Thursday, October 30, 2003
Drug War: Slow and Stupid Is Better Than Nothing
Bureaucrash wants me to surrender in the War on Drugs. I disagree with them on this. I still support many of the aims of bureaucrash and wish to participate, but this is a matter I disagree with. I hope that the others in bureaucrash are comfortable with a respectful disagreement.
I have spent a lot of my life pursuing drug smugglers. While they are not necessarily the worst of humanity, they are better capitalized than most dictatorships. In several instances, the drug producers and smugglers are attempting to become dictators and this does need to be opposed.
I do agree that different methods should be used and a more coherent and effective long term policy should be created. It is a shame that all the best people for this effort are now fully engaged in preserving our civilization from fundamentalist terror, but that is a reasonable priority choice. I have high hopes for some of the new addiction research, and can dream of a day when demand diminishes to the point where the suppliers are bankrupted. That day has not come yet. Until then, I reluctantly must support the continued drug war, unfair and badly directed though it may be.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Partisan Headlines Hit New Milestone
A Cambridge, Massachusetts think tank came up with an estimate of the number of Iraqi war dead during major conflict; Yahoo News reported it as hitting a new milestone on the home page. Moments later they changed the headline on the main page to something approaching a description of the linked story. I regret that I did not get a screen capture of their unthinking bias, but I was operating on the assumption that they had actually thought about the stories before posting them. This was a failure of editorial oversight on a number of levels. I realize that Glenn Reynolds is right to insist on people seeking their news from more outlets than Instapundit; it is nice to have that as an alternative to unthinking bias.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Doing the Math for Real
Two contractors for the CIA, William Carlson and Christopher Glenn Mueller, were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan today. This is a shame and something of a surprise because the CIA was able to release the names so quickly. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of outsourcing the Director of Operations (DO) covert personnel, if so I am all for it. A lot of good people have died in the interests of the United States doing good things and their families never knew why. It also indicates that the DO is operating with a level of transparency that is of value to the free people of the world.
The math on this is kind of fuzzy. It appears that the ambushers lost at least 18 people to our two. Actually a nine to one ratio is not quite good enough for the long haul. We would prefer to have at least ten enemy killed to one of our troops, that is the minimum that civilized people can readily trade for barbarians. A better number would be an order of magnitude greater; one hundred barbarian warriors for every civilized soldier. With the 100:1 ratio, barbarians tend to depopulate themselves and learn toleration through attrition. It is difficult to sustain vendettas when you cannot repopulate your tribe. Polygamy can recover some of this, but unless the wives of the intolerant are continuously pregnant with triplets, the sense of powerlessness batters its way through the prejudice. The whole 72 virgins for killing an infidel promise only works while fewer than 72 martyrs are required to hit the lottery.
The other end of this math is also fuzzy, there were 18 that were claimed dead and probably at least sight verified. There is no accurate count of enemy wounded or missing. The missing number is important because after a 500 pound bomb is dropped, a lot of dirt gets thrown up. Ambushers hiding behind a rock who get buried don't get counted in the casualties list. My father was buried for an hour after a mortar barrage in Korea; it is only because he was a Marine and they do not leave their people that he lived to tell the tale and become claustrophobic. (More importantly from a personal standpoint he also survived to sire your humble author, an act for which I am eternally grateful.) Mujahadeen bugging out under air attack are not known for their concern for those who died for Allah. They are also not known for great medical treatment.
What is important about this is that the civilized people of the world are continuing the fight and engaging the enemies of civilization. We are sending good men into the mountains to risk their lives and we are supporting them with modern equipment. This is not like the shadow wars of the past against communism. We are not being coy or playing games. It is getting on to winter in Afghanistan, and supplies for the Mujahadeen have to be interdicted. It is a tragedy that Carson and Mueller died, but I thank them for going in harm's way and am glad that they did not die unremembered.
Doing the Math
My greatest disappointment with the Left is that thirty years after the advent of inexpensive calculators, twenty years after the availability of powerful computer spreadsheets, and two years after 9/11, they refuse to do the math. There are extreme complexities in the world that are not readily approachable with inexpensive computing devices and simple accounting methods. The variables of global economies and climate, for instance, are so profoundly complex that they challenge the human capacity for understanding with any tool, method, or philosophy. The motivations of the brutal, the ignorant, and the rapacious are not a complexity of this order, however.
