The Tories are a Bunch of Worthless Opportunists

What an intensely nauseating bunch of popularity hounds the Conservative Party's leadership are! Frankly, these people deserve to remain in the political doldrums they're in. At least Blair has been willing to risk his neck for what he believes, whether or not I agree with his policies.

A wide-ranging shakeup of the BBC, including a dramatic cut in the licence fee, is likely to be dropped from the Tories' next general election manifesto as Michael Howard attempts to tap into widespread anger at Downing Street's treatment of the corporation.

In a major change of heart, the Tory leadership is planning to shelve a radical report by the former Channel Five chief David Elstein which will be published amid great fanfare today.

The report, which was commissioned under Iain Duncan Smith, would have led to the most wide-ranging changes in the BBC's 82-year history by calling for a phasing out of the licence fee over 10 years. Mr Duncan Smith had planned to use the Elstein recommendations as the basis for a populist manifesto pledge to cut the licence fee, which he regarded as an unfair "poll tax".

The new Tory leadership has decided, however, that it would be better off positioning the party as the friend of the BBC in the wake of the fallout from the Hutton report. Well-placed Tories believe that the widespread public anger at the Hutton report, which exonerated the government and censured the BBC, shows there is great political mileage in standing by the corporation.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary who is in overall charge of the party's policy on the BBC, made a show of support for the corporation by lunching with Greg Dyke within days of his ousting as director general. Mr Davis is understood to believe that it would be foolish to float plans for the break-up of the BBC at the very moment when Mr Dyke will launch a stinging attack on Downing Street in his forthcoming memoirs.

Spineless, pandering careerists! Why would anyone in his right mind vote for politicians for whom principles mean absolutely nothing? Say what you like about Margaret Thatcher, but at least with her you knew what she stood for.

BBC - Nigeria Leads in Religious Belief

Hardly surprising. When one lives in a country as difficult as Nigeria, religion is one of the few comforts available to keep one sane. What's more interesting (to me at least) is that despite all the attention paid to Jewish settlers on the West Bank and the political demands of ultra-orthodox parties like Shas, Israelis seem to be less religious than Americans.

The subject of prayer found 95% of Nigerians and 67% in the US claiming to pray regularly.

Those saying they never prayed included 29% of Israelis and 25% of Britons. But across the entire sample, almost 30% of all atheists surveyed said they sometimes prayed.

What's that about deathbed conversions again? Nothing quite like a close brush with disaster to bring out hidden religious sentiments in many a militant atheist. Pascal's wager in action I suppose ... The following tidbit was also interesting:

In Lebanon and the US, 71% said they were willing to die for their God or their beliefs.

Hmm. Is one supposed to applaud this show of resolution, or be appalled by it? In any case, I think the meaning of "dying for one's beliefs" is probably slightly different in the United States and Lebanon.

A Profile of Kwame Nkrumah

Few things irritate me more than the hero-worship paid to rulers like Kwame Nkrumah. Just because a man knows how to spout fiery anti-colonial rhetoric doesn't mean he knows what he's doing, or even that he has good intentions. This profile of Nkrumah illustrates why I hold leaders like him in such contempt.

Nkrumah has been described by author Peter Omari as a dictator who "made much of elections, when he was aware that they were not really free but rigged in his favor." According to Omari, the CPP administration of Ghana was one that manipulated the constitutional and electoral processes of democracy to justify Nkrumah's agenda. The extent to which the government would pursue that agenda constitutionally was demonstrated early in the administration's life when it succeeded in passing the Deportation Act of 1957, the same year that ethnic, religious, and regional parties were banned. The Deportation Act empowered the governor general and, therefore, subsequent heads of state, to expel persons whose presence in the country was deemed not in the interest of the public good. Although the act was to be applied only to non-Ghanaians, several people to whom it was later applied claimed to be citizens.

The Preventive Detention Act, passed in 1958, gave power to the prime minister to detain certain persons for up to five years without trial. Amended in 1959 and again in 1962, the act was seen by opponents of the CPP government as a flagrant restriction of individual freedom and human rights. Once it had been granted these legal powers, the CPP administration managed to silence its opponents. Dr. J.B. Danquah, a leading member of the UGCC, was detained until he died in prison in 1965. Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, leader of the opposition United Party (UP), formed by the NLM and other parties in response to Nkrumah's outlawing of so-called separatist parties in 1957, went into exile in London to escape detention, while other members still in the country joined the ruling party.

On July 1, 1960, Ghana became a republic, and Nkrumah won the presidential election that year. Shortly thereafter, Nkrumah was proclaimed president for life, and the CPP became the sole party of the state. Using the powers granted him by the party and the constitution, Nkrumah by 1961 had detained an estimated 400 to 2,000 of his opponents. Nkrumah's critics pointed to the rigid hold of the CPP over the nation's political system and to numerous cases of human rights abuses. Others, however, defended Nkrumah's agenda and policies.

Nkrumah discussed his political views in his numerous writings, especially in Africa Must Unite (1963) and in NeoColonialism (1965). These writings show the impact of his stay in Britain in the mid-1940s. The Pan-Africanist movement, which had held one of its annual conferences, attended by Nkrumah, at Manchester in 1945, was influenced by socialist ideologies. The movement sought unity among people of African descent and also improvement in the lives of workers who, it was alleged, had been exploited by capitalist enterprises in Africa. Western countries with colonial histories were identified as the exploiters. According to the socialists, "oppressed" people ought to identify with the socialist countries and organizations that best represented their interests; however, all the dominant world powers in the immediate post-1945 period, except the Soviet Union and the United States, had colonial ties with Africa. Nkrumah asserted that even the United States, which had never colonized any part of Africa, was in an advantageous position to exploit independent Africa unless preventive efforts were taken.

According to Nkrumah, his government, which represented the first black African nation to win independence, had an important role to play in the struggle against capitalist interests on the continent. As he put it, "the independence of Ghana would be meaningless unless it was tied to the total liberation of Africa." It was important, then, he said, for Ghanaians to "seek first the political kingdom." Economic benefits associated with independence were to be enjoyed later, proponents of Nkrumah's position argued. But Nkrumah needed strategies to pursue his goals.

On the domestic front, Nkrumah believed that rapid modernization of industries and communications was necessary and that it could be achieved if the workforce were completely Africanized and educated. Even more important, however, Nkrumah believed that this domestic goal could be achieved faster if it were not hindered by reactionary politicians--elites in the opposition parties and traditional chiefs--who might compromise with Western imperialists. From such an ideological position, Nkrumah supporters justified the Deportation Act of 1957, the Detention Acts of 1958, 1959 and 1962, parliamentary intimidation of CPP opponents, the appointment of Nkrumah as president for life, the recognition of his party as the sole political organization of the state, the creation of the Young Pioneer Movement for the ideological education of the nation's youth, and the party's control of the civil service. Government expenditure on road building projects, mass education of adults and children, and health services, as well as the construction of the Akosombo Dam, were all important if Ghana were to play its leading role in Africa's liberation from colonial and neo-colonial domination.

Let's face it - Kwame Nkrumah was an incompetent, authoritarian, far-left-wing thug who just happened to have a way with words. It's well past time Africans got beyond blaming the West for the idiocies of men like him.

UPDATE: Here's more information on Nkrumah and the way in which the socialistic schemes he initiated helped to fatally undermine Ghana's economy. All those LSE-indoctrinated left-wing "development economists" of the 60s and 70s also have to take their share of the blame for the disasters that unfolded in Africa, as they all heartily endorsed the policies of men like Nkrumah and Nyerere at the time.

When Mobutu Reigned Supreme

Here's a truly hilarious piece on one woman's (partially succesful) attempt to get a personal audience with the Congo's one time Kleptocrat-in-Chief, Mobuto Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga* ("The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.") The following anecdote about Mobutu's rule tells one all one needs to know about the man's philosophy of governance:

Mobutu once told citizens at a public rally, "Go ahead and steal, but don't steal too much, or you will get caught."

It's clowns like this who gave both African leadership and anti-communism a bad name. Unlike a lot of Africans, I have no illusions that Patrice Lumumba would have done great things for the Congo - a country so diverse simply couldn't have been held together other than by brute force, and Belgium had done almost nothing prepare the Congo for independence - but I still think it would have been better in the long run had Lumumba been allowed to try to govern and fail. That Lumumba sought Soviet aid to quell Katanga's attempt at seccession was hardly grounds enough to label him a "communist" and green-light his kidnapping and murder; plenty of Third World rulers before and since have welcomed Soviet arms and training without buying into the Soviet ideology, including Egypt's Nasser, Nigeria's Gowon, Syria's Assad and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. All that was achieved by the unseating of Lumumba was a delay of Congo's day of reckoning by some 37 years, and the granting of Joseph Desiré Mobutu the licence to rob his countrymen blind in the interlude.

*UPDATE: Heeding the remarks of one commenter, I've amended Mobutu's name to reflect the title in it's full glory.

Passionless About the Passion

Am I the only person in the blogosphere who isn't the slightest bit interested in The Passion of the Christ?

But Hitler Was a Vegetarian

My all-time favorite example of the argumentum ad hitlerum has to be the statement "Hitler was a vegetarian!" This statement has to be the most transparent instance of ad hominem around, and I've often wondered how anyone could possibly be stupid enough to be swayed by it. As the old saying goes though, no one's ever gone broke underestimating the stupidity of the public, and it really does seem to nettle some people that Der Führer wasn't exactly a beef and mutton sort of guy.

Rynn Berry wants to set the record straight about Adolf Hitler. "There's absolutely no evidence he was a vegetarian. It simply isn't true." Berry, a 54-year-old raw-foodist and "vegetarian historian" who is the author of Food for the Gods: Vegetarianism and the World's Religions, is on a mission to dispel the commonly held view that the 20th century's most notorious mass murderer was also an adamant herbivore.

