First, kill all the doctors

Meta and Meta discusses a common free-market argument that economies are self-correcting equilibria. He quotes from a Wall Street Journal interview with economist Thomas Sowell:

The notion of a self-equilibrating system -- the market economy -- meant a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians, he says. "And even today many still haven't accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging."

before going on to raise the question:

But are the interventions of policymakers into the workings of the "self-equilibrating" economy really any more fraught with error than, say, the interventions of doctors into the workings of the "self-equilibrating" human body? Should we dispense with surgery merely because it "might be" damaging?

I think that Sowell would reply that the question of whether interventions into the economy is more or less fraught with danger than surgery is an empirical question, not a philosophical one, and as such should be decided based on the empirical facts. Sowell's emphasis on empirical testing of economic theories is excellent advice. No matter how elegant of sensible your theory is, if it fails to match reality, it is worthless (except in the negative sense of "this is what not to do").

Furthermore, I guess that Sowell would probably continue that we've already collected enough evidence to be sure that attempts to intervene in the marketplace almost always do more harm than good. Whether he is right about this, I'm not so sure (which is a polite way of saying I think he's wrong.)

Public diplomacy

Marc Lynch from Abu Aardvark recently gave a workshop about public diplomacy:

I laid out the rapid transformation of the Arab media, especially satellite TV, and said something about the causes of anti-American attitudes. But mostly I argued for taking the "public" in "public diplomacy" seriously, thinking about it as an environment rather than as an instrument: an environment which isn't amenable to centralized control, where information can't be compartmentalized, where messages can't be tailored for a domestic or international audience without the other listening in, and where the game rewards argument and engagement rather than message control and spin.

I got some pushback on my argument that this growing "publicity" means that PsyOps and strategic deception should be avoided because of the devastating effects of their inevitable exposure on the credibility of America and America's would-be defenders in the Arab political realm. Several military and psyops folks objected, pointing out that I don't know how many PsyOps have not been exposed, and expressing great confidence that their operations would never be exposed. Maybe - they're the experts. But I still urged them to take seriously the implications of the transforming Arab and global media environment, where the the odds of eventual exposure of secret programs is high and increasing. Look at the wiretapping or the CIA flights or Abu Ghraib or the Lincoln Group payola scheme - the planners of all of those policies must have assumed they would never be exposed, and here we are. Exposure should be assumed, and its implications worked in to the operational plan, even if it doesn't happen. Even if 19 out of 20 of the operations remain secret, the one that gets exposed is enough to devastate credibility.

Credibility is a major issue in all of this, and I would like to see more serious thought put into America's failure there. It's a heck of a lot easier to lose credibility than to get it back, and "partially credible" is like "partially pregnant" - no such creature. American credibility in and about Iraq is so low now that everything it says is met with skepticism, even if it's true. Somebody should take responsibility for that lost credibility, and learn some lessons from it beyond just blaming the media.

Fascinating stuff, and worth reading.

There is another lesson to be learned, which so many people don't do. Instead of planning for the exposure of bad schemes, and working to minimize the harm from them, here's a radical thought: don't be a mongrel in the first place. If you think that world public opinion will hate you if they find out you've done something bad, just don't do that bad thing. Do something else instead.

International politics would be so much simpler if people weren't such dicks.

Freakonomics has trouble with the economics of plenty

Stephen J. Dubner from Freakonomics is having trouble with the economics of plenty:

Some interesting e-mails turn up in the Freakonomics in-box. Here's a recent one:

I downloaded your book FREAKONOMICS on Limewire. Can I pay you something for this great book? Call it guilt or trying to use file sharing in an honest way, but I'd like to pay you something.
[...]
If you can reveal what you get per book from the publisher I want to better that amount.

A file-sharer wants to pay for the book he downloaded. Dubner isn't especially hostile to the concept, but neither does he quite get it:

Thanks for asking. The combined share that Levitt and I receive from a hard copy of the book is a bit under $4; I think it's less, however, for the electronic version. But if you were to pay us, why shouldn't you pay the publisher? After all, their costs are just as legitimate as ours, right? That would bring the price to roughly $14. And then what about contributing to the distributor who got excluded--that's got to be another $2 or $3. In other words, why should we be the only ones to get the offer of your generosity--are we simply more appealing b/c we're the creator of the work?

Well, yes, that was the point -- the authors are more appealing because they're the creators.

But Dubner gets the economics wrong, not just the human psychology. The electronic version of this book was downloaded -- I assume illegally, but that's not the point -- from the Internet. The publisher and distributor didn't have any costs. Zero. Whatever insignificent costs there were, were paid by people other than the publisher and distributor. Why should the publisher get paid $10 for duplicating a file when somebody else duplicated it?

In other words, Dubner's thinking is still stuck in the mid-twentieth century, not even the late twentieth century (let alone the twenty-first). He sees a product, in this case an electronic file. Therefore, the publisher must have had costs to produce it, right? Not at all: it was actually produced, at zero cost, by some third party. And it was delivered to a reader, so therefore the distributor must have experienced costs too. Not so: in reality the file was delivered electronically, at the (minimal) cost of the downloader.

