While the American hostility toward taxation was undeniable, the situation was far more complex.

The British argued that the taxes levied on American colonists were to pay for the defense of the colonies. Wrong! The British had just fought the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War). Lest someone assume that the French and Indian War was prosecuted for the interests or defense of Americans, let's be clear: this was an imperial war and a European territorial war. It was almost entirely a continuation of thew War of Austrian Succession - another war not fought for the interests of America. The Seven Years' War was an alliance of Austria, France and Russia against Prussia and Great Britain. The fighting started in Ohio and was mainly maneuvering between two large empires. The British and French also fought in India, the Philippines, the Caribbean, coastal Africa and of course Europe. Suggesting that the British were fighting in India for the good of Boston or Charleston is absurd.

The soldiers (supported by taxes levied on American colonists) weren't there for the defense of Americans. The French had just been defeated in North America and were even less of a threat than they had been before. Why the need for troops, then? To cement central authority and to prevent Americans from settling westward. British troops burned countless homes of settlers attempting to settle to the west. The taxes were going to pay for the soldiers tasked with destroying American homes. Of course, few Americans were harmed in the burnings, and would build a replacement home very quickly - so quickly that settlers were building more homes than the British could burn down. But to say that these troops were there for the colonists' defense is not entirely accurate.

When the British soldiers came to fight in the American West in the French and Indian War, they saw how the colonists lived. Americans had the lowest tax burdens in the British Empire and in the world. They had large homes, large plots of land, ample trade and lived better than most British in England did. This fueled the argument for greater taxation when officers and soldiers reported the American affluence to their superiors in England. England was in serious debt due to its colonial ambitions around the world. In addition, British citizens living in England paid roughly twenty-six times more in taxes than did their American counterparts after the Seven Years' War. The solution seemed obvious to parliament: tax the prosperous Americans who benefit from England's mercantilist policies and military protection. To be fair, the taxes parliament levied on the American colonies after 1765 weren't economically crippling, but after over one hundred years of salutary neglect and colonial rule, the colonists had no interest in surrending power or liberty to England.

It was not about 'paying their fair share' or anything similar. The Americans hadn't been invaded all the decades previously and had handled defense situations without major British taxes.

Other people say that the tax-cheating Americans were smugglers who didn't appreciate attempts to cut down their black-market business. Of course, this argument leaves out the mercantilism of British colonial policy. All goods from America were supposed to go to Britain and then sold or re-shipped from there. This was supposed to keep the central government at the top of the trade business. Smugglers would naturally oppose taxes aimed at blocking their business because smuggling had been tacitly allowed for decades. Under salutary neglect, the British Parliament and Crown more or less let the colonists do as they wished. Smuggling was not very strictly policed, nor were large amounts of taxes collected. Salutary neglect was the equivalent of a respectful distance. Ending that respectful distance was bound to meet with opposition from the people who were doing things that, though illegal, were not often prevented.

To say that the American Revolution was all about tax dodging is grossly inaccurate. The fact is that Americans were not treated as full British citizens and did not have a government dedicated to looking out for them. "Taxation without representation" was a fitting phrase for the time: the problem wasn't with taxation itself because colonists had been paying taxes to their legislatures for over one hundred years. Taxes were accepted as an integral part of life in the colonies and British Empire. The American colonists opposed a foreign parliament--a parliament in which Americans had no representation--levying a tax without the consent of the colonies, especially since that tax was 1) unprecedented and 2)imposed to pay for a war the American colonists did not initiate. When repeated petitions and letter-writing committees failed and violence broke out, revolution was a natural step to address the gross inadequacies of the British colonial system in America.

2005-07-04T02:01:00.000-04:00

Paine: Voice of the Revolution

It was the pamphlet Common Sense, authored by Thomas Paine, that helped propel the massive shift in public opinion toward revolution and independence in colonial America. It was published in January, 1776 and quickly 600,000 copies were spread throughout a colonial population of 3 million (America's first best seller); in other words, virtually every American either read it or had it read to them. It was dicussed in taverns and clubs, and it helped frame the national debate.

Thomas Paine met Ben Franklin in 1774 and his new friend helped arrange transport for Paine to America. The Englishman was a strong supporter of America's cause. He would famously remark in Common Sense:

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested.And also:

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.After the American Revolutionary War, Paine went to France to press the cause there. He was one of two non-French members of the revolutionary legislature. Along with the finest minds of revolutionary France, Paine sided with the Girondin - leading to his imprisonment during the Reign of Terror. Paine engaged Edmund Burke in a great literary debate between classical liberalism and classical conservatism, and forcefully advocated for a government not beholden to ancient commitments.

He was a man of skillful argument and great words, and his work on behalf of freedom was invaluable. This holiday, let's remember the corset-maker from Thetford that helped create America.

2005-07-04T00:18:00.000-04:00

Happy Fourth of July

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

2005-07-02T23:49:00.000-04:00

Trade Not Aid for Africa

With all the self-congratulatory Live8 stuff going around, I just wanted to make clear my own solution to the problems in Africa. First of all, unlike the 'cancel the debt' types, I'd address the causes instead of the symptoms. You can relieve some short-term problems by fixing a symptom, but you can fix the problem by addressing its cause.