I first learned of Berry this winter while listening to the radio. An adviser to the North American Vegetarian Society, Berry was on lefty WBAI's weekly animal-rights show, "Walden's Pond," to explain what Hitler really ate for dinner. According to his research, while Hitler for the most part followed a vegetarian diet, some of his favorite treats were liver dumplings, ham, and caviar. "Mainstream historians have an elastic definition of vegetarianism," he says. "They don't hold Hitler to the same standards as a practicing ethical vegetarian. You can't be a vegetarian and eat liver dumplings." But Berry's quest raises some obvious questions: Why investigate what Hitler ate? Does it matter, considering his ghastly crimes?

It matters to Berry. He, like other devout vegetarians, whose diets are inextricably linked to their self-avowed, pacifistic lifestyles, can't stand being associated with Hitler. Berry neither eats nor wears animal products and avoids all cooked foods. He first became interested in Hitler's diet after he wrote a book in 1990 called Famous Vegetarians and Their Favorite Recipes. It includes Leonardo di Vinci's love for fried figs and beans; George Bernard Shaw's favorite, brussels sprouts casserole; and Plutarch's classic, asparagus with tahini. It doesn't, however, include any mention of Hitler. At talks and seminars, Berry says, it's rare that someone doesn't point out the omission: "I've been the target of a lot of abuse and taunts from hostile non-vegetarians who bring out the alleged fact of Hitler's vegetarianism and tax me for not having put him the book."

Berry's new book, Hitler: Neither Vegetarian nor Animal Lover, is an attempt to clear the table on what we know about Hitler's diet. The book, published by Pythagorean—a small house that specializes in vegetarian and animal-rights topics (and named after the Greek genius, Pythagoras, who was apparently history's first famous vegetarian)—is a slim paperback whose cover features a black-and-white photo of Hitler dining with Neville Chamberlain. There's a plate of appetizers on the table, but it's hard to tell if there's meat in them. In any case, Hitler looks like he has other things on his mind.

What a pity for Mr. Berry's argument that we have the word of several witnesses testifying to Hitler's vegetarianism, including Albert Speer, his secretary Traudl Junge, and both of his cooks, Constanze Manziarly and Marlene von Exner. To be frank, this guy is both a nutcase and a moron for caring enough to write an entire book about such an inane topic. Sure Hitler was a vegetarian, but he was also a lot of other things as well: he was fastidious about washing his hands after playing with his dogs, he showered regularly and kept himself scrupulously clean, he detested cigarette smoke, and he liked to read. Are all these things to be condemned because of his association with them?

That a vegetarian also happened to be a genocidal megalomaniac doesn't say anything one way or another about vegetarianism. That so many vegetarians care enough about Hitler's eating habits to seek to "set the record straight" does say a great deal about the allure vegetarianism has for mushy-brained new-age types.

Dog Bites Man - Deadly Religious Clashes in Nigeria

Pardon my cynicism, but this sort of thing happens far too often for me to be able to feign shock and surprise.

Suspected Muslim militants armed with guns and bows and arrows killed at least 48 people in an attack on a farming village in central Nigeria. Most of the victims died as they sought refuge in a church, police said.

The latest bout of Muslim-Christian violence in the region occurred Tuesday night in Yelwa, a mainly Christian town in Nigeria's Plateau State, police commissioner Innocent Ilozuoke said.

Army and police reinforcements helped restore calm, Ilozuoke told a news conference yesterday in Jos, the state capital.

The killings appeared to be the latest retaliatory attack in a sporadic conflict that has rocked the central region since an outburst of sectarian violence in 2001, pitting Christians against Muslims in once-peaceful Jos. In the initial outburst in Jos more than 1,000 people died in one week.

Since then, several hundreds more have died as rival Muslim-Christian militias attacked isolated villages and towns.

On February 19, gunmen suspected by the police to belong to a Muslim militia ambushed a patrol car, killing four police officers. The ambush followed an earlier attack by a Christian militia upon a Muslim village that killed 10.

For decades, the majority Christian inhabitants of Plateau and the minority Muslim population - mostly Hausa and Fulani tribespeople with origins farther north - had lived in harmony.

But tensions between the two communities heightened in the past four years as 12 majority Muslim states in the north adopted the strict Sharia, or Islamic, legal codes, perceived by Christians as an expansionist threat.

As you can see, Nigerians are one big happy family. These clashes aren't about Islam as such - who's ever heard of a militant Yoruba muslim? - but about the desire of a feudal oligarchy to perpetuate its rule by any means. In the context of the middle belt, what this means is forced islamization and hausaization. It's a damned shame what's going on in the North, as Jos is a very nice city.

Petroleum and Politics in Nigeria (PDF)

Here's a nice paper that details the tremendously damaging effect oil revenues have had on federalism in Nigeria, and the rampant corruption the hunt for some of that unearned income has given rise to. Oil is a curse for a developing country, particularly when the revenues from it flow directly into the hands of the state.

Within each region a single ethnic group predominated while federal authority (established formally in 1954) and nationalist sentiment were weak in the face of strong and fissiparous regional subnationalisms. In the 1950’s, for example, political delegates remained in the regions and simply sent their representatives to Lagos.

If the regions were the source of identification and political loyalty, they were also marked by striking patterns of unequal development. The Northern Region, while larger in population and area than the other regions combined, was the poorest and least exposed to Western education. The West conversely was by virtue of cocoa, coastal access, industrial development and early education, the wealthiest region which captured 38.3% of the statutory (i.e. federal) revenue allocation by 1954/55. Educational inequities contributed to regional tensions as southerners (Yoruba and Ibos) dominated federal posts and attempted to penetrate northern government. As a consequence, Northerners attempted to slow down the transition to Independence in the 1950’s and promoted a northernization policy to limit Yoruba and Ibo incursions.

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

The emergence of petroleum as the centerpiece of the Nigerian export economy and the mainstay of state revenues had enormous consequences for the political development of post-colonial Nigeria. First, the geography of oil mattered. Close to 80% of the petroleum was located in the eastern region -- more precisely in the delta which represents roughly 8% of the country -- and not infrequently in the territories of ethnic minorities (i.e. non-Ibo). While the civil war -- the attempt by the Ibo to secede from the federation and to establish the independent state of establish Biafra -- was not in any simple sense caused by the discovery of oil, the control of oil revenues was the central issue which precipitated the crisis of February 1967. The Governor of the Eastern Region, Colonel Ojukwu, passed the Revenue Collection Edict #11 in 1967 by which all revenues collected by the Federal government would be paid to the treasury of the Eastern government. The Federal (Gowon) government in response created three new states within the Eastern Region in an effort to gain support from oil producing minorities who would be awarded newfound autonomy and a share of oil revenues.

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

Second, petroleum underwrote a new political dynamic in the relations between the regions and the federal center. Growing nationalization of the petroleum sector and the establishment of a national oil company in 1970 channeled petroleum rents directly to federal coffers. Centrally controlled oil revenues superseded the regionally-based revenues derived from the commodity Marketing Boards. As a consequence of the stunning growth of state revenues in the 1970’s, the political center possessed a newfound fiscal capacity by which petrodollars could be used to manufacture a sort of political compliance, and conversely the regions discovered a new interest in gaining access to the seemingly infinite wealth provided by centrally-controlled black gold. Petroleum enhanced the capacities of the historically weak center.

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

Petroleum is key to understanding the two fundamental dimensions of Nigerian politics in the period following the defeat of Biafra in the civil war: state creation and revenue allocation. One of the first acts of the post-war military government under Gowon was to create twelve new states in 1967 from the existing four regions. Designed to balance north and south with six states, and thereby break the power and pathological competitiveness of the large regional blocs, the new state system had the effect of increasing minority access to federal funds while simultaneously making the entire state structure dependent on central (oil) revenues. Of course the demand for new states to meet the local needs for access to government resources, especially in deprived areas, was in practice difficult to halt. More states were created in 1976 and in 1991, while the number of local government areas (LGA’s) within each state also proliferated, and for similar reasons. The result was the genesis of small states with little or no fiscal basis, totally dependent on what each state saw as `their share’ of the national cake (i.e. the oil monies), and a profusion (there are 589!) of corrupt, ineffective and hugely expensive LGA’s driven by the logic of patronage politics. Ironically, this massive edifice effectively stymied any sense of Nigerian federalism -- the dialectics of oil once more! -- pointing to the ways in which vast oil revenues could not create a more robust sense of Nigerian identity and federal authority.

Nonetheless, the multiplication of states from in twelve in 1967 to thirty in 1996 did have the effect of irrevocably breaking some aspects of the old pattern of regional power, and accordingly increased the power of minorities who came to hold some form of political representation and economic autonomy. To this extent petrodollars permitted a certain degree of political cohesion within the federation to be quite literally purchased. The cost of course has been an undisciplined federal structure driven by massive inflationary costs -- the proliferation of state bureaucracies driven by prebendal politics -- largely without a robust material base. As Khan (1994, p.32) notes, the states have abandoned any pretense of a productive identity and rely unashamedly on federal handouts. The result is `power untempered by responsibility....[the states are]..miniature versions of their free-spending federal paymasters (Economist 1993, p.12). Oil revenues moreover did not require taxation of personal income or poverty, and reduced the economic and political significance of taxpayers (Forrest 1995, p.68-69) thereby removing another potential break on inflated state and federal expenditures.

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

To simplify and enormously complex picture, prior to 1959 statutory revenue was allocated on the basis of a `derivation principle’ by which states received allocations from the federal pool in strict proportion to their contribution to these revenues (Ashwe 1996). This generally benefited northern and western regions but in the face of growing oil revenues in the 1960’s they sought to change the principles of allocation. Monies to be allocated to the states came to be deposited in a Federation Account (formerly the Distributable Pool Account), the vast proportion of which was (and is) derived from oil. As the size of this account grew, new criteria were developed, largely to amend and supplant the derivation principle. By the 1960’s population, need and equity principles were invoked; by the 1980’s social development and internal revenue were added. In the 1990’s the weighting of criteria for allocation has been as follows: population 30%, equity 40%, land area 10%, social development 10% and internal revenue 10%. This new horizontal allocation system obviously privileges more populous and larger states. Hence the five oil producing states which account for 90% of the oil receive 19.3% of the allocated revenues (Ikporukpu 1996, p.168). Five northern non-oil producing states conversely absorb 26% of allocated revenue.