Some people might argue that I've forgotten something. Somebody must have converted "Freakonomics" into electronic format first, right? That must have cost the publisher, and they deserve compensation for that, surely?

Not necessarily. Chances are Dubner and Levitt provided the book to the publisher in electronic format, and therefore conversion was essentially zero cost: it could take as little as a mouse click and three seconds worth of computer time. But even if there was some cost, it is beyond all credibility that it was anywhere near the $10 per electronic file estimated by Dubner.

That $10 cost for a book includes the cost of material (paper, binding) and printing; it includes an allowance for damaged and lost books that have to be replaced. If Dubner and Levitt are allowing their publisher to charge them for loss and damage to electronic files, they are being seriously cheated.

But let's take the worst case scenario: assume the publisher has to be paid to transcribe the book, by hand, from a paper copy to the download format. What's that going to cost? Hard to say, but I can make an estimate: how does $1,000 sound? At $10 an hour, that allows for 100 hours of typing and proof-reading. At $100 an hour, 10 hours. Surely a realistic cost can be found somewhere between those two extremes of 10-100 hours and $10-$100 rate.

So we can take $1,000 cost as a generous estimate of the cost of producing that first electronic copy of the book. But every copy following that costs essentially nothing. If the publisher conservatively assumes he'll sell 1,000 legal electronic downloads, he can amortize the cost as $1 each.

And distribution -- sure, running a website like Amazon doesn't come for free, but the downloader didn't get the copy from Amazon. Why should he pay Amazon for services not rendered? (Amazon, by the way, is selling Freakonomics for $12.95, significantly less than Dubner's estimate of $17 just for the cost of the download.)

Now, had Dubner argued that he had a moral imperative to see that his publisher and distributor got paid, that would be a different kettle of fish. "I made a deal to these people, and I want to stick to it!" -- that's the sort of argument I could respect. He could have said he is contractually obligated to give his publisher and distributor a slice of the action, no matter who actually experienced the costs of providing the file. He might even have taken a legalistic approach, and abused the file-sharer for breaking his and Lewitt's government-granted monopoly on copying that file (their copyright) without permission, regardless of monetary compensation offered.

But arguing, as he does, that the cost of duplicating a bunch of electronic bits in a computer is at least as expensive as making an actual hard copy from real dead tree, is just foolish, and demonstrates that he, at least, is one economist who has not come to grips with the economics of essentially zero-cost replication.

Arctic Ocean is falling

The BBC is reporting new research which, surprisingly, shows that the Arctic Ocean is falling by about 2mm per year:

It is well known that the world's oceans do not share a uniform height; but even so, the scientists are somewhat puzzled by their results.

Global sea level is expected to keep on climbing as the Earth's climate warms.

To find the Arctic out of step, even temporarily, emphasises the great need for more research in the region, the team says.
[...]
"When you get a result like this you always worry that your processing of the data may have introduced signals that are not real. But we can't find anything that we've done wrong, so that makes us think we have stumbled across something real - and we hope that will excite our colleagues," [Dr Scharroo] added.

Absolutely! The most exciting part of science is not when you discover what you expect to discover, but when you look at your results and say, "Hmmm, that's funny..."

Pope asked Hawking not to study beginning of the Universe

According to physicist Stephen Hawking, the late Pope, John Paul II, asked him not to study the beginning of the Universe:

NorthWest Florida Daily News reports:

Hawking, who didn't say when the meeting was held, quoted the pope as saying, "It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not enquire into the beginning itelf because that was the moment of creation and the work of God."

Religion has a long, and still current, tradition of ruling out or forbidding entire areas of inquiry, not on the basis that it is "too dangerous" or harmful to others, but simply because it is one of those Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

In other words: God wants us to remain ignorant. Don't study that!

There seems to be the sense that studying some things (like, in times gone past, the movement of planets across the sky) is somehow stepping on God's turf. We must not learn about how the Earth formed, because that's Secret God's Business.

But I wonder whether there is also something else going on? Is it possible that, hidden behind all the talk about faith, the religious are frightened that if people are allowed to look at God's Turf, they will discover there is no need for God? There certainly have been Christians who have welcomed intellectual investigation, and indeed the natural world has been called the true Book Of God: if God created the Universe, then his message to us may be revealed by studying everything in the Universe.

But there are also Christians who have been anti-intellectual, who have tried to draw lines across vast areas of the Universe and rule them out of bounds. It is almost as if, having spent their life telling everyone about the wonderful gift inside the box, they can't bear to open the box in case it is empty.

Word of the Day: Dysphemism

Dysphemism

n : an offensive or disparaging expression that is substituted for an inoffensive one; "his favorite dysphemism was to ask for axle grease when he wanted butter"

That leads me to ask, what would be a euphemism for "dysphemism"? Perhaps "crudity".

How about a dysphemism for "euphemism"? "Bowdlerism" comes to mind.

