Attitude Check

Please take a look at the following news story:

The Scotsman - International - Mystery group wage war on Sadr's militia

Now gage your attitude against the following chart:

a) Optimistic (People in Iraq do want a representative secular government)
b) Pessimistic (Just another group of thugs looking to carve out a power base)
c) Opportunistic (Hopefully the Marines will make contact with these people and offer whatever material they need)
d) Paranoid (Who you kidding? You know that its only a team of US Special Forces operating behind enemy lines)
e) Pragmatic (What does it matter why whoever is doing this, so long as it helps end the fighting quickly)

My answer: e

Link via Instapundit

For the Geek in All of Us

Not much happens in this little bit of Flash, but here's your chance to briefly wield the Light Sabres of the Star Wars Saga.

Link via Venomous Kate

"I Don't Feel Bitter At All, Why Do You Ask?"

Divorce can leave an ugly legacy. And I don't mean just the pictures. If you are looking for a particularly pricey wedding dress with a history check out this item on E-Bay quickly. Just keep scrolling downward.

Score One for Rummy

Via Instapundit.com comes this quote from a recent press briefing by Donald Rumsfeld. Making a note of how some in the media spin the news, he said:

There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to headline saying that Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques. That would be one way to present the information.

Another might be to say: Mosques Targeted in Fallujah. That was the Los Angeles Times headline this morning.


Alright, maybe using the "Terrorists" word would be a bit too right leaning. Let's compromise and say Insurgents Attack Coalition Forces from Mosques. Still gives the proper initiator/responder correlation.

The Inevitable Gas Crunch

Via Vodkapundit comes this article:

Running On Empty (washingtonpost.com)

detailing the situation facing motorists in America. Living in Southern California, I'm used to habing to pay upwards of thirty cents more than the national average for a gallon of gas. What I did not know is that the US is not only a net importer of oil, but it is also a net importer of refined gasoline. Our refineries do not have the capacity to produce all of the gasoline we use. As the government adds more and more requirements for the formulation of gasoline, the fewer and fewer foreign sources will be capable of providing what we want to buy. I would doubt seriously that any of the gas that I buy in California is imported as this state has even tighter regulations than the national standards.

As a free-market libertarian, I'll bite the bullet and stick with my principles. The only way to ride the inevitable price increases is to let it happen. Much as I know that it will slow down the economy in general, allowing market forces to work things out will be the path of least pain. The article's reference to increasing the fuel efficiency mandates would be redundant as people will increase the importance of fuel efficiency in their purchasing as prices rise. Standard engine SUV's will take a big hit, with manufacturing in those lines facing lay-offs and reorganizing. The flip side of that is going to be a harder push toward hybrid vehicles whose efficiencies start in the 40 mpg at minimum, and bigger numbers in that stat will be a key selling point, so look for increases there.

I don't see much expansion in refinery capacity in the near future. The article points out that it takes three years, minimum, to go from planning to production, and that does not take permitting into account with all of its attendant political hassles. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are not likely, in my opinion to get much traction from this unless gas prices hit about $4 per gallon, and then add another five or six years at that level so that the switch-over costs are competitive.

You Call That Evidence?

Today just seems to be a day of random thoughts, so why not go with it?

The way in which a person's bias can be most clearly seen is in the way that person evaluates evidence. I had a conversation over the weekend in which the matter of Bush being AWOL from the National Guard was proven by the fact that Bush could find only one old man who was a general at the time who was obviously partisan while a pile of papers showing that he was paid, had signed in for meetings in accordance with regulations and had partaken of the required physical examinations were not proof to the contrary. While it was never said out loud, the implication was that all of the "evidence" to the contrary was false, that they were lies.

It has been said that the playing of the "Liar" card must bring to a halt any principled or useful discussion. That is because the "Liar" card gives its user carte blanche to disregard any point or article of evidence on its face because of its presenter, not on its merits. Accusations of lying deny the opposition any opportunity to add value to the discussion by requiring that the accusers acceded to any new information being brought to the table.

It is in this way that any bias on the part of reporters becomes important. By deciding what evidence is important to the way a situation truly is, the reporter is the gatekeeper. This has to be done before the information is even discovered, a process that decides which questions need to be asked. For many years, the product of this process was the sum total of all of the information that was included in the public debate. As the ages old computer axiom goes: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Overcategorization

Humans always try to organize their world according to how things relate to one another. We are so good at it that the process tends to get carried away. I confess to falling prey to that tendency as well.

In politics, people slam each other with labels of right and left. If anything, I tend to the barest right of full on libertarian. When I see those who fall into the convenient left category and I listen to their arguments, I discover that I am getting lost more often than not. The problem is one of trying to fit too many points of view into an easy box. So, I'm putting out my list of apparent assumptions of various members of the "left".

George Bush (and his administration) is an idiot.
George Bush (and his administration) is an evil genius.
George Bush (ditto) is a Republican with all of the evil that entails.
George Bush (ditto) is not a Democrat with all of the goodness that entails.

This is a work in progress, comments, as always, are valued more than gold. Not really, and if you can find a way and actually send some gold, I'll be your friend for life.

A Question from One Too Young to Remember.

Take a look at the last things Sen. Kerry said in this transcript of his Good Morning America appearance. If I read the poorly transcribed words correctly, then he is saying that there is no difference between Bush and Nixon.

I'm all for parsing out analogies, so lets try this one on. George Bush has lead us into war in Afganistan and Iraq. Wasn't Richard Nixon the one that got us out of Viet Nam? Shouldn't that mean that Nixon was the one who did what war protestors like John Kerry wanted him to do?

Proper Use of Analogy

Reading through Daily Kos and a round up of Iraq news. Toward the end is a quote from Ahmad Chalabi. The issue is the ban on the Baath Party from any role in the new government. Chalabi said:

"This is like allowing Nazis into the German government immediately after World War Two,"

The poster then wrote:

Someone needs to tell Chalabi about Godwin's Law.

Godwin's Law pertains to the use of overheated rhetoric invoking Nazis in usenet discussions. The implication is that referencing the Nazis was unwarranted, an unnecessary analogy. Let us examine the parellels that Chalabi mentions.

The Nazi Party and the Baath Party were both lead by megalomaniacal leaders.

Both parties outlawed any type of democracy in their lands.

Both parties murdered mind boggling numbers of their own citizens.

Neither relinquished power willingly.

Both were banned from future government out of fear that they would sieze power again.

From the way it looks to me, this analogy is spot on. Certainly better than any of the Bush=Hitler comments I've seen on signs around town, and definitely not deserving of the snarky comment from Dem From CT.

I Couldn't Say it Better

It is always cool to find someone making the same point that I had earlier. The fun in this whole writing business is to see my ideas as they stand in the real world. I went on at length a couple of weeks ago about American Ideals and Interests in Iraq. The thrust was that the war in Iraq did not limit itself to being only about American interests or ideals, but was about advancing our interests through spreading our ideals.

Senator John McCain put it far more succinctly:

"In Iraq our national security interests and our national values converge. Iraq is truly the test of a generation, for America and for our role in the world. Faced with similar challenges, previous generations of Americans have passed such tests with honor. It is now our turn to demonstrate that our power, ennobled by our principles, is the greatest force for good on earth today. Iraq's transformation into a secure democracy and a force for freedom in the greater Middle East is the calling of our age. We can succeed. We must succeed.

We are trying to make our lives better by making other people's lives better. It may seem arrogant that we chose to impose this freedom on others, causing them some pain in the process. If one were to look closely at how things truly were under the Hussein regime, then what we have done is actually a relatively gentle cure for the sickness that was there.

Quote via Andrew Sullivan

Where's the Street?

During the lead up to the war in Iraq, I kept hearing references to the "Arab Street", the code for Mr. Mohammed Q. Public of the muslim world. Whatever reports we get out of that part of the world are largely unreliable, largely due to the ingrained fear of anything one says being used against them. What occurs to me is that the only terrrorists for which I have heard any great details about, namely the 9/11 19 and the upper echelons of Al-Qaeda, all seem to come from well-heeled, affluent families. Palestinian attackers seem to fulfill the prophesy of the street, but I believe that to be the result of having the enemy in one's face almost constantly. Those who would go across continents to strike at an enemy must be acting on a more abstract, disconnected from the here and now, level. If I recall correctly, all of the 19 were college educated. A cliche about a college education is that it expands your horizons. A person fighting off the pressures of poverty can not look very far beyond his immediate surroundings. If there is an enemy within sight, then that enemy can be targetted. If one has the leisure to pursue an education, then one can contemplate the larger picture and allow that people and places one may never see in person can influence one's life. From this pool are those who will be willing to "fight" in some far off land.