Amidst the shifting sands of revenue politics and allocative criteria, several patterns are clearly evident. First the proportion of revenues flowing to the north increased substantially from 35% of the total in 1966/67 to 52% in 1985. Second, the proportion of statutory revenues as a proportion of the local states’ budget grew disproportionately. By 1979 state governments budgeted over 80% of their revenues from federal sources (a dependency which created new competitive pressures among states to tap central oil revenues, and further deepened pressures for the creation of new states). And third, the change in the derivation principle meant that oil producing states in particular saw their share of statutory revenues fall; Bendel and Rivers States’ share fell from 23.1% and 17.1% in 1974/75 to 6.4% and 6.2% respectively in 1989/90. To paint the revenue allocation picture, in short, is to depict northern hegemony in a weak and fissiparous federal system in which the oil-producing states in particular have experienced a sort of fiscal (and political) deprivation.

What more need I say? Where there is no taxation there can be no real representation, the overwhelming reason why Nigeria continues to exist is because there is easy money to be had from oil, and the indigent, illiterate North is determined to maintain its parasitical lock on the oil money without which it would quickly sink into even deeper destitution. The only people who benefit from the continued existence of a single Nigeria are those in the northern part of that country, and even there only a small coterie of feudal Hausa-Fulani potentates get to enjoy most of the rewards.

You Can't Eat Islam

I've mentioned before that in educational terms, northern and southern Nigeria belong in two very different worlds. Literacy rates in many of the southern states approach 80 percent, while in the north the typical figure is about 20 percent, Kano state, with an estimated 45 percent literacy rate, being the standout. Here's a Radio Netherlands article that gives an idea of just what "education" means in the Muslim north, and why we in the South chafe so badly under the prospect of being ruled by people of the North.

In Nigeria, one in five children are sent to Koranic schools. They spend at least four years memorising Islam's holy book. The pupils are often abandoned by their parents and are forced to beg on the streets to survive. Efforts are now underway to improve the lives of these children, to teach them basic subjects such as English and mathematics, and to give them professional skills.

"Most of these children are children of peasant farmers and menial labourers," says Salamatu Jibril, the director of the Women Farmers' Advancement Network, WOFAN, which recently carried out research in 60 Koranic schools. "The parents are so poor that they cannot afford modern education. Many of these parents have 20 children, so if they can send one away, it's a relief for them."

Daily routine
The Koranic school pupils begin their day with the early morning prayer between 5am and 6am. Then they start reciting and memorising the Koran till 10am. They are free till the late afternoon prayer at 5pm and then they begin to recite again. This is followed by more prayers and then recitation till late in the evening.

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

In 2001, Nigeria introduced mandatory universal basic education. The government is now trying to integrate secular education in the religious schools. But it hasn't been easy, according to Doreen Enadi Dodi of the Kaduna State Primary Education Board. "Initially we thought we could assign some of our teachers to give lessons at the Koranic schools. But we've encountered some resistance from the malaams who think the government is trying to take over control of their schools." It's also unlikely that malnourished children who have to wake up before dawn and study till late in the evening will be able to assimilate any of the additional lessons.

Non-governmental organizations have also noted a reluctance on the part of malaams and children to introducing Western education. Mrs Sani, the co-ordinator of Millennium Hope, a project in Kaduna, describes one setback: "We had one instance in the town of Zaria. We gave a Koranic school chairs, uniforms, textbooks and exercise books. The children literally ran away! Of the 250 children at the school, only 50 remained."

Comparing this article to some personal reminisces made by Razib about his brief study at a madrassa makes it clear that there's a great deal held in common between Northern Nigeria and Bangladesh where Islamic education is concerned. In particular, the intellectual sterility of islamic "learning" in both places is quite marked, as is the utter lack of reference to any practical subjects in the teaching material. Spending years on end cramming religious verses in a language one doesn't understand is hardly the best preparation for making one's way in the world in the scientific age.

From a strictly ethnocentric viewpoint, I'm personally less than bothered if Northern muslims react to the prospect of exposure to English, mathematics and the sciences as if they were kryptonite - all the better when the inevitable day of reckoning comes for the artificial state called Nigeria - but I have to say, is it any wonder, given the aversion of these people to all forms of modernity, that we see outbreaks of anti-western paranoia like the ongoing hue and cry about polio vaccinations being an American plot to sterilize muslims? Here's one respect in which widespread ignorance in one group can have fatal consequences for others: as long as Northern Nigeria remains a reservoir for the poliomyelitis virus, children all over the world, and not just the unfortunate offspring of a few illiterate fanatics, will continue to be at risk. Yes, my Nigerian problem is yours as well, if you have children.

Nigeria expels The Economist (Subs. Reqd.)

Typical nonsense from Obasanjo's government. I thoroughly despair for that hopeless excuse of a country.

SINCE Nigeria stopped being a military dictatorship in 1999, its government has grown more gentle. The immigration officials who escorted your correspondent to the airport to be deported last week were quite charming. But it was still unpleasant to be thrown out of the country, prevented from doing one's job, separated from one's Nigerian husband, and so on. And baffling: last month, in Davos, the president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, was heard expressing dismay that The Economist did not write more about his great country.

According to the information ministry, your correspondent was advised to leave because of her “flagrant disregard” for Nigeria's immigration laws. The rap sheet is confusing, but includes the allegation that she worked despite only holding a tourist visa (which is untrue), and the insinuation that she is not really a proper journalist (you decide). The trouble began after your correspondent refused to pay a rather excessive sum of money to an official in the information ministry. The information minister said last week he would consider a fresh application for press credentials, but that “a lot depends on whether she says something that would make it more difficult for her to come back, like accusing people of bribery.”

A foreign correspondent's woes are trivial, of course, when compared with the effect Nigeria's dysfunctional public administration has on ordinary Nigerians. The civil service absorbs most of the budget but delivers little in the way of services. Needless duplication breeds waste. Embezzlement is rife. And perhaps most dispiriting is a tendency among some bureaucrats to be pointlessly obstructive in the hope that someone will bribe them to lay off. A small example: a retired school teacher recently tried to renew his Nigerian passport, but was told that he had first to learn Yoruba, the indigenous tongue of the South West, even though he was born in Nigeria, his parents were Nigerian and the country's official language is English.

The only sure way to get things done is to go straight to the top. The president rules on important issues by decree, sometimes bypassing his profligate parliament. He is effectively his own oil minister (having left the post vacant), and does much of the foreign minister's job, too. Even rural folk have learnt to appeal to him when local authorities do not deliver. Delegations from the countryside beat a path to his office in Abuja, the capital, hoping to win his support for projects as small as drilling a bore hole in their village.

That's Obasanjo for you - Micromanager in Chief. In a sane country in which politics was actually about policies, rather than about endless rounds of ethnic squabbling over oil rents, a man with administrative talents as limited as the Nigerian president's would never have been allowed near power. Seeing Nigerian rulers and bureaucrats abuse their powers to frustrate all attempts at individual initiative has soured me for life on the notion that one ought to look on government as the solution to most problems, rather than their cause.

Alexis de Tocqueville on Slavery

The man's foresight and keen understanding continues to amaze me: so much of what he had to say about America in the 1830s still holds true today. Note also how clearly his words about "the ills that threaten the future of the Union" foreshadow the American Civil War.

The Indians will perish in the same isolated condition in which they have lived, but the destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

Generally speaking, men must make great and unceasing efforts before permanent evils are created; but there is one calamity which penetrated furtively into the world, and which was at first scarcely distinguishable amid the ordinary abuses of power: it originated with an individual whose name history has not preserved; it was wafted like some accursed germ upon a portion of the soil; but it afterwards nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread naturally with the society to which it belonged. This calamity is slavery. Christianity suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the sixteenth century re-established it, as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted upon humanity, though less extensive, was far more difficult to cure.

It is important to make an accurate distinction between slavery itself and its consequences. The immediate evils produced by slavery were very nearly the same in antiquity as they are among the moderns, but the consequences of these evils were different. The slave among the ancients belonged to the same race as his master, and was often the superior of the two in education and intelligence. Freedom was the only distinction between them; and when freedom was conferred, they were easily confounded together. The ancients, then, had a very simple means of ridding themselves of slavery and its consequences: that of enfranchisement; and they succeeded as soon as they adopted this measure generally. Not but that in ancient states the vestiges of servitude subsisted for some time after servitude itself was abolished. There is a natural prejudice that prompts men to despise whoever has been their inferior long after he has become their equal; and the real inequality that is produced by fortune or by law is always succeeded by an imaginary inequality that is implanted in the manners of the people. But among the ancients this secondary consequence of slavery had a natural limit; for the freedman bore so entire a resemblance to those born free that it soon became impossible to distinguish him from them. (emphasis added)

Truer words have rarely been spoken. African-Americans may now enjoy all the freedoms of any other Americans on paper, but to be black is still, in many eyes, to be presumed innately inferior.

itex2MML for Windows Update

A new binary of itex2MML, incorporating a couple of bugfixes, can be downloaded from here. The binary was compiled with GCC 3.3.1 and Cygwin, so you'll need to make sure that Cygwin1.dll (included in the ZIP archive) is either in your library path, or is in the same directory as the itex2MML executable.

Revelation: Coin Tosses Obey Newtonian Physics

Am I missing something, or is this really as obvious as I think it is?

Feb. 24, 2004 -- Flipping a coin may not be the fairest way to settle disputes. About a decade ago, statistician Persi Diaconis started to wonder if the outcome of a coin flip really is just a matter of chance. He had Harvard University engineers build him a mechanical coin flipper. Diaconis, now at Stanford University, found that if a coin is launched exactly the same way, it lands exactly the same way.

The randomness in a coin toss, it appears, is introduced by sloppy humans. Each human-generated flip has a different height and speed, and is caught at a different angle, giving different outcomes.

But using high speed cameras and equations, Diaconis and colleagues have now found that even though humans are largely unpredictable coin flippers, there's still a bias built in: If a coin starts out heads, it ends up heads when caught more often than it does tails.

