It's All Dutch to Me - A Weird Linguistic Experience

Here's a comment that's sure to enrage all native Dutch-speakers out there, but here it goes anyway: spoken Dutch (or some varieties of it anyway) sounds remarkably like English*!

The reason I mention this is that I was sitting next to a trio of tourists today, who happened to be talking loudly amongst themselves about this, that and the other. I don't make it my hobby to eavesdrop on the conversations of others, but these individuals seemed determined to share their discussion with everyone around them, so voluble were they; or, in retrospect, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they felt so confident that they wouldn't be understood that they saw no reason to keep the volume down. Anyway, as I listened on, I found myself growing ever more perplexed: why was it that what these obviously English folks (or so I thought), loud as they were, nonetheless seemed incomprehensible to me? I had this vague feeling of almost but not quite comprehending what they were going on about, when after a considerable period, it dawned on me that perhaps they weren't speaking English after all. But if so, what language could it be?

I know a Slavic or Romance language when I hear one, and so I could rule those options out straightaway. Finnish and Hungarian are also sufficiently distinct from all European languages that I knew that neither of those languages could have been what I was hearing. The more intently I listened, the more certain I was that these strangers had to have been speaking a Germanic language - words like "ya/ja" and "for/vor" that are common to most of them being one tipoff, and the general intonation (to which I am always attuned, being a native speaker of a tonal language) being another. Indeed, it was the intonation pattern that led me to dismiss the possibility of the mystery language being Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. At the same time, I knew it couldn't be German, or I would have understood what was being said, which meant it absolutely had to be ... Dutch?

As indeed it was. The final clue came in a most unexpected manner, as someone handed a check to Mr. van der Waerden, who just happened to be the loud gentleman in heated discussion with two ladies next to me. That is about as Dutch as a name gets, so there was no cause for further puzzlement as far as that went. But why then did so much of what I'd been listening to seemed at once so familiar and yet meaningless?

Now, I do happen to know a bit of written Dutch, and by leaning on my understanding of German I can make my through a fair amount of Dutch (and Afrikaans) writing with surprising ease, but knowing how to read a language and understanding its spoken form are very different skills, and I've little opportunity to work on the latter in my daily life. I try to listen to Radio Netherlands broadcasts on the web, but given that most speakers on it will likely be using Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands ("General Civilized Dutch"), this is probably a less than ideal means of getting a feel for the sound of the language in ordinary usage, being the Dutch analogue of trying to learn how ordinary English people speak by listening to Oxford-educated BBC broadcasters going on in Recieved Pronunciation. Still, that the gap between the written and at least some forms of the spoken language should have been so great that listening to one would fail to help me recognize the other came as a surprise to me; I'd really expected the language to sound more ... well ... German in intonation (this my Dutch readers may feel is taking things too far!), what with being right next to Germany and all, an assumption that Radio Netherlands broadcasts have actually helped to foster.

I still have one wild hypothesis up my sleeve to explain what I heard, though I'm in no position to confirm or disprove it. Could it have been that what I mistook for Dutch was actually Frisian? Never having knowingly heard Frisian spoken, I can't even begin to guess, but given the history of settlement of the British Isles and the classification of Frisian as the closest to English of the Low German languages, the possibility naturally occurred to me. That Friesland is a province of the Netherlands also makes the hypothesis seem reasonable, as it could be that Mr van der Waerden's name is just a reflection of a degree of assimilation to the mainstream.

UPDATE: I've just discovered Omrop Fryslân, an online Frisian radio station. Listening to a broadcast, my hypothesis doesn't seem quite as outrageous as I originally thought. Still, I don't know the sound of the various Dutch dialects well enough to be in any position to dismiss the possibility that I really was listening to a variety of Dutch, rather than Frisian. One complicating factor that I haven't mentioned at all is the incredible influx of English words into all of the other Germanic languages (other than Icelandic), especially amongst the young. When one is listening to young people casually throwing English words into a conversation which is already going on in a language with many similarities to English, it can be hard to tell which language is actually in use.

*This may sound extraordinary to American ears, but it isn't so difficult to understand if one appreciates that there is a tremendous amount of variation in the way English is spoken in the British Isles, and to one who has lived amongst the British for any decent amount of time, all of them will sound as "natural" to the ear as would Brooklynese or a Texan twang would to an American.

NYT Paris Memo: Since 1066, It Hasn't Always Been Cordial

This profile could only have been written by an ardent American francophile, for making out the British as little more than wannabe Frenchmen who are largely ignored by their Gallic neighbors. Nothing could be further from the truth.

PARIS, April 5 — If the history of British-French relations had begun with the signing of the Entente Cordiale on April 8, 1904, the record would not look too bad.

The agreement led to an easing of the colonial rivalry, alliances against Germany in two world wars and eventual collaboration, tinged with competition, within the European Union.

The problem is that most of the British and French public know "entente cordiale" only as a phrase — and they do not really believe it.

So Queen Elizabeth's state visit to France this week to mark the accord's 100th anniversary is as much an occasion to remember what divides the neighbors as what unites them. And here history began long before 1904.

Since 1066 for the British and the Hundred Years War for the French, the governments and the peoples have viewed one another with a mixture of envy and hostility. And even today, their cordiality often seems to be more out of necessity than conviction.

Yet, relations have also changed fundamentally, not as a result of the Entente Cordiale, but because the D-Day landings 60 years ago persuaded the French that the United States was now the undisputed leader of the English-speaking — "Anglo-Saxon" to the French — world. And if any doubt existed, that status was confirmed when London bowed to American pressure to end the Suez adventure in 1956.

As a result, since then, a basic asymmetry has shaped cross-channel relations: when France looks west, it now sees the United States, not Britain, as its competitor; but when Britain looks east, it still sees France controlling, at times blocking, its relationship with Europe. So, while the French are obsessed with the United States and somewhat indifferent to Britain, the British remain passionate about their love-hate for France.

And on and on it goes. What is it with so many Americans and the urge to belittle Britain? One would think they had chips on their shoulders or something. Whether it's taking sole credit for the spread of the English language - conveniently forgotten just who bequeathed it to them, as well as the fact that it would still be the most widely spoken European language around if America were excluded, thanks to the existence of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, Pakistan and Britain's former African colonies - or portraying World War II as a mostly American enterprise in which the British came along for the ride as sidekicks (ignoring the fact that the British stood alone against Hitler from 1940 to the end of 1941, as well as doing lots of fighting against the Japanese in Southeast Asia), there's a persistent belittling tendency that runs throughout American historiography and reportage on the mother country.

The only explanation I can give for this negativity is that for all of their swagger, a great many Americans still feel a certain sense of cultural inferiority towards the British, and try to make up for it by portraying their closest ally as a has-been country, a tatty old tourist-trap where everyone still speaks like Bertie Wooster and a nice cup of tea is had by all in the afternoon. It isn't only Australians who seem to suffer from the "cultural cringe."

Piss Poor Reasoning

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has a post up which harbors such egregious lapses in reasoning that I am hard-pressed to understand how a lecturer in economics could have made it. Following is an excerpt from the post in question, with the most glaringly absurd bit highlighted.

As I said in Henry’s comments thread the ev psych analysis is essentially “realist”. This is the kind of style of social and political analysis that purports to strip away the illusions of idealistic rhetoric and reveal the underlying self-interest. The only question is to nominate the “self” that is interested. In Ev Psych the unit of analysis is the gene, in Chicago-school economics the individual, in Marxism the class, in public choice theory the interest group, and in the realist school of international relations the nation.

All of these realist models are opposed to any form of idealism in which people or groups act out of motives other than self-interest. But, logically speaking, different schools of realists are more opposed to each other than to any form of idealism. If we are machines for replicating our genes, we can’t also be rational maximizers of a utility function or loyal citizens of a nation. Clever and consistent realists recognise this - for example, ideologically consistent neoclassical economists are generally hostile to nationalism.

This is the sort of blockheaded nonsense that does so much to lower my opinion of the most of the Crooked Timber contributors. We most certainly can at once be both machines for replicating genes and maximizers of a utility function - all we have to do is that the utility function we're maximizing is that for reproductive fitness. Similarly, nationalism makes sense in as far as

1. We conceive of the nation as a sort of mutual defense pact against external enemies, and
2. Nations and ethnicities (and therefore breeding populations) are often largely coterminous, this being particularly true of those nations in which nationalist feeling is strongest (the USA being a glaring exception to this).

To speak, as Quiggin does, as if those who believe in nationalism, free markets and evolutionary psychology all at once are little more than fools is to do no more than display one's own foolishly cramped conception of what is logically possible. It is true that, say, not all forms of nationalism are reconcilable with support for free-markets, but often such arguments are more a matter of disputing the efficacy of various policy alternatives, rather than a fundamental clash of values; for instance, nationalist free-traders despise Buchananite protectionism not because their love of free-trade is stronger than their nationalism, but because they genuinely believe that the nation is weakened rather than strengthened by protectionist measures. Similarly, one can easily reconcile nationalism, even to the point of willing self-sacrifice on the battlefield, with evolutionary psychology, by drawing on the concept of inclusive fitness; being the son, brother or nephew of a deceased war hero can bring tremendous social respect, and with it, more and better mating opportunities as well as a higher chance of raising one's offspring to become successful adults. Even if this isn't true in modern society (and I think it is still true to some extent), it was indisputably true in the context in which we evolved, and that is what matters for the sake of this argument.

I am actually not much of a fan of the field of evolutionary psychology as it currently stands, as I feel that there are too many "just so stories" floating about in it, and there is too little hard scientific evidence to back them up. It is all too easy for some kook sitting in his armchair to draw up ridiculous "explanations" for social phenomena instead of doing the hard work of investigating all the possible alternatives, and that is precisely what many kooks on the right have indeed been doing - witness recent "explanations" of the Southern African AIDS epidemic as being due to Africans' supposedly greater promiscuity and lower jealousy. The problem I have with arguments like Quiggin's isn't that they've picked an undeserving target, but that they've chosen patently dishonest means of attacking it, which makes it much too easy for the practitioners of what is mostly junk science to paint themselves as victims. This is precisely the same difficulty I have with much of Stephen Jay Gould's output; hand-waving nonsense about "reification", and pointless quibbling over whether "g" was a single trait or a multitude of traits, made it easy for all sorts of quacks to shoot his arguments down while wrapping themselves in the mantle of martyrdom. In short, Gould actually set back the cause he claimed to be defending.

New Scientist - Ostrich Beads Indicate Early Symbolic Thought

I've long held that the notion of a uniquely European "creative explosion" in the Upper Paleolithic was an absurdity, an artifact arising from the fact that most of those who'd bothered to look for evidence from the period happened to be Europeans looking on their home-ground. Earlier finds from South Africa dating back to c. 77,000 BC had already begun to cast doubt on the old story, but this latest news makes it even less plausible than before that modern human creativity post-dated the dispersal out of Africa 50,000 years ago.

Stone Age beads revealed by archaeologists on Wednesday could be the strongest evidence yet that humans developed sophisticated symbolic thought much earlier than once thought.

The ostrich egg beads and numerous other artefacts, including ochre pencils, carved bone and stone tools, were recovered from the Loiyangalani River Valley, in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

The archaeologists who discovered the relics have yet to date them precisely, but believe they originate from the African Middle Stone Age - between 280,000 and 45,000 years ago. This is because they were found in a sedimentary layer along with many items characteristic of the Middle Stone Age.

They believe that the carefully worked ostrich beads, which have no use as tools, provide the clearest evidence to date that humans could think symbolically before 35,000 years ago. That is the time when artwork and sophisticated artefacts start to appear commonly, although so far only outside Africa.

"I'm fairly sure that these items are very old, and if that is so this could be a very important site," says Audax Mabulla, one of the archaeologists behind the find from the University of Dar er Salaam in Tanzania. "The beads are unambiguous examples of symbolic behaviour."

Mental capabilities

The ostrich egg beads were probably made by cracking ostrich eggs, boring holes into the pieces and then smoothing them. Ethnographic records show that similar pieces of jewellery are often used by modern hunter-gatherer groups for trading or other forms of social interaction.

But not everyone is convinced that the Loiyangalani find proves that the earliest "modern" humans had similar mental capabilities and social structures.

"It is certainly debatable whether ostrich egg beads are symbolic," says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in the UK. "If they can convincingly date them, they also need to demonstrate that they are symbolic rather than simply decorative."

Pettitt also points out that 70,000-year-old ochre crayons, covered with carvings that might have symbolic relevance, have already been recovered from the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Mabulla and his US colleagues acknowledge this, but argue that the ostrich shell beads are much less ambiguous.

Paul Pettitt is simply splitting hairs; what difference is there between saying something is symbolic as opposed to decorative? Is it even meaningful to speak of a thing being decorative without carrying symbolic meaning? I rather doubt it.

However one chooses to parse this find, the bottom line is that it is evidence of behavior that is simply unheard of amongst earlier species of men; to date, not a single item of a decorative nature, or even one made of anything other than stone, has been found that could be unambigously attributed to Neandertals, H. Erectus or any other archaic populations. These ostrich egg beads, ochre pencils and carved bone tools are indisputably hallmarks of a modern sensibility.

Coup Foiled in Nigeria?

The bastards! I'm not at all surprised to see them described as "Hausa-speaking" and "muslim" - these idiots want their feudal lifestyle shoved down everyone else's throats, whatever the price.

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Authorities were investigating Nigerian army commanders Friday in connection with "serious security breaches" that some officers have privately characterized as a plot to overthrow President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Obasanjo spokeswoman Remi Oyo declined to say whether the alleged offenses constituted a coup plot, saying there is "no danger whatsoever; this president is firmly in charge."

"It is true that the intelligence community is investigating allegations of what appears to be serious breaches of security on the part of some officers and apparent civilian collaborators," Oyo told The Associated Press. She refused to elaborate.

"The truth of the matter is they remain allegations until proven," Oyo said.

Three military officers privately told The Associated Press that army intelligence officials had interrogated 28 mid-ranking army officers in connection with an alleged army plot to topple Obasanjo, whose 1999 election ended 15 years of military rule in Africa's most populous nation.

The officers were questioned Monday at the nation's military intelligence headquarters in the capital of Abuja, the three officers said. The officers, who included one of the 28 who had been interrogated, spoke on condition their names not be used.

After the questioning, officials released the suspects -- many of them Hausa-speaking, Muslim army colonels and majors from the north -- but impounded their cellphones, apparently to investigate call records, the men said.

Obasanjo, a southern Christian, has faced stiff opposition from northern Muslims who have long dominated Nigeria's military.

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

Army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Martin Agwai tried to stamp out the spread of what he called "dangerous" coup rumors.

"National security is so important that I don't to want to speculate," he told reporters. "I need time to consult with my officers ... It would be more dangerous if I'm the one encouraging rumors."

The Lagos daily Vanguard newspaper reported Thursday the suspected coup-plotters were believed to have sought the support of soldiers disgruntled over late or unpaid salaries as well as by "general insecurity, corruption" and alleged irregularities in recent elections.

Supporters were recruited "along religious, ethnic and geopolitical lines with intent to incite men under arms against the state," the paper said without citing sources.

Maj. Hamza Al-Mustapha, the jailed former security chief to the late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, was suspected by some officials of leading the alleged coup plot, officials privately told AP.

On Tuesday night, army officials hurriedly transferred Al-Mustapha -- who is being held on charges of murdering the wife of one of one of Abacha's chief opponents -- from a Lagos prison to a facility in the capital, Abuja. Residents heard hours of gunfire during the transfer.

Al-Mustapha's family claimed the inmate was shot in the leg during the transfer, an allegation vigorously denied by officials.

What a bunch of worthless bastards! I'm sick to death of Northern army officers with inflated ideas about their proper station in life plotting coups, under the banner of fighting "corruption." Who appointed these little shits as judge and jury over the political class anyway?

What irritates me the most about all this is that these worthless individuals are getting far better treatment than anything that they might have expected under a military regime: Obasanjo's spokesmen is still talking about "allegations until proven" where these mallams would simply have shot all the suspects out of hand straight away, were they the ones whose lives had been under threat. You'd think they'd now have a keener appreciation of how even a corrupt democratic regime is better than a military dictatorship, at least in some respects, though I find that prospect highly dubious.

I worry that a different and extremely pernicious lesson will be taken from the gentle handling these officers have been receiving thus far; my fear is that in the name of a false humanitarianism, these scum will merely be sentenced to a little jail time, leaving them the possibility of being sprung from prison later on, should yet another effort by some of their comrades succeed. No, if they're found guilty, I hope they get to face the firing squad.

Obasanjo's been discussing a drastic downsizing of the Nigerian armed forces for quite a while, and this latest incident indicates that its well past time he got round to seeing it through. Safely half of the entire army could be gotten rid of in my opinion, and it is precisely those "Hausa-speaking, muslim" officers who are most in need of cashiering; most of them are so lacking in aptitude for the soldierly duties they're supposedly being paid for that 99 percent of them wouldn't have gotten into the army to begin with, were there no regional quotas working in their favor.

