Doha is nice this time of year right?

I should probably look into moving to some country that actually has a media. Like Qatar.

Because there isn't anybody in America watching this thing. Maybe they weren't surprised, but this is a country where the Presidential candidates are all vetted by the actual leaders (the Ayatollahs). The election of any one of them shouldn't be a cause of concern. And yet we see an election where the voices of dissent are silenced by shutting down internet and satellite access, cell phone access and text messaging, sending out the shock troops, and arresting the "reformist" leaders. That's a lot more than Iran usually bothers with. Despite the underlying theocratic regime, they've done a good deal to present a legitimate face of democracy beside it. This totally undermines that, and may backfire on the Iranian regime.

For example, they may have been better off letting Mousavi win (or at least make the results look legitimate instead of ridiculous) and having Obama waste time talking to the guy who doesn't actually run the nuclear program while we can't step on the gas to get them to stop because there's a "reformer" in office. We suffered the same problems when Khatami was in office. They'd also have been better off because their economy would have a chance of repair without serious sanctions, which will be coming if Ahmadinejad is charge, and with someone who presented an actual economic agenda instead of blaming Zionists/Israel/Americans for everything. The importance of that is that it mollifies many of the domestic reformers. It doesn't address the women's rights issues or various human rights problems with freedom of speech, religion or press. But keeping domestic rabble-rousers at bay is more important to the Iranian regime than worrying about international opinion. When they have to run about stamping out dissent locally it sort of makes it difficult to appear like a legitimate and influential country internationally (China somehow gets a pass on this, probably because they're not run by the sort of Muslims who attract the real ire of American interventionists).

news in the form of good cop bad cop

good

I particularly enjoy the Federalist paper reference "nations, to be more safe, at length become willing to run the risk of being less free". Seeing anyone in the administration that approved illegal and immoral acts in the supposed quest for national security is fine by me.



The bad. I'd been following this for a while and hadn't commented, mostly because my impression was different than the news media with the purported Obama bump going on. It looks more to me like with the general economy in disarray, people around the world are voting by their checkbooks rather than their radical ideological opinions. Americans rejected social conservatives (for the most part), Lebanon rejected Hezbollah, Europe embraced a variety of radicals proposing different solutions to the present crisis than the bulk of incumbents ("far right" isn't quite accurate, but that's what it looks like to Americans), India stayed the course (because they have a pretty good one) and then Iran had "elections".

It looks to me like they rushed out a pre-certified election with a simple blank slate margin. The question is this: is that the actual margin (although it most likely isn't that way all over the country, as their published election results demonstrate), because undoubtedly there is a large contingent of what passes for social conservatives and firebrand foreign policy supporters, just like we have here. And it's something of a question just how populist such ideas are over there. The main points of contact for media and westerners are Iranian intellectuals. Which one could suppose are much like our intellectuals, with a predilection toward democratic processes and some variety of human rights (and more or less opposed to terrorism, violent threats, and holocaust denial). That's not however the bulk of the country, only a significant cross section of it (that we should expect should have carried various districts or regions in an actual election) So of interest over the next couple of days is whether there are widespread demonstrations and possible revolutionary tendencies building up in a nation that was once what passes for a bulwark of democracy in the Middle East (particularly in relation to our allies). Or if it's just a bunch of the educated elite over there that didn't actually have much influence within Iran itself that backed a reformer while the bulk of the country backed the mad man who promised a road to greatness without a map. Sort of like the '04 election here only with an actual candidate opposing the crazy guy.

Best guess, some riots for a few days followed by a restoration to status quo. And we can get some support this way for international sanctions that we wouldn't have had under a basically powerless Mousavi regime.

Update: It looks like the margin was totally faked now. The question remains who might actually have won under an actual national democratic election. But the likelihood of open revolt and riots, given the obviousness of fraud, is much stronger now than my first impression. I still don't believe it will reach a point that the Khamenei theocracy will be toppled, but they will have to do something different than just attempt to suppress their opposition internally given their tendency to at least appear like a legitimate government (rather say DPRK's dictatorship of the Dear Leader).

I'm with stupid, the poor version

why isn't education the top priority

Looking over data like this, you get a sense of why economists consistently put education at the top of the list of national priorities. It corrects for all sorts of other problems by itself.

