Ideological Purity (or, Apple Does Wintel)

For some time now, Apple Computer has been shipping machines built around the Intel Core Duo processor, which has the same instruction set as any other Intel processor. When this move was first announced, Steve Jobs emphasized the gains in reduced processor heat and increased speed; but observers speculated that this was Step One in a bid to allow Windows use on the Mac.

A few days ago, this potential became reality as Apple introduced Boot Camp, software that allows you to partition a section of your hard drive and install Windows on it. Apple has no intention of shipping Windows software itself, so users have to buy the operating system from Microsoft and install it on their own; but as a marketing move, this is brilliant. Apple has been struggling along with a 3% market share in personal computers. Many people who would prefer to use Macs are forced to use software for their work that is only available for Windows; owning a Mac under these circumstances was a luxury. But now, you can buy a Mac and still use all the Windows software you want, including computer games or anything else. Suddenly, the equation changes; now, when buying a Mac you are paying a slight premium over other PC models for the exceptional hardware design, and access to the beautiful OS X and the specialized software that comes with it — while losing no functionality.

Moreover, as more people begin to experience the joy that is Macness, fewer people will tolerate working with Windows software if they can avoid it. The opportunity cost of purchasing a given piece of software for Mac, as opposed to Windows, just plummeted. In time, many people might completely transition to Mac software, using Windows only for specialized applications.

So, who can possibly be upset by such a shrewd business move? Apparently, the Los Angeles Times.

Last Friday, the print LAT carried a lead editorial titled Apples, Oranges and Windows. In it, they accused Steve Jobs of selling out to the Man:

Apple's move looks like a concession, if not a defeat, in its three-decade-long battle against rival Microsoft. For years, Apple's advertisements have urged computer users to abandon Windows, asserting that the choice between Mac and Windows was a choice between easy and confusing, cool and geeky, good and evil. On Wenesday, however, Apple started giving away software for Intel-powered Macs that makes it easy to install Windows XP…. Instead of trying to cure people of their Windows addiction, Apple is now an enabler…. It seem[s] silly, like trying to fit a lawnmower engine inside a Vespa scooter….

But from a cultural standpoint, it's jarring. It used to be said that the difference between the two tycoons of the computer age is that Bill Gates just wants your money, while Steve Jobs wants your soul. What Wednesday's announcement shows is that, if forced to choose, Jobs will take the money too.

This editorial should be embarrassing for the Times. Good heavens, a businessman actually wants to make money! Imagine that!

More than that, this editorial perfectly demonstrates a pernicious worldview that continues to harm American politics, of which the Times is often a major exponent. In this worldview, image is more important that reality, and cultural subversiveness is prized above all. It doesn't matter that Apple's computer business was continually struggling on the edge of irrelevance, with a market share that would horrify General Motors. No, what matters is that Apple is part of a Manichaean war with the font of all evil, Microsoft, upholding the sacred virtues of coolness and soul.

Never mind that this Manichaean drama was never so cut and dry. Microsoft, while it had some business practices that were definitely unethical and occasionally illegal, and while its software is generally clumsy and poorly written (and has the aesthetic sense of ten drunken clowns in a flea market), performed the service of making software that was good enough. And Bill Gates has in recent years been using his prodigious fortune to fight the spread of malaria in Africa, fund biomedical research here in the States, and assist in a host of other beneficial activities.

Never mind, too, that the Times's narrative uncritically accepts Apple's slick advertising pitch. The idea that you could demonstrate your moral superiority by your choice of computer is laughable. But it appeals to a certain class of people who want to be seen as virtuous, not because of what they actually do in the world, but because of the image they project.

Note the horror with which the Times treats Steve Jobs's desire for profits over so-called principle. They would be much happier, I'm sure, had Apple continued to flail away in the quicksand of the marketplace without getting anywhere, but still preserving their purity of ideas, the pristineness of their vision. Actually getting things done is not important. What is important is to be true to your beliefs in some bizarre sense that holds that intentions trump reality.

Therefore, if you cut taxes for the rich, even if it helps the poor in the long run by stimulating economic activity, you are evil. If you raise taxes for the rich, even if this puts hundreds of thousands of people out of work, you are righteous. If you oppose universal health care, even if such programs are a disaster in every country that has them, you are evil. If you force businesses to purchase health insurance for their workers, even if this makes them fire everyone they can spare, you are righteous. What is important is not real-world consequences, but the beauty of your inner vision.

Needless to say, if you ignore basic economics, if the idea of cost/benefit analysis is beyond you, if you make decisions based on emotion and not logic, if the long run is too far in the future to even cross your mind, if you lack the ability to think three moves ahead, if you willfully disregard Murphy's Law and Heinlein's Law of Tanstaafl (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch), if you insist on casting the basic operations of a free society as an apocalyptic clash between good and evil — then you will tend to create ruinous public policy.

These people should learn from Steve Jobs. They do claim to venerate him, after all.

Alternative Energy Roundup

At Winds of Change, they've posted an extensive series of links about advances in alternative energy. Lots of good stuff over there, you should check it out. Especially interesting to me is the piece about plasma energy experiments at Sandia National Labs, which (IIRC) I've mentioned here in the past. Also interesting is that Honda is apparently researching home cogeneration units, including one that can refine hydrogen. Honda is perhaps interested in establishing a market for hydro-cars, whether the infrastructure is in place or not. Good for them.

My general optimism about our energy problems continues unabated. The trick is getting people to take the initiative in using all this good stuff.

(Hat tip: Instapundit.)

Zarqawi Booted From Insurgent Leadership Role

It would be hard to hat tip everybody I've seen who linked to this, but suffice to say that the blogosphere is reacting gleefully to the news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has reportedly been unseated as leader by Iraqi insurgents:

According to Huthayfah Azzam, the son of Abdullah Azzam, al-Zarqawi’s former mentor, the notorious commander of al-Qaeda in Iraq was stripped of his political duties at a meeting two weeks ago.

“The Iraqi resistance high command asked al-Zarqawi to give up his political role and replaced him with an Iraqi because of several mistakes,” said Mr Azzam in an interview with al-Arabiya, the Arabic news channel. “Al-Zarqawi’s role has been limited to military action,” he said.

…

Al-Zarqawi then faced a humiliating climbdown in December when he was forced to drop his opposition to general elections in a clear ideological split with the mainstream Sunni Arab population in Iraq, which participated in the polls. Certainly today al-Zarqawi is no longer regarded by the authorities in Baghdad as the main threat to the country’s stability.

As many other commentators have noted, this is a clear sign that the insurgents are rethinking their strategy of indiscriminately murdering the populace. It has backfired rather spectacularly, leading their former supporters among the Sunnis to switch camps. If the events of the past few weeks are any guide, the insurgents are now trying to game the political system instead of opposing it entirely, by exacerbating tensions between the various political parties. This may end up backfiring as well, as it seems that the most lasting effect of the recent turmoil in Baghdad has been to force the United states and the Iraqi military to finally confront Moqtada as-Sadr's Mahdi Army. (For more on this, go to Belmont Club and just keep scrolling down.)

Of course, this shouldn't be seen as a sign that we're actually winning in Iraq. Because, you know, everyone on TV says that it's a quagmire. And the LA Times even showed gruesome pictures of wounded soldiers on the front page! Things must be bad! Surely it's irrelevant that the highest daily casualties the US has suffered in months came from a single vehicle accident?

Perhaps a year or two after the invasion, I made an off-the-cuff prediction that the stabilization of Iraq would take no less than four years, and not too much more than that. This was based on nothing more than extrapolations based on what I knew about Arab politics in general, and the histories of previous stabilization efforts by the United States, particularly in the Carribbean and Philippines (read Max Boot on the subject). The person I was speaking to was shocked. He said words to the effect of, "The government never told us that we should expect the war to last four years!"

Perhaps I am atypical, given that I did a lot of reading in my youth about the Civil War, WWII, Korea, and other wars that tended to last a long time. My expectations are calibrated to those measurements; I do not consider four or five years to be a long time in which to rebuild a country from the ground up. And it seems from everything I can see that we are more or less on track to hit that goal. Yes, we have suffered temporary setbacks, but that's all they were: temporary. American casualties have dropped precipitously in the past several months. The Iraqi governing coalition continues to take shape. The Iraqi military has grown to more than 230,000 troops. The trend is still our friend.

Britain's Slide into Totalitarianism

From Samizdata comes a frightening post about the creation of a new law-enforcement body in Britain that seems, quite literally, to be a secret police. Agents of the Serious Organized Crime Agency will not take the Police's customary oath of service to the Crown that mandates adherence to the rule of law; they are authorized to act out of uniform, anywhere in the world; the names of SOCA agents will be kept secret; the locations of SOCA offices in Britain will be kept secret; there is at present no address or email given for SOCA, and the only way that private citizens can contact them is through a P.O. box. (There is a phone number given, for media use only.)