Color me underwhelmed by this report. A coin flipped in a given manner will land on the same side if tossed precisely the same way again? You're having me on! Even the bit about the slight bias we have in coin tossing strikes me as less than revelatory, as it's long been known that humans are terrible at randomness, even when explicitly trying for it.

Persi Diaconis is a very smart guy (and that's putting it mildly) so there's got to be more to the story than is being let on here, but a visit to his web site gives no evidence of a recent paper covering this issue. What's stranger still is that the reporter for the story, David Kestenbaum, has a PhD in physics from Harvard, so it ought to have been blazingly obvious to him too.

Ethnic Fractionalization and Economic Development - More Evidence

I've just had the good fortune to discover this 2002 Harvard Institute of Economic Research paper, written by (amongst others) William Easterly of "Africa's Growth Tragedy" fame. What I particularly like about the new and more comprehensive data provided by this paper is that it does an even better job of capturing the amount of diversity in a given society, going beyond linguistic diversity to consider other markers of differentiation like race/ethnicity and religion.

We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the e¤ects of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization on quality of institutions and growth. We partly confirm and partly modify previous results. The patterns of cross-correlations between potential explanatory variables and their different degree of endogeneity makes it hard to make unqualified statements about competing explanations for economic growth and the quality of government.

The mark of a good paper like this one (unlike the sort of junk turned out by race cranks), is that the authors go out of their way to avoid making exaggerated claims about the scope and implications of their work. Nevertheless, one thing is clear from the data provided: the link between heterogeneity and poor growth is, if anything, stronger than was implied by Easterly and Levine's 1997 paper.

By the way, I couldn't resist pointing out the following information, for those who've ever doubted that Nigeria is a far more diverse place than India, in spite of the fact that the latter country has 8 times as many inhabitants as the former. For ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity, the numbers for India were 0.4182, 0.8069 and 0.3260 respectively (with a higher number meaning greater heterogeneity). For Nigeria, the corresponding numbers were 0.8505, 0.8316 and 0.7421, higher in all categories, but tremendously so for both the ethnic and religious measures. Looking over the data, not a single country on earth matches Nigeria for heterogeneity - not even Indonesia or Papua New Guinea!

TIME Europe | 'We Want Our Country!' (1965)

An extremely interesting Time magazine article on what was then Rhodesia, written at about the time Ian Smith was about to make his unilateral declaration of independence. This article really does give one plenty to think about, especially in light of the events that have occurred since then.

Ethnic Diversity, Social Sanctions and Public Goods in Kenya (PDF)

Yet another paper that demonstrates the powerful influence ethnic tensions can have on good governance.

Abstract: This paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western Kenya. The identification strategy relies on stable, historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement. Ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding, worse school facilities, and poor water well maintenance. The theoretical model illustrates how an inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures. We find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents. We relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development, and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries.

This is an especially timely find, especially in light of a recent Samizdata post by Perry de Havilland bringing to mind the ill-fated breakaway Republic of Biafra. Nigeria is an obscenely diverse place, with some 515 languages (as compared to a mere 400 in India) and no one ethnic group with a clear plurality in terms of population; no one who has lived there for a decent amount of time could ever underplay the centrality of ethnic rivalry to the politics of the country.

Looking back on the last 30 years, it seems obvious to me that it really would have been for the best if Biafra had been allowed to go its own way, though I think poor decisions made by Biafra's leader, Chukwuemaka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, had a greater role to play in Biafra's failure to secede than most Igbo people are willing to acknowledge today. Portuguese, Rhodesian and apartheid South Africa's recognition of Biafran independence was also a major setback for Igbo independence efforts, as it guaranteed that hardly any other country in Africa would extend the same recognition. Some friends simply aren't worth having (a notion Jonas Savimbi would also have done well to heed).

Shoddy Reasoning About Outsourcing

Via a post by Edward Hugh, I came across this BBC article on the Indian state of Maharashtra's attempt to position itself as a low cost centre of medical services catering to patients from the developed world. The article was interesting in as far as it demonstrated that the potential gains from international trade in services extend even to areas the naive might have thought immune to foreign competition. Nevertheless, it was something said in the course of the argument that paticularly caught my attention.

Many people from the developed world come to India for the rejuvenation promised by yoga and ayurvedic massage, but few consider it a destination for hip replacements or brain surgery.

Yet that's exactly what the government in the Indian state of Maharashtra hopes will happen soon.

Together with the state's business sector and private health-care providers it recently launched the Medical Tourism Council (MTC) of Maharashtra.

Its aim: to make India a prime destination for medical tourists.

At its swish offices in central Bombay, also known as Mumbai, members of the council explain the concept.

Bombay, they argue, has private hospitals on a par with the best in the world.

Many of the surgeons at hospitals such as the Hinduja are leaders in their field, working with the best equipment available.

But they can provide their expertise at a fraction of the price that comparable surgery would cost in Europe or the United States.

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

For the MTC, its plans are the next chapter in globalisation and the outsourcing of work to India.

As Sanjay Agarwala, the Hinduja's chief neurosurgeon, says: "Wherever you can offer better services at a more competitive price, that is the place that is going to win in the end."

But others question who the winners will really be.

Dr Rama Baru is a health academic in Delhi.

She believes that the marriage between the interests of Western medical tourists and a handful of private hospitals is at "a very superficial level as far as the medical care industry in India is concerned".

Contrary to the claims of the council, Dr Baru believes there will be no trickle down of money to the impoverished public health system, which currently receives just 0.9% of India's gross domestic product.

The MTC's plans may well benefit the doctors and patients involved, but it is currently unclear how a country that still suffers from malaria and TB will reap the rewards of a new wave of medical tourists coming to India. (emphasis added)

That highlighted bit was so chock full of economic ignorance that at first I was at a loss as to where to begin. One would think the benefits of this trend would have been obvious to both Dr. Baru and the BBC, but apparently the economic sophistication of both of these parties extends no further than the concept of a static cake, with any gains for one group only possible at the expense of another. The emergence of healthcare providers catering to the international market ought to be applauded, even if it brings no immediate dividends for the public healthcare system, as more affluent Indians will be in a better position to pay for any healthcare they desire out of their own pockets, regardless of what the government does; in addition, the foreign demand will stimulate domestic demand for more doctors and hospitals, from which Indians also stand to benefit. Even if one buys into the notion that healthcare and public healthcare are necessarily identical, which I certainly do not, it is still true that a larger economy means larger government revenues, which means more money to spend on healthcare, even without raising the percentage of India's GDP devoted to the public healthcare system.

What I do have a problem with is not the prospect of patients from overseas flying into Maharashtra to get cheaper hip replacements and heart bypasses, but the notion of any sort of "public-private partnership" to bring this about - such initiatives all too often turn out to be covers for the coddling of particular private sector interests at the expense of others. Private Indian medical services providers ought to be able to make the business a viable one without public assistance, while I'm sure the Maharashtra state government has more than enough difficulties as it is catering for the very basics of good government, like enforcing the law and guaranteeing an efficient, impartial judicial system.

A Speech by Thabo Mbeki

I've just come across this speech that was to have been delivered on the 5th of November 2003 by Thabo Mbeki, at the University of Toronto. What is noteworthy about the speech from my point of view isn't so much the political vision outlined in it, but the sheer erudition it bears witness to: there are references to Hegel, to Francis Fukuyama, to Ben Okri, and to Paul Collier, amongst others; there is an awareness, rare amongst political types, that the "globalization" about which so much is made today is in some ways little more than a return to where the world already was in 1913, albeit without the labor mobility of that era.

One expects, of course, that Mbeki, like any other prominent politician, will have had some help in writing the speech, but it still speaks true to life, given what I've heard about the man; he has a Master's degree in Economics, is said to be an intensely bookish sort, and is visibly lacking in what is euphemistically referred to as the "common touch", i.e., a penchant for cheap soundbites guaranteed to please the crowd. Mbeki's intellectualism, while commendable in my book, makes it all the more mystifying that he should go in for such strange theories about AIDS. It would be one thing if he were the sort of man of whom it could be said "he doesn't really know what he's doing", but that is the very last thing one can say about Thabo Mbeki; his highly competent management of the South African economy puts paid to any notion of a man too limited to understand what's at stake. The only explanation I can think of is that he has an emotional block or a phobia of some sort where AIDS is concerned.

NB - This BBC article gives a bit of insight into Mbeki's background. Incidentally, it also helps a bit to dispel the cheap propaganda that Mandela was a dangerous "communist", as so many conservative apologists loved to argue in the 1980s; Mandela's ideological disagreement with the South African Communist Party member Govan Mbeki (Thabo's father) was so intense that the two men didn't speak to each other for the first two years of their imprisonment on Robben Island. Some much, then, for Mandela's "communist" sympathies.

Stupid Linguistic Nativism

One has to be really insecure and/or have too much time on one's hands to engage in the sort of "language purifying" nonsense that seems so common in France and Germany.

As the world celebrates International Mother Language Day on Saturday, Germany's language purists bemoan the relentless onslaught of Denglish. But a German watchdog has hinted that a turnabout might be in sight.

When burger giant McDonald's recently dropped its famous English slogan "everytime a good time" for its TV advertisement in Germany and replaced it with a very German "Ich liebe es" (I'm lovin' it), an audible whoop of joy was heard in the language purist camp in the country.

After years of all-out war against the rise of Denglish (a mixture of German and English), the Institute for German Language (VDS) -- self-appointed guardian of the sanctity of German language -- is celebrating.

"We have detected a trend reversal," Walter Krämer, chairman of the VDS told dpa news agency. "The fast-food chain McDonald's is once again advertising in German for its products, even other companies and concerns have rediscovered German for their slogans," he said.

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

Spectacular moves to clean up German

The VDS has been up in arms against the encroachment of English words in the German language for the past six years and is known for its often eccentric ways to achieve its aim.

Last year the watchdog symbolically auctioned the German language on Ebay. Within two days, the highest bid lay above ten million euro, following which the Internet auction site stopped the trade.