You want health care, well under the current system the only reliable way to get it is to have a decent job and employer who gives you health insurance benefits. And to get that, you need a decent education. Obviously we have other problems with health care that aren't addressed this way, but those are longer and more systemic problems than access problems. You say you want energy independence, well education helps there because we'd have a bigger pool of scientists working on alternative energy research. And presumably a population with some association with energy efficiencies and cost savings.

Budget constraints are about the only thing that's not tackled immediately by educational concerns, and they're a problem that has a few decades to resolve and can still be tackled immediately. Even there, a better educated population could have at least a cursory association with delayed gratification or the idea that we should resolve problems as they surface rather than when the entire iceberg pokes up out of the water and into the boat.

strike two

more terrorism from the right?

I realize that associating wackos from extreme fringe is sometimes disingenuous. But when the fringe/Faux right spent a week complaining about observational concerns within the people who create their "fringe" for violent action, and then we see violent action from that extreme fringe, i suspect we can say something like "told you so". This isn't a phenomenon limited to right-wingers (many of the anti-globalization forces are for example anarchists), but it is a phenomenon we will be seeing more of over the next few years to have some right-wing nut job shooting abortion providers, Jews, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans, or some other group "causing" perceived injustices. Because the people that for some reason oppose these various groups are most casually aligned with "Southern Conservatism" (of the sort that dominated GOP politics over the past decade), and the source of a domestic terrorist's motivations seems most like "the perceived inability to produce action through legal channels". Something that Southern Conservatives presently cannot do without decent spokespeople, a coherent message, and representation in key federal channels. It's something that bugged me about many Ron Paul's acolytes being drawn strongly from these sorts of people, and which more clearly defined his brand of libertarianism as inconsistent with the underlying ideology of a classical liberal. I have no interest in preserving the ability of some to practice social discrimination (individual discrimination is something we all do more or less in our choice of associations, this is different) or to permit the authorities exercising local or state power abuses over individual liberties while denying this to federal (or international) authority. But these people do. And without the perception that they have a voice (however flawed that voice was), they will choose to act.

Good luck getting people to back rational causes of social conservatives (whatever these might be) when your primary "advocates" are armed lunatics on a mission from God.

whoops. i mean...uh

faux pas!

Fox news was creating an alternative reality? I had no idea.

I notice this problem over almost every crucial debate in this country that neither side uses the same set of facts. It isn't merely enough to debate what to do about these, all debates become a war over acceptance of a data set first. When the basic reality that underlies a problem cannot be agreed upon, social gridlock is the inherent result. We see this where abortion is concerned because social conservatives stress the a factual set that includes a beginning of life at a point far before scientists and social liberals have set theirs. We see this with drug controls because social conservatives have a firm belief that any narcotic substance is inherently dangerous and addictive, while doctors tend to describe addiction as an inherent medical problem of a few people (rather inherent to the substance/activity of their choice, be it alcohol, cocaine, or pornography). We see this with civil rights for gays because social conservatives rely on a data set that claims homosexuality is a choice, while many biologists tend to recognize this as a natural "abnormality" that cannot be willed aside with some sort of treatment or faith, similar to the problem that a person does not choose their skin colour, or, for the most part, sex, and that we grant equal rights on these provisions because they have very little to do with a human being's underlying character and potential, why not those of homosexuals? So the idea that a news organization that feeds these alternative realities with reinforcing and non-threatening data sets is popular with a large percentage of the population is hardly a news flash. It can certainly be argued over many issues the validity of a data set or a proposed theory and its implications on policy choices (such as in the arena of economics). And we may certainly find reasons to argue over public policy (and private) decisions regarding our preferences in this manner (health care vs retirement funding for example). I don't think that requires an alternative reality to have healthy and structured debates. There are plenty of peculiar political persuasions based primarily on different preference sets; security versus freedom, tolerance "versus" free speech, and so on, that do not require the use of any alternate facts in order to persuade or disagree. To me, when you have to invent a new set of facts to support your argument, there is a problem with the underlying argument. It may be an entirely justified perspective from your emotional and visceral reaction, but if there are no facts, facts based on rational investigation of a matter, to support a course of action on my part (or that of any shared authorities), I am not moved by your plea. This includes the irrational bleating of many economic "conservatives" over budget deficits, national debt, taxation, regulation, and so on. There are factual arguments and sensible economic theoretical concerns to each of these debates. Make them. Stop using talking points and do some research. It is getting most tedious to have to explain to these conservatives every time that their supposed problems are not new, and that some of the most blatant offenders are their supposed heroes. If they lived in a reality that acknowledged this instead of in a world of unquestioning worship free of doubt, we might get along better, and we'd certainly have something like an actual cohesive opposition party to "big government", instead of a party with no ideas and no alternatives because it apparently lives in an alternate reality.