The Arab Street, consisting of those whose lives seldom reach past their neighborhoods, will have it's direct effect on very small scales. As such, it is a valid concern for the CPA. The longer that grievances are allowed to build with an easily identifiable target, the greater the opposition and threat to American troops. That anger, however, would be very difficult to turn to places very far from home. It is much easier to mobilise against a threat in one's own backyard, but much more difficult to go after a target on another continent. Only those who have been trained to think on a global scale can be easily recruited to carry out action on that scale.

Also, the elites who form the cadres of foreign action are more dependant on the street than the street is on them. If rule of law and free markets are successful in improving the prosperity of the Arab Street, then the theoretical lack of will to terrorism will tend to trickle up, either as a reduction of revolutionary fervor in the old guard or as a neuvaux riche class develops and subsumes the old guard.

The Price of War

Everything is economics. Every decision that a person makes takes a cost in what the decision requires, what you can't otherwise do, and whatever penalties come of it, and a benefit in the good things that come and the bad things that don't happen. In Iraq, we are trying to establish the some of the good thing we have in America, rule of law, personal liberty, etc., in the hopes that Iraq can earn some of the posperity that we take for granted and show the rest of the region that it is the structure of their governments and not the US that is holding them in poverty.

If the Iraqi method is to make the situation suitable for the carrot, the Palestinians are learning the sting of the stick. The intifada against Israel is causing vast increases in poverty. Granted, the Palestinian situation was not great to begin with, but when a person has little, they tend to be more dependant upon it. Whatever authority there is in Palestine is going to have to keep an eye out on their own. If they get hungry enough, and see the means to food with the other side, Hammas et al. are going to get a revolution, just not in the direction they wanted.

So What Are We Doing Here?

I've been out of the 'sphere for a few days now, and the whole "Does Wonkette deserve her rep?" issue seems to the be the latest hot button. The Lovely and Talented Kate throws down not on Wonkette herself but on the discussion of whether the blogosphere is a proper replacement for big media.

I am big on figurative navel gazing. I tried literal navel gazing and am too disturbed by the results to try that again. In that spirit, I am going to pitch in my figurative two cents in:

Bloggers should not seek to replace big media. Perhaps on the whole the blogosphere has the writers, but its forte is not on the level of data collection. I think the best use of blogging is to magnify the individual voices that occupy the innumerable points of view that surround every story. The rate of feedback between fact, opinion, theory, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is the true strength of the blogosphere. If one were to rely on big media alone, then only a few points of view, interpretations of events, could be heard and the discussion would happen at the leisurely (yawn) pace that it always has. In the blogosphere you suddenly have a huge crew working at examining all of the permutations of the data in every philosophical framework imaginable. Those results are fed back into the machine, and reactions to the reactions occur. Not only do bloggers fact check the Big Boys, but they also fact check one another. Ideas that don't hold water die quickly, while the ones that survive first read get acid tested in the previously mentioned every viewpoint possible. The blogosphere is an environment for ideas where evolution has been speeded up a thousand-fold.

So, should the blogosphere replace Big Media? Absolutely not. Why should we limit ourselves to the lower level of mere data collection? Let Big Media continue to seek out "What happened?" The blogosphere is much better suited to question the editorial pages of Big Media, the level where the question is not "What happened?" but "What does it mean?"

This thought brought to you by some guy who might have had these ideas years ago, but you would not have known because he didn't feel like dedicating his life to journalism. Viva Blogspot, the primordial ooze of the blogosphere!

I Declare Shenanigans!

Either that or someone for whom idiomatic english is not their first language came up with this headline.

Link via Andrew Sullivan

Analogous Reasoning

Brian Micklethwait of Samizdata.net wrote an entry that pondered the concerns expressed in an article dealing with genetic engineering to achieve states of "better than health". The title he used: Is there perhaps a connection between the dangers of central planning and the dangers of genetic engineering? invokes a method that I use to a great deal on this blog, so I felt that I had to add my two cents worth.

Anything physical can be modeled with mathematics, and in my belief, so can the larger scale entities that evolve from those physical interactions, such as economies and societies. That being said, it does not mean that the math will be easy. Indeed, we have already cracked most of the easy ones such as the laws of kinetics and electrical circuits. Other problems, where we have the equations, are still intractible because of the need for perfect data to predict long term effects (we have the laws of thermodynamics down cold, but we still can't predict weather much past five days).

The difference between these two types of systems lies in the differential equations that define them. The easy differential equations are linear, the derivitives stand as they are. The hard ones are non-linear, the derivitives are squared, cubed, and even greater degrees of weirdness are imposed upon them. These as of yet unsolvable equations are the domain of chaos theory and what has become a whole new field of experimental mathematics.

Getting back to the Samizdata posting, I believe that there are really only a finite number of systems that are seen, systems that have a common number of derivitives that are raised to powers in the same places. This is sometimes found when the results of two different systems can be found to be driven by the same formulas. In one case (I believe this was referenced by James Gleick in his book Chaos) it was shown by a mathematician that the spasmodic movements of an eye due to a particular condition were similar to the motion of a ball in a semi-circular trough that was suspended as a pendulum. That all of the details of the strength and connectivity of the occular muscles did not exactly go over well with the optometrists at that conference.

It is possible that the equations for the biochemistry of the human body and the political operations of a human society may be of similar forms as well (so perhaps that old metaphor of the body politic isn't so far off). If those equations were to be found, and the necessary variable put into their respective places, then the variables that coincided in the similar places would be of a higher level of analogous. For instance, I sometimes picture stock markets and weather systems as being similar. If this were true, then I would believe that the sum total of money in the stock market would be analogous to the sum total of heat in the atmosphere. Both are the driving force within their systems, and all of the actions derive from them.

I am just now completing a promise to myself and finishing my first read of Popper's The Open Society and It's Enemies Vol. I. I definitely agree with his aversion to social engineering for the sake of acheiving utopia, and I too have a similar aversion to the idea of genetic engineering to acheive "better than health". I am more leery than Popper about "piecemeal engineering" however. One of the analogies I make is to propose an identity of the Butterfly Effect and Law of Unintended Consequences. Not to say that ameloriating deleterious effects (there goes by vocabulary budget for the day) is not wise, I would love to get rid of this pesky color-blindness, but that extreme care should be taken when making such changes. Wisdom won't come without pain, and wisdom is needed to avoid yet more.

Apology Forthcoming?

In all fairness, everyone from the military and media who covered this should make as much effort to get this story out as the original arrest and charges got. However, once the public eye turned from the case, the case turned into very little but an embarassment for the Army security services.

Captain James Yee was a muslim chaplin ministering to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. When news broke that he had been charged with aiding the prisoners in communicating for them to the outside world, it just struck a chord with the outwardly turned paranoia of the times. I'll admit that it worked for me with my cynical, Hollywood trained mind.

Today's news isn't even that charges of treason and espionage were dropped. What were dropped were lesser charges of adultery and misuse of a government computer for downloading pornography. Those charges were brought when a first apology might have been in order. Overall, not good for a government that is still trying to communicate that it is seeking a new balance between security and freedom.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

The Count is Now: 80

I just finished reading the interview: Oliver Stone's Twist - Is the director's latest film soft on Castro? By Ann Louise Bardach, and it just made me irate, hence the add to the count.

Stone comes off as so willing to give whatever rationalization to Castro that he becomes willfully blind. How on earth can he possibly believe that the prisoners would really be honest about how they were treated in prison with Fidel Castro sitting in the same room, hearing everything? Oliver Stone wouldn't believe an eye witness to the Kenedy assassination who has a film of Lee Harvey Oswald firing the gun and Kenedy's brains getting splattered if the guy so much as had a father whose cousin had roomed with a guy who once dated a stenographer for the FBI. Where was I? Oh, right. Evidently Mr. Stone is not one to handle evidence in an even handed and unbiased fashion.

On a scale of 1-10 (10 being that I'd believe he saw Elvis at Burger King if he told me) Oliver Stone's credibility score is a 2. Not a one or a zero, that low and I'd have to doubt that JFK really was assassinated.

Freedom Through Invention

Via Andrew Sullivan comes a link to the Rolex Awards for Enterprise. These awards are for inventions that have a great impact due to the use of simple inventions for fudamental problems in the lives of their communities. The link above describes the invention of a method for food preservation by refridgeration that uses no electricity, only a reliance on the simple rules of thermodynamics.

The lifetime of fruits and vegetables using this method, consisting of only two clay pots and wet sand, can be extended dramatically. For subsistence farmers, the difference eliminates the need to spend as much time selling the produce at market. That task has traditionally been done by young girls in the family. Now that their time is more open, these girls are starting to attend school in larger numbers.