How iTunes rips off Weird Al

The king of comic rock, Weird Al Yankovic, explains on his blog that he makes less money from iTunes downloads than from regular CD sales, even though there are fewer costs involved in the download than the physical product.

Weird Al writes:

Tim Sloane of Ijamsville, MD asks: Al, which of these purchasing methods should I use in order to make sure the most profit gets to you: Buying one of your albums on CD, or buying one of your albums on iTunes?

I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED... I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure.

Go figure indeed. There are thieves and pirates involved in stealing from artists, and most of them work for the record labels.

Over on The Digital Music Weblog, Grant Robertson discusses the financial arrangements between Apple, the music studios, and the artists. There is no reason to think that Weird Al has an especially raw deal:

If all of your fans bought through iTunes rather than buying CDs at the record store you'd be looking at an overall reduction in income of 85%!

Eighty Five Percent! If they cut my income by 85%, I'd be making soup from old shoes down by the railroad tracks!

The coming threat of Muslim suicides

I just posted about the U.S. military characterizing the Guantanamo Bay suicides as an attack on America. Fafblog has put up a brilliant satirical look at the threat of Muslim suicides:

6-10 Changed Everything

Run for your lives - America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America's freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the "Blame Atrocities First" crowd will tell you these prisoners were "driven to despair," that they "had no rights," that they were "held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice." But what they won't tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide![...]

"Oh but Giblets there are dozens of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo" you say because you are a namby-pamby appeasenik who suckles at the teat of terror. Well if these Guantanamo prisoners are so innocent then what are they doing in Guantanamo? Sneaking into our secret military prisons as part of an elaborate plot to make it look like we're holding them in our secret military prisons, that's what!

Quite.

See here for it all.

Suicide as a weapon of war

The BBC is reporting that Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. military gulag at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, described the suicide of three prisoners as an act of war:

I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.

Hey Harris -- it isn't always about you.

It is true that self-harm, including suicide, is often the desperate final act of somebody who feels utterly powerless and helpless. When you control absolutely nothing else, when your fate is in the hands of hostile forces, sometimes the one thing you can do is hurt your own body.

But to describe that desperate act as an act of war just boggles the mind. Who does Harris think he's fooling? Nobody in their right mind thinks that the U.S. military is seriously threatened with defeat and disaster because a few prisoners of war, uncharged with any crime (let alone found guilty), hanged themselves.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
-- General George Patton

What's with all the Hawking haters?

A few days ago, physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that it is important that the human race begin moving out into space, in order to ensure the long-term survival of the species:

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

Suddenly, he's being attacked on all sides.

Chris Clarke asks "Who the hell does Stephen Hawking think he is anyway?". He starts with an attack on Hawking's prediction that we "could" have a permanent moon base within 20 years:

...the sheer hubris-laden assumption that within twenty years we'll be able to build artificial ecosystems, sustainable over the very long term, that can support human life at population levels necessary to preserve a worthwhile percentage of human genetic, intellectual, and cultural diversity.

That's not what Hawking said. That's some major strawman kicking going on. Hawking isn't predicting self-sustaining colonies in space within twenty years. He's saying that, if we try, in twenty years we could have a dozen astronauts living for months at a time on the moon.

Clarke goes on to describe the fiasco that was Biosphere, and entirely misses the point that Biosphere merely shows us the job is hard and we don't know how to create a self-sustaining ecosystem from scratch, not that it can't be done. The Wright Brothers couldn't build a faster-than-sound airplane either. It is no surprise that the Biosphere failed, and it will be no surprise when the next ten or thirty experiments fail too. But with every failure, we will learn more about ecology until one day we will be able to create self-sustaining ecosystems.

Clarke's argument is simply the argument from ignorance: we don't understand ecologies today, so we will never understand ecologies.

Clarke goes on:

I'm looking at the list of dangers Hawking cites: genetic engineering turning the biosphere into gray goo, climate change from burning of fossil fuels, nuclear war-- and a certain commonality among them strikes me. [...] we're not talking comet impact or flood basalt here. Every threat, every looming disaster Hawking's talking about here is human generated.

(Emphasis in original.)

It's moments like this I wonder about the intelligence of supposedly intelligent human beings. Hawking is interviewed by a mainstream newspaper, the SF Gate. Does Clarke think that the average newspaper reader would have the foggiest clue what flood basalt is? What are the clearest and most obvious dangers to the survival of the entire human race that ordinary newspaper readers with limited science education will know about?

Nuclear war. Viruses. Global warming.

Exactly the things Hawking mentions. If he had talked about flood basalts, chances are 98% of the readers would have just scratched their collective heads and filed it in the "what is he talking about?" basket. In fact, he may have mentioned flood basalts, and the paper simply edited it out as too technical for their readership.

This isn't rocket science here folks. It doesn't take a genius to realise that even if three of the four threats Hawking mentions are preventable, there are a whole lot more which aren't. Clarke mentions two of them: comet impact or flood basalt. Climate change driven by non-human activity (e.g. solar activity). Ordinary, non-genetically engineered viruses. A nearby supernova (those gamma rays could be coming straight for us right now, and we would have no way of knowing until they hit). There are many ways the world could end, and Hawking's argument holds regardless of whether they are human generated or not.

