MnKurmudge&DCKid

How Iraq Is Like Reconstructive Knee Surgery

2006-10-31T15:07:00.000-06:00

I think I understand the deeply-rooted dreams of my fellow citizens, and the vision is not encouraging. The only acceptable military goal today seems to be the Powell Doctrine of military engagement: take a sledgehammer ("overwhelming force") to the international problem, but only provided that-

a) no one anywhere in the world objects, and
b) you can be assured of “total clean victory”, complete with dancing in the streets and V-E celebrations, in less than a year.

That’s a great strategy- it avoids all the tough problems associated with those enemies who simply refuse to cooperate. As in, well, they fight back. Or refuse to surrender. Or, pretend to surrender, but also covertly fight an on-going guerrilla war.

Unfortunately, the bad guys in Iraq have decided to be obstreperous and resist. This has led to the usual American reaction- if the millennium doesn’t come by the day after tomorrow (we aren’t so bad as to expect the millennium in the morning; we’ll give it at least two days), we quit!

Our time horizon is measured in biennial terms- every election cycle brings out another occasion to find excuses to declare victory and go home. Sort of the way the Russians did in Afghanistan after a decade of fighting the mujahideen. And these are the same people who (correctly) criticize corporate CEO’s for making strategic decisions based on quarterly financial reports and the associated effects on the company’s stock price.

Look past the fact that a lot of the “more (American) troops” fervor is fueled by some members of the careerist general officer class of the US Army (not the Kaplanesque "Imperial Grunts", but the high-ranking heavy armor bureaucrats who got passed over for promotion), in its ongoing war against Rumsfeld to prevent military transformation (that is, a shift from 1975 European warfare doctrine and force structure to something a bit more useful in today’s world); the logic simply doesn’t hold.

Read all the arguments of those who are supposedly in favor of the GWOT- from Lowry to Kristol and beyond, and note that almost every proposed “new” strategy is based on wishful thinking in the attempt to speed up the clock by turning up the heat. Win now, so we can declare the war over and get back to border security and reducing government spending (fat chance). Or, understandably, focus on Iran, as though that were somehow a severable issue. Or made easier when you don't have a few airfields and divisions right next door ready to pounce if needed.

I have a secret for everyone: if you want to bake bread, it takes 30 to 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Running the oven at 600 degrees doesn’t bake the same bread faster, it simply produces something very different. Something inedible.

A better analogy is recovery from an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear of the knee, the dreaded “reconstructive knee surgery” you hear about so often in football. In this case, a small bundle of collagen fibers woven together sort of like a guy wire cable, runs from the back of your thigh bone (femur) to the front of your shin bone (tibia). It is small, but has a very important job- when you straighten out your leg, it prevents the quadriceps muscle (the big “one”- actually four- on top of your thigh) from pulling the shin bone forward and locking the joint as the kneecap serves as the lever fulcrum for the contraction. The hinge joints for the knee are on the side- the medial and lateral collateral ligaments. For a variety of reasons, they can get injured, but they heal very nicely by themselves simply left alone for about six weeks. The ACL is the Big One; God simply didn’t make it to deal with some of the stresses applied by modern athletics.

When the injury occurs, the time scale is unforgiving. The good news is that we can come back and be about as strong as we were before getting hurt. The bad news is- it takes a year to get all the way back. Period.

No matter who your doctor is, no matter what you do, you won’t be yourself athletically for just about 12 months. There are some few freaks of nature who may come back sooner, taking a big risk on revision surgery (check the story of Rod Woodson), but for all of us “normal people”, we are looking at a year of recovery to get back to what we did before the injury in the same way.

Why? It is simple- tissue healing is all biochemistry, which simply requires the chemical elements, and the time, in order to work.

When the knee is first injured, everything is swelled and inflamed. You almost cannot see the injury because of all the extra fluid and blood, so you wait a few weeks before surgery to get the knee to “calm down”. When all of the trauma except for the torn ligament has subsided, you can have the procedure, usually by replacing the ACL with tissue from a cadaver, or from the middle third of your patellar ligament (often wrongly called the patellar tendon), or a piece of the hamstring muscle folded over to get to the right length. At each end, a little plug of bone is cut out and left on the new graft, because the easiest way to heal it is to drill a little hole in the bone of your femur and tibia, and tap the graft bone plug into the hole, fastened further by a titanium screw, rather than try to heal “new”collagen onto bone.

When you wake up and the anaesthesia wears off, it hurts, but at that point the graft is about as strong as it will ever be- theoretically, if you could forget pain, and the inflammation was gone, you could go do almost anything at that point, provided the screw holds.

However, the body also immediately starts to tear down the new ligament, literally dissolving it biochemically and turning it into a different type of collagen (sound like Iraqi society yet?). After about 6 weeks to three months, it is very weak, as the tissue breakdown process is almost done, but the conversion to the right version of type 1 collagen is still in process, and that goes on for about a year to get to 90% and much longer for more.

This doesn’t change or speed up, no matter what you do. The National Football League has lots of money ready for the genius who figures out how to heal and rehab an ACL repair in six weeks. But you can apply heat, ultrasound, prednisone and other antiinflammatories, hyaluronic acid, glycous amino glycans, insulin, alkaline phosphatases, TGF beta, HGH, you name the growth or metabolic factor.

You can hire the world’s best physical therapists, bring in the best exercise machines. But if you overdo the rehab exercises, you actually damage the repaired joint.

No matter what you do, there is a natural process that only plays out at its own pace. Just like baking bread.

So, throw money at Iraq (or not- Speaker Pelosi would owe a lot to a lot of constituencies). Some added cash might help somewhat in some places, or it might also cause more corruption opportunities, create a colonial-style addiction, and permanent dependency.

Go ahead, send “More Troops! More Troops!” Fine, add more US targets to shoot at; but the US military believes that what they need are more Iraqi troops- who are not infiltrators or beholden to bad guys. Cleaning that group out and training more and more takes... time.

The government? After several decades of direct ethnic and religious subjugation, building trust and believing in the democratic process while fighting against the agendas of the bad guys (Sadr’s Mahdi Army, Iranian-linked SCIRI, former Baathists, etc.) takes... time.

The message is that everything here that needs to be done to produce something in the end that is better, takes time. At least another five years, more likely ten.

And, as we see frpom the polls, America may not be ready to pay that price. We may not believe that it is necessary- we forget now, but we weren't ready in late 1944, or 1864, either.

And looking at home front today, it is clear that the price in blood and cash is nothing like it has been in any prior war, but we are still whining, louder than ever. As the sainted Dr. Sowell said, “frivolous politics”. I have news for you- if you really believe that fighting back against the fundamentalist Salafist and Wahabi terrormasters causes more terrorism long run, you also believe that the NutRoots only oppose Bush because of Iraq.

It is times like this that you can be happy to be 50 rather than 20, so you have a better shot at avoiding dealing with the long term consequences of failing to seriously address terrorism, social security reform, and the like. Just remember- I told you so.

Time.

Song of the Disenfranchised

2006-09-13T21:07:00.000-05:00

If you enjoy cheering for an underdog – for the sort of pathetic soul that doesn’t have a chance in hell of coming out on top – then join the Washington, D.C. Republican Party. I don’t think anyone from their headquarters would take offense at that – they pretty much admitted in their letters soliciting volunteers and financial contributions this fall that they had no real hope of victory, and therefore wouldn’t be making any promises.

Of the voting population of the 550,000 or so residents of the nation’s capital, about three-quarters are registered Democrats. This means that the outcome of yesterday’s Democratic primary elections actually decided all the races. (The Republicans held a primary yesterday as well, but as none of the candidates were in contested races, nor do they have any hope of winning, it received little attention and little press.)

What this means for me, a registered Republican and resident of Washington, is that I’ve never had a say in the election of my city’s leadership. All the races are decided before I ever get to vote.

Of course, I’m likely not getting much sympathy on this point from registered Republicans living in other heavily Democratic districts, but my situation is different for one very important reason: local government is all we’ve got. There’s no turning one’s hopes to the Senate or the Gubernatorial races, which even in the most solidly Democratic or Republican states can still be turned after a few years of electoral discontent. Remarkably, D.C. government has never been vulnerable. No matter how many times our schools fail, we top the charts in murder rates, or our leaders get arrested, this city is safe for the Democratic Party. It boggles the mind.

It should be evident, above all else, that the two party system with primaries and general elections has failed in DC. What we need instead is something more fluid, that allows all the candidates to run simultaneously and be judged on their merits, with no party monikers attached. A primary could narrow the field to a handful of candidates, then elected by plurality in a run-off election. This is the only way I can think of to get someone eminently qualified like Tony Williams, Republican candidate for Member of Council in Ward 6, his due consideration by the voters.

Running the local government doesn’t require a commitment to national party platforms: a stance on Iraq or musings on global warming. The solutions Washington needs actually don’t have much to do with the famous institutions we house – they’re much closer to home, and deal with things like getting kids to read, taking lead out of the water, and stopping the omnipresent violence. On security issues, we cooperate with the federal government anyway – it is, after all, their fault we’re such a hot target and their institutions that need protecting. What we don’t need is the two-party system restricting our voting, narrowing our choices, and preventing the (sadly vast) numbers of knee-jerk, party-line voters from thinking about what’s best for our city.

For the left, the solution to all of DC’s many and varied ailments is statehood. “Taxation without Representation” claim our license plates, co-opting the familiar revolutionary refrain for the cause to get two extra guaranteed Democratic seats in the Senate. I can’t imagine why else they would think statehood for an area so small – with portions of it necessarily the domain of the federal government – is a good idea. And speaking of taxes, I can’t even imagine what it would take to support a full “D.C. State” government, even in miniature. I already pay out to the district at almost the same rate as I do as the feds, and that’s just to support our cancerous city council.

In fact, statehood would solve none of our real problems and create plenty of new ones, but without that step, we are left with a conundrum: we in the district don’t have voting representation in Congress. And the rare District Republicans, well, we are likely among the most disenfranchised voters in this country. So little to vote for, and no choices to make.

What I’d like to propose in place of Statehood is the partial annexation of D.C. by the state of Maryland. Now, I couldn’t really blame them for not wanting to take us on, but ignoring that objection for a moment, consider how it might work. Historically, there’s a sound argument for such a move: the land that is D.C. now was carved out of Maryland. It was to be a perfect diamond-shape, but Arlington and Alexandria were never ceded (as they were promised to be) by the Commonwealth of Virginia. So in terms of our neighbors, Maryland makes more sense geographically. Politically, Maryland also tends to go Democratic. Sticking D.C. into politically more conservative Northern Virginia could only lead to resentment, as our population tried to vote the state out of the government of its natural inclinations. But our votes backing up the Senate races in Maryland would only serve to widen the margins, not change the outcome.

My plan is not for us to simply re-join Maryland. Instead, I would propose that we share her Senators (and perhaps her Governor as well, though this is by no means necessary): we would vote for them, and they would act on our behalf. We would then be given our own, voting member of the House – we would be “the District district.” Our local government would then continue to run our schools, city government, police force, etc. This way, we get a say in national issues, but we are not turned into a mini “city-state” (heh), with all the questionable repercussions that could entail.

Republicans would still be in the minority, of course, but even in Democratic strong-holds, things can happen that change the balance and lead to the occasional Republican senator. Consider Norm Coleman, for example: a Republican senator from the only state in the Union to vote for Mondale.

I see real solutions here – compromises that could take away the overwhelming sense of disenfranchisement felt by many of the people of D.C., of either party. What’s more, these two systems combined would give us Washington Republicans something that we haven’t ever had before: hope.

2996 Tribute: Billy Tselepis, Jr.- Cantor Fitzgerald

2006-09-08T16:21:00.000-05:00

I never met Billy Tselepis. In fact, I never even knew his name until I got a frantic phone call on the morning of September 11, 2001, from my friend and his big brother, Peter Tselepis.

Billy worked as a trader for Cantor Fitzgerald (www.cantor.com) in the World Trade Center, just like Peter. He had moved to New York, just like Peter, from Chicago, where the big, warm, Greek family always welcomed them back for visits.

"Duane, pray like you have never prayed before! My little brother Billy works on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center and the building is on fire below him! There’s no way to get out, and we can’t get through to him!"

Foreign exchange options traders generally are not prone to panic. They like the action, the risk, and the intensity of the situation where millions of dollars can swing on one decision. Over the long run, you had to be right a lot more than you were wrong, and Peter thrived on the excitement. He relished the life, leaving it earlier than he had intended when his wife wanted to take a job in her hometown Minneapolis area. So Peter moved to the cold Northland, but still got back to New York whenever he could- to spend time with Billy.

They hung out. They played golf. They spent time with Billy’s wife, Mary. They played with Billy’s toddler, Katie. Then Peter would go back to Prior Lake, Minnesota and wish that Billy lived in Minneapolis.

On September 11th, 2001, Mary Tselepis was about eight months pregnant with Will. And then she, Katie, Will, and, yes, Peter, were robbed of love, a lot of life, and a lot of happiness by a gang of kamikaze assassins carrying out their conviction that if you were not conforming to the nihilistic legal creed of Sayeed Qutb, you didn’t deserve to live.

The New York Times profile of Billy Tselepis is here, where photograph originated: http://www.legacy.com/Sept11.asp?Page=TributeStory&PersonId=94766

God loves you Billy, even though thugs robbed you of life, and robbed your loved ones of you, allegedly in His name. The best tribute is to put them all out of business before their successors can destroy other lives.

And God loves Mary, the kids, and Peter, as well. May His blessings soothe the pain and loss as you go on- but never, never forget.

For more on the 2996 project, go to http://www.dcroe.com/2996/ to see how each 9-11-2001 victim is being honored.

Floods, Fire, and Famine, Doom, Defeat and Despair, all because of Lebanon

2006-08-18T16:29:00.000-05:00

This comment is cross-posted as a comment at Belmont Club, I believe it is #496 (two typos corrected).
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What all the post-Lebanon commentary reminds me of more than anything else is not Solzhenitsyn so much as Whittaker Chambers. Read "Witness" (again, if you already have) and see how dark and pessimistic the outlook is, one who knows he is in the right side, but also believes that it is the losing side for almost the exact same reasons as are constantly cited today by those who believe that our leaders in the current long war are not fighting it fast- or bluntly- enough.

Perhaps Condi has indeed been overcome by the DoS Realpolitik crowd. Perhaps W is indeed too tired or helpless to do anything else, and Rumsfeld has given in to the careerist generals who wish from this time forth only to fight Grenada-level actions (short, no opposition, combat stripes and rapid promotions, no hot war budget perturbations interfering with the multi-year procurement projects). Perhaps Bolton has indeed been seduced by Kofi into mainlining the Turtle Bay KoolAid and doesn't really understand the threats and issues as well as do all of us hobbyist bloggers in pajamas.

Or, perhaps Norman Podhoretz is correct, and this is what Bush said it was five years ago- a long struggle. Perhaps he is doing the same thing he has done every time before, which is giving outlet to all of the alternatives (such as extended UN inspections) and then moving.

In the recent case, Israel was surprised and unable to be as effective as it was 30 years ago due to the concerns over civilian populations despite the fact that Bush gave them an open window to operate before pulling the plug. It still inflicted severe damage, and the inevitable collapse of the ceasefire will only be meaningless if that collapse is greeted by retreat and Hezbollah's re-supply is not challenged.

But I have heard the same song over and over again, about Communism until Reagan confronted it, and about WWIV. The same people who today say that the Administration is backing away from the Iranian threat firmly predicted in 2002 that the UN inspection diversion meant that Saddam would never be deposed.

I take the words of Bush, Snow, et all at face value. They are not kicking the can down the road to leave our civilization to the Russ Feingolds of this world.

The Real Global Warming Problem

2006-07-20T09:47:00.000-05:00

For the last few years, there has been something of a controversy about changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Rumor has it that "greenhouse gases" (GHG) have increased in concentration, in turn causing global temperatures to rise. You may have heard about it. The former Vice President mentions the topic occasionally.

Despite overwhelming evidence that bovine flatulence releasing tons of pre-warmed methane up into the sky is a primary cause (http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/kyoto/ewe.html), it is most often asserted that the real chief culprit among such greenhouse gases is carbon dioxide.

As the graph below shows, this evil gas has been increasing in atmospheric proportion since about 1855. Note the curve- roughly linear from 1855 to 1960, with an upward spike from then till the present (Michael Mann’s famous "hockey stick"). Speaking of which, what was Mann doing messing with these hockey sticks instead of "Miami Vice", "Starsky and Hutch", or "Last of the Mohicans"? But I digress.

Now, in search of the true causes, let us look at the critical elements of history over these last 150 years that have been characterized by the accelerating CO2 concentrations. People say it is cars and power plants. Perhaps those sources might contribute, as do six billion humans who insist on not only inhaling, but exhaling 20 times a minute.

But, from http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa091699.htm, we learn the sickening truth: ginger ale was invented in 1851. The term "pop", to describe carbonated beverages such as "soda pop", was coined in 1861. By 1876, root beer was being mass produced for sale.

Then came the big ones- the first cola drink in 1881 was succeeded by the invention of Dr. Pepper in 1885, closely lagged by the upstart Coca Cola in 1886, and then Pepsi-Cola in 1898. The "crown bottle cap" moved these poisonous beverages from the drugstore soda fountains into bottles kept in peoples’ homes, available to drink at any time, prompting unlimited growth in consumption. The barn door had now officially been blown off its strap hinges.

In accordance with the best current standards of scientific proof (that is, if you can find some piece of data somewhere to support your "deeply held beliefs"), the new statistical reality is that "correlation equals causation". We thus hereby claim that irrefutable proof, even better than the evidence that drove the Alar scare or magnetic fields from cell phones causing brain cancer. We now KNOW the anthropogenic causes of global warming.

It is obvious that the fundamental reason for the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere is not humans burning fossil fuels, cow flatulence, or any similar phenomenon. It is the event that occurs millions of times each day, and mostly in the evil, cowboy, capitalistic world of George Bush’s "poisonous water and poisonous air" America: the "pffft" sound we hear every time another can top is popped or bottle cap is unscrewed.

Each time we pop open another can, that poison gas and pollutant, carbon dioxide, is carelessly and thoughtlessly released into the atmosphere to do its evil work, work such as melting the polar ice caps so that sea levels in Tuvalu drown the desperate population, icebergs are calved off of Antarctic glaciers into the sea, and the formerly snow-capped mountains of Kilimanjaro turn in to hilly deserts, thereby screwing up the local economy.

The cause, humans, is YOU- you selfish American consumers of Coca Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and various brands of root beer, ginger ale, and so on.

Consider the data: at the beginning of this greenhouse gas tragedy in 1886, Coca Cola sold a total of 25 gallons of syrup to drugstores, and there were no real "bring home" sales because the stuff would go flat in those poorly sealed jugs. That 25 gallons made up about 200 gallons of ("old", not "The New") Coke, which, based on US population in 1890, equated to .0000031 gallons per person per year.

By 1999, according to Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC), Americans were swilling 14,930 million gallons of the stuff (for the math-challenged among us, that is 15 billion gallons), which is about 55 gallons, per person, per year, an increase of umpty-ump times as much, a scientific-looking number with a big exponent- my calculator doesn’t have enough display capacity to actually show the number.

Sadly, BMC doesn’t have data that go back to 1855, and their reports, as far as far as I have been able to discern, only hit about the last 30 years. But we can derive the data if we look at US population history (data from http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ref/abouttx/census.html) and calculate a reasonable fit curve- we sort of make up the data points that are missing in between the two end points (interpolate, for you math types), which practice fits perfectly with the IPCC Executive Summary conclusions (not the detailed report). Remember, we are not only seeing increased numbers of people, but carbonated beverage consumption of each of the people has also been skyrocketing over the period of interest. That, friends, is your real "hockey stick":

Now compare the US carbonated beverage consumption trend line with the proper section of the temperature changes over the same period:

How can you get a more persuasive cause and effect relation? I think that the Senate needs to clear the calendar and deal with this immediately. Forget unimportant stuff like war, budget earmarks, and Medicare solvency.

But What's in a Name? The Failure of Panda Diplomacy

2006-03-31T08:49:00.000-06:00

Taiwan has now officially rejected China’s offer of pandas, the much-famed “goodwill ambassadors” that represent a unique breed of zoological diplomacy in China’s recent past. DC’s National Zoo once boasted of its own, freely given representation of Sino-American friendship that was black and white and fuzzy all over. It is, perhaps, symbolic that Washington now leases its pandas from China, at a rate of $2 million a year for the pair (and a promise to send back any panda cubs once the initial, fund-generating cuddly childhood is behind them).

Taiwan says the problem was its ability to care and provide for the pandas. Having been to one of the candidate zoos in Taipei, I do understand their concerns – a certain sort of anarchy reigns there. I once found a lost zebra wandering about the antelope pen, dazed and clearly as confused as I as to how it got in there. In the heat of the August sun, animals would be lined up in the little shade provided, as if awaiting their commanding officer for inspection.

Then again, having seen panda habitats in China, I will say that Tuan-tuan and Yuan-yuan could do a lot worse than Taipei.

Beyond the Chen Shui-bian quest for Taiwanese identity, I suspect that the real problem with this pair was their names.

Yuan-yuan (圓圓) means round, implying roly-poly loveableness. Tuan-tuan (團團) on the other hand, means unite or reunite. The two were named during a national voting contest in China (see, the Chinese do vote… just not for anything that counts) that involved several newspapers and websites. Suggestions were taken and voters could weigh in on line or through telephone text messages.

Now, I grant that Tuan-tuan is ever-so-slightly more subtle than some of the other suggested names I saw, like one proposal to name the two “Peaceful” (和平) and “Reunification” (統一). “There is only one China and Taiwan is a part of China” must have been deemed too long.

But by far the cleverest suggestion for panda names were “Zhi-ming” (志明) and “Chun-jiao” (春嬌). Beyond being common names in Taiwan, these two are the lead characters in a Taiwanese (Hokkien) language song by the band Mayday (五月天).