SOCA agents can act without judicial warrants; they can deputize anyone else to act on their behalf. They can gain access to secured data from most government agencies, and are authorized to pass data on to whomever they choose. SOCA is exempt from Freedom of Information requirements, and answers to nobody except the Home Secretary.

Most worrying, perhaps, is that SOCA is ostensibly meant to fight not terrorism (which might perhaps justify such abridgments of standard checks and balances) but organized crime, while not being limited to same. Rather, it is authorized to enforce all laws as needed. In other words, the infrastructure is now in place for Britain's government to totally subvert the traditional police powers and ignore judicial restraint.

Tony Blair may be an ally of the United States in international matters, but he is not a good man. His government is steadily exerting control over more and more areas of private and public life in Britain. And he has the almost total cooperation of the leading opposition party, the Tories; the debate is not whether to erect a police state, but in what manner.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the erosion of Britain's Bill of Rights began in earnest after the 1997 ban on handguns.

Quote of the Day

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

--Sir Robert Peel, founder of London's Metropolitan Police Force, generally acknowledged to be the first "modern" police force.

There is no moral distinction, in the abstract, between taking violent action in self-defense or in defense of others, and expecting the police to do so on your behalf. There is considerable moral cowardice in believing that you must not act violently in self-defense or in defense of others, and the police must act violently to keep you and yours safe. And there is great hazard in the unsupportable belief that the police will always keep you safe, and that you have no responsibility for securing your own safety or the safety of those around you.

(Hat tip: Kevin at Smallest Minority.)

Quote of the Day

The reason the American Army does so well in war is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.

— Unknown West German general

What Message From the Medium?

[Disclaimer: I am not a rabbi, nor do I play one on TV.]

Jewish tradition records that we received at Mount Sinai two interdependent codes of law: the Written Torah (or simply the Torah, i.e. the Five Books of Moses) and the Oral Torah (Torah sh-ba'al peh, the core of what would become the Talmud). On the one hand, we were commanded to transmit the Written Torah according to precise scribal rules which could not be deviated from; on the other hand, we were originally forbidden to transcribe the Oral Torah at all. Scholars were allowed to make their own study notes, but not to pass them on. The Oral Torah could only be passed on by word of mouth. The Talmud was only redacted when there was a danger that the Oral Torah would be lost entirely, thanks to the Romans hunting down and executing the musmakhim (members of the High Court).

When one reads the Torah, one is struck by its subtlety as an educational tool; not only does it describe the process by which the Children of Israel first were taught the law, but simply reading about that process teaches us the law as well, in a multitude of ways. At its heart, the philosophy of the Torah is that by mandating a set of behaviors (many of which are highly symbolic), the human soul is taught virtues and principles that ultimately extend beyond the limits of the law to infuse all of life.

The Torah is the immutable word of God. (Indeed, some mystical traditions believe that the text of the Torah is a representation of God's essence, perhaps in the manner that a two-dimensional pencil sketch can suggest a fully formed being.) That word is meant to permeate our beings and purify our souls. But it is important to realize that in many ways, the medium is the message.

That the Torah is written is a deep lesson all by itself. It is an implicit command that we as a people learn to read, and learn poetry and music (embedded in the text are often subtle poetic forms that escape the reader who is not looking for them). It forces us to check our understanding against an unchanging source, and not to stray from it over time. It is a physical embodiment of the tradition and the Covenant, focusing our attention in ways that an abstract concept cannot.

Yet if that is so, then what is the intrinsic meaning of an oral tradition? And why must we have both a written and oral law? Many cultures have had oral traditions, and more modern cultures rigorously record their histories and legal systems. What is the purpose of mandating both methods of propogation, and why forbid that the Oral Torah ever be written down?

[At this point, I'm more or less taking a shot in the dark. See disclaimer.]

First, the obvious difference. A written work is unchanging, assuming accurate transcribing; but oral traditions are notoriously prone to evolve. To accurately transmit an oral tradition requires tremendous dedication and study on the part of the scholar, and even then there is a constant danger that material will be lost. Several times the Talmud records the lament of rabbis who were unable to learn all that their teachers knew, and were unable to teach all they knew to their students.

This sharpens the question. If you want the material to be propogated, why prohibit written records? And if you already have a body of written material, why entrust additional material to such an unreliable mechanism? What is being accomplished here?

I can only assume that such gradual evolution of the Oral Law is not a bug, but a feature.

The Written Torah is primarily a pedagogic tool, not a self-contained legal system. It contains only the broadest strokes of the civil law, enough to convey the underlying principles that it is built from, and to set specific anchor points that cannot be deviated from, yet not enough to stand on its own as a comprehensive source for legal rulings. The minutia of the law are found in the Oral Torah.

What effect would this have? While the fundamental principles of the Law would remain absolute, the practical aspect of the law would have a relationship with the evolving society which, although certainly not "dynamic" in the usual sense, is at least not rigid. Oral traditions are quite powerful and capable of resisting change when such change is anathema to the whole; yet on minor points, oral traditions are often quite pragmatic. This allows the law as a whole to remain vital.

The Talmud was written as a series of freewheeling debates, preserving the opinions of scholars who were later outvoted and organized around the idea that "These and these are the words of the Living God" — in short, that there are many valid forms for the law to take. This gave rabbis in later generations a degree of freedom in applying the law to their own situations; in extremis, one could rely on a minority opinion if necessary. In this way the organic character of the Oral Law was at least partially preserved.

But later works such as the Shulkhan Arukh ("Prepared Table" by R' Yosef Karo) were written as authoritative reference books, laying out the law as a series of definitive statements. When differences of opinion are recorded, it is only so that scholars can seek to satisfy both opinions at once. This made the Oral Law largely static; it became much harder to adapt to the needs of the day without being called a backslider by a horde of lesser figures frenziedly waving legal codes. The vitality of the law became endangered. And that has led to all sorts of problems today.

This is not to say that we must bend whichever way the wind blows. The Written Torah is still supreme, and the Oral Torah is still authoritative. Traditions should evolve, not be forcibly crossbred. Yet today, for many people, the Oral Law is encased in amber — to such a degree that it often eclipses the Torah itself in importance, in reality if not in theory. To let ourselves fall into this trap is to disregard the meaning of an oral tradition.

What is there to do? I don't know. It is incredibly dangerous for individuals to begin passing judgement on the modern Jewish Law, despite its flaws. That way lies the void. But we who love the Torah should at least begin the discussion, on our terms. We have for too long allowed criticism of the Law to be monopolized by those who disdain the Law in the first place, nullifying such criticism's value. Now, we must stand up again.

Worker Shortages in China

This article in BusinessWeek (hat tip: ArrogantAthiest commenting at Samizdata) discusses how a shortage of skilled workers in China is causing wages to grow rapidly. Salaries at multinational firms in China increased 8.4% last year, and job turnover jumped to 14%. At the same time, working conditions are improving dramatically, as employers must compete for skilled employees.

This is having several cascading effects. Internally in China, the multinationals are building infrastructure further inland in search of cheaper labor, helping to extend prosperity to the peasants that have long been the Communist Party's most loyal dependents. I suspect that this will reduce the relative power of the government in the long run, which is good. At the same time, the existing middle class on the coast is becoming stronger, and is beginning the cycle of endlessly-rising expectations that is the first nail in a centrally-planned economy's coffin. All the best state employees are being poached away by multinationals, hastening the demise of state-owned companies.

At the same time, the increase in wages may slow the exodus of manufacturers to China, easing some of the protectionist pressures that have pushed the West into some asinine economic policies. (On the other hand, more companies may move to Vietnam or Cambodia instead. Ah well.) Perhaps this will give the United States more time to transition more completely to an Information Economy.

On the other hand, only China's low prices have saved us from broad inflation over the past few years. Now that the party is coming to a close, we have already begun reaping the fruits of our reckless monetary and fiscal policy. Inflation is creeping up, rates are rising, and yet Congress still spends money like there is no tomorrow. Yet tomorrow will always come, and in this case it is a tomorrow without the safety-valve of low Chinese business costs. We should plan accordingly.

Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land

A few days ago, President Bush gave a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, laying out his fundamental vision of how the war in Iraq is progressing. Much has already been said about this speech, which was apparently one of the President's better ones; but I would like to look at one small point in the Q&A session. When a representative of the Cleveland Hungarian Revolution 50th Anniversary Society [?] asked:

[H]ow can we help you, from the grassroots level, how can we help you promote the cause of freedom and liberty for all peoples throughout the world?

The President responded:

[T]he best way you can help is to support our troops. You find a family who's got a child in the United States military, tell them you appreciate them. Ask them if you can help them. You see somebody wearing a uniform, you walk up and say, thanks for serving the country.

While giving emotional support to the military is certainly valuable, the President completely missed the point of the question. In his conception, apparently, the role of private citizens is to lend their support to the initiatives of government. What the questioner was interested in, which I think is much more important, was the ways in which private citizens can act independently of government in ways that advance freedom and the broad national interest.

