Mad Social Scientist

A interesting rumor

2005-02-20T21:28:00.000-08:00

"Sources" are passing the word that the US is in secret talks with a man who claims to be a representative of Sunni Baathist elements in the Iraqi insurgency would want to make a deal. I haven't, naturally, any idea whether the sources are telling the truth, whether this man is telling the truth, whether he is who he claims to be, and whether any putative deal is in earnest. But if true, this would be a big step---indeed, probably a necessary step---towards a stable Iraq.

How the Bush admin would play such a deal is another question. Talk about a commitment problem! Once the insurgents reveal themselves, they have no security from our overwhelming military power. It's the classic IR problem of being too strong to negotiate a good deal.

And how would the US enforce/coordinate deals with the (as yet undecided) coalition of Shias and Kurds in the National Assembly? And how would Sunnis who "sold out" be received by the public they seek to represent? Or, more pointedly, how do they protect themselves from the remaining rebels?

These aren't necessarily insoluble problems, but they sure are tough.

Humor and Anger

2005-02-19T00:02:00.000-08:00

Humor can be used to provoke powerful righteous anger. Like this.

I can't believe it's not spam

2005-02-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

I got this "invitation" today; it lies somewhere between spam and and personalized waste of my time.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:42:40 -0800
From: XXXXXXXX
To: XXXXXX@XXXXXXX.edu
Subject: Revelations

Dear Professor XXXXXXXX:

NBC is hosting a one time screening of their new pilot "Revelations" in XXXXX on XXXX and we would like to invite students and professors from XXXXXXXXXXX to come and participate in this event.

This is a groundbreaking show for network television--it asks the question of whether God and science can fit into the same equation.

To preview the show, we have provided a password, protected Website that can only be viewed by select universities. The site has a PROMO of the show and the capability to RSVP online.

www.NBCscreenings.com

User Name: nbcscreener

Password: revelations

Attached you will find information pertaining to the event as well as the show. Please forward it to your students, your faculty and to anyone else you feel may be interested in coming to this exclusive NBC screening.

I will follow up with you in the next couple of days to discuss the possibility of your department's participation in this event.

Little do they know that I have seen every MST3K, and could riff their lights out given half a chance. I half-hope they do contact me personally...

"So a dialogue on the roles of science and religion consists of a bunch of endtime believers berating a goggle-eyed scientist for refusing to accept the Book of Revelations as a scientific explanation?

And since when were Catholics end-timers? And since when were nuns hot? And what the hell does it mean to put science and religion in the "same equation"? And if God himself wants to destroy the world, why is the Church trying to *stop* him?

If you want to mix science and religion, why not a movie on scientists being forced to confront the hypothesis that the universe is turtles-all-the-way-down? Why are you using valuable TV time that could be devoted to test-patterns, or the display of cosmic background radiation, or---"

FFFT! My head explodes Servo-style...

Contagion or inhibition?

2005-02-18T00:11:00.000-08:00

A timely article (for me, anyway) notes that the Israeli army has decided to stop demolishing the homes of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Israel's defense minister ordered a halt Thursday to the controversial policy of demolishing the homes of Palestinian suicide bombers and gunmen after an internal army review concluded it has not deterred attackers but has inflamed hatred.

Since the 1967 Middle East War, Israel has razed more than 2,400 Palestinian homes -- leaving thousands of people homeless -- including 675 houses destroyed in the past four years of fighting, according to the Israeli human rights group B'tselem.

I was taken aback by the evidence-based approach of the Israeli army on this one. Too often in dealing with violence, governments and democratic publics decide that the only response that will reduce violence is forceful retaliation. While in the limit as retaliation goes to genocide, this is true, for any level of force that leaves some of your enemy alive, retaliation may be counterproductive, for the same reason it was appealing in the first place: when hit, people just want to hit back.

So props to the Israelis for looking at the evidence and trying to fashion a policy that will actually work---thus protecting their own citizens better.

The timeliness comes from the topic of my lecture today, the statistical analysis of event counts. Suppose we count the number of times an "event" happens in a period of time. The event might be the number of phone calls you receive in an hour, or the number of guerilla attacks made in a day, or the number of presidential vetos overriden in a year. A key issue is whether the occurence of an event has any effect on the likelihood of future events in the period. If not, we can say the events are independent.

But suppose we are counting phone calls by the hour, and usually we see 2 in the first 30 minutes, and 2 in the second thirty minutes. Then, something weird happens---in the first thirty minutes of one hour, we get 50 phone calls. Independence says we should drop back to the usual 2 or so in the next thirty minutes. Common sense says that we'll continue to get lots of calls---the calls are "contagious", and probably related.

Inhibition is the opposite of contagion. A classic example is challenges to presidential vetos. They are rare, and once challenged, the chastised president is more cautious with his veto. Having more challenges in the first half of a year should make them (and vetos) less likely in the latter half.

So the Israelis are looking at the past history of terrorist attacks and retaliation, and asking themselves the following question:

When we retaliate, does that lower the need for retaliation in the short-run? Or does it increase it? Does retaliation inhibit suicide bombing, or does it spread it like a disease, so that we must retaliate ever more in a spiral of violence?

This is a question that data can answer, and apparently, the Israelis have looked at the data and decided that while punishment might satisfy the needs of vengeance, may actually be harming the interests of security.

(An aside, reaching from statistics to economics: One might think from the above that a great way to test the effectiveness of deterrence logics is to look for inhibition following actual punishment. I suspect that in most case when actual punishment occurs frequently enough to be analyzed, you will find contagion, overdispersion, and failure of deterrence. Deterrence requires the capacity for rational and coordinated action---in which case, threats need only be credible, not actually carried out. The most effective punishments are those that are never used. If you have to ask whether a punishment is working, the answer is likely "no".)

Double or nothing

2005-02-17T00:13:00.000-08:00

Bush signaled today that he is willing to consider raising the cap on payroll taxes to help fixed Social Security's long-run funding gap. Well, just barely:

Asked directly, Bush said he would not bar raising the $90,000 cap, although he does not want to see the payroll tax rate go up.

``The one thing I'm not open-minded about is raising the payroll tax rate. And all the other issues go on the table,'' Bush said in the interview, according to an account in Wednesday's New Haven (Conn.) Register.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said raising the cap on Social Security taxes is just one option among many being advocated.

``Just because he said it was an option doesn't mean he embraced it,'' Duffy added.

The present arrangment levies no tax on wages above $90,000 per year, so the change would make Social Security more redistributive to boot.

Why would Bush consider such a move? To date, the Bush proposal appears to be designed to slowly siphon off resources from and eligibility for Social Security, until the program, leaving people with a fixed contribution pension for retirement that is their responsibility to manage. In the process, the mild redistribution of Social Security would be largely abandoned, which makes the rich happier, and Wall Street would get a huge commission on managing private accounts, which would make them very happy.

This burn-down-the-New-Deal dream has hit a solid wall of opposition in red and blue America. So Bush can either search for a graceful exit, or he can double his bets.

That is, Bush could propose a reform that creates private accounts and begins the siphoning off process, and simultaneously increases the SS tax base and progressivity. This would set off a slow class war through the coming decades as the rich and upper middle class seek to privatize their contributions to hold on to them, while the lower middle class and poor fight to hold on to their piece of the payroll tax pie and guaranteed benefits, by curtailing privatization. The outcomes could range from a bigger, more progressive SS, to none at all.

So perhaps Bush is a gambling man, willing to risk strengthening the welfare state while trying to poison it. Or perhaps he just wants to lure the Democrats into a policy debate they shouldn't engage.

The article above also includes this gem:

``Investors aren't just Wall Street people, as far as I'm concerned,'' Bush told the crowd invited by the state's all-GOP congressional delegation. ``I think every citizen, every citizen has got the capacity to manage his or her own money.''

Does anyone really believe that? Surely everyone can think of one person in their lives who would fritter or speculate away any money they got their hands on. It's no coincidence many unscrupulous financial sector firms target suckers---especially elderly pensioners---for foolish investments in gold, currency, land, etc. P.T. Barmun's law of suckers isn't going to be repealed anytime soon.

(Among my nominees for "people who shouldn't be trusted with their own retirement" includes the former chairman of Arbusto himself...)

Of course, Bush is full of it when he suggests he is offering "choice". His advisers know that it would be foolish to do so, and will insist on drastically limiting choice among investment plans, and requiring retirees to purchase annuities with their savings. So this is all, as usual, a cloud of lies...

Alan Greenspan's long and strange affair with Social Security

2005-02-16T20:17:00.000-08:00

My third ever post to MSS discussed how Alan Greenspan, while arguably a monetary policy savant, was a best a fiscal policy dunce. His advice to cut taxes in 2001 to avoid "paying off the whole national debt" failed the laugh test when he said it, and failed the reality test in short order.

But as Paul Krugman pointed out, Greenspan may be worse than dumb on fiscal policy---he may be giving misleading advice in order to rip off the middle class and shrink the government. Greenspan helped set up the 1983 pact to improve Social Security's long-term financial position by raising payroll taxes and creating a trust fund. The deal to the middle class, enunciated in plain language by none other than Ronald Reagan, was that there was an "iron-clad" commitment to keep Social Security around forever. You pay your dues, and you get to guaranteed basic retirement benefits. Then, in 2001, Greenspan effectively sold out the middle class, sending the money needed to keep his and Reagan's committment back into the pockets of the rich. The choice, as Al Gore kept pointing out, was between a Social Security "lock box", and a tax cut spree. Greenspan showed *zero* concern for the long-run fiscal position of SS in 2001.

Tax cuts created an unnecessary fiscal crisis in the general fund which now gives Greenspan and Bush cover to cluck about the need for cutbacks in benefits. All those middle class taxpayers, who diligently did their part in the 1980s and 1990s, are being played for chumps.

One might almost think that Greenspan has always hope to gut Social Security, in pursuit of a smaller state. As a Century Foundation report notes, we don't have to speculate---we can read Alan's lips.

A troubling juxtaposition

2005-02-16T18:10:00.000-08:00

A judge has just ruled that a Texas hospital can take a baby, born in September with an almost-always-fatal genetic abnormality, can be removed from life-support. According to this story in the Houston Chronicle, "Texas Children's doctors have said they believed `it was immoral to subject a terminally ill child to unnecessary life-sustaining medical procedures.'"

The report is skimpy, but a key issue seems to be whether any insurer or hospital wants to pay for the (arguably quixotic) attempt to keep the child alive. The hosital in its case claimed that of "40 facilities with neonatal intensive-care units across the country ... not one is willing to accept the baby as a patient".

The mother is black, and according to the article, there are questions about her "mental competence". She has been fighting to keep her child on life-support; the hospital wants to pull the plug.

I find myself thinking of the Florida case, in which Jeb Bush has been grand-standing for religious right votes by intervening in a similar case to override the wishes of a brain-dead woman and her husband to terminate life-support.

They are different cases, to be sure, but a similar principle is involved: that of being so blindly "pro-life" that you refuse to recognize when even the hope of life is long past---and, as a consequence, divert health care resources from active lives that could still be improved or extended.

The differences?

1. The infant is not *yet* brain-dead; his effective death is not-quite guaranteed, while the Floridian woman is actually brain-dead, and thus completely gone, without any hoep of resuscitation ever.

2. Saving money and resources has been the key issue in the debate over the infant's life; abstract issues of euthanasia are the key issue in the debate of the woman's "life".

3. One case involves a white woman. The other a black infant.

So, will the usual cast of pro-life right-wing Christians line up to defend the baby?

Or are they a bunch of flim-flam artists?

Mircosoft smells the coffee

2005-02-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

With respect to computer security issues, Microsoft is---and certainly aspires to remain---what Mancur Olson called a "privilege group": an entity that benefits so much from a secure cybersphere that is should be willing to pay for that security itself, rather than leave it up to the collective action of others.

For the non-economically inclined, I should note that computer security is a collective good (just as immunization of humans against biolgical viruses is); other people's security precautions make me safer by reducing viral epidemics, and by discouraging network probing as a fruitless endeavor. If everyone else is using a virus checker, and updating it daily, I'll be so much safer that I probably won't need one myself---and there's the dilemma, free riding.

The oldest solution in the book to free riding is a privileged group. MS presides over an operating system monopoly which also happens to be a monocultural breeding ground for viruses. The insecurity of Windows is one of its least attractive features, and has encouraged migration to lesser known alternatives like Linux. MS could reduce the long-term threats to its monopoly by taking the security dilemma onto its own soldiers and bundling free security software with its OS. And they are finally realizing this...

A question: does this run afoul of antitrust? (in theory, I mean; of course the Bush DoJ won't care...)

Speculation on Iraq

2005-02-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

Now that we have the election returns, it is striking just how complete the Sunni boycott was. I can't tell from today's news just how many seats the Sunnis have, but they appear to have gotten under 5% of the vote, and well under 5% of the seats (remember they are 20% of the population). Turnout in Anbar province, heavily Sunni and the biggest locus of violence, was 2 percent. That's 2 as in 1 in 50 registered voters. That's quite a boycott, whether by choice or intimidation.

The Kurds did better than expected, with turnout in the 90s, and have 26+% of the votes and seats.

Within a week or two, we should see the fruits of bargaining among the theocratic Shias (50+% of the seats), the secular Shias (about 15%) and the Kurds (almost 30%). It's a fascinating problem:

two sides want secular rule, but don't quite have a majority;

the Sistani group doesn't have enough power to design institutions, so any likely institutions will include super-majority requirements to prevent them from taking total control;

the Kurds are in a powerful position, especially since they don't need or want much from an Iraqi state anyway, and will side with whoever gives them the greatest autonomy.

The big problem in Iraq, of course, is the Sunni insurgency, and while the election was a success in the smaller goal of convincing Shias to particate in a democracy they can dominate, it was a failure in the sense that Sunnis refused to participate, choosing instead to continue their insurgency. Now the insurgency has new targets: the officials of the new government, and assassinations look to be the order of the day.

We have successfully transformed a vaguely Sunni, vaguely anti-American insurrection into a nascent civil war, through the magic of ethnic bloc voting. Kudos!

(Another way of putting it: In Bush world, democracy tastes like kordite.)

Now how can the Sunni-Shia war be ended? With almost no Sunnis in the assembly, there is no real political representation to connect the Sunni population with any dealmaking between Sunni and Shia leaders. Hell, they aren't real public Sunni leaders, and I don't expect to see any among the non-suicidal. Whether a majority of Sunnis want peace or democracy doesn't much matter if the only structure in their society is a well-armed, well-organized rebellion willing to kill anyone who tries to settle things politically.

So unless the Shias have the patience and forebearance of Job, eventually this conflict is going to move from nascent civil war to full-on civil war---and the US will be the Shia army. (Which is rather ironic, and has the pleasant side-effect of making it harder to move towards a US-Iran war.) We will have created a new Beirut/Northern Ireland/Palestine right around our occupying forces. At least one side will want us to stay now!

I wonder whether the Kurds will try to extricate themselves of a messy situation altogether. A clever Sunni strategy would be to stop attacking Kurdish leaders or Mosul, while redoubling attacks on Baghdad---in essence, saying to the Kurds that they can go their own way with the Sunni's blessing, as long as they don't side with the Shias. (If we see this happening, it would also probably tell us how centrally coordinated the Sunni rebels are.)

This could be a very long conflict. Perhaps, though great luck, and contingencies I'm afraid I can't really imagine, be nipped in the bud. At this stage of the game, I would like to remind everyone that we knew this day would come when we invaded Iraq. And given the probability distribution of possible outcomes, we can also say that only a fool would have invaded Iraq in the first place.

If things somehow work out, all we can say is that the fool was lucky.

Another brick in the wall...