With less spoilage occurring, some farmers are finding it possible to stay at their farms and not have to go look for work in the cities. This simple invention has slowed a major demographic trend in the area.

Everyone does what they do given the environment around them. One is only free with respect to physical reality. I can not fly like a bird merely by flapping my arms, nor am I free to get to New York in the next five minutes. With respect to the economic needs of their families, the girls were not free to go to school. Some farmers were not free to stay at their farms.

Technology is the means by which humanity changes its environment. With this blog, I am free to write words that are accesible all over the world at a moment's notice, a power that was only a dream twenty years ago. Some day people might be free to go to New York in five minutes or less provided teleporters are inventible.

Those are grand ideas, but even smaller ideas, like inexpensive refridgeration, can have vast repurcussions. Now that some of those girls can go to school, who can say whether one of them will be the next inventer, or at least inspire her children to invent.

Trends and Prognostications

Predicting the future for anything has always been tricky. Methods such as reading stars and the entrails of sanctified animals never really seemed to be all that effective, and despite all of our best technology, we can't get decent weather forecasts beyond five days.

Daily Kos takes a gander at the tea leaves and is already laying out the script for the right's withdrawal out of Iraq and inevitable ass covering. Aside from any political motivation, I want to examine the "Iraq is going to hell," statement and the trend that it implies.

Just about every prediction you here, be it crime rates, global warming, population, tax revenues, etc., tend to rely on the basis of "If present trends continue..." What strikes me is that very few people seem to realize what a whopping big assumption that is.

If one were to have a quantifiable value of how good things are in Iraq at any given moment, and use that value as the vertical axis with time as the horizontal axis, one could then observe the change of how things are in the country over time. The main thing to notice is that the graph would NOT be a straight line, the rate of improvement or deterioration will change over time. All predictions of the future rely on the graph suddenly freezing at the current rate of improvement/decline, a presumption that is the only one that can be categorically considered wrong. The prediction that Iraq is going to deteriorate far enough for the US to abandon the country is as unsupported by current events as rosy images of a free and prosperous Iraq in five to ten years based on shifting hold-out tactics three months ago.

Above all else remember: We are talking about human beings here on both sides. Each one has free will to exercise the power they have, from President Bush deciding to withdraw, nuke, or anything in between; to al Sadr aceding to the governing council or inciting his followers to martyrdom; to some random dude in the Shi'ite community joining a mob or saying, "Screw this", and going home to watch a soccer match. The impact and obviousness of that impact of each of those choices will vary, as will the size of that impact (Butterfly Effect). Either way, the best we can have is a plan and a readiness to follow through with it with our best considered actions to keep it on track.

As for me, I'll keep ignoring these long range prognostications until someone can tell me for certain if I'll need an umbrella for Thanksgiving.

The Definition of Ambivalence

No, I don't mean watching your mother-in-law driving off a cliff in your brand new H2.

I am definitely of two minds reading this story:

CNN.com - Stamos, Romijn-Stamos have separated

One part of me is sad to see any marriage come to an end.

The other part is trying desperate to come up with a way to discover if Rebecca did her own contorting in the X-men movies in person. This part is going to take me straight to hell, I know.

Information Wants to be Coherent

The term "fog of war" refers to the fact that it's never possible for anyone to truly know what's going on.

So begins an article from Stephen den Beste that looks at how information regarding war is dissemenated to the civilian population back home. He procedes to give a primer on how to read the news and actually come away with a semblence of the truth. His key observation is, "You have to look at a lot of different reports in order to figure out the true picture." While I think he means it as a criticism of the journalists writing the many different reports, I feel that he hit on something more fundamental.

No one is ever going to have the whole story on first read. I feel, however, that all of the information about the story is already available, and awaits assembly, some basic dot-connecting. The difficulty is that the dots for this story are mixed in with all of the dots from other stories and no one has bothered to number them. (I'll put this tortured metaphor out of its misery now and head onto another one)

The way the news and blogosphere are now is similar to the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, wherein several blind men attempt to describe an elephant by touching specific parts of it. When asked what an elephant is, they can not agree and fall into vigorous argument. Whether limited by a small amount of information or by philosophical blinders, reporters and bloggers give facts and opinions derived from a set of data that are far from comprehensive.

I could imagine in the fable that a wise blind man might have listened to each of his compatriots and considered that if each of the men were honest in his beliefs, then it would be possible that each was describing an aspect of the whole, and that the elephant was a totality of all reports. While the image of a combination of pot, ploughshare, blanket, etc., might seem ridiculous, the assembly would still be closer to the truth than any one impression.

That is why I spend so much time considering the differences between the ideologies of left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican. Merely having all of the views is not to have all of the information, because there is information in what report matches with what viewpoint. The blanket, ploughshare and pot would be an accurate description of the elephant only if one knows where each impression belongs. Similarly, if I know the values and premises of the reporter/blogger in relation to my own, then I can add his/her report into the data set in the proper place. Optimally, all of the data that actually describes the event (as opposed to not describing the event, ie mistaken or false reports) will be included and the fullest possible sense of the event can be reached.

That's the plan anyway, stay tuned to see if it works out.

The Matter of Perspective

I was taught in a debate class that if one does not understand the position of the other side, then one does not understand one's own position. For that reason I am linking to the Daily Kos and Eschaton, two of the more widely read liberal weblogs (see right). That is also why I take so much time contemplating what principles motivate the various sides of any issue. Knowing how an issue that seems to be one way to me appears to someone else in another position is helpful, but only if I know how that person's viewing position is related to mine. I like the idea that a large number of small scale views give a better description of an object that one single overarching view. The composite view of many viewers is less likely to be manipulated than the one grand viewer. Hearing one person's view is useful, but until I have a fix on where the view should be placed it is like a jigsaw puzzle piece that has yet to be affixed to the rest. I'm in this to learn what I can, express what I have learned and figured for myself, and to have it peer-reviewed. Much like a doctoral thesis, my goal is to add to the sum total knowledge and understanding in the world, one iota at a time.

Damned If You Do...

and damned if you don't.

Gregg Easterbrook nails it with a report from an alternate timeline detailing the impeachment and conviction of President George W. Bush in the summer of 2001. Obviously his actions would have turned America into a true rogue state:

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."

The real genius of this piece is that it recreates the blissful ignorance we were living in up to 9/11. I might not have put it this far as to invade a country on a flimsy pretext, but at the very least we would be having hearings on why the FBI had policies that mandated such blatant racial profiling as to arrest Mohammed Atta and 18 other men for merely being Arab and taking flying lessons.

Link via A Small Victory

Update: Thanks to Dan Spencer for the pointer to this article by Kathleen Parker at TownHall.com

Who Do We Think We Are?

Stephen Den Beste takes a critical look at a report on the atrocities committed by Saddam's regime. The facts of the report are not questioned, merely the author's belief that revelation of the atrocities would take the pressure off of Bush for the failure to find stockpiles of WMD. I respect Stephen particularly for his acknowledgement of his own naivety in having believed the same himself several months ago.

I have tried in the past, more than once, to understand the principles that drive both sides of the political divide in this country. Neither has proven entirely satisfactory, so here I go with another idea that shall satisfy just as much as the last times.

American hubris has been a favorite villain for decades. It has been a charge laid at the feet of the conservatives in our country by the resident liberals since the turn of the last century. In many cases, the charge sticks, the US government has in the past bent it's policies so that a select few could make profits, expanding their Liberty of Property, often in direct detriment to the Liberties of Property and Self of people in the way. That showed the old conservative hubris that the only interests in the world were American interests.

It was, and is, proper to protest such things, especially when they violated American ideals. In the War in Iraq, however, I believe that we actually are, for once, acting on our American principles. Granted, American interests are being served, and that we would not be acting unless they weren't. In this case, American interests and American ideals are congruent, and real good is happening for someone other than just ourselves.

Does this matter to the liberal opponents of President Bush? No. That is because they can only see that some American interests are being served and the fact that some people are being hurt and killed as a result. Whatever good is done, in this view, is thoroughly corrupted by the idea that Halliburton stands to make several millions of dollars in profits from the reconstruction. Its all about the oil, ya'know.

When you see this attitude in Americans, it shows a different type of arrogance. It assumes that the only evil that needs to be considered in the world is American evil. Any evil that happens is the result of past American hubris, and if America takes any action that is not utterly pure of motive, then we shall reap the whirlwind in some later time. America is responsible for Saddam Hussein having the power to do his evil, therefore America is to blame for all of Saddam Hussein's evil. Simultaneously, we can not act to remove him from power because to do so now may serve someone's interests to a greater degree than someone else's or may cause hurt to an innocent third party (most certainly an Iraqi).