The organization also attempted to sue the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom for its "nonsensical use" of English words like City call, Holiday plus Tarif and German Call. The institute also awards a prize for the Sprachpanscher (language debaser) of the year.

Give me a break, why don't ya? What's with all the militaristic talk of "relentless onslaught" and "all-out war"? English is a Germanic language with more than half of its words of either Romantic or other origin, but you don't see anyone going around ranting about an "onslaught" because terms like weltanschauung, avant garde, nabob and so forth have made their way into the language, do you? The argument against this sort of linguistic purity crap is the very same one as that against TV production quotas and "cultural exceptions" - anything that is attractive in its own right doesn't need protecting.

The R Project for Statistical Computing

Linux and Apache may get all the limelight, but there are other open-source projects out there that are truly impressive. One such effort is the R Project, which is essentially an alternative implementation of the S language and environment, the best known implementation of which is S-PLUS. If you're the sort of person who needs to carry out the odd bit of hypothesis testing, time-series analysis, regression or analysis of variance (ANOVA), I'd heartily recommend taking a look at R before parting with hundreds of dollars for S-PLUS: you'd be surprised just how much you can do with this piece of software. Heck, there are actually things one can do with R that simply can't be done with its extremely expensive sibling.

When You Praise the T-34, You're Praising Bolshevism!

In the comments to this Brad DeLong post on the Eastern Front in World War 2, John Emerson says something that is both hilarious and true:

"Man, toast, you really don't like the T-34, do you? When the T-34 was introduced, it wasn't a Camry. It was best tank in the world. As time passed, the Germans introduced a few boutique tanks which were individually superior, and this strategy would have worked if tank warfare were a series of one-on-one duels.

However anti-Soviet one might be, it's irrational to believe that every single thing the Soviets ever did was inferior. You don't become a Stalinist by saying nice things about the T-34. "

Indeed. The T-34 was an excellent battle-tank. Not everything the Soviets built was crap - even if most of it was.

Breyten Breytenbach

The response in some quarters to my posts on real South African history (as opposed to the propaganda dished out in school during the apartheid years) has been less than enthusiastic, with histrionic and self-pitying cries of "racism" ringing out where reasoned, factually supported arguments might have been expected. This is a pity.

It is simply an absurdity to accuse me of "racism" for pointing out that most of the voortrekkers were not culture-bearing supermen bringing enlightenment to dark savages, as has until recently been the portrayal of events. To say that they were for the most part poor and illiterate peasants is in no way an insult - so were most of anyone's ancestors until the 20th century - and there is a tacit racism in taking umbrage at my pointing out that what separated the Afrikaners from the Xhosas and Zulus they encountered was pretty much their possession of firearms and their whiteness, which afforded them better treatment from the British than the "natives" on many crucial occasions in the early-to-mid 19th century; after all, what is so insulting about being compared to Zulus, unless one still buys into the notion of "civilized" whites and "savage" blacks?

But let us leave all that aside for now, as I wish to point to an example of an Afrikaner who fought for the right principles and paid a big price for doing so, the poet, writer and painter Breyten Breytenbach. Let it not be said that one can assume all Afrikaners were racists or cowards when it mattered the most.

BREYTENBACH, Breyten (1939-), South African poet, prose writer, and painter, was born in Bonnievale in the Western Cape and studied fine art at the University of Cape Town. He left South Africa for Paris in the early 1960s, and when he married a Vietnamese he was not allowed to return. He co-founded Okhela [Zulu: ignite the flame], a resistance group fighting apartheid in exile. On an illegal trip to South Africa in 1975, he was betrayed, arrested, and sentenced to nine years of imprisonment for high treason. Released in 1982 as a result of massive international intervention, he returned to Paris and lived alternately in Paris and Gorée, Senegal, where he founded and headed a fine art workshop for African artists. His work includes numerous volumes of poetry, novels, and essays, many of which are in Afrikaans, many translated from Afrikaans to English, and many published originally in English. He has won five CNA (Central News Agency) Awards. He recently returned to South Africa to take an appointment in creative writing at the University of Natal. (emphasis added)

One consequence of the risks Breytenbach was willing to take, and the price he paid for taking them, is that when he talks today about the rights of the Afrikaan-speaking minority, he has a moral weight that none of the old National Party types, not even FW de Klerk, can ever hope to muster. What a pity it is that more than a few Afrikaners are unable to emulate his example even today, and face honestly the true nature of the system they enthusiastically supported for so long.

Free Mathematics Texts!

Now, I'm sure this isn't exactly everyone else's cup of tea, but for all admirers of the queen of the sciences, this find by Jacques Distler will seem like coming into an unexpected inheritance. Why, there are texts covering algebra, number theory, topology, and even grubbily practical stepchildren like applied mathematics! What more could you possibly want, chopped liver?

Would-be logicians will especially appreciate Stephen G. Simpson's lecture notes on mathematical logic, which are surprisingly complete for an "incomplete set," Robert B. Ash has 3 online books covering first-year graduate algebra, algebraic number theory and commutative algebra, while J.S. Milne has notes on a broad range of algebra-heavy topics, including algebraic geometry, elliptic curves and class field theory. I've only touched on the subjects that catch my fancy, but there really is a tremendous amount of other material to be found by following the links on the master site. What are you waiting for?

Problems with the Computer-Based GRE

A helpful commenter pointed me to the above document detailing problems with wide-scale cheating on the computer-based GRE in Asia. I am less than surprised to learn of this development, not because I thought Asians particularly susceptible to cheating, but out of my long-held scepticism about the merits of supposedly adaptive, computer-based tests.

Last fall, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Services (ETS), the company that generates the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) as well as other secondary and post-secondary entrance exams, made two startling announcements -- that it planned to suspend its computer administered GRE General Test in China and other parts of Asia and that it was canceling the administration of its GRE Computer Science Subject test in China and India. [1] Both announcements followed reports from graduate admission departments and the media that incidents of cheating on these tests were widespread throughout China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. The GRE involves more than 400,000 students each year, 41,000 of whom are from China, making any substantiated accusation of cheating -- and the actions taken to combat it -- issues of concern to the world of academic integrity.

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

The first signs of cheating were noticed by graduate admission offices in the United States, who reported a sharp increase in test scores from Chinese and Korean applicants, including near perfect scores on the verbal section of the GRE. Eventually, ETS investigated the matter and found web sites that were publishing test questions from live versions of their computer-based test. The GRE Board acted immediately, requesting that ETS cease administration of the computer based GRE in the countries involved and recommending that U.S. graduate school deans be wary of high test scores from the region. It is easy to imagine how these actions by the ETS, the GRE Board and the U.S. academic community could affect those test takers from China and other countries who arrived at their scores honestly. It is equally easy to imagine the impact on all students, regardless of nationality, competing for a limited number of slots in top business schools.

One can also see how the scandal in Asia could spread quickly to the U.S. In the past, cheating on the GRE has been a problem in the U.S. [4] , and the involvement of the Internet makes containment an issue. Several sources predict seeing more evidence of cheating as U.S. students discover these Asian-language web sites.

It seems that one consequence of this has been the return of the paper-based version of the test to East Asia, a policy change I would have welcomed whatever the rationale behind it. There is just something profoundly disturbing to my sensibilities about a test in which one has no chance to see all of the questions or go back and check over one's previous responses, and how exactly can a computer possibly calibrate questions by "difficulty"? It seems to me that the ETS imagines that all questions in a set of problems must have a total ordering under a single, well-defined and totally objective axis of difficulty, an assumption I'm pretty certain is false. If only American students could enjoy the same good fortune as their Asian counterparts, and be given once more the option of taking a paper test; thank goodness I took the damn thing before the option was phased out!

Quackery in the Name of "Human Biodiversity"

I've long maintained that Richard Lynn was a quack, whose "research" was to be trusted only by those so eager to believe in his "evidence" for monumental "innate" racial differences that they would throw all scepticism to the wind. As it turns out, a challenge laid down by a certain "Guessedworker" in the above Gene Expression thread, in which he dared me to question that blacks had innately higher testosterone levels than whites, provided the opportunity to demonstrate precisely that. Below are links to all of the original sources that are relevant to this debate.

Blood hormone profiles in prostate cancer patients in high-risk and low-risk populations, Ahluwalia, Jackson et. al. (1981)
5-alpha-reductase Activity and Risk of Prostate Cancer Among Japanese and US White and Black Males, Ross, Bernstein et. al. (1992).
Testosterone and Dominance in Men, Mazur and Booth (1997).
Serum Androgen Concentrations in Young Men: A Longitudinal Analysis of Associations with Age, Obesity, and Race., Gapstur, Gann (2002).
Richard Lynn's Own Bit of Scientific Quackery (1990)

For those too lazy to follow up on all these links, I suggest reading at least the following critique of Richard Lynn's "research" methods in establishing the "fact" of higher black testosterone levels:

>Being a tenured professor in a university, writing papers and

>attending conferences, having journals that publish your work,

>and being able to cite backwards, forwards and sideways, working

>in an "Institute of Science" or a "laboratory", and speaking more

>in jargon than in English are only the paraphernalia associated

>with science.

>

>Going through the motions however, does not make science.

>

>Here is another example of "science" produced by another of these

>scientists, again, quoting Kamin :

>

>"The high rate of sexual activity in Negroids," Lynn has suggested,

>may be caused by a high level of the male sex hormone, testosterone.

>The "crucial supporting evidence" for the notion that blacks have an

>over-supply of testosterone is the fact that "Negroids have higher

>rates of cancer of the prostate than Caucasoids...an important

>determinant of cancer of the prostate is the level of testosterone."

>The chain of reasoned evidence is : prostate cancer is caused by

>testosterone; blacks tend to have prostate cancer; therefore blacks

>must have lots of testosterone; the abundance of testosterone makes

>blacks sexually active; that causes them to produce lots of babies,

>for whom they will not provide, and who will become criminals and/or

>welfare cases. Its all in the genes.