The Bush Administration has consistently underestimated the importance of engaging the people and harnessing our energies. For all the talk of the dreaded Rove Machine, the White House's PR has been inept at best. And while there have been some moves towards exploiting the strength of distributed systems rather than centralized planning, the trend in all areas of the Federal government is in the opposite direction. (A notable recent exception has been the release of intel documents from Iraq and Afghanistan, for which I am exceedingly grateful.)

But private citizens, when acting together, have tremendous power to spread the ideals of liberty on their own, without using tank battalions or national diplomacy. Given that the President unaccountably missed his chance to rally the people, as it were, I would like to submit my own suggestions:

1. Establish merit-based college scholarships for students from oppressed countries such as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, China, or anywhere else where freedom is kept in check. Send the best and the brightest of these countries to schools where they will be taught the benefits of liberty, an appreciation for America, and the practical skills to establish open governments and free markets back home.

2. Privately fund radio broadcasts into oppressed countries, a do-it-yourself Voice of America so to speak. Translate the classic texts on liberty (Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, the Declaration of Independence, etc.) into the languages of oppressed countries and distribute them in as many formats as possible. For that matter, translate popular literature as well. Heinlein can be a better exponent of liberty than Madison, if more people read him.

3. Sponsor English teachers. The more people in these countries who can speak English, the better for America.

4. Invest in these countries. Not in the big government-linked crony-capitalist industries like oil or diamonds, but in the growth of middle-class entreprenuers. Instead of allowing oppressive governments to become more powerful with our money, private investors should be strengthening the middle class, the true engine of liberty. Additionally, the more contact we have with private citizens in these countries, the more knowledge we will build up about them and the more opportunities the government will have for effective intelligence-gathering.

5. Individuals should aggressively switch away from oil consumption towards alternatives such as solar power or coal. In every country where oil revenues make up a large portion of the economy, you find government corruption, oppression of the people, and rampant poverty. The oil industry by its very nature depends on cooperation with governments, and massive capital investments. Worse, at a recent event I attended, anti-slavery activist Aaron Cohen digressed from his main presentation to talk about the ways in which slavery and ethnic cleansing are often linked to large oil projects in the Third World. The bloodshed in Darfur? Largely over oil rights. Individuals can help by promoting technologies that are independent of huge, centralized government-run producers.

In brief, there are all sorts of ways in which private citizens can fight tyranny and advance the cause of freedom. If the government won't take advantage of what we can offer, we'll just have to do it on our own.

Gotcha: Saddam was Financing al-Qaida Affiliate

But, but, but surely Saddam had no connection to al-Qaida!

Read it and weep, useful idiots of the Jihad. John Negroponte finally got moving after the President gave him a direct order to release as many documents as he could, from the vast hoard of intelligence captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the documents is a fax to Baghdad from the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines, outlining their previous financial and material support for the deadly Salafist terror group Abu Sayyaf. (Abu Sayyaf has had operational links to al-Qaida in the past.) As if we needed more proof of Saddam's involvement in terrorism, given his public support for Abu Nidal, the Palestine Liberation Front, and his paying stipends to the families of suicide bombers.

As for that absurd pseudo-argument stating that Saddam could never have worked with Islamist terrorists, since he was secular: remember that the saying "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" originated in Arabic. And Saddam showed no compunctions about using Islam to buttress his own authority.

That sound you hear is a million "Bush lied" drones frantically shoving their fingers deeper into their ears.

The Cheapening of Symbols

Tonight, I attended a production of Kiss Me Kate at UC Irvine. The production was in most respects quite good; the singing and acting were both top-notch, and the sets were lavishly done. But there was one sour note that had me fuming for most of the second act, unfortunately. The character of Harrison Howell, a Texas cattle-rancher in the original, had been rewritten for the 1999 revival as an Army general, apparently modeled on Douglas MacArthur. He is domineering, rude, and peremptory, and portrayed as the future running-mate of Republican Thomas Dewey. That I might have swallowed with only a little irritation, but in this production his military escorts were dressed in SS uniforms, and the main character mockingly gives the Sig Heil salute when the General's back is turned.

Perhaps it is to be expected from a theater department at UC Irvine. Surely they must think it highly amusing to take such a dig at the military today, given their presumed opposition to the war. Yet that they should do so by using Nazi imagery, in the same way that some today are fond of equating Bush with Hitler, suggests to me that such people no longer appreciate just how evil the Nazis were — or they understand it in some abstract sense that doesn't really penetrate.

For Jews, however, Nazi imagery can be incredibly powerful and inspires visceral reactions of loathing and hatred among some, and terrible fear and anger among those who actually went through the Holocaust. I remember going to see The Producers on Broadway last year; when the actors came out in SS uniforms for a dance number, I felt a sudden instinctive need to find a gun and shoot them. That was how strongly the very sight of those uniforms affected me.

Yet the very fact that the Nazis represented the pinnacle of evil, which should make people hesitant to use them as a point of comparison, instead had the reverse effect. It is too easy for sloppy thinkers to use the Nazis as a cheap shortcut for conveying just how strongly they feel about something, whether or not the use is justified. This phenomenon has become so widespread that Godwin's Law was formulated to try to discourage such hyperbole, at least on the Internet. Sadly, it has had limited effect, and now invoking the Nazis or Adolph Hitler has become a debating tactic with almost zero semantic content.

Now, people are so used to such sloppiness, such ahistoricism, that they often don't even consider the effect of such usage on listeners who might fully appreciate who the Nazis were, or the Communist Party, or the Ku Klux Klan, or any such incarnation of evil who has been appropriated by the ranting classes. When we hear such unthinking appeals to reflexive emotion, we only feel disgust for the one who is so willing to mangle history for the sake of the transitory political problem of the day.

Similarly, while Americans may be used to speaking of "crusades" as a general term, the Muslim world (and the Jewish world, for that matter) has much stronger memories of what the Crusades actually were. Hence the semantic confusion after one of President Bush's early speeches.

Perhaps such cheapening of symbols is endemic to democracies, which by their nature are forward-looking and have a poor appreciation of history. Associations to past events quickly fade; democracies constantly change, with few attachments to what came before. And those of us who are still stongly attached to our heritage are doomed to a constant, low-level dismay at the thoughtlessness of those who surround us.

After all, it's just a show, right?

Interesting… Flawed, But Interesting…

I happened to run across an editorial from last month by Ted Halstead, boss of the New America Foundation, in which he proposes a "new Homestead Act" to promote greater access to financial assets. His thesis:

The most promising way to revitalize America’s middle class is to update old traditions. In the nineteenth century, the U.S. sought to broaden the ownership of land; in the twentieth, the ownership of homes. In this new century, the target should be the ownership of financial assets. The logic for such a course follows from the economic dynamics that are widening the gap between today’s haves and have-nots.

This presupposes that financial assets are as fundamental a part of individual prosperity as are land holdings and home ownership. This assumption is off-base for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the small stockholder doesn't actually control anything to speak of, as a landowner controls his land or a homeowner controls his home; nor does stock directly contribute to physical security in the same way that a home does. But regardless. Setting aside the flawed comparison to the Homestead Act and the G.I. Bill, let us proceed to the meat of the proposal:

Imagine if every newborn in America were to receive $6,000 at birth as a down payment on a productive life. With the magic of compound interest [ed: uh oh…], that sum could grow to $20,000 or more by the time the child reaches 18. This young adult could then apply his or her nest egg toward various investments, such as college tuition, a down payment on a first home, seed money for a legitimate business, or retirement savings. Given the number of children born in America each year, the annual cost of such a program would be about $24 billion—roughly what the government squanders on farm subsidies. The benefits, however, would be immeasurable.

Endowing the next generation with resources to invest in its own human capital and financial future would create not only a much broader middle class but also a more self-sufficient, skilled, and entrepreneurial workforce. Gradually, the U.S. would witness the birth of a mass investor class, with ever more citizens deriving their income from returns on financial holdings as well as from wages. There would be less need for a generous welfare state, and the interests of workers and business would be better aligned.

A Homestead Act for the twenty-first century could also offer inner-city kids a new social contract:if they play by the rules and graduate from high school, then a pot of money will allow them to invest in their own futures. Paired with financial-literacy education in schools, such a policy could help turn a culture of poverty and dependency into one of hope and opportunity.

First, the obvious issues. Going from $6,000 to $20,000 in 18 years assumes a rate of return of about 7%. Assuming that Halstead is interested in real returns (i.e. adjusted for inflation), this would require a rather aggressive investment strategy, certainly more so than can be done with bonds. So either the "down payment" would have to be actively managed (with the corresponding risk of catastrophic losses), or else we should settle for smaller hypothetical gains — perhaps a $6000 stake could double (in real terms) in 18 years, reflecting a real rate of return of 4%, which is still being generous.

Second, this is a universal welfare program. The starting stake must come from tax revenue, and it further reinforces the notion that it is the government's job to take care of everyone by confiscating wealth from those who are most successful (cue Ayn Rand rant here).