The danger of this attitude is that it will paralyze the US from doing anything good for the world at all, because there is nothing the US can do that can not be spun as a benefit for some moneyed interest, real or imagined. The situation of Iraq is strange because Bush is unabashedly seeking to advance US interests by creating an Arab state that can serve as an example that the Islamic world can be improved through democracy and free market policies rather than through terrorism. The war in Iraq will not be won by the United States having more resources at the end of it all, but by Iraq having more resources and a better standard of living by the end of it all. Liberal objectors have themselves all turned around in knots, and far too many have opted to criticize the ultimate objective of American interests being served than the intermediate objective of Iraq become a freer and more prosperous place.

War in the Media

I happened upon some discussions of the latest outbreak of fighting in Iraq over atInstapundit.com. The view seems to be that the plans of al Sadr and the Baathists in Falluja are calculated to have as much impact on the TV watching public as they are on the soldiers they are fighting.

If that is the case, two can play at this game. I say it is time to call all of those embedded reports back into active duty. The more eyes on the scene, the more difficult manipulation becomes.

Find Some Priorities, Mr. Ashcroft

I had gotten to the point where I had thought that my bad opinion of John Ashcroft was a result of some seriously selective reporting. Now comes this crackdown on pornography that shows me that I should pay more attention to my first impressions. Add this to the story about how the Patriot Act is being used in cases with no connection to terrorism, and you can see my truly deep ambivalence to the Bush Administrations attitude toward law enforcement.

Note to everyone enamored with Federal authority: Get the hell out of my life. I do not need you to worry about what I am putting into my mind (pornography), or what I am putting into my body (super-sized fries). Why don't you just let me mind my own business, and you can mind yours. If what I do offends you or makes you think I am an idiot, let the effects kick me in the teeth. I'll deal with the mess. In the meantime, please keep those freelance oppressors (criminals, terrorists, et al.) off my back. That's what I'm paying you for.

Link via Instapundit.

Enough Already!

Will people please stop trying to make political points off of 9/11, please? In my quest to avoid hypocrisy, I do not hold anyone blameworthy for failing to prevent 9/11. Prior to the infamous date, terrorists hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings was something that might happen. Just as much as an attack on our military and commercial computer systems might happen, or that China might invade Taiwan. In those late 90 and very early 2000 days, any law enforcement agency would have seen an inquest into charges of racial profiling as more likely than an actual terrorist attack on American soil.I did not blame anyone, but trying to pin blame on someone will bias any findings and will prevent the report from actually fixing the mistakes that allowed the event to happen.

Examinations of President Clinton's last national security report show that terrorism was not the top on his administration's list of concerns. So what? It certainly wasn't on mine. Perhaps I am naive, but can people just stop thinking about politics and start getting on with the one thing that the federal government is supposed to do, which is protecting its populace? If mistakes were made, then learn from them, make changes and move on.

Update: Here is what a White House press release regarding the report cited above and about what the Clinton Administration's priorities were:

The report previews the President's national security agenda for the coming year, including: forging a lasting peace in the Middle East; securing the peace in the Balkans and Northern Ireland; helping Russia strengthen its economy and fight corruption as it heads toward its first democratic transfer of power; furthering arms control through discussions with Russia on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and deeper reductions in strategic nuclear weapons; implementing China's entry into the WTO and other global institutions while promoting freedom and human rights there; easing tensions between India and Pakistan; building on hopeful developments between Greece and Turkey to make progress in the Aegean, particularly on Cyprus; securing new energy routes from the Caspian Sea that will allow newly independent states in the Caucasus to prosper; supporting democratic transitions from Nigeria to Indonesia; helping Colombia defeat the drug traffickers who threaten its democracy; fighting weapons proliferation, terrorism and the nexus between them; restraining North Korea's and Iran's missile programs; maintaining vigilance against Iraq and working to bring about a change in regime; consolidating reforms to the world's financial architecture as the basis for sustained economic growth; advancing global trade; enacting legislation to promote trade with Africa and the Caribbean; pressing ahead with debt relief for countries fighting poverty and embracing good government; reversing global climate change.

Two things strike me as necessary to say about this: First, it is a tour-de-force in the use of semicolons; and Second, the US had a shitload of stuff on its foreign relations plate. There was a lot to get done, and if non-state sponsored terrorism wasn't on the top of that list, it might be because it still didn't have the urgency that killing 3,000 people can give an issue.

Link via Robert Tagorda

At Least Some of Them Got it Right

Linked here is a PDF file of the opinions given in a 9th Circuit (California and the other western states) regarding gun show operations. (PDF file, so have Acrobat ready to read it)

That so many of the justices of what is considered to be the most liberal appeals court circuit dissented from the decision to hear a case en banc (to be heard before the whole court for those who don't speak italic) is something of a coup. Lets cheer these judges on so that we might start to get some sense out of these justices.

TV and Reality

I posted below about how things that can be shown on television tend to have more reality for people than things that can not. One of the ways this happens is that people we have seen on TV occupy a role much like a person you see in the coffee shop every so often.

A few years ago there was a reality series called Combat Missions where a number of active and retired special forces and SWAT members were put into teams and competed in simulated combat situations. One of the men on the show was named Scott Helveston. He was brash, messing with peoples heads and doing a hell of a job of psych warfare on the opposition. I personally didn't like the guy, but he was very effective at taking the opposition out of the game.

Scott Helveston was one of the four civilian contractors, former military hired to provide security for various humanitarian efforts, who was killed in Falluja, Iraq.

Just Out of Curiosity

One would certainly hope that these two stories aren't connected.

Vampire bats kill 13 people in Brazil

and

Rabies vaccines recalled

Great, in addition to everything else, now I need to keep an eye our mad dogs and whatnot. I much prefer insanity to going mad from rabies.

Even a Stopped Clock...

is correct twice a day.

I try not to be thoroughly cynical. Granted its fun and makes for much better jokes, but I honestly do try to keep a sunny disposition about people. (All comments from the peanut gallery should be filed properly below)

In that spirit, I would like to commend Senator Barbara Boxer (normally the only senator that John Kerry doesn't make look like a John Bircher) for her stance on arming commercial airline pilots. While one can can presume that this has something to do with a tight re-election race, I would like to think that she really is caring about the safety of the flying public.

Alright, its my birthday, and I am trying really hard to keep things pleasant.

Link via Will Collier at Vodkapundit.

Say What?!!

I seldom disagree with Andrew Sullivan, you can find a link to his site to the right. Agreement is never always, however, and he chose a doozy to split with me. To call this type of thinking short sighted is to make an extreme understatement.

One of the main reasons that the United States has had such a strong economy is because of low energy costs, primarily through the use of inexpensive oil. So now we are to emulate the economies of France, Germany, and Japan, even while their economic growth lags behind us and the only thing they have more of is unemployment? It has been noted that the vast bulk of American economic growth has been in small to medium businesses. There, the primary energy costs are not consumed in production, but in transportation. Whether in movement of product or materials, or even the delivery of personnel in more service oriented fields, the cost of transportation is almost entirely derived through the gasoline or diesel that gets put into the tank. With the rise of more specialized small businesses, the need to transport goods in which one company's product is another company's material becomes greater and greater. Increasing fuel costs would require a greater increase in the cost added to the goods along each step of the supply chain. Ultimately, all of those costs get passed on down to the final consumer.

Gas prices are not simply paid by the individual at the pump, everyone pays for it everywhere they buy something that has been moved. That Andrew Sullivan, someone I usually respect for his fical conservatism, would fail to see this is very surprising.

Why I Do This

There are two reasons that I am keeping this weblog. The first is deeply personal. I enjoy the opportunity to put out my thoughts, heck, even to force them into a coherent form, and to possibly have them examined under a similarly interested scrutiny. I can create new ideas, for me at least, and have them tested by the rest of the world. If they are found wanting, the reasons that they are wanting come back to me and I can consider them and change the ideas if necessary.

When I first started writing this, I had an imaginary audience in my mind, and I wrote to them. After a few weeks, however, I stopped feeling that presence. That was probably when I put on the Site Meter and saw that I could go days without a single hit. That actually gave me the courage to start wrtiting down a more perssonal narrative. Obviously I was only writing for myself, so why not?

The second reason is really the first in a way. I came upon blogs and the connectivity with the rest of the world that they seemed to have. This article makes a lot of the points that lead me to take up this hobby. The idea of reading many different impressions on an event, each one from a different reference point, is very striking for me. I go on and on about how the world is fractal and that to properly understand it, one can not rely on one master view but instead need to have many smaller views from many smaller places. The environment of bloggers, known as the blogosphere, is tightly connected, with ideas able to bounce from one end of the world to the other and back again in seconds. I myself have posted comments on boards all over the world. The first comment to this blog came from England, how cool is that?