Police Find Bomb on High-Speed Rail Line in Spain

Perhaps the Spanish were a little premature in assuming they had the suspects for the March 11 bombing in hand? Even if all those arrested so far really were involved, this latest find argues strongly for a far more extensive terrorist network than Spain's security and intelligence services seem to have reckoned with.

MADRID, April 2 -- Spanish police found a bomb Friday under the track of a high-speed train that links Madrid and Seville, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said.

A railway employee alerted police after discovering a suspicious looking package about 35 miles southwest of Madrid, Acebes said at a news conference. The package contained 22-to-24 pounds of explosives, which were connected to a detonator with a 450-foot cable, Acebes said.

The minister said it was not yet known who had placed the bomb. He said early analysis suggested the explosives were similar to those used March 11 to blow up commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring 1,800.

A railway employee alerted police after discovering a suspicious looking package about 35 miles southwest of Madrid, Acebes said at a news conference. The package contained 22-to-24 pounds of explosives, which were connected to a detonator with a 450-foot cable, Acebes said

According to Acebes, the bomb's mechanism was not complete, which led police to believe whomever placed it was surprised by someone and left quickly.

Again, are we really sure that only Islamists were involved with the March 11 attacks? Once more we see (here in the presence of a 450-foot denotator cable) a concern for personal survival that is uncharacteristic of would-be shaheedeen. What is more, this planned outrage flies in the face of the announcements by a supposed al-Qaeda representative that Spain would henceforth enjoy a "truce", just as long as the PSOE held to its promise to pull out of Iraq. Perhaps we really shouldn't be taken all these self-proclaimed spokesmen quite so seriously from here on out? But if that's to be the case, one also has to wonder why Islamist claims of responsibility have been deemed credible enough by many on the left to condemn Aznar for "dragging" Spain into the sights of al-Qaeda.

One more thing to consider: on the assumption that this latest intended outrage was also the handiwork of Islamic terrorists, doesn't this fly in the face of those who argued that Spain would be safe from further outrages once its new leader announced his intention to pull out from Iraq? I said on the day of Zapatero's election victory that the Spaniards had chosen shame and would get war nonetheless, and was virulently castigated for my words, but events seem to be bearing me out; right on the heels of the greatest terrorist outrage in Europe in years, yet another was being planned to target the very same country as the previous one. Perhaps more thoughtful individuals will now recognize the validity of my claim that Spain's electoral upset revealed that country to be the soft underbelly of Europe, and therefore an inviting target for yet more attacks.

MathPlayer 2.0 Released

Jacques Distler informs us that Design Science has finally gotten round to releasing MathPlayer 2.0, so now even benighted Internet Explorer users can enjoy reading MathML documents in all their intended glory. The plugin can be downloaded here.

BBC - Michael Jackson 'may tour Africa'

Is this an April Fools' Day joke? Since when has Michael Jackson wanted to have anything to do with blackness?

Singer Michael Jackson may stage a concert tour of Africa to support the Aids fight if he gets permission from the judge in his child abuse trial.

A US Congress member revealed the plan at a press conference in Washington DC where Jackson appeared but said little.

Sheila Jackson Lee said the tour could be held in May or June after invites from ambassadors.

Jackson will need a judge's permission to travel outside the US after handing over his passport following his arrest.

He is charged with seven counts of child molestation and two counts of administering intoxicating liquor to a child with the intent of committing a crime.

The star, who is currently out on $3m (£1.6m) bail, denies all the charges. A pre-trial hearing is scheduled for Friday.

Smiled

When details of his possible tour were announced, there was mild applause at the press conference. "That wasn't loud enough," said Jackson - his only words during the event.

The narcissism of that last statement tells me this probably isn't a joke after all. It's amazing what child-molestation charges can do for one's desire to connect with one's black roots.

Harvard Prof Scams $600,000, Hands it to 419ers

Uh oh. Looks like even Harvard men aren't immune to Nigerian mind-games.

A US scientist who collected $600,000 for SARS research in China from students, colleagues and friends, actually handed the money over to Nigerian 419ers, the Boston Herald reports.

Former Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researcher and Harvard University professor Weldong Xu, 38, was contacted by the lads from Lagos and promised $50m in quick profit.

We assume that the usual "unforseen expenses" scenario soon kicked in, since Xu began to solicit funds for his philanthropic far-eastern venture.

Among the 35 individuals who fell for the scam was a friend who remortgaged his house to support Xu's initiative. Boston police detective Steve Blair noted: "These are co-workers who trusted him and believed in him and took him for his word."

Xu was uncovered after employers Dana-Farber fingered him to police over the affair. Unhappily for the criminal mastermind, he was spotted arguing with one scammee in the Dana-Farber canteen by another victim who was at the time being interviewed by police.

The cuffs slapped on, Xu 'fessed up and handed police a book containing details of his shameful fleecings.

Xu would not, however, admit that he had himself been played like a cheap violin by the Nigerians. "The scammer's been scammed," said detective Blair. "He wouldn't acknowledge he'd been scammed. I tried to tell him he'd been scammed, but he never caught on."

I don't know who to be more irritated by when I read stories like this one: the scammers who help to give all of their fellow Nigerians an ugly reputation, or the greedy fools who allow themselves to be taken in by their pitches. This was a Harvard professor, for goodness sake!

Guardian - Clinton Chose to Ignore Rwandan Genocide

No, this isn't really news, but it is worth repeating, if only to emphasize the hollow nature of the routine proclamations of "never again!" one hears from even supposedly caring public figures. Even if one grants the International Answer and Indymedia crowd's claims that Bush has the blood of thousands of innocent Iraqis on his hands (which I do not), it is just as easily pointed out that Clinton has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his. That doesn't make Bush any less culpable for any failings he may have, but it does make a nonsense of any supposition that his is a regime particularly careless with the lives of others.

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington's top policymakers.

The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his senior officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.

"It's powerful proof that they knew," said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.

The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington DC, went to court to obtain the material.

It discovered that the CIA's national intelligence daily, a secret briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, the then vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of senior officials, included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, said rebels would continue fighting to "stop the genocide, which ... is spreading south".

Three days later the state department's intelligence briefing for former secretary of state Warren Christopher and other officials noted "genocide and partition" and reported declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis".

However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying "acts of genocide".

Ms Des Forges said: "They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn't want to act. It was a very pragmatic determination."

The administration did not want to repeat the fiasco of US intervention in Somalia, where US troops became sucked into fighting. It also felt the US had no interests in Rwanda, a small central African country with no minerals or strategic value.

William Ferroggiaro, of the National Security Archive, said the system had worked. "Diplomats, intelligence agencies, defence and military officials - even aid workers - provided timely information up the chain," he said.

"That the Clinton administration decided against intervention at any level was not for lack of knowledge of what was happening in Rwanda."

Many analysts and historians fault Washington and other western capitals not just for failing to support the token force of overwhelmed UN peacekeepers but for failing to speak out more forcefully during the slaughter.

Some of the Hutu extremists orchestrating events might have heeded such warnings, they have suggested.

Mr Clinton has apologised for those failures but the declassified documents undermine his defence of ignorance. "The level of US intelligence is really amazing," said Mr Ferroggiaro. "A vast array of information was available."

Despicable. Bush may or may not be mistaken in his invasion of Iraq, but at least he was willing to sacrifice political capital to carry it through. Clinton certainly got what he wanted - re-election - even if the deaths of 800,000 people was part of the price to be paid for it to happen.

No Honor Amongst Thieves

Is this an instance of those who live by the sword dying by it? One can only hope so.

Security police detained Sudan's leading Islamic opposition leader Hassan Turabi early Wednesday, his wife said.

Wisal el-Mahdi told The Associated Press that a large squad of police came to their Khartoum home at about 1:30 a.m. local time and arrested her husband, saying he was "was wanted by the authorities."

The arrest came days after the government detained members of Turabi's Popular National Congress and some military officers in connection with an alleged plot to overthrow the government of President Omar el-Bashir.

"We were expecting this arrest" because of the alleged coup attempt, Wisal el-Mahdi said.

Turabi was once a close ally of el-Bashir and the main ideologue of the Islamic fundamentalist government set up after el-Bashir seized power in 1989.

Both el-Bashir and Turabi are murderous scum. I won't shed any tears if one or both of them bump each other off.

George Bush Invites Buhari to America

An ... interesting development. Buhari is probably the least democratic Nigerian alive, so anyone inviting him to visit has to do so with his eyes wide open. Still, this might have a salutary effect in restraining the worst impulses of Buhari's supporters, if the prospect of having good relations with the White House means anything to Buhari. There can few things more flattering to someone in his position than to have the ear of the American President, his Secretary of State and his National Security adviser.

Opposition leader and presidential candidate of the All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP) in the 2003 general elections, Maj-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd), has been invited to Washington by the US President, George W. Bush.

The invitation, according to sources this morning, follows America's increasing concern about the spate of political assassinations, repression and electoral violence in Nigeria.

ources hinted that General Buhari is expected to leave Nigeria and will meet Secretary of State, Colin Powell and National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, apart from President Bush.

General Buhari will be accompanied on the trip by former Army chief, Gen. Victor Malu, Chief Ogbonnaya Onu, Miss Joy Yowika, a lawyer, Mr. Sam Mbah Isaiah and AVM Mukhtar Muhammed.

Also on the entourage is Mr. Jimoh Ibrahim, the ANPP governorship candidate in Ondo State.

"The meeting is not unconnected with America's concern about democracy in Nigeria and its direction," said a source close to the ANPP presidential candidate in the 2003 general elections.

It's good to see American concern for stability in West Africa extend beyond the usual after-the-fact wrangling in the United Nations about how to best handle some disaster or another - though I'm sure that Nigeria's position as the world's 6th largest oil exporter, in a period of high oil prices, does have a little bit to do with this solicitous attitude.

Did Lucy Have a Soul?

What is it about religion that makes otherwise sensible people lose control of their faculties of reasoning? I recently came across a post in a discussion of archaeological evidence relating to toolmaking and the evolution of our species in which the most clearsighted thinking on the significance of what has been found is tail-ended by the weirdest segue into batty theological speculations. Below is an excerpt of the most significant parts of the post in question:

One of the valid criticisms of my view has concerned the lack of cultural remains found in times earlier than when the genus Homo first appeared, around 2.4 million years ago. In the recent years, this gap has begun to disappear. Tools have been found at African sites such as Gona, Ethiopia, as old as 2.6 million years, with only Australopithecus being present. This raises the possibility that a being not of our genus, much less our species, was making and useing stone tools.

One of the interesting things about these finds is the light they shed on the mental capacities of these early hominids. First, obviously, these creatures had the ability to know that stones could be fashioned into tools. Secondly, they had more knowledge of rock mechanics than chimpanzees are able to master. Toth tried to teach a bonobo, Kanzi, how to make stone tools. Kanzi never mastered the ability to strike the stone tool at the optimum angle for the maufacture of a sharp edge. He took to smashing stones on the floor and looking for sharp flakes produced by accident. But the early tool maker from 2.6 million years ago had the knowledge as his tools are not made by accident.(Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.207; Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 136)

Secondly, it meant that the creature had to know WHERE to find appropriate rocks and what rocks were suitable for making stone tools and which weren't. Limestone is not good for making stone tools. Neither is sandstone. Thus, this being 2.6 million years ago needed to be able to tell the difference between igneous and other fine grained rocks and coarse sandstones, conglomberates and limestone--thus he was the first primitive mineralogist.

Thirdly, these beings acted like you and I do in the presence of abundance--they are wasteful in the presence of abundance. One sees great
outdoor fountains in rainy areas but rarely in dry deserts where water is precious. I will cite Heinzelin et al,

"At the nearby Gona site, abundant Oldowan tools were made and discarded immediately adjacent to cobble conglomberates that offered excellent, easily accessible raw materials for stone-tool manufacture. It has been suggested that the surprisingly advanced character of this earliest Oldowan technology was conditioned by the ease of access to appropriate fine-grained raw materials at Gona. Along the Karari escarpmetn at Koobi Fora, the basin margin at Fejej, and the lake margin at Olduvai Gorge, hominids also had easy access to nearby outcrops of raw material. In contrast, the diminutive nature of the Oldowan assemblages in the lower Omo [made on tiny quartz pebbles] was apparently conditioned by a lack of available large clasts."
Jean de Heinzelin et al, "Environment and Behavior of 2.5-Million-Year-Old Bouri Hominids" Science 284(1999):629

Fourthly, there is evidence of great planning abilities and forethought, which is the most important trait we can find in these hominids because it is precisely this which allows us to follow moral commands (see Morton, G. R. (1999) Planning Ahead: Requirement for Moral Accountability, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 51:3:176-179 )

When the Bouri hominids, that Hinzelin et al are describing and which are of the same age as the Gona hominids, are faced with scarcity, their behavior is different in a typically human way. There are no great heaps of thrown away tools at Bouri, just an occasional tool. Yet we know that they were using stone tools to butcher animals because they left cut marks on the bones.

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

If these creatures, whoever it is, were carrying tools 59 kilometers, that is about a 2 day walk and means that the creature could plan 2 days in advance. For comparison, a chimp can plan only about 20 minutes ahead. That is the longest time they have been observed carrying a stone with which to break open coula nuts. Clearly the people living 2.5 million years ago, were far away more advanced than a chimp. And given their ability to plan ahead for at least 2 days, it strongly implies that they would have understood consequences (i.e. make tool, carry tool to Bouri lake, kill animal, use tool to butcher animal) They didn't miss sight of the consequence of killing the animal and then going to Gona to make a tool and come back with it to butcher the animal. The animal would have been eaten or rotted by the time they came back.

The fact that they carried their tools away with them means that they understood the consequence of not having the tool and planned ahead for future kills.

Interestingly, the only creature found at Bouri, was Australopithecus garhi--a creature not of our species but whose hands were very human like in their abilities:

“This new Australopithecus hand seems, like that of the modern human, to be relatively unspecialized in that it has a short palm and fingers compared with those of apes.” Ron Clark, “Discovery of Complete Arm and Hand of the 3.3 Million-Year-Old Australopithecus Skeleton From Sterkfontein,” South African Journal of Science, 95(1999):477-480, p. 480

What is the importance of this planning ahead? It implies that this
creature, one we don't even allow into our genus, was capable of understanding moral imperatives and the consequences of not obeying a
command of God. I have long argued that Adam was much longer ago than most theologians want to accept. Here is evidence that a creature existed 2.5-2.6 million years ago who could manufacture complex tools, who could plan ahead, who could act like a human in response to plenty, and who could understand consequences be they physical or moral. What more is needed to be able to call this creature, Man (or Adam in the Hebrew)? (emphasis added)

Here's a fellow who's making insightful, persuasive points about what conclusions can be drawn about the mindsets of late australopithecines, given evidence for their usage and curation of stone tools, and all of a sudden, completely out of the blue, he starts leaping to conclusions about the supposed capacity for morality of said creatures, and the existence of the biblical Adam. What is going on in such a person's head? Tool use and the capacity to plan ahead say nothing whatsoever about one's capacity for moral thought and behavior - the average sociopath seems to get along just fine with the mechanical aspects of life despite lacking anything in the way of an internal moral compass.

The need to believe in the religious precepts one is taught early in life seems to be so great in many people that they're willing to surrender their critical faculties at the first hurdle in order to keep believing. If we say the likes of Lucy and the Turkana Boy were moral creatures in the same sense as most of us are today, we might as well throw in the towel and grant the same right to all of the other great apes right now. There's very little that distinguishes an australopithecine from a chimpanzee other than the ability to walk upright.

Andrew Sullivan on the Case for Gay Marriage

Having recently bashed Sullivan for his characterization of male circumcision as "genital mutilation", it's only fair for me to point out a piece on which I think he makes a very convincing argument. A lot of the arguments we're seeing against gay marriage have been seen before, and if we found them false then, we are logically bound to find them false today.

Marriage rights for homosexuals have not been dressed up as a civil rights issue as a means to sell them to the broader public. The original arguments were often socially conservative ones--namely, that encouraging stability, fidelity, and family among homosexuals was a tangible social good. But when the matter came before the courts, they really had no alternative but to address the matter in a civil rights context. "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men," wrote Earl Warren in Loving v. Virginia, the landmark miscegenation case in 1967. "Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man' ..." The right to marry whomever you wish is a fundamental civil right. That is not contestable in the history of this country's jurisprudence. Now you may argue that marriage is definitionally heterosexual and therefore such civil rights only apply to heterosexuals. But you have to make that case--that civil marriage as currently practiced and enforced is inherently heterosexual--before you can dismiss the notion that it is a matter of civil rights. And there is some irony in the fact that the very same arguments that Steele is now using against civil marriage for gays--that it is not a civil right--were once used to argue in defense of anti-miscegenation statutes. The anti-miscegenationists argued that marriage was about procreation and that mixed-race marriages would lead to "mongrel" offspring; and, besides, blacks were already as free to marry as whites were, as long as they married someone of the same race. There was no discrimination involved, the opponents argued, and no civil rights being denied. This was merely an extremely awkward issue having to do with the compatibility of racial mixing and the institution of marriage, which had always been uni-racial in much of the United States. (emphasis added)

Opponents of gay marriage are going to have to do better than this if they're to retain any claims to intellectual respectability. Personally, I think the government plays far too prominent a role in marriage as it is, and that a lot of the benefits bestowed on marriage couples are both discriminatory and unnecessary, in as far as there are already advantages of scale to having any two income earners living together under the same roof. I see no reason for the government to discriminate between gay marriage, straight marriage, or even exotic (by Western standards) combinations like polyandry and polygyny, as long as there's no coercion involved.