2005-02-12T17:23:00.000-08:00

So Congress is seriously considering giving the Secretary of Homeland Security an exemption from the rule of law when it comes to constructing "barriers" in the "vicinity" of US borders. He can ignore any law, and his actions are not subject to judicial review. So if this law reaches the books, with respect to the construction of walls, the US will cease to be a republic, and become, in this instance (walls !?), a dictatorship.

That's just amazing. What is it about building walls near the border that requires this unprecedented break with the rule of law? And why isn't there another way to accomplish whatever goal it is? When did everyone go mad? (ok, 1994, I know...)

Throughout the 1990s, the GOP was obsessed with the "rule of law", but only insofar as it applied to presidents' statements about oral sex while under oath in sexual harassment lawsuits. Today, they are obsessed with "freedom", but only insofar as it applies to certainly crudely designed elections in our colonial dominions.

Giving cabinet secretaries enabling legislation to ignore Congress and the Courts and the Code of the US, and actually protecting colonials from death and maiming at the hands of would-be oppressors, are apparenly minor footnotes to the grand principles to which our moral betters have dedicated all their efforts.

But maybe the House Republicans are sane after all. According to Josh Marshall, who logic appeals, GOP House members may be inferring from Bush's abject failure sell his private accounts patent medicine in red states the implication that to follow his lead would be to commit suicide in the 2006 elections. Has reality finally struck a blow against the faith-based mentality of the Bush Party?

I hope so. But you just can't ever count on this bunch to do anything right.

To continue the military theme

2005-02-12T12:32:00.000-08:00

Here are three notable news items:

1. The Pentagon is considering a draft, and is especially interested in one that would target people with needed skills (can you say, "when they came for my neighbor the doctor, I said nothing...."). But declining recruitment, and a short-sighted willingness to threaten current reservists with compulsory lifetime service may leave no options other than a whole-sale draft, heavy dependence on mercenaries, or a roll-back in US military operations. As always with the Bushies, the only palatable choice is not up for discussion.

2. More, very detailed, allegations of torture from an Australian Muslim picked up in Pakistan in 2001 and detained in Egypt and Guantamo under US orders ever since. I don't know what this guy has done or not done, but we have released him, so there must be slim to no evidence of wrong-doing. When you hear that this guy has kids whom we told him he'd never see again, that hurts. The DoD says there is "no evidence" of torture, which is "odd" since this guy has bruises and scars, which would be a start. We've really sold our souls for these monsters. We aren't above the law, any more than Saddam or Osama.

3. Discharges for gay members of the military are way down. This has several obvious interpretations and implications that should surprise no one. My favorite is that it appears allegations that gays are harmful to the military are deemed false by, well, the military, which tends to keep them in time of war (you know, the time that matters) and dump them afterwards.

Update on General Mattis

2005-02-11T22:16:00.000-08:00

A commenter on this blog has posted a few times to defend General Mattis (of "it's fun to kill the Taliban" fame). She points to this defense:

Col. Anderson added: “Please don’t vilify Mattis. If he is guilty of anything, it is for using poor judgment in the use of his words. But it was Mattis who had a mandatory reading program for all Staff and Officers giving them a basic understanding of Islam, the region, and the culture. He is a good Marine and someone we need,” said Anderson, currently a professor of Naval Science at Norwich University, the oldest private military college in the Untied States.

“What came out and what he meant are two different things,” said Col. Anderson. I’m in full support of him, he just needs to be more careful of what he says.”

Perhaps Mattis did choose his words poorly. He probably did not expect them to receive the scrutiny they have, and may regret the way they have been heard. He may also be laying low---rather than publically apoligizing or explaining---on the principle that this is the fastest way to make the problem disapear.

So let me say this: I hope Mattis mispoke. I hope that he doesn't think it's okay to enjoy killing, under any circumstances. I hope he doesn't encourage his men to think that way, either.

But given the recent behavior of our military and government in Iraq and Guantanamo and who knows where else, and the incredible stonewalling on and defense of torture as an instrument of war and police work, I don't think we can be too careful with the idea of dehumanizing an enemy to the point where killing becomes fun.

I think its safe to say that if we all look at Iraqis as people as deserving of respect as anyone else, things would have taken a very difference course.

VDQI: Continuous zooming on vectorized maps with fractal geometry

2005-02-11T17:59:00.000-08:00

Okay, so the post title is a bit opaque, but it will clear up in a bit. I met someone at a party this week who's been working on a neat bit of technology, which allows you to take some very large vectorized image*, like a road map, and zoom in from a wide view to a close up in one continuous zoom, rather than a series of discrete steps. Imagine using MapQuest, and having a slider bar to zoom from the whole country to your city to your street, all in the same window. Now do that in real-time, over a slow connection, and no jerkiness in the emergence or scaling of objects.

Better than words is the experience itself; follow the above link, and look for the map demo.

What you get is very elegant and useful for, well maps, at the moment. But I wonder if it might not be the basis as well for very user-friendly explorable 3D plots of quantitative data...

*"Vectorized" refers to the distinction between vector graphics, which consist of precise mathematically defined points, lines, and fills, and raster graphics, which record the color value of each pixel in the mapped space. Vector graphics are very useful for maps, scientific diagrams, and 3D simulations; raster graphics are more practical for pictures of real world objects.

A well-intentioned criticism, and my response

2005-02-11T15:12:00.000-08:00

A (clearly well-intentioned) reader posted the following comment on my post about Lt. Gen. Mattis. I've edited only slightly to improve legibility; the original post is below.

"It's fun to kill some people..."

The general said that it's fun to kill SOME people -- so which people did he mean? Well, the Taliban, who you wanted to attack before 9/11.

LtGen Mattis didn't say he enjoys taking human life for its own sake. He said he enjoys killing bad guys - the very bad guys you wanted killed. You can't read the state of a man's soul from one comment which the news services offered free of context. What question was he responding to? what else did he say? (hint: something about addressing the conditions that lead people to join terrorist organizations.)

It's also worth noting that Gen Pace commented that LtGen Mattis' leadership in Iraq and Afghanistan showed proper respect for the value of human life.

The LATimes article gives a little more than CNN did:

Here is my response:

I wanted to stop the Taliban. I didn't "want" to kill them. I wouldn't enjoy killing them (I hope). And if I caught them, I would not have them put to death if there was another option.

Before posting, I looked for more quotes from Mattis, as well as more context on his comments. I found nothing, but I also found no attempts to apologize, or restate his remarks in a way that contradicted the wanton spirit of killing they espouse.

Finally, and most importantly, at present, the US military and the Bush administration take very little care in distrnguishing the "bad guys" from innocents. They round up and torture innocent Iraqis on the slightest suspicion of involvement in the insurgency. They choose to bomb homes from a distance, rather than take the risk of personally confronting the residence. As a result, they often kill innocents. No one participating in such slaughter should call it fun.

(If you seek to justify such behavior as acceptable, because it saves soldiers lives, I would point out that Iraqi lives are just as valuable, and that current law requires taking every precaution to protect civilians, even at the risk of soldiers' lives.)

I have lifted this comment mainly to emphasize an important oversight common among hawks of all persuasions: The illusion that we can confidently identify bad actors in the heat of battle, or based on skimpy intelligence. Often, reports are mistaken, or the subordinates sent out to grab a suspect in Iraq get the wrong person, etc. We cannot assume that everyone driving up to a checkpoint at speed, or living in a suspected residence or neighborhood, or carrying a weapon is an enemy. Even if battlefield circumstances require combat with such people, we cannot stoop to celebrate it.

That kind of moral certainty leads to a dangerous comfort with killing at a distance that leads to tragedies like the ~100,000 Iraqis we've likely slaughtered.

It's also important to remember that in any war, individual soldiers may have their own reasons for fighting. They may have been drafted. They may be patriotic. They may have been forced at gunpoint to join the militia. We cannot point to every soldier fighting with the Taliban, or Saddam, or Hitler, or Stalin and say "There is an evil psychopath. It is okay to kill him. It is even okay to enjoy killing him."

That is a large part of the difference we have tried to create between "civilized" war, and "genocidal" war. I'm not saying the former is great; as I said, I have pacifistic tendencies. But the latter can be much worse, and can seep into the hearts of a nation.

What we're up against: Science edition

2005-02-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

On Brad DeLong's site, there is an amusing discussion of a lay columnist's presentation of some research on anti-matter and on cosmology. Here's a juicy quote from Gregg Easterbrook, the layman in question:

Both the donut and soccer-ball camps hold that when astronomers scan deep space, the infinity they think they see is an illusion. In some doughnut-shaped or soccer-inspired or bagel-sliced way, the cosmos appears much larger than it is. Cosmologists estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies; actually, these researchers contend, what we observe is reflections of a much smaller number of galaxies: a traveler moving at super-speed straight out into the universe would eventually end up back at the starting point, not continue forever. The universe is an illusion? Well, this seems easier to swallow than the idea that all material for the entire cosmos popped out of a single point with no content, as Big Bang theory maintains.

To a real astrophysicist, I'm sure this sound like mumbo-jumbo, or a Stephen Hawking book turned into magnetic poetry. From my vantage point as layman-with-a-lifelong-interest in cosmology, I have a slightly different perspective. Easterbrook appears to have read a number of NYT science articles over the last year or two giving reports on studies (both theoretical and empirical) of cosmological questions like the open- or closedness of the universe; the amount of matter in the universe, and its related long-term fate; and the big bang. I have read articles over the same period that discussed each of these issues (even the question of whether some galaxies appear to be reflected in the sky because of the shape of a closed universe has been the topic of a recent NYT article). He probably didn't have too much else to go on besides these articles, and cobbled them together into a semblance of an argument. Because he hasn't (presumably) read many books on the subject, or taken any courses, he's missing some major points. For example, no one who believes the universe is open thinks we could see "all of it" from any one place; very speculative theories on the shape of the universe are unlikely to lead to intellectual "camps"; few non-Buddhist physicists would say the universe is illusion under any version of these ideas; and his slam on the Big Bang is, well, silly, wrong, and totally beside the point.

So maybe Easterbrook should have talked to a physicist before publishing (hey, maybe I should have before hitting "publish" myself).

But this is nothing compared to what social scientists have to contend with. Far more comically uninformed or incoherent articles are written about policy, elections, politics, etc. every day. Most of these are taken seriously, and accrete into an almost impenetrable miasma of misunderstanding. Most discussions I have with laypeople fail to get out of the miasma into the realm of coherent arguments based on , say, known data, facts, and history.

And social scientists have it much worse for another reason: there are several well-funded right wing groups which serve as fog machines, exploiting and thickening common misunderstandings of policy so that the public can no longer tell a policy that benefits them from one that doesn't. I'm looking at you, AEI, Cato, and Heritage.

Evolutionary biologists are presently the only natural scientists facing a constant stream of misinformation that is, well, "intelligently designed" by people who want to keep the public confused and ignorant. The biologists are furious. And the physicists may be next---some on the right, for no reason I can fathom, want to refight the debate over the Big Bang.

Welcome to the club, guys.

Outrage overload

2005-02-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

Four news items in one day provoke a case of "outrage overload". I can do little more than list them:

The "moral" Bush government, that so loves to spread "freedom" to the world (except Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and Russia, and China, and...) also likes to pick up foreign citizens merely suspected, by the boneheads in our intelligence services, of being connected to known terrorists, then delivers them to oppressive regimes for months of torture. As Bob Herbert points out, this is akin to contract killing in its gruesome disregard for liberty, life, and law. There is not an ounce of honest love from freedom in Bush's body, for you cannot have freedom without due process and protected civil rights---and Bush hates these things. How can you sneer at the "courts" and "due process", which protect liberty from the state, at the same time that you hallow liberty in the abstract?

Sinclair news is proudly in the "center" of the American political spectrum (smack dab between the American Nazi Party and everyone else). Their leadership is proud to use their access to the public airwaves to run a Pravda-like new service saying only good about our government, hiding the bad, and firing anyone who refuses to give up their journalistic ethics. All part of a continuum of Bush-party propaganda efforts that include covert payments to "journalists" for their support, and covert insertions of party yes-men as "journalists" in the White House press pool.

Bush didn't run on Social Security reform, and some Americans may be
belated realizing they shouldn't have voted for the lying, smirking chimp. Oh well.

Some right-wing bloggers claim that "everyone" on the Left wants to (literally) destroy America, and are allying with Islamic terrorists to do it. I believe that's called blood libel. So... at what point do the American far right (i.e., the mainstream Republican party elite) decide that American liberals are the real enemy, and start using against us tactics currently reserved for the innocent citizens of countries they don't like?

Part of the the problem is that the wingnuts have their own vision of America, and refuse to accept any other vision of America as legitimate. Oppose their ideals, and ipso facto, you oppose "America" and are a traitor. Moreover, they have decided these ideals are embodied in, of all people, George W. Bush; oppose him, or point out his astounding dishonesty, hypocrisy, cruelty, and stupidity, and likewise you are necessarily a traitor. All treason means to the right nowadays is disagreement. Ideologically, they are headed for absolutism at a minimum, and at worst, fascism dressed up with the hilariously inappropriate rhetoric of liberty.

On punditry

2005-02-07T23:15:00.000-08:00

In his latest smackdown of Jonah Goldberg, Juan Cole raises some trenchant points about the role and problem of "pundits".

We'll start with an oldie-but-goodie: "if you haven't read a printed-on-paper book on a topic, you aren't remotely qualified to pontificate about it":

I do not understand why CNN or NPR would hire someone to talk about Iraq policy who has not read a book on the subject under discussion. Actually, of course, it would be desirable that he had read more than one book. Books are nice. They are rectangular and soft and have information in them. They can even be consumed on airplanes. Goldberg should try one.

My high school debate coach would bludgeon people with that one; especially people with an emotional stake in an issue (say, Israel-Palestine), but no intellectual chops.

My interest here is not on the content of the Cole-Goldberg debate, but about the larger issue of "why we have to listen to people like Goldberg in the first place". So I'm afraid I'll be editing out his retorts, and fast-forwarding to another nice nice jab from the historian:

Goldberg also makes an elementary error in arguing that the fact that people in Iran are disillusioned with Khatami now, in 2005, has any bearing on their attitudes in 1997 when they first elected him. As a historian, Jonah, let me explain to you about this mistake. It is called "anachronism." It occurs when people argue that present conditions explain past ones. It doesn't work that way. Mostly because time's arrow goes forward, not backwards. I should explain that one too. It is called "the second law of thermodynamics." Apparently this law does not exist in Punditland, where the grand pooh-bahs are all permitted 3 anachronisms before breakfast.

Which reminds us that one problem with pundits (and blogs, and water cooler conversations) is that you can get away with silly, nonsensical rhetoric. In a book, Goldberg would have to explain why the degree to which an election is democratic depends on what happens years later; referees and editors would stop you and---well, maybe not at the presses Goldberg frequents.

Round three. Cole puts his finger on something important:

Goldberg is now saying that he did not challenge my knowledge of the Middle East, but my judgment. I take it he is saying that his judgment is superior to mine. But how would you tell whose judgment is superior? Of course, all this talk of "judgement" is code for "political agreement." Progressives think that other progressives have good judgment, conservatives think that other conservatives have good judgment. This is a tautology in reality. Goldberg believes that I am wrong because I disagree with him about X, and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, and ipso facto lacks good judgment.

An argument that judgment matters but knowledge does not is profoundly anti-intellectual. It implies that we do not need ever to learn anything in order make mature decisions. We can just proceed off some simple ideological template and apply it to everything. This sort of thinking is part of what is wrong with this country. We wouldn't call a man in to fix our plumbing who knew nothing about plumbing, but we call pundits to address millions of people on subjects about which they know nothing of substance.