I believe that the blogosphere is similar, perhaps analogous, to a mind. Information comes in, is noticed by other elements around it, and is reacted to. If the reaction is positive, then the idea spreads, where it interacts with even more ideas. If the response is negative, it clashes with other ideas, and it dies off. The iterative nature of the exchange is fundamentally chaotic, ideas grow and change like storms over the ocean.

And like the apochryphal butterfly, this blog might just play a role in one of those storms someday.

Stamp Out American Imperialism!

No wonder the rest of the world hates us. Especially when we have senators saying that America should get what it wants by throwing a little weight around:

Kerry's campaign aides said the Democratic candidate wants the United States to pressure the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase production and apply diplomatic pressure to the member nations to reduce prices.

Just who does Senator Kerry think we are, to go around and diplomatically dictate what other countries should do with their resources? Come on, lets get MoveOn.org and ANSWER on this, pronto.

Gotta Love the Irony

Just overheard a conversation about people having seen bootlegged copies of The Passion of The Christ. It just seems a little odd that someone who would want to see the movie badly enough would also be willing to get an illegal copy.

I'll Say it When It Needs to be Said

And I'll say it again when the opportunity comes to make the point more clearly. I don't blame Clinton or Bush for 9/11. I blame Osama for that. I believe that only eight months is not enough time for Bush to have done anything to Al Qaeda. I also believe that without an extreme event like 9/11 Clinton could never have mustered up enough political support to do what Bush is doing. Yes, Al-Qaeda was backing Ramzeh Yousef when he and his group blew up the bomb under the WTC in 1993. That it failed to accomplish destruction on a military scale would have had Republicans howling if we had responded to it militarily.

Scott Ganz, aka Doctor Suarez, on half of the husband and wife of The Protocols of the Yuppies of Zion makes this point very well. Granted, Clinton may have handled most of what he did do poorly, in this arena, but the Congress would never have backed him enough to really do it right.

So don't let it be said that I never criticize Republicans. Next time you hear about some idiot bombing an abortion clinic, I'll be right with the Democrats yelling to fry the bastard. Although the Democrats tend to be anti-death penalty, so I'll still be pretty lonely. You get the point, anyway.

Is it OK to Start Getting Scared Now?

Last Thursday, blogger Matt Margolis was assaulted at a demonstration outside of a Bush appearance in Boston. I'm not sure of the details, Matt has them on his site, and the actual occurrence of the assault is not what I want to write about.

What has me concerned has been some of the reaction of some people to justify assault. That one person does not have equal recourse to the arena of verbal debate, the author argues, is justification to move to the arena of fisticuffs.

And then there is a comment left on Matt's site:

Hitler had his beliefs, just like Matt has his. Sometimes violence is the only way to show people how devastatingly bad their ideas are. When society is so distraught about policy that individuals feel the need to take violent action, revolution is not only expected, but necessary. I'm no union man, but I'd have probably taken a swing at you too.

Maybe violence is the only way, sometimes. That some people are already starting to think this way has me really worried. If Bush wins re-election, I would seriously doubt that he will make it all the way through his term without a domestic attempt on his life. Come on, people, this is still America. We don't work this way.

Thanks to Michelle at A Small Victory

The Right Methods and The Right Results

I just finished reading this post: Pejmanesque: "THE HOLOCAUST SHRUG". Once I get more than a few minutes of breathing time I'll read the whole articles. What I have seen so far reminds me of the post I made below. Who do you reconcile "War is NOT the Answer" with the potential that Iraq now has? I can allow that some people truly believe that Bush is a fascist thug who is looking to crush rights all over the world. I would ask those people, can you not agree that at least the lesser of two evils won?

In philosophy, there are two positions that are opposed to one another, two positions that describe the divide I see in civil discourse. The first is the Categorical Imperative, the most visible portion being that it is immoral to treat another person as a mean to an end rather than as an end in and of themselves. We often see this expressed as "Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you." "War is NOT the Answer" also derives from this. It is a necessity of war that one kills the other side and any other poor slob who gets in the way. The Categorical Imperative would hold that one must not seek out the right ends in a way that exploits or infringes on the rights of others: If one can secure the health and well being of all the world at the cost of the life of one innocent new-born infant, then the Categorical Imperative would say that that is too high of a price.

The opposing view is derived from Consequentialist Utilitarianism, so long as an act creates a net increase of good as opposed to bad, then the act was moral. The articles in the top referenced link take the Utilitarian view. In the first season of The Shield, a police officer beats a kidnapping suspect in an interrogation room until the suspect confesses where he is keeping his victim. Given that the girl would have eventually died where she was buried, the Utilitarian would have said that it was moral to have beaten the man to save the life of the girl. One can look at the necessity of paying taxes at the simple end, to the extreme of saying that it is allowable that 51 people, to ward off starvation, kill and cannabalize 49 others.

My philosophy is of the utilitarian avenue. I come to it because I have learned that to choose not to act is still a choice that will lead to real consequences. To categorically deny that a method is absolutely wrong is dangerous.

That last sentence was difficult for me to write. That is because I want to be able to say "Terrorism can never be a right means." Terrorism is a means to an end. Al Qaeda and all of the terrorist organizations have goals, from get money to remake the world into an Islamic world. That is why the War on Terror is unlike any other ever fought. We are not at war with any individual or group, we are at war with a method. If we capture Osama bin Ladin and every other person in the world who has ever applied the words Al Qaeda to themselves, the war would still go on, because there would still be conditions in which the means of terrorism would still be attractive.

That is why I supported the Invasion of Iraq. Iraq is the means to end the conditions that push people to terrorism. With Iraq fallen, Saddam Hussein is no longer paying the families of suicide bombers in Palestine, he is no longer bribing UN officials in charge of the Oil-for-Food program (indeed, the sanctions aimed at him that were hurting his people are now gone, a plus for the people of Iraq), and he is no longer torturing and murdering his own people. All of these would have continued if the US had not invaded.

MAYBE Bush lied, full-on knew-it-wasn't-true-but-said-different-anyway, lied about Iraq having stockpiles of WMD. If he did, I would feel very indignant and deeply offended. Is that indignance and offense enough to offset the good that has come about due to the war? I hardly think so.

The Count is Now: 70

I might just be able to appreciate that some things are so horrible that a person's mind would not wish to acknowledge it. Certainly the events of September 11 are a case in point. But to go to such an extreme that such a thing is not horrible, and is in fact good grist for a comedy, is entirely beyond the pale. I would like to write about making a counter-proposal about producing dramatic recreations of all of the bombings in England carried out by the IRA in mime. However, even the extended 15 count has still not gotten me past the image of carrying out the addage: Why not kick a man while he's down? He's that much closer to your foot.

Something to Torture Yourself With Over Lunch

Stumbled on these Mind Games during my lunch break. I am proud to say that I got the math challenges right, even the ones I hadn't already seen.

Thank God We Won the Revolution

Or else we would have to live in a country that would imprison a man for killing one of four men breaking into his home. Or maybe we could be in a country where if a man is found to have been wrongfully incarcerated the government, upon his release, can charge him for room and board that he was obviously not entitled to.

God bless the USA. (For now at least)

And You Wonder Why We Haven't Found Bin Ladin

Take a look at this photo taken by a Marine Corp aviator. Could you imagine trying to find a moving target in that type of terrain?

Makes Me Wish I Could Just Turn Around...

so that I could use my hindsight to see what's coming. A panel is investigating the intelligence acitivities of the US with respect to Al Qaeda throughout the nineties and up to September 11, 2001. The implications made in that inquiry are that the US was too cautious in its reading of the intelligence.

Not two weeks earlier, however, we have another panel grilling George Tenet, Director of the CIA, over whether the intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD stockpiles and programs were spun to sell the war to the public. Personally, every time I hear the voice of Ted Kennedy (D-Mas), I have the urge to ask people to call me by my real given name for the rest of the day.

The Game is Intelligence. The object, figure out what the other guy is hiding while preventing anyone else from discovering what you are hiding. The second part is far easier than the first. In the second part, you look at all of the evidence your activities leave behind and ask yourself, "If Sherlock Holmes had this evidence, could he figure out what I'm up to?" If yes, get rid of the evidence. If no, get rid of it anyway, because you can't be sure if the other guy isn't better than Sherlock Holmes.

The discovering side of intelligence is the hard part, because, face it, you never have Sherlock Holmes on your side. All that you have are a bunch of people, buried under a pile of information in which useful clues look no different than random noise on first, second, or third look. It would be like looking for a needle in all the hay in Kansas.