Clarke also goes on to make the analogy of human beings with cockroaches: the Earth is a home infested with cockroaches, and he's distressed at the suggestion we should allow those cockroaches to go to our neighbour's home as well. What an ... interesting ... argument that is. If we human beings are the cockroaches, who is there to get upset at the cockroach infestation? Does the house care that it is filled with cockroaches? A thinking, emotional house. Hmmm.

If there is no owner to get upset, who will care? Has Clarke perhaps considered that the Earth is troubled by that disgusting infestation of green plants pumping out billions of tonnes of toxic, corrosive oxygen gas? If not, why does he think the Earth is troubled by that disgusting infestation of mammals? There is some seriously wooly thinking going on here -- and I can't help but think of those accusations that environmentalism is the last politically correct refuge of racism. "There are too many people on the Earth -- they aren't like me!" That sinking feeling of racism would possibly go away -- or be supported -- if folks like Clarke who think people are the problem would come clean and tell us just which people they think should be allowed to live.

Amanda Marcotte writes "Stephen Hawking is a tool" and compares his suggestion to neo-Fundamentalist Christian belief in The Rapture. She goes on to say:

Now Stephen Hawking has just put his authority behind an escape fantasy that allows wingnuts who aren't Rapture fanatics to ignore the fact that we're destroying our planet and very soon going to make in uninhabitable.
[...]
The idea of starting over with a small group of people on another planet is the same racist, classist superiority complex-driven fantasy that fuels the mythology of the Rapture, where it's assumed an elite group of "Christians" (imagined as mostly white Americans) will get sucked away while the rest of us inferior humans died in the cesspool that is Earth.

How strange. What part of Hawking's statement "It is important for the human race" does Marcotte think means "It is important for white Americans"? The woman has issues. For all her furious rage at the elites who flit from mansion to mansion, fantasizing about the "inferior humans" dying in droves, the last paragraph gives a hint at Marcotte's real motives:

If I seem angry, it's because I am. I'm only 28 years old, and with the rapid degradation of the planet, if things don't slow down, there's a solid chance my "golden" years will be pretty horrible.

Frightened and terrified and striking out and anything that she thinks will spoil her life. Who cares about our great-grandchildren in ten thousand years? (Well, Hawking for one.) What's important is that Marcotte has a comfortable retirement.

Hey, I'm cool with her having a nice life. I'd like a nice life too. And I'd like to think that when -- not if -- the next "dinosaur killer" asteroid strikes, our cultural decendents will be spread all over the solar system so they can continue having nice lives too.

Marcotte inadvertently demonstrates why Hawking is right. She writes:

If you don't believe that, let me remind you that this planet had previous inhabitants

and shows a picture of a dinosaur fossil. Well yes, and that's precisely the sort of thing Hawking is thinking about. The dinosaurs didn't wipe themselves out, they were wiped out by a disaster they couldn't prevent. If Mad King George pushes the red button and wipes us all out in nuclear winter, it won't be my fault, and it won't be Marcotte's either. We'll be just as much victims of disaster as the dinosaurs. Doesn't it make sense to plan ahead for the day when we can stop putting all our eggs in one basket?

And what's with the digs about Hawking's use of the passive voice? There is something strange when both Marcotte and Clarke feel it is necessary to sarcastically say "nice passive construction". Is the passive voice the new Fascism or something?

P.Z. Myers is less hysterical than Marcotte and Clarke, but he too criticises Hawking:

Emigrating to some other world doesn't save us; under the best of circumstances, only a miniscule elite few would escape, and as Chris [Clarke] points out, the technological problems are so great (Guess what? We have no idea how to build a home on another planet that won't require continual resupply and that will last more than a few years) that even that would only be a temporary reprieve. Flicking a few gametes into the sky isn't any kind of salvation--it's desperate and sad and futile.

Myers is wrong. Under the best of circumstances (his words) disaster won't strike at all; but if it does, it won't happen until there are thriving colonies of millions or billions of people spread all over the solar system. As a biologist, Myers should know that in almost every case of a species moving into a new environment, it is a only "a few gametes" that make that first step. They don't stay a few gametes for long.

Myers too gets confused by the fact that today we don't know how to build a home on another planet, and assumes that it must therefore be impossible. Of course any moon base we build now will require continual resupply. But after there have been continuous human populations on the moon for a century? What then? How self-sufficient can they get with skill and experience?

The first priority is to put our own house in order: we need stable, sustainable human cultures that know how to maintain a healthy environment (if we can't prevent ourselves from trashing a whole planet, how are we going to ever maintain a viable home in the more limited and hostile confines of a habitat elsewhere?).

Myer's is right on that point, but that's hardly disagreeing with Hawking, who allowed that his scenario depended on humanity avoiding killing themselves off in the next 100 years. That's just common sense: if we cause massive ecological disaster and kill ourselves off on a relatively comfortable, safe planet, of course we won't be able to survive in more hostile environments.

