Hilarious Quote of the Day

From a commenter at Crooked Timber:

Ask for a recommendation for a book, and you’ll get 37 suggestions apiece from 400 people, half of them scholarly peacocks eager to make a vulgar display of learning, and the other half sadists looking to inflict Pynchon and Habermas on an innocent.

French National Assembly Bans the Veil

I predict that the French will come to regret this move. Few courses of action could be better designed to alienate France's muslim citizens from their government.

PARIS (Reuters) - An overwhelming majority of France's National Assembly has voted to ban religious emblems in state schools, a measure Paris wants to keep tensions between Muslim and Jewish minorities out of public classrooms.

Deputies voted 494 to 36 on Tuesday to ban Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses from state schools and threaten pupils who insisted on wearing them with expulsion.

The government insists the ban does not single out any religion, but cabinet ministers admit its main targets are the Islamic headscarves and anti-Semitic remarks from Muslim pupils that teachers say have become more frequent in recent years.

[............]

In Washington, 47 members of the United States Congress protested to the French ambassador on Monday in a letter saying: "The proposed law threatens the religious rights of French children by forcing them to choose between school and religious practices that are central to their core values.""What is at issue here is the clear affirmation that public school is a place for learning and not for militant activity or proselytism," Assembly Speaker Jean-Louis Debre said.

Mr. Debre's statement is blatantly nonsensical. What is "militant" or "proselytizing" about simply covering one's head? And in order to maintain the charade that this is anything other than an anti-islamic measure, yarmulkes are now to be banned as well? Then there are the Sikhs to consider. This is state-sponsored religious discrimination, pure and simple, and those who champion such a measure in the name of "liberty" don't understand the meaning of that word. Liberty means the freedom to practice one's religion without actively harming others, not just freedom from religion.

I've long held that the true test of one's commitment to a principle is a willingness to champion it even when doing so would be to the benefit of people or ideas one dislikes; as such I was interested in knowing whether, given the events of September the 11th, 2001, the American government would be willing to abide by principle by clearly stating its opposition to this French initiative. It is disheartening, but not surprising, to read that only 47 members of congress were willing to protest the ban to the French ambassador; most people, whatever their station in life, don't really believe in the notion of permitting the expression of beliefs they find disagreeable.

More on Halliburton in Nigeria

The African Oil Politics blog has more comprehensive coverage of Halliburton's Nigerian activities than I've provided so far, with this , this and this post being particularly pertinent.

Dartmouth is Dean Country

Well, well, things have certainly changed since my time if the students at Dartmouth can tilt so heavily towards Howard Dean.

Jan. 17 - Dartmouth is Dean country. The former Vermont governor won over the college's hemp-necklace-wearing-bootleg-tape-trading set long ago. But now, even the students salivating for Wall Street internships are stumping for the good doctor. HOWARD DEAN FOR AMERICA signs are affixed to dorm windows. As the Democrats prepare to descend on the small New Hampshire town of Hanover for a Jan. 25 debate, backpacks on campus and off are festooned with buttons that read THE DOCTOR IS IN.

This might surprise some outsiders who think of Dartmouth as a conservative school. But the triumph of liberal sentiment in this election season isn't just anecdotal—there is mathematical evidence, too. The Dartmouth, the college's student newspaper, paired a story headlined ADMISSIONS OFFICE CONFRONTS CONSERVATIVE STEREOTYPE with a student-conducted poll reporting that only 22 percent of the Dartmouth community approves of the job being done by President George W. Bush—this while Bush's national approval rating stood solidly near 60 percent. And Dean's popularity isn't merely youthful idealism: Just 3 percent of Dartmouth professors back Bush.

Though it was never as quite as right-wing a school as some made it out to be, Dartmouth used to be the one place in the Ivy League where one could say "I am a conservative" without feeling the least bit of embarrasment. President James Wright has had to have done a real job with the admissions process to get a student body that's so heavily left-leaning.

Evolutionary Biology and Religion

P.Z. Myers has an excellent post up on the points of conflict between religion and the science of evolutionary biology. Suffice it to say that while the creationists are utterly wrong, those who claim that there are no points of conflict between religion and evolutionary biology are peddling a comforting falsehood.

In fact, I'd say Myers actually pulls his punches a bit. It would be nice to believe that one could hold onto one's religious faith with just a few tweaks to accomodate Darwinism, but on this point the creationists are more insightful than many of their opponents. The reality is that certain sorts of religious systems, like deism or pantheism, are more easily reconciled with evolution than others with more interventionist deities. The more one knows about evolutionary biology, and the better one understands the history of life on this planet of ours, the more difficult one will find it to reconcile the notion of benevolent supernatural entities with the reality of a capricious, arbitrary and vicious natural world, in which suffering and brutality have been the norm rather than the exception. Why should a God who cares about us in particular have created a universe in which no life existed for 14 billion years, or a planet on which no life-forms more complex than bacteria were to be found for the first 2 of its 4.5 billion years of existence? Why was a deity so concerned with the affairs of men prepared to wait out the 550 million years from the emergence of creatures like Myllokunmingia and Pikaia and beings like ourselves? Was God on holiday throughout this period or something? And if we Homo Sapiens have souls, what about Homo Erectus or the Neandertals? What about Homo Habilis, or going yet further back, Australopithecus Afarensis? But if we are willing to grant souls to all of these creatures, I see no reason not to extend the courtesy to chimpanzees, gorillas and all of our other fellow apes.

Of course, one needn't be acquainted with evolutionary biology to realize that there are intellectual difficulties inherent in all of the traditional monotheistic religions. The old problem of evil sufficed to shake me from my religious faith early in my teenage years, and I still am yet to come across a convincing explanation of how God's omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence can be reconciled. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, contrary to the claims of those who try to fight creationism by claiming an easy conexistence between religion and science, the claims of evolutionary biology do indeed inflict mortal damage on the traditional religious conceptions with which most in the Western world are familiar. There is no place for an activist, benevolent God in Darwin's universe.

John Derbyshire in His Own Words

Some people took issue with my characterization of John Derbyshire as a bigot. Well then, what better proof of my claim can there be than the man's own words about himself? From the above link:

I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going.

Leave out the self-pitying nonsense about PC bogeymen, and what do we have, other than a confession of the obvious? Would-be Derbyshire defenders who assume that my problem with him is that he is "a white male writing for a conservative journal" ought to ask themselves why I haven't bothered to accuse any of the numerous other such National Review writers of the same failing; last I heard, Jonah Goldberg, Andrew Stuttaford, David Frum and Victor Davis-Hanson were all white males writing for a conservative journal.

The Natives are Restless

Discontent with Bush is clearly building across all sections of the Right. If Andrew Sullivan's takedown of his interview with Tim Russert wasn't evidence enough, this NYT article ought to dispell all doubt about the matter.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — For most of his presidency, George W. Bush has counted on a chorus of conservative newspaper columnists, radio hosts and television commentators to give powerful punctuation to his initiatives, proposals and defenses.

But in recent days, there has been an uptick in criticism of Mr. Bush from those quarters, underscoring strains between him and the Republican base that has so faithfully defended him in the past.

For example, Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter, had this to say on Sunday in opinionjournal.com about Mr. Bush's "Meet the Press" interview: "The president seemed tired, unsure and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive, and when he tried to clarify them he tended to make them worse."

George Will, the conservative columnist, wrote in his syndicated column on Sunday, "It is surreal for a Republican president to submit a budget to a Republican-controlled Congress and have Republican legislators vow to remove the `waste' that he has included and that they have hitherto funded."

While most conservatives remain squarely behind Mr. Bush, the united front has not been quite as united.

Columnists like Robert Novak, conservative television hosts like Joe Scarborough of MSNBC and others on local radio and the Internet have raised questions about Mr. Bush.

"It's a critical departure," said J. David Hoeveler, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who said last week that he believed that his local conservative radio host, Charlie Sykes, had begun sounding less exuberant about Mr. Bush. "Generally it's been whole-heartedly Republican," Mr. Hoeveler said of the tenor of the conservative media. "It would suggest that those who would call themselves Republicans are quite possibly breaking ranks."

Bush campaign officials say the frustration stems from an eagerness among his supporters to take on the Democrats aggressively, which they say he will begin to do soon. And some columnists and commentators who have voiced criticism of the president insisted on Monday that they were not breaking ranks and that he remained their standard-bearer.

That line strikes me as being a mixture of spin and wishful thinking. The problem with Bush isn't so much that he's unwilling to "take on the Democrats aggressively", it's that he's violating most of the principles conservatism supposedly represents. Certainly, for the libertarian wing of the GOP, Bush has absolutely nothing to offer. But let's read on:

Many critiques go beyond politics. For instance, until recently Mr. Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, was as energetic a booster of Mr. Bush as anyone. He said he began speaking out against the Bush fiscal policy about two months ago, as he grew alarmed by the growing deficit and what he said were needlessly expensive proposals, like a manned Mars expedition and an increase in financing for the National Endowment of the Arts.

"When I first started doing it, I had Republicans calling me up and saying `Hey, why are you knocking a guy who's from your party?' " he said. "Two months later, everybody seems to be saying it. There's been no fiscal restraint and that's hurting the party and it's hurting the conservative cause."

In one column last week, Mr. Novak criticized Mr. Bush for giving "the most ineffective State of the Union address in recent years." And, he wrote, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the admission that the president's plan to expand Medicare would cost more than initially estimated were "a double blow to his credibility."

These criticisms get to the heart of the matter: a spending spree so reckless that many on the Right are now openly acknowledging the Clinton years as a golden era of fiscal restraint, coupled with a war advanced using arguments that have now been shown to have been manifestly untrue. I still think Saddam needed taking out, as he would have eventually gotten round to rebuilding his arsenal once all sanctions against his regime had been lifted, but that does not excuse the fact that the administration was willing to perpetuate falsehoods to achieve that objective. American credibility abroad has been seriously damaged by the failure to find any WMDs, and at this point, I'd say that anybody expecting some to be found is living in a dream world.

When Howard Dean was surging in the polls, I feared that I'd have no choice but to hold my nose and support Bush, whatever his failings on the domestic front, but now that Dean is effectively history, I think the Democratic Party once more presents a credible alternative. The old TINA (There Is No Alternative) rhetoric may work to keep the religious right on the reservation, but as a libertarian I have absolutely no reason at this point to prefer Bush to Kerry or Edwards; Bush is no free-trader, he seems not to understand the meaning of the term "spending restraint", and his social conservatism leaves me utterly cold. With a Democrat in the White House and a Republican-controlled Congress, one can at least hope that deadlock will serve to keep the worst instincts of either side in check.

John Derbyshire Says Something Sensible!

Who'd have thunk it? I actually am in full agreement with what John Derbyshire has to say for once.

Yes, I got a lot of e-mail about my postings too, some of it angry. Who the heck do I think I am, criticizing Bush's performance? Etc., etc. Well, I'm a citizen, and this is not North Korea. I want GWB to win the general election in November. I wish him well. I think a Kerry presidency would be a horrible disaster. I do not, though, agree with Peggy Noonan that it's fine for a President to be this bad in an interview format, so long as he gives good speeches. Being good in an interview format is part of the job requirement, and I don't anyway think GWB gives particularly good speeches.

And just read that transcript. Sure, not everyone can think on his feet. I'm not much good at it myself. Remember the writer Oliver Goldsmith, who apologized for his lousy conversational skills by saying: "I have only sixpence in my pocket, but I can draw on a thousand pounds." GWB's speaking skills don't even amount to sixpence, though. Can you tell me what questions the President is responding to in the following three cases?

(A) Listen, we got some five let me let me, again, just give you a sense of where I am on the intelligence systems of America. First of all, I strongly believe the CIA is ably led by George Tenet. He comes and briefs me on a regular basis about what he and his analysts see in the world.

(B) And this is all in the context of war, and the more we learn about, you know, what took place in the past, the more we are going to be able to better prepare for future attacks.

(C) And the President of the United States' most solemn responsibility is to keep this country secure. And the man was a threat, and we dealt with him, and we dealt with him because we cannot hope for the best. We can't say, Let's don't deal with Saddam Hussein. Let's hope he changes his stripes, or let's trust in the goodwill of Saddam Hussein. Let's let us, kind of, try to contain him. Containment doesn't work with a man who is a madman.

Answers: (A) Will you testify before the commission [on intelligence failures]? (B) Same question. (C) In what way [was Saddam Hussein a danger to America]?

Now, the answers don't bear any relation to the questions. They are just incoherent babbling. Sure, the guy's heart is in the right place on national security -- I don't doubt that for a minute. "Language is the dress of thought," though, and we are entitled to suspect that a man who can't answer a question reasonably straight can't think straight.

As for the lese majeste accusation: Shove it. This is a republic. (emphases added)

It's nice to see that even a right-wing bigot from Central Casting like John Derbyshire is willing to think for himself on occasion. The idolatry of George W. Bush by many on the right is downright creepy.

Dick Cheney's Nigerian Connection

This is hot news; I wonder why it's gotten so little play amongst even the left-leaning bloggerati?

Feb. 4 - The Justice Department has opened up an inquiry into whether Halliburton Co. was involved in the payment of $180 million in possible kickbacks to obtain contracts to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria during a period in the late 1990’s when Vice President Dick Cheney was chairman of the company, Newsweek has learned.

There is no evidence that Cheney was aware of the payments in question and an aide said today the vice president has not been contacted about the probe. Still, the inquiry by the Justice Department’s fraud section—which prosecutes federal anti-bribery law violations—is likely to bring new public attention to the vice president’s past at the giant oil-services firm. Halliburton has been under intense scrutiny in recent months over its handling of hundreds of millions of dollars contracts relating to the rebuilding of Iraq.

The Justice inquiry, along with a related probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission, parallels a separate investigation into the Nigerian payments that is being conducted by a French magistrate and has received widespread attention in recent months in the European press. But the Justice Department and SEC probes have not previously been reported, although they were briefly mentioned by Halliburton last week near the end of a lengthy filing with the SEC.

[............]

The Justice Department inquiry involves a trail of payments to unknown recipients that were routed through off-shore bank accounts and were allegedly handled by a longtime Halliburton lawyer in London who, according to French press reports, was also a financial advisor to Nigeria’s late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha. The payments were made in connection with the construction of a giant liquefied natural gas plant on a remote island in Nigeria.

The plant, one of the largest in the world, was built by TSKJ, a consortium of four major international construction firms, including Kellogg, Brown & Root, a major Halliburton subsidiary that has been the principal recipient of the company’s contracts in Iraq. Halliburton touted its role in the Nigerian project in a March, 2000 press release headlined: “Four Industry Leaders United to Execute World Class Project in Nigeria.”

The question Justice is probing is how exactly Halliburton’s subsidiary came to play that role. According to lengthy accounts of the probe in the French newspaper, Le Figaro, the TSKJ consortium in 1994 had created a subsidiary called LNG Services on Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic where companies are not required to pay any taxes. The French investigation was triggered, according to Le Figaro, when an official of one of the consortium’s French partners, Technip, was charged two years ago with embezzlement growing out of a separate, long-running corruption case involving the French oil company Elf Aquitaine.

According to Le Figaro, George Krammer, the accused Technip official, was outraged when Technip refused to defend him and turned state’s evidence. The paper reported that he told French authorities about an alleged $180 million “slush fund” that TSKJ maintained to bribe Nigerian officials relating to the natural gas plant in Nigeria. French authorities then tracked close to the same amount in “support contracts” from LNG Services—the subsidiary on the Portuguese island—to yet another obscure entity called Tri-Star, which was located on the British tax haven of Gibraltar. Tri Star, according to Le Figaro, was headed by a London lawyer named Jeffrey Tesler, who has long done work for Halliburton, and was known to have close relations with officials in Abacha’s Nigerian government. Tesler did not respond to a request for comment from NEWSWEEK.

If there's one thing that can be said for sure about the oil business in Nigeria, it's that it is out of the question for one to be a major player without paying massive bribes as a matter of course. This was especially true during the 1995 to 1997 period, when Abacha was in office - and Cheney was Halliburton CEO. This report actually underplays Jeffrey Tesler's connections with the military junta ruling Nigeria at the time, as Tesler was actually Abacha's personal financial advisor. I have a feeling that the Justice Department enquiry won't really go anywhere, given the GOP's hold on all levers of power and the apathetic nature of Democratic opposition. Still, it will be interesting to see where the French probe leads.

UPDATE: The Nigerian government has also launched its own investigation into Halliburton's activities.

The Argument from Nature

One of the most common fallacies in reasoning committed by supposedly sophisticated people is the identification of the "natural" with the "good", and the "unnatural" with the "bad." That this is a fallacy ought to be obvious when we consider how many things which are entirely natural are harmful to us, like viruses, toxins in uncooked food, or natural disasters like droughts and tornados, while in contrast many of the activities that make our lives worthwhile are deeply unnatural - bathing with soap, brushing with toothpaste, vaccinations, taking antibiotics, even reading books. In light of the manifestly false assumptions on which such arguments are built, it strikes me as a poor tactic for a political movement to resort to them to bolster its arguments, yet that is precisely what this New York Times article on homosexuality in animals proceeds to do, despite a half-hearted attempt to question the logic of such reasoning.

Roy and Silo, two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, are completely devoted to each other. For nearly six years now, they have been inseparable. They exhibit what in penguin parlance is called "ecstatic behavior": that is, they entwine their necks, they vocalize to each other, they have sex. Silo and Roy are, to anthropomorphize a bit, gay penguins. When offered female companionship, they have adamantly refused it. And the females aren't interested in them, either.

At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm in the folds of their abdomens, said their chief keeper, Rob Gramzay. Finally, he gave them a fertile egg that needed care to hatch. Things went perfectly. Roy and Silo sat on it for the typical 34 days until a chick, Tango, was born. For the next two and a half months they raised Tango, keeping her warm and feeding her food from their beaks until she could go out into the world on her own. Mr. Gramzay is full of praise for them.

[............]

Roy and Silo are hardly unusual. Milou and Squawk, two young males, are also beginning to exhibit courtship behavior, hanging out with each other, billing and bowing. Before them, the Central Park Zoo had Georgey and Mickey, two female Gentoo penguins who tried to incubate eggs together. And Wendell and Cass, a devoted male African penguin pair, live at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. Indeed, scientists have found homosexual behavior throughout the animal world.

This growing body of science has been increasingly drawn into charged debates about homosexuality in American society, on subjects from gay marriage to sodomy laws, despite reluctance from experts in the field to extrapolate from animals to humans. Gay groups argue that if homosexual behavior occurs in animals, it is natural, and therefore the rights of homosexuals should be protected. On the other hand, some conservative religious groups have condemned the same practices in the past, calling them "animalistic."

Even if it could be established that homosexuality was rampant in other animal species, that would still tell us nothing about whether we as humans ought to endorse it: after all, cannibalism is rampant amongst animals too, but we refrain from giving it our approval. On the other hand, even if it could be shown that in no other species had homosexuality ever occurred, we would have no justification for ruling it out in our own - no other species builds skyscrapers, drives cars or watches movies, either. Rather than waste time and energy on a spurious appeal to an ill-defined concept of what is "natural" or otherwise, I think gay activists are better off taking the libertarian position: "it's my life, I'm not forcing you to join me, so leave me alone." Appeals to homosexual behavior in penguins are all too easily swatted away by the opposed as simply an indicator that certain mental illnesses aren't confined to humans.

UPDATE: In an amazing stroke of luck, I've just come across an old Reason article by Virginia Postrel that makes exactly the same point I'm making - that the argument from nature is a trap to be avoided, whatever the state of affairs in the rest of the animal kingdom.

Dating South African Rock Art

Given how much attention is paid to the cave art of Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira and other European sites, one might be forgiven for imagining that the so-called "Creative Explosion" characterised by Paleolithic art was a uniquely European phenomenon. In truth, such art is to be found in copious quantities across the entire globe, wherever men have resided. If the historical record of the distant past is more poorly preserved in some places than others, it owes more to unfavorable climatic conditions than to any artistic shortcomings of those who lived in those regions. At any rate, this article about the San art of South Africa's uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Park provides a bit of a corrective to the conventional wisdom.

New radio-carbon dating technology shows some South African rock art to be three times older than previously believed, Newcastle University in the United Kingdom said.
A study by archaeologists at the institution estimated that rock art at the World Heritage Site of uKhahlamba-Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal could be 3,000 years old.
Their age was originally put at 1,000 years, university spokeswoman Claire Jordan said in a statement to Sapa.
Archaeologists from the Australian National University in Canberra participated in the study.
"The findings, published in the current edition of the academic journal South African Humanities, have major implications for our understanding of how the rock artists lived and the social changes that were taking place over the last three millennia," Jordan said.
The mountainous uKhahlamba-Drakensberg region was considered to be one of the best areas in the world for rock art.
It has the largest and most concentrated group of painting in Africa south of the Sahara, with over 40,000 paintings, said Jordan.
San hunter-gatherers, who settled in the area about 8,000 years ago, created the artwork using mainly black, white, red and orange pigments.

[............]

The research team were able to analyse salt samples taken from the painted rocks using a highly-refined radio-carbon dating technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry.
The results show some of the paintings are at least 3,000 years old.
Jordan said: "Experts suspect they could be even older due to the San people's long occupation of the area but say they need to carry out further tests to prove this theory."

As the passage makes clear, there is a tremendous wealth of material in this region that has been paid little attention in the West. In addition, the ancient settlement date attributed to the San, and the prodigious quantities of art testifying to their continuous habitation of the region, ought to dispel any doubts that the old Afrikaner propaganda about South Africa being an "empty" land, which one still often encounters today, has any basis in reality. Even if Bantu settlement hadn't long predated the arrival of any Europeans (as in fact it did), South Africa still wouldn't have been a land without a people. "Scarcely populated," sure, but hardly "empty."

No, James Lileks, YOU Have Jumped the Shark!

James Lileks is extremely overrated, and this latest rant of his provides a perfect example of what I'm talking about. You have to be pretty darned clueless to equate wasting public money on manned space programs with private expenditure on movies and theater productions.

"I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets," Stewart said.

Oh: right. Actor talking. “Get this place right.” What would that look like, exactly? And how would we know? If in 2079 there’s one monomanical Marxist sub-saharan leader starving his people for political gain, does this obligate other nations to shut down their rocketry programs until the guy dies and crop production returns to pre-tyrant levels?

Note the implicit stereotyping there: if in 2079 there's a monomaniacal Marxist leader in power somewhere, it can be taken for granted that he'll be "sub-saharan" (i.e, Black African). Nice work.

The 63-year-old British actor says manned missions are too expensive. "It would take up so many resources, which I personally feel should be directed at our own planet," he said.

Making movies takes up many resources which could be directed at our own planet. For that matter, millions of pounds are spent in England annually for theater productions – I propose a ten-year moratorium on all stage shows, with the money distributed directly to our own planet. And after we have gotten things right on this planet we can get back to such frivolous luxuries as theater. What’s that, you say – theater employs many people? Theater inspires imaginations, adds to our store of knowledge, helps us define what it means to be human?

This is so stupid I don't even know where to begin, and the worst thing is that it's coming from a so-called "fiscal conservative"! Listen buster, your childish daydreams about spacemen with shiny rayguns is in no way a justification for throwing American taxpayer money up into space. If your imagination so badly needs inspiration, I have a far cheaper suggestion for you - go find yourself some peyote or LSD and take a drug trip! I'm tired of listening to petulant morons like this guy whine about their precious Mars fantasies when real scientific research is being given the shaft to satisfy their delusional yearnings. Where was Lileks' ire when the abandonment of the Hubble was announced?

I don't entirely agree with Stewart's statements, but he is mostly right, and James Lileks is hopelessly wrong. From a scientific viewpoint, nothing could be more damaging to the search for life on Mars than contaminating (yes, Lileks, contaminating!) the place with the millions of germs any human traveller would inevitably bring along on the journey. That Lileks is unaware of such an elementary fact only goes to show how little his annoyance has to do with any real interest in scientific understanding per se, as opposed to living out the sort of nonsense imbibed by watching too many cheesy space operas. If public money isn't going to go to worthwhile scientific endeavors, it ought to be returned to the public, not burnt up in an exercise that will add little to our knowledge of the universe.

Five Nigerians Charged in $242 Million '419' Fraud

I can't help feeling a touch of perverse pride at the sheer scale of the crime these chaps have committed - what was that again about dumb Africans and their illiterate missives? When Nigerians go in for crime, they don't bother with the small stuff, and they never deign to sully themselves by engaging in crimes of violence. No, the Nigerian way is the Enron way - white collar and obscenely lucrative.

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) -- Nigerian prosecutors leveled 86 counts of fraud and conspiracy against five people Thursday for allegedly swindling a Brazilian bank of $242 million, in the biggest crackdown yet on the West African nation's advance-fee fraud or "419" scams.

The five are accused of luring an employee of Sao Paulo's Banco Noroeste into siphoning off the funds from his employer, persuading him he could land a share in a lucrative Nigerian construction contract if he just paid enough handling fees up front.