The cause of Africa's poverty and rampant disease is illiteracy, lack of education and lack of wealth. The principal cause behind those is the underdeveloped economy in most of Africa. What, then, is holding back economic growth?

Rampant HIV/AIDS incidence, widespread malaria infection, governmental corruption, and difficult trade barriers all contribute to the economic problems in Africa. Addressing each one of them, as well as any wars or conflicts that erupt, is the key to improving Africa's long-term chances.

HIV-AIDS - This is the hardest to fix and it's also perhaps the most serious. AIDS is all over Africa and is simply destructive to any attempt at progress. All that can be done is give what medication is possible, which is already being done in my understanding, continue the search for a cure that's ungoing in the West, and continue the education campaign. It's the education campaign that's going to have to take front seat here. Stopping the rise of AIDS cases is critical. When national leaders, like South African president Mbeki, give false information such as HIV not leading to AIDS, it horribly undermines the education efforts. People need to be educated on basic steps to avoid contracting the disease.

Malaria - Mosquito-spread malaria is a problem across Sub-Saharan Africa and we need to employ measures such as DDT to fight it. The dangers thought to be associated with DDT exposure have been shown in studies to be strongly overestimated. In any event, exposure to DDT won't be worse than malaria, which millions of Africans contract and from which many die. It's awfully hard to get an economy going when most of the workforce and capital are tied up by malaria.

Corruption - Transparency and misregulation lead to very poor environemnts for business and living. Democratic processes and protections are the best methods to police the police and bureaucracy in any country. Therefore, they all need to have free and fair elections to elect their leaders. It's not a sufficient condition, but it is a necessary one. Without representative government checking corrupt leadership is difficult at best.

Trade - The key to economic success for Sub-Saharan Africa is to have a place to sell their goods and services. The West should open up trade barriers on agriculture; without a market for their goods, they are going to have trouble expanding their economic output. Moreover, the result would be cheaper goods for US consumers.

The easiest thing we can do is make goods cheaper for us while providing economic opportunity for them. It's also very important to recovery, as fighting disease costs a lot of money. It's also often been suggested that there's an economic minimum threshold for democratization; while I don't believe that there needs to be a certain level of Purchasing Power Parity for democracy to arise, certainly it's not controversial to say that financial self-sufficiency is a firm basis for being interested in voting.

Fighting disease, establishing democracy and promoting trade are where the focus needs to be. Simply sending more money to corrupt governments isn't going to do much good and could do some real harm.

2005-07-01T17:49:00.000-04:00

Legal Legos (tip to VC)

These Lego characters will act out the hearsay exceptions for you in this entertaining video file (with sound).

2005-07-01T16:28:00.000-04:00

O'Connor Retiring (tip to VC)

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee and the first woman on the Supreme Court, is retiring at the end of the term. She is 75 and has served on the Court for 24 years. This will be the first appointment to SCOTUS in 11 years, and the first of Bush's presidency.

The obvious opening is that replacing O'Connor with a Justice that opposes the Stenberg v. Carhart ruling would tip the court on partial-birth abortion. However, the right to abortion itself, under something like Casey, would still very likely be maintained by Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kennedy.

Here's hoping Bush makes a good nomination. No doubt the left groups like People for the American Way will grouse about a filibuster and will smear the nominee. The vote will probably not be one those near-unanimous affairs. There's a good chance the nominee will be a woman, since it's O'Connor's seat. That would also make it much harder to unfairly smear the nominee as an old, rich, white man that wants to "turn back the clock."

2005-06-30T15:25:00.000-04:00

30 Days Documentary Slant

I've been seeing a lot of commercials for 30 Days, a "documentary" where the main character lives as an American Muslim for a month. I figured it was supposed to be a learning experience for all involved and in the end the audience was supposed to come away with a greater understanding of how Muslims live and the differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. Apparently the show is actually tailored not only to that end, but to show that there's a great deal Islamophobia in the country and that Muslims are the real victims of 9/11. More than that, the director Morgan Spurlock is the same guy who did Super-Size Me.

Debbie Schlussel was going to be in the documentary. She had this to say in a piece about it:

Glad to see we're dealing with a thorough, rigorous analysis from an informed, educated investigator.

Now I don't mind the idea of a slant on principle, since people are free to give biased opinions all the time. I do mind that something portrays itself as objective and informative when in fact it's pre-decided to favor one position. I also mind that the slant in question involves an overly narrow view of the information at hand. The fact is that there are Muslims that love America, Muslims that hate America, and Muslims somewhere in between. It doesn't foster long-term understanding or tolerance if we proceed based on lies or misinformation. It serves the goal of anti-bigotry to give an honest assessment, because if in the future we found out something bad about some American Muslims that we were told does not happen, then it could cast doubt on the argument the lies were made to serve.

What the hell is with the left and fake documentaries?

2005-06-29T16:45:00.000-04:00

Global Warming Sham
#5 Medicine or Trees

Economics is the distribution of scarce resources; opportunity cost is whatever you can't do that mutually exclusive with what you decide to do. The basic lesson of economics is that we have limited time, energy, labor and capital. Given that, priorities for spending our resources are a necessary step.

