The Review
June 20, 2003
Well, aren't you the cheery fellow?
(Review) John Derbyshire predicts that we are in the last days. Not out of any biblical expectations of apocalypse, but for two simple reasons:
He gets these ideas from a Cambridge don, Sir Martin Rees, whose new book, Our Final Hour, predicts the Human race will probably drive itself to extinction some time prior to 2099. If you've been a little too happy lately, go read Derb's article right away. Or better yet, get the full dose of pessimism by ordering the book directly.
- In many fields of scientific and technological research, notably biology and particle physics, we are now tinkering with deep fundamentals that we don't completely understand.
- There is a tremendous "force multiplier" effect in a lot of modern and soon-to-come technologies that will give malign small groups, or even malign individuals, the power to wreak terrible havoc.
Gray Davis says, "It's my money!"
(Review) California Governor Gray Davis will triple the California vehicle registration fee by executive order, perhaps as early as today. The license fee will now be 2% of your vehicle's value.
Earlier this year, Davis promised to veto any increase in vehicle license fees, if the legislature asked for it. I guess he just wanted to do it himself. Of course, last year, prior to the election, he told us the state deficit was only $20 billion. Only after his inauguration did he announce that the real figure was nearly twice that: $38 billion. So, changing his position on the car tax is no new thing for Davis.
Enjoy being Governor while you still can, Gray.
The top news story of the week
(Review) American soldiers face death every day by unreconstructed Baathists in Iraq. The White House is getting rattled about our progress, or lack thereof in Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel and Hamas are engaged in a war of assassination and suicide bombing. Iran is teetering on the verge of revolution. And what is the cover story for Time magazine this week? The Saturday release of the new Harry Potter book, which is, I believe, titled Harry Potter and the Mountain of Cash
Now, with everything else that's going on in the world, with American soldiers dying overseas, how in the world does the publication of a freakin' children's book become the the central story for one of our nation's premier news magazines? A cynical observer might suggest that one reason is that AOL Time-Warner owns the rights to Harry Potter, which would make the Time Magazine cover story look suspiciously like an effort to use the magazine to hype the release of the book.
But, of course, I would never be cynical enough to suggest such a thing.
Heh.
Seriously, though, welcome to the world of media conglomeration. People have written to me wondering why I think the Bush Administration's relaxation of media ownership is such a bad idea. Well, this is a prime example of why. I'll concede that the release of a Harry Potter book is newsworthy because of the sales phenomenon the series has become. I'll even concede it's important enought to link to the book through my affiliate account on Amazon several times in hopes you'll buy it from here, so I can get a cut of the purchase price. But is it really important enough to be the cover story for Time?
You see, when a few big media companies own every newspaper and broadcast outlet, how do we detect when their news coverage is slanted towards the selection of news stories whose publication helps funnel money into the corporate coffers? Sure, this is a pretty easy case to detect, because it looks like a blatant attempt to convert this week's issue of Time into a nationwide advertising supplement for AOL Time-Warner's publishing arm. But think of all the regulatory concerns that a company like AOL Time-Warner, or Viacom have, but which are not as readily apparent. How do we know that CBS isn't airing a negatively-spun story on some congressional attempt at interstate commerce regulation because a proposed set of regulations may reduce profitability for an arm of Viacom?
Perhaps some senator--say, Joe Lieberman (D-CT)--starts condemning MTV for too much sex and violence in their videos, and the next thing you know, there's Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, moaning about Congress' new push to censor broadcasting. Is this a reflection of CBS' historical concern for our first Amendment rights? Or is it Viacom sending a "don't screw with us" message to Congress?
Is this type of media environment really better than a fragmented ownership environment, where many different owners each control a very small portion of the media? Is this the type of concentration of power we really want?
I don't think so.
Limited Sovereignty
(Review) Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposes a Mideast peace plan that he thinks is better than the Road Map.
But there is a third option, one that offers hope for a realistic and responsible solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The guiding principle is this: The Palestinians would be given all the powers needed to govern themselves but none of the powers that could threaten Israel. Put simply, the solution is full self-government for the Palestinians with vital security powers retained by Israel. For example, the Palestinians would have internal security and police forces but not an army. They would be able to establish diplomatic relations with other countries but not to forge military pacts. They could import goods and merchandise but not weapons and armaments. Control over Palestinian daily life would be in the hands of the Palestinians alone, but security control over borders, ports and airspace would remain in Israel's hands. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed these ideas last year, and most Israelis support him. Indeed, those Israelis who support a Palestinian state are in effect calling for limited Palestinian sovereignty with Israel retaining control of vital security powers. The greatest danger to peace and security in the world today is the notion of unlimited sovereignty applied indiscriminately. In many flash points around the world, the right to self-government must not include unlimited security powers. Otherwise, every ethnic group with a grievance will seek to establish its own army, its own weaponry and eventually its own weapons of mass destruction.My main worry--like Netanyahu's--about a Palestinian state is that, in the current atmosphere, it would be nothing more than a terrorist state, much like Afghanistan was. The real problem is not whether the Palestinians are capable of governing themselves, but rather what kind of government would it be if Hamas, Fatah, Al-Aqsa, et al. are allowed to operate unmolested there.
Millions of little Hindenburgs, Driving down the road
(Review) I love the idea of a hydrogen powered economy. Cheap, non-polluting fuel, available at a low price. Hillary Clinton loves the idea, too. She wants 2.5 million hydrogen-powered vehicles on the road by 2020.
It sounds great, doesn't it?
Car and Driver veteran editor Brock Yates, on the other hand, sees a lot of potholes, both technical and evironmental, in the road.
Contrary to conventional thinking and the constant agitprop issuing from the elite media, fuel cells might not be the perfect solution for the environment. Recall that we have been led to believe the cells only emit is a few drops of water vapor. That is true, but a potential assault on the atmosphere comes from the source of the fuel cell power -- hydrogen. We learn from new research that massive conversion to a hydrogen-powered vehicle network could lead to serious leakage of the volatile gas, which in turn could radically reduce the already threatened ozone layer. In case you missed high school physics, hydrogen is lighter than air. It is also highly explosive (remember the Hindenburg). Presuming we reach Dame Hillary's goal of 2.5 million fuel cell miracles on the road by 2020, this would radically increase the amount of hydrogen manufactured, stored and dumped into vehicle tanks on a daily basis. Leakage would inevitably occur somewhere during the cycle. (Not to mention the occasional explosion. Safe storage of the gas in vehicles remains an unspoken but serious dilemma for vehicle developers at General Motors, Honda and Toyota, etc.) The entry of unwanted trillions of cubic feet of hydrogen into the earth's atmosphere could radically alter the climate by the gas oxidizing into water when it reaches the stratosphere. This could cause a dangerous depletion of the ozone layer. Add that little problem to those already present in a hydrogen nirvana such as the massive energy costs in manufacturing the gas (which you don't exactly strain from tap water in your kitchen sink) and safely transporting it through a new network to filling stations. Suddenly the whole scheme begins to sound like another feel-good bamboozle, like the now-defunct electric car.Clearly, there are some bugs that have to be worked out. And Clinton's way of going about it is a bit of a problem. She wants to mandate--by federal law--that there are 100,000 hydrogen fueld vehicles by 2010, and 2.5 million by 2020. Uh, I know that being in the Legislature grants one God-like powers of wisdom, but we already tried that in California, and it did't work. The State Legislature here, back in '94 or '95, created a mandate that was supposed to ensure that 10% of all new vehicles sold in California had to be zero-emissions. The car companies were supposed to do this by 2003. The problem they ran into was that you can't mandate that manufacturers produce a technology that doesn't actually exist yet, no matter how powerful a legislator you are. Yeah, I'd love to ditch the fossil fuel-powered IC engine. But I want to replace it with something that really works.
