Fontana Labs writes about being pissed of Dennis Kucinich.#

As my irritation goes into high-earth orbit, look for a bitchtastic post about why Dennis Kucinich pisses me the hell off. The short answer: remember 2000? No, not our side, but the other side? How everyone in the big fractious Republican family went along with Fortunate Son and kept the differences out of sight when company came over? Now it's our turn, and for the most part everyone's on board, since the alternative is unspeakable. But Kucinich doesn't seem to get it. I don't mean that he's being disloyal or anything like that; he's got the right, etc. etc. What he doesn't get is this is the year when no one cares about fringey candidates and they're not going to pay attention. Has he affected the campaign in any way? Has he shifted the debate? Of course not. But he beats on, like a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into, say, 1984.

Nate P. writes about The Passion.#

For me, I can't say I really believed it. I was never able to suspend disbelief and get lost in this. It just seemed like a set of scenes with lots of gruesome pain as their motif.

I mean this on a very basic level. The movie was a cartoon: all that blood and violence and savagery and for what? It wasn't particularly believable. It looked and impressed at about the same level as a Schwarzenegger or, well, Gibson action flick. There's no sense of empathy there. Christ suffers, and I can't understand why I was supposed to care. We never really got to know him (I guess it's assumed we were supposed to before we walked in), and we just see Him suffer a lot. It's gory, but to what effect? In the end, I think, my reaction has come to be something close to "Who cares?"

Dave Pollard finds a very interesting correlation between violence and population growth and people per arable hectare.#

In this chart, about a third of the countries, those with annual growth rates under 0.5%, are excluded to keep it from being too busy. The overall global population per arable hectare (4.0) and overall global annual growth rate (0.8%) are shown by a large blue dot. The sustainable global population per arable hectare (1.0, per a variety of sources I have cited in earlier posts) and the sustainable overall global annual growth rate (0%) is shown by a large green dot. No country has achieved that sustainable level -- every country in the world has either positive growth rate or a density over 1 person per arable hectare.

Sure enough, the countries furthest from the green ideal point are also, almost without exception, the most violent and war-torn countries. At the far extreme, you find Palestine and Kuwait, with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and most of the MidEast countries close by. In the upper central part of the chart you find most of the war-ravaged sub-Saharan African countries, led by the Congo, with its horrendous and incessant war, Sierre Leone, where militias amputate their enemies' limbs as a symbolic warning, and Rwanda & Burundi, site of the bloodiest massacre of the last half-century. Here, too, you'll find Colombia, where anti-drug spraying and civil war have killed thousands, destroyed the economy and poisoned 80% of the arable land. And you'll find Haiti, site of this week's coup, and several Central American states that have witnessed horrendous warfare in recent years.

Tony Pierce addresses President Bush.#

fuck you for thinking that people need protection from words on the radio or nipples on tv. fuck you for pretending that you think that people need protection from these things because i know how hard you partied in college and i dont even think that you believe that people need protection from nipples.

what we need protection from is government.

what we need is protection from power hungry moralists who dont even read the bible but thump it.

Julie Leung writes about an amazing experience that will make you love your mom even more.#

Tony Pierce writes about America.#

Americans make me sick. Myself included. (Yes that's right, I make myself sick). We're so lazy, but we can somehow manage to post on our blogs how much we hate the government or how disenfranchised we are. Meanwhile, the average immigrant can come here and make twice as much money as we do, own 6 businesses, and manage to raise their kids to replicate the process. Why? Because they recognize that authority is authority and they can bitch and moan but it's not going to change their situation. They actually DO something in spite of the government. So I say, we're full of excuses and I think it's a load of crap. People need to step outside of themselves. How does what we do as individuals impact the same issues we complain about. In spite of our problems, we're freakin' blessed to live in a country like America and that shouldn't be forgotten. Whoever catches that revelation will be the most successful in life. Period.

Bill Gates reviews Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.#

The book reminds me that innovation sustains success while complacency leads to stagnation and decline—a lesson I try to keep in mind every day.

