Saturday, January 31, 2004

Even AOL's polls suck

I took the cue of Andrew Sullivan, who took his cue from Dan Drezner, and went to the AOL Presidental Match Guide.

My infamous Link Policy is in effect. If you want to visit that site, it won't be from here. I must additionally warn you that AOL's poll stinks and is not worthy of your time.

Get a load of this option: "Appoint Judges Who Will Outlaw Abortions". The whole controversy about the judicial branch and abortions is that in 1973, the Supreme Court made abortion into law. What if I want the Supreme Court to un-make that decision and to cast it back into the legislature? I'm not the activist-judge devotee, here. Find some other patsy.

And here's another one: "Constitutional Gay Marriage Ban". The reason I'm for a Federal definition of marriage has nothing to do with wanting to "ban" what a State might do. What if my position is that I would only vote for a Federal "gay marriage ban" if it came within a definition of federal marriage overall?

"Vouchers for Public, Private or Religious Schools". Gahh! Why add the "religious" schools to that lot? I want vouchers but I don't want them given to madrassas. Is that so hard?

Some of the questions are "either/or". If I want to privatise Social Security, there will be no federal retirement age, and it is not my business by how much the now-private savings corporations dole out payments to their consenting "wealthy".

AOL sucks. So does this poll. If you take this poll seriously, you're a fool. I hope you don't plan to pollute the system with your vote.

posted by Zimri on 19:37 | link |

Friday, January 30, 2004

How to answer a simple question

Posters on Volokh Conspiracy are asking, Mel Gibson, Holocaust denier?.

Gibson's Clintonian response has already been Fisked. I'd like instead to investigate what I'd say if I received a question along the lines of, "You're going to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?"

Here would be my response. "What the FUCK kind of question is that?! I've met a man with Nazi numbers tattooed on his arm. Hitler targeted the Jews for extermination in camps he built for the purpose. He killed six million Jews. Can you conceive of a moral reason for this? I can't. I agree that we run the risk of taking away from other Holocausts, like the others the Nazis murdered and like the Ukrainians the Soviets murdered, if we dwell on the fate of Jews to their exclusion- but Shoah-denial excludes the Jews, and there is no other term to describe that but anti-Semitic. The very question insults me."

As for the movie: I haven't seen it. I assume it's faithful to the Gospel text. That means it's anti-Jewish. This is not something Gospel-believing Christians can avoid. Fortunately, I don't have that problem.

posted by Zimri on 18:54 | link |

Thursday, January 29, 2004

The empty-seat amendment

The ACLU is suing Ohio. Its Governor Robert Taft back in 2002 had let James Traficant's Congressional seat go vacant for five weeks. "Attorneys for the ACLU argue that the right to representation is a fundamental right guaranteed by both the United States and Ohio Constitutions. The clarity of the language in both documents is such that Governor Taft has no discretionary power not to call an election. It is his Constitutional duty to do so." (From Ohio ACLU sues Taft.)

Said Constitutional duty is found in Article I Section 2: "When vacancies happen in the Representation from any state, the executive authority thereof shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies."

In the summer of 2002, Jim "Beam Me Up" Traficant got recalled by the House of Representatives before his own constituents got the chance to. He'd been found guilty of gross corruption whilst in office. The Democrats were fighting a tough Senate election battle and didn't want the embarrassment (or to have a Republican beat him); and the Republicans had no interest in protecting him.

The problem is that the US Constitution didn't define spans of time (rather like that "advise-and-consent" mess). I suppose the Founders deferred that sort of thing to the State of Ohio, but apparently its Constitution doesn't define anything either.

The ACLU is trying, again, to write law from the bench. It probably won't win but it is a shame that the Constitution is allowing it.

Let me propose another Amendment (whee!):

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any state, the executive authority thereof shall appoint temporary replacements from within their constituencies. If the general election is scheduled for more than six months afterward, then the State executive authority shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies. This special election shall take effect within a span not longer than five weeks, and its victors shall take office the following day.

This ensures the seat does not become vacant; it prevents the expense and confusion of multiple elections within the last few weeks of a "Traficant Term"; it prevents the Governor from appointing some minion from the other side of the State; and it even allows for proportional-representation if the State has it.

posted by Zimri on 20:31 | link |

Phony Scandal #2

Blah blah blah no WMD found blah blah Kay blah BUSH LIED!!! blah.

What a waste of time.

I was a few months away from my first blog post when the Enron / Andersen thing really blew up: January 2002. Skilling and Lay, remember, had made "friends" with influential politicians and journalists all the way from Bush and DeLay to Gore and Krugman. When all the dirty laundry had been aired, it became clear that this was less a political scandal than an accounting scandal. Everyone had forgotten about it already by, when exactly, April that year? I'm not sure how many people even remember Skilling's name, much less what he did.

So here we go again with yet another "Bush scandal". And yet again, it isn't Bush's fault. Bush can plead guilty of believing his CIA and his ally Tony Blair and, for that matter, Saddam Hussein when they all claimed that Iraq had the fabled "weapons of mass destruction". Not to mention that Saddam was bankrolling and hosting terrorists, and was an overall bastard who deserved execution (which was enough to get me on board; hell, I'd support invasions of Burma, Cuba, and North Korea too if Bush suggested it).

But, yes, there is a scandal here: the scandal of George Tenet's reign of error over the Central Intelligence (ha!) Agency. The CIA had already failed to stop 9/11. And now it turns out that it failed to uncover Iraq's armament program. Fire that idiot.

posted by Zimri on 18:44 | link |

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Paul Craig Roberts, racist

Eugene Volokh notes that Paul Craig Roberts is spewing bile again. Volokh's got a fine set of links that show quite the pattern of "remarkable opinions". I might also add that he's one of Pat Buchanan's friends. (Full disclosure: the House of David noted Roberts's angry white male schtick years ago, and we're obviously very happy to see him being multiply Fisked elsewhere.)

So, why has the mainstream conservative movement been ignoring this troglodyte? NRO has run Roberts's humbug under the "Crafted with Pride" label here. NRO runs Crafted With Pride ads to this day. It'd be nice if NRO quit doing it, given that they like international trade and helping the world's entrepreneurs and all.

posted by Zimri on 21:43 | link |

The artful dodger

In other news, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has dodged a party rebellion over university funding; and he got off scot-free over the Hutton inquiry. More or less. There do exist Hutton inquiry detractors.

I wonder if he will move against the BBC, hustle those 72 rebels off the party, and quit cozying up to the EU. He might also make up the difference with pro-American factions of the Conservatives, whose leadership has behaved disingenuously and worse, ineffectively.

What he'd end up with is a reconstructed "Whigamore" party, a.k.a. the Liberals circa Gladstone. The 72 leftovers will merge with the now-hard-Left "Liberal" rump and remain in minority status indefinitely. The rump Tories will survive, as their party always does, perhaps on an "Airstrip One" platform of strict national interest.

UPDATE: Took most of the pro-Blair bias out of the above. Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One has made clear that the Hutton inquiry is not unassailable. I don't know enough about the lines of command or the political ethics in that country to comment on whether Blair was right, wrong, justified, or in what measure of each. I do know that the BBC does not require a licence fee and that Blair does not belong in a "Labour" party.

posted by Zimri on 21:30 | link |

By the time I git to Arizona

Yeah, I've seen this Arizona prayer before. I used to get it in chain mail, whereupon I typically flamed the sender, no matter who she was (and it was almost always "she"). Lovely piece of work.

Some of it I will admit to approving. I don't like "those who call evil good", and the slams against abortion and lotteries get thumbs-up from me.

What bugs me are the anti-enlightenment and anti-pluralist attitudes, mentioned on their own lines and united under "we have worshipped other gods" (like that was such a bad thing). For the speaker, "absolute truth" is "your [God's] word", in context the Christian Bible.

In my final days of Episcopalianism, the priest said there was a difference between praying with and praying at. The Democrats rightly noted that this was an example of the latter. But their response was laughable. They mouthed their usual platitudes about diversity, and grunted out this steaming load of bunkum: "The opening prayer is the one opportunity during each day that we can come together as a body. The opening prayer should unite us, not divide us." Oh please! What the hell did you expect? You've already excluded all the atheists in the state. It never stops there. - But everyone knows the only reason a career Democrat prays is because he's pandering to churchgoers.

Another issue is, why does the State of Arizona need to start its business with a prayer at all. It has every right to (see below), but ya-know: it doesn't do any good!

It's a state full of self-important jerkwads. The sand must be gumming up the voters' brains. I'm sure glad I don't live there.

posted by Zimri on 21:09 | link |

National Boondoggle for the Arts

Here's Drudge: "BUSH TO SEEK BIG BUDGET INCREASE FOR NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS... Laura Bush plans to announce the request -- for the largest increase in two decades -- on Thursday... Developing... "

What gives the Federal government the right to decide what art is so worthy that funds for it must be extorted from the taxpayer? Either the NEA is going to waste the budget on Leftist agitprop like it always has done, or else George II is turning Pharaohnic in his dotage. And who dissolved the Union and coronated Queen Laura?