Consider the impact of those few photos of the Earth taken from orbit or from the moon, and how they changed the mental perceptions of millions of people. How much greater effect will the struggle to build self-sufficient space colonies be? When you've just come back from a six-month work assignment on the L-5 colony, you'll never take breathable air and drinkable water for granted again.

Myers also wants to have his cake and eat it too: we can't build self-sustaining space colonies, but if we could, we'll just be creating biological competitors:

In the long run, I don't think that any of our progeny that we spin off into space will be human for long, and I don't think we can predict what a post-human race would want, or how it would interact with us.
[...]
But do we really want to create a competing race of naked mole apes?

He's right, as such: in the long term, humans on Titan and humans on Earth will become different species. (The long term might be millions of years.) But will they be competitors? Highly unlikely -- if they are as different as Myers fears they may become, naked mole apes, they are almost certainly not going to want to come back and live on Earth, or have sex with us, or even make illegal copies of our movies. There will be economic competition for resources -- they'll want oxygen, just as we will, but it isn't clear that they will want it from the same source.

Myers' argument is really as nonsensical as the argument that individuals shouldn't have children, because they might grow up to be serial killers. Sure they might. And they might grow up to be wonderful people. Saint or sinner, we can't predict before hand, and we can't possibly imagine what our descendents on Titan a hundred thousand years from now will be like. But I can't imagine what my descendents on Earth will be like in a hundred thousand years either -- will they be Scientologists or atheists, vegetarian or live-kitten-brain eaters, collectivists or anarchists?

We are the first species on the planet that can guide our evolutionary children, both genetically and culturally. Eventually, of course, just as English culture in the American colonies mutated into American culture, our children on Titan and Mars will create their own biology and culture. But in the meantime, we have the ability (and hopefully the will) to instill in them values that we will approve of, so they don't become naked mole apes.

Greebo Lives!

Fans of the Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett will remember Greebo, the one-eyed, scarred, malevolent tom-cat owned by Nanny Ogg. In Pratchett's books, Greebo is well-known for fighting -- and beating -- wolves and bears.

The BBC is reporting about a real-life tom named Jack, who chased a black bear up a tree not once but twice:

The terrified bear was only able to make its escape when owner Donna Dickey called the hissing cat into the house.

Ms Dickey said Jack liked to keep a close watch on his territory and often chased away small animals, but one of this size was a first.

"We used to joke, 'Jack's on duty', never knowing he'd go after a bear," Donna Dickey told local newspaper The Star-Ledger.

Why the US won't invade Iran

Juan Cole quotes Al-Hayat on why the U.S. won't invade Iran:

Another [Iranian official] joked that there was not need for the US to invade Iran. He said that the US had invaded Afghanistan and established an Islamic republic there. Then it had done the same thing in Iraq. Since Iran has had an Islamic republic for 27 years, he said, there really isn't a point in a US invasion.

It is a joke, but one with a large kernel of truth to it.

The Northern Alliance that the U.S. installed in Afghanistan is a coalition of the Sunni Jami'at-i Islami and the Hazara Shiite Hizb-i Vahdat. Those with long memories will remember that the Taliban were originally welcomed by the people of Afghanistan after they over-threw the Northern Alliance (around and around we go...) because they were more moderate.

In Iraq, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Da'wa Party, and the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front are the leading parties, and the new constitution forbids legislation contradicting Islamic law.

The biggest joke is that U.S. soldiers have died to put Osama bin Laden's spiritual brothers in power.

Thanks George!

TBW addiction

Don Hazen from AlterNet challenges progressive journalists and writers to ignore the Tall Blonde Woman in the Short Skirt with the Big Mouth:

Today is the devil's day, a celebration for the evildoers; that's right, it is 6-6-06. [...]

And on this day, the devil herself -- the Tall Blonde Woman in the Short Skirt With the Big Mouth (TBWSSBM, or TBW for short) -- has a new book out. You know who I'm talking about. I will not mention her name, nor the name of the book, the publisher or any of her previous books. She is releasing her book today as "a little tribute to liberals." The time has come to ignore this woman.

He's right. As satisfying it is to rage against the TBW, it does no good and considerable harm. The extremists of the Republican Party are masters of setting the agenda, forcing the issues and framing the terms of the debate. Arguing against the TWB just gives her publicity and reinforces her frames. It just helps keep her message front and centre in the public eye. And don't be fooled: the TBW is said to be easy on the eye (perhaps to Republicans and men who haven't seen a woman for twelve years), and as such she gets far more attention than her words deserve. There are hundreds of wingnuts spreading hate and bile across America, and yet the TBW gets far more liberal media attention than any other.

Hazen's solution, to just ignore her, works. Imagine if all those "liberal media" newspapers, television stations and so forth just refused to interview her. Sure, she's still get her message across, but she'll just be preaching to the choir, and no longer speaking to the moderate audience.

