I couldn't resist

Your results:You are Geordi LaForge.
You work well with others and often fix problems quickly. Your romantic relationships are often bungled.

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Political Delusions

Sometimes I think that (in the United States anyway) political parties can be characterized by the delusions shared by their respective leaderships. For instance, the Republican delusion seems to be that everything can and should be run like a business. That this doesn't work with war - that you can't fight and win with bean counters (think Rumsfeld) forcing you to do it on the cheap - is only beginning to dawn on them. They even think you can run the National Laboratories like businesses, and have replaced the old University-run management with business consortia. Yes, the University of California is still involved, but the business is changed for the worse, including the compensation plan that used to help retain seasoned scientists. (And the Republicans are mouthing the same platitudes I heard at the now defunct Bell Labs when it began to be run like a business 20 years ago.) Indeed the Republicans think the business delusion applies to everything and everyone but themselves - no business could stay in business, or its managers out of prison, if its finances were run like our government.

The Democrats, on the other hand, labor under the delusion of Amerocentrism. They think everything in the world revolves around us, and therefore it is our foreign policy that determines everything that happens in the world. For example, they think we would have no war against the Bin-Ladenists if we had treated the 9/11 attacks as an international police matter. [Never mind that we treated the attacks leading up to 9/11 as police matters, which gave the Bin Ladenists the time and shelter to organize, recruit and grow strong. It was not our response to 9/11 that led to a surge in recruitment - it was the images of the towers collapsing all over the internet, which the Bin Ladenists downloaded and incorporated into their recruiting videos. More...]

Amero/Euro-centrism is also the reason why many people (not just Democrats) think that if we were only nicer to everyone, they would like us and adopt our values. Sorry, huge portions of humanity see things differently. While we might think that earning a reasonable living at a tolerable job and coming home to watch TV without fighting with our neighbors or being repressed by my government is the pinnacle of human achievement, others find it unbearable. To them, a life without struggle (other than to earn the next dollar) is a life without honor, without glory, and therefore without meaning. Therefore the culture that promotes such a life is inhuman and must be stamped out. While our enemies might complain about our foreign policy, we need to understand that what they really hate is us. And that we can only change that by ceasing to be ourselves.

Reparations for Slavery

On the question of possible reparations paid (presumably) by the US Government to descendents of Africans enslaved in America, the answer is NO. The institution of legal slavery in the United States ended 144 years ago in 1863. The Confederate States of America continued the practice until its military defeat by US forces in 1865. In other words, the US fought and won a very costly war to end slavery, so the cost of reparations must be deducted from the cost of the war, with interest. But more to the legal point, there is nobody alive today who can show that they themselves have been personally damaged by the above referenced slavery.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can show that they have been damaged by the Jim Crow laws that used to be common throught the United States until the middle 1960s. Or the discriminatory hiring practices that were not stopped until the then farcical "Equal Opportunity" was replaced by "Affirmative Action," in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Or even the red-lining and steering practices of the banking and real estate industries that continued into the 1980s. Folks who have been on the receiving end of such practices are still very much alive, but somehow the idea of reparations for slavery always seems to push their causes out of public view. Could it be because someone might actually have to pay up if we could keep public attention on our more recent practices?

Silly Barack, Bin Laden is for Grown-Ups

Dear Barack Obama,

I like you, and I may support you for President someday, but not this go-round. You have more book-learning than many of your opponents. But today, you proved to me that you lack the necessary real-world experience, by raising the specter of US troops on Pakistani soil.

President Musharraf's regime is poised on the edge of a knife. On one side he is undermined by the Pakistan People's Party composed of ethnic Sindh's led by Benazir Bhutto (widely believed to have been corrupt both times she was Prime Minister of Pakistan), and on the other by a collection of Islamofacist parties openly sympathetic with al-Qaeda. In the middle is the Pakistani military led by Musharraf, trying to keep Pakistan together.

At the same time, we have a nuclear arms standoff between Pakistan and India. Yes, Barack, both countries have already built and tested nuclear weapons. They even got close to having a war which might have gone nuclear, when Islamofacists based in Pakistan bombed the Indian Parliament a few years ago.

Now it may be that one of the things that keeps the Islamofacists from gaining enough sympathizers to topple Musharraf's government (and take possession of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal) is that, so far, Musharraf has managed to keep massed US troops from crossing into Pakistan. You have just signaled that in an Obama administration, this might no longer be the case.