That said, it has a few interesting features which can be examined. Assuming that such a program were instituted exactly as described (ha ha), everyone would grow up knowing that there is a lump sum of money waiting, which is not large enough to finance consumption for any length of time, yet is easily large enough for a down payment on a house, or the starting capital of a small business or an investment portfolio. Combined with a prudent upbringing (ha ha), the child would have a great incentive to learn the fundamentals of budgeting and money management, or even entrepreneurialism. That this would be of tremendous benefit should go without saying, especially compared to the status quo of widespread financial illiteracy.

Additionally, as noted above, this would constitute a financial incentive for students to graduate from high school (or the equivalent — homeschoolers should benefit as well). At present, many students see no benefit to sticking it out when they could go directly into the workforce, legal or illegal. Given the abysmal content of many high schools, I sympathize; but in any event, this would cause students to reassess their interests.

Moreover, if social welfare programs were indeed scaled back (har har), they would be replaced by a market system that allows the new adults to do whatever they wish with their stake, and reap the benefits or consequenses of their choices. Government spending could thus be employed more efficiently (hee hee), reducing the total cost to taxpayers (giggle).

Of course, in the real world such a program would most likely cause a boost in sales of luxury SUVs to recent high-school grads. Government spending would continue to skyrocket, nary a program would be cut back, and young people would develop an even worse mentality of entitlement. And there would be a proliferation of credit cards targeted to middle-schoolers, secured with the assets in this "Homestead" account.

So, not really useful. But an interesting idea nonetheless. It would be fun to compare this with Heinlein's idea of "legacies" that he put forth in For Us, the Living.

Brought to You by NASA

Some days it's really easy to believe that most of our problems will be solved by advancing technology:

Robert Downs: Well, on the 2009 [Mars Science Laboratory] mission nuclear powered machine that they’re going to put up there, lots of power, and they are going to put this little device that’s going to be in the order of 200 cubic centimetres in size and it’s going to sit out as an arm on the rover and it’s going to come up close to the rocks and it’s going to shoot a laser at the rocks. And the laser’s going to excite the atoms, make them vibrate and they’re going to send a signal back - it’s in the order of a million times weaker than the laser and we’ll see these tiny little spots of light that the rock emits and we can use them as fingerprints and we can identify minerals that the rock is made out of.

In other words, a small, portable device that can perform laser spectroscopy. And the manufacturer is hoping to commercialize it, since it can do far more than identify minerals:

[Downs:] You can shoot the Raman and the laser goes through that white plastic, it identifies the three parts of Tylenol the aspirin and it tells you what the plastic is made out of. It works on leaves – I can identify the species of trees by shooting their leaves. I don’t think the biologists are aware of this yet. I have a friend who collects snakeskins, I shot the snakeskins and I can identify the species of snake. Last month researchers in Switzerland showed that with the Raman instrument they could detect breast cancer. So we don’t know where this is going, it’s a brand new technology basically made because NASA funded it to make it cheaper, created the new optics and so on. And then we have people like Mike Scott [of Apple Computer, see more in the original article], who’s willing to put their own pocket money out to actually create the databases required to identify things.

Hat tip to Samizdata, where Dale Amon calls the device "a real tricorder."

Thoughts on Imperial Grunts

In his fantastic book Imperial Grunts, Robert Kaplan returns again and again to the way in which our military is constrained by a top-heavy bureaucracy, in which soldiers on the ground often cannot act without confirmation from multiple levels of high-command officers. In his section on Afghanistan, Kaplan notes that Special Forces teams receiving "actionable intel" on insurgents cannot strike against them until they secure authorization from the higher ups, which typically takes three days; in that time, the intel often goes stale.

Similarly, our deployments in Columbia and the Phillipines are subject to incredibly restrictive rules of engagement, such that our forces there can clearly point to factors that will undermine their mission yet be unable to do anything about it. The ROE's are usually laid down by the highest levels of the Pentagon, and while the leadership is most sensitive to the political environment in Washington they are least connected to the situation on the ground. Often, American troops can lose goodwill when civilians see that they have the power to act against narco-gangs or terrorists, yet refuse to do so for reasons that the civilians discount.

In general, the problem seems to be that soldiers on the front lines are not given the command authority they need, or access to the logistical support they require. There are good reasons for this, from a certain point of view; the Pentagon wants its troops to operate according to a unified strategy, which can be set according to the dictates of grand strategy and politics. Individual units, operating to complete their own missions, can conceivably act in ways that harm a larger effort. Similarly, there are only so many logistical resources to go around. Unless an authority can allocate these resources, units in combat will consume resources out of proportion to their utility.

But this merely changes the institutional bias from too much action to too much inaction. Worse, it removes control from officers on the ground, who can most deftly apply their strengths. Furthermore, while the Pentagon is acutely sensitive to large-scale politics, it is inherently ignorant of local politics in each of the hundreds of deployments around the world. Orders that seem appropriate from a high level can become hamfisted at the micro.

There is another problem with removing control from the front lines, one that is prevalent in all branches of government: the "just following orders" syndrome. If low-level agents have no discretion, they can blame all of their actions on those higher than they, who gave the orders. This enables them to act without caring whether the policy is actually helpful, or whether it is counterproductive. Meanwhile, those who give the original orders are often too powerful to discipline directly. This leads to what Hans Sherrer calls "bureaucratic inhumanity." It is true that soldiers are taught that "just following orders" is no excuse; but this just means that soldiers bear all the responsibility with relatively little of the power.

Meanwhile, in war as in everything else, the key is to respond to changing conditions more quickly than your adversary can. (See John Boyd for more.) The present structure of our military is slow and lumbering, an Industrial-Age organization in an Information-Age world. Something must be done.

Releasing control to the front line is not the hard part, and happens more often than I have implied, but only when it is relatively uncomplicated. The hard part is how to allocate logistical resources. And here, Kaplan is at his best. He repeatedly criticizes the military's bloated logistical tail, which consumes far too many resources just supporting itself to be able to nimbly support the troops on the front line. Kaplan argues convincingly that our troops would be more effective if there were fewer of them who were capable of more autonomous action. His harshest scorn is reserved for Camp Victory, the Army deployment in Iraq that is overrun with REMF's.

Robert Kaplan is an incredible observer of conditions on the ground, and the nobility and sacrifice of our soldiers. Everyone who is at all interested in the military or the future of American imperialism should read Imperial Grunts.

Quote of the Day

An "intellectual" is a man who takes more words than he needs to say more than he knows.

--President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Quote of the Day

The mind is not a storehouse to be filled
but an instrument to be used.

John Gardner

(Though to be precise, your mental instrument can be best used when it is guided by knowledge; but still, knowledge is nothing without application.)

Children and Childlessness

Shannon Love over at Chicago Boyz has written a piece on the economic consequenses of the growing numbers of childless adults. She argues that such adults are economic free-riders, since they benefit from society while doing nothing to perpetuate that society. This is not a moral judgement per se, as it does not consider whether such adults are childless by choice; not only are marriages occurring later and later in the West, but fertility seems to be lower in industrialized societies. But there can be no doubt that growing numbers of people have decided to remain childless, for reasons of personal convenience, rational economic calculation, or ideology.

The economic issue is perhaps the least difficult to address. Love writes:

In the pre-industrial era, children almost always contributed to the economic success of the family directly. Agriculture depended heavily on the labor of children, and children brought further benefits by extending support networks via marriages. In the industrial era, however, children began to contribute less and less while consuming more and more. Nowadays, children usually return very little if any economic benefit to the parents.

Being a parent costs one economically. Although we socialize some cost, such as education, parents pay most of the cost of raising a child. Parents also lose out in non-monetary ways such as in a loss of flexibility in when and where they work. If an individual sets out to maximize his lifetime income, avoiding having children would be step one.

A large part of this situation, I think, is due to child-labor laws, and the associated attitude that children are entitled not to work, and furthermore must not work for a living for fear that it would impact their (often pointless) schooling. My own observations seem to indicate the opposite. A struggling family I know in New York has seven children; at least one of them chose to work "under the table" (i.e. illegally) for businesses in the area starting from when he was twelve. Some of the other sons had their own catering business. Not only did their wages and earnings help pay for essentials, but the work experience has made them all more disciplined and dependable; the eldest son recently graduated college with a degree in business management.

Conversely, those of us who are unused to employment have a terrible work ethic and tend to spend money all the more freely for its being unearned. Additionally, people are waiting longer and longer after reaching legal age to go out and look for empoyment, simply because they can.

We must take steps to correct the present situation, in which children are incredibly expensive leeches for the first twenty years or more. One first step is to dramatically revise the child-labor laws, and to reprogram public attitudes towards honest work. As Thomas Sowell writes:

At one time, child labor laws were used to stop youngsters whose ages had not yet reached double digits from working in exhausting and dangerous factories and mines. Today, they are used to keep big healthy teenagers from handling pieces of paper in air-conditioned offices.