The five appeared in court in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, in handcuffs to hear the charges Thursday. All the suspects, including housewife Amaka Anajemba, lawyer Obum Osakwe, and businessman Emmanuel Nwude -- described by prosecutors as "a major shareholder" in a leading Nigerian bank -- pleaded innocent.

Penalties for each of the counts range between seven and 10 years.

Four Nigerian companies -- Ocean Marketing, Fynbaz, Emrus, and the African Shelter Bureau -- also accused of involvement in the alleged crime were not represented in court.

Presiding Judge Lawal Gumi entered innocent pleas on behalf of the companies and postponed proceedings until Wednesday, when he will consider requests for bond.

There was mild drama in court when suspect Nzeribe Okoli, while making his plea, declared he would make "shocking revelations" during the trial.

"There are so many hidden things which Nigerians should know," Okoli said before he was interrupted by the judge, who told him to restrict his answers to the questions he was asked.

An interesting fact that needs pointing out is that all the accused are Igbo, which goes to show that there is some truth to the notion of a special Igbo enterpreneurial flair; here they are, blazing trails others will be hard-pressed to follow!

Playing Politics with People's Lives

The immorality of the American government obstructionism over peacekeeping in Ivory Coast is simply astonishing. What motive can there be for it, other than a desire to score a petty point against the French?

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 4 — The United States on Wednesday blocked the dispatching of United Nations peacekeepers to Ivory Coast for at least a month even as France argued that the mission was essential to peace.

The American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, in a closed meeting of the Security Council, questioned a United Nations estimate that 6,240 peacekeeping soldiers were needed for the job and expressed concern that the mission might lead to a de facto partitioning of the country.

It would be one thing if the American government were obliged to provide troops for any peacekeeping force, but this doesn't seem to be the case. What is more, a partitioning of Ivory Coast, "de facto" or otherwise, is arguably precisely what is needed to resolve the ethnic tensions there.

The Charade of Russian Democracy

Old habits are hard to break. Here's yet more evidence that Russia is still just a one-party dictatorship garlanded with the trappings of democracy.

MOSCOW, Feb. 5 — The Russian Parliament on Thursday unexpectedly scheduled a vote this month on a long-ignored bill that would extend the presidential term to seven years, even though President Vladimir V. Putin has publicly opposed such constitutional changes.

The legislation was introduced by a group of regional lawmakers in 2002 but languished. As written, it could allow Mr. Putin to run for two new terms, conceivably keeping him in power until 2018.

The committee that controls Parliament's legislative agenda, which scheduled the vote, called for lawmakers and others to suggest any amendments by next Thursday and to prepare for a vote this month — before the presidential elections scheduled for March 14, which Mr. Putin is universally expected to win.

Mr. Putin, traveling in central Russia, said Thursday evening that he opposed the legislation but understood that its proponents were "guided by a desire to create more stable conditions for the country" and were supported by a "majority of the population."

That last statement is right out of Joe Stalin's playbook; the brazen quality of Putin's lying mock humility reminds me of nothing so much as Uncle Joe's infamous Dizzy with Success Pravda propaganda piece from the 1930s. What is happening in Russia is truly nauseating to behold - the personality cult, the craven sycophancy of the parliament and the press, the crackdown on any independent centers of power. To call Russia a "democracy" merely because it goes through the formality of holding elections makes as much sense as saying the Soviet Union was a democracy - after all, it too held elections as regularly as clockwork, and voting was even compulsory.

Stating the Obvious

Does Pervez Musharraf really expect anyone to believe that Abdul Qadeer Khan was a rogue proliferator operating without the knowledge and approval of his superiors? It's a transparent lie, and the IAEA isn't buying it.

A Pakistani scientist who has admitted to being at the centre of a network selling nuclear technology to other countries was yesterday called "the tip of an iceberg" by the head of the United Nations' atomic agency.

On Tuesday Abdul Qadeer Khan, so-called father of Pakistan's bomb, made a televised admission of his role in leaking nuclear technology to other countries. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, said yesterday he would pardon Mr Khan.

But Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: "Dr Khan was not working alone," adding that there was a lot more work to do in unraveling the network.

The network's shape has become clearer this week. The Scomi Group, a company controlled by the son of Abdullah Badawi, Malaysia's prime minister, has admitted supplying components usable in uranium enrichment centrifuges to Gulf Technical Industries, a Dubai-based trading company.

Components from Scomi were seized in October aboard a German ship bound for Libya. The Dubai company specialises in trading of special and carbon steels, and is controlled by BSA Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman who is in Malaysia.

It was described by a Vienna-based diplomat yesterday as an essential "gateway" between suppliers and buyers, although the manufacturers may not have known who the end-users were. Mr Khan has admitted a role in supplying technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran. The IAEA believes his black-market network involves companies or individuals in at least five countries.

The Pakistani authorities have denied that its military and intelligence officials have played a role in the network.

The true state of affairs, as far as I can make out, is that the Pakistani government is scared of incurring Washington's wrath, and has essentially asked Khan to fall on his sword like a modern day Varus. That is the only plausible explanation for the rapidity with which he has been granted a pardon by his government, barely a day after his confession on television.

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Feb. 5 — Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, granted a full pardon on Thursday to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, a day after Dr. Khan appeared on television and confessed to sharing nuclear technology with Iran, North Korea and Libya.

As a result, Dr. Khan, 67, will not face prison, a fine or any other punishment.

In a 90-minute news conference at army headquarters here, General Musharraf said Pakistan would not hand over all documents from its investigation to international nuclear inspectors. He said it would not order an independent investigation into the Pakistani Army's role in the proliferation, calling the idea "rubbish." And he said he would never allow United Nations supervision of Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

"Negative to all three," General Musharraf said, raising his voice. "It is an independent nation. Nobody comes inside and checks our things. We check them ourselves."

The White House praised General Musharraf for breaking up the network linked to Dr. Khan, which appears to have been one of the largest ever discovered, but made little mention of the pardon and declined to say whether it would insist that Pakistan sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

Pakistan presents a real test to the Bush administration; should America keep dealing on friendly terms with a country that is a confirmed nuclear proliferator, run by a military dictator? I've pointed out before the perverse incentive Pakistan's reckless dealings present to its commitment to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but it bears repeating once more: nothing would suit Musharraf's government more than that the hunt for Bin Laden should continue indefinitely, for the day that Al Qaeda's operations in that part of the world are shut down will be the day when Pakistan's sole source of leverage in the White House will be lost. It is useless to expect any substantive results from a "realpolitik" alliance with such a dubious regime.

The Cockroaches Come Out to Feast

Like Blattaria taking advantage of the fall of darkness to help themselves, the ridiculous tempest in a teapot over Janet Jackson's breast has seen the emergence of its own parasites.

A Knoxville woman filed a proposed class action lawsuit Wednesday against Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, MTV, CBS and Viacom, contending she and other viewers were injured by their lewd actions during the Super Bowl halftime show.
Terri Carlin filed her lawsuit "on behalf of all Americans who watched the halftime show" in federal court in Knoxville.
The lawsuit stems from Sunday's now infamous exposure of one of Jackson's breasts when Timberlake ripped off part of her costume during their performance on the CBS network.
Viacom International Inc. owns both CBS and MTV. MTV produced the show.
Carlin, who works at a Knoxville bank, said the exposure and "sexually explicit conduct" by other performers during the show injured viewers.
"As a direct and proximate result of the broadcast of the acts, (Carlin) and millions of others saw the acts and were caused to suffer outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury," the lawsuit filed by Knoxville attorney Wayne A. Ritchie II states.
It doesn't specify the type of serious injury.
"All of the defendants knew that the Super Bowl, the pre-eminent sports event in the United States, would be watched by millions of families and children," Ritchie wrote. "Nevertheless, (they) included in the halftime show sexually explicit acts solely designed to garner publicity and, ultimately, to increase profits for themselves."

I haven't seen such a hue and cry about nothing in ages. Skimpily dressed cheerleaders flouncing about and dogs biting men's genitals aren't worth commenting on, but the mere sight of Janet Jackson's right breast (and not even the full thing) is cause for injury? Something is seriously wrong with American culture if such an innocuous event can draw out so many opportunists and schoolmarms, especially when there are so many far weightier issues in need of some attention. Juvenal's insight into Roman life still holds true in our time - the canaille dearly loves its panem et circenses.

UPDATE: This BBC article gives a decent view of just how crazy the outrage about this incident must seem from a European perspective. If there's one aspect of life Europeans have a saner perspective on, it's this one.

The Allure of Realpolitik

Matthew Yglesias has a post up on the administration's support for Uzbekistan's government in its "anti-terrorist" activities. I shall have a lot more to say about this later, but for now I'll content myself with saying that the American government seems to be making a mistake it has all too frequently made in the past, by resorting too dogmatically to a simple-minded notion that "Islamist/Leftist = Evil", therefore "Their Opponents = Good." It may seem like hard-headed realpolitik to give sustenance to vile regimes that indulge in the rhetoric of "anti-terrorism", but in the long run this is a terrible idea, as the hatred this sort of lazy thinking gives rise to can take a long time to die down. We are still dealing with the consequences of support for the Shah today; there's no need to further inflame the muslim world by making the false assumption that every islamic movement must necessarily be worse than a secular autocracy. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is a nasty piece of work, but then again, so is the Uzbek government.

itex2MML Binary for Windows

I'd expect anyone looking for this to have spotted the link the binary posted on Jacques Distler's blog, but just in case not, I'll post the link here again:

itex2MML for Windows (Compiled with GCC 3.3.1 on Cygwin)

The zip archive contains both the binary and the "cygwin1.dll" shared library required to run it. You should only need the shared library if you aren't planning to install Cygwin and run itex2MML from within it. Use of the program is straightforward: just run
itex2MML.exe < input.xhtml > output.xhtml
to obtain a file with the itex markup translated into MathML. Remember to use the following doctype
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0//EN"       "http://www.w3.org/Math/DTD/mathml2/xhtml-math11-f.dtd" >
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
before the <head> tag, and to serve any pages with MathML content with a MIME-type of "application/xhtml+xml" if you want Mozilla to display the equations as they were meant to be seen.

Go Howard Dean!

I'm by no means the greatest Dean fan out there, but I really have to hand it to him for pointing out the absurdity of the outcry over the Janet Jackson breast incident. To hear the self-appointed advocates of virtue fulminate, one would think all these hypocrites had never seen a female mammary gland before or something.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Sometimes a breast is just a breast.

Howard Dean, a physician and a Democratic presidential candidate, on Monday dismissed as "silly" a government inquiry into whether indecency rules were broken during the broadcast of the Super Bowl halftime show when pop diva Janet Jackson's bodice was ripped to expose her right breast.

"I find that to be a bit of a flap about nothing," the former Vermont governor said. "I'm probably affected in some ways by the fact that I'm a doctor, so it's not exactly an unusual phenomenon for me."

During the break in the National Football League's championship game, singer Justin Timberlake reached for Jackson as they sang a duet and tore off part of her black leather bustier.

Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell promised a "thorough and swift" investigation of the stunt aired during one of the most popular American television broadcasts, which also attracts a major worldwide audience.

"In general, I think the FCC does have a role in promoting some reasonable standard of decency," Dean told reporters aboard his campaign plane. "However, considering what's on television these days, I think the FCC is being pretty silly about investigating this."

Dean, who does not have cable television at his home in Burlington, Vermont, said Americans could inadvertently turn on "far worse things" while "cruising through cable at regular viewing hours."

"I don't find it terribly shocking relative to some of the things you can find on standard cable television," he added. "I think the FCC probably has a lot of other things they should be pursuing."

Howard Dean is right - these people need to get a life! I still don't like Dean's pandering to protectionist sentiment, but this boosts my respect for the guy by a huge amount.

How Prevalent is HIV in Africa?

It seems reporter Rian Malan, grandson of apartheid creator Daniel F. Malan and author of My Traitor's Heart, has been doing some investigative work on the way in which South Africa's HIV/AIDS statistics are being collected, and has come to the conclusion that the statistics being bandied about for Southern Africa are "grotesquely exaggerated". Rather than rely entirely on the Wired article (which, despite conceding Malan's point about the ASSA 2000 model, and further corroborating his criticisms by citing statistics about the results of a Kenyan AIDS survey, still manages to give an image of Malan as some sort of paranoid AIDS-denier), I thought it best to read his article myself. Following is some of what Malan has to say about the real situation:

It was an article from The Spectator describing the bizarre sex practices that contribute to HIV’s rampage across the continent. ‘One in five of us here in Zambia is HIV positive,’ said the report. ‘In 1993 our neighbour Botswana had an estimated population of 1.4 million. Today that figure is under a million and heading downwards. Doom merchants predict that Botswana may soon become the first nation in modern times literally to die out. This is Aids in Africa.’

Really? Botswana has just concluded a census that shows population growing at about 2.7 per cent a year, in spite of what is usually described as the worst Aids problem on the planet. Total population has risen to 1.7 million in just a decade. If anything, Botswana is experiencing a minor population explosion.

There is similar bad news for the doomsayers in Tanzania’s new census, which shows population growing at 2.9 per cent a year. Professional pessimists will be particularly discomforted by developments in the swamplands west of Lake Victoria, where HIV first emerged, and where the depopulated villages of popular mythology are supposedly located. Here, in the district of Kagera, population grew at 2.7 per cent a year before 1988, only to accelerate to 3.1 per cent even as the Aids epidemic was supposedly peaking. Uganda’s latest census tells a broadly similar story, as does South Africa’s.

Now, there are many criticisms that can be levelled against Malan's statements here, not the least important being that the sources of error in these projections he dismisses may have been some other parameters than the HIV prevalence rate. Nevertheless, Malan's statistics, if they can be trusted, do indeed suggest that something is very wrong with the models in use. Malan lays the blame on the use of a simulation called Epimodel:

In 1985, a science journal estimated that 1.7 million Americans were already infected, with ‘three to five million’ soon likely to follow suit. Oprah Winfrey told the nation that by 1990 ‘one in five heterosexuals will be dead of Aids’.

We now know that these estimates were vastly and indeed deliberately exaggerated, but they achieved the desired end: Aids was catapulted to the top of the West’s spending agenda, and the estimators turned their attention elsewhere. India’s epidemic was likened to ‘a volcano waiting to explode’. Africa faced ‘a tidal wave of death’. By 1992 they were estimating that ‘Aids could clear the whole planet’.

Who were they, these estimators? For the most part, they worked in Geneva for WHO or UNAIDS, using a computer simulator called Epimodel. Every year, all over Africa, blood would be taken from a small sample of pregnant women and screened for signs of HIV infection. The results would be programmed into Epimodel, which transmuted them into estimates. If so many women were infected, it followed that a similar proportion of their husbands and lovers must be infected, too. These numbers would be extrapolated out into the general population, enabling the computer modellers to arrive at seemingly precise tallies of the doomed, the dying and the orphans left behind.

Because Africa is disorganised and, in some parts, unknowable, we had little choice other than to accept these projections. (‘We’ always expect the worst of Africa anyway.) Reporting on Aids in Africa became a quest for anecdotes to support Geneva’s estimates, and the estimates grew ever more terrible: 9.6 million cumulative Aids deaths by 1997, rising to 17 million three years later.

Or so we were told. When I visited the worst affected parts of Tanzania and Uganda in 2001, I was overwhelmed with stories about the horrors of what locals called ‘Slims’, but statistical corroboration was hard to come by. According to government census bureaux, death rates in these areas had been in decline since the second world war. Aids-era mortality studies yielded some of the lowest overall death rates ever measured. Populations seemed to have exploded even as the epidemic was peaking.

[............]

In the year 2000, Timaeus joined a team of South African researchers bent on eliminating all doubts about the magnitude of Aids’ impact on South African mortality. Sponsored by the Medical Research Council, the team’s mission was to validate (for the first time ever) the output of Aids computer models against actual death registration in an African setting. Towards this end, the MRC team was granted privileged access to death reports as they streamed into Pretoria. The first results became available in 2001, and they ran thus: 339,000 adult deaths in 1998, 375,000 in 1999 and 410,000 in 2000.

This was grimly consistent with predictions of rising mortality, but the scale was problematic. Epimodel estimated 250,000 Aids deaths in 1999, but there were only 375,000 adult deaths in total that year — far too few to accommodate the UN’s claims on behalf of the HIV virus. In short, Epimodel had failed its reality check. It was quietly shelved in favour of a more sophisticated local model, ASSA 600, which yielded a ‘more realistic’ death toll from Aids of 143,000 for the calendar year 1999.

At this level, Aids deaths were about 40 per cent of the total — still a bit high, considering there were only 232,000 deaths left to distribute among all other causes. The MRC team solved the problem by stating that deaths from ordinary disease had declined at the cumulatively massive rate of nearly 3 per cent per annum since 1985. This seemed very odd. How could deaths decrease in the face of new cholera and malaria epidemics, mounting poverty, the widespread emergence of drug-resistant killer microbes, and a state health system reported to be in ‘terminal decline’?

But things get more interesting still, as model replaces model, with the number of AIDS deaths declining sharply with each revision:

Towards the end of 2001, the vaunted ASSA 600 model was replaced by ASSA 2000, which produced estimates even lower than its predecessor: for the calendar year 1999, only 92,000 Aids deaths in total. This was just more than a third of the original UN figure, but no matter; the boffins claimed ASSA 2000 was so accurate that further reference to actual death reports ‘will be of limited usefulness’. A bit eerie, I thought, being told that virtual reality was about to render the real thing superfluous, but if these experts said the new model was infallible, it surely was infallible.

Only it wasn’t. Last December ASSA 2000 was retired, too. A note on the MRC website explained that modelling was an inexact science, and that ‘the number of people dying of Aids has only now started to increase’. Furthermore, said the MRC, there was a new model in the works, one that would ‘probably’ produce estimates ‘about 10 per cent lower’ than those presently on the table. The exercise was not strictly valid, but I persuaded my scientist pal Rodney Richards to run the revised data on his own simulator and see what he came up with for 1999. The answer, very crudely, was an Aids death toll somewhere around 65,000 — a far cry indeed from the 250,000 initially put forth by UNAIDS.

There is a lot more to this article, but I've quoted more than enough of it already, so I'll just say that if one grants that everything Malan says is true, it gives grounds, not just for extreme scepticism about the scale of the AIDS crisis in Africa, but also for cynicism about all statistical modelling that is based on simple extrapolations of current trends. This is an issue I've mentioned before, but the issues Malan raises are as vivid a real-life illustration of what I was going on about as one can get. When one has researchers saying things like the following

"The nature of statistics is that we don't know," said Mary Crewe, director of the Centre for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria. "Modeling is to some extent guesswork ... and in a way it doesn't matter if you're working on a figure of 10 percent or 20 percent of the population. It's still an appalling number of people who are dying."

one has a serious problem on one's hands, as the danger with crying wolf is that people stop believing you even when you're speaking the truth. Yes, a 10 percent figure is atrocious, but there is a difference between 10 and 20 percent, and it does matter. As Malan points out, AIDS is far from being the only preventable cause of illness and death in Africa, but diseases like malaria and tuberculosis get nowhere near the funding AIDS treatment does. It makes no sense to spend $400 on anti-retroviral drugs to keep a single person alive when 20 other lives could be saved with exactly the same amount of money.

Unlike Rian Malan, I'm not willing to attribute the tendency to overstate the HIV epidemic entirely to self-seeking advocates obsessed with their cause to the exclusion of all else - though I do think this is a major issue, as with all advocacy. I think Malan's numbers are at least partly wrong, and that there really is an incipient epidemic occurring in Southern Africa, even if not quite on the scale most sources have made it out to be. The danger with the sort of position Malan is pushing is that a lot of people who are bent on denying that there even is an AIDS problem (like, say, Thabo Mbeki) will take what he has to say as vindication of their beliefs, rather than as the criticism of simplistic extrapolations that Malan meant it to be, but even if this comes to pass, the blame will still have to rest primarily on the shoulders of those who relied on sloppy guesswork to make overblown claims. Scientists shouldn't be in the business of perpetuating falsehoods, even if they are doing so for what seem to be noble causes.

Quality Control Problems at the NYT

I'd actually spotted this earlier in the day, but it wasn't until I came across a post by PZ Myers that it came back into mind: what on earth is the New York Times doing running an editorial on astrology, of all things?

I'd originally ignored the op-ed as a spoof, not even bothering to read what I thought would be a lame attempt at humor, but from Crooked Timber I've learnt that the contributor of the article, a certain Erin Sullivan, has actually written an entire book on the subject titled Saturn in Transit, and nothing in the reviews gives any indication that this work was meant to be taken other than seriously. With that in mind, I think any notion that this was an NYT joke has to be cast aside. This sort of pseudoscientific trash has as much business being in the supposed Newspaper of Record as an editorial on phrenology, and I'd say someone on the Times' editorial team is in serious need of an acquaintance with Popperian falsificationism.

Outsourcing and the Importance of Language

One issue that tends to get overlooked when talking about offshore outsourcing is the importance of language issues in determining who gets what business. It is a commonplace that China is set to follow on the heels of India in the outsourcing business, but those who imagine that the Chinese can do anything the Indians can fail to reckon with an important reality: English is an official language of India, with a constituency of several million speakers within that country, while most Chinese are as resolutely monoglot as the typical American or Englishman. It is easy to imagine that all that is required is a few Chinese-English intermediaries, but this is quickly seen to be a fantasy when the nature of most work that is outsourced is considered - call centers, document writing, and even software programming are all occupations that require native-level English fluency, and China simply doesn't have people with such skills in the numbers required to consitute a threat. Even within India itself, the English fluency issue represents a serious impediment to the growth of outsourcing, as the number of fluent speakers of the language is estimated at no more than 50 to 100 million individuals, depending on whom one asks. That still constitutes a very large pool of talent, but, to put the number in perspective, it is at most equivalent to the combined population of the UK, Ireland and Canada.

I don't mean to portray the competitive pressures presented by the offshore outsourcing trend as non-existent; indeed, the pool of cheap English-language speakers stretches well beyond India alone, to embrace not just other South Asian countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, but also ex-American colonies like the Philippines, and all of the former British colonies in Africa. Still, the same limitation faced by India is present in all these other places, with at most a minority of the native population possessing the requisite level of English-speaking ability to take advantage of the opportunities on offer. This may change in the long term, but as anyone who has ever tried to study a second language will know, such skills cannot be acquired in the space of a few months, unlike, say, an MCSE certification. It is a mistake, though an understandable one, for embattled IT workers to see in the vast populations of the Third World a "swart gevaar" that simply isn't there; competitive pressures do exist, but not quite to the degree that is feared.

One corollary of all the above that is also worth mentioning is that in the long-run the trend to offshore outsourcing actually presents a competitive advantage for the English-speaking nations of the developed world. Workers in countries like the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, and even larger ones like Italy, which are lacking in great numbers of foreign speakers, will be under far less competitive pressure than those in the Anglosphere, Spain, Portugal, France, and, to a lesser extent, Germany*, which may be good for the job security of workers in certain sectors of those nations' economies, but will have adverse effects for the productivity, and therefore the prosperity, of the countries as a whole. Ethnic pride being what it is, there is simply no prospect of the Norwegians or the Finns being happy to have all of their day-to-day interactions with their own governments, schools, banks, hospitals and so on being done in English, but the ever-increasing price to be paid for this linguistic stubborness will be in terms of foregone growth.

*Germany was the traditional lingua-franca of central Europe until the unfortunate events of the 1930s and 1940s, and a good knowledge of German is still a nice thing to have in Eastern Europe. As such, these nations are potential beneficiaries of outsourcing tendencies in Germany proper.

Much Ado About Outsourcing

I originally made the following remarks while commenting on a post made by Edward Hugh:

I'm not as pessimistic as a lot of people seem to be about the future of software development in the Western world, for a very simple reason: IT salaries in India are rising sharply, recording the highest increases in all of Asia in 2003 - about 17 percent if my memory serves me correctly - and this from a base that is by no means as low as India's per capita GDP might suggest. What this tells me is that we're a lot closer to an equilibrium situation than the current angst lets on.

Now, a naive reading of the facts might suggest that if the average Indian programmer is earning $10,000 and his American counterpart is earning $60,000, we wouldn't expect equilibrium until the two's salaries had equalized, but there's clearly a lot more to programmer productivity than a reading of skillsets might indicate. India is a country with serious shortcomings in infrastructure and the legal system, and as such programmer productivity there will be considerably lower than in the US, even if Indian programmers are individually as skilled as their American counterparts.

Assuming the laws of economics still hold, at equilibrium we should expect American and Indian developers to earn the same amount per unit of output; what this means in plain English is that if Indian programmers are only half as productive, corporations should be indifferent between hiring IT staff in the US or India, once Indian salaries are at half American levels. Once the low hanging fruit is gone, as the rapid rise in salaries indicates is already happening, expect all the hype about outsourcing to cease as suddenly as it took off.