But I did not say that Goldberg's judgment is always faulty. I said he doesn't at the moment know what he is talking about when it comes to Iraq and the Middle East, and there is no reason anyone should pay attention to what he thinks about those subjects, as a result. If judgment means anything, it has to be grounded in at least a minimum amount of knowledge. Part of the implication of my assertion is that Goldberg could actually improve his knowledge of the Middle East and consequently could improve his judgment about it (although increased knowledge would only help judgment if it were used honestly and analytically). I don't think he is intrinsically ignorant, I think he is being wilfully ignorant.

The American right-wing has called this play---the "judgment call", if you will---incessantly in recent decades. They prefer their values to others---and who doesn't prefer their own values---but they are so enamored, so confident that their values are "right", that they don't care what the facts are. Opponents might show that, regardless of whether their values are "correct", right-wing policies are failures, or that right-wing assessments of the state of the world are factually inaccurate, or right-wing statements are self-contradictory---and they don't care! Many educated people in the left and center (sane people with the ability to admit being wrong) would try to understand knowledge-based criticisms of their assumptions and conclusions, because we know that being wrong has consequences, and so we want to avoid being wrong. That is how we ensure that our values are realized in the world. Good intentions and stupid policies don't deliver good results.

People on the modern American right have an amazing faith that simply espousing their own values makes being right about everything else superfluous. There is clearly a parallel, maybe even an origin, in the bizarre belief that simply accepting Jesus as your "Savior" makes everything okay---no need for good works here! And there is an early exemplar in Reagan, who was so senile and so nutty that he couldn't tell reality from his own fictions---but he knew what his values were.

With followers and leaders like these, modern Republicans have become hopelessly lost intellectually. They seldom respond to factual or knowledge based arguments; bitterly regard instances when they have been proven unarguably wrong to be ideological, rather than intellectual defeats; and relentless respond to intellectual arguments with irrelevant value statements---the strategy of the judgment call.

More than anything else about the modern American right---more than its fascism, its greed, its recklessness and shortsightness, its cruelty and bloodlust---what I cannot stand is its disregard for knowledge. Their values are awful, maybe even evil. But their lack of the slightest respect for truth is something I can never accept, respect, or forgive.

How did we get into this mess? Isn't the media supposed to prevent such idiocy from gaining the highest ranks of power in a democracy? It would, if the media served as the collective expression and puzzling of a great society. But like any other function in our republic, it's not guaranteed. Instead---because many of us want it, and because rich, politically motivated wingnuts have sought it---we have a media that shuns expertise, knowledge, and logic for testosterone, pointless graphics, and overheated lies shouted in 30 second snippets. It has given prominence to ignorant hotheats like Jonah Goldberg, bent on sowing a simple, impossible ideology, even though there are thousands in our country who could use his position to help sort out the confusion of the modern world. I'll give Cole the last word.

Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.

The thing that really annoyed me about Goldberg's sniping was it reminded me of how our country got into this mess in Iraq. It was because a lot of ignorant but very powerful and visible people told the American people things that were not true. In some instances I believe that they lied. In other instances, they were simply too ignorant of the facts to know when an argument put forward about, say, Iraq, was ridiculous. For instance, it was constantly said that Iraqis were "secular." This allegation ignored four decades of radical Shiite organizing and revolutionary activity by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the al-Dawa Party, and others, as well as the influence on Iraqis of the Khomeini revolution and of the 1991 Saddam crackdown on Shiites. They were never contradicted when they said this on television, though.

And, of course, there was all that hype about Iraq being 2-4 years from having a nuclear weapon, which was either a Big Lie or a Dr. Strangelove fantasy. Khidir Hamza appears to have been paid by someone (and got big royalties from the American Enterprise Institute) to spin a web of complete lies about the Iraqi (non-existent by then) nuclear program. Goldberg in particular pushed that line, with his North Korea comparison, on a number of occasions. His current excuse is that other people were wrong, too. D'oh.

...

The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skilfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society and very possibly to end the free Republic we have managed to maintain for over 200 years.

Would you like some Censorship(tm) on your Freedom(tm)?

2005-02-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

Now, just in time for, well, winter, comes a delicious new topping for Freedom(tm) frozen desserts: Censorship(tm). (Mmmm.... Censorship(tm))

It works like this: try to take Dear Leader's ramblings at face-value, and you may get a threatening letter from Dear Leader's thugs implying your station may be sued. You see, Dear Leader carefully chooses his words to ensure you remain as confused as he is:

Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

'Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

'Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.'

If you try to use the free press to translate Dear Leader's speech into clear policy consequences (e.g., switching from wage-indexation to price-indexation will lower SS costs by, you know, cutting benefits), you will get an Orwellian message from your friendly Freedom(tm) fascists at the RNC.

The RNC letter tastes like marzipan, and goes great with any of the tasty Freedom(tm) flavors on the market.

All kidding aside, if this had happened fifteen years ago, everyone on the left and most of the right would be furious. But people are now accustumed to Bush bullying the press, deriding his tens of millions of opponents as out-of-the-mainstream and un-American.

Just imagine what a hand-picked Bush Supreme Court would do to the Bill of Rights.

MSS: Shia, Sunni, Red, and Blue

2005-02-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

No doubt many of my readers have daydreamed about breaking the Blue States away from our lunatic breathren in the Red States. Or simply approving the South's request for secession, and apologizing for the delay. But looking at Iraq's ethnic divisions has the Mad Social Scientist in me thinking: maybe we just have to deal with the Red/Blue split like we would deal with any (other?) ethnic conflict: create institutions granting both sides a veto.

My simple thought is that we reorganize Congress into two chambers with equal membership and powers (e.g., both have the power of the purse, and both have the right to deny confirmation to presidential appointees). One would be the House of the Blue, drawing its membership from Congressional Districts in Blue States only; the other the House of the Red. Under current rules for passing laws, this would grant each side in our national argument the easy ability to veto any legislation that comes up the pike (and that includes resolutions for war).

Points for the plan:
1. It achieves the goals the Founders set out for the Senate---balancing the interests of diverse states---in a fashion more appropriate for our present urban/rural split.
2. Only policy changes that are uncontroversial across the Red/Blue divided would pass. Some worthy policies would languish, but few horrible new policies---or unfair policies---would pass.
3. The potential for compromise would be built into the system, but if one side refused to negotiate, things still wouldn't get any worse than they are now.

Caveats:
1. Republicans will demur, because they have all the power, and want to use it to the maximum extent they can.
2. But, once the split is made, Republicans would have an unassailable veto forever. We would never become a great nation (we'd never get national health insurance, or stop global warming, or start a national initiative to develop new fuels, or give full rights to gays, the disabled, minorities, women, etc.). But we would never become a nation that either half our populace couldn't bear. Republicans who hate liberals could take comfort in that.
3. The presidency remains a problem, especially in its present imperial state. It would be better to have a Prime Minister selected by the consent of, and serving at the pleasure of, both Houses---some real milquetoast no one has strong feelings for or against. Alternatively, we could give each House an independent legislative veto.
4. We'd be competing with French 4th Republic and the pre-Berlusconi Italian Republic for the title of most immobilized political system (but that's better than global enemy number 1, our current world ranking).
5. It's a Mad Social Science idea...

Fun questions for political scientists:
1. How many parties would there be, and what would they stand for?
2. What rules would the Houses adopt? E.g., how would conference committees be selected?
3. Would the preferences of the national median voter have any relevance?

What are the right institutions for Iraqi democracy?

2005-02-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

My friend Ryan has a post complaining about the choice of proportional representation in Iraq. I think the real issues are separate for the vote-aggregation rule, as I explain in this comment:

PR with MMD isn't really the problem here. In ethnically divided states lacking a history of democracy, elections, once introduced, tend to be ethnic censuses. That will happen under PR/MMD, FPTP/SMD or under Mixed systems.

Perhaps I'm too credulous of Arend Lijphart's claims of the virtues of so-called consociational institutions, but I think what Iraq really needs are more institutions that give the elites of all ethnic groups a stake and a say in collective negotiation of policy. Rather than focusing on the voting rules, I would emphasize 1.) strong federalism, with different regions enjoying autonomy over all policy areas where such autonomy is feasible and 2.) veto-status in national institutions for each ethnic group.

There is some degree of this written into the current rules, but not enough. The Sunnis can be shut out by a Shia-Kurd coalition, at least given the apparent turnout in the election. That is a bad system---you need a system that is boycott-proof, in the sense of giving Sunnis a say whether they try to refuse to participate or not. Then, you reward any Sunni leaders who choose the path of compromise and talk. But that path has to remain open, regardless of the outcome of elections, so long as ethnic division are deep.

Everything must be done to keep each group engaged in politics, so that they do not resort to violence. Even when they resort to violence, an avenue for political neogiation must always be open. The trick them becomes punishing particular elites who try to play both sides, war and politics, and rewarding those who virtuously stick to political negotiation. This is a lesson the Israelis have been very slow to learn, at their great cost, but they are starting to show signs of sense.

One hopes the US and Shia leadership will follow.

Naturually, any of my readers who are more knowledgable of Iraqi institutions or more cynical of consociationalism should beat me over the head for my naivete...

FREE-E-E-E-DOM! (yet another Fafblog tribute, guest starring Mel Gibson)

2005-02-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

What is this "freedom" that Bush keeps on about? I thought I knew what freedom was, and under the old definition (civil liberties), I though Bush had the worst record in post-war history, so I'm a bit surprised he brought it up.

But Fafblog suggests maybe it's not freedom Bush is yammering about, but Freedom(TM), which comes in three tasty flavors and can be found in the freezer section of your neighborhood grocery store.

In potentially related news, Bush wants us to stop "frivolous asbestos lawsuits". (Cough cough wheeze). And wouldn't you know it, Halliburton has a huge asbestos liability weighing down its profits. (I'm sure that's just a coincidence, which, incidentally, is what Halliburton means in Ancient Greek.)

A friend of mine suggests that we must stop these lawsuits because asbestos particles are actually Freedom Fibers(TM), a floating particulate version of Freedom(TM), perfect for spreading the breath of Freedom(TM) to the oppressed peoples of the Middle East (cough hack wheeze choke).

Which is where I get confused. Because I can't tell: Are Freedom Fibers good or bad?

Back in the day, Republicans used to love Freedom Fibers, and told us they were the greatest guys in the world. They used to funnel money and weapons to them, legally or illegally, but that was okay, because they were fibers for freedom. It said so, right in the Republican's defense to the investigating committees.

Maybe I'm not expert enough, but I see some guys in Afghanistan and Iraq who look a lot like those Freedom Fibers we used to support in Nicaragua and, well, Afghanistan. In fact, I think some of them are the same Fibers. But now apparently they are all Evil Fibers, and we have to destroy them to protect the true Freedom Fibers, who, like good Highlanders, paint their fingers blue.

I guess I'm not good enough at Fiber recognition. Maybe we need to get a forensic pathologist out there to tell us which fibers are Freedom Fibers and which fibers are Evil Fibers.

And what about Freedom Fibbers? There seem to be a lot of those in the White House nowadays, saying that something is Freedom(TM) when it's not.

Maybe, when we get the forensic pathologist, we should also order up Braveheart, so that when one of the Freedom Fibbers shouts "FREE-E-E-E-DOM", Braveheart can say, "That's not a Freedom Fiber, *THIS* is a FREE-E-E-E-DOM Fiber."

But then the White House might say it's just the new peanut-butter-flavored Freedom(TM), and Braveheart will get frustrated and chop the spokesperson's head off, and---

What's that you say? Braveheart went crazy and started making psuedo-Catholic slasher flicks? Oh, where's a true Freedom Fiber when you need one...

Amusing, but a bit painful

2005-02-06T03:00:00.000-08:00

This clip from Fox was making the rounds not long ago; I just saw it now. A Vanity Fair editor rips Bush for spending $40 million on parties when our soldiers are dying in Iraq for lack of adequate equipment. The Fox anchor is clearly flummoxed; she thought this would be a puff enterview on party plans, but her interviewee would rather talk about something important (yay! Death to puff pieces!). When she regains her equilibrium, this Fox "journalist" rushes to defend her Fuhrer by pointing to his prayers for the troops---which, since she is about two steps behind, only adds to the effectiveness of the VF editor's argument that Bush exploits our troops' suffering for photo ops and parties, while leaving them to die on the other side of the world.

But it was painful watching Judy Bachrach's face (which, all else equal, really shouldn't be the case). I can see on it the twisting-guts feeling I get when pitted against an implacably stupid person bent on wreaking havoc, and no amount of rational argument can get through. Bachrach knows that the madness of soldiers dying for ersatz Iraqi democracy will continue, while the men who engineered it all will enjoy many more parties. She knows that the Fox empire will continue its largely effective efforts to keep Red America woefully misinformed about the state of the world. (Reality check: do you really think the good people of, say, Wyoming like the idea of big Washington parties in lieu of material aid for the troops? I can imagine they would be the first to call it an abomination, if they had all the facts at their disposal.)

Oh well. Someday, probably soon, Rupert Murdoch will die. Someone could write a far-and-balanced obit on how he helped destroy the free press and end two centuries of American democracy. And then, perhaps, the market will cast his media empire to the four winds.

Juan Cole catches a moron

2005-02-05T14:30:00.000-08:00

The most frustrating thing about being an American these days, and interested in public affairs, is that half the people getting air-time and page-space are morons writing fiction from a conservative view. The educated left and the Bush right don't just disagree about values, or the implications of different policy choices, or the seriousness of different problems: the Bush right actually doesn't care what reality is. They don't care what demonstrably happened lst week, last year, or last decade. They don't care when they are caught taking opposite positions from year to year on important issues. They don't care if everything they say is soon proved wrong; they just move on to new works of fiction.

But they are very good at propoaganda. They would make Goebbels proud, any day of the week. They are especially good at audacious propaganda, of the form, when committing sin X, accuse you opponent of being the only one committing sin X. If you are simply making up history from whole cloth, say the Democrats are unmoored from reality. And define reality as whatever your red state followers believe, which happens to be what you tell them to believe, which happens to be pure fiction---so accusing Democrats of living in their own world is really accusing of them of staying in the real world, while the right drifts off into dreamland.

I've seen this meme a lot lately, and find I have zero patience for it. I refuse to take anyone who pulls this sort of trick seriously. When some one just makes up their "facts", then attacks their opponent for disagreeing, you know that they aren't just stupid, but liars and, quite probably, up to no good. (Social Security is a great example, but a bit painful to talk about right now.)

So it's nice to see Juan Cole catch an uber-moron and liar, Jonah Goldberg. Cole asserted that the 1997 Iranian elections were more democratic than the 2005 Iraqi elections. This is not just arguably true, it is very important. The 1997 election in Iran produced a massive mandate for a reformer (Khatami) eager to reach out to the US. It gave me and many Iranians I knew great hope for the future of that country. It was the best thing to happen in the Middle East for many years.

And things were getting better, until Bush came into office and pulled the rug out from under Khatami. You see, President Khatami had legitimacy, a mandate for democratic reform and renewed trade with the US, but he had an institution enemy in the Revolutionary Council. The Council tried to undermine Khatami by heightening conflict with the West, and forcing Iranians to take sides. If Bush had said "Khatami is great, and we're going to help him every way we can. If he want renewed diplomatic relations and a trade agreement, even an aid package, he gets it,", it would have boosted Khatami, given his supporters a sign that their voices made a difference, and kept Iran on the path to democratization.

Instead, Bush refused to talk with any Iranians, then labeled the country part of the "Axis of Evil", even though it had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda, and even though Iran had been making strides for years towards the kind of state we ostensibly wanted it to be. Progress stopped overnight.

Jonah Goldberg, it turns out, doesn't know anything about the 1997 election. Yet he writes about the Middle East, and Iran in particular, and says "[Juan Cole] absurdly declared that the 1997 Iranian elections were much more democratic (Iranian candidates had to be approved by the mullahs)."