There is absolutely no libertarian case for this. The only reason Bush gets away with all this crap is because the Democrats are so awful this time around. It takes a lot of work to be simultaneously cynical and idiotic, but somehow this administration manages it. These clowns are making me sick.

posted by Zimri on 20:56 | link |

Back to basics for the Latter Day Saints

I don't think the Latter Day Saints of Utah will go for polygamy immediately; too many of them joined after the ban. But I do think that fundies might decide to swamp underpopulated states in the region, like Idaho and/or Wyoming, and suborn the systems in place over there. I also think that Mormon polygamists will emerge from the closet and make life doctrinally difficult for the non-polygs and the mainstream Church. Eventually the Church will have to accommodate the practice even if they don't recommend it.

That brings us back to Lucianne. Poster MSTS related, "I read once that Utah's admission to the Union was dependent on its elimination of Polygamy. The article went on to say that if the ban on polygamy was lifted, the state may no longer be part of the Union."

The Union would acquire its pretext to expel or demote Utah, but I don't see the Federal will to do it. And that's only if the state makes polygamy legal. But we're talking about lawsuits in Federal court. The Feds are going to make it legal; Utah won't have to do anything. In fact, it's wholly in the State interest to wash its hands of the whole thing and settle polygamous unions under Federal law.

Even if the Church reinstates it as doctrine, they can still tell the Feds that, hey, they only happen to be the majority here, so don't punish the State.

This is not a battle that the United States is prepared to fight.

posted by Zimri on 20:29 | link |

Constitutional polygamy

Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Mormon Question doesn't limit itself to theocracy, of course...

Polygamy, remember, was the twin to Slavery in the 1856 Republican platform against "relics of barbarism". The original Constitution was a bargain between those former-colonies who needed Federally-protected rights to enforce slavery locally, and everyone else who didn't care for or about slavery. Hence the infamous "three-fifths" of a vote for electoral calculations, on "behalf" of that novel civic concept the disenfranchised citizen - i.e. slave. The 13th-15th Amendments of the 1860's trimmed all that out of the Constitution, and also permitted the Federal government to interfere into private business practices enough to ensure that no employer might ever again base a non-convict labour contract upon extortion.

The Constitution also does not define "marriage". That is why there is currently a drive to codify homosexual unions as "marriage", starting in one state, and expansible to others via the Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause.

Mormonism in its fundaments, famously, depends on both theocracy and a non-monogamous/heterosexual definition of marriage.

The new dispensation took awhile before it became a Constitutional crisis. At first, Mormonism affected only individual states, which rejected it violently without recourse on either side to Washington. In 1847 the Brigham Young branch of the faith moved deep into the disputed Mexico-US borderland of Great Salt Lake, still not posing a problem for the US. But then the US signed a treaty with Mexico that nullified Mexico's claim to that region, and delineated a majority-Mormon part of it as "Utah territory".

By that time, the States had reached a consensus against State theocracy and for priviliged monogamy. The Federal government aimed to enforce this consensus upon Utah. But that led to the Mormon Question: Utah would not follow the States' consensus; if Utah were to become a State then the Union could not enforce that consensus according to the then (and now) Constitution; and Utah was too weak to secede.

The Union did not want Utah to secede. But it was also unwilling to Amend its Constitution to Blaine-ify the First Amendment and/or to define "marriage". Instead the Union relied on false interpretation of that Constitution, on police force, and on the happy timing of that Republican era between Lincoln and Wilson. The Mormon Church and the federal government existed in a standoff for decades; eventually the Church blinked and helped drive the "polygs" so far underground that the latter now exist only as a subculture.

But now, Utah's ban on polygamy faces challenge anew. This link is from lucianne, whose commenters made some cogent points.

Polygamy cannot be stopped under the present Constitution and under the present political climate. It would take an Amendment to do it.

posted by Zimri on 20:18 | link |

Creative class-work

Steven Malanga of the City Journal Winter 2004 goes over the evidence for The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. Go click that link; it is good; I should only forewarn you that the article's use of "Florida", rather than "Dr Florida" (say), confuses those of us who associate his surname with the moniker of a certain American state.

Teixeira and Judis cited Florida's book heavily in The Emerging Democratic Majority. That book was a fantasy/sci-fi epic on the urban professional vote, which would ally with the Democratic base and "0wN" the nation. I'd blogged back then that there is no such "creative class"; there are only professions, each of which has its own agenda.

What Malanga does is to show that Dr Florida too had been engaging in fantasy writing. The relationship of a "creative class" population to economic growth was not a causation, or even a correlation, but an artifact of the dot.bomb bubble.

Dr Florida's thesis has inspired dozens of cities worldwide. Now those cities are doing badly and their Leftist political machines are getting hammered. A "miserable failure", one might say.

posted by Zimri on 20:01 | link |

State theocracy

Great Salt Lake City is actually not so bad a place, despite the pollution and cold. I got to do lots of fun stuff over there. One of the funnest was a trip to the Temple Street Barnes & Noble, which has an extensive Latter-Day Saints subsection within its Religion stacks, much better than what I can find over here.

Among its contents was The Mormon Question by Sarah Barringer Gordon. It points out that polygamy and theocracy are not contrary to the literal US Constitution.

I've argued many a time that the Union may not institute bounds of religion; e.g. "Under God" is illegal in a national pledge. But the Union does it anyway.

By contrast the Constitution has no brief concerning State theocracy. Gordon points out that Massachusetts clung to its established (Puritan) church until 1833, and many states held onto pro-Protestant blasphemy laws, the use of the King James Bible in school, public prayer et c. following that. The Federal government did so little about all this that atheists and secularists have resorted to the courts. Thus our secularism depends on local Blaine amendments and on the whims of Federal judges.

State secularism can end any moment. I emailed Richard Carrier of the Secular Web back in October 1999, concerning whether we had a Constitutional Freedom From Religion; he responded that it would take a "social upheaval" and that it was "unlikely". These are subjective terms both.

Again: scared yet? I guess it depends on which State you are in.

posted by Zimri on 19:16 | link |

Back online

Sorry I've been AWoL from the blogosphere. Last week I was battling a skin infection, and then I went to Salt Lake City, and when I came back I had to: buy & use tax software, do dishes, do laundry, pay the credit card company, pay a hospital bill, get cash, buy a new exercise shirt, mail personal property back to two ex-girlfriends, and (today) get my burglar alarm fixed. Since that last event took place on company time, I then had to go back to work and stay late.

At any rate, while I was waiting for the repairman, I've been able to type up some blog posts...

posted by Zimri on 19:16 | link |

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

The State of the Union

I think I watched it last year, but I didn't care enough to blog. I didn't watch it this time. I hear tell that it was the worst Bush SOTU yet. Bush is running on the far right this year. I guess because he's trying to corral up all the conservatives deserting him over spending and over Mexican amnesty.

If this is a taste of the next five years, then to hell with him; where's Lieberman?

posted by Zimri on 00:21 | link |

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

The surrender

Tacitus is saying that the Brits have lost the occupation in Iraq for us. He believes that one rules by showing overwhelming force on Day One, and every time one's authority is questioned. One can never slack off. "Six months ago, a couple of infantry squads simply showing up was enough to quell a major demonstration. That won't deter anyone now; if anything, that's when the shooting would start."

This accords with my own views on rulership. It's the A-level standard Macchiavelli that you really learn in your second year at the boarding school, usually within a fortnight.

I've noticed that British journalists think Ayatollah Sistani is a stand-up guy with whom the Brits can work. Well, they certainly have to work with him now, because he's holding a good fraction of the British Army hostage. You see what he's got in his right fist? Tony Blair's testicles.

At this point, the Americans are going to have to proceed apace with autonomising and federalising the non-Shi'a-Arab parts of the nation. They need to have a rival set of administrations in effect. Oh yeah, and let them stay armed. Then, when the south starts going on its Islamically pure path, they can do it alone.

posted by Zimri on 21:37 | link |

Fractious politics

In lucianne.com, an "eweiss" writes that all is not well in Jew-ville:

Hmmm...

These Orthodox Jews are willing to have dialogue with Catholic Cardinals ... but not with their Reform Jewish brethren?

Before you flame me, read ONE PEOPLE, TWO WORLDS by Reinman (Orthodox) and Hirsch (Reform). After writing the book, and before they could go on a book tour together, the Orthodox rabbinate forbade Rabbi Reinman from doing so.

Also read WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THIS PEOPLE? JEWS AND THE FRACTIOUS POLITICS OF JUDAISM, by Milton Viorst.

Not a pretty picture.

And, I'm a Jew.

The divisions between religions are breaking down, and so is the unity within each. There is a larger force to unite their factions. That force is liberalism, which "respects all faiths" and therefore no faith. Liberalism is now dominant in the Episcopalian church as well as among Unitarians and Reform-Jews.

Secularism / agnosticism / atheism, even classic deism, don't amount to much in Church. We're already outside the fold. The liberals within the church cannot be so easily excommunicated.

Or maybe... they can. Maybe they're all headed for schism around mushy Intelligent Design creationism, strict monotheism, support for homosexual marriage and abortion, Jesus as the final prophet, and socialist economics. But I see them as too many pastors and not enough sheep. I don't see them doing too well among true believers.

