Cobb

The Ghetto Good Life

I have always found it ironic that the ghetto-bound would stay there given what Okies have done to get out of the Dust Bowl. Political bloviation to the contrary, I think when the going gets too tough, people have sense enough to come out of the proverbial rain.

So I believe that black people vote with their feet, or not. So basically the ghetto is at equilibrium. Everybody who lives there wants to be there, everybody who doesn't, doesn't.

Considering that there are millions of people without a dime who walk, bike, swim or levitate across our southern border in the face of indifference, hatred and law in order to make a fistful of dollars, the relative complaints of ghetto life are pins dropping in a thunderstorm. Considering the glorification of ghetto life by various superstars and the attendant market that supports radio station networks, clothing & shoe manufuacturers (hecho en Mexico), American Studies departments, and everything else that reads 'urban contemporary', there is really nothing to complain about. There are surely a million Sudanese who would give their right arms to chill with Snoop Dogg sippin' gin and juice in the hood with their minds on their money and their money on their minds. Whatever soul killing attributes we in the middleclass lay at the feet of the ghetto, the electricity is always on, and the corner store is always open. Hell, people complain about all the liquor stores. I've never seen a liquor store in the hood that only sold liquor. There's always bread, milk and eggs too. And orange juice in the winter. Maybe Latasha Harlins had it coming. Maybe that's just how real Koreans roll when fools try to bogard their cream.

People who care enough to escape that relative poverty may or may not retain virtual shackles on their feet. That doesn't stop the crabs from grabbing. And it doesn't stop the various industries attending ghetto life for trying to keep their market share by any means necessary. I mean you have to give them credit for maintaining the impression that everything and everybody black begins and ends in the ghetto. But you know if I escape the attention of those hucksters, I really don't mind a bit. They say the best revenge is a live well-lived. It's pleasant to regard the old 'hood as a distant, rough and character building memory in the foggy past. That's as good as it gets, and that's as good as it has to be.

This story will repeat in the next generation as new folks emerge from the barrel.

Southern Strategy: Dead

I suppose it won't be long until the Reparations movement targets the Republican Party for the Southern Strategy. Wouldn't that be interesting? But just for the record, I wanted to include the official apology, just in case people are curious about the Healing part. Here's the link to the Washington Post article. And just in case that goes dead, here's the document on my site, always and forever. Download mehlmans_apology.pdf

Now let's see. Maybe we can find it in USA Today as well. Yep. Right here. Where else? Here's the Wikipedia entry for all the context that's fit to debate.

Case closed.

Kerry's Gaffe

One of the reason I like John McCain is that, love him or not, he's out there on all the issues, and he knows how to get things done in the media as well as in Congress. As far as I'm concerned he looks more and more presidential every day. On the other hand, a guy like Kerry came from nowhere as the Democratic nominee and should disappear back into nowhere, especially with gaffes like the one he delivered in Pasadena yesterday. Along with Angelides, believing that only the choir is listening, there are many embarrassments spewing these days.

Today I stand with McCain and reiterate:

“Senator Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country's call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education.  Americans from all backgrounds, well off and less fortunate, with high school diplomas and graduate degrees, take seriously their duty to our country, and risk their lives today to defend the rest of us in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.  They all deserve our respect and deepest gratitude for their service.  The suggestion that only the least educated Americans would agree to serve in the military and fight in Iraq, is an insult to every soldier serving in combat, and should deeply offend any American with an ounce of appreciation for what they suffer and risk so that the rest of us can sleep more comfortably at night. Without them, we wouldn't live in a country where people securely possess all their God-given rights, including the right to express insensitive, ill-considered and uninformed remarks.”

Well said, Senator.

Dr. Lou's Proposal

Dr. Lou is one of the wisest men I know. He is also possessed of one of the hardest heads and kindest hearts. I know him to be the kind of man who, if he could live to be 150 would spend most every waking moment attending to the needs of his patients, whom these days are mostly children of the medically indigent. It turns out that he has a plan. It begins thusly:

It is almost common knowledge that our health care system is in a state of chaos. Dominated by governmental bureaucracies and the bureaucratic maze created by the various mega health maintenance organizations, insurance companies and a supporting cast of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and laboratories, costs spiral and our federal deficit swells. Worse yet, those needing and seeking health care are often put off, delayed or denied the needed care. The bean counters in the various bureaucracies decide who gets care and, if they get care, what care consumers (patients) get. Medicare and Medicaid costs, including pharmaceutical costs, are like a runaway train. These costs comprise the lions’ share of the federal deficit. This has been well documented in many writings published in the New York Times and other major papers and by television money reports. Efforts to positively, definitively, and permanently correct the health care problem have failed. To date, changes in the system proposed by politicians and others have been little more than bandaids applied to a wound hemorrhaging money. As a result, the taxpayer is drowning in red ink. China, who floats a huge piece of our deficit, has a choke hold on our economy. The purpose of this proposal is to offer a completely new approach to health care in our country.

The rest is here.

I am woefully ignorant on the economics of health care. What I do know is that it could be a lot cheaper than it is and some parties in America are getting away with murder. How do I know this? Because in one of my first serious jobs, I learned that the State of California was well on its way to funding a health plan for the medically indigent of Los Angeles County. If only we had been able to get a block grant for the program, instead of several layers of bureaucratic oversight, it would have worked. I designed the interim capitation accounting system on an Apple II computer. That was 1982.

Today my experience tells me that accountability in the health care profession seems all but impossible. From the perspective of a systems professional, it is my experience that health care systems are the most technically backward, confusing and outdated. If you work in IT, the last place you want to work, well aside from perhaps construction and the restaurant businesses, is in health care. The industry is rife with custom-hacked systems designed by individuals who are part-time doctors and part-time programmers. The systems represent the worst of both worlds, and they are almost always intractably embedded in the culture of the business and integrate with nothing. I've heard that HIPAA initiatives both multiply and uglify that state of affairs, but that's just what I've heard. I mean stick security on top of something that is almost impossible to make sense of in plaintext and you get an idea.

Let me put it to you this way. It was only about 7 years ago that the first system *ever* was put in place that took a systematic accounting of indications, physicians, and prescriptions and tied that to money spent at pharmacies and reimbursed by insurance. It was done by some associates of mine, including George Trudel, one of the good guys.

Some companies are opening their warehouses to customers. MIM Health Plans Inc., an independent pharmacy benefits-management company, lets its customers view data culled from MIM's warehouse so they can make better buying decisions. For instance, benefits managers can view reports and drill down into the warehouse to see claims costs, overall costs, the number of prescriptions ordered in a given time period, the number of brand vs. generic drugs, and other metrics, according to George Trudel, OLAP manager at MIM Health Plans, a Wakefield, R.I., subsidiary of MIM Corp.

Think about it. Imagine that you were a member of a health plan that allowed you to look at other members who used the same drug as you so you could do comparison shopping for pharmacists or vs generic drugs. The technology to do this is old. The need to do this is constant. The incentive and willingness to do this is close to zero. Big carrots and sticks are necessary, and perhaps a little bit of dynamite.

I'm hoping that someday I'll get another opportunity to work in this area. I've done some work for Medtronic and BCBHs in several zipcodes back in the day, but it has been quite a while. These days, there aren't many people thinking creatively about what transparency and efficiency can be achieved with the proper tech. I think that's a consequence of the lazy outsourcing school of 'thought' prevalent in today's large businesses, but let me not go there.

In the meantime, give Dr. Lou your feedback, and remember that there's always a better way.

The Ballot or the Bullet

Having been in the Enterprise Applications business for all of my career, I have more than a little nose-thumbing and resentment for the sirens of Open Source. I have always considered them arrogant and petulant at the same time, especially Linux bigots. I most love the quote: "Those who hate Microsoft use Linux. Those who love Unix use BSD."  Linux and that Open Source gang have always been haters, denizens of the Long Tail, envious of market share. What they never quite realized about their 'business model' is that in order to be responsible and responsive to real paying customers, you need to do some proprietary computing. These days it doesn't surprise me one bit that Oracle is fielding its own Linux and that Torvalds himself has accused various kernel geeks of bloating his OS. This is not only cosmic, but real-world justice.

wonder, why the Open Source community has yet to respond with a viable alternative.Some of the Open Source bleating has also found a convenient target in the Diebold folks vis a vis their efforts to build voting machines. Here is one place where one of the particular strengths of the Open Source model - independently verifiable security - can be put to good use. One wonders, OK I I think the answer lies soemwhere between, they have to work at real jobs, they don't really care about democracy and, they're just haters who shouldn't have been taken seriously in the first place.

I do take the White Hats seriously however, and I do have this from Emergent Chaos:

The right to vote, and to have one's vote counted is fundamental to how and why we accept our government, even when it makes colossal mistakes. This is an ideal which people around the world recognize and aspire to. The imprint of legitimacy which an election confers on a leader is important enough that even the Soviets faked elections so they could claim that mantle.

If we had voting systems that were trustworthy, transparent and understood by those operating them, then we could buy our voting machines from Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and not have to worry a lot about it. We do not, and cannot. We have transitioned from paper ballots and their understood problems into a brave new world of computerized and untrustworthy voting systems, and we are poorer for it.

So let's see an open source, free, secure, tamper resistant voting system. Democracy is waiting. Or is that kind of freedom not free either?

The First Annual Internet Racist Hunt

I've decided to put some dogs in the fight against racism and I'd like to use the power of the blogosphere to assist me.

As a (black) Republican, I get jacked around in discussions about various things, but high on the aggravation scale is the lazy presumption that the Republican Party is the last refuge for white supremacists. What's interesting about that particular presumption is that you'd think those who believe so would be able to name names. But in these days after the death of the KKK, vague feelings of racist insults are about as dangerous as things get. I'm not particularly sanguine about the public's ability to identify and combat the real dangers of racism, but we seem pretty energized to try. To that end, since we are in the blogosphere and have the power of thousands if not millions of minds, why don't we just do some hunting?

I set forth this challenge. Find all of the racists in the blogosphere and bring them out into the harsh sunlight. Let's really see if.

#1. People care enough to try.
#2. There are racists out there.
#3. They are actually philosophically racist.
#4. We can agree on who poses this threat and how dangerous they are.

Get your links ready and report here to Cobb. Spread the word to other blogs.  This is put up or shutup time.

Do You See What I Saw?

Given our appetite for fictional obscenity, one might be rather surprised at the resistance among Americans to the idea of torture carried out by the government. I think it's a good thing which is testament to our maturity as a society. It is in fact this maturity and robustness that is the only thing that allows me to say that porno is good, but pornography is bad. Most of our entertainment rated 'R' or 'M' is porno. Every once in a while, such mainstream products lurch over into pornography.

One of those products which occupies that line is the series of grotesques known as the Saw series of horror flicks. This weekend, Saw III killed at the box office, drawing something like 34 million blood-soaked dollars. Having seen the original first installment, I cannot bring myself to bear another. Like the Nick Berg video, it's one of those things that reasonable people ought to avoid watching in order to save their souls. Unless one is of strong intellect and quite capable of compartmentalizing, it's really not a good idea to ingest such stuff.

I was reminded of this matter in watching some older films this weekend. In fact, I'm also compiling a list of my favorite spy, con-game and twisty mystery films. But the one that most caught my attention in regard to the protection of the soul was 'The Conversation' starring Gene Hackman.  Hackman shows up in a number of my all-time favorite films including  'Heist', 'Enemy of the State' and 'Unforgiven'. It is however in 'The Conversation' that  he is most soulful.