Cole decimates this point, and takes the time to note that Goldberg is has been persistently moronic on Iraq. My favorite part is that Goldberg appears to admit in his reply that he doesn't know anything about the 1997 election. It seems he just though "Iran=undemocratic", a simple equation that ignores, of, the last decade of political history there.

And these are the guys who want us to start a war with this country. As with Iraq, their information is a decade old, and badly mistaken.

If there is a war with Iran, I want these men in the first Humvees over the border. And they can pay for their own armor.

Honor, Murder, and War

2005-02-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

Via Brad DeLong comes this parallel from Billmon:

From Apocalypse Now:

Col. Walter E. Kurtz: "What did they tell you?"

Capt. Willard: "They told me that you had gone totally insane, and, uh, that your methods were... unsound."

Col. Walter E. Kurtz: "And are my methods unsound?"

Capt. Willard: "Uh, I don't see any method at all, Sir."

Whiskey Bar: Unsound Methods:

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling . . . You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis, USMC
Speech on Strategies for the War on Terrorism
February 1, 2005

"While I understand that some people may take issue with the comments made by him, I also know he intended to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war," [Marine Corp Commandant Mike] Hagee said. "Lt. Gen. Mattis often speaks with a great deal of candor." Hagee also praised Mattis, calling him "one of this country's bravest and most experienced military leaders."

Associated Press
Marine General Counseled for Comments
February 3, 2005

I have a few observations, ranging from the visceral to the contemplatative:

1. Lt. Gen. Mattis is apparently a high ranking officer of our country's military who enjoys killing. He likes shooting people. He finds it fun.

Some would say there's a fine line between murder and war. Others would say there is no line, that all war is killing, and we should renounce it except under immediate threat of destruction. I don't know which view is right, only that we have to strive to make and keep a distinction between these activities so long as we are going to engage in war at all.

In war, killing is necessary to achieve urgent ends---protecting civilians, ending the conflict, defeating the forces of oppression and conquest. Soldiers kill because they have to. Sadistic, inhuman murderers kill because they want to. When a soldier must kill, either to obey orders or protect himself, he must guard against taking any pleasure in it---both to protect himself from becoming a monster, and to protect our military from becoming a instrument of cruelty.

Lt. Gen. Mattis, by his own colorful admission, takes great pleasure in killing his enemy. In my book, that makes Mattis a murderer, a psychopath, and a threat to the safety of our armed forces. He must be removed from command at once, or he will continue to commit murder in our nation's name, continue to set an evil example for our nation's soldiers, and continue to endanger the safety of our troops by allowing war to descend into butchery.

2. Marine Commandant Hagee, Mattis's superior officer, has defended Mattis. That is frightening, and I worry about whether Hagee is himself fit for command. (Though in politics, and especially the Bush administration, refusing to admit that your organization ever makes mistakes is a favored strategy, and so perhaps Hagee is merely hiding his own disgust.)

Hagee also says Mattis "intended to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war". I read Mattis in the opposite fashion: he appears to revel in the harsh realities of war.

3. Hagee describes Mattis as "one of this country's bravest and most experienced military leaders". I know nothing about Mattis beyond the quote above. But a man who takes pleasure in killing a far weaker enemy strikes me as the opposite of brave. Bravery requires adhering to a high standard of conduct even under fire.

I hazard to guess that a brave man would consider the necessity of killing a weaker enemy to be an unpleasant necessity, and would consider anyone who took pleasure in the "mopping up" to be a disgrace.

4. One of the features that distinguishes the practice of many wars from unfettered killing is the rules by which combatants abide. In the midst of battle, two enemies may seek any means of killing each other, lest they be killed themselves. But let a soldier surrender, and everything may change. The victor often is bound by social or legal conventions to cease fire, to offer humane conditions of captivity to the vanquished, even to accept the desire of the prisoner to escape as legitimate.

It is easy to imagine a war fought by two countries in which each side accepts to surrender from enemy soldiers. Every battle is a fight to the death. Prisoners may be slaughtered, to save the trouble and expense of guarding and feeding them. Or prisoners may be worked to death.

In past centuries, the conventions of humane war---admitted, not very humane, but better than simple killing---rested in large part on social conventions of honor. Men on opposite sides of a war might be ordered to kill each other, but still respected the "honor" of the other side, accepted surrender graciously, treated prisoners decently, etc. Wherever the idea of honor in war came from, it proved a useful device for soldiers, who could be somewhat confident that if they were captured, they would not be simply slaughtered. If you treated a captured enemy honorably, you upheld a convention that could protect you in the event of role reversal.

Today, we rely on international treaties like the Geneva Conventions to make war more humane. War is always harsh and bloody, but civilized nations try to limit the brutality to actual combat. (We left the company of civilized nations over a year ago, through our torture of prisoners, and confirmed our barbarian status by accepting Albert Gonzalez, a war criminal and torturer, as head of the Department of Justice). More important, civilized nations also avoid war except as a last resort to defend themselves or prevent crimes against humanity. (In contrast, America now makes war for sport, apparently.)

I tend to think of honor or laws of war as institutions that make an awful activity a bit less awful. Soldiers may think of honor as something more; something so worth gaining as to make honorable participation in combat desirable. That attitude scares me, but not nearly so much as a thirst for killing itself. Someone, like Lt. Gen. Mattis, who thinks that killing the enemy is a hoot; who thinks "it's fun to shoot some people", has no honor.

And when you consider that Mattis's forces are vastly superior to his enemy, so that his shooting games are like shooting fish in a barrel, and when you consider that as a general, Mattis life is in little danger, while his own troops risk death for Mattis' blood sport, then you can only conclude that this dishonorable man has no place in the armed forces of this republic.

5. I supported US intervention in Afghanistan long before it became fashionable in conservative circles. I wanted the US to back the Northern Alliance long before 9/11, because I thought the Taliban's oppression of women was a crime that justified an armed struggle. I am mostly pacifistic, but I have my limits, and the Taliban walked over them.

But I didn't want to send Col. Kurtz over to Afghanistan to do the job. I wanted to send real soldiers, like the brave men and women who went to Bosnia to rebuild that divided nation. People who believed in making the world a better place, even at the risk of their own lives; volunteers whose professionalism, selflessness, and composure under fire would make us proud. Not sadistic killers looking for permission to endulge in bloodsports.

It's time to find Captain Willard, and send him up-river. Our methods are unsound, and our own commanders and their political chiefs are the real enemy of the republic.

Ending our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity

2005-01-31T16:33:00.000-08:00

Daniel Gross is easily the best regular columnist on Slate.com, and he outdoes himself with this history of Republican frustration with the wild success of New Deal policies.

Gross's thesis is that Republicans have never gotten over the fact that FDR was right: that regulation, taxation, and government programs could save capitalism from itself, give it a conscience, and simultaneously usher in a new age of growth, prosperity, opportunity, and equality, and save the world from Communism and fascism. Instead, Republicans blindly assume things must be worse than they would be under unfettered capitalism---and refuse to even listen to contrary evidence. Gross says Republicans are scheming to demolish Social Security not because of any of the official reasons they give, but because they want to stick it to FDR. If they have to end our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity in the process, so be it.

I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of self-schadenfraude motivated the Grover Norquists of the world. But I think the muscle is coming from politicos, not intellectuals, who see the chance to carry out the greatest heist in history...

I love one point Gross makes: who saved the country from Depression and the world from fascism? Who led when the Greatest Generation was soldiering through America's darkest hours? Not the Republicans---they just helped create the catastrophe. No, it was the Democrats who were in charge when it really mattered. Thank God. And let's never let the Republicans forget it.

Bush's idea of freedom

2005-01-31T14:57:00.000-08:00

Apropos my earlier post, here is how my friend Rob heard the Bush inaugural speech.

How else could it be heard?

An old protest slogan, meant to be chanted by assembled crowds speaking to the powers that be, goes "This is what democracy looks like."

Mr. Bush, if your policies look like "freedom" to you, I can only conclude you are dangerously sociopathic.

No, no, no, no, no

2005-01-31T13:57:00.000-08:00

It's time to point out a dangerous delusion. One of my favorite economists, and favorite bloggers, Brad DeLong, has one annoying intellectual habit. Like many economists, he occasionally speculates on the optimal policy, assuming politics is no barrier to that policy (e.g., the assumption that a benevolent dictator exists, who always implements the optimal known policy, so the only policy problem consists of finding it). This is a useful exercise, within limits. But it is not an adequate route to policy prescription, because public policy is a political economic equilibrium, depending not only on what is feasible and rational for strategic actors in the economy, but also what is feasible and rational for strategic actors in the government. Moreover, it is an institutional equilibrium: institutions, as, for instance, Douglass North often argues, shape the resources of actors; hence control of institutions contributes to the long-run equilibrium in policy.*

Upshot: a policy that might be optimal under a benevolent dictator (who may be governing a pack of wily, selfish economic actors) may not---in fact, usually is not---optimal or sustainable when the government itself is run by and contested by wily, selfish political actors (who may, of course, overlap with the economic actors). It may sound good in "theory" (that is, a naive theory), but in practice, may be quickly subverted, exploited, or trashed.

Example: Brad notes a possible compromise on Social Security involving granting the Social Security Administration some latitude to govern a tentative private accounts scheme, and also giving the SSA the power to expand that scheme at a later date. The virtue of the plan is putting that date off, so that current arguments about the course of privatization that seem false can be proven so before irrevocable changes are made.

But supposing this plan were implemented, how would the governing party react? The same way they always do---they'd try to staff SSA with sycophants, profiteers, and liars; they'd build a long term campaign convince the public that the Democrats had in fact conceded that SS is collapsing; they'd try to manipulate the calendar for further privatization; and in general use the new institutional power of the SSA to achieve their own (nefarious) ends. I'd like to say the Democrats would fight tooth and nail, and develop strategies to undermine the Republicans', but they haven't done that over the last 20 years, and they show little sign of strategic thinking even now. Instead, they are struggling even to unite in short-term opposition to the destruction of their party's grand achievement.

If the world were run by powerful, smart technocrats, who cared equally about the fate of all citizens, then Brad's idea might be the way to go. But *nothing* is run that way. In a shameless plug of my dissertation, I should note that not even central banks, the supposed paragons of modern economic technocracy, are free of subjectivity, disagreement, and indirect government manipulation. To the extent DeLong's proposal to give the SSA independence is a conscious or unconscious imitation of the granting of legal independence to central banks, it would be wise to note that laws alone do not create autonomy.

Instead of offering compromises that might, under a wise government, offer marginal improvements over status quo, we should recognize that we can do no better than to "buy insurance" against truly catastrophic policy choices made by the morons, monsters, and madmen in charge of our government. That means fighting like hell to preserve the good-but-imperfect system we have. On every major policy initiative---tax cuts, Medicare, Iraq, Social Security---the Bush administration has lied about the effects of that policy to Congress. Lied, as in "told Congress things it knew to be untrue", like the size of the tax cut, the cost of prescription drug benefits, the cost and necessity of war, the current fiscal state of Social Security... There can be no relationship of trust with political actors who have repeatedly shown a willingness to lie for short-run gain. We can never compromise or work with them; we can only defend what is good about the status quo, and hold out until they are at last sent home to Texas.

Lesson: We can't expect a rescue by wise men or those missing Republican "adults" Brad and other keep hoping will ride to the rescue. Throughout history, many political economies have found themselves under the power of fools with grand schemes, or under the thrall of petty thieves bent on extracting rents at the expense of national wellbeing. We in the US have largely escaped that fate, through wisdom and luck. We've pressed our luck by (re?-)electing a snake-oil salesman. Without wisdom, even our luck will eventually run out.

*I call this a habit, because I am sure DeLong is as aware as anyone of the need to consider the politics of equilibrium policies, and the role of institutions. I have my own lazy intellectual habits; a good friend often complains about my tendency to confidently assume "the grass is greener" in Western Europe on many issues. Perhaps you've noticed others...

9/11, Iraq, and the meaning of freedom

2005-01-31T13:33:00.000-08:00

A very disturbing study finds that a large fraction of the current crop of American high school students---the 9/11 generation---no longer believe in the 1st Amendment.

Only half, for example, think there should be a free press.

My friends teaching freshmen and sophomores in college tell me there has been a sudden, generational shift towards authoritarianism. Hobbes is in; Locke is out. Fear of terror, and the imperative of maintaining security, have triumphed over the love of liberty.

Did al Qaeda attack America because it "hated our freedom", as so many Republicans have said? Of course not; only someone totally ignorant of al Qaeda's goals, and willing to treat a serious enemy as a gaggle of idiots, would assert such nonsense. They wanted to engage us in a global struggle over the future of the Islamic world. They don't care what we do in the privacy of our own borders.

The real enemy of American freedom has used to the 9/11 attacks to tear up the constitution, introduce fear and torture to the daily political lexicon of America, and, most insidiously of all, shift political discourse so far towards security policy that children growing up in today's America think the struggle against terrorism trumps all other concerns, including civil rights. Is the constitution of American liberty so weak that a mere 3000 civilian deaths, in a country of 300 million, could persuade us to abandon the Bill of Rights? Horrible as 9/11 was, it would not test the Founders' faith in liberty, and it should not test ours. Thomas Paine would be shocked at how little we suffered before abandoning our birthright.

My words may strike some readers as strange, because the very terms "freedom", "liberty", and "democracy" are being redefined under own noses. Bush claims he is on a worldwide crusade for freedom---which naturally consists of war, threats, and occupation abroad, the secret construction of an international gulag archipelago, and the smearing of domestic opponents as traitors. All part of freedom, you know.

All modern authoritarians must confront the concepts of liberty and democracy. Most choose to redefined these words so that their regimes can be seen as paragons of democracy and freedom. We're not just living such a redefinition, we're exporting it.

Yesterday, the brave people of Iraq ignored guerilla attacks to participate in... what exactly? An election with more than a hundred parties, secret candidates afraid for their lives, a puppet government expected to do well (how can they not in the circs), an occupier regulating their press and freedom of movement---this sounds like a plebiscitory carnival to me, not a democracy. I'm hesitant to even admit the mere possibility this could lead to democracy or a democratic culture.

But the press and pundits of the US called it "democracy", and, more disturbingly, "freedom". In Bush's America, political freedom is no more than the right to participate in periodic majoritarian elections, no matter how twisted, and subsequent submission to the supposed embodiment of that majority. I don't know how anyone can connect the two concepts, but essay after essay says the Iraqis, by participating in this grisly joke, are showing their love of "freedom". (Soon, we'll probably find that this exercise of freedom consisted of granting a patina of legitimacy to the occupiers' puppet while generally voting on ethnic lines. Woo-hoo!)

Freedom, for those who have forgotten, is not the same as democracy. Often, freedom must be protected from democracy. That, high school students, is the purpose of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights. Our most cherished political documents; the very Holy of Holies of the American civil religion, is a bulwark against the tyranny of democratic majorities.

But these precious civil liberties have been traded in for a cheap knock-off: personal autonomy, which many Americans incompletely construe as liberty from government taxation and regulation.

Plebiscites and empire. Napoleonic democracy, anyone?

All you really need to know about Bush's plans for Social Security

2005-01-31T13:13:00.000-08:00

Bush will (someday) espouse a particular plan for Social Security. That plan will almost surely involve borrowing lots of money (selling government bonds) to invest in the stock market, because "the stock market pays better returns than bonds". As has been noted, this is a bizarre plan: who are the chumps buying our bonds instead of buying stocks, if stocks are such a no brainer? So the first problem is that our plan says the market offers better returns, but is full of fools willing to hand that return to the government, for free, over a period of decades.