Sadly, so many people just don't get it. Reading the comments on the AlterNet article, person after person points out the irony of Hazen writing an article telling people not to write about TBW -- and no doubt each and every one of these folks were so swelled up with pride that they were sooooooo smart to notice the irony that they were in danger of drifting off into space.

Newsflash bozos: recognising irony doesn't make you a great wit. Perhaps half of one. To get the other half, you have to realise when the message needs to be said, despite the irony, and let it be. Or at least read the comments and realise that your brilliant comment has already been said a dozen times before.

Sadly, some people don't get it unless it is laid on with a trowel. For those, here it is: yes, we should ignore the TWB. But the first step in ignoring her is to spread the message that she needs to be ignored. Without that message, she'll continue to get attention and publicity for years to come. The plan is simple: a few short days or weeks of telling everyone to move on, followed by the cold shoulder, or never-ending publicity to the TWB. You choose.

The new Cold War -- over oil

Mark Ames from The eXile writes about the new Cold War starting between the U.S. and Russia. Of course, it is over oil. (What else would it be over?)

The rat of course was the insane hypocrisy of a foaming fascist like Dick Cheney suddenly getting all Amnesty International righteous over a bad regime that does bad things. The fact that Cheney flew straight to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan right after squirting over Russia's human rights problems turned the rank hypocrisy into a bad black comedy routine, barely fit for even a Tom Green. Kazakhstan is a country where opposition politicians and media aren't merely jailed, exiled or cowed as they are in Russia, but are shot and dumped in forests, Miller's Crossing-style, on behalf of a despot whose family runs the country like its own fiefdom.

Don't hold back, tell us what you really think of Cheney and his buddies in Kazakhstan.

Cheney's speech raised a lot of questions and a lot of debate, but no one asked one of the most obvious questions of all: Why did Cheney choose to flaunt his hypocrisy in everyone's faces? Why not try faking it, the way most Western leaders operate when they mix righteous words with rapacious policies?
[...]
The best way to answer this is to go back and retrace how Russia and America wound up in this once-unimaginable situation. It would seem to be a massive policy failure, allowing Russia to become a Cold War enemy again, perhaps the greatest American foreign policy failure of our time. Unless, of course, you put all the blame on Putin's evil little authoritarian shoulders, which is the natural tendency of nearly every American commentator.

They say Americans' memories are short, but that's like saying a Nazi's sense of compassion was fleeting. Americans literally rewrite their memories over and over. Case in point: Just four-and-a-half years ago, Vladimir Putin was treated as a rock star in America. You probably forgot about it, so I'm going to remind you because it's not a pretty memory.

Face isn't everything in international politics, but it is almost everything. Putin went out on a limb for the Americans, going against his base at great political cost -- and Bush and Cheney rewarded him with a six-pack of Screw-You and a bucket of Up-Yours by pulling out of the ABM Treaty and starting up the old Star Wars missile shield programme again. The Russians aren't idiots: they know that the missile shield is an offensive weapon designed to make a nuclear first-strike practical.

This is where the bad blood started. At America's darkest hour, we reached out to Russia and got full cooperation and trust. And literally the second we felt tough again, we announced our intention to build a weapons system that targeted Russia for total annihilation.
[...]
I don't think a jackal like Cheney is capable of recognizing hypocrisy. I think he meant everything he said, with a straight face, and that he saw it as both rationally and morally right to chastise Russia's record on democracy while praising Kazakhstan's and Azerbaijan's in the same trip.

Democracy isn't about voting. It's about serving America's interests.

And serving America's interests is more tightly defined a serving the interests of the oil oligarchs in Houston, where Cheney spent the previous 10 years. In fact, it's even more simple than that. It's personal. America's interests are Cheney's interests. Il est l'etat. In that sense, Putin is indeed a genuine menace.

And that's what makes this Cold War so different: Whereas the last one was a mortal struggle over two different systems, this is a struggle between two short, balding, bloodless men, and the oil -- other people's oil -- that made them as powerful as they are today.

With the end of the Cold War, it is easy to forget that the nuclear Sword of Damocles is still hanging over us. As late as 2002, the U.S. had over 10,000 nuclear warheads in active service. Russia had 18,000, of which all but about 8,000 were in the process of being dismanted. Four years later, the U.S. has modernized their strategic arsenals, and every indication is that the U.S. has the ability to deliver those warheads more accurately and with less risk of retaliation than every before. On the other hand, the Russians' delivery systems are in tatters. Likewise China, with between 200 and 400 warheads, has no long-range systems in place, and needs at least two hours to launch even a single missile, putting them in distant fifth place, just behind Britain and France. Nobody, not even Russia, comes even close to being a real threat to the U.S.A.

Tracking devices

Black humour from Dr. Fun: tracking devices.

Why your business will be using Open Source

Bernard Golden writes for CIO Magazine:

The first reason you need to begin using open source software is that IT budgets suffer from two simultaneous imperatives: low-growth and increasing demand. One important way to respond to these imperatives is to lower your cost of delivering technology. Open source can be an enormous help in this response.