As Harry Caul, Hackman portrays a man who is unafraid of death but scared to death of murder. A sometimey devout Catholic, Caul is on the technical side of the spy business and designs recording equipment for sometimes murky clients. It is revealed that he delivered the some evidence against a corrupt union official that resulted in the murder of that official and his family. Caul's technical brilliance was such that nobody believed the official could have been bugged, and so the conclusion was that he ratted and so met his doom. Caul lives in the shadow of that and takes responsibility for it. As he completes a new near-impossible assignment, he realizes that the stakes are life and death once again, and he tries as best he can to forestall the inevitable. His life now hangs in the balance. He is the messenger, and the only way he can protect his own life is to stay mum, a witness to murder.

This is a dilemma shared by the best journalists, and likely the best of all of us. It is inevitable that we, in our professionalism encounter corruption, but only a few of us see the extent to which such corruptions of humanity lead to matters of life and death. And yet this is the very bread and butter of our more sordid entertainment. We go straight for that jugular in watching horror films, and in that regard Saw is rather unique, although extreme. For the premise of Saw is that most of us take our lives for granted and would not dare do anything extreme in order to preserve it. And so the radical antagonist, Jigsaw, kidnaps individuals and forces them to do just that, some horrid act of self-preservation. In the first episode, two men are shackled by the leg to pipes in an abandoned building and given hacksaws. These saws are incapable of cutting through the chains - Jigsaw expects them to cut off their feet in order to save their own lives. Grand guignol to be sure. It gives the Saw series a moral appeal through all its grisly gore.

Were we a bit more attuned to more upstanding moral entertainments, such points could be made without gallons of bloody verisimilitude. Hard to know, however if our principled thinking would make the connection. You see we are faced with precisely the same dilemma geopolitically. I wonder if the weekend movie audience, those who made this Halloween thriller number one in the country, are aware of the parallels. For there is certainly a group of thinkers out there who see the fate of our nation and indeed Western civilization as hanging in the same bloody balance. What indeed are we willing to do for our own survival which we so blithely take for granted?

In the first episode of Saw, a doctor who has taken liberties with his marriage is blackmailed. He doesn't appreciate what he has and thinks he can get away with his indiscretion, but Jigsaw has him tailed and photographed. Jigsaw also gets someone to tie the doctor's family up and threaten his wife and daughter at gunpoint - the doctor hears all this via cell phone as he remains shackled and realizes that his family is worth so much more than the dalliance that got him into Jigsaw's dastardly, yet radically moral plot.

We were aghast at the comments of Pat Robertson and others as they suggested that America brought the wrath of Al Qaeda upon itself. In the same twisted way as the Jigsaw killer of Saw, their moral logic is consistent. But whether or not we are forced to cut off our own feet to survive, there are very difficult choices we must face. Better to think about them now than later.

Is torture or the use of weapons of mass destruction the foot we must cut off to escape the shackles our liberties have ironically put on us? Should we resent the grisly lesson that Jihadists are trying to teach us or learn from it? Do we deserve the horror brought upon us, or is this just part of the price we pay for being strong in the first place? Are we being held hostage my our unwillingness to stay paranoid at all times?

Even though I cannot bear to watch another greay-gut episode of the Saw series, its themes resonate is a peculiarly uncanny way.

Oaxaca Burning

Just a couple weeks ago, we had a smartass from Mexico here at Cobb threatening to blow up American buildings. I told him, in so many words, that he needed to check his home country and leave me to checking mine. I'd like to cash in some prophet-ability chips now. Oaxaca is burning.

Federal forces moved to take back this picturesque tourist town one cobblestone street at a time on Sunday, bashing through barricades and pushing back activists who had seized the downtown five months ago in an increasingly ugly dispute with the state governor.

Police officers wearing riot gear and carrying shields were backed by water cannons, police helicopters and heavily armed soldiers as they marched from all directions toward Oaxaca’s main square, the Zócalo, which used to draw tourists but in recent months has been a giant encampment for an array of groups intent on toppling Ulises Ruiz, the governor of Oaxaca State.

The police, estimated to number in the thousands, met resistance in some areas. Demonstrators clutching rocks and sticks tried to stop them. Buses shuttling police officers to the center of town were pelted with stones, and bonfires in the middle of streets sent huge plumes of smoke into the sky.

When police descend on a city, numbering in the thousands something is radically wrong, and this is the kind of thing Americans need to keep in mind when talking about our border. There are some seriously wrong things going on in Mexico and we need to keep our eyes open to them.

Tuesday Geopolitical Fragments

Dissolving the Compromised
If Abu Mazen dissolves the Hamas government in Palestine, what will he have left? It occurs to me that after the latest conflict between Hezbollah (Lebanon) and Israel that it really doesn't take much to compromise a weak government completely. It gives me pause in all manner of directions. But to the point of Palestine, I think he should because really, what does he have to lose? Wags are already suggesting that Fatah and Hamas are about to start killing each other on a bigger scale.

It's Jihad Charlie Brown
This is the funniest thing I've seen on the web in months, if not all year. There's hope for our culture yet.

Hands Off Waziristan No More
I sensed a bit of agitation several weeks ago as Waziristan made the news. I didn't realize this was the same deal that rather compromised our relationship with Pakistan that Democrats have been making noise about - vis a vis losing ground on that front. Well it seems there was a double whammy. Some Waziris evidently had a hand in a botched assassination attempt on Uncle Pervez and he smacked back. Incidently, this strike at a madrassa lays waste to the theory that AQ wasn't busy recruiting and training there, and just missed Ayman Zawahiri. If Musharraf had to purge ISI again, we may just be the best ally he has, Armitage included. What's the Democrat line on Pervez Musharraf? Any plans to leave him high and dry Ms Pelosi? CWCID Spook86.

Terrorist Watchlist Visualized
This is the coolest databank on the web.

The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) is a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing terrorism on U.S. soil or mitigating its effects. MIPT was established after the April 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, and it is funded through the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Grants and Training (G&T).

The United States Congress directed MIPT to conduct “research into the social and political causes and effects of terrorism” through our automated information systems and to “serve as a national point of contact for antiterrorism information sharing among Federal, State and local preparedness agencies, as well as private and public organizations dealing with these issues.” MIPT firmly believes that the accurate dissemination of knowledge on terrorism is a critical ingredient for combating terrorism. Serving the needs of emergency responders, counterterrorism practitioners, policymakers, and the public, MIPT offers access to a wealth of information resources including its knowledge base initiatives, its website, and its library collection.

MIPT manages two other knowledge bases – the Lessons Learned Information Sharing system and the Responder Knowledge Base.

 

Top Crossover Rock Hits

We all know about the black groups that has crossover appeal to white audiences during the 70s. You know, Lionel Ritchie, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire.. What about the white groups that had crossover appeal over to black audiences?

This is going to be hard but I'm going to try it, a semi-scientific aggregation of the top 70s crossover & rock songs that did well in the 'hood. I'm going back into my memory banks and digging up what I remember from highschool that appealed to brothers back in the day and I'm ranking them on three scales.

1. How generally alien they were to R&B and funk.
2. How much I gauge that I (and other brothers liked them)
3. How broad was that liking.

For example. Take Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way'. On the alien scale, that scores high. It ain't a white group trying to be funky, that's a straight out rock anthem. On the excitement scale, it was pretty high. If you liked it, you really liked it, and brothers who liked it really did. On the broad scale it scores low. Brothers did not admit that they liked it openly and black radio didn't really play it.

So let's take some nominations. I'll publish a spreadsheet with the results on Thursday. On a scale of 1-5, 5 being most, give me your guesses. Song, Artist, Year (if you can), Alien, Excitement, Broad.

Here's my guess. The top groups are going to be The Eagles, Journey, Toto, Foreigner, Pat Benatar and Rod Stewart. In the second tier will be Steely Dan, Chicago, Doobie Brothers, ELO, Fleetwood Mac, and ACDC. Then in the third tier, Aerosmith, Foghat, Gino Vanelli, Boz Scaggs, Hall & Oates, J Geils, David Bowie, Elton John.. At least that will give you something to think of. Fire away.

Predictions for 2006

I started this in January and completely forgot it. Looks like I was mostly wrong.

Geopolitics
Troops will come home. Americans will start being proud, by and large, of what has transpired in Iraq. Osama will remain on the loose. There will not be such a huge amount of foreign intrigue in the national polics. Rather we will start hearing more about the next presidential election, which will start earlier than ever before. The antagonists of GWBush will move their harangue over to 'What about Iran'. There will be quiet progress on N. Korea, but loud setbacks.

Critical Theory
Pirates of the Caribbean 2 will be a smash hit. People will get sick to death of Johnny Depp. Will Farrell will disappear off the radar. Two rappers will die or get served with felony indictments. Gangsta rap will finally be over. Dance will return to hiphop.

About That Time

Paglia Pounces

Camille Paglia. I haven't paid attention to her since 1991. But guess what? She hits the bullseye several times in her Salon interview. Most importantly this one:

Well, as long as the Democrats are perceived as the anti-religion party, we're going to lose the culture wars. That's why Hillary has made such a show of churchgoing and wearing crucifixes -- even while there seems to be little connection between her Christian ideals and her backstage activities as a politician and money raiser. But religion is absolutely central to this country in ways that Europe's secularized intellectuals fail to understand. I'm speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list -- like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we'd have anarchy.

Religion is also a metaphysical system that honors the largeness of the universe. It's that sense of largeness, which my generation used to call cosmic consciousness, that is missing in the cynical ideologies promoted by the elite universities -- like post-structuralism, which is obsessed with politics and language and has a depressingly debased view of human experience. Post-structuralism doesn't see the stars or the enormity of nature, which for religious people symbolizes God's power. So I think that the constant sniping at religion coming from liberal Democrats is really a dead end.

But there's reason for alarm at the right-wing intertwining of religion and politics, where the Bible is seen as the prophetic master plan of the universe and where Israel as the Holy Land must be protected at all costs from Muslim infiltration -- duplicating the agenda of the medieval crusades. But to claim, as Democrats often do, that there has always been a separation of church and state in America is misleading: The U.S. simply has no official state religion. The formative influence in our intellectual heritage came from Puritan dissidents in New England. Major universities like Harvard and Yale were founded on religious principles.

The more liberal parents are, the less contact their children have with religious ideas. That will surely disable our future American leaders from being able to understand the religious commitment of Islamic fundamentalists. Liberal journalists often seem incredulous about how anyone would seek death for religious principles. But that was the entire history of early Christianity, when the saints willingly sought martyrdom. We're heading into that world again.

What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It's snide, elitist, and politically marginalized. The chattering class clearly has no effect whatever on decision-making in Washington. Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush's decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler's rise. The intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.

She's the smartest Democrat I've heard all year and probably the wisest in America.

Black Anti-Semitism?

Noted in passing.

Lamentably, the alliance between Jews and blacks in America that was so strong before and during the civil rights years has been rent asunder in the last 30 years. This has been much commented upon. The causes behind this rupture are beyond the scope of this article but it is a sad reality. The level of anti-Semitism within the black community is the highest among any community in America (3 to 4 times that of the white community).  As minorities, blacks might feel a kinship with Palestinians and Arabs in general, whom they perceive to be oppressed minorities. The increasingly large black Muslim population shares a religious bond with the wider Muslim world. Unfortunately, many current black leaders have done nothing to counter the rising anti-Semitism in the community and in some cases stoke it.