It is a shame that so few people on the Left will do more than roll their eyes up at the next paragraph. Literally, peoples who wish to make a coherent point that is worth talking about should be ashamed for unwillingness or inability to pay serious attention to verifiable facts. Those who wish to compel the world and the leadership of the nation to follow their policy should be able to coherently understand simple math. Criticizing numbers without a willingness to discuss the import of those numbers is despicable.
The Gross Domestic Policy (GDP) of the United States in 2002 was ten point four trillion dollars ($10,400,000,000,000). The per capita (per person share) of that was $36,700) Last year was a bad one and the US GDP only grew at a rate of two point four five percent (2.45%), increasing our GDP roughly $254,000,000,000. The GDP for Syria was fifty-nine point four billion (59,400,000,000), with a per capita GDP of $3,500. Iraq's GDP last year was fifty-eight billion (58,000,000,000), with a per capita of $2,400.
While economics is a complex study with many exceptions and often outright lies, there are certain basic assertions that can be made. An order of magnitude is a significant indicator, when something is ten times larger than another thing there is a substantial difference. The average person in the US is more than ten times more productive than a person in Syria or Iraq. On the basis of the above figures, it appears that being a fascist and exporting terror is not very good business. Furthermore, asking a nation burdened with the poison legacy of fascism and a terrorist campaign to accept ruinous loans is churlish and indefensible.
If you would like to dispute my conclusions and assert your own, it will give me great joy to check your sums.
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Work Worth Doing Is Worth Finishing
The press is not being provided with images of coffins being unloaded at Dover Air Force Base. I am alright with this because it images of coffins unloaded from a plane are horrifying but anonymous, a statistic not a story. If the press wants to take pictures of government issued coffins, they have to go to the funerals, not the cargo handling. If they go to the funerals, it will be hard for them to dodge reporting the story instead of the statistic.
The major media's decision to not risk confronting their own prejudice by presenting the life decisions that led to the death of our troops is contemptible cowardice. If they were to report the stories of the people who went in harms way, they would find a lot of decent people convinced they were doing the right thing by risking their lives so that others could be free.
Some people are concerned that George W. Bush is not attending individual services or even a mass memorial for those who died in Iraq. It is far too soon for a memorial service for Iraq, we are going to be there a lot longer and we will continue to lose people. For those who were raised by wolves or television, this is what is called national resolve. Properly applied, resolve can accomplish great things. As for individual services, were the President of the United States, the most powerful individual in the world to attend a service, it would do little to help those grieving their loss. I lost a Grandmother, an Aunt, and my father this year; I surely did not need every major media camped on my front lawn to help me through my grief.
I would rather have our people make a lasting accomplishment than receive empty accolades. Gordon and Shugart earned their Medals of Honor, but a more lasting tribute would have been a civilized Somalia. The greatest affront to me would be to require all the sacrifices our people have made in Iraq and Afghanistan and then walk away with the job in sight of completion but undone. Until Iraq is economically stable enough to make itself politically stable, the job is unfinished.
We are building something more important than roads and bridges in Iraq and Afghanistan; we are building the tools for widespread prosperity. The only way to prevent tyranny is to provide the people with the economic power to defeat those who would enslave them. This is what we are doing in Iraq and why the fascist Baathists and the militant Islamists are trying to kill us. We are providing the tools for choice; this is the death of totalitarianism.
I understand that many do not like Bush, but he is freeing slaves. If you are not an Afghani woman, this freedom may not mean much to you; it should. By any reasonable standard of Western liberalism, we are engaged in work worth doing. According to history, this work is worth doing well and, above all, finishing.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Kool-Aid Dissent
It is a lot of fun to be angry. The adrenaline flowing, the feeling of unity with a pack, the delicious clarity of an extreme position are all heady experiences. The tonic of youth for many young and old is the adherence to a compelling ideal. This feeling is real and addictive; the source and cost of the feeling for many is irrelevant. Kayaking down rapids, skiing down a glacier, and screaming at Bush can all be accomplished in one day in Portland. Dissent has become another extreme sport in the Northwest.