>

>...To show that testosterone causes prostrate cancer ....Lynn cites

>a paper by Ahluwalia et. al.. That paper, Lynn writes, reported

>"higher levels of testosterone in patients with prostate cancer

>than in healthy controls." [But] Ahluwalia et. al. reported that

>black prostate patients in the United States had higher testosterone

>levels than did control subjects. But among blacks in Nigeria,

>control subjects had higher testosterone levels than did prostate

>patients !.....

>

>What about the next claim, that blacks are more prone than whites to

>develop prostate cancer?.....Lynn reprints some age-standardized

>incidence rates for prostate cancer for "Negroids" and "Caucasoids"

>in seven American cities. Those statistics and others had been

>gathered by the International Union Against Cancer. There was

>variation from city to city, but in each case African-Americans had

>about twice the incidence of whites. The highest white rate was

>59.7 per 100,000 population in Hawaii...the lowest black rate was

>72.1, in New Orleans.

>

>The paper from which Lynn copied (or tried to copy) those figures

>contains other relevant statistics. The rate in Senegal was 4.3 --

>the lowest rate except for Japan and Shanghai, among the thirty-odd

>countries for which data were given. The rates in Jamaica and(then)

>Rhodesia were 28.6 and 32.3 -- still far below the rates of both

>black and white Americans. Follow-up studies by the International

>Union reported a rate of 9.7 in Nigeria. In the Cape Province of

>South Africa, the rate for whites was a low 23.2; for Bantus it

>was 19.2 and for Africans in Natal 23.2. The facts are well known

>to every serious scholar concerned with prostate cancer : American

>blacks have an alarmingly higher rate of prostate cancer than

>American whites, but black Africans have a much lower rate than either

>American blacks or whites.

>

>...To admit Lynn and Rushton into the scientific mainstream -- I'll

>say it bluntly -- is a betrayal of science. To say this out loud is

>not to advocate what Malcolm Browne describes as a "shroud of 

>censorship imposed on scientists and scholars by pressure groups."

>It is a simple defense of truth and integrity in science.....

To that last paragraph I say a hearty "amen!" Note that the "Ahluwalia et. al." referred to here is precisely the one I've linked to above. If there's any doubt in your mind that Richard Lynn has been fairly treated in the material quoted here, I suggest you go take a look at his own 1990 paper, also linked to above. The man is nothing but a quack with tenure.

Those who moan and groan about a "blank slate asymmetry" would be on firmer ground if they weren't so willing themselves to lean on the work of racist charlatans like Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton. It is the height of hypocrisy and illogic to criticize me for only warning against the dangers of genetic determinism (as if I were logically obliged to warn against all evils or none at all), even though one routinely reaches for the worthless research of just such genetic determinists to "rebut" the claims of so-called "human biodiversity deniers." That's a nice catchy riff on the "holocaust denier" phrase, but catchy slogans do not a scientific argument make. If I really were working in a field as chock-full of pseudo-scientific rubbish as the study of human genetic variation has been, I'd go out of my way to avoid being tainted by association with dubious characters, rather than proudly holding up their flapdoodle as "evidence" for my theories.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the all too common tactic utilized by the fearless champions of "human biodiversity", in which they resort to cheap attacks like retorting "Leon Kamin is a Marxist!" may work with an unsophisticated audience, but it certainly won't wash with me, nor will saying things like "Sowell and Heckman aren't psychologists", to which my response is "So What?" It is a sign of intellectual weakness to draw attention to a man's credentials or political leanings rather than addressing his claims directly: Rushton and Lynn aren't quacks because they are racists (though they are), but because their "work" is founded on selective quotation, egregious misunderstandings and shoddy statistical techniques.

Who Would You Vote for in South Africa?

I just came across this interesting quiz, based on the party platforms as of 1999. Let's just say that my results weren't quite what I was expecting them to be.

For better or worse, your replies indicate that your heart lies with the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) .

Apart from the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), you would also consider casting your ballot for the Democratic Party (DP) , or even the New National Party (NNP) .

You are least likely to vote for the African National Congress (ANC).

Me, an Inkatha supporter? Only if that is identical to being for decentralized government with decision-making occurring at the lowest possible level, being in favor of labor deregulation and more rapid privatization, being against the requirement that citizens carry "papieren, bitte!", and thinking that sports teams should pick players on grounds of merit alone, rather than to ensure that "teams are representative of the make-up of the nation."

Of course, there is more to politics than platforms, and I simply can't stand Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whose deeply dishonorable past I am unable to put aside; faced with a choice between Inkatha and the ANC, I'd pick the latter anyday, even though there isn't all that much about the ANC platform I'm enthusiastic about. What is true of Inkatha even more true of the "New" National Party, which I would sooner die than vote for. No, if I were a South African, the Democratic Alliance would likely be my first choice.

MCSEs are Child's Play

This sort of thing really takes the shine off having a Microsoft certification, doesn't it?

Siliguri, Feb. 15: “I want to build a computer that will respond to brain waves and dispense with the need to use hands,” says Mridul Seth, his fingers almost a whir as he punches the keys of a laptop.

Fresh from Bangalore where he successfully passed Microsoft’s online test on the software programmes devised by the firm, Mridul logs in to a site on Sikkim.

Within seconds, the screen changes to the site’s homepage, then to another on the hill state’s telecommunication.

“There is a lot more to do. Computers are like a gateway to a larger world for me,” says the shy eight-year-old designer of the two portals on the state that is also his home.

Later, as he prances about in the lawn with some other children without a trace of the earlier seriousness, it is difficult to believe he is the youngest Microsoft Certified Software Engineer, one of the most sought-after degrees for software professionals.

What makes Mridul’s story even more interesting is that until four years ago he did not even know how to speak.

His father, M.K. Seth, says: “Mridul was born without an external ear and his hearing ability is still weak. He learnt to speak late and was almost perennially sick when younger.”

His extraordinary skills came to light when as a four-year-old he learnt counting 1 to 100 in 24 hours.

“I taught him tougher maths the next day and he had no problem understanding them,” Seth said.

On February 12, he successfully passed the Installing, Configuring and Administering Microsoft 2000 Professional Examinations held in Bangalore.

The kid is obviously very bright, despite the "brain waves" wierdness, but I have to say that I wouldn't be happy about this news if I were in charge of Microsoft's certification programme. One can just see HR types saying to themselves "See? An MCSE is so easy to get even a child could do it!"

The Perils of Investment Banking

Here's a story that nicely illustrates the often punishing reality behind the glamour associated in many minds with investment banking.

SLEEPY lawyers and bankers, exhausted after working on the takeover battle for AT&T Wireless, almost cost Cingular, the winning bidder, an extra $1.6 billion (£847 million) because of a clerical slip-up.

Cingular was forced to file a new acquisition agreement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last night because the costly error had not been noticed and was therefore legally binding.

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

There was much confusion among Cingular’s advisers in New York last night. At first they said that the interest payment was part of the deal, but was unlikely to be invoked because they expected it to clear all regulatory hurdles ahead of the December 16 deadline.

After some reflection, however, they changed their minds, saying that the interest payment, while apparently in the sale agreement, had actually been removed before the deal was signed. But within minutes, they changed their minds again when it emerged that the error had not been removed.

A senior City source tried to explain: “Look these guys haven’t slept for four days.” (emphasis added)

That last bit probably wasn't much of an exaggeration either - 48 hour stretches are surprisingly common in the business. There's a good reason why investment banking pays as well as it does, and it has nothing to do with the intellectual difficulty of the work to be done.

Racial Attitudes of Afrikaners and White English-Speakers in 1984

The following table is courtesy of the May 1986 issue of New Internationalist:

White opinion survey 198412		A - Afrikaans speaking E - English speaking	For	Against
Group Areas Act People can only live in areas allotted to their own racial category.		A E	76.8 42.4	16.1 38.4
Separate Education children go to schools designated for their own racial grouping.		A E	90.2 55.4	5.1 28.3
Separate Amenities Public transport, places of entertainment etc. segregated. This is now not universally applied and depends upon decisions made by local authorities.		A E	84.9 50.5	8.1 30.1
African Homelands All Africans are allotted a tribal homeland, which the Government then considers to be their only real home - even if they have never visited it. They are then only in ‘white South Africa’ to work.		A E	89.6 60.3	4.2 19.7
Separate Voters’ Rolls Black people vote only for people of their own racial category, for authorities which only have very limited powers. Africans still have no vote at all in national elections.		A E	92.1 64.3	2.5 17.7
Mixed Marriages Act Forbade marriage between people from different racial groups until it was repealed in 1985.		A E	78.9 41.3	16.6 41.3
Immorality Act Forbade sex between people from different racial groups until it was repealed in 1985.		A E	81.3 37.8	13.4 41.0

There are two things worth noting here:

1. Negative attitudes towards black equality were common amongst English-speakers as well as Afrikaners. This was especially so where political rights were concerned. Matter of physical intimacy were another story - nearly as many English-speakers were against the Group Areas Act as supported it, at least as many came out against the Mixed Marriages Act as did for it, while more actually opposed the Immorality Act than supported it.
2. Nevertheless, Afrikaners were much more strongly opposed to measures that would permit physical proximity of the races. This was especially the case when the prospect of interracial sex was at issue, with an Afrikaner-English support gap of 34.8% for the Group Areas Act, 34.8% for Separate Education, 34.4% for Separate Amenities, 37.6% for the Mixed Marriages Act, and a massive 43.5% for the Immorality Act. In not a single category did Afrikaners show less than overwhelming support for racial exclusion.

Now that we are 20 years from the era in which this poll was carried out, one expects, or at least hopes, that attitudes have dramatically altered for the better since then, even amongst Afrikaners. Matters will likely have been helped along by the emigration of many of those least willing to tolerate an integrated South Africa, while even those remaining behind who dislike the new dispensation will probably be too discrete with their opinions to honestly share them with poll interviewers.*

In any case, what is at issue here isn't attitudes today, but the accuracy of my assertion that overwhelming Afrikaner support was the pillar on which apartheid rested, and that "anti-communism" had little to do with white opposition to its demise even in the 1980s. This polling data bears out precisely that claim.