If resources are spent on global warming, either in limiting our current energy output or in controlling or altering it, then those are resources that can't be spent elsewhere. If we simply cut energy output (as I suspect most environmental religionists would prefer) then we have fewer resources to distribute.

Now let's remember that poverty, disease, illiteracy and malnourishment are still problems around the world, especially in the less developed parts of the world. If we're serious about fighting the problems of want then we're going to need more resources, not fewer. AIDS research, pharmaceutical production, fighting malaria, making and shipping clothes, building sturdier homes, constructing sanitary sewage systems, implementing water drainage and sanitation technology, and improving hospitals are all important for the quality of life around the world, but especially in the poorest parts of it.

Environmental activists would probably like to say that we can do both, or even that a government that was "environmentally responsible" (what a misnomer that is) would be more interested in aiding the poor. The fact is that, despite their attempts to please everybody all at once, it's just not possible. The first rules of economics about scarcity and opportunity cost hold true; we can't spend on everything because time, energy and resources are limited. You simply can't please everyone and you can't do everything. In this case, the goal of less energy and less productive output is directly at odds with the desires of the poorer people in the world that would benefit from medicine, food and shelter.

If we're going to first decrease the amount of resources we have available to spend, then regulate an increase in the cost of energy, and then spend more of the remainder on forests and swamps and tundra, then we're going to find it very difficult to ship needed supplies and aid to Africa, Asia and elsewhere. In fact, we'd be reserving energy to an even wealthier subset of human beings who could afford the premiums that environmental regulations require. Environemntalism could have some very inegalitarian effects in this case.

We need to set priorities. Climate change is hard to understand, highly difficult to predict, unlikely to be affected substantially by human reductions in carbons, and would probably include longer growing seasons and warmer winters. Contrarily, malaria, malnourishment, famine and inadequate shelter are all easy to recognize and easy to solve, while AIDS is an obvious threat to millions upon millions of people. We can prove that an avoidable lack of resources is negatively affecting people's lives right now, but we can't prove that climate change is readily avoidable or that it would be an obvious threat even if it does come true.

Setting priorities, it makes a lot more sense to increase our resources so that we have more to help develop the poorest parts of the world rather than impoverishing the entire world for the sake of an unproven threat.

WEBSITE: This is available on the website under issue articles along with the other Global Warming Sham essays here.

2005-06-29T16:44:00.000-04:00

Global Warming Sham
#4 Colder Isn't Always Better

We are constantly inundated by media and pressure groups about the catastrophe that would come with climate change. The world will end, diseases will spread, deserts and swamps everywhere, mass extinctions, political instability, economic depression, and millions dead. In other words, they sound a lot like the Y2K survivalists.

If global warming were to come, what would be affected first? News reports like to talk about the ice caps melting, deserts advancing and floods over much of the Earth. Of course, if global warming is real then there has to be a starting point because all that stuff wouldn't happen overnight. That starting point for warming would actually be where it's most needed: in the coldest parts of the planet and at the coldest times.

Northernmost regions, at night, during winter, are going to see the first effects of warming. This means that these places would be more habitable for humans and more hospitable for plants and crops. It means growing seasons would be longer. It means fewer fatalities due to weather. In short, it means a better planet to live on.

This isn't to say that all warming would be good, but it's important to retain some perspective on the issue. On the whole, it wouldn't be so horrible if more parts of the Earth were easier for animals and humans to live in and produce food from. Lives would be saved and improved from that change.

A good example is the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted roughly from the 900s to the 1300s and saw increased temperatures for Europe and the northern Atlantic. Winters were shorter and warmer. Ice receded around Scandinavia and allowed colonization of Iceland, greenland and newfoundland. It was during the MWP that the Vikings probably sailed to North America. Grapes grew in southern England, which is 300 miles north of their current northern limit (in France).

The Medieval climate optimum ended in the 14th century - just as the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe's population. There's a good chance that fewer warm bodies and decreased agricultural production helped bring about the end of the MWP and replace it with the Little Ice Age (which ended in the 1800s, as Europe's population began to boom). The decrease of heat-generating sunspots and the increase of volcanic ash probably converged with other factors to cause this shift. What was the result when the boom-time ended?

Colonies in Greenland and the northern Atlantic were lost, isolated from food and resources back home. Iceland was often completely surrounded by ice and had no port access, coinciding with the collapse of the government there. Because the LIA concided with the Black Death, it's perhaps misleading to say that crop yields saw major reductions, but it's definitely true that crops did not grow as well or as far north as they had earlier.

A warmer winter is in many respects a very good thing. It allows more crops to be grown, it means fewer deaths to cold, fewer resources spent fighting the weather, and a more hospitable world. Is this what we're going to spend billions and trillions trying to avoid? That's a pretty flimsy rationale.

Certainly global warming can have very dangerous consequences for human beings if it's out of control. But every indication is that the coldest parts of the planet would improve with warming and that they would be the first things affected.

WEBSITE: This is available on the website under issue articles along with the other Global Warming Sham essays here.

2005-06-29T13:42:00.000-04:00

Leave Baseball Alone Already

Stupid Congress. It wasn't enough that they had to root around and try to find out if baseball players might be trying to ENHANCE THEIR PERFORMANCE! The horror! Now two Republicans, Sweeney from NY and Davis from VA (formerly a Democrat, then an Independent for one term) are making open grumblings about a financial group headed by George Soros buying the new DC baseball team. Just leave baseball alone.