Just like kayaking and skiing, there are points beyond which you can no longer recover. Just like other extreme sports, many of those points are not attended to by amateur enthusiasts. Just like other extreme sports, screwing up can get you imprisoned, hurt, or killed. Unlike other extreme sports, there is no regulatory body of peers to keep things safe and sane. Extreme dissent lacks the civility and sanity of a mosh pit.
There are issues with dissent that are not faced by extreme sports. Sportsmen routinely confront the bounds of natural laws, but they operate within them because they have no other choice. Extreme dissenters often ignore the bounds of human laws, civil communication, and fact verification regardless of the consequences, and they often get away with it. Eventually this behavior is wildly destructive.
Jim Jones is a mostly forgotten specter of a bygone era, but the legacy of his dissent is still worth reviewing. In another time, Jim Jones led a congregation to believe that they were persecuted and possessors of a special truth. He took those people away from rational community into a jungle and established his own criteria for truth. When confronted with a reality they could not dismiss or suborn, he chose to kill his community rather than relinquish the ecstasy of his message.
Today much of what advertises itself as dissent is increasingly isolated and lunatic, like the ideology of Jonestown. The acrimonious opposition to the current administration is pushing itself further into the jungle and away from honest communication. The eventual result of this political extremism is not yet written, but there is a point of no return. The final act of dissent is to drink the Kool-Aid and deny reality forever. Last week, Garrett Hardin and his wife took that position without admitting the failure of their Malthusian stance. This is not necessarily the ultimate fate of all who pronounce the true religion is named, "Bush=Hitler", but it is not an unlikely result, either.
Admitting that you are wrong is hard; admitting that you were deliberately vile in support of a lie is impossible for many. There are some mountains you should not ski, some rivers you should not run, and some political stances that will destroy you. Abandoning civil communication is like ignoring safety warnings and the weather; it may be a rush at first, but eventually it will bring you grief. In the end, it is better to accept a buzz kill than a kool-aid dissent.
(Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, Howare Kurtz, and Gregg Easterbrook for the inspiration)
Sunday, October 19, 2003
The Last Straw
S.Amdt. 1871 to S. 1689 (Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan Security and Reconstruction Act, 2004 )
Looks innocuous, doesn't it? I suppose that they couldn't actually call it the Iraqi Indentured Servitude Amendment and expect passage. That is what it is, though. Another "loan" with no expectation of repayment, only the expectation of decades of odious moral advantage over people struggling to be free in the harshest environment in the world. Keeping track of this "loan" will cost the US millions of dollars, and it will never get repaid. This amendment is penny wise, pound foolish, and diplomatically inane.
For me this is the straw that broke the camel's back. Tomorrow I will change my registration from Independent to Republican. I do not think all that much of many of the Republicans in control of the local constituency, but on the whole, that is more of a challenge than a matter for despair. The Republicans, for whatever reasons, were doing the right thing when it mattered. The Democrats were seeking personal advantage at any cost when it mattered. The Democrats have embraced isolationism instead of opposing the next holocaust and they are as damned for that position as the Republicans were in 1941. How Senator Wyden can reconcile this position with his own faith is a mystery to me. I can no longer do so.
Liberate Iraq. Free Iran. End Oppression in North Korea. Make your vote count.
(Thanks to Instapundit and Priorities and Frivolities for the heads up.)
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Legislating Morality...That Trick Never Works
As any bright can tell you, religion is a tool to keep the credulous in squalor, oppressing them endlessly and filling their lives with superstitious nonsense. In case you hadn't heard the people formerly known as atheists now want to be known as brights. Okay, most of the atheists I know probably think this is as big a steaming pile of hubris as has ever littered the green…but go with me on this one. The ones who want to be known as brights like the term because it is less laden with negative connotations than the terms previously used to identify them like atheists, arrogant bastards, and pretentious weasels. I'm more than okay with this rebranding effort because it will more clearly differentiate between the people who want to identify themselves as not believing in God and/or deities and those who want to identify themselves as clearly superior to anybody who does believe in God and/or deities.
Let me be above board with my own biases: I believe in God. My particular choice of expression of my faith is a fairly liberal Christianity that is really very open to new ideas and different beliefs. I actually have a fair amount of education in this theology stuff; my father had his Masters of Divinity from the University of Chicago Theological Seminary and I attended a very liberal Catholic University. I have seriously considered the teachings of a number of religions as well as atheism. I have also toured the world, sailed on every ocean, loved a woman, fought a man, eaten well, gone without, set foot in the tombs of the Pharaohs, and buried my father. I have been stranded in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles from the nearest land in an open boat with a dead engine while my ship sailed over the horizon. I assure you that I have given religion some serious consideration.