*Embarrasment at admitting to racist views is known to occur in most surveys of public opinion, and it is an issue that perennially comes up in France, where support for Jean-Marie Le Pen is repeatedly underestimated by pre-election polls.

Trekboer Photographs

It seems my last post on the Afrikaner past has excited accusations of "racism" from some quarters. To dispel any doubt that I'm not just posting anti-Afrikaner propaganda, I present here a few photographs that attest to the veracity of my claims about the material circumstances of most of the voortrekkers.





Presenting the historical truth isn't equivalent to "racism" in my book, and I wouldn't even be bothering with any of this if I weren't fed up with encountering Afrikaner after Afrikaner whining about how South Africa was supposedly a paradise for all, how apartheid was erected for the benefit of blacks, and how the country is rapidly heading downhill now that the National Party no longer runs the show.

I've stated before, and I'll state it here again, that I think those who have truly broken with the past should be welcomed without recriminations, and that the last thing South Africa needs is a new blacks-first majoritarianism to replace the old order's "whites only" policies, but frankly, few things make me feel less like hectoring Mbeki and company than hearing the beneficiaries of apartheid rubbishing the present government over "racism", when precious few of them lifted a finger to combat the genuine article as long as it had no adverse effects on their own lives.

There are noble Afrikaners who fought against the system when there was still a price to be paid for doing so - Beyers Naude being perhaps the most important, with André Brink and Nico Smith being others - and the apartheid system could not have lasted as long as it did without at least passive collusion from white English-speakers, but the pathetic reality is that the National Party was entirely an Afrikaner creature, and the overwhelming majority of Afrikaners enthusiastically supported its' policies throughout the apartheid years; when they did break with the party, it was usually to join even more extremist organizations like Andries Treurnicht's Conservative Party. The racist attitudes that led Afrikaners to support apartheid were near-universal amongst them from the very beginnings of white settlement in South Africa, and British imperialism, as bad as it could be in practice where racial matters were concerned, simply didn't go in for the sort of blatant, etched-in-stone discrimination Afrikaners practiced once they got in power. If it is "racist" to point these things out, then anyone who talks about America's antebellum south or Nazi Germany is also a "racist" according to such reasoning.

UPDATE: Anton Raath has some images of just the sort of extreme-right Afrikaners I was talking about, all dating from the early 1990s. Memories are short indeed if some can now claim that Afrikaner racism was overstated or a thing of the distant past alone.

Houston Area Survey of Immigrant Educational Attainment

Note that the figure for African immigrants is actually higher than that for Filipinos, the best educated of the four Asian groups accounted for in the survey.

Figure 14 shows that distinctions by continent of origin matter greatly for the black immigrants in Houston. Remarkably, the newcomers from Africa, primarily Nigeria, have higher levels of education and professional skills than any other immigrant community interviewed in the surveys, including any and all of the Asians. Only 5% of the African immigrants now residing in Harris County have no more than high school diplomas; 62% have college degrees, and 35% have post-graduate credentials beyond college. In contrast, the black immigrants from the Caribbean, primarily Jamaica, are arriving with no higher educational credentials than those of the native-born African Americans.

Of course, as the survey points out, this is largely an artifact of American immigration regulations: immigration simply wasnt an option for either Africans or Asians (after 1929) until 1965, so chain immigration based on family ties isn't an option for most would-be immigrants from those regions even today. Nevertheless, the point of this post is to caution against the temptation to lump all individuals of African ancestry in the US into a single generic "black" category, as there really are major differences in the characteristics of the various subgroups. It also demonstrates the illegitimacy of drawing inferences about the capabilities of whole nations based only on what one knows about immigrants from those countries - immigrants do leave their homelands for a reason, after all.

On a sidenote, it is intriguing to note that the winner of the 1996 National Geography Bee was the son of Yoruba immigrants. It simply won't do to apply all the old stereotypes about "black" educational underachievement to the newcomers.

Seyi Fayanju, 12, of Verona, New Jersey, is the U.S.-born son of two Nigerian immigrants. His hours spent reading his parents' encyclopedias came paid off at the National Geography Bee. The contest brought together 57 finalists from middle schools nationwide and was hosted by "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek, who is a native of Canada.

The geography bee competition came down to Seyi Fayanju and Ryan Bean, 14, of Augusta, Maine. Trebek asked the final question: "Name the European coprinicpality whose head of state are the president of France and the bishop of Urgel?" Ryan Bean guessed Monaco but was incorrect. Trebek turned to Seyi Fayanju, who answered "Andorra." His correct answer won him a $25,000 scholarship

I have a prediction to make: 20 years from now, assuming anyone bothers to make the distinction between African immigrants and African-Americans (confusing, isn't it?), people will marvel at the way these newcomers managed to climb so quickly and so high up the economic ladder. I know at first hand that there are an awfully large number of highly-trained Nigerian emigrés in America and Canada working menial jobs as they settle into their newly adopted countries.

POSTSCRIPT: Another interesting fact, if this link is to be believed, is that in 1993 there were more than 21,000 practicing Nigerian physicians in the United States. I emphasize "practicing" because it is by no means easy for foreign-trained doctors to gain licenses to practice in the US, which explains why more than a few highly-trained Nigerians end up having to drive taxicabs for a living.

Often, these immigrants are quick to take any employment opportunity that they can get. Although there were about 100,000 highly educated African professionals throughout the United States in 1999,[24] many more are also involved in jobs where less education and often less skill may be required. They work as cab drivers, parking lot attendants, airport workers or waiters, waitresses, and cooks in restaurants.

Xavier Sala-i-Martin - "Why I am not a Keynesian"

The good professor gives a few reasons not to buy into the notion that governments are necessarily any more competent than the private sector in running things. Below are just a few of the examples he provides:

Here's one ...


Here's another ...



And the best is left for last ...


Just a few things to keep in mind when evaluating calls for government to "do something!"

UPDATE: On the advice of Andrew Brown, I've replaced the old "Secret Nuclear Bunker" example with a more appropriate display of government incompetence; as it turns out, the "Secret Nuclear Bunker" sign indicated a disused World-War II bunker. Hey, private actors make mistakes too, but at least your tax-money didn't pay for this one!

Afrikaner Nationalism and the Emergence of Apartheid

Here's a page that gives a fairly detailed and, for the most part, accurate overview of how Afrikaner ultra-nationalism led to the emergence of apartheid as official state policy. Some of the statements made in this document are particularly worthy of notice, especially in light of all the claptrap that is usually wheeled out about "anti-communism" where South Africa is concerned.

Afrikaners were stridently anti-communist and anti-Soviet Union. The Cold War provided the basic mode for viewing world politics. But there were 2 curiosities:

• S. Africa was more like the Soviet Union than most other countries; there was the prominence of the state over the individual; political crimes and police were very important; there was a highly developed police state; and individual freedoms were whittled away to almost nothing, even for whites (all ‘rights’ were at the discretion of the minister of justice).
• The dominance of state capitalism. Government ownership was more extensive than anywhere in most western societies—railways, telephones, airline, merchant marine, ISCOR (steel), SASOL (oil from coal), etc. Only in socialist countries was the proportion higher. Yet at the same time the South African gov’t opposed social welfare measures as ‘socialism’. Nevertheless, the colour bar was really a massive social welfare programme for poor whites!

Also note the following, which is thoroughly corroborated by other sources*, particularly where pre-1948 Afrikaner hygiene is concerned:

“There is a vast difference in civilisation between the various national groups which is reflected in their mutual relations. In this disparity of civilisation—and this is not always realised by foreign observers—difference in hygienic development plays a very important role.” [my emphasis]

- this is a very curious statement; in the oblique reference to ‘hygienic development’, there is the traditional white objection to the way Africans smell. Here, ‘civilisation’ seems to have been reduced to the way people smell!

- there are several ironies in such a contention:

• as we noted in a previous lecture, Afrikaners brought into the concentration camps in the war horrified British military and medical people with their habits;
• traditionally, where water was available, Zulu and Xhosa washed much more frequently than the Voortrekkers—every day in warm weather.
• water is a scarce resource in much of S. Africa and most of it was appropriated for use by whites. Most municipal locations (this was the term for residential areas for Africans although ‘townships’ came to be the preferred term in the 1950s) had only communal faucets in the street several hundred feet apart. Thus, all water had to be carried to the houses. In rural areas, Africans often have to go 2-5 miles and even more.

The point of all this isn't to say that modern day Afrikaners are dirty pigs - I'm sure they're just as fastidious as any other group of people - but to illustrate that the present-day conception of South African development owing mostly to the superior mores and acumen of generic "whites" (as opposed to the highly-vetted groups of skilled British immigrants who began arriving in 1820) is a complete fiction. Most 19th century Afrikaners were unlettered and unversed in the refinements of higher culture, particularly amongst the trekboers who were far from Cape Town's influence. Truth be told, many European visitors to South Africa who had to deal with both the Boers and the Xhosa formed a much higher opinion of the latter than the former, whose slovenliness, boorishness and hardscrabble existence they deplored.

Even when we restrict our attentions to those 19th and early 20th century Afrikaners resident in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, what is notable is the intense anti-intellectualism that is remarked upon by commenter after commenter, along with an intense cruelty towards Hottentots and Bantu speakers, who the Afrikaners couldn't even bring themselves to refer to as "mensen" ("humans"), preferring the term "schepsels" ("creatures"). The much ballyhoed Great Trek was stirred in large part by British insistence on according equal status before the law to all free subjects, regardless of skin color, and the fact that the British actually dared to enforce penalties against Afrikaners who mistreated their non-white servants (as was the case with Freek Bezuidenhout) particularly grated on Afrikaner sensibilities.