But this only begins to address one point leading to childlessness, the economic cost. Many people have chosen not to have children either because they don't want the hardship, or because they actually oppose childbirth in general. This is a more serious problem, having to do with societal attitudes and principles more than economic concerns. And here, Ms. Love's piece falls short; she does not point out that often, birth rates correlate strongly with the level of religious practice. This is certainly true in the Jewish community:

[The Orthodox] fertility rate is far above the Jewish norm. As against the overall average of 1.86 children per Jewish woman, an informed estimate gives figures ranging upward from 3.3 children in “modern Orthodox” families to 6.6 in Haredi or “ultra-Orthodox” families to a whopping 7.9 in families of Hasidim. These numbers are, of course, difficult to pin down definitively, but anecdotal evidence is compelling. In a single year, according to a nurse at one hospital in the Lakewood, New Jersey area serving a right-wing Orthodox population, 1,700 babies were born to 5,500 local families, yielding a rate of 358 births per thousand women. (The overall American rate is 65 births per thousand women.)

Religious Jews see childbirth as a Divine imperative, and a crucial obligation to the community. We are not alone in that regard:

The more Islamic a country, the higher the birthrate: Iran, Jordan, Lybia, Kuwait and Eritrea double their populations in 20 years or less, up to twice as fast as India.

I have thought for a long time that strong religions are a Darwinian survival trait for societies. Secularism offers few reasons why the perpetuation of a society is worth striving for. Is it any surprise that the "blue" states in the United States are steadily losing congressional seats to the "red" states?

God Bless Congressman Lantos

Be sure to watch this interview by Pajamas Media of Congressman Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), the only Holocaust survivor in Congress and a consistent champion of liberty. He recently chaired a subcommittee hearing to nail down Yahoo and Google for cooperating with China's political repression. The video linked above shows clips from that hearing, which demonstrate just how easily the companies have rationalized their complicity. We need about twenty more Lantoses, fast.

To Each According to His Needs?

A recent study by the Boston Consulting Co. says that 60% of private wealth in China is concentrated in the hands of 0.6% of the population.

—J. Christoph Amberger, executive publisher of the Taipan Group's "Dynamic Market Alert"

(By comparison, the wealthiest 1% of Americans had 33.4% of the United States's net worth in 2001, and 39.7% of America's financial wealth. Not sure what this proves, but interesting nonetheless.)

(Addendum: the figures in the above link that the esteemed G. William Donhoff is hyperventilating over, it seems to me, simply illustrate the 20/80 Rule, i.e. that 20% of people account for 80% of the results in any setting. This should hardly come as a surprise to him.)

The Incompleteness of the Free-Market Model

When dealing with complex human interactions, people have often found it useful to construct simplified models which, while they do not capture the full intricacies of a given interaction, are close enough so that one can abstract away from the human and draw conclusions based on mathematics or logic. In international relations one find the Realist model, which posits that all nations are unitary actors that have the same basic motivation, to become more powerful. This allows an analyst to construct scenarios in advance, which can be used to establish baselines for states' behavior when real crises erupt. (That this model becomes disastrous when academics confuse Realism with reality, unfortunately, is another matter.)

The trick when building such models is that they have to be simple enough to use, yet must include enough moving parts to do a good enough approximation of the real world. When your simplification is too simple, it will inevitably lead you down the wrong path.

In market economics, the standard model consists of two groups of actors: buyers and sellers. They engage in positive-sum interactions to their mutual benefit, efficiently allocating resources and creating a veritable paradise of industry and affluence. No formal place in this model is given to governments or analogous actors, despite their omnipresence. Governments are seen as intruders into the market to the extent that they are involved at all, spoiling with their touch the pristine operation of pure economics. Governments are expected to keep the peace and leave it at that.

As pleasant as such a vision might be for some, it bears no relation to reality, anywhere. The point need not be belabored; governments everywhere intervene in the market routinely. And not just governments, either; increasingly, elements of civil society act when they perceive a threat from seemingly unrelated transactions, for example when farmers will protest the construction of factories that could pollute their water.

The truth is, economic transactions do not occur in isolation. Third parties have an inherent and inalienable interest in the outcome of market interactions. First, such transactions could have incidental effects (such as pollution, or the disruption of established industries, or consuming common resources such as roads) that directly impact third parties. Second (especially with regard to governments), economic transactions cause power shifts. For a government (or an established company or community) to allow the free market to increase the power of an adversary, incidental to its normal operation, would be foolhardy; this is why we have blockades and trade embargoes.

Interested third parties, far from being intrusions onto the free market, are an integral part of that market and always will be. Market transactions will only occur once their expected utility outweighs any opposition put up by third parties. Sufficiently motivated third parties can disrupt markets entirely. That being the case, the typical market model is flawed for neglecting interested third parties.

An improved model would ideally take into account two additional factors: direct incidental impacts on surrounding parties, and changes in relative power. Can this be done without being bogged down in excessive complexity? I don't know. But thinkers who venerate the austere genius of the free market should acknowledge that their model is critically deficient in the same way that political Realism is, and it is equally naíve to rely exclusively on either.

Quote of the Day

If five firemen get killed fighting a fire, what do you do? Let the building burn?

I wish people in Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their system.

—Lt. Col. "Duke" Christie, Special Forces, quoted in Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts, p. 82

Jewlicious Thoughts

Long-time readers of this blog willl know that I have frequently complained about what I saw as a declining interest in fine arts within the Jewish community, at least those parts of it I interacted with. Well, Rabbi Yonah and the crew at Jewlicious decided to do something about it. I was blown away by the whole shabbaton, but most of all by the incredible collection of talent, Jewish and non-Jewish, that was put together for us. Not only did they perform, but they led jam sessions and workshops with the students. The spoken-word poetry workshop run by Besskepp and a friend of his (I forget the name) was especially noteworthy, as students writing on short notice produced some incredibly powerful poetry.

Almost around the clock, students were playing music and singing with Rabbi Yonah, Rabbi Leibish, and many other fantastic artists. The best thing was that none of the music was of that excrable "Jewpop" variety (which is all that I heard at YU); while most of the music had Jewish content, the musical styles were either authentic (and good), or heavily influenced by other musical styles such as jazz, acoustic rock, or funk (and good). The incredible concert was opened by the Makkabees, who played death-metal covers of standard Jewish songs like "Shabbat Shalom." Words simply cannot describe.

I really think that the Shabbaton may end up being the catalyst for a new revival of Jewish creativity. Hundreds of students were exposed to truly innovative and electrifying musicians and writers, and many of us went away inspired to do our own work. (I'm not sure if I want to post the poetry I wrote. It was pretty intense. Think Fidelis, but about fifty times creepier.)

For the first time in a long time, I really think that religious Jewish culture is being revitalized. The Jewlicious Shabbaton should stand in our history as a critical event in that process.

Jewlicious at the Beach 2: Fun With Digital Photography

Freshly-applied henna + "Apple Photo Booth" FX = Spawn of Hell!

Originally uploaded by Mastiff.

Jewlicious at the Beach 2, Coming Soon

I'm typing right now on a Mac that Apple generously donated to the Jewlicious convention in Long Beach, CA. The event has been amazing so far, and I will have an awful lot to write about once I get time. For now, I'll leave you with a quick thought from one of the writers of a short documentary, "The Tribe," which I heartily recommend. He said that the two core aspects of the Jewish identity, shared by Jews anywhere on the religious spectrum, were a sense of being on the outside, and being unusually comfortable with abstraction.

This goes all the way back, of course. Our forefathers were called "Ivri," Hebrew, meaning "those on the other side." And we were unique in the world in that we worshipped a deity without any sort of physical representation. God exists, as a concept, only in our minds and our books (which themselves are only someone's mind captured for eternity). More than that, our tradition says that God is not simply a being, but at the same time a principle. This affinity for abstract principles has served us in good stead throughout the centuries; I suspect that it could be the root of the famed Jewish skill with managing money.

More to come in a few days. In the meanwhile, some additions to the blogroll are going up in just a bit.

P.s.: Matisyahu's baby is really, really cute.

Quote of the Day

The evil of the current [organ-donation] regime is not that innocent people are dying to uphold a principle. Indeed, it is only for principles that people should be compelled to die. It is, rather, that this is a pretentious counterfeit principle.

—Lloyd Cohen, writing about his proposal for an organ market.

Electronic Currency

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the IRS estimates unpaid taxes at roughly $290 billion. That's nearly enough to close the budget deficit on its own if it were collected, without any changes in government policy. Whatever your views on taxation, it is grossly unjust for some people to break the law and let the tab fall more heavily on their fellow citizens. Yet our present system of taxation relies heavily on self-reporting; tax fraud can be discovered in individual cases, but it seems impossible to halt entirely.

Meanwhile, we are moving more and more in the direction of two loosely-connected economies: a cash economy and a cashless economy which runs on electronic transactions. The cash economy is largely the province of lawbreakers of one sort or another, whether it be those who want to avoid what they consider excessive taxation of otherwise-legal activities, or those who actually make and spend their money illegally. The cashless economy as it presently functions can be incredibly convenient for users but often has unreasonable transaction costs, especially for businesses. (For example, here are the fees paid by the merchant for each Visa transaction.)