Remember, these are people who, while patriotic, are doing a job to put food on the table. They face the constant dilemna of Get it Done versus Don't Screw UP. Before 9/11, the juiciest stories were when the US would go in only to find that they had the wrong target. "Heads Must Roll!" would be the cry from the Congressional Oversight Commitees. So someone's head would roll, and all the rest would keep their personal favorite heads down. To do nothing would usually be the safest course of action unless the rare golden perfection of "knowing" was reached. Since that almost never happens, nothing is what was usually done.

And Nothing was done, until 9/11 showed that the safety of doing nothing was far from perfect.

Why a Good Education in Science is Important

This article starts off as an expose of Ralph Nader and fails miserably. It tries to impugn Nader's credibility by pointing out the apparently intentionally sloppy work done by the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). With no other, more direct, link between unethical activities and Ralph Nader, his premise falls short.

What the article does bring up is an issue near and dear to me: the misuse of science for political purposes. This is a condition I blame on the way that science is taught today. For the most part, science classes, particularly on the elementary level, are taught as a rote set of facts. What tends to be lacking is a study of the method by which scientific data and conclusions are reached. In the article, NYPIRG is cited repeatedly for willfully bad methodologies, apparently for the purposes of achieving results that would invite the political action that they are seeking. Without a proper grounding in the proper methods of science, people would have no way of telling what are reliable results and what are not.

As it currently is, science is taught much like history, a series of facts with no indication or basis for justification. Science taught like this allows the unscrupulous to slap the label of "Scientific" on something without being called on it. Science taught like this is like a catechism, something handed down by an anonymous authority that has to be taken on face value.

So What is it That You Want?

James Lileks has a very good look at the anti-(whatever it is they're against) protests over the weekend.

Do the ends justify the means? That is one of the big ones, really. I'm sick of war, but can I say that there are not things worth fighting for? No. The line we try to draw between ends and means gives lie to the truly fractal nature of the boundary. Is it right to go to war for this? It could be that there are fingers of yes reaching into no that any small change of the conditions can change the answer. That is why we one can not say yes all of the time, or no all of the time. That is why I will keep my little head as far away from actual leadership as possible. I just don't want the headache.

Guilty as Well

It is shameful how some former members of the Clinton administration are pointing fingers at members of the Bush administration for not following up on their warnings about Al Qaeda in the eight months prior to 9/11. Many people are jumping all over them pointing out that Bush had eight months, Clinton had eight years.

Glenn Reynolds links to a number of sites on this topic, but he makes a point in the update that applies to me as well:

Well, I'd give Clinton a bit more of a pass on this than Hewitt does. I think a lot of people -- including me -- viewed Islamic terrorism in the 1990s as a minor threat that could be contained until it collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity. That was wrong, but I don't blame the Clinton people for getting it wrong.

The cruise missile attacks took place during the Lewinsky scandal. I recall my impression, as I was looking at a headline in a sidewalk newspaper machine, when I first read the name Osama bin Ladin. Here is a billionaire Saudi oilman using terrorism to take over the world. Out of what James Bond novel did Clinton find this guy? It was so transparently a ploy to take attention off of Lewinsky's grand jury testimony (or somesuch new event in the scandal) that bin Ladin just didn't merit my mental faculties.

Count me among those who didn't take the guy seriously enough.

Just a Random Thought:

In the age of television, people have been conditioned to think that something that can be photographed is more real than that which can not.

Case in point: the steel tarrifs President Bush pushed through a couple of years ago. A video camera can be pointed at a dilapidated steel factory and the workers filing out of it with a voice over telling us that these men will not be returning for another shift. One can see the line and be told that 800 men at this one plant will be out of work. The result, hue and cry for government to Do Something to either prevent the plant from shutting down or to prevent the workers from suffering too badly.

On the other hand, tariffs are enacted and the price of steel goes up. Thousands of small to midsize companies, running thin margins to begin with due to tight competition, have to cut loose four or five employees apiece in order to stay afloat. The thousands put out of work due to the tariffs are diffused across the country. No plants go under and there are no lines of workers all in one place to point a camera at. No hue and cry, no single legislator with enough voters discomfitted to make a point about, yet, by shear number of unemployed, no one can doubt that the tariffs have made things worse.

With no pictures, however, how do you convince people of that?

(So I may have lifted this line of argument from Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon. Its been a couple of years since I read it, and the point is still a good one.)

Tolkien Knew Good vs. Evil

Apply this to debates on either the 2nd Amendment or the War on Terror.

Those who have not swords may still die upon them.
--Éowyn, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Link via baldilocks

I Think Someone Has Been Watching Too Much CSI.

Even better that this happened in Las Vegas. Its very good that the guy has finally been caught, but I just couldn't help but chuckle at this paragraph:

Malsom said he called the FBI in Cincinnati but said they were skeptical. He went back to the bar after McCoy had left, retrieved items that McCoy left behind and turned the objects -- including a matchbook and a drinking glass -- over to the FBI. He also downloaded photos and other information on the suspect from the Internet.

Gus Grissom would be proud.

Somebody Who Gets It

Via Vodkapundit, I read this entry from The Daily Ablution. His Open Letter to Osama really spells it out.

This is war, and the enemy has shown that it will be fought all or nothing. More than your life is at stake.

Peace is Never Unilateral (The Count is Now: 55)

By the time I decided whether or not to include this article in The Count, I had cooled off enough to proceed without it. At issue today is an editorial from the Guardian of the UK. This was written in response to the bombings in Madrid.

An international conference, to bridge the divide between Muslim and Christian communities, should be one first step.

I don't think that I have ever seen a clearer example of "Since what we have done hasn't worked, let's see if more of the same will do the trick" reasoning. We have been talking and discussing and conferring for the past thirty years. How many people have died due to terrorists in that time? By what reasonable measure can it be said that this is working?

We need to take the fight against terror out of America's hands.

I did add to The Count just now. "We need to the the fight against terror out of America's hands."? I suppose that might be a good idea. After all, the only things that have happened since America took the fight in its own hands have been the fall of the Taliban, the fall of Saddam Hussein, over half of Al Qaeda's leadership dead or in prison, the handover of Libya's WMD programs, Iran allowing IAEA inspectors to examine their nuclear weapons program, and North Korea engaging in multi-lateral talks. No, nothing positive at all.

We need to get beyond the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys, and seek a genuinely collective response.

I'm going to add my response to "War is Not the Answer" to my critique of this line. I entirely agree. I am thirty years old, and I am tired of all of the war and violence and bloodshed in the world. I fully believe that war and violence are the worst possible things that humans can bring upon this earth.

My question is: When do the terrorists learn that? When do they get past the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys? Yes, we need a collective response, but those who are attacking us have to be part of that collective. Unless and until then there can not be peace. I am not racist enough to think that the Muslim world is incapable of holding up its end of any type of peaceful consensus, nor do I think that the Western world can or should ensure peace only by its own action.

When was the last time Al Qaeda issued demands stating what had to be done in order to prevent further attacks? Never. If they have demands, then it is only that we should cast aside anything that is not Muslim in our culture and embrace the will of Allah. They are on a Crusade. They hate us because we give lie to their religion. We do not adhere to the tenets of their faith, and yet we are prosperous, healthy, and reap all of the other benefits that Allah should only bestow upon the faithful. Therefore, we must have gotten what we have by evil means, and that they must be the avenging hand of God to smite the unrighteous down into their proper place. Al Qaeda are not "beyond the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys." They are the Good Guys, and we are the Bad Guys.

I want my as of yet hypothetical children to never have to fear that their lives may be turned upside down, or even ended, because they are different than someone else. There are only two powers that can make that come to pass. One is for those who follow the path of radical Islam to set aside their weapons and agree to live and let live. The other is for us to destroy them. If they show us a sincere intent to use the first power, then we shall have peace. If they continue to fail to do so, then they shall be destroyed, and we shall have to continue wondering who else in the world hasn't yet gotten the message.

(via Andrew Sullivan and The New Republic)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Can I Get a "D'oh!"?

Right now, some paralegal is wanting to crawl into a hole and pulling it in after him/herself. Because of some "bad research" the city of Aliso Viejo was contemplating the ban of any product made with dihydrogen monoxide.

The problem: dihydrogen monoxide is water. So much for "Eight a Day for Health".

For more information on this well hidden menace, you can check here and here.

It Is Chilling

Stephen Green the Vodkapundit makes several good points in his reflection on the Madrid bombings. What really got to me was a quotation posted in the comments:

As word of the bombings spread, many people frantically called family and friends on cell phones.