June 19, 2003
They Clearly Were Traitors
(Review) Ron Radosh asks, "Isn't it about time for the Left to acknowledge the truth about the Rosenbergs?" The truth being that they were spies for the USSR, and they were guilty as sin.
Ain't technology Grand?
(Review) TechCentralStation's editor-in-chief, Nick Schulz, writes in the LA Times that Gray Davis' keen interest in pushing technology appears to have turned around and bitten him on the butt. Seems that there are all sorts of things that technology can help one with.
Like recalling Gray Davis.
"We live in a remarkable moment when technology is turning the impossible into the commonplace. Just as computers and the Internet have transformed the way we shop, communicate and work, it is a matter of time before these innovations transform the way we govern ourselves" Who was that techno-enthusiast? California Gov. Gray Davis, writing in a newspaper article he co-authored with New York Gov. George Pataki in 2000. The governors were hopeful that citizens could be empowered to vote electronically one day. But when the power of a technology is unleashed, its effects are unpredictable. Davis is finding that out as the technology he championed--and defended against taxation and other burdens--is being harnessed in an effort to remove him from office.Heh.
No action against terrorists, No Palestine
(Review) Alyssa Lappin writes an open letter to President Bush, explaining why allowing a Palestinian state without requiring the elimination of the terrorist infrastructure there first, will result in disaster.
As a journalist specializing on Middle East history, I urge you to refocus on the goals you brilliantly outlined on June 24, 2002. We must not ask Israel to negotiate for a Palestinian State until the renewed terrorist attacks stop and the terrorist infrastructure is dismantled. Hamas is not at war with the Palestinian Authority, despite a PR campaign to the contrary. The PA has worked actively with Hamas for years. In 1995, it wrote a pact with the Islamist terrorists in Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas’ protests are evidently for show. On March 3 of this year, Abbas urged that violence continue. A draft of the Hamas-PA pact, appended below, ran on Sept. 20, 1995 in Egypt’s Al-Ahram government weekly. Article 12 requires the PA to cease all preventive security and let Hamas operate without PA interference. The agreement gives Hamas a role in the PA government, which Abu Mazen fulfilled by naming a Hamas partisan as education minister. Indeed, PLO political chief Farouq Al-Qaddoumi confirmed on Jan. 3, 2003, Fatah was "never different from Hamas...Strategically, we are no different from it." The Hamas-PA agreement crosses Article XV paragraph 1 of the second Oslo agreement, which requires both sides to take "all measures necessary in order to prevent acts of terrorism, crime and hostilities directed against each other, against individuals falling under the other's authority and against their property, and shall take legal measures against offenders." In public, especially to foreign reporters and leaders, Mahmoud Abbas defends "peace." This extends a decade of PA mass deception, originally planned in Cairo in 1974. Its leaders still consciously encourage terror, mass produce anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitements, illegally import arms and teach small children to kill. Abu Mazen’s PA TV greeted the Road Map with a call to murder Jewish civilians. (You can see the video here.)The Road Map to peace is a chart to nowhere, as long as Hamas and Fatah prefer killing Jews to living peacefully in a country of their own. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.
Iraqi WMD Facts
(Review) Jed Babbin recounts his discussion about Iraqi WMDs with the UK's top officer in Iraq, Air Marshal Brian Burridge. Air Marshal Burridge believes that Iraq did, in fact, have the WMDs that George Bush was talking about prior to the war.
Air Marshal Brian Burridge (his rank equal to a three-star American general) was National Contingent Commander of U.K. Forces in the Iraq campaign, the top Brit on the job. Burridge has a degree in physics, an MBA and a fellowship at King's College, London, and a lot of years in uniform. Like Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers, Burridge is a highly experienced command pilot. All of that adds up to a warrior who is also part teacher and part political scientist. In the buildup to the Iraq campaign, his job required him to focus his attention on planning and the intelligence on which it was based. To paraphrase Churchill, Air Marshal Burridge was the man deciding how the British lion would use its claws. This is part of what he told me. In the buildup to the campaign, he saw a great amount of intelligence material, which--based on his years of experience--he believed to be correct. That material indicated that Saddam did have one or more programs for the development and/or production of weapons of mass destruction. "We were looking at it from the campaign-planning perspective, which means from the most dangerous potential it could represent," he told me. "Whichever way you look at it now, Iraq wasn't compliant with UNMOVIC" needs to inspect and verify the destruction of the WMD. In short, when the Coalition entered Iraq, it had to be prepared to fight an enemy that was expected to use chemical or biological weapons, or both, and planned accordingly. So where are the WMD? Was the WMD smuggled out to another nation in the area? From other sources, I'm hearing unconfirmed but very specific reports of where the WMD were moved, from people who are confident that they were not destroyed. Burridge doubts this. Air Marshal Burridge believes most of the WMD had not been "de-weaponized" and was probably destroyed at Saddam's orders. But why? Why allow himself to be thrown out of power in defense of weapons that weren't there? Why would he deny and then destroy the WMD before we began the battle? "There is an illogic to what Saddam apparently did," Burridge said. A masterful understatement, that.Trying to find out why dictators do the things they do is a difficult thing sometimes. Dictators often act irrationally, because their information gathering system is irrational, as I've written about before. But we keep coming back to the situation as it existed prior to the war, And during that time, no one, not even the French or the Russians, doubted that Iraq was working on a WMD program. All this stuff about Bush lying to us appears to be nothing more than Monday morning quarterbacking. Well, hindsight is always 20/20.
What sex are angels?
(Review) Walid Phares compares the Democrats' obsession with Iraqi WMDs to the Byzantine debate that took place as Muslim armies surrounded Byzantium. While the Sultan's forces were massing against the Eastern Roman Empire, the top political and religious debate in the imperial city was over the gender of angels.
Where were our politicians when the mass graves in Iraq were found? Digging trenches for upcoming elections. They have totally missed the meaning of the changes taking place in Iraq, in the region, and worldwide. They have not even understood the parameters of post-September 11. In their minds, the War against Terrorism amounts merely to collecting information about al Qaeda and finding the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. It's simple, it's square. Indeed, it is not so different from the O. J. Simpson, Chandra Levy, and Peterson cases. Where is the smoking gun? Where is the knife? That's the best analogy we can use in international politics. The Byzantines didn't do any better back in the 15th century. That jihad armies were surrounding the city, remained to be proved. One Byzantine legislator accused the then-emperor of lying to the people. "He told us those weapons outside will be used against us," the hopeful legislator screamed. "He has no proofs, how can he mobilize the army?" That member of the Byzantine Senate was furious at Caesar--because he had no proofs that the forces below the towers were indeed a direct threat to Constantinople! Besides, Eastern Rome had more important issues to deal with: the sex of the angels, for example. That matter was not yet resolved. How can we send our armies to meet jihad when we still haven't figured out the weight of God's angels?Maybe there were no WMDs in Iraq. But the Iraqi government sure acted like there were, and the world's top intelligence services did too. My TCS article this week addresses this issue as well.
The Countdown Continues...
(Review) With 75 days left to go before the deadline, the effort to recall California Governor Gray Davis now has 81% of the signatures required to force a recall election.
Delusional on the Deficit
(Review) Senator Earnest "Fritz" Hollings (D-SC) is complaining in today's Washington Post that the Bush Administration is recklessly cutting taxes at a time when the Federal government just HAS to spend a whole pot-full of money. He's just terribly, terribly worried about that darn Federal Deficit.
Cutting Federal spending, of course, is not a solution in which he's interested. He is, after all, a Democrat who, along with the rest of the Democrats in the then Democratically-controlled congress, voted to appropriate $157 billion more than Ronald Reagan asked for in his budgets, and who then blamed Reagan for the deficits of the 1980s.