Additionally, the proliferation of payment schemes can make recordkeeping and budgeting far too complicated. This is compounded by the sloppiness with which most people manage their money in any event. We as a society depend too much on high-interest credit for our own good, and people far too easily waste their money on frivolous expenses. A daily visit to Starbucks (assuming $3 a day) will set you back $1000 per year. That same money in an investment account could secure your eventual retirement.

Even with the growth in electronic funds transfers, cash has refused to die. This is primarily because individuals have had no convenient way to accept electronic payments. It is hard to match the ease of digging into your pocket for a few bucks. Yet this competitive advantage is beginning to disappear. Paypal, for example, allows low-volume transactions for free. Admittedly the process is still relatively clunky, but that is merely a matter of improving the interface. I could easily imagine someone writing a macro for a cheap handheld internet device that could make Paypal transfers as quick as credit-card transactions are today.

Governments have a large interest in eliminating cash altogether. If all transactions were electronic, they could be routed through a central government clearinghouse, giving a government realtime data on all transactions using that currency. Aside from the obvious uses for taxation, a record of transactions could also be used to generate economic data, detect and prosecute monetary crimes, or (more ominously) to exert control over citizens by regulating how they can make and spend their money. (Such a scenario is a favorite bugbear of gold-afficionados and black-helicoper types. That does not make it any less plausible.)

Some may argue that governments have no right to control people's money in this way, saying that it represents a dangerous infraction on property rights. Perhaps; on the other hand, money is issued by governments to serve as a symbol for value. It is a crime to deface Federal Reserve Notes; in a real sense, governments never give up ownership of their currencies. Citizens are permitted to use government property as a medium for exchange. A parallel can be drawn with public roads and the like.

It is doubtful that electronic currencies and a centralized clearinghouse would be any greater an infringement of property rights and privacy than our current system. Governments can freeze bank accounts or confiscate cash; governments can demand financial records from banks or investment professionals. The only difference is one of efficiency. In a centralized system, there can be no hope of escaping government scrutiny. But that can work to our benefit, if property crimes and tax evasion are curtailed, and if transaction costs for electronic currencies went down. Additionally, proper recordkeeping would become trivially easy. A large segment of the parasite economy (not in a derogatory sense, just in the sense that tax preparers et cetera add little value to the larger economy) would become obsolete.

In all likelihood, a parallel economy based on barter and private currencies would arise. There are some small moves towards such a system already. But criminals who use such things (as opposed to private citizens worried about government control) would lose their easy interface to the legitimate economy, once anonymous cash is replaced. It becomes more difficult to benefit from your crimes safely.

The question now becomes whether such a system is cost-effective, and how governments who use such a system can be prevented from turning it into a tool for oppression. But if sourced transactions allow us to nearly close the deficit, we should at least take a closer look. (Whether politicians can resist spending beyond their means regardless is another problem.)

Bullish or Bearish on Bombs?

I do a lot of research in stock trading and mutual funds. In the market, everyone tries to guess which way particular stocks are headed. When you guess right, you get rich. When you guess wrong, you can get wiped out. Such are the risks and rewards of playing the market.

Traders can choose between two general strategies when looking at a possible stock trade: fundamental investing and technical analysis. Fundamental investors compare a stock's price with the financial performance of the underlying company. This can be as simple as comparing price with sales or profits or dividend yields, or you can get into arcane ratios such as enterprise/sales or cash flow versus liabilities. Experienced analysts factor in the company strategy and whether it is likely to succeed in the long run. Essentially, the philosophy behind fundamental investing is to find companies that should be worth more than they actually are, or else should perform well in the future, and then buy the stock and hold on until the stock lives up to its potential.

Technical traders, on the other hand, are relatively uninterested in the underlying company. Stock prices are dependent on the behavior of traders alone, they say, and you can learn everything you need to know about a stock by looking for patterns in its actual price movements, or in volume, or in abstract derivatives of both. Essentially, you predict future behavior by interpreting past behavior alone, without looking at the nebulous potentialities of the fundamental investors.

Of course, the wise trader will employ both methods. A pure fundamental investor risks buying a stock that stalls or declines regardless of its potential, and being too afraid to cut his losses when the stock could recover any day now! And the technical trader risks being blindsided by market meltdowns caused by crisis in the underlying company. Conversely, the fundamentalist will often avoid stocks that rack up huge gains from momentum alone, while the technician will be left behind when a company introduces the next miracle technology or new way of doing business.

In analyzing geopolitics, we often face a similar choice. The present crisis over Iranian nuclear ambitions is a case in point. Looking at a historical trend, there can be no doubt that Iran wants nuclear weapons and will successfully develop them if given enough time. Similarly, there is a clear historical record of Iran's violence against her neighbors and other countries, whether it be the takeover of the U.S. embassy, the bombing of the Buenos Ares Jewish Community Center, or the continuing support for Hizbullah, Hamas, and Shia militias in Iraq. That record leads us to the reasonable conclusion that a nuclear umbrella would free Iran to do more of the same.

On the other hand, the Iranian regime is notoriously harsh and unpopular with the people. Iran has a large middle class and student body, and a history of revolution. In the past years there have been persistent reports of armed attacks against regime installations, leading many to predict an imminent overthow of the mullahs (Michael Ledeen famously amog them). The recent crash of a jet carrying the senior leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and the multiple assassination attempts against President Ahmadinejad, have only made people more hopeful that the end is near.

Complicating the picture are the large costs of a military strike against the nuclear program, to say nothing of the danger of regional chaos. The relative attractiveness of waiting for the Iranians to rise up is hard to argue with. But it is nearly impossible to predict a discontinuous change in the course of Iranian politics, and every day we wait puts the mullahs that much closer to their goal.

Do we bow to the weight of seeming historical inevitability and strike Iran, setting off a firestorm in the process? Or do we put our hope in the Iranian people, and run the risk of waking up one morning to a new era of nuclear blackmail?

Dare we put our trust in miracles?

Thesis Update

Apologies for the nonexistent posting last week. I've been hard at work (some of the time, anyway) on my thesis, and can now proudly report that I have a completed draft. Woo-hoo!

Once I finish drawing up some accompanying diagrams, I get to send it off to my professors. There will almost certainly be some revisions, but I should have a final draft ready soon.

If you need a primer on what's been going on in the last week, just go to the Belmont Club and keep scrolling. Not much good news; but then, the good news isn't what we need to keep up with, is it?

How Government Agriculture Policies Stifle Energy Independence

Today's print Wall Street Journal carries an article examining how Brazil managed to shift its gasoline consumption habits, so that it now relies heavily on diesel and ethanol fuel. Government action was required to build up the retail infrastructure, and Brazil simply mandated that its state-run oil company Petrobras sell ethanol at all of its fuel stations. Another critical component was reducing ethanol's price, relative to gasoline. Most of the price was dependent on the price of sugar, which was heavily subsidized. When Brazil reformed its agricultural subsidies, growers were forced to produce more ethanol with their crop, bringing down the price.

In the United States, we get most of our ethanol not from sugar, but from corn. This is due in no small part to the powerful sugar lobby, which has managed to keep government price supports high at the same time as it has nearly shut foreign sugar imports out of the market, via massive tarriffs and import quotas. Looking at the commodities markets, today's price for international sugar (Sugar #11) is roughly three quarters that of domestic sugar (Sugar #14). These are wholesale prices for raw, unprocessed sugar, which means that the difference for consumers is even greater.

Ironically, the sugar regime is so restrictive that emergency imports were necessary after Hurricane Katrina to prevent domestic shortages; and even these imports were temporary, and did nothing to alleviate the long-term tightness in supply.

Corn production is also affected by sugar subsidies. The price of high-fructose corn syrup, a sugar substitute, closely tracks that of sugar itself. And corn also receives more direct subsidies, which are actually in breach of global trade agreements. The net effect of all this government intervention is to keep prices for sugar and corn higher than they need to be, making ethanol less able to compete with gasoline.

It is true that even with the status quo, ethanol is currently cheaper than gasoline. As of last year's technology, ethanol is price-competitive with gasoline when oil sells for above $50 per barrel, and including the current government ethanol subsidies, is competitive at $32 per barrel. But this does not include the significant cost required to set up the necessary infrastructure. At present, ethanol blends are only sold at about 500 stations, according to the Wall Street Journal article.

Is ethanol a viable alternative to gasoline? Brazil doesn't seem to mind. And at a time when our reliance on petroleum helps support our enemies in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, it is absurd to restrain the growth of alternatives with corrupt government price controls.

Biodiesel, Yea or Nay?

I had been under the impression for some time that the US government's subsidies for biodiesel production were misguided, as producing biodiesel supposedly cost more fossil fuels than it replaced. As to why the US government would continue to subsidize biodiesel… well, soybean growers are generally found in swing states, right?