Even the mere talk of US military incursions into Pakistan by a candidate for US President might have potential to destabilize Pakistan. Such destabilization could lead India (in an attempt to pre-empt a nuclear attack by a new Islamofacist regime) to try to sieze Pakistan's nuclear weapons. The Islamofacists, knowing that they cannot prevail against India in a conventional conflict, might opt to use their new nuclear weapons, rather than let India take them away. In other words, your remarks may court the possibility of igniting a regional nuclear war.

Your are correct to note that the Pakistani army has been unable to control Pakistan's mountainous Northwest Frontier Provinces and Federally Administered Tribal Areas where Bin Laden and company are widely suspected to be hiding out. But no army in history ever has.

So maybe we could get Bin Laden if we sent troops into Pakistan, and maybe we couldn't. But one thing is clear: all hell might break loose if we tried it. The irony of it is that, in a manner of speaking, Bin Laden (if he is there, if he is even still alive), may be hiding under Pakistan's nuclear umbrella.

If you want to get the al-Qaeda senior leadership thought to be in Pakistan, Barack, then you had better have a really good, well thought out plan, not based on book learning, but on ground truth knowledge. You would also do well to make sure they are really there. And it would be best to keep quiet about it.

Pride and Paranoia

It isn't about policy, it's about pride. Or as it's known in the Christian world, the sin of pride, and the self-deceptions, the paranoid fantasies that whole peoples will adopt in order to save face in the face of cultural change.

Cultural change is the inevitable result of globalization bringing cultures into such close contact that they interpenetrate: people from different cultures are trying to live on each other's turf. And the cultures that are dying are the old honor/shame cultures of northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia that date from the Time of Ignorance before the coming of Islam.

To be respected in a traditional honor/shame culture, you must know more than your children. You must force all your family members to retain the details of your cultural dress and lifestyle, because the source of your honor is adherence to the code of honor that prescribes that dress and lifestyle, and any other choices they might make reflect badly on you. Yet you are surrounded by media which your kids are more savvy at using than you are, and it carries appealing images of alternative dress and lifestyles. You almost begin to feel like a left-behind loser with a rag on your head.

But, wait! There's a quick fix! A paranoid fantasy that makes the surrounding culture evil and you good. The other culture consists of devils who are attacking your religion! You are good and wise, they are depraved. But they are winning, and must be stopped! KILL THEM!!!!!

See? You're feeling better (meaning superior in an honor/shame culture) already. Never mind that Islam is universal and transcends culture, never mind that Islam as a religion is almost nowhere under attack, and that with over a billion adherents, shows no sign of going away.

Now once you've adopted the paranoid fantasy, all you need do is twist any facts you can into supporting your fantasy, and disregard those you can't. This is the dynamic behind the film, "Valley of the Wolves," in Turkey, for example. The film purports to be a documentary and depicts the current Iraq conflict as what yesterday's Wall Street Journal calls, "an organ-harvesting operation run by greedy Jews and fundamentalist Christians."

Unfortunately for us, the paranoid fantasists will think what they want to think and do whatever they can to inflict mega-violence on all their designated enemies, regardless of any of our words or actions. But fortunately for us, their cause is already lost, partly because their culture is simply not competitive, and partly because their ideology is rooted in idolatry and blasphemy. Idolatry because they imagine that God is as wedded to their culture as they are, and blasphemy because they impute their own rage (and evil intent) to God.

So have a good look at the picture above. These are the faces of the defeated, but they are not going down without a fight (even a nuclear one, if they can get the wherewithal). The pity is that the fight is unnecessary: nobody is insulting Islam (because in modern culture it is meaningless to try to insult a revealed religion), nobody is even insulting them, because we're all too politically correct to do that. It's just that they feel insulted (dishonored, shamed), because the surrounding culture does not afford them honor in their traditional ways of getting it. Rather than open their minds and hearts to new ways of being Muslim, they trap themselves into thinking that they must subjugate the rest of us, or live with dishonor.

Finally, contrast their behavior with that of the surrounding culture. People like those in the photo rioted over the "Muhammad" cartoons, because they feel genuinely (culturally) threatened. If the British were as touchy, they would have responded to the above provocation with riots and mass deportations. But they can afford to be less touchy, because their cultural identity and sense of self-worth is not threatened. They know that ultimately, it just doesn't matter what these people think.