You see, Fritz just comes right out and says it. We just aren't being taxed enough.
Rumblings in Iran
(Review) Bill Safire has some comments about how to handle the current unrest in Iran.
Here's what not to do: don't assume the enemy of our enemy is our friend. The "People's Mujahedeen," a communist group, broke with the ayatollahs decades ago and treasonously set up shop under Saddam's protection in Iraq. We just disarmed thousands of these terrorists (getting no thanks from Tehran), and in Paris this week Jean-Louis Bruguière, chief of "la section antiterroriste" rounded up 150 of its leaders (getting effusive thanks from Tehran). We want no part of this crowd, hated by patriotic Iranians. Nor should we succumb to the siren song of "engagement" with the phony reform front. Such a display of Western appeasement would undercut the dissenters and give the ayatollahs time to complete the nuclear bomb-building that even the previously complaisant International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors fear is underway. Fortunately, engagement advocates have become an endangered species even at the State Department. Colin Powell is on board, and President Bush's message to "those courageous souls who speak out for freedom in Iran" hit the right note: "America stands squarely by their side, and I would urge the Iranian administration to treat them with the utmost of respect." His studied avoidance of the disparaging word "regime" signaled that it is political change that is needed, not regime change. Even in his tougher statement yesterday about the danger of nukes in the arsenal of the leading supporter of terrorism--"we will not tolerate construction of a nuclear weapon"--Bush's pronoun "we" referred to consensus of "the international community." By breathing on the spark of freedom without blowing too hard, and by leading the increase of pressure on a crumbling dictatorship, we may be able to limit the spread of nuclear weapons without having to take them out.I think those who say Bush doesn't have a policy on Iran are wrong. The policy is to wait and watch. And that may be the best policy of all in the current environment there. If the people are about to overthrow the mullahs through more or less peaceful political change, then the best thing we can do is to let them.
Horatius at the Bridge
A Marine colonel sent to me the amusing little item below. It demonstrates how our increasingly PC and legalistic military might have handled Gaius Horatius (later known as Horatius Cocles) after his stand on the bridge.
For those of you who do not actually know the story of Horatio at the Bridge, a brief recap is probably in order. In 508 BC, the Etruscans, under Lars Porsena, invaded Roman territory with an army said to be 90,000 strong. The Romans were beaten back all the way to Rome, where the Tiber River was the last natural barrier to the Etruscan army.
By cutting the single bridge over the Tiber, which was then running at flood stage, the Romans could prevent the Etruscans from crossing the river, and Rome would be saved. The Bridge, known as the Pons Sublicus, had a very constricted approach that only allowed a few people at a time to enter it. Horatius, who was the one-eyed Captain of the Gate in Rome, along with two other volunteers, Spurius Lartius and Junius Herminius, proposed that they could hold the narrow entrance at the far end of the Bridge while the Roman Army destroyed the Pons Siblicus behind them.
The three held off the Etruscan Army for several hours while the bridge was destroyed behind them. Engaged the entire time in individual combat, Horatius slew several of the Etruscan leaders. Just before the bridge was knocked down, Spurius and Herminius crossed to the Roman side while Horatius held the bridge entry alone. As soon as the bridge fell, Horatius leaped into the Tiber, wearing full armor and equipment. Miraculously, Horatius did not drown, but somehow managed to cross the Tiber, arriving safely to the other side amidst the cheers not only of the Romans, but of the Etruscans as well.
Now, you know the back-story. So, how would the Roman military have handled the situation in a pettifogging climate like todays?
INITIAL CITATION
Rome
II Calends, April CCCLX
SUBJECT: Recommendation for Senatorial Medal of Honor
TO: Department of War, Republic of Rome
I. Recommend Gaius Horatius, Captain of Foot, O-MCMXVI, for the Medal of Honor.
II. Captain Horatius has served XVI years, all honorably.
III. On the III day of March, during the attack on the city by Lars Porsena of Clusium and his army of CXM men, Captain Horatius voluntarily, with Sergeant Spurius Lartius and Corporal Junius Herminius, held the entire Etruscan army at the far end of the bridge, until the structure could be destroyed, thereby saving the city.
IV. Captain Horatius did kill one Major Picus of Clusium and one Colonel Astur of Luna in individual combat.
V. The exemplary courage and the outstanding leadership of Captain Horatius are in the highest tradition of the Roman Army.
Julius Lucullus, Cmdr.
II Foot Legion
Ist Ind. AG
IV Calends, April CCCLX
TO: G-III
For comment
FIVE WEEKS LATER
IInd Ind. G-III
IX Calends, May CCCLX
TO: G-II
I. For Comment Forwarding.
II. Change phrase in paragraph III, from "Saving the City" to "lessened the effectiveness of the enemy attack". The Roman Army was well dispersed tactically, the reserve had not been committed. The phrase as written might be construed to cast aspersions on our fine Army.
III. Change phrase in paragraph V from "outstanding leadership" to "commendable initiative". Captain Horatius' command was II men, only I/V of a squad.
Junius Gracchus
G-III
TWO MONTHS LATER
IIIrd Ind. G-II
II Ides, June CCCLX
TO: G-I
I. Omit strength of Etruscan forces in paragraph III. This information is classified.
II. A report evaluated at B-II states that one of the officers killed was Captain Pincus of Tifernium, and the death of Colonel Astur cannot be confirmed. Recommend change phrase in paragraph IV "one Major Picus of Clusium and one Colonel Astur of Luna" to "an officer of the enemy forces."
Julius Quintillius
G-II
IVth Ind. G-I
IX Ides, January, CCCLXI
TO: JAG
I. Full name is Gaius Caius Horatius.
II. Change service length from XVI to XV years. One year in Romulus Chapter, Cub Scouts, has been given credit for military service in error.
Avernus Scipio
G-I
TEN MONTHS LATER
Vth Ind. JAG
IInd of February, CCCLXI
TO: AG
I. The Porsena raid was not during wartime; the Temple of Janus was closed.
II. The action against the Porsena raid, ipso facto, was a police action.
III. The Senatorial Medal of Honor cannot be awarded in peacetime. (AP-CVIII-XXXV, paragraph XII.C).
IV. Officer is eligible for papyrus scroll with medal pendant.
Sextus Varo
JAG
VIth Ind. Ag.
I Ide of October, CCCLXI
TO: G-I
For draft Citation of payrus scroll with medal pendant.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER
VIIth Ind. G-I
III Calends, October CCCLXI
TO: G-II
I. Do not concur.
II. Our currently fine relations with Tuscany would suffer and current delicate negotiations might be jeopardized if publicity were given to Captain Horatius' actions at this time.
Avernus Scipio
G-I
VIIIth Ind. G-III
VI Day of November, CCCLXI
TO: G-I
A report (dated X-IV), partially verified, states that Lars Porsena is very sensitive about the Horatius affair.
Julius Quintillius
G-II
IXth Ind. G-I
X Day of November, CCCLXI
TO: AG
I. In view of information contained in preceding VIIth and VIIIth indorsements, you will prepare immediate orders for Captain G. C. Horatius to one of our overseas stations.
II. His attention will be directed to paragraph XII, POM, which prohibits interviews or conversations with newsmen prior to arrival at final destination.
Avernus Scipio
G-I
TWO YEARS LATER
Rome
II Calends, April I, CCCLXII
SUBJECT: Survey, Report of Department of War
TO: Gaius Caius Horatius
III Legion, V Phalanx
APO XIX
C/O Postmaster, Rome
I. Your statements concerning the loss of your shield a sword in the Tiber River on III March, CCCLX, have been carefully considered.