Of course, saying that last bit puts me on the fringe of Western public opinion, but I don't really see why polygamous family units should be regarded as more abhorrent than any others, once the element of coercion is removed, and as long as all partners get to have a say in deciding whether or not to bring other parties into the arrangement. If a woman thinks her life would be improved by having a companion to share the domestic chores and overheated attentions of her husband, who are we to argue with her? Or if a man feels like sharing his wife's charms with another man of her desiring, what business is it of anyone else, as long as no one else's tax dollars are going to subsidize the arrangement? Polygamy may make a lot of people feel squeamish, but mere squeamishness is no basis on which to make public policy. The thought of touching, let alone eating, amphibians makes me nauseous, but I don't imagine that this is reason enough to ban frogs' legs.

The Golden Rule - In Hebrew

My apologies to those who follow the link above only to see the name of a certain heretical former resident of Nazareth mentioned on the page linked to, but I simply haven't been able to find a Hebrew-to-English translation of the passage below anywhere else.

שוב מעשה בנכרי אחד
שבא לפני שמאי
אמר לו: גיירני על מנת
שתלמדני כל התורה כולה
כשאני עומד על רגל אחת.י
דחפו באמת הבנין שבידו.
בא לפני הלל
גייריה.י
אמר לו דעלך סני
לחברך לא תעביד
זו היא כל התורה כולה
ואידך - פירושה הוא.י
זיל גמור!י

"Why is this here?" you ask me, and I'll respond that there are two reasons for it, neither of which has anything to do with any religious belief on my part. The first is that it's interesting to state what is the forerunner of the Kantian rule that is the credo of those who are opposed to utilitarianism (as am I, for the most part, though far less so than some), given the recent debate I've been participating in below about the pros and cons of male circumcision. The second is that I'm a language-nut who likes learning new languages for the sake of it, and right now I'm trying to get my Hebrew up to scratch. That's reason enough, isn't it?

Teach Yourself Macroeconomics

Now, it goes without saying that Brad DeLong and I are not anywhere near each other on the political spectrum, so it may seem strange to some people that I happen to have such a high opinion of the guy despite my opposition to a lot of what he believes in politically. This really isn't all that strange, at least not in my eyes, as long as one keeps in mind the distinction between positive and normative economics, between what is and what one feels ought to be (see here for a definition of both terms.)

I don't buy into Brad DeLong's concern for income inequality as a thing in itself, preferring to concentrate my attentions on absolute levels of income; if the poorest tenth could be made 15 percent better off only if the richest tenth could be made 150 percent better off, I would be more than happy to go along with such an arrangement, though I imagine that Dr. DeLong would not. Where I completely agree with, and in fact mostly defer to the good Professor is where the positive economics is concerned, as there's just no doubting that he knows his stuff on that score - Berkeley is very lucky to have him. Anyone who's still in doubt as to his understanding of his subject would do well to check out these online macroeconomics resources he's so generously provided gratis for all the world to learn from.

Not everyone can afford to get a decent macroeconomics textbook, nor do we all have access to decent libraries from which such books can easily be borrowed, but these notes ought at least to give the curious a head-start in learning how economies work, as seen from the viewpoint of those who get paid to think about the subject. For those of you who've engaged in sniping about the conclusions of economists in the past without having studied the subject in any depth, you just might discover that there's rather more to what these "Ivory Tower" intellectuals get up to than you'd imagined from your perch as armchair critics. As the great הלל once said, "now go and study!"

Outsourcing Hysteria in Perspective

This CNET piece being carried in the NYT, asking if India is pricing itself out of the offshoring market puts the lie to any notion of a there being such a surfeit of talent in India that IT wage levels are doomed to sink to Third World subsistence levels. If these gloomy scenarios were on the mark, how would it be possible for Indian IT workers to be enjoying double-digit salary increases?

The U.S. technology industry's demand for offshore services is apparently beginning to drive up pay rates in India, raising questions about the long-term benefits of outsourcing work to that country.

Information technology workers in India reported double-digit salary growth in 2003, according to recent research, while pay for similar work within U.S. borders has been relatively stagnant if not declining. Although India's salaries generally remain significantly lower than U.S. averages, the narrowing wage gap and other unforeseen factors are leading at least some American companies to reassess the cost savings to be had by sending work offshore.

"Expectations about the benefits of outsourcing are becoming more realistic," according to a report by DiamonCluster International, a Chicago-based consulting firm, which recently released a survey of more than 180 companies involved in offshore outsourcing. "Most buyers in the previous study expected gains in efficiency in the range of 50 percent. Today, those expectations have declined to 10 to 20 percent."

India's wage inflation, which approached an estimated 14 percent last year, is a natural byproduct of a classic supply-and-demand scenario. Although projections for outsourcing remain highly speculative, Forrester Research has estimated that 3.3 million American jobs will be moved to other countries by 2015. But as far back as a year ago, India technology trade association Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies) was already concerned that India would fall short of demand for workers by as many as 235,000 professionals.

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

India reported gains of 12.8 percent and 13.7 percent last year for positions in categories labeled "IT solution provider" and "software development," according to an annual Asia-Pacific survey of more than 500 companies by Hewitt Associates, an international business consultancy. The numbers, which reverse a six-year decline in pay raises in India, are far more than any increases reported among other nations surveyed.

By region, India's highest increases were reported in Chennai, at an average of 13.5 percent, followed by Bangalore, with 12.5 percent, and Kolkata, with 11.5 percent. For 2004, the study predicts that average wages will rise again, as much as 13.4 percent.

There you go - I, Brad DeLong, Daniel Drezner, and everyone else who's insisted that outsourcing is greatly overrated as a "destroyer" of American jobs, are being proven correct. It's just plain stupid to look at per capita GDP in India, compare it with America's, and then draw the conclusion that there are 1 billion Indians with MCSEs willing to work for $450 a year. Hysteria over outsourcing is being driven by little more than a sense of entitlement brought on by the technology bubble, coupled with racist fears of innumerable brown-skinned hordes just waiting to take our jobs and wimmin.

BBC - Aids risk 'cut by circumcision'

The evidence for this has been accumulating for quite some time now, and I'd say that the precautionary principle requires that it be taken on board in attempting to restrict the spread of HIV. A little prevention now is worth any amount of free anti-retrovirals down the line.

Men who have been circumcised may be six times less likely to contract the HIV virus than uncircumcised men, research carried out in India suggests.

The study in the Lancet journal says that the thin foreskin tissue could be highly prone to HIV infection.
The latest study, which backs up earlier research in Africa, was carried out among 2,000-plus men in India.
Researchers say circumcision only reduces the risk of HIV infection - other sexual diseases are not affected.
A number of studies have shown that circumcision appears to lower the chances of contracting HIV.

Different susceptibility

When Aids first began to emerge in Africa, researchers found that it was more prevalent in the east and south of the continent than in the west.
Differences in sexual behaviour were widely thought to be reason for this.
But some scientists argued that as circumcision was more common in west Africa, it could be reducing the risk of HIV infection, as the foreskin could be more susceptible to the virus than other parts of penis.
This latest research, looking at more than 2,000 men in India, suggests exactly that.

The actual Lancet article can be found here. Following is a summary of the paper's findings:

Circumcised men have a lower risk of HIV-1 infection than uncircumcised men. Laboratory findings suggest that the foreskin is enriched with HIV-1 target cells. However, some data suggest that circumcision could simply be a marker for low-risk behaviours. In a prospective study of 2298 HIV-uninfected men attending sexually transmitted infection clinics in India, we noted that circumcision was strongly protective against HIV-1 infection (adjusted relative risk 0·15; 95% CI 0·04-0·62; p=0·0089); however, we noted no protective effect against herpes simplex virus type 2, syphilis, or gonorrhoea. The specificity of this relation suggests a biological rather than behavioural explanation for the protective effect of male circumcision against HIV-1.

Perhaps this piece of news will bring an end to anti-circumcision crusades of the sort perpetuated in the past* by Andrew Sullivan. So what if circumcision leads to some hypothetical loss of sensitivity? There's more to life than sheer physical pleasure, particularly when the pleasure at issue is one that can't be missed, never having been experienced. In any case, circumcised men still seem to find enough pleasure in the sexual act to seek out copulative possibilities, so Sullivan and other opponents of male circumcision are making a big deal out of very little, while the consequences in increased mortality of paying heed to them are likely to be steep indeed. I suspect it's meagre consolation to a South African dying of AIDS in his mid-30s that at least he got to enjoy superior orgasms before prematurely shuffling off his mortal coil.

*Google fails to turn up a link to the original comment on Sullivan's website, indicating that he's since had the good sense to remove that particular post from the face of the earth; what's problematic is that none of the dummies who quoted Sullivan on the subject bothered to actually use a permalink to record where exactly he said it, while Sullivan himself doesn't seem to bother with a link to archives of his older posts on his website.

Economic Illiteracy 101

Reading the responses to this post on outsourcing by Brad DeLong, in which he makes the following innocuous remarks

But--holding real GDP constant--a decline in the wages of high-skill workers is a rise in the wages of low-skill workers (and a rise in profits). Isn't there a chance that the yuppies facing competition from Bangalore will be a highly positive development, pushing U.S. wage levels together and raising the real wages of those at the bottom?

makes me weep for the irrationality of my fellow human beings. Rarely does one come across as nauseating a mixture of ignorance and arrogance as that displayed by most of the commenters on that post, the vast majority of whom seem to think poisoning the well constitutes the epitome of devastating criticism. What is it about outsourcing that brings out the very worst tendencies in pampered middle-class types? Do they think international competition is something only blue-collar workers deserve to worry about?

As a matter of fact, what Brad said was mathematically obvious: if American GDP isn't shrinking - and there's zero evidence that it is - while the share of GDP going to highly-skilled workers is shrinking, then it clearly must be true that the share going to capital + low-skilled workers is rising. If the share of income going to capital showed a long-term upwards trend, stock market valuations would be expected to rise sharply in reflection of the anticipated long-term gains in profits, a trend that is most certainly not in evidence. The conclusion is therefore inescapable that the current outsourcing trend augurs well for the lower-skilled, something one would expect "progressives" to celebrate.

I've stopped reading Brad DeLong's blog nearly as much as I used to, as I've found his partisanship ever-increasingly strident and unbalanced, but on trade issues at least, he continues to make sense. It's always eye-opening to read his comments sections on those occasions when he departs from the usual Democratic Party talking-points to state the case for trade, only for him to be called a drunk, a corporate stooge and a Bush stooge by those who are usually more than happy to cheer on his attacks on Bush as the works of a mind of genius. Heaven forbid I ever accumulate such "supporters"!

Books I HAVE to Buy

I really have to acquire personal copies of the following two books sometime soon.

• Robert J. Barro, Xavier Sala-i-Martin - Economic Growth
• Phillipe Aghion, Peter Howitt - Endogenous Growth Theory

So many books, so little time! Or, as קהלת put it, "Of making many books, there is no end." I already have a fairly definite picture in my mind of what works and what doesn't work in terms of getting poor countries to grow, but it's always nice to have a firm theoretical and empirical backing for one's ideas.

Economist - The al-Sauds Resist Reform

I've always found it strange that critics of the Bush administration's middle-eastern policy have harped on the need to address the "root causes" of terrorism, while at the same time disparaging any attempts to implant liberal constitutionalism in a soil in which it supposedly can bear no fruit. If one accepts that the misrule of oppressive governments is largely to blame for terrorism, doesn't consistency demand that one support efforts to get such governments to change their ways?

With that in mind, the nascent attempts at peacefully challenging the status quo in Saudi Arabia outlined by this Economist article are well worth watching, and eminently deserving of further encouragement. Saudi Arabia is home to Mecca and Medina, and any direct attempts at regime change would provoke deep outrage from all of the world's muslims; what is more, it is also the world's largest oil producer by some distance, giving the al-Sauds a powerful chokehold on the global economy. Any change that will occur in that country will have to come from within, and if a few liberal voices are raised within its borders, we ought at least to make it known that we will not stand quietly by as they are stifled.

IF YOU thought that change was coming soon to Saudi Arabia, think again. Consider the six prominent Saudi liberals who have spent the past week in jail. Their crime is that, unlike seven colleagues arrested at the same time but freed soon afterwards, these recalcitrants refused to pledge that they will stop pestering the country's rulers to reform.

There are other countries where simply asking politely for more rights—in this case, by signing several petitions—can land you in prison. But Saudi Arabia had lately shed some of its aura of arch-autocracy. A mix of pressures—home-grown terrorism, criticism from abroad, and the general restlessness of their mostly youthful subjects—appeared to have awakened Saudi princes to the incongruity of running a large, modern state like a family ranch. The past few years have seen the start of a wide-ranging dialogue, in the press and in government-sponsored forums, to find ways to devolve at least a measure of power to commoners.

Tensions were bound to emerge, particularly in the absence of any elected assembly to air differences or frame a legislative agenda. Reform-minded citizens took to probing, to see just how far the establishment, which in Saudi Arabia means the 10,000-odd princes of the al-Saud family and their pampered traditional allies, the Wahhabi clerical hierarchy, would let them go. They soon encountered red lines.

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

But a strong popular backlash against religious extremism following recent terror attacks, and the tacit backing of some senior princes, had lately encouraged the kingdom's normally quiescent liberals to further boldness. Despite warnings from the authorities, one group of them had the temerity to prepare yet another petition, demanding the right to set up a human-rights commission.

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

These are the men, most of them academics, now in jail. But their fate is not the only signal that hard-line princes are losing patience. The minister of defence and second-in-line to the throne, Prince Sultan, this week dismissed any idea that the Shura Council, an appointed body that vets laws, might become an elected legislature ... For his part, the chief mufti of the kingdom, Sheikh Abdel Aziz al-Sheikh, declared that liberals were as much of a danger as militant religious extremists.

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

Liberal reformists have not despaired yet. While one group launched yet another petition, to demand the release of their colleagues, others met Prince Nayef, the owlish interior minister, to make the request personally. Participants at the dawn meeting said that the prince assured them that royal doors would always be open to citizens' complaints but that “foreign agencies” were exploiting the reformers' platform in order to damage Saudi national unity. In other words, to call openly for domestic change is tantamount to treason.

If those who accuse Bush of negligence in failing to put more pressure on the Saudis mean what they say, here's an excellent opportunity to put him under the spotlight. The likes of Mubarak and the al-Sauds have used the excuse of Islamic extremism to perpetuate their despotisms for too, and Tony Blair's nauseating photo-opportunity appears to promise more of the same sort of nonsense from Ghaddafi's regime. Bush needs to put the lie to the accusation that the "War on Terror" is merely an excuse to shore up autocrats indefinitely.

Suharto 'most corrupt leader'

Is Suharto really the most corrupt leader of the last 20 years? If so, it's only because he had more time to loot than some. Nigeria's own Sani Abacha managed to loot $4 billion in the space of 4 years - at that rate, he'd have more than doubled Suharto's hoard had he enjoyed 32 years in power. Even Mobutu only managed to extract $5 billion from the Western taxpayer and his long-suffering subjects, despite also enjoying 32 years at the top. In terms of intensity of looting, Abacha really has no competitors.

Indonesia's former president MOHAMED SUHARTO holds the dubious title of being the most corrupt world leader in recent history, a leading anti-corruption organisation said in a "top10 " of graft published yesterday.

Plundering a family fortune estimated at anything between $15 billion (BD5.6bn) and35 bn during his32 -year reign from1967 , Suharto was a clear winner, according to British-based Transparency International.

The group gave a corruption "top10 " for global political leaders over the past 20 years, released to coincide with the release of its annual Global Corruption Report, a round-up of government graft worldwide.

In second place was former Philippine president FERDINAND MARCOS, deposed in1986 , who plundered between five and 10 billion dollars, Transparency International estimated.

The Philippines has the unfortunate boast of featuring two of its former presidents in the top10 , with Joseph Estrada, ousted in2001 , making the final spot with a haul of $78m to $80m.

Coming in third was late dictator MOBUTU SESE SEKO, who acquired around $5bn when he ruled Zaire - now the Democratic Republic of Congo - from 1965 to1997 , despite an average income per capita which even now is only $ 80per year.

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

The top 10 corrupt leaders are:

Mohamed Suharto, Indonesia, $15bn to $35bn; Ferdinand Marcos, Philippines, $5bn to $10bn; Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire, $5bn; Sani Abacha, Nigeria, $2bn to $5bn; Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia/Yugoslavia, $1bn; Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haiti, $300m to $800m; Alberto Fujimori, Peru, $600m; Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukraine, $114m to $200m; Arnoldo Aleman, Nicaragua, $100m; Joseph Estrada, Philippines, $78m to $80m.