While Martin Luther King was a strong supporter of Zionism in theory and Israel in fact, his successors are cut from a different cloth. Black leaders such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Louis Farakkhan all have records marred by a history of anti-Semitism. [3] The Congressional Black Caucus has increasingly voted against Israel in Congress. Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) and her supporters have had a long history of anti-Semitic statements. Congressman John Conyers hosted a mock impeachment hearing featuring known anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists (while the “hearing” was proceeding, anti-Semitic literature was being distributed by activists at the Democratic National headquarters).

Congress likely will be soon welcoming its first Muslim and first black Muslim member: Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, who has been a supporter of the Nation of Islam and its anti-Semitic leader, Louis Farrakhan.

Regrettably, the efforts that the American Jewish community made on behalf of the black community in America seems has been unappreciated and certainly has not been reciprocated in recent years. This key component of the Democratic Party will not be a strong source of support for the America-Israel alliance going forward.

I'm trying to remember any positive support among blackfolks for Israel during the recent conflict with Hezbollah. I'm sure it was all Republican. Somebody's got a lot of 'splaining to do.

Walmart Sustainability?

Believe it or not.

A Parlor Question: Nukes or Torture

I've recently found several discussions about waterboarding around. What's most interesting about almost all of the con arguments vis a vis Bush's attempts to legalize it for the purposes of CT interrogations, is that they ignore the purposes. This underlines the fact that they simply do not trush Bush, but it does in fact have little to do with waterboarding itself.

My position on the matter, as usual, is nuanced and complicated, which on the face of things always seems equivocal. But quite frankly there's an easy way to clear up any confusion on the matter, as the black actor asked in 'Hollywood Shuffle', "Does your character..die, in the film?" To that end I'm likely to use the terms like coercive interrogation to distinguish from torture. Discovery of new areas of knowledge always requires one to expand one's vocabulary. Tautologically, torture can be a fate worse than death, coercive interrogation never is. But more specifically, I think as with any sort of violence, the intent and context of the act is central to the question of its morality.

We therefore come to the parlor question, which is the proper context since none of us are likely to be involved in such matters. As regards the image and morality of the military of the United States of America, would you rather give up Torture or Nuclear Weapons?

There are lots of ways I could word this question but I don't think it matters. What matters is that we have both, and they can both be considered weapons. Obviously, the lethality of the nukes are huge and that of the torture is minute. Therefore I ask, upon what grounds is the current noise against torture and coercive interrogation based? Doubtless, it is Abu Graibh, in which a couple dozen detainees were evidently tortured for no good reason at the hands of amateurs who thought it was OK. But in the context of a deadly war, this hill of beans is an offense in the direction of ethics and honor. In short it was an abuse of power.

I think many anti-war protesters would take the position that our entire engagement in Iraq is an abuse of power, in which case they would be much more justified in bringing to light our most lethal battles. But it is harder to hurl such charges at our Nuclear Forces, which have never been abused and deployed only twice. The potential for their abuse is limited because of the policies and procedures employed by the armed forces to insure their judicious use. They are our greatest monsters. They are on a leash.

But as many suggest, our image and credibility in the world has been horribly damaged by GWBush and the Neocons. From that, however, we cannot deduce that the nature of the leashes on our various monster weapons have been categorically altered. It is not the nature of our deployment of forces that protesters decry, but that we deploy them at all. Their argument is at legitimacy of the conflict itself, not the prosecution of the war. For if there's one thing we know, it is that the military learns its lessons. We have not lost a single battle in Iraq except for the hearts and minds of the insurgents who are currently terrorizing their own nation, and many of the innocents now facing that terror.

I'm convinced that the use of nuclear weapons makes absolutely no sense in the context of the GWOT, whereas the use of torture or coercive interrogation makes much more. In any case, I believe that it is the prerogative of the President to have all options at his disposal, including the option to build new heretofore unconsidered weapons. But the morality of the matter lies in what is effectively done to counter the threat and win the war in a way as to sustain a meaningful and lasting peace. In that regard, nukes are out of the question for the Axis of Evil.

But the parlor question is one which eschews much of these details. Rather it is an attempt to put some factor of equivalence in plain view. If I give up one tactical nuclear weapon and allow it to be destroyed, how many people do I get to torture? Similarly, the question can be iterative and cover various other weapons systems.. perhaps even through the entire arsenal? Given our extraordinary military capability, we could talk warships, submarines, tanks, cruise missiles, helicopter gunships..

The US has given up permanently on chemical and biological weapons. We have them, but our leashes on them are more like dungeons. We don't want them to be unleashed under any conditions. There are none appropriate. As well, I don't believe we have any scenarios in mind for neutron weapons which kill people without destroying infrastructure. Our polity seems satisfied with things that go boom, although many of us go queasy around matters of cluster munitions. (BTW, here's a next generation one).

Is torture the new mustard gas? If so, what would take its place? And what of coercive interrogation?

While I'm playing parlor games, here's a very plausible scenario. We capture an enemy combatant who we suspect of being rather close to a terrorist organization. During the course of his capture, he is wounded on purpose. As he undergoes surgery for removal of a bullet, a small passive receiver is implanted as he is sewn back together. He is interrogated and then summarily released. His movements are thereafter tracked. Now I may be wrong, but Red Cross and Red Crescent observers might be required to be present during medical procedures on captives. That would flub that plan...

Keyku

Steele In the Hood

Ouch.

All About You

Patterico has a post asking commenters to tell a little about themselves, including:

City, country, age, gender, educational background, profession, hobbies, how they define themselves politically, favorite sites, etc. sort of thing.

To this I would add: tell us something interesting about yourself — especially something most people don’t know.

It has proved an interesting thread, and I’d like to try it here.  I’ll start:

Redondo Beach, California; USA; 45; male; Undergrad at USC & Cal State in Computer Science; Business Intelligence Project Mgr. I'm married with three kids, two in middle school and one in elementary school.

I enjoy gaming, cycling, volleyball, music (I play bass guitar a little and have composed a little funk and ambient music), reading (especially spy novels & historical fiction like Neal Stephenson), and geeky science stuff. And action movies.

I am a moderate conservative meaning I'm more authoritarian than libertarians (there's no such thing as a libertarian army) but don't believe in a vengeful God or the politics of prudery.

My favorite blogs are the Belmont Club, Counterterrorism Blog, Patterico, Emergent Chaos, Jimi Izrael, Booker Rising, American Digest and TechCrunch. I think I don't read nearly enough.

When I was a kid I once poured a gallon of gasoline on a BBQ grill which exploded in a fireball that was visible for blocks. I once had a shoulder length jheri curl and I once danced on top of a speaker in a disco with Rosie Perez. On the other hand I never had a drink of alcohol until I was 26 and one of my proudest moments was my Confirmation into the Episcopal Church at the age of 16. I made Who's Who of Outstanding High School Students. I'm extraordinarily self-centered and completely adrift about how exactly to present myself. And so I write.

How about you?

       

Obama? Get Serious

Like the buzz for the holiday season's upcoming penguin movie 'Happy Feet', people are hopeful. Who is keeping their hope alive? The better question is what, and the answer is desperation, but the who answer is Barack Obama. As closely as I have looked at the Jr. Senator, he is a policy reincarnation of Paul Simon, whose legacy he inherits in the Land of Lincoln. Already, wags are comparing him to JFK.

To all of that I say phooey.

Any serious criticism of George W. Bush must begin, although not end, with the fact that he runs the White House with no regard to the open way in which things get done in Washington DC. In short, if you want an outsider to run roughshod over the bureaucracy, then Obama is as likely to satisfy you as anyone.

I happen to be one of those people who believe that the best path to the presidency is trod by people with executive experience. In other words, governors. Especially governors who come from one party in states where the legislative majority is from another party, and they still manage to get things done. That's a tall order, but it is a very good predictor. I would add to that somebody who really knows the backdoors and tricks of Washington politics.. but I've said some of this before:

Second, he'd likely have to be a Governor or perhaps a Federal Judge but more likely a head of one of the large civilian agencies. They'd have to understand how to get things done in government.

Thirdly, he'd have to triangulate and say so up front. He would have to have a series.. a long and intense series of Sistah Souljah moments in which he made it clear that he had no place for creeping socialism or international unionism in his party. In fact, he'd have to infuriate the radical Left so much that groups like International ANSWER would feel like they have been kicked to the curb, that they'd seriously have to look at people like Leonora Fulani and the Greens in order to participate.

I'd consider voting for a Red White and Blue party of the non-college educated Second World, bootstraps, Budweiser drinking family man.

When I was a Democrat, the man I thought would be the great black hope in politics was Ron Brown. And behind him, I very much liked Mickey Leland. But somehow both of these gents died in plane crashes. Go figure. Still, there is nobody who remembers them who can honestly say that Barack Obama has nearly the political skill or depth of those men. We don't even have to mention Colin, or even Michael Powell.

A Senator is a different kind of politician, and in my book, the ideal Senator does best as a Senator. He's supposed to get to the bottom of things, way deep into the weeds. Think Senate confirmation hearings or investigative panels. Think legislative packages and working the talk shows, lobbyists and town hall meetings to get some substantial change to student loans or affordable housing grants. Obama has yet to prove that he can do this in the job he just started. He's going to have to show more integrity cookies than his sentimental upbringing and rhetorical aptitude to get any credit around here, much less political capital of a presidential candidate worthy of taking seriously. In that regard, even Schwartzeneggar has done more than Obama, and he's nowhere near presidential material.

As for all the diversity puffery that surrounds Obama. That's just window dressing and everybody knows it. There are ridiculous people who think Obama is worth assassinating, but I have faith that our political system will smack him down before he gets that undeservingly high. 

Desert Island Islam

In approaching Mark Steyn's opus America Alone, I considered for a moment the idea of the 'Clash of Civilizations'. I don't think matters are so dire, but a lot of it depends upon some issues of technology transfer and longevity.

We've recently noted vis a vis Operation Paperclip (is Germany a nuclear nation?) that a significant field day was had for American business in the wake of the WW2 victory. A huge amount of intellectual property was made available to the public domain, or cheaply, after which mumblings of 'plastics' became commonplace in the post-war era. Aside from that, I previously noted that advances in American catalytic cracking made the Allied supply of gasoline more plentiful and cheap, and that helped literally drive Patton to VE.