But that logic does not explain why environmental activists would pursue biodiesel with such fervor. Admittedly, many environmentalists ignore economic costs in favor of environmental impact, but one might expect them to be able to account for the direct fuel costs of producing biodiesel in the first place.

Today I stumbled on this 1998 report by the Depts. of Agriculture and Energy on the "life-cycle" costs of biodiesel, which explains much of the difference (section 9.2.2):

A survey of commercial technology for biodiesel reveals that there is high degree of variation on reported steam and electricity requirements for the transesterification process. High and low estimates for both steam and electricity used in the model are indicated in Table 138….

Steam requirements vary 3.5-fold from the lowest to the highest value. Electricity varies 4.4-fold. This high degree of variability warrants testing the range of these assumptions in our model to assess the uncertainty of our overall results related to this assumption. Furthermore, energy inputs for soybean oil conversion are a substantial part of the life cycle, making this variability even more important.

In other words, biodiesel detractors use the high values for energy consumption, while biodiesel advocates use the low values. Energy and resource consumption is even lower if the projections assume that biodiesel production occurs in particular ideal regions of the country, such as Chicago (section 9.2.1).

The report concludes that on average:

Biodiesel yields 3.2 units of fuel product energy for every
unit of fossil energy consumed in its life cycle. The production of B20 [20% biodiesel, 80% diesel] yields 0.98 units of fuel product energy for every unit of fossil energy consumed. By contrast, petroleum diesel’s life cycle yields only 0.83 units of fuel product energy per unit of fossil energy consumed.

Apparently, biodiesel is indeed more energy-efficient than petroleum-based fuel. This is especially true since in a comptetitive marketplace, producers will be driven to employ more efficient processing methods, as opposed to the less efficient ones. Now, the only catch is to build up the necessary infrastructure. Few gas stations sell biodiesel (ironically, Willie Nelson's B20 mix "BioWillie" is mostly sold in Texas), and unless consumers can easily switch over, they will have little incentive to do so.

The United States can grow truly awe-inspiring amounts of food, so much that we have to pay farmers to grow less. If biodiesel is truly a viable alternative to petroleum, I see no reason why we should not implement it as quickly as we can. (Especially with the Iranians acting up…)

Doctrinal Inadequacy

A recent report in the Washington Post by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British officer who served in Iraq, argues that US military efforts there are hampered in two critical areas. First, the military is too wedded to the notion of "killing people and breaking stuff," and has yet to systematically internalize the lessons and methods of a proper counterinsurgency, or of using military means to achieve political ends. Second, the military chain of command remains rigidly hierarchical and prone to micromanagement from the top; while the need for decentralized control or "mission command" is recognized in theory, little has been done to implement it in practice. Additionally, the military was profoundly weakened in the 1990s, losing a great deal of institutional memory and skill.

Key paragraphs:

Nonetheless, the characteristic U.S. military intent has remained one of uncompromising destruction of the enemy’s forces, rather than a more finely tuned harnessing of military effect to serve political intent—a distinction in the institutional understanding of military purpose that becomes highly significant when an army attuned to conventional warfare suddenly needs to adapt to the more subtle political framework of a COIN [counterinsurgency] campaign.

...

Commanders and staff at all levels were strikingly conscious of their duty, but rarely if ever questioned authority, and were reluctant to deviate from precise instructions. Staunch loyalty upward and conformity to one’s superior were noticeable traits. Each commander had his own style, but if there was a common trend it was for micro-management, with many hours devoted to daily briefings and updates. Planning tended to be staff driven and focused on process rather than end effect. The net effect was highly centralised decision-making, which worked when serving a commander with a gift for retaining detail and concurrently managing a plethora of issues, but all too readily developed undue inertia. Moreover, it tended to discourage lower level initiative and adaptability, even when commanders consciously encouraged both.

...

A significant symptom, and in time a catalyst for the de-professionalisation of the Army, was the so-called exodus of the captains, now a well documented phenomenon. Captains are a particularly significant rank in the U.S. Army, as they provide the company commanders, and it is arguably company and squad commanders who are the lynchpin in the de-centralised operations that tend to characterise COIN and S&R campaigns. According to Mark R. Lewis, in the mid-90s, junior officers, particularly captains, began leaving the Army in increasing numbers. The captain attrition rate exceeded the in-flow necessary to maintain a steady state, such that by 2000 the Army could fill only 56% of those positions intended for experienced captains with officers of the right quality and experience.

...

Tempting though it may be to attribute all the problems in OIF to U.S. institutional ineptitude and a collective closed view of the world, this is simplistic, quite apart from being unjust. Enlightened Americans in theatre, military and civilian, were surprisingly willing, for such a powerful nation, to bare their professional souls and heed advice from other nationals. A visit to various U.S. Army establishments in May 2005 to research this paper revealed a similar open-mindedness, frankness, and hunger to learn and adapt, in order to improve military effectiveness. It was also clear that Army senior leadership was actively engaged.

...

However, to conclude, as some do, that the Army is simply incompetent or inflexible, is simplistic and quite erroneous. If anything the Army has been a victim of its own successful development as the ultimate warfighting machine. Always seeing itself as an instrument of national survival, over time the Army has developed a marked and uncompromising focus on conventional warfighting, leaving it ill-prepared for the unconventional operations that characterise OIF Phase 4. Moreover, its strong conventional warfighting organisational culture and centralised way of command have tended to discourage the necessary swift adaptation to the demands of Phase 4. Its cultural singularity and insularity have compounded the problem, as has the recent so-called ‘de-professionalisation’.

Read the whole thing.

The Palestinians Have Chosen

Voting results have come out in the most recent Palestinian elections, giving Hamas a commanding majority in the Palestinian parliament. In other words, a terrorist organization that has not even had the decency to pretend for the audience that it had mellowed (as did Fatah) is now in effective control of a semi-autonomous region containing over 2.5 million people.

It is true that a not-insignificant component of their victory was out of popular disgust with Fatah, which was notoriously corrupt and unable to provide basic services and security for the PA. But Palestinians could have voted for the independent party of a former PA finance minister who also happened to be a World Bank official (can't find the name at the moment). That they voted for Hamas instead cannot be ignored.

Some are looking for a silver lining, saying that a Hamas in power must inevitably moderate itself as it focuses more on good governance. Perhaps; if so, I certainly will not mind much. But there is absolutely no reason to assume that will happen; Hamas's much-touted schools and hospitals are nothing more than recruiting centers for the Jihad, and everything they do is geared towards that goal. Will they do otherwise with the resources of the PA? Doubtful.

Should the Palestinians continue their war, Israel cannot hesitiate. The Palestinian populace has publicly thrown its support behind a program of anihilation, and they should face the consequences should that program be carried out.

Quote of the Day

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other.

—George Orwell, "Pacifism and the War" (1942).

The Quick and the Dead: War in Open Societies

In 1989, warfighting theory was thrown into upheaval by the publication of "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation," by William S. Lind, Colonel Keith Nightengale (USA),  Captain John F. Schmitt (USMC), Colonel Joseph W. Sutton (USA), and Lieutenant Colonel Gary I. Wilson (USMCR). They pointed out the trend in war toward a greater blurring of the distinctions between soldier and civilian, frontline and rear, state and nonstate actor; they then predicted that this trend would culminate in what they called "fourth-generation warfare," or 4GW:

In broad terms, fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity. Major military facilities, such as airfields, fixed communications sites, and large headquarters will become rarities because of their vulnerability; the same may be true of civilian equivalents, such as seats of government, power plants, and industrial sites (including knowledge as well as manufacturing industries). Success will depend heavily on effectiveness in joint operations as lines between responsibility and mission become very blurred. Again, all these elements are present in third generation warfare; fourth generation will merely accentuate them….

A major target will be the enemy population's support of its government and the war. Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions….

Terrorists use a free society's freedom and openness, its greatest strengths, against it. They can move freely within our society while actively working to subvert it. They use our democratic rights not only to penetrate but also to defend themselves.

Building on this work, many academics began thinking about how the nature of war itself was changing. Two researchers whose work I have followed for several years now are John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt at the RAND Corporation, who have written extensively on swarming in battle, and what they call "Netwar" (for example, see here). Starting at least a decade ago, every major work that they have published has included the following policy implications: "Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks…. It takes networks to fight networks…. Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages."

While the US military and government appreciate the need for networking and more flexible communications, at least in theory (which is already a sizeable improvement over earlier attitudes), the fundamental approach has been to graft network structures onto fundamentally hierarchical organizations, without restructuring those organizations at all. We are better now at networking than ever before, but we are still constrained by the inherent limitations of the underlying hierarchies.