II. It is admitted you were briefly in action against certain unfriendly elements that day; however, Sergeant Spurius and Corporal Herminius were in the same action and did not lose any government property.
III. The finance officer has been directed to reduce your next pay by II I/II talents cost of one, each, sword, officer's; III/IV talent cost of one, each, shield, MK M-II.
IV. You are enjoined and admonished to pay strict attention to conservation of government property. The budget must be balanced next year.
H. Pocus
Lieutenant of Horse
Survey Officer
If you've served in the military at any time in the last 20 years, this probably sounds familiar to you.
June 18, 2003
Goodbye, Jane
Asymmetrical Information, also known individually as Megan McArdle (Jane Galt) and Mindless Dreck appear to have shut down the site. Too bad.
UPDATE: Well, it appear that their hosting company's "This site is no longer active" page was a mistake. They're back.
Control Freaks
(Review) The Senate Democrats want the White House to consult them before announcing judicial nominees. In the words of Senator Daschle (D-SD), the Minority leader, "The more we can consult, the more we can meet, the more we can talk about avoiding a major confrontation, the better off the country and the system will be."
That is steaming pile of crap. The president gets to nominate whoever he wants to judicial positions. The Senate's role is limited to confirming or denying those appointments. What Dashcle, Leahy, et al. want is to be able to nix judicial nominations before the president announces them, in order to avoid having to use the filibuster in an intentionally obstructionist manner, in order to prevent a mjaority in the Senate from confirming the nominees. It is nothing more than a mechanism whereby the minority can control judicial nominations, without paying a political price for publicly preventing the will of the majority in the Senate from being carried out.
This is constitutionally--and morally--repugnant.
The president's reply to Daschle, as near as I can make out, is "Bite me."
Geez, What Is It About Free Trade That W Just Doesn't Get?
(Review) The Bush Administration has just ordered a new set of stiff tariffs against imported catfish and computer chips.
Catfish, for cripes sake!
This is the same administration, by the way, that regularly ignores WTO subsidy rules for US exports, then wants them enforced to the exact letter of the law for imports. And get this, because Samsung electronics is alleged by the Bush Administration to have received a government subsidy of 0.004% of the price, they want to slap a 44% or so tariff on it, too. They've already slapped Hynix Semiconductor with a 44.71% tariff. And catfish? Try tariffs of up to 63.88%.
So, just add them to the Bush Administration's similarly stupid rulings on steel or softwood lumber. I hope W's trade policy gets whacked with a hammer by the WTO.
CBS Tries to Buy Jessica Lynch, or, The Power of Government-Sanctioned Monopolies
(Review) Former congressman Joe Scarborough (R-FL) writes that CBS' attempt to buy off former POW Jessica Lynch, is a perfect example of why the FCC, under the Republican leadership of Michael Powell, made a horrid decision by relaxing the FCC's ownership rules.
Now CBS, of course, huffed and puffed that their independence was without question. Oh really? Then why did they even bother bringing up MTV, Simon and Schuster, CBS entertainment and all the other pretty horses in Viacom’s stable? Why? Because Viacom is working on a monopoly of sorts, and neither the FCC nor politicians on Capitol Hill dare to stand in their way. After all, the bigger the monopoly, the bigger the campaign checks. Soon, a few international conglomerations will control American media, and everything you watch on TV, read in your local paper and buy at the bookstore. Free market be damned. When it comes to media monopolies, there is no room for free enterprise, and little toleration for free speech. If Washington continues to sit back and do nothing, big brother won't be watching you. You will be forced to watch him.Broadcasting is, for better or worse, a regulated medium, and the FCC's decision to allow a few large media conglomerates to own, well, everything that is printed or broadcast in this country is a perfect example of regulatory capture. Monopolies in the free market, whether it's A&P, Sears, IBM, or whatever, tend to be transitory. I explained all this once before, here. But regulated monopolies tend to never die. They merely coax the government "regulator" into helping them maintain or extend their monopoly power indefinitely, usually by transfusions of campaign cash. Aggregation of power, whether in the hands of government or the hands of big business, is generally injurious to liberty and to the public weal. Aggregation of power by collusion of the two is even worse, especially when it comes to the agencies whereby the dissemination of new ideas is accomplished. It's already happening in radio. Your favorite radio station is probably owned by Clear Channel, not some local businessman. The FCC has just delivered a death blow to all local media ownership. Corporate bigwigs in New York and LA will control everything you see on TV, everything you hear on the radio, and everything you read in the newspaper. Expect, at the very least, bland conformity, and an unwillingness to air anything politically incorrect. On the other hand, it may be a boon for blogging, as people look for something--anything--different.
The irrelevance of income inequality
(Review) Jonah Goldberg responds to the latest round of Lefty moaning about income inequality.
The Lilliputian army of politicians running for the Democratic presidential nomination, terrified that the economy might actually rebound before Election Day and hence sweep President Bush to reelection, are laying the ground work to rail against income inequality. The New York Times, The Washington Post and other leading papers have recently run several articles and op-eds bemoaning the rich-poor divide. Now, the first thing to keep fresh in your mind is that high income inequality is not the same thing as high poverty. As the Gatesbergia example illustrates, you can have outrageous gaps between the rich and poor and the "poor" will still be OK. For example, according to Robert Rector, an economist with the Heritage Foundation who uses the government's numbers, the typical person in the poorest fifth of U.S. households today spends as much as the person of average wealth in the early 1970s (adjusted for inflation). The typical "poor" American, according to census data, has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a VCR and a color TV. It should go without saying -but usually doesn't -that in, say, 1960, someone who had a color TV, a refrigerator, air conditioning and a car would not be considered poor. More telling: Child hunger has largely been wiped out as a major social problem in America. While deplorable instances of hungry children still occur (usually attributable to bad parenting), the real nutritional problem we face today is fat kids.Jonah makes a fine point, which is that Americans are, in general, getting wealthier and wealthier, irrespective of how "poor" they are compared to Bill Gates. yes, the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer, too, at a slightly slower rate. But there are other important considerations that make the income distribution argument problematic, as well. First, the number of people in the lowest income quintile (20%) is pretty small, comprising only about 7% of the population. Indeed, there are more people in the highest income quintile than there are in the lowest quintile. Income equality advocates never mention this, preferring that you believe that 20% of the population are in the lowest income quintile, but it isn't true. Income quintiles measure incomes, not numbers of people. When you add up everyone whose incomes fall in the lowest 20% of incomes, you only come out with 7% of the population. Second, income is strongly a factor of age. When I was 20 years old, and making $800 a month as a USAF cop, I was in the lowest income quintile. Now I'm 39, and, in terms of household income--counting both my and Chris' salary--I am in the highest quintile, being both a full-time software developer and the owner of a small web hosting company. Of course, since household income for the highest quintile starts at $82,000 according to the Census Bureau, which is the equivalent of her and I making 41,000 each, it's not all champagne wishes and caviar dreams, let me tell you. And, when you look at the people in the highest income quintile, three-quarters of them were, like me, in the lowest income quintile at some point in the past three decades. So membership is any particular income quintile is pretty fluid, and the same person moves between the different income quintiles at different stages in her life. Third, income is strongly associated with, unsurprisingly, employment. 75.1% of the people in the highest income quintile are employed full time, with an additional 15.4% working part time. By contrast 63% of the people in the lowest income quintile did not work at all for the 2000 census year. Evidently, having a job increases your income. Who'd have thought? Moreover, as the census bureau notes: "[T]he householder of a low-income household was likely to be someone 65 or older who lived alone and did not work in 2000." In other words, 39.9% of people in the lowest income quintile are retirees. They have low incomes because they are living on pensions or annuities. (And that low income figure is misleading, because Americans over 65 in general have high levels of personal wealth, and tend to own their homes and cars outright, etc.) When you put all of this together, income distribution seems pretty meaningless.