The true believers meanwhile are headed to vast warehouses where they can all indulge in a fantasyland where Darwin was wrong, where the Bible is right, and where the churches and synagogues are apostate. - But who will unite them?

Even now the prophets are howling in the wilderness. They will not tarry long.

posted by Zimri on 19:05 | link |

About that economy, stupid

Stupid Indiana voters think Bush has done a bad job with the economy.

Let's put that into perspective. The man inherited a tech bubble, corporate scandals, and a metastasising terror network. He also inherited a HUGE steamin' pile of regulation, some of it from Clinton's last days on the job; and a divided Congress unwilling to roll it all back. He has handled all of that admirably. The economy's already made up what it lost and is only growing stronger.

You can trash his fiscal policy and immigration policy to the stars. But his economic policy overall has been pretty damn good, given all the above.

Insofar as Indiana is losing its economy relative to other states, that's not Bush's problem. Indianans can blame that on their local politicians.

posted by Zimri on 19:02 | link |

Countering John Edwards

I've been reading about the ongoing ADA shakedown and asbestos shakedown, by which street hustlers and their lawyers are looting the private sector.

Presidential candidate John Edwards is a trial lawyer who got his wealth from similar hucksterism. He has a book about the four trials that made him so rich. In 1984-5 he cost North Carolina hospitals at least $10.2 million in 1984-5 dollars. So next time you're stuck in a wait-list, or you're paying hundreds or thousands a month in health insurance, or you're not insured at all and you've got a mammoth bill to deal with - hey, at least someone got sued and Mr Edwards got paid. That's consolation for you.

One would think that Bush could use all that against him. Perhaps the House can draft up a raft of anti-lawyer federal legislation, and dare the Senate to kill it.

posted by Zimri on 18:57 | link |

Sucker-Americans

It's not going to be as easy to defeat John Edwards as we might think. Trial lawyers are despised in theory, but there's a reason they make so much money. That's because they convince the jury that the outcome is not about the lawyer, but about the plaintiff and defendant.

So it doesn't matter that the Americans with Disabilities Act, say, is being abused. If anyone ever challenges the abuse, it won't be the trial lawyers taking to the streets to protect their paychecks. It'll be a parade of carefully-coached pathetic little tots in crutches to "protect the ADA".

We see it in every election, too. When Republicans try to crack down on electoral fraud, we hear that they are disenfranchising or threatening or insulting minorities. Republicans then balance whether likely guilt-infected White sympathisers outnumber likely fraudsters, do the math, and usually back off. The Democrats won this way in the 2002 South Dakota Senate race, the 2000 Missouri Senate race, the 2000 Wisconsin Presidential race - and very nearly the 2000 Florida Presidential race.

The greatest swing vote in the nation: the Sucker-American community.

Since this country gives the voting franchise to almost every citizen who wants it, we can't outvote Sucker-Americans. I guess we could blog about this humbug when we spot it, and America in general could improve education to the point where the people can see through this demagoguery.

posted by Zimri on 18:23 | link |

The tribe and the state

By using geographic bounds, the American Republic tends to conserve the power of regional interests. For example, a mining company can move a coal mine from West Virginia to Wyoming. A "tribe" of miners would have little say in whether the mine should move or not. Rather, each miner would decide whether to move, or to stay and find another line of work. But since West Virginia is a state, it can vote to weaken environmental laws and to demand subsidy from Washington (the district, not the other state). The mining company stays.

Regional interest costs the taxpayer twice: at tax time, and at the store - in the preceding case over coal. There are an awful lot of states getting by on our dime. A less-regional federal government would decrease the cost of living in our cities. Admittedly it would also force migration from these now-unviable locations.

The Roman Republic tended to conserve the power of families. If you were in a "patrician" family, you could vote to maintain that family's position and to ensure that no other family overtook you. The Republic evolved (famously) into a form of electoral feudalism. The US government recognises no nobility, of course; but if we ever got so oligarchic a system, then the patricians would surely opt to "Amend" that into law.

posted by Zimri on 18:09 | link |

Electoral Colleges

Oregon Mag reminds us that the Electoral College protects minority rights. This is the doctrine of the Republic - that power should be vested in elective bodies, but not in the electors themselves. America is a Republic of autonomous states.

It is possible to have a Republic without geographic provinces. The classical Roman Republic divided up its electoral units according to tribal affiliation.

The Founders didn't even think of eliminating state boundaries to institute a tribal system. That is partly because most of the voters then were Protestants of western European ancestry with over a century of interbreeding, so the voters didn't start with that many ethnic nations. By contrast, the Colonies inherited boundaries and infrastructure from the Brits. Where the first Americans differed most was over slavery. Only a strong state government could enforce such a force-based institution. As a result, the slaveowning interests ensured that the colonial map and infrastructure remained more-or-less constant.

In Iraq, tribal and religious concerns cover pretty much everything. If Iraq is to be federal, then to which "state" should multiethnic cities belong, like Kirkuk? The "Roman" system might work better over there.

posted by Zimri on 18:08 | link |

Philo-Semitic paranoia

They say that even paranoids have enemies. Sometimes, it works out that even those with enemies get a little paranoid.

One example, regrettably, is Andrew Sullivan, who is usually pretty reasonable. He
writes that Cynthia Cotts's article about Thomas Friedman's synagogue is a "diatribe".

Cotts's article said that Friedman is mounting a personal struggle to move American Jewry to support the more tolerant side of Israeli Jewry, and thus to balance out other American Jews' support for Israel's ultra-Orthodox. That part of her article is news and eminently worthy of reportage. Now, there's other bits in it that Cotts seems to have just thrown in there, like the bit where Friedman refuses to speak at a dinner where the speech has to be optimistic. I didn't know where Cotts was going with that line of reasoning; most likely Friedman didn't, either, which is why he didn't comment. Overall I would have called her article clumsy but important. No worse than some of the articles on my own site, surely.

But rather than asking Cotts to find a better editor, Sullivan thumps his table and bellows, "What on earth does this have to do with anything? All it amounts to is an attempt to dismiss or undermine Friedman's views because he's a religious Jew. Some on the left really are bigots, aren't they?"

Once again, one can actually answer the opening rhetorical question (always a bad sign). I'd say that Cotts's chosen topic has to do with Israeli politics, with the Diaspora's effect on those politics, and with Friedman the man himself. Hey Andrew: next time you - ah gods, I haven't the heart to say it.

Cynthia Cotts may or may not be "on the left", bigoted, and/or anti-Zionist. But her article contains no evidence for any of that. Andrew Sullivan's complaints on that score are baseless - slanderous, actually.

It surely doesn't make Jews or Judeophiles look good when we yell out "bigotry" just because someone wrote a neutral article about a Jew and how his religion inspires his politics.

And here we invoke the House of David's new link policy, again: I am hoping Cotts's article gets the links, and that Sullivan's doesn't - for Sullivan's sake.

posted by Zimri on 17:58 | link |

Frivolous payouts

Last May, blogger Dwight Meredith wrote:

Thus, in Georgia courts, no doctor is ever sued for malpractice unless another doctor has already testified, based on a review of the medical records, that the defendant doctor was negligent.

The affidavit requirement of Georgia law is a common sense way to reduce the number of frivolous suits. It accomplishes that goal without limiting the right of the most badly injured victims of medical malpractice to receive full compensation.

If the purpose of tort reform is to actually reduce the number of frivolous suits, the proposal outlined above is a good first step. If the purpose of tort reform is simply to prevent insurance companies from having to pay full compensation to injured people, a cap on non-economic damages works better. Mr. Edwards proposes a policy to accomplish the former. President Bush proposes a policy to accomplish the later. Which of the two actually wants to reduce frivolous lawsuits?

Now, Georgia's plan does at least reduce the frivolty of the lawsuits. It thereby improves the honour of the courtroom, too. So if this is Edwards's position, I'm glad he holds it.

But the first thing is, I don't see Bush opposing such a plan; despite what Mr Meredith implies, Bush can absorb Edwards's idea while sticking to his own ideas.

Bush believes that whether the lawsuits are "frivolous" or not isn't the point. He thinks that it is non-frivolous lawsuits that are the problem. So do I.

Someone whom malpractice or environment has harmed should have the right to exact retribution on the malefactor. But none of these lawyer-lottery fans ever troubles to define "full compensation". Is it thousands of dollars? Myriads? Tens of millions? And who pays? In malpractice suits, the doctor may or may not be at fault - but if he's likely to be saddled with a bad jury, then his insurers will want to settle. The doctor probably hasn't the cash reserves to fight the thing, so he'll do whatever his insurers say.

With that in mind, let's say the Georgia method works as intended. This means it will be harder to file a lawsuit. But that also means that when a lawsuit does go to court, suspicions will be lowered. The average cash payout will be higher. Insurers dealing with a hazy case will see less incentive to gamble; they will settle.

I should also say that abuse is only the first symptom of a broken cash-based system. The next symptom is crime. Now that there are laws in Georgia, I predict that people will break them. In this case, doctors will be encouraged to find evidence of negligence.