In early human history, technological advantages were built on the availability of certain plants, animals and geographies.

In today's emerging information society, the critical natural resources are human intelligence, skill and leadership. Every region of the world has these in abundance, which promises to make the next chapter of human history particularly interesting.

David Sheen at Anarchitecture writes a series about agriculture and harmony with nature. The first part is called The Great Forgetting.#

It primarily sets the stage by talking about the fallacy of "prehistory" and some details of the "Agricultural Revolution."

During the Great Forgetting it came to be understood among the people of our culture that life in "the wild" was governed by a single, cruel law known in English as "the Law of the Jungle," roughly translatable as "kill or be killed." In recent decades, by the process of looking (instead of merely assuming), ethologists have discovered that this "kill or be killed" law is a fiction. In fact, a system of laws -- universally observed -- preserves the tranquility of "the jungle," protects species and even individuals, and promotes the well-being of the community as a whole. This system of laws has been called, among other things, the peacekeeping law, the law of limited competition, and animal ethics.

Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war on your competitors.

George Orwell writes, in 1949, about Gandhi in his essay, Reflections on Gandhi.#

SAINTS should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi's case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity - by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power - and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.

Orwell talks about Gandhi's 'sainthood' and the idea of saints in general:

In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher". The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

He talks about some of the finer and more controversial points of Gandhi's philosophy and what it means to a humanist and anti-totalitarian activist.

Niall Ferguson & Laurence J. Kotlikoff (PDF link) write about the problems the United States is facing internally in Going Critical: American Power and the Consequences of Financial Overstretch.#

The moral of the story is that the United States is effectively, or will be shortly, bankrupt and it is Social Security and other policy decisions that caused it to happen. This is surprising because it is not military expenditures that cost the most amount of money. Read for the gory details.

It is not as if people are completely oblivious to the problem. It is common knowledge that we are living longer and that paying for the rising proportion of elderly people in the population is going to be expensive. What people do not yet realize, however, is just how expensive.

In the "solution" segment is this brilliant gem:

The Bush Administration's approach to the impending federal fiscal crisis appears, surprisingly, to be a variation on Lenin's old slogan: "The worse the better." Faced with the perfect fiscal storm, the President and his men appear to have decided to punch a hole in the boat by pushing through not one but three major tax cuts.

There is a brilliant comparison to the problems of the ancien régime and the French revolution near the very end. Bourbon France also succumbed to internal fiscal problems.

Richard Gwai Lo comments on this article:

Not particularly argumentative—I'm more interested in arguments than facts, although facts can be presented in a way to make an argument—but this strikes me as a well-written, understandable to the lay-person, economic summary, even if it paints a bleak picture. The article covers some interesting ground, like market psychology (the "mental prisoners" on the 6th page), the "conventional wisdom" of using Congressional Budget Office Numbers simply because they're press-friendly, the advantage (as well as disadvantages) of inflation, a comparison of the Bush Administration to Lenin (!), why lowering taxes lowers revenues (the chain of the reaction happens longer than conventional wisdom suggests), why pension reform in America will not go through as easily as it did in Britain in the late seventies-early eighties.

Alex Tabarrok at the Marginal Revolution, comments on this:

We do not have 45 trillion dollars. What then can we do? Here is why conservatives should not ignore the warnings of Kotlikoff and Ferguson, even when they deride similar pronouncements from Krugman and DeLong, because Kotlikoff and Ferguson argue that taxing ourselves out of this mess is not a desirable option. Instead, they argue that we must a) "discipline Medicare spending" (this was written before the prescription drug plan passed!) by eliminating "entirely the traditional fee-for-service option and giv[ing] all Medicare participants a voucher to purchase private health insurance." and b) "privatize social security."

Kotlikoff and Ferguson are not optimistic about the political viability of these actions, hence the opening quotes.

I worry when intelligent people on both the right and left start to talk about the U.S. "going critical."