While mumbling to myself, self-satisfied that I am not one of the retards that the CT folks concern themselves about, I considered what I have prior to 9/11 considered positive about Islam. It was some incident about not saluting the American flag or standing for the pledge of allegiance that got some NBA baller in trouble. I liked his fidelity to his religious discipline and that he felt an obligation to sacrament, an outer expression of an inner commitment. But there was no question that his discipline was out of step and alienating to American society. The difficulty with interpreting that is that generically, one is inclined to say that the American society is wrong, but I differ. The strength of American society is its unique inclusiveness, and openness. To no be inclusive, to not be open, to not subject oneself to the scrutiny and critique of the mainstream is to, by definition, be anti-social. And this is how Islam runs afoul of open society, it requires a conformity which is alienating. There is no clearer example of this than the matter of Hijab, which places women apart from society, hides them away from the crowd. I am reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's 'Book' in which she says that the greatest thing about coming home to America from being abroad is her ability to go incognegro, to become one with the crowds in the streets of New York and be an ordinary person and not a standout. I think very much of this when I speak of the modernity of the West, our interchangeability and the necessary amount of assimilation required of us to live with each other in harmony. It is a necessary component of Western equality, and very much in line with Baldwin's edict of nakedness. To that end I said:

We all carry the poetry of our souls into our conversations and debates. Additionally we carry our experiences into our decision making. We will always have to translate nuance are resist the temptation to immerse everything that really informs us in our favorite metaphors. We can't apply Malcolm's rhetoric to Lebanon. We can't describe house Israelis and field Israelis. The only way communication across cultures and boundaries works is with just a little bit of flavor. You have to strip down and be naked. One thing I truly believe is the premise of modernism - that we can strip down and be naked and that in that nakedness our humanity can be seen. That when we put on the old clothes of old arguments and metaphors we become stereotypical. Our opportunity to assert brotherhood comes from that willingness to occasionally show our asses and in that effort we all can admit at bottom we are the same.

But very little of this applies to a desert island. If I were lost on a desert island with 500 or so people, I would not be so interested in encouraging diversity. I would want to discipline the ways of living to a spiritual anchor. I would want the system to be spartan and focused on the efficient survival of my people. I would want all the stories to relate back to us, I would have much less tolerance for dissent. I would cultivate intense personal relationships, I would imbue the simplest tasks with great meaning. If the desert island grew poppies, I would probably be in the Holy Opium business.

When Mark Steyn goes there, suggesting as I think he does, that Europe is in trouble and thus the West is in trouble, there is this to consider. Does a desert island mentality work in a large society? Is Islam actually scalable? Could Sharia handle Enron? If the Caliphate were to be established, who would control the patents on electric turbine generators? Would they end up in the hands of publicly traded companies and be open to search on the web?

Europe gets old and we all get old, and we all live long and most notably our childhoods are very long. We in America have absolutely no faith in the wisdom of 18 year old women having babies; we know for a fact that they forgo the opportunity to learn what is learnable in college - they become pegged into a lower socio-economic rung in our large and complex society. You practically need a masters degree to understand anything of significance, like where your electricity actually comes from and whether EC85 is actually a cheaper and more sustainable fuel than other alternatives. Not to mention what kind of job you need to be able to purchase a hybrid vehicle. If you're on a desert island none of these things matter. But on this planet which has evolved human intelligence there's a whole lot of history, technology and culture to be understood and communicated. History is never going to get smaller. If you think about the scope of humanity, openness is required.

So there's something to the notion that what we've created in America is useful. I think we understand better than most people the scope and breadth of human experience. We know that in order to allow all of these ideas to benefit the people, that they must be open to the people, and we have to let the people experiment and try to make use of them.

If you believe, as I do, that the long arm of history bends towards justice, then doing well by the people will ultimately win. That means that the banks will have to stay open and the courts will still have to uphold contracts, that the patent office has to share information and that public education remains good enough and cheap enough. It requires that we be pro-social and open and modern. That is the challenge that we face equally whether we are muslims or not.

Oracle Linux: Pigs Fly

I wonder what percentage of the Oracle tech support organization is outsourced to second-rate English speakers. I say so because that is, as far as I can see, the only obstacle to Oracle's new distro from taking over the corporate market.

What a huge and wonderful kick in the pants. Open sourcers are running around with their hair on fire in disbelief.

Sullivan Vs Hewitt

The best thing about Hugh Hewitt is that he gets the blogosphere and that his crossover style of talk radio and web is revolutionary. The second best thing about him is that he's a lawyer and has a very good background in making arguments that are stellar for radio and way better than anything on television. The third best thing and also the worst thing about him is that he's an unabashed conservative Republican partisan, but only to the extent that tail wags the dogs of the first two qualities. When he's at his best, he can skewer his guests and callers Perry Mason-like. When he's at his worst, he sounds just like the other hacks on Right radio.

In his 'interview' with Andrew Sullivan, it was a very frustrating experience which made Sullivan look a lot worse than he is, and took Hewitt off his game. I think the entire thing was flubby.

Sullivan came off as very defensive and accusatory, dealing with Hewitt as if he were dealing with the head of the Gestapo. It was something I was entirely unprepared for - turning out to be a battle of ideological and theological (almost) dimensions instead of anything really resembling a book review. From the very first question, Sullivan was dodgy, sounding almost like Moussaui questioning the validity of American courts.

I think Sullivan came off best talking about the nature of Christianity and the tension between Paul and Jesus and the interpretation of that for Christians. He also presented a stellar bit about the tripartite bases of morality in Catholicism. Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell if much of this was just him off the cuff or actually something that was covered in the book.

Hewitt played then to his strengths in revealing his intention of snapping Sullivan to the grid of the matters of faith for Thomas Jefferson and the Founders, which did make Sullivan look rather silly for being wary. He also nailed Sullivan rather nicely on matter of Constitutional interpretation. But Sullivan would have none of it and was rather determined to call Hewitt a Pharisee. A good reversal, but really not Sully's place as a guest.

On the whole it was a distasteful affair and I found it emblematic of the kind of arrogance many conservative pundits have in their intimations that they do indeed have the last word on True Conservatism. Both men did themselves damage, neither willing to delineate for the radio audience what legitimate differences might be found between them in order for us to figure out how such a gap might be bridged or sides intelligently chosen.

Sullivan asserts without a doubt that Habeas Corpus has been destroyed and that Christian Fundamentalists have, without precedent or restraint, blasphemed and abused their faith by their politics - using several times as an example Ann Coulter's 'Godless'. If he weren't so strident to make a point, he might have made a point. But I've stopped reading him long ago (I forget the reason) and am unaccustomed to his tone. Surely he could have thought of a more significant or subtle example of this insidious plague. Everybody hates and discounts Coulter, what's new in that? Sullivan acts like a petty blogger and is completely outclassed by Hewitt, but only by default. There are lots of ways to get around Hewitt's bloviation and plenty of interviewees have done it, but clearly there was a lot of fear and loathing going on.

In the end, I ordered Frame's translation of Montaigne instead of Sullivan's book.

The Right Choice: Lewis v Harris

Reuters reports on a decision I can live with:

RENTON, New Jersey (Reuters) - Saying that times have changed, New Jersey's highest court on Wednesday guaranteed gay couples the same rights as married heterosexual couples but left it to state lawmakers to define how the state wants to define marriage.

"Times and attitudes have changed," the New Jersey State Supreme Court said in a nuanced 90-page ruling that was neither a clear victory nor a defeat for gay marriage, which is currently legal in the United States only in Massachusetts.

"Despite the rich diversity of this State, the tolerance and goodness of its people, and the many recent advances made by gays and lesbians toward achieving social acceptance and equality under the law, the Court cannot find that the right to same-sex marriage is a fundamental right under our constitution," the ruling continued.

But saying that gay couples must have the same rights as other couples, the court said gay advocates must now "appeal to their fellow citizens whose voices are heard through their popularly elected representatives."

With that in mind, the court gave the legislature six months to either amend the state's marriage statutes to include gay people, or write a new law in which same-sex couples "would enjoy the rights of civil marriage."

As you might presume, I am against gay marriage, in the same way I am against human rights for animals. Misinterpret what as you may but they are apples and oranges. The very declaration of being gay is OK, but don't call it marriage. So I think this decision, from the way it is reported here, is exactly the proper ruling for a court. Defend civil liberties, but leave it to the people to determine the social acceptability of the declaration. Once again, I have no problem with the state acknowledging and defending civil unions, and I think the precedent for matters such as medical benefits, etc is well established in the law. But don't call it marriage.

I hope that the people of NJ recognize the importance of recognizing the difference between the civil and statutory definitions of civil union and the social convention of marriage and that they uphold the status quo with regard to the current definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.  It is the people's right to decide, as I've said before we all have a say in these matters. By not being activist and establishing gay marriage by legal fiat, the NJ judiciary did the right thing, and they should be commended.

Key Language: (emphasis mine)

Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed samesex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to same sex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process.

That's the right choice.

The Right To Be Poked

I've known for a couple days that the pigs are squealing again. This time it that the paragon of blackness that is Harold Ford, Jr. is poked as a playboy by a political attack ad. Considering the dirt I've heard on the Ford clan in Tennessee politics, the worst may be yet to come.

I engaged the imaginary enemy in my head yesterday thinking whether or not it would be worth the time to comment on this silliness. Now I suppose I must.

I like Ford. He's a Blue Dog and stands with me on the question of illegal immigration. He represents what I think of when I think of the second generation of post-Civil Rights African American pols. Polished, professional, and a whole lot more mainstream than their fathers. The question about Ford and the others is whether or not they have the fortitude or desire to rescue black politics. The jury is still out, although of the litter, I most like Michael Steele - no surprise there. (I wonder if Ford could get a Russell Simmons endorsement, or oreos thrown at him). But Ford is a bright guy, and I think he's tough too, and I would be awfully surprised if he would even stoop to calling this ad against him racist. If he did, then I would lose a substantial amount of respect for him.

At any rate, the ad in question alleges and intimates that Ford has connections to the porno industry and it illustrates this by having a bunny wink ask for a phone call. Some NAACP flack is saying this raises the spectre of miscegenation and sends a coded message to a presumably racist Republican base that  Ford , if elected, would have his way with (gasp) white women.  Somebody from the NAACP ought to ask him point blank if he ever had sex with a white woman. I mean that's what it's all about, neh?

I'm not particularly surprised by this ridiculous development. It sounds just like the CREtins (as in Civil Rights Establishment) to insist that no responsibilities go hand in hand with the opportunities of equality. So their protected classes can be Senators but they can't actually be criticized for trying. They can be the equal of white men, but not sleep with white women, nor get in trouble for hanging with porno queens. That's the one way racial ratchet racket. Up, but never down.

But more insidious and engraining of actual racism is the assumption that everybody sees interracial sex the way the NAACP assumes 'racist Republicans' see it, and therefore political speech must be devoid of any image or message that suggests such an interpretation. That's Orwellian. That's today's NAACP. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Ford has two feet. He should stand on them, but use one of them to kick this nonsense to the curb, and in so doing prove once and for all what the NAACP's pandering is worth.

Calame's Calumny

Apology accepted.

Oh wait. That was a parody.

The Spousal Unit

On their Sistah's Weekend 2006, the Unit and her sibs went driving up the California coast and enjoyed many diversions. Among them was a fantasy photo shoot. I am surprised about the extent to which I find this semi-niqab to be enticing. Then again, I love her. I wonder at what point American fashion mavens (not that I follow) will purposely start integrating some Hijab accessories into their wardrobes. How long will it be before some American women begin to dress in solidarity with muslim women in some form of cultural or political statement. I think it would be absolutely fascinating to see.

Pipes

Eyes Without A Case

The Captain reports:

A Michigan judge threw out a lawsuit brought by a Muslim woman because she refused to show her face while testifying. Paul Paruk may have started another round of legal battles over the niqab, which only exposes the eyes, by ruling that witnesses must show their faces in court in order to allow a determination of their veracity..

And furthermore...

What I think is interesting at this juncture is the extent to which African Americans are on the brink of dealing with some rather serious matters as Americans. That is to say that the benefits of our collective efforts over the past 50 years to get America right is consequently come back to demand a few things of us which most of us, some reluctantly, are doing. That is to say we are patriots and taking pride in the country we have helped shape.