It is a toss up as to who is more obnoxious; proselytizing Christians or litigious Brights. Proselytizing Christians often do not feel complete until they have ruined your day by humbly making you feel like crap. Litigious Brights appear not to feel complete until they have officiously used the judicial system to enact social change that their ideas are insufficiently attractive to accomplish. Fifty years ago, confronting some very despicable totalitarians, who happened to be atheists, the US chose to differentiate the country by altering the wording of the pledge of allegiance and the design of the dollar bill. (See, everybody rebrands; no big deal.) Now the brights want to remove that differentiation and are more than happy to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
Now, if the people who are interested in retaining the differentiation were smart, they would engage in a class action lawsuit against the brights and take them for every penny they had. Who cares what the countersuit would be about; this is about predatory enforcement of personal beliefs on others using the courts, not about integrity or principles. If it was about personal beliefs, the brights could go someplace where their beliefs would be less infringed upon, nobody is keeping them here. If this was about superior ways of living and thinking, the brights could come up with a coherent dialogue that would make their case for them. More importantly, if this was about being a superior person, the brights could muster up a tithe of the tolerance that has been shown them. This is about using the courts to legislate morality. These days, maybe this wasn't such a toss up after all.
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
They Are Demanding Freedom and Justice in Tehran
The return of Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has caused a spontaneous protest of the government. Compared to the orchastrated support rallies of the theocracy, this is exciting, fresh, and fraught with possibility. Free Iran!
Holy Cow, the Nobel Committee decided to do something to wash the stain that is Yasser Arafat from their hands! Welcome to the beginning of the world.
Equity and Sabine Herold
Michael Totten has declared that he can never hate the unions because of the benefits he has enjoyed as the stepson of a union worker. I wonder how long his credulous tolerance of unions would last stuck on the freeway in Los Angeles during the transit strike. Knowing you, I am sure that you could endure a day for solidarity's sake. You probably would last at least a week. But on the seventh week of the seventh year...oops, just drifted into an augury...after several years of this kind of crap and the insidious effects of routine striking your love of unions would likely turn ugly. American unions survive better because of the treat of strike. In France, and much of the EU, strikes are the endless tollbooths of their existence; extorting a toll on the economy and the people as if it was their due.
The greatest gift the Unions ever received from Washington was the Taft-Hartley Act which prevents them from shutting down the United States and being loathed in return. We just invaded two nations because 3,000 of our citizens and guests were killed, and we would not stand for that kind of effrontery happening again. How well would the unions in the US stand up if they were conspicuously culpable for the deaths of fifteen thousand Americans? French union mandated maximum hours meant that during the holiday month, understaffed hospitals could not require staff to stay extra hours to provide life-saving care. French unions would have thought us vile and intemperate for not ignoring the piles of corpses with their fortitude and indifference if al Queda had declared itself the defenders of organized labor.
The key to American stability is the balance of power and the notion that all power derives from the people, not the government, the corporations, the military, nor the unions. In France they have never established that balance as a central idea of their identity and they suffer for it now. Hooray for Sabine Herold for providing the beleaguered French with the prospect of equitable liberty.
UPDATE:
Clarified a passage that Michael Totten pointed out as unclear.
TrackBack
Monday, October 13, 2003
Oh Yes, This Is Also Free Speech…
It is a good and great thing to have free speech and to use it to express your views. However, when you choose to do so it serves all well if you are able to support your contentions and articulate your views with the support of facts. While telling stories of bogeymen and wicked monsters is also protected speech, it is usually best when not put forward as defensible policy. If someone puts themselves forward to speak as an expert, they should be prepared to have their comments reviewed. Colleen Rowley did not express herself defensibly; in fact she showed her ass. James Lileks then proceeded to thrash it for her.
Funniest stuff I have read in quite some time.
T-Shirt Politics
I have a politically provocative t-shirt that I had made ten years ago. On the back is a drawing of my ship (USS Stump DD-978) launching Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Iraqi nuclear weapons facility at Tuwaitha on the evening of 16/17 January 1993. On the front is the logo "No Nukes". I have waited for years to explain to a Greenpeace activist what I meant by the term.