Baseball should police drug violators itself, like the Olympics. But does it really matter that Soros wants pot legal and opposed the war in Iraq? Not really a baseball issue at all. In fact, it seems to me that it's his right to hold his own political opinions. He's not a criminal and he's not being accused of theft or underhanded tactics, just of being on the wrong side of the political divide. Who cares?

Leave baseball alone. Go fix Social Security. While you're at it, run to Schumer's office and tell him to leave video games alone. Pack of no-goodniks, you all are.

2005-06-29T13:29:00.000-04:00

Europeans and The Wall

The Supreme Court's recent Ten Commandments decisions (allowing one on the lawn of public property, disallowing another inside public property) are not particularly well decided. I do think, however, that the standard of allowing the Ten Commandments as a historical piece is a good one - and that it should've been the standard for the whole Moore business in MS a couple years ago. After all, it's no different from having a portrait of Abraham Lincoln - a part of history that doesn't force anybody to believe in anything (pictures and monuments can't coerce you into a point of view).

Todd Zywicki at VC makes a good point though: why didn't the Court look to Canada and Europe for advice on the Establishment Clause? I have to say that the "cruel and unusual" part of the Eighth Amendment makes it more open to opinion polling, but the Court didn't draw such a neat line. It seems to me that they look to Europe when they can find results they already wanted.

If we did model ourselves after Europe, of course, we'd be forced to violate the First Amendment. The British, after all, still have their government officials involved in the appointment and elevation of bishops in the Church of England (also called Anglican or Episcopalian). That is clearly violative of Congress making no law respecting an establishment of religion (or else the establishment clause is almost meaningless). Public religious displays are widespread in Europe and elsewhere. Many countreies run religious schools on the public dime (such as Israel, which has a large system of public orthodox schools, and is a self-titled 'Jewish state'), including Muslim minority schools.

America itself was created in rejection fo Europe. For many years Americans saw Europe as backwards, conservative, violent, imperialistic, feudalistic, unequal, unfree and unfit for our role model. In fact, we saw ourselves as the role model for Europe to follow - and that's actually come to pass, with Europe largely abandoning monarchy, fascism and communism in favor of a grainy facsimile of American capitalism and democracy. The Civil War was popular in North not so much because of slavery, which most Yankees opposed, but because of union; it was argued and believed that breaking the American union would result in endless war, strife, tyranny and the death of representative government from the Earth. Americans favoring the war made very unfavorable comparisons between a divided America and the contemporary European model.

Our history is being better than Europe, and it's a bad sign that we'd try to move ourselves backwards to be more like them rather than moving forward to be objectively better.

2005-06-29T12:46:00.000-04:00

The God Metaphor

The idea thet liberty is "God's gift to mankind" is incredibly old and is part of the foundation of this country. It's not supposed to be taken literally, however. It's a metaphor for the universality of the moral imperative that is liberty. In other words, it's everywhere at all times -like God- and it's something that's inherently good and right to do -like God's will- which makes it a great metaphor. Many people believed it literally in the sense that God wanted liberty for us all. But the real message of it is as a metphor, and that's how people like Thomas Jefferson would've meant it. Jefferson, after all, was effectively a Deist (like Franklin and Paine and others) and believed that God didn't intervene in human affairs after creating us. To say that it was God's will that we should be free didn't mean God had told Jefferson anything, it meant that it was morally right and applicable to all.

Perhaps the deiphobia of the nihilist left in Canada and Europe finds even a metaphorical reference to God unhinging, but they should realize the real-world applications and arguments. The point is not religion, it's about freedom.

Had a leftist made an argument about Jesus commanding us to forgive criminals or help the poor then secularists and nihilists would have understood and cheered - anything to stick it to religious conservatives. Unfortunately most modern religious leftist rhetoric is not genuine but reclaimed. It used to be that there were many religious leftists but most of them are weak or gone from political circles. Religiously left rhetoric is often a secularist attempt to reclaim a moral high ground for socialism as God's work.

It's too bad that they can't see the same parallels in the 'God's gift to mankind' metaphor. You don't have to believe in God of any specific type or form and certainly God doesn't have to intervene for you to accept the phrase (if God did intervene to bring it about, we wouldn't need to argue about its possibility because it would've happened). It's just a way to communicate that freedom is inherently right for everyone, and that all ethnicities and religions and countries are irrelevant to the call of freedom. You'd think that sort of hug-the-world rhetoric would have the left come running, but apparently many of them hate a Texan accent more than they hate tyranny.

2005-06-29T12:09:00.000-04:00

Gitmo Conditions (tip to LGF)

After all the stupid gulag business from Amnesty and Durbin, I'd say that the case for judicious reform of the war on terror and the Patriot Act has been set way back. My view is that these people are being held for a crime and ought to be put on trial. While it's true that various international conventions allow holding a POW until the end of hostilities, we shouldn't wait until the end of the war on terror, because it's ill-defined. If we only started trying drug dealers at the end of hostilities in the war on drugs then we'd still be holding all of them.