When “Zhi-ming and Chun-jiao” (in English, aptly titled “Peter and Mary,” as a recognition that these two names are common, everyman sort of names) first hit the airwaves in 1999, it turned Mayday into something of a sensation. The song was so very Taiwanese – not only because few popular artists sing in the local dialect, but because it spoke directly of the two lovers visiting Danshui (淡水), the northernmost point on the Taipei subway line that includes a boardwalk covered with restaurants and arcades and that is a favorite date spot for young couples.

(As one of the few artists in the world of Mandopop – Mandarin language pop music – to write their own music and play their own instruments – Mayday has since been dubbed by the press the “heavenly band.”)

Since that first major hit, Mayday has put out five albums, a compilation album, untold singles, music videos, concert DVDs – they even played two packed houses in California last year (we won’t discuss how many of these items I own. The number is not small). In short, even with a two year break in 2002-03 to fulfill their mandatory service in the Taiwan military, they are an international sensation. Like all Taiwanese artists courting mainland fans, they demonstrate a fair amount of diplomatic savvy, referring to China in the local term “nei di” (內地), or inland, instead of as a separate entity from Taiwan (but without saying anything to imply Taiwan is not separate). The band sings more songs in Mandarin lately, to reach out to that audience, and carefully refers to their “Taiwanese” songs on the mainland as using the Min-nan hua (閩南話), the language from south Fujian Province from which Taiwanese emerged.

There was a huge scandal a few years back with lead singer Ashin (full name Chen Xin-hong 陳信宏) was thought to be on the roll as a contributing member of the DPP, the party of Chen Shui-bian. As it turned out, his was merely a common name. The band’s bass player diffused the uproar on the mainland by noting than all of the band members take care to stay out of formal politics (though the band did contribute to an album about the President, it was not a campaign related item. President Chen did quite publicly attend the boys' last concert before their military service), and anyway, every year someone named Chen Xin-hong tests into the National Taiwan University, and we can all have no doubts that it has never been Ashin.

In short, Mayday – like every Taiwanese act with Chinese fans – has to play to its home audience in Taiwan, but take great care not to alarm or offend anyone on the mainland, a bit of diplomacy the leadership in each government could do to study. (I admit, though I appreciate the freedom in the US to spout any political view you like, I sometimes wish my favorite bands would tone down their politicking, as I almost inevitably disagree with them and tire of their uninformed punditry.)

The proposal to make “Zhi-ming” and “Chun-jiao” the pandas’ names emerged no doubt from the whimsy of a fan-girl, but the campaign took off and they became the dark horse candidates. In the final vote, it came in second place – not bad, given the hundreds of millions of votes counted.

During the voting period, certain websites opened places for voters to make campaigns on behalf of their preferred names. The most common (and obviously fairly convincing) argument for Zhu-ming and Chun-jiao was that these names were familiar to the Taiwanese, they would feel local, make the pandas (and presumably, by extension China) feel like a part of Taiwan. Even the (probably twelve or so) people not familiar with the song would hear the names as being Taiwanese.

One Shanghai middle school student wrote her essay as an open letter to the Taiwanese on one of the websites, promoting the names as ones that her friends across the strait could appreciate and accept (from www.sina.com.cn, via forum.maydaymayday.net).

She entitled the essay, “You Over There,” and stressed what she felt were some of the similarities and differences between the two places. People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait work, go to school, see their families, buy snacks at the local convenience store, live in the beautiful nation of China – if separated by a tiny bit of water.

The people in Taiwan are, she suggested, particularly blessed, though. They are blessed because Mayday is from Taiwan. Ashin, Guaishou, Masa, Guanyou, and Shitou wander the streets of Taipei for all to see, they produce their music there, and the people of Taiwan get more concerts and public events with the fantastic five.

But the Taiwanese people are also to be pitied, she noted. Pitied because politics pull them in every direction. During elections, they cannot even hear themselves think for all the candidates yelling “elect me” at them, then they can only shout at their “representatives” that they should “stop causing trouble” (麥來亂 - cleverly, also a recent Mayday song title), but can’t do anything about it. Then, when they turn 20, the Taiwanese have to take the responsibility of voting onto themselves – deciding who will rule and with the wrong choice, suffering. How pitiable are the Taiwanese.

But, she notes, we love you anyway.

Voting on panda names is all good fun, it seems, but voting for government is a miserable burden any true friend would never wish on another. This tells us, no doubt, a little something about the way the concept of representative government is taught in Shanghai. While living in China, people would always tell me that American-style democracy just doesn’t suit the Chinese. I would argue that it seems to suit the Chinese people in Taiwan just fine, and they’d inevitably give me a dark look and claim that Taiwan’s democracy is chaos and a misery for her people. Now, I guess, I know where they learned this idea.

Tuan-tuan and Yuan-yuan will not be heading over to Taiwan any time soon. Taiwan’s democratically elected leadership has ensured against that. Though I’m sure the reasons why are myriad and various, I would suggest that the next time the Chinese people vote to name a bit of public diplomacy, they study the more politic maneuvers of Mayday and opt for subtlety over symbolism.

The "Culpepper Rattled" Company

2006-03-15T14:18:00.000-06:00

The recent bargain-basement trade of Minnesota Viking quarterback Daunte Culpepper for a second round draft choice has excited three different types of responses- those Minnesota football fans who are happy to see him leave, those who support him no matter what, and other average citizens who have been turned off by his behavior over the past few months.

The (Minneapolis) StarTribune's best sports columnist, Patrick Reusse, has been praising Culpepper to the heavens for several years, his constant theme being that any criticism of his Daunte was a sign of racist attitudes on the parts of fans. In other words, those who had embraced Randall Cunningham during the almost-magic year of 1998 had suddenly developed the racialist mentality. Maybe some- but mostly nonsense.

Now, Mr. Reusse is an old line Hubert Humphrey Democrat, who rather instinctively, for understandable reasons, might be drawn to that explanation for why Culpepper's departure is not being mourned in the same way Reusse is grieving:

It is still to be determined if he treated himself to a lap dance on a boat...... by Vikings standards established over the past 20 years, Culpepper was almost beatific in his public conduct. Thus, the source of this strange parting between Culpepper and the Vikings remains mysterious.We know that Culpepper's long streak of being a stand-up guy came to an end on Oct. 12, when the reports of Sex Cruise had surfaced and he refused to comment in his weekly press conference. If he was that rattled by boat party questions from the media, one can only imagine how rattled he might have been by questions from Mrs. Culpepper......Then, in mid-December, he was among four Vikings charged with misdemeanors stemming from Sex Cruise.On Jan. 12, owner Zygi Wilf stiffed Culpepper at a scheduled meeting, and Culpepper responded by stiffing new coach Brad Childress for their scheduled meeting. Somehow in those three months, from his no comment to the media to his no comment to Childress, Culpepper's relationship with the Vikings changed from franchise quarterback to persona non grata......Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is a team that apparently plans to enter the season with a 38-year-old and a couple of nobodies at quarterback,.....the Vikings are headed into the great unknown with Childress. He's a first-time head coach tying his wagon to Johnson, who graded out at C+ in nine starts for the Vikings last season, after flunking his way to the bench in four 2004 starts for Tampa Bay.

This is a not unreasonable take on the circumstances, but I think it is wrong in several significant ways.

First: I suspect that many out there shared my own own view of the infamous boat ride and subsequent allegations and charges- a bunch of undisciplined, overpaid fools went out without their chaperones, and we got the same result as we did from the snowmobile-hot tub Viking scandal of 2003 (http://www.stevesilver.net/mt/archives/003655.html )- this is something of a habit for Vikings players. Apparently the long winters make them unable to think of anything except sex. (come to think of it, we all tend to.... if you lived here, you would..... oh, never mind)

But outside of the camera-hungry publicity games of local prosecutors, who cares about the boat ride other than their wives and local TV news? It was easy to see how the easy-going Daunte could have been a relatively innocent victim of that event. Not an issue.

Second: The thing that bothered many of us was Culpepper's behavior after he was injured. As soon as he was hurt, the Vikings started to win- and he began to pout. Instead of coming to the sidelines and cheering on his teammates and being happy for them, he holed up in Florida, and seemed almost to be upset that his replacement was winning with the same cast of characters that lost with him at the helm. That is not how you establish the old team spirit and leadership credentials.

Finally: In contrast to Pat Reusse's cheerfully snarky comments about the immobile 38-year-old Brad Johnson playing quarterback at a "C-plus" level, that was far better than Culpepper's "D-minus" performance, and I think there is a very good reason for the difference. Culpepper is a prodigious athlete, an excellent physical talent. Those racists out there (I do agree that there are a few) who, whenever Culpepper made a series fo mistakes, immediately began to suggest that the big guy was too dumb to play QB in the NFL. I think that the ease with which this meme is embraced by some does reflect an attitude that I deplore. Daunte Culpepper is as smart as most successful NFL quarterbacks, and he has shown that for at least 5 years in the league.

But he has an Achilles' heel, and it is one shared by the majority of NFL signal callers: he is not cool under fire, making sound decisions. When the going gets tough, he gets nervous- and this has nothing to do with brains or courage. Staying cool in the last 2 minutes trying to drive downfield with the game on the line is a rare characteristic, and highly prized when found. There are only a few QBs who exhibit that trait- Brady, Favre, Hasselbeck, Rothlisberger, DelHomme, (yes) Johnson, and the damaged Carson Palmer come to mind, with honorable mention to McNabb and Pennington, and the jury still out on Grossman and Chris Simms. Most of the rest have composure flaws- both Mannings get nervous, Plummer gets trigger-happy, Joey Harrington throws it up for grabs, go down the list.

If you look at the record, it is hard to find games where Culpepper took the team down the field in the last possession to pull it out. The bigger the stakes- such as the first major test, being shut out in the NFC championship game in 2000- the worse Culpepper played, and the easier it was to see his happy feet and sprayed throws. He is a talented player with a fatal flaw- he is afraid to have the ball when it all depends on him. Incidentally, that trait is shared by Minnesota's best basketball player, who averages less than 5 points in the 4th quarter of games, and would rather pass the ball than shoot with the game on the line.

Brad Johnson played behind the same leaky O-line, with far less running ability, the same lack of a running game, the same receivers, and with the same marginal defense- all he did different was not give the game away, and stepped it up a notch at crunch time. That is a solid pro, and can play for my team any day. I wish he was 28.

Here is the prediction: Culpepper will rehab from his knee injuries, and play well for Miami, because Saban is no fool- he will design the ultimate low-risk, non-QB-dependent offense. But when the division championship is on the line up in New England, Brady will throw the winning pass, and Culpepper will have an "uncharacteristically" bad game. He'll fumble at least twice, and throw it up for grabs for all the marbles. Too bad- he has all the other tools.

You saw it here first.

Cartoons and Icons

2006-02-06T08:56:00.000-06:00

Hugh Hewitt makes note of the fact that sometimes we can do things that are within our rights, but are not smart. Such is the case with the current European controversy over newspapers publications of a series of cartoons that depict the founder of Islam in different forms.
No matter what your Christian practice- be it evangelical protestant (like me), Catholic, old-line mainstream denominations, or even what I consider to be off-shoot cults of Christianity that profess some allegiance to Christian scriptures, the Pauline epistles are part of your guide for life. And Saint Paul (don’t get him mixed up with this fellow) admonished us in 1 Corinthians 10: 23: "All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify." The publication of cartoons that are likely to be insulting to many devout people is not "edifying" in any way.

That doesn't meant that there is not a real inconsistency here. The reason that cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad are deemed to be wrong is that portraying his image is tantamount to blasphemy, and could lead to quasi-canonization and temptations to worship him in the same manner as the Catholic saints have spawned virtual iconic cults. The backstory to the "no image depictions" is that Muhammad is the founder to whom the final truth was revealed, but still a man, one of 22 veryial prophets (including Moses, Aesop, Jesus, etc.) who had particular honor of transmitting Allah's words and instructions to earthly types.

In practice, this appears to be handled very differently. According to the prescribed mode of behavior, to avoid temptations to idolatry, Jesus, and any of the others on the list of 22, is to be treated as an equal to Muhammad. Yet, you get a strong impression to the contrary, because in standard discourse, a Muslim friend would not refer to the prophet without immediately adding "PBUH" ("Peace be unto him") after reciting the name; I don’t see that done with other supposedly equivalent prophets. Here is an example in the title of an historical piece:
"*** THE PROPHET'S (PBUH) MARRIAGE TO KHADIJAH ***"

If there were ever a case where something is definitely and absolutely legal, and persons are well within their rights to do what they do, it is where papers publish illustrations as the Danish, Norwegian, and French newspapers have done. But, as much as we can point out the inconsistencies and our view of the double standards we believe we see regarding the usual handling of these issues, we have a lot of rights that we routinely surrender in favor of wisdom, or kindness. You don’t tell your wife that you hate the way she looks in her new jeans even though you might be right about the unflattering effect. And you have the absolute right to speak. Sometimes it is wise to find a different subject.

Memo to the blogosphere re Google China

2006-01-27T16:42:00.000-06:00

Get over it, already. Take a deep breath, and repeat after me:

“China censors the internet. China censors the internet. It is actually CHINA that is censoring the internet.”

If you are in China and surfing the web for pictures of the massacre at Tiananmen Square, you either need a fabulous proxy server and a few other tricks up your sleeve, or you are out of luck. This is not Google’s doing, no matter how much we’d like to blame them.

You see, China is run by an authoritarian regime that tries – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – to control the flow of information in and out of the country. For the sake of preserving the position of the Communist Party and preventing a revolution, they often exercise tight restrictions on potentially destabilizing issues. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Most of the time, people in China are not searching the internet for pictures of Tiananmen Square. For one thing, they don’t want anyone to find out that they are looking for said pictures. For another, there are other ways to communicate about democracy, protest, and tanks – code words, text messages, word of mouth, through the massive Chinese diaspora abroad, and so forth.

When googling for information on whether or not hunky Taiwanese Mandopop megastar Ashin has a girlfriend,** however, you can wait a very, very long time before the search has been cleared of any unsavory results. A very long time. For these people, there is now a new service: a locally based Google search engine that has already been sanitized.

The difference is between having the censoring done all at once from the start, so all you have to do is search and find your results, and having it done on an ad hoc basis, so that each time you open Google, you have to wait through the censors. It’s not a choice between a censored search and an open one.

The beauty of the pre-censored search, beyond the shorter wait times, is that it is labeled as being censored. A little line appears at the bottom that says: 据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示. That is, “According to local laws and policies, some of the search results are not displayed.” This is a good thing. This means that when you search for Tiananmen and find only tourist information, you also discover that there are things about Tiananmen that you aren’t allowed to see. Chances are, at some time in the last 16 or so years you heard about a little disturbance taking place there, but you can see that whatever it was, it was sensitive. If you so desire, you can go elsewhere to fill in the blanks.

I’m missing the part here where Google is evil for complying with this. I get the “government censorship is evil” bit, just not the part that puts it all on Google’s head. Google made a decision about how they were going to be censored. Not whether they would be, but how.

** Sadly, he does.

An Ode to All Things Berenstain, Upon the Death of Stan

2005-12-01T22:55:00.000-06:00

I’ve traveled many places in recent years, but I admit that the one place I’ve always wished I could go is down a sunny dirt road, deep in Bear Country, to the home of the Berenstain Bears.

Though Brother and Sister Bear have stayed roughly the same age in the First Time Books series that began in the mid 1970s and continues until today, the issues they’ve faced in each installment have changed with the times. As a child, I could sympathize with the conflict that led the Bear cubs to draw a harsh red line down the floor of their playhouse – my sister and I had a similar line in the back seat of our parents’ car (of course, while Brother and Sister sorted out their differences and erased said line by the end of the picture book, my own sister and I continue to sport a sibling rivalry that puts many international conflicts to shame).

Together with the Bear Family, I started school, visited doctors, watched my own mama go back to work, stayed with new babysitters, picked up toy-strewn playrooms, and even went out for a team (the Bear siblings had much more success with this than I did; while they learned teamwork and honed skills, I was benched while the boys on my soccer team led us to an undefeated season. Of course, I saved us from one goal and thereby earned my trophy, but I remember with some embarrassment that my extraordinary save was entirely accidental – as in, the ball hit me in the ass while I desperately searched in the wrong direction for signs of play).

I read about the Bear family’s need for a healthy diet after eating too much junk food, and saw them appreciate other forms of entertainment after watching too much T.V. Though I learned about the importance of moderation in many aspects of life from the Berenstains, I never actually applied that lesson to my Berenstain book collection: it numbers in the hundreds.

The reason for this is that unlike most children, I never grew out of a desire to read of the Bear family’s adventures. As a high school Spanish student, I learned inclusiveness and the present progressive verb tense in “Los Osos Berenstain No Se Permiten Ninas.” (As a China specialist in grad school, I harbor a fantasy of translating the books to share with the Chinese speaking world.) I howled when the Beary Bubby toy craze hit Bear Country, and Papa got swept up along with Brother and Sister in collecting the little creatures in a frenzy that paralleled the US obsession with Beanie Babies. In general, I loved the Bear versions of popular ideas: Sister Bear’s Bearbie Dolls, the dramatic presentation of Grizzlystiltskin, a visit to Santa Bear.

Over the years, the topics became more sophisticated: the Bear family explores God in “The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question,” reproduction in “The Birds, the Bees and the Berenstain Bears,” and racial prejudice in “The Berenstain Bears and the New Neighbors,” in which Bear Country becomes home to the Panda Family, and Papa Bear comes to terms with their differences – which include a preference for bamboo over honey and a lack of knowledge of football.

Ask me anything about the Berenstain Bears: I am a superfan. I joined the Berenstain Bears Treehouse Fan Club. . . when I was 18. When the series expanded from First Time Books and First Time Readers to include Berenstain Bear Scouts mysteries and Big Chapter Book stories, I was the first on the band-wagon. Never mind the fact that I was a college student and had long mastered the art of reading a picture-less novel – I was smitten by all things Berenstain. I can still sing the theme song from the old Saturday morning cartoon, set to the tune of Stars and Stripes Forever. It wasn’t until I joined the junior high band that I learned the song had alternate, non-bear-related lyrics.

Like all things popular and much-beloved, the Berenstain Bear books have come under much criticism over the years. I was first introduced to the supposed difference between mass-produced Bear adventures and “quality” children’s literature when I worked in an elementary school as an Americorps*VISTA after college. I was creating a curriculum for a family reading program, and learned the hard way that my favorite books to read with my family as a child didn’t make the cut. Papa Bear was a bumbler – a travesty for turning the ideal of the father into a big kid that had to be controlled and raised by Mama Bear. The cartoonish pictures weren’t quality art – no Caldecott medals here – and the themes failed to embrace a diversity of cultures to which children of color could relate.

The problem, however, is that when I sat down with my after-school reading program kids in the school library and told them to pick out books they wanted to enjoy together, they would inevitably declare the latest and greatest Newberry award winner “a bit boring” and reach for something Berenstain. Don’t get me wrong – among the medal winners and among the books considered high quality children’s literature, there are many that I love and adore. For every new book that is a little too socially conscious for a five year old, there is one that is timeless and lovely. But appreciation for these supposed “masterpieces” should not come at the expense of recognizing what children love to read; making children love to read is, after all, the point of creating children’s literature.

Just a few years ago, I spent a long afternoon in line on the Mall in Washington, D.C. queuing for autographs from Stan and Jan; when the line was cut off a few people ahead of me and the Berenstain family escorted away, I was easily as disappointed as any of the five-year-olds in line behind me. Maturity has only taught me not to cry. In public, anyway.

This week marks the end of an era of my life as a Berenstain devotee: Stan Berenstain, co-creator of the series I love, has died. Because the Berenstain Bears are now a family business, the books will live on, with future volumes written collectively by The Berenstains, rather than simply Stan and Jan. My own collection, which spans a longer frame of time on this earth than I do, will include these new volumes, but I know I’ll remember 2005 as the year of transition.

More pointless and unproductive whining about Miers

2005-10-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

I can't believe how silly some of this stuff has gotten. Here, cross-posted for reference purposes, is my comment interchange from Two Minute Offense, where I agree with the core post, and take issue with some of the commenters, particularly one "courageous" person identified as "anonymous" and one Jeremy. Read their statements, but pay heed to Stan's.
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Oh, Jeremy- "I've yet to see any "personal attacks" against Miers"- go to Jonathan Adler's posts at NRO where they make an extended point about how a typo in her questionnaire response ("contact" instead of "contract"- it is obvious that they had to rely on spell-check given the time) means she is too sloppy to be a SCOTUS justice when she is actually supposed to be meticulous, to see how petty the personal attacks have been.

And none of the opponents here have cited one specific documentably supported objection to the nomination. "Not conservative enough"? We simply don't know. We can have ideas, but we don't have actual evidence- the stuff about sending money to Gore, the feminist lecture series, and the Texas Bar affirmative action outreach ("quota"? Perhaps- ask the quesiton and don't let her dodge it) are either already dealt with and well-explained, or we don't really know yet and the answers will come from the hearings- if the SJC does its job.

Stan correctly points out that the Entitled Right Punditry immediately threw a giant temper tantrum when the nomination was announced and has been pounding on the floor and kicking its feet wildly ever since. And much of the commentary I've seen has been other unrelated recycled gripes, most of which are either incorrect, unimportant, fueled by ignorance, or are essentially unrelated policy differences (Katrina spending, steel tariffs, highway spending, drug benefits, immigration, etc.), giving the distinct impression that it was just time for us Real Conservatives to have a good cry over the fact that the American public and Senate are not enough in agreement with us so we get to have our own way about everything. I heard almost exactly the same caterwauling in 1986 and 1987 about another Republican president who now looks to have been a pretty good president.

The thing to do now is what we should have done several weeks ago. Dig for all the information we can find, publicize it without the side comments, let our representatives and lobby organizations know our well-supported views and concerns based on facts (e.g., send Sekulow a letter, enclose a $20 contribution), ask our senators to be sure that certain questions are answered appropriately (I could provide a list), and wait to see what the hearings turn up.If Miers looks bad, she will withdraw. If she looks good, she will be confirmed. If she looks liberal, the center-right senators will vote "no".But the state of the "debate" to date has been appalling. The best comments on substance have been made by John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff at Powerline- go read their stuff.