Imagine your son, fresh out of college, came to you and said: "Dad, you've always told me to save for retirement, and I've always wanted to live it up while I'm young. My new plan is to spend 100% of my income, but simultaneously take out loans, and invest the proceeds in the stock market, which on average will return 8%. So I just need to find someone who will give a loan for less than 8%, and I'm probably set." Asks the father: "What will you do if the market crashes?" The son: "Oh, I'll default, and live off what I can find in dumpsters after I retire." The bank: "Like hell you're getting a loan for less than 8%! We could invest the money directly in the stock market. Why should we take on the risk of a shiftless, insolvent middle man?"

The reason bonds and stocks coexist, despite bonds having a lower average return or premium, is that the former are lower risk, given the government's *historical* behavior. As the risk associated with bonds increases, say, because the currency is sinking, or because the government is hinting at a future default, especially by piling up unsustainable red ink, the premium associated with bonds will increase. Likewise, the more bonds we issue, the more expensive the next bond is to sell, as we tap out demand for low risk assets and increasingly crowd out private investment. In expectation, there is no benefit to the borrow and invest scheme, unless you think your creditors are a pack of fools.

So does Bush really believe there is a free lunch that can be eaten over a period of decades, on the tab of the world's investors? Well, Bush's economic sophistication pales compared to the average housecat's, so what does his "team" think?

I suspect they think they can make out like bandits in the short run by handing over a large borrowed sum to Wall Street. They know they can't fool all the market indefinitely---they just want to fool some voters for a short time.

Re: Social Security, you need to know only a few other things.

1. Though estimates differ abit, non-partisan experts in the Social Security Administration believe the system will pay out 100% of benefits through 2042, and at least 70% thereafter. Those benefits are indexed to inflation, so 70% is still pretty good---and a lot better than zero. Small tweaks---raising the retirment age gradually, eliminating the cap on payroll income that means an executive and his secretary pay the same SS taxes, and perhaps raising taxes a bit or cutting benefits a bit---could ensure the long-run solvency of the system for many generations.

2. Privatization plans that have been examined by SSA don't provide as much expected benefit as the status quo that's supposedly in crisis.

3. Thanks to Bush's insane fiscal policies---unaffordable tax cuts on the very rich, a massive military build up and endless war in Iraq, increased pork barrel spending---and the weak recovery they have produced, the rest of the Federal Government is in far worse fiscal shape than Social Security. Anyone serious about fiscal responsibilty would tackle the budget deficit first, and be willing to consider tax increases to do it.

4. The Social Security Trust Fund is real, and full of real assets---treasury bonds. The goverment must honor those bonds in the future---both as a matter of constitutional law, and to avoid a massive financial panic. The system is not, nor will it be, "bankrupt". Even in 2042, payroll taxes as currently structured will pay 70% of benefits.

5. If you are 28, like me, you can not only expect to receive Social Security, you should be ready to take to the streets to defend it against theft.

Hoist on their own.... well, you know

2005-01-29T23:47:00.000-08:00

A fascinating argument on whether people deserve their pre-tax incomes is making the rounds. (The answer, of course, is "no", but the argument seems novel.)

In essence, Elizabeth Anderson is pointing out that if you believe prices aggregate information about present demand, they cannot simultaneously reward responsible past behavior, unless present demand was known with certainty when people made the decisions that ultimately determined their wages. If, as Hayek argued, the prices in a capitalist system are the unique source of this information; ie, future demand is uncertain at the time people are making the investments that lead to their income (in combination with relative prices), then incomes do not reflect desert only, but also chance. The component of incomes reflecting chance is not deserved, and can be taxed and redistributed justly.

If, to get out of this argument, one claims that people can know with arbitrary certainty future prices, then the information exists to create a socialist planned economy as efficient as a free market.* But of course, people don't know future prices. And therefore future prices, and the incomes that depend on them, are not precise measures of just desert.

I'm curious how Hayekians and other conservatives would respond. I imagine many would make efficiency arguments against redistribution, while implicitly conceding capitalism is unjust; in essence saying that the degree of redistribution describes an efficient-incentives/justice-in-income frontier, and arguing for a corner solution at the free market.

Others may try to salvage a Nozick rebuttal to Anderson's essentially Rawlsian twist on Hayek, but I'm likely to find that unpersuasive.

Some may employ a public choice argument against redistribution, by defending the market as the most just available system, even if they are not terribly just (e.g., intervention on balance lowers justice, as the politically powerful collect rents/divert redistribution to the undeserving).

What other responses am I missing?

*I hasten to note that such a system may not be in any political economic equilibrium, even if this information is available. Why should any planners do the efficient thing, when they can exploit their institutional power to collect rents?

Does Halliburton know something we don't?

2005-01-29T23:43:00.000-08:00

For years, Halliburton has maintained operations in Iran, despite investigations and criticism. Now, they're pulling out. Dismissing the possibility that Halliburton has developed a corporate conscience or delusions of respectability, should we wonder whether Halliburton knows something we don't?

Fafblog, in the flesh?

2005-01-29T23:32:00.000-08:00

I just read a fun book about Pirates (arrhh), called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, by Gideon Defoe. I've seen it described as a cross between Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and, well, pirates. But me beauties, that's not the half of it. Aye, tis more than a nip of Douglas Adams in this brew, but there's another spice in there, laddies. The humor and style is unmistakable. Is Gideon Defoe the author of Fafblog? Or just an avid reader? Only the Medium Lobster knows for certain, and he's not telling the likes of us scurvy dogs.

The point of a Doomsday device...

2005-01-29T23:24:00.000-08:00

In lighter news, I was picking up wrapping paper at the drugstore when I found a great gag gift. Many years ago, one of my uncles got one of my other uncles an... unconventional birthday gift.

Naturally, this meant war. The Mr. T Sprinkler got passed around for a couple of years, then disappeared. My cousin found one on ebay and gave it to his father this Christmas, no doubt igniting a new gag gift war.

I cannot risk a gag gap!

And today, I found my new first strike weap---er, doomsday deterrent. The fools at the drugstore had slashed the price from $20 to $5, and placed it hopefully by the register. The sales clerk thought my plan to purchase it a gift from God. It talks, you see, and that must get very annoying. Very annoying indeed...

Mu-hm-hm-ha-ha-ha!

I was tempted to play the lotto numbers on this one

2005-01-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

The fortune cookie I received at a Chinese restaurant, an hour after defending my doctoral dissertation:

"You have had a good start. Work harder!"

MSS: The madness of King George, and the 25th Amendment

2005-01-11T22:40:00.000-08:00

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

I think it's time. Alas, the VP is as mad as a hatter himself, and the Cabinet is full of undistinguished sycophants, but file this provision in the back of your mind. Bush's mental incapacity could have a silver lining.

Lies my president told me

2005-01-11T22:32:00.000-08:00

The government is calling off the weapons hunt in Iraq. At least O.J. is still looking for the real killers.

And the GOP continues to try to drown the federal budget in the bathtub, claiming as justification the limp it picked up the last time it was beaten up by the Republicans.

Despite everyone else's opinion that elections cannot be held in Iraq on Jan 30, President Tell-Me-No-Evil insists they can. Goodie. Anything to bring forward the day Iraq enjoys the fruits of democracy. Like ethnic civil war. And a government that secretly pays the press to feed the unsuspecting public propaganda.

Fafblog I most wish I'd thought of

2005-01-11T02:18:00.000-08:00

here

Damning with a weak defense

2005-01-11T01:36:00.000-08:00

Spc. Graner's attorney isn't exactly Clarence Darrow. In fact, I don't think he's even Lionel Hutz.

The prosecution showed some of the photos taken at Abu Ghraib in their opening argument, including several of naked Iraqi men piled on each other and another of England holding a crawling naked Iraqi man on a leash.

In his opening arguments, Womack said using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees, especially those who might be soiled with feces.

“You’re keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections,” he said. “In Texas we’d lasso them and drag them out of there.” He compared the leash to parents who place tethers on their toddlers while walking in shopping malls.

Referring to stacking the prisoners, Womack said: "Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year? Is that torture?"

Womack also said that Graner was "doing his job, following orders and being praised for it."

Yeah, those cheerleaders who are forced to form pyramids naked by people who just finished beating them. I'm sure I saw that in a half-time show somewhere...

Bonus points for appealing to the civility of Texas prison procedures.

An important point most people seem to have forgotten is that a large percentage of Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent bystanders picked up on weak evidence or swept up to meet quotas. They weren't being "corrected", and they hadn't been tried as criminals.

Please be sane

2005-01-11T01:32:00.000-08:00

Today's two op-eds at the NYT are a perfect illustration of the present divide in American politics. The two sides used to be called liberal and conservative, but those monikers no longer capture the real division, which is between the sane and the mad.

Paul Krugman writes a standard Social Security piece, which, like so many I've read in the last month, points out that improving Social Security's fiscal position has nothing to do with private accounts, and everything to do with net national saving. He points out that the deficits Bush's current fiscal policies and proposals will likely create could bring about an Argentina-style crisis. I get the feeling that while Krugman would prefer that Bush preserve the nation's commitment to its retirees, he above all wants Bush to have a sane fiscal policy. If you're going to rob us blind by pillaging the trust fund and/or giving Wall Street a cut of the Social Security pie, at least do it without bankrupting the country. (Let's put it another way, Mr. Bush. How much would it cost to get you and your crew to leave us alone. $500 billion? An even trillion, cold hard cash? It'd be a bargain for the country.)

David Brooks writes a truly bizarre article that as much as admits that Iraq is beyond hope and doomed to a bloody civil war, then does an about face to assert that because most Iraqis want security (he goes so far as to say democracy; I find it dubious that most Iraqis know what it is), therefore they will find a way to control the small percentage who want chaos. Wow. Now that they have all the power, they don't even put the slightest effort into convincing us things will be okay.

First, if "majority for peace brings peace" were an empirically supported principle, world history would look very different. I think most people in pretty much every society are decent folks who would like to live peaceful, secure lives. Yet history is full of civil wars, genocides, and other conflagrations. Clearly, a minority can create violence and instability in some cases, and the peace-loving majority can be persuaded that violence is the only way. Paging Dr. Pangloss---you've just been one-upped.

Second, WTF---aren't conservatives endlessly bleating on about the age of terror, and the power of small, fanatical groups to threaten superpowers? Isn't that why the Bush administration insists on being allowed to invade countries at the first hint of a future threat? And now we're to believe that any small group dedicated to violence and terror is doomed because it lacks a majority? I guess 9/11 doesn't change anything after all.

I haven't posted in a month, but I've been reading, and Jebus is it depressing. I've seen three main news stories: Bush-engineered economic decline; Bush-engineered chaos and death in Iraq, and natural disaster around the Indian Ocean. Nature trumps Bush for destructive power, but give him another year in Iraq, and he'll catch up. I've also seen three main propaganda themes in the conservative press: 2+2=5 level falsehoods, especially regarding Social Security; increasingly fantastical hopes of a turn-around in Iraq; and ominous mutterings that it is time to really "get tough" on the insurgents by training death squads to foment terror in the Sunni triangle (no doubt the new Torturer General can help out).

In the Bush era, the formerly-conservative Republicans have a single media goal: keep their image positive and their enemies under fire while they grab everything that isn't bolted down. Formerly-liberal Democrats have given up on seeing progressive aims realized, and increasingly just want sane policies. Sane conservative policies would be fine. But please, don't burn down the country while you're pilfering the Treasury; don't bleed the army white to make your opponents look like cowards; don't turn us into a nation of torturers, terrorists, and thugs because you lack the creativity to solve the problems you've created; and don't throw out two centuries of democracy just to hold on to power through our national descent into poverty and despair.

We former-liberals in the Sanity Party know you are morons, monsters, and madmen. We tried to stop you; we tried to tell the people, but you've won every round. Now just take what you want and go. We won't press charges, and you can pardon yourselves on the way out. Just leave something standing.

MSS: Boycotts... and general strikes

2005-01-11T01:21:00.000-08:00

A man is trying to organize a general boycott on Jan 20, to mark Bush's Inauguration as a black day.

I think this is a good start, though to be sure, boycotts are seldom successful.

I have something a little larger in mind. Bush is threatening to privatize Social Security, and in the process, steal enormous sums from the trust fund---a trust held by the government on behalf of the people---and from working Americans. Democrats will be hard pressed to stop him in Congress, if Bush is willing to push through a bill to kill Social Security on a party line vote. Before we let that happen, we should consider a general strike. A large fraction of the electorate clearly hates the Bush administration, and we are concentrated in the economically vital Blue States. If we refused to go to work until Social Security was guaranteed, we could wreak havoc.

I should note this is a nuclear option and would be a Herculean task to organize, given the usual free rider problems and inevitable selective efforts at punishment by Republican employers. So I've marked this entry as Mad Social Science. But it's worth filing away---someday, it might not seem so mad...

Kerik bows out

2004-12-11T16:45:00.000-08:00

Ostensibly because of a nanny-problem, Bernard Kerik has declined the nomination to DHS. I don't really think the nanny thing is so deadly (my understanding was that nowadays, that's no barrier to nominees; at least that's what Larry Meyer says). So is it because Kerik once had an outstanding arrest warrant? Has questionable experience? Poor managerial skills?

Maybe, but if a weak resume was such a problem, why did Bush nominate him? And look who we're talking about: Bush is a terrible businessman, probably was arrested for cocaine, definitely was arrested for DWI, etc. etc.

No, the real point is that in the Bush admin, unless you are Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfield (for whom any scandal is tolerated) if you start causing problems---especially if you become a magnet for media criticism---you are gone before the media gets out of hand. The famous Bush loyalty goes only one way.

It's not like Kerik was going to contribute anything policy- or management-wise. So the second he stopped being a nice symbol, he's gone.

Update: I'm thinking there's an even simpler reason to drop Kerik: he's accumulating scandals at a pace that would make Harding blush. Petty corruption, a possible mob connection---the Bushies had to dump this guy fast.

But honestly, picking him in the first place was a insult to the voters. Whatever the bloviators say, the crucial issue for Bush was terrorism, and the perception of a large bloc of voters that Bush could handle terrorism better. Kerik was their first choice to run the agency that tries to stop the bad guys?

Geography game

2004-12-11T14:47:00.000-08:00

Try it. I got 92% with 11 miles average error in 218 seconds.

Then try the advanced version (the states disappear after you place them). I got 74%, 27 miles, and 258 seconds on that one.

Feel free to post you scores in the comments. I'm curious to see who beats me (I have a feeling at least two of my regular readers will).

A world version would be very cool.

Update: Ask and the internet provides. There are a slew of world versions of the game. Some are fiendishly difficult, because you have to both rotate and place, say, all the African countries. So if you (like me) felt pretty good about your US score, there is a version that will provide your comeupance, unless you are some kind of human GIS.

Not even a pretense

2004-12-09T18:58:00.000-08:00

A fiscal conservative? "Not my style", apparently.

A mild irony

2004-12-09T18:54:00.000-08:00

In 2000, Gore lost his home state, Tennessee, and thereby the presidency. That was a major irony.

In 2004, Iowans essentially picked the Democratic candidate, on the grounds that Kerry was the most electable choice. Kerry lost two states which Gore had managed to win in 2000: New Mexico, and, yes, Iowa.

I guess those Iowans really didn't know too much about electability. You can't blame those "out-of-the mainstream" East Coast liberals for this one: the heartland couldn't read its own heart.

Something to think about as the DNC ponders its next chair.

Live political action

2004-12-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

Get yer constantly updated Washington state results here.

Iraq, Democracy, and Reality

2004-12-07T13:41:00.000-08:00

Since 9/11, Bush has shown a predilection from grand statements about politics.* But I usually have no idea what he means. Take today's example:

President Bush, appearing before cheering U.S. forces Tuesday, declared that terrorists won't be able to control Iraq's destiny because ``free people will never choose their own enslavement.''

Just eight words, but to anyone who's studied any history at all, it is hard to support. And what exactly does Bush mean by these words; in particular "free people", "enslavement", and "choose"?