Moreover, the US citizens are entitled to trials whether they were found on the battlefield or not. They still possess all their constitutional rights. Additionally, I think the government must be prevented from using any evidence int rial that the defendant and his lawyer cannot cross-examine. They want to use secret evidence that would preserve the secrecy of a source, but that's not appropriate for a courtroom. I don't really have an opinion on whether Gitmo is still the base, but it seems to me that it's more easily secured there than somewhere in the mainland.

I have to say, though, I find the evidence for 'torture' incredibly thin. Abu Ghraib was clearly torture conditions, but nothing similar has shown up from Gitmo. In fact, here's on observer's take on life at Camp Delta.

I disagree with the trial considerations currently taking place, especially for US citizens, but if even half this report is correct then it seems highly unlikely that any torture is going on. Would anyone call it torture if some of the detainees were punished for their insults with reduced rations or special confinement? I doubt it. Of course, the detainees probably WANT to be beaten and bruised so they have something to show observers and so forth that might visit.

Insufficient legal remedies? Definitely. Torture? Not at all.

2005-06-29T11:55:00.000-04:00

Economic Right and the Supreme Court

The Kelo case emphasizes something long-forgotten: the Supreme Court has as much trouble with economic issues as social ones. While the biggest cases are usually social, like abortion and religion, and most cases are procedural or criminal, a good deal of them have economic impacts. The biggest one is affirmative action, but Kelo is the sort of thing that could make a great deal of homeowners and small business owners uneasy. While many uses of eminent domain are against neighborhoods or homes, it's very common for small businesses to be replaced by bigger and/or more tax-generating businesses.

Of course, the wider fact is that the Supreme Court is so hostile to economic rights and business interests that it's a much more of a long-shot issue than throwing abortion back to the states or allowing more public prayer. Economic libertarians have normally been very marginalized in the legal community and have not mobilized with regard to nomination battles. There are legal scholars who espouse Lochner-style solutions to property and economic rights, but there's almost no real grassroots movement on the issue. Even the Institute For Justice, effectively the only libertarian public interest law firm (the ACLU is NOT libertarian, it's radical) is forced to spend its time on other issues. I'm not even sure if they take a positive view of Lochner or not, which is irrelevant because they'd have a hard time getting it back.

It's clear that the economic libertarians (social conservatives som etimes call them 'business conservatives' but conservative is a misnomer here) are not nearly as interested in the court nomination battles as the social lefties and the social conservatives. Given Kelo, I think it's clear that they should start taking an interest.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be aligned with the social conservatives. It's clear that the Democrats are incredibly hostile to economic and property rights, as some of Bush's nominees have been chastised for allegedly opposing zoning laws and eminent domain (which isn't necessarily true). Janice Rogers Brown, moreover, called the New Deal America's own socialist revolution, which received ire from the left.

But it's not immediately clear that the social conservatives are the right way to go here. They attack Roe and Casey not because they attack the foundation of legal personhood, but because they infringe on ... states' rights? They don't want to declare fetuses have a right to live, only that the federal government has no business on the issue (which could very well see abortion largely legalized in 30-odd states). They want to strip away unenumerated rights like privacy. Rather than using a framework of liberty to protect the unborn, they are attacking the structure that allows legalized abortion instead of the creators. The effect on strengthening economic rights like property is that they are

The political left espouses a very inconsistent and lopsided view of constitutional liberties that gives strong protections to unenumerated social rights but a great degree of latitude to the government on economic issues. The political right largely espouses an intellectually consistent view of strictly interpreting the laws - which means finding pretty weak rights all around, whether social or economic. This lets the social conservatives pass whatever interventionist laws they want at the state level, but it doesn't help small business owners when their state comes knocking on their door.

On the recent issue of eminent domain, it's true that social conservatives are angry about it and wnat it overturned. Their idea hgere is informed largely by the strict interpretation of "public use," but it does create a clear, particularist nexus between social conservative and business libertarians. The fact that it exists on one high-profile case doesn't mean it extends elsewhere, or that economic libertarians can expect much from nominees tailored to social conservative demands.

The compromise, then, is to pick nominees that can bridge the gap between the social and economic spheres of the GOP base. For a Supreme Court Justice, this might mean someone who strongly endorses Lochnerian unenumerated rights but uses them against abortion, and someone who takes a laissez-faire attitude to religious statues but a more hostile one to private-benefit eminent domain. Compromise is less likely, though, while the capitalists in the GOP stay either on the sidelines or in generic pro-nominee groups. Those advocating more rulings for economic freedom from the Supreme Court need to form an independent pressure group to make sure that our views are reflected in the nominees.

The culture war gets a lot of play in the media reports on judiciary battles, and it's time for the long-lost economic freedoms to truly re-enter the debate on nominations.

2005-06-29T00:03:00.000-04:00

Pelosi: Raiding SS is Great

Several days ago Nancy Pelosi said that Congress re-appropriating Social Security funds from the SS trust to other organs of government is a good thing because the interest will be paid back to the trust - and the interest will keep it solvent longer. Apparently nobody explained two things to Pelosi: 1) the money the government owes itself is going to have to be generated from somewhere, meaning that the interest isn't going to change any need for tax hikes or spending cuts, and 2) the government is obligated to meet Social Security payments whether or not it has interest obligations. The only thing loaning SS trust money back to itself does is hide the actual size of the budget deficit.