Lawsuits always follow the money. "Full compensation" without limits offers a lot of money. Cut the temptation of money and you will cut the lawsuits.

Presumably Mr Meredith's last question was rhetorical. But on self-interest alone, a pro-business party would have to reduce the total cost of lawsuits on business. So of course Bush is the one who "actually wants to reduce frivolous lawsuits", alongside other forms of lawsuit. Hey Dwight: next time you ask a rhetorical question, why not make it a smart question?

posted by Zimri on 17:54 | link |

Link policy

Google seems to link its search engine results for phrase X to the number of links to which phrase X refers. So if I say "miserable failure", and I link "miserable failure" to, say, former President James Earl Carter's biography, then I've put the latter website on the list of search results. Multiply that by a few thousand and his bio climbs up the list.

When lots of people do this, it is called "Googlebombing".

I want good essays to show up on Google, and I want bad essays to wither away. So I'll try to link good essays under a good keyword. Bad essays will get the keyword "here" or "writes" or "this is her take".

posted by Zimri on 17:50 | link |

Monday, January 19, 2004

Heads exploding

I didn't directly say that Dean the man had a chance. I did allude to Dean the phenomenon, sort-of: I said that the Democrats want anger. This gave me enough wiggle-room to allow for a Clark surge.

I do still think that if Dean had kept his cool around the grownups a little better, he could have taken Kerry to the cleaners here. But to paraphrase Kerry, did I think both Dean and Clark would f*** it up as badly as they did? Those two clownboys all but forced the voters to choose someone else.

Perhaps that is the problem with running a campaign for hotheads. You get caught up in the maelstrom and get a little hot under the collar yourself. And then when it comes to running for the adult vote - well, they don't want anger. They want someone serious.

posted by Zimri on 20:49 | link |

The primary begins

John Kerry seems to be the frontrunner, now. He's winning Iowa and with that, he's got a good chance at New Hampshire. The other primaries are likely to break for him as the anti-Dean (and anti-Clark), at least until Dean utterly flames out. This is a pity; I don't respect the man, and I don't see him putting up any kind of fight against Bush - let alone a principled fight.

Howard Dean's campaign is over. Done. Kaput. He pissed off the Black community. In addition his supporters are - were - an emotionally-damaged pack of brats who were always there more for the validation of being in a "movement" than for electing an actual candidate. Without the righteous feeling of being on the side of the Oppressed, this strain of Leftism is nothing. Expect Dean's followers to desert in droves. Maybe they'll, like, try to go back to school and careers and stuff. That'd be, like, totally sweet.

Wesley Clark's not going to get traction; and if Dick Gephardt couldn't rake in a #2 in Iowa for gosh sakes then he's finished. Joe Lieberman's campaign is now officially "quixotic".

John Edwards still has a chance; hopefully he can be the anti-Kerry. Will he dis farm subsidies too? Maybe he can offer Lieberman the post of shadow Secretary of State. Otherwise I don't think I could vote for a trial lawyer with so little political experience.

posted by Zimri on 20:42 | link |

Saturday, January 17, 2004

The battle flag

Presidential candidate Howard Dean thinks that in the post-1970's age, "dealing with race is about educating white folks". (Here's NRO's take.) Therefore, in honour of Martin Luther King Jr, whose birthday it is today, I will muse on the psychology of that segment of Southern White-dom which still pastes the "southern cross" to its collective pickup.

What most know as the "Confederate flag" isn't the Confederate flag. As of 1861, the Confederates believed that they were the rightful heirs to Jefferson and Washington, and so adopted a near-copy of the US flag. Our "Confederate flag" is really the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, a variant of the flag of Scotland with an American touch. The true Confederate flag was a statement of respect for the old Union; Lee's battle flag is a declaration of rebellion.

I've seen a lot of battle flags among Whites in Texas. Among females alone, I've seen them on tattooes, on posters, and on bumper stickers. These are ladies I love and respect, and none admits to racism. They say they view the battle flag as a symbol of culture; but I think the tattooed lady is closer to the mark, when she speaks of personal alienation.

Those who bear the battle flag - female and male - view individual Blacks as individuals, and will respect an individual Black. And they are by no means Confederate nostalgists. No-one wants to own a slave, God forbid, or to revert to the moral sickness of Jim Crow.

But the flag bearers do fear the majority of the Black population. They see the majority as takers, not givers. They're also tired of "redneck" jibes from the East and West Coasts. They see leftish Black leaders and Coastal élites as enemies. And since they have no obvious way of getting back at said enemies, beyond voting in Federal elections, they'll settle for annoying them. Hence, the battle flag; hence, Pickering nominated on MLK day.

Bradford DeLong considers these fellows to be racist. Well, they're not - at least not overall. But they are insensitive. They care so much for their own symbols and honour, but have no empathy for the symbols or honour of the average Black.

posted by Zimri on 12:26 | link |

Pickering

Charles Pickering got appointed to the Court of Appeals - on recess.

I agree that Pickering was never one of Bush's important choices. I've never blogged about him until now. In May of 2003 (during this blog's near-silence), more information cropped up, on which the (leftist) Silver Rights has more. It starts smearing Pickering's birthplace and youthful employment, but later it gets to the point where Pickering risked his political capital protecting the now-infamous Daniel Swan, who apparently hasn't repented the racist act that got him there. I have to say: Pickering made a rotten call.

I figure that Bush felt it would hurt him if he was forced to endorse this man periodically in the drip-drip-drip of this election year, and that it would make him look like a weak blowhard if he did nothing. In addition, Pickering is not young and could have retired without all this. As of now, Pickering is a faît accompli; and the Dems would have to actively support his removal. Bush has thus avoided worrying moderates. Bush has also placated the Confederate-Flag constituency (who aren't necessarily racist, pace Bradford DeLong, but certainly don't have Blacks' interests at heart). In the meantime Bush can continue to insist that his real nominees - Black and Hispanic libertarian-conservatives - get an up-or-down vote.

But was Pickering really so noxious a nominee that the Senate required the threat of filibuster to keep him out? and what about Estrada? I would say that Roe v. Wade is a worse threat to respect for the Constitution. And respect for the Constitution is what we require in judges - not respect for 1990's liberalism retrojected back to the 1960's. So I can take Pickering or I can leave him. That's why we have a Senate to vote on him - except that they refused to do it.

Glenn Reynolds blames this zoo on a breakdown in "norms of civility" as does Solum. Reynolds considers it an inevitable byproduct of a party realignment.

As far as I care, we can have party realignments whenever. But it is a lousy time to be clogging up courts. I think that if any given branch of government is abusing its Constitutional rôle in a time of crisis, then we need to better define that rôle in the Constitution. In 27 October 2002 I suggested time limits on "advise and consent". I see no reason to adjust that opinion.

posted by Zimri on 11:25 | link |

Early primary alternatives

Kate O'Beirne in NRO says that Missouri and Colorado would be better "early primary" states than Iowa and New Hampshire.

The general complaint about Iowa and New Hampshire is that they don't represent majority America. I guess they are better than Utah, Vermont, New York, Maryland, Hawaii, etc, etc but I have to admit that is a weak defence. I also have to agree that weird states are likely to make for a weird campaign and a very weird general-election candidate. I don't think that serves the Republic very well.

Just for grins, let's see what's special about the two states she picked instead. Colorado is border mountain/ Plains/ Aztlan. Missouri is border Mississippi/ South/ Plains/ Appalachia. Both are large, and both are expanding. For states that look like America, are in the midst of America, and look like the future of America - those two are perfect.

If we get to the point where the (continental US) border becomes an election issue, then we'd want a border state. We can rule out the off-route wastelands of New England and Dakota Territory. We should also rule out Washington, Texas, and California as just being too weird. In that case, the ones I'd choose would be Arizona (Mexico), Florida (Caribbean), and/or Illinois (Canada).

That of course assumes that we want a primary system at all - rather than a convention format, which is what I advise, and what we may end up with after all.

posted by Zimri on 01:18 | link |

Kerry endorsement?

What with the formidable conservative backlash against Bush, extending to Andrew Sullivan (whose site is down for now), it's heartening to see an opposition leader willing to stand up against federal pork. And against farm subsidies no less!

The problem is: it's John Kerry, and he's running in Iowa. Matt Drudge links to a story reminding us (and Iowans) that Kerry advocated gutting the Agriculture Department. That is wonderfully libertarian of him; and if I'd been blogging then, I'd probably have noticed. But I don't trust Kerry anymore and I fear that he's going to backtrack.

Drudge also has Howard Dean in full pander mode:

Dean spokeswoman Tricia Enright said the Kerry quotes should alarm Iowans. "Teachers and farmers in Iowa will be disappointed to hear that Senator Kerry wanted to dismantle the Department of Agriculture and gut the Department of Education," Enright said. "That's not the kind of change that Iowans are looking for"...

Okay fellows, let's stop this right here. The Iowa farming industry, like that of every other farm state, is driving up my food costs and polluting the Mississippi. Apparently Dean wants me to keep subsidising this industry. Chalk up another "minus" for THAT candidacy (not that I was really keeping track).