Not so our enemies. It is unclear to what extent terror groups were already moving towards 4GW and decentralized networks on their own, and how much they learned from the theoretical work of Western warfighting scholars. But it is clear that they have learned from us. When al-Qaida took responsibility for 9/11, their statement made repeated, explicit reference to 4GW theory:

The time has come for the Islamic movements facing a general crusader offensive to internalize the rules of fourth-generation warfare. They must consolidate appropriate strategic thought, and make appropriate military preparations. They must increase interest in Da'wa [proselytizing], and recruit the peoples' public and political support. In addition to the religious obligation, this has become an integral part of the means to triumph in fourth-generation warfare. Old strategists, such as [von] Clausewitz and Mao Zedong, have already indicated this. Perhaps the best example is the phenomenon of the intifada, that wiped out the Zionist military's mighty superiority over the Muslim Palestinian people.

Here we have one of the fundamental dangers of an open society: its enemies can learn from its expertise just as quickly as the society itself can—especially when military doctrines are developed in public discussion, allowing adversaries to react accordingly or use such doctrines themselves. That is not to say necessarily that open societies are doomed in war (though it is worth noting that historically, most doctrinal discussions were censored from the public view during wartime), but it does highlight the costs of inflexibility.

If an open society is to disseminate the best work of its military theorists, it had better be implementing those theorists' recommendations as quickly as they determine that those recommendations are sound. Otherwise, the society risks falling victim to strategies of its own devising, purely due to its institutional lethargy. Yet in the United States, often our best theorists were made into pariahs because their work threatened to upset the wrong applecarts. For example, Col. John Boyd, despite his brilliance and the self-evident truth of his OODA Loop, and despite his crucial work on the F-16 fighter, was quickly blackballed from polite company among Pentagon brass. Only the Marine Corps appreciated him fully, and took the erstwhile fighter pilot under its wing during the latter portion of Col. Boyd's life.

This seems to be a problem in all levels of public life, where changes that desperately need to happen are axed for fear of disrupting the status quo. We cannot afford the luxury of such complacence for long, especially as new threats are looming ever closer. Life is change; if our institutions will not change to better fit the need, we will all pay the price.

Liberalism Face to Face with Death

Little Green Footballs points to news of the al-Masri trial, in which British feel-good liberalism is having to confront the core contradiction in its nature:

COPIES of the Koran were handed to the jurors in the Abu Hamza trial yesterday as his defence argued that some of the cleric’s “offensive” statements were drawn directly from Islam’s holy book.

Edward Fitzgerald, QC, for the defence, said that Abu Hamza’s interpretation of the Koran was that it imposed an obligation on Muslims to do jihad and fight in the defence of their religion. He said that the Crown case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was “simplistic in the extreme”.

He added: “It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.”

In other words, so long as incitement to murder is justified on religious grounds, it should be protected just as any other religion. This forces liberalism to face squarely what it has steadfastly avoided looking at for decades: some religions are evil.

Once the British understood this, such as when they destroyed the Thuggee cult in India. Now, they must learn again that multiculturalism is incompatible with true peace.

(I wonder whether the defense barristers did this intentionally to bring the topic to greater attention. If so, kudos to them.)

An Educational Ideal for a Changing World, Part 2

Yesterday, I outlined in broad strokes the problems I see in our predominent educational model. Today, I would like to suggest a new model for education designed to produce citizens who are moral, prudent, creative, skilled, flexible, and knowledgeable.

It is worth noting that many of the suggestions to follow are such radical breaks from established procedure that it will take a lot of tinkering to translate them into the real world. For purposes of this piece, let us assume that we live in the best of all possible worlds, where wonderful teachers have a capable administration backing them up and access to huge amounts of money, and a supportive community of parents. (And noses exist to hold up our spectacles, et cetera. But regardless…)

1. Instead of grouping students by age, this new model would borrow from the structure used in Scouting. Within a Scout troop, scouts are assigned to patrols in which the age spread is usually two to three years. Senior scouts in each patrol assume leadership, and train their younger comrades for eventual leadership themselves. More importantly, even the younger patrols are constantly around the senior patrols made up of older teenagers, and older scouts are constantly teaching skills and techniques to the younger scouts as well as modeling proper behavior (both of which help in developing the older scouts' skills as well, and force them to live up to a higher standard).

The precise way in which this could be emulated in a school would have to be worked out. But the guiding principles would be youth mentoring, of collaboration with older students, and of youth leadership within the class. It is well known that the best way to learn something is to teach it, and to have senior students teaching more junior ones (with proper supervision) would powerfully reinforce their own skills. Additionally, the influence of older students may restrain the emergence of the "Lord of the Flies" mentality and cliqueishness that we often see in typical classes, and more quickly socialize younger students to proper modes of behavior.

2. Classrooms would be specially designed from the start to inspire the proper mental atmosphere. The architecture and furnishings would be calculated to convey a sense of wonder, of expansiveness, of endless possibility. Students could either sit in chairs and at desks that are properly designed to promote good posture and avoid back probelms, or they could stand behind lecterns (such as this one) that allow students to rock back and forth or otherwise fidget as necessary. Chairs or lecterns could be placed anywhere in the room, within reason.

Periodically, classes would be held outside, among trees or other vegetation. Nature is both a source of some of life's greatest wonders and lessons, and a wonderful tool for calming students who feel stifled by the cloistered environment of a classroom.

Learning materials would be designed to be as light as possible. Large textbooks would be broken into smaller segments, computerized materials would be used if possible, and care would be taken to avoid the back problems that plague our schools today. Additionally, classes would incorporate movement and exercise whenever possible, as well as teaching basic forms of meditation so that students can learn to quiet their emotions and focus, without coercion or excessive medication. Students (indeed, some adults) must learn that they are not hostage to the vagaries of their neurotransmitters, but can exert conscious control over what they think, feel, and perceive.

3. The fine arts would be a primary focus, following Aristotle's dictum that music and art are the best ways to teach love for the Good. All students would be taught at least one instrument, or at least one physical medium, or dancing, or writing, or (optionally) any of these in combination. Moreover, suplies and computer equipment such as graphics programs or CAD systems would be made available so that students can create their own music, or paintings, or stories, or poetry, or inventions, and package them for wide distribution. Students would be encouraged to immerse themselves in artistic and mechanical creativity.

There would be frequent exhibitions on campus by musicians or other artists, open to students, parents, and the general community. Students would thus learn what good art looks and sounds like, and be inspired to create their own. This would also be meant to innoculate students from degenerate culture, as much as possible.

4. All subjects would be interdisciplinary, as much as possible. Additionally, students would learn the different modes of thought: formal and informal logic, reductionism, holism, and different ways of understanding the outside world. The goal would be to make them more agile and rigorous thinkers, who can transcend particular paradigms, adapt to changing circumstances, and be effective thinkers at all times. Students would also learn how to balance the head against the heart, and not to emphasize one at the expense of the other; emotion and logic should work hand in hand, not at cross-purposes.

5. Students would be taught from day one how to manage their finances. All students would learn about credit cards, home loans, budgeting, how to spend money wisely, and the basics of investing. Optional classes would teach entreprenuerialism, more advanced finance, and organization and logistics. (The truth is, such things are not hard to learn at all if you start early.) Students would draw up budgets and track their spending habits, receiving guidance from teachers. They would also be given the resources and knowledge to form their own businesses, and encouragement and mentoring from successful businessmen in the community.

Moreover, students would be taught to treat money as an organic part of their moral behavior. Money, strictly speaking, simply allows the possessor to do more things; developing the proper attitude towards money will lead to healthier behavior and avoid crass materialism or sacrificing morality for the sake of material gain.

6. Most of all, students would be taught civics and morality. This does not mean heavyhanded indoctrination; rather, they would learn all of the classic thinkers on the need for civics, and the foundation of morality. Religious schools would have a stronger basis to draw on here, and should take full advantage of it; yet even secular schools have the great thinkers of the Western tradition. This is the key point: it does no good to train brilliant pupils if they go on to harm people and society with their brilliance. Power brings responsibility, and that responsibility must be taught.

A few additional points. The school day would be lengthened to better match the typical work schedule; parents should not have to choose between their work and their children. The additional time would be entirely unstructured, giving students a chance to play, think, take advantage of school facilities, do research, and unwind. School should not be entirely regimented; children are not factory workers, but fresh minds and bodies. This time could also be used for in-school assignments. "Homework" as such, with the exception of long-term assignments, would not exist. Schools have no right to infringe on the private time of families on a regular basis.

The youngest students would be placed in intensive foreign-language immersion courses. The benefits of learning additional languages are profound, aside from the practical ability to understand people from other countries. In theory, young children can learn any number of languages if they are taught, and this should be exploited to the fullest. The ideal student should learn Arabic, French, and Chinese at the very least.

And of course, educational games would be promoted at every opportunity. This includes the stalawarts like Chess and Go, but also games like Cashflow and computer games that focus on concepts like logic, strategy, logistics, and spatial reasoning. At any rate, if it's good for the kids, it's in.

The end result of this program should be to produce citizens who are well-equipped for the fluid world that we will see in the future. Certainly, they should outperform the unfortunate inmates of the conventional educational system.