So I see this as an example of a case in which many blackfolks will not automatically defend what has become of multiculturalism. Set this case next to the rejection of the idea of a 'latina Rosa Parks'.

Grunge Tech Films

Frank Ahrens has some movies that he thinks are great tech flicks. He's right. But there are some movies that are not directly sci-fi that indulge some pretty cool tech. I'm thinking dystopic future visions as well as oddball technology and fright flicks that don't roll off the top of your head when thinking tech. He's already got Brazil and Blade Runner. Who could miss them, but I think you'll agree that these are very worthy candidates as well.

Buckaroo Banzai
This is an all time classic grunge tech film. The Overthruster has got to be the ultimate, must-have, tech item every pursued on the silver screen. The shell shaped space ships with liquid bath rotating seats were a perfect example of bizarre alien grunge tech.

12 Monkeys
Some basic time travel and inter-spacial communication devices made this one pretty cool. A dysfunctional future with strange tech if there ever was one.

Saw
The greatest tech thriller since 'The Abominable Dr. Phibes'. Saw pushed the level of evil genius to the extreme. So much so that I can't really bear to watch the sequels, although I'm tempted.

Existenz
Ultimate creep-out technology. Organic biological neurotransmission of twisted fantasies. Way better than Brainstorm, which actually was fairly pioneering. You'd also want to see Strange Days as the second best example of this brain swapping genre.

The Cube
Instead of gadgets that you hold in your hand to wreak havoc, The Cube was an entire environment of nasty tech gadgetry.

OK that's the dark side. Oh yeah, let's not forget Lawrence Fishburne in Event Horizon. But on the other side of the universe, there are some fairly cool lighter and more traditional high tech films, just to balance this out.

My dark horse favorite is the pathetic but beautiful Lost in Space. I think it's the last movie where I actually enjoyed the slow motion beauty shot of a space ship. For cool gadgets and tech in a futuristic setting, few movies outdo The Island, which wins hands down for the coolest high speed chase in future vehicles. Add to these to the glamour of Spielberg's A.I. and the just slightly ahead of our time vision of I Robot and you have a great set. But it wouldn't be quite complete without one of the coolest tech visions of all, which is the world of Spielberg's Minority Report. That one was probably the most comprehensive and detailed future vision ever.

Tortured Arguments about Interrogation

The most difficult aspect of engaging serious debate about the presidents pushing of Geneva conventions is that very few people know what a proper interrogation looks like and what methods work. All most of us know is good cop -bad cop, and we only get theat from television.

Pattericos' lengthy interview with Stashiu illustrates that techniques that the layman wouldn't expect to be successful with hardned terrorists actually do make them more forthcoming.

A couple of recent pieces in the media have suggested that some of the detainees actually enjoy their interrogations. For example, in a passage that reminded me of Monty Python’s “Comfy Chair” sketch (from the show about the Spanish Inquisition), Rich Lowry said this:

Interrogators rely on the soft sell.  Detainees sit in a La-Z-Boy chair during interrogations, and beverages and movies are available to put them at ease. The most effective interrogator is said to be an older woman who adopts a nurturing attitude.

(All emphasis in this post is mine.)

Balkin writer Stephen Griffin puts forward an example of the ticking time bomb 'TTB' torture scenario and says:

In a democracy, I do not think we should ask our fellow citizens to sacrifice themselves or their principles for the public good unless we are, at least in principle, prepared to do the same. We may not be capable of serving in the military, but we should understand what that means before we ask our fellow citizens to fight for us. One of the signal characteristics of the TTB is that it treats the interrogators and their agency, their principles, as a black box. Who they are is unknown. But we should not assume �democracy for us, dictatorship for the interrogators.� The interrogators are our fellow citizens, part of our democracy, and it would be wrong to ask them to do something we were not prepared to do ourselves. Thus the democratic implication of the TTB is that we must steel ourselves to do something that is very unpleasant, but necessary.

All of the moral revulsion to torture, and especially all of that in the TTB scenario which involves the purposeful torture of one individual assumes that torture is a fate worse than death.

Is it?

I think that despite the appeal or the non-appeal of torture, I think we all understand the moral equivocation of total and limited war. That is to say we more readily accept in these political times the real death of non-combatants as collateral damage, or as accepted damage.

My memory may be faulty, but I cannot recall such moral outrage over the battle known as Second Fallujah in which certainly innocents remaining in town were killed after recieving orders to leave the city. The moral outrage of Abu Graibh was much more pronounced.

And we clearly know that perfidious combatants encountered on the field of battle can be shot on sight. Mercenaries, under Geneva, are not afforded the protections of soldiers in uniform. If there are conditions which a life can be taken in the moral context of war, how can it be that torture categorically cannot?

The answer, it seems to me, is that there are 1000 ways in which that which goes by the name of torture can be preferable to death, and likely another 1000 worse than death. If there is ever a case in which torture in the context of war is not a fate worse than death, this is a question of enumeration, so long as killing is acceptable in the context of war. TTB as exemplified gratuitously is not. The problem is not solved completely.

Marathon Interrogations
According to the authors of The Interrogators, the Geneva Conventions on the matter of sleep deprivation cannot 'tag-team' interrogators while keeping detainees awake. The principle involved is that you cannot subject the detainee to a greater sleep deprivation than you would subject your own interrogators. So they stayed up the 27 hours for their key detainees, not only the interrogator, but his supervisor as well.

The point these officers make is that while they were very conscientious about remaining within the legal framework of interrogations set by Geneva, and were appalled by the reports coming out of Abu Graibh, they consistently found that each time they got creative and pushed the envelope of what was allowable, they got better results. In other words, more harsh interrogations yeilded better results.

This is precisely the kind of testimony I expected to find as GWBush asked, on behalf of the CIA, to push the envelope of the US interpretation of Geneva up to the threshold of physical damage.

Waterboarding
Stuart Buck has some interesting comments on these matters as well. And in his investigations he has found one of the sort of individuals we are fortunate to see. Somebody who knows what's going on and walks right in to demonstrate some facts about harsh interrogation. There is nothing so starkly demonstrative that torture is not a fate worse than death, than the fact that for the sake of proving the point, a man will volunteer to show us.
 

Similarly, Buck says that as with sleep deprivation, this is something that our own troops go through. Thus conforming to one of the provisions of Geneva.

Dershowitz' comments during the Current TV video are worth noting. He argues, and I agree, that the President should say in writing, that these are the techniques that we will authorize. The US interpretation of our obligation to civilization will document what's legal for us to do and what is not. And this is indeed what the President has done, albeit with some tricks vis a vis legal recourse. The point is, however, that interrogators will be trained, the effectiveness and proper implementation of the more coercive techniques will be known, and it won't go unaccounted for.

The leash remains on the Monster.

Another Truly Awful Survey

But very entertaining.

Cobb's Rule Number Two

"There is marriage and there is everything else. Everything else doesn't count."
-- Cobb

Once upon a time I used to spend a lot of time talking about 'dating' in the context of black men and women. I guarantee you that there are few things that generate so much hot air and energy on this planet as that debate. Just avoiding the necessity to engage in it is a good reason to be married.

Jimi has patience for it, as I suppose must everyone who hasn't done the proper deed. Check out this exerpt:

..My ex was shady but our chemistry was off the chain.

>So let me get this straight: he was shady—a quality that many suggest occurs in heart and mind of folks—yet, you all had great chemistry? I don't follow. By shady, do you mean he was a street nigga with street ways? That he was a street hustler?<


Nah, man he was legit I'm a lawyer, I can't hang out with someone who was a street hustler, He had street ways. I didn't really understand how shady he was until much later in the relationship. So we tried to make it work through 2002 until 2005 when I discovered that he stole from me. I had tons of CDs and when I was packing them up I realized that I was missing a bunch of them, what hurt is when I asked him about it, he lied and then admitted it but then said they were just CDs and that I should get over it because our relationship was worth more than CDs and that if I was a real Christian I would forgive him. The way he tried to disregard my feelings of betrayal and distrust by saying it is just a bunch of CDs. The whole situation told me that this was a man who would always disregard my feelings and do what he wanted to me in the name of our love. I couldn't stick around for another shoe to drop.

I'm going to tell you something harsh. If it takes you three years in 'a relationship' to tell if somebody is worth your hand in marriage, I think you're a very poor judge of character, or just straight out shallow.

But in this case, I think there is a very strong exception, but it's still dysfunctional. I speak of this because I was on the same track, which was the track to find a New World African mate of globetrotting potential. In otherwords, a black trophy wife. Somebody like...hmm... this woman.

You see, when you buy into this game, of finding somebody who will make you flip in bed, that will make you look good at society functions, makes their own Nordstrom shopping money, and has a brain the size of Massachusetts, your blackified social world shrinks to the size of Pee Wee Herman's gonads, in winter, ice-fishing, naked, with a fan on. Consequently, you cannot afford to be relatively ho-fied, nor relatively exclusive. It's a no-win situation. Why? 'Because the good ones are already taken'. And so you're forced to make excuses to keep looking and keep looking for somebody black who doesn't disappoint you, and they're looking at you with the same colored eyeglasses on. The war of expectations is crushing as is the weight of the baggage.

For the third time in the past couple months, I found myself out chowing and drinking with single friends. The topic of conversation drifted to The Chase, and once again I found myself driving home at somewhere past midnight thanking God that I don't have to deal with that world. In the latest particular installment, the friends didn't happen to be black, but the subtext was the same. I don't trust any woman well enough to marry her.

The trick is simple. You don't trust the woman, and you don't trust the man, you trust the marriage. It is only the mutual willingness to trust the institution of marriage that is going to get you out of this trap of trusting some other mortal human with your love, respect and money. But the problem is, as these friends know, there's all kinds of legal and emotional finagling that can be done. The men want to do the legal finagling to keep their money, and the women want to do the emotional finagling to keep their sanity. And so the conversation turned to prenups. I tried to be helpful, but I was kind of discounted. I'm the guy with the successful marriage, the one with the good kids. But it's very hard to explain to people that I love my woman less than I respect my marriage. It means I will sacrifice my personal happiness on the alter of Marriage. It's something you know subconsciously from watching married couples talk smack about each other in public, but you never want to admit. Single people say, I never want us to be like that. Well then you won't be, you'll be divorced and looking for somebody new to make you happy.

And that's the thing. You don't need to be married to make you happy. Marriage won't make you romantically happy most of the time. Marriage makes you fulfilled by fulfilling the requirements of marriage, and marriage is not about romatic happiness. You can have that without the rings. But you have to have the leap of faith and the committment to principles in order to work that.

I have been surprised by the number of different variations on marriage vows and ceremonies that are blessed by the various faiths. I don't know how to explain how this variety evolved, but I would guess that they are in response to the demands of romantic love, the advent of birth control and the laws of community property. In each way, there's some way to cheat, to make the cliff of marriage a little less steep, and therefore the consumability of it more approachable. You can have a marriage like you have a mortgage, or a car, or a job. Permanent, but disposable for a price. And so long as you can hedge a marriage, you can hedge a relationship headed towards marriage.

I used to ask The Questions.

• Are you exlusive with me?
• Do you love me?
• Do you want to live with me?
• Do you want to marry me?
• Do you want to have kids with me?