Until then, enjoy your dose of Limbaugh, Cheney, Rove, and Gingrich. You're not going anywhere with that.

sun tzuish, war what is it good for.

Since it is a significant military history day tomorrow (yup, D-Day), and since I have occasionally opine on military affairs or strategies, I figured I'd outline some distinctions between the military philosophy of Sun Tzu and the current systemic problems of American geo-political strategy.

1) "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win". America has not often followed this sort of basic dictum. We embroiled ourselves in an un-winnable conflict in Vietnam for example (and contributed to the problem by not committing resources to make that mistake a shorter one which would have less damaged public will against it). We currently are sitting with two major wars in Central Asia (and a third or fourth possibly on the way).

I argued at the time against the Iraq invasion, principally because the strategy was vaguely defined, the victorious terms non-existent, and the rationale poorly laid out (as in, there was no convincing case to do it). But once the war started, there was then the problems of how to conduct it, how to win, if possible. A war with an asymmetric foe is always going to be conducted in asymmetric battles. We call much of this "terrorism". But the reality is that in small sporadic doses, such efforts can call upon the people of a land to resist and oppose an occupying force, particularly if it operates like a traditional army and tries to wage war on symmetrical terms. It will lose if it does this. The dictum of Sun Tzu in part reads never to allow one's enemies to define the terms of an engagement. We managed in Afghanistan (at first) to wage war in this manner. We used firepower and mobility (two things American forces have traditionally been supreme at), and combined these with decent to hard intelligence and conducted a war using quite a bit fewer troops, and those mostly of high quality special operations training. That's more or less how the shooting portion of a war against a numerous but unspecific foe should be fought. The difficulty in Afghanistan was not running the rest of the counter-insurgency playbook (or one could say, not having a counter-insurgency playbook in the first place). Iraq was a different case. The war was conducted on something more like a conventional arms set piece battle at first. Despite any evidence that suggested such a setup was fruitless at best and convincing evidence from Afghanistan that such efforts were unnecessary to defeat another undeveloped nation's organized military forces quickly and efficiently. In both cases, we went into a war without a playbook that defined any victory or proclaimed our ability to achieve one.

2) Torture. I didn't quite beat this one to death. But quite bluntly, I'm not sure how well our policies of torture to seek out information would be carried over. Sun Tzu's primary interest was speaking to the likelihood that a war being conducted would result in a dominion level control/annexation or at least alliance with the conquered state. That's basically what our two wars seem aimed at. A state which resolves itself through inhospitable treatment at the hands of a conquering occupier to resist and object to the advances and requests of that occupier isn't much use to conquer. Or rather, it hasn't actually been conquered in the ancient sense of the term. And torture isn't exactly welcoming treatment of citizens. Even where those citizens live under a pre-existing system that endorses torture, it does not represent an improvement to sidestep the protections created by rule of law. Where this comes up: "Treat the captives well, and care for them. This is called winning a battle and becoming stronger." The idea being that you do not gain allies and additional forces to marshal for future conflicts (even those of diplomacy and ideas) by treating your enemies with disdain and indolence. Mao Zedong, of all people, even endorsed that type of effort in his text on Guerrilla Warfare. When Mao is higher on the sort of moral scale than America for any reason, that suggests we've made an egregious error of judgment.

3) Sun Tzu does endorse the necessity of gathering vital intelligence. But he does this with a specific chapter on espionage. And not through the more protracted battle over conquest and the ancient struggle over "hearts and minds". His primary focus is also not on gathering more information. One can use scouts to do that in a battle. But on preventing the enemy from gathering information through deceptive and unpredictable tactics. Strike where unexpected, that sort of thinking. Back to espionage: "It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used." Based on my understanding, we have far too few Arabic and Islamic scholars in the employ of our national policies to be trying to understand the objectives our enemies through espionage type tactics, much less to explain those objectives plainly to our public to galvanize support for a long and protracted war. Something Sun Tzu explicitly says to avoid starting, long and protracted wars are not good wars. Indeed his counsel suggests that the very best generals would win battles without actually fighting.