The second reason for using open source is that the software industry itself is undergoing change and will increasingly resemble the open source model: the software itself being freely downloadable, but with far fewer ancillary services delivered by the vendor for free. [...]

Now, let's discuss the third reason you need to jump on open source -- and this one extends the impact past the confines of the IT organization: open source can offer competitive advantage to the overall organization -- in other words, open source can help businesses perform better financially.

Golden goes on to describe the economic forces that make Open Source a huge competitive advantage, and warns that businesses ignore it at their peril:

The counter-argument to the cost advantage of open source software is that the cost of licenses is unimportant in the overall budget of IT. [...]

This reminds me of the dismissivenss that Detroit used to evince toward Japanese automakers. It used to take US car manufacturers two weeks to perform annual model tooling changeovers. Toyota figured out how to do it in less than a day. So what, was the attitude of US automakers. The cost of model changeover is peanuts compared to everything else.

But Japanese car companies continued to incrementally improve their cost structure -- quicker changeovers, less inventory via JIT techniques, lower manufacturing cost by creating option bundles. One day the US industry woke up and Japanese makers had an unbeatable cost advantage; thirty years later, the domestic manufacturers are still trying to catch up.

Golden gives figures for the cost of licences: 10% to 20% of the cost or individual project, perhaps 6% of the entire IT budget, and warns that many people (especially Microsoft) argue the cost of licences is insignificent in the grand scheme of things.

Who's drinking that Kool-Aid? 20% of the project budget is insignificant? On what planet?

Failure to take a 6% saving is mathematically equivalent to a 6% increase. (Note: the two figures aren't quite equal -- it is actually equivalent to 6.38%, because the base is smaller. But let's not quibble about a few tenths of a percentage point.) So let's do a thought experiment.

Imagine that your head of IT goes to the company accountant and demands a budget increase of 6% "because it's an insignificent amount, you won't miss it." What reaction do you think he'd get? If your IT department is one Windows 98 PC, the accountant probably won't blink. If it is 3,000 PCs and 100 servers, well, blinking won't be the only reaction.

I'm sure that a good IT manager will be able to justify that 6% increase. Sometimes you really do need to put more money into IT. And sometimes the right place to spend it is on software licences. But to say that cost savings of 6-20% are insignificant is sheer poisoned Kool-Aid drinking insanity.

The new killing fields

I challenge anyone to read this report from Nir Rosen and still deny that Iraq is in full-blown civil war.

Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq "the republic of fear" and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military—with its towering vehicles rumbling through Baghdad's streets and its soldiers like giants with their vests and helmets and weapons—seemed overwhelming. The Occupation could be felt at all times. Now in Baghdad, you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their Kalashnikovs at passersby.

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.

Zarqawi: from farce to tragedy

There is good news, farcical news, and tragic news.

The good news is that Zarqawi really is dead, killed by a U.S. airstrike. That's one really bad guy who can't kill any more. (However, it seems that his death is just inspiring more people, deluded or bad or both, to continue his terror tactics. Saddam Hussein, who is on trial -- fair or not -- isn't inspiring anyone to go out and commit murder. There is a lesson there for those who are willing to learn.)

The farcical news is the details of his death. Zarqawi, we were told, was Number One bad guy in Iraq, the evil genius behind virtually the entire vicious, bloody mess. But the Independent is reporting that in the days before his murder -- let's not mince words: whether it was justified or not, he was not tried and executed, nor did he die of natural causes -- Zarqawi was living with virtually no guards and just five companions, including two women and an eight year old girl. Such a big shot.

The tragedy is that, even in their moment of triumph, having killed the Big Bad (and, presumably, an eight year old girl), American troops killed yet more innocents who were doing nothing other than trying to keep the peace. The Independent reports:

The only resistance encountered by American commandos was from local Sunni villagers in the village of Ghalabiya, near Hibhib, who thought the strangers were members of a Shia death squad. Villagers who were standing guard fired into the air on seeing the commandos, who in turn threw a grenade that killed five of the guards. American regular army troops later came to Ghalabiya to apologise and promise compensation to the families of the dead men.

These weren't insurgents attacking U.S. troops. These were ordinary men trying to keep their village safe from death squads, and in the quagmire of the Iraqi civil war, their tragic, pointless deaths at the hands of trigger-happy U.S. commandos doesn't rate anything more than a throw-away paragraph.

It's clear that Zarqawi was nothing more than a two-bit opportunistic murderer with the gift of self-promotion. He wasn't the brains behind the insurgence, he wasn't even the biggest player in the vicious civil war that the Americans brought on. He was as much the creation of the Pentagon as he was his own man: he and Osama bin Laden hated each other -- scarily, bin Laden was "too moderate" for Zarqawi -- and Saddam was trying to have him arrested. He was never a member of al Qaeda, except in Colin Powell's dishonest speech to the U.N. Only after the U.S. invaded Iraq did Zarqawi, ever the opportunist, change the name of his previously insignificant group to "al Qaeda in Iraq". Powell's accusations were especially duplicitous given that Zarqawi was hiding out in northern Iraq, in the Kurdish Zone, where Saddam was powerless. Zarqawi was, quite literally, protected by U.S. and British jets in the no-fly zone.