"On many bodies, we could hear the person's mobile phones ringing as we carted them away," said Beatriz Martin, a doctor who tended to victims at El Pozo.

---
Mentally hear this sound when you vote Kerry in November....


Posted by: Chilling on March 12, 2004 06:38 AM


Some of my friends can't understand why I still consider the War on Terror to be the primary issue of our time, and why I am still considering voting for Bush in November (Yes, my feeling on the issue have been renewed). I admit that I still kept a distance, didn't let my emotions get to me when I was first reading the reports of the attacks. The comment above drove it home. I am outraged. I feel the outrage that I wish more people outside the United States felt on 9/11.

I have never been to Spain, but my parents have. They came back with the requisite pictures, and a story about cell phones in that country. They told me of seeing a business man walking down the street, carrying a briefcase in one hand and holding a mobile phone to his ear with the other. Suddenly, another phone he was carrying started to ring, forcing him to tuck his briefcase between his knees so that he could answer the second phone.

I have not heard or read anything about Americans being killed or injured in the blasts. Honestly, I don't really care. The story my parents told me was just a silly little anecdote, but that it was silly is what made that guy human. Is he still alive? Might he have been one of the people whose friends and family were trying desperately to get hold of him?

Was he able to answer those calls?

Not Good All Around

The reporter on this story was unable to get a statement from the woman at the center or it, but from I read so far, it does not look good for her. Regardless of her reasons, I still have to swallow my disdain for her decision and say that she had the right to make it.

What I am really bothered by is the direction that the decision to prosecute her and the decision to charge Scot Peterson with two counts of murder. The Courts are being forced to charge into that quagmire of deciding when rights begin. Unlike most other instances, there is no bright line to say yes/no, alive/not alive. The legal system does not like grey, and there is no greyer area than this.

Self-Righteousness Lead Astray

You say "self-righteous" and the first image that comes to mind is some bible-thumping preacher with a southern accent hollering about how God is going to smite the unworthy (read: everyone he believes to be unworthy). I can't stand those people.

Self-righteousness does not come solely from the reactionary religious, however. Take the case of Susan Lindauer, a former journalist and congressional staffer. Here's the key statement in the story:

"I'm an anti-war activist and I'm innocent," she said after her arrest in her hometown of Takoma Park, Md. "I did more to stop terrorism in this country than anybody else. I have done good things for this country. I worked to get weapons inspectors back to Iraq when everyone else said it was impossible."

Yes, I believe that we can all now see that it was her daring efforts of conciliation on behalf of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and not the hundreds of thousands of US troops sitting on his border, that lead Saddam Hussein to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq. We should be thanking Ms. Lindauer rather than treating her like a spy.

[end sarcasm]

As things look now, this woman makes me sick. I'll try to curb my gut reaction and keep my opinion flexible pending new information.

Update: Via Instapundit and Eugene Volokh (both of whom are law professors) I have learned that my use of the term "spy" above is incorrect. Ms. Lindauer is being charged with being an unregistered agent for Iraq. The term "spy" requires that secrets be exchanged, which it seems that Susan Lindauer was not in a position to do.

The Nanny and The Cop

When it comes to government intrusion into people's lives, there are two ways it can show itself. One I call the Nanny and the other the Cop.

The Cop is what comes to most people's minds when they consider government interference in their lives. We can imagine jack-booted thugs in police uniforms breaking in doors to search for immoral, and hence illegal, acitivities (John Aschcroft, anyone?). This William Safire cloumn looks at the way surveillance is encroaching on privacy. The assumption behind the Cop is that freedom must be curtailed because everyone can be a criminal.

The Nanny does not get as much attention. This force of government interference is responsible for mandatory helmet and seat belt laws. It tells us that companies have to provide greater and greater protections for their workers. This Telegraph of the UK article talks about wide ranging smoking bans. The assumption behind the Nanny is that everyone is too stupid and/or helpless to be able to take care of themselves.

As a Libertarian, I would like to cordially tell both the Nanny and the Cop to go screw themselves. I don't want protection from myself and I can be trusted to keep and deviancy I may or may not practice in my home in my home.

I'll Stop Laughing any Minute Now

Oh, Dear Lord, can You please deliver us from politicians bound and determined to make California the laughing stock of the world?

State Sen. John Vasconcellos is obviously aClass II Granola Californian . The various classees of Granola Californian are:

Class I: Fruit
Class II: Nut
Class III: Flake

Here's a clue for the clueless: Teenagers are idiots. I most certainly was a Teenage Idiot. They are in the process of learning about how to get along in the world, and can not be relied upon to hold up to the full burden of responsibility that we demand adults to carry. Hell, I know more than a few "adults" who still can't figure that out.

Fortunately, this idea has about the same chances of passing as John Ashcroft had of passing that gall stone through his pancreas. And even if it did, you can figure that American Idol would still get better turn out than American Presidnet.

I'll Stick with Essays

For a brief time I thought about keeping my posts short and very much to the point, as Halley recommends here.

I don't like to make assumptions as to what is known and unknown to my readers. Actually, its more a matter of writing the assumptions that I make in my thoughts that is useful, it forces me to question them. Afterward, I feel more confident that I have not left a gaping hole in my argument. Since blogging is best done in the voice of the writer, I say now that I embrace my inner windbag.

D'oh!!

Here's the story for you: Dear Abby Almost Falls for 'Simpsons' Spoof.

You know that it is only a matter of time before Matt Groenig uses "I will not write fake letters to Dear Abby" as the chalkboard line.

Is TV losing out to video games?

Short answer: Yes

While it may not be on the Playstation, (my Playstation 2 sees far more use as a DVD player than game machine) I currently spend far more time currently playing Star Wars: Galaxies far more than watching TV. I, like most people, watch TV to be entertained. Lately, the game has done a far better job of doing that than the Ol' Boob Tube.

That's Why He's the Professional

A couple of weeks ago I really surprised a friend of mine by admitting that I hadn't ruled out voting for Bush this November. Not that I would vote for him, but that I hadn't ruled him out entirely. She asked me how, and I responded that I still consider the war on terror to be the most important issue in the country.

Today's The Bleat by James Lileks captures why I still feel the necesity to continue the war the way it has been going. Just head on down past the domestic paragraphs to where he starts his screed. I truly envy his ability to convey what I want to say in a third of the space it would take me.

I remember how I felt on that day. So far, the memory of that intensity of uncertainty and fear is still mostly fresh. I don't want to be protected from the feelings those memories carry. I want to be protected from feeling them for a whole new set of victims.

More On Chaos and Economics

In the first comment to this post below (first comment ever, truth be told) Tom questioned my assertion that the patterns that emerge from lower level interactions are essentially illusory. He points out that our use of technology has been developed using higher level patterns observed without our awareness of the lower levels.

Considering his argument, I have to admit that was overbroad in my statements. There are many cases where one does not need to invoke the lower levels to describe the behavior of an entire population. In some cases, the behavior "flattens out", the chaotic effects cancel leaving an easily figured linear system. For example, one would not need to calculate the quantum paths of every quark in a ball to deduce the ball's trajectory. Another case is where a large number of "random" events form patterns that reflect the probabilities of those events. Insurance actuarial tables and radioactive half-lives are both cases where one can make predictions on the large scale but is denied predictive power over individuals.

Tom made a very good point about how those who understand the patterns that emerge have an advantage in increasing the value in their lives. I fully agree with that sentiment. The brain in a very complex system, and one of the ways that it is truly amazing is that it can create models of other complex systems. A person who can create a more accurate model of a prey animal's behavior will be a better hunter. If a person has a better sense of the behavior of the market, then that person would be the one I'd want managing my retirement fund. This process is not entirely conscious, I believe that this is from where feelings of intuition and hunches arise.

While there are many cases where complexity in nature has denied science predictability (weather, turbulent flow, etc.) I intended in the post below to apply the concept of chaotic unpredictability only to social systems. The simple systems that I listed previously are simple because there is relatively little feedback of information in those systems. I can say that a flipped coin will land on Heads 50% of the time precisely because each flip is not "aware" of what previous flips have done.

I changed the tag line of this blog just before posting this entry. It means that those who are aware of the rules and all of their implications tend to come out better. It is incomplete (I was going for pithy) because one would also need to know the conditions in which the rules are being applied. This is where chaos in social systems really get out of hand. The possession of information changes the system. This includes the degree to which patterns are recognized. There is an old schtick that is illustrative: I know that he knows that I usually go right, so I'll go left. But he knows that I know the he knows the I usually go right, so I can't go left. etc., etc., ad nauseum. The degree to which information is fed back into the system is huge, and any change made to the rules or knowledge gleaned about patterns resulting from the rules will have far reaching effects.