If all of the answers weren't yes, then I could just enjoy the 'relationship', which meant I could pursue my own version of happiness and not really worry so much about hers. But after a time, I got to the point that I didn't want to be in the position of constantly being the heartbreaker. I would go into bars and clubs and say to myself, I'm not even going to talk to a woman I couldn't see marrying. Because I knew how it was going to go. After you become a master at seduction, once you're in the game, you know how it goes. It always comes down to The Questions.

If the answers were all yes, then I'd have to choose. Which meant I had to have all my crap together. And that was tough to face, but when I turned 29, that had to be the plan. It turned out that I married the woman whose breakup forced me to come up with the plan. Because for her, the answers were yes, and I didn't have my game together - not internally to my own mind. I wasn't quite the man I thought I needed to be to be able to say after all those yeses, "Then I'm your man."

Timing, they say, is everything. And I tend to agree. Like going for a masters degree, or deciding to put on 12 pounds of muscle, there are certain committments that only make sense to pursue while they still capture your imagination. If you hang around with people who have done it too long, their gritty reality and disappointment can sour you forever. I think you ought to pay serious attention to your biological clock. I think that if seeing a happy married couple pushing their baby around in a stroller makes you envious, then you need to get while the getting is good. You only have one chance to have your first child.

I could go on and on but I won't. It's a personal subject and Cobb is not all about me, only partially about me. But I'd be happy to get into this discussion about you.

Mixed Signals

A trip to an art exhibit inside of a dormant and decayed power station. A sign of the post-modern times. I was unimpressed by the art, but found it remarkable to learn what I could about the power generation equipment. I had no idea that it is standard practice to use hydrogen as a coolant for power generators.

Your Boss Ain't Cool

I'm not talking about your boss. I'm talking about your boss's boss's boss.

Bruz says buy no junk, which would put us in the same club several years ago. You see for most of my life, especially having come from the scientific end of things, I expected that the people who really ruled, spoke in the codes of Western Civilization. You know, they would pepper their perfect diction with quotes from Shelley and Keats at the appropriate moments. And all the while I thought this, I had this nagging suspicion that the only people who told the truth on television were the baseball coaches who were interviewed after a losing game. So maybe these people who were smart enough to run the world just didn't show up on TV. Maybe they had no need to interact with most of us crude folks who can't tell Andrew Marvell from Alexander Pope. Perhaps they secret themselves among the blowhards and retards of the idle rich in perfect anonymity. I would.

I inhabit the world of people with degrees from State who keep the engines of their world working. And occasionally I meet one of our guys who did good. They inevitably turn out to know everything about one thing and nothing of Shelley. I might just throw up my hands and say that there is no civilization in civilization, but I know that's not true, I just look too hard.

One of the things I'm in particular awe over these days are those leaders of large organizations. Oftimes I wonder how they did it, and how they do it. I mean the good ones. It has been a very long time since I worked for a large organization. My boss's boss's boss has been 'the market'; I haven't been deeply nestled in a deep corporate hierarchy since 1990.

Who is your boss's boss's boss and would you like to be like him? What's different about him? It's one of Cobb's rules never to trust anyone whose clothing cost more than your day's pay. Maybe your uberboss is an exception.

You Wish

Yesterday I took the kids down to Orange County. I didn't realize that Saleen has a showroom at the Irvine Spectrum. Well.. Here I am in a horrible backlight with the awesome Saleen S7, which despite all Veyron claims to the contrary, they say is the world's fastest production car. So I asked the guy some Project Gotham questions.

It turns out that they guys from Bizarre pay Saleen to have their cars in the game, and Saleen has close inspection rights to see that the car is properly represented in the game. So they approve the specs, but are just happy to get media props.

As for the real car, it goes something over 250 MPH, but nobody really knows because they haven't had enough space to test it.  Saleen has about 500 employees, and they were the ones who did the assembly for the new Ford GT. Their plant is around the way somewhere near the store. There are only 10 people in the company authorized to drive the S7, which goes for something like 600 grand. They still make the Mustang and the Truck (obviously somebody is tight with Ford), but they aren't going to make the Focus any longer. They worked with the prototype of the new Camaro and may or may not do something with that in the future. I'm hoping they do. I always loved Mustangs over Camaros, but the new Camaro is absolutely awesome. Besides, there's always Shelby. They can have the Mustang as far as I'm concerned, because what Ford has done to it, despite the very tasty prototype was just horrendous.

The S281 looks very tasty in yellow. With 500 horsepower at only 45K, I like it a lot. As far as I'm concerned, it's the only Mustang worth considering. I might even do that over a Porsche, and the interior looks good enough to make me consider it over a BMW 650. I'd certainly save money.  I'd hold onto it until they perfect the Camaro and then get a silver one. Really, the body of the new Camaro is that sweet.

Are Iraqi Insurgents All About Oil?

You really have to scour the net to find words like 'Majnoon' and 'Halfaya'. The odd thing about it is that these are the largest oilfields in Iraq. Why is nobody talking about Iraqi oil? I think it's because the anti-war crowd only wants to use that question to beat up America. That is because much of the rhetoric we hear about the Iraqi insurgency assumes that we 'stirred up a hornets nest' and that their violence is strictly a reaction to the immorality they percieve in the American Neocon position. But does it really stretch the imagination that Iraqis themselves are motivated by oil?

When speculation and BDS was presented that we Americans were only interested in getting oil out of Iraq and our invasion was for such brazen purposes, I countered with a syllogism. In retrospect, it might not be all that far-fetched a long-term investment. Let's imagine that an all out war is an investment in purchasing an entire nation. That investment may not pay off for a generation, or at least 20 years. Is it reasonable to assume that the Neocons were thinking 20 years in advance for an economic payoff in Iraq? It seems to me that they must have. But I find it difficult to believe that there were economic payoffs expected during the Bushies term in office. The geopolitical payoffs, however, were self-evident. Iraq goes from hostile enemy to friend (or not-so-enemy, as the case may develop).

So while it's rather easy for me to dismiss the Halliburton kickback theory, it's not so easy to dismiss the consideration that the US was horning in on Russian and French claims on Iraqi oil that sere exclusive during the Oil for Food Program, now proven corrupt. Yesterday some serious questions were raised about a certain French oil exec.

I put together this notebook with some research fragments. I find this particular and recent statement very interesting:

This led to two major developments in the form of attempts to establish controversial laws prior to any possible amendments to the constitution. The first relates to the insistence of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on the full ownership, control, development and operation of the oil industry, both upstream and downstream, in accordance with its own interpretation of the disputed articles on oil and gas. As an example, Article 111 of the constitution states that “oil and gas is the property of all the Iraqi people in all the regions and provinces.” However, the KRG says that such resources within Kurdish areas are owned only by the people of Kurdistan. It also says that the regional parliament of Kurdistan is the sole legislative authority over all petroleum operations in that region.

The KRG on 7 August published the draft of a proposed petroleum act and followed it last week with a final draft to be submitted for enactment. This move came as a surprise to the central government, which was itself preparing a draft hydrocarbon law for the whole country in a ministerial committee headed by the deputy PM, Barham Salih who happens to be a leading Kurdish figure and representing the Kurdish parties in the central government. Among other controversial articles in the Kurdish legislation, it is stated that it will apply to all “disputed territories,” meaning the currently-producing Kirkuk, Mosul and other oil fields as well as all other undeveloped fields. It clearly states that no law, contract or license issued by the central government can be applied without the explicit agreement of the KRG.

The Iraqi Oil Minister Husain al-Shahristani said a few weeks ago that there will be only one authority in control of oil resources. Yet there has so far been no official reaction to the latest Kurdish move, and it remains unclear what will be the fate of the draft hydrocarbon law that is supposed to be finalized and submitted to the Iraqi parliament for legislation by the end of the year. The KRG is continuing to sign production-sharing agreements for blocks and structures under its control, as with DNO of Norway, Genel Energi of Turkey, PetOil of Turkey and Canada’s Western Oil Sands and Heritage. In one of these agreements profit oil will be shared on a 51-49% basis and cost recovery oil could reach as high as 80-90%.

 

The second major development is politically motivated but is also focused on the oil wealth in the southern part of Iraq. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the main groups in the present government, last week submitted to parliament a controversial draft law detailing the mechanism for establishing regional governments similar to that in the Kurdish region. However, this was strongly opposed by other parties within the same coalition as well as other groups outside it. This is being looked upon by some observers as a possible sign of national aspiration against the latest tide of sectarian motivations.

A federal region in the southern part of Iraq could encompass up to nine provinces, including three oil-rich provinces - Basrah, Misan and Thi-Qar – which contain oil fields with proven reserves of nearly 80bn barrels, or over 70% of Iraq’s current proven reserves. These include undeveloped super giant oil fields such as West Qurna, Majnoon, Bin 'Umar, Halfaya, Nasiriya, and Ratawi and nearly 30 other fields.

Who is getting what oil? The recent discussions about Iraqi Federation may be a reason for the recent killing uptick. Isn't this what the insurgencies are all scrambling for? Makes sense to me.

London Hijack Research Fragments

I'm publishing these fragmented research notes on the London Hijacking (Bojinka 2) Attempt. There's not much else to say about it. Download london_hijack_attempt.pdf

The Final Nail

Richard Miniter (via Belmont & Pajamas) puts the final nail in the coffin of the Lancet Study.

The Lancet study uses a baseline mortality rate (the   rate during Saddam years) of 5.5/1000 – almost half of the mortality rate of   Europe. The mortality rate in the EU is 10.10/1000. Given Europe’s excellent   health care, public health infrastructure and, lack of war in the past 60   years, how is it possible that Iraq’s baseline is half that of the EU? Are   you simply relying on pre-war publications or was the baseline itself   generated by interviews with random clusters?

The answers are rather insufficient but it takes a more experienced eye than I have to ask the proper questions and interpret the answers. As I suspected the blogosphere delivered. Thanks blogosphere!

I conclude finally that the study was flawed in such a way that it calculated something methodically but what that something was gave a unfortunately incomplete picture. There seems to be no way to adjust the sample size in retrospect or correct what was done wrong .. in this case not adequately qualifying the baseline sample distribution among hot and cool zones of the war.

I am satisfied that it's quite possible that many tens of thousands of people have been killed by this war. Unlike the people who programmed  Douglas Adams' near infinite computer, however, I am not satisfied by the 'implications' of one number. The spread provided by the Lancet smelled fishy and now we have some concrete reasons why they are.

This episode reminds me very much of The Bell Curve.

The Racism Index

Nulan claims:

2. The existence of negative special recognition and concommittant acceptance and utilization of the same for socio-economic ends by folks who actively deny any such proclivity, undermines any possible claim for basic decency by ordinary, middle-class white folks. You simply can't have it both ways and make a credible claim for being morally decent.

I expect that the economically qualified answer to this net effect is swirling somewhere inside the noggin of David A. Bositis  (God of the Black Left) and all those who read his newsletters. This is something I might be interested in understanding better. However I think that the best demographic evidence is already clear that the material conditions of African Americans are rising steadily and outpacing most other ethnic groups.  But if I understand Nulan's position correctly, little of this matters when it comes to race relations. His argument distills the reason for a moral insurgent imperative for the black partisan. Basically this: whitefolks are morally poison, and particularly suceptible to the evils of white supremacy in America. The degree to which this is true invalidates any claims they might make, or might be made on their behalf to basic moral decency.

In other words, we are surrounded by white devils. I think I've heard that before.