Of course, considering the Democrats are currently trying to play on fears and ignorance to block Social Security reform, it was not bright at all for Pelosi to make an argument that's both against conventional wisdom and somewhat involved. If she wanted to engage the Republicans in a forthright discussion about the fiscal aspects of retirement policy then she and Reid should come up with a PLAN beyond negation.

Given the polling data, Americans are in favor of personal accounts by a margin better than ten points. Those numbers widen when you exclude the over 55 groups - which would not be affected by any of the Republican proposals (it's funny that old people are so stubbornly conservative about Social Security that they won't even let it be changed for other people). When you narrow it down to the under 40 or even 25 and under crowds you get pretty lopsided results. These people are the energy of both parties and they are the future of political trends. By setting themselves against this groundswell, the Democrats are positioning themselves to be of greater and greater irrelevance as time goes on. It would be less of a factor if they'd even offer a plan, since the young people who are so bent on reform would do well to have a Democratic proposal to analyze and maybe support. In the absence of a plan, they could at least be less overtly hostile to pro-reform elements of their party, but Pelosi and Reid have been clamping down hard on their side to even offer proposals.

If the Republicans don't win even their latest plan, which is quite limited in scope, then at least expect reform to come soon. They've proven that Social Security isn't a third rail and polls show that majorities consistently favor various reform proposals. Social Security will be changed, whether or not the Democrats boo from the sidelines or try and offer some measures of their own.

2005-06-28T16:50:00.000-04:00

Unocal Mercantilism

The argument about the Chinese trying to buy Unocal provokes hesitance and opposition over the deal from many different people. The argument from people otherwise disposed to free trade and open markets is that oil is a strategic asset and China is untrustworthy or hostile.

Last things first, China isn't a good country, nor is it a particularly friendly country. But it's not a major threat. We still possess the nuclear deterrent and we're working on methods to shoot down missiles fired our way. Taiwan alone could probably beat the Chinese in a shooting war, so long as the US was there to keep nukes off the table. Add Japan, Australia and Great Britain to the mess (maybe Canada and New Zealand and a slew of Latin American countries and Asians fearful of attack, and maybe even Russian assistance) and you have one seriously lost war for China. While 1.2 billion people sounds impressive, you still have to arm them, train them, move them and command them. The fact is that China's army isn't as good as ours and it's not going to be for a while. They're not a major military threat to us and that means we have the ability to keep them from being major military threats to other countries.

While it's definitely true that the Chinese Communists are both evil and pugnacious in many of their activities, is that any less true of the Saudis or others? Are they not also pretty despicable in their behavior? The fact is that the Chinese are invested in us and we're invested in them. Our companies and factories are in their borders and our two countries are enriching each other as we speak. We're intertwined. If our economy started to slow, so too would theirs. Moreover if they started behaving belligerently or depriving us of oil then we'd have time to make a response. The fact is that they have little interest in screwing us over and they'd have limited ability to do so even if we let them buy Unocal.

Second, if oil is a strategic asset that we shouldn't be letting other countries control, then why do we buy over half of ours from other countries? More to the point, why should those other countries sell to us? If we try to hoard all the "strategic assets" to ourselves then so will other countries. If we don't trust the international market that we've tried to spread around the world, then why should other countries? We're not perfect in free trade by any means, but other countries have needed prodding to get as far as they have.

We'd see a partial reverse in globalization. Demand could rise in response to a new emphasis on obtaning "strategic assets" and supply could be restricted as it became more difficult to obtain across borders. Efficiency could also drop as more "strategic assets" were stockpiled in preparation for shortages and thus various resources like oil, steel and coal would go underutilized.

The fact is that necessary goods and services will exist and that we can't do it all ourselves - and we certainly can't do it by ourselves as effectively as we could in an open global trade regime. Just what is a strategic asset, anyway? Oil, coal, steel, wheat, grain, dairy, butter, salt, rubber, what? Our military needs a lot of stuff to go, as does our economy. In fact, a large portion of our economy is necessary to keep other parts of it going, everything from gas to paper and pens is critical to our economy's current operations. The bureaucracy alone involved in monitoring and controlling "strategic asset" industries is scarcely worth any risks avoided.

Moreover, it really weakens our arguments for free trade agreements when we partake in it so inconsistently. People will accept an inconsistent trade policy as long as our movement is in a pretty consistent direction. Taking such a self-interested view of the policy destroys a good chunk of US credibility on the issue.

Maybe blocking this one purchase won't counteract all the free trade initiatives of the last sixty years. After all, we still have plenty of tariffs, NTBs and subsidies, not to mention a wealth of strategic exemptions. But I do know that moving in that direction is the wrong way to go. We shouldn't try to do everything ourselves because it's difficult and inefficient at best and impoverishing and doomed to failure at worst.

2005-06-28T15:53:00.000-04:00

God Bless This Smartass

A real estate developer in New Hampshire wants to use eminent domain to condemn Justice Souter's house in Weare and replace it with a hotel. It would be called Lost Liberty Hotel and every room would come with a copy of Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Apparently he's actually serious about this project (which would raise a couple questions about hypocrisy) and says he needs Souter's house because Souter is so relevant to the loss of liberty.