Have you ever read those "Investing Secrets from the Pros" in financial magazines? Don't bother with them. Those are patterns that have emerged from the rules of the market, and the only reason that they might have worked is that they were secret. Once a large number of investors start pursuing those strategies, the relative advantage decreases and there comes a counteracting force applied by those who wish to profit from the behavior of the first group.

I had meant the first post of this line to be a critique of social engineering in light of chaos theory and emergent phenomena. Much of social science in the past decades has been to develop rules that will provide predictive power over the actions of groups of people, an Ideal Gas Law for people or Laws of Mechanics for social institutions. The problem is that should those laws ever be discovered, we enter into a feedback loop (He knows that I know the he knows that I know...) where those laws themselves become causes generating unpredictable effects because no law can describe the repercussions of its own knowledge.

The feedback loop ensures that System I is not the same as System I + New Law or System I + Knowledge of Pattern. One might argue that such change would be minimal, but please recall that the Butterfly Effect tells us that there is no such thing as a negligible change. The systems may remain similar for a period of time (the period of time where the parties with the knowledge of the pattern are profitting), but after that period the systems diverge to where the Law or Knowledge are operating in conditions that they were not created to address.

Ummm, Excuse Me?

Looks like McDonalds is phasing out their Supersize Fries and Drinks. I'm just a little confused by some of the wording.

Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but since when is removing options the same things as giving them choices? If I hadn't been numbed to these types of "people can't be expected to take care of themselves" stories, then I would have added to the Count. In that respect, don't even get me started on this idiot:

An award-winning documentary called "Super Size Me" has heaped on more unwanted publicity for McDonald's. The documentary, which chronicles the deterioration of filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's health during a monthlong experiment eating nothing but McDonald's food, won a directing prize at the Sundance Film Festival and is set for wide release this spring.

I say we should find this guy and pour hot coffee in his lap until he admits that no one was coercing him to eat only McDonald's food by threatening to pour hot coffee in his lap.

A Salute to a True Man of Science

You have to respect a person who, in the name of Science! will put themselves on the line. He went from concept to experiment with scarcely a look back.

Sir, this blog salutes you.

Chaos Theory in Economics

This post has been knocking around inside my head for some time now, and this post at Samizdata helped me to finally get it started. The link refers to a discussion over a quote by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book Pyramids of Life:

As Adam Smith understood long ago, an illusion of harmony and real efficiency will emerge in an economy dominated by self-interest at a lower level.

Brian Micklethwait, the author of the Samizdata piece, then goes on to question the use of the word "illusion" in the above quotation and to analyze the assumed metaphor that underlies the quote. To paraphrase whichever poet, "Market, red in tooth and claw."

Dawkins's reference to Adam Smith in the quote credits Smith with a very early understanding of what has become a fundamental aspect of Chaos Theory, the idea of the self-organizing system, in which a large number of individual units acting independently give arise to a system that appears to act in a coordinated manner. The "appearance" or "illusion" of coordination is no more real than the coordination of ants in a colony (it is being learned that individual ants do what they do by instinct and that the queen is very far from being some sort of central brain), or the illusion that a storm is a singular thing rather than a huge conglomeration of air and water molecules dancing to the dictates of the laws of physics and thermodynamics. What is happening in all of these systems; market, ant colony, and storm; is the result of a large number of individuals acting in accordance with a set of rules. These rules are applied over and over again, with the situation each individual finding itself in being the result of the previous applications of the rules by itself and its neighbors.

What the field of self-organizing systems is discovering is that the complexity of the final system is not necessarily reflective of the complexity of the underlying rules. An individual ant's instincts are not very complex, and the rules of physics that apply to a molecule in the atmosphere are rather well known. The complexity arises from the repeated iteration of the rules. A classic example is the Game of Life. Each square on the grid can be either on or off (populated or unpopulated in this simulation) and its state is determined by a total of four rules. From these four rules many shapes occur that appear as if they must have been deliberately designed, the Large Exploder is my personal favorite.

An important thing to remember is that the rules remain constant. There is no cosideration made for the fact that a cell is part of a glider or and exploder or any other form that we might give a name to. The only elements that exist are the individual cells, any other pattern that occurs is an accident of the system.

These patterns can either be self-reinforcing or self-destroying. The difference between the two is whether continuing the pattern makes it easier or harder for the pattern to continue. Ant colonies are a good example of a self-reinforcing pattern. A species that destroys it's food supply is a self-destroying pattern.

Two important revelations about these types of systems emerge from their study. The first is that the patterns that emerge from the repeated applications of the rules can not be predicted merely from the rules. The only way to discover the results is to observe the system or to create a simulation.

The creation of simulations leads to the second revelation: the degree of change to the initial conditions does not create a proportional change to the final results. An arbitrarily small change can create a completely new result, the infamous Butterfly Effect. When we look at weather patterns, we wonder why we can not achieve predictions greater than five days with any reliability. The problem is that five days is the effective limit placed on predictions due to the sensitivity of our measuring tools. In order to have a perfect model for predicting the weather, we would need to know the initial conditions of every atom in the atmosphere to an infinite degree of precision. That would be an impossible standard to achieve, and that doesn't take into account some jerk in Bangladesh throwing it off by sneezing.

Tying it all back to economics, and by extension sociology, I hold that all of the patterns we see between individuals and government, namely communities, races, demographic subgroups, etc., are all illusory. They emerge from the interactions of individuals acting to basic sets of rules. The problems that arise from the study of the field of economics and sociology arise from trying to establish rules that apply to the larger scale patterns when there is no reality to those patterns in the first place.

Even greater problems occur when we try to manage the large scale patterns. Three problems arise: we do not know for certain the rules that individuals are using, we do not know to the necessarily infinite degree of precision our initial conditions, and we do not know to the necessarily infinite degree of precision how much change we are adding to the system. When we add uncertainty to uncertainty, you absolutely bet that we are going to be getting results that will be uncertain, the oft spoken of Law of Unintended Consequences. It is from this understanding that I say that Karl Popper was heading into Chaotic territory when he posited that any attempt to predict the "Historical Destiny of Society" would be an exercise in futility.

If you can not predict what is going to happen in the future, then it is equally futile to try to change what is going to happen. How can you change the direction of society when the whole appearance of a society is an accident? How do you change the direction of a storm? The storm is a huge mass of atoms moving in a temporary pattern.
Where would you push?

The temptation in social systems is to change the rules by which individuals operate. However, if the complexity of the final patterns can not be predicted merely by the rules, and if we do not truly know the initial conditions on which the rules are acting at every individual level, then it becomes impossible to predict the effect the change in rules would have, and consequentially it becomes impossible to judge which changes would be the ones to lead to the desired outcome.

My solution: leave each individual to seek to increase the value of their lives. Teach each individual to value the ability of others to increase the value of their lives. Empower each individual to reward or punish other individuals' adherence to those rules. Those patterns that are rewarded (an honest business, a friendly neighbor) with greater value, while those that are punished (a dishonest business, an unpleasant neighbor) will suffer or be removed. Only so long as everyone has some power to influence the world around them can everyone be influenced to do the greatest good.

At Least He is a Principled Jerk

I've railed againt former Justice Roy Moore in the past. He gave an interview recently where he came out against stated his oposition to a proposed amendment to the federal Constitution against gay marriage.

Damn it, I suppose this means that I have to give him some degree of respect. Having principles can be tough.

Inventiveness and Determination

And two Cubans who had tried to land in Florida last year on their pontooned 1951 Chevy truck (but were turned back by the Coast Guard) tried again with a pontooned 1959 Buick (but were again turned back).
MSNBC - News of the Weird

I tell ya, America needs people like this, if only for new episodes of Monster Garage.

Motive is Everything in a Conspiracy

One of the latest offerings of Conspiracy du Jour is that United States forces captured Osama bin Ladin months ago and that the Bush Administration is holding him until shortly before the election.

Obviously this notion is entirely laughable. Bush is very aware to what happened to Winston Churchill immediately after WWII. We've even seen it happen to a small degree with Bush's poll numbers falling after the capture of Saddam Hussein. People don't like the reminder of things being bad, and the leader from the bad times is exactly such a reminder.

Obviously, Bush is waiting until after the election to announce the capture of Osama bin Ladin.
(Link poached found via Andrew Sullivan)

God Hates Shrimp

(Begin Sarcasm)

It's about time that someone has started to apply the Will of God consistently as presented in the Bible! As I have said, when God roasts the homosexuals in the time of judgement, He shall save a place beside them for all those who partook of the Shrimp, Shrimp, and More Shrimp special at Sizzler. Know now that God Hates Shrimp.

(End Sarcasm)

(via Andrew Sullivan)