WMD terrorism
(Review) Yonah Alexander and Milton Hoenig predict that Bad Things will happen vis a vis terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Iran is doing just fine
(Review) Amir Taheri writes that Iran is on the right track, and US intervention is uneccessary. The Liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan are, in his view, doing a good enough job of pressuring the mullahs from the outside, while civil unrest is pressuring them from the inside. Indeed, he thinks a second revolution might not even be necessary, as a peaceful constitutional change might overthrow the mullahs fairly bloodlessly.
For the past eight days, thousands of students have been protesting against the regime in Iran. Starting in Tehran University, the movement has spread to campuses in other cities. It has also attracted some middle-class support, while industrial workers in a number of cities have held walkouts in solidarity. The Khomeinist Establishment is no longer strong enough to crush its opponents, as it routinely did throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The armed and police forces have made it clear that they will not shoot anti-regime demonstrators and the regime’s hired thugs, known as the Followers of the Party of God (Ansar Hezbollah), are not numerous enough or confident enough to beat opponents and disperse demonstrations. Yet Iran is not on the verge of a second revolution or civil war, as some commentators suggest. The volcano, hissing menacingly, is unlikely soon to erupt. The students’ demand for constitutional change seems to have some support within the Establishment. More than two thirds of the members of the Islamic Majlis (parliament) have published an open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the spiritual leader, to endorse the call for the separation of mosque and State. Another open letter, signed by 250 intellectuals with impeccable Khomeinist credentials, goes further by calling for the establishment of a Western-style democratic system. A consensus may yet emerge inside Iran for change through a referendum. One popular idea is to remove two articles of the Constitution and amend six others, thus separating the mosque from the State. Under the proposals the position of Supreme Guide, held by Ayatollah Khamenei, would be abolished, allowing Iran to become a "normal" republic with a president and parliament elected by and accountable to the people. Today hardly anyone, even within the Establishment, is prepared to defend the principle of Velayat-e Faqih (Custodianship of the Cleric) under which a mullah, the Supreme Guide, is regarded as the embodiment of divine will on earth and given absolute powers.Well, let's hope so. By the way, Pejman Yousefzadeh is on it, when it comes to the Iranian Revolution Watch.
Mideast peace
(Review) Former head of the World Bank, Martin Wolf, addresses, for the first time, the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Yet many view Israel not as a miracle, but as a brutal occupying power. For many Arabs, Israelis are neo-crusader interlopers. For many Europeans, Israelis are neo-colonialist oppressors. Even well-intentioned observers seem sure that a just peace would appear if Mr Sharon were to abandon Israeli control over the West Bank and uproot the settlements. I wish it were so. But people who argue that the real problem is Israeli control over the West Bank or the plight of the refugees have their history back to front. Both Israeli control over the West Bank and the refugees are the consequence of wars fought to destroy what many Arabs call the "Zionist entity". For this reason, Israelis fear that the Arab objective remains Israel's destruction. It is important to remember, for example, that the pre-1967 borders were themselves armistice lines reached at the end of the 1948 war. If the land conquered after the 1967 war is "occupied", so must be much of pre-1967 Israel. It is hard to believe that these historically arbitrary borders would, once Israel has withdrawn from its 1967 conquests, be accepted as the legitimate borders of a predominantly Jewish state. This fear is reinforced by repeated insistence on the right of return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. If the refugees were to return, Israel would soon, given the differences in birth rates, become another state with a Jewish minority. So, naturally, sceptical Israelis view this demand as code for destruction of their state. The belief that this remains the objective of their adversaries is supported not just by what they demand, but also by what they say. Hamas has made no secret of its determination to destroy Israel. The breakdown of the negotiations at Camp David and then Taba, in 2000, and the subsequent outbreak of a well-organised campaign of suicide bombings, strengthens the scepticism. Even a well-known revisionist historian, Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University, has reached the conclusion that Mr Arafat's rejection indicated the concerted will of Palestinian Arabs never to accept the Jewish state.And that is why I do not for moment believe that we should allow the creation of a Palestinian state without first eliminating Palestinian terrorism. Including, hopefully, Yasser Arafat.
Tom's advice for W
(Review) Thomas Friedman says it's too soon to tell whether or not our operation in Iraq will be a success. But he has some advice for making it one.
If I were President Bush, though, and my political life depended on Iraq being a success, I would already be worrying. I would have double the number of U.S. troops there and be throwing so much food and investment into Iraq that people there would think they've won the jackpot. Why the president is not doing that beats me, and it could end up beating him.I have to agree with Tom on this one. We should be flooding the place with every penny of aid we can spare. Bechtel, Haliburton, US Homes, and anybody else with an extra bulldozer or two should be over there building roads, hospitals, houses and schools. Iraqis who want a college education should be coming over here in droves to get schooling on Uncle Sam's dime. The last thing--the very last thing--we want to happen is for Iraq to fall back into the usual Arab pit of despotism and economic mismanagement. If we're gonna do nation building, we need to go at it full tilt.
Affirmative Ambiguity
(Review) Robert Samuelson feels ambiguous about affirmative action.
The trouble is that affirmative action's methods (for example: Michigan's practice of giving extra admission points to blacks and Hispanics) are often wickedly discriminatory. And there are other dangers: Affirmative action may stigmatize all minorities for the benefit of a few; and it may fan exaggerated resentment among whites. The Post reports that many candidates for mid-Atlantic colleges don't answer the race and ethnicity question on their applications -- because they think that being white hurts their chances. At William & Mary, nearly a fifth didn't answer. (The resentment is exaggerated because minority admission rates only slightly alter white admission rates. If 1,000 whites have been rejected and then 100 fewer minorities are admitted, 90 percent of those whites will still be rejected.) But, there's a but. Despite its many flaws, affirmative action remains one of the crude devices by which America tries to become a more open society. I have seen in my own children's experience -- in middle and high school -- that diverse classrooms can demystify race and ethnicity in the way students pick their friends. This must be good for the country, even at Brown or Princeton. It's understandable that these institutions don't want to be lily-white. What fails on principle may work in practice.Sure, there's undoubtedly a value in integrated classroom, and learning about people from other backgrounds and cultures. The question, though, is how much we're willing to pay for that, and who's making the actual payments. Well, I'll tell you who's making the payments: minorities. It's all well and good for Harvard to crow about their high level of minority admissions. But admissions is only part of the story. It isn't whether you get admitted to Harvard that's important, but whether you graduate. And drop-out rates for minorities at top-ranked schools are astronomical. Sure, it makes your admissions policy look like all the colors of the rainbow are converging at your school, but it results in fewer minority students actually graduating. How is that good? Look, any Ivy League college is a tough school. 99% of white students aren't qualified to finish the course there. But, while the school doesn't lower the entry requirements for white students, it does do so for minorities. If Harvard accepted white kids from Critter Creek, Alabama with an SAT of 857, those white kids would drop out like flies. So if Harvard accepts white kids with 1200 SATs and black kids with 1000 SATs, the black kids, who are not as qualified to handle the difficulty of the courses, will drop out of Harvard at a higher rate. As a result, they often don't finish college at all. A black kid with a 1200 SAT is just as likely to finish school at Yale as a white kid with a 1200 SAT. But any kid, black or white, that gets accepted with a 1000 SAT to Yale is gonna find it tough, and is more likely to drop out. A kid with a 900 or 1000 SAT score might do great at a University of California school, where the course work more nearly matches their qualifications, and where lower division courses go a bit farther in preparing the student for more difficult work. Or they might go to junior college at Saddleback College to get remedial and lower division courses done, then transfer to a UC school to finish their upper division requirements. That black kid with a 1,000 SAT has a much better shot at getting a degree at UCSD, whereas, if he went to Stanford, he might get so pummeled with his lower division courses that he drops out completely. If you want minority students to get accepted into Harvard and actually graduate, then the answer is to improve schooling at the primary, intermediate, and secondary levels. That's a lot harder, and takes a darn sight more money than simply dropping the SAT score requirements for minorities by 100 or 200 points. But it addresses the chief problem of minority academic underperformance, which is poor schooling prior to college. The way to have minorities succeed is to give them a quality education before they go to college. Do that and you'll have proportionately just as many blacks with 1200 SATs as you do whites. But just to lower entry requirements for minorities at the college level does them no real favor. It inappropriately forces minority students to tackle coursework for which they have not been prepared, which results in disproportionate numbers of those students flunking out and failing to finish college. If they were accepted into second-tier schools, or junior colleges, their chances of flunking out are greatly reduced, and their chances of obtaining a college degree are greatly enhanced. Yes, the primary solution is to improve the education that minority students get prior to college. In the meantime, though, I think it's far better to have a greater number of black and Hispanic graduates of UC San Bernardino than it is to have a large number of dropouts from Harvard, Brown or Yale. A BS degree in Computer Science from UC Fresno might be pretty useful at getting a good job. A withdrawal form from Princeton is a lot less so.