This list has at least one glaring hole in it - where is the name of General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida on it? This is a guy whose government managed to mysteriously "lose" some $12 billion in windfall oil revenue from the Gulf War, and he doesn't even get a mention, while wannabes like Fujimori and Estrada do? Geez, a big-time kleptocrat can't even catch a fair break these days.

Genes and Human Evolution

From reports like this one and this one, it seems clear that the decision to sequence the chimpanzee genome is quickly paying scientific dividends, just as I expected it would.

Touching off a scientific furor, researchers say they may have discovered the mutation that caused the earliest humans to branch off from their apelike ancestors — a gene that led to smaller, weaker jaws and, ultimately, bigger brains.

Smaller jaws would have fundamentally changed the structure of the skull, they contend, by eliminating thick muscles that worked like bungee cords to anchor a huge jaw to the crown of the head. The change would have allowed the cranium to grow larger and led to the development of a bigger brain capable of tool-making and language.

The mutation is reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, not by anthropologists, but by a team of biologists and plastic surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The report provoked strong reactions throughout the hotly contested field of human origins with one scientist declaring it "counter to the fundamentals of evolution" and another pronouncing it "super."

The Pennsylvania researchers said their estimate of when this mutation first occurred — about 2.4 million years ago, in the grasslands of East Africa, the cradle of humanity — generally overlaps with the first fossils of prehistoric humans featuring rounder skulls, flatter faces, smaller teeth and weaker jaws.

And the remarkable genetic mutation persists to this day in every person, they said.

Nonhuman primates — including our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee — still carry the original big-jaw gene and the apparatus enabling them to bite and grind the toughest food

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

University of Michigan biological anthropologist Milford Wolpoff called the research "just super."

"The other thing that was happening 21/2 million years ago is that people were beginning to make tools, which enabled them to prepare food outside their mouths," he said. "This is a confluence of genetic and fossil evidence."

Other researchers strenuously disagreed that human evolution could literally hinge on a single mutation affecting jaw muscles, and that once those muscles were reduced, the brain suddenly could grow unfettered.

"Such a claim is counter to the fundamentals of evolution," said C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University. "These kinds of mutations probably are of little consequence."

Under normal circumstances, the endorsement of anything by Milford Wolpoff would be enough to make me doubt its veracity. Wolpoff's stubborn defense of his multiregionalist theory, long after the genetic and archeological evidence against it has become crushingly overwhelming, and his overeager misinterpretation of the Mungo Man fossil find, have long marked him in my mind as the anthropological equivalent of Alan Feduccia, whose dogged insistence on denying the theropod ancestry of birds against all evidence brings him awfully close to the mindset of creationists.

Despite Wolpoff's enthusiastic endorsement of this paper, however, I think that there really is something to what the researchers have managed to find, Owen Lovejoy's claims to the contrary; whether that something is quite what Stedman et. al. think they've found is something else altogether. It isn't at all clear to me why jaw musclature should have been some sort of barrier to brain growth, and it seems a lot more likely to me that the actual direction of causality has been reversed here: it wasn't the loss of jaw muscles that enabled brains to grow, but an increase in intelligence that enabled our ancestors to get higher quality food than the tough vegetation that other primates must make do with, removing the selective restraint against a weakening of jaw muscles.

One good reason for believing this to be the correct order of events, rather than that posited by Stedman and co., is that without any increase in food gathering capacity, there would have been no good reason for strong jaw muscles to have been any less vital than they'd been for millions of years previously. If our ancestors were still no brighter than Australopithecines when this change is supposed to have occurred, how could they have possibly eked out a living in the interim while their brains were supposed to have been growing? Indeed, here's another paper that indicates that hominids were already using stone tools 2.5 million years ago, or about the very time when loss of function of the MYH16 gene is estimated to have taken place.

NB - An abstract of the actual research paper can be found here. A discussion of the paper is already underway at The Panda's Thumb

A Blog to Watch Out For

Mrs. Tilton and Razib have already covered this, but P.Z. Myers and a bunch of other scientific heavy-hitters from Talkdesign have gotten together to launch The Panda's Thumb, dedicated to dealing serious blows to creationism and other sorts of nonsensical quackery masquerading as science. Add this one to your blogroll, now!

Ethnic Cleansing in Darfur

Bravo to Nicholas Kristof for bringing attention to this issue. I know that Bush is eager to get the Sudanese government to sign on to a peace deal, but he shouldn't let his eagerness get in the way of reining in that government's malevolent behavior towards Sudan's non-Arab citizens.

ALONG THE SUDAN-CHAD BORDER — The most vicious ethnic cleansing you've never heard of is unfolding here in the southeastern fringes of the Sahara Desert. It's a campaign of murder, rape and pillage by Sudan's Arab rulers that has forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages.

The desert is strewn with the carcasses of cattle and goats, as well as fresh refugee graves that are covered with brush so wild animals will not dig them up. Refugees crowd around overused wells, which now run dry, and they mourn loved ones whose bodies they cannot recover.

Western and African countries need to intervene urgently. Sudan's leaders should not be able to get away with mass murder just because they are shrewd enough to choose victims who inhabit a poor region without airports, electricity or paved roads.

The culprit is the Sudanese government, one of the world's nastiest. Its Arab leaders have been fighting a civil war for more than 20 years against its rebellious black African south. Lately it has armed lighter-skinned Arab raiders, the Janjaweed, who are killing or driving out blacks in the Darfur region near Chad.

"They came at 4 a.m. on horseback, on camels, in vehicles, with two helicopters overhead," recalled Idris Abu Moussa, a 26-year-old Sudanese farmer. "They killed 50 people in my village. My father, grandmother, uncle and two brothers were all killed."

"They don't want any blacks left," he added.

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

The U.N.'s Sudan coordinator, Mukesh Kapila, described the situation in a BBC interview on Friday as similar in character, if not scale, to the Rwanda genocide of 1994. "This is ethnic cleansing," he said. "This is the world's greatest humanitarian crisis, and I don't know why the world isn't doing more about it."

Countless thousands of black Sudanese have been murdered, and 600,000 victims of this ethnic cleansing have fled to other parts of Sudan and are suffering from malnutrition and disease. The 110,000 who have fled into Chad are better off because of the magnificent response of the Chadian peasants. Chadians are desperately poor themselves, but they share what little food and water is available with the Sudanese refugees.

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

To his credit, President Bush has already led the drive for peace in Sudan, doing far more to achieve a peace than all his predecessors put together. Now he should show the same resolve in confronting this latest menace.

In the 21st century, no government should be allowed to carry out ethnic cleansing, driving 700,000 people from their homes. If we turn away simply because the victims are African tribespeople who have the misfortune to speak no English, have no phones and live in one of the most remote parts of the globe, then shame on us.

What's truly disgraceful about the domestic response to the atrocities going on in Sudan is that it's been mostly the Religious Right, whose influence has been baleful in other arenas of American life, that's been putting any real pressure on the American government to do something to end the bloodshed. Preserving the lives and property of black Sudanese just doesn't seem to carry the same cachet as marching against Israel or chanting "No war for oil!" does in the minds of so many complacent, self-styled "liberals." Hey, Indymediots, Sudan has oil too! If you can come out to march everytime a killer like Saddam or Ahmed Yassin gets his due, surely you can spare a moment or two for the 700,000 Sudanese driven from their homes! What's that you say? Too busy inveighing against "Zionazi" Sharon and Bushitler™?

Nicholas Kristof is a genuine liberal, in the best sense of that word; those whose "liberalism" consists only of advocating higher taxes on the rich, but can't be bothered about the sufferings of other human beings outside their borders, are nothing of the sort.

Zaha Hadid Wins the Pritzker

And I'm less than surprised - which isn't to say that I think she's undeserving. Hadid's conceptual creations were so striking to my eye when I first saw them that I instantly knew that this was someone to watch out for. What a change a few years can make: it wasn't so long ago that she couldn't find anyone to build her work, especially in Britain.

The Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid has been selected to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2004, considered the profession's highest honor. She is the first woman to receive it.

The prize, which carries a grant of $100,000, is to be awarded at a ceremony on May 31 at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, the award's sponsor.

Movement, curvature, porosity, extreme horizontal elongation: these are some of the aesthetic properties that helped to establish Ms. Hadid, 53, as a major influence in her field well before she began to build. The powerful forms of her unbuilt projects, like the Cardiff Bay Opera House (1994), were widely published. Typically presented in the form of paintings, these projects have been publicly exhibited in the United States and abroad.

Ms. Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950. She studied mathematics in Beirut before moving to London to study architecture at the Architectural Association School. After graduating in 1977, she worked with Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the fledgling Office for Metropolitan Architecture, a practice that subsequently moved to Rotterdam under Mr. Koolhaas's direction. She is now based in London and is a British citizen.

Ms. Hadid's personal charisma has also helped to publicize her work, though to mixed effect. Beloved by journalists and members of her own profession for what is frequently described as her diva presence, Ms. Hadid has only recently found the clients willing to look beyond her reputation for being difficult. She reached a professional high point last year, with the completion of her first building in the United States, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. An immediate critical and popular success, the Rosenthal Center presaged a string of major commissions now at various stages of construction and design development. These include two buildings in Germany: the BMW Central Building in Leipzig and the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg; and two projects in Italy: Maxxi, the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Rome, and a high-speed train station in Naples. Design work is under way for a second American building, an addition to the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, Okla.

Hadid does indeed enjoy a reputation for being a "difficult" person, but this hardly marks her out from a lot of high-profile architects. The real reason for her meeting with such resistance seems to have been the sheer innovativeness (or, if you prefer, strangeness) of her conceptions, which were typically thought to be unbuildable, little more than high-concept architectural fantasies in the manner of a Hugh Ferriss or an Antonio Sant'Elia.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's a link to an old 2blowhards post that happens to have links to some of Hugh Ferriss' illustrations, which really ought to be seen to be believed. The same post also has links to images of drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (more of whose work can be seen here)and Claude Nicolas Ledoux (see here for more), two other masters of architectural fantasy. I won't bother providing links to the works of Zaha Hadid or Antonio Sant'Elia on here, as I'm feeling lazy, and it's easy enough to find a surfeit of images for either of the two anyway with a bit of Googling.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is Dead

Good riddance. The man was as much a murderer as any of the thugs he incited to kill on his behalf.

ERUSALEM, Monday, March 22 — Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, was killed early Monday by an Israeli missile that struck him as he left a mosque in Gaza City, his family and Hamas officials said. They said at least two bodyguards had been killed with him.

Sheik Yassin, a symbol to Palestinians of resistance to Israel and to Israelis of Palestinian terrorism, was by far the most significant Palestinian militant killed by Israel in more than three years of conflict.

Black smoke curled over Gaza City as Palestinians began burning tires in the streets and demonstrators chanted for revenge. Mosque loudspeakers blared a message across Gaza of mourning for Sheik Yassin in the name of Hamas and another militant group, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

The Israeli military confirmed the killing, saying in a statement that the sheik was "responsible for numerous murderous terror attacks, resulting in the deaths of many civilians, both Israeli and foreign."

The army said it had targeted a car carrying Sheik Yassin, but Palestinians at the scene said that the Sheik was not in car when he was hit.

The Israeli weapons punctured the pavement of the street where Sheik Yassin, a quadriplegic, was being escorted home. Blood spattered the walls of surrounding buildings. "I could not recognize the sheik, only his wheelchair," said one witness, Maher al-Beek.

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

Hamas is officially committed to Israel's destruction, not just a withdrawal from the occupied territories. The word means "zeal" in Arabic, and that is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement.

The group runs a network of low-cost clinics and schools that have broadened its ideological reach while helping to give its popularity a boost among Palestinians. Israeli security officials regard it as the most organized and disciplined of the militant groups.

This man possibly did more to set back the cause of Palestinian independence than anyone but Yasser Arafat himself. Still, I don't really expect to see a change in direction from Hamas, not unless Israel seriously steps up the pressure by getting rid of all of the organization's upper management.

Democracy vs. "Democracy"

I rarely find National Review palatable reading, but this Victor Davis Hanson column touches on a point I've also elaborated upon many times in the past: the need to distinguish between democracy as a merely formal matter of holding votes every so often, and democracy as a total package that includes freedom of speech, association and religion, stable laws, an independent judiciary, and security of persons and property, with voting being arguably the least important item in the package. Iran, Venezuela, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt may be "democratic" in the purely formal sense, but they certainly aren't anything of the sort under any interpretation of the word that is really worth having.

Unilateralism in Historical Context

A lot of the criticism of the war in Iraq has focused on Bush's "unilateralism", the assumption being that "unilateralism" in foreign policy is so obviously a grievous shortcoming as to be a condemnation in itself. To those who agree with such a notion, I pose a simple question: what would they have made of Britain's genuinely unilateral decision in the 19th century to militarily interfere in the affairs of many other nations across the globe, in order to bring about the end of slavery? Was this an evil too? If not, why not? And if American intervention in Iraq is inexcusable because of the cost to the American taxpayer, why should British policy in the 19th century have been any more forgivable? After all, the average Briton then was a lot poorer than the average American is today, and the "needless" expenditure of British funds abroad in pursuit of a moral crusade would therefore have been felt far more keenly.

I personally am more than grateful that Britain unilaterally decided upon the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, even taking into account all the other evils of which the British Empire was guilty; as such, I cannot bring myself to adopt the position of those who argue that it was somehow more "immoral" to invade Saddam's Iraq without French and Russian acquiescence than it was to leave the Iraqis under the rule of the Hussein family. It's a strange sort of morality that accords more weight to the concerns of European politicians than to the sufferings of 23 million people.

My Kingdom for an IP Lawyer!

I just happened to be reading the above NYT article on namespace and copyright clashes in the Internet age, when a particular statement in it (highlighted below) caught my attention, for a reason I shall explain shortly.

Certain namespaces have grown dangerously overcrowded. Pharmaceutical names are a special case: a subindustry has emerged to coin them, research them and vet them. The Food and Drug Administration now reviews proposed drug names for possible collisions, and this process is complex and subjective. Rigor may be impossible, and mistakes cause death. METHADONE (for opiate dependence) has been administered in place of METHYLPHENIDATE (for attention-deficit disorder), and TAXOL (a cancer drug) for TAXOTERE (another cancer drug). Doctors fear both look-alike errors and sound-alike errors: ZANTAC/XANAX; VERELAN/VIRILON. Linguists are devising scientific measures of the ''distance'' between drug names. But LAMICTAL and LAMISIL and LUDIOMIL and LOMOTIL are all approved drug names. Meanwhile, of course, drug companies have other worries; they spend millions on market research to make sure their names are both serious and sexy. ROGAINE, the hair-growth treatment, was deliberately chosen to make you think ''regain.''

Now, this article is interesting in its own right, but as I've said, that isn't why I'm mentioning it. The real reason for focusing on it here is that the particular sentence highlighted happens to deal with an issue I myself dealt with a few years back while doing research on information retrieval - how does one determine a method for measuring similarity between words, in the sense of imposing a metric on them, where "metric" is meant in the strict mathematical sense? By this I mean that given any words ABC, DEF and GHI, and using D(X,Y) to denote the distance between X and Y,

1. D(ABC,DEF) ≥ 0
2. D(ABC,ABC) = 0
3. D(ABC,DEF)=0 ⇒ ABC=DEF
4. D(ABC,DEF) = D(DEF,ABC)
5. D(ABC,GHI) ≤ D(ABC,DEF) + D(DEF,GHI)

The preceding properties are very nice to have for mathematical reasons, as they are in fact an abstraction of the properties enjoyed by our conventional notions of distance, and therefore well-studied. As it turns out, I did actually find a satisfactory (and non-obvious) solution, and, perhaps most importantly, one that wasn't too computationally costly to be worthwhile. It was clear to me at the time that this was an idea worth getting intellectual protection for, but I lacked the resources to do so at the time. Maybe I ought to write James Gleick to find out exactly was looking for the the distance measures he wrote about ...

BBC - Student 'Sells Virginity' via Web

I'd say she got far more than fair value for it too. A whole evening with a high class escort would have cost perhaps £2,000 at most, so anyone who'd pay a whining, plain, cheapskate student £8,400 for the act obviously enjoys throwing his money away.

A lesbian university student who auctioned her virginity on the internet to pay for her studies is reported to have had sex with the highest bidder.

Rosie Reid, 18, from London, slept with a 44-year-old BT engineer in a hotel room in Euston after he paid her £8,400, the News of the World reports.

But she told the newspaper: "It was horrible... I felt nervous and scared."

She hatched the plan to avoid graduating with debts of £15,000 from her Bristol University degree course.

Banker's draft

Ms Reid, from Dulwich, had sex with the divorced father-of-two after he gave her a banker's draft, according to the News of the World.

Her partner, Jess Cameron, stayed in the same hotel while she went through with the act nearly three weeks ago.

She told the newspaper: "I felt obliged... to please him as he had just paid all this money."