I find this a specious claim of course. But what are Americans to make of racism? How can we measure its real effect outside of such ghastly ravings? Is there anybody credible out there on this outside of the Freakanomics crew, Bositis, Sowell, Loury and Hacker? OK there's Walter Williams and Orlando Patterson, Kozol and several others I'm sure I've heard of but can't remember now. Why don't they come up with a Racism Index?  Maybe the IEM guys will do it. Or is this just ideologically impossible and irreconcilable to science?

I think that if people say it is irreconcilable to science, then there's more racial hypochondria in this nation than we think.

On Jonah Goldberg

Yesterday everybody on the right was flipping out over Jonah Goldberg's imitation of a surrender-monkey. Patterico said he even looked like a dignified monkey. I haven't had much time to ponder the implications of recent events in Iraq, but I'm more of the angle that mistakes were made rather than to say the war itself was a mistake.

In my geopolitical view of things having an American military presence in Iraq on a more or less permanent basis is a good idea. What we haven't heard recently is much stuff about the role Egyptians play in the terror game. In fact almost nobody talks about Egypt at all. But I recall specifically reading some things that convinced me that instability in Egypt was a major breeding ground for AQ recruits. And so going into the region I thought that American boots would be needed. It remains a significant part of my view that anytime the US is involved directly in military containment or conflict, that it is a far better option than the use of Israel as a proxy. So if there are wars to be fought by Arab nationalists or muslim extremists, better us than Israel, and that will continue to be the case so long as the global economy depends significantly on oil resources from the Middle East. Those interests are more or less permanent in the world as we know it.

My conclusions are fairly firm and they are that GWBush's arrogance to move on his own calendar rather than 'the world's calendar', has become an infected scab that gripers everywhere have been picking for 3 years now. So long as we are a democracy, there's no way of avoiding the repercussions of that. But claims that violently overthrowing the Baathist regime and painfully hand-cranking Iraq through the democracy building machine was not worth it are wrong. George W. Bush and the neocons were not wrong, repeat not wrong, nor was this initiative a mistake. What it has been, unquestionably is a very costly, and poorly strategized mission. We have been, thus far, an improper Empire. But at the other end of history, the US will be vindicated, because the creation of a free, democratic Iraq is worth it. The Iraqis know this more than anyone, and they also fundamentally understand that the disbanding of insurgent militias is in their best interest. How long will that take? I guess the Iraqi calendar doesn't coincide with the anti-war calendar. Tsk.

It is about time for a review of predictions about the war, and I'll get to that this weekend. I'll say this: US soldiers killed is just below the number of civilians killed on 9/11. For a war of occupation, the political clock is running out, just as I predicted. When we cross that line, my hunch is that the Bush Administration is going to be forced to float some rapid exit strategies. But I don't think Goldberg's premise of the entire war being a mistake is going to survive in the minds of anyone but his fellow monkeys.

Latinos: Poor & Happy

In today's WaPo, Marcela Sanchez reports on the Second World.

If immigrants, especially Hispanics, are card-carrying members of the U.S. underclass, society at large is having a hard time convincing them of it: Latino immigrants are too busy working, buying cars, purchasing homes, and even investing abroad.

Such a lifestyle is not exactly the picture of poverty. The poor are supposed to be the down and out -- the hungry and depressed standing in bread lines. Under this stereotype, they struggle for basic goods and services and are left outside the mainstream, unable to get ahead.

Yet observers of the Latino experience in the United States say that Hispanic immigrants generally don't fit this mold for two basic reasons: choices and attitude. Immigrants cut what corners they can to keep rent, health care, sundry expenses and taxes to a minimum. They also leave family behind, clearly the most painful among their money-saving strategies to reduce the number of dependents in the United States.

Are blackfolks un-poor and unhappy?

Awww

Standing With Steele

Russell Simons on the Radio sez:

Russell Simmons: Yo, what’s up, y’all, it’s Russell Simmons.

Today I’m coming to you to ask you to vote for my good friend, Michael Steele to become the next Senator from Maryland.  Four years ago, I came here to campaign against the Lt. Governor.  Today, I come here to stand beside him.

I trust him because he’s lived up to every commitment he made to our communities.  He’s increased the state contracts for minority business by more than a third.  He’s reduced recidivism among ex-offenders.  He went against the grain and gave people drug treatment rather than prison.

I trust the Lieutenant Governor.

Michael Steele knows the issues that affect us because he comes from our struggle.  For too long, our voice has been ignored in Washington. Michael Steele could change that.

Let’s go to work now and change the game.  Go to the polls and vote for Michael Steele for United States Senator.  Make sure you empower yourself on Tuesday, November 7. Vote.

Michael Steele: I’m Michael Steele, candidate for the United States Senate, and I approved this message.

BAM!

The Demographer's Complaint

I have confirmed 'confirmation bias'. It is said that if you look for something long enough, you will find it. I guess the important thing is that you are wise in your choice of searching. So as I predicted, there would be an expert to raise important questions about the science behind the controversial Lancet study of Iraqi deaths. I'm quoting Volokh in toto, it is roughly my opinion:

Daniel Davies is impressed with the Lancet study estimating 655,000 "excess" Iraqi casualties since the U.S.-led invasion.  Based on his experience conducting surveys in Iraq, Steve E. Moore is not.

Of Moore's criticisms, the most significant seem to be 1) the relatively small number of cluster points used for the survey (which, he claims, is more important than the number of actual interviews in the sample); and 2) the failure to obtain demographic data on those interviewed so as to verify the representativeness of the survey sample.

the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points.

Neither would anyone else. For its 2004 survey of Iraq, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) used 2,200 cluster points of 10 interviews each for a total sample of 21,688. True, interviews are expensive and not everyone has the U.N.'s bank account. However, even for a similarly sized sample, that is an extraordinarily small number of cluster points. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC News, Time magazine, the BBC, NHK and Der Spiegel used 135 cluster points with a sample size of 1,711--almost three times that of the Johns Hopkins team for 93% of the sample size. . . .

With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census. . . .

while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. . . .

Without demographic information to assure a representative sample, there is no way anyone can prove--or disprove--that the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths is accurate.

These are also criticisms that I have not seen responses to elsewhere (e.g. here).  No charges of fraud here, just poor methodology.

I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of civilian Iraqi deaths. I agree with Moore that "there have been far too many deaths in Iraq by anyone's measure," and I certainly believe that the Bush Administration's poor policy decisions and execution bear a significant portion of the blame. Nonetheless, Moore seems to mount a serious challenge to the validity of the Lancet estimates.

And futhermore:

    Curious about the kind of people who would have the chutzpah to claim to a national audience that this kind of research was methodologically sound, I contacted Johns Hopkins University and was referred to Les Roberts, one of the primary authors of the study. Dr. Roberts defended his 47 cluster points, saying that this was standard. I'm not sure whose standards these are.

    Appendix A of the Johns Hopkins survey, for example, cites several other studies of mortality in war zones, and uses the citations to validate the group's use of cluster sampling. One study is by the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used 750 cluster points. Harvard's School of Public Health, in a 1992 survey of Iraq, used 271 cluster points. Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million.

    When I pointed out these numbers to Dr. Roberts, he said that the appendices were written by a student and should be ignored. Which led me to wonder what other sections of the survey should be ignored.

    With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.

    Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census.

    And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it--try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions.

    

BAM!

Red Thomas Redux

(from the archives, originally c. October 2001 )

I posted this over three years ago and it came out long before that. It's probably a good thing to review it. Snopes says that this is the real deal, so it's probably still good advice.

One of my original angles on surviving the threat had to do with my basic understanding that in a crisis, people accellerate what they already do, and that experts are not likely to change their behavior. However the people, having no prior experience or knowledge, are most likely to change their behavior. Consequently, the best way to leverage the power of the US would be in terms of self-defense, IE millions of Americans doing something slightly different. (Like buying tube socks or duct taping windows). But seriously, an immunized public is the greatest defense against assymetrics. The theory is that if one terrorist can do X, than one civilian can do 1/x.

A Soldier's Viewpoint on Surviving Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Attacks
From: SFC Red Thomas (Ret)
Armor Master Gunner
Mesa, AZ 

Unlimited reproduction and distribution is authorized. Just give me credit for my work, and, keep in context. 

Since the media has decided to scare everyone with predictions of chemical, biological, or nuclear warfare on our turf I decided to write a paper and keep things in their proper perspective. I am a retired military weapons, munitions, and training expert.

Lesson number one: In the mid 1990s there were a series of nerve gas attacks on crowded Japanese subway stations. Given perfect conditions for an attack less than 10% of the people there were injured (the injured were better in a few hours) and only one percent of the injured died.

60 Minutes once had a fellow telling us that one drop of nerve gas could kill a thousand people, well he didn't tell you the thousand dead people per drop was theoretical.

Drill Sergeants exaggerate how terrible this stuff was to keep the recruits awake in class (I know this because I was a Drill Sergeant too). Forget everything you've ever seen on TV, in the movies, or read in a novel about this stuff, it was all a lie (read this sentence again out loud!). These weapons are about terror, if you remain calm, you will probably not die. This is far less scary than the media and their "Experts," make it sound.

Chemical Weapons
Chemical weapons are categorized as nerve, blood, blister, and Incapacitating agents. Contrary to the hype of reporters and politicians they are not weapons of mass destruction they are "area denial," and terror weapons that don't destroy anything. When you leave the area you almost always leave the risk. That's the difference; you can leave the area and the risk but soldiers may have to stay put and sit through it and that's why they need all that spiffy gear.

These are not gasses, they are vapors and/or air borne particles. The agent must be delivered in sufficient quantity to kill/injure, and that defines when/how it's used. Every day we have a morning and evening inversion where "stuff," suspended in the air gets pushed down. This inversion is why allergies (pollen) and air pollution are worst at these times of the day.

So, a chemical attack will have it's best effect an hour of so either side of sunrise/sunset. Also, being vapors and airborne particles they are heavier than air so they will seek low places like ditches, basements and underground garages. This stuff won't work when it's freezing, it doesn't last when it's hot, and wind spreads it too thin too fast. They've got to get this stuff on you, or, get you to inhale it for it to work. They also have to get the concentration of chemicals high enough to kill or wound you. Too little and it's nothing, too much and it's wasted.

What I hope you've gathered by this point is that a chemical weapons attack that kills a lot of people is incredibly hard to do with military grade agents and equipment so you can imagine how hard it will be for terrorists. The more you know about this stuff the more you realize how hard it is to use.

We'll start by talking about nerve agents. You have these in your house, plain old bug killer (like Raid) is nerve agent. All nerve agents work the same way; they are cholinesterase inhibitors that mess up the signals your nervous system uses to make your body function. It can harm you if you get it on your skin but it works best if they can get you to inhale it. If you don't die in the first minute and you can leave the area you're probably gonna live. The military's antidote for all nerve agents is atropine and pralidoxime chloride. Neither one of these does anything to cure the nerve agent, they send your body into overdrive to keep you alive for five minutes,
after that the agent is used up. Your best protection is fresh air and staying calm. 

Listed below are the symptoms for nerve agent poisoning: 

Sudden headache, Dimness of vision (someone you're looking at will have pinpointed pupils), runny nose, excessive saliva or drooling, difficulty breathing, tightness in chest, nausea, stomach cramps, twitching of exposed skin where a liquid just got on you.