To talk about the history of South Africa as if it were merely a matter of separate peoples with different customs fighting over land, rather than the constant struggle by one group of white immigrants, little separated in civilizational terms from the blacks they sought to exploit, to use state power to further their own particular ethnic interests, is to perpetuate a travesty of the historical record. Apartheid wasn't about superior "whites" seeking to protect Western civilization in the face of an onslaught of hordes of dark-skinned savages, but about Afrikaners without the skills and resources to flourish in the marketplace using the fact that they could vote, and blacks couldn't, to lever themselves into higher positions than they would have obtained on merit alone; by far the biggest employer of Afrikaans-speaking whites during the apartheid years was the government, whether through the civil service, through the various government parastatals, or through that employer of last resort (and the single largest corporate employer in the nation), South African Railways. I'm no cheerleader for affirmative action, but for the beneficiaries of affirmative action on so vast a scale to bitch about blacks now getting to commandeer the spoils of office strikes me as a bit rich.

See, for example, Frank Welsh, "A History of South Africa", 1998, HarperCollins. Also see this page, hosted on an Afrikaans website.

Bringing Outsourcing into the Classroom

I can't imagine a better example of the potential benefits of outsourcing than that presented by this story. We all should be so lucky as to get foreign language instruction from instructors of the caliber hired by Berlitz.

At the Atlantis Preparatory School in Manasquan, N.J., it's just after 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. For nine third graders, that means Spanish class. Carolyn Bermeo, their teacher, introduces a song popular in Latin America. When she invites the class to join her in acting it out, her charges need little prodding.

Atlantis Prep is a private school in an upscale community on the Jersey Shore. A lesson like Ms. Bermeo's might take place in many schools across the United States, but with one notable difference: Ms. Bermeo, a native of Bogota, Colombia, is not on the school staff. She is an employee of Berlitz Jr., a division of Berlitz International, provider of personal and business language instruction.

In the last few years, more schools have turned to language instruction companies for teachers. Berlitz Jr., which started hiring out its instructors in 1987, now serves more than 100 schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Two other language instruction companies have contracts with a number of Midwestern schools. Most of the schools that hire language instructors are private, and tuition covers the cost. The public schools that hire such instructors pay for them out of existing funds, or through grants or money raised by the PTA.

In the St. Louis area, the Brunetti Language School provides instructors of Spanish, French, German and Latin to several schools. Dede Brunetti, the company's vice president, said it had placed 28 instructors in classes ranging from preschool to 12th grade. In 1995, Christine Frantz, a former teacher, started World of Languages in Barrington, Ill. Her company offers preschool through eighth-grade programs in Spanish and French and has 13 instructors in 10 schools - one public and nine private - in the Chicago area.

Experts cite a dearth of foreign language teachers as one of the main reasons for these companies' success. According to a 1998 study financed by the Center for Applied Linguistics, the number of elementary schools offering foreign languages increased 10% from 1987 to 1997, and the supply of language teachers cannot meet the demand.

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

One of the selling points for the private companies is the ability to offer instructors who are native speakers, although the companies do make exceptions. For example, Berlitz Jr. also hires Americans who have studied abroad or who have been raised in bilingual families, the company's director, Susan Jacoby, said. (emphasis added)

Of course, as with any other category of workers faced with the prospect of increased competition, teachers have been quick to whine about the new development.

Tim Dedman, a senior policy analyst with the National Education Association, which represents teachers, said that hiring outside instructors "sets up an unfair playing field" when staff teachers are required to have special training. He also said he had "a problem with tax dollars going to for-profit companies for instruction in public schools," adding that while the federal No Child Left Behind law aims at tightening teacher qualifications, "outside instructors are circumventing state licensing requirements."
He also questioned whether outside instructors were fully investigated. "Who knows if a person wasn't released for cause in another state or has any training in teaching kids?" Mr. Dedman said.

"Unfair playing field" indeed; even the language used in whining is the same as that employed by other pleaders for special protection. As for that "tax dollars going to for-profit companies" bit, I presume Mr. Dedman would also be opposed to competitive private bidding for public contracts too? Then the old guild technique of using credentialism to restrict competition is trotted out, with mutterings about "circumventing state licensing requirements" (no doubt installed at the instigation of the teachers unions) and having "any training in teaching kids", as if children could only possibly learn anything of value from individuals with the right pieces of paper certification. The tightening of teacher qualifications complained about by Tim Dedman almost certainly was insisted upon by Ted Kennedy, at the prompting of the NEA, and it is laughable that such a blatantly pro-teacher initiative should now be proferred as an excuse to avoid the use of outside teaching staff. Would he really prefer the alternative in which the mostly nonsensical teacher qualifications were abolished as a requirement, and anyone with a solid degree in a real subject could try his hand at teaching? I know I would.

It ought to be clear enough that I find the concerns of people like Mr. Dedman utterly bogus. There is no better way to learn a language than to recieve instruction from those who have native levels of fluency in it, and who devote all of their working hours to teaching the subject to others. The importance of specialization is recognized in other fields, so why shouldn't it be in foreign language instruction? I can't even see a good reason not to extend this trend to all other subject fields. The current system under which a single individual with an education degree, and at best a mediocre understanding of one or two areas of the curriculum, is nevertheless obliged to teach multiple subjects to a broad range of students, strikes me as utterly ridiculous.

Russia's Oil Dependence

An important thing to always keep in mind when thinking about Russia's economic recovery is just how dependent that country is on oil and gas revenue. Russia's improved economic circumstances over the past few years have had almost nothing to do with Vladimir Putin's merits as a leader, and everything to do with an upwards trend in oil prices.

MOSCOW, Feb. 17- Russia's economy is more deeply dependent on oil and gas than previously thought, with energy making up an estimated 25 percent of output instead of the 9 percent attributed to it in Russia's own accounts, the World Bank said on Wednesday in an economic report.

Russia's greater dependence on oil also meant that the country's extremely successful recovery is "much more vulnerable to fluctuations in international oil prices," Christof Ruehl, chief economist for the World Bank in Moscow, said at a news conference here.

Since the United States-led invasion of Iraq, oil prices have been climbing. Brent crude oil for March delivery rose to $35.88 a barrel on Wednesday, its highest level since Jan. 20.

Russia's economy grew 7.2 percent in 2003, and Mr. Ruehl said that roughly 3.2 percentage points of that growth came from oil revenues.

If there's one thing watchers of the oil market know, it is that what goes up will go down, sooner or later. When this does happen, it is likely to take the bloom of Putin's rose, and I wouldn't be surprised if he starts casting about for scapegoats on whom to lay the blame. Russia is far from being a stable country.

Rates of Return to Education

This image puts some numbers behind my contention that universal primary education is a far better goal to aim for than the churning out of university graduates LDC economies are poorly placed to absorb.


I daresay that it is probably true that too many people go to university even in OECD countries like the UK and the United States. One way of reducing this oversupply would be to make university students bear more of the true cost of the educations they are obtaining, a measure Tony Blair has commendably attempted to effect, and the Tories, in a complete absence of principle, sought to undermine; even though Blair managed to carry the day, I'd say his proposals go nowhere near far enough to compensating for the damage done to the British higher education sector by his own government's foolish insistence on a numerical target of 50% of all students going to university.

Anti-Islamism as the New Anti-Communism

The New York Times has a very good editorial up today about Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine ben Ali's upcoming visit to Washington, making a point of the need to have our words match our deeds, by pushing our "allies" to live up to the ideals on behalf of which we claim to be fighting.

Last fall, President Bush declared that Washington had learned the folly of accommodating Middle East dictatorships in the name of stability and that America would start putting its power in the service of democratic values throughout the region. Today, one of the area's most unbudging autocrats, President Zine el-Abidine ben Ali of Tunisia, will visit the White House. If Mr. Bush meant what he said last fall, he will offer some constructive public criticism on the value of free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary. Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared the ground yesterday by offering Mr. ben Ali just such criticism.

Mr. ben Ali's record on human rights and democracy is poor even by the standards of the Middle East. No serious political opposition is allowed, no critical coverage appears in the mass media, and hundreds of Tunisians remain jailed after unfair trials. Such arbitrary practices warrant condemnation anywhere, but are doubly deplorable in Tunisia, a relatively developed country that enacted pioneering protections of women's rights decades ago.

Tunisia's political progress has all but ground to a halt since Mr. ben Ali seized power in 1987. Since then, he has had himself re-elected three times, on each occasion claiming more than 99 percent of the vote.

He plans to run for yet another term this October, and he recently pushed through constitutional changes that would allow him to remain in power through 2014.

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

Mr. ben Ali also poses as an effective ally against Islamic extremism, a danger he has invoked to justify his wider repression. Mr. Bush provided the best answer to that last fall, noting that in the long term, neither America's safety nor stability in Middle Eastern countries — like Tunisia — could "be purchased at the expense of liberty." That sound advice bears repeating today.

Washington seems set on repeating in the Arab world the same errors it did throughout the Cold War, by opting for a "realpolitik" that makes all its talk of "freedom" and "democracy" look like so much cant. It simply will not do to allow characters like ben Ali, Mubarak and Musharraf to get away with stifling all domestic dissent by raising the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism. Playing along with this nonsense actually increases the danger that the very fundamentalism these strongmen claim to be fighting against will actually be strengthened, for in societies in which all avenues of criticism outside of the mosque are forbidden, who else but the imams can be the voices of change?

America's refusal to seriously push Portugal and South Africa to reform played a major role in the upsurge of communist sympathies in that part of the world, and American tolerance for the Shah's brutality helped deliver Iran to Khomeini, Carter's initiatives coming too late in the day to save a regime that had become universally loathed. The same story does a great deal to explain South Korean ambivalence towards America's security presence, as many people are all too aware of Washington's willingness to countenance the dictatorships like Chun Doo Hwan's, even in the face of the Kwangju massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in 1980. People have long memories, and are quick to spot big-power hypocrisy when they see it. Those who think political "realities" oblige us to tolerate stifling regimes are the ones who really have a poor grasp of reality, for how can they hope to convince people who have seen America effortlessly overthrow the Taliban and Saddam in quick procession, that the United States is truly unable to enforce its will when it feels like doing so? The natural (and correct) conclusion they will come to is that the US only really cares about "democracy", "human rights" and "freedom" for that portion of the world it considers "civilized", and the rest can go hang.

UPDATE: It seems David Adesnik of Oxblog is touching on the same issue.

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.