(As a side note, I'm going to make the obligatory whine that Iowa has too much influence. But you can get that from another blog, so I'll quit now.)

If Kerry can hold fast to his past stance, and can use it as the springboard for an anti-pork campaign - I'll throw a "protest" vote his way, even if he doesn't apologise for his obnoxious anti-war comments.

posted by Zimri on 00:51 | link |

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

The country that stays behind its borders

Napoleon Bonaparte once famously stated that "the country that stays behind its borders is beaten". A weak nation is easy prey for external aggressors and internal adventurers.

Whether group consciousness is "rising" or not in the US, I have no idea. I do know that it exists and that a major political party hopes to profit by it. PRIsmo does make for a remarkably stable state.

But if we don't want to go the way of the PRI's Mexico, or for that matter of Milosevic's Yugoslavia, then we require a shared mission. Warfare isn't an option; we already have our hands full fending off the soldiers of Allah, and what kind of national victory is it that doesn't benefit the US directly?

To give us the goal of a shared national victory is, I think, what George II is trying to do with all his talk about colonising the Moon and going to Mars.

posted by Zimri on 18:12 | link |

The next Irish

John Derbyshire reminds us that the United Kingdom has had its secessionist movements. Following the First World War, the UK could no longer rely on the Irish. The English and Irish, please note, are indistinguishable to uninformed outsiders, including most Americans. With this example, Derbyshire proves that "race" is irrelevant when dealing with ethnic grievance. Derbyshire considers the Arabs to be the next Irish, this time relative to the US.

I would say that Mexico and Americans of central Mexican descent are an even closer analogy. Mexico and Ireland share their borders with prosperous, Protestant, capitalist Anglospheric nations. They are both Catholic, converted from warrior paganism. They both have a longstanding literature, culture, and language independent of Latin and prior to English. To make the analogy even more exact, we can count out the nations which Mexico rules (Zapotecs, Maya, etc), and just consider the ancestrally Nahuatl portion from Mexico City on north, to which we can add other native Uto-Aztecan nations like the Comanche, and Mestizo colonists sent up here during the centuries 1530-1830. In this case, both also lost significant fractions of their ancestral lands to their Anglo neighbours.

Whatever party runs the US, it must take into account Aztec national pride.

posted by Zimri on 17:35 | link |

El PRI del Norte

Teixeira and Judis wrote in The Emerging Democratic Majority (remember that?) that the Democrats can count on urban professionals and on self-conscious ethnic communities. Both are growing in number and influence. Therefore, say Teixeira and Judis, all the Democrats have to do is to expand and empower this base, or rather these bases.

I'd written that the Democrats cannot guarantee the urban professional vote. That leaves the other base. The logical strategy for the Democrat Party will be to increase the self-consciousness of individuals as members of non-White ethnic groups, to bring in more members of them, and to get them to the polls. The Democrats must then keep these individuals in line somehow; but where there's a will, a legislature, and a trillions-dollar budget, there's a way.

Group identity and patronage have been around since the opening of the first Irish pub in New York City, and has been a proven vote-earner for the Democratic Party. Only the faces have changed. Andrew Sullivan notes that no Democrat, not even Lieberman, dares defy Sharpton, let alone Julian Bond.

Mexico is likewise a nation of diversity. In Mexico's case, first the Aztecs and then the Spanish conquered dozens of nations, each with its own culture, history, and language. After alternating periods of repression and dissolution, culminating in the Revolution of the 1910's, Mexico settled on a system of institutional patronage. Although Mexico was officially a democracy again, its main party - the Partido Revolucionario Institucional - owned enough of the economy that it could afford to bribe, divide, and rule. This system lasted until at least 2000, when Vicente Fox of the PAN finally unseated the PRI.

So if Teixeira and Judis are proposing national drift, it is not a drift to nowhere. The endpoint of the Democratic Party is for an America of enforced "diversity" under the monoculture of an American PRI. Such a nation may not be good for the ethical American entrepreneur, nor for those nations abroad that depend on our military and economy. But it would certainly be good for political hacks such as Teixeira and Judis.

posted by Zimri on 17:27 | link |

The notorious CHO

Margaret Cho takes her place alongside Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Jack Nicholson, and the members of Coldplay. That is, I was once a fan, and now I'm not. (That is what we Brits like to call understatement, on both counts.)

It's one thing to criticise the President and other movers of American policy. (I do rather a lot of that in here, don't'cha know.) But when you slander their motives, when you mock the accent of their homelands, and - above all - when you side with Saddam Hussein: well. This last week has just proven how stupid you are. And how bigoted. And unfunny.

UPDATE: Contrast Sean Penn. He still thinks he's a better writer than he is - so there are far too many words in his essay - and he's not exactly ready to endorse Bush or his campaign. But he's making an effort to be impartial, and to venture away from his minders. (Link via lucianne.com and via andrewsullivan.com.)

posted by Zimri on 17:27 | link |

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

American laïcité

America's unspoken laïcité is under fire from internal factions. We face what France faced, off and on, until 1905.

Like France, we too have immigration on a vast scale, and problems with assimilation. And certainly we too must fear overtly violent madrassas. But those of our immigrants who do profess extreme religious views are proportionately few; for example, the 1850 Catholic Church is long gone. It is unlikely that the demographics of personal religion will ever force us back to the Blaine solution.

In America, religion associates itself with patriotism, and is becoming increasingly public. The Weekly Standard feels safe in asserting (however overbroadly), "the broader American system does not insist on the religious evacuation of the public square". To the extent that it does not, it continues, "It is probably the stronger for that." This sentiment is majoritarian.

There is a gathering popular movement against Blaine amendments. Major newspapers publish editorials tarring Blaine's supporters as bigots. In America, the argument of "bigots" is automatically invalid. Proof by ad hominem, QED.

France's threat to laïcité was in 1905 an internal one from their own Church. Likewise, it is our own government and people who threaten Jefferson's Wall today. However many "bigots" supported Blaine, it does not change the need for Blaine amendments. Blaine was a freethinking patriot with a legitimate interest against the Inquisition; whether it comes from outside or develops right here in the US.

posted by Zimri on 23:00 | link |

Blaine Nation

France as of 1905 has lived by a church/state ideology which they call laïcité, and which our Thomas Jefferson would call a "wall of separation". Laïcité has recently become controversial again in France.

laïcité is not explicit in the US Constitution. It is standard American rightist propaganda that the ACLU dreamt it up in a 1967 sit-in. In fact the idea has exerted a powerful force in American social history, powerful enough to drive French history as well. The aforementioned Thomas Jefferson (with Thomas Paine and others) inspired the French Revolution not even a decade after the close of the American Revolution. Later in American history, fear of Catholic immigrants brought the issue to the fore again, such that many State constitutions adopted "Blaine amendments" restricting State recognition of any "religion" - meaning you-know-what. I doubt the 1905 French were blind to this. Jefferson's Wall does not run between our countries but through them.

The problem the French have now comes from outside, the equivalent in America of "some 30 million rapidly radicalizing Muslims, concentrated in a handful of pivotal cities". The Weekly Standard label the issue a "veiled threat": the threat is an outsiders' faith, and the veil is the State's attempt to hide its (self-interested) acts against that faith. In France, "The neutrality of the law [against the Muslim veil] is a fraud, because France is worried about Islam, not about "religion.""

France is now where the US was in 1850, when Catholicism was our Islam. Chirac and Stasi's ban on "religious" expression is dusted-off American Blainism.

posted by Zimri on 23:00 | link |

Monday, January 12, 2004

University reform

I have heard, admittedly second-hand, of a sociology professor in a Canadian university whose performance evaluation depends only 15% on her teaching skills. On the plus side: there is a system for it, the professors know what to aim for, and the portion is more than 10%.

Undergraduates see it differently. They would rather their teachers spend more energy on teaching. They would rather not deal with profs who can't teach, nor with grad-student "teaching assistants".

I think the problem is deep and structural. The state of human knowledge has outpaced the ability of the university to distill and transmit it.

Élite colleges as of the 1850's could afford to be primarily research institutions. This was before Maxwell, Planck, and Einstein - so physics was easier. This was before Darwin and the double helix - biology was easier. This was before Riemann, Hilbert, and Cantor - mathematics was easier. And this was before modern archaeological techniques and widespread awareness of pre-1200 BCE civilisation - even the study of ancient history was easier. All anyone needed for university study was a good high-school education.

Some university study remains within the reach of students with a high-school diploma. Some fields are by nature easy, and other fields are still in their infancy. The university only need train the scholar in the basics of the topic to be researched.

I consider the basic humanities plus standard History to be easy enough. But that means those fields are very popular, and that means their gatekeepers are cliquish. This is as it should be.

There is also still room for high-school graduates in fields closer to the spirit of original research. There are basic schools that teach ancient languages, often for cultural reasons - I would include Latin, Greek, alphabetic Semitic tongues, Chinese, Sanskrit, Coptic, and Armenian - and graduates from those schools could profitably perform original research on texts in these languages. If the high school had run an exceptional Applied Mathematics program - which must include statistics to the point of regression analysis, and differential equations to the point of partial and nonlinear types - then its graduates could perform statistical modeling: necessary for economics, fluid dynamics, and other "chaotic" fields.