From Bush's other statement, "freedom" appears to mean just two things: having elections (regardless of who contests them or how), and having as little state intervention in the economy as possible. Perhaps on these criteria, Iraq will count as "free" on January 30. But I doubt many political thinkers would call an occupied country with a boiling guerilla war, martial law, and a handpicked puppet government free.

What is "enslavement"? I suppose the opposite of freedom. But if freedom is having elections, even if they are rigged or restricted to favored candidates, I suppose enslavement becomes a logical impossibility. Because whatever "choice" the people make, so long as sham elections** continue to be held, they are still "free".

Any other stabs at this sentence? Perhaps Bush meant that in a free and fair election, people will never choose a party that promises to end democracy. As an empirical proposition, that holds little water. It also begs the obvious question: how can people ensure that their chosen party won't promise democracy, then bring on the oppression? Memo to neo-cons: Democracy is more than elections.

So what would be a truer statement? Try "Affluent societies never choose enslavement", which is the prevailing conventional wisdom in political science. But the same study finds poorer societies often "choose" to stop being democracies.

As my colleague Erik Wibbels points out, Iraq looks like a very poor candidate for democracy using the accumulated knowledge of social science. He estimates the probability of success at 2%, which may even be an overestimate.

But when did the neocons ever care about reality?

* Before 9/11, all Bush had to say about political theory was that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. Which is very funny, because the main political statement associated with Jesus is "Render under Ceasar": i.e., pay your taxes.

** For our purposes, sham elections include those where no overt fraud takes place, but where the incumbent uses the power of the state to ensure an advantage for himself; e.g., by restricting campaigning of other parties, restricting the media, using the police to intimidate opponents, etc.

To Caunterbury they wende, the holy blisful martir for to seke

2004-12-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins, recently declared England's premier intellectual, and in my view the sanest man on earth, has a new book out, The Ancestor's Tale. (See this interview.) Its clever conceit is to trace backwards the ancestry of humans, from earlier primates to the first bacteria, focusing on "concestors", those ancestors which are the earliest common ancestors of groups of presently existing species. The march of concestors towards the root of the Tree of Life is like the pilgramage of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Highly recommended and entertaining, though not as original as, say, the Selfish Gene. It also is beautifully illustrated with scientific diagrams; one almost wonders if Edward Tufte were a consultant.

Stem cells debate takes a turn for the weird

2004-12-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

Saletan writes up a new proposal for harvesting stem cells being considered by the bioethics committee: genetically engineer cells eggs cells to divide without ever forming an embryo. This avoids creating new human life under any definition currently espoused; instead, you can make a big mass of organs with no organizing principle. As I was reading, I first felt horror, then realized that my revulsion had little moral basis (just squeamishness). I suspect anyone who's actually taken gross anatomy or performed an organ transplant would find this mostly unobjectionable in itself. A clever end-run around the whole issue of when life begins.

My prediction is that conservative bioethicists will love it (because it fits with their moral views), but rank-and-file conservatives will deplore it as an abomination (because they are guided less by abstract notions of morality than by gut feelings about what is natural or unnatural). When they say "protect life", they really mean "no tampering in God's domain".

Which brings me to an interesting article on the commonalities of fundamentalism, fascism, and evolution; the argument being that fundamentalisms and fascist movements the world over seem so similar because they result from inherited territorial impulses. Interesting speculation, though I wonder how one would go about testing the hypothesis.

Social Security basics

2004-12-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

If you worry that Social Security is doomed to "bankruptcy", you should read today's Krugman column. The good bits:

The grain of truth in claims of a Social Security crisis is that this tax increase wasn't quite big enough. Projections in a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (which are probably more realistic than the very cautious projections of the Social Security Administration) say that the trust fund will run out in 2052. The system won't become "bankrupt" at that point; even after the trust fund is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits. Still, there is a long-run financing problem.

But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year.

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

It's true that the federal government as a whole faces a very large financial shortfall. That shortfall, however, has much more to do with tax cuts - cuts that Mr. Bush nonetheless insists on making permanent - than it does with Social Security.

But since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one.

My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system's current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn't really an independent entity - it's just part of the federal government.

If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980's was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice.

But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn't an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis - you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

There's no honest way anyone can hold both these positions, but very little about the privatizers' position is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success.

For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it.

No need for verbs on this one

2004-12-07T10:51:00.000-08:00

Kofi Annan oil-for-food resignation calls? Mote beam eye.

Sigh.

Find sushi

2004-12-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you often find yourself thinking: "I could really go for sushi for dinner tonight, but where is there a sushi restaurant around here?", this site is for you.

Statistics Corner: multi-level modeling

2004-12-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

In the unlikely event that any of my readers are interested in statistics, I note that Andrew Gelman has a neat presentation on multi-level modeling (e.g., hierarchical models) which argues they can and should be more widely used, especially where prediction is a goal. He also provides useful software and examples.

(Mental note: find the latex package he used to get those cool on-slide buttons in the header and footer)

Recounts: A serious proposal

2004-12-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

Washington is currently mired in a hand recount of it's governor's race, which came out with a 42 vote margin in the last count. An article here reviews the usual arguments that so close an election can never be definitively counted, due to random errors in either machine or human counting.

That argument is fine under the assumptions, which seem to be a fresh start every time, combined with distractable/fallible/tired humans or machines that lack the imagination to discern unusually marked ballots.

But why start fresh every time? After they are collected, let's number each ballot with some unique identification number. At each recount (i), for each ballot (j), you determine the vote v_ij, such that v_ij = 1 if it's a Rossi vote, and v_ij = 0 if it's a Gregoire vote. As the number of recounts i increases, for each ballot you get a vector of results, v_.j. If v_.j = {0,0,0,0,0}, then we can be pretty sure that's a Gregoire vote; at no stage of the process has a machine or human disagreed. But if v_.j = {0,1,1,0,1}, say, we have identified a problem ballot that needs extra scrutiny.

As the rounds of voting progress, we can segregate the ballots into three bins: those that always count for Rossi, those that always count for Gregoire, and "problem ballots" that get counted different ways. The goal of counting should be to resolve as many ballots in the problem category as possible to everyone's satisfication, and then stop the recounting process when the size of the problem pile is smaller than the margin of victory.

Even with fallible machines and humans, this procedure seems to have a reasonable chance of generating a reliable, accurate count for arbitrarily close elections, provided the counters are fairminded.

Nice to see that Tom Ridge is keeping busy

2004-12-05T16:17:00.000-08:00

Iraq's new color alert system.

Today's humor

2004-12-05T13:50:00.000-08:00

The last few posts have been depressing, so here are a couple of funny posts from a humor blog.

And even the White House is getting in on the fun. After running for re-election without mentioning the environment (because they knew the public disagrees with their anti-environmental inclinations), the Bush admin has discovered a mandate to dismantle environmental protection from their resounding 3 point victory. Those clever Bushies, always trying to give the Onion a run for its money. Like Bush always says: "I'm an oil president. That's my style."

Paranoia's end

2004-12-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

In recent posts I've talked about the role of fear in Bush's America, and about the dangers of dehumanizing the peoples of the Middle East as, in our growing paranoia, we lash out at anyone who might possibly be a threat---sometimes, anyone who moves.

Israel has long since reached this point, and is now a place where the following monstrosity can happen (caught by Andrew Sullivan):

The officer, identified by the army only as Captain R, was charged this week with illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and other relatively minor infractions after emptying all 10 bullets from his gun's magazine into Iman al-Hams when she walked into a "security area" on the edge of Rafah refugee camp last month.

...

But the tape recording of the radio conversation between soldiers at the scene reveals that, from the beginning, she was identified as a child and at no point was a bomb spoken about nor was she described as a threat. Iman was also at least 100 yards from any soldier.

Instead, the tape shows that the soldiers swiftly identified her as a "girl of about 10" who was "scared to death".

The tape also reveals that the soldiers said Iman was headed eastwards, away from the army post and back into the refugee camp, when she was shot.

At that point, Captain R took the unusual decision to leave the post in pursuit of the girl. He shot her dead and then "confirmed the kill" by emptying his magazine into her body.

The tape recording is of a three-way conversation between the army watchtower, the army post's operations room and the captain, who was a company commander.

The soldier in the watchtower radioed his colleagues after he saw Iman: "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward."

Operations room: "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?"

Watchtower: "A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."

A few minutes later, Iman is shot in the leg from one of the army posts.

The watchtower: "I think that one of the positions took her out."

The company commander then moves in as Iman lies wounded and helpless.

Captain R: "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

Witnesses described how the captain shot Iman twice in the head, walked away, turned back and fired a stream of bullets into her body. Doctors at Rafah's hospital said she had been shot at least 17 times.

On the tape, the company commander then "clarifies" why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

Most people would be appalled if a dog were treated so callously. Iman al-Hams was a 13 year-old girl.

Let anyone who thinks that Islamic fundamentalists have a monopoly on cruelty and evil remember her.

Our heart of darkness

2004-12-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

Naomi Klein charges that American forces in Iraq are killing, imprisoning, or intimidating doctors, journalists, and clerics to prevent word of civilian casualties from getting out. Her story fits with the facts as we know them (accounts of "anyone who moved" being killed in Falluja, including doctors, the targeting of hospitals and clinics for bombing and take-over, the refusal of the US to do bodycounts, and the estimated 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq).

Most of these stories get little mention in the American press. Klein is writing in the Guardian, and the US acting ambassador complained; a US publication would doubtless find its access to the White House curtailed for such a disloyal publication. But the institutional constraints on media coverage of the civilian costs and immoral conduct of the war are just half the story. The US media has been reluctant to explore or consider the conflict from the point of view of ordinary Iraqis. To be sure, its increasingly hard to do, given how dangerous it is to conduct journalism in Iraq. And Abu Ghraib was a brief exception (but they had pictures, the sine qua non of media in the television age. But the American media seems reluctant, even incapable of framing stories from a Iraq point of view---not just the view of a particular Iraqi on the street, but the view from Iraqi society. Instead, the frame is that the US knows what's best for Iraq, and anyone who disagrees is an insurgent terrorist evil-doer.

But we are doing horrible things to Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy. They will not forget, nor will the rest of the world. I suspect we will be paying for these crimes for a long time. Not least by turning Iraq into the kind of terrorist haven we incorrectly charged it with being.

But then, the Bush administration doesn't really need to stop terror attacks on the US. They want to exploit the symbolism of the terrorist threat, and perversely, that's easier to do it that threat isn't squelched. So they replace cardboard cut out and fingerpainter Tom Ridge with Bernard Kerik, a tough-looking, tough-talking symbol of 9/11 who happens to have awful managerial skills. The job? Only coordinating dozens of uncoordinated, uncooperative agencies, something both he and the Department of Homeland Security are ill-prepared to do. (Pre-Enron, the Bush administration supposed to bring private sector manegerial competence to Washington. They don't talk about that so much anymore.)

After the 9/11 commission identified the importance of inter-agency coordination in preventing further attacks, you'd think we'd get better people to run our agencies. But instead we get loyalists (Rice, Gonzalez), f***-ups (Rumsfield), and symbols (Kerik).

Both at home and in Iraq, the US government is not being held accountable for failure and misconduct. And the electorate just flunked its once-every-four-years chance to impose accountability, so the Bushies have decided to throw what little caution they had to the wind. We will all be paying for this party of fools for a long, long time. But right now, most Americans (or rather, most Red Staters) don't even want to look at the looming crisis.

Preemptive self-satire

2004-12-03T19:06:00.000-08:00

on global warming from Kieran at CT.

Season's warnings, Linda and Morbo

2004-12-02T10:27:00.000-08:00

Here's an amusing list of 10 awful Christmas specials that might have been.

(The post title above is from an anti-Christmas special that was; Futurama's second episode with the evil robotic Santa that was pre-empted for a year because it was too much for Fox. Yes, that Fox.)

Funny

2004-12-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

Before the Ukrainian election, I was keeping an eye on it because the challenger is a former central bank governor, and I keep a database of the political careers of such people. I made a mental note to look for the brief Reuters item that would report the outcome, lest I miss it entirely.

But now every twist and turn of this election is top of the page NYT news. It's always funny when you're aware of a story before it makes it into the papers. I guess my biggest finds on that score are Ebola, which I was following back in 1993, when there were only a handful of epidemiology publications on the topic, and one or two lay publication, and Barrack Obama, whom I had been following when he was looking at being an also-ran in a seven-way primary, because I'd heard good things about him from a Chicago student.

Tom, we hardly knew ye

2004-12-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

"[a]s the first head of the newly created department, Mr. Ridge became known best for, well, playing with colors." --- NYT editorial.

Ouch.

The rest of the editorial dwells on what you might call the Political Fear Cycle---the opportune "alerts" at sensitive points in the media cycle and in electorally sensitive areas, designed to keep Americans "very afraid but not so afraid that, as Mr. Ridge once reminded Americans, you fail to appreciate President Bush's leadership."

I miss the old-fashioned Political Business Cycles, the kind where they sent you your Social Security check a few weeks early. That seemed right for a creaky old welfare state democracy. Political Fear Cycles seem more appropriate for a fascist or even totalitarian regime.

Hmm.

What did he even mean?

2004-12-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

Today's Bushism.

If nothing else

2004-12-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

I got to vote in the closest state-wide race in American history. It still could go either way, but we won't know for weeks.

Two nice macro-economics discussions

2004-12-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

One on Crooked Timber: A discussion of inflation, and who benefits and loses from it. The comments are particularly good.

One on Brad deLong's page, a nice discussion and links/excerpts on the dollar and the deficits, here here, and here, and see also here.

Time for the free trade left

2004-11-26T23:49:00.000-08:00

David Brooks writes about an important topic in today's NYT: the benefits of free trade for developing nations. He notes that in recent years, growth in developing nations has risen at historic rates. He also cites work by Sala-i-Martin, who finds that inequality globally has fallen, even as it has risen in many nations.

Some thoughts:

1. Partly, this is a reshuffling of inequality, from something that divided rich nations from poor nations, to something that divides middle and lower classes within nations. But because I take the view that an impoverished Congolese is as bad as an impoverished Canadian, I view the net decrease in inequality and poverty as a good thing.

2. Whether higher growth is mainly a result of globalization is an open question. As a friend once pointed out to me, it is very difficult to find any examples of countries that developed without protectionist policies. (I hasten to emphasizes there are many examples of countries with protectionist policies that failed to develop; my friend was wondering if they are a necessary condition, not supposing they were sufficient). Maybe whatever stage of development we're in (late late super late?) allows or even requires free trade development policies. I don't know. But it is an open question.

3. Setting aside the growth question, the changing patterns of inequality do fit with a basic Stolper-Samuelson view of trade betwen rich and power nations, which (put crudely) should make the poor and rich within nations more alike (while producing efficiencies all around, of course).

4. I've always been a free trader, but I've also always been in favor of strong welfare states. And despite American's parochial assumptions that the left is always protectionist, many left-wing parties throughout Europe's smaller countries have long been welfare state free traders. And if you believe point (3), this approach makes a lot of sense: capture the efficiency gains from trade, and use your growing wealth to ensure economic security and an income floor for all your citizens. You can have falling inequality across nations and within nations, if you build up the welfare state even as you tear down tariffs.

5. I simply note (the literature is too large to summarize, and it's late) that welfare states can persist, grow, and even thrive in economies open to world trade, even in today's "era of limits".

6. Institutions involved in globalization, like the IMF, often twist developing countries arms to get them to adopt not just free-trade, but a whole neo-liberal brew of rigid monetary policy and austere public spending, even during recessions. We taint the benefits of free trade when we tie them to this sort of economic blackmail.

7. The American left should pair the welfare state and free trade more often in its rhetoric. If you admit the later is unstoppable, insist on the former.

8. The right should be ashamed of touting the benefits of free trade for the poor as the ranks of the poor grow in the US as a result of their half-assed policies.