Debates from ConfirmThem-dot-com

2005-10-25T11:24:00.000-05:00

I posted a harmless little bit of commentary on a thread about JR Brown, and got shot at by "Andrew". Here it is, for the record, from http://www.confirmthem.com/?p=1691.
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16 Kurmudge Posted on October 24th, 2005 at 7:01 pm. About 'JRB on SDP'.
No matter how much we want the Constitution to be specific enough to protect us from black-robed dictators diving headlong off the cliff before they can even get to the slippery slope, we can’t. Unless we turn the US Constitution into something as detailed as the EC nightmare, there will always be a need for an interpretive court to tell the government to knock it off, which it does well sometimes and less well at others (Kelo).

But how do we really preserve the basic fundamental rights of not being regulated by the government for everything if there is not some kind of recognition that we have inalienable rights not spelled out (because they were so obvious to the founders) in the Constitution, and had been called out just 12 years previously in the Declaration as being liberties endowed by the Creator? When voracious governments of all levels go nuts, someone has to call a halt. Yes, today the SCOTUS is as much at fault as is the legislature, but pretending that there are no natural law liberties is not exactly a way to preserve them.

The problem is not Griswold as described and justified by Harlan (NOT Douglas’ execrable opinion), but that the Court then threw off all barriers and started to act like a permanent Congress in Eisenstadt, Roe, etc. Each time they didn’t like a case, they made something up to justify it. That is STILL not a reason that we don’t have some kinds of “fundamental rights” that flow from our basic right to life liberty, and property. I think that that is where JRB was going, and decided not to get into the debate and the need to explain in one-syllable words the delicate difference between Griswold (some logic) and Roe (utter nonsense, with no pretense at Constitutional justification).

This is still, and will always be, a sort of dialectical balance to yank things back when they go too far off, as Rehnquist, et al did to the Commerce Clause in Lopez and Morrison.
And we STILL don’t know how Miers feels about this, despite all the heated rhetoric in the blogosphere. Time to stop bloviating and wait, make sure that somene on the SJC asks the right questions. If she answers sensibly, that’s all we can ask for unless we are sure she’s lying., Last time I looked, the President gets to make these nominations, and us fussing that he didn’t consult us enough is equally wrong as Chuckie-doll Schumer suggesting that he provide the list off of which the choice is made.
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17 Andrew Posted on October 24th, 2005 at 7:10 pm. About 'JRB on SDP'.
Kurmudge, who tells the British government to knock it off? The British parliament got along perfectly well prior to the Factortame case.

Basically, there are two kinds of judicial review: either the courts strike down only legislation that plainly conflicts with the terms of a constitution, or the courts have carte blanche to enforce what they deem to be the “spirit” of the constitution. Those of you who advocate the latter have two high hurdles: (1) the framers never intentioned such a thing, and (2) other countries have gotten along perfectly well without ANY judicial review, much less the carte blanche type that you advocate.
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18 Kurmudge Posted on October 25th, 2005 at 12:22 pm. About 'JRB on SDP'.

As you very well know, Andrew, the British government operates essentially totally on “political questions” that are, by definition, non-justiciable. And you know that we have a different system. And the issue here is separation of powers, particularly the tendency of the SCOTUS in arrogating for itself a lot more power than most of us who read this blog would believe is proper. I do agree with Black’s comment in his dissent on Griswold, even if I am sympathetic to Harlan’s actual opinion on that case.

But you still don’t address the fundamental question, it seems to me. We cannot spell everything out as the EC bureaucrats in Belgium are determined to do, and it is obvious that Thomas is the only justice who will rail against the unfortunate modern tendency to threat the 10th as a “truism” in his dissent on the term limits case. So we are left with the reality that something still has to be interpreted, and this ends up being in actual practice a push-pull battle to keep the Douglas-Brennan-Stevens-Souter-Ginsburg cabal from making it up as they go along when that irresistible mood strikes to be a Change Agent For Good, and preventing the Kennedy types from getting too enamored of their press clippings and listening to goofy clerks who like to read Swedish laws about “tolerance”.

I categorically reject your notion that the process of judicial review is a digital switch. Over history we went from Gibbons to Slaughterhouse to Darby to Lochner to (yecchh) Wickard to Lopez, etc.- not exactly a straight line of interpretive approach. And I fail to see where, by recognizing the same principles of review as CJ Roberts appears to accept, I am suggesting anything like “carte blanche” to legislate judicially.

Your comment suggests to me that you think that every law allowed to stand under the Commerce Clause that regulates something not directly crossing state lines (in other words, Marshall in Gibbons was dead wrong) is an example of unconstitutional behavior. Maybe, under the most restrictive interpretation of originalism, but that view is a non-starter in the real world, so much so that you won’t find any mainstream conservative seriously saying that the minimum wage laws, for example, can be struck down. The realistic approach was Rehnquist’s in Morrison, it seems to me. If we can maintain and extend that, we will do well. If we can kill Roe (and, please, the principle of “health” exceptions established by Doe and affirmed in Casey) dead once and for all so that the issues could be legislated appropriately, we ought to be delirious.

In practice appellate jurisprudence is a continuum, and we need to keep doing useful things to increase the spring pressure toward the right side. I’m not sure that trashing Miers to promote JRB (a personal favorite, I add) is helpful on that front.

Piling on Miers is getting ridiculous

2005-10-24T10:59:00.000-05:00

This post at "Baseball Crank" prompted me to post a mild rebuke in the comments, cross-posted here for the record. The subject is Hugh Hewitt's imputations of elitism to some of Miers' critics (because she went to SMU rather than Harvard), followed up by him then actually invoking a little bit of an elitist tone in a follow-up response to a different criticism.
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Hugh is on record as actually promoting an elitist mindset in his book "In, But Not Of", where he advises young Christians to go to fancy schools, etc., to get with the crowd that has the influence on the world. Sort of like he did.

But though I think he has gotten a bit hyperbolic at times in his earnest defense of the Miers nomination, he has been a lot less so than Will, NRO, Prof. Bainbridge, or the other virulent commentators who are so unhinged by this that they have taken to criticizing the proofreading of her questionnaire responses for one letter typos as evidence of her unfitness for the job (http://bench.nationalreview.com/archives/080370.asp).

This would have been far better in every respect if those opposed had made their substantive objections known and then shut up, at least with the hortatorical invective, until there was something real to talk about. The first legitimate policy-oriented issue I've seen brought up is the Texas Bar Assn minority set-aside, which is a substantive policy matter that people can discuss, pro and con, in an adult manner.

But it was, and still is, demeaning to a distinguished attorney to say that unless she is an incompetent idiot she is supposed to remember the names of ConLaw cases (e.g., the 1920's Nebraska case on German language instruction, etc.) that only law professors remember after ConLaw 1- you remember the concept, the ruling, but seldom the rationale or the case name. And there is absolutely no reason to remember it all, even for one going to the Court.

And to be apoplectic about her statement that Griswold was "correctly decided" is simply unfair, revealing more ignorance on the part of those protesting than Ms. Miers herself. I tend to agree that Griswold WAS correctly decided, while disagreeing with Douglas' rationale. If you read the decision again, you can very consistently argue- with Harlan- that the state has no right, where we are "endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights... among these... life, LIBERTY..." (emphasis added) to intrude on the intimate affairs of married couples. That says absolutely nothing about Roe, which made no pretense whatever of any natural law or Constitutional basis. Harlan goes to the 14th Amendment, implicitly incorporating the originalism of the Declaration in declaring our independence from state interference in our daily lives. Where there is another life involved- as in a fetus- there is a state interest in protecting that helpless life. What's not to like about liberty and morality, predicated on marriage, as the Griswold decision- not the Douglas opinion rationale- concluded?

The thing to do, still, is to see how she handles the hearings and the questioning. Ask her detailed questions about philosophy. If she refuses to answer, or gives answers you don't like, vote her down.

But the current right-vs-right food fight has brought out the petty in everyone, and makes me ashamed to be a conservative. Some of these postings in various places sound, in form and even substance, like Daily Kos.

Is Harriet Miers Brennan, or Blackmun?

2005-10-07T18:10:00.000-05:00

“Servant Disposition”, Skilled Manipulator, or anxious and scared nonentity?

Harriet Miers was not my candidate for the open SCOTUS seat; I threw the same kind of hissy-fit upon hearing about it as did many of my fellow True Believers. However, after reading all the fulminating outrage coming from many of them, it almost seems as though it is time to take a shower and move on. The outrage is a bit over-the-top, and seems to have as much to do with disappointment over missing out on a good cathartic fight as it does with any actual evidence about the nomination.

There is a lot of the current furious commentary, larded as it is with comments about the highway bill, Katrina-recovery spending, the steel tariffs, failure to veto appropriations bills, signing BCRA, and (drum roll) the ineffably evil act of keeping a primary campaign promise to add prescription drug coverage to Medicare (the latter shows up in virtually every post). Based on what we read, the desire for a “good cathartic fight” seems to be as much longing for a fight with Bush as with Harry Reid.

One factor that is never addressed, as the commentators slog down the list of judicial superstars they wanted to put into O’Connor’s chair, is that of roles on an effective team. Smart people, from athletic coaches and managers, to corporate gurus, to Saint Paul in the 12th chapter of first Corinthians (“14For the body is not one member, but many. 15If the foot would say, “Because I’m not the hand, I’m not part of the body,” it is not therefore not part of the body. 16If the ear would say, “Because I’m not the eye, I’m not part of the body,” it’s not therefore not part of the body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the smelling be? 18But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body, just as he desired. 19If they were all one member, where would the body be? 20But now they are many members, but one body. 21The eye can’t tell the hand, “I have no need for you,” or again the head to the feet, “I have no need for you.”), have discovered that an organization that pays attention to a range of roles and responsibilities and fills the essential holes usually accomplishes more than one exclusively staffed by superstars. This is emphatically not an argument for Hruskaism, the famed paean to mediocrity descended into by the late Nebraska senator while desperately trying to support the Supreme Court nomination of the unlamented G. Harrold Carswell for associate justice.

The most effective working group- which in this case means a center-right caucus on the US Supreme Court- boasts a variety of skills to fill a variety of essential roles and responsibilities. Thus far this debate over Miers has exclusively focused on two issues: 1) where does she stand on various Constitutional law positions, and 2) how can she be competent to deal with those issues given that she is not known as a Constitutional scholar in the way that law professors and appellate court judges are. The debate might be enhanced if we stop and look at a couple of characteristics of the Court and of those persons who have been most effective, and thus left a lasting legacy (for better or worse) in their service on the Court.

When I was young, I recall a lot of angry talk about the Supreme Court by conservative people, and the object of the enmity was Justice William O. Douglas. This ire at Douglas actually midwifed a lot of half-baked, but sort of serious proposals to “Impeach Douglas!” He was the target of the barbs, and the reputed source of all the Godless and Immoral rulings to protect communists, outlaw Bible-reading in schools, and the like. Interestingly, he retired in 1975, and the Court didn’t make any sudden correction toward more sound jurisprudence. And the liberal legacy of the Court didn’t start in 1939 when he took his seat on the bench. Why?

Because these things require teams, not just visible superstars- and superstars are important, provided that they can operate in a group dynamic without being narcissistically counterproductive. If you are uncertain about this, think of a football team with 11 superstar defensive ends. They will still be outrun by the fast tailbacks. Any real team needs to field all the different positions. To the extent that the luminously intelligent and articulate Justice Scalia is successful in shifting the Court in his direction on some matter, it was likely at least as much because the late CJ Rehnquist had quietly maneuvered such a result by taking care of a lot of little things in the background as it was because Justice Scalia debated the issue in the conference with rapier-like logic.

Marvin Olasky has been widely ridiculed for approvingly posting a statement at the World magazine blog to the effect that Miers’ “servant mentality” would serve the country, and the Right, well at the Supreme Court: “According to a source in her Dallas church quoted by Marvin Olasky, Harriet Miers is someone who taught children in Sunday School, made coffee, brought donuts: 'Nothing she's asked to do in church is beneath her.”

The question that should be asked, as we all fulminate over Michael McConnell and Michael Luttig, is whether the conservative wing of the Court would benefit from adding someone who is less debater and more water-carrier.

The best water carrier in Court history was probably William Brennan, whose 34 year tenure fell just short of that of his then more notorious colleague. I doubt that there is a Court historian around today who would not agree that the unabashed liberal who had the most impact on the Warren Court and its successors was the previously little-known, certainly not particularly impressive state supreme court justice from New Jersey. As David Yalof, UConn political science professor and expert on Supreme Court nominations put it in the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1007/p01s03-usju.html): "No one could possibly have thought in 1956 that William Brennan was on the top 100 list of people to become a justice of the Supreme Court," Yalof says. "At the time of his appointment, William Brennan…… was far and away not considered the most reputable justice on his own court. "Was he qualified?"

Tony Mauro, in Legal Times (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1122023116162) explains why the most effective style is not necessarily brilliant argument: "’They don't argue cases at conference,’ says one former Court clerk. ‘Kennedy and Scalia would say early on, 'Wait, we need to discuss this,' but Rehnquist would tell them, 'This isn't a debate society”. Mauro went on to explain why Brennan had been effective with his personal relationship style, while Chief Justice Roberts’ formidable skills of debate may not necessarily be the defining issue compared with his pleasant demeanor. The same factor may apply to Harriet Miers based on the roles she has had to play over the last 20 years in many situations infused with challenging group dynamics.

The best exposition on this phenomenon with regard to the Court and the way Brennan worked to move the agenda without flash or visibility is Bob Woodward’s 1979 book about the Burger Court, The Brethren. More than any other treatment, that narrative shows how Brennan’s causes were moved forward- through Brennan’s tireless, behind-the-scenes maneuvering and personal lobbying. The most interesting case in point was the cultivation and apostasy of Harry Blackmun. Just take the book, and in the index under “Blackmun”, go to “and Brennan”, and you will see how the senior Justice spotted Blackmun from the beginning as a timid person who hated to be the person on whom everything rested. He took his chair at the end of the term, and dreaded having to make the decisions about certiorari on a large pile of cases that had three justices already signed on.

Brennan saw Blackmun as one whose insecurity could be manipulated, and he set his plans to do so. The process by which that occurred, the significant shift by one insecure and frightened justice away from his philosophical roots, and his long time friend (Chief Justice Warren Burger, friend since childhood, wedding participant, and the reason he had been nominated for the Court at all) toward media lionization and the creative exploration and discovery of privacy penumbras, is an fascinating tale that may offer a very different take on the current situation.

The single most over-invoked point of the current discussions of Miers has been the solemn recitation of the mysterious ways of constitutional law. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg made an illustrative comment that appears to reflect that common misconception (http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_02_corner-archive.asp#078565): “Here's the trap. Miers by all accounts is tireless at doing her homework. If she does show up at the hearings and can actually duke it out over the fineries of constitutional jurisprudence, the Democrats will have no place to go (and, I might add, neither will many conservative critics). This might mean Miers is in for the Mother-of-All-Cramming-Sessions.”

This is a common misconception, and very popular in print these days. The truth is, on those constitutional law subjects, Miers will need about one day, if any, of brush-up coaching and reminders from any competent professor; I suspect that Mr. Hewitt would be happy to help. Any first year law student can go in front of Senator Biden and quote exhaustively from “Griswold” and “Doe-Bolton” about privacy, “Lopez” and “Morrison” about the Commerce clause, “New York” and “Prinz” on federalism, and so on.

The key is not the debate- every party who ever took a Con Law course knows the issues in those cases like the ingrown nail on his left big toe. The deciding point is not nuances of Article II, it is persuading an undecided someone else, for reasons that often have little to do with legal matters, to go along with your position on a particular case. That happens more often through personal interplay that has little to do with the Constitutional mysteries.

I seriously doubt that Justice Brennan won very many battles by applying superior, as Charles Krauthammer put it, “constitutional jurisprudence …. exercise of intellect steeped in scholarship."

In Blackmun’s case, it had more to do with an old friend, Burger, who, as portrayed in the book, was a bit self-absorbed and took Blackmun for granted as an ally, and Brennan, who saw a chance to use his personal skills to pump up self-esteem of the insecure man and win a permanent and ever-more-reliable ally. Brennan didn’t care who got the ink or wrote the opinion- just the so he got the vote for the precedent he cared about. Woodward’s description of the patient seduction of Blackmun, on Roe v Wade, to move from trusting the Mayo doctors’ medical judgement regarding abortion, to writing an opinion that effectively authorized legal infanticide, is classic marionette manipulation. You don’t have to like the result to admire the craftsmanship. Like Reagan, Brennan cared more about results than about credit. Burger was the opposite, an image person who loved the cameras.

So, what does that suggest we should watch for when Justice Miers takes her seat on the Bench? Will she be a Brennan- a stolid behind the scenes rudder helping to steer a large ship in her preferred direction? Or a Blackmun- a nervous and uncertain cipher with regard to the causes near and dear to the hearts of President Bush’s “base”, currently in near revolt? A team player on a good team, as she has been for her life thus far in the law? A team-focused provider of synergy and steady progress rather than a mercurial leadership?

Her nature and style have been described both ways by people alleged to be “in the know”. And she could turn out to emulate either predecessor, and still make conservatives very happy if she allies with the right mentors on the Court. The inference is actually high that she will gravitate toward those with whom she is comfortable, most conspicuously, the new Chief Justice. If he is the person he is reputed to be, that is good news for the Right. And, after the justice’s philosophy in an area of appellate law is established, the leg work is done by clerks, and if she selects clerks the way she helped to select appeals court judges, the President’s base has no cause for complaint.

On the other hand, David Frum has described Miers as “a taut, nervous, anxious personality”, likely to succumb to the seductive Washington leftward temptation and abandon her roots, whatever they are (http://frum.nationalreview.com/), seeking approval. Knowing nothing whatever firsthand, and having infinite respect for Frum, it still doesn’t appear to be obvious that she is a Blackmun. In fact, it would appear most unlikely that she would tend to work closely with Justice Breyer or Stevens as her “Brennan”, if indeed she subconsciously seeks a mentor on the Court in the manner of Blackmun.

If she is the person President Bush appears to believe she is, she may well herself be the next Brennan, with views that are more popular with conservatives.

We shall all see.

Why Miers? It may be simpler than you think.

2005-10-04T08:47:00.000-05:00

The dismay on the right over the Miers selection to the SCOTUS, which I philosophically share, may be a bit more histrionic than necessary in light of one logical scenario.

Suppose Bush's issue in getting a true "movement conservative" justice confirmed is not that a Democrat filibuster would block a vote. Suppose that the Senatitis sufferers (that word is a tribute to the Dr. Johnson of our day, James Lileks) who actually wish to dictate the selection are Specter, Snowe (who voted against Rogers-Brown and made a speech criticizing her opposition to abortion as the primary reason), Collins, Voinovich, Warner, et al? Suppose that when Bush consulted the Senate regarding this nomination he discovered that his own party was likely to betray him, because of the truism- there are liberal Republicans, but when it comes time for a party-line vote, there is no such thing as a conservative Democrat now that Zell has retired.

Therefore, he did the only thing he could do to still meet the objectives- selected a stealth candidate who only he knew, but also knew he could trust on the key issues.

By the way, regarding age and prospective longevity on the Court, remember that Miers' mother is 93. She could still stay there for 20 years.

Like any other therapeutic drug

2005-08-29T15:50:00.000-05:00

The estimable Prof. Althouse is hosting a discussion of the medical marijuana issue, the context being this story about suspected rigged research on the subject being done for the Feds. The Usual Suspects are all over the map on why/how, with a lot of discussion of the recent SCOTUS overturning of the California law, Gonzales v. Raich at the request of the US government.

Why is it that when libertarians talk about this issue it so often sounds like they are not really interested in cancer sufferers, they are just eager to get their hands on a good stash for recreational use? The public can be forgiven for concluding that they are, as in the California case (Gonzales-Raich), eagerly jumping on whatever train will get them there.

There is no drug in existence that does not have unintended consequences (just ask any COX-II inhibitor manufacturer, or chemotherapy patient, about side effects). And MJ, like another very effective drug, thalidomide, has a nasty reputation. But, just because a drug is capable of being misused does not mean that its therapeutic effects should be denied to sick people for whom its use is indicated.

However, the problem here is not the FDA, the DEA, or any other bureaucracy- bureaucrats do nothing more than what all bureaucrats do, that is, go with the flow and offer the policy proposals favored by those who provide the money. The issue is with Congress, where there are few serious policy people willing to play this issue when there are more camera-friendly dragons to assault.

The reason that Congress won't change? There are two. First, there are those who are anti-recreational-drug and pretty much enthralled with the memories of Reefer Madness, just as there are those who want to kill vaccines and thalidomide. Second, the California gang that gave us the very dumb Raich law is the perfect illustration of how to kill any progress, by letting the overage '60's hippies get near the issue.

Raich, as written, was not a medical marijuana bill, it was an ill-disguised Trojan Horse for unfettered home cultivation by the most intemperate of recreational users. If you are trying to get some relaxation against a Schedule I drug on scientific grounds, you don't pass a law changing the drug all the way out to Schedule III instead of II, and then eliminate the requirement that it be prescribed (what sane person would only require a doctor to "recommend" use of MJ). That philosophy of treating marijuana as being less problematic than Allegra and Viagra may reflect what the hemp enthusiasts truly believe, but it is no way to change either minds or laws.

The smart way for California to have handled this, before poisoning the well as they now have, would have been for a UCLA team to set up a carefully controlled double-blinded study using high quality extracted THC in suppository form, with a patient population that was clearly compassionate use- late stage cancer patients, hospice AIDS patients, etc. That gets away from the emotion and treats the alternate route administration drug as a drug.

Then, if the results are as expected- patients get relief from nausea, you publicize the outcomes broadly, expose the inevitable blue-haired Priscilla Goodbody opponents for the anti-science bluenoses they are, and move to the next stage, inhalation.