I was never in the level of danger our people in Iraq were in during the war. I was never in the level of danger that Shirin Ebadi was in for most of her life. But I was in harms way, doing what I could against people who would do real nuclear damage if they had the chance. Greenpeace never hung it out there in a coherent, consistent, disciplined, and effective manner to oppose real nuclear risks.
I still feel quite strongly that the left fell into a pattern of behavior best described by Monty Python's movie "Life of Brian". I just wish they weren't wasting so many good people's lives and demeaning so many things that need to be done. I wish they weren't so committed to the posture of outrageous exclusion that drives independant thought and integrity away from them.
Thanks to the lovely folks at who knew for reminding me of my t-shirt. I wonder what this does: TrackBack
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Productive National Security
(or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Powerball)
Hidden amongst all the drifts of hyperbole and spin is a very important fact: the current administration is one of the most productive national security organizations ever. With a minimal force, the United States has invaded and pacified two nations. This was done with minimal casualties amongst civilians and our military. This was done in nations where other invaders have broken their teeth and their hearts in recent history. Two years after the balloon went up; two of the most destabilizing governments in the world are reduced to the status of annoyance.
The endless reports of every mishap in the area could easily lead you to a different conclusion. This is an illusion. Soldiers and civilians are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan that is not illusory. The level of casualties relative to the level of reporting is much more important to consider. That bastion of marketing self-importance CNN is reporting every civilian death in those two countries caused by the actions of their former regimes, now. Two years ago that same CNN refused to air any reports of those same regimes slaughtering their people. The difference is that now the deaths are news, matters of isolated distinction instead of the daily grind of the totalitarian meat processor. Does CNN ever mention how much less deadly it is to be a civilian in these nations? Well, that would imply integrity. Orders of magnitude fewer people are being killed by the vicious bastards of the Taliban and Baath Party; that benefit is the direct result of productivity of our national security organization.
Although the victories of the last two years have been presented as effortless despite our own leadership failures, nothing could be further from the reality. Our troops fight diligently, intelligently, and with remarkable restraint. They face dangerous opponents who have no concern for the customs of war or the cost to their own people who have crushed and humiliated opponents in living memory. However, it must be noted that our enemies are disorganized and that is a result of decisions made by our leadership. Every one of our enemies' leadership we could reach that could be bought has been bought. (Powerball technology applied to military ends. Oh the humanity…)
This is a brilliant strategy with far reaching consequences. Once a leader has been bought and abandoned his troops, it becomes intensely difficult for him to raise troops against us again. We can discredit him at any time; although it is much more likely that he will spend the rest of his days in comfortable obscurity. If you put the value of a permanently wounded US troop at one million dollars, it quickly becomes much cheaper to purchase victories with dollars instead of casualties. (As a reference, my father was retired for injuries sustained in the Korean War. He died in June after drawing disability pension and benefits for more than fifty years.) The Powerball bomb is arguably the most cost effective weapon ever used by American troops.
This is certainly not the only arrow in our quiver and not the only one to hit the mark. There are interesting rumors coming out of Africa of US personnel out and about doing things and stuff. It is hard to find much about this in most media because, like CNN, they are engaged full time presenting a fantasia of humiliation and defeat where we are formally engaged. What is most important is that there was no major terrorist attack on US soil in the last two years. That could change before I post this, but it seems unlikely.
For all the sturm and drang about supposed lapses, failures, and leaks in the current administration, there seems little real substance to these charges when weighed against the results. No administration has ever done so much with so few in so little time. The accusations that they aren't doing more are as substantive as complaints that they are not doing all this while wearing ballet slippers. Accusations that they are somehow responsible for the attacks that caused this activity are simply despicable calls for attention from pathetic fools who've discovered that their life's work has been blindly backing the wrong horse. The George W. Bush administration has lapses, failures, and leaks, but their problems have interfered less with the task of protecting this nation and its interests less than any in living memory. There is still much to be desired from them, but there is little to actually complain about regarding security.
Tuesday, October 07, 2003
The Arnold Post (Cobbled together from comments on Roger L. Simon's Blog)
McClintock's decision to stick in the race and split the conservative Christian (i.e. nutbar) wing of the Republican Party means that Arnold owes them nothing. Splitting the nutbars who do not care if they elect anything away from the Republican Party is a huge shift. It redefines party affiliations and changes everything.