If you are in public and you start experiencing these symptoms, first ask yourself, did anything out of the ordinary just happen, a loud pop, did someone spray something on the crowd? Are other people getting sick too? Is there an odor of new mown hay, green corn, something fruity, or camphor where it shouldn't be? If the answer is yes, then calmly (if you panic you breathe faster and inhale more air/poison) leave the area and head up wind, or, outside.

Fresh air is the best "right now antidote." If you have a blob of liquid that looks like molasses or Kayro syrup on you; blot it or scrape it off and away from yourself with anything disposable. This stuff works based on your body weight, what a crop duster uses to kill bugs won't hurt you unless you stand there and breathe it in real deep, then lick the residue off the ground for a while. Remember they have to do all the work, they have to get the concentration up and keep it up for several minutes while all you have to do is quit getting it on you/quit breathing it by putting space between you and the attack.

Blood agents are cyanide or arsine which effect your blood's ability to provide oxygen to your tissue. The scenario for attack would be the same as nerve agent. Look for a pop or someone splashing/spraying something and folks around there getting woozy/falling down. The telltale smells are bitter almonds or garlic where it shouldn't be. The symptoms are blue lips, blue under the fingernails rapid breathing.

The military's antidote is amyl nitride and just like nerve agent antidote it just keeps your body working for five minutes till the toxins are used up. Fresh air is the your best individual chance.

Blister agents (distilled mustard) are so nasty that nobody wants to even handle it let alone use it. It's almost impossible to handle safely and may have delayed effect of up to 12 hours. The attack scenario is also limited to the things you'd see from other chemicals. If you do get large, painful blisters for no apparent reason, don't pop them, if you must, don't let the liquid from the blister get on any other area, the stuff just keeps on spreading. It's just as likely to harm the user as the target. Soap, water, sunshine, and fresh air are this stuff's enemy.

Bottom line on chemical weapons (it's the same if they use industrial chemical spills); they are intended to make you panic, to terrorize you, to heard you like sheep to the wolves. If there is an attack, leave the area and go upwind, or to the sides of the wind stream. They have to get the stuff to you, and on you. You're more likely to be hurt by a drunk driver on any given day than be hurt by one of these attacks. Your odds get better if you leave the area. Soap, water, time, and fresh air really deal this stuff a knock-out-punch. Don't let fear of an isolated attack rule your life. The odds are really on your side.

Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear bombs. These are the only weapons of mass destruction on earth. The effects of a nuclear bomb are heat, blast, EMP, and radiation. If you see a bright flash of light like the sun, where the sun isn't, fall to the ground! The heat will be over a second. Then there will be two blast waves, one out going, and one on it's way back. Don't stand up to see what happened after the first wave; anything that's going to happen will have happened in two full minutes.

These will be low yield devices and will not level whole cities. If you live through the heat, blast, and initial burst of radiation, you'll probably live for a very, very long time. Radiation will not create fifty foot tall women, or giant ants and grass hoppers the size of tanks. These will be at the most 1 kiloton bombs; that's the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT.

Here's the real deal, flying debris and radiation will kill a lot of exposed (not all!) people within a half mile of the blast. Under perfect conditions this is about a half mile circle of death and destruction, but, when it's done it's done. EMP stands for Electro Magnetic Pulse and it will fry every electronic device for a good distance, it's impossible to say what and how far but probably not over a couple of miles from ground zero is a good guess. Cars, cell phones, computers, ATMs, you name it, all will be out of order.

There are lots of kinds of radiation, you only need to worry about three, the others you have lived with for years. You need to worry about "Ionizing radiation," these are little sub atomic particles that go whizzing along at the speed of light. They hit individual cells in your body, kill the nucleus and keep on going. That's how you get radiation poisoning, you have so many dead cells in your body that the decaying cells poison you.

It's the same as people getting radiation treatments for cancer, only a bigger area gets radiated. The good news is you don't have to just sit there and take it, and there's lots you can do rather than panic. First; your skin will stop alpha particles, a page of a news paper or your clothing will stop beta particles, you just gotta try and avoid inhaling dust that's contaminated with atoms that are emitting these things and you'll be generally safe from them.

Gamma rays are particles that travel like rays (quantum physics makes my brain hurt) and they create the same damage as alpha and beta particles only they keep going and kill lots of cells as they go all the way through your body. It takes a lot to stop these things, lots of dense material, on the other hand it takes a lot of this to kill you.

Your defense is as always to not panic. Basic hygiene and normal preparation are your friends. All canned or frozen food is safe to eat. The radiation poisoning will not effect plants so fruits and vegetables are OK if there's no dust on em (rinse em off if there is). If you don't have running water and you need to collect rain water or use water from wherever, just let it sit for thirty minutes and skim off the water gently from the top. The dust with the bad stuff in it will settle and the remaining water can be used for the toilet which will still work if you have a bucket of water to pour in the
tank. 

Biological Weapons
Finally there's biological warfare. There's not much to cover here. Basic personal hygiene and sanitation will take you further than a million doctors. Wash your hands often, don't share drinks, food, sloppy kisses, etc., .... with strangers. Keep your garbage can with a tight lid on it, don't have standing water (like old buckets, ditches, or kiddie pools) laying around to allow mosquitoes breeding room. This stuff is carried by vectors, that is bugs, rodents, and contaminated material. If biological warfare is so easy as the TV makes it sound, why has Saddam Hussein spent twenty years, millions, and millions of dollars trying to get it right? If you're clean of person and home you eat well and are active you're gonna live.

Overall preparation for any terrorist attack is the same as you'd take for a big storm. If you want a gas mask, fine, go get one. I know this stuff and I'm not getting one and I told my Mom not to bother with one either (how's that for confidence). We have a week's worth of cash, several days worth of canned goods and plenty of soap and water. We don't leave stuff out to attract bugs or rodents so we don't have them.

These people can't conceive a nation this big with this much resources. These weapons are made to cause panic, terror, and to demoralize. If we don't run around like sheep they won't use this stuff after they find out it's no fun. The government is going nuts over this stuff because they have to protect every inch of America. You've only gotta protect yourself, and by doing that, you help the country.

Finally, there are millions of caveats to everything I wrote here and you can think up specific scenarios where my advice isn't the best. This letter is supposed to help the greatest number of people under the greatest number of situations. If you don't like my work, don't nit pick, just sit down and explain chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare in a document around three pages long yourself. This is how we the people of the United States can rob these people of their most desired goal, your terror.

Love

Love.

I've heard that there are languages that have different words for love for different types. We could use some of that in English if only to remove rhyming couplets ending in 'from above' from pop tunes.

I don't know about what love is other than the willingness to put oneself at risk for the benefit of someone whose welfare you think is more valuable than your own. But love doesn't necessarily imply devotion. Love can be fleeting, transitory. We love and then we learn, and suddenly the object of our love is not worthy. If we continue to love then we are fools and love becomes cheap. That cannot be love.

Love rewards by its presence. You can love someone or something that does not or cannot return that love, but in that love is not diminished. The reward of love is the feeling that giving brings, it is the acceptance of love by the recipient that rewards.

Wesley Reprises The Fugitive

Wesley Snipes is about to learn the hard way that he's just a comic book hero. He and some co-conspirators have allegedly decided to bonk heads with the IRS to the tune of $12 million. Uh oh.

Actor Wesley Snipes, who starred in the "Blade" movie series, was charged with tax fraud on Tuesday in an indictment that alleges he illegally claimed refunds of almost $12 million.

A warrant has been issued for Snipes' arrest, but the actors whereabouts were unknown, Paul Perez, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida, told a news conference in Tampa.

Perez said a federal grand jury indicted Snipes, who once lived in Windermere, Florida, along with co-defendants Eddie Ray Kahn of Sorrento, Florida, and Douglas Rosile, of Venice, Florida.

Rosile has surrendered to authorities and Kahn is believed to be in Panama, Perez said.

I always liked Wesley Snipes. My gut is that he's too smart to do something dumb like this and may have been dragged into a scheme. But I would also bet that he's ballsy enough to try and do some international finagling. I mean he's not the sort of individual whose talents have been adequately recognized here in the states. I'm thinking of his more low key performances over the years, like Down In The Delta. But hey, ever since Demolition Man, he's had action star written all over him, and that's where the money is.

We all know he's a big star in Asia and I wouldn't be surprised that he could stay gone from the US a long time without too much discomfort. Maybe he'll show up in Country Two.

I Love Ms Dewey

Now here's something I didn't expect to find. The woman of my dreams. Online.

Somewhere there is a marketing manager who has tapped into my subconsious and found the perfect woman, or basically the idea of her, and fleshed her out into Ms. Dewey. She's got the look, the brains, the voice, the attitude, from what I can tell, she's got everything. Alas, she's a search engine. And a pathetically slow and buggy one at that. But I'll wait for her, even though she crashes my browser. My guess is that there are millions of people out there just drooling over her and that's why she's so slow. She has been slashdotted.

I don't know what's going on in her head, but ... argh. I'm not going to sit up here like a fool for very long. I can only tell you that whomever that actress is, I'm smitten. If I were a rich man, I'd break a bunch of necks and promises to find her - then again if I were a rich man, Ms. Dewey would be in line right behind Zadie Smith.

if... OK so now you know. This is the woman Amanda Congdon is trying to be in my mind, but she's failing. Ms. Dewey is so incredibly hot. OK I'm done. I'm not saying anything else.

The Departed

The Departed is a huge movie by Martin Scorsese that has about 4 or 5 throwaway scenes and one rather obvious continuity problem in a scene where Jack Nicholson probably farted or did something to throw Matt Damon's game off. Other than that, it's a great movie. But I have to say that it's not as great as Eastwood's Mystic River, but it's right up there.

Nevertheless, It has been a very long time I saw a movie with as many real American men portayed in the midst of the dilemmas that define them as men. Because of that, this is something more than a police drama or a gangster movie, it's one of those rare films that capture the spirit of what it feels like to be a man, caught up. This one happens to be about young men, and it's damned good. The last film that approached such territory and handled it well was Tom Hanks' excellent Road to Perdition.

The Departed is a smart plotty thriller with some of the saltiest, snappiest dialog ever in this genre. It's a through and through Irish and Italian Boston barnburner of a movie that revolves around the mystery and double dealing that happens when two moles in rival organizations try to discover each other's identities. That makes for some very dramatic tension and more plot twists and cliffhangers than I was prepared to deal with going in, but it was well worth it. There is a deep spy double agent vibe in this.

In a great scene reminescent of Lawrence Fishburne in 'Deep Cover', Leo DiCaprio discovers that he's about to be used as a deniable undercover operative, but not before he undergoes the most inquisitorial ball busting interview ever captured on film.

The film moves at a brisk pace and although it takes a while to get twisty and complex it does so in a hurry. The ending is great, bordering on magnificent. Without question this is the best cop & gangster film since Mystic River with fine performances all around, even Matt Damon. But special props go out to Mark Wahlberg whom I think for the first time in his life, gets to portray somebody close to who he really is. He should get best supporting actor for this one.

One more note. There has been an interesting meme floated around last week about the fact that the FBI only has about 33 Arabic speakers and it is the reason they are unable to crack Al Qaeda. That the higher ups at the Bureau are mostly Irish and Italians and that's because their generation of leadership cut their teeth busting up crime families that they were able to infiltrate handily. This is the film that shows how cozy that relationship is. Sounds like truth to me.