In the end, if you are right about the drug, you have the true clinical data to support a compassionate use application for Schedule II prescription in two different alternate administration forms. But MJ should be usable like any other drug, and controlled- by DEA prescription reporting, if appropriate, like any other abusable drug to prevent the wrong people from getting it or overdoing it. And I say that as a conservative evangelical who doesn't even like wine, myself (I wish I did- red wine has very real health benefits).

Of course, if the real agenda is to make it easy for spaced out refugees from Haight-Ashbury 1968 to grow their own stuff, that strategy wouldn't be terribly helpful in the short run.

Terri, Feeding Tubes and Life Support

2005-03-27T19:45:00.000-06:00

The Terri Schiavo saga is almost done, the Almighty Courts have spoken, and we can begin what one would hope to be a mercifully short post-mortem on the issue itself. I have two thoughts on this, regarding mainstream media treatment of the matter, and then about the nature of end-of-life law itself.

First- media performance. Once again, the Big Media coverage has been lousy, and it is almost impossible to tell if it is the result of pure incompetence and laziness or promotion of its standard position- scientists and rationalists versus the dogmatic and ignorant religious zealots. The truth is almost certainly a combination of the two.

The most obvious example is the constant characterization of Mrs. Schiavo as a vegetable on life support, essentially described that way by ABC News in its push-poll a week ago. This matches the willful ignorance of my favorite lefty friend, who has variously scolded me in the last week for promoting lawlessness, insensitivity to "states rights", immorality for supporting a president who signed a Bill in Texas that permitted a level of cost analysis to be incorporated into "pull-the-plug" decisions, and of promoting heroic artificial life-extension measures for accepting what he repeatedly referred to as "artificial nutrition and hydration" to keep her alive (his final comment was: " hey a lump of cancer is alive... lets feed that too"- this sensitive statement gives you an idea of the real attitudes of some of the far left on these matters). Regarding the latter point, he revealed that he is just as confused about this as every lazy network "reporter" out there. If you polled the public on this subject, you would likely find that a large majority is sure that Terri was being fed either intravenously or by a tube stuck down her throat, and with respiratory and circulatory assistance as well. Wrong.

When I was in nursing school (I have a current license which I earned when I was deputy principal investigator on clinical trials while managing operations for a small medical device company; I now work in the support area for an academic medical research facility), I took care of patients like Terri. People who were demented to varying degrees, from loss of short term memory all the way to total unawareness of surroundings, incontinent, and immobile. We would awaken them in the morning, get them cleaned up and dressed, administer morning meds, then get ready for breakfast.

I had one particular patient who took all his nutrition and hydration through a percutaneous endoscopic gastrectomy (PEG) tube, just like Terri. Folks, do you know what that really is? It is a funnel, into which you pour Ensure- just because it is easier to do it that way than to spoon-feed. Period.

It is used in two types of situations: 1) the patient has trouble swallowing, or 2) it is simply a lot easier on the nursing care staff and more efficient to feed the client that way. There is nothing wrong with any of the GI tract- the stomach works just fine, the intestines absorb nutrition totally normally. And, regarding the swallowing difficulties, any person who has ever spent any time around a long term care facility knows that up to half of the residents have trouble swallowing, so all of their liquids are mixed with thickeners to make them more viscous and easier-to-swallow.

So Mrs. Schiavo had a fully functioning cardiac system, and a fully functioning GI tract. Her "life support" consisted of being fed by use of a funnel to dump in the most common over-the-counter "instant breakfast". Yet the Big Media types seem to have done their best to obfuscate reality, by never explaining the PEG tube, in fact, they seem to have gone out of their way to suggest that a "vegetable" was getting D20-plus-lipids through some kind of intravenous infusion. The reality is that, if Terri had been given to custody of some other party, the twelve-year-old kid next door could have fed her just fine. No significant infection issues, no special medical problems.

There is no question that the mischaracterizations of her physical (not mental) condition fed a public impression that was quite different from reality. Why? Couldn’t those advocating death for Mrs. Schiavo make the case honestly? One wonders. Especially given the behavior of ABC and the Washington Post regarding that mysterious talking points memo never tied to any Republican lawmakers, handed to them by Democrat staffers, yet somehow reported as a Religious Republican Right Manifesto. (update- this memeo actually turned out to have been created by a legislative assistant to Sen. Mel Martinez, so we can leave out the "Democrat conspiracy" and simply note that ABC still did not perform well before that source was reveaed)

That brings us to the second point. One can have a variety of views on what should have been done in this case, what the trial judge did and should have done, whether or not Congress should have acted, and so on. There was a lot of unseemly preening and posturing on both sides, from those who favor the Netherlands "duty to die" euthanasia philosophy to those who seem to believe that they need to take care of God’s business here on earth for Him because He cannot take care of the souls of the fetuses and neglected unles the activists are there to scold us on His behalf.

Who, besides God, knows which side is right? The key is that the record shows that the trial court made a lot of rulings it didn't have to make, for reasons we don't understand- perhaps the judge is upset that his judgement is being questioned, etc. In a case like this, we need laws that leave egos at the door and opt for the best expression of morality. We need 50 state laws that say:

1) If a patient is in such a non-communicative state, but the major organ systems function normally, so that there is no artificial respiration or circulatory support, or and the gut will absorb nutrition, and
2) if there is no written legal document of at least the same evidentiary (Statute of Frauds, for contract matters) level as we require to buy a $500 item of hardware,
3) if there is a dispute among the family over the inferred wishes of the patient, and
4) a first order relative is willing to take on the custody, care, and support of that patient, then:
- the system should "err" on the side of life. That does not apply if some family member wants the patient alive but desires that the government pay for it all; if we are pro-life, pay the price, personally. If the patient is left as a ward of the state, the Florida-type law can be used to deal with the situation.

My own experience tells me that this has probably been hopeless all along, but the law failed miserably in its duty to Terri Schiavo to protect her from those who-let’s be blunt- wish her ill. If a doctor messes up a terminal cancer case that costs a patient a possibility of 20% chance of recovery instead of sure death, the patient wins 20% of the award in a malpractice case.

The Solomonic solution was there all along for those with a moral compass- let Michael have his divorce, let the Schindlers try 6 months of intensive rehabilitation therapy to confirm the mental state insofar as we can. And leave the rest of us out of the private family matter. A minister friend of mine was the police chaplain who counseled Mrs. David Mack after her Minneapolis police officer husband was shot and in an extended coma- then, suddenly woke up and lived five more years, awake and alert. My memory of that case, and the talk then about the futility of the situation haunts me now.

Moral considerations are difficult- but one thing far worse than making the wrong decision is ducking the moral consequences of the debate. If we are going to avoid the head-first dive down the slippery slope, we need some changes in law, now.

The Statute of Frauds and Terri Schiavo

2005-03-19T20:58:00.000-06:00

The law allegedly has a strong bias in favor of truth, reasonableness, justice, and avoidance of moral hazards. One of the best illustrations of this is a universal US law that is enshrined in both the Common Law and by the Uniform Commercial Code governing all US sales transactions.

As law professors explain, the real meaning of the term is "the statute for the prevention of frauds". The idea is that there are certain kinds of dealings that inherently offer the temptation to cheat. Hence, to eliminate both the temptation, and the possibility, of either party being less than truthful about oral communications alleged to have occurred between the contracting parties, certain kinds of contracts must be in writing, and signed by the person you are trying to enforce the agreement against. The exceptions are few, and only are allowed if they provide very strong circumstantial support for the claims.

Now, this principle of law applies to agreements of two types: contracts to buy things "of great value", and situations where the temptation to, er, liberally interpret to your benefit (that is, "lie") is "easily imagined". For example, if you want to buy a piece of real property, land, the seller must give you a signed piece of paper clearly describing the specific piece of land, the price she is willing to sell it to you for, and then sign the paper. Or, if there is an agreement that I will cover the bad debts of my worthless brother-in-law, that is, act as guarantor for his purchase of a used Geo Metro on his salary flipping hamburgers down at the local bowling alley, I have to provide the seller of the car a signed piece of paper indicating that when, not if, Lazy Larry defaults on the loan, I will write a check. Then another check, then another…..

The same principle is found outside of contracts, in areas where "strict liability" applies; if a man erotically amuses himself with a girl of fourteen, he is guilty of statutory rape no matter how old he thought she was. It is too easy to play he-said-she-said with the truth, and public policy should discourage opportunities for older men to take advantage of young women.

To illustrate what the law considers to be a contract of significant "value" the Statute of Frauds requirement for transfer of goods kicks in at a sales price of $500. If you are going to write a contract to buy anything worth more than $500, you need to have the deal in writing and signed by the other person. Period.

Now, let’s consider Terri Schiavo, the woman in Florida whose brain injury has led to the battle between her husband and parents over starving her to death by removing her feeding tube so her husband, Michael, can marry his live-in girlfriend and "legitimize" their two children. She is physically healthy, not on any kind of respiratory or circulatory support systems. The question is entirely whether the nursing home should stop giving her meals and water so she can starve to death and free old Michael up so he won’t have to fuss with a divorce. Since her parents are eager to assume responsibility for her care, Michael must have come from a tradition where divorce is, literally, worse than death. Or something like that. Nice to know that he has such a strong commitment to marriage.

The Florida judge on the case has apparently adopted this as his personal "right to die" crusade. He refuses to consider transferring custody of Terri to her parents, who promise to take care of her and provide various kinds of physical and occupational therapy that might improve her condition. Their petition is opposed by Michael, who swears, honest, that Terri had told him when she was about 27 years old, conveniently not long before her highly unusual and unforeseeable injury, that in the event that she was ever in such a "vegetative state", she wanted him to starve her to death.

Michael Schiavo was inspired to remember this "kill me!" conversation by warm thoughts of Terri immediately after winning a lawsuit that provided $1.7 million, much of designated to provide the care and therapy to help her condition improve. Of course, since she had really wanted to die anyway, he would just use the money in her memory after she was gone, presumably thinking of her with every bite of gourmet food and over every mile traveled in the new car.

So now we see the comparison of what is too morally risky to leave to one person’s unsubstantiated assertion. If you are buying a used Geo for $600, you need a written contract signed by the car dealer. If the object is the life of your wife, you don’t need anything in writing from her- you can just suddenly remember that she had said once, by strange coincidence not long before having a tragic accident, that she wanted you to kill her if she ever had just such an accident. And the judge, having just finished ruling that a writing is needed in a dispute regarding sale of a used drum set, will pat you on the head and say that he will do everything he can to help you starve her to death. Even though her parents have asked you to simply divorce her, give them custody to care for her, and go on with your own life.

Ironically, if Terri and Michael had made a contract to get married, in exchange for Terri giving Michael title to that $1.7 million, the deal would have had to be in writing under the Statute of Frauds. The idea is that it is easily imagined that one might be tempted to stretch the truth a little bit with that kind of incentive, so the moral hazard is avoided altogether by simply requiring written proof.

We don’t know what Terri said to Michael about the possibility of death in this kind of circumstance; I know that my wife and I have been married for 30 years and never talked about that, nor do I know anyone else who set up a plan at an age under thirty when most young people feel immortal. I do know that if Michael had tried to force someone to sell him a Geo for $600 he would have been tossed out of court without written proof, and a $1.7 million incentive to enforce the unwitnessed oral terms would have only reinforced a judge’s hunch that the evidence offered might be a bit tainted.

We are doing a fine job protecting the rights of those owners of $600 Geos- on the off chance that they didn’t really want to sell.

(this post was edited on 3/21/05 to improve the illustrative examples and correct name spelling error)

Blogdom Civil Disobedience!

2005-03-10T17:08:00.000-06:00

The blogosphere is abuzz with back-and-forth outraged commentary over the not-so-veiled threats to free speech in the US posed by an activist judge. This would not necessarily be a problem, since court rulings are not necessarily sacrosanct if there are other courts that actually respect the Constitution, but the (big-D) Democrat-bloc on the FEC has prevented an appeal of Judge Colleen Kottar-Kotelly's made-up ruling that "campaign finance reform" (read: Incumbent Protection Act, AKA "shut-up, you inconvenient non-MSM pajamahadeen") applies to blogs.

The K-K ruling is based on some breathlessly creative and specious "reasoning". I suspect a convenient new emanation of a penumbra, or whatever that last one was (Harry Blackmun's creative writing in 1973 regarding "privacy" showing up in the margins of the First Amendment and what that means about legislatures writing laws).

It is kind of amazing what the First Amendment says these days, and what it doesn't say.

This makes old conservative me wonder what would happen if we operated here the way they do in other countries that are just coming out from under the yoke of totalitarianism. If the Orange Revolution can defy Putin, and the Cedar Revolution can defy Assad, why can't the PJ Revolution tell the New Age censors in our midst, "Byte Me"? Could everyone who has ever posted an entry (whether or not a site that no one would ever read, such as mine, or Instapundit, which everyone reads) band together and simply refuse to comply with the planned gag orders from the hoped-for 21st century keepers of the Electronic Gulag?

Will those who claim to be libertarians (a couple of big ones come to mind)- who actually have readers- take the lead in organizing the rest of us to stick out our little smiley tongues at the decisive group of crypto-fascists in the FEC (Weintraub, this means you) and the Appeals Courts?

When Big Brother comes to restrict our rights of free expression, presumably in time for the 2006 mid-term elections, there will be court orders shutting down servers. Google, of course, would terminate any Blogspot bloggers, so there would need to be new available outlets. Who are the experts who can start planning the underground insurrectionist servers (offshore? Wherever the porn purveying autodialers, who face no threat whatsoever of censorship, originate out of the reach of all of us?) to which folks could migrate when Kotar-Kotelly mounts her broom to come after us all, with John and Russ, the virtuous censors of political speech, riding shotgun.

Who's in charge here, in the event that this nonsense is not turned on its ear by a SCOTUS properly stricken with remorse over the BCFR decision?

US, “the world’s largest polluter…..”

2005-02-25T16:31:00.000-06:00

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to periodically repeat the demonstrably true rebuttals to the standard litany about How Evil Is The Texas Cowboy And His Misguided Electorate Who Rejected Kyoto………

This story at Yahoo from Reuters “Science”, about an actually useful climate change agreement, prompts the need to remind everyone (again) (and again, given the fact that most MSM “journalists” don’t do any actual homework on scientific matters, instead relying on a limited rolodex of reliably radical sources to give the expected quotes supporting the story’s “green” theme) of what is true and what is myth.

The story casually repeats what is always said: “The United States, the world's largest polluter, refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark U.N. plan to curb global warming by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.”

By the logic implicit in that statement when made in conjunction with greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, every person alive gains several pounds every day from food and water intake. At the end of a year after eating one pound of food and drinking a quart of liquid, I should weigh at least a thousand pounds more than I did on January 1.

OK, here is reality- again- for those who tend to forget. What shows up on your bathroom scale is not food and water intake, it is food and water intake minus waste elimination and minus the food and water consumed and turned into energy (heat) through the body’s metabolic process. Got that? Good. Ready for the next step?

What counts in atmospheric greenhouse gases (GAG) is not what you emit, but what you emit minus what you consume. When Reuters “Science” tells you that the US is the “world’s largest polluter” they are giving one side of the equation, a good way to flunk math and science even in US public schools.

The fact is, the US is roughly a net zero emitter of GAG, possibly even a net absorber, while the Germans who lecture us on our Kyoto-rejecting sins are part of a land mass that regularly pumps those nasty GAG into the air at a net positive rate that confirms the USA as the environmentally greenest place on earth- because it is literally one of the greenest places on earth.

Iain Murray told us about this three years ago in a “Technopolitics” column:

“A scientific paper published in October 1998 ("A Large Terrestrial Carbon Sink in North America Implied by Atmospheric and Oceanic Carbon Dioxide Data and Models," Fan et al, Science, Vol. 282, p. 442 ff.) concluded that the North American continent acted as a huge carbon sink, absorbing about 1.7 billion metric tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year. As North America is responsible for only about 1.6 billion tons of carbon emissions per year, the continent is actually a net consumer of carbon dioxide.

“The same paper, however, found that the Eurasian continent was in a much less healthy state, consuming an "uptake" of only about 100 million tons of carbon per year while at the same time being responsible for 3.6 billion tons of emission. Unlike North America, the majority of the plant life in Eurasia is outside the Temperate Zone. The temperate areas of Eurasia, which include the industrial nations of Western Europe, actually act as a net "source" of carbon. It seems likely, therefore, that all of Western Europe's carbon emissions (about 1 billion metric tons in total) survive in the atmosphere, unlike North America's. Europe is actually a net polluter, while North America cleans up its own mess.

“Just how great the discrepancy is can be seen when we look at the effects per person. Under the Kyoto Protocol, America would have to reduce its emissions by about 2.3 tons per person. Europe, with a far bigger population but a far lower reduction target, would only have to reduce its emissions by about 0.4 tons per person. But if we take the carbon sink/ source effect into account, America actually absorbs 0.4 tons of carbon per person while the average European puts out about 2.5 tons each.

Somebody tell the Johns (McCain and Kerry). Of course, Arizona doesn’t have that many trees, and Massachusetts cut lots of theirs down……

More on the principles of carbon sinks and the way they are misapplied in the computer simulations (i.e., model results used by the scaremongers don’t match the real world empirical data) can be found here and here.

UPDATE: Thanks, Hatcher, for defending New England. We are committed to environmental truth, so you are encouraged to visit here and here to see the good news about reforestation of Massachusetts. I'll have to confine my snarky comments about rich NIMBY environmentalists such as Mr. Kerry to his campaign agaisn the wind farm blocking his view at Martha's Vineyard: story here.

Life's Little Ironies: Austin Miles goes full circle on Bill Moyers

2005-02-10T13:00:00.000-06:00

In the last week, the intrepid journalists at Powerline (yes, I mean that- the three attorneys who majored in philosophy between participating in general left-wing shenanigans and antiwar protests back in college) broke yet another story, exposing how the laughable Bill Moyers (who, like Franken, Cole, and Ward-not-Winston Churchill, has turned into a parody of himself) lifted a quote from Grist magazine, which had in turn lifted the quote from a book by "former circus ringmaster" and defrocked Assemblies of God minister Austin Miles. The details are all at Powerline, as most details of most everything useful in life may be found (whatever you can't get here, that is).

The story was essentially regarding Moyers' allegation that Christian evangelicals (full disclosure: that category includes yours truly) are a bunch of apocalyptic nuts who are perfectly willing to despoil God's creation (here I expect to be struck down by John Derbyshire for using the other "c" word; I will have more to say in another post about Derb's disingenuous misstatements regarding intelligent design) because we all want the world to end next week and sweep us up to Glory. That exact point was the citation of Congressional testimony to that effect which has been alleged for the last 20 years to have been offered by Reagan's Interior Secretary, James Watt, a member of the Assemblies of God denomination.

I've seen that alleged quote repeated in print for years as illustration of the idea that center-right conservatives are anti-conservation wackos, so that didn't faze me at all. What I found interesting, rather, was the author of the book, Austin Miles. I wondered if he, widely cited as a former religious nut who had embraced the virtues of rational agnosticism, was a descendant of a Penn-trained pharmacist named C. Austin Miles. The latter gave up drugs (pun-type reference intended) for a new career as gospel hymn-writer and song publisher for Hall-Mack at the start of the 20th century. Miles' most well-known song is "In The Garden", which was my late father-in-law's favorite song, and is on almost any Christian's top ten "older hits" list (that would be George Beverly Shea, as opposed to Third Day).

In my searches, I located this bitter diatribe composed by the currently quoted Austin Miles, invective against everything Christian, and obviously reflective of his book Don't Call Me Brother, which he followed up with Setting the Captives Free: Victims of the Church Tell Their Stories.

But there was also something else strange about the name- because the Google search turned up several links for pieces written by "Rev. Austin Miles" at places like the Bush Country blog, and various evangelical sites. Recent posts, not ten-year old re-hashed archival writings from the days of e-bulletin boards, for example, a post of concern over Islamic proselytizing in public schools. A little more review was in order, and the full story unfolded, here in Rev. Miles' own words, "Burned out- a refining fire":

I defiantly left the ministry with a vow never to return. The worst years of my life followed. My rebellion grew to the point that God found it necessary to send me to the pits where I could truly hear His voice....... In the midst of the chaos, God had a Divine plan and used three men and a poodle to get me back on track...... With God foremost in your life, in your work and focus, no man, thing, committee or hierarchy will ever manage to get between you and God again. This is the way it has worked for me.

I would try to impress this upon all Christians: Every soul you encounter, even those who observe you from a distance (such as the supermarket or on the street) has been entrusted to your care. You will be accountable for that soul and how your conduct affected it. A sobering thought and challenge indeed. You never know who may be struggling, even those who appear secure. Don't let anyone down.

The boot camp required of me was tough but essential. It has proved to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I no longer have the need for man's approval or acceptance. I am now serving Him on His terms. And the entire ministry today, for me, is joy unspeakable and full of Glory!

For the Republicans among us, he writes regularly at the Bush Country web site, which indicates his candidacy for sainthood, living as he does in Northern California where he is not in the majority, one might guess.

One thing we know for certain- he does not believe that James Watt is an anti-environmental nut. Thus, Moyers not only got the quote wrong, but both of his source's original non-fact-checked sources have gone completely the other way in an easily verified fashion.

If that doesn't tell you the difference between the work of "legitimate journalists" such as the felllow at Grist who hasn't returned Big Trunk's phone calls, and the corrective powers of the blogosphere, nothing does.

InstaPuerility

2005-02-07T10:35:00.000-06:00

DISCLAIMER: The post below is intended as gentle and good-natured poking fun at Prof. Reynolds, whose blog is the first one I go to every day. This is post not a slam- it is, perhaps, a tribute of sorts, like TKS' forthcoming inclusion in the American Heritage Dictionary as creator of "Pajamahadeen".
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The Super Bowl was yesterday, and the field was full of self-absorbed professional athletes who like to refer to themselves in the third person-

“If TO catches the ball, we win; if they don’t throw to TO, we don’t.” (made-up quote, to illustrate the point)

After the self-aggrandizing third person talk, and then the “royal "we”, we come to the newest phenomenon- the “Blog Prefix Identifier”! This is the newest rage in Brand Identity. For example, an emergent star of the last election campaign was Jim Geraghty of the National Review “Kerry Spot”; he is now fixing to move to Turkey, as reward for his labors, with, of course, “Mrs. Kerry Spot”.