Marc Lynch on Abu Aardvark discusses the killing of Zarqawi:

His death will not likely end or even diminish the Iraqi insurgency, but it may change its character. Zarqawi has been a real organizational and mobilizational force in the Iraqi jihad, but does not seem to have been the central mastermind that his and American propaganda alike made him out to be. The Iraqi insurgency has always been far more complicated than either "regime dead-enders" or Zarqawi's jihad [...]
The one place where Zarqawi's death might make a real difference is in the Sunni-Shia dynamic. Zarqawi's rabid anti-Shi'ism went beyond tactical or strategic considerations, of trying to push civil war ot make the American project untenable. Even by radical Islamist standards, his anti-Shi'a focus was extreme (though not by any means unique). If Zarqawi's group drops off in prominence for a while as it reorganizes, you might see less of an anti-Shi'a focus in the attacks.

Nir Rosen from the New America Foundation has this to say:

Zarqawi was not very important in the first place, and hardly represented the majority of the resistance or insurgency. When he arrived in northern Iraq he was a nobody. After the war he descended into Iraq proper and began to organize the disparate foreign fighters who had come to fight with Saddam's army against the American invasion. [...] Zarqawi and his foreign fighters were a numerically insignificant proportion of the anti American fighters.

It took the United States to make Zarqawi who he became. Intent on denying that there was a popular Iraqi resistance to the American project in Iraq, the Americans blamed every attack on Zarqawi and his foreign fighters, and for a while it seemed every car accident in Baghdad was Zarqawi's fault. The truth was that much of Iraq's Sunni population, alienated by the Americans who removed them from power and targeted them en masse during raids, supported and participated in the anti American resistance. Even many Shias claimed resistance. [...] But by blaming Zarqawi for everything the Americans created the myth of Zarqawi and aspiring Jihadis throughout the Arab world ate it up and flocked to join his ranks or at least send money.

I can't hope but wonder, in the coming weeks and months, will the White House feel the need to invent another Big Bad to blame everything on, or will they grow up and learn that not all terrorists/insurgents/partisans/whatever are on the same side?

What really makes Wikipedia great

There's been a lot of recent discussion about the Hive Mind and when collectivism is wise. For the Internet-savvy generation, the two best examples of collective wisdom are Google and Wikipedia. I would hope that Google needs no support -- it is by far the best search engine available today. But Wikipedia is frequently criticised for equating the opinions of amateurs -- and not very good amateurs at that -- with the opinions of experts.

But there is a factor which people have not considered. While Google is collectivist, it is opaque -- Google's Page Ranking algorithm is secret. We cannot criticise or test Google's results, only take them as revealed wisdom.

But Wikipedia is the opposite: it is completely transparent. You aren't forced to choose between accepting Wikipedia's articles as revealed wisdom, or rejecting them all together. Instead, you can click on the "discussion" button on each page, and see for yourself the discussions, arguments, disagreements and agreements that led to the article. Where the stakes are high, the wise person will not only read the article, but take into account the article's history and those who wrote it. Was this section written by somebody with an axe to grind? Is this point controversial? Does this authour have the respect of other authors, or is he a loose cannon with an agenda? All that information is publically available in Wikipedia.

In that regard, Wikipedia reminds me of that other great example of collectivism: the scientific consensus. In science and mathematics, it doesn't -- or at least shouldn't -- matter whether you are a self-trained amateur or Mr. Establishment himself: it's what you say, not who you are, that is important. The scientific consensus is completely open and transparent (at least in principle) -- anyone can borrow or subscribe to the appropriate scientific journals and follow the debate between scientists as they nut out a collectivist opinion.

In that regard, I see the greatest feature of Wikipedia is its transparency: unlike other encyclopedias, with Wikipedia you don't have to accept the wisdom of the article on trust, but can see for yourself where it came from.

Previous posts on this subject:
The Hive Mind is stupid and boring -- why do we love it so?
The Hive Mind, part II

Five good reasons to love iTunes

iTunes is a great money-spinner for Apple Computers. And with features like these, no wonder:

1. Thanks to Apple's Digital Restrictions Management software, your investment in music is worthless if you decide to switch from iTunes to a competing product


2. Apple is willing and able to remove features from iTunes after you've already paid for them, and has done so in the past


3. Apple's software over-rules one of the fundamental tenants of private property rights, the doctrine of first sale -- you have no way of legally giving away, selling or loaning the songs you buy


4. Apple uses blacklists and legal threats against people who try to innovate and create new functionality for your iPod or iTunes


5. and best of all, many recording artists report that they are getting as little as seven cents a download, which means the great bulk of that $0.99 you paid ends up in the pockets of the same greedy, lying, cheating music executives we all love so much

With features like those, who wouldn't want an iPod and iTunes account?

The people at Defective By Design, who protested outside Apple Stores on Saturday.