I've met the nutbar wing of the Republican Party up here in Oregon and they scare me. These people never check their facts, only act from emotion, and are incapable of making the kinds of compromises that are needed to make good government. Pushing them out of politics is striking a blow for liberty and rational liberalism everywhere. I disagree with the people stating that McClintock won this because he convinced the conservative Christians to an eternity of dying on the cross. We've checked the records and that only worked for one guy.
I do not see myself becoming a nutbar Christian in the next ten years. My education is much better than that because I studied religion as part of my liberal arts degree. I had as many theology and philosophy hours as I did history hours. I view detailed research and intellectual discussion as an essential to establishing a worldview. In other words, to the nutbar Republicans, I am viewed as the anti-Christ.
Providing rational centrists with the key to unlock the shackles the nutbars have put on them is valuable. People like to feel at least a little bit safe, and the "stolen election" screaming moved a lot of people away from the left just before 9/11. People like to feel decent, and Pat Robertson's denouncing of America as deserving to be attacked moved a lot of people away from the right just after 9/11. Arnold was the first person to make a plausible case for centrist rationality and internal compromise.
I am sick and tired of being cast as the polar opposite of anyone I disagree with. I am furious over being caricatured because my position is different. I have been a centrist for decades now, disgusted with the hyperbole of the left and the right. I want to be evaluated for what I say in context to what I am talking about and be confronted with my adherence to logic and facts instead of dogma and hysteria. I want to thank Governor Schwarzenegger and Roger L. Simon for letting me be myself, again.
Object of Beauty
I have an object of beauty on my desk. I think it is beautiful, some might argue that it has an insufficient dynamism. It is in fact more skillfully rendered than almost any artist would take the time to create these days, if they had the skill. It is balanced on all axes, it is light enough to lift with your littlest finger, and it is strong enough to lift my house. It is a rail adapter for an AGM-84 Harpoon missile that was discarded for a slight damage sometime in the early nineties, literally thrown on the scrap heap, and collected by me shortly before I left the Navy. It is an inert chunk of metal and a reminder of the definition of power.
The object of beauty is worthy of consideration. From this small piece of metal, no longer than your forearm, the entire weight of the missile was hung. During launch, this piece of metal, no thicker than my index finger in any dimension, would hold the missile in place until the rocket booster had come to full power. Then it would travel down the launching rails, holding the missile in place, until it exited traveling a substantial fraction of the speed of sound, all in the length of a small dining room.
It is marvelously well machined and fabulously well preserved. Although it's time on the scrap heap left it with many marks and scrapes, it has no signs of corrosion after nearly a decade of sitting in a box unattended. What the blemishes do not conceal, however near perfection of machining and design that went into its creation. Every facet of the object, and there are hundreds, has been perfectly machined to a fine tolerance. This could probably be attached to any Harpoon missile in the fleet tomorrow and fit flawlessly.
In all likelihood, it was designed and built by some of the people who put men on the moon. Those long retired steely eyed missile men of the cold war crafted this wonderment on a drafting board, checking their figures with slide rules. Every facet is machined, each to tolerances finer than most motors. For that matter, this one piece of metal probably cost more than most engine blocks. When this was designed, it probably took months of planning, weeks of refining, days of machining, and years of testing. Today, with the latest computer aided design, manufacturing, and preliminary testing, the whole project could be ready for test in a few weeks, less time than that if put on crash priority. For all the yammering about $400 hammers, the United States has a design and production capacity that is tremendous and efficient. The price of our weapons systems is dropping while their quality and capability is increasing dramatically.
If designed today to deliver the same capabilities and tolerances without concern for the bureaucratic maze, this same object could be built smoother, with less material waste, fewer machining steps, less weight, even closer tolerances, higher strength, less airfoil disruption, and for less money. Even so, this is an object of beauty to me. Saddam Hussein, al Queda, and the Taliban could not make anything so fine, and I think that is beautiful. The organization, understanding, teamwork, science, capitol, and industrial capacity necessary to create this kind of weapon are not available to intolerant racists. We should all take more time to appreciate beauty and what makes it possible.