But the king of all is also the originator of the practice, the High Lord of the Blogosphere- of course, Professor Reynolds, the one and only InstaPundit. His household is rounded out by the InstaWife, the InstaDaughter, and so on.

The question: is this new blog-based naming convention a clever branding technique, or the work of the InstaPompous? Do we have here, with the InstaPreponderance of Insta-this and Insta-that the perfect example of the InstaProtoNarcissist? Or just a happy InstaPapa who tells bad jokes as the InstaPunster, and InstaPrattles about a wide variety of topics, for example, blogging recipes (thereafter needing to do some jogging, er, that would be InstaPlodding, in order to avoid becoming an InstaPorker after trying out all the food).

Of course, we get a lot of photography blogging as well, as the InstaPundit morphs onto one of the InstaPaparazzi, taking care who and what he “shoots” around Knoxville- take too much interest in the wrong lovely (just for observational purposes, of course, sort of like Powerline’s Rocketman’s academic interest in reporting on beauty contests), and you may find your self the object of InstaPursuit by a large irate and unjustifiably jealous guy wanting to beat the perfessor to an InstaPulp, after which his carrion would transition into InstaPutrefaction.

One area we don’t generally expect to see covered on the blog, though, is housecleaning. We anticipate that from Lileks, but last weekend Mr. Reynolds became the InstaPurifier as he waxed rhapsodic over an addictive cleaning product (BTW, are we sure that that was happenstance blogging as opposed to the latest clever runs of product placement? First blogads, then product placement? Does Hewitt know about this?)

Cheney was right- the NYT says so!

2005-02-01T16:26:00.000-06:00

The most ubiquitous swipe taken daily by the denizens of the Left at The Evil Liar BuSh, is the standard "He lied about WMD!". The number two line is the obligatory reference to Cheney saying, in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, that we would be "greeted as liberators" by the Iraqi people. The reference is always followed by a mournful recitation of the sins of the occupiers and why we are therefore hated for invading the beloved homeland.

I wonder if anyone else noticed, in NYT reporter John Burns’ story on the historic election, the casual Gray Lady reference acknowledging that Cheney had been very much correct in that assertion:

Burns says, "There had been no day like it since the first American units arrived to the cheers of crowds and the tossing of flowers in April 2003, and that lasted barely 24 hours, as unchallenged looting began to devastate the city." (emphasis added)

Seems to me that the VP should be out there making a few characteristically amused and understated comments about his finally-recognized vindication.

"Leaving" Iraq

2005-02-01T09:24:00.000-06:00

I think that there needs to be some sensible strategic reality in the Iraq exit discussions. The real keys are progress and time. No one wants to remain there any longer than necessary- but the goal is not tactical; therefore, "necessary" is likely to be a bit longer than a lot of us wish were the case in our utopian dreams.

Responding to the phrase: "by leaving sizable bases in Iraq after they are no longer needed"- what is the definition of "needed"?

We went into Iraq, in reality (as George Friedman noted in "America's Secret War"), not because of imminent WMD concerns (as Bush pointed out over and over again from the beginning- WMD was the UN focus), but because it is the single most strategic country in the most problematic part of the Middle East. It is right in the middle of the bubbling cauldron that has Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as the troubled periphery, and Jordan and Turkey as the other two neighbors. In other words, all the troublemakers are right there within arms' reach.

Thus "needed" is going to be- by consensus of the Iraqi government AND the US - not when that government APPEARS to the NYT and Howard Dean to be stable, but when it really IS stable- which can only occur when at least two of the primary remaining troublemakers are neutralized.

That means when Iran is opened up, Syria has become "Libyanized" by whatever means are necessary, and the Saudis have pulled their heads out of the sand and recognized that their stability requires ending the pact with the Wahhabi radicals to keep the public "quiet". (some "quiet")

If you think about it, those really are the conditions that permit Iraq to be stable and progress.

But the military presence won't look anything like it does now- instead, there will most likely be division-sized tripwires, a la the Korean DMZ, on the Western and Iranian borders, far away from the cities and very discreet, like the German bases have been for 60 years. Those numbers run in the range of 30,000 troops or so, which roughly matches the best guesses of the likely increased size of the Army.

We Flat Earth Evangelical Bombers

2005-01-26T15:00:00.000-06:00

If I wrote an essay in which I referred to all persons practicing Islam as "terrorists" because of the few international fascist murderers who use that religion as their rationale for their evil deeds, articulate and responsible mainstream journalists such as Jonathan Rauch would properly criticize me for painting with such a broad brush. Yet, it seems that every time such a writer mentions evangelical Christians, the primary reference gets around to those who use Christianity as their excuse to bomb abortion clinics.

The reality, of course, is that the vast majority of not only evangelicals, but of abortion clinic protestors have always vehemently condemned such reprehensible tactics; for example, David Lackey, leader of a group that regularly protested outside the Birmingham Alabama clinic where the first US bombing fatality occurred, called the 1998 bombing a "heinous act." And the pro-life movement is actually dominated by persons such as Carolyn Gargaro (http://www.gargaro.com/bomb.html) who combine fervent pro-life feminism with fervent opposition to all types of violence. Yet, bombing suspect Eric Rudolph is the favored representative of Christians when the topic is opposition to abortion, just as, say, the "reverend" Fred Phelps is the official spokesperson selected, as opposed to Joe Dallas, when the subject is gay rights.

Mr. Rauch, reflecting his seriousness of thought and reflection, has noted that he used the reference in haste (http://www.hughhewitt.com)/, and we laud him for his openness in admitting such. But core the issue remains, and while Jonathan is the kind of person who won’t repeat that thoughtlessness, we see Nicholas Kristof and the rest of the MSM expanding daily on the theme. This is the same reflex that has Jerry Falwell repeatedly sought out as the official spokesperson for all evangelicals whenever there is a need to address those quaintly strange people in our midst who somehow survive and prosper as a plurality in the US despite holding such archaic views as we do; "Hugh is such a nice guy, how can he really believe that stuff?"

You can miss a lot if you only eat dinner with people who didn’t vote for Nixon in 1972, or who have never talked with USC philosophy Professor Dallas Willard, or Ravi Zacharias, or Dr. Greg Boyd, or Rev. Floyd Flake, or Dr. William Lane Craig….. the list goes on, and I haven’t started on the scientists. I tend to believe that the lack of reflection over such matters before tossing out casual insults and condemnations is that they are afraid to do the kind of introspection where we look at ourselves and recognize our flaws; classic "intellectuals" tend to see themselves at the center of the universe, and not appreciate the idea that their minds can't figure it all out, or to have any kinds of moral constraints on their own living (I specifically except Jonathan Rauch from the latter characterization- he has always been one of the most approachable and honest of the center-left writers, which is why this off-hand reference was so disheartening).

Rauch belatedly recognizes the problem as he draws a very good parallel approaching stereotype from the opposite side:

What seemed obvious to me--so obvious that I was careless about it--was that religious conservatives are not bombers. The article, after all, is about how most Americans, right and left and "red" and "blue," are not as extreme as the stereotypes make out. I assumed that most people, reading in context, would understand me as saying not that most activists are hard-core extremists, but that we'd have more hard-core extremists if politics didn't make room for activism.

That is not a reflection on religious conservatives or any other political grouping. It is a reflection on the political system. I could have written, for example, "Better left-wing environmentalists should write anti-biotech planks into the Democratic Party platform than bomb genetics labs." That would have made the same point, and I could very well have written it, and it would have been just as clumsy, and I'd be making the same explanation now to environmentalists that I'm making to you.

There is some validity to his "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" position, since I heard conservatives make similar statements to sympathetic brethren regarding the war protesting bombers back in the Vietnam days. But there is clearly both a conscious decision on the parts of so many MSM people to caricature those who actually believe that Jesus was and is the Son of God as ignorant fools, and a reflexive unawareness and ignorance of what they criticize. I would challenge these folks to actually do a little research some time- read the writings of the intellectual evangelicals, be the writer Dr. Roberts or from the list above. Go visit one of those urban churches like Sanctuary Covenant in Minneapolis who are doing the hard work in the inner city because of nothing other than the love of Christ and spend some time with them.

Then tell me about the abortion clinic-bombing naïve fools. And God bless you, by the way- seriously. The basis of Christianity is grace- we get mercy, not the justice we deserve.

The Army Versus Rummy

2005-01-24T15:34:00.000-06:00

Now that the freshness and novelty have worn off the story of the latest assault on SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, with the multi-pronged campaign to get him tossed out having failed at least temporarily (though that appears to be John Kerry’s great hope to remain in the public eye- see this- http://www.johnkerry.com/petition/rumsfeld2.php), it is time to step back and look at the subject with a bit more perspective. To this observer the recent war against Rumsfeld was about winners and losers in the military transformation process, not whether troops in Iraq are adequately supported or even large enough in number.

With that one reporter-planted question about HMMWV armor, Rumsfeld returned to the bulls-eye of the stabilized infrared sights of everyone in Washington- a “perfect storm” combination of several groups, each with its own agenda:
a) the US Senate- egos plus money, enough said (Truman’s Secy of State, the patrician Dean Acheson, famously said that he had been criticized because “I don’t “suffer fools gladly; I respond that those who say this fail to give me credit for the amount of time I spend with the US Senate”)
b) the Fourth Estate, for reasons that are obvious, ranging from near-universal knee-jerk anti-war views to Rumsfeld’s own unwillingness to suffer fools (most of the Washington press corps writing about military affairs) gladly; besides, with the election over and Scott Peterson’s trial finished, the news is a bit slow….
c) high level uniformed personnel, essentially the Army, but certain elements of each Service, with a dual stake in preventing reform of the military establishment and getting revenge for prior perceived indignities
d) the paleocons, the standard group of anti-Israel isolationist anti-immigrationists led by Pat Buchanan; Robert Novak weighed in, accusing “the neocons” of going after Rumsfeld to shift blame away from themselves for their primary role promoting The Disastrous War In Iraq.
e) the rest of the anti-Bush opportunists

What makes the story notable is not that the various MSM outlets and leftist groups have piled on, but that so many on the right- traditional supporters of the military- joined the attack, and on the purported basis that they are nobly protecting the military. The Usual Suspects were led this time by Senators McCain and Hagel (is just so disillusioning to see US Senators actually posturing for cameras; it would almost seem like they are look for favorable publicity to promote future ambitions).

But the larger Washington firestorm broke when “The Weekly Standard” joined the fray (Et tu, Brute?), leading off with a Washington Post op-ed written by William Kristol, which bluntly called for Rumsfeld’s scalp, followed up by two more hit pieces (see below) in the magazine as part of an entire issue largely devoted to pointing fingers elsewhere for any possible long term negative fallout flowing to “neocons” from Iraq (if the bad guys don’t give up fast enough; so much for patience to prosecute a multi-year war on terror; and so much for conservative loyalties.)

As usual, the Right doesn’t lose as much to MSM bias as it does to friendly fire.

The Weekly Standard followed Kristol’s op-ed with a hit piece in the 12/27/04 issue written by national security and history writer Frederick Kagan, entitled “The Army We Have”. The article was a poster exhibit of how to mount a left wing (!) assault using half quotes and misconstruction to hide the real objective. To this was added a 12/16/04 “Daily Standard” article from military affairs contributor Tom Donnelly (www.weeklystandard.com), about “Rumsfeld’s War- Imagination, transformation, and reality in Iraq”. Finally, even the estimable Cap’n Ed Morrissey, here (http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/003326.php#comments ) suggested that the Capitol Hill revolt over the “up-armor HMMWV ‘shortage’” might, at last, be a means to get rid of the SecDef, in favor of one whom his enemies might find a bit more malleable.

I see. Bravely do the necessary and unpopular, and you will be thrown overboard as a means of rewarding those who lie about you. The logic approximates that of rewarding Zarqawi by delaying Iraqi elections.

As perceptive observers (e.g., Powerlineblog- http://powerlineblog.com/archives/008949.php ) note, the current HMMWV armor protection issue is a dust-up that hit the headlines after the problem had been quietly solved using the standard wartime processes of the DoD. For the previous example of the military taking care of a problem before the press noticed that it existed despite months of press releases, review the time line of Abu Ghraib, which hit the WaPo daily front page well after US CENTCOM had held a press conference, announced their discovery of the problem, the on-going high level investigation, and the plan to address it (all of which were ignored by bored reporters until Seymour Hersh completed his New Yorker screed).

I believe that one can make a very strong case that the core of this undercover war against Rumsfeld is nothing new- though the latest round was initiated by an ambitious reporter, the larger flack comes primarily from category “c” above- those in the military establishment, led by traditionalist general officers in the Army, who are intractably opposed to military transformation. The rest of the people in the various groups are merely opportunists piling on.

Before I go on, let me vehemently assert that these comments are in no way directed at the incredibly brave, selfless, and capable men and women of our military, all branches and ranks, fighting out in the field. This is about the bureaucratic wars of military mission transformation and top management military and civilian careerists, active and retired, who are extremely loyal to the Army or Navy as institutions- in ways that may cloud their perspectives about the defense of the USA in the 21st century. It is not about the warfighters.

This Army-opposed-to-military-transformation issue actually has its roots in the National Security act of 1947 that formed the Defense Department, in part by creating the US Air Force by splitting the Air Corps off from the Army. This was the equivalent, in the view of the Army at the time, of a business executive designating a favored protégé and then being stabbed in the back by the ungrateful little whelp.

The Army has always had a general view that it is the Service that regularly gets the shaft, and opines to that effect regularly. The publications of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA), the Service trade association, are constantly leavened with gripes over comparative budgets, roles and missions, budgets, differences between Service budgets, responsibilities, size of budgets, and budgets. They also complain a lot about how much money they get compared with the Air Force and the Navy. Oh, and did I say that the Army is unhappy with its budget? Every year? (this is not unique in Washington, by the way, so don’t pile on the Army just because of that, pile on instead because of the substance of the resistance to change).

In the post-Cold War downsizing, it is unquestionable that the Army took major hits in personnel. People cost a lot of money, and the Army had a lot of people set up for central European land warfare. The so-called “peace dividend” was able to harvest nice chunks of cash from cutting the Army and its central anti-Soviet ground mission. The universal sense in the Army was that the reduction from 16 active divisions down to ten, with several of the remaining battle entities designated as smaller “light” divisions, was wildly unfair in the Army’s view. Also unwise, and in retrospect they are probably right. They have never stopped lobbying earnestly to restore some portion of what had been lost.

The “Build the Army!” lobby now believes that Bush (Rumsfeld) has had four years to fix the egregious problem of an undersized land force. However, instead of fixing the broken Army we are in a war, equivalent to military malpractice. The idea suggested is not that “you go to war with the army you have”, it is that you should never go to war at all until everything is perfectly up to snuff. The Japanese and North Koreans forgot that rule, if I recall.

Donnelly and Kagan adopted that exact same theme, and it is not a new message- it comes right out of the talking points and press releases of the AUSA as they have been issued weekly almost since the end of the Vietnam War. I heard it constantly in the Army wing of the Pentagon when I was around there starting in the mid-1980’s (“Once again, we’re the #@**&# billpayer for the Air Force’s fancy new airplane…” I can’t identify the precise source and date to say that this is an identifiably direct quote, but it is far more accurate than those CBS memos).

Of course, Bush is quite popular with the fighting active duty military, the alternative candidates are all a lot worse (imagine how happy John Kerry would have been to fund Crusader, a bunch of new tanks, a few new heavy divisions, and so on), and you don’t throw rocks at the president whose re-election you had just strongly championed. So you stone the surrogate (Rumsfeld) instead.

The current dust-up is partly a combination of ego-versus-ego (how does a Boy Scout start a fire without matches? He puts a general officer, a Senator, and an arrogant civilian executive in a room together and holds the tinder up to catch all the sparks) (I made that up; but I stand behind the science), and post-Iraq occupation grandstanding and scapegoating.

In the larger sense the core of the controversy has little to do with any of those matters. It is better understood as simply one more chapter in the long “uniformed Army versus the Pentagon Whiz Kids” saga that began in earnest with the Kennedy’s administration in 1961, though it has roots going back in the Korean War with the firing of MacArthur by Truman. It is about who runs the Defense Department- the uniformed bureaucrats or the civilian political appointees. One could think of the two sides as future-thinking analysts arrayed against the traditionalists among the uniformed brass who are following in the best tradition of fighting the last war, based on very real experiences.

The “old soldiers” group is reminiscent of the “never let traditions die” attitude that had horse cavalry units operational in World War II (The 1st Cavalry Division, the 112th and 124th Cavalry all were sent to the Pacific, where they fought dismounted as infantry). The analysts think that the traditionalists have feet set in concrete, and the traditionalists think that the analysts are unrealistic and dreamy about things that are real. Both sides have lots of civilians and military officers in their numbers, and both are partly wrong and partly right about the other.

But Rumsfeld is somewhat unique in this long saga. He is the first proactively “reform-minded” SecDef whose first objective is improving the warfighting capability of the military- not saving money by controlling those bloodthirsty money hogs, gradually disarming, or diverting budget to political and social crusades. He knows that a bureaucracy, especially a large one, is not going to be perfectly efficient. As one who has no particular other personal ambitions, he can, and does, burn bridges when necessary to at least get everyone focused on urgently needed reprioritizations, which means that he refuses to play The Money Game with them.

And anyone who has actually spent any time in the Pentagon knows that it is a game. I remember walking through the Army wing one day in 1985 and seeing a sign on a door- “Army Space Office”. In equal parts bemused and curious, I went in and asked the sharp young Major, seated by himself inside with a very clean desk and air of boredom, to explain to me what prompted the establishment of the office, and what the expected mission was to be. After a thirty minute conversation, neither of us knew the answer to the question beyond the idea that it was important to establish a beachhead so that the Air Force didn’t get all the space-based SDI money. Or something. I never did notice a Navy Space Office- I suspect that they realized that they needed to wait on that until water could be discovered on Mars.

US war plans for the last 40 years or so have been built around the large scale and sophisticated opposing capabilities of the USSR, directed toward stopping a land invasion of Central Europe. There have been certain military cadres that have consistently been ascendant and run the Services- based on the importance of their particular branches to classical anti-Soviet war planning. This is described very well by Professor Owens (http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens071703.asp)
and John Hillen (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/hillen200412230823.asp). In one way, this is not much different from the determination of the Sunni Baathist minority to maintain their power and control in Iraq- they’ve always had the upper hand, so it can’t change. It is almost a divine right when that is all you’ve known.

Every change in any organization has its winners and its losers. Military transformation is several steps beyond a mere reorganization. In the corporate world, the losers go on to other jobs in other firms. In the DoD, they stay right there and keep fighting to restore things back to the way they have always been (only with more money….) and the way the war, in their career spans, have always been approached. Since the 1970’s, opponents of military reform have known that they could outlast the evil reformers and they always have.

It is very easy to undercut a Congressman Aspin or a showpiece caretaker William Cohen. It is less easy to fool Rumsfeld. He’s been there before.

US wars are run in the theater of operations by the “maneuver commander”, the Army ground commander. Every other element, no matter how strategically important to the battle, is there to support the ground commander. What this means in terms of career prestige in the military is that the route to the top for ambitious Army officers, with one slight exception noted below, is to be in a “maneuver” branch. Conversely, prestige and glamour in the Air Force and Navy is tied to leading the missions where those Services are the boss- most emphatically not the elements that are designated primarily to support the Army-led ground operation.

In practice, this means that for decades, the top levels of the Army have been run by men who came from the Armor Branch, the Infantry, or, (and here is the slight anomaly to classic front-line “maneuver”) Field Artillery. For example, if you look at the Army chiefs-of-staff for the last 25 years prior to the current Rumsfeld selection, you find two armor officers, two artillerymen, and two infantrymen. These Branch identities and loyalties are pounded into the soldiers from the time they start basic training, as an essential element of the team spirit and morale-building necessary to prepare them to go to war together, and endure the risks and terror involved, in a way that optimizes the collective opportunity for mission success. It is totally natural for them to cling to these identities as they rise to the top, and when they get into power, to determine that this is the opportunity to “take care of the armor” (or artillery, whatever).

In the other Services, the glamour spots, as was mentioned, have been the special missions of each Service, those strategic aspects not ruled by the ground commander. For the Air Force, it is “air superiority” that rules (for vital strategic reasons), and for the Navy, anti-submarine warfare has trumped much else (again for vital strategic reasons). If you own the skies and have taken out the enemy air forces and anti-aircraft defenses, you are then free to provide effective close air support to the ground commander. If you own the oceans and have taken out the enemy’s submarines, your aircraft carriers and sealift forces are free to operate in support of the ground commander.

While the primary enemy was the USSR, which had highly sophisticated air and undersea capabilities and strong anti-aircraft defenses, the path to position and promotion was clear. But in this world where we face new kinds of war, the power inside the military shifts just as the threats and methods of warfare have shifted, and all of a sudden you see the entire Army ranks of Armor and Field Artillery general officers passed over in favor of an Airborne Special Operations commander- Gen Schoomaker- who was, worse yet, pulled back out of retirement.

Now we have a totally different world imposed on people who have devoted their lives, and in most cases, their blood, to certain parts of a cause for thirty years, and they are being told that their way of viewing the world may be obsolete. Look at some likely winners and losers in the world of military transformation:

Army winners- Airborne(e.g., Rangers), Special Ops, Infantry, Combat Aviation, Military Police, Civil Affairs; Army losers- Armor, Field Artillery. Probably little significant change for Engineers and Quartermasters, though some shift in focus and conditions.

Air Force winners- Close Air Support, Military Airlift, very long-range conventional air-to-ground assault using strategic bombers; Air Force losers- Air Superiority (air-to-air “Top Gun” dogfighters), Strategic Air Command.

Navy winners- Carrier Operations, Seals, USMC, Military Sealift; losers- Anti-Submarine Warfare, nuclear submarine forces, classic battleship warfare.