But she added: "It didn't feel like it was happening to me. I felt like I was watching it happen to someone else.

"I was just so relieved when it was over... I was desperate to get back to Jess as I felt so uncomfortable."

The next morning she said she joined her partner and they "just cried and cried".

'Drastic action'

The social policy student put herself on offer in January, saying she would rather sleep with a stranger than face years of comparative poverty.

The horror! She actually had to sleep with a man! Well, wait a minute, no she didn't ... She came up with the bright idea of selling her body, and she chose to follow through with it, so why exactly are we supposed to be sympathetic to her whining about the experience? And she did get paid for it too! What an idiot.

Marginal Revolution: Born to Sue?

Alex Tabarrok has posted a story about legal intimidation and intellectual dishonesty that deserves to get wider circulation.

Frank Sulloway's Born to Rebel (BTR) was a smash hit when it was published in 1996. Sulloway's thesis, that laterborns are born to rebel while first-borns are conformist defenders of the status quo, was initially greeted with some skepticism among experts who knew of an earlier review of the large literature on birth order that had found little evidence for an effect on personality. The thesis struck a cord with the public, however, and Sulloway seemed to have gathered so much data from so many different sources (including scientific revolutions, political revolutions, religious revolutions etc.) that with a few exceptions (such as the great Judith Harris) the book won over skeptics and carried the day. Michael Shermer, Mr. Skepticism himself, said, for example, that Born to Rebel was "the most rigorously scientific work of history every written."

Two devastating studies of BTR, however, have just now been published in the September 2000 issue of Politics and the Life Sciences (alas this issue is not online, perhaps for reasons discussed below). After exhaustive efforts, the studies failed to replicate key results in BTR - that is the authors tried to replicate what Sulloway said he did, on the data that he said he used and they could not reproduce anything close to his results. Now, you may be asking, how it is that the September 2000 issue of PLS has only now been published? And therein lies a story.

When Politics and the Life Sciences decided to publish the initial critique of BTR by Frederic Townsend, after peer review by four referees, it invited Sulloway to respond along with a number of others in a roundtable format that they had used in previous debates. Sulloway was guaranteed ample room to respond to Townsend and was invited to submit his own names for roundtable participants. He initially agreed but shortly thereafter he wrote to Gary Johnson, the editor of the journal, threatening that if the critique were published he would sue both the journal and the editor personally for what he considered to be defamation.

I suggest reading the rest of Tabarrok's post. I'll just add that I find it amazing that individuals can be so brazenly dishonest, publishers can be so cowardly, and the American legal system so open to abuse that this sort of intimidatory behavior can be used to effectively stifle criticism.

NB - On an entirely different note, this post by Tyler Cowen on this study of health outcomes in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe points to some interesting conclusions, perhaps the most notable of which is that "capitalism" per se is not to blame for Russia's decline in life expectancy - contrary to the arguments of many on the far left. This ought to have been obvious a long time ago, had anyone previously bothered to compare Russian health outcomes with those in states like Poland and the Czech Republic.

History Repeats Itself

It's looking like Taiwan is about to have a retread of the "Hanging Chads" fiasco of America's 2000 presidential elections.

HONG KONG, March 21 (UPI) -- Taiwan was thrown into political chaos following the presidential election Saturday, after President Chen Shui-bian won re-election by a narrow margin and opposition candidate Lien Chan declared the poll invalid and called for a recount.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, crowds still milled in the streets of Taipei and riot police remained on alert should violence erupt among rival political camps.

Kuomintang leader Lien Chan refused to concede defeat after the final results showed Chen the winner by a margin of less than 30,000 votes. Lien said there had been too many irregularities surrounding the election, in which more than 80 percent of the island's 16 million eligible voters participated. He asked the Election Commission to seal the ballot boxes and re-examine the votes.

The final count was 6,471,970 votes for Chen, with 6,442,452 for Lien. In addition, more than 300,000 votes were declared invalid, a number more than ten times larger than the margin of difference between the two candidates. Within hours after the vote, the Kuomintang filed a complaint with the Supreme Court contesting the validity of the election.

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

The challenge to the election result and the failure of the referendum will be welcome news to China's leaders.

This is the second failed presidential attempt for Kuomintang leader Lien Chan and his running mate, James Soong, who ran on separate tickets in the last election in 2000. They expected an easy win after pooling their parties to run against Chen.

Speaking to his supporters after the election, a clearly agitated Lien said that events surrounding the election were highly questionable. He pointed out that no details on the shooting had emerged, and that the number of votes declared invalid should be investigated. He said his party would pursue legal means to have the vote declared null and void.

Suspicions abound that the attempted assassination of Chen on Friday was staged, with members of different camps accusing each other. Kuomintang supporters dredged up reports that the hospital where Chen was taken had been preparing Friday morning for a VIP visitor, and asked why pictures said to be of Chen's wounded stomach did not show his face.

At a late-night press conference on Friday, police said they had found two bullets, which they believed to have been fired by a trained marksman using what appeared to be a homemade weapon. By late Saturday they still had no suspect in the case.

In Chinese-language chat rooms, conspiracy theories were relayed and embellished from Taiwan to mainland China and Hong Kong. "The whole thing is just too bizarre to be real," said a Hong Kong resident surnamed Yu.

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

There were no reports of violence, despite the strong police presence. An outbreak of violence would be particularly worrying in Taiwan, as it could invite intervention from Chinese forces. China has said it would send troops to Taiwan under any of three conditions: should the island declare independence from China, should foreign forces interfere in its affairs, or should riots occur in the territory.

Here I have to agree with this Yu person, whoever he or she may be. These clowns need to get their act together quickly: the last thing Taiwan or the rest of the world needs is an excuse for China to attempt to invade to "restore order." Any such action would be almost certain to provoke a Sino-American war.

Nigerien Government Report Clashes With Islamic Militants

This news item ought to shake a few people out of the complacent assumption that Islamic militancy in West Africa can safely be ignored as a merely regional issue. Borders in Africa are extremely porous, and many of the peoples of the regions bordering the Sahara have been linked by Islam for centuries, well before there was any substantial European footprint on the continent.

Government troops and members of an armed Islamic group have clashed in recent weeks in the north of Niger, Defence Minister Hassane Bonto told parliament on Tuesday.

Bonto said there were three clashes between the armed forces and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC - le groupe salafiste pour la prédication et le combat) between 22 February and 5 March.

The first two occurred in Midal, over 600 km north of the capital, Niamey, and in the Air Mountains in the extreme north.

The latest clash came after the armed forces received a tip-off that GSPC members were about 100 km from a military outpost in the northeast. "After troop reinforcements were sent," Bonto said, "our forces pursued the GSPC elements to the Chadian border, around Tchigai region" in the extreme northeast.

He said 43 GSPC militants were killed and five were taken prisoner, including one Niger national. Three Chadian soldiers died and 18 were wounded, while the Niger armed forces did not register any casualties, according to the minister.

Caught between the Chadian and Niger armies, the militants fled, leaving five vehicles - four of them equipped with 14.5-mm anti-aircraft guns - six mortars, six Thuraya satellite phones, two night-vision binoculars, mortars, AK-47s and a sizeable quantity of other arms and ammunition.

Bonto said the GSPC arrived recently in northern Niger after being dismantled in southern Algeria and Mali as part of efforts to fight terrorism. The group, he said, was working hand-in-hand with armed bandits from Niger and was using hideouts and caches left over from a rebellion in the 1990s by Tuareg nomads.

And here's another story on the clashes, illustrating the diverse origins of the militants being fought in the region.

N'DJAMENA, March 11 (Reuters) - Chad's army has killed 43 Islamic "terrorists" during two days of heavy fighting near the border with Niger, the government said on Thursday.

The government said in a statement that those killed belonged to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, a hardline Algerian Islamic militant group which recently pledged its allegiance to al Qaeda.

"The government forces have neutralised the threat from the terrorists," the statement said.

U.S. military experts recently began training soldiers in Mali and Algeria to fight the potential threat from Islamic militants believed to be roaming freely along ancient trade routes across the Sahara desert.

Washington has also vowed to assist Mauritania, Niger and Chad to combat security threats.

Chad said among the dead Islamic militants were nine Algerians and nationals from Niger, Nigeria and Mali -- all countries where the United States fears al Qaeda is recruiting militants and setting up cells. (emphasis added)

As can be seen from the passage in bold, Nigerians are already involved in fighting for Islamist groups outside of their nation's borders. This shouldn't really be all that surprising: as long ago as 1995, Nigerian volunteers were already to be found fighting in Kashmir, of all places. Anyone who thinks the Bush administration is overplaying the Islamist threat in West Africa is seriously in head-in-sand mode.

UPDATE: Here's a May 2001* PDF article by Peter Bergen that also mentions Nigerian membership in al Qaeda; in particular, one K.K. Mohamed is mentioned by name. No doubt there are more than a few others. It is simply wishful thinking to imagine that al Qaeda, and those who wish to emulate it, respect any of the artificial boundaries of race and nation that we imagine all people are somehow bound to acknowledge. Theirs is an explicitly global Ummah, and we ought to take them at their word when they say so.

*Which is to say, written before any hysteria associated with September 11 could have gotten off the ground.

Conspiranoia in Taiwan

It seems that Europe and America aren't the only parts of the world plagued by the conspiracy mindset at the moment. The reaction of supporters of Taiwan's Nationalist Party to the shooting of President Chen Shui-bian betrays a level of cynicism and suspicion that is hard to credit.

The president and vice president of Taiwan were shot in this southern Taiwan city Friday afternoon on the eve of bitterly contested national elections, but neither suffered life-threatening injuries and the central election commission said that the vote would proceed as scheduled today.

President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu were standing next to each other in an open-roofed red Jeep being driving slowly through streets crowded with supporters in Tainan, the president's hometown, when the president was struck in the stomach by a bullet, the police and government spokesmen said.

Supporters lining the route of the motorcade were discharging large numbers of firecrackers, and the president initially thought he had been hit by one of them, only to find his stomach becoming wet with blood, Chiou I-Jen, the secretary general of the presidential office, said at a news briefing in Taipei. The president and vice president were taken to the Chi Mei Medical Center in Tainan, where they were treated and released. They returned Friday night.

The precise circumstances of the shooting, which many observers surmised could affect voting in the tight race, remained unclear through Friday night. There was even speculation that the shootings might have been staged in an effort to increase support for Mr. Chen.

A bullet was found lodged between the skin of the president's stomach and his undershirt, having apparently torn a wound four inches long, an inch wide and an inch deep, Dr. Steve Chan, the medical center's president, said in a televised briefing.

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

Mr. Lien and other top Nationalist Party officials repeatedly called for calm and emphasized that they were mainly concerned with the health of the president. But they also called for a full explanation of the shooting.

Some supporters of the Nationalist Party, speaking on television call-in shows, in Internet chat rooms and in street interviews, raised the possibility that the incident was arranged in advance to generate a last-minute sympathy vote for Mr. Chen. Several people said the event reminded them of a "ku rou ji," an ancient Chinese term for a self-inflicted wound intended to trick a foe. (emphases added)

One would have to be pretty gutsy to stage a "trick" of this nature, where the difference between survival and certain death would only be a matter of a few inches. We can chuck that theory in the bin right away, alongside the "Bush knew in advance" and "Clinton killed Vince Foster" nonsense with which we've had to deal in this part of the world. I have to give the Nationalist Party supporters espousing this theory their rightful due, however: it takes real chutzpah to attempt the rhetorical jujitsu of using Chen Shiu-bian's close brush with death against him.

Reuters - Irate Muslims Burn Four Churches in North Nigeria

Another timely reminder of why I'm not as sanguine as some about the influence of Islamic extremists in West Africa. What possible legitimate grievances could there be to address here? What "root causes" should one be looking for? What diplomatic initiative should one expect to have any impact on such people?

LAGOS, March 18 (Reuters) - Islamic militants burnt down four churches and a hotel in the northern Nigerian town of Dutse after a magistrate denied bail to a Muslim youth charged with setting another church on fire, police said on Thursday.

Police in the predominantly Muslim state of Jigawa said irate youths went on the rampage late on Wednesday in the provincial capital, southeast of Kano -- Nigeria's second largest city where hundreds have died in religious clashes in the past three years.

"The miscreants were angered by the court ruling, they went around the town and burnt down four churches and one hotel," a senior officer told Reuters by phone from Dutse.

The officer said the town was calm and that the police were investigating the violence, the second in the state in the last five months. He said no arrests have yet been made.

More than 5,000 people have been killed in religious violence in northern Nigeria in the past four years since the introduction of strict Islamic sharia penal code in 12 states.

It's understandable that some people should doubt that the appropriate response to Islamic extremism is force - one should always look for peaceful ways of settling disputes where feasible. Nevertheless, though such a sentiment may be understandable, it strikes me as gravely mistaken. These people want to kill or intimidate those who don't agree that their way is the only way, and with such people there's no reasoning or debating to be done. All too common incidents of Islamist thuggery like this one are the reason why I'll always scoff at anyone mouthing empty platitudes of the sort Spain's prime-minister elect has been engaging in; only someone who hasn't lived in proximity to such religious extremism can subscribe to that sort of fluffy rhetoric.

Reuters - US-Trained Malian Troops Ready for Desert Battle

America's seriously stepping up its effort to take the battle to the Islamists, even in West Africa. Good.

Thursday marks the final day of training with U.S. Special Forces for Mali's troops in the Sahara desert, patrolling a region roughly the size of Texas where Washington says Islamic extremists are roaming freely along ancient trading routes.

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

U.S. military experts have been in Timbuktu since January, giving basic weapons training and teaching Malian troops how to move effectively in platoons and ambush the enemy.

The aim is to help the former French colony's army to police massive swathes of sand and stop what the United States calls terror networks criss-crossing the desert and setting up cells.

Washington is most worried about the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a hardline Algerian Islamic militant movement that has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda.

The armies of Mali, one of Algeria's southern neighbours, and Chad say they have clashed with GSPC members in recent months.

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

Colonel Younoussa Barazi Maiga, who heads the Malian forces that cover the huge region north of Timbuktu, said his troops had chased up to 100 GSPC members out of Mali in January.

"They had some bases towards the west and we attacked them. There were about 20 vehicles with around four or five people in each," he said, watching his troops complete an ambush exercise.

"They have never done any harm to our people but we don't want them here," he said, adding they had fled to Niger and Chad.

SHADOWS IN THE SAND

Chad's government said earlier this month its army had killed 43 Islamic militants in two days of heavy fighting. It said those killed were GSPC members and included nine Algerians and nationals from Niger, Nigeria and Mali.

The armies of Chad and neighbouring Niger will receive U.S. training, like their counterparts in Mali and Mauritania.

U.S. satellites are also helping pinpoint suspected militants.

I knew Nigerian involvement had to show up sooner or later. With scum like Kano state governor Ibrahim Shekarau and Sheikh Ibrahim el Zak Zaky (a Shiite protege of the Iranian government) doing their best to foment religious strife in the country. Add Algerian, Chadian and Nigerian oil into the mix and you have all the ingredients for big time trouble.

Tennessee County Retreat from Gay Ban

What a bunch of idiots! How could these people ever have seriously entertained the notion of "banning" homosexuals from their county?

The county that was the site of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" over the teaching of evolution Thursday reversed its call to ban homosexuals.

Rhea County commissioners took about three minutes to retreat from a request to amend state law so the county can charge homosexuals with crimes against nature. The Tuesday measure passed 8-0.

County attorney Gary Fritts said the initial vote triggered a "wildfire" of reaction. "I've never seen nothing like this," he said Thursday.

But Fritts said it was all a misunderstanding.

"They wanted to send a message to our (state) representative and senator that Rhea County supports the ban on same-sex marriage," he said. "Same-sex marriage is what it was all about. It was to stop people from coming here and getting married and living in Rhea County."

Not that the issue of banning homosexuals didn't arise.

"I'm not saying it wasn't discussed," Fritts said. "Sometimes you had five or six people talking."

Fritts said he advised the commissioners they cannot ban homosexuals or make them subject to criminal charges. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 struck down Texas' sodomy laws as a violation of adults' privacy.

Fritts said he doesn't believe the issue will come up again.

"I think they got all the publicity they need about it," he said.

The bit about the Scopes "Monkey Trial" doesn't surprise me in the least. It looks like Rhea County has long made a specialty of stupidity.

The Economist Echoes My Thinking on the Spanish Elections

I find that this Economist article lays out eloquently my very own thoughts about the attacks in Spain and their electoral aftermath. That magazine continues to justify its high reputation for insightful commentary.

IF YOU carry out a well planned atrocity, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than a thousand, and three days later the government that supported an invasion to which you object is unexpectedly defeated in a general election, you are entitled to consider the venture to have been a success. So although Spain's high voting turnout on March 14th, and many Spaniards' apparent ire at the way José María Aznar's government had prematurely blamed Basque terrorists for the outrage, can be taken as healthily democratic signs (see article), there is no escaping the fact that the biggest triumph has been that of the terrorists. Assuming, as is likely, that they are indeed linked to or are members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, they scored another success when the new Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said he would withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq. This may only be a symbolic move, for that is a mere 1% of the American-led coalition's forces there, but symbols and emotions are what terrorism is all about.