Monday, October 06, 2003
The Economics of Terror
Israel attacked Syria. That Syria was hosting a terrorist base camp actively engaged in attacking people in Israel is entirely beside the point to many people. While stupid young men are strapping bombs to their bodies and detonating themselves in public streets, it is much more important to discuss the diplomatic considerations of the attacked nation's decision to defend itself using military means. Some would have you believe that all military actions are bad and so the United States should cut its ties with Israel. As the rabbi said, fat chance.
I suspect that the US might give up on Israel when Jewish peoples stop contributing to the GNP of the nation more than any other group. Please note that I am not talking about holding wealth or manipulating wealth, I am speaking about creating wealth for everyone around them. Excising that thread from the fabric of our nation could be done. Doing so would start a process of impoverishment and leave our children bickering in the squalid ruins of a once great nation.
There is a critical difference between treasure and wealth. Treasure provides tangible rewards, wealth provides investment. One of the chief failures of many Arab peoples is the inability to make this distinction. Michael Totten also makes this mistake on occasion, so it could be said that this is not a massive intellectual failure, even if it is a critical one. It is possible to convert treasure into wealth, but it does take time and, more importantly, sustained intelligent effort.
The people of Israel provide the world and the United States with wealth. The Arab members of OPEC provide the world with treasure. Wealth flourishes in freedom and treasure works in oppression. It is vitally important to remember that Islamist fundamentalists view any economy other than a treasure economy as a direct violation of the teachings of the Koran. We are working to create a wealth economy in Iraq and al Queda is trying as hard as they can to kill us for it.
This is a conflict between nomad and agrarian economies. The Islamic fundamentalists attempting to kill you believe that economic strength not measured in sheep and gold is blasphemous. To them, any successful economy not based on nomadic herding and hording treasure is the work of Satan. Look carefully at where the Bedu peoples were eighty-five years ago when Lawrence organized their revolt against the Turks who ran the cities. Also remember that forty years ago the dollar was tied directly to silver in this country. Stepping away from the atavistic joys of a treasure economy is something we have only done in the last generation, and many people will still tell you it was a mistake.
People are trying to make you believe that this is a war for oil; that is not really true. Iraq can produce roughly $20 billion a year in petroleum. The Gross Domestic Product of the United States is $10.4 TRILLION (A number so large that it cannot be meaningfully expressed in sheep and treasure hordes; therefore it is a blasphemy.) People asking you to believe that as a nation we have gone to this great effort to snag a quick 0.19% growth in our GDP are probably not doing the math. (That is to say less than one fifth of a percent or eight percent of our growth on a recession year.)
To the limited extent that this is an economic war at all, this is a war for wealth, and we want to create it. That this wealth is something that will destroy the way of life for tens of thousands of violent, abusive, genocidal, racists who have killed people in the United States is not so much of an accident as some would have you believe. Think of this as an inverse of Carthage. Instead of salting the earth, we are making it bloom again. Instead of scattering the survivors, we are gathering them. We are making an ancient civilization young again. None of this is covered in the parts of the Koran the Islamists fixate on though, so we all must die. That "all blasphemers must die" policy has some flaws, though.
The chief problem with any operation is personnel. Top-grade fundamentalists capable of surviving an operation against blasphemers are actually quite hard to find. The advantages of using suicide bombers are that you don't have to provide them with a getaway car, you don't have to find them a secure place to stay until the heat blows over, you do not have to train them for their second mission, and they don't talk afterwards. (You thought your VP of HR was evil, ha!)
It is fairly hard to maintain the conditions that generate a suicide bomber. There is no indication that diplomatic efforts have ever discouraged or diminished these conditions, though. Rockets exploding in the middle of the training hall have had measurable effect on breaking up operant conditioning. The sense of invulnerable purpose is hard to maintain when a precision guided munition is headed to your position; perhaps they are too impersonal.
Until we can break down the homicidal and suicidal adherence to treasure economy, we will probably continue to support our co-economists in Israel. When they use rockets and laser-guided bombs to discourage the suicidal, we will be at worst vaguely admonishing to them. If this upsets some people who feel we should sever all diplomatic ties with people who use military violence to defend themselves or are otherwise controversial, so what. The money that treasure provides talks in the halls of the United Nations, but wealth built the halls and keeps them lit.
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