Winners across the board: public affairs, and anything to do with RSTA (recon, surveillance, target acquisition) and intelligence.

Note that the “losers” don’t go away or have their missions eliminated- there are still very real threats out there of all types. But- they no longer rule as #1 in the way they have, and give something up to support the newly rising missions. Whe you’ve been frustrated about budget for decades, taking another hit for transformation is like waving an extra cheese pizza in front of a football team.

The winners are primarily non-traditional areas, the losers are the former power brokers, their contractors, and Congressmen. For example, consider the non-military stakeholders in the transformation process. Throughout the Cold War, there was a certain set of military-industrial players who worked with their counterparts in the Services and Congress to keep procurement money flowing. Much conventional (“dumb” ballistic) ammunition was used in high volume to make up for its lack of accuracy, and it was manufactured in whole or in part in government-owned plants. The weapons were made by more industrial firms with unionized employees and stored and maintained in Southern depots near those ubiquitous bases throughout the South. The large Army had lots of people to train and house in the US, Air Force bases dotted the landscape, and East and West coast docks and shipyards took care of building, maintaining, and loading the many large ships.

The Congressmen for the districts in which these facilities were located fought to keep them “workloaded” long after their efficient usefulness was a thing of the past. This has been such a thorny problem that Congress established the Base Closing Commission (BRAC) and vested it with authority to act without positive approval from Congress to avoid the horrific specter of having to vote on the closings (then, as each list of facilities to be excessed was released, the Congressional staffs of course did their best to undercut the process).

Transformation warfare uses a fraction of the conventional arms and ammunition as was required in the old days. In the hyper-public-relations world of 24 hour cable war coverage, you simply do not engage in “carpet bombing” or artillery mass fire-for-effect. There are too many innocent people who can be injured, so all weapons must now be highly precise. When you make a mistake and kill innocents, it is generally because you had bad information, not because your aim was lousy. The shift from thousands of dumb bombs to a few JDAMS takes the bulk of the budget money from a unionized government arsenal and hands it to Martin Marietta in Florida. Cancellation of the Crusader shut down plants in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and lots of other places with companies and Senators; but we simply don’t have a need for advanced “scoot-and-shoot” big ballistic guns when it is more flexible and precise to send an aircraft to shoot a missile.

Rumsfeld correctly killed the Crusader self-propelled howitzer, and that was the public symbol of the fact that the historic practice of log-rolling and mutual back-scratching by generals and Senators bringing home bacon steadily and reliably is finished. This has absolutely nothing to do with political affiliations, either, as anyone who has ever seen Ted Kennedy at a Senate Armed Services Committee Bill “mark-up” can attest. He may crow about his anti-war principles, but check out what committee assignments he has demanded for 30 years (can anyone spell “SASC”?) and how the “made in Massachusetts” programs have fared in the budget. Teddy was a fine friend to Raytheon and GE, thank you very much, just as the California delegation’s Feinstein and Waxman, etc. just loved and preserved Fort Ord long after it was surplus to mission. Rummy is also correct in ordering the review of intr-Service roles and personnel placements. Back when I worked in the Army's procurement shop, we had a lot of captains and majors wandering around doing paperwork. The O-6 commander needed to be there, but they could have shifted a lot of other people out of the bureaucracy and into the military world.

Check out how much action there is in Mississippi after the totally money-wasting and unnecessary construction of the Mississippi Army Ammunition Plant ended up with no significant workloading (at the time it was built, the Army was shutting down plants all over the country) and you know why Trent Lott wants a new SecDef. My own Minnesota appropriators, Martin Sabo on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, and James Oberstar, have been anything but hostile to such pork through the years, providing appropriations for projects urged by Minnesota defense companies such as Honeywell, Rosemount Engineering, and Control Data.

The delicate dance and balance of “you vote for my earmark and I’ll vote for yours” has thrived among all for fifty years. Everyone recognizes that some pork-driven inefficiency in the defense budget has always been the price of maintaining a good capability, and as long as the stakes were not visible in peacetime, we happily paid it. The key for any particular project was just to make sure that your system production team had the right geographic balance, the right companies with nice unionized factories located in the right places (districts of powerful Congressional members). This has worked until now- with Crusader. That program was painstakingly put together politically, and its cancellation was a shot across the bow, providing unequivocal notice that the old rules no longer apply, and Rumsfeld is the man pulling the lanyard.

The key point is that when Rumsfeld took his position, there was some hope among the uniformed military that they would re-gain some of the past glories, because he had a history of serving and supporting military effectiveness, not of playing caretaker for a president who merely wanted to keep costs under control. But Rumsfeld is actually temperamentally more of the McNamara or Brown/Perry type, with the one important difference that he also truly cares about field troops and building US defense capability at a time of major threat change.

The other fact that everyone knows is that the invective about starving the war and the need for “more troops” is patently disingenuous. If Congress wants more troops available, Senator Clinton and Senator McCain can sponsor a Bill any time they desire to authorize the levels, and they can also volunteer to cut their states’ federal support to pay for them. Even then, it would take years, not months, before they were fully trained, equipped, and deployable. Much of the “more troops” meme is part of a strategy to force Bush, not Rumsfeld, to give up on extending the tax cuts (note all the recent commentary drivel about “asking the American public to make Sacrifices”- translated, that means volunteer tax increases for support of domestic programs).

Funny thing, you actually DO “go to war with the Army you have.”

AP Discovers Saddam's embrace of radical Wahhabiism

2005-01-05T16:24:00.000-06:00

I wonder if Paul Wolfowitz feels any better (or Douglas Feith, for that matter), after being bashed non-stop for all of 2004 over the constant drumbeat from the MSM, CIA leaks, and vario0us talking heads that there have never been any ties between Saddam and al Qaeda. The most careful critics (the 9-11 Commission) admitted to "links", but disavowed "cooperation". The most blatant anti-Bush politicos (er, CBS, the NYT, the LAT, PBS, BBC, Reuters, Kos, Daschle's caucus, Michael Moore, you get the idea) were a lot less cautious, and simply printed the Kerry campaign and 527 talking points about the Iraq war having been entered into based on lies.

Chief among those politicos was Associated Press. Now that the election is over and they lost, they can afford to cover the story a bit more fully, even as they hype every daily car bomb and urge delay i n the elections (AKA "defeat", or "Dean's Dream").

Schereherezade Faramarzi writes that Hussein invited the Sunni Islamists, including Zarqawi, into Iraq after Operaiton Desert Storm in 1991 because he feared that he would need allies to hold on in the face of rising Shi'a discontent:

Internationally isolated and fearful of losing power, Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) made an astonishing move in the last years of his secular rule: He invited into Iraq (news - web sites) clerics who preached an austere form of Islam that's prevalent in Saudi Arabia.He also let extremely religious Iraqis join his ruling Baath Socialist Party. Saddam's bid to win over devout Muslims planted the seeds of the insurgency behind some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces today, say Saudi dissidents and U.S. officials.

Read the entire story; it is a model of how the issue should have been covered for the last year, incorporating verified quotes from all sides, including radical Sunnis, but keeping those statements in context.

Better late than never, I guess.

Smart women or dumb men?

2005-01-03T07:43:00.000-06:00

Yahoo News has an AFP wire service story titled "Brainy women face handicap in marriage stakes: British survey" that , as one so often finds, is totally self-contradictory. In two consecutive paragraphs they push exactly opposite theses:

First, the background on what the study found; no great shock-

"The study found the likelihood of marriage increased by 35 percent for boys for each 16-point increase in IQ.

"But for girls, there is a 40-percent drop for each 16-point rise, according to the survey by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow."

But then they get to the quotes on why this is the case. Turns out that it is all the fault of men, for two contradictory reasons:

"Women in their late 30s who have gone for careers after the first flush of university and who are among the brightest of their generation are finding that men are just not interesting enough," said psychologist and professor at Nottingham University Paul Brown.

OK, we knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who are only interested in beer, ball, and bimbos are boring to the bright, educated New Women who want to keep company with intellectual equals. As one who has always been outnumbered at home by a very bright and accomplished wife and two brilliant daughters, I can understand where that might be the case, though I personally find smart women about sixty times sexier than I find beach bunnies. If you are into blondes, who would you rather spend time with, Laura Ingraham or Pamela Anderson? So far, they haven't made the case on why the data show what they do. Next quote:

Claire Rayner, writer and broadcaster, said in the article that intelligent men often prefered a less brainy partner.

"A chap with a high IQ is going to get a demanding job that is going to take up a lot of his energy and time. In many ways he wants a woman who is an old-fashioned wife and looks after the home, a copy of his mum in a way."

Gotcha. Women don't find men interesting enough to marry, and men want barefoot and pregnant airheads. Totally consistent.

In every case it's because we males are wrong.

Political Correctness Runamuck- Bus Stop Division

2004-12-17T09:11:00.000-06:00

The University of Minnesota is a very good institution of higher education, featuring world class scholars and researchers in a number of disciplines. By one study measure (from the University of Florida) that examined a number of different benchmarks (NIH grants, research budget, numbers of refereed publications, patents granted, etc), it is a top 5 public research university. All this despite the fact that it bears the burden of being my alma mater (my family couldn’t afford Harvard or Dartmouth, and in fact, I was the only one of five kids who went to college) and the stigma of my lousy scholarship. Of course, I’m no worse than the football program, and I don’t demand a million bucks a year to be mediocre.

But I digress. The Twin Cities campuses of the U of Mn have more than 40,000 students, and there are two primary locations, one in Southeast Minneapolis, the other in Northwest St. Paul. They are separated by about three miles, and students and staff can travel between the two locations via shuttle bus that runs on a dedicated private road. It only takes about ten minutes to get from one to the other because the bus basically does not have to stop for traffic- there is just one point on the busway where it crosses a thoroughfare, and the drivers have transmitters to lower stop arms against cross traffic. So far, we fit the urban green ideal- buses, mass transit, poor students, discriminate against big bad private cars, and so on.

Recently, the University teamed with the city of St. Paul to establish a business start-up “incubator”, a building where new companies that are spun off through the research discoveries of the university could find floor space and biomedical “wet labs” on an affordable basis where some rent and support services can be paid for in equity shares of the company. This is similar to the way many of the Silicon Valley and Boston 128 corridor biotech firms got their starts; it is hard to manage effective anti-cancer drug discovery in the kinds of garages where Apple and Medtronic were midwifed.

Happily, the Minnesota “University Enterprise Labs” (UEL) incubator happened to find a home in a recently vacated building right smack on the private bus road between the Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses. You can literally stop the bus at the one place where it needs to slow down to check for crossing traffic, jump out, and walk from a figurative fifty yard line to the end zone and be at the building. The location is so perfect that the University moved its business development support office from the campus to the incubator. Thus, now there are not only companies associated with the U in the building, companies that professors have to go visit frequently and that have license agreements with the university, but actual university employees.

Perfect, right? In our world of traffic, gasoline price hikes, pollution, and all that, we can just jump on the bus at the McNamara Alumni building, where the University’s intellectual property and legal departments are housed, ride to the UEL, and hop off! Now we can even take mass transit to work in the morning, knowing that we won’t need to have an automobile available to get to meetings at the UEL!

Not so fast, bub. I tried that once. I was smart enough to ask the driver if he knew where to stop, and he told me that he could not, and that I couldn’t ride because I would not be able to get off the bus. So I sent an e-mail to the university transportation department and asked why (which e-mail was never answered; maybe it was my sarcastic tone about air pollution?).

However, I did learn, finally, from an inside source what the problem is. Children, can we all say "government regulation"?

It seems that the trend of the court decisions regarding the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) has been to order specific and advance compliance with strict standards for bus stops. Even for private bus lines. In order to set up a bus stop at that point, they determined that they would have to construct shelters and access ramps for all possible variants of passengers, at a cost of near $250,000. This when the buses all have hydraulic lifts already to assist wheel chairs in and out. And, the need to possibly cross the (private, with no traffic other than university-operated buses) street means that they need to add full traffic light systems with pedestrian walk signs, and the like.

Now, I believe that the provision of lifts on the bus is exactly the right thing to do, and I will happily pay added taxes to ensure that it gets done. And I can't think of a soul whom I would want to be around who would object to making sure that those with special needs are safely accommodated under such circumstances. The issue here is that the bureaucratic powers that be felt that this could only safely be done, from an ADA-compliance and/or tort liability standpoint, by looking at the extreme solution. For less than $100 I could install an alarm buzzer from the non-bus stop up to the receptionist in the building so that someone could come to assist. I am sure that there are many other ideas that would work as well. But the game today is CYA.

So, we drive to work, then drive to the UEL, burning gas, adding to traffic, polluting the air, and (worst of all) losing our regular parking spots in the ramp closest to the building. Someone put in an emergency call for Walter Olson at “Overlawyered".

Maybe Nick Coleman could write a column about it.

UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Walter Olson fans.

Newsweek's Jon Meacham and Christmas

2004-12-15T17:22:00.000-06:00

The Newsweek managing editor produces this lengthy and intended “myth-busting” account of how we misguided evangelicals simply Don’t Understand Enlightened religion. It is the standard explanation “Jesus Seminar” treatment, focused on the lack of positive proof of all of the Biblical events.

But, I suspect that Meacham is one of those people who is trapped by the world he has chosen to live in. He actually has a history of respectful interest in matters of religion, which would make sense given his choice of a little-known religious-origin college for his undergrad studies. Read his description, in his fine book Franklin and Winston, of the church service conducted by FDR and Churchill aboard ship up in the Arctic, where Roosevelt read the prayers and robustly led the hymns (“O God, Our Help In Ages Past”) in a way that would give apoplexy to Barry Lynn if it were reported about Bush and Blair today.

I almost feel sorry for Meacham, because he gives off an almost wistful sense of wanting to believe, but not being able to harmonize “simple” faith (that is not the same thing as “simpleton faith”) with the hyper-sophisticated and cynical world that the editor of a major national newsmagazine must inhabit, that of a nice "god" who stays out of the way and doesn’t interfere with how we want to lead our lives.

In this way, he reminds me a lot of the late and now little-known (in America) Chuck Templeton, who was the closest associate (and acknowledged superior preacher) to Billy Graham in the late 1940’s. He lost his faith after attending Princeton Theological Seminary, and died unhappy after a polymathic media career in Canada. Despite that apostasy, incidentally, he and Graham remained good friends until his death, with Templeton telling anyone who would listen, “Billy Graham is a NICE guy!” Templeton cried at times because he wanted the warmth of the relationship with Jesus back in his life, but simply could not believe no matter how much he desired to do so.

The entire “expert analysis” approach trumpeted by The Jesus Seminar has been thoroughly debunked by many people, including Dr. Greg Boyd’s Cynic, Sage, or Son of God (now unfortunately out of print), Penn State’s distinguished professor of history, Dr. Philip Jenkins’ Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way, (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195156315/qid=1103151724/sr=2-2/ref=pd_ka_b_2_2/102-0185129-7198507) going all the way back to Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus,
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0800632885/qid=1103125525/sr=2-3/ref=pd_ka_b_2_3/102-0185129-7198507).

The most interesting account I have found is Charlotte Allen’s The Human Christ- The Search For The Historical Jesus (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684827255/qid=1103132668/sr=1-6/ref=sr_1_6/102-0185129-7198507?v=glance&s=books), because she summarizes, in very readable form, the attempts made by every different new group of liberal scholars going back 2,000 years to suddenly re-manufacture Jesus in their own images. Today’s "Jesus Seminar" clone of those previous militant naturalists straightening out us superstitous "Jesusland" residents is painting a picture for us of a pacifist, tolerant, feminist and (especially- the common trait) non-divine philosopher named Jesus. Certainly not the Son of God.

But all of history is what we believe based on the best accounts we can find, minus what we have falsified, not what we have built up because we found another brick; we start imagining the edifice without having all the bricks because they simply do not all exist any longer. If we didn't reconstruct the past this way we would never be able to know anything at all. So, Jesus and all elements of His life we read about in the most comprehensive accounts we have of any character of antiquity, with generally such supportive compatible accounts that schlars invented a supposed common document, "Q" that they were all supposedly copied off of. Where we can, we discard errors.

Then we believe or we don’t believe. And nothing significant to Christianity has been falsified.

But the dirty little secret in the entire controversy is the “catch 22”: if you are a debunking, anti-divinity scholar, your views are credible. But, if you have the same or far better credentials, write for publications that are as prestigious, but you also happen to be a Believer, your scholarship is tainted and your work does not exist. This is the way that Mr. Meacham and his friends justify ignoring the large majority of scholars, through the centuries dating back to Origen, up till today. If they believe, they are not qualified- they reach the wrong conclusions.

Women and Porn

2004-12-14T13:12:00.000-06:00

OK, OK, that title is a bit misleading, I admit, because the winning entry has nothing to do with sex, which says (confirms?) something all by itself.

It has been fairly widely asserted that what porn is to men, romance novels (“bodice rippers”), with their discreet descriptions of passion and suggested- as opposed to blunt- physicality, are for women. I can see certain ways in which that might be the case for those females who are starry-eyed and thinking about men all the time. But if you are a more, er, “normal” woman, you don’t see the world that way. There are lots of higher priority thoughts regarding much different matters. Such as the kids, for example.

Let me explain. Men think of sex, conservatively, every eight seconds or so, unless something intervenes to increase the frequency, such as, for example, an attractive female walking by. Or a slightly less attractive female walking by. Or any female thinking of walking by. You get the idea.

What is the equivalent obsession for women? What will make them risk their reputations, lives, and careers because of its irresistible hold on their psyches and all waking thoughts? Not sex, that is certain. Fashion? For some, perhaps.

But the real winner is: home remodeling, as represented by HGTV. If I had football or basketball running on the television as much as my wife has HGTV going from the instant she arrives home after a long and stressful day at work, I would be the most expert data wonk in history, and ready for a prime-time job at ESPN. And look at the rise of first, Home Depot as the initial outlet for such impulses even as the high couture department stores fade away as major economic players. And what chain is now rising fast as the competitor to Home Depot? Lowe’s. Why? Because its store formats are more appealing to women. Home Depot has too many power tools and too much wood (men). Lowe’s is full of stainless steel appliances and window coverings.

Men, do this experiment. Next time your one-and-only is watching HGTV, stand in front of the television (if you dare), and wave a thousand dollar bill, all the while screaming “Free shopping spree! Here’s the cash! I’m watching the kids!” She will decapitate you as she responds, “Move, dumbbell, Candice Olson is describing why she stenciled a polar bear next to the fireplace!”

A woman can do a striptease in front of the Super Bowl on the TV screen. Or the NCAA championship game, and he will follow her to the next room, panting, having lost all curiosity about who might win. But if you interrupt or block “Designer’s Challenge”, God help you.

UPDATE: Welcome, all ye who observe and hallow the name of Instapundit. I always wondered how I might react to the ecstasy of an Instalanche(TM). Actually, I haven't quite yet grasped the reality. I'll go home tonight and ruminate on it as my lovely bride watches HGTV.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE (final version):
The New Merriam-Webster pocket dictionary defines “satire” as “n. biting wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose vice or folly…” I suspect that my unpardonable sin here was to treat the compulsive viewing of HGTV as “vice”. Excuse me, folks, gotta go add one more thing to the list of things that you aren’t allowed to say!

The reactions to this post, less here than at Michele Catalano’s “A Small Victory”, ranged from the Not Me refrain of “Well, I’m a woman and I LIKE porn-power tools-whatever”, to the Catherine MacKinnon radical feminist school of “You slimy men only think of one thing” to “I’m a man and I LIKE HGTV”. Forthe record, I know all kinds of women and men, and viva la differences both ways, as well as the similarities. My basic text is UVa Prof. Steven Rhoads' book, a serious meta-analysis of the hundreds of studies on gender differences.

If Jonathan Swift were alive today, he would be a blogger. He would also post “A Modest Proposal”, and he would get reactions from:

PETA (If you are going to insist on hamburgers, at least be consistent and eat your own young)

Policy Wonks (Mr. Swift’s proposal appears to have merit on its surface, but he makes a mathematical error that defeats his entire thesis; the better solution is to raise taxes and set up collective farms)

Anti-abortion activists (This debauchery just goes to illustrate how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope…) (Disclaimer: I am pro-life, anti-Eric Rudolph)

Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome (If we had instituted universal population controls, this wouldn’t be necessary......)

I wonder how Scott Ott (Scrappleface.com) handles this. Of course, he is actually funny……

2004-10-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

Vaccines- Why Can’t We Buy Any?

Kevin Drum is here partly right in his blog comments about the current shortage in flu vaccine supply, talking about Chiron and Aventis as the only remaining manufacturers willing to sell into the US market. He completely misses the core issue, because he wildly and verifiably writes off the primary cause of the problem.

There is absolutely no reason that there could not be a thriving and competitive human vaccine market in the US. We have a lot of vaccine manufacturers here- several large producers, and a lot of start-ups. Big companies buy up smaller ones all the time and new ventures try to get started.

There are also many research organizations, both non-profit, and commercial, who are exploring vaccine-based cancer treatments, which makes sense because the very basis of the vaccination process is stimulation of our own body’s immune system to fight off and destroy abnormal cells (e.g., humoral immunity associated with lymph filtration, etc.). If our own natural immunity did not work as well as it does against cancers, we would all be dead at a very young age; the best illustration of this is the high cancer rates experienced by transplant patients, whose immune systems must be depressed in order to prevent rejection due to graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). I saw one case history of a heart transplant patient who developed over one hundred new skin cancers in the year following his receipt of a new heart for this exact reason. Therefore, vaccination, for a variety of ailments, is still an extremely important method of treatment and subject of on-going, cutting-edge research.

What about all those missing vaccine manufacturers? Drum talks about low margins and small markets- the fact that the potential revenue numbers are not that high and the prices not that appealing, causing firms to exit the business.