But even that stretches what a high school can provide. Otherwise, a research program must follow four or five years of study in fields few are qualified to teach. The same applies for a high-skilled career program, such as in engineering or medicine.

Universities should be even more devoted to research than they are today. The professor should be very picky about which students to mentor; his job is to research and to publish, and so his "students" would really be research assistants.

Other "undergraduate" students are flat not ready for a university, at least not as the traditional universities' founders understood the concept. What these students need instead is, in American terms, a "higher-school" education up to the "fourteenth" or "sixteenth grades". That means professional educators do the teaching, and preferably not on the same campus, or sector of campus, as that of the research functions.

In a way, universities already segregate the freshmen-sophomores from the upper classes. Universities sport an array of remedial and basic courses to bring underskilled students up to par. Note that in some topics - like maths and physics - even "basic" is beyond the average bear. For example, I started out with courses in basic Latin, intermediate Greek, economics, history, differential equations, statistics, and abstract mathematics. I didn't then have a hope in Hell of performing independent research in any of the above - even the maths, which is the reason I was there at all. Later on, I studied Justinian's reign and Saint Luke's Gospel. I like to think I had a hope of publication on those scores. In effect, I had four years of high-dollar high-school and one semester of real university research.

Under a split higher-education / university system, you would be paying for what you want: either high-level education, or research. If the former, your teacher wouldn't be distracted by research projects, but would be concentrating on your class. S/he wouldn't be a grad student, unless s/he had passed an interview with equally-qualified non-students. The postgraduate faculty would interact with the higher-education group on a basis of mutual understanding (volunteering time to mentor, coming to job fairs, etc).

posted by Zimri on 16:59 | link |

In God's name

In NRO, Doug Bandow of the libertarian CATO Institute has had his fill of religious pandering, now that the Democrats have gotten in on it; and has asserted that God's not endorsing political candidates.

Not so long ago, both NRO and the Catoes were demanding government subsidies for madrassas. I consider Bandow's corrective a step forward for NRO and for the Cato Institute... a giant leap if the parties in question can apply it to Republican politicking and to state education-funding.

I'd ultimately like for NRO and CATO to repudiate such silliness, and to swear off playing footsie with theocrats.

posted by Zimri on 16:59 | link |

An unhealthy obsession

In The New Republic Online, I see that Jonathan Chait is losing it, again. This time he's rejecting Joseph Lieberman for being too cosy with the "business lobby". Chait doesn't prove direct corruption and he demonises vital services as part of the "business lobby".

Chait believes, "Currently American politics is being swamped by the untrammeled power of the business lobby. Even the Reagan years seem like halcyon days by comparison."

I don't see where Chait is even defining "power". Does he mean popularity? Ability to fund a campaign? Ability to rig an election? Ability to bypass the political system (in which case Lieberman would be irrelevant)? Allow me to quote Chait again: "It is no longer 1975." The voting public is no longer composed of passive consumers of televised pitches. Increasingly we are getting our information from the 'Net. What power is left to the "business lobby"? Where is thy sting? Without even a definition of "power", I fail to see where Chait can find a metric comparing "power" today to "power" two decades back.

"For evidence of that", Chait blithely continues, "Most recently, Lieberman was the only major Democratic presidential candidate to indicate he might support a version of Medicare "reform" that showered hundreds of billions of dollars on pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, and doctors after a Republican-dominated House-Senate conference committee came to agreement on a bill in November."

Again: what, exactly, does this have to do with the "business lobby's" power? Is Lieberman betraying his principles for campaign cash? or is it that the "business lobby" is piggybacking on Lieberman's principles for profit?

And how is this particular "business lobby" even a problem? We're talking about druggists, insurers, and doctors - people who save our lives. They're exactly the people we want to be "showering" money on. American policy ought to be about ensuring they spend that money on research and cures.

To the extent that the sundry actors in the medical sector are not spending on research and cures, much of their extra cash is going to Danegelds: for malpractice claims and for politicians who promise to keep those claims low. That's not the problem of any right-wing business lobby. That's the problem of a left- wing business lobby - trial lawyers.

Chait calls for "a standard-bearer who's willing to make a tough populist case against the GOP's reverse-Robin Hood agenda, and who's willing to make enemies on K Street and among the Washington establishment in the course of doing so." I yield to no-one in my disgust for venal subsidies, and I would happily elect a Democrat who ran against a "business" lobby parasitic on the rest of us. But the health industry is a poor example. As long as Democratic opinion leaders persist in lumping healthcare providers in with, say, West Virginia road construction contractors; then the rest of us should conclude that such Democrats are ignorant of economics and hazardous to our health.

To put it another way, Jonathan Chait is bad for the health of The New Republic, and for that of the centrist Democratic faction for which the magazine exists. It is of course grand that TNR didn't consider Chait's argument in its overall endorsement, and that TNR allows space for varying opinions. But why doesn't TNR at least demand that those opinions be constructive and rational?

posted by Zimri on 11:18 | link |

Hidden service charge

I'd earlier suggested that we export services, specifically healthcare, to the paying citizens of other nations. When I suggested this to my dad, he asserted that many exported services - such as banking - aren't included in US trade statistics. What the hell?

To ignore such a huge and growing sector of the export economy is to mislead the international investment community. We are all overestimating the US trade deficit. When investors get scared, they run away, and American people lose.

And please, spare us the "services don't count" line. The move from commodity sales to service sales is a feature, not a bug, of technological improvement. Services don't count only to people who don't like serving others - i.e. the lazy, the hidebound, and the antisocial. We should defer to antisocial dinosaurs because...?

It is high time that the service we provide non-Americans be better represented in our export statistics.

posted by Zimri on 11:18 | link |

Saturday, January 10, 2004

The rise and fall of Vermont

The American Revolution was a loosely-coördinated collection of local resistance movements. I'm just reminded that the party left us with some painful hangovers, like the existence of that pisspot People's Republic of Vermont.

As a side example of an indigenous rebellion, take South Carolina. I recently got through Partisans and Redcoats by Walter B. Edgar. This made clear that South Carolina's resistance really started when the idiot Brits forced its backcountry into a guerrilla campaign. Begging the pardon of Massachusetts, but all that Boston / Lexington / Concord stuff didn't do anything for the South beyond moral support. In South Carolina's case, America should be grateful the colony stuck it out on our side, and then signed up for the Constitution.

Vermont was a different story. It's not in the original 13. Vermont literally means "Green Mountain": a region claimed by France, occupied by few, and governed by none. When the Colonies acquired it (1763: Treaty of Paris), there was a tug of war between New Hampshire and New York over the area. New Hampshire claimed it, and Vermonters generally preferred it that way - but New York had the legal right (here). Ethan Allen ran his war of independence against the state capitals of New Hampshire and New York - only secondarily on the side of the Continental Congress.

The main difference between South Carolina and Vermont in that dustup, is that Vermont spent most of the War of Independence trying to get in good again with Great Britain. And then the place had the effrontery to demand seats in Congress as a sovereign state. The only reason the US let them get away with it (as State #14) is because the other Northeast states wanted extra Senators to balance out the South.

Since then it's looooong overstayed its welcome. The population is subpar. They're sliding into dependency. And they've given the rest of us Bernie Sanders, Jim Jeffords, Howard Dean, and a bunch of useless hippies.

It looks like Killington has finally decided that Vermont was a bad idea, and that New Hampshire was right all along. Better late than never, I suppose.

While I'm at it: "This blog calls for the federal government to withhold all aid until Vermont agrees to surrender its unearned and unequal statehood status." (From 2002 predictions. Just thought I'd keep my word.)

Oh yeah. And vote for Howard Dean! Governor of a state that entire towns want to be rid of! I'm sure he's locked up the Mexican- and Canadian-nationalist votes...

posted by Zimri on 19:21 | link |

America's next export

I still don't see a future of wealth for software engineers within the United States.

Even if we did cut our cost of living to the barest minimum, slashed ALL the waste from government budgets, and otherwise made this place a fiscal paradise - our labour costs will still be higher. This is because we're America, and so we pay a little extra on taxes and regulations to keep the air clean and our streets paved. And there is also the point of declining returns to keep in mind. We may not want our kids to be software engineers at $30k/year when a good plumber makes $50k. Some of us want our kids to be cutting edge - and software won't be cutting edge.

So the best of us will be training our kids to work in some other field. Something we can export to the world at a much higher profit. Allow me to suggest: healthcare.

Healthcare is already a huge factor in our economy, and will only increase as the population grows older and as it votes for health subsidy. It's not George Bush's fault that the American people demand an entitlement and don't care how. The only question is who hands out the dole and how it gets done.

We can reduce costs within healthcare by encouraging medical innovation. This means machinery, genetics, drugs, nursing, databases. Other ways, as mentioned, are to cut insurance costs, and to regulate such hospital fees as room and board so that hospitals can't play games with billing. Government can help with the latter.

I think a capitalist system, with some means to regulate ethics, will allow healthcare to reduce the cost of its components, and thus to pass on savings to the people. The taxpayer will need to subsidise some of it - but I don't see that as a problem, if it goes to disease prevention, pharmaceutical research, and genetics.