Still it's nice to hit Souter where he lives. Sorry, that was too obvious to avoid.

2005-06-28T15:42:00.000-04:00

Fleet Review for Trafalgar 200

The Queen of England, in a fit of attempted relevance, overlooked the British fleet in an International Fleet Review yesterday - the first since her 1977 silver jubilee. The preparations are for the 200th anniversay of Trafalgar this October. The Battle of Trafalgar was set in southwestern Spain near Gibraltar in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars. Britain was threatened with invasion and had formed a naval blockade of France.

Admiral Lord Nelson commanded a British fleet of 27 ships against 33 French and Spanish ships. Though Nelson died in the battle, he was widely regarded as a larger than life hero for his command of the engagement, during with the French lost 22 ships (two out of every three) and the British lost none. A sniper on the French ship Redoubtable shot Nelson in the shoulder, piercing his lung. Nelson did not die until four hours later, shortly after the battle was completed, and was conscious during the engagement. As the two fleets sailed toward each other, Nelson strung up a 31-flag message (each flag representing a number 0-9) that said, "England expects that every man will do his duty." The message is still repeated and paraphrased in Britain today. The HMS Victory, Nelson's flag ship, is still commissioned as a museum ship and sits in dry dock in Portsmouth; it flies the 31-flag message every October 21st.

The Battle of Trafalgar meant that Napoleon's plans to invade England, which Napoleon himself seemed to have been doubting or delaying before the battle, were well out of reach. His naval ability to protect landing craft was already doubted by Napoleon, but this battle drove the point home. It allowed the British to focus on fighting Napoleon on the constinent instead of playing defense.

More than that, it cemented the position of the British as the ultimate naval power of Europe and the world. That position would never even be challenged until the 20th century and German failed attempts to beat Britain in a naval arms race. The French never again attempted a major naval engagement against the British.

The re-enactment of trafalgar, for political and diplomatic reasons, will pit the Red and Blue Fleets against each other. This way the ceremony seems less about defeating the French and Spanish.

2005-06-27T19:56:00.000-04:00

SPD-PDS Berlin Gov't Tearing Down Wall Memorial (tip to Medienkritik)

The Berlin Wall memorial stands as a monument to the many who died attempting to cross the wall and flee the tyranny of the Stasi and East german communism. Unfortunately, the current Berlin government is composed of a coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the Party of Democratic Socialism that together seek to tear down the monument.

They argue that the memorial is too much like Disneyland, though that's an absurd argument given the rows of over 1,000 crosses. It's more like a graveyard than an amusement park. They also argue that the Berlin Wall memorial is too similar to the Holocaust Memorial at Brandenburg Gate (also in Berlin) that the berlin Wall should not be equated with the Holocaust and the Third Reich.

No doubt one of the main motivations here is that the PDS was the ruling East german Communist Party during the Soviet era and institutionally they were the ones who pushed for creating and maintaining the wall. No wonder they don't want to be reminded about those killed attempting escape.

In pricniple moving or demolishing a memorial isn't attacking it so long as respect for the intent of the memorial is clear. If they wanted to move it somewhere else or change it then they would say so. As it is they seem to be acting like the Japanese right-wing acts toward the Rape of nanking - forgive, forget, move on, play dumb.

The Berlin Wall was a symbolic and imposing evil that was a wonderful metaphor for the entire Cold War. It's not something that should be forgotten or downplayed. Whatever happened to the Germans feeling collective guilt for past wrongs? Seems like the left-wing needs to be reminded of it more than the right-wing (for now).

2005-06-26T13:14:00.000-04:00

Kelo Disaster

A lot of people online are angry about the Kelo decision handed by the Supreme Court that entrenched the right of states to use eminent domain against non-blighted neighborhoods if the state believed it would increase tax revenues. Many instances of eminent domain involve replacing a perfectly safe and clean homeowner or businessowner with a denser residential area or a bigger business - both intended to market to more upscale consumers - thus bumping up revenue for the city.

Of course, condemning a used-car dealership to replace it with a new BMW dealership (it happened in a town in Kansas recently) isn't exactly "public use" as the Fifth Amendment states. That's a private use, even if some locals benefit directly and many benefit indirectly from the tax revenue. What's funny is that the lefties on the Court along with kennedy found for the city of New London, even though private usage of eminent domain is overwhelmingly done for corporations, real estate developers and wealthy businesses at the expense of homeowners, small businesses and others like local churches. It's a distinctly un-left result, at least compared to how they see themselves, to legitimize a practice that explicitly empowers wealthier and larger groups against less-wealthy and smaller groups. But that's how it works - after all, how would tax revenue be improved if it were the other way around.

This is a blanket negation of property. You no longer own your home, you merely paid to live there and at any moment the state or county can come in and uproot you if they want to use THEIR land differently. That's the essence of the decision; states and cities can decide when people ought to move, rather than the property owners in question.

Most people opposed to the decision don't come up with an exact view of what the Fifth Amendment really requires with regard to eminent domain. I've been searching since the decision came down yesterday and I've found lots of information but very little in the way of a comprehensive alternative. I believe I've formulated one, however.

1) Right off the bat, let's reaffirm one principle. Property is a constitutional right. That's important to remember and explicitly acknowledge.