So, what constitutes an attractive vaccine market? How about less than $50 million per year in the US, for about six major diseases, and yet, attracting at least six eagerly competing suppliers? If that is true, there must be another problem scaring the manufacturers away.
Well, the total annual market for broiler chicken vaccines is $38 million. Chasing that market in the US are Merial, Ft. Dodge, Schering Plough, Intervet, Solvay, Lohmann, and Biomune, to list the bigger players. Other animal vaccine producers and marketers for the total animal market include, with those listed above, Boeringer-Ingelheim, Novartis, and Pfizer (which just bought another animal vaccine company, in Australia). The most telling fact is that the revenues margins on this business are even smaller than those for human application, reaching grosses of tenths of a cent per dose for many types.

Drum suggests that a possible deterrent might be market volatility ("some years you sell out, but other years you make 50 million doses and only sell 20 million"). First of all, that difference looks large but is not actually terribly important- marginal costs of production, as with most pharmaceuticals, is extremely low; the biggest costs are "licensing" (the federal regulatory approval), R&D, and set-up. Once you turn the process on, you make large batches (which is why the Chiron lot failures are so problematic). But second, look at a market where the government is telling everyone what vaccinations to get, and how often to get them, along with the AMA, Academy of Pediatrics, and so on- people who compete to sell wristwatches or diet soda pop would kill for a market like vaccines.

The problem is not new production technology, either. There is nothing beloved or sacred about the current processes; suppliers are always doing R&D looking for more reliable methods of creating different vectors, whether "hot" or "attenuated" viruses, and new ways to grow them. If any new production technique really works, it will work for far more than the annual US flu outbreak, it will be used for your dog, your cow, and 40 billion chickens around the world. Production process investment amortization is not a barrier.

Then he proposes regulation as the bugaboo. Not. Each animal vaccine is regulated and must be licensed prior to any sale by the Department of Agriculture (DoA). Furthermore, the standards are not trivial, because you cannot have contamination entering the food supply; just ask the mad cow people, if you need an example. I would venture that if you compared the pre-market steps required of a supplier by the FDA and the DoA, you won’t find a huge difference.
So the shortage issue is not about market size, margins, volatility, production processes, or regulation.

Finally, Mr. Drum falls back on government monopsony procurement. If that were the problem, there would be no US Department of Defense. There is no market more fraught with roller-coaster monopsonistic volatility on a program basis, more regulation, or more scrutiny on margins- just ask Halliburton. The only reason that this marketplace works, and works a lot better than many out there is because of I*N*D*E*M*N*I*F*I*C*A*T*I*O*N!

Kevin Drum wastes an entire post dancing around and discarding the one elephant-in-the-room issue because it really messes up his major political ally. John Edwards can’t channel the words of a wounded GI in front of a jury as the grief-stricken mother wails in the background and demands $500 million as punitive damages. The product liability risk, absent fraud by the manufacturer, rests on Uncle Sam, and he ain’t buyin’ into it, which option he does not afford Pfizer or GM. There are claims, but they are not adjudicated by whiny ambulance chasers in front of credulous juries selected for their very credulity. Until the John O’Quinns, and Peter Angelos of the world are reigned in, we will deal with this over and over.

2004-10-18T15:39:00.000-05:00

My hometown newspaper is the StarTribune (of Minneapolis, though they call themselves "the newspaper of the Twin Cities" because of larger circulation (than the St. Paul rival) leavened with a healthy dose of plain ol hubris. Because of their execrable editorial policies (on both the commentary pages and the alleged "news" pages- it is hard to tell the difference at election time), I don't subscribe to the daily editions, but do read the weekend papers.

As part of the current full-court press to save Minnesota from the ascending conservatives, led by very popular and personable Governor Tim Pawlenty, the "Strib" has gone into bunker mode for the full dress battle over the soul of the state, which battle culminates on November 2. Among the stories on the business pages last week, all more or less positioned to try to persuade us that the economy is in the tank (hey, it worked in 1992.....), was a piece Sunday, Oct 17 piece on page D-1, discussing relative stock market performance under Democrats and Republicans. The most interesting element of their analysis was this little point on the graphic sidebar with the usual simplistic and a bit inflammatory title:

"Bush tide didn't lift all boats- Of four industry sectors that were widely expected to do better under a Bush presidency than if Al Gore had been elected, two advanced smartly between Inauguration Day and the day before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The oil sector showed only a small gain, however, and pharmaceuticals declined during the period."

Stop and think about that revealing statement for a moment. It makes three important points:

1) They admit that any economic slowdowns we have experienced over the last three years were powerfully affected (not caused- the market actually peaked in 2000 before the election) by the wrenching events of 9/11. Of course, Mr. Kerry and his friends (read: MSM, most particularly and explicitly including this very same Strib) are still selling the snake oil about Republican economic management, outsourcing, whatever, causing job losses.

2) Pharmaceutical stocks have dropped? Gee, I thought that, according to the Kerry commercials, Bush was in the tank for the drug manufacturers and doesn't care about prescription prices. Not so.

3) Oil stocks have only showed a very small gain? Hey, I thought that we were at war for oil and all that kind of stuff, to make the Texans and Enron rich. Scratch that one too.

I wonder what else about old Bushitler these guys have been lying to me about? Maybe there are even elections in Afghanistan and progress in Iraq, where the French were blocking Iraqi liberation and freedom in order to preserve the TotalFinaElf oil concessions they would be awarded after getting the sanctions lifted......

2004-04-27T15:57:00.000-05:00

FactCheck.org Needs a Fact Check

It appears that "FactCheck.org", run out of the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania has really screwed up in some basic ways in their zeal to help Senator Kerry as he tries to extricate himself from his latest self-made disaster, this time about medals.

The self-styled media watchdogs are not always wrong; but this time they let the kiddies write the post and their total ignorance of DoD budgeting and procurement policies and practices is embarrassing.

At: "http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=177"

they take issue with the Bush-Cheney ads that criticize Kerry for his Defense budget voting record, and allege that the ads are not truthful because then-SecDef Cheney proposed cancelling the same projects in 1989 (FY90 Appropriation, I believe) that Kerry had tried to kill in 1984 (from the FactCheck post):
------
"Missing Context

"It is true that when Kerry first ran for the Senate in 1984 he did call specifically for canceling the AH-64 Apache helicopter. What the ad lacks is the historic context: the Cold War was ending and the Apache was designed principally as a weapon to be used against Soviet tanks. And in fact, even Richard Cheney himself, who is now Vice President but who then was Secretary of Defense, also proposed canceling the Apache helicopter program five years after Kerry did. As Cheney told the House Armed Services Committee on Aug. 13, 1989:

"Cheney: The Army, as I indicated in my earlier testimony, recommended to me that we keep a robust Apache helicopter program going forward, AH-64; . . . I forced the Army to make choices. I said, "You can't have all three. We don't have the money for all three." So I recommended that we cancel the AH-64 program two years out. That would save $1.6 billion in procurement and $200 million in spares over the next five years.

"Two years later Cheney's Pentagon budget also proposed elimination of further production of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle as well. It was among 81 Pentagon programs targeted for termination, including the F-14 and F-16 aircraft. "Cheney decided the military already has enough of these weapons," the Boston Globe reported at the time.

"Does that make Cheney an opponent of "weapons vital to winning the war on terror?" Of course not. But by the Bush campaign's logic, Cheney himself would be vulnerable to just such a charge, and so would Bush's father, who was president at the time."
---------- (end of quote)

Only someone who can't spell "FYDP", "POM", or "Inventory Objective" could make such silly charges.

The underlying issue is the fact that Kerry has a 20 year record of opposing military Authorizations and Appropriations. The jockeying before the final Bill is largely parliamentary. One can vote for or against most anything at one point or another, but what counts in the end is a total record, not one parliamentary vote, which is why several different votes are cited to illustrate that total record lacking concern for the US military readiness posture.

The FactCheck "analysis" reveals people who are ignorant of military procedures. To suggest that pulling one good example (body armor) out of a wildly irresponsible vote, as described by Kerry himself on "Face the Nation", against the $66B in military support funds (out of the Supplemental total of $87B) included is somehow misleading, reveals how either partisan the writer is, or how dumb he or she is. The body armor example is totally appropriate- and Kerry effed up big time when he made that vote. It is easy to see how and why Kerry did it- it was one more short term political calculation to try and stop the Dean juggernaut and peel off a few anti-war votes himself. Now he pays a price for that in the general election- that's life.

The comparison with Cheney is almost worse, and reveals these people as having rotten egg on their collective face.

It is because of two things: first, in 1990 the Cold War was effectively ended and Cheney was presiding over the drawdown and decommissioning of significant pieces of the force structure. Back in 1985 there was no such prospect on the horizon; we were still preparing militarily for an apparently viable USSR, and Kerry proposed shutting down the most important Army combat aviation asset right in the middle of the Cold War- if that doesn't reveal his flawed and anti-military view, I don't know what else would show it better, other than marching through Lafayette Park with his old V-VAW "Band of Brothers" (the real B-O-B shouldbe insulted by the terminology when associated with the Senator) and urging that all weapons be beaten into love jewelry (we don't do plowshares any more).

Second, this example shows that the writers have no idea how the DoD appropriates funds and runs their programs, and has no interest in finding out before waxing eloquent and self-righteous on the subject.

There is a huge difference between cancelling a program in FY90 (which would be Aug 89) and FY85 when Kerry wanted to kill the Apache. By FY90, the Army had built at least 50 to 100 more Apaches (at an assumed, for lack of budget history specifics, production rate of 1 or 2 per month) than they had in 1985, so the likely revised procurement objective would be about complete at that point. Generally, the argument would be over whether to keep a warm line at a minimum sustaining rate or let the line go down and just provide spare parts. At that time there was a replacement attack helo on the drawing boards and no war on the horizon, so likely all the TDA were filled to support the revised and reduced authorized or anticipated future troop strength. Killing the program at that time would have made sense.

If you had had Cheney on record in 1985 as saying that the program should be ended, then you would have had a disingenuous twisting of fact, criticizing Kerry for proposing killing the same procurement program in the same context. But 1984/5 versus 1989/90 makes a huge difference.

The same thing applies to combat vehicles, such as the Bradleys. By 1990, the Army was consolidating multiple combat vehicle production capabilities- there were BMY in York, PA, the Army plants in Toledo and Detroit, and the FMC plant in San Jose. Eventually the BMY and FMC merged into United Defense Company, so that the readiness objective could be met to keep one warm base to build self-propelled howitzers, infantry combat vehicles, etc., with mod-refurb and spares lines in the government plants (with the usual jockeying by Congress over what is built where because of the district jobs issues).

In the case of the Bradleys, you had seven years of production runs, after Kerry first tried to kill the program, to fill the inventory.

The FactCheck discussion equates Kerry's Cold War disarmament with the post-Cold War drawdown and treats them as the same. Time to get the grown ups into the media analysis business, because these folks are not up to it.

2004-03-26T15:35:00.000-06:00

When Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, as much a doctrinaire conservative as there is in the gubernatorial position of any state in the union, unveiled his plan for reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada, he immediately found himself obliged by his purported friends to defend his position. Friendly, but thinly veiled, skepticism he encountered ranged from his being criticized by blog commentaries for anti-business actions, to being questioned skeptically by Hugh Hewitt (who has since backed down) to being pilloried by True Believers who seem to believe that any talking points ever faxed in by any large business anywhere must be gospel. On the other side were such commentators as Minneapolis StarTribune editorialist Lori Sturdevant, who applauded Pawlenty for a shrewd political populist gambit to drown out the cries of misery that are following his evil tax-freezing, expenditure-cutting budget. Sturdevant sees a Minnesota version of the triangulating “Sister Drug-ya” moment.

There have been millions of words written by both sides promoting their respective points of view, often espoused by some strange political bedfellows: picture Sen. Mark Dayton’s Canada bus runs departing, with Pawlenty and Rep. Gutenecht wishing the seniors Godspeed as they head North, while Democratic pundit Morton Kondracke urges the White House to hold firm and veto any legislation that enables pharmaceutical free markets to operate. At the moment we are hearing political sound-bites based on the self-interests of the various parties- but, what are the real issues to this idea? Are the battle lines as simple as to obviously brand Pawlenty as an apostate, or is he actually the real free-market conservative in this debate?

There are two distinct non-political motivations that might drive one to promote the idea of re-importing prescription drugs. First, it is obvious that one can embrace the idea simply to save money by acquiring drugs at lower foreign prices. This has a short-term effect of mitigating costs, but it does nothing about the cause of the high prices. The second approach is that of the Minnesota governor: importing drugs is a necessary means of eliminating artificial barriers, barriers that are set up and maintained by government regulators. This is not a simple case of “regulation-good, big pharma-evil”; neither is it absolution for the drug companies. And it is important that such market distortions, abetted by government, be removed before the only answer is government in the form of execrable single-payer socialization plans and the rationing that has inevitably followed wherever they have been implemented. Pawlenty is telling the free-market apologists to clean out their closets before the accumulated dreck blows up the system.

There are three major objections to prescription drug reimportation that are most often cited: 1) Safety concern- imported drugs are not manufactured in FDA-blessed facilities, so they could kill us; 2) Interference with free enterprise- bringing in prescription drugs from Canada is “importing price controls”; and 3) Reimportation would lead to a loss of drug company profits that are needed to support future development of new drugs.

There are sensible responses to each of these objections. Let’s look at them, one at a time.

First: Reimporting drugs would not be safe! The FDA won’t be able to “certify the safety” of drugs sold outside of the US :
OK, let me get this straight. They are saying that the same companies that sell safe and pure pills, made in the US, would casually change all of their production and quality processes and procedures when they sell those same drugs to Canada or Brazil? Um, for those of you who have never encountered a factory or a government regulation process, I have a secret for you: the FDA can’t certify the safety of ANY of the drugs made and sold in the US either, even at several times the foreign price. People, get real. This excuse is a con; the FDA doesn’t have labs all over the US where they test the drug production lots coming out of the pharma phactories. They do things the only practical way that they can- the drug manufacturers set up procedures that match the FDA Good Manufacturing Processes (GMP) regulation, they establish process controls, and they sample the production lots. The processes are periodically inspected by outsiders to ensure that the company follows its own rules. Then the information- the data on all of this- is made available to the FDA. To believe that the safety issue is a major concern, one would have to believe that the drug manufacturers don’t care about product liability or the circling sharks of the trial lawyers bar (ATLA) who can’t wait for an easy shot at a major pharma.

The best and most enthusiastic enforcers of drug safety are not US government bureaucrats, they are the drug companies themselves. At least, that is the premise of the argument used by free market conservatives in every other area when they are not trying hard to justify protecting the current FDA-enabled monopolistic pricing power of drug companies. Imagine even that some smuggler obtained a supply of black market medication with labels that proclaimed the drugs to be The Real Thing. Whether the stuff worked as advertised OR made people sicker, who would be the most likely candidates to track down the bad guys and stop them? Good guess. If the FDA were not playing cop, you can bet the pharm that Pfizer, Merck, Bristol-Myers, and GlaxoSmithKline would have their own detectives on the beat and making citizens’ arrests at a dizzying pace.

The objection that drug safety would decline dramatically due to re-importation is simply nonsense. It is the rough equivalent of saying that a 10% cut in the city budget will lead to firing all the police and firefighters- it only happens that way if the city decisionmakers are incompetent.

Second: You’re Interfering with free enterprise by importing the price controls of foreign countries like Canada!

For those of us who believe in free markets, this is a troubling accusation; based on the universal evidence of history, we know that when we try to control prices by capping them, we only succeed in reducing the supply. That generalization doesn’t very neatly fit the pharmaceuticals’ situation, however, because the common examples deal with commodities where the per-unit variable cost margin is very tight. If there is any description that doesn’t fit prescription pharmaceuticals, it is “tight per-unit variable cost margins”. The real case is more like “a penny a pill variable cost, selling price a buck”. Not, as Seinfeld said, that there’s anything wrong with that…… However, unlike the case of natural gas, which is a standard commodity in a tight supply situation, the availability of pills is unlikely to be directly affected by any realistic price caps, not that I am suggesting that real live price caps ought to be implemented. In fact, I am arguing that the actual situation is not one of price caps, but of the rational responses of monopolists to the offers of very large, high leverage customers, to buy. Here we have monopolist sellers complaining about monopsonist buyers (think “monopolist single customers”), the rough equivalent, to quote James Bovard on another topic, of two drunks lying in the gutter, each complaining that the other is ruining the neighborhood.

Back in our first half-semester of classical theoretical microeconomics, we learned about “price discrimination”, a pricing system that is feasible only under conditions of monopoly. The fundamental principle is that any rational business enterprise will charge the particular customer highest price possible for the product. In a monopolist’s best case, there is no reason whatever to charge everyone the same amount for the same product- in fact, in the best of all possible worlds, there is a different price for each individual consumer, based on ability to pay and the degree of power wielded by the seller over that hapless captive customer. The term “price discrimination” has no moral component; it simply means that the seller will differentiate among his various customers and go to each with the highest price he can get away with charging.

We see this all the time in the real world. A common and easily recognizable example is the concession stand in the stadium or the movie theater. The market price of popcorn at home may be a quarter for a huge bowl, using Orville’s best in the old air popper. But, because the theater’s security people stand at the door to make sure that you are not smuggling in any contraband popcorn, your only alternative is for them to happily sell you an oily tub for five dollars.

The large international pharmaceutical companies have honed this art to near-perfection. The major issue faced by any seller- that is, how to prevent competitors from entering “their” market and undercutting the established prices- is solved and enforced for Big Pharma by Your Government. Our elected leaders stop all competition through a combination of patents and regulatory barriers to prop up prices, and then they vote for big spending programs to save us from the consequences of overregulation. That is not to say that patents and FDA drug regulation should be eliminated; clearly they should not, though some reform of certain abuses of drug patents is in order (i.e., one patent per basic chemical formulation), and something needs to be done to manage the costs of the clinical approval process in a safe manner.

But. The last time I heard sentiments similar to the current fear-mongering by the drug gangs was in my first job out of college working for a trucking company, right at the time that the over-the-road trucking industry was fighting against the horrors of decontrol. They had a long list of reasons why the republic would be destroyed if interstate trucking were deregulated. The real reason was that they didn’t want to lose business to individual entrepreneur, truck-owner-operators. Notice that the wordl didn’t end then, either- the trucking firms that were flexible sold most of their fleets and switched to a contract hauler model and the weak sisters fell by the wayside. The roads aren’t any worse than they were before, and goods still get moved. The trucking firms were wrong- and the airline and telecommunications industries, equally terrified of the pricing disruptions of competition, were also wrong.

Forty years ago, the sainted Nobel laureate Milton Friedman noted that the biggest supporters of regulated industries are the regulators and regulated of those industries. He cited the incestuous and self-serving nature of virtually any such relationship, from the old Minnesota Railroad and Warehouse Commission to the ICC and its trucks, and the cozy way that the FCC takes care of the old guard telephone companies. What makes us think things work much differently with regard to the US Food and Drug Administration, particularly when the power of the agency rests in its ability to control the US drug market?

Kevin Hassett of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute recently bemoaned the way the TRIPS agreement messes up Big Pharma’s pricing power overseas by permitting foreign governments to violate drug patents on a humanitarian basis if they are being charged “excessive prices”. This is actually a sensible provision of any patent structure, including the US system; the US government also has “march-in rights” to exploit technologies that are improperly being withheld from the public for anti-competitive reasons. The entire basis of US patent law is that such protection from competition is provided as a means of ensuring deployment of technology, not preventing competition. As a moral issue, I don’t know anyone who would seriously propose that all of Africa be allowed to die so that Glaxo can prop up its developed country drug pricing structure. TRIPS is an attempt to balance competing interests and needs to exist, yet be administered in a balanced way. The most recent domestic example of a Big Pharma trying to play games with this was when HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson was trying to get reasonable price quotes for CIPRO in the wake of the 2001 anthrax scare, and Bayer Pharmaceuticals did their best to stick it to the US. Only a threat by Thompson to invoke the emergency powers ended the problem. (And we then did the smart consumer thing anyway- switched to generic doxycycline. Served them right.)

What actually happens in Canada, as Gov. Pawlenty observes, is not price control, but two parties, a buyer and a seller in each transaction, negotiating to get the optimal exchange based on the leverage each holds. Big customers have a lot of clout- Best Buy and WalMart tell their suppliers what products and how many units they are willing to buy- and they negotiate very hard on price- BUT THEY ARE NOT IMPLEMENTING PRICE CONTROLS- they are using their leverage as dominant customers. The seller does not have to take the deal, as Super Valu wisely illustrated a few years ago when K Mart tried to squeeze them too hard in lining up a primary supplier for their grocery shelves. Best Buy and Wal-Mart essentially dictate their purchase cost by squeezing every nickel of extra margin from the producer.

In the same way, if the dominant customer is a country, Canada (or South Lichtenstein- the specific country is not important) decides what price it is willing to pay for 100,000 units of drug X. It makes an offer to the pharma manufacturer to buy drug X from them for the price it has determined to be appropriate for its needs. The pharma determines whether it is willing to sell 100,000 units of drug X at that price, based on all relevant factors- unit variable cost of production (labor, materials, tooling, energy) and ability to protect the higher selling price of, say, two dollars per pill in other markets. If each pill costs a penny to produce and the selling price in other markets will not be driven down by accepting a Canadian or Peruvian offer of ten cents per pill, it is advantageous to take the deal. In this case, the US FDA is determined to continue to pay two dollars per pill, so Big Pharma eagerly sells cheap to Canada and most of even that selling price is profit.

But then: suppose the US started to import drug X from Canada for fifty cents per pill, Big Pharma has two choices: let it happen and see revenues drop by $1.50 per pill ($2.00 less $.50), times the total sold in the US, or stop selling to Canada at the low price. Either way, total dollar sales change. Eventually, they either bite the bullet and stop discriminating against the United States consumers, or they persuade Canada to pay more. Pawlenty and other true free-trade enthusiasts are betting that the “rest of the world” price will rise a bit and the US price will fall a bit, so that, eventually, the US pays market-established prices that are similar to those paid by everyone else rather than artificially-propped-up prices enabled by government regulation. That is not “importing price controls”, it is advancing free trade.

Which brings us to the third issue.