A liberal's condescension toward Hispanics slips out
(Review) Ruben Navarette takes exception to some remarks made by Senator John Edwards (D-NC), on the subject of Miguel Estrada, one of President Bush's judicial nominees whose nomination is currently being obstructed by Senate Democrats, Edwards among them.
What is at stake is whether bright and hard-working Latinos will be allowed by liberal politicians and interest groups to ascend to positions of prominence even when they are so impressive as to threaten the left, as does Estrada, who has become the poster child for Democratic obstructionism. The obstructionists include Edwards. While claiming that he supports diversity, he apparently doesn't think we should push the concept too far by encouraging diversity of thought, ideology or political views. "We need more Hispanics on the federal bench, but we should choose people because they have the right record, not just the right last name," Edwards said. The implication is that, now that it is hip to be Hispanic, a person named "Estrada" or "Gonzalez" or "Rodriguez" can write his or her own ticket. I can't wait to call my parents and give them the good news. In light of the way that their generation was denied opportunities because of their ethnicity, it is worth taking a moment to contemplate The World According to John Edwards, where apparently being Latino is like winning the lottery. OK, I've contemplated. And Edwards doesn't know what he's talking about. It was foolish, and a tad racist, for the senator to imply that someone with Estrada's credentials -- Honduran immigrant, honors graduate from Harvard Law School, clerk for a Supreme Court justice -- received an appellate court nomination simply because he is Hispanic. Edwards intended to tell his audience what he thought of Estrada, but instead, he wound up telling the rest of us how little he thinks of Hispanics in general.Of course, this kind of soft racism is what we should have come to expect from the Left. Minorities can't pass the SATs? Lets eliminate it so they won't have too. Minorities can't score well enough on civil service exams? Well, then lets just give them extra points. The entire theory of the left as regards racial matters is that minorities can't compete on a level playing field. Their solution is not, as one would suppose, to improve education for minorities, and to demand high standards in return. No, their solution is to keep them in failing public schools and prevent them from using, say, vouchers to attend schools of their choice; lower the standards for them for admission to college or the workplace; and then blame white "racism" if anyone has the temerity to point out that such a policy might not be working very well. The left's argument on racial matters is implicitly that minorities aren't as capable as whites, and therefore require lower standards. There are a large number of minority doctors, lawyers, scientists, and other professionals who find the Left's arguments rankling. But the last thing the left wants is an accomplished black or Hispanic individual to stray off the reservation when it comes to questioning this bit of ideology. The left wants to see a rainbow of color in public life, but a rigid orthodoxy of thought. To claim that one has diversity by using the least important physical feature, the color of one's skin, while ignoring the true diversity of contending ideas is a sham. People like Miguel Estrada are dangerous to the race hustlers, because their very existence puts into question the ideas that minorities can't compete in America. Even worse they demonstrate the dangerous idea that individual hard work makes high achievement possible to nearly anyone in America, irrespective of their color. Sure, there are still racists out there. There will always be racists, because there will always be evil persons of every stripe. But this isn't 1963. Bull Connor is dead, and good riddance. But many of the racists now disguise themselves as the friends of minorities, and who paternalistically shake their heads in sorrow that minorities just can't compete. Someday, perhaps in my lifetime, we will stop seeing issues in terms of skin color, and realize that there are only two races: The decent, and the indecent.
June 17, 2003
In good company
(Review) The Lefty blog Triptych Cryptic, to whom I permalink as a matter of reciprocal courtesy, lists me in the section of his blogroll labeled, "Feces Hurling Morons". I am one of only four listings, the others being Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter.
I'd be a lot more gratified if I had some of the other three's money, though.
Sean Delonas, New York Post
Armavirumque
(Review) The New Criterion is now running a web log named "Armavirumque". I am permalinked to them. They do not, however, permalink to me.
It would be nice if they could be persuaded to do so by my readers.
UPDATE: Good work, guys! They permalinked to me. I'm gratified.
Administrative Announcement
I have updated my permalinks. Visits to those whom I link would be appropriate.
The media's march to amalgamation
(Review) Bill Safire writes that the FCC's recent decision to relax media ownership rules may face some serious opposition in Congress.
Good.
Sacramento Spendthrifts
(Review) Jill Stewart confirms our worst fears about what the Democrats in Sacramento are doing to california's money.
[T]he Assembly Appropriations Committee, facing California's $38.2 billion budget deficit, shelved one proposed spending bill after another, spending being a pointless topic. I watched as committee chairman Darrell Steinberg noted the only good news was that President Bush was sending Sacramento $2.4 billion in relief. Hearing news of the inbound $2.4 billion, a member of the committee declared, "Well, maybe now we'll be able to fund some of these programs we are talking about!" I'll admit, I snorted reflexively. Then I perched forward to see who had uttered such a thing. But my view was blocked as a curious contingent of citizens craned their necks at the same time. We in the peanut gallery glanced in amazement at one another. These Sacramento politicos have driven California to the brink of financial collapse with their gross overspending, and some assemblywoman with a microphone glued to her lips still doesn't get it? Could this be right? Gov. Gray Davis and the majority Democrats are asking taxpayers to cough up $8.3 billion in new taxes -- including $4 billion in tripled auto license fees, making California's taxes the highest by far -- and Sacramento isn't using the $2.4 billion to pay down its deficit?Hard to believe isn't it? But every since California became a one-party state five years ago, that's how the Democrats have run Sacramento. Somehow, these mental midgets turned an $18 billion budget surplus into a $38 billion deficit. From 1998 to 2002, the state budget balloned from $58 billion to $91 billion. On the plus side, however, The Davis Recall campaign now has 80% of the votes required to call a recall election for Governor Gray Davis. At this rate, they'll have the required signatures by July 1st.
Martha Stewart Living in Very Very Small Places
(Review) Tammy Bruce is outraged at the Feds for prosecuting Martha Stewart. And, frankly, the more I learn about this prosecution, the less I like it, too.