The idea that India's 1 billion-strong population represents a limitless pool of IT talent to draw upon lies behind much of the worry about offshore outsourcing, but all the evidence indicates that such worries are considerably overdone. If India were as chock-full of IT talent as the doom-mongers make out, one wouldn't expect salaries to be rising much, if at all, in stark contrast to what has actually been transpiring. Currently, average programmer salaries in India seem to be running at about $10-$20,000 per year, which might seem miniscule in comparison to what American developers have come to expect, but when one factors in all the hassles of doing business in India, it seems clear that there actually isn't all that much room left before Indian labor becomes too expensive to justify moving more work there; If anything, I'd say a lot of the jobs currently being moved to India will soon end up back in America, as companies realize that the cost savings are more than made up for by the drop in productivity.

I can imagine someone saying in response to all the above "Very well, the Indian job market is currently tightening up, but what happens in the longer term, as India starts churning out limitless quantities of new programmers?" To this I can only respond that It takes a lot of time and money to train decent programmers, and I see no reason to imagine that India enjoys some sort of superiority in talent development that makes it any easier over there than here in the West. In fact, I'd say precisely the opposite is true.

It's Microsoft, So it Must be Guilty

God knows I don't like Microsoft - I think it's a rapacious monopoly, and Thomas Penfield Jackson's initial verdict was more on the mark than the slap on the wrist imposed by Colleen Kollar-Kotelly - but this article accusing Microsoft of culpability in Communist China's suppression of free speech seems totally off the mark to me.

Technology sold by Microsoft to the Chinese government has been used by Beijing to censor the internet, and resulted in the jailing of its political opponents.

An Amnesty International report has cited Microsoft among a clutch of leading computer firms heavily criticised for helping to fuel 'a dramatic rise in the number of people detained or sentenced for internet-related offences'.

The human rights group has slated Bill Gates's company for an 'inadequate response' to escalating abuses in China. 'We don't believe this is appropriate or responsible,' said Mark Allison, an Amnesty International researcher who wrote the report. '[Microsoft] should be more concerned about human rights abuses and should be using its influence to lift restrictions on freedom of expression and get people out of prison. It is worrying that they don't seem to have raised these issues.'

Amnesty believes Microsoft is in violation of a new United Nations Human Rights code for multinationals which says businesses should 'seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights'.

It would be one thing if Microsoft had actually collaborated with the Chinese government in specifically designing systems for monitoring and shutting down dissidents, but as far as I can tell, the firm's activities in China amount to nothing more than the same old struggle to ship boxed-product, nothing to get excited about. Castigating Microsoft for selling Windows XP or Office 2003 to the Chinese government makes about as much sense as bashing farmers for selling wheat to the Communist regime - the items being sold are hardly crucial to the repressive activities of the government, and it isn't as if they can't be bought elsewhere. Anything being done by the Chinese government with Microsoft's products could just as easily be done with open source alternatives like OpenOffice and Linux. There is absolutely nothing newsworthy about this story other than the fact that "Microsoft" and "human rights" are being mentioned in the same article.

Time to Give Mark Twain a Second Look

I came across the following wonderful passage from Huckleberry Finn via a comment made by a visitor on Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal. Thanks in large part to over-exposure to a televised version of the novel in my early youth, I hadn't given Mark Twain's writing much consideration in the past, but I guess it's time I got round to doing so.

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin. Them's the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I'll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn't a give me the road if I hadn't shoved him out o' the way. I says to the people, why ain't this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that's what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in the State six months, and he hadn't been there that long yet. There, now—that's a specimen. They call that a govment that can't sell a free nigger till he's been in the State six months. Here's a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet's got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—"

Pap was agoing on so he never noticed where his old limber legs was taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork and barked both shins, and the rest of his speech was all the hottest kind of language—mostly hove at the nigger and the govment, though he give the tub some, too, all along, here and there. He hopped around the cabin, first on one leg and then on the other, first one shin and then the other one, and at last he let out with his left foot all of a sudden and fetched the tub a rattling kick. But it warn't good judgment, because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes leaking out of the front end of it; so now he raised a howl that fairly made a body's hair raise, and down he went in the dirt, and rolled there, and held his toes; and the cussing he done then laid over anything he had ever done previous. He said so his own self . He had heard old Sowberry Hagan in his best days, and he said it laid over him, too; but I reckon that was sort of piling it on, maybe.

Mugabe's Pathetic Self-Defense

Mugabe's regime resorts to the tried-and-trusted "we aren't the worst offenders" argument to defend itself against EU criticism:

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Friday said the European Union should not target his government, arguing that his embattled country was more democratic than the majority of African nations, state media said.

"We are a more democratic country than most African countries and there is really no case the European Union should hold against us," the government Ziana news agency quoted Mugabe as saying.

Mugabe was speaking when he met outgoing French ambassador to Harare, Didier Ferrand, just weeks ahead of the proposed renewal of sanctions by the European Union.

The EU in 2002 imposed travel restrictions on 72 of Zimbabwe's top government and ruling party officials, including Mugabe, accusing them of human rights abuses and electoral fraud after controversial elections that year which saw Mugabe return to power.

The truly sad thing about Mugabe's statement is that it actually is true: Zimbabwe is by no means the worst offender on the continent when it comes to respect for democracy, particularly when the countries of the Maghreb are taken into consideration. One legitimate criticism of the Western focus on Zimbabwe is that there isn't a comparable interest in the wrongdoings occurring in any of the other nations on the continent where there are no white settlers to catch the media's eye. If Zimbabwe is to be criticised for violating human rights, then surely nations like Algeria, Egypt and Sudan ought to meet with even more vehement condemnation, which they never do. Human rights violations in Africa only seem to matter in the Western press when the victims are both white and christian.

An Interesting Conceit

Simon Cozens' idea of transcribing Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book as a blog is truly an inspired one. This just goes to show the wisdom of the Preacher in Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) - "There is nothing new under the sun." No, there isn't, not even blogging.

UPDATE: I've just discovered that Jonathan Delacour wrote a rather interesting and prescient entry on Sei Shonagon way back in April last year. Well worth reading.

Unintended Consequences

What effect did Richard Nixon's decision to take the United States off the gold standard have on the South African economy? Can it be an accident that South Africa's long boom, dating from the 1930s, petered out just about the time that the United States went to a floating currency regime?

If there really was a causal link between the two developments, Nixon's decision will have turned out to be one of those things whose full ramifications remain unclear well after they occur; the apartheid regime's economic prosperity was based on the exploitation of cheap, unskilled black labor, and the shift in the terms of trade away from raw materials exporters served to penalize the South African government for its discriminatory educational policies. Not until white South Africans began to feel the impact of the economic slowdown did sufficient pressure arise to stir Vorster's National Party government from its complacency with regards to African education, and it was the defiance of the students that reawakened what had seemed a completely defeated black opposition.

Of course, there are still quite a few loose ends to be tied up with this conjecture of mine: for one thing, gold prices actually hit their peak in 1980. Nevertheless, it is a fact that South Africa's economy did stagnate during the 1970s, and that this affected all sectors of the country, irrespective of race. What would be most useful in assessing this hypothesis one way or another would be firm statistics about the South African economy during the period in question, statistics I am currently at a loss as to how to obtain.

The Planning Urge

At Samizdata, Frank McGahon asks an interesting question - why are so many architects left-leaning? Now, there are architects who swing to the right rather than the left, some even to the far right (the late Philip Johnson being one example), but it is correct to say that most architects are rather more enamored of big government than one might expect, given their professional profile. McGahon gives four possible reasons why this should be so, but I lean more towards the fourth item on his list rather than the others:

4. Architects are planners. Forgive me yet another obvious assertion but the point is that there is little that the architect imagines cannot be planned. If you can design a house, you can design furniture for that house or the city in which that house is located, so goes the thinking. If a chair, a house, a city, why not an economy?

Looking at the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, I think this tendency obvious. Frank Lloyd Wright's impulse for control was so strong that he even dictated the furnishings for Fallingwater; as for Le Corbusier, no architectural vision contributed more to urban blight in the 20th century than his "Ville Radieuse" ("Radiant City"), to which we owe the soulless, intimidating concrete slums popularly known as "projects" in the United States. Corbusier's totalitarian impulses also gave an impetus to that other 20th century tendency, the yearning for totally planned, brand new, "rational" capital cities; his Chandigarh was the forefather of Brasilia, Abuja, Islamabad and other monumentally ugly wastes of public money that blight the globe.

As one who had harbored an impulse towards architecture in my early youth, I know that one major attraction of the profession is the promise it dangles before one's eyes of being able to impose one's own artistic vision on others someday, if one is sufficiently lucky or successful. The call of the New Jerusalem, La Città Nuova, Germania - an architectural utopia, pristine and orderly, free of the irrational accretions of history, planned to the last detail to provide for the everyday needs of men as well as well as their spiritual and aesthetic requirements - what siren song could be more intoxicating to the mind than this one? Just fix man's physical environment, totally immerse him in the harmonious fruits of one's creative vision, and all else that ails him will be seen to as well, at least to some degree. It is no wonder that architects should look so sympathetically on the grand aspirations of planners in other fields.

South Africa's Inkatha Problem

Here's a news report that makes one appreciate that as bad as Mbeki's management of both the AIDS crisis and the Zimbabwe issue have been, things could have been a lot worse in that part of the world.

South African President Thabo Mbeki was mobbed by scores of opposition Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) supporters, carrying traditional weapons, during a visit to an IFP stronghold in the volatile KwaZulu Natal province on Thursday.

Zulus, carrying assegais (traditional spears) and shields and wearing t-shirts bearing the image of the veteran IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, surged forward surrounding Mbeki’s presidential convoy. They chanted that they were not afraid of the governing African National Congress (ANC) party.

Mbeki’s spokesman, Bheki Khumalo, said the Zulu opponents, traditionally IFP supporters, did not get close to Mbeki’s car which was approaching the small town of Tugela Ferry. Police and security officers had to clear the way for the convoy. There were later reports of another incident when police tried to confiscate a gun from one man.

The president is on a three-day "imbizo," touring KwaZulu Natal, as part of an interactive government programme aimed at putting the country’s political leaders in touch with the people, to discuss policies.

Now, the ANC isn't by any means a party of angels, but I regard Buthelezi and his Inkatha movement as entirely negative in their influence on South African affairs. Buthelezi's main priority since the bad old days of apartheid has always been his own self-aggrandizement, regardless of the cost to his fellow countrymen, and if that meant accepting funding from the apartheid regime to destabilize the country, Buthelezi was more than willing to go along. South African politics certainly needs some competition to the ANC, but I don't see the parochialists of either Inkatha or the ("New") National Party serving in that role. For now, let us at least hope that Buthelezi's desire to retain power doesn't plunge KwaZulu Natal into another round of mass killing.

Unprincipled Conservatism and NEA Funding

Over at NRO, Roger Kimball demonstrates a major difference between libertarians and conservatives when it comes to public funding for the arts: libertarians don't believe in publicly funded art, whatever its merits, while conservatives think its just fine and dandy, as long as it supports their values.

Under normal circumstances, the White House announcement that the president was seeking a big budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts might have been grounds for dismay. Pronounce the acronym "NEA," and most people think Robert Mapplethorpe, photographs of crucifixes floating in urine, and performance artists prancing about naked, smeared with chocolate, and skirling about the evils of patriarchy.

Thanks, but no thanks.

But things have changed, and changed for the better at the NEA. The reason can be summed up in two trochees: Dana Gioia, the distinguished poet and critic who is the Endowment's new chairman.

Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp.

Mr. Gioia is moving on other fronts as well. He has hired a number of able deputies who care about art and understand that what the public wants is more access to good art — opera, poetry, theater, literature — not greater exposure to social pathology dressed up as art. After a couple of decades of cultural schizophrenia, the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people.

What a load of horse manure. How is this any different in principle from the state-directed art of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? Stalin had his Socialist Realism, Hitler had his Arno Breker and Albert Speer, while for American conservatives the important thing is supporting "real" Shakespeare instead of repellent "transgressive" freaks - a phrase redolent of Nazi complaints about "degenerate art".

I love the arts, I love classical music, painting, sculpture and architecture, I think my life would not be as complete without such things in it, but nevertheless, I refuse to endorse the notion of state-sponsored art. The state simply has no business deciding what constitutes "innovation" or "beauty" in the arts, whether that means praising Shakespeare or Chris Ofili's latest dung-piece. Mr. Kimball may think it self-evident that traditional renditions of Shakespeare's plays are "obviously" better than those set in concentration camps, and he might believe it equally obvious that everyone knows what "good art" is, but I don't see why taxpayer funds have to go to subsidizing his particular aesthetic conceptions as opposed to anyone else's.

The truth is that in aesthetic matters, more than anywhere else, "De gustibus non disputandum est." Shakespeare's art, as celebrated as it is today, was a purely commercial offspring of its own time, full of ribaldry and slapstick of a sort the Roger Kimballs of the day would no doubt have lambasted as "repellent" and "freakish"; the notion that Shakespeare's work would be fetishised in the manner conservatives do today would have struck Elizabethans as the height of absurdity, as ridiculous a notion as some future generation venerating Seinfeld scripts would strike us in our own time. Taxpayer money shouldn't be used to subsidize any art, whether or not it accords with the sensibilities of middlebrow "conservatives" like Roger Kimball.

Resistance-Fighter, Post-War

There's a phrase I learnt from a Jonah Goldberg column back in 2001 that struck me at the time as particularly funny, something about there being so many Frenchmen falsely claiming resistance membership after liberation that a new term had to be invented just for such individuals - "maquis d'apres-guerre" ("resistance fighter, postwar"). What makes it amusing is that there's plenty of truth to it, and if this tendency to historical amnesia was commonplace in France, it has taken on endemic proportions in Germany. It would seem that everyone from that era "secretly opposed Hitler" at the time, if the utterences one hears from German sources are taken at face value, but such claims have always struck me as nonsensical. If everyone either opposed or was indifferent to the man's message, who were those adoring crowds lining the streets of Berlin and Vienna as he was chalking up victory after victory? Who were those fanatical young men chanting "Führer befehl, wir folgen!" ("Leader command, we will follow!") as late as 1943?

Daniel Goldhagen's attempt to get at the truth about German support for Hitler's goals was easily brushed aside as so much hysterical axe-grinding, but Robert Gellately's Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany presents a far more formidable challenge to those who would wish to efface the guilt of most Germans of the time for the record, even as they work to present a deceitful picture of Germany as the innocent victim of the Allied "war crime" of area-bombing. Here's a Publishers Weekly review of Gellately's book that is worth quoting:

Using newspapers and radio broadcasts of the day as evidence, Gellately (The Gestapo and German Society), Strassler Professor in Holocaust History at Clark University, effectively demonstrates how "ordinary Germans" evolved into a powerful base of support for the Nazi regime. Although Hitler and the National Socialists had never garnered an outright majority in elections before 1933, the author convincingly shows that "the great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945." The Nazis achieved this political miracle by "consensus." The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that political regimes could hardly expect to use unlimited terror against their subjects a technique combining the threat of terror and coercion would be more effective. Using Gramscian theory is hardly new in an analysis of Nazi Germany, but Gellately does make a provocative claim: that the Nazi use of terror against certain categories of "undesirables" (first Communists, Socialists and trade unionists, then Catholic and Protestant opponents, then the mentally and/or physically impaired, then the Jews and Gypsies) was purposively public and that most Germans agreed with such policies. Decrees, legislation, police actions and the concentration camps were not meant to be hidden from the German people, but in fact were extensively publicized. Some of the same arguments have been made in Adam Lebor and Roger Boyes's Seduced by Hitler (Forecasts, Mar. 26), but readers will notice that Gellately offers a far more sophisticated argument and more abundant evidence than Daniel Goldhagen's cause celebre, Hitler's Willing Executioners. In truth, Gellately's work is what Goldhagen's book could have been, but wasn't; that is, a closely reasoned and tightly constructed analysis.

I don't believe that the Germans of today should continue to pay penance for the sins of their fathers, but I think the historical reality of broad German support for Hitler's policies worth recalling every so often, if only to fight certain tendencies that are alive today in that country's media. Germany was not in any sense a "victim" of Allied war efforts, but a thoroughly deserving recipient of a much-diluted portion of the bitter medicine it handed out so many millions of non-German origin; nor were the postwar Vertriebenen by any measure "victims" either, as they had been all too happy to enjoy the fruits of overlordship during the brief period of German superiority; finally, to use the German war experience as a blanket condemnation of any war at any time or place, let alone as an excuse for inaction in the face of tyranny, is the height of immorality.

The Economist Endorses John Kerry (Subscription Reqd.)

It's uncanny how often the Economist's take on events turns out to be exactly the same as my own.

WHEN it comes to voting in an election, it is not always easy to decide which candidate you prefer. So why complicate an already difficult choice by trying to work out which candidate most other people might prefer? Mental gymnastics of this sort are coming to dominate the Democratic presidential campaign—and making John Kerry the clear front-runner. This week, as the Democrats in New Hampshire plumped for the senator from Massachusetts, the chiselled New Englander's chief selling-point was once again his apparent “electability”—the idea that he stands the best chance of beating George Bush in November.

In it to win

Good. Democratic America is beginning to think with its head, not its heart. At the beginning of this month, Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont whose fearsome anti-war rhetoric had made him the darling of many Democratic activists, had a 20-point lead in New Hampshire; Mr Kerry, who had voted for the Iraq war, was stuck in third place, behind Wesley Clark, another anti-war outsider. But then doubts about Mr Dean set in. Would America really vote for a man who refused to admit that Saddam Hussein's capture might be helpful and who wanted to repeal all Mr Bush's tax cuts? Democrats began to look at Mr Kerry's years of experience in the Senate and his record as a war hero in Vietnam in a new light.

[............]

The odds still favour Mr Bush (see article). But on paper at least, a Kerry-Edwards ticket would stand a chance of snatching from the Republicans a Carolina in the south, as well as, say, West Virginia and maybe even New Hampshire. Given Mr Bush's non-existent majority in 2000, that could prove to be enough. Yet first Mr Kerry would have to start landing blows on the president.

[............]

Mr Kerry's strongest card, though, could prove to be foreign policy. As a supporter of the Iraq war, he can convincingly criticise the White House's exaggerations about weapons of mass destruction. The former war hero can credibly chide the administration for its post-war incompetence, especially if American casualties continue to mount. And, as a foreign-policy expert with a long record of internationalism behind him, he can plausibly broaden the debate, demanding explanations for why Mr Bush's foreign policy has left America so unpopular in so many corners of the world.

Mr Bush ought to be able to summon up good answers to these questions. But it is in America's interest that they are raised and debated by a Democrat who stands a chance of winning. For all his faults, Mr Kerry looks closer to fulfilling that role than any of the current alternatives.

My thoughts exactly. I supported the decision to go to war, and I still think it was the right thing to do, but there are questions about the way the issue was framed to the public, as well as the way in which the aftermath has been handled, that Bush needs to be made to give answers to. He simply must not be allowed to waltz to a landslide re-election.

For Goodness Sake, Why?

What is the Obasanjo administration thinking, to get in bed with the North Koreans, of all the regimes on this planet? And why chose to do so on the matter of missile technology? Here is an administration faced with a host of difficult problems to solve, and it wilfully chooses to compound them by trying to acquire technology it doesn't need from a regime that is universally loathed. Obasanjo must be insane!

NORTH Korea has offered Nigeria missile technology but Abuja has not taken up the offer, a spokesman said yesterday, clarifying an earlier statement that Nigeria was seeking such weapons.

A spokesman for Vice-President Atiku Abubakar said the subject of arms sales had come up at a meeting in Abuja, Tuesday, between Atiku and his North Korean counterpart, Yang Hyong-Sop. Spokesman Onukaba Ojo ,who had earlier said Atiku had met the North Korean delegation to discuss buying missiles , said he had since discussed the matter with Nigerian defence officials and found that the suggestion had come from North Korea.

"They came to us wanting a memorandum of understanding signed with us towards developing missile technology and training and manufacture of ammunition. They were just trying to get us interested," Ojo said.

"There hasn't been any interest shown on our side. We're not interested, but we didn't tell them that that way," he said.

FG's move may annoy Washington

Any move by Nigeria to acquire North Korean ballistic missiles is sure to annoy Washington, which is locked in a bitter stand-off with Pyongyang over its nuclear ambitions and international arms sales.

Kim Jong-Il's regime , which US President George W. Bush regards as a member of a so-called "axis of evil" , earns much of its hard currency by selling and swapping missile and weapons secrets.

North Korea has developed missiles capable of carrying warheads as far as Japan, and is reported to have shared its technology with Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Saddam Hussein's former Iraqi regime.

Profits from the proliferation are said by US intelligence to feed back into North Korea's search for a nuclear weapon. Nigeria, by contrast, is seen as a friend of the United States.

Bush visited Abuja last year and praised President Olusegun Obasanjo for his leadership within Africa. Some 15 per cent of the United States' crude oil needs are supplied by Nigeria's burgeoning oil industry.

Ojo insisted that Abuja's talks with Pyongyang should not give Washington cause to worry, and promised that Nigeria was not at all interested in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

"I'm sure that Nigeria is not dreaming of nuclear weapons at all, just missile technology," he said, adding that the foundry discussed at Tuesday's meeting would be for civilian use. If you're acquiring technology for peaceful purpose I don't think that should make our allies uneasy," he added.

Earlier, Atiku's office had released a statement implying that military links with North Korea were nothing new.

"He assured that government would continue to co-operate with the Korean government in the defence sector, an area in which both Nigeria and North Korea have co-operated over the years," the statement said. (emphasis added)

This Atiku character is talking absolute rubbish. What peaceful use is there for North Korean missile technology? The worst thing about this is that Nigeria faces absolutely no military threats whatsoever from its neighbors, making this not just a boneheaded move from a political perspective, but also an entirely unnecessary one. A sane government would be trying its best to cultivate stronger ties with the United States, rather than choosing the most sensitive issue on the American agenda on which to engage in wayward behavior.

Signal + Noise: This Is Your Brain on Bayes

Christopher Genovese has an interesting post up on the longstanding argument between devotees of the Bayesian and Frequentist schools of statistics.

Paleoconservative Rubbish

Eugene Volokh has a post up dismantling the idiotic rantings of Paul Craig Roberts, "VDare" contributor and recent co-author, with Senator Charles Schumer, of an anti-free trade tract. How one individual manages to harbor so much idiocy within his head is beyond me. Let me give you a flavor of what Volokh has to say:

"In the old feudal system, there were no First Amendment rights. The legally privileged were free to engage in hate speech and to verbally harass others, but any commoner who replied in kind could be sued or have his tongue cut out. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott still has his tongue, but just barely. He used his tongue in a way that gave offense to the new aristocrats. Black Americans have been granted the right to be offended by any words they don't like and to extract retribution. The offending speaker finds himself forced into contrition and humiliating apologies. Often the penalty is a destroyed career. . . . The spectacle proves -- if proof is any longer required -- that the First Amendment has been trumped by the race-based privileges of the new feudalism." Wow -- "black Americans" are "the new aristocrats"; and when a public outcry leads to political damage to a politician (the general way in which free speech often works in a free country), that's somehow the equivalent of "feudalism." (italics added)

What more is there to say? There's plenty more where that came from. Anybody who writes for an outfit like "VDare" is by definition a depraved idiot. Fine company Chuck Schumer's keeping eh? That's what you get for hanging around with anti-globalization kooks.

Heights II - Or the Dangers of Political Vanity

Hot on the heels of the report of Berlusconi's month-long absence from the spotlight due to plastic surgery, comes, via Davids Medienkritik, the amusing image below:



Schröder would have been better off not faking it for the camera, or, better yet, conducting a seated interview, rather than risking this sort of embarrassing revelation.

The height thing really does seem to bother a lot of politicians terribly, though. Berlusconi is even more notorious for his attempts to disguise his diminutiveness (he stands at an estimated 167cm, or 5' 6"), and both Dennis Kucinich (5' 7") and Howard Dean (5' 8") have been the butt of jokes about their stature. I don't know that it matters as much as they think it does, though: the 5' 9" Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford (6' 2"), while George W. Bush (5' 11") defeated (or, depending on your political persuasion, "cheated") Al Gore (6' 1") to obtain the presidency. Still, if height does factor in the presidential elections, the Democratic Party can take comfort in the fact that the present front-runner, John Kerry, stands at an awe-inspiring 6 feet 4 inches.

Untrustworthy Reporting on Genetics

I happened to come across an article on Yahoo containing claims that, if true, would be sensational. Supposedly, a premutation expansion of the Fragile-X Mental Retardation 1 (FMR1) gene, associated in male carriers with several debilitating syndroms in later life, is also associated with higher intelligence in early to mid-life; if this statement is true, it would be revolutionary for two reasons:

1. it would represent the first gene of which we are aware to have been definitively linked to higher intelligence
2. it would provide an instance of a human gene providing a benefit during the reproductive years at the cost of lower functioning once those years were past. This mechanism has long been suspected as being implicated in the aging process - why code for immortality at the expense of present reproductive fitness, especially if life expectancy is already limited by predation and other hardships?

Needless to say, however, I am extremely sceptical, not least because of the source of this information.

TUESDAY, Jan. 27 (HealthDayNews) -- Doctors may frequently be confusing Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and similar age-related neurological ailments with the symptoms of a recently discovered genetic disorder that's surprisingly common yet unfamiliar to most physicians.

The illness is called fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome, or FXTAS (pronounced fax-tass). It typically affects men over age 50, causing tremors, balance problems and dementia, which all progressively worsen over time, much like Parkinson's and related conditions. People afflicted by the genetic flaw appear normal through childhood and much of their adult life.

FXTAS is closely related to fragile X syndrome, the leading cause of inherited mental retardation.

Fragile X occurs when cells in the body don't product a protein produced by the fragile X mental retardation 1 gene (FMR1). Men with fragile X syndrome suffer from mental and motor impairment, autism, elongated faces, enlarged ears and testes, and connective tissue problems. In women, retardation may be accompanied by premature menopause in about 25 percent of people.

Previous studies have found that about one in 259 women and one in 813 men in the United States are born with oversized versions of FMR1. The gene is bulged by stretches of repeating DNA, called "premutation expansions," whhich cause cells to think they're not producing enough FMR1.

Rather than cause retardation, this error often leads to high intelligence and achievement, at least in early and mid-life, says Dr. Randi Hagerman, a fragile X expert at the University of California at Davis and a co-author of the study.

"Generally, these individuals are very smart and very productive," Hagerman says. But starting in their 50s and beyond, she adds, they begin to show signs of brain damage -- the result, apparently, of tiny pearl-like protein clusters that accumulate in their neurons.

Rather than take it for granted that HealthDayNews had gotten Dr. Hagerman's words right, I decided to track down the abstract for the actual article, which can be found here. I'm not a JAMA subscriber, so I can't tell what's in the full article, but nothing in the abstract I saw indicated that this gene had anything to do with "high intelligence." The OMIM entry for FMR1 also failed to mention anything about above-normal intelligence, while the PubMed entry for an earlier Am. J. Hum. Gen. article by the same team was similarly uninformative. Now, given as sensational a claim as the one put forward in this article on Yahoo, how likely is that none of the informed sources would have said anything about it?

The full JAMA article will be freely available to the general public in 6 months, but I'm doubtful that the claim that this premutation expansion "often" confers "high intelligence" will be substantiated. At best, I'm sure, it will be revealed that the gene had no appreciable negative impact in early to mid-life, a much weaker claim; nevertheless, a new myth of a putative "intelligence gene" will probably have been born. Such are the fruits of shoddy science reporting.

The Result Trivially Follows ...

A sentence worth committing to memory:

"Whenever a philosopher or mathematician uses words like "easy" and "obvious", that is a sure sign of difficulty."

John F. Sowa, page 58, "Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical and Computational Foundations", 2000, Brooks/Cole.

The Problem With Oil Wealth

Via Jonathan Edelstein, I came across this report on Gabon's declining oil revenues, and the discontent this development is unleashing amongst its secondary-school students. Nothing in this report is surprising to me, as both Nigeria and Saudi Arabia underwent precisely the same economic transition as Gabon is currently undergoing: at first the oil money gushes in so fast that the nation's leaders hardly know what to do with it; then a period of high-living begins, and though native industries wither as the domestic currency appreciates on the international markets ("Dutch Disease"), nobody cares, as the belief starts to take hold that the good times clearly must last forever; but then the party draws to an end, either because oil prices come down from unsustainable heights, oil production falls, or population growth simply outruns the increase in oil revenues.

The problem with transitory windfall wealth is that it engenders high expectations in its beneficiaries that are unsupported by correspondingly high productivity of the people themselves. The Saudis and Nigerians of the 1970s came to believe that the satellite dishes and Mercedes Benzes they flaunted garishly were merely the external appurtenances of their personal merits, and acquired a disdain for all "menial" occupations. Along with this highfalutin' attitude came a conviction that the government, the source of so much largesse during the happy times, was the proper source to which one ought always to look first for a solution to any problem: free university education, free housing, free entertainment, free this, free that - everything could be expected to come free from some government ministry, without the slightest exertion on one's own part, and heaven forbid that any obligations (like, say, paying taxes) be required in return!

Of course, the good times always come to an end sooner or later, and the more rapid the crash, the more severe the difficulties people have in adjusting to the sober new reality. One still meets Nigerians today who are utterly convinced that theirs remains a wealthy country, and if the corruption could only be flushed out of the system, the pie would be big enough to serve generous helpings all round. It takes no more than a back of the envelope calculation* to show the absurdity of this idea. Going by the sorts of complaints made by Saudi expatriates, the illusion of wealth in that country is, if anything, even more tenacious, given the lofty heights of prosperity to which that country once attained. Tough new circumstances would be expected to summon up vigorous measures to adjust to them, but the comfortable old ways of seeing the world stand in the way of their adoption; why should one suddenly be expected to pay for one's own housing, transportation and tertiary education, goes the thinking? The entitlement culture has taken too strong a hold, and the rulers, themselves corrupt and incompetent, are too scared of rebellion to spur their angry subjects to sacrifice. Consequently, things are simply left to rot - potholes appear on once gleaming highways, roofs of government buildings begin to leak, teachers' salaries are withheld for ever longer periods, schoolbooks cease to be revised in order to skimp on printing expenses ... All the proud symbols of yesterday's jackpot acquire the seedy air of a once proud man fallen on hard times due to an addiction to drink.

I know of no easy way out of this cul de sac once a nation has gone down it, and it is for this reason that I break into scornful laughter whenever I hear some ignorant person remark on the "good fortune" some poor country enjoys in being "blessed" with extensive mineral resources. The truth is that all lasting wealth is based on the achievements of the people themselves, their talents, their drive, their wisdom. A resource-poor country with an educated and ambitious populace is better off in the long run than any sheikhdom floating on a sea of oil; the wealth of a nation like Israel, surrounded by oil-rich but impoverished despotisms, is a stinging rebuke to the false notion that abundant natural resources are a route to economic nirvana. If there is one bit of wisdom I feel qualified to share with the poorer nations of the world, it is this - "pray that no easy riches will ever be found either lying beneath your soil or within your coastal waters. If it is too late for you to make such a prayer, at least pray that the riches not be so great as to warp your citizens' values."

*Nigeria's population is estimated at 120 million. Given the current crude oil production capacity of 2.8 million barrels/day, an oil price of $24/barrel, and an extraction cost of $4/barrel, annual oil revenue would come to $20.4 billion, or $170 per person, hardly the stuff of extravagant living.

People are Incredibly Gullible

The BBC's reporting standards must be incredibly low for them to have given as obviously fraudulent an article as this one a public airing.

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do.

N'kisi's remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine.

N'kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.

About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N'kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material.

The mere mention of the word "telepathy" is all the proof I need that this is a scam. James Randi, where are you when we need you?

How are the Mighty Fallen

Ever wondered who the real sources of all those 419 letters you received were? Here's your chance to learn about just one such individual, who goes by the name Fred Ajudua. It turns out he's actually been clapped in jail, which goes to show that Obasanjo can get the the odd thing right now and then. How astonishing it is to learn that Fred - the one and only, the man of the 10-car motorcade, the man of the multi-page spreads in Ovation magazine, the "businessman" so renowned for his exploits that he became known only by his first name, like a Nigerian Cher or Madonna - is sitting in a jail cell in Kirikiri, like a common thief!

DETAINED businessman and Lagos socialite, Chief Fred Ajudua, is among several inmates of Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison, Lagos, who have picked up teaching appointments under the Africa Resources Initiative Education Foundatiion (ARIEF).

Ajudua, currently standing trial for alleged involvement in advance fee fraud "419" charged, now teaches basic law at the prison.

Ajudua, a lawyer, disclosed to Daily Champion at the school's launch inside the prison, that he was motivated into teaching the course because, "most of the inmates would not have committed the crimes for which they were imprisoned if they had known, for instance, the difference between robbery and armed robbery."

Which of course raises the question why he went in for a life of crime, seeing as he clearly knew full well what he was doing.

He said he had always wished to be a lecturer in Law adding that the establishment of the school has offered him the long-awaited opportunity, stressing that imparting knowledge to fellow inmates gives him satisfaction.

Yeah, right. Knowledge of how to make an end-run around the law, no doubt.

Chief Ajudua expressed optimism that if prisoners were properly educated, they would leave the prisons better citizens and ready to contribute to the improvement of the society.

According to him, the essence of imprisonment is not to punish or degrade but to reform and transform the individual.

Heh. In the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, he would say that, wouldn't he? And what better example of the transformative powers of prison could there be than the noble Fred Ajudua himself? I suppose we ought to release him straightaway, seeing as he's all reformed and everything. What do you mean you "refuse to take him at his word?"

"It is in the light of this that extra efforts should be made by the prison authorities and Africa Resources Initiative (ARI) to bring the school to the standard obtainable elsewhere. The laudable effort at educating the inmates is commendable because, education or knowledge is something every individual should not be deprived of," he said.

On the benefits of the ARIEF programme, Ajudua said the inmates were lucky that "in their own time, such a programme is put in place for them. It has not been there before. And the way I am seeing things and if the quality of teaching and teachers in the prison is anything to go by, I bet you these students will beat those who are enjoying their freedom outside. This is so because there is absolute concentration and commitment."

He urged the Federal Government to encourage the founder of the school, Lady Doris Anyadoh so that other prison formations across the country could benefit from the programme aimed at ensuring mental development of prisoners.

He hinted that he might continue with teaching any time he leaves the prison.

"I may continue with teaching after leaving here because I am always fulfilled anytime I succeeded in imparting some knowledge to somebody else. I look forward to being an accomplished law lecturer in future," he stressed.

For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, that "hinted" bit comes off more like a threat than anything else. As you can see, Fred does a good line in plausible-sounding bullsh*t. The guy has all the expected talk of reformation down to a science - don't believe a word of it, however.

Comparing life inside and outside prison, Ajudua who once ruled the social wavelength went philosophical:

"Life inside prison or outside of it does not really matter. What matters is the reason behind the design that one must be at a certain place at a certain time. God may send one to prison in order to save one from death at the hands of hired assassins or armed robbers. By being sent to prison, God may be extending one's life by several years.

"What really matters is the impact one is able to make in the environment one finds oneself. How did you help in the growth and development of those you come in contact with anywhere you find yourself? That makes the difference between life in prison and life out of it," he said.

A lot of nice-sounding fluff, but fluff nonetheless. Still, if there's one thing this article makes clear, it is that the conmen behind these 419 letters are by no means all as dumb people think they are. Ajudua is a crook, but he's no dullard, and neither are most of the other 419 experts I've encountered in Lagos. If those pleading letters from Mrs. Sese-Seko and Mariam Abacha are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, consider that these errors were put in intentionally, to lull the gullible into a comforting sense of superiority over those dark-skinned dummies who can't find a way to get $26 million out of the country without the help of clever white men like you, Joe Blow, sitting in your la-z-boy in Peoria, Tx; though this story doesn't mention it, the reason for Mr. Ajudua's arrest was his defrauding of one greedy Dutch gentleman of the grand sum of $1.7 million dollars.

Howard Dean - Iraqis Worse Off After War

I don't know what to make of this guy. He seems to be addicted to making statements that border on the outlandish. One would think he'd have been a bit more cautious after his last gaffe with "the scream", but no, he has to go and make yet another wierdo statement.

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean (news - web sites) said Sunday that the standard of living for Iraqis is a "whole lot worse" since Saddam Hussein's removal from power in last year's American-led invasion.

"You can say that it's great that Saddam is gone and I'm sure that a lot of Iraqis feel it is great that Saddam is gone," said the former Vermont governor, an unflinching critic of the war against Iraq (news - web sites). "But a lot of them gave their lives. And their living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before."

[............]

"Now I would never defend Saddam Hussein," Dean told the "Women for Dean" rally. "He's a horrible person. I'm delighted he's gone. Would there not have been a better way to get rid of him in cooperation with the United Nations?"

Dean's comments here simply make no sense. If Iraqis were better off under Saddam than they now are without him, what difference would "cooperation with the United Nations" have made? Would fewer people have died in a UN-approved war? Would less infrastructure have been damaged? War is war, nothing short of war would have removed Saddam, and it makes no difference to a man's chances of survival whether the bomb that flattens his home does so with UN approval or otherwise; Howard Dean is simply spewing dishonest partisan rubbish.

Anti-Trade Stupidity at the New York Times: Episode XXXIV

What is it with the ridiculous anti-globalization slant of New York Times reporters? Why aren't these clowns required to take a few econ courses before being allowed to cover economics-related issues? This article by "Tim Weiner" is so full of biased assumptions it makes one's head spin.

TURRIALBA, Costa Rica, Jan. 22 — The game of baseball is a pure product of America. The ball itself is another matter.

Every baseball used in the major leagues is made here, millions of them. They are handcrafted with the precision of a machine by the men and women of Turrialba and the towns in the green hills beyond.

The baseball workers typically make about $2,750 a year. A baseball player in the United States makes, on average, about $2,377,000, the Players Association says.

To which one must respond "so what?" What does one thing have to do with the other? Is Mr. Weiner suggesting that baseball manufacturers are somehow funnelling the rightful wages of their employees to American baseball players?

"It is hard work, and sometimes it messes up your hands, warps your fingers and hurts your shoulders," said Overly Monge, 37. Temperatures inside the factory can rise to 90 to 95 degrees, he said, and when they do, "we suffocate."

He makes $55 a week after 13 years at the baseball factory, barely above Costa Rica's minimum wage. After he pays for the necessities of life, he has about $2 a day left over for himself, his wife and daughter. His salary, adjusted for inflation, is about the same as when he started.

But that's life, he said with a shrug. Hard work, but far better than no work at all. Many of the coffee and sugar cane plantations around here have collapsed, done in by the forces of globalization.

A loaded statement if ever there was one; there were those poor defenseless plantations just going on about their own business, when the evil "forces of globalization" came on the scene and, totally unprovoked, decided to deal them death-blows! It never occurs to Mr. Weiner that those plantations were also producing goods for export, and as such, were once themselves beneficiaries of the wickedness that is globalization.

There is only one other factory in Turrialba, population 30,000. Without baseballs, Mr. Monge said, life here "would be more like Nicaragua," the poor neighbor to the north.

The baseball workers arrive at 6 a.m. and work until 5 p.m. Peak production pressures have pushed the day deep into the night. Each can make four balls an hour, painstakingly hand-sewing 108 perfect stitches along the seams. They are paid by the ball — on average about 30 cents apiece. Rawlings Sporting Goods, which runs the factory, sells the balls for $14.99 at retail in the United States.

"After I make the first two or three balls each week, they have already paid my salary," Mr. Monge said. "Imagine that."

Yes, as we all know, the rest of that $14.99 is pure capitalist profit, and there are no costs of production to worry about in the baseball manufacturing business. Why, making baseballs is a veritable licence to print money, which explains why Microsoft, Sony and Nokia are rushing to get into this high margin business ...

Rawlings was awarded a 54,000-square-foot free-trade zone by Costa Rica. It pays no taxes. It imports duty-free the makings of millions of baseballs — cores from the Muscle Shoals Rubber Company in Batesville, Miss.; yarn from D&T Spinning in Ludlow, Vt.; cowhide from Tennessee Tanning in Tullahoma, Tenn.

Its operations are a harbinger of a pending free-trade accord between Costa Rica and the United States; negotiations on that agreement, expected to bring more such ventures to Costa Rica, are in their final stages.

"Free trade is excellent for the United States, because they consume so much," Mr. Monge, the Rawlings worker, said. "For other nations, it's more complicated."

That's funny, I could have sworn that high-placed individuals in America were saying precisely the opposite. Pace Senator Charles Schumer, free trade is all fine and dandy for other countries, but American workers need protecting from this grievous evil. Can both parties be right? Could it be that no-one benefits from free trade? Then why does anybody freely engage in such a pernicious practice?

Officials at Major League Baseball headquarters in New York referred questions about the plant to Rawlings. The head of baseball's Players Association, Donald Fehr, said workplace injuries at the plant had not been brought to his attention. Dudley W. Mendenhall, a senior vice president of K2, also said he was unaware of any workplace injuries at the plant.

Few baseball players are aware of where the ball comes from, said Charles Kernaghan, the executive director of the National Labor Committee, an international workers' rights group based in New York. "But if the players would actually stand up, it would have enormous consequences" for the baseball workers, including better pay, he said.

Just what we need - uninformed baseball players engaging in feelgood social activism. Left unmentioned is the fact that this activism, if successful, would harm both American consumers and Costa Rican baseball-makers, as the resulting price increases would force down demand for baseballs, for which market demand is far from inelastic. No, better for everybody that the prima donnas of baseball stick to their ball-swatting and girl-chasing.

Some past employees say they had to quit after developing repetitive stress injuries, and they have the medical records to prove it.

"The work deforms your fingers and arms," said Maribel Alezondo Brenes, 36, who worked seven years at the plant — until her doctor told her to stop sewing baseballs.

Soledad Castillo, 46, cannot make a fist, or touch her right palm with her middle finger after nine years at Rawlings. Disputing Mr. West's contention that workers are not injured by their labor, she said, "If he ever worked a day sewing, he'd know it's hard."

I genuinely feel for Misses Brenes and Castillo, but the last thing their country needs at this point is the introduction of American-style personal-injury litigation guaranteed to drive away all demand for labor, even it is of the injurious kind. Better grueling work of this sort than leisurely starvation, no? If Rawlings decides to pack up and leave, it isn't as if there's much else to do in town, as the story admits.

Despite their injuries, the two women say they liked the camaraderie and the atmosphere at the Rawlings plant. "I can't complain about the work environment," Ms. Alezondo said. "The ventilation improved over the years," even if the pay did not. There was time to make small talk and good friends.

Still, when she talks about the difference in wages between baseball workers and baseball players, it takes her breath away.

"We sacrifice a lot so they can play," she said. "It's an injustice that we kill ourselves to make these balls perfect, and with one home run, they're gone."

Ah, we see envy, that most human of emotions, at work. There's no way of breaking this gently to you, Ms. Alezondo, but no, you're wrong, this isn't an "injustice", or at least not one that is in any way the fault of your employer. The ugly truth is that anyone can make a baseball, while very, very few people can hit one like Barry Bonds. That's why you get paid what you do, and he gets the sums he does. Rather than blame "globalization", your employer or players like Bonds for this, why not ask your government why it never invested enough in raising your human capital to the point where you could command higher wages on the market, even if not baseball star levels? Hell, even with all my education, I don't command a Barry Bonds salary, but you won't see me moaning about the "injustice" of it all!

Really, though, it isn't so much this woman I'm annoyed at, but "journalists" like Tim Weiner, who seize on every story as an opportunity to paint "globalization" as an evil spectre haunting the globe for fresh victims. This sort of article isn't "journalism", but crude propagandizing of the sort more befitting of a Marxist rag like Workers World. One would think Weiner and others of his ilk were actively conspiring to keep these people poor, in a desire to foment their long-desired anti-capitalist revolution, if one didn't know better; your average "anti globalization" type is much too stupid to be attributed that sort of intellectual subtlety.

Heckscher-Ohlin Theory and Attitudes Towards Globalization

Now here's an interesting paper:

Abstract: The aim of the Paper is to see whether individuals’ attitudes towards globalization are consistent with the predictions of Heckscher-Ohlin theory. The theory predicts that the impact of being skilled or unskilled on attitudes towards trade and immigration should depend on a country’s skill endowments, with the skilled being less anti-trade and anti-immigration in more skill-abundant countries (here taken to be richer countries) than in more unskilled-labour-abundant countries (here taken to be poorer countries). These predictions are confirmed, using survey data for 24 countries. The high-skilled are pro-globalization in rich countries; while in some of the very poorest countries in the sample being high-skilled has a negative (if statistically insignificant) impact on pro-globalization sentiment. More generally, an interaction term between skills and GDP per capita has a negative impact in regressions, explaining anti-globalization sentiment. Furthermore, individuals view protectionism and anti-immigrant policies as complements rather than as substitutes, as they would do in a simple Heckscher-Ohlin world.

Japan as Anything but 'Number One'

It irritates me to no end that people continue to peddle Japan as an example of successful protectionism in practice. To counter this erroneous notion, I can think of no better antidote than to read Jon Woronoff's prescient 1991 book, "Japan as Anything but Number One". Here is a guy who foresaw the stagnation that would become Japan's lot right up till the present time, even as charlatans like Ezra Vogel and fearmongers like Michael Crichton were still playing up the notion of a monolithic, hyper-efficient, infallible "Japan, Inc." Here's hoping that this book awakens a few souls from their dogmatic slumbers.

Mugable Ailing?

Seems Comrade Bob's having a spot of bother:

Robert Mugabe was airlifted to South Africa for emergency medical treatment yesterday after collapsing at his state residence in Harare, a member of his security staff said last night.

The 79-year-old dictator was flown by military aircraft to Johannesburg after a violent vomiting fit. He was accompanied on the flight by his wife Grace, personal doctors and a string of aides.

Robert Mugabe: no details of illness yet

His collapse followed a similar bout of illness three months ago, for which he was also treated in South Africa. Last night, road blocks were set up around Harare, manned by riot police and soldiers to dispel any mass protests. Reinforcements from police, army and militia outside the capital were drafted into Harare to shore up the regime.

"We were ordered not to give any details of the president's illness in case it brought people out on to the streets," a senior member of the 'Green Bombers', the notorious youth brigade created by Mr Mugabe, told The Telegraph. Mr Mugabe is understood to have vomited repeatedly during Friday night then collapsed as he attempted to get out of bed yesterday.

Needless to say, I won't be wishing him a speedy recovery. The best thing that could happen for the people of Zimbabwe would be for Mugabe to hurry on his way to his maker.

A Story Too Good to Check?

This has all the hallmarks of a hoax, as far as I'm concerned, but hey, why let scientific plausibility get in the way of an entertaining piece of corporation-bashing?

LAST February, Morgan Spurlock decided to become a gastronomical guinea pig.

His mission: To eat three meals a day for 30 days at McDonald's and document the impact on his health.

Scores of cheeseburgers, hundreds of fries and dozens of chocolate shakes later, the formerly strapping 6-foot-2 New Yorker - who started out at a healthy 185 pounds - had packed on 25 pounds.

But his supersized shape was the least of his problems.

Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock's entire body deteriorated.

"It was really crazy - my body basically fell apart over the course of 30 days," Spurlock told The Post.

His liver became toxic, his cholesterol shot up from a low 165 to 230, his libido flagged and he suffered headaches and depression.

I don't dispute the message he's trying to get across - that making McDonalds happy meals a staple of one's diet is a bad idea - but I just don't believe that this guy is being completely honest. He claims to have gained 25 pounds in 30 days, or about 0.83 pounds/day; assuming that 1 pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, he would have had to be consuming at least that much extra throughout the time period in question, or about 6,000 calories/day for a man of his weight and a moderate level of activity - and this on the extremely dubious assumption that his digestive tract would have extracted every last bit of nutrition from his food intake. I'm extremely doubtful that most of us can synthesize fat quite that rapidly - assuming he isn't lying, most of his weight gain would have come from water retention. As for the liver toxicity claims, I say bullsh*t - who is to say this guy wasn't ingesting other, less orthodox, substances during the period in question?

Lenin Dead From Massive 'Stroke of the People!'

Glorious Lack of Oxygen Distributed Equally Through Brain! Brain Parts Shut Down like Proletarian Workers Laying Down Tools to Paralyze Bourgeois Factory Owner! Cerebral Hemorrhage of Glorious Red Blood Declared 'Heroic Victory for the Communist Vanguard'!

Yup, in case you had any doubt about the matter, the Onion has struck again. Look closely at the whole image, as there are some seriously funny gems scattered about on that page - "Negro Sharecroppers Informed of Nation's Prosperity!"

Atom Feed Enabled!

Blogger has finally enabled Atom syndication; my feed is available at this link.

Now, if we can just get more newsreaders to actually support the new standard ...

What's Wrong With John Kerry?

It appears that not everyone shares my appreciation of John Kerry. Frank McGahon finds him "creepy", and notes that Mickey Kaus is of a similar opinion.

I don't see what there is about Kerry to be creeped out by, and if there's one thing I know about Mickey Kaus, it is that he often likes to be contrary for the sheer sake of it. Kerry's hardly perfect, but at the end of the day, politics is about picking the least bad option from a range of unappealing choices; still, I'd be interested in hearing what gripes people have about him. He's no fire-breathing Howard Dean type, but apart from that, what is there to make him so unappealing?

Economist - The Jews of Uganda

Now here's a curious story:

STROLL through the foothills of Mount Wanale in central Uganda, and you may be surprised to meet children greeting you with a cheery “Shalom.” The village of Nabugoya is home to one of the world's least-known Jewish communities, replete with its own brick synagogue, marked in chalk with the Star of David.

Unlike the 18,000-odd remaining Ethiopian Jews, whom Israel recently promised to airlift to Tel Aviv, the Abayudaya of Uganda do not claim a lineage dating back to King David. They converted to Judaism less than a century ago. “It began in 1919,” explains Rabbi Gershom Sizomu. A local chief, Semei Kakungule, had—so he says—been promised a kingdom by the British, but they broke their promise, so he took his revenge on British missionaries by rejecting the New Testament for the Old.

At first, Mr Kakungule was forced to improvise, but in 1926 he obtained a Bible in Hebrew and English from two Jewish traders. For the next 35 years, his people studied the scriptures in Hebrew and in complete isolation, before being discovered by Israel's first ambassador to east Africa. By 1961, the Abayudaya had 3,000 members and 30 synagogues.

Then, in 1972, the Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin banned Judaism, after a row with his Israeli arms suppliers. The Abayudaya's synagogues were filled with goats and their prayer books burned. All but 300 of them left the faith. Mr Sizomu, a third-generation Jew, and schooled at a rabbinical college in New York, is trying to rebuild the community. It now has six synagogues and 600 members.

Israel has shown no interest in Mr Sizomu's efforts, but he is not too disappointed. “When I read about the violence in Israel, it puts me off,” he says, lounging under a banana-tree on a sunny Sabbath.

It looks like the old (Christian-imposed) aversion to proselytizing still holds for many Jews. Given the frequency with which prominent figures in the Jewish world lament the demographic trends threatening the existence of their religion, one would think they'd welcome developments like this one, even if the origins of this particular community are a bit ... strange. To do otherwise is to buy into the pernicious belief that Judaism is nothing more than an ethnicity masquerading as a religion.

The Democratic Primaries Get Interesting

John Kerry now seems to have a 10-point lead in New Hampshire, which is frankly a good thing in my view. I would rather that Joe Lieberman have been the Democratic candidate, but since that isn't going to happen, better John Kerry than Howard Dean or John Edwards.

The only unknown quantity is Wesley Clark; the guy has no political track record to look at, and although he's a general, it is clear that he was far from universally loved and admired by those who served with him in the army. Domestic policy clearly takes a back-seat to foreign affairs in Clark's consciousness, and while this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it means that one has little idea just what he proposes to do about healthcare, education and all the other day-to-day concerns that can't be subsumed under the War on Terrorism mantle.

As a small "L" libertarian, I'd rather have a candidate who combined social liberalism with fiscally conservative policies, but I realize that it simply isn't going to happen anytime soon. My choice then comes down to picking between a candidate who is more liberal than I'd prefer on things like taxation, but who at least won't be bashing me over the head with his religiousity, or trying to legislate sexual morality, and, on the other hand, a president whose sole nod to libertarian concerns - tax cuts - has been more than compensated for by his reckless spending and willingness to pander to the religious right. Frankly, the latter bothers me more than the former at the present time.

I'd feared that the Democrats were bent on depriving those of us who don't comfortably fit into either the "liberal" or "conservative" slots a true choice in the 2004 elections, by nominating Howard Dean, a candidate so extreme in his rhetoric that even a second Bush term, with all the attendant religiosity, "pro marriage" paternalism, devil-may-care spending and "Patriot Act" heavyhandedness, would seem the only option open to us. It's looking like my fears were overdone, which is bad news for shrill opinionators like Paul Krugman, but good news for American democracy as a whole. Bush is actually going to have to put some real effort into get himself re-elected.

Hitler's Great Blunder

A comment made in response to my earlier post about the upcoming D-Day ceremony led me to thinking about Hitler's decision on to declare war on America, on December 11, 1941. That surely has to rank as one of the greatest blunders in all of history, so needless was it, and so certainly did it seal the demise of the Third Reich. To be sure, America and Germany were already in a barely concealed state of hostilities at that point, as Ribbentrop missive declaring war makes clear enough (though, as with anything said by Hitler for public consumption, the speech contains at least as many falsehoods as true statements) ; nevertheless, a rational person, faced with an awareness of America's industrial might, would have judged it better to remain in a state of low-level hostility than to provoke an America in which isolationist sentiment still prevailed to enter whole-heartedly into the fray. Hitler's decision cannot be rationalized away as being a result of his ignorance, for he was well aware, having been thoroughly briefed by Fritz Todt, of America's vast industrial potential. In Todt's own words, "given the arms and industrial supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon powers, we can no longer militarily win this war."

And yet Hitler went ahead and declared war on America anyway, in fulfillment of a pact with an "ally" (Japan) that felt itself under no obligation to reciprocate the gesture by declaring war on Hitler's primary opponent, the Soviet Union. For the Japanese, Hitler's declaration of war was a godsend - without it, Imperial Japan would certainly have perished long before it actually did - but what did Hitler expect his own side to get out of it? Why did a man who took pride in his having broken every pact he'd signed decide to keep this one in particular? The Soviet Union was far from defeated at that point, as his generals had made abundantly clear to him, and if he had reason to doubt his generals, any doubts about Soviet military reserves ought to have been dispelled by the Red Army counter-attack that began on December 6, 1941. Britain too remained both hostile and undefeated, and had even begun to take the fight right into the German heimat by carrying out bombing raids on industrial targets, sometimes in daylight. All things considered, there is simply no way one can explain Hitler's decision other than as an act of madness, motivated by his intemperate hatred for a nation of "mongrels", too weakened by admixture with Jews and blacks to be worth worrying about, rather than by the sort of cold calculation that is supposed to be the lot of the statesman.

Whatever Hitler's reasons (or lack thereof) for declaring war on America, I must say that I'm glad that he did. It is fashionable these days to declare that the Soviet Union would have won the war even without American intervention, a reaction that is to a great extent understandable, given the irritating American tendency to ignore the vital contributions of other nations to the war effort, not least the Soviet Union, Britain, Canada and Poland; but if it is natural that the self-aggrandizing tendencies exhibited in films like "Saving Private Ryan" and "U-571" tend to provoke an equally emphatic downplaying of America's significance in defeating the Third Reich, that does not make this reaction any more accurate than the attitude that provokes it.

It is true that Britain had begun harrassing Nazi Germany with its bomb raids, but these were little more than annoying pinpricks at the time - not until America entered the war did their scale escalate to the level that would see entire cities riduced to rubble, and the Luftwaffe devoting more resources to defending the homefront than to attacking the Red Army. On the Soviet side, most industrial capacity had been lost to the invaders, while the Red Air Force had been almost completely annihilated in the first days of Operation Barbarossa, losing more than 4,000 aircraft in the first week of battle; losses on such a scale would have been almost impossible for the Soviets to make up had they been forced to rely only on what help they could get from the British. The Red Army's relentless forward drive from late 1943 to the close of the war would simply have been inconceivable without the prodigious quantity of materiel supplied under the Lend-Lease program, as this link makes clear: "From March 1941 until October 1945, the United States provided the Russians with 15,000 aircraft, 7,000 tanks, 350,000 tons of explosives, 51,000 jeeps, 375,000 trucks, 2,000 locomotives, 11,000 rail wagons, 3 million tons of gasoline, and 15 million pairs of boots." These figures completely exclude the substantial American contribution to the Soviet Union's food supply during the period in question.

In fact, it is safe to say that America's primary contribution to the war in Europe came not from its troops, whose valiant deeds are not to be denigrated, but from its willingness to act as manufacturer in chief, on terms that were extremely generous, to the Soviet Union, a country that had not long before been regarded as a mortal adversary (as it again would be within months of the war's end). Without America's participation in the war, there is no good reason to think that Hitler would not have defeated the Soviet Union outright, even if at a cost far higher than he had initially anticipated. There are those who may wonder why this was an outcome to be regretted any more than that which came about with the spread of communism throughout Eastern Europe and much of East Asia, but I am not one such person. Going by the sorts of things outlined in the Generalplan Ost (also see here and, for an English-language outline, here), the bodycount under the New Order would have made Stalin look like a rank amateur; apart from the annihilation of every single one of the 11 million Jews on the European continent, more than 50 million Slavs would have been "deported" to Western Siberia (with the intention in mind clearly being that they should perish there), to make room for the Herrenvolk, while yet millions more would have been worked and starved to death on the spot for the sake of their new masters. As bad as Stalin was - and he was very, very bad indeed - Hitler would have been far worse had he been given the chance. Some mistakes do turn out for the better, and Hitler's was one of them.

Swords into Ploughshares?

This Guardian article profiles Major General Mahmud Durrani of the Pakistani army, who has supposedly been working to get his country and India talking about a peaceful resolution of issues that are outstanding between, not the least important of which is Kashmir.

The major general's analysis is that the rivalry between the two countries can be geographically located in Kashmir, the Muslim majority state that has been cleaved into two by India and Pakistan. But his insight is that it is the terrain and relief of people¹s minds in both the countries that needs to be changed if peace is to come about.

"Look, I was a soldier, and in the Pakistani army there was a saying that the only good Indian is a dead one. But I have met Indians and I know that all the adjectives that we used about them, they used about us. Yet none ­ that we were devious, sly, dishonest ­ appear to be true."

Maj Gen Durrani's road map to peace, called The Cost of Conflict and the Benefits of Peace, was published just after the Kargil war in 2000 when both countries fought in the world's highest battlefield. It accurately foretold of the detrimental effects of creating a cold war mentality in south Asia. Large defence budgets gobble up money needed for development ­ desperately needed in both countries where tens of millions of people go hungry and even more cannot read or write. The antagonism of both nations has meant that the advantages of regional trade have never materialised ­ as both sides in the past have imposed punitive tariffs on each other.

Official trade between two nations that share a common culture, history and a mutually intelligible language, is paltry. Officially, bilateral trade between India and Pakistan was $200m (£109m) last year, but many analysts put the real figure at around $2bn if India-Pakistan trade routed through third countries is counted. If the barriers come down, the figure could easily top $5bn in a few years, bringing much-needed jobs to both countries.

"We would welcome Indian investment," says Hafeez Shaikh, Pakistan's privatisation minister, a former World Bank economist. "We hope to negotiate all the duties and restrictions between India and Pakistan by 2006."

There's more than a little fluff in this article: one hardly needs to be a strategic genius to understand that Kashmir constitutes the largest bone of contention between India and Pakistan, while the understanding that development efforts in both countries (particularly in Pakistan) were being stymied by outsized defence expenditures dates back long before General Durrani's book came out. Still, the fact that a Pakistani general is willing to go on record as an advocate of peace in the subcontinent is a noteworthy development.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the upcoming meeting between the Kashmir separatists and the Indian government (in the person of L.K. Advani.) Still, I can't see that all that much can be expected from all these talks. The brutal reality is that Pakistan needs peace a lot more than India does - the military burden is heavier for the Pakistanis than it is for the Indians, and the benefits of restored trade links would be much greater proportionally for the Pakistanis than it would be for an India that is already growing quite nicely; then there is the negative fallout from the ongoing revelations about Pakistan's nuclear proliferation activities to consider. India holds all the cards, and the sort of surrender that Musharraf's government would need to undertake for the sake of peace would be too much for him to go along with and stay alive - not that his days aren't already numbered as they are. In any case, even if Musharraf were willing to play the martyr for peace, it is almost a certainty that any new Pakistani government would simply break off talks and resume the Kashmiri "jihad."

All Hail Wikipedia

It's amazing the things one can find on Wikipedia; a bit of browsing turns up well-written entries for algebraic varieties, Noetherian rings, class field theory, even Iwasawa theory. In combination with PlanetMath and Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics (aka MathWorld), Wikipedia provides a surprisingly comprehensive reference for the mathematicians who finds it inconvenient or impossible to consult an appropriate Springer yellow book.

One would have expected the Wikipedia project to have quickly deteriorated into a morass of gibberish and misinformation, yet this evidently has not been the case. Is it just a matter of time before the ignorant hordes run the place over, as they are currently attempting to do with comment spamming of Movable Type blogs? Or is there some deeper principle at work which will preserve the quality of the entries even as increasing popularity brings Wikipedia to the attention of ever greater numbers of people? Reading this essay found by Razib titled "Why Wiki Works", I fail to see what will stop determined spammers from wreaking havoc once they start thinking it worth their while to subvert the project to their own selfish goals. Better enjoy it while it lasts, I suppose.

Blog Maintenance

I've decided to do a bit of housecleaning, by removing as many hardwired links to blogs as I can get away with and placing them on the Blogrolling list instead, as that way it'll be obvious when any of the blogs have had a recent update. I'll be moving the non-blog links in the opposite direction in the next day or two.

Ontologies

Edward Hugh has moved, forsaking Blogger for a much nicer setup, so it's time to do some link updating. He also has a new post up on the Semantic Web, and the importance of metadata. The vision of the Semantic Web is an alluring one, and it constitutes a major incentive for the adoption of XML, as well as the move away from HTML towards standards-compliant XHTML (which is really an XML-language that happens to look a lot like crufty old HTML).

Given my own work in dealing with the problem of knowledge representation, there's a great deal I'd like to say about all of this, but as I don't have the energy to do so right now, I'll just say that anybody interested in learning about the problems faced by the creators of ontologies, or even why ontologies are important, would do well to read Borges' Analytical Language of John Wilkins (truth be told, Borges has a great deal to say about the problems of knowledge representation and information in general).

Goodbye Gephardt

And I have to say, good riddance. His poor showing, and Howard Dean's weak finish, seem to signal a Democratic Party shift against the sort of shrill, ultra-negative politics advocated by the likes of Paul Krugman. Perhaps we'll now have a real political debate about the big issues, rather than "Dr. No" style grandstanding.

ES MOINES, Iowa Jan. 19 — Rep. Dick Gephardt signaled his withdrawal from the Democratic presidential race Monday night after a devastating fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

"My campaign to fight for working people may be ending tonight, but our fight will never end," Gephardt said in a post-caucus speech that sounded like a political farewell.

The Missouri lawmaker offered his congratulations to his presidential rivals, and in a campaign concession, said one of them would wind up with the party's nomination to challenge President Bush this fall.

He pledged he would support that person "in any way I can," but did not indicate whether he would endorse anyone while the nominating campaign proceeds.

Nor did Gephardt say whether he intends to serve out his current term in Congress, his 14th and last.

The conventional thing to do at a moment like this one is to emphasize the good things about a politician's career while playing down all his failings, but I'm going to buck that convention and say that I'm glad Richard Gephardt's career is over. His political legacy has mostly been a negative one, and one can only hope (probably in vain) that the protectionist and anti-market forces in the Democratic Party will be weakened by his departure. There've been far worse politicians in recent times (Jesse Helms and Strum Thurmond spring to mind), but as Democrats go, Gephardt was pretty bad. Don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya, Dick.

Attack of the Prudes

Is the Irish government so utterly bereft of new ideas for its presidency that it should float as silly a scheme as this one? And isn't it surprising that the proposed legislation should have been spurred by a report from the ultimate nanny-state?

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Ireland, current president of the European Union, said Monday it would propose a ban on paying for sex throughout the EU but held out little hope of agreement among the 15-nation bloc.

"(It) has not been discussed in any meaningful way at European level yet, but certainly it is something which will have to be considered during the Irish presidency," Willie O'Dea, minister of state at the Irish Department of Justice, told reporters.

O'Dea was responding to questions from reporters about a report on the multibillion dollar sex industry drawn up by Swedish European Parliament member Marianne Eriksson, which suggested a ban on paying for sex. Sweden is the only EU state where it is illegal to pay for sex.

"I would envisage that it is one of those controversial proposals where it will be difficult to find common ground, but I certainly think it should be put up for discussion," O'Dea said.

[............]

"We are faced with a very wealthy and powerful industry, one of the richest in the world, which is quoted on several stock exchanges," Eriksson said.

Making Germans accountable
She recommended that the EU should ban companies such as German sex shop chain Beate Uhse Ag and Sweden's Private Media Group Inc., from being listed.

Reacting to the report, a spokeswoman for Private Media Group said being listed meant it was more accountable and regulators had greater control of the company.

"Banning or trying to build barriers won't necessarily enable a greater control over the industry. There is an enhanced risk of pushing it underground," said spokeswoman Alex Moore.

Wonderful. Europe-wide legislation to block voluntary transactions between willing adults, just because their activities don't accord with the proprieties of a few politicians? The sheer cheek of the proposal beggars the mind. It simply doesn't cross the minds of certain people that some things just aren't their business, whether they approve of them or not. Really, how difficult is the concept to grasp? As for the defense put forward by the Private Media Group representative - it just goes to show how compliant so many Europeans have become that they should think of defending their freedoms by phrasing things in terms of being under more regulatory control, rather than insisting on their rights to trade wherever and with whomever they please.

It will be interesting see just how far this proposal gets - let's just hope that the Dutch and the Germans don't feel themselves obliged to make the Irish presidency "successful" by selling their citizens' freedoms down the river. The last thing Europe needs is the imposition of Swedish-style prudery across the entire continent.

A Strange Enthusiasm

Brad DeLong seems to think that all of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary "are of the quality to be a very good president" - a stance towards which I find myself shaking my head in puzzlement. How can DeLong, as a committed free-trader, and one who played a personal role in the administration that gave us NAFTA, give his blessings to the likes of Howard Dean, who would cripple the competitiveness of Third World countries by imposing crippling labor and environmental standards on them? In his own words "We ought not to be in the business of having free and open borders with countries that don't have the same environmental, labor and human rights standards." How can Brad DeLong endorse the candidacy of John Edwards, who supported the very same steel tariffs DeLong castigated Bush for, who voted against the African Growth and Opportunity Act, and who even the Daily Kos regards as an arch-protectionist? How can Brad DeLong in good conscience endorse the candidacy of a knuckle-dragging anti-free-trader like Dick Gephardt, who agitates for an international minimum wage, who rejected NAFTA, who voted against a trade agreement with Chile, and who has always been staunchly opposed to granting China MFN status?

Bush has a terrible record on free-trade issues, and his fiscal profligacy threatens to mire future generations of America in debt, but I fail to see how the likes of John Edwards, Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt would in any way be improvements on him; where Bush at least pretends to virtue on trade, these Democratic candidates wear their antagonism to unfettered free-trade with pride, as if it were a medal of honor. Opposition to Bush's remaining in office I can certainly understand, but actual enthusiasm for these three individuals? As far as I'm concerned, there are only two Democrats in the race whose positions on trade issues are in any way supportable - Joe Lieberman and John Kerry. The rest are enemies of the American consumer and the Third World poor at worst, and shameless panderers to the extreme left at best.

SAT-3/WASC - Nigeria's Well-Kept Secret

Here's an IEEE article from a few months back discussing the fact that Nigerians are still starving for high bandwidth, low latency connections to the rest of the world, even though the SAT-3 undersea fiber-optic cable, with 120Gbps capacity, has long been completed.

20 June 2003, Lagos, Nigeria–It lies 7 meters beneath the sand, protected by four concrete walls, painted sky blue but topped with concertina wire, and surrounded by snack shacks and concession stands. It’s the sealed access point to the so-called SAT-3 sub-sea communications cable, now the country’s major broadband link to the outside world. The terminus is covered by a concrete slab, strewn with garbage and an omolangidi female idol carved out of driftwood. But most Nigerians have no inkling of the cable’s existence–even those who make their living around the landfall site, on this beach on Victoria Island, one of four islands that make up the sprawling city of Lagos, with some 13 million inhabitants.

Built and laid at a cost of US $640 million, the submarine SAT-3 fiber-optic cable is 14 350 km long and links 9 African countries. It connects to the wider world just outside of Cape Town, South Africa, via a cable that terminates in Cochin, India, and Penang, Malaysia. SAT-3 has a capacity of 120 Gb/s, enough to carry 5.8 million phone calls simultaneously, and the link to Nigeria was established here on Victoria Island a year ago. Yet after a year’s availability, it has just one confirmed customer, Shell Oil, with another oil company, Chevron, showing some interest.

[............]

In a story published earlier this week in Nigeria’s largest-circulation newspaper, The Vanguard, communications columnist Reuben Muoka claims that recently re-inaugurated Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo is considering wresting control of the cable from NITEL and handing it over to Globacom, the second national carrier. (Muoka is a stakeholder in MTS, a small private telephone company here.)

[............]

Confronting its critics, NITEL talks a good game. U. I. Nwokocha, director of transmission for the NITEL International Submarine Cable Gateway, speaking with IEEE Spectrum, said plans call for NITEL to "launch Nigeria into ISDN [integrated-services digital network]" for applications like telemedicine and inter-univerisity communications. Nwokocha said a public awareness campaign is planned for the SAT-3, which he said no one here knows about–except, apparently, all those Nigerians who are frustrated by their inability to get on it.

Yet Chife and Muoka are scarcely the only ones skeptical about whether NITEL ever will be able to truly deliver. Titi Omo-Ettu, a telecommunications consultant, a director of the IT training center Executive Cyberschuul, and a former NITEL engineer, feels that NITEL has poorly serviced all 130 million Nigerians. He thinks that as a government entity, it doesn’t have the business and marketing acumen to provide mass access to the SAT-3.

Omo-Ettu doesn’t like the idea of turning SAT-3 over to Globalcom, because this would just put the cable into the hands of a different ill-regulated national monopoly. Vanguard columnist Muoka, agreeing, has written that "no private operator should be given the undue benefit that also conveys ownership in the shape of a monopoly, as is being proposed to your [Obasanjo’s] exalted office. It would amount to transparency in reverse if Mr. President uses his office to sign off a national asset into private pockets."

So, Muoka and Omo-Ettu do not think that unbridled privatization is the answer. Omu-Ettu argues, rather, that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) needs to demand more from the companies it licenses.

For instance, none of the cellular networks are interconnected, meaning that many business people carry two and even three mobile phones that operate on MTN, Econet, and NITEL. A more active NCC should encourage, if not enforce, interconnectivity, says Omo-Ettu.(emphases added)

The telecommunications business, in which increasing returns are ubiquitous, is one industry in which a dogmatic libertarianism simply will not do. Some measure of regulation is required, but the problem is getting the balance right, as governments are far more likely to impose too many regulations than too few. Miss Omo-Ettu is right in criticizing any policy that would privatize infrastructure while leaving the NITEL monopoly's current structure intact, but I wouldn't take quite the same route as the one she endorses. I think NITEL ought to be privatized, but where access to the SAT-3 cable is concerned, there ought to be a separation of infrastructure maintenance from access provision. Barring the maintenance firm from providing any retail voice or data services would remove the perverse incentive currently in place to keep bandwidth artificially scarce and expensive, in order to protect monopoly profits on international voice calls.

As for the mobile phone networks, well ... there it gets a bit more difficult. My initial inclination would be to let them do as they please, and allow the market to push them in the right direction; forcing them to interconnect will have a dampening effect on the will to construct network infrastructure, as part of the allure of building an extensive network is the prospect of enjoying monopolistic profits if one is able to outlast the competition. It just isn't clear to me that the gains from mandating interconnection would outweigh the losses in terms of foregone network construction. I am open to alternative approaches, however.

Playing Politics With D-Day

Glad to see that even the New York Times feels that there's something offensive about Chirac's decision to invite Schröder to the D-Day celebrations. A more blatant display of ingratitude could hardly be imagined.

his June, for the first time, a German chancellor will attend ceremonies in Normandy marking the anniversary of D-Day. Gerhard Schröder has declared himself "very pleased" at the invitation he received from President Jacques Chirac of France to join other leaders for the 60th anniversary of the Allied landings. On the face of it, this appears to be a welcome signal that Europe has put its last great war behind it, and that the Germans are now viewed as an integral part of the European family. Ten years ago, Helmut Kohl, then chancellor of Germany, was frustrated in his efforts to secure just such an invitation.

Still, there's something not quite right with this picture. It's not that the Germans need to be ceaselessly reminded of their Nazi past. Few nations in history have so sincerely and deeply looked into the evils of their past and worked as hard to come to terms with them. Germany is, and deserves to be, a full and equal partner in everything Europe does, without being made to feel that it bears a permanent taint. The trouble is that Mr. Chirac's invitation smacks more of politics than reconciliation. France and Germany have found common cause on a number of issues of late, ranging from the invasion of Iraq to the future of the European Union, and Mr. Chirac was apparently anxious to parade this alliance.

The ceremonies in Normandy are meant to honor the Americans, British and Canadians who stormed the beaches on June 6, 1944, dying by the thousands to liberate France and the rest of Europe from a German yoke. No one who has visited the Allied cemeteries in Normandy, row after row of graves, can fail to be moved by this sacrifice. This is therefore not the place for France and Germany to play a political duet, any more than the anniversary of the terror attacks of Sept. 11 is an event for the Republican Party to co-opt for its political convention.

Apart from the obvious fact that playing politics with such anniversaries is an insult to their heroes and victims, doing so is counterproductive. There are plenty of venues where Mr. Chirac could demonstrate, and has demonstrated, his rapport with Mr. Schröder. At the D-Day commemorations, the German chancellor will only prompt the sort of commentaries and reactions so memorably spoofed in the "Fawlty Towers" television show: "Just don't mention the war!" However admirable Germany's soul searching, World War II still hangs heavily over all European activities. It was painfully obvious in the outcry when Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, referred to a German heckler as a concentration-camp guard, and when Poland reacted angrily to Germany's objections to the size of Poland's vote in the E.U.

The Fawlty Towers reference is particularly on the mark. Chirac must be thoroughly lacking in both shame and historical awareness to parade his new alliance with the three-time (1870, 1914, 1940) invaders of his nation in front of the leaders of the very nations that twice saved the French from German subjugation.

Google-Japan Weirdness

Why does doing a search for 白人 ("hakujin") return porn sites for the first 30 results? Either the term has come to carry a much lewder connotation than I remember it having, or Google's quality-control on its' Japanese-language portal is a lot lower than with the European-language sites. There's a business opportunity in there for the right person ... 今はお金持ちになりたい人の時。

The Stono Rebellion

A comment made in response to my earlier post about the Yoruba language led me to thinking about the Stono Rebellion of 1739, as well as the numerous other slave revolts that followed on its' heels. One consequence of this particular revolt was the imposition of a ban on the ownership by Africans of "talking drums", which may not qualify as the worst thing in the world that could have happened; the Southern reaction to succeeding rebellions was to have far-reaching effects with which we are still living today.

Between 1800 and 1831, African Americans instigated several ambitious rebellions in the American South. Among these were Gabriel's Revolt, which began north of Richmond, Virginia, on August 30, 1800, and Vesey's Rebellion, an 1822 conspiracy to incite as many 9000 plantation and urban slaves in the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina. Nat Turner's Rebellion, the most effectual slave revolt, erupted in Southampton County, Virginia on the night of August 21, 1831. Nat Turner and his followers killed nearly sixty white people as they moved toward an armory at Jerusalem, Virginia. Halted mere miles from their goal, the approximately seventy-five insurgents were soon killed or captured by the militia. Turner's November execution failed to assuage fears of continued insurrection. Across the South, renewed legislative efforts to forbid education and greatly restrict movement and assembly further constrained the lives of enslaved people (emphasis added)

That final sentence ought to be kept in mind when people go on about African-Americans' (supposedly innate) disinclination for academic study. When you spend hundreds of years discouraging self-improvement* and ambition in a down-trodden people, when you forbid them to learn reading and writing lest they become capable of rebellion, the last thing you ought to do is complain once your efforts have attained a measure of success. The same thing can be said for illegitimacy amongst African-Americans; it should come as no surprise to any thinking person that the family as an institution should lack the solidity one might wish it did, given the ease and the frequency with which slave families were torn apart.

Breezy speculation about innate black inferiority is the easiest thing in the world to do, and those who engage in it deceive themselves if they imagine they are somehow fearless pioneers struggling against a suffocating tide of Political Correctness™, as theirs is in truth an old and well-furrowed path. There is nothing easier in the world than for those children of privilege who have known nothing of either the horrors of slavery or the humiliations of Jim Crow to simply say "but racism is dead! That these people aren't flourishing is proof that they just don't have what it takes!" Bad habits acquired through long practice can take a long time to cast aside, and it is naïve in the extreme to expect the less attractive aspects of African-American culture to simply disappear after a single generation of true equality. Neither the Irish nor the Italians were instant successes on their arrival to America's shores, and they at least had the option of either returning home (as a surprisingly large percentage of immigrants ended up doing) or leaving behind their old names and cultures in an attempt to pass into the mainstream - neither option of which is available to most African-Americans.

*Some specific instances of legislation forbidding the teaching of reading and writing African-Americans of which I am aware include the Missouri Literacy Law of 1819 and the Georgia Literacy Laws of 1829 and 1833.

The Axiom of Choice and Assumptions in Applied Mathematics

Via Jacques Distler, I came across this extremely informative discussion of the Axiom of Choice by Eric Schechter. The Axiom of Choice (or AoC, as I'll call it from here on) is justly notorious for being easy to state, seemingly obviously true, and yet leading to some very strange conclusions:

Let C be a collection of nonempty sets. Then we can choose a member from each set in that collection. In other words, there exists a function f defined on C with the property that, for each set S in the collection, f(S) is a member of S.

Straightforward enough, right? And there are even more seemingly obvious formulations, such as the following one:

Given any two sets, one set has cardinality less than or equal to that of the other set -- i.e., one set is in one-to-one correspondence with some subset of the other.

Or try the following equivalent statement:

Every vector space has a basis.

Now, what could seem more obvious than that? The problem is that buying into any of these equivalent formulations of the AoC means buying into results like the Banach-Tarski Decomposition Theorem, which basically says that it is possible to take a solid ball, cut it up into no more than five pieces, and then re-arrange these pieces to obtain two balls of the same size as the original! Either the old saying about being able to get something for nothing is false, and the conservation laws of physics do not hold, or something is very wrong in our mathematical assumptions.

The traditional reaction most mathematicians have had to the Banach-Tarski "Paradox" has been to either regard it as grounds to reject the AoC outright, or, finding it too useful to do without, to argue that theirs is simply a formalist enterprise, mere symbol manipulation without any consideration for the meanings of the symbols being studied; in fact, whatever they might say to the contrary, few mathematicians either believe or act like they believe in formalism while going about their business - as the old saying goes, "platonism on weekdays, formalism on weekends."

The unvarnished truth is that the AoC is simply too obviously true, and too fruitful to mathematics, for most mathematicians to spend serious time doubting its veracity, and a little consideration shows that the Banach-Tarski "Paradox" (quote-unquote) actually gives us no reason to do so; for there is another assumption on which Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski's strange theorem relies, an assumption of a much more dubious nature where the world about us is concerned - that there exists such a thing as a physical manifestation of the continuum.¹

The assumption that various phenomena are continuous in nature has been an extremely fruitful one in science and engineering, and it is only natural that engineers, economists and other users of mathematics should have come to take it for granted that any phenomena of interest to them can be treated as being continuous. The problem, however, is that nature apparently is not continuous, particularly not at the smallest scales. Both string theory and loop quantum gravity, the main competitors for a unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, tell us that the universe is fundamentally discrete at the lowest levels - that spacetime is quantized, and cannot come in the arbitarily sized bundles demanded by the assumption of continuity.

For economists going about analyses of market behavior, or engineers working on aircraft design, such reconceptualizations of the nature of the universe are of no practical impact, but I think that they, in combination with the Banach-Tarski result, ought at least to make one a little more cautious in jumping to the conclusion that continuity is always a safe assumption to make. It is almost certainly the case that one other assumption that engineers and economists are fond of, namely that linear differential equations provide a good approximation of the phenomena they wish to study, has sometimes proven in practice to be catastrophically flawed.²

What does all of this mean for those for whom mathematics is merely a tool rather than an end in itself? Does it mean that engineering types should be expected to add courses on the foundations of mathematics to their curricula? Not at all. I'd just say that they would do well to be more conservative both in the assumptions they choose to make as well as in their estimates of the applicability of the models they create. Too much engineering mathematics is little more than a "plug and chug" application of formulas learned by rote, with little understanding evident of the domain of applicability of the techniques being used. The seductions of extrapolating from limited data, with little to rely on other than the conviction that continuity must hold, must also be resisted; even when continuity does hold, it is dangerous to imagine that changes can happen only in a constrained³ manner; finally, simplicity does not always imply predictability - a point well illustrated by the behavior of the logistic equation.

In summary, engineers, economists and other heavy users of mathematics would do well to take a bit of mathematical rigor on board themselves, rather than imagining it as only of importance for pure mathematicians working in their ivory castles.

1 - In plain English, the real line, which consists not just of the rationals, their nth roots and the rest of the algebraic numbers, but also transcendantal numbers like e and π. (In fact, nearly all numbers on the real line are transcendental, as the algebraic numbers, being countable, have zero measure.)

2 - McKenna, P.J. 1999. "Large torsional oscillations in suspension bridges revisited: Fixing an old approximation." American Mathematical Monthly 106(January):1. See this MathTrek article by Ivars Peterson for an overview of McKenna's paper.

3 - I.e., that functions must be uniformly continuous, or, even more optimistically, Lipschitz continuous.

Oprah and the Indian Bride Who Said 'No'

With all the fuss in recent months about arranged marriages and the negative impact they have on the integration of muslim immigrants into Western societies, it might come as a surprise to some that muslims aren't the only ones with marriage practices that may strike Westerners as less than attractive.

NEW DELHI - When an Indian is flown specially from India to feature in the Oprah Winfrey show in the United States it becomes an occasion to revisit all that the person stands for. Such is the case of 22-year-old Nisha Sharma.

Nisha did something different, she dared to fight back when threatened with possible death, in this case, a dowry death. Ever since, she has become a symbol of the new Indian woman.

Nisha called the police when the family of her husband-to-be demanded extra dowry on the day of her marriage in June last year, and turned into an overnight heroine in India. Nisha chose to stand up to a man who was to be her husband, and also took on his family. In India, this can be close to staring death in the eye. For such behavior, girls have been ostracized by their own families and killed by their husband's family. According to government figures, in 2001, angry husbands and in-laws killed over 7,000 women over small dowry payments. Nisha's not-to-be husband has been quoted as saying that if he had ended up marrying her he would probably have thrown her off the terrace.

[............]

It should be noted at this point that Nisha and her family had accepted the original dowry. The problem arose when the groom's family suddenly demanded more. Both families were in breach of the law. In India, the punishment for demanding a dowry is imprisonment for not less than six months and up to two years, and/or a fine that is up to 10,000 rupees ($215). The punishment for giving or taking dowry is worse: imprisonment for not less than five years and a fine of 15,000 rupees, or the value of the dowry, or more. In this case, the groom's family is in jail, but Nisha's is not.

What followed though was an outpouring of emotion, support, commercial interest and now Oprah, whose show featuring Nisha was scheduled to be run on Tuesday. Bollywood bigwigs and television producers wanted Nisha's story; politicians of every leaning lined up at her house to congratulate her, inviting her to join their party. TV news channels ran a ticker to accommodate the thousands of salutations from a fan club that has cut across class, geographic and gender barriers. Many men have written letters offering their hand in marriage.

Traditionally in India the script for Nisha's story would have gone another way. The father would probably have died of a heart attack on hearing of the fresh demand for money, or worse, begged the boy's family to go ahead with the marriage, allowing him some time to somehow arrange the money. He would have gone to any extent to save his izzat (honor) as nobody would marry his daughter after they found that she had been lined up to marry someone else. The girl, to protect the izzat of her father, would marry, then be tortured, probably killed. Nisha had other ideas.

While it is important to note that this young woman's plight met with a favorable reception amongst the great and the good in India - a positive development one wishes were also the rule in the Islamic world - it is still the case that what brought about a crisis was not the notion of having to pay a dowry as such, but the decision by the groom's family to renege on the sum initially agreed to. If one finds the notion of forced marriages between cousins abhorrent, one also ought to be repelled at the prospect of forced marriages in which the bride represents little more than an unpleasant burden some other family must be bribed to take off her parents' hands.

Shilling for Manned Space Flight

I prophesied that there'd be no shortage of conservatives willing to come forward as apologists for the irresponsible direction in which NASA's space programme is heading, and sure enough, the WSJ's been kind enough to make space on its opinion pages for just such a character.

Since the Apollo moon program ended, I think it's fair to say that our federal space program has muddled along without much purpose or conviction. But this week President Bush changed all that when he unveiled a straightforward plan directing NASA to explore the solar system and especially Mars with robotic spacecraft. The space agency is also to construct a human-tended laboratory on the moon. Then, if we learn enough on the moon, and if our robots on Mars have piqued our interest enough, NASA will be told to send people to Mars to investigate. We will proceed in a logical sequence, in our own good time, and with a reasonable amount of money spent each year over many years.

In my estimation, that's a pretty darned good plan. We've never had one like it. Even Apollo didn't plan beyond landing a man on the moon in the 1960s and returning him safely. This is, as the students who write me all the time would say, "so cool."

Sadly, a lot of my fellow Americans won't think it's so cool. You'll be able to recognize them pretty easily.[Grinches!] They'll be the ones moaning about how awful it is we might spend a federal buck on something other than their favorite federally-subsidized program and how it's going to add to the deficit something awful. In an Associated Press story that put the cost of a Mars mission at "nearly $1 trillion," one politician quipped, "They want to send the red ink to the red planet." [Damned tightwads, worrying about how taxpayer money's being spent! How dare they!]

All I've got to say is please, for pity's sake, stop worrying about NASA stealing money from your favorite federal program and adding to the deficit. Out of a $2 trillion-plus budget in 2004, human resources programs (Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Social Security, etc.) will get an astounding 34%! In contrast, NASA has the smallest budget of all the major agencies in the federal government. In fact, its budget has represented less than 1% of the total budget each year since 1977 and it will probably never get more than a fraction above that, even with this new plan. [What's a few billion dollars in the grand scheme of things? Live a little, dude!]

This Homer Hickam character is as pathetic as he is predictable. One could use the very same sort of reasoning he's peddling to sell oneself on the merits of absolutely any pie in the sky program whatsoever: the real reason for his enthusiasm has nothing to do with science or return on investment, but because, as he himself admits, he thinks manned space flight is "cool." Amazing the nonsense one can pick up by watching too much pulp science-fiction.

Misplaced Priorities in Space Research

I've just learnt that one casualty of America's ridiculous emphasis on manned spaceflight will be the Hubble Space Telescope, which NASA is to allow to fall into desrepair by ceasing all maintenance.

Why is Nasa abandoning one of the most productive scientific instruments of all time?

Safety first

The main reason is safety. It is said that the decision was made solely by Nasa's chief, Sean O'Keefe, and that it was not related to President George Bush's new space plan for a return to the Moon and missions to Mars. Money was not an issue.

Following the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in February last year, all shuttle fights will now be to the International Space Station (ISS).

This is so that the shuttle crew have a lifeboat in space if there are any problems.

But Hubble is not in an orbit from which it is possible to get to the ISS. New safety and inspection procedures would have had to be developed just for this one mission and it was deemed unfeasible.

Hubble's next servicing mission was due in 2005. During it two major instruments - the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrometer - would have been installed. They would have been magnificent additions to Hubble, significantly boosting its performance.

[............]

Although some of Hubble's scientists are reported to be preparing job applications at other institutes, there is still a lot of science Hubble can do. But with the announcement that it will not be re-serviced, most of its science is now behind it and it could cease working altogether at any time.

Hubble has six gyroscopes which control its pointing. Only four are working. In normal circumstances it requires three for normal operations (though some science can be done with two). So if any more fail, as they are bound to do eventually, that could spell the end its life.

Oh well. Who cares that an invaluable source of scientific data is about to be lost, as long as we can send men into low earth orbit! And take pretty pictures of them silhoutted against the Earth! Woo hoo! What other justification do you need - fire up them thar dilithium crystals, Scotty!

There'll be no shortage of conservatives and "libertarians" to cheer on this rubbish, of course. What a ridiculous bunch of infantile scientific ignoramuses! A willigness to applaud either the ISS or Bush's new proposals is a surefire sign that one is an unprincipled, financially irresponsible, pseudo-science worshipping hack.

Pharyngula: Adaptive evolution of ASPM

P.Z. Myers has had the good fortune to have received a copy of the ASPM paper by Evans et al. that appeared recently in Human Molecular Genetics, and he's been able to put up a more informative post on the contents of the paper than I've been able to find anywhere else. If only I had as solicitous a reader as he does - I would certainly love to have a full read of the report myself.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Yorùbá

Ever wanted to see what written Yorùbá looks like? Well here's your chance! The link above is to a translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from which I provide an excerpt consisting of the first two articles, along with the Yorùbá translation. First the English language bit,

Article 1

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

and then the Yorùbá equivalent:

Abala kìíní.

Gbogbo ènìyàn ni a bí ní òmìnira; iyì àti è̟tó̟ kò̟ò̟kan sì dó̟gba. Wó̟n ní è̟bùn ti làákàyè àti ti è̟rí-o̟kàn, ó sì ye̟ kí wo̟n ó máa hùwà sí ara wo̟n gé̟gé̟ bí o̟mo̟ ìyá.

Abala kejì.

E̟nì kò̟ò̟kan ló ní àǹfàní sí gbogbo è̟tó̟ àti òmìnira tí a ti gbé kalè̟ nínú ìkéde yìí láìfi ti ò̟rò̟ ìyàtò̟ è̟yà kankan s̟e; ìyàtò̟ bí i ti è̟yà ènìyàn, àwò̟̟̟, ako̟-n̅-bábo, èdè, è̟sìn, ètò ìs̟èlú tàbí ìyàtò̟ nípa èrò e̟ni, orílè̟-èdè e̟ni, orírun e̟ni, ohun ìní e̟ni, ìbí e̟ni tàbí ìyàtò̟̟ mìíràn yòówù kó jé̟. Síwájú sí i, a kò gbo̟dò̟ ya e̟nìké̟ni só̟tò̟ nítorí irú ìjo̟ba orílè̟-èdè rè̟ ní àwùjo̟ àwo̟n orílè̟-èdè tàbí nítorí ètò-ìs̟èlú tàbí ètò-ìdájó̟ orílè̟-èdè rè̟; orílè̟-èdè náà ìbáà wà ní òmìnira tàbí kí ó wà lábé̟ ìs̟àkóso ilè̟ mìíràn, wo̟n ìbáà má dàá ìjo̟ba ara wo̟n s̟e tàbí kí wó̟n wà lábé̟ ìkáni-lápá-kò yòówù tí ìbáà fé̟ dí òmìnira wo̟n ló̟wó̟ gé̟gé̟ bí orílè̟-èdè.

If your eyes are hurting from all the diacritical marks above and below the vowels of each word, it's because Yorùbá, like Chinese, is a tonal language; in consequence, one has to know the exact pitch of a word to grasp its' meaning, and speaking Yoruba therefore has a lot in common with singing. For instance, depending on the pitch of the last vowel, the word "oko" can mean either "forest" (plain "oko"), or "penis" ("okó").

NB - If you're using Internet Explorer and the above looks like garbage, make sure to set your encoding (look under the "View" menu) to "UTF-8"; afterwards, click on
"Tools->Internet Options", and in the resulting dialog box, click on the "Fonts" button; then, under the "Latin based" language-script option, set the "Web page font" to "Arial Unicode MS". Mozilla and Firebird users shouldn't need to do anything to see this post as intended.

The Geographic Distribution of Fulfulde Dialects

Those interested in learning a bit more about Fulfulde, the language spoken by the Fulani, may be interested in taking a look at the report linked to above, which is accompanied by some very nice and highly detailed maps showing the geographical distribution of the various dialects constituting the language. The extensive bibliography, which draws on literature available in both English and French, will also prove extremely handy for those wishing to learn more.

PS: One curious thing worth noting about the Fulani is that although they show evidence of substantial admixture with the peoples of North Africa - or, perhaps more accurately, are midway in appearance along the continuum that runs from the West African coast to the North African shoreline - they, unlike the darker-skinned, Afro-Asiatic speaking Hausa, have a Niger-Congo language. Why this should be so, I have no idea.

Michael Kinsley on Free Trade "Butters"

I just came across this excellent column by Michael Kinsely, whose views on economic policy I have often violently idisagreed. He rips apart the ridiculous arguments made by "fair trade" advocates against unrestricted free trade.

The "but" of Howard Dean's "free trade but" is more traditional (see the trade section of his Web site for a concise summary). He professes concern about lost blue-collar jobs here in America; about scandalously low pay and miserable working conditions in Third World factories that export to American consumers; about the ravaging of the environment by these same factories. Dean endorses the principles of the International Labor Organization, which include freedom to organize and bargain collectively, abolition of slave and child labor, and non-discrimination. He says he's all for trade—he just wants a "level playing field."

This package of concerns and rhetoric is more or less state-of-the-art for a mainstream Democratic presidential candidate. But it confuses, either naively or purposely, two different issues: guaranteed minimum standards for labor and equivalent standards in the United States and elsewhere. The hard-core free-trade position is that working conditions in other countries are none of our business. If someone wants to sell us stuff for a price we want to pay, that's all we need to know. Trade and the rising prosperity it brings will, if anything, increase the pressure for capitalism and democracy.

The reasonable free-trade position (i.e., mine) is that buying a product does implicate you to some extent in the process by which it was made. And there are working conditions so wretched and wages so low and practices, like child labor, so heartless that you do want your own government to ban imports of the product at issue, to avoid the taint of association and, with luck, to pressure the exporting nation to change.

But this is very different from demanding a "level playing field" on environmental regulations, worker health and safety, and so on. American standards on these things are a luxury of affluence. If we had insisted on these standards for our own economy while we were becoming affluent, we never would have gotten there. And indeed, the effect of a "level playing field" rule—blocking imports that weren't produced in accord with American-level regulatory standards—will not be to make jobs in poor countries as well-paying, safe, and good for the environment as jobs in America. The effect will be to wipe out those jobs.

And that is not just the effect of the "level playing field" concept. It is the very purpose. "Level playing field" advocates—including, most prominently, the labor unions—say that it will prevent American jobs from being stolen. Another way to say this is that it will prevent jobs in poor countries from being created. Essentially, the "level playing field" concept forbids poor countries to take advantage of their poverty. When poverty is their main asset, this is no favor. (emphasis added)

Couldn't have put it better myself. It's one thing to be against free-trade because you're interested in preserving your job, domestic consumers and foreign workers be damned; such a stance has a certain selfish integrity to it, however unconvincing it may be as a sales-pitch for protectionism. What is something else altogether, and far more offensive, is to claim to be in favor of "fair trade" for the benefit of the world's poor, when in reality the effect of your policies will be to keep these unfortunates mired in poverty - which I suppose does have its benefits for the "fair trade" crowd, in that it ensures that foreign-aid programmes, famine-relief efforts and anti-poverty NGOs will never run out of work to do.

Learning to Love Bill Clinton

Thanks to George W. Bush's fiscal profligacy, Andrew Sullivan is gaining a newfound appreciation of just how good fiscal conservatives had it under Clinton's tenure.

Here's the truth: If you take defense and entitlement spending out of the picture altogether (and they have, of course, gone through the roof), Bush and the Republican Congress have upped domestic spending by a whopping 21 percent in three years. That compares with an actual decrease in such spending of 0.7 percent in the first three years of Bill Clinton. Spending on education is up 61 percent; on energy 22 percent; on health and human services 22 percent; on the Labor Department a massive 56 percent. There really is no spinning of this. Bill Clinton was a fiscal conservative. George W. Bush is a fiscal liberal of a kind we haven't seen since LBJ.

Astounding, isn't it? If there's one criticism of Bush in which liberals are absolutely on the money, it is that he is recklessly piling up debt for America's children to pay off.

I can never absolve Bill Clinton of his irresponsible attitude towards the Rwandan massacre (which extended beyond a mere refusal to militarily intervene, to actively blocking the authorization of UN peacekeeper reinforcements while abetting the slaughter by refusing to jam the "Radio Machete" station that did so much to incite the killing of Tutsis); I think that Hillary Clinton's healthcare proposals would have been a disaster for America, a stance on which I am in rather surprising company; I found it rather distasteful that a self-proclaimed champion of female equality should have taken a sexual interest in a White House intern young enough to be his own daughter, or sought to discredit the accusations of harassment made against him by having the accusers tarred as "bimbos" or "trailer trash" (the "nuts and sluts" defense); yet, when it comes to economic management, I think it beyond all doubt that Bill Clinton was a far better steward of the nation's finances than George W. Bush has turned out to be, and a truly courageous champion of free trade, which Bush most certainly is not.

On international affairs, Bush has been much more assertive than Clinton ever was, which I think a good thing for the most part. A definitive resolution of the whole Iraq mess was long overdue, and better for both the wider world and the citizens of Iraq that America went to war to overthrow Saddam, than that France and Russia should have had their way, with sanctions being lifted and Saddam finally at peace to restart his weapons programmes and Kurd-killing; the Kyoto Treaty was a dead letter in America long before Bush came into office; the Clinton administration's attitude towards North Korea was unbelievably naïve, better described as wishful thinking than realistic policy; and the virtues of multilateralism are often overrated, as even the most committed Bush-bashers are willing to note when partisanship isn't clouding their thinking.

Ultimately, however, the separation of foreign policy from economic policy is a largely artificial one. America's ability to realize its foreign policy goals, regardless of the willingness or unwillingness of allies, depends very much on its' economic strength, which Bush's fiscal recklessness threatens to undermine in the long-term. Stealth bombers, cruise missiles and Nimitz-class aircraft carriers cost huge amounts of money, and only an America that can afford to pay for such costly weapons will be able to continue to make its weight felt around the world. When considered in this light, it can be argued that by falling down so badly on the financial front, Bush is actually working to undo all his foreign policy achievements over the longer term - it could well be the judgement of history that Clinton was the better leader on both the economic and foreign policy fronts.

Dennis Miller is a Smart Guy

This NYT profile makes clear that Dennis Miller is far more intelligent than the average media personality, and I'm not just saying that because he appears to be a libertarian (not a conservative, as the NYT writer seems to think). Anybody who can make casual references to Pliny the Elder and Franz Kafka in the course of a single conversation, and even use the word "novella" without sounding pretentious, has a lot more going on upstairs than your run-of-the-mill celebrity.

I can't say it's all that surprising that the more reflective Hollywood personalities tend to tilt libertarian rather than right or left. I don't mean to imply that libertarianism is the only obvious choice for intelligent people - the existence of extremely smart liberals like Matthew Yglesias and Brad DeLong puts that notion to rest - but it seems to me that it takes more intellectual subtlety than a lot of people possess to realize that one can be for the toleration of a thing, whether it be free speech for neo-Nazis, the freedom to wear the hijab, gay marriage, marijuana usage or abortion, without necessarily endorsing it as a positive good. The conservative attitude towards things that run against the traditional grain is simply to seek to have them banned outright, "for the good of the ignorant masses", while the liberal attitude is to say "no, you're wrong, these are good things, and only your lack of enlightenment obscures recognition of this"; both stances are equally condescending in their own way, as they strive to impose one viewpoint on the rest of society.

Sense and Nonsense on Clean Energy

Over at Gene Expression, Godlesscapitalist has given an unexpectedly warm appraisal of the Apollo Alliance's 10-point plan for energy independence. I must say that I cannot share his enthusiasm, as all the items on the list strike me as little more than excuses to peddle programs greenies and labor unions bought into a long time ago for self-interested and/or ideological reasons, rather than as practical steps for promoting the supposed goal of energy independence.

If energy independence really were the goal, environmentalists would be pushing for a more radical but ultimately far more promising solution to the problem, to wit, nuclear fusion. Sustainable nuclear fusion, if attained, would mean a permanent end to the leverage the nations of OPEC currently have over the rest of the world, and it would make irrelevant all the effort currently being expended on energy conservation; what is more, it would also achieve the long-desired goal of utilizing non-polluting energy sources, as the end-product of hydrogen fusion, helium, is an inert gas.¹

Critics of fusion research on the grounds of its having promised so much for decades, but having yet to deliver on said promises, are undoubtedly correct in their criticisms, but they can nevertheless be faulted for having missed the wood for the trees. The reality is that fusion energy is no chimera or philosopher's stone we chase at our peril, but a fact of the natural world on which all life on our planet ultimately depends. The existence of our sun is a daily reminder that the endgoal is a practical one, however arduous the road to the destination. The big question isn't one of feasibility, but one of will, and the requisite will to see fusion research through to ultimate success has not been sufficiently present in the industrialized world ever since the end of the last oil shock in the early 1980s.

As it turns out, there is currently a big push underway to build a nuclear reactor with the requisite scale to achieve criticality, or a self-sustaining fusion reaction. The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project, a joint venture by an international consortium consisting of America, the EU, Russia, Japan, China, Canada and South Korea, has been in the planning stages since 1986, and this year was to see the selection of a site for the construction of the reactor. Given the potential benefits of the project, one would have expected environmentalists to have been hopeful of its success and given their full backing to it, but as it transpires, this is not what happened, at least not in Canada. Far from being enthused by the prospect of limitless, clean energy, the leaders of Greenpeace Canada, the Sierra Club of Canada and several other environmental organizations teamed up to write a letter to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien saying (in their own words) "STOP ITER – SAY NO TO FUSION SUBSIDIES – SUPPORT GREEN ENERGY"!

What grievous fault, one might have wondered, could have provoked such an outburst? What possible evil could have moved these self-proclaimed wardens of the earth to such passionate opposition? Was it really, as they claimed, their concerns about "significant government spending and risk", "cost overruns" or "uncertain scientific benefits"? If so, then surely these advocates of fiscal responsibility and scientific conservatism should have been similarly opposed to research on other "renewable energy and efficiency programs", virtually every single one of which is just as vulnerable to the dangers they claimed to wish to guard against. Furthermore, such concern for costs surely cannot be squared with the gung-ho enthusiasm for the extremely economically costly Kyoto Treaty which these noble souls displayed within the very same missive.

And what of their scientific objections? Perhaps these should have been taken seriously, even if their financial objections couldn't be? These consisted of a bald, unsupported assertion about the possibilities of fusion research ("A prototype fusion power plant is not possible for another 40 years"), and another statement essentially saying "you haven't supported fusion research for the last eight years, so why start now?"² Now, for the life of me, I cannot see where the heads of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace acquired the expertise to determine with such certainty what will and will not be possible in fusion plant design over the coming four decades, while the second argument is simply too absurd to take at all seriously. What it comes down to, then, is that these so-called friends of clean energy lacked a single good reason for their opposition to the ITER programme!

Now, as this story makes clear, the self-styled "friends of the earth" did eventually get their way in Canada, as that nation eventually pulled out of ITER altogether; and the opposition of these "environmentalists" could in fact have easily been predicted, had one factored in certain peculiarities of their way of thinking, the most important of which is the totemic religious role that the mere word "nuclear" plays in their thinking. For the religiously committed greenie, the term "nuclear" has as much power to terrify as the words "Satan" or "Hell" do for an ardent fundamentalist Christian; any project with a phrase like "nuclear fusion" at its heart could therefore have been expected to set their teeth on edge, as ITER ended up doing. Only if one subscribes to the naïve notion that these individuals actually desire the taking of practical steps towards "sustainable" or "clean" energy, rather than merely the imposition of anti-growth measures, does their opposition to fusion research seem mystifying, and I will always be averse to endorsing any environmentalist campaign for "energy independence" as long as I know that such magical thinking is the rule rather than the exception amonst those who belong to these movements.

1 - More information on the physics of fusion can be found on this page.
2 - "Fusion has not been a scientific priority for Canada since funding was eliminated in the 1995 Program Review", sayeth the greenies.

A Troubling Development in South Korea

This is not good news. Roh Moo-Hyun appears hellbent on indulging his anti-American instincts at just about the worst possible time. The DPRK's leadership will no doubt be pleased by this latest turn of events.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea's foreign minister resigned Thursday because of a rift between ministry officials and President Roh Moo-hyun over the country's close ties to the United States.

The division comes at a critical time as South Korea and the United States wrangle with North Korea over its nuclear weapons programs and discuss sending South Korean troops to help the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

Roh accepted the resignation of Yoon Young-kwan, saying the Foreign Ministry was not fully backing his administration's policy of independence from Washington. The human rights lawyer-turned-politician took office a year ago promising not to ``kowtow to the Americans'' and gain equal footing with the country's top ally.

``Some Foreign Ministry officials have failed to shake off the old foreign policy that tended to depend on foreign countries, failed to fully understand the spirit and course of the (Roh) government's new foreign policy of independence, and repeatedly made remarks that went against national interests in private and public occasions,'' said Roh senior aide Jeong Chan-yong.

Local media reported that several officials in the ministry's elite North American affairs division, which handles U.S. relations, criticized Roh's policy as unrealistic.

Jeong said the foreign minister resigned to take responsibility for failing to rein in those critics.

Roh said Wednesday he would transfer those officials who criticized his foreign policy.

``Several times, they have been asked to follow the president's policy,'' Roh said. ``Some of them responded with objections to the president's foreign policy and expressed their discontent with insulting comments.''

The Yonhap news agency said some members of Roh's National Security Council accused the foreign minister of leaning too much toward the United States.

Yoon defended the importance of the U.S. alliance, saying relations with Washington were ``very useful'' in resolving such issues the standoff with North Korea.

Yoon noted that the divided Koreas are still technically at war since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in a cease-fire and not a treaty.

``So far we have maintained peace (on the peninsula) through alliance (with the United States) and I had said the alliance was important as we are in a situation where complete peace between the two Koreas has not yet been achieved,'' he said. (emphasis added)

How strange of President Roh to speak of "kowtowing" and "equal footing" in the context of a hostile North Korea with which it is officially still not at peace and 37,000 American troops risking their lives along the DMZ; one might be forgiven for thinking that the risks of war with the DPRK were shared equally between the two countries, and the South Koreans were doing America a favor by allowing its' troops to be stationed on their soil. At times like this, one almost wishes the anti-American elements in South Korea could have their way, and the American military presence in the country could be withdrawn entirely, to leave them to get on with defending their own country unassisted.

Height

Matthew Yglesias has recently been taking pains to dispel the notion that he's in any way vertically challenged, though, strangely enough, he doesn't bother to actually tell us what his actual height is. From what I can gather from the comments left on both posts, he's about 6' 0" or thereabouts, which, while not lifting him into the ranks of potential NBA-draftees, does put him well above the average American male (who measures about 5 foot 9 inches, a number that seems not to have changed since the late 1960s.)

Unlike most of the other commenters on Matthew's blog, I was far from surprised to learn that he wasn't a diminutive individual, as it seemed obvious to me that anyone with his social background (Movie industry father, high-profile economist uncle, Dalton/Harvard graduate) could be expected to be taller than average. Even in a society as affluent as modern America, the quality of dietary intake between the richest and poorest echelons of society differs enough that this translates into an appreciable height difference. Indeed, as one commenter pointed out, to an average person milling about Harvard yard, the place would likely seem to be populated by a race of giants, so marked would the relationship between social class and physical stature be.

Of course, all of this holds only on average, and for all one knew, it well might have turned out that Matthew was a runt* of a fellow; still, statistically speaking, it would have been a safe bet to make. I'm even willing to bet that the trend holds true for the blogosphere taken as a whole, i.e, that most bloggers, particularly in the English-speaking world, are likely above average in the height stakes when compared to their compatriots as a whole, simply because they are more affluent than average, and social mobility isn't so high in the anglosphere that the correlation between height and adult income has completely broken down. I suspect that things would be rather different if we restricted our attention to Dutch or Swedish bloggers, however.

*No offense intended to anyone reading who isn't a hulking brute!

BBC - Imam Rapped for Wife-Beating Book

Now here's a real test of one's commitment to the principle of free speech.

A Muslim cleric who wrote a book that advised men how to beat up their wives without leaving incriminating marks has been sentenced by a Spanish court.

Mohamed Kamal Mustafa was given 15 months in jail, which he will not serve as Spanish law suspends sentences of under two years for first offences.

Mustafa's book, Women in Islam, sparked outrage among women's groups when it was published three years ago.

In his defence, the imam said he was interpreting passages from the Koran.

A jury in Barcelona found Mustafa guilty of inciting violence against women, lawyer Jose Luis Bravo told reporters.

He was also fined euros 2,160 ($2,735).

Removed

In his book, Mustafa wrote that in disciplining a disobedient wife: "The blows should be concentrated on the hands and feet using a rod that is thin and light so that it does not leave scars or bruises on the body."

[............]

The book incensed women's groups and, in July 2000, around 90 groups filed a lawsuit in a Barcelona court to have the book withdrawn.

The book - some 3,000 copies of which had already been distributed - was removed from Islamic cultural centres around Spain.

Needless to say, my sympathies are entirely with the critics of this so-called "Imam", but having said that, I still think it abominable that Spain should think this sort of thing worthy of banning, much less criminalizing. The man is a moral reprobate, to be certain, but he still ought to have the right to peddle his rubbish in my opinion.

BBC - Japanese Manga Ruled Obscene

Here's a ruling that illustrates a contradiction in Japanese attitudes towards sexually explicit media. On the one hand, erotica and pornography are everywhere in Japan, and much of it takes forms most Westerners would find scandalous - good old-fashioned "lolicon" ("lolita complex", or the fetishization of teenage schoolgirls), anime with tentacle-rape demons (whose victims of choice are, again, teenage schoolgirls), "cosplay" ("costume play", or people dressing up as anime characters for erotic adventures) and other such weirdness; on the other hand, Japanese law forbids the explicit display of genitals in pornographic movies, which goes some way to explain the otherwise inexplicable (to me, anyway) appeal of "bukkake" videos.*

A Tokyo court has ruled a Japanese cartoon book obscene, in a landmark court case that sparked debate on freedom of expression and the position of the country's ubiquitous 'manga' cartoons.

Monotori Kishi, a 54-year-old publisher, was handed a one-year prison sentence, suspended for three years, for violating Japan's penal code on the sale and distribution of obscene literature.

Presiding Judge Yujiro Nakatani said Misshitsu, or Honey Room, was too graphic.

"Bodies were drawn in a lifelike manner with little attention to concealment (of genitalia), making for sexually explicit expression and deeming the book pornographic matter," Mr Nakatani said.

About 45% of all books and periodicals sold in Japan are manga. They often contain sexual material.

"Given what's available it seems an extraordinary decision," said the BBC's Tokyo correspondent, Jonathan Head.

"There is so much pornography available in Japan in every form - in films, computer games, cartoons and famously manga and anime - those books of cartoons you can see men reading openly on the train everyday," he told the East Asia Today programme.

*I realize that this sort of thing has now made its way to the West, but given the sheer variety of sexually-explicit alternatives available over here, the fact that anyone in the US or Europe would plump for such a thing is, if anything, far more perverse than that it should appeal to the Japanese.

Something to Admire About Howard Dean

The fact that he doesn't drag his wife around as a campaign prop is actually a pretty positive thing in my eyes. I just don't see what the point of that sort of thing is; what does a man's choice of wife tell you about his fitness for office, particularly when said wife seems as uninterested in politics as Dean's? One might even say that, like Dennis Thatcher before her, she constitutes the ideal political spouse, one who doesn't make the mistake of thinking that an electoral vote for her partner is one for her as well.

In 23 years of marriage, 18 of which Dr. Dean has spent running for, or serving in, office, his wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, has developed an unusual role for the political spouse: invisible.

During Dr. Dean's two years of relentless campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Dr. Steinberg has stood by her husband's side at a political event exactly once, at his official announcement speech here in June. A country doctor who still makes the occasional house call and attends PTA meetings, Dr. Steinberg has given about a dozen interviews — none televised — two fund-raising letters and a cameo on a half-hour advertisement.

She has never been to Iowa.

It is a reprise of her performance as first lady of Vermont. When Dr. Dean became governor, Dr. Steinberg reluctantly danced through the first two inaugural balls, in 1993 and 1995, but that event was soon cut from the state capital calendar and replaced with an open house, which she skipped. Dr. Dean, for his part, rarely uttered her name, even to say thanks, in public speeches.

[............]

"I do not intend to drag her around because I think I need her as a prop on the campaign trail," Dr. Dean said last week in Iowa. "If she wanted to do it, it'd be great, but she doesn't want to do it, and therefore if she does do it, it won't be great. I just think she should do what she needs to do for her own happiness and satisfaction."

The woman has a full life of her own, shows none of the telltale traits of power-lust, is, if anything, probably a better doctor than Dean ever could have been, and yet some people seem to think there's a problem with her for not playing the political cheerleader for her husband? I just don't get the interest some people have in prying into the private lives of others. If there's one issue on which I am in complete agreement with Howard Dean, it's this one - people should leave the woman alone, and concentrate on what's important, Dean's own record and stance on the issues.

UPDATE: It seems that opinion amongst the commenters over at Tacitus is almost uniformly in accord with mine. I think it's a good thing that even those who intensely dislike the man's politics are able to separate their aversion to him as a politician from their attitude towards him as a family man. Not all of the blogosphere is given to the sort of fits of personalized hatred characterized by, say, John Derbyshire's hit piece on Chelsea Clinton, or the shameless attacks on the Bush twins carried out by so many on the left.

Mars: Meaningless Step for Man, Giant Waste for Mankind

This column by Anne Applebaum captures well my stance towards Bush's proposal for a manned mission to Mars: it's a damned silly idea, especially in this time of gigantic budget deficits stretching as far as the eye can see.

The first colour pictures from the NASA space probe expedition to Mars have now been published. They look like - well, they look like pictures of a lifeless, distant planet. They show blank, empty landscapes. They show craters and boulders; red sand.

Death Valley, the most desolate of American deserts, at least contains strange cacti, vicious scorpions, the odd oasis. Mars has far less than that. Not only does the planet have no life, it has no air, no water, no warmth. The temperature on the Martian surface hardly rises much above minus 18 degrees, and can drop more than 100 degrees below that.

Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, is not the kind of place to raise your kids. Nor is it the kind of place anybody is ever going to visit, as some of the NASA scientists know perfectly well. Even leaving aside the cold, the lack of atmosphere and the absence of water, there is the deadly radiation. If the average person on Earth absorbs about 350 millirems of radiation every year, an astronaut travelling to Mars would absorb about 130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of radiation that would probably destroy every cell in his body.

"Space is not Star Trek, " said one NASA scientist, "but the public certainly doesn't understand that."

No, the public does not understand that. And no, not all scientists, or all politicians, are trying terribly hard to explain it either. Too often, rational descriptions of the inhuman, even anti-human living conditions in space give way to public hints that more manned space travel is just around the corner; that a manned Mars mission is next; that there is some grand philosophical reason to keep sending human beings away from the only planet where human life is possible. One actual Star Trek actor, Robert Picardo, the ship's holographic doctor, enthused this week that "we really should have a timetable to send a man to Mars . . . Mars should be part of our travel plans." Naive, perhaps, but fundamentally not much different from President George Bush's grandiloquent words after the Columbia disaster: "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on."

But why should it go on? Or, at least, why should the human travel part of it go on? Crowded out of the news this week was the small fact that the troubled international space station, which is itself accessible only by the troubled space shuttle, has sprung a leak. Also somehow played down is the fact that the search for "life" on Mars - proof, as the enthusiasts have it, that we are "not alone" in the universe - is not a search for sentient beings but rather a search for evidence that billions of years ago there might possibly have been a few microbes. It is hard to see how that sort of information is going to heal our cosmic loneliness, let alone lead to the construction of condo units on Mars.

Any so-called advocate of small government who is excited by this Mars nonsense ought to turn in his conservative/libertarian credentials and go find some other political home to call his own. Manned space-flight on the government dime, in any incarnation, is a waste of money, of essentially no lasting scientific value, and a trip to either the moon or Mars would be especially wasteful. I would rather that governments cease altogether regarding their citizens' hard-earned money as theirs to toss at whatever grand schemes they please, but if politicians are so determined to throw vast sums around in the name of science, there are far better ways of doing so than funding manned space programs, and I'm even willing to offer a suggestion of my own; revive the Superconducting Super Collider.

Even at twice the one-time projected cost of $20 billion, the SSC would still be far more affordable than any mission to Mars ever would be, and the prospects of learning something profound about our universe would actually be pretty good - which is a lot more than can be said to any retread of the Apollo program. But what are the odds of this happening? Fundamental breakthroughs in particle physics are not "sexy" in the simple-minded way in which space programs are sexy; they don't capture the imaginations of children of all ages - especially "grown-up" children - in the manner that Buck Rogers daydreams do; they are therefore of little use in getting politicians re-elected, and are apt to be sacrificed for the sake of worthless rubbish like the International Space Station, or hare-brained missions to Mars, at the first opportunity.

UPDATE: Here's what John Van Allen (he of the Van Allen radiation belt) has to say about Bush's Mars proposal:

James Van Allen, the namesake for the Van Allen Belts of intense radiation that encircle the earth, said Monday that such manned space missions have become too expensive and better results can be gained by robotic spacecraft.

"I'm quite unimpressed by any arguments for it," Van Allen, 89, said in an interview from his office at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

"I'm one of the most durable and fervent advocates of space exploration, but my take is that we could do it robotically at far less cost and far greater quantity and quality of results," he said.

[............]

Van Allen said he doesn't have any direct knowledge of Bush's plans yet. But he thinks the time has passed for the usefulness of manned space flight.

"These days, it's really been uninteresting except when disasters occur," Van Allen said. "I think we need someone in a responsible political position to have the courage to say, 'Let's terminate human spaceflight.'"

Needless to say, Bush isn't that man of courage, but what about the Democratic challengers? Does any of them have the cojones to come out and say "this scheme would be an insane waste of money", or are they all too scared of being thought visionless killjoys?

Immigration Enforcement, Singapore-Style

America and Europe aren't the only places in the world where the enforcement of immigration laws are an issue, as this Hindustan Times article makes clear.

Fourteen men from Tamil Nadu, who had overstayed in Singapore, returned to Chennai on Friday after being whipped and having their heads shaved.

"Our only guilt was that we overstayed," said Balayian, a construction worker who had gone to Singapore on a six-month visa. "For this we were treated worse than animals before being deported."

Balayian said that after being rounded up for overstaying, Indians, particularly Tamils, were stripped down to their underwear and forced to live in the compound of the immigration office in Singapore. They were not even allowed to bathe or shave.

"We spent three months in jail where we were whipped and then our heads were shaved before we were deported," said Chandrabose, another Indian worker.

The workers' savings were taken from them and their suitcases smashed by the authorities, the workers complained.

I don't doubt that the sort of thing detailed in this article has the desired deterrent effect, but then again, so do the amputations and beheadings prescribed according to some readings of Sharia. There are some measures that are simply a bit much for decent people to stomach, even if they work as intended. Would we really want to go back to the Code of Hammurabi, or the harsh Legalism of the Ch'in Dynasty, however efficacious they might be shown to be?

Good News on Trade?

An unexpected initiative from the Bush administration to get the WTO talks moving again. As usual, it leaves the EU and Japan as the major obstructionists when it comes to opening markets for developing countries.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Washington drew praise Monday for an unexpected bid to breathe life into struggling free trade talks, but risked tensions with its ally the European Union over a call to end controversial farm export subsidies.

The negotiations, whose success the World Bank says would give a huge boost to the global economy, have floundered since September when a WTO ministers' meeting collapsed, partly due to deep divisions over agriculture.

Trade officials and analysts had feared that with nobody ready to make concessions and many nations, not just the United States, facing elections or busy negotiating bilateral trade deals, there was little chance of progress at the WTO this year.

But in letters to the World Trade Organization's (WTO) 146 member states and senior trade officials, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick made it clear that he did not want 2004 to be a "lost year."

"This is clearly positive and somewhat unexpected," said former Canadian trade envoy John Weekes of Geneva-based law firm Sidley, Austin, Brown and Wood.

But in a potential blow to Washington's negotiating alliance with the EU, Zoellick said talks would go nowhere without a deal to end farm export subsidies, something the EU has resisted.

[............]

n his first significant contribution to the debate since the Cancun ministerial failure, Zoellick urged WTO countries to set a mid-year deadline for reaching outline accords and said he would visit a number of capitals in the search for deals.

He added that farm trade reform, including slashing the massive production subsidies rich states pay their farmers and agreeing lower import duties, was so crucial that members should focus first on securing a breakthrough there before tackling other parts of the trade agenda.

In another sign of discord with Brussels, Zoellick said he was willing to see negotiations begun on customs reform, but opposed the demand of the EU and allies such as Japan to see more new issues added such as investment and competition policy.

Zoellick's emphasis on obtaining progress on agricultural trade issues to the initial exclusion of other areas, as well as his opposition to the EU and Japan's attempt to torpedo the entire enterprise by tacking on negotiations about investment and competition policy, are strong indicators that this new initiative is actually meant to achieve something, rather than being a hollow effort whose sole rationale is to make the administration look good.

Guardian - The Looting of Benin

One West African civilization I neglected to mention was Benin (not to be confused with the modern state formerly called Dahomey). The artistic legacy of Benin is substantial in its own right, and although it shares a great deal in common with that of Ife (with which Benin shared many close links other than the merely artistic), the Edo people gave it an interesting, less realist, interpretation all their own. How fortuitous it is, then, that I came across the above Guardian article, from which the following excerpt is taken:

We set fire to the Queen Mother's house and those of several chiefs; the fire spread uncontrollably and destroyed a large part of the city. The royal palace was also burnt, although we claimed this was accidental. The royal palace of Benin was one of the great cultural complexes of Africa, a continent that, according to Victorians, wasn't supposed to have anything like it. It was a court as big as a European town.

"It is divided into many palaces, houses, and apartments of the courtiers," reads Olfert Dapper's enthusiastic 1668 account, "and comprises beautiful and long square galleries... resting on wooden pillars, from top to bottom covered with cast copper, on which are engraved the pictures of their war exploits and battles... Every roof is decorated with a small turret ending in a point, on which birds are standing, birds cast in copper with outspread wings."

[............]

The best ye breed. Ralph Moor, governor of Britain's west African Niger Coast Protectorate, had a problem. British traders were outraged that Oba Ovoranmwen, ruler of the still-independent Benin, demanded customs duties from them. A British officer, Lt James Phillips, set out under Moor's authority to lay down the law to the oba. As Phillips approached Benin City - with eight British officers, 200 porters and a band - he was ambushed. The British officers were killed. Moor now had a casus belli for the annexation of another bit of Africa. The punitive expedition set out two months later, led by Sir Harry Rawson with 1,200 British troops. Oba Ovoranmwen was put on trial and exiled.

It resembles one of those episodes of cultural misunderstanding that anthropologists love to tell. In fact, Benin had been dealing successfully with Europeans since the 15th century, when the Portuguese began to trade in west Africa. Oba Ovoranmwen had every reason to think he could maintain favourable trading terms with the British. He reckoned without the hysteria of late-Victorian empire-building.

[............]

A photograph taken in 1897 shows these very best men sitting among the ruins of Benin, smoking, smiling. On the ground in front of them are treasures of 16th-century art: brass plaques that decorated the pillars of the oba's palace. Nine hundred of these plaques were found in a storehouse, having been removed during redecoration of the palace. Along with these powerful pictorial reliefs, the punitive expedition discovered the rich artistic culture of Benin going back well before Portuguese contact: heads of Queen Mothers and other ancestors - such as the elegant, stately and vigorously alive 16th-century head of a Queen Mother, now in the British Museum - and snakes and hunters, all cast in brass by the lost wax process. Some of these treasures were privately looted. But many were taken back to Britain officially as "reparations".

[............]

It was the looting of Benin that made African art visible to Europeans. When the seized artefacts were sold, entering the collections of museums, there was a sense of surprise and mystification. Although travellers had written descriptions of Benin City, this was the first time anyone outside Africa comprehended the scale of Benin's artistic achievement. So the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius set out to study and collect African sculpture, while in Britain, serious publications - including, in 1899, the British Museum's catalogue of its Benin acquisitions - laid the foundations for the history of the art of Benin and that of Africa.

There were plenty of ambiguities. Frobenius could not believe that the 12th- to 15th-century brass heads of Ife, which are earlier than the art of Benin, were of African origin; he speculated that they were the work of ancient Greeks from the lost city of Atlantis. And in 1903 Henry Ling Roth published a pioneering book on Benin called Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors. (emphasis added)

Leo Frobenius' attitude towards African culture is hardly dead in our time, as even now there are numerous people all too happy to accredit the creations of black Africans to nonexistent light-skinned invaders. It is simply taken as a given in many quarters that Africans cannot ever have come up with anything worth noticing on their own, without the guiding hand of some white man to lead them on the road to entitlement. The possibility that black Africans weren't all residing in caves or isolated mud huts is simply dismissed out of hand; one would never guess that such peoples could be capable of constructing structures of the sort over which Olfert Dapper rhapsodized in 1668. Another little-known fact is that Benin possesses the world's longest known series of earthworks, extending to more than 16,000 km in length and covering an area of more than 6,500 square km; they are also the world's second largest man-made architectural feature, after the Great Wall of China - quite a planning achievement for people supposed by some to possess IQs characteristic of mental retards!

PS: A short Wikipedia entry on the Punitive Expedition of 1897 can be found here; the page also provides a link to a more detailed portrayal of what happened in the course of that little imperial adventure. Although I normally wouldn't put too much trust in any site with a name like "Race and History", this article on the Edo people, the founders of Benin, seems mostly accurate, and actually appears to have been written by an Edo person (the name "Osamuyimen" being very much in the typical Edo style).

Met: Ife (from ca. 350 B.C.)

A small but illuminating piece about the history of Ife, the city regarded by the Yoruba with the same special fondness that Jews do Jerusalem, along with some images of traditional Yoruba art, can be found on the Met Museum page linked to above.



As you can see from reading both the page above and this one, Ife's history dates back a considerable while, predating the origin of "Heian-kyo" (Kyoto) by about a thousand years. People who say things like "Africa has no indegenous civilizations" are simply spouting rubbish.



Does the above work of art look like the fruit of an "uncivilized" people, or one with an "average IQ" of 67 (as one so-called "researcher" claims for Nigeria) to you? Nor were the Yoruba alone in displaying such creativity: the bronze Igbo-Ukwu bowl pictured below has been dated to the 9th-10th century period,



as has the following roped pot, also of Igbo-Ukwu origin.



Lest it be assumed that sophisticated art only began to be created in sub-Saharan Africa in the Igbo-Ukwu era, I present the following Nok terracotta, dated to c. 250BC - making it contemporaneous with the far-better known "terracotta army" of Chinese Emperor Chin Shin Huang Ti.



Now, when one is talking about peoples who have founded cities dating back more than 2,000 years, who were already using pottery-shard pavement in said cities 1,000 years ago, who were producing sophisticated works of art in bronze and copper from just as far back, and masterful terracottas from well before the birth of the Roman Empire, who, as with the Yoruba state of Oyo, had (in the Oyo Mesi) constitutional checks on monarchical power long predating their first substantial contacts with Europeans - when one considers all the preceding, what is it other than a manifestation of prejudice or woeful ignorance to label such peoples "uncivilized", to refer to them as "tribes", or to breezily attribute to them average levels of intelligence below that considered indicative of mental retardation in Western countries?

Ignorance of African culture and history amongst Westerners is to some extent understandable, but it is difficult to interpret a willingness to make grand claims about the "innate" capacities of Africans coupled with a refusal to correct the deficiencies in one's knowledge as anything other than malicious in nature. It isn't as if there is any shortage of decent books on African history, after all. Such obstinacy from the usual sorts of kooks and nutcases who hang around places like "Stormfront" I can understand - some souls are so far gone that one might as well write them off - but for anyone with claims to "scientist" status to do so ...

NB - For this post, I have entirely disregarded the ancient states of the Horn of Africa region i.e, Kush, Meroe, Aksum and so forth, not because they weren't "real" African states, but for two reasons, the first being that the states of West Africa are the ones I know best, and the second being the annoying tendency of Africa-bashers to capriciously exclude such states from the "black African" counter whenever it suits them (even though the very same crowd will happily lump Ethiopians along with the Ijaw whenever they can make Africa look worse by so doing - the Ethiopians, descendants of the inhabitants of the state of Aksum, are accorded a jaw-dropping "average IQ" of 63 by the eminent "researcher" named Richard Lynn). I have also avoided talking about the states of Ghana, Mali and Songhai for similar reasons - their achievements are all too easily "explained" away as owing entirely to Arabs.

Acceptance Of Sharia Law In Nigeria

Here's yet more information to illustrate the manner in which ethnicity manages to play a role in virtually every conflict that occurs in Nigeria. What might seem at first to be purely a religious phenomenon - the increasing militancy of Nigerian muslims and the attendent calls for the imposition of Sharia - turns out to have a substantial underlying ethnic component. This isn't surprising, as the primary utility of Sharia for the Northern political class has been as an instrument for defying President Olusegun Obasanjo, a southern Christian.

To measure the degree of acceptance of Sharia law among Nigerians, RMS Media Services inserted some questions in the political section of its omnibus survey 1. The following pages present the key findings of the survey.

Nigerians’ opinion on the introduction of Sharia in Zamfara State is largely unfavourable: while 38% approve, 49% reject the implementation. About one tenth (9%) had no opinion on the issue. Quite expectedly, disapproval was unanimous across the entire South; surprisingly, however, even in the North, Zamfara’s move meets with opposition with one third (32%) rejecting it. Unfortunately, we don’t know the opinion of the people in Zamfara itself; the Sharia system prevented fieldwork in this state.

[............]

The spread of Sharia into other states is widely rejected by Nigerians. 50% are opposed, 6% remain neutral and an additional 8% had not yet formed an opinion. Thus, a bare 36% of Nigerians favour the implementation of Sharia in other states. Even among Muslims, about one in five reject the further spread of Sharia.

[............]

The entire South, i.e. Lagos, the Yoruba West and Igbo and ethnic minority East, are strongly opposed to more states joining the league of Sharia states. In the North, the scenario varies considerably from state to state.

[............]

The list of problems, which are faced acutely by the better part of Nigerians, remains remarkably consistent across all demographic breakdowns, e.g. sex, age, region etc. Thus, the introduction of Sharia law may well be interpreted as a move to detract from the severe economic and infrastructural crisis, which no government, federal or state, could hope to solve within the foreseeable future. To fire up the populace’s religious sentiments, on the other hand, can be achieved practically overnight. Complementary to this strategy, the debate surrounding Sharia points at regional and ethnic conflicts, which, suppressed by consecutive military regimes, have never been resolved and now erupt violently.

Consent to implementation of Sharia depends more on ethnicity than religious affiliation. Whereas 89% of Hausa Muslims (88% Kanuri, 79% Fulani) approve of Sharia law, less than a third (32%) of Yoruba Muslims (the one Southern ethnic group with the highest proportion of Muslims) concur. Christian (or canon) law is likewise rejected by Yoruba Christians (24% approval), strongly pointing at the Yoruba’s desire for secular rule. Slight majorities in favour of Christian law can be found only among Igbo (52%) and Ijaw (62%) Christians.

Almost simultaneously with the introduction of Sharia in Zamfara, militant groups have entered the political scene in all corners of the country; e.g. Oodua People’s Congress, Arewa People’s Congress etc. Sharia may, therefore, be an expression of social and political disintegration rather than a debate over religious dogma; it seems to aim at ethnic segregation more than at a quest for a religious lifestyle. The states, which have declared their intention to implement Sharia law (and in which majorities would facilitate such a move), are concentrated in the North-Western sector of the country.

Now, what was that again about ethnic heterogeneity being an "ad hoc" explanation for the woes of African states like Nigeria?

Putting such claims aside for the moment, this sort of ethno-religious split is one reason why an African "Swiss Confederation" model is bound to fail. If one group believes it is duty bound by Allah to impose Islamic religious law on the entire nation, while another group believes that faithfulness to the Bible demands Canon Law be the universal legal system, and yet a third group desires no legal code other than a purely secular one, what hope can there be for amity, even under a confederation? Sharia, Canon Law and the Common Law tradition cannot be reconciled, and there is little hope is for any confederation, however loose, if even the basic framework of the law cannot be agreed upon. To say that not every ethnic group in Africa has the numbers to constitute a state in its own right is not to establish that states like Nigeria ought to remain whole, even if as loose federations.

Maureen Dowd Says Something Clever (For Once)

Maureen Dowd's take on Wesley Clark's sartorial initiative to woo the feminine vote is actually clever, which is something of a rarity for her. I found the following snippet particularly amusing:

After General Clark's ill-fitting suits in his first few debates — his collars seemed to be standing away from his body in a different part of the room — a sudden infusion of dandified sweaters and duck boots just intensifies the impression that he's having a hard time adjusting to civilian life.

It's also a little alarming that he thinks the way to ensorcell women is to swaddle himself in woolly geometric shapes that conjure up images of Bing Crosby on the links or Fred MacMurray at the kitchen table.

"I think there's an impression that the armed forces is a male-dominated, hierarchical, authoritarian institution," he told The Times about his gender gap, notwithstanding the fact that the armed forces is a male-dominated, hierarchical, authoritarian institution. {You Go, Girl!]

After his rivals jumped on him for trading hats with the Bosnian war criminal Ratko Mladic in 1994, you'd think he'd stick to his true gear.

Or how about this passage?

Is his staff watching "What Not to Wear" or "Style Court"? It's discouraging to see presidential campaigns succumb to the makeover culture. Obviously, appearances count, but clothes don't make the man. Sometimes, they unmake him.

In the final stretch of Michael Dukakis's moribund '88 campaign, he borrowed an aide's brown suede jacket to look cozier. (If General Clark has trouble with civvies, Mr. Dukakis was a dud with military duds, aping Rocky the Flying Squirrel on that tank.)

A witty Dowd column is as unexpected as a Krugman column without unhinged fulminations against the Bushitler™, something to be savored in the knowledge that the experience is unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.

What Famous Leader are You?

My results are as follows:



No surprise there - I'm usually classed as an INTP on the Myers-Briggs test.

The Educational Backwardness of Northern Nigeria

I recently came across a comment by some ignorant character who claimed, on the basis of his proclaimed 7 years residence in Nigeria, that the fairer-skinned Northerners had managed to hold the reins of power in Nigeria at the expense of their darker-skinned fellow citizens in the south in large part because they were "more intelligent" and "better organized", with the presumption no doubt being that there was some sort of linkage between fair-skin and intelligence. The article linked to above (written by a Northerner, for those worried about bias) should lay to rest any notion that ridiculous claims of this sort have even the slightest bit of merit.

According the United States Agency for International Development (USAID/NIGERIA), for example, ‘the current state of education in Nigeria can be summarized by three simple statistics. Today, just 60% of age-eligible children are enrolled in primary school. Of those who do enroll, nearly half (40%) eventually drop out. Among those that remain in school to the sixth grade, just 40% would be considered literate. Clearly, Nigeria's schools are failing to serve the needs of its children’. One may hasten to add that northern Nigerian schools are the ones leading in this colossal national failure. For example, the 1991 Population Census Analytical Report (NPC, 1998) showed that age-specific literacy rate for ages 6-9 in northern states like Benue, Borno and Kebbi were 21, 35 and 18 per cent respectively. For the same age group, some southern states like Anambra, Lagos and Rivers recorded literacy rates of 51, 80 and 52 per cent respectively.

The truth of the matter is that the educational disparity between the Northern and Southern states is gargantuan - one would be hard-pressed to believe such variation possible in a single country (then again, who says Nigeria really is a single country?). Nor does the difference between the two halves of the country end with education; not only do the vast majority of professionals hail from the south, but nearly all commercial and industrial activity is concentrated there as well. If Northern elites have been able to exercise an inordinate grasp on the reins of power, it has been for one reason only - the top ranks of the army are dominated by people who hail from that region, because in the closing period of British colonial rule, only those from the mostly illiterate Northern Region were willing to opt for what was seen at the time as a low-pay, low-prestige career in the armed forces.

PS: If there's one reason I'm not as sanguine as most African-Americans are about affirmative action, it is that I've been on the other side of the aisle where such policies are concerned. Nigerian educational institutions also have admission quotas, for those who hail from the Northern states, and the sight of Northern students gaining entry into prestigious schools and universities while far better qualified Southerners are rejected has long been a major source of friction in the country. The American situation isn't completely analogous - African-Americans, unlike the Hausa, really have been the victims of a historical wrong - but the feelings of resentment that are stirred up are largely the same.

XDev - Fiber in Nigeria

Via a post made by Andrew McLaughlin some six months ago, I came across a little-known fact: that there is an undersea fiber-optic cable running from Spain to South Africa, with landing points in Dakar (Senegal), Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Accra (Ghana), Cotonou (Benin), Lagos (Nigeria), Douala (Cameroon), Libreville (Gabon) and Cacuaco (Angola).

The SAT-3/WASC fiber segment consists of 4 strands, which may not seem like a lot, but when Wave-Division Multiplexing (WDM) is taken into account, the carrying capacity of a single strand will be seen to be phenomenal. The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE page indicates an ultimate bandwidth of 120 Gbps; assuming that one fiber remains unlit for whatever reason, each of the remaining fibers would only have to be transmitting on 16 wavelengths at OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) for the 120 Gbps total to be attained. This is very far from the state of the art, as OC-192 (10 Gbps) transmission speeds are now commonplace, as are WDM systems that accomodate up to 160 wavelengths; OC-768 (40 Gbps) components are already on the market, while both NEC and Lucent have demonstrated Ultra-Dense WDM systems of 273 and 1,022 wavelengths respectively. All things considered, 4 fiber strands is plenty, and the only real bandwidth limitations are imposed by cost considerations for the multiplexing/demultiplexing technology at the ends of the fiber strands.

Now, it may seem strange to some that I should go on at such length about what might seem a routine matter of undersea fiber cabling, but the implications of this fiber are truly tremendous when properly considered. Take, for instance this 2002 article by Esther Dyson for the New York Times, in which she indicated that the entire country had access to a mere 20 MB/s (160 Mbps) of bandwidth, much of which was almost certainly provided by high-latency satellite links; a single OC-48 wavelength on just one of the SAT-3/WASC fibers would be enough to multiply that number by more than 15-fold! This would enable a host of other possibilities; apart from dramatically slashing the cost - and likely raising the call quality - of international telephony for Ghanaians, cheaper and more plentiful bandwidth would also enable Ghana, which has a substantial class of educated English-speakers, to take advantage of the same outsourcing trend that has been such a boon to India. Unfortunately, the vested interests of the political elite, which sees international telephony mostly as an easy source of revenue via tariffs, as well as those of Ghana Telecom, the incumbent monopoly, constitute formidable obstacles to realizing these possibilities, a point made clear by this NYT article, some of which is excerpted below:

Calls in and out of sub-Saharan Africa have long been among the world's most costly, strangling business opportunities and burdening ordinary people. Services have been tightly controlled by government-owned telephone companies, many of which are rife with corruption and incompetence. Governments also imposed high tariffs on international calls, seeing it as a lucrative source of revenue.

But now, thanks to what is called voice-over-Internet, phone alternatives are flourishing, sharply lowering costs and expanding opportunities for business and consumers in some of the poorest places on earth -- even as they pose a competitive threat to government-sanctioned telephone companies.

Sending telephone calls over the Internet is gaining ground in Africa because it makes possible a range of new services, linking the sub-Saharan to the world's major industrial centers in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. And better digital connections, mostly via satellite, are raising the hope that Ghana -- the most peaceful country in a West African region besieged by civil wars and ethnic strife -- may become the regional hub for an information-technology industry.

"As Ghana improves its connectivity to the outside world, it has the potential to become for Africa what Bangalore became for India," said Paul Maritz, a former senior executive at Microsoft who recently visited Accra to survey the nascent high-tech scene here.

[............]

As the movement advances, though, many government-owned telephone companies, which dominate wired service in most African countries, are fighting a rear-guard action.

Internet telephony "is presented as the salvation for business and society in Africa," said Oystein Bjorge, chief executive of Ghana's national telephone carrier. "It is not."

Mr. Bjorge, a Norwegian telecommunications consultant hired recently to do battle against the Internet telephone services, said it wreaks havoc with the economics of phone companies. Here in Ghana, the national phone company is waging a sporadic campaign against its own citizens who use the Internet to make or receive telephone calls from America and Europe, periodically turning off the lines of those suspected of doing so.

Three years ago, the government even jailed the heads of some of Ghana's leading Internet providers. Though later exonerated by a court, the dissidents fear another crackdown. "Internet telephony is changing the whole power structure," said Francis Quartey, chief technology officer of Intercom Data Network and one of those jailed. "The dangerous thing is that the power elite is responding out of fear and ignorance."

Despite this opposition, American companies are experimenting with new ventures in Ghana, seeing if enthusiasm for Internet telephony can transform local technology entrepreneurs into a force for genuine economic advancement.

For example, Rising Data Solutions, which is based in Gaithersburg, Md., introduced a call center here last month, where a dozen Ghanaians -- trained in American-style English -- are trying to sign up customers in the northeastern United States on behalf of a wireless phone company. At least three other call centers are expected to open in Accra later this year, all relying on Internet telephony instead of telephone carriers.

[............]

... official anxiety over Internet telephony is widespread throughout Africa and particularly rife in Ghana. At a public meeting in May, held at the largest Internet cafe in Accra, a regulator defended the government's latest campaign against those who use the Internet to bypass authorized telephone providers. "The players have been apprehended or will be apprehended soon," said Bernard Forson, deputy director of the National Communications Authority of Ghana.

The government is not opposed to any particular technology, Mr. Forson explained, but merely wants "regulated entities to provide telephone service," not unlicensed and untaxed wildcatters. [a sentiment not dissimilar to that expressed by those in the US who wish to regulate VoIP]

Other African countries face a similar quandary, aware of the appeal of Internet voice service but fearful of its damage to the state-owned telephone company.

Neighboring Togo, for instance, allowed Internet telephony until the end of last year, when the government cracked down on behalf of Togo Telecom. So many foreign calls in tiny Togo were being routed over the Internet that a small "com" center -- ubiquitous in Africa, offering calls for a fee -- took in $10,000 a month from just two phones.

But some African countries have embraced Internet telephony as a way to end decades of frustration. In Nigeria, for example, the government has not officially approved telephoning over the Internet but looks the other way, partly to ease congestion on its authorized networks.

Still, the legal confusion surrounding Internet telephony has prompted some to avoid it. Affiliated Computer Services, which is based in Dallas, set up shop in Accra two years ago, relying on a private satellite connection to the Internet that supports both a data and a telephone network. Today, it is one of Ghana's largest private employers, with 1,200 people and plans to hire another 700.

While the company runs call centers in Jamaica, Mexico and India, it does not intend to do such telephone work in Ghana. "We can't use satellite lines" because of the brief delay in hearing a response [the latency issue], said Tom Blodgett, the executive who started the Ghana operation. And for now, he adds, "there is no suitable wired alternative." A legal one, anyway.

In the case of Nigeria, I know a fair bit about the political machinations going on behind the scenes; let it suffice for now for me to say that, in addition to the usual self-seeking of a monopoly carrier (NITEL) and the "poisonous legacy of LSE-taught Marxism" mentioned by Frank McGahon (the baleful influence of which, President Obasanjo, who ruinously nationalized a broad swathe of industries in the name of "anti-colonialism" back in the 1970s, is still struggling to free his thinking from*), ethnic rivalry also plays a major role, the question as always being "qui bono?" ("who benefits?"), one perception, as always, in the minds of Northern politicians being that NITEL privatization and telecoms deregulation is a plot by Yoruba politicians to tear down a regime which has provided so many comfortable sinecures for favored sons of the North. Again, as always, there is the worry that such initiatives will only enable the Southern states to pull even further ahead of the North in terms of economic prosperity, detrimentally tilting the balance of power; "better that everyone remains where they are than that those Southern infidels lord it over us with their new wealth" is a very widespread, and frequently openly admitted, strain of thought amongst Northern opinion-makers.

*Note that I'm not implying that he is an LSE graduate. What I am saying is that the LSE has produced plenty of graduates whose subsequent careers as advocates of theories of "exploitation" and "neo-colonialism" popularized the indigenization policies that proved so disastrous for the developing world in the 1970s.

CNET - Senator Wants VoIP to be Regulation-Free

This is just too important an initiative to ignore. The worst possible thing that could happen for the prospects of IP telephony would be for legislators to start suffocating it in its cradle with new regulations.

LAS VEGAS--U.S. Sen. John Sununu said he's preparing legislation to keep broadband telephone service providers from being "smothered by state and federal regulators."

The New Hampshire Republican described the proposed law at the Consumer Electronics Show that as a "clear, pre-emptive remedy" that directs state utility regulators to take a hands-off regulatory stance on what's called voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The legislation also seeks to make the Federal Communications Commission the main authority over VoIP service providers, the senator said.

As more conversations begin to flow through unregulated VoIP links instead of the heavily taxed public switched telephone network, state governments stand to lose billions of dollars. Because VoIP currently is not regulated, companies offering the service aren't subject to the vast thicket of taxes and regulations governing E911 and guaranteeing wiretapping access for police. Also at issue is the future of a special $2.25 billion-a-year tax--typically reflected in higher monthly phone bills--that provides schools and libraries with discounts on everything from Internet access to phone lines for fax machines and domain name registrations.

Some states want broadband phone providers to follow the same state rules and regulations as traditional phone providers. But FCC Chairman Michael Powell indicated here at CES he favors a either new regulations for VoIP providers or a hands-off approach for now to allow the young industry to mature.

"Unfortunately, if left unattended, I'm afraid the benefits of VoIP will be smothered by state and federal regulators," Sununu said during a CES panel this week. "A clear pre-emptive remedy is needed now. Congress must establish pre-eminence of federal authority in this area and provide major direction for any action by the FCC."

David Isenberg got it exactly right in his Rise of the Stupid Network paper from 1998, when he argued that the future lay not with traditional "smart" networks like the SS7-based, FCC-regulated, switched infrastructure associated with the AT&T and the Baby Bells, but with "stupid" networks that would serve merely as passive conduits for traffic, instead of trying (and mostly failing) to anticipate all the new applications that their traffic capacity could be used for. Who in his right mind imagines that peer-to-peer filesharing would ever have gotten off the ground if it had depended on the telephone companies forming a consortium, hashing out a brand-new standard and then upgrading all their SS7 switches with new software to accomodate it? And yet, it seems that most politicians are still stuck in such a mindset, or they would not even be contemplating extending the plethora of regulations that burden traditional telephony to VoIP. From a "stupid network" point of view, VoIP is just another form of IP data, like p2p traffic or streamed video, and only under such a regime will it finally fulfill its promise - the inauguration of an age in which international telephony will truly be "too cheap to meter" on a call-by-call basis, regardless of the locations of the participants.

The struggle over who gets to enjoy regulatory oversight of VoIP is likely to prove a vivid illustration of the Public Choice argument that bureaucrats and politicians are, just like their counterparts in the private sector, self-seeking individuals with a penchant for empire-building and self-aggrandizement at the public's expense. The regulators of traditional telephony are naturally worried about what the advent of VoIP is likely to mean for their jobs, and would like nothing better than to either kill the technology before it becomes entrenched as the default alternative, or, if that isn't possible, to burden it with enough rules and regulations that nothing changes from the public's point of view, and cries can continue to ring out for regulatory oversight of rapacious phone companies. The politicians see in VoIP a threat to precious revenue streams and the political patronage they represent; the spooks working for the various Three Letter Agencies perceive (rightly) that their ability to pry in the affairs of ordinary citizens will be severely curtailed should the marriage of strong encryption and IP telephony ever become a routine affair.