Third objection- Reducing US prices would lead cripple future development of new drugs. Well, would it? Rational analysis suggests that it would not affect new drug discovery R&D much at all- and the changes would merely accelerate the drug development changes that are already in progress- due to biotechnology and molecular chemical design. The largest impact would be on the approval testing process, the clinical trials where most of the expenses and risk are encountered. Those effects can be mitigated somewhat, not completely, by regulatory reform (though the risk of discovering previously unknown side effects will always be with us). But we already have “Orphan Drug” laws because the drug suppliers don’t willingly pursue less sexy or less lucrative treatments. The reason that these drug qualifications cost so much is a combination of liability and the intolerance of the US public to assuming any risk for unknown-unknowns. Bush and Frist are right to promote medical tort reform.

The fundamental claim currently shopped by the defenders of the regulatory-barriers-enabled status quo is that, without the high profit margins currently enjoyed only in the US, drug producers will be unable to create new therapies and we will all be less healthy as a consequence. If you believe that, you believe that a drug firm will voluntarily cut its own throat by eagerly emptying its pipeline of future products.
Anyone who watches television knows what Big Pharma does with large portions of its money- folks, it isn’t going to dedicated lab rats to find revolutionary treatments for rare and deadly diseases. The big bucks are spent on promotion and advertising, described in the R&D budget as “public education”, to try to persuade patients to demand that their doctors switch their antihistamine prescriptions over to the enhanced extended release Clarinex before the patent on Claritin runs out. That is, all the money not spent on Viagra commercials.

Investment goes where the money is- big markets, chronic diseases (where the patient needs to take the stuff daily for years, a la baby-boomer arthritis), and low-risk incremental variations of compounds where there is already some level of market share, brand-name identity (Bayer Low-Dose Aspirin) and barrier to competitor entry. If there is less cash available for new R&D, will the budget cuts come in finding new products or TV advertising? These sorts of decisions give gray hair to CEOs; fine- let them earn those bonuses.

The frequently-cited allegation that it costs $802 million, on average, to bring a new drug to market, is not necessarily a number that any analyst would agree with; the sample of 68 drugs was culled to massage the numbers and the R&D expense figure used was subject to some creative interpretation. We like firms to make profits in our free market, but Big Pharma's rate of return is enormously higher than for most other industries, and that profit is AFTER writing off the R&D investment. There's enough cash there to put some back into new drug approvals if it is necessary to do so. We don’t want to regulate drug finances, we just want them to live in the market a little bit more.

That real story is the primary reason that Big Pharma is resisting changes in the marketplace: in the same manner as every other relatively comfortable business, they hate disruption. In the world of technology investing, every history survey features story after story of “disruptive technologies”- the effects of internal combustion engines on the horseshoe and buggy whip industries, how General Electric threw the growth business plans of the whale oil producers for a collective loop, the need for IBM to adapt in major ways as mainframe computers were replaced by very low cost personal computers, the current woes of the Baby Bells as wireless telephony intrudes on their previously inviolate turf, and the anguished cries of network news organizations and old-line newspapers as the public places increasing reliance on satellite TV and internet bloggers than on ABC and the New York Times.

Big Pharma, like every large entity, wants to control its own fate and be internally integrated. They want to identify drug candidates internally, do the development in-house, control key suppliers on an exclusive basis, and so on. With other consumer products, such as with the automotive industry, outside competition (from imports) forced them to become less inbred and to open up both design ideation and subsystem manufacture to outside sources. Even the fabled creativity mills at 3M have seen the in-house research centers have to compete directly with external concepts, which are acquired by the corporation through intellectual property licensing, equity investment, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures.

The drug companies are making their first reluctant, halting steps on these uncertain paths. They have customs and processes for doing things. Several major firms, such as Schering Plough, also have their new drug pipelines drying up. But we need to speak the unspeakable: there is no reason whatsoever that today’s Big Pharma firms need to be protected so that in 2020 Pfizer and Glaxo are still dominant players, any more than back in our history we should have protected the Union Pacific railroad, Cray Research, Pan American airlines, and Northern States Power Company’s Reddy Kilowatt. Forbes magazine recently discussed the emerging elephantine issue- that the days of large blockbuster drugs and broad general drug markets are going the way of TV network broadcasting when cable and satellite came to be. “Business Week” described “Reinventing Corporate R&D” back in September 2003, and they were largeyl correct.

The emerging sciences of individual genomic characterization combined with biometric information databases will lead us to “individual designer drugs”, meaning that there will be far fewer medications that can be marketed to most everyone. The sooner Big Pharma gets over its marketing myopia, stops quivering against the reality of fundamental changes in their world, and gets on with shaping themselves to compete in the “narrow-casting” world, the better.

To believe that Big Pharma will abandon their life’s blood R&D because of marketplace changes is to believe that businesses give up completely when things are not perfect. No- they adapt, but when the market forces them to. We should stop enabling their denial. Faced with the continuous imperative to fill their product pipelines, they will eventually adapt in any way necessary to stay afloat. Reducing the margins of some products will force them to accept the fact that we will no longer tolerate them selling Allegra over-the-counter in foreign markets, while saying that US consumers are too stupid to use the product safely in the US until the magic infusion of wisdom the day after the patent expires. This sort of nonsense might impress one group of politicians, but before long the majority of Congress will join the majority in the House of Representatives in saying “Enough! We can’t cover for you any longer!”

The current revolution in drug discovery mirrors the changes in R&D in other industries. For years, a lot of drug discovery has originated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) university research system, where federal grants for basic science have been followed by drug companies licensing the discoveries to take them to market, or new spin-off businesses coming out of the universities and research institutions to exploit such inventions. Research by universities and very small business startups is accomplished at lower cost, and is often also more likely to be carried to a meaningful pursuit decision based on both financial and medical necessity criteria than if buried in the Bristol-Myers corporate structure. Suggesting that failing to feed the current corporate pharmaceutical development model as it currently operates means that beneficial new therapies will be lost is nonsense, and ignores current reality.

To be sure, there are already abuses by Big Pharma that need to be addressed- for example, if a non-profit research center utilizes proprietary material from a pharmaceutical manufacturer for a new project, the pharm routinely demands that all new discoveries tied to the use of the material in any way be given back to the firm. If they are providing the ideas and funding research, that makes sense; but if NIH is funding the research of an independently creative scientist, there should be legal provisions for equitable shares of the proceeds of the research to flow back to the researcher and his company or organization. In some cases at present, pharma companies do no more than provide non-unique research tools, not formulations or materials, and still demand ownership of all the research discoveries in exchange. That obviously has to stop. But these are manageable implementation issues, not dead ends.

Now what?

So, how do we make sure that drug innovation doesn’t die when (not “if”) the current wildly unbalanced, country-specific discriminatory pricing system inevitably collapses? Well, most importantly, we do not turn this into a government program, but we do enable the researchers receiving NIH support to work even more toward practical applications when appropriate, whether through new start companies or licensing to industry. We encourage industry to look to these new start companies to fill their product pipelines. We can retain promising new formulations in the research setting for longer periods to answer more of the safety and efficacy questions, thus reducing the cost burdens of the clinical trial stage that can only be completed by Big Pharma. We can provide tax incentives for both individuals and pharmaceutical firms to invest in the new start companies working on new drug formulations. We can strengthen the “orphan drug” laws to encourage firms to think less about marginal analgesics and more about life-threatening conditions. Perhaps most important, we can stop the ambulance chasers from chilling the risk climate, but in a way that protects customers. It works for Underwriters Lab and electricity.

The policy prescriptions are endless, and deserve debate- but to say that there is no way to protect new medication R&D other than to pay monopolistic prices only in the US suggests that the wrong people are in charge.

2004-03-08T16:43:00.000-06:00

A lot has been written about the massive difference between the employer survey and the household survey regarding job creation; the two measures are almost 2 million jobs off. I deal a lot with new start companies, and it is obvious that these kinds of ventures are where the growth originates, and also obvious that the alleged entrepreneurial investors aren't. If there is one thing noticeably missing from the current economic outlook it is Risk Capital.

Investors BUsiness Daily explains why, for those who can't figure this out:
http://www.investors.com/editorial/issues.asp?v=3/8

The new firms hire and take risks to grow. What the old firms do is buy small young ones and then cut payroll.

2004-03-08T14:05:00.000-06:00

The amazing thing about the recent debates over intelligence issues regarding Iraq is not the differences of opinion about “what the intelligence said”- the fact is, everyone saw the same intelligence information, including John Kerry. When our new pompous JFK is quoted saying “Bush lied to lure us into war!” it is time to snicker. Once more, he is on both sides of an issue at the same time, as even the NYT is beginning to notice.

The right question is not what the CIA said regarding Saddam and his mass civilian murder weapons, it is the utter lack of any discussion about the way rational executives, such as the Harvard-MBA-trained Bush, deal with decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Tom Lifson dealt with this in detail at American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=3378), discussing how MBA candidates are trained to address risk and uncertainty rationally, depending on the relative risk tolerance of the entity involved. I went throught the same exercises in grad school, and have to address such issues almost daily now.

The puerility of the Iraq WMD sound-bite debate, prompted by the Democrat candidates and their lazy lackeys of the mainstream media, can be illustrated by two prominent examples of cost versus risk: automotive airbags, and “global warming”.

From a 2001 student paper on risk management at a major university, we read:
“During 1996 there was an amazing amount of car crashes, and those car crashes totaled up to be about 6.8 million. A third of those accidents actually resulted in serious injury or at least some type of injury and 1% ended up being fatal.” Ignore the lousy syntax and what that says about college students and ability to communicate in English (“an amazing amount of car crashes), and dissect the numbers.

Where roughly 1% of 2.3 million crashes results in a fatality, we end up with 23,000 people in the US being killed in traffic accidents each year. To determine accurately what your own probability of dying is, it would require a lot of added data, driving mileage distributions, locale information, weather data, and so on. But, for the sake of argument, let us make a few assumptions and think parametrically (in a manner that would get us thrown out of any course on probability theory and risk management, but might at least provide an order of magnitude comparison).

There were 191 million licensed drivers in the US in 2001, according to “Info Please” (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908123.html). It would be better to be able to factor in the number of cars owned by each driver, and so on, but we live with what we have. Very roughly, about 23,000 of 191 million drivers are killed each year on the road, so the simplistic probability of one particular driver being killed is .00012 (just over one in ten thousand). To mitigate that possibility, every new car manufactured in the US costs about $1,000 more to pay for inclusion of at least two airbags, and no one complains all that much. Are there cheaper ways to reduce the fatality risk? Sure- buy an SUV, take the bus, drive slower, and so on. But the airbag is the major decision we have embraced. For a fatality probability of roughly one in ten thousand, we pay an extra $1,000 for the car.

This example describes to some degree our individual tolerance of risk. But we are a collective society, and what we need to do is also look at societal risk as a total issue, since we tend to think that way; we did not grieve for the victims of 9-11 because we feared that we were next so much as we felt collectively violated by the evil perpetrated on some of our own in our own yard. Even though we may not have personally known a victim, they were mostly American, so they were our brothers.

What about the risk of terrible consequences arising from anthropogenic global warming? This is a reasonable collective measure, since we also feel it when our citizen brethren are hit by hurricanes and floods. Well, the lead author of the scientific portion of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report says that the most likely worst case increase in temperature over the next century is one degree, and the best study of the costs by the Clinton Department of Energy estimated that the GDP would decline by 3%-4% per year as a result of trying to achieve Kyoto carbon dioxide reduction targets, which themselves by the most optimistic estimates could at best reduce temperature averages by a third of a degree. And the possible worst consequence of a one to three degree temperature increase in global average temps is by no means particularly problematic, as Patrick Michaels documents in The Satanic Gases. So, we have the entire left wing of US politics eager to reduce US GDP by 4% a year on the off chance that it might have a 30% effect on a remotely possible temperature increase, which is itself identified by some of the best authorities as being far less than 10% probable, the effect of which is as likely to be beneficial as negative (so call the impact 50-50), and, even if negative, still not likely to cause significant problems, maybe a 5% chance that a temp increase could lead to trouble. So we get a $400 billion cost per year, against a .0075 (3/4 of 1%) chance of a slow developing problem that might affect a very few people on our coasts if the worst case occurred and led to some areas of coastal flooding caused by melting glaciers.

Fine. We are obviously risk-averse, both collectively and individually. It is obvious from just those two examples that we are willing to pay a lot to mitigate the consequences of bad outcomes.

So. Regarding the terror threat, especially as represented by Iraq in early 2003, we had the following known threats:

1) 30 years of progressively increasing-scale terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of US citizens prior to 2001 (think Marine barracks, Khobal Towers, USS Cole, multiple airline hijackings, and so on. Probability (i.e., certainty of occurrence): 100%
2) Sept.11, 2001 murdering more than 3,000 innocents. Probability: 100%
3) Multiple fatwas issued against the Great Satan encouraging terror groups to murder US citizens at every opportunity. Probability: 100%
4) Saddam Hussein having himself reported to the UN very large stockpiles of chemical weapons. Probability: 100%
5) Saddam Hussein with a documented record of using chemical weapons against Iranians and Iraqis. Probability: 100%
6) Saddam Hussein paid off terrorists for conducting successful homicide bombings. Probability: 100%
7) Saddam Hussein offered safe asylum and medical care for international terrorists such as Abu Nidal and Al-Zarqawi. Probability: 100%
8) Saddam Hussein permitted construction and establishment of a sophisticated terrorist training facility at Salman Pak just outside Baghdad, complete with aircraft fuselage to practice hijacking techniques, and had his secret intelligence services help train new terrorists. Probability: 100%
9) Iraqi agents provided critical support and assistance for the terrorists who attempted to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Probability: 80%
10) Thus far, despite finding multiple violations of the 17 UN resolutions ordering him to disarm, the larger WMD stockpiles that Saddam Hussein self-reported to the UN have not been located, and some credible authorities believe that those stockpiles may have been destroyed, leading to some question whether the WMD threat was as great before Operation Iraqi Freedom as had been believed. This leads to some question about the accuracy of CIA pre-war intelligence estimates and the attendant potential threat to the US. Probability: 50%
11) There is a history of cooperative relationships between Saddam Hussein and active anti-American Islamofascist terrorists, based on multiple sources and events, such as was summarized by DoD’s Douglas Feith to the Jojnt Intelligence Committee. Probability: 90% (we allow here for an amazing set of coincidences and the possibility that multiple witnesses have lied in a coordinated manner)
12) Chance that Saddam could pass WMD capabilities to active al Qaeda-type terrorists for use against US interests, including inside the US: Probablity? You choose- certainly more than 20-30%, most likely at least 50%.

If we take the lowest conditional risk probabilities identified above, we get 50% times 90% times 50%, which is 22.5% as a rough parametric risk probability of an attack on the US originating in Iraq as ruled by Saddam Hussein. That is about 25 times as great an imminent risk as is posed by the worst speculative cases associated with global warming if indeed you subscribe to that scenario, which most trained climatologists do not. (The major supporters of apocalyptic climate scenarios tend to be chemists- e.g., Clinton’s IPCC leader, Bob Watson.)

Now, these last data are somewhat overcome by the fact that the inexact science of CIA estimates usually does not cause them to err in the direction of overestimating threats; that is, variability is bilateral, causing us to underestimate at least as often as we overestimate. As Mort Zuckerman recently wrote in US News and World Report, “We underestimated the Soviet nuclear program in 1949, China's in 1964, India's in 1974, and Iraq's in 1991. The list goes on: North Korea in 1994, Iraq again in 1995, India in 1998, Pakistan in 1998, North Korea in 2002, and Iran and Libya last year.” What we see here is that most often in recent years, including with regard to Iraq within the last decade, and just a couple of months ago regarding Libya, the CIA underestimates the threat.

With that comparison of relative risk profiles and the associated costs and benefits, it is clear that any US president who pursued the Kyoto Treaty would be irrational, and any president who failed to deal effectively with Iraq would either be grossly incompetent or grossly negligent. You are left to decide which description fitted Mr. Clinton; I fear that a third category applies to Mr. Kerry and his compatriots.

2004-02-25T11:02:00.000-06:00

Passionate about "The Passion"
I grew up in a conservative Evangelical home, and attended a Baptist church for the first decade-plus of my life where every Baptist cliche was law. No dancing, no movies (heck, imagine how corrupted I could
have gotten from "Beach Blanket Bingo", which was the sort of thing that was running at the time), no smoking, no booze, etc. Every element of this background suggests classical fundamentalism, and that would be a correct assessment. And this is exactly the sort of group that supposedly also had problems with Jews because "they killed Jesus", in the current set of talking points from the cacophonous tribe that opposes most everything traditional or religious, this time led by Mr. Foxman of JADL. It wasn't till I was much older that I studied enough and learned enough and was able to separate the legalistic propaganda from what I still recognize as the reality of a crucified, then resurrected Son of God and the way that we personally interact with Him.

The trouble is that this rigid portrayal of fundamentalists as anti-Semitic simply doesn't work. The KKK may have had ugly views, but they were slime about all sorts of people. The crusaders were frequently terrible people. There may have been problems inside the Catholic church, but I never saw them myself as a Baptist, and none of my friends, including my Catholic best friend, ever even hinted at having any issue with the Jews. All my youth I never heard about "Christ-killers" or anything else even close- I heard instead "pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee", I heard that Jews were good at business, that there had been prejudice against them because they were God's chosen people, and we should not behave that way ourselves.

The first time I ever heard anyone even suggest that "the Jews killed Jesus" was on an episode of the late-'70's TV series "Soap", spoken by the blatantly cliched character played by Mary Kay Place. I was honestly puzzled: "Huh?" And I am just as puzzled by all the heat over "The Passion of the Christ" today. Corrupt religious leaders and nasty government authoritarians killed Jesus for their own reasons. But, as Gibson suggests in the film, in reality, we all did.

2004-02-23T17:15:00.000-06:00

Outsourcing: The Stuff People Forget
Now that Edwards and Kerry have joined Pat Buchanan and the rest of the isolationists in opposing international trade, under the guise of "saving jobs" (this means that the unions have ordered them to try to kill NAFTA), and fresh from the demagogic opportunity to trash Dr. Mankiw for his gall in speaking the truth, it is time to take a more rational look at the whole mess.

The root of the terror that is supposed to be engendered in our collective breast as we contemplate the idea of every job fleeing to India is the mythical idea that the statistical trend of outsourced "white-collar" jobs is a linear relationship. If the trend line is up at a 25% slope, and 20,000 jobs fled last month, golly, it won't be long till every US job is over there! The idea on its face is nonsense, and only "populist" presidential candidates and your average reporter would fall for it, which explains the fascination the networks seem to have for the story.

This is not only bad economics- the net jobs impact of outsourcing is positive- but it ignores the reality of logistics. If we had applied this "logic" to the auto imports in 1975, all US production would be in Japan today. Just as with tax rates, the phenomenon is self-limiting. Today, the so-called "foreign" cars are assembled in Alabama, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. The UAW may not be happy, but the local employees love it.

Here is a more recent example. Dell, well-known previously for its good customer service support for its laptop computers, formerly had the call centers in places like Texas. You have a problem, you call the 800 number, talk to a rep, answer some questions, try some things, maybe fix it, perhaps send the machine in if it turns out to be a hardware issue.

Now, reading into Dell's process, based on my personal experience, this is the likely turn of events. The "customer service" boss decided that it would be a good thing to "reduce costs", based on the early trial with the Indian outsourcing firm, an entrepreneurial, growth-oriented, service firm. The test doubtless utilized the outsource support company's brightest, least-accented people, and no one could tell the difference. As soon as the ink was dry on the contract, it was time for the Indian company to staff up to meet the volume demand, at the same time as the company put the star staff onto the next marketing test to go for the next new contract, heavily sold based on "Dell liked our results so much, they signed on, so you should consider it too!"

I never heard a thing about this anywhere- I experienced it for myself. I called Dell to resolve a problem under my extended warranty. Oops. I am hard of hearing enough that I have a lot of trouble understanding accents. I endured a long and painful conversation with a young lady who was doubtless a wonderful person, but whose words were almost unintelligible, reading a canned script of "what to try to avoid having to fix the machine" that was written for people who couldn't spell "computer". I, knowing what was wrong and that it was absolutely a hardware issue (I had an LCD screen that was intermittently going in and out, a second time this had happened), I finally said sternly that I did not want to waste any more time on this, just give me the return authorization NOW. She did, I sent it in, they fixed the bad inverter, and things were fine. And Dell heard from more than just me, announcing about two weeks later that they were re-opening their domestic call center for business customer support.

Why? Because the Indian firm made the classic error of confusing growth in booked orders with satisfactory execution., and paid the price. They could not find enough help that had thoroughly passed through accent-elimination training, or had the basic knowledge required to be useful to a customer with a problem. Dell got an earful from many formerly satisfied customers, and the outsourcing trend reverted for the time being.

There is always a tradeoff, a cost-benefit equation for these decisions. Sometimes companies make bad decisions because they segment the departments too much- saving money on customer service is a lousy idea if your formerly satisfied customer goes elsewhere; save a buck, lose a hundred plus suffering all the inevitable bad word-of-mouth.

There is always an inflection point for the equation, and the benefits plateau (that means "level off", you four justices in the Massachusetts Court majority), the point that the Congressional Budget Office always had trouble understanding about marginal tax rates- "You can raise the marginal rate to 100%, but Mr. Trump simply WON'T give you all of his money; he is rich enough and smart enough to hire William Gates Senior to set up his tax shelter!" The Japanese found that, MITI notwithstanding, there came a point where transportation costs, real time flexibility, increasing Japanese labor costs, and after-market support argued for assembly closer to the customers. In a Southern, right-to-work state where the work rules enabled quality production, of course.

The key: the US needs to avoid doing dumb things to its own cost basis that push the plateau point farther out.

2004-02-23T14:02:00.000-06:00

Saw a bumper sticker on a vehicle when I was almost to my office at the University. This was the sort of commentary you would only see in the proximity of a typical college: pretentious and condescending, with not-very-well-disguised anti-American-proletarian sensibility.

The message: "I love my country, but I think we should start seeing other people."

Cute. And roughly as honest and truly meaningful as when your ex-girlfriend gave you that line as an excuse to break up.