2) Since property is a right, any eminent domain taking - assuming it's just - would have to be done through due process. The Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment make this explicit.
The Fifth says: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."
The Fourteenth says: "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."
Given these two passages (and the Ninth Amendment, which I apparently cite in almost every single hypothetical court opinion) the right to property exists, and it's given ironclad protections through due process. Any eminent domain taking, even if it's valid, must go through the courts for due process. In other words, you have to sue somebody to get their property, and they get all the regular Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections. This protects property owners from the horror stories about people who had seven days to contest takings attempts or who bought property without being told that it had already semi-secretly been condemned via eminent domain.

3) "Public use" means that the government cannot simply fork it over to somebody willing to pay more taxes. Eugene Volokh brought up a good point that it's often better to have private entities contracting public services rather than have the government do the job itself, and that a definition of public use forcing the government to take over the high-end restaurants, car dealerships and housing complexes would perversely create a larger government despite such a check on government. That concern aside, public use must mean something. It really doesn't make sense that the only limit from those two words is that any property taken must result in something better than that which came before it - better, after all, is defined by the legislatures and not the courts. Public use means some government operation like for example roads; it doesn't just mean something that some of the public would like (especially since the legislature would be the barometer of whether the public likes it). In Kelo, the developers do not meet this requirement; if they want to develop the area, let them offer as much money to the holdouts as it takes.

4) "Just compensation" means repayment that is fair, right, appropriate or based on sound reason. Usually the courts say this means the market value. It's important for the government in question to consider the costs of replacement; the example that comes to mind is US v. Cors (1950), a WWII incident where government demand had dramatically increased the cost of tugboats but the Supreme Court let the government get away with paying a pre-war price for a legally stolen tug. That was a flawed finding, because "just comepnsation" must include the cost of replacement, and the tug owner could not have purchased a new tug solely with the compensation he received because no tug seller would accept the argument that prices USED to be lower.

However the replacement costs are not the sole indicator either. In US v. Felin (1948) the government, as part of FDR's statist-syndicalist war government, seized a large amount of pork products after the producer refused to sell them at the government's price ceiling (which was below the cost of making the products). Similarly, SCOTUS heard in US v. Commodities Corp. (1950) a case where pepper had been seized and compensated at the artificial price ceiling. This is incredibly wrong, both legally and morally. First of all, the cost of initial investment must act as a minimum standard, by simple logic. If person paid $100 for supplies he then turns into processed pepper then the government owes him $100 in compensation - including any associated costs of labor and capital (like machinery maintenance). But beyond that, it's flat out morally wrong to let the government announce a price ceiling and then, when producers refuse to be forced out of business by the government, to seize their stuff at the price they themselves set.

Compensation is holistic and isn't limited to the monetary value of the thing that was legally stolen by the government; just compensation must be at least enough to cover all costs of relocation and replacement, and to make sure that the lives or businesses of those expelled are disrupted as little as possible If this sounds like a high hurdle then that's only because it is. "Just" means morally right as well as legally valid and reasonable. The most appropriate way, of course, is to secure the consent of the homeowners by increasing the offer until they agree and sign over their property.

But the minimum for just compensation should follow all the steps on this check list: a) start the compensation from the market value as determined by comparable properties; b) the compensation must be high enough to meet all replacement costs, including any costs of relacation or acquiring new permits, or of advertising the new location for a serized business, or of increased transportation costs for a sized home; c) the compensation must be at least the production costs, even if such value is not represented in the market value of the home, and production costs include improvements, labor, capital and other significant factors; and d) government price ceilings on the seized property cannot lower the compensation and must be disregarded as much as is reasonably possible (this does not apply to price controls on goods and services related to improving or producing the property, which are not a factor here).

Those are the fourt things I would hope to find in an eminent domain case that would lay out the board principles that restrict this governmental power. Of course, beyond that I'd hope to see something else: a constitutional amendment banning eminent domain. Unfortunately, the Fifth Amendment seems to be fairly clear that takings are allowed, as the Founders set to restricting its abuse, and not to prohibiting it outright. I think we need to clear that up. Here's a proposed amendment I found that I scribbled in the back of Judge Andrew Napolitano's book Constitutional Chaos (I highly recommend it to all).

The right of the people to be secure in their property and assets from eminent domain and takings for public use or public benefit, shall not be infringed, nor shall property or assets be seized except in punishment of a crime and through due process, nor shall the Congress or the several states take any action that substantively depreciates the value of private property without paying full compensation.Of course, if we really did this then the Sixteenth Amendment would have just been repealed. What else is a tax but taking assets for public use? Obviously this wouldn't pass without some new wording to allow the hated income tax - and all taxes, except for user fees - to continue. Something like "This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the power of the Congress or the states to lay and collect taxes" would do the trick.

On a related takings issue that wasn't part of Kelo, the government also ought to be forced to pay proportional compensation for partial takings, like when they decrease the value of property by some regulations or law limiting the use of that property. A partial limit on the whole of a property is equivalent to a whole taking of a portion of a property. If the government regulates away half the value of a piece of property then it owes just compensation, the same as if it had taken half the property outright. Either way, the government took half the value and you deserve to be compensated for the infringement of your property rights.