9. Finally, a note for David Brooks. Cut the caricatures. The left is more than Bono and Springsteen. There are lots of smart people engaging these issues, but instead of taking on their arguments, you take potshots at singers. Classy.

And spare us homilies like "if you really want to reduce world poverty, you should be cheering on those guys in pinstripe suits at the free-trade negotiations and those investors jetting around the world"? Everyone is involved in globalization. Why single out investors for praise, and not hard-working laborers or farmers? Investor-worship went out of fashion with compulsive Nasdaq watching.

Someone to talk to

2004-11-25T20:32:00.000-08:00

The first hopeful news to emerge from Iraq in ages: Iraqi leaders are going to talk with "insurgent leaders" in Jordan. I'm a big believer in the idea that elite contact and bargaining is an essential step in resolving this sort of conflict, so I see this as a positive step.

It's not like things could get much worse.

Watch this meme

2004-11-24T21:04:00.000-08:00

As I predicted after the election, the Republicans are looking for a chance to pull out of Iraq post haste. They've started up the media campaign with comments from right wing think-tanks; soon they be echoing this call as if it weren't their idea.

Then, sometime after the elections (March? April?), most of the military will pull out. We'll keep some bases, I expect, as trophies, and forward positions for the next war (Iran). Iraq will collapse into civil war, or worse.

But still, do they have to pour salt in our wounds? Take this quote:

"Our large, direct presence has fueled the Iraqi insurgency as much as it has suppressed it," said Michael Vickers, a conservative-leaning Pentagon consultant and longtime senior CIA official who supported the war.
...
"The end of the foreign occupation will seriously undermine the terrorists' claims that their acts of violence against Iraqis are somehow serving the interests of Iraq," according to "Exiting Iraq," published by the conservative-leaning Cato Institute. Moreover, "The occupation is counterproductive in the fight against radical Islamic terrorists and actually increases support for Osama bin Laden in Muslim communities not previously disposed to support his radical interpretation of Islam."

Yes, that's the rightwing saying that Michael Moore and Howard Dean were right. Do you think they realized this just yesterday? Or a year ago? Yes, they played all those Red Staters for suckers, knowing all along (as any reasonably intelligent toaster oven would) that invading Iraq has made us much less safe.

"Good God" Department

2004-11-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

Clear Channel, the largest owner of radio stations in the country, now recognizes Bush as Il Duce. Really.

The daily march to fascism continues.

Elections roll on

2004-11-24T19:31:00.000-08:00

Two races from the 2004 elections roll on: the Washington gubernatorial race, which the Republican Rossi now leads by 42 votes out of 2.8 million cast, and a Texas State House race that in which a Democratic challenger appears to have beaten the chair of the Appropriations committee by a mere 32 votes.

In Washington, the Democrat Gregoire is requesting a third count, this time by hand, after the initial count found Rossi ahead by 261, and the automatic machine recount cut that lead to 42. Rossi's people are starting to complain; as in Florida in 2000, the refrain is that it's taking too long to count all the votes. (A recommendation to Gregoire: hold the recount state-wide, not just in your strongest counties. It may be more expensive, but it's the principled thing to do. And if AL Gore had done it in 2000, he would be president today).

In Texas, Republican Heflin isn't waiting for a recount. He just wants the State Legislature to seat him, or hold a new election, alleging election fraud.

I tend to think the point of elections is to make sure the person preferred by a majority wins. Sometimes, that means counting careful, when the results are really close---whether your side is ahead or behind. And when it comes to other countries, Republicans still seem to agree. Colin Powell today condemned the Ukrainian elections for failing to meet international standards, and said the US would refuse to accept the outcome until the counting was made more transparent.

One wishes the Bush administration held itself to the same standards.

Falling

2004-11-23T01:37:00.000-08:00

Three quotes to remember:

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. ---Nietzsche

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. ---Orwell

They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace. ---Tacitus

We went to Iraq on a flimsy excuse---a claims of "pre-emptive" self-defense that looked weak from the outset, and turned out to be totally baseless. We turned on a dime, and began insisting we were invading and occupying Iraq for the good of Iraqis, the Middle East, and the world. So difficult a moral tightrope---to fight a war to make peace, to destroy a regime to build up a better one as alien occupiers---would have given pause to a saint. Against the corrupting effects of war and the unpredictability of occupying a hostile country, it takes self-sacrifice and humility to stay good guys, instead of brutal bastards.

But we really went to Iraq looking to kick some ass, get some "revenge", secure some oil, threaten Iraqs neighbors, bully domestic opponents of war, and whip the public into a frenzy of fear. So moral corruption isn't so much a danger as part of the plan.

Our country is now the one that bombs innocents in their homes, invades countries without provocation, tortures prisoners who have not been so much as tried, allows its soldiers to kill civilians and pillage their homes if that's the easiest way to suppress the insurgency, and allows children under our rule to starve and die. There isn't much point in arguing whether we have made things better than they were under Saddam Hussein. We have become Saddam Hussein.

But that's not enough for many in our country. They want to revel in this evil. They want to give a medal to the Marine who shot an injured, unarmed captive in the head. And they condemn as a traitor the journalist who simply recorded the action. They even joke crudely about having him killed by the USMC. Is this your America? America is about freedom of speech, about showing the people the truth, and about protecting the innocent (or at least it used to be--now you can be locked up for a year for being Muslim). The Iraq war has brought out a fascist streak in the American public that terrifies and appalls me.

What next? When the neo-cons gin up the propoganda for a bombing campaign against Iran, how many in our country will say "Enough"? And how many will say "Yee-ha! Let's kill those Ay-rabs [sic]!"

Red-State moralists, the question is for you.

Squirrel behavior

2004-11-23T01:28:00.000-08:00

Growing up in Houston, I always wondered about squirrels' suicidal behavior during encounters with their major predator, the car. This article explains a lot.

Not the only one who's mad

2004-11-23T01:22:00.000-08:00

My friend Rob is very upset about American war crimes, too. He takes this sort of thing very seriously, having a bit more faith in American institutions (constitutional and military) than I, and is consequently even more infuriated when they are perverted.

But I can't but repeat Rob's determined response to the election, which I am sure he would apply here, too:

"You know, General, we've had the Devil's own due; haven't we today?"
"Yup. Whip 'em tomorrow, though."
-Generals Sherman and Grant after the first day of the Battle of Shiloh

It's going to be a hard struggle, but it could be harder.

The library of Babel

2004-11-22T15:01:00.000-08:00

Primate section.

A lovely illustration of how amazing it is when order arises from chaos, and how precarious.

The Onion isn't a satirical newspaper

2004-11-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

but a record of the not too distant future that somehow travels back to us.

Coming to a torso near you

2004-11-21T19:44:00.000-08:00

It's high time the Democrats forcefully defined themselves. Call it branding if you must, but it needs be done.

I like "National Security First. Presidential Yachts Later. Much Later."

The clown show continues

2004-11-21T17:05:00.000-08:00

Some bitter humor here:

Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq say it is increasingly likely they will need a further increase in combat forces to go after remaining areas of resistance in the country.

Wouldn't that be, say, all of Iraq? I mean, you can't even get from the airport to the city of Baghdad without a small private army. The only places we control are the ones that substantial troops are standing on.

More bitter humor: Bush's support for the 9/11 commission's recommendations was, as anyone could have guessed, a sham abandoned as soon as Ohio went red. The "Pentagon" torpedoed this, but Bush "supported" it? I think Bush could overrule Rummy on this if he desired. Rumsfield kind of owes Bush big; on account of not being fired for gross incompetence.

Sigh. I guess the upside of being bogged down in Iraq is that it will be harded to invade Iran. But then, they may just want to bomb the crap out of Iran instead.

Nice new statistics blog

2004-11-20T01:31:00.000-08:00

Andrew Gelman has a statistical inference blog for his research group at Columbia. A useful resource, and an interesting idea for promoting a group of grad students.

Even if you're not a statistics person, this post will be of interest. It critiques a recent working paper by some Berkeley scholars (who purport to find unexplained effects of evoting technology in Florida, even controlling for past votes); turns out this finding rests entirely on two outliers, both of them large Democratic counties. A great reminder to always look at the data, even if you're going to throw it into a "fancy" regression (and especially if that regression isn't robust!). For bivariate relationships, the scatterplot has yet to be outdone.

Google Scholar: Virtual Library

2004-11-19T15:44:00.000-08:00

Wow. Now if they can just get full text books on line, I'll never need to go to the bricks and mortar library again!

Falling dollar

2004-11-19T01:47:00.000-08:00

I love the balancing job in this article. A falling dollar will bring jobs to manufacturing exporters in Iowa, but may provoke a massive financial crisis in the medium term. But don't forget that factory in Iowa!

Of course a falling dollar is good for exporters, and, during an economic slump, is a pretty desirable thing. I've had to explain this to people who assume a "strong" dollar is always good more times that I care to remember. And a (gently) falling dollar would probably be a part of a sensible economic policy, if our government had one.

But why would we want to run an economic policy during a weak recovery that combines a.) a huge structural budget deficit that has relatively little stimulative effect, given the tax policies that created it, b.) reliance on foreign bondholders to finance the deficit, and c.) no realistic plans to cut the deficit, but lots of promises to further monkey around with the tax system?

That's just crazy.

But then, what's crazy today, anyway? The Republicans are now talking about eliminating the employer health insurance tax deduction to pay for more tax cuts for the rich and investor class. The health insurance tax deduction is the American health care system, at least for working people. It's a dumb way to run a health care system, but not as dumb as having no system at all.

Maybe the R's have decide there should be more uninsured. Maybe they think Americans would like to have a society where everyone buys their own health insurance, on their own, with after tax dollars. Or maybe they're closet Marxists working to "heighten the contradictions". I really don't know anymore.

But if they pull of this crackpot scheme, I know what business the Democratic Party should get into---the health care business.

As far as the eye can see

2004-11-19T01:35:00.000-08:00

Here is a zoomable 2.5 gigapixel image from Delft. Pick something interesting near the horizon and zoom in.

One thing that surprises me is how quickly, even with a 2.5 gigapixel image, you reach the end of the zooms. (Well, 2.5 billion isn't that many, when you consider it is the resolution of a 50k by 50k matrix, so anything "shorter" than 1/50k of the initial view won't be discernable.) There sure is a lot of data hitting our eyes.

I'm reminded of a "scientific" paper I just read in the Annals of Improbable Research, on a cheap new alternative to electron microscopy: the ordinary office copier, set on iterative zoom. The authors claimed to "image", through 48 enlargements, a single deuterium atom (and, oddly, a discrete noncollapsed representation of the quantum fuzziness around it---but I never did understand quantum, so I'm sure the oddness is all in my perception).

Imagine what the creators of the Xerox Quantum Microscope could do with a 2.5 gigapixel image!

RegExp pranks

2004-11-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

RegExp's are truly powerful, but I hadn't fully appreciated the possibilities for humor (and in particular, as a tool to drive trolls nuts).

Hmm. Two techie posts in one day. Bt dnt wrr, t's nt trnd, r nthng.

VDQI: Cube of Potential Doom

2004-11-16T16:11:00.000-08:00

A very cool VDQI of attempted TCP connections on a network. The subject is a bit technical (not to mention techie), the write-up could be clearer, and you'll need to decompress the movie to watch it, but it's worth a look. The basic question is how to display, dynamically, attacks on the ports and addresses of a network.

I think this is a great VDQI for several reasons:

1. It is a sucessful implementation of a 3D scatterplot. Very rare. The key is that we're not so interested in pinning down the locations of particular points, but instead we are interest in noticing 3-D patterns, which is much easier. Even more important; this is a real time display, and adding a time dimension to 3D VDQIs makes them easier for our brains to decipher, because we can use the (illusion of) movement to start figuring out the depth of objects.

2. The use of color, about which I was skeptical at first, seems well done. The choice of axes helps motivate things too: stuff near the floor is the bad guys trying to break in.

3. The metaphor is perfect for the audience. Techies ~= Trekkies, and this is straight out of sci fi displays of baddies attacking in space. And the audience ate that up---and "got" it faster than most people would.

4. The creators classify common (and memorably named) patterns of attack (see the write up for the barber's pole or the lawnmower). Very cool, and this bit of info makes the whole package much more dicipherable.

The only complaint I have is the spinning, which (except when user controlled) does nothing for me.

Elections not over in Washington

2004-11-16T13:26:00.000-08:00

We're still counting the governor's race, and it's agonizingly close.

It's reassuring to know that my new state seems to actually care who wins, and has laws ensuring a recount of close elections, by hand if necessary. A few years ago I would have assumed most Americans would agree with idea that we should count all the votes and make sure we determine the winner correctly, but then, what do I know? I'm just a political scientist.

Another attempt at understanding the religious right

2004-11-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's all just a big confusion; the rest of us keep thinking they're talking about Jesus of Nazareth, but really they are talking about this other guy, Jesus Smith, from East Texas. Clever little substitution, really.

Turning the corner

2004-11-16T04:20:00.000-08:00

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. ---Nietzsche

From Eric Umansky (picked up by Brad DeLong). See also this disheartening piece.

Clearly, most civilians left before the assault. It's unclear how many stayed behind. And it's unclear how many of those were wounded. We may never know. But here are two reports from civilians inside the town. The first is from an A.P. reporter who fled:

``I decided to swim ... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.''

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he ``helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands.''

``I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards.''

The second is from a local doctor, as recounted by the LAT:

Late Tuesday, a bomb struck one side of the makeshift medical center. Ghanim ran out.

A second bomb hit, crashing through the roof and destroying most of the facility. Ghanim believes it killed at least two of the young resident doctors working there and most of the patients.

"At that moment I wished to die," he said. "It was a catastrophe."

Afterward, he said, he half-ran, half-wandered through Fallouja, dodging explosions that seemed to be everywhere. He took shelter in an empty house and did not move.

"Time stopped. I don't know how long I was there," he said. "The tanks hit anything that moved.

"I saw the injured people on the street, covered in blood, staggering, screaming, shouting, 'Help me! Help me!' but we could not get out and help them because we would be killed.

And this Reuters report picked up by Kos. (See also this followup)

The U.S. military has begun an investigation into possible war crimes after a television pool report by NBC showed a Marine shooting dead a wounded and unarmed Iraqi in a Falluja mosque, officials said on Monday [...]

The pool report by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites said the mosque had been used by insurgents to attack U.S. forces, who stormed it and an adjacent building, killing 10 militants and wounding the five.

Sites said the wounded had been left in the mosque for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. No reason was given why that had not happened.

A second group of Marines entered the mosque on Saturday after reports it had been reoccupied. Footage from the embedded television crew showed the five still in the mosque, although several appeared to be already close to death, Sites said.

He said one Marine noticed one of the prisoners was still breathing.

A Marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: "He's fucking faking he's dead. He faking he's fucking dead."

"The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man's head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast," Sites said.

The report said the Marine had returned to duty after being shot in the face a day earlier.

Sites said the shot prisoner "did not appear to be armed or threatening in any way."

Remember, almost 1200 US soldiers have died in Iraq (already about 70 this month), and tens of thousands of Iraqis. How many? The US refuses to count, which, combined with tales like those above, makes me think the number is on the high side. The Lancet study may be right.

Suppose it is, and we've flushed more than 100,000 lives down the drain so far. Why? For a war of choice that couldn't have ever improve US or regional security? To make Iraqis' lives *better*? To bring them freedom? If the above is "freedom", I'll take "tyranny".

Insightful man, Orwell. Just off by 20 years.

In which I try to channel Fafnir

2004-11-15T01:47:00.000-08:00

I think the Republicans need a new name. One that reflects the breadth of a party whose officials run as "God's Own Politicians", then turn around and steal money from taxpayers and deaf kids for a wild time at the plastic surgeons. Pharisees for Fascism, perhaps?