Here’s the bottom line Scary Thing about what’s happening to Martha—she’s not charged with insider trading—she is essentially being prosecuted for protesting her innocence of that now nonexistent charge. Let me see if I can unravel the absolute absurdity of the situation for you. As you all probably know, the Feds launched an investigation to root out suspicions of insider trading—an investigation which actually cleared Martha, as evidenced by the lack of an indictment. So, instead she is being accused of obstructing the investigation that proved her innocence. Is that Mr. Orwell I hear? Last time I checked, someone was innocent until proven guilty in this country. We are supposedly free to shout our declaration of innocence from every mountaintop if we so choose. Even Martha Stewart has that right. Despite the existence of that rather important little Constitutional right—the Feds had their Big Important Press Conference and huffed and puffed that this was a case about lying—that declaring her innocence to the public was actually a clever ruse to defraud investors in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia by trying to get them to believe she was innocent so her stock price would climb.I have heard this from a couple of analysts now, and it seems to be a pretty shoddy trick the Feds are pulling. Unlike Ken Lay of Enron, however, Martha confined her political donations to Democrats, so don't expect anyone on the White House to be interested in her plight.
The responsibility of citizenship
Well, according to the Superior Court of San Diego County, I must report for Jury Duty on July 9th. Cool. I get out of work, and, because my company offers 5 days of jury leave, I still get paid.
Even better, I may get the chance to send some deserving weasel to Folsom for a few years.
Monetary Policy
(Review) Larry Kudlow is calling for the Fed to begin a "shock and awe" monetary accommodation.
OK. First, let's stop using the phrase "shock and awe" shall we? I'm getting as sick of it as I was back in '91, when I was on active duty during Desert Storm, and everyone was talking about the "mother of all whatever". It was funny the first time I heard it. The second time it bought a wry little smile. But now it's just irritating.
Anyway, Kudlow is breaking from Supply-side orthodoxy (which frankly, causes me to feel the mother of all shock and awe myself1)! I never would have though I'd see the day that Kudlow came over all Keynesian on us, but there it is.
No matter what the investment — be it corporate profits paid out as dividends, or capital gains, or new capital-goods orders and shipments by large and small businesses, or new high-risk venture start-ups — higher after-tax investor-class returns will place new liquidity demands on the financial system. The Fed must accommodate them. A shock-and-awe liquidity-expansion policy from the Fed will counter our underperforming economic recovery, offset the forces of worldwide deflation and recession, and stomp out deflation fears at home. An aggressive liquidity stance will also accommodate rising transaction demands following the latest Bush tax cut. And it will even counter the negative effects of any potential breakdowns in the investment portfolios of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the troubled loan institutions.See?! He's making demand-side arguments and everything! If Jude Wanninski was dead, he'd be spinning in his grave like a machine lathe. He also happens to be right, and his arguments are compelling.
Deflationary interest rates are making this very same case. Last winter, the bellwether 10-year Treasury note yielded around 4 percent. Today it is slightly over 3 percent. In the money markets, euro-dollar and fed-funds futures have all risen to new contract highs, thereby pricing in a 50 basis-point cut of the Fed's interest rate. In commodity markets, early year rallies for basic metals and industrial materials have stalled. Even gold prices, the strongest reflation indicator so far, have slipped in recent weeks. The Fed should follow these real-time financial- and commodity-market indicators. Liquidity-sensitive market prices are signalling that the economy is still soft and that lingering deflation remains a threat to future growth. In fact, business durable-goods prices continue to fall at a 2 to 3 percent rate, on average. Broad-based government price indexes may be registering zero inflation, but people like Ben Bernanke, a new Fed board member, and Glenn Hubbard, the president's former top economic advisor, have sensibly argued for a 2 percent inflation target. Meeting this objective would require sustained reflationary policies, not stand-patism.The output gap (the difference between potential GDP growth and actual GDP growth) has been sustained for a while, and the overcapacity this represents has been putting a lot of downward pressure on prices. The past two months have seen the Consumer Price Index drop at a -0.2 rate. The Producer Price Index dropped by -1.9 in April and -0.3 in May. The Fed is nearing rock bottom on interest rates, but there are still effective tools in the policy box. The Fed should forget the target rate at the discount window and start buying back treasuries from the banks, in order to add liquidity to the system. As Kudlow writes, this will enable the banks to meet the demand (gasp!) for cash as tax cuts stimulate it. ========== 1Yeah, yeah, I know.
Bad Social Science
(Review) Eugene Volokh comments on a "study" by the University of Pennsylvania that concludes that, if you own a gun, you are likely to die of a gunshot wound. True, says volokh, but meaningless.
What the University of Pennsylvania study found was a statistical correlation: Gun ownership is correlated with gun deaths. But that two things are correlated doesn't prove that one causes the other. The sex-crime rate is correlated over time with the use of air conditioning, but not because air conditioning causes sex crime; rather, both rise during the summer months. Likewise, whether someone in your home has been to the hospital recently is correlated with death in your home, but not because hospital care tends to kill people (though sometimes it does). Rather, both hospital stays and deaths often have a common cause: serious illness. It turns out that a hugely disproportionate fraction of homicide victims are themselves criminals — criminals do dangerous things, and deal with dangerous people. In a recent San Francisco study, two-thirds of all gun-homicide victims (and one-third of all gun suicides) were found to have had arrest records, and other studies of gun-homicide victims yield similar results. And criminals, especially drug dealers and gang members, are particularly likely to own guns; most gun owners aren't criminals, but many criminals are gun owners. So even if gun ownership and gun homicide are correlated, both may be caused by a common factor: Hardcore criminals are especially likely to own guns — and to be killed by guns.Unfortunately, flawed studies like this do much to mold conventional wisdom.
Blood for Freedom
(Review) Koorosh Afshar writes from the barricades in Tehran about the struggles that he and his peers have been going through daily to agitate for freedom in Iran.
In the past few nights, my peers — and our mothers and sisters — have poured into the streets of our city. Some of us have been arrested and many have been injured by the ruthless attacks of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah. These people attack whomever they see in the streets with tear gas, sticks, iron chains, swords, daggers, and, for the last two nights, guns. It has become almost routine for us to go out at night, chant slogans, get beaten, lose some of our friends, see our sisters beaten, and then return home. Each night we set to the streets only to be swept away the next dawn by agents of the regime. Two nights ago, on Amirabad Street, we wrote "Down with Khomeini" on the ground. Before long, the mullah's vigilantes attacked us on their motorcycles. They struck a female student before my eyes so harshly that she was no longer able to walk. As she fell to the ground, four members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah surrounded her, kicking her. When I and two other students threw stones at them so that they would leave her alone, they threatened us. We escaped into a lane and hid in a house whose owner, an old lady, had left the door open for us. A few minutes later, we saw the young lady being carried away by riot police, her feet dragging on the ground, her shattered teeth hanging out of her still-bleeding mouth.It's staring to look like 1979 all over again in Iran. And this time, that's probably a good thing.
A Palestinian State...With Terrorists
Review) Reader Mike Daley points me to the Brother's Judd (which has become a group blog with the addition of writers who are neither Judds, nor brothers).
In any event, one of the non-Judd non-brother contributors, Paul Jaminet, chimes in with his support for the Judd editorial policy of going ahead to create a Palestinian state now, and worrying about terrorism later.