And we don't have to subsidise other countries. Why should Canada freeload? If they want our entitlements, they can apply for statehood (heh, heh, heh). Otherwise, their government can pony up the difference. Ditto the other guys.

Healthcare can be our export. It can employ all tiers of labour, from the nurse to the researcher. And it can pay them well, as long as politics doesn't interfere.

posted by Zimri on 17:20 | link |

Reducing cost of living

One way of addressing the labour balance between the US and India, is to level the cost of living between the US worker and the Indian worker.

India will eventually improve itself such that it costs more to live there. Then its workers will demand more and international companies will no longer wish to outsource there. As an added bonus India will itself become a nicer place to live. Less family dislocation, more tourism, and so on and so forth.

But this may take decades. In the meantime, America can pursue policies to make it cost less to live here.

That means: lower taxes; lower cost of healthcare; lower cost of education; lower cost of housing; lower cost of transportation. I'd say lower cost of food, too, on principle; but it's already quite low except for the poorest of the poor. America might also think about keeping luxury items out of range.

This isn't socialism. It's actually progressivism. Socialism is a means to that end, of ensuring a good life to the deserving. I happen to believe that Socialism is a bad means, because it only masks the cost of all the above - it doesn't reduce it. A Socialist has to tax or borrow or enslave or fight or threaten or all the above in order to pay for it all. Progressivism by contrast needn't rely on Socialist means to arrive at the end toward which Socialists claim to aspire.

A progressive national policy to reduce such costs would be to reduce the demand on, to increase the supply of, and to cut the costs within healthcare, education, housing, and transportation.

To reduce demand, one would restrict immigration, and discriminate against this or that group of people. Perhaps the elderly can be cut off from free healthcare, and perhaps the childless can be cut off from any mortgage and homeowner-tax exemptions. But any such program will become mired in politics, and can in no case work on its own.

To increase supply is easier. The best way to increase supply is to encourage people to work on it. That means capitalism.

It also means cutting the costs within the supply. For example, medical professionals have to pay malpractice insurance and to deal with its bureaucracy. Why? Because trial lawyers are taking them to the cleaners. Tell John Edwards to take a hike; make payouts just high enough that insurers don't want to pay them.

Do this and we will get more for our dollar. Employers won't pay us as much but since our costs will be lower, who'll care? We'll get by. Any more would be greedy.

posted by Zimri on 16:56 | link |

The future of the US economy

I happen to think America's great strength is in its economy. I won't argue that point; you can take that up with Milton Friedman or any other libertarian.

America's economy, like any other non-tourist economy, is export-driven. America had agriculture and textiles; and then it had manufacturing; and then it had software. Each one, historically, has had its day and then shed profits and workers - and now it is the turn of software.

What tends to happen is that other countries figure out how to do what we do. At that point, a bidding war takes speed, and our export advantage gets nullified. Our goods end up costing little more than the price of their components. Those goods become commodities - resources like, say, tin, that have to be found and dug up, not made. (Smart companies employ a strategy to make commodities of their components, by processes given the unsurprising label commoditisation. But that's not really relevant here.) When a company's components enter commodity territory, the company then turns on its other biggest cost - labour. That means people like us, who then have to move, to accept lower pay, or to find another job.

Much software has already commoditised most of its components (test PCs, basic authorship software, etc), and so the remaining sticking point is labour. Companies want software to be easier to write and easier to maintain. This will expand the pool of those willing and able to do it. Increased supply and stagnant demand means lower wages.

From a labour perspective, the problem with software is that it's electronic. You have to pay freight in order to get iron ingots from China over to Pennsylvania. That allows Pennsylvania steelworkers some breathing room to make the stuff locally. Not so software; there are people in India who speak better English than I do, who can do my job for far less (thanks to lower cost of living), and send their products here for nearly nothing. I don't provide anything extra but Anglo-American service.

One way out is for software geeks to learn a trade that cannot be exported, like laying bricks and plumbing pipes. So Kim Du Toit. He received accusations that he'd said we should become a "nation of bricklayers and plumbers". His response: "I never said that, either.". Exactly. He said we would, whether we "should" or not. Those letter-writers who don't want to learn a trade, should not be flaming the messenger; they should be asking, where else can I work?

More to the point: the "trade deficit" means that we are pulling in from other countries more than we push out. We need to think of some means of redressing this balance, before other countries decide not to invest here and we get a drop in the dollar (oops, that's happening already).

So, what can we offer the rest of the world now?

posted by Zimri on 16:05 | link |

The borders of the Great Omission

I recently looked through a fascinating book called Decoding Mark, by religion writer John Dart, who has recently entered the blogosphere (the dartboard). He proposes a new "Urmarkus" hypothesis: that is, that the Mark in our Gospels has been edited from its original version.

So far all I have seen on the 'Web are press releases (e.g. "PUZZLES ORIGINAL VERSION OF THE GOSPEL"), and I do not feel qualified to give a full review of his work. But I do feel qualified to expound and (if I may be so bold) to correct one portion of it.

First, some background. There is a "synoptic problem" between Matthew, Mark, and Luke - "synoptic" because in Greek, portions of them match word-for-word; and "problem" because no-one agrees on why this should be. Most believe that Mark best preserves the original wording and order: hence, "Marcan Priority Hypothesis".

But assuming Mark is the first, there is a large block of text in Mark running from 6:45-8:27a which Luke does not literally include. Luke does appear to parallel parts of it: mentions of Mark 6:45's and 8:22's Bethsaida in Luke 9:10; and of Mark 8:27a's Caesarea Philippi in Acts 8:40, 21:8 (which Luke's author also wrote).

John Dart and I solve this by proposing that original Mark omitted the bulk of 6:45-8:27a, but not all of it. We also agree that Mark 8:27a was part of the original. But John Dart thinks that 6:45-46 was part of the original, and I prefer 8:22-26.

I have details in my project The Bethsaida Gospel, which explicates Mark 6:45-8:21 as an addition, but does not speculate upon "Original Mark". (I try that elsewhere - look to the link "website" on the left.) I think Luke's author was likely female so I use "she" as a descriptor. Try not to be too distracted by that if you're curious enough to venture further.

posted by Zimri on 15:07 | link |

Friday, January 09, 2004

Awaken me when it is over

Ah, the days of Adorable's "Sunshine Smile", the Boo Radleys' "Every Heaven EP", and Catherine Wheel's "Black Metallic". My last years of high school, 1991-2, when President George Bush kicked Saddam Hussein's ass...

I'm glad to see Bush's son wasn't the only one who wanted to relive the glory days. So now we have Longwave's "The Strangest Things", whose opening "Wake Me When It's Over" takes more than a peek back at the shoes of yesteryear.

This blog-post won't be a review, as such. I will note that if Longwave had been around in the early 1990's, they would have outsold Radiohead's "Pablo Honey" and outreviewed Chapterhouse's "Whirlpool". They might not have withstood Ride's "Nowhere" so well.

PopMatters felt that Longwave's sound peters out toward the end of the CD and that there's "something missing". That review and others say the album wears out its welcome early. It's a short album, and it shouldn't be having that effect on the listener. The Cure's 1989 "Disintegration" went over 70 minutes on CD and it wasn't enough. One could probably stitch together a CD of Slowdive tracks of about that length with the same effect. So what's going on?

Leonard points out "Tidal Wave" as "striving to soar" but "ultimately forgettable". I tend to agree that the second half was not up to the standards of the first.

I thought "Tidal Wave" and "Ghosts Around You" started out great, but that they both blew it midway through with pointless caterwauling and clanging of instruments. The band must've felt that the choruses (khoroi?) were too low-key. I am also guessing that the band was engaging in the age-old trick of shifting the songs they're not sure about to the B-side.

I should add that shoegazer wannabes need to spare us the vulgarities. Words like "balls" and "shit" work for Longwave about as well as rapping worked for Electronic. It was just about tolerable in "Meet Me At The Bottom". "All Sewn Up" just doesn't bear up under the onslaught of S-bombs.

Like Chapterhouse before them, Longwave have dumped upon us a short album with lots of filler. Unlike Chapterhouse, Longwave are living in the age of broadband connexions and peer-to-peer networks. I predict the album's sales are not going to be nearly as high as downloads of its first six tracks.

For their next (third) album, I suggest that when they have a song with two choruses, that they don't just bang and wail aimlessly after #2; but that they churn out some sort of rockin' riff à la Stone Roses' "Made of Stone", or else spin off some trippy atmospherics Pale Saints-style. And if they still have filler: save it for the B-sides and special collections, and go back to the writing desk. I don't want to have to skip through that crap in the car.

posted by Zimri on 18:53 | link |

NoKo tourism

Matt Drudge is pointing to this article - as is lucianne, whose commenter Morgoth additionally cites this article.

That latter exerted a nauseating fascination on me. I could not quit reading it. What a sinister place. And what a beautiful landscape. "Arirang Nation", indeed.

posted by Zimri on 17:56 | link |

Which pun to start with?

Three polish divers are under investigation after a news photo showed them serving champagne to a pike.