The Irrational Part of Atheism

A fine article on the subject is right here. Neither the will to believe nor the will to disbelieve is grounded in rationality. Enjoy.

We are going to win the "War on Terror"

First of all, I hate the term "Global War on Terror" or GWOT because you can't win a war if you can't name your enemy. If we are fighting a war on terrorism, then it is a very old war, beginning with the Jewish Sicari (named for the short swords they used for political assassination) of 1st century Roman-occupied Judea (which the Romans disingenuously called Palestina, or Palestine).

No we are responding to a war brought upon us by Islamofacists - facists who hide themselves in Islamic clothing - which many are calling the Global Salafist Hirabah (GSH). Salafism refers to a desire to return to the simpler, purer times of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, in itself a laudable thing, provided that would-be salafist realizes that the Prophet and his Companions were innovators who looked forward, rather than fundamentalists who looked backward. Hirabah is a term connoting illegal war, brigandage, banditry, and terrorism. It stands in contrast to Jihad, or Holy War, sanctioned by God, a term with the Islamofacists misappropriate.

The Global Salafist Hirabah had a beginning - the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie on charges that he wrote a book, The Satanic Verses, that Khomeini didn't like. TSV satirized both the West and Islam in general, and Khomeini in particular. I nominate the fatwa as the beginning of the GSH, because a head of state of one government seeking to incite the murder of a citizen of another government simply for exercising his right to free expression is de facto a declaration of war against the civilization that recognizes and upholds the right to free expression. Khomeini had declared war against the West.

The GSH will also have an ending, brought about by social change in just one or two generations. This is because the Islamofacists are fighting to preserve and extend their priveleged status as Muslim men. Their sense of self-worth depends on their subjugation of Muslim women. Continuing this subjugation is ultimately a lost cause. Eventually, Muslim women will decide that they do not want to have their bodies mutilated, that they want to show their faces, that they want to drive, to study subjects both sacred and secular, that they want to work, that they want to choose whom they marry, and they want to vote. After that, this particular war will be over, because there will be nothing to fight about.

"But it's not a war!" one of my colleagues protested. It is a war because our enemies say it is a war. Denying that it is a war is just manipulating the definition of war because one wants to manipulate the conduct of the war. Is is also Eurocentric bigotry. Eurocentrists fight wars wholesale, with massed armies. Their way of war descends from the Greco-Roman way of trying to get the war over with as fast as possible so as to return to normalcy, to farming, to peace. In contrast, the horse peoples of the steppe pursued war as a part time occupation. You could raid the Roman Empire for a goods and glory on any given afternoon. You didn't want the war to come to a swift and decisive conclusion, because then what would you do? The Islamofacist way of war is descended from the tradition of the steppe nomads, but fought with modern weapons, and enabled by the internet.

But all this is not a problem if we realize that the war need not be won militarily. We can switch from fighting war wholesale, to fighting retail - where most of the action is not in shooting but in having tea with the right local leaders. We need only strive not to lose. Muslim women will eventually do the rest.

Of course, it would be nice to help them achieve their Islamic Reformation. If Western Feminists could get over their navel-gazing disregard for the condition of any women but themselves, they could help in ways that governments cannot.

In closing I present the photo above as evidence for my thesis: World War IV, the War of the Islamofacists against Western Liberal Democracy (the Cold War was World War III) will be won, not by the West, not by the Islamofacists, but by Islamic women. It is a picture of Iraqi women lined up to vote.

Their victory, like the victory of the Central European and Russian people over Communism, will be a victory for the whole world, and, in the world of Islam, a victory for God.

Useful Deaths

On the radio I heard Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada and currently the US Senate Majority Leader) asking for a moment of silence to mark the 3500th US soldier to die in Iraq. The implication is that 3500 is too many, and that we should pull our troops out of Iraq now.

I'm not buying it. In the 4 years it took for those 3500 troops to be killed, 170,000 children, women and men were killed in traffic accidents on US roadways. Senator Reid did not call for a moment of silence for them, because he can't make some political use of their deaths.