Professor Wisse's statements are undeniably correct: the terrorists want to annihilate Israel. But the roadmap is not aimed at making peace with these folk. The roadmap aims at nurturing a Palestinian peace party, at improving Israel's reputation among people of goodwill by publicly offering to satisfy every legitimate Palestinian grievance, and at exposing the terrorists as the true barriers to peace by removing their ability to masquerade as a party of Palestinian independence. The battle with the terrorists must come later, after the ground has been prepared, an alternative created and the world public prepared for the necessity of battle...Time, and the advance of freedom in the Middle East beginning in Iraq, will steadily make the alternative of peace more and more attractive to ordinary Palestinians. By clarifying the problem into stark alternatives of endless destructive warfare and a prosperous peace in a democratic state, and by waiting patiently for Arab minds to change while steadily increasing the benefits of peace, the Bush-Sharon strategy holds out hope for eventual resolution to the conflict without catastrophic loss of live [sic].And while we're waiting for time to heal all wounds through the magical spread of liberal democracy to Palestine, what will the Palestinian government be doing in the meantime to stop Hamas, Fatah, and the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade from blowing up innocent women and children on buses, ice cream shops, and pizza parlors? Not a lot, it appears. Mahmoud Abbas has already stated that will not, under any circumstances, use force to prevent Hamas from carrying out suicide attacks on Israelis. The Judds have this dreamy idealism in which, if the Palestinians can only get a recognized state, much of the impetus for terrorism will disappear, and things will automatically be much better. I, on the other hand, believe this to be an extraordinarily naive and unrealistic view. It assumes that what the Palestinians want is a state of their own, and upon receiving it, they will be essentially satisfied. After this, the small bands of extremists can be pursued at leisure, and, presumably, the Palestinian government will willingly do so. Unfortunately, the truth is Hamas, and even Abbas' Fatah organization, do not have, as their ultimate goal, the creation of a small Palestinian state. Their goal is a Palestinian state that extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and from Lebanon to Egypt. It is not a peaceful Palestine and Israel in which they are interested, but a peaceful Palestine where Israel used to be. A majority--a very large majority--of Palestinians appears to agree. Mahmoud Abbas, for example, has an approval rating even lower than California Governor Gray Davis, as hard as that may be to believe. In point of fact, if Abbas wanted to take on Hamas, or anyone else, he could do so. He has 60,000 men under arms in the Palestinian security forces, compared to 1,500 or 2,000 active Hamas members. That he doesn't do so is measure of how much support the Palestinian people have for the goals of Hamas, and how little interest there is among Palestinians in moderation, even if it's just the lukewarm moderation that Abbas represents for the purposes of Western PR. Creating a Palestinian state, while at the same time, liberating it from the responsibility to hunt down the terrorists in their midst, is a recipe for disaster. A Palestinian government that is not forced to eliminate terrorism will not do it. And why should it be otherwise? If terrorism is effective enough to gain them their own state, why not try to see if it's use--all piously disavowed by the Palestinian government, of course--can allow the Palestinian government to extract further concessions from the Israelis? And don't think the Israelis don't know this. And don't think they'll sit idly by while infiltrators from the West Bank and Gaza blow up Jews in coffee houses. If Canadians were regularly blowing up Americans in Buffalo and Detroit, I suspect that Canada's life as an independent nation would be drastically foreshortened. An independent Palestine that fails to crack down on terror would have a similarly brief lifespan. A Palestinian government that is not forced to crack down on Hamas will never willingly do so. At the same time, Palestinian independence will limit Israel's ability to track and eliminate terrorist groups there. Unless Israel wishes to declare war against Palestine, terrorists will have a safe haven there. If the Palestinians will not abandon terrorism in order to obtain a state of their own, what makes anyone think they will do so after they have it? Clearly, as it stands now, it's more important to Hamas to kill Jews than it is for them to have their own state. Why will it be any less important for them to kill Jews after they have a state of their own? If their goal is the destruction of Israel, the creation of a Palestinian state is merely a mile marker on the road to driving the Jews into the sea. The solution to the problem is not to declare a Palestinian state and hope the problem of terrorism will go away because the Palestinians are so darn grateful. The solution is to force Arabs to hunt down and kill the terrorists in their midst. Until they are willing to do so, there will never be peace or security for either Israel or Palestine.
June 16, 2003
Steyn on Hillary
(Review) Mark Steyn's review of Hillary Clinton's book can be summarized as follows:
Hillary's fans will buy the book, open Chapter One, and read, ''I wasn't born a first lady or a senator. I wasn't born a Democrat. I wasn't born a lawyer or an advocate for women's rights and human rights. I wasn't born a wife or mother . . . '' and think, well, that's just like the early bits of the Old Testament, all the begetting, or in this case all the things she wasn't begot as, so I'll just skip ahead to Chapter Two, and I'll bet it's really crackling along by now. And Chapter Two begins: ''What you don't learn from your mother, you learn from the world' is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya.'' And you think, well, isn't that just wonderfully diverse, and she heard it from an actual tribe in Kenya! Any tribesman in particular? Or did they all yell it out in unison as her motorcade passed by? Either way, it's the sort of soothing multicultural sentiment that separates an enlightened progressive from rabid knuckle-dragging redneck Clinton-haters, and that's all you need to know. So you put the book up on the shelf and never open it ever again.If you don't read the whole thing, however, you're missing a lot.
The Reality Principle
(Review) Thomas Friedman argues that the reason that Israeli attacks on Hamas should be stopped is that, at the end of they day, they simply aren't useful.
You know that both sides are in self-destruction mode when you can look at their military actions and say that even if they succeeded they would be worse off. The question is not whether Israel has a right to kill senior Hamas officials. They are bad guys. The question is whether it's smart for Israelis to do it now. The fact is, the only time Israelis have enjoyed extended periods of peace in the last decade has been when Palestinian security services disciplined their own people, in the heyday of Oslo. Unfortunately, Yasir Arafat proved unwilling to do that consistently. The whole idea of the Bush peace process is to move Mr. Arafat aside and replace him with a Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who is ready to rebuild the Palestinian security services, and, in the context of an interim peace settlement, corral Hamas. Hamas knows this. So its tactic is to goad Israel into attacks that will unravel the whole process. The smart thing for Israel to do — and it's not easy when your civilians are being murdered — is not to play into Hamas's hands. The smart thing is to say to Mr. Abbas: "How can we help you crack down on Hamas? We don't want Israel to own Hamas's demise. Palestinians have to root out this cancer within their own society. If Israelis try to do it, it will only metastasize." Israel's supporters argue that if America can go after Osama bin Laden, Israel can go after Hamas. Of course Israel is entitled to pursue its mortal enemies, just as America does, but it cannot do it with reckless abandon, notes Mr. Ezrahi, for one reason: America will never have to live with Mr. bin Laden's children. They are far away and always will be. Israel will have to live with the Palestinians, after the war. They are right next door and always will be.If Mahmoud Abbas is unable to step up to the plate with Hamas, and his fellow Arabs are unable, or unwilling to provide assistance in doing so, then Israel will obviously have to take another look at the problem. In the meantime, however, restraint, as difficult as it may be, needs to be the order of the day.
Past the Point of Justifying
(Review) Senator John McCain (R-AZ) writes for the Washington Post to address the Iraqi WMD issue
While war was never inevitable, it was, in retrospect, the most telegraphed military confrontation in history. Hussein had plenty of time to destroy or disperse weapons stocks and to further conceal weapons programs, which often rely more on human knowledge than physical infrastructure. If Hussein had the weapons destroyed or concealed, reconstituting them would have required primarily the skills of Iraqi scientists. Precious few Iraqis would have been involved in the actual destruction or concealment. That's why capturing and interrogating Iraqis involved in concealment -- as well as scientific personnel -- is essential. Despite highly intrusive inspections after the Gulf War, U.N. inspectors were shocked in 1995 when an Iraqi defector revealed the existence of Iraq's enormous biological weapons program. Until we capture Hussein or prove him dead and eradicate the remnants of his apparatus of terror, which continues to coordinate daily attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Iraqi scientists will not feel free to talk, and warped dreams of outlasting America will persist. We went to war in part because Hussein failed to account for his weapons, had proven his willingness to use them and behaved in a way that encouraged governments around the world to believe he possessed them. Our intelligence about a hostile foreign government is never perfect. When it tends overwhelmingly toward one conclusion -- in Iraq's case, that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- should we give the benefit of the doubt to a dictator with a record of deceit and aggression?If you listen to the Democrats....Yes.
WMD Whining
(Review) My newest TechCentralStation article is up, in which I discuss the whining about our failure to find WMD in Iraq.