Myabe there's a method to the madness. They want Jesus to come back, right? But he's not cooperating. They've tried praise, and prayer, and good works (well, maybe), and ascetism, and Calvinism, and withdrawing from society, and leading society, and predicting the end, and accepting they cannot know the hour, and converting the heathens, and leaving the heathens be, and stirring up trouble in the Holy Land, and kicking Muslim ass, and Nothing. Ever. Works.

But have they tried---I mean really tried---to make God angry, so angry he comes back early to generally kick ass and take names? Not petty stuff like killing millions of innocents or treating whole nations as inferior because of their skin color; God's got a pretty high pain tolerance for that kind of thing, evidently. No, there's just one thing that really sets Jesus off: the rank hypocracy of subverting his temple for private gain. So maybe it's all a plan, to get Jesus good and pissed, so he'll come down and knock over their tables, and say "that's it; I was going to give you another 10,000 years, but I just can't take this hypocricy anymore; we're ending it now", and then the Pharisees for Fascism say "ha ha, it was all just a trick to bring on the Second Coming, and we got you", and then the world ends.

On second thought, maybe that's not such a good plan. Which of course is further evidence that it is, in fact, unfolding.

If only generals had voted

2004-11-14T01:38:00.000-08:00

would Bush have won?

Also from the "now they tell us" file: Brent Scrowcroft for Kerry's foreign policy.

Question: if Bush ran on values and terror-mongering, how long till he jettisons both?

Bonus: Nice snarky question from Timothy Noah on AG, our prospective AG.

Sigh. Poking fun at Bush helped me through the last four years, but four more. Good God, we're in trouble. Well, if you're as bummed as me, try this.

A discovery

2004-11-14T01:33:00.000-08:00

Mozilla Firefox can handle over a dozen open tabs in a single window without taxing the processor. But open multiple tabs in multiple windows, and Firefox will start wheezing like a grampus (whatever that means; always have meant to look it up).

I've been using Firefox for a couple of weeks now, and mostly like it. But until I found out about the efficiency of opening all your tabs in one window, I was thinking of going back to IE, which can have twenty or more windows open without weighing my computer down.

Now, if Firefox would add a "Save as single meta-html file" option, I'd be set.

That Lancet study...

2004-11-13T21:57:00.000-08:00

I finally read it, and it looks as well done as could be under the circumstances. There's an odd habit in the media and blogosphere to discuss a study without ever directly linking it (and thus encouraging others to discuss it with first hand knowledge); I sure had to look around a while to find the link this study.

One thing I hadn't realized is that most of the violent deaths the Lancet people encountered were from air strikes. Just like the first Iraq war, it appears the publicity of smart bombs and the reality are far apart.

Maybe I'll have my students replicate this for a homework next quarter...

In case you had any doubt

2004-11-12T20:23:00.000-08:00

One side of the debate in America has the intellectual consistency of jello (as Eric Alterman points out):

If the Olympics were ever to introduce a competition for intellectual acrobatics, the hands-down gold medal winner this year would be Dick Morris. On October 23, just before the video surfaced, the disgraced Clinton adviser asked Sean Hannity, "Do you hear a peep out of them? Do you hear a bin Laden tape?" A deeply impressed Hannity declared Morris to be "100 percent right." Likewise, two days later, speaking to Bill O'Reilly, America's most famous foot-fetishist explained, "Al Qaeda attacked us in Spain before the election. Al Qaeda attacked Australia before the election. Hamas and Hezbollah attack Israel before every election, and there has been no Al Qaeda attack anywhere in the world in months. No bin Laden tape, no threats coming out of it, and I think that Al Qaeda is voting with its silence for John Kerry."

But it turns out that in Morris's universe, bin Laden votes for Kerry when he's silent and he votes for Kerry when he's not. After the tape's release, Morris told Fox viewers that "obviously" the tape was "a design on [bin Laden's] part to help Kerry, and that's going to backfire massively." Hannity earned a silver with his own Pythonesque pirouette on his previous pronouncement: Bin Laden, he now said, had "come out and virtually tr[ied to] influence the election today in favor of John Kerry."

It's going to be a long four years.

Albert Gonzales summed up in one sentence

2004-11-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

"It's like a Horatio Alger story, but with more fascism!" --Giblets

Whizzing past the irony barrier

2004-11-12T18:18:00.000-08:00

"I don't know what science fiction he is reading," said LaHaye. "We believe the Rapture is going to come, not his nonsense that Christ came back in 68 A.D."

Generational transfers

2004-11-12T17:09:00.000-08:00

Brad DeLong has a very nice post on Social Security. His starting point is a thought that confused me (or perhaps beguiled is the better word) as an undergrad econ major. To wit (and I will give the game away by stating assumptions clearly), assume a closed economy, with static production technology, and with overlapping generations of agents who retire in their last period of life. Goods produced in each period must be consumed in that period (they are perishable). Suppose there are N people at any given time, consisting of p*N, 0 < p < 1 workers and (1-p)*N retirees. Also assume that each worker produces g goods per period. Under these assumptions, total consumption in each period will be p*g, average consumption will be p*g/N, and so if the fraction of workers p declines, there will be less to go around regardless of who gets what. We haven't specified an allocation mechanism, but we don't really need to under these assumptions. Unless goods themselves (and not written promises of them) can be produced in an earlier generation and saved for a later one, it doesn't matter how you split the pie among a growing number of retirees---it will be smaller per person.

Social Security is a method for reallocating present production among workers and retirees. It does not involve the saving of goods, or very much saving of promissory notes for that matter. So Kevin Drum wonders what the big deal about how it is structured (private vs government accounts): won't the pie shrink the same either way?

Hopefully, you are quicker than I was when presented with this as an undergrad. If we relax the assumption that the economy is closed, then consumption in a given period could rise above p*g, through international investment or borrowing. But the big point is one BDL raises: if the production technology is endogenous, then more investment early on with increase g over time, so that domestic production can keep up even though p is shrinking. So there is at least a possible argument for private investment of social security funds leading to long run efficiencies. Notice, however, that the investment need not be done by individual accounts; it could be done by the government as a whole. Notice also that what we really need is net private investment to rise. Borrowing money to put in private accounts does jack squat.

Falluja Stomp

2004-11-12T16:04:00.000-08:00

(with apologies to Burnt Toast)

Several articles worth reading on the Falluja assault. Surprisingly, the Slate news roundup is probably the place to start, since it gives as good a picture as we have of what's going around in Falluja and around Iraq. Not only do we seem to be losing this war, but the guerillas seem to be calling the shots---during our long planned, and long advertized attack on Falluja, they mount a counter-attack on Mosul and draw away a substantial fraction of our forces. They can do this indefinitely, folks.

Two posts from an ex-Marine (Bing West) in Iraq are interesting. The first presents a soldier's eye view of the battle, which sounds for all the world like a video game. Now, the marines are fighting for their lives too, and I don't mean to diminish that. But it is truly frightening how modern war works, and I worry about the long-term consequences.

The second post, a defense of US tactics in Falluja, is very telling. West winds-up with this statement:

At the operational level, battle is about killing until the enemy forces are destroyed or surrender.

which raises an obvious question: who are the enemy in Iraq? If it is a populace that resents occupation, and resents it more with each insurgent or bystander killed, then we will never attain this goal until Iraq itself is destroyed, or utterly oppressed. Neither end is consistent with our stated goal of establishing a stable, democratic Iraq from which we can withdraw. Clearly, if we are to retain this goal, you either must believe the insurgents are clearly separate from Iraqi society, or you must recognize that winning in Iraq isn't about winning "battles", as the Marines define them, but avoiding the need for them.

West isn't unaware of the difficulties. He selectively cites opinion polls to claim that the Iraqis are on our side, not the insurgents', but I think the same polls show deep resentment of the US, and large swaths of the country that are on the insurgents' side(s). More important, he defines the problem of Iraq in a misleading way.

The insurgents are an amalgam of jihadists who must be destroyed, former regime elements who must be neutralized or destroyed, and unemployed, uneducated, emotional youths who are being manipulated and who must be won over. Too many Sunni imams, fearful of losing temporal power, are preaching hate and despair to the desperately ignorant. American troops can stand against those who bear weapons against them. But U.S. soldiers cannot persuade Iraqis to support a new form of government that brings a dramatic shift in the Iraqi centers of power.

It would be nice if we could blame it all on "jihadists" and nasty rabble-rousing clerics misleading those innocent poor "emotional" youths who, but for their influence, would welcome their American saviors. But this is drivel. The hatred for America and resentment of American tactics, bombing, sanctions, and demonization runs deep and wide in Iraq. The "rabble-rousers" have to keep up with the mass's anger, not the other way around. Many of the men who take up arms do so because their relatives have been killed, or their towns assaulted, and they see no hope. I would not call them "good guys" of "freedom fighters", because they aren't fighting for a free society. But they are fighting for their own conception of independence and nation, and if we underestimate that, as West does, we will someday leave Iraq in disgrace and defeat.

On this point, West relates a fascinating anecdote, but I think in his eagerness to defend the Marines qua soldiers, he fails to realize its devastating implications for our strategy

Based on his visits to Fallujah, Patrick Graham wrote that "it is the sniper the people of Fallujah fear more than anything else." Yet the sniper is the most discriminating of weapons, suggesting that the "people" Graham referred to were the jihadist fighters. I was on a roof during the April siege in Fallujah with a Marine sergeant who was a sniper. One afternoon, he told me, he saw an old man hobble out of his house, supported by his teenage son. They shuffled next door and returned with a few groceries. The son paused to look toward the Marine position before going indoors. On a hunch, the sniper kept watch, and a half-hour later, the young Iraqi sneaked out with a rifle, hid behind a wrecked car, and aimed in. The sniper shot him in the street. From the house came a sharp cry. A few minutes later, the old man hobbled slowly out and, step by faltering step, dragged the body back into the courtyard. The sniper watched through his scope as the old man began to dig a grave.

Was the Marine sniper justified in shooting the combatant? Hell yes. A soldier on the battlefield has every right to defend himself, almost anyone would agree. But that's not the point. The real point is that if we define as a "jihadist" anyone who picks up arms to defend his town against an foreign occupying army, we will lose. (As usual, a defender of the war seeks to redefine critic's barbs as aimed at GIs, when we're really sympathetic to soldiers' plight, and angry at the generals and political leaders for putting them in a hopeless situation.)

The world is not made up of evil terrorists and good liberating armies. Most people are in between, and we have convinced many, if not most Iraqis that we are their enemy. We did that, by torturing and imprisoning innocents, humiliating proud fathers in front of their families, by invading on false pretexts, manipulating their economy for profit and their lives for domestic political advantage, by holding our lives precious and theirs cheap, by sending our least qualified and most corrupt to run their society, instead of our best and brightest, by annointing as puppet ruler a CIA man, by destroying the security of their society and grinding their economy to a halt. As they take up arms against us now, our men can and should defend themselves, but our generals should never suppose that if we keep shooting the insurgents, they will eventually be purged from Iraqi society. Every step in that direction just makes them more a part of that society.

If I were an Iraqi, I would work with the interim government, not because of lofty dreams of democracy and freedom, but because of the desparate need for security. If I were an Iraqi, I would accept mild authoritarianism as the best feasible outcome, rather than throw in with insurgents who, if victorious, would likely make Iraq a hellhole. But I am glad I am not an Iraqi. We have given them no good options, and should not be surprised then that they resist our occupation.

***

Brigands of the world, after the earth has failed their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea; if their enemy be wealthy, they are greedy; if he be poor, they are ambitious; neither the East nor the West has glutted them. . . . They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

Tacitus, Agricola

Iraq veterans, new citizens

2004-11-11T21:04:00.000-08:00

Ask not what these soldiers must do to be worthy citizens, but how America can change to become worthy of them.

Ohio, we may have a problem

2004-11-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

It's been over a week, and I still think there's a need to understand what exactly caused the large discrepancy between exit polls and vote totals on election night. I have seen a number of pages on the net purporting to show evidence of (or more circumspectly, evidence consistent with) rigged counting, but haven't found any of it very persuasive.

Now comes a paper from Steven Freeman, a UPenn political scientist, noting that the end of day exit polls were far off. I was willing to believe that the mid-day totals could be off, if Democrats were racing to get to the polls for some reason, but end of the day? Historically, those are right on the money. As Freeman points out, the publically provided reasons for exit poll failure seem a bit farfetched (my favorite silly argument is that exit-pollsters oversample women because they want to chat them up; you'd think exit polls all through history would be biased if this were so).

Freeman points out that if we take the confidence intervals on the polls seriously, the likelihood of simultaneously getting such large pro-Bush margins in Florida and Ohio, and such a narrow Kerry victory in Pennsylvania, is vanishingly small. By itself, this is quite disturbing.

But he also points out this pattern was consistent across all the battlefield states, save MI, IA, and WI. But instead of making the election fishier, this makes me more worried about the exit polls. Widespread fraud, even in states with Democratic election officials, seems a bit hard to pull off. Systematic failure to choose representative precincts, perhaps? Systematic errors in data processing? It happens. So open up the polling records.

I really think we need to know the answer to this question. Moreover, I would feel better if a trusted international group of election monitors did their own count of the ballots of some of the key states. Part of the reason for suspicion is distrust of the officials who are supposed to safeguard the election. Katherine Harris was the very opposite of a dispassionate vote counter, and her actions cast a pall over the officials of the rest of the country, fairly or unfairly. And when you hear Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell say "The last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress", well, you can't help but want a second opinion on the count.

It would go a long way towards restoring legitimacy, and if Bush has been honest, he has nothing to fear.

Stupid science is not acceptable

2004-11-10T15:26:00.000-08:00

I find mad science amusing, but stupid science is just frightening. Apparently one of Bush's "scienticians" thinks global warming is an anti-American plot. (Note that his bio refuses to say what his degree is in, but since it's from trh LSE, I'm betting it's a Masters in Economics, at best. Not exactly a climatologist, but I guess all those guys are "in on the conspiracy" Sheesh. Doesn't it take a qualified person to determine who isn't qualified?)

When future generations look back and curse George W. Bush's name---and they will---their biggest complaint will be his obstruction on global warming.

"What we would tell the children of Iraq is that the noise they hear is the sound of freedom."

2004-11-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

I was forwarded a dated but revealing article on the Iraqi occupation. Sure sounds like it's all irrevocably gone to hell, doesn't it?

The attack of Falluja might have helped if it were done months ago, but instead it was telegraphed to the insurgents but delayed for Bush's sake. Most of the insurgents have already left, they just kidnapped some of Allawi's family, and the Sunnis are threatening to back out of the election. The insurgency is coming out of this week at least as strong as it entered it. I also read in early accounts that the Iraqi forces assigned to fight in Falluja mostly deserted. The current puppet government is falling the minute we leave. Most Americans, regardless of ideology, can agree on two things: we must not fail in Iraq, yet we are failing, miserably.

Freedom is on the march, all right. And pretty soon, it will be marching double time out Iraq, to leave those wretches to their fates.

Today's cool web find

2004-11-10T14:51:00.000-08:00

This paper details a Turning machine (a building block for a universal computer) made entirely of very simple cellular automata. It's just a grid, where the cells blink on if two neighbors are on, blink off if three neighbors are on, and stay as they are otherwise. It turns out the given the right starting grid and those simple rules, you have a computer capable of processing input, storing data, and producing output. Amazing.

The rules are called the "Game of Life". Daniel Dennett notes that other people have produces self-replicating structures in Life. He thinks these two creations make the evolution of sentient beings a lot less mysterious, and I think he has a point.

The Onion eases the pain...

2004-11-09T20:46:00.000-08:00

Has Bush fulfilled his obligation to the Mall Security Reserve?