Harry Reid is implying that 3500 deaths fighting against Islamofacists are bad, while 170,000 deaths in pursuit of bourgeois mobility are acceptable. And he is counting on you not to see it that way.

The conflict in Iraq is not a war in itself - it is a battle in the larger war against Islamofacism. True, it was not a battleground in that war until the US made it one (and that appears to have been a mistake), but Harry Reid wants the US to lose that battle as quickly as possible, so he can win his larger war against the Republican Party.

See also: Retreat, Defeat, Cowardice and Treason

Globalisation: Tribalism v Liberalism

Melanie Phillips has posted "Liberalism v Islamism" in which she decries the apparent suicide of liberalism. She claims that by abandoning its principles for multiculturalism, liberalism is appeasing and succumbing to the Global Salafist Hirabah (aka the Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders - and if you are not an Islamist, then you're at least a Crusader). She also refers to London as "Londonistan," because of the increasing frequency of honor killings and other cultural baggage brought by immigrants from certain predominately Islamic countries.

She's a bit over the top, but well worth a read, nevertheless. We all need to recognize that the Hirabah is simply another facet of Globalization. Globalization was once thought to be a form of economic and cultural imperialism on the part of the West. Now we see that Globalization is a leveling of the world's playing field, so that not only money, but values - cultural values - can compete for territory, like players in a multi-way game of Go. In this case the counters on the board are not little round stones, but immigrants and less recent immigrants, or "natives."

Back in the old days, when it took months to travel from one country to another, new immigrants found themselves isolated in their new homelands. Messages to and from the old country took those same months to travel. It was almost impossible to keep reinforcing the values of the tribe you had left back home. (I use the word tribe, because the tribe is the fundamental unit of human societies, and has been so for as long as humans have lived on earth. If it seems less true in America, that is because everybody in America is from somewhere else, and has lost their tribal affiliation in the immigration process - except, of course, for the First Americans, who have had their tribal cultures overrun by the immigrants.)

Nowadays, you can migrate across the globe by stepping on an airplane. In a few hours, you are in your new country with your old affiliations and values. If you want to reinforce them, you need only pick up a telephone. Or tune into internet or satellite radio. Thus has Globalization made smooth the path for values from outside the prime Globalizers' (the "developed nations") core.

So, for those of you who want to be nice people, and who think it wrong to impose our Western Liberal values of limited government power, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, equality of women, etc., on other cultures, think again. If we do not live by, trumpet, and enforce those values in our homelands, and sell them abroad, then those other values that we think are "good enough for those people" will be lived by, trumpeted, and sold everywhere, even where you live.

No, pushing Western Liberal values isn't cultural imperialism anymore. In the Global Bazaar of ideas, it is just one voice among many, competing to be heard. Time to stand up and shout, before we are terrorized into silence.

Farewell to Jerry Falwell

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority has died of an apparent heart attack in his office at Liberty University, which he also founded. Guided by his Love for God and his concern for the well-being of his country, the United States of America, he gradually outgrew his early racism and anti-Semitism to focus on anti-feminism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-scientism. While some like Christopher Hitchens have impugned his sincerity, I have always assumed that he truly believed what he preached, even as it changed. That he did not preach violence to achieve his agenda, I find praiseworthy, given the world's recent struggles with clerics who do.

Perhaps one might wish that he had been guided by God's Love for him and for us all, and that he had outgrown his other anti- stances. Yes, he helped form the Christian Right into a more or less cohesive voting block. But the people who make up the Christian Right would still be with us even if he had not done so. Without him, they might have splintered into disenfranchised and bitter groups, some of which might have turned to violence in their increasing frustration. It's better to have them inside our polity than outside of it, and Jerry did his part.

So, thanks, Jerry. You did the best you knew how. I hope that you don't mind sharing Heaven with homosexuals, feminists, liberals and scientists, and I hope that at your eschatological banquet they don't serve you too much crow.

A Christian Kama Sutra

Stimulated by The Deadliest Things, one of our readers has contributed her own parody of a fictitious book to be released by a noted Christian publishing house.

Just click here and enjoy!

Oh. The image at left is from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Folio 25v - The Garden of Eden in the Musée Condé, Chantilly. It appears here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Deadliest Things

(Tune: My Favorite Things - from The Sound of Music, Rogers & Hammerstein)

Anthrax in orange juice and toxins in water
Chemical agents as means of mass slaughter
Plumes of chlorine wafting over DC
These are a few of the deadliest things.