To say all that is not to say that it is wrong to vote out governments that supported the invasion of Iraq a year ago. In some cases, such as Spain, they did so against a huge majority of public opinion. In all cases, their claims that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of dangerous weapons now look to be a blunder, a gamble or a deception. This year both George Bush himself and John Howard, Australia's prime minister, face re-election contests and next year Britain's Tony Blair is also expected to do so. There is now a real possibility that all three could follow Mr Aznar's party into defeat—though Mr Blair may be saved by the fact that his Tory opposition supported the war strongly, too. Such defeats would be natural, in democratic terms. But the tragedy of Madrid is that the terrorists in effect cast the swing vote, given that Mr Aznar's party had looked set to win a comfortable victory, despite opposition to the war, and that such success may now stimulate more terrorism during the other three electoral campaigns. The big question, if such defeats occur, is whether successor governments would be more effective in pursuing al-Qaeda and stabilising the regions within which its terrorists thrive—or less.

Some critics of the war in Iraq say that there is no such danger. There was no genuine link between toppling Saddam and fighting al-Qaeda, so to punish governments for what opponents claim was an illegal invasion is a quite separate matter. Mr Zapatero even appears to think that pulling troops out of Iraq will make things better, on the view that the occupation is itself the cause of terrorism. Yet that policy is irresponsible, because it increases the risk of civil war in Iraq. Even those who opposed the war should now want to help make Iraq secure enough for Iraqis themselves to take back their sovereignty. If other new governments copy Mr Zapatero and prove their anti-war point by withdrawing from Iraq, they will make everyone less safe as a result. And it is a delusion to claim, as Mr Zapatero does, that all would be well if the UN were to take over from the Americans. Few Iraqis think so. It is as well to recall the Dutch UN peacekeepers who looked on helplessly during the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995.

Moreover, withdrawal would put the rest of the Middle East at greater risk, too. For even if there was no direct link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the connection was always indirect and much more long-term: that while he remained in power to threaten his neighbours and required bombing and sanctions to contain him, it would be impossible to move towards a wider peace and modernisation of that whole troubled region. To advocates of the war, including The Economist, sticking with the status quo looked a more dangerous option than toppling Saddam.

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

The right grounds on which to criticise and even condemn the perpetrators of regime change in Iraq now lie in that slow or non-existent regional progress. They, especially the Bush administration, do deserve criticism for their mishandling of the post-war situation in Iraq, but the correct response is to strengthen the effort to rebuild and secure Iraq, not weaken it. They deserve much more criticism, though, for having so far failed to turn the strategic change represented by the fall of Saddam into a wider and more profound set of changes: notably, a restoration of full relations with Iran and the establishment of some sort of Arab-American alliance to persuade the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. Such things could never have happened overnight and many a previous attempt, whether American or European, has foundered amid the blood of the Middle East. Yet as the terror in Madrid showed, time is on no one's side. In contrast to its urgency over invading Iraq, the Bush administration has shown little urgency in trying to achieve these wider goals.

Yes, Bush and Blair erred in their selling of the war in Iraq, but that still doesn't mean that removing Saddam Hussein from power was a bad thing. What is more, Zapatero's accusations notwithstanding, the Iraqi people themselves don't seem to agree with his assessment of Iraq being a "fiasco," nor do they seem at all eager to see the sort of hasty pullout that Spain's prime minister elect is advocating. Whatever one feels about the truthfulness of Bush and Blair's campaign to remove Saddam from office, I think it inconceivable that any truly moral human being could argue that leaving him be would have been the proper course of action, or that pulling out of Iraq and leaving it's people to suffer intimidatory violence is a just cause of action. That is precisely what Jose Louis Rodriguez Zapatero is doing, and why I consider him and those swing voters* who won him office appeasers and capitulationists whose confused ideas can only give heart to advocates of terrorism everywhere. Leaders like Bush, Blair and Aznar ought to be held accountable for what they say, but not if that means throwing them out of office and replacing them with unserious individuals like Zapatero, whose rash promise to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq has been (commendably) condemned even by his preferred occupant of the White House, John Kerry.

*It is a fact that the great majority of the Spanish election did not allow the incidents of March 11 to affect their vote, and that the POSE's electoral victory owes largely to what one might the "young and dumb" contingent - that mass of apathetic under-30s individuals who hold all the usual trite far-left views but are usually too lazy to bother to vote. Their baleful influence in bringing to power such a deluded individual is yet another argument against the notion that more political participation is always better, regardless of the circumstances.

There's a Method to His Madness

How the Onion keeps finding inspiration week-in week-out is beyond me.

STANFORD, CA—Known throughout the community for his verbal outbursts and his shopping cart full of trash, area street denizen "Cosmic Stan" must have studied advanced physics at some point, sources reported Monday.

"Where's my cheese? Don't take my rowboat! Got no room!" the lunatic screamed from his regular spot near the Campus Drive bus stop. "I need space! Gimme space! Infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space!"

Though his rants seem nonsensical to most passersby, some astute listeners say they contain evidence of higher learning.

"I'd always see him around that bus stop, dressed in his ragged wool clothes, duct-taped shoes, and that plastic sheeting covered over with symbols drawn in magic-marker," Stanford Ph.D. candidate James Willard said. "Then, a few days ago, he was out there waving his tin-foil wand at random strangers, and I heard him yell, 'I demand that you buy me an ice-cream cone! My third-favorite flavor is strange! My second-favorite is top! My favorite flavor is anti-charmed!' Suddenly, I realized the guy was talking about quarks."

Willard said he spent the next several minutes listening to Cosmic Stan's rant.

"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"

Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.

"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'"

Lundergaard said he first became intrigued by Cosmic Stan in December 1999, when the homeless man threw a chicken bone at him and said, "Components of the Weyl conformal curvature tensor." (emphasis added)

Yes, I think that highlighted bit is key here. If a lunatic were to dress in a nice suit and tie but kept spouting the same nonsense, how would the average Joe be able to tell him apart from a perfectly sane if somewhat self-absorbed scientist going on about his favorite subject? The experience of listening in on a conversation in some lunatic's private language is one I'm sure many a bewildered freshman struggling with calculus can relate to.

As an aside, I feel compelled to mention that a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I once enjoyed(?) the acquaintance of the infamous Archimedes Plutonium, who liked, as did I, to hang around the Dartmouth mathematics department's library. The most noticeable difference between the two of us at the time was that he was a dishwasher at the Hanover Inn, while I was merely an undergraduate. Needless to say, I found his ramblings, such as they were (he being of the taciturn variety of lunatic) rather less entertaining and erudite than those of the fictional "Cosmic Stan" detailed above. Here was one case in which the reality did actually fall short of the imaginary alternative.

"This Means Peace in Our Time!"

Hmm. Despite Chirac's noisy opposition to the war in Iraq, it looks like France still hasn't managed to avoid the attentions of Islamic militants. Wasn't it supposed to be only the lickspittles and running-dogs of the American Imperialist Infidels who were exposing themselves to danger?

PARIS (Reuters) - France has received threats of a possible attack against French interests from an Islamist group apparently named after a Chechen guerrilla killed in a Moscow hostage-taking in 2002, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday.

The letter, sent to several newspapers, threatened "to plunge France into terror and remorse and spill blood outside its frontiers," Jacques Esperandieu, deputy editor of the daily Le Parisien which received a copy, quoted it as saying.

The ministry confirmed earlier Justice Ministry reports that the threat, which it said was sent "on behalf of the servants of Allah, the powerful and wise," mentioned possible attacks in France and against French interests abroad.

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

The group called itself the Movsar Barayev Commando, an apparent reference to the militant who organized the October 2002 Chechen raid at a Moscow theater that ended with 129 dead. He died in the special forces raid on the theater.

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

France's firm stand against the Iraq war was originally thought to have won it support in the Muslim world, but this evaporated when Paris banned Muslims from wearing headscarves in schools. Summarizing the letter, Esperandieu said: "They're basically saying 'you thought you were safe because of your stand on Iraq, but France is no longer safe at all since February 10."

The National Assembly passed the veil ban on Feb. 10.

SEVERAL REASONS TO TARGET FRANCE

Security experts say France is also a target because of its cooperation with authorities fighting Islamic militants in its former North African colonies Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.

Several members of hard-line Algerian Islamic groups are currently being held in French jails.

Wednesday, France will put on trial David Courtailler, a Frenchman converted to Islam, for links to Muslim extremists. He is said to have met a prime suspect in the Madrid bombings, Jamal Zougam, during a visit to a mosque in the Spanish capital.

The ban on Muslim headscarves in state schools, a step Paris took to stem what it saw as growing Islamist influence among young Muslims, provoked a verbal attack from Ayman al-Zawahri, No. 2 in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"This is a new sign of the Crusader hatred which Westerners harbor against Muslims while they boast of freedom, democracy and human rights," he said in a tape broadcast by the Arabic television channel Al Arabiya on February 24.

I've always thought the proposed ban on the veil to be ham-fisted and intolerant, but I must stay that as reasons for Islamist ire go, this is a pretty weak one. Oh well, one never can tell with these guys. I guess the French will just have to fold immediately on that point, and hurry up and drop all co-operation with Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco while they're at it. Those steadfast* Islamic gentlemen languishing in French prisons should also be released post-haste, and be given ample restitution for their unjust imprisonment - all this terrorist stuff is just a quarrel between the overexcitable Americans and al-Qaeda after all, and the French had no business sticking their noses in it.

*How dare you call them "hard line" or "extremists", simply for being differently emphatic in their beliefs! This unenlightened and oppressive milque-toastism parading as "moderation" simply isn't acceptable!

Life Can be Beautiful

I'll admit that where the whole relationship thing is concerned, I'm very much a cynical, cold fish, not at all the type to let my feelings get ahead of my reason. As such, it's always noteworthy when I come across a story like this one by P.Z. Myers, who's celebrating his 24th wedding anniversary today. A happy story like his makes me wonder whether I'm not overdoing the hard-boiled cynic thing - though I'm sure that I'll soon find a way to rationalize it away as an exception to the generally miserable human lot >-( ...

Anyway, instead of imbibing my misanthropic poison, why not drop by and give your warm regards? The joys of family life are a major part of what make life truly worth living, rather than something merely to be endured.

The Ultimate Price

It's fashionable in many circles nowadays to dismiss supporters of the war in Iraq as "warbloggers" or "chickenhawks", but here's a reminder that it's too easy to assume that all such bloggers are armchair warriors. Via Instapundit, I've just learnt about Bob Zangas, a blogger and Marine Corps reservist who went to Iraq with the hope in mind of doing something positive for the people of that country, and who, as it transpires, was killed last week in an ambush in southern Iraq.

It is a fact that not everyone who supported the war in Iraq would have been willing to put his or her life on the line as this man did, but glib generalizations about "neocons", "warbloggers" and "chickenhawks" so common amongst those who opposed the Iraq war are every bit as indecent as accusing all those with anti-war views of being "traitors" and "America-haters."

UPDATE: If you wish to leave your condolences, here is the place to do it.

Reasonable People Can Disagree

Of all the takes on the Spanish election that disagree with mine, Edward Hugh's has to be the most level-headed and perceptive I've come across. Here is someone who gets what is at stake, regardless of whether one thinks the war in Iraq was justified or not.

I understand that Zapatero would wish to negotiate a greater role for the UN, and I agree with him. But if we get to that magic date (30 June), and the consensus formula has not been found - and I dearly hope that it will be - I do not think it would be responsible politics to remove Spanish troops. I think that my understanding of responsible government under democracy is to accept responsibility for the errors of your predecessors, even if you don't agree with them. Iraq is in chaos, all parties to the intervention have some responsibility for that, and Spain cannot simply up and leave. This, as the Washington Post piece I post below indicates, would only make the job harder for the Poles and the Italians. This would also make the job of destabalising Iraq easier for Al Qaeda. It is a moot point whether Al Qaeda was a serious problem in Iraq before the invasion. It certainly is now, and no one should be thinking of leaving any time soon. Being serious about terrorism in the Spanish context means: solving the Basque 'problem', opening a serious and sustained dialogue with Morocco (which would include the future of Ceuta and Melilla and the Sahara - without giving in on this one - the loss of life in the Gibraltar Straits and how to avoid this, and the position of Moroccan immigrants within Spain), and retaining a commitment to Iraq until such time as the country is able to maintain stability for itself. This latter situation I think is years, not months, away.

I couldn't have put it better myself. Instead of wasting time and energy rehashing old arguments, we ought to be thinking with an eye on the future, and when we do so, it seems pretty clear that the threat of a unilateral pullout issued by Zapatero was ... ill-advised. Spain's departure will make no material difference to the American effort on the ground in Iraq, but what it has done is deliver a massive propaganda coup to the terrorists who attacked Madrid. What sense does it make to expend far more energy lambasting Bush and Blair, as Zapatero actually did, than on making clear to terrorists of any hue - and not just the ETA variety - that he is prepared to hunt them down to the ends of the Earth?

Had Zapatero made a point of emphasizing an even deeper commitment to challenging terrorism worldwide than Aznar had done, the attackers would have been deprived of whatever propaganda gains they might have hoped to make, and my criticism of the Spanish electorate would have lost most of its force, but that isn't what has happened. One can be sure that were Labour to be similarly bombed out of office in the UK, the Conservative Party would be even more implacable in its response than Blair could ever be, which is one good reason to think that the next outrage won't occur in Britain but somewhere else in continental Europe.

The Crisis in Korea

The Economist has an article up about the impeachment of Roh Moo-hyun. This is a situation that really needs close watching, especially with the recent events in Spain in mind. It is not at all helpful for Korea to be effectively leaderless at such a crucial moment, and one can expect Kim Jong Il to seize milk the ongoing political crisis in Seoul to maximum effect.

ROH MOO-HYUN has never commanded the support of South Korea’s political establishment. Even after his surprising nomination by the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) for the presidency in 2002, conservative elements in the party itself tried to undermine the former human-rights lawyer. The split in the MDP last September—between a small band of Roh supporters and the majority—left the president without a party. Worse, the opposition, helped by the country’s conservative newspapers, has been trying to bring down the president for months. Even so, there was widespread surprise that the opposition managed to secure the required two-thirds majority for an impeachment bill on Friday March 12th. The vote, which Mr Roh’s supporters had tried to block by occupying the speaker’s podium for two days, produced scenes of chaos in the chamber, with the speaker having to be escorted out under a hail of shoes, nameplates and other improvised missiles. The bill has bitterly divided the country. At worst, it could lead to years of political turmoil. It has already had an effect on efforts to improve relations with communist North Korea: on Monday, the North pulled out of inter-Korean trade talks, saying the South was too “unstable” for its officials to visit.

In the short term, it is not clear if Mr Roh’s impeachment will stand. The bill must go to the constitutional court, whose judges must approve it by a two-thirds majority. The court will probably take at least a month, and possibly up to six months, to deliver its verdict—so this may not come until well after the election, due on April 15th. In the meantime, the country will be run by the prime minister, Goh Kun, who is normally a ceremonial figure. The nightmare scenario, in terms of policy paralysis, is that Mr Roh is reinstated to serve the remaining four years of his term but his new party, Uri, fails to make big gains in the election. It currently has 47 seats in the 273-seat parliament.

The transgression that led to the impeachment vote was surprisingly minor. Mr Roh is not accused of Nixonesque lying or Clintonesque sexual peccadilloes. He is guilty simply of pledging to do his utmost to secure votes for Uri in the general election. In South Korea, where the president, even when he has a party, is a public official deemed to be above grubby party politics, this is against the rules. Nevertheless, Mr Roh refused to apologise. He finally relented on Friday morning, just before the vote, but his opponents said it was too late.

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

Campaigning on a platform of rooting out endemic political corruption and infighting, Mr Roh was elected on a wave of optimism. However, he has struggled to build on the goodwill. Some problems, like North Korea’s nuclear shenanigans, were outside his control. South Korea’s economic troubles, too, were evident before Mr Roh’s inauguration in February 2003. The country’s growth was already slowing before the SARS virus dampened business activity throughout Asia. The government’s economic pump-priming in response to the outbreak has helped to stimulate a recovery, but this has not been entirely painless. The previous government’s policy was to underpin economic growth by encouraging consumer spending. But that has left many South Koreans struggling with huge credit-card bills. On Tuesday, the Bank of Korea, the central bank, said in a statement: “If the uncertainty over the impeachment lingers, weak consumption and slow investment could delay economic recovery and hurt employment.”

It looks like we have the makings of a South Korean Lewinsky scenario here, and the denouement looks to be similar to the American version, with a backlash hitting the overreaching politicians of the right. That aside, I think the ongoing crisis in South Korea will be an excellent test-case of John Kerry's seriousness about handling allies and enemies. Will he have anything to say about developments there, or continue to devote his energies primarily to attacking Bush's foreign policy?