Tyler Cowen, also at the Marginal Revolution, has another take on this that is not as pessimistic.

So the real cost of our current fiscal irresponsibility is the increase in deadweight loss, resulting from the required increase in taxation, as will be needed to pay off all those trillions. The real cost is not equal to the number of trillions that need to be paid back. And most of the associated transfers are within a generation (tax some living people to pay off bondholders, other living people at the time), rather than across the generations. Let's not confuse the size of the deficit, or the debt, with the size of the intergenerational transfer.

Tyler also poses an interesting challenge to Alex. Read it.

I'm reading Jeffrey Record's report from Parameters, the Journal of the US Army War College, in Spring 2003, about the Bush Doctrine and its implications, including on the War with Iraq.#

The Bush Administration issued its first National Security Strategy in September 2002, a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States by al Qaeda. The document's Chapter V summarizes the Administration's approach to using force, known as the Bush Doctrine. It essentially reiterates, in four pages, presidential statements made over the months following 9/11, including the President's speeches before a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001, before the Warsaw Conference on Combating Terrorism on 6 November, his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002, his remarks before the student body of the Virginia Military Institute on 17 April, and his address to the graduating class at the US Military Academy at West Point on 1 June. The Bush Administration now has in place a clear, declaratory use-of-force policy whose objective is stated in Chapter V's title: "Prevent Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Record summarizes the assumptions of the Bush Doctrine and the words it defines, then states:

In summary, the Bush Doctrine postulates an imminent, multifaceted, undeterrable, and potentially calamitous threat to the United States—a threat that, by virtue of the combination of its destructiveness and invulnerability to deterrence, has no precedent in American history. By implication, such a threat demands an unprecedented response.

Record talks about the differences between preemptive attacks and preventive war and explains why the administration is trying very hard to use one term over the other:

The difference between preemption and preventive war is important. As defined above, preemptive attack is justifiable if it meets Secretary of State Daniel Webster's strict criteria, enunciated in 1837 and still the legal standard, that the threat be "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation." Preemptive war has legal sanction. Preventive war, on the other hand, has none, because the threat is neither certain nor imminent. This makes preventive war indistinguishable from outright aggression, which may explain why the Bush Administration insists that its strategy is preemptive, although some Cabinet officials have used the terms interchangeably.

Record makes the point that the administration is part of the problem of the failure of deterrence. The argument goes like this: Deterrence depends on the deterree believing he will be safe if he complies, so after threatening and then attacking anyway, the US is making the strategy of deterrence even weaker than it supposedly already is.

The whole article challenges many assumptions of the Bush Doctrine and the logic of recent decisions:

There is no question that Saddam Hussein has chemical and biological weapons and would love to have nuclear weapons. But for what purpose? The Bush Administration argues that he is itching to use them against the United States and its allies and friends. But could he not be seeking his own deterrent? In Israel and the United States he faces two nuclear-armed adversaries; would not having his own nuclear weapons make his enemies think twice before attacking him—as well as offset Iraq's greatly weakened conventional forces? And can we speculate that this is the real reason why the Bush Administration wishes to attack him before he gets nuclear weapons? Middle East expert Stephen Zunes contends that "any Iraqi WMDs that may exist are under the control of a highly centralized regime more interested in deterring a US attack than in provoking one."

[...]

There is also the issue of control. Saddam Hussein and his regime are about absolute political control because control means survival. How likely is it, therefore, that Saddam, a Stalin-like paranoid and megalomaniac who has a long record of repressing radical Islamists in his own country, would transfer his own hard-earned WMD to an Islamist terrorist group beyond his control?

[...]

If there is a plausible scenario of Iraqi first use of WMD, including indirectly via transfer to a terrorist group, is it not in response to an American attack on Iraq that placed Saddam in the position of certain doom, thereby removing any "deterrent" obstacles to taking down as many of his enemies as possible on the way to his own extinction? [...] Thus, would not a US attack on Iraq make Saddam's first use of WMD a self-fulfilling prophesy?