4) And of course this one: "Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories." We went into this protracted engagement without a clearly defined sense of who and what we were fighting. As such, that already suggests a 50/50 battle. The problem as I see it: we also did not clearly define what we ourselves were fighting FOR. Who are we? What did we want? What could we do? And how would they fight, and what for? Thousands of questions left to the "soldiers" of both sides to resolve rather than the philosophers and politicians on our side to proclaim. These are questions that we indeed grapple not without difficulty every day in America. A diverse nation with thousands of significant demands of its body politic is inherently difficult to divine out a single articulate goal in any one endeavor. It is likewise a mistake to presume and to act, as we have often done, that our enemies exist on this sort of monolithic and empirical plain where they have properly identified and organized themselves and gathered all plausible supports to their cause over ours. My reading of many Islamist responses to Obama's speech is that they have not done so. There are indeed members of Islamist majorities in some countries that do not condone violent measures and threats against the "infidels". It may be possible over a period of time to parse out the violent extremists from more moderate extremists, and to obtain for them actual goals that still remain within our own international interests (namely: democratic self-rule and some acceptance of general human rights conventions but carried out by Islamic governments instead of the brutal dictatorships we presently support). I saw quite a bit more interest from oppositional forces in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in particular that suggest we (America) might be better off dropping support for the Wahabbi hardliners in Saudi Arabia or the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarak in favor of more democratic strangeness like we saw in Palestine with support for Hamas or the present election season in Iran (which has a secular Constitutional government that sort of obeys some wizard beyond the curtain theocratic regime). I'm not totally sold that this is a great argument for regional or international stability, but it certainly holds somewhat greater consistency as it regards human rights records and our foreign allegiances. And I would suspect getting our own affairs on these matters in order would be of great help. We're not always going to get to talk to wonderful people when we come to want something to progress or to defend that which has already evolved in the world (see: Cold War or Stalinist Russia as an ally during WW2). And that includes the sometimes crazy Islamic populism of our present enemies. Some of those populists only exist out of convenience, and can shift their support to more tolerable levels (within the greater philosophical "consensus" on human rights) in exchange for a greater sense of regional autonomy and stability. Others are fighting "to the death" in what may be characterized as a clash of civilization. We will have to conduct ourselves on our own rules within a good sense of who we are and what we are fighting for, even where that conflict is within the world of ideas instead of that of bombs and bullets. And we will also have to determine what our opponents really want, if only to seek to deny it to them.

When I have a good sense that this has been happening, maybe I'll be more confident when we attack other nations for no apparent reason that we're going to war for a good reason. But the track record of the past decade is not very reassuring.

hey that might have been a funny commercial

So that's a beer commercial?

Magically Mystery Hypothesis

Yup. Definitely America

Not that stupid theories are wholly limited to an American convention, but we do have some of the best practitioners. Nimbly denying that evidence defies their ideas, and fails to support even the new and flimsy conventions instead. For example, I'm guessing Chrysler and GM basically used some sort of algorithm to decide which dealers got shut down. If somebody figured out what the basis for that algorithm was, then that's where the actual bias lies (presumably the less movement of product by percentage or raw value, and thus the more local competition, the less likely to stay open a dealer was). But even that might certainly correlate with some totally irrelevant thing, such as donations to Hillary Clinton or people who report being abducted by Martians and probed while they dismembered some cattle together. Or some such.

I often think of stuff like this whenever the history channel does its end of the world week or has a special on Illuminati/Knights Templar/Freemasons/Pyramid numerology. I just don't need to go through the statistical jargon and mental exercises to arrive at the conclusion that it's amusing and pointless conclusions being put forth by these people. The distressing part is the amount of people, including more mainstream media types than the sort that Faux employs, who buy into and purvey such bullshit assessments or distortions of reality to fit their worldview.

private schools are better how exactly...?