I don't see that there's much any American leader can or even ought to do about the political situation within South Korea, beyond quietly encouraging both sides to step away from brinkmanship, behind closed doors of course. That said, I'd still like to know how the critics would like us to handle relations with North Korea, given the stark differences on this point within South Korea itself.

Guardian - US Sends Special Forces into North Africa

So much for the canard that the war in Iraq has somehow "distracted" America from attending to Islamic terrorists elsewhere.

US special forces troops have arrived in several north African countries over recent months amid Pentagon warnings that the region runs the risk of becoming an al-Qaida recruiting ground and a possible back door into Europe.

Three days before the Madrid bombing, where the first arrests included three Moroccans detained on Saturday, the deputy commander of the Stuttgart-based US European command - which covers all of Africa except the Horn - warned that al-Qaida had an interest in north Africa.

"We have to get ahead of it," General Charles Wald told a group of African reporters in Washington.

Units of around 200 from the US army's 10th Special Forces Group are already installed, or are due to arrive, in Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Niger to train their armies in anti-terrorism tactics and to improve coordination with the US military.

Military cooperation with Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia - where many suspected violent Islamists detained in Europe over the past two years come from - is also being boosted.

Senior US generals, including the commander of the US European command, General James Jones, have been touring the region looking for temporary bases and airfields to use in possible future operations in Africa.

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

Unconfirmed reports have already emerged from anonymous Pentagon sources of on-the-ground operations involving the US soldiers.

One carried by Voice of America said US troops on the ground in Mali helped track and drive into the arms of the Algerian army a big haul of weapons due to be delivered to a radical Islamist group there.

The report also suggested they had requested a US air strike against a suspected terrorist target in the desert region of northern Mali and that, although this was turned down, the Pentagon did not rule out such air strikes.

A separate report said a US navy P-3 Orion aircraft guided Chad troops during a two-day battle on the border with Niger last week in which 43 suspected members of Algeria's Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat were killed.

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

The focus on Africa also comes amid a push by some in the US, especially conservative thinktanks, to do more to secure alternatives to oil from the volatile Middle East. West Africa supplies 15% of US oil and the figure is growing.

A need for the US European command to concentrate harder on north and west Africa may explain why the US Sixth Fleet is considering moving its main base from Gaeta, in Italy, to the southern Spanish port of Rota.

A militant group that has been linked to al-Qaida has been recruiting members from mosques in northern Mali, according to security sources quoted by Reuters. The US state department advised against travel to northern Mali in December, warning that the area had become "a safe haven" for the Salafist Group.

It seems like America is now starting to pay a lot more attention to a part of the world it had previously written off as unworthy of serious consideration. Those who argued against intervention in Liberia on grounds of realpolitik turn out to have been the shortsighted ones. It is utterly stupid to imagine that Washington can avoid poisoning its image in the eyes of West Africans while avoiding any commitment to helping them when self-interest isn't at stake. In any case, America's emphasis on West African oil should make for rather ... interesting politics in religiously-divided Nigeria.

The "Lump of Effort" Fallacy

One very popular argument for opposition to the war in Iraq and rejoicing at the outcome of the Spanish elections is that invading Iraq needlessly detracted from the effort against al-Qaeda. This seems at first blush to be an entirely reasonable argument, but when examined more closely, it becomes clear that a hidden assumption lies behind the plausibility this argument is accorded, namely that there is a fixed amount of effort a government and a people can put into fighting an enemy, and any energy devoted to Iraq must mean that less is available for other activities. This is quite simply a blatant falsehood, and one that I find particularly strange, coming, as it tends to, from the Left, where the more typical assumption is that there is absolutely no limit to what governments can successfully undertake.

The war in Iraq was by no means World War 2, and today's America is a much more populous and far wealthier place than Roosevelt's, yet the America of the 1940s was able to simultaneously bash Germany and Japan into submission whilst enjoying an unprecedented boom in domestic prosperity, so what good reason is there to expect that today's America can't possibly go all out in defeating al-Qaeda even while turfing Saddam's regime out on its ear? Are we to believe, against all evidence, that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are mightier foes than Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo ever were? What is more, if Saddam really was as insignificant and unworthy of immediate attention as so many detractors of the war like to claim, this makes such an assumption even less plausible than it might have been.

America was able to enjoy growing prosperity even while arming the world and fighting on two fronts for one very simple reason, namely an excess of unutilized industrial capacity due to the depression. Though the current economic situation is by no means as gloomy as the likes of Paul Krugman like to make out, it is also true today that American businesses have plenty of slack left, which explains their reluctance to hire in great numbers. What this means from a military perspective is that, on the assumption that one buys into the Keynesian view of the economy that is the orthodoxy on the Left, one ought to welcome a war on several fronts, in as much as arming for it would prime the pump for a return to robust economic growth. The bottom line is that there is simply no reasonable argument available to those who believe in the great possibilities of government action that will support the contention that Iraq must have detracted from the effort against Islamic terrorism, even if one accepts as the gospel truth that Saddam and bin Laden had absolutely nothing to do with each other.

A Little Soviet Humor

A bit of distraction from the recent unpleasant developments.

Lenin is dying, and talking things over with Stalin, his successor.

'The one worry I have,' says Lenin, 'is this: will the people follow you? What do you think, comrade Stalin?'

'They will,' says Stalin, 'they surely will.'

'I hope so,' says Lenin, 'but what if they don't follow you?'

'No problem,' says Stalin, 'then they'll follow you.'"

In Spain, the Terrorists have Won

It looks like the perpetrators of the Madrid attacks got just what they wanted. The Spanish population seems intent on rolling over and playing dead before terrorists, which is a great pity. A few commentators are rejoicing about this as if it were a great victory, but from a game-theoretical viewpoint, this is just about the worst possible message one can send to those willing to resort to violence for political ends - that terror works.

MADRID, March 14 — Spain's opposition Socialist Party claimed victory in today's general elections over the governing conservative Popular Party.

With 79 percent of the vote counted, the Socialists appeared to have 164 seats in the 350-member Parliament. The Popular Party, which had 183 seats going into the election, apparently wound up with 147.

"The Socialist Party has won the general election," said José Blanco, the party's campaign manager. "It is a clear victory."

Mariano Rajoy, who was running as the Popular Party's candidate for prime minister, conceded defeat, congratulating the Socialists.

Spanish voters streamed to the polls today to decide on the new government three days after a deadly terrorist attack on commuter rail lines that left 200 dead and divided the nation in grief and fury.

Before the bombings, Prime Minister José María Aznar's conservative Popular Party had a slim lead over the Socialist Party in its effort to stay in power for a third term. But the political clash intensified after the attacks, and the government's response prompted angry protests late Saturday night.

Security was heightened on the streets, and leading politicians, including the outgoing prime minister, cast ballots to applause and jeers. Protesters taunted him during a morning appearance with his wife at a local school with the chant: "Your war, our dead," a slogan that others sought to drown out with shouts of "Viva Aznar!"

Those who carried out the outrage in Madrid played their cards just right. The sad thing for the Spaniards is that this show of weakness on their part will only encourage more of the very same violence, now that Spain has been shown to be the soft underbelly of Europe. Cowering in one's territory and forsaking one's allies for fear of offending islamic fundamentalists is no way of going about things. Faced with a choice between shame and war, the Spanish seem to have chosen shame, but they'll get war anyway.

BBC - Russia's Love Affair with Strong Leaders

Is someone at the BBC reading my blog? This article mirrors my thoughts about Russia to an uncanny degree.

When Russian voters go to the polls on Sunday, many will be firmly convinced that President Vladimir Putin is the strong leader they are looking for.

That is, the kind of authority figure that Russians have been used to and have admired over the centuries.
Even a short glance at Russian history shows that it's the "firm fist" that has always won respect.
Ask most people to name the best known tsars, and they will say: Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.
Ivan was Terrible because of the brutal methods he used to strengthen his rule.
Peter was Great because he made the then civilised world sit up and take note of Russia - but also at great human cost, not least to his own people.
Conversely, Nicholas II may also be high up on the list of best known tsars - but he was known for his weakness, a major factor as to why he was overthrown by the March Revolution of 1917.
Feeding off Nicholas' weakness, the Bolsheviks, who seized power in November 1917, understood that Russia could be governed only by strength.
Lenin was brutal in his conclusions as to how "enemies of the people" should be treated.

Black joke

Much of the brutality carried out on the orders of Stalin was simply a logical continuation of Lenin's thought.
A black joke of the later Soviet period supposedly quotes a history book of the 21st century: "Who was Adolf Hitler?"
Answer: "A petty dictator who lived in the time of Joseph Stalin."
It is estimated that as many as 20 million Soviet citizens perished in the network of labour camps - the Gulag - which Stalin perfected.
After an initial period where he gave Russians back some pride, Boris Yeltsin became an embarrassment
And what is the simplistic, but widely held view as to why the Soviet Union collapsed?
Because Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and only Soviet president, was too weak, toyed with Western ideas of democracy which do not suit Russia, and lost the country.

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

Growing power

To those schooled in Western democratic traditions, figures giving Mr Putin 80% approval are staggering. And when they look at Mr Putin's democratic credentials, they find it even more puzzling.
In his first term as president, Mr Putin has overseen the closure or takeover by the state of all six independent national television stations that existed when he was elected in 2000.
The lower house of parliament, the State Duma, is now controlled by the party that hangs on every word Mr Putin says, United Russia.

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

Hand-wringing

But partly through luck, partly through good judgement, under Mr Putin's presidency the Russian economy's improved and living standards for millions have risen.
And if the liberals wring their hands and complain that democracy is now weaker in Russia than at any time since the collapse of the USSR?
There are plenty of Russians who will shrug their shoulders and say that Russia's too big to be ruled any other way than by the strong hand in Moscow.

People like to crack jokes about a supposed German tendency to blindly defer to authority ("kadavergehorsam"), but it seems to me that this is actually much more true of Russians than it ever has been of the Germans. There's something deeply contemptible about the eagerness of so many millions to be under the heel of a strongman. This sort of "anything for a quiet life" mentality is more in keeping for sheep or cattle than for self-respecting human beings.

Some Illegals are more Illegal than Others

This Free Republic post illustrates the racist thinking behind a lot of the opposition to illegal immigrants in the United States. Freepers never tire of bashing illegal immigrants and calling for immigration restrictions, but what do they have to say when the spotlight is turned on just one such group that happens to be white?

Could it be because Eastern Europeans are overwhelmingly white and willing to learn English, they are a safe group of immigrants to bash, albeit a relative tinkle in the ocean in terms of sheer numbers? I'm just waiting until a few are allowed to sue exploitive and dishonest employers and placement agencies for less than the legally mandated wages and bennies. Sure, they would expose themselves to deportation-- but deportation with a bankroll might not be so bad.
4 posted on 03/13/2004 2:34:11 AM PST by Vigilanteman(crime would drop like a sprung trap-door if we brought back good old-fashioned hangings)

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

To: Vigilanteman

Overseas workers often in U.S. illegally

What a rediculous[sic] headline. 'Overseas' workers? They are rather obviously not 'overseas' (exactly which sea does Paige St. John think they are over?) They are immigrants. More specifically, they are illegal immigrants. I'm glad to see an article on the topic, even though it twists and tortures both itself and the English language trying to evade that reality.

Even then, starting with an article on illegal immigration, do we really need to focus on Eastern Europeans? What proportion of the illegal immigrant population is this article focusing on? And why? Even doing an article on Eastern European illegal immigration, why focus on dishwashers? Why not focus on the rapidly expanding Russian mafia? While illegal, and should be stopped, Eastern Europeans (nor Asians for that matter) are not the cultural problem that non-assimilating groups are.
7 posted on 03/13/2004 2:50:26 AM PST by blanknoone (If our enemies want Kerry to be President, should Americans?)

Freepers are, by and large, the dregs of the right, but I think it useful to keep an eye on them, as their views are a lot more representative of a certain sort of Ordinary Joe than those of the highly selected opinionators who figure so prominently in the media and the world of blogging. The truth is that a lot of - and perhaps even most - antagonism towards illegal immigrants in America is based purely on a visceral, racially-based distaste for the "hordes" of swarthy "wetbacks" from down below the Rio Grande. In truth, Mexico is actually much better off economically than a lot of the Eastern European countries from which illegal immigrants hail, and I doubt most freepers and those who think like them would be half as exercised about illegal immigration if the immigrants had the exact same characteristics as Mexican immigrants do, but just happened to be white.

Yet Another Reason to Doubt Al-Qaeda Involvement

One thing that has stuck out like a sore thumb for me in the ongoing investigation into the Madrid attacks is that the perpetrators all seemed to have taken care to ensure their own survival. That certainly isn't in keeping with Al-Qaeda's style, as it suggests a concern with living to enjoy the pleasures of this world that is entirely out of character for the average Islamic terrorist. If I remember my Islamic terrorist philosophy correctly, the key to attaining the rewards of "martyrdom" lies in dying while "fighting for the work of Allah" - as such, a committed Al-Qaeda operative would have no great desire to get off the train. What is more, the very act of getting on a train, leaving a backpack and then getting off again is likely to jeopardise a mission by raising suspicions, so it would also have made sense from a purely operational perspective for the perpetrators to sacrifice their lives.

I'm leaning increasingly towards the position that this act was carried out by Europeans. It may still be that Al-Qaeda had a hand in its planning, but the care taken to preserve the lives of the plotters argues very strongly against the notion that this was an entirely Arab-run affair.

More on the Spanish Terrorist Attacks

Just as I suspected, the evidence emerging from the bombings appears to implicate ETA as well as Al-Qaeda.

The flood of conflicting evidence and clues that emerged from the carnage of the Madrid bombings yesterday pointed in two very different directions, leaving counterterrorism officials in a country painfully familiar with terrorist violence struggling to identify a culprit.

Just hours after the bombings, the Spanish authorities blamed the Basque separatist group known as ETA. Hours later, the same officials announced the discovery of new evidence they said left open the possibility that Islamic militants had been involved.

"Could it have been Islamic fundamentalists?" one senior Spanish antiterrorism official asked last night. "It could have been. Spain is clearly a target of Al Qaeda; Osama bin Laden has said so himself."

The scale of the violence, the indiscriminate nature of the killing and the near-simultaneity of the 10 bombings yesterday were all reminiscent of Al Qaeda. In addition, the Spanish interior minister said the police had found detonators and an audio tape of Koranic verses inside a stolen van that was parked near the station where three of the four bombed trains originated.

In an indication of concern that the violence might not be limited to Spain, France raised its national terrorism alert from the lowest level. A senior French security official said in the days before the Madrid bombings that they had indications of possible terrorist attacks on railways in France and other European nations.

Yet in the chaotic aftermath of the bombings, antiterrorism officials cautioned that other evidence seemed to implicate ETA.

One Spanish official who spoke on the condition he not be identified said the dynamite-like explosive used in the attacks had often been used by ETA, which stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom.

Most recently, the official said, the police found a similar explosive, titadine, in a vehicle they intercepted last month as it was driven to Madrid by ETA militants. The police also found explosive-laden backpacks like those used in yesterday's attacks when they foiled a bombing at a Madrid train station on Christmas Eve, an event they linked to ETA.

Yesterday's bombings also came after months of intelligence reporting that ETA was planning a major attack, several Spanish officials said. The timing of the violence — with national elections scheduled for Sunday — seemed to suggest ETA's hand as well, they said. (emphasis added)

It's still too soon to say for sure one way or another, but I think it highly likely that if Al-Qaeda really was implicated in this attack, it was only through the assistance of ETA's operatives. The "evidence" for an Al-Qaeda attack was just too conveniently close at hand for me to buy into this as plain-old Islamic terrorism - I suspect that this is precisely what ETA would like everyone to believe. Does anyone remember when the conventional wisdom was that the anthrax attacks after September 11 had to have been the work of Islamic terrorists?

South Korea Parliament Impeaches President

Why am I not surprised by this? Mr. Anti-American Man-of-the-People has landed himself in seriously hot water.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Parliament voted to impeach President Roh Moo-hyun on illegal electioneering and incompetence charges Friday following hours of scuffles and dramatic protests.

Roh's presidential powers will be suspended while the matter is referred to the Constitutional Court for final approval to unseat the leader. The court has 180 days to rule.

The impeachment passed by a vote of 193 to 2, well above the 181 votes needed for the measure. Many pro-Roh lawmakers had been forcibly removed from the chamber by Assembly security and were unable to vote.

A shoving match was sparked earlier when pro-Roh Uri Party members tried to stop Assembly Speaker Park Kwan-yong from taking the podium, the only place he can call a vote.

Assembly security officers then moved in to begin removing lawmakers trying to block his progress. Park had warned Thursday that he might exercise his right to have security officials clear the lawmakers.

Live television footage showed security officers dragging out screaming Uri members one by one.

As the voting proceeded by secret ballot, opposition members applauded and screaming Roh backers chanted that it was a ``coup.'' Other Uri Party members broke into tears and sang the national anthem.

Speaker Park admonished them, saying ``You asked for it.''

Lawmakers loyal to Roh had planned to stall for time in the hope that the ouster motion would automatically expire on Friday evening.