It's a low-visibility substance. They ought to count themselves lucky they didn't get spitted. How could they possibly find Das Boot through the murk?

Hey, James Taranto's pun was even worse.

posted by Zimri on 17:41 | link |

Thursday, January 08, 2004

Disparate impact

It will not be easy to stop felon franchise through the courts. Felon franchise is already a Constitutional right.

Kirsanow advises us to forget the 14th Amendment and to worry about the Voting Rights Act instead. I do not know the Voting Rights Act, but I do know the 24th Amendment. The 24th Amendment is the amendment that will, directly or indirectly, bring Bubba to your booth.

The 24th Amendment exists precisely because of "racially disparate impact". In its day, Black citizens in the Jim Crow South disproportionately did not pay the local taxes. The legislatures and the Democratic Party outposts therein had designed the taxation and primary structures in tandem, so as to force such a "disparate impact" and thereby to circumvent the 14th Amendment. The Amendment blocked this means of circumvention and helped finish Reconstruction.

But at what a cost! I've already blogged the 24th Amendment as the worst amendment for its direct impact alone. Its indirect impact will be far greater. The 24th Amendment has made "disparate impact" a Constitutional principle concerning the franchise. Courts tend to take principles from the Amendments and to expand them far beyond what the Amendments say. As the principle of the 4th Amendment gave us Roe v. Wade, and as the principle of the 10th gave us localised slavery, the principle of the 24th is going to break open the franchise to pretty much anyone on the planet who wants it.

I doubt they'll be voting for responsible finances, impartial courts, and strong police.

posted by Zimri on 18:27 | link |

Official pardon

In NRO, Peter Kirsanow has written an article on whether felons ought to vote. I read Kirsanow's 2004 article as a sequel to David Lampo's 2002 article.

Lampo had grounded his opposition to felon franchise upon its projected effect on Democratic margins, unethically enough. What got me blogging, was that in the process Lampo dwelt rather too long on the effect upon Black voting rolls. This was not one of NRO's better moments.

Kirsanow by contrast concentrates on the ethics and results of the felon franchise, and cites the racial disparity as relevant only to demagogues. With this article NRO has abrogated Lampo's article, and improved NRO's moral case against the felon franchise.

I still wish that NRO had removed Lampo's article from its server. In addition Kirsanow did not need to cite that thing as favourably as he did. But I suppose there is a conservative case for preserving articles for historical purposes and for citing them as precedent, even such as Lampo's.

Kirsanow has at last given us a moral and factual basis for argument and policy. The resistance to felon franchise is going mainstream. For that I applaud him and NRO.

posted by Zimri on 18:27 | link |

Friday, January 02, 2004

Christians are above the Constitution

The tract quoted below, using the $50 bill to promote a religion, is illegal. That tract is a copyright violation against the United States. By now I think all American 'Net-geeks know that copyright violation isn't protected speech. It would be similarly illegal for me to sell bootleg t-shirts based on "Lord of the Rings". Perhaps this explains why the tract's author was too cowardly to print his organisation and address on it.

Likewise, Lakewood Church is using national symbols to plug its services. That, too, is illegal. The US could revoke its status as a tax-exempt foundation, and pull in some extra cash for damages in the process.

Why doesn't the US do this? Because the government is already compromised in this manner, and because most Americans want a moderate theocracy (and will probably get one). Future plans aside, it all goes to show how much respect the US and most of its citizens have for our Constitution now.

posted by Zimri on 18:55 | link |

Rendering unto God what is Caesar's

Christian theocrats find many ways to mock us secularists, and among their favourite targets is our opposition to their slogans in "public life" (theocra-speak for "state communications"). Such Christians think that we're paranoid or persecutors or both. But their "public-life" slogans are propaganda, and are being used to browbeat theological dissenters. I call to witness a religious tract based on the $50 bill.

I ran across this particular example back in early 2000. I'd snuck into a local Republican convention in the Astrohall, and I suppose I wasn't exactly shocked to find literature of a Christian nature lying around. Back then I wasn't blogging, and I didn't keep the tract, but I never forgot it. Today I found another copy, lying in the ground outside the local Subway sandwich store.

Face up is a facsimile of a fifty-dollar bill, with the usual numeral "50"'s framing the standard "THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" / "IN GOD WE TRUST" [boldface in original] above the Capitol building. The lower right corner substitutes "ISAIAH 53" for the "50", there's an angel flying off above it, and "JOHN 3:16" is superimposed above "FIFTY DOLLARS". And then there's an "expanded" quote of Isaiah 7:13-16 below it.

On the reverse side, it reads:

WHAT IS THE ANSWER? If People had the Answer We would see the Evidence We look for the Answer in.. MONEY..INTELLECT... SCIENCE..TECHNOLOGY.. PHILOSOPHY..RELIGIONS... GOOD WORKS..GOOD DEEDS.. If one, or all of these..held the Answer Generation after Generation, We would have seen ..... the Evidence! The only hope we have...is God's intervention, in our lives. God said ... "For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory, of God." Immanuel (Jesus), Who was without sin.. gave His Life, as a payment! For my sin debt ....... God said, "For it is by Grace, through Faith, that you are saved, not by works!" If you have put your faith in .. Money .. and any of these other things..then ask God, in prayer...Jesus (Immanuel)! "If You are, The Answer..I want to know You!"

The primary function of this tract is to get passers-by to say "Ooh look! $50" and to pick it up. Cute. But it also juxtaposes "IN GOD [boldface!] WE TRUST" with the United States and its symbols, and associates both with citations from the Prophets (under Christian interpretation) and from the New Testament.

For this tract, and for millions of fellow Americans, you must be religious to be American, you must be Christian to be religious, and you must believe in the faith of Saint Paul to be Christian. The same attitude holds sway at the Lakewood Church, which advertises on bumper stickers and in movie previews using flags, bald eagles, and the Statue of Liberty, with nary a cross in sight.

The United States government enables such abuses, and is an accessory to fundamentalist proselytisation, as long as it defiles its own currency with monotheistic slogans. And that is why said government needs to knock it off.

posted by Zimri on 18:13 | link |

Thursday, January 01, 2004

The blood of 'Ali

The "occultation" of the 'Alid bloodline poses the worldwide ahl al-bayt with the same problem. Shi'a sects have come up with a number of mutually-incompatible solutions to this problem. The most famous Shi'a are those of Iran, who believe that the last Imam went into hiding and will return. Other Shi'a believe that the last Imam (for Bohra Ismailis, a different one) went into hiding and died there, but that his line survives in secret. The followers of the Aga Khan hold their leader as a living Imam. Another possible solution, held by no-one I know of, is that the Imams have served their purpose, and that modern-day Shi'a must instead live by the canonical Imams' precepts. (Thanks to Aziz for clearing all that up.)

The above "solutions" all rely on faith. But there is a real solution, based on science...

Suppose a team of scholars were to loot the tombs of the Imams, to conduct DNA tests on their bones. Also suppose they uncovered lineages of 'Ali that no-one could dispute. What would happen?

First, there might be a living male-line heir of 'Ali, although this is unlikely. The probability is higher (very high, actually) for a living heir of 'Ali with females in the line of ancestry. Such an heir would of course invoke the precedent of the Prophet's daughter Fatima. This would likely lead to a conflict between rival Shi'a houses.

Second, Shi'a would be divided over the means by which the scholars obtained the DNA. Some would call it desecration. Others would claim that the Imams would approve of this, as the only real solution to the fundamental crisis in the faith.

Third, it would shake up the existent sects of Shi'ism. Believers in the promised Hidden Imam would split over whether to follow a flesh-and-blood Hidden Imam. Believers in a dead Imam but living faith would say that the heir of 'Ali is all well and good, but that Allah no longer requires him; Allah's plan rests fulfilled in the books of Imams past (a rather Sunni interpretation of Shi'ism, if I may be so bold).

Ah, what dark beast slouches toward the Ka'aba to be born...

posted by Zimri on 16:17 | link |

The mooting of the Shi'a cause

Lately I've been pondering the paradoxes of Shi'a Islam.

Saddam Hussein, tyrant and liar, forced changes to the family tree of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam. Aziz the Shi'a Pundit was outraged. In Aziz's comment section, I wanted to know if any other tyrant had committed such fraud since 'Ali ruled Iraq back in the 650's CE. From this another commenter, Hassan, went further: "Yet another reason why the title of "sayyid" is an archaic institution. do away with it, it's inherently anti-egalitarian". What applies for a sayyid - relative of the Prophet - must also apply to the family of 'Ali, the most famous sayyids of all.

The very name "Shi'a" means Shi'at 'Ali - the Party of 'Ali and of his family. If 'Ali's legitimate heir returns, the Shi'at 'Ali must rally to his cause. This holds true whether the heir is the "Hidden Imam" of the Iranians, or a new Imam of a recognised bloodline.

The "title of "sayyid"" is nice to have for a Sunni, but not critical. But for Shi'a, there must be an 'Alid Imam or at least the promise of such an Imam. The lack of a family tree therefore stands to render the Shi'a cause irrelevant.

posted by Zimri on 15:32 | link |

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