Toxic nerve agents unleashed on civilians
Mutating strains of bird flu killing millions
Cattle with blisters transmit FMD*
This is what we have been analyzing

Suicide bombers blow buses to splinters
Slolen devices cause nuclear winter
Railcars torn open by an IED**
These effects we have been calculating

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember what we're modeling
And then I don't feel so bad.

*Foot and Mouth Disease
**Improvised Explosive Device

Jim G-, my colleague who wrote this parody of sorts, wishes to remain anonymous. It's a bit hair-raising, but part of the tasking of our lab is to help the nation and its allies prepare to deal with the consequences of major natural or human-made disasters. We think them through, we model them with as much precision as we know how, and we report our results to our sponsors. We also work on attribution - figuring out where the stuff came from, and whodunit - so others of our sponsors can deal with the guilty parties and those who sponsored them. That's part of the Homeland Security side of the business, anyway.

It's scary stuff. It's only natural that it gives some folks in the government the willies, and induces them to occasional over-zealousness. To counter that, we also model which security measures make the greatest difference for the least amount of effort, money, and social change. The hard part about that is that politicians are used to doing what they want to do. They don't like rational calculation indicating priorities. The priorities are theirs for political posturing. A bunch of scientists trying to calculate priorities is received as stepping on their turf. And when it comes to turf, the politicians are the pros and the scientists are the amateurs. The pros always win. Our priorities are set by our politics, not by our systems analysis.

So we are still knee-jerking our way to greater homeland security, and the press tries to be "neutral," or as Mark Steyn puts in the Chicago Sun-Times:

According to genius New York Times headline writers, "Religion Guided Three Held In Fort Dix Plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?

In other words, Homeland Security is only part of the solution to the present danger. Another part is making the bad guys feel insecure in their homelands. This is always problematic, and even more so when their homeland is our homeland. There is an essential tension between security and freedom, which can never be finally resolved. We must constantly strive for balance.

Yet another part of the solution is Religion itself. We must recognize that some of the greatest gifts God has planted in us - our capacities for Hope and Faith - can be perverted by the Evil One. As Pascal said, "Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." And Pascal himself was a devout Catholic.

Well. Got that off my desk. Happy Mother's Day everyone!

Forgiving Google

It's been more than a year since VCBC decided to boycott Google Ads for hypocritically stiffing the US Government hunting for internet child pornographers in order to give the false impression to Westerners that Google was a defender of human rights. At the same time, Google was knuckling under to the Chinese government by deleting all references that might help pro-democracy dissidents. Google could have done worse. Yahoo is being sued on behalf of Chinese citizens for providing information to the Chinese government that led to their illegal (under international law) imprisonment.

But you get the picture. Google's major competitors haven't distinguished themselves either. Instead of fulfilling Tom Friedman's prophecy that the internet would lead to greater freedom on earth, they are enabling it to be used as a tool of oppression as well.

So has our boycott been effective? Our search engine ratings, traffic, and revenues have declined. But the effect on Google has been absolutely nil. We made our point, and took our hit. Now we have decided to forgive Google, renew our advertising, and take our cut.

Our boycott was futile. On the other hand, the lawsuits over contributing to false imprisonment are probably not. They put the calculus of whether to cooperate with despots directly into the profit and loss columns. Web portals may still decide that it is more lucrative to cooperate with tyranny, but it will now cost them something to do it.

Dear Dr. Laura

by J. Kent Ashcraft

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,

J. Kent Ashcraft

Editor's Note: This little gem has been circulating the net. It illustrates the absurdity of a selective and wooden literalism, even if it is not illustrative of Dr. Laura's thinking, other than her dogmatic stand against homosexuals. The copyright, if any, belongs to its author.

Retreat, Defeat, Cowardice and Treason

That's what friend Gator Bob (retired Navy) calls the US Democratic Party position on Iraq, as well as the not-so-well-named Global War on Terror (GWOT) in general. Perhaps he's being uncharitable. Perhaps not.

He points to the death rate among American soldiers and civilians in Iraq. Measured in deaths per hundred thousand, it is comparable to the murder rate in say, Washington, D.C. Perhaps the United States should pull out of Washington, he suggests.

But Right or Left, the emphasis on the death rate in Iraq is misplaced. Compared to previous wars (but not to previous occupations) it is low. What is high is the rate of serious and permanent injuries, the number of our young men and women coming home with pieces of their bodies or brains missing in action. But a national debate centered on that subject would be expensive. We might have to take care of them, so best not to mention them unless we can use them to sack a general.

The dead are already taken care of. They are comparatively cheap, like the talk on the Left and Right that obsesses about them, not for moral reasons, but for political ones. Unlike the wounded, the dead can be trusted not to contradict to whatever claims politicians and activists might make in their names.

Leaving the dead to their graves, and the wounded to their fates, let us move on to the future. Both the Left and the Right seem to be staring at their toes, and thinking that whatever way their toes are pointing is forward. The Right says "Stay the Course," without articulating what that course is and where it will lead. The Left says, "We aren't getting anywhere, so let's get out fast," without hazarding a guess as to what will happen next, either to the Iraqis, the Middle East, Islam, or even us.

That is to say, there is no strategic thinking in evidence from either side. I'm not asking for much, here. I'm thinking of a game of pool, in which a player who's any good tries to hit the cue ball not just to knock another ball into a pocket, but to then position the cue ball so as to be able to make the next shot. What I want to know from both the Democrats and the Republicans is: (1) What position will we (all of us, the entire world) be in if we take your shot, (2) what is your next shot, and (3) how will your first shot line us up to make the next one?

So far, all I've seen and heard is spokespersons for either side looking at their toes and whining. I used to do that, too, when I was three years old.

The House of Misrepresentatives

American politics has become ridiculously polarized, to the point where the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is willing to travel to Syria in order to make her own foreign policy, but not to walk across the aisle of the House floor to talk with the Republicans. Our politics are so polarized that Democrats and Republicans fear and distrust each other more than they do, say al-Qaeda. (Because al-Qaeda may kill a few of them, but it can't really threaten their hold on domestic power.)

So how did this idiotic state of affairs come to be? I give you one word for it: Gerrymandering. Our state legislatures have drawn and re-drawn Congressional voting districts to advantage incumbents to the point that in any given year only a handful of Congressional elections are competitive.

The effect of this is that in order to win, you can't compromise. The voters in your district are dominated either by hard-over Moonbats (left) or Wingnuts (right). By showing any willingness to entertain the ideas of the other party, you merely show weakness to your own voting constituents. And then you lose. Compound this with a media that panders to the public's love of a good political fight, and you get politics that is progressively polarizing itself for no better reason that a positive feedback loop in the re-districting process.

What we need is for each state to have its districts re-drawn by a non-partisan committee of geographers, demographers, mathematicians, and a retired judge or two. People with a sense of justice and fair play with no major stake in the outcome. People who understand population distributions, and convex sets.

That way we could get Congresspersons who would have to demonstrate their willingness and ability to bargain and compromise. That way we could get a government that actually represented the Will of the People, rather than our current tragicomical lurching from left to right and back again. And maybe we could even get a more consistent and thoughtful foreign policy, that might do some good in the world rather than just kicking it one way or the other every four to eight years.

So Americans, unless you are a Moonbat or a Wingnut, your Congressperson does not represent you. Your voice has been Gerrymandered into silence. You don't count. And you won't count unless and until you get an anti-Gerrymandering measure on your state ballot, and vote for it.

How Free is the USA?

The latest "big thing" is how President George W. Bush has sacked some US Attorneys. Maybe he sacked them in order to let the others know that they had better be zealous in investigating and prosecuting possible malfeasance on the part of Democrats. That kind of exercise of arbitrary power makes me suspicious. It reminds me of the time President Bill Clinton sacked all the US Attorneys and replaced them with his own people. Maybe he did it to insure that certain details about that Whitewater thing would never come out.

Both men could exercise arbitrary power within certain bounds. And if they did not exercise it, then they would lose power, because their opponents would chisel away at their power in other areas. In other words, they did what they could because they had to. It's the way our system works.

They were trying to protect themselves from accusations. Had they actually broken any laws, which would validate the claims of those who sought to accuse them? Of course. So have you, if you're an American. We have so many laws, which are so complicated, that you can't know them all. Chances are, you've fallen afoul of one or more of them somehow, somewhere in your life. All it takes for you to find out is to enrage someone who has the resources and desire to have you investigated. We have so many laws that we are no longer a nation of laws, but of people. The only reason you have freedom of speech or action or property rights is that nobody is currently willing to make the effort to take them away from you.

It's the kind of tyranny that creeps over all democracies, one well-intentioned law, regulation, rule, or judicial opinion at a time:

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter 4, Section 6, "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear"

The counter-argument is that as our society gets more complex, we need more complicated rules to govern it. On the other hand, it is a well-known result from the science of complex systems that "Simple rules lead to complex behavior - complex rules lead to simple behavior." Too many complex rules freeze the system up. None of its parts can do much of anything.

What to do? When a computer code gets too long and unreadable, the computer scientists "re-factor" it. They look at how it is supposed to work, and, having learned from their past mistakes and new developments, re-design it and re-code it from the ground up.

We need our Congress and our regulatory agencies to re-factor government. Not just to keep making up new stuff to pile on top of the old because nobody remembers what it does anymore. And not to re-factor with laws and regulations that are even more complicated than the originals because they are written by unelected staffers who promote for their own agendas without ever coordinating with each other or even - gasp - reading each other's sections of the documents they produce.

But until that happens (and Hell freezes over, I suppose) I have a word of advice. Once anyone gets elected or appointed to any office of public power, that person must be suspect. It is in the nature of power itself in a society governed by too many small complicated rules. One in power must abuse the system to protect herself or himself from those who are abusing the system to get at them. As the old saying goes, "Politicians are like diapers. They both should be changed frequently, and for the same reason."

Teach the Boobs Economics

Now the poor in Mexico are facing hunger because the price of corn is rising on speculation, because the US is planning to up the percentage of ethanol (made from corn) in auto fuel. But that would require re-directing a substantial fraction of US corn production from food and animal feed to fuel. This in turn would raise corn prices. Moreover the demand for more corn acreage would displace other grains, like rice, and drive up the price of rice as well. And the poor of Mexico can't switch to wheat flour because they need the nutrients in corn flour to complement the rest of their diet. So, we are driving up the price of corn and rice worldwide, and pushing more poor people into malnutrition. Why?

The idea was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. But (duh!) to make ethanol you have to heat the corn mash using - you guessed it - fossil fuels. The net result is that the ethanol will have a bigger "carbon footprint" in the atmosphere than the gasoline it is supposed to replace.

In other words, we are starving people and polluting the air so that our legislators and regulators can make a show of caring for our environment. I'm tired of people who know nothing but politics trying to run our world when they don't understand how it works.

So here's a resolution for you: Let's require all newly elected federal and state officials to take a three week crash course in Economics and Energy before they assume office. Heck, let's make them retake the course every time they are re-elected.

The effort on their part to learn the course material would be an act of loving their neighbors, namely us - the people they presume to govern.

Flying Low

Speaking of technology, have a look at this video of low flying jets.



If you can't see anything, click Flying under the radar.

Name Your Fear

Since the previous post mentioned fear, here is a post from my MySpace page.

The other evening, we got together with friends for a "Bring Your Own Barbecue." We talked about law school, career changes, psychotherapy, religion... And then we talked about the future. We must be in a time of great transition, because the dominant mood was not hope. It was fear.

I talked about how genetic engineering, implants, and other high tech "enhancements" could make the people of the future so different from us that they might not consider "non-enhanced" or "natural" people like us to be fully human. And how, by tinkering with human nature itself, we would undermine the basis of Natural Law.

Our host spoke of Global Warming, and how climate change could wipe out agriculture in some parts of the world, and sink coastal cities.

My wife talked about how the melting of the North Polar Icecap could decrease the salinity gradient in the North Atlantic that drives the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream were to stop, that would almost shut down the transfer of heat from the equatorial to the polar regions. The result could be a rapid re-freezing of the northern latitudes resulting in a new Ice Age. In other words, our climate is metastable, with tipping points beyond which large and sudden changes may occur.

I suppose we could have mentioned asteroid impacts, and global thermonuclear war while we are at it. Or maybe the day some terrorist organization gets hold of a nuclear weapon and detonates where you would least like it.

So I'm just curious. Was it just us, or are other people having anxious thoughts about the future. What sort of thoughts?