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

Earlier Friday, a man attempted to drive his car up the steep steps into the Assembly hall in protest. When the car stalled, the man got out and set the car on fire, said police Sgt. Lee Sun-kyun.

``I will kill them all!'' the man shouted as Assembly guards overpowered him.

On Thursday, a Roh supporter set himself on fire outside parliament, shouting ``Let's block impeachment!''

The embattled leader has yet to apologize for the flash point of the impeachment attempt: accusations that he broke election laws by stumping for the Uri Party in the upcoming April 15 parliamentary campaign.

Roh does not belong to a party, but has said he wants to join Uri.

Roh's supporters come across as a bunch of raving lunatics. This really is an ugly business, and I won't even dare to guess where it will all end.

Protect Your Precious Bodily Fluids!

I ask you sir, what would we do without the Onion?

'Al Qaeda' Claims Madrid Blasts

So this wasn't the handiwork of ETA after all?

A statement attributed to Al Qaeda and sent to a London-based newspaper has claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombings in Madrid.
Ten simultaneous blasts ripped through four packed commuter trains at peak hour, killing 190 people and injuring 1,247 others.
The letter, which called the attacks "Operation Death Trains", was sent to the Al-Quda Al-Arabi newspaper.
"We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one of the bases of the crusader alliance," it said.
There was no way of authenticating the letter, a copy of which was faxed to Reuters's office in Dubai by the newspaper.
The letter bore the signature "Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades/Al Qaeda".
The newspaper received similar letters from the same brigade claiming responsibility on behalf of Al Qaeda for a November bombing of two synagogues in Turkey and the August bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

Koran tape
In Madrid, Spanish officials say they have found seven detonators and a tape in the Arabic language in a van which may be linked to the 10 simultaneous blasts.
Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes says the van was found in the east of the Spanish capital.
He says the tape contained recordings of verses from the Koran.
Mr Acebes says authorities are not ruling out any line of investigation in their probe of the bomb blasts.
"The conclusion of this morning that pointed to the terrorist organisation [ETA] right now is still the main line of investigation," he said.
"[But] I have given the security forces instructions not to rule out anything."
Earlier, Mr Acebes had said there was "no doubt" the Basque separatist group ETA was responsible for the attacks.
He says the Koranic verses were those "usually used to teach the Koran" and he left open the possibility that the tape might have been planted to mislead authorities.
The van had been stolen from the southern town of Alcala de Henares, which was the point of origin for the four trains targeted in the bomb attacks, Mr Acebes said.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the attacks, the worst to hit Europe since the 1988 bombing of a US plane over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270.

I say let's wait and see. It may well turn out that ETA worked hand-in-hand with Islamic extremists to pull off this heinous crime; I certainly wouldn't put it past them to do so. For all one knows, this might even have been entirely an ETA operation, with all the supposedly "Islamic" evidence knowingly planted as red herrings to lead in the wrong direction. I can even think of a strong motive why this might be so - a Popular Party weakened by a public backlash over Aznar's support for Bush would be in less of a position to crack down on Basque separatism terrorism.*

*I'm taking my lead here from Frank McGahon, who points out the inappropriateness of calling murderers like ETA by the oh-so-innocous label of "separatists." There is no identity between separatism and mass murder.

Testing an Idea to Destruction

Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell has a post up that ought to make for fascinating reading to all those interested in 2nd amendment issues.

Everyone’s favorite libertarian SF author, Vernor Vinge, makes the case for private ownership of nuclear weapons as an important bulwark of liberty in his short story, “The Ungoverned” (it can be found in his recent Collected Stories). If you’re a serious anarcho-libertarian, do you agree that individuals should be able to have their very own nukes? If you disagree, on what grounds do you justify your disagreement? Discuss.

I'd also be intrigued to see this one hashed out one way or another. If the right to bear arms is important for the sake of protecting one's liberty, why should a right to own a nuclear weapon be troublesome? And yet the latter very clearly is, to me at least. What if some nut decided to take up the Samson option by walking into midtown Manhattan and blowing himself and 7 million other people away? If there are any libertarians out there who have serious arguments to make on behalf of personal nuclear weapons, I'd love to hear from them.

Yukon, Whidbey Releases Slip Yet Again

Typical Microsoft crap. How is it that a company sitting on $61 billion in cash and equivalent short-term assets can't get its act together well enough to meet schedules it gets to set for itself? If any more proof were needed that Microsoft is a monopoly, here it is. Any company with a healthy respect for the marketplace would do a better job of getting new products out the door than Redmond has done.

The wait for the long-awaited Yukon and Whidbey is going to be longer still, eWEEK.com has learned. Microsoft Corp. Director of Product Management for SQL Server Tom Rizzo confirmed that Microsoft expects to ship both Yukon—Microsoft's code name for the next major update of its SQL Server database—and Whidbey—the coming update of Visual Studio—in the first half of 2005. In the meantime, a third beta has been added to the current beta schedule of Yukon, with 15 beta customers from across all major vertical industries signing up to run Yukon Beta 3 live in production settings before giving the thumbs up for Microsoft to make the product generally available.

Rizzo also confirmed that rumors about the final names for the products, gleaned from leaked screenshots, are correct: The final name for Yukon is SQL Server 2005, and the final name for Whidbey is Visual Studio 2005. According to Rizzo, both products are on the same timeframe for shipping for a key reason: Namely, Microsoft wants to release the best of its developer tools with the best of its database technology "to really change the industry," he said. "If you look at Oracle [Corp.] and IBM and other competitors in the open-source space, they don't have releases where new and innovative tools are released with a new and innovative database. Customers want that: the next generation of tools that exploit the next generation of database technology." (emphasis added)

The hell we do! This has absolutely nothing to do with what costumers "want," and everything to do with Microsoft's inability to abide by the discipline of deadlines. To hell with this rubbish, I say, and to hell with ASP.NET! Microsoft has messed me around for too long, and I'm not going to wait until 2005 - or, given Microsoft's way of letting deadlines slip, 2006 - to get my hands on standards-compliant web development tools. From now on, I'm sticking with Java.

How Urban Legends Stay Alive

Next to the old "albino alligators in the sewers" myth, one of the hoariest urban legends to make the rounds has to be the "AIDS Mary" story, in which a man sleeps with a woman and then wakes up to find his partner gone, and a message saying "welcome to the world of AIDS" lying next to him. As it so happens, this South African report happens to perpetuate just that very legend.

Johannesburg - 39-year-old man claims to have been sexually assaulted by three women who then told him, "welcome to the world of Aids", East Rand police said on Monday.

The incident's circumstances echo those of one which took place in December last year in which an 18-year-old man was allegedly forced to have sex with three women on the East Rand.

Police spokesperson Superintendent Andy Pieke said the man claimed that three women, all armed, confronted him in Duduza last Thursday and forced him to have sex with them. He was walking home from a tavern around 23:00 when he was accosted.

The man told police that he reported the incident late because he had been waiting for results of a medical test from a clinic. He was apparently told to lay a charge.

Pieke said police were investigating the possibility that the case may linked to the other, similar, incident which occurred between Tsakane and Duduza on December 20, 2003.

A 18-year-old boy was attacked by three women who were armed with firearms. He was also ordered to have sex with them. Afterwards, they said: "Welcome to the world of Aids."

The women are described as being middle-aged and one as being large. It was alleged that the women were wearing jeans, jerseys and jackets.

Let's just say that I find this all slightly ... implausible. How exactly does a woman, or a group of women, go about "raping" a man? It isn't as if one can be forced to have an erection, after all, and as far as I know, the sort of fear that accompanies having a gun pointed at oneself is hardly conducive to sexual arousal. Chalk this one up under the "too good to check" column of story writing.

I Knew It!

I've never liked Paul Kagame, and I've never understood why people were so willing to give him a pass when it seemed obvious that what his regime was about was preserving Tutsi domination of Rwanda. As it turns out, the French police have just released a report directly accusing Kagame of initiating the successful attack on President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane that triggered the Rwandan massacre of 1994.

A French newspaper says an official report has blamed Rwandan President Paul Kagame for a rocket attack that triggered the genocide 10 years ago.
Le Monde says French police have concluded that Mr Kagame gave direct orders for the rocket attack on then President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane.
Mr Kagame was head of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) at the time.

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

The newspaper says the report was based on interviews with hundreds of witnesses, including one man who allegedly belonged to the assassination squad.
It says that according to the report, the aircraft was downed on the clear instructions of Mr Kagame, who was then in charge of the mainly-Tutsi RPF.
Mr Habyarimana's death in the crash led to the genocide of Tutsis, which only ended when Mr Kagame took power in Rwanda.

Kagame had to have been aware that the assassination of Habyarimana would unleash a bloodbath, the main victims of which would be the Tutsis on whose behalf he was supposed to have been fighting. So much for the notion of Kagame as some sort of reconciler of Hutsi and Tutsi; the man is just another power-hungry character willing to step over any number of dead bodies to attain his goals.

Form vs. Substance

Jonathan Edelstein has a post up about the recent developments in Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea. His remarks about the political situation in Equatorial Guinea are particularly interesting, in light of the stress recently I've laid here on the importance of distinguishing between the formal rites that characterize a free society and the actual existence of freedom in a society. Teodoro Obiang's regime (and Robert Mugabe's, for that matter) is yet another reminder that the "right" to vote means nothing in and of itself. Were the citizens of pre-handover Hong Kong really worse off than those Equatorial Guinea or Zimbabwe are, in any meaningful sense?

Dumbest ... Quiz ... Ever!

This Libertarian Purity Test that's been making the rounds has got to be one of the most loaded quizzes I've come across in years. I only managed to score a measly 48 on the damn thing, but I have to say that it beggars the imagination that anyone could possibly score much higher than I did without being a raving lunatic. Abolish all taxes? All government is inherently evil? Abolish the state? These sorts of ideas are every bit as delusional as any nonsense ever spouted by Karl Marx about the "withering away" of the state. Libertarianism as I understand it is equivalent to the classical liberalism of the 19th century, not anarchism, or "anarcho-capitalism" as some like to call it.

I like to think I'm a pretty hardcore libertarian sort, but I'm only willing to go as far with any political philosophy as experience and my reason can take me; what that means in practice is that whenever I hear people talking about the state as an "unnecessary evil" or the defense budget being slashed 75%, alarm bells start ringing in my head about that person's degree of contact with reality. That the state can and ought to be severely pruned back is reasonable enough, but there really are arenas in which private action fails and the state's intervention can be for the better. For instance, I see no problem with completely decriminalizing marijuana, but anybody who thinks antibiotics ought to be handed out like sweeties is living in some fantasy world where drug resistance is never a problem, rather than the one I inhabit in which it is. It's all well and good to talk about "privatizing" the law, but what happens when we have two courts, each of which refuses to recognize the jurisdiction of the other? What resort would the poor have to the protection of the law in a world in which the government provided no policing functions? All that aside, a lot of the questions in Part II and Part III of this quiz only seem sensible if one has absolutely no knowledge of economic theory or history whatsoever - freezing the monetary base indeed!

Looking over the questions in this quiz, I'd really have to question the sanity and intellectual abilities of anyone able to score more than 90 points on the thing; having read a great deal of his work, I'm pretty certain that even Milton Friedman himself, though pictured on the quiz page, wouldn't manage to hit that barrier. The day when libertarianism becomes identified with utopian isolationism is the day I'll cease to answer to that label. I believe in practical politics of the Burkean, gradualist variety, not in retreating into a world of daydreams about ideological heaven on earth.

The Nigerian Civil War - A Military Perspective

I've just had the good fortune to come across this 1984 report on the military aspect of the Nigerian Civil War that raged from 1967 to 1970. I find this report interesting for two reasons; the first is that I'd like to know what an American military officer, being a member of the world's best-trained fighting force*, would make of the conduct of the war by both sides. The second reason for my interest is that it's virtually impossible to get an objective account of what went on from Nigerian officers of any extraction, for obvious reasons of career/ethnic pride, which in a way makes the Nigerian Civil War similar to the (much less deadly) Yom Kippur War - there's a Rashomon like quality to the starkly contrasting views of what occurred depending on who one chooses to listen to.

*Yes, I really do think this is true. Bring up all the conventional historical examples you like and I think today's US armed forces would stand up well by comparison. Not even the Wehrmacht comes close in terms of quality at any level, from what I know about the German military's organization - which is a fair bit.

A Nigerian in the Family

Glenn Reynolds' brother just got married (actually re-married - see the post) to a Nigerian lady. Hmm, it almost feels like we're family now, though there are nearly 130 million of us about these days, so that would have to be one pretty big family we're talking about. Still, if the bride's from the southern part of the country, which she likely is, I'm sure I'd only need 2 or 3 intermediate links to connect the two of us in a social chain, especially if she's ever lived in Lagos.

Romanticizing Aristide

I find it hard to overstate how irritating it is for me to see so many Democrats level accusations about Bush's supposed "coup" in Haiti, as if Jean-Bertrand Aristide were some sort of blameless paragon of democracy deserving of American armed support. It's true enough that many of those who opposed Aristide were no better than the man himself, but if the choice in Haiti was only between one set of thugs and another, what justification can there for screaming blue murder when the leader of one party leaves the scene? This is a guy who first refused to hold parliamentary elections on schedule, then flagrantly rigged them when he was finally cajoled into doing so; to castigate Bush for not propping him up in the name of "democracy" is the height of cheek.

The fortune Aristide amassed for himself is unimaginable in a country where per capita income is less than $1 a day, a former admirer of the deposed President tells DAVID ADAMS

The young man led me down a rough track, through a dirt yard and into his humble cinderblock house on the western fringe of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. He ordered the women and children out of the main room and then fetched a black plastic bag from the bedroom.
Out of the bag he pulled $20,000 in $100 bills so rotten that some had crumbled like aged Stilton. Others were compressed so tightly that they were impossible to separate.
In a country where the average per capita income is barely $1 a day, this is a fortune. The man, who asked not to be identified, said that the money was part of a stash of approximately $350,000 that Jean-Bertand Aristide, the deposed Haitian President, left behind in his private home when he fled into exile last Sunday.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said as he described how he and other looters had discovered the money in one of four safes sealed behind a concrete-block wall in a secret underground compartment beneath the salon of Aristide’s house in the suburb of Tabarre. The looters used sledgehammers to break open the safe and found the money in five 3 inch-tall blocks wrapped in disintegrating elastic bands.
“It’s barbarism,” he said. “All the poor people suffered for him and he had all this money hidden under his house,” the man, who described himself as a long-time supporter of Aristide’s Lavalas Family party, said. “Imagine what could have been done with this much money if it had been invested for the poor.”
The source of the money is anyone’s guess, although there have long been rumours that Aristide, a penniless former priest who rose to become the country’s most powerful politician, had amassed a sizeable fortune during a 14-year political career in which he was elected president twice.
Opponents have accused his wife, a US-educated lawyer, of setting up front companies to hide her husband’s investments in lucrative businesses, including several privatised former state companies.
Last week, the godfather of one of Aristide’s children, Beaudoin “Jacques” Ketant, told a court in Miami after receiving a 27-year jail sentence for drug trafficking that Aristide had turned Haiti into a “narco-country” and took pay-offs from the traffickers.

And here's a snippet from this week's edition of the Economist(sub. reqd.):

Establishing democracy in Haiti, the poorest and most misgoverned country in the Americas, was never going to be easy. The Americans and the United Nations quickly gave up. But Mr Aristide, too, carries much of the blame. The same dogmatic inflexibility that made him a brave opponent of dictatorship made him a poor democratic ruler.

Having installed an ally as president in 1995, Mr Aristide was complicit in delaying legislative elections for three years, with a consequent breakdown of government and the loss of several hundred million dollars of aid. When those elections were at last held in 2000, they were flawed. Several opposition candidates were murdered; the electoral court was browbeaten into awarding ten disputed Senate seats (and thus a majority) to Mr Aristide's party. Mr Aristide was then re-elected president in a poll boycotted by the opposition.

Ironically, Mr Aristide would almost certainly have won a free vote. But he was turning into another Haitian despot, wanting absolute control of his destitute country. He relied on gangs to enforce his rule. So reviled had this become that he was toppled by a rag-tag army of as few as 200 rebels.

Some paragon of responsibility, huh? If only more of those whining about Aristide's departure actually cared for the wellbeing of the people who had to suffer from the man's misrule.

Frankly, listening to the corrupt ingrate whining from his place of refuge in Bangui, without the slightest recognition that he's causing needless diplomatic difficulties for his hosts, I can't help thinking Bush ought to have left him to meet his attackers face to face - the Congressional Black Caucus would no doubt make a big to do about his "martyrdom", but at least we'd be spared the sight of this thug presenting himself as the democratic victim of evil American machinations.

NYT - A New Teenage Culture of Restraint

Now here's a story that's guaranteed to cause heartburn for people in both aisles of America's culture war, what with having an interracial romance of the most taboo variety - white female with nonwhite male - and teenagers practicing abstinence, something only conservative curmudgeons could possibly expect them to do.

Alberto and Jasmine are 16-year-old sweethearts, or were until that day in November when Jasