Life Unworthy of Life?

As I was taking the bus today, I happened to find myself sitting across from a lady with two children, one of whom clearly had Down Syndrome. I've always felt it extremely impolite in such circumstances to stare, and I kept the facade of complete indifference one usually does when one has to share closely confined space with strangers while using public transport. Nevertheless, watching the lady and her son interact with the disabled daughter, what struck me most was just how high functioning the girl actually was, how human in every respect. This was no vegetable, no automaton with a passing resemblance to a member of our species, but a curious, socially engaged person with an ability to know laughter and suffering just like any other individual walking down the street.

With the awareness of the humanity of this child in mind, my thoughts naturally turned to that dark era in the not so recent past when individuals like her would have been judged unfit for life and sent off to die by state officials in white coats. How was it possible for these men to do what they did? The individuals who had the ultimate say in such matters interacted with the patients they marked for death, and yet were unable to realize the innate humanity binding them to their victims; how was such a thing possible? By what tortuous process of rationalization did these murderers justify to themselves the crimes they carried out? There were a few sociopaths to be found amongst the doctors of death, to be sure, Josef Mengele being perhaps the best known, but the great majority of them seem to have been ordinary individuals, family men, upstanding pillars of society. The only conclusion I can come to is that men are easily swayed by ideology to commit the most heinous deeds.

It's easy for most of us to imagine that "mercy" killings of those deemed "unworthy" of life are somehow indicative of a uniquely German pathology, but the truth is a lot more worrisome; the use of state power to foster "eugenic" goals occurred in every single "civilized" Western state, with the notable exception of Great Britain, and America was at the very forefront of the movement. While outright murder of the "unworthy" wasn't adopted outside Germany, forcible sterilizations of the mentally ill, the "feeble minded", gypsies, blacks, "loose" women and "vagrants" was both widespread and long-standing, ending in many cases only in the 1970s. If there is one devastating illustration of the dangers of state power, I'd have to say that the shameful record of government support for such brutal scientific quackery has to be it; one would like to believe that most of one's fellow men are decent enough to refrain from abuse of the vulnerable, but the evidence for such a belief isn't good, and it is a terrible idea to support a system of government that depends on men being angels.

One final thought that occurs to me is that the world would have seen far less suffering had many of the simplistic notions peddled by the eugenicists been more vociferously challenged. The men of that era at least had the excuse of not knowing where it would all end, but I think we who have the benefit of hindsight would be remiss in not contesting the sorts of tendentious claims being made by the modern-day champions of genetic determinism. Genes clearly do matter, and their frequency distributions do vary across groups, but the truth is that we know precious little at present about how genetic variation is tied to differences in human abilities and behavior. As such, and in light of the dreadful past of of research in this field, one would think researchers with bold claims to make (as opposed to dilettantes and propagandists) would go to great lengths to be meticulous in their work, to avoid relying on dubious data, to seriously consider alternative hypotheses, to generally do their damndest to knock down their own theories before letting them out into the world, not because of some "political correctness" bogeyman, but out of a recognition that serious consequences can follow from the claims they make; this sort of due diligence is what sets the true scientist apart from the crank with a political axe to grind.

Bad News for Gorgeous George

Yet more documents have surfaced implicating George Galloway in peddling influence on behalf of Saddam. These new papers may turn out to be false, just as the ones offered to the Christian Science Monitor were discovered to be, but I have to say that it doesn't look good for Galloway at this point; there are simply too many lines of evidence linking him financially to Saddam, and his strange reluctance to prosecute with vigor his legal case against the Telegraph, given the pro-accuser tilt of British libel law, marks George Galloway out as doubly suspect.

Money illicitly siphoned from the UN oil-for-food programme by Saddam Hussein was used to finance anti-sanctions campaigns run by British politicians, according to documents that have surfaced in Baghdad.

Undercover cash from oil deals went to three businessmen who in turn supported pressure groups involving the ex-Labour MP George Galloway, Labour MP Tam Dalyell, and the former Irish premier Albert Reynolds, it is alleged in documents compiled by the oil ministry, which is now under the control of the US occupation regime.

Separately, a dossier from the oil ministry in Baghdad has been handed by the British Foreign Office to Customs and Excise, which has been asked to investigate. They were also referred to the Cabinet Office because of their political sensitivity.

"The government has been given copies of certain documents [from Iraq]," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said yesterday. "They are being passed to the appropriate authorities for consideration."

Two of the three businessmen involved in UK campaigns, Burhan al-Chalabi and Riad al-Tajir, were based in Surrey; the other, Fawwaz Zureikat, a Jordanian entrepreneur, had offices in London.

Mr Chalabi and Mr Zureikat gave money to the Mariam Appeal, run by Mr Galloway, the MP confirmed. Mr Tahir said he ran another anti-sanctions campaign called Friendship Across Borders, which had Mr Dalyell as its official patron and organised visits to Baghdad by supportive politicians.

The three businessmen are alleged to have received money from Saddam via oil allocations. They sold the oil rights on at a profit of more than $1m (about £530,000), in an exploitation by Saddam of loopholes in the UN's then oil-for-food programme.

Mr Tahir agrees he profited from the oil deals. Mr Chalabi refuses to comment. Mr Zureikat confirmed to Agence France Presse in Jordan last week that he had made the oil deals.

There doesn't seem to be much wiggle room here for dispute: Galloway did recieve financial contributions from these businessman, and they in turn did obtain easy profits from the Oil-for-Food programme. Still, while this does have ethical implications for Galloway's moral standing as an anti-war campaigner, it isn't quite enough on its own to implicate him in bribery. My suspicion is that Galloway knew very well what he was doing, and intentionally set things up in this fashion to avoid direct culpability.

Setting Educational Priorities

I have a post up on BonoboLand about skewed educational priorities in the developing world, in which I argue that outside of East Asia, most LDCs devote too many resources to tertiary education at the expense of universal primary schooling, and that the end result of this is that these states produce floods of graduates whose skills go under-utilized, even as economic growth potential is held in check by low levels of basic adult literacy.

Shakespeare as Businessman

I've argued before that government sponsorship of the arts is not just problematic because it must necessarily promote certain aesthetic and moral views over others, but is also largely unnecessary, as much of what we think of today as high art was actually created very much with commerce in mind.

In particular, I mentioned William Shakespeare in this regard, so it was with some pleasure that I came across, via Tyler Cowen, the above 2blowhards post on the business aspects of the theatre in the Elizabethan era. William S. was a wordsmith without peer, but he was also a canny businessman, well-rewarded in his lifetime by an audience appreciative of his craft. The notion that "real" artists are never appreciated in their time is a myth borne of 19th century romanticism, and was palpably false even as it was being born. Artists like Franz List and Paganani were eminently well rewarded in their day by an adoring public, as was the capricious Richard Wagner* after "Rienzi", and even Beethoven, who we like to think of as the proverbial "underappreciated" artist, enjoyed a glittering career as a virtuoso, until it was prematurely cut short by impending deafness. When we turn to consider the odd genius like Franz Schubert who actually did match the penniless artiste cliché, we see that no government grants were required to stir his imagination; if all of these men could contribute as much to Western civilization as they did without the benefit of an NEA, why do the "artistes" of our day insist that they simply cannot do without such support? It seems to me that an "art" that cannot find an audience to support it is no art at all - if a member of the avante garde as cutting edge as Stravinsky was before the Great War could earn his own bread, so should the beautiful souls of our own time.

*Yes, I know Wagner leeched off the purse of King Ludwig (i.e, the Bavarian public) to build his Bayreuth theatre, but that seems to me an argument against publicly funded art rather than for it - just think of the hysterical little corporal who made the place a site of pilgrimage!

Don't You Bother Your Pretty Little Head None!

This story just goes to show that one can never underestimate the stupidity of elected officials. If Kay O'Connor thinks women have no place in politics, what's she doing in the Kansas state senate? Shouldn't she be at home like a good little wifey, baking brownies and looking after the kids?

A prominent female state senator has said that she does not support the 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, and that if it were being considered today she would vote against it.

Sen. Kay O'Connor recently told the co-presidents of the Johnson County League of Women Voters that the amendment was the first step in a decades-long erosion of traditional family values.

The Olathe Republican was in the audience at a public affairs forum on juvenile justice at Johnson County Community College on Sept. 19, when league co-president Delores Furtado asked her if she was planning to attend the league's "Celebrate the Right to Vote" luncheon.

"You probably wouldn't want me there because of what I would have to say," O'Connor told Furtado after the forum had ended.

"Wasn't it in the best interest of our country to give women the right to vote?" Furtado asked the senator.

"Not necessarily so," O'Connor said.

Although she does vote, O'Connor said in two subsequent interviews with The Kansas City Star that if men had been protecting the best interests of women, then women would not be forced to cast ballots and serve in the state legislature. Instead, they could stay home, raise families and tend to domestic duties, she said.

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

Asked if she supports the 19th Amendment, the Republican lawmaker responded: "I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women (today) we wouldn't have to vote.

"I'm sorry women have not been taken more care of," she said. "We have gotten the short end of the stick."

If the measure were up for ratification today, she said, she would not support it.

I take it that Mrs O'Connor's husband is doing a less than perfect job of being a man then.

Gauging Black Stewardship of the South African Economy

To hear some people speak, one would think South Africa had entered into a downward economic spiral since 1994, under the mismanagement of its new black leadership. This 2003 IMF Staff Report should prove a useful counter to that sort of propaganda. Contrary to the imaginings of many detractors of black rule, the South African economy has actually undergone a strong change for the better, which has been rewarded with ratings upgrades from both Fitch and Standard & Poors, from "stable" to "positive", while Moody's has hiked South Africa's long term foreign currency debt rating from Baa3 to Baa2, and its domestic debt rating from Baa1 to A2.

I know it's hard for people who think all blacks are stupid and incompetent to accept, but the facts simply don't bear out the notion that South Africa is going to the dogs. Economic growth, as good as it has been (and a substantial improvement over that recorded in the last 15 years of National Party rule), would be even better, were the South African economy not hampered by the artificial skills shortages induced by state-sponsored racism. To quote from an article in this week's Economist (sub. reqd.),

South Africa is not as bad at making jobs as is popularly believed. Between 1996 and 2002, about 2m jobs were created. Skilled workers have found new opportunities in tourism, information technology and manufacturing. Unskilled workers have done less well, though the number of informal farm jobs has risen.

Not enough new ones have appeared, however, to mop up the swelling flood of would-be workers. South Africa's available labour force in 2001 was 16.4m people, 3.5m more than a decade earlier. Barely two-fifths can expect to find a formal job (see chart). Unofficially the labour supply is even bigger, including perhaps 2m illegal Zimbabweans.

South Africa may have an oversupply of unskilled workers, but at the same time the country is suffering from a shortage of skilled ones. One economist, Iraj Abedian, estimates there are between 300,000 and 500,000 unfilled posts for skilled workers in hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, financial firms and the civil service. Too few South Africans are skilled enough to take the work: many school-leavers are innumerate or otherwise unemployable. (emphasis added)

The Bantu Education Act of 1950 and the cynically named Extension of University Education Act of 1959 (which actually closed off black entrance to white universities) worked precisely as intended, and if South Africa isn't enjoying the growth of an Asian tiger, it is not black but white misgovernment that is to blame. Indeed, the growth of the South African economy had been on a relentlessly downwards path ever since 19711973, as the terms of international trade shifted away from primary exporters to those with large numbers of skilled workers. Thabo Mbeki has his faults, which are glaring and have been condemned here on several occasions, but economic mismanagement isn't one of them.

The Ever-Charming Muammar Gaddafi

Via AfricaPundit, I came across this depressing article about the Libya we are currently so generously extending olive branches to.

A trial in Libya of seven expatriate health workers accused of deliberately infecting 400 children with HIV enters its final phase this week, as the former pariah nation steps up efforts to improve its relations with the West.

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

A wave of infections among children in the public hospital in Benghazi came to light in 1998. The notion that foreign staff had deliberately infected the children, at least 43 of whom have since died, was apparently Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's idea.

At a conference on Aids in Nigeria in April 2001, the Libyan leader said of the epidemic: "It is an odious crime. We have found a doctor and a group of nurses in possession of HIV, who had been requested to do experiments on the effects of the virus on children. And who charged them with this odious conspiracy? Some say it was the CIA, others say it was Mossad."

The foreign health workers were first charged with "premeditated murder with the intention of undermining the Libyan state", an offence that carries the death penalty. The case was dismissed, but a new one was filed, charging the five Bulgarian nurses and two doctors, one Bulgarian and one Palestinian, with "provoking an Aids epidemic through the use of contaminated products", another capital crime.

A daughter of Zdravko Georgiev, the Bulgarian doctor, said: "My father was kept in total isolation for one year, in a cell one metre square without light. He was beaten and subjected to heavy psychological pressure.

Then he was transferred to a prison where 100 inmates were held in a single cell, without even space to sit. For one year he was not allowed a change of clothes." Two nurses who had confessed and then recanted said the confessions had been extracted from them through torture, which included electric shocks and beatings.

An eminent French Aids expert, Professor Luc Montagnier, told the court that the infection was caused by poor hygiene in the hospital. He pointed out that the epidemic had begun before the accused people started working there, and continued after their arrests. (emphases added)

None of this should come as a surprise. The notion that anyone in the Libyan leadership, let alone Gaddafi himself, would step forward to take responsibility, as would be expected in any decently ruled country, is simply absurd. Much easier to blame it all on a conspiracy by the usual suspects (Mossad or the CIA). This sort of scapegoating is par for the course in the Arab world, and if there weren't so few Arabs floating on so much oil, one would be hard-pressed to discern in what way most of these countries differed from those south of the Sahara developmentally. In any case, given the exploding populations of countries like Libya and Saudi Arabia, it won't take more than one or two more generations before their living standards collapse to sub-Saharan African levels.

In Search of the Ur-Language

As surprising as it may seem, it is a fact that the great majority of the languages in existence today belong only to a very few families: Afro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Sino-Tibetan being the most important of these (for a more extensive list, see this page). The spectacular success linguists have had in classifying the vast numbers of languages in existence into only a few clusters has prompted many to speculate that even these large groupings may yet be collected further into super-families, or, more ambitiously still, that a single ur-language spoken by the first men, and ancestral to all those in use today, might one day be recoverable, at least to a certain extent. I for one find such speculations implausible.

Languages are to a great extent like species in the way they fission and diverge from each other, and just like biological species, it is often difficult to tell precisely when a single language has really given birth to two truly different entities. Again, like species, two communities that speak a single language may become geographically isolated, and as time goes by and the two communities undergo random drift, whether in genes or in vocabulary and grammar, it may transpire that a point is reached when enough differentiation has occurred to set up an impregnable barrier to any future interchange, even if the original obstacles that separated the two communities were to disappear. Finally, in an analogous manner to that with living species, one tends to find with languages that the more central a feature tends to be, the less likely it is to undergo drift, explaining why it is precisely those words whose usage is central to the lives of the speakers, like mother (mutter (German), mater (Latin), matr (Sanskrit)) or two (zwei (German), deux (French), duo (Latin), dwo (Sanskrit)), that are best conserved with the passage of time. In light of the close resemblance between the process of speciation and linguistic differentiation, one might expect that the tools employed in tracing ancestry in one field would prove useful in another - as indeed has turned out to be the case. The great classification successes enjoyed by linguists, including controversial figures like Joseph Greenberg, has rested heavily on techniques that would be familiar to any disciple of cladistics.

Now, we know that biologists have enjoyed breathtaking successes in classifying all the life-forms on our planet into a single tree, with only a few major points of dissension left outstanding, and we also have some reason to believe that human language, whenever it might have arisen, did so only once, rather than on several independent occasions. As such, it might seem reasonable to expect that linguistics will meet with the same sort of success that biologists already have, but this is where it pays to keep sight of the ways in which the analogy between biological and linguistic evolution break down. There are considerations that would lead one to expect the task to be simpler for the linguists - for one thing, languages, unlike many living creatures, don't undergo sexual reproduction. At the same time, there are difficulties to consider that outweigh such advantages, not the least of which are the rapidity with which languages change by comparison to most species of multicellular animals, and the sheer amount of cross-family borrowing that occurs between languages - English, with more than half of its vocabulary of Romance origin, being one egregious example, with the heavily sinicized Japanese and the many English pidgins of the world providing more instances of this phenomenon.

What all of this amounts to is that as we go back further in time, it gets ever harder to tell genuine similarities between languages apart from resemblances that have arisen purely by coincidence. Even when we confine ourselves to languages we have good reason to believe are related, the difficulties remain very great. Consider, for instance, the following two translations of the first two articles of the the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the first from Edo, the language of the people of the old kingdom of Benin, and the second from Yorùbá, spoken by peoples who lived right next to the Edo, and with whom there has been a tremendous amount of cultural interchange. First the Edo version:

Emwen Nokaro.
Emwan ne agbon hia ne a biere, a bie iran noyan-egbe iran kevbe wee, umwon-mwen o ree etin hia ne o kheke iran khin. A ye ewaen kevbe ekhoe ne o maa wu iran, ne iran gha yin da egbe vbe orhion oghe eten-okpa.

Emwen nogieva
Dowande –omwan ore o mween etin ne o khekee kevbe a yaan-egbe omwan ovbehe. Iyen emwen na, vbe ne alughaen ke-alughaen i na rro, ne o dekaen ovbi evbo ne omwan khin, omwan fuofua ra okhui-khui okpia ra okhuo, ra ovbi evbo na ze, ugamwen, otu aze, ra otu eghaevbo, uhunmwun evbo ra oto evbo ne omwan ke rre, ukhu ne omwan mween, ubiemwe, ra emwin ovbehe hia. Levba-sevba, alughaen-ke alughaen ni khian gha rro vbekpa otu aze ne omwan ye, ototo evbo ne omwan ke rre, ra arrioba evbo ne o yaan egbe ere, arrioba edayi ra arrioba ne i mween ekhae ne egbe ere, ra evbo ne o rre ototo arrioba ovbehe.

And now the Yorùbá version:

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.

Both Edo and Yorùbá are classified as Benue-Congo languages, and both have been side by side for at least the last 1,500 years, with considerable amount of well-attested back and forth between speakers of the two; the best estimate is that the two tongues diverged only 5,000 years ago; yet despite all this, what stands out most, at least to my eyes, is how little the two languages actually share in terms of common vocabulary¹. That it has even been possible to classify the two into the same family owes more to certain grammatical features they share in common than to the sort of systematic comparisons that Indo-European scholars relied on in the 19th century. If we are so hard-pressed to find resemblances between languages lying in the same subfamily of Niger-Congo, what right have we to expect any better when comparing conjectural reconstructions of the long-dead ancestors of today's big families?

The difficulties linguists have faced ascertaining the relationships between languages like Korean and Japanese are, if anything, greater than those with which students of African languages must wrestle. Here are two languages in close geographic proximity with each other, spoken by peoples that are clearly closely related by blood, but what little vocabulary they share is essentially comprised of the borrowings Korean and Japanese have both made from Chinese. If we accept the hypothesis that Japenese stems from a now extinct and highly divergent form of Korean spoken in the ancient kingdom of Baekje (백제), we ought to be, if anything, even more discouraged about the prospects for reconstructing language superfamilies, for the lesson to be drawn from the example of Japanese would be that linguistic divergence can be even so rapid that a mere 2,000 years is sometimes enough to efface all similarities in vocabulary. Our great success with Indo-European owes as much to luck as to anything innate to the process of linguistic change.

If one were trying to make the case for optimism, one might reason as follows: it is true that languages diverge so rapidly that it is foolish to hope to recover what was spoken by the men who first decided to venture out of Africa, but we needn't be reaching that far back in the past to obtain the ancestral language. Might it not be the case that the common ancestor of all the languages in existence today lies close enough in time for something of value to be recoverable? Just as in population genetics it can happen that the common ancestor² of all of a given population occurred much more recently than the origin of the species itself, it could well be that Arabic, English, Japanese and Yorùbá are all descendants of just one of many languages spoken long ago, with the descandants of all the others having since gone extinct. This is not a possibility to be dismissed out of hand, but it still strikes me as extremely unlikely, as, for one thing, the extremely ancient date of settlement of those areas in which Austronesian and Na-Dene speakers are to be found argues against any possible ancestral language being less than 25,000 years old. Even if we restrict our attention to less comprehensive groupings like the hypothetical Nostratic, the time scales involved remain so great that any such proposal seems an exercise in futility.³

1 - The same phenomenon can be seen when comparing numerals in Igbo, another Benue-Congo language, with those in Yorùbá; numerals are usually amongst the most conservative of language elements, but there is essentially no resemblance two be found in the words the two languages use to denote numbers.

2 - The knowledgeable reader will be aware that I am referring, of course, to the coalescent theory of population genetics.

3 - We can pretty much rule out from the start any Nostratic proposal that includes Afro-Asiatic within a supposedly Eurasian superfamily, as the number and divergence of the various branches of Afro-Asiatic point very strongly to an African origin, most likely within that portion of North Africa that has given way to desert over the last 5,000 years.

The Perils of Data Mining

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has a very interesting post up about the pitfalls of data mining. This is well worth reading, if only as something to keep in mind on those occasions when some person or other threatens to "run the regressions" to "prove" some point.

There is a lot more to statistics than many people who suppose themselves sophisticated users of its techniques* realize, and economists (and econometricians in particular) are at the forefront of wrestling with the problems that the field faces. In fact, I'd say that anyone looking for a thorough understanding of statistical techniques and their limitations is better off reading a book like William H. Greene's Econometric Analysis in combination with Fumio Hayashi's Econometrics than the sort of pap usually ladled out in the biological and social sciences.

*In particular, those who work in fields like psychology, with practitioners of psychometrics being particularly guilty.

"Brown Peril" Hysteria

Here's a really nasty bit of xenophobic fear-mongering, irresponsible journalism of the worst kind, calculated to stir up a backlash against outsourcing to India.

STAFF at call centres in India are being bribed by organised crime and industrial spies to them help hack into the computer systems of British firms.

In at least two recent cases, local IT staff working on the sub-continent for UK institutions were involved in what industry sources say were 'security issues' in what is described as the tiniest fraction of a far larger problem.

In one case, sensitive financial information and credit card details were apparently illegally taken from a leading British financial institution.

A spokesman for the National Outsourcing Association (NOA) in Britain said: 'This shows that there are some things that you really should not send overseas. For organised criminals, this is a godsend.

'If you are using people in a low wage area, organised crime can afford to pay a lifetime's wages for data.'

The tipoff that this is nothing more than anti-outsourcing propaganda masquerading as a journalistic exposé is that not a single plausibly objective party is named as a source - the NOA is clearly a pressure group with an axe to grind, while the only other source quoted on the record, a director of an "information security solutions company", obviously has business to drum up. What's next, I wonder, lurid stories about Indian call center Lotharios lewdly chatting up "our" innocent young women?

Ah, Them Good Ol' Days!

Just to show that apologists for apartheid aren't the only ones who suffer from convenient amnesia, we have the following charming bit of wisdom from our good friend Pootie-Poot.

MOSCOW, February 12 (Itar-Tass) - Presidential candidate Vladimir Putin has described the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a national tragedy of enormous scope. He said so, responding to questions of his electioneering agents here on Thursday.

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

According to Putin “it is the elites and the nationalistically minded sections of the population, who gained from the disintegration of the USSR.”

Wonderful, isn't it? We already have the man on record as regarding Uncle Joe as some sort of national hero, so these shouldn't be all that shocking. I'm sure he'd also say that communism was "a good idea, only poorly implemented" if he thought he could get away with it.

While we're on the subject of apartheid and communism, many (most?) Russians feel (with some justification) that even if they now enjoy personal freedoms they never could have imagined in the old days, the material circumstances of their lives have taken a turn for the worse since the fall of the workers' paradise, and yet none of those who rush to condemn the new South Africa for its failings are ever to be found doing the same when the subject turns to the Soviet Union; why is that, I wonder? Actually, I don't wonder at all, as it really is quite obvious what these despicable creatures are really bothered about.

The Inglorious Past

If I've been focusing on South Africa of late, it's because I've been having a run of encounters with white emigrants from that country who've taken it upon themselves to present a distorted image of the past, as if it were a golden age for all of their former country's citizens, an age that has now (allegedly) given way to a new epoch of black barbarism. Images like these do more than any torrent of words to show these individuals up as the brazen liars that they are. I am no supporter of Mugabe-style retribution, and I think one ought to embrace in a spirit of reconciliation all those who are willing to genuinely break with the past, but I have no patience for those who try to make out that apartheid was anything other than a brutal system of racial oppression designed to keep blacks permanently in servitude to their white masters; all that "anti-communist" rhetoric is just so much bullshit.

Iraq and the Importance of Ethnic Tensions

When I pointed out the important role ethnic conflict had to play in Africa's problems, someone objected to my explanation as being "ad hoc." Leaving aside the tremendous amount of historical evidence (much of it going back, where Africa is concerned, to before 1920) in support of my supposedly jerry-rigged thesis, as well as the substantial body of high-quality statistical data in its favor, I can't think of a better illustration of precisely what I was talking about than what is currently happening in Iraq. Here I am living by Popper's prescription that a theory is worthwhile only if it risks something by making falsifiable predictions: if Iraq isn't partitioned, it will take a miracle to avoid civil war once American troops depart the country.

A year ago, testifying before Congress, Wolfowitz predicted that securing postwar Iraq would be an easier job than the United States and its allies faced in Bosnia or Afghanistan. After all, the deputy secretary said, there's no ethnic tension in Iraq.

The immediate reaction of virtually everyone who knew even a little bit about Iraq and its long-simmering tensions, repression, bloodshed and just plain bad blood among Kurds and Turkomen in the north, Sunni Arabs in the middle and Shiite Muslims in the south, was: Say what?

Not since President Ford prematurely declared Soviet-dominated Poland a free country has a public official stuck his foot so deeply and so publicly in his mouth.

Wolfowitz visited Iraq early this month and, at a meeting in the northern city of Kirkuk, he got a long, painful ear pounding on the subject of tension and fear among the country's ethnic groups.

The Sunni Arabs complained that they were being abused and mistreated by the Kurds. The Shia made it clear that the only thing would satisfy them - the long-oppressed majority in this nation of 25 million people - was free and open elections, which they would, of course, win. Other Iraqis complained that local militias, who owe no loyalty to the central government, are intimidating and frightening people.

Central Intelligence Agency officers in Baghdad Station have reported to the home office their own fears that Iraq is on a "glide path to civil war." (emphasis added)

Things are looking good so far for my "ad hoc" explanation, no? Not that I want to be vindicated at the expense of the Iraqi populace - I think Washington ought to have been bolder, and done something to satisfy Kurdish demands for a state of their own, even if that meant risking the wrath of the Turks, who did prove less than helpful in the prosecution of the war, after all.

Black or White?

The strange case of Happy Sindane (or Abbey Mzayiya as he is now known) illustrates the pointlessness of trying to set hard and fast boundaries about racial identity. It probably is true that he is the result of a liaison between a "white" man and a "black" woman, but for the life of me, I cannot see how one could tell him apart from any other "white" person walking down the street. Happy Sindane is a living example of the genetic notion that what we call "racial" features are merely statistical tendencies; were we able to pick out the genes responsible for, say, nose shape, it is likely that a good many "white" people who pride themselves on their racial "purity" would learn that they carried at least one of the genes for "black" noses. To say that we can use the relatively small amount of geographic structure inherent in our genes to statistically tease out where (most of) one's ancestors came from is not to say that there are any exclusively "black", "white" or "Asian" genes.

UPDATE: Anyone who doubts the veracity of that last statement is free to look around on the Kidd Lab's ALFRED database. There are a few genes which show starkly differing variation structured along "racial" (as opposed to just ethnic) lines, but these tend to be genes under very strong selective pressure, like the FY^O allele that confers P. Vivax resistance in Africans, or the CCH5-d32 allele that is believed to have been selected for by the plague endemic to medieval Northern Europe - as these two examples imply, such genes tend to code for resistance to infectious diseases, and can by no stretch of the imagination be considered typical in their distribution. Even in these cases, the differences aren't always as stark as might be imagined - only 10-15% of Europeans carry CCR5-d32, while the Duffy FY^O allele is nearly universal only amongst West Africans - and present in even isolated European and Asian populations, if at a very low frequency. The point ought to be clear - there is no such thing as a "black", "white" or "Asian" gene, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or attempting to mislead.

Human Cloning Achieved?

This report is a lot more credible than claims made by groups like the Raelians, but, as with all dramatic scientific announcements, it would be wise to wait for some time to pass, and for a great deal of crtical scrutiny to occur, before taking the claims of Drs. Woo Suk Hwang and Shin Yong Moon at face value. One strong reason for scepticism is that until now, no reputable researchers had succeeded in cloning any anthropoid species, much less one that is as difficult to work with, given ethical, legal and political constraints, as our own.

Scientists in South Korea report that they have created human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells, the universal cells that hold great promise for medical research.

Their goal, they say, is not to clone humans but to advance understanding of the causes and treatment of disease. But the work makes the birth of a cloned baby suddenly more feasible. For that reason, it is likely to reignite a fierce debate over the ethics of human cloning.

The paper, to be published tomorrow in the journal Science, provides a detailed description of how to create human embryos by cloning.

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

Even before the paper's publication - reported last night by a South Korean newspaper, one day ahead of the embargo imposed by Science - the scientists' findings were being assailed by opponents of cloning. Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, called for federal legislation to stop human cloning for any purpose.

``The age of human cloning has apparently arrived: today, cloned blastocysts for research, tomorrow cloned blastocysts for babymaking,'' he wrote in an e-mail message. ``In my opinion, and that of the majority of the Council, the only way to prevent this from happening here is for Congress to enact a comprehensive ban or moratorium on all human cloning.''

I really wish idiots like Dr. Kass would shut up for a change, instead of jumping up and down clamoring for a federal ban on cloning for any and all purposes. It is precisely this sort of easy conflation of private religious beliefs and public policy that irritates me most about social conservatism - for goodness sake, a blastocyst is hardly in any position to merit the sort of concern one might extend to a third trimester foetus! If these religious extremists get their way, medical research in the United States will be dealt a serious blow, and the money and brains will flow to countries in which fundamentalists and the Vatican don't get to set the parameters for researchers.

White South African Attitudes towards the Apartheid Past

A very interesting interesting paper that gives some hard numbers about the attitudes of white South Africans with regards to their country's recent past. What is worth noting here is that these numbers almost certainly understated the real level of ambivalence towards the changes occurring in that country when the surveys referenced in it were carried out.

As an unrelated aside, it is also worth pointing out, for those who like to parrot rubbish about how black rule has lead to "skyrocketing" crime rates, that violent crime was already raging uncontrollably during the apartheid era, due in large part to the active encouragement of the government at the time. "Black on black" crime was a useful tool in dividing the black population and discrediting the ANC in the eyes of a Reagan administration all too willing to see what was going on in South Africa as a manichean struggle between brown bolshevik hordes and valiant white defenders of "civilization." The only thing that has changed since the demise of apartheid is that with the passing of the Group Areas Act and the abolition of the black "Homelands", the crime epidemic that had once blighted only the lives of black Africans could no longer be contained away from the eyes of South Africa's white population. The apartheid-era police, which allocated only 6 percent* of its staff to dealing with real crimes as opposed to violations of the apartheid regulations, and then mostly those committed against whites, had never learnt the art of effective policing, so when the new dispensation came to be, the inevitable impression from the white perspective was that crime suddenly "exploded"; as the saying goes, those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.

*See Page. 151 of A Concise History of South Africa, Robert Ross, 1999, Cambridge University Press.

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.