check out this list

Permit a moment to read off a few titles

Dante's Divine Comedy
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Milton's Paradise Lost
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye
Orwell's Animal Farm
Voltaire's Candide
Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Golding's Lord of the Flies
Heller's Catch-22
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5
Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Out of these, I can recall several that were required reading at some point during high school and all that I read during or around that point if not prior (there were others on his list I've read since [Qu'ran, Dorien Gray, East of Eden] or read and didn't care for). I'm not sure what the issue would be that these could be banned books by a private school. Even for religious reasons.
What exactly was wrong with Milton, Dante and Chaucer for example? What did Catch-22 or Animal Farm have to do with religion at all (at least on an initial reading by an average high schooler). And in both cases, what did they suggest that was really wrong. Are paradoxes something to be overlooked in education now or is a demonstration of the problems of totalitarian statism somehow at odds with the goals of that educational system?

Presuming this was an American school, I think we can see there's not much of a difference in the quality of private versus public schools if this is what we're offering up.

couple things

let's all stare out at the terrorist

This point was interesting. "....a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position". If true, I'm not sure if that's actually protected free speech or not, to advocate violence. Not because I wouldn't argue that it is (annoying as that may be), but because there's some legal confusion.

"1993 shooting of Tiller". I saw a quote yesterday on google that indicated: The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance when we are in the majority." I'd say we can say, given the amount and consistency of threats to his person and business, who came out ahead on these tests. The supposed majority failed in its imposition toward tolerance. There are many who are suggesting now that this lone act does not or should not discredit pro-life movements. I disagree because this isn't a lone act. Violence toward abortion providers has been constant. There are very rational concerns that indicate an individual may not wish to have an abortion, and pro-life advocates should be permitted to lobby, even intensively, to prevent, limit, restrict, or even to ban abortions, and to protest at clinics that perform them. They should not be permitted to do so with violence and they have done so. In addition the rhetoric that has been used seems to foment and encourage violence further (as in the above case with "justifiable homicide").

This therefore does a great deal to discredit the entire movement simply because when a few members are willing to use violence to further their cause, it suggests there's a problem with the underlying movement. As an example, we shouldn't have to impose democratic rule through invasions and violent assaults on other nations, the merits of our cause should sell themselves and we can do what we can to do so further. But to use violence to create democracy? Similarly, when Islamist movements try to (and indeed, have to) use violence to impose sharia law and to suppress opposition, this doesn't bode well for their underlying demands. Despite what I might think of religious intolerance and practices, I have no problem if an individual wishes to use a particular, even a strict, interpretation of personal morals and conscience and impose it upon themselves. There's a big difference imposing such codes upon everyone else. It's a distinction that occurs within Christianist movements just as often, and a principle reason (based on recent studies) that many people have had something of a falling out with organized religions. I think most of us are content to live and let live, and to leave judgments of less serious matters to whatever higher authority we wish or at least, to allow people to learn of their mistakes and to present grievances where they occur to aid in this matter. There should be no quarrel that prevents people from lobbying a particular social construct or point of view. But they should be able to make that appeal without resorting to force and direct harm. There are occasions where this breaks down on the international scale and war breaks out, just as there are occasions where mayhem and murder occur on the individual level. But we must be careful to deny and to work against violent resolutions toward our civic disagreements just as diplomacy must work to resolve international disputes peacefully where possible.

I am not seeing a pre-existing attempt to suppress violence by ardent anti-abortionists within the remains of the pro-life constituency only a post event grief that may have set in with the understanding of the type of terrorist incident that their rhetoric has fomented.

""Freemen" was a term adopted by those who claimed sovereignty from government jurisdiction and operated under their own legal system, which they called common-law courts...." I think this is similar to the idea that Muslims would operate under their own distinct sharia courts in some countries of Europe. But they're still required to follow most civil laws, particular governing interactions with other people. Simply because your particular group condones a particular strain of violent behavior upon others (or each other) does not mean that the harms that it causes are non-existent and should not or cannot be punished by the society at large. And again, if you must resort to violence (in the case of Roeder, he appeared to be doing so with home-made pipe bombs as far back as 1996), then your case is appreciably weakened. Looking over the statements by those who knew him from various radical groups, even they appear to look at this as someone who was a red flag. And yet none of them stepped him aside to question his rhetoric or his penchant for violence to resolve a social discord? Or to publicly speak out against violence for doing so before this action? Not surprising. When people believe their cause is just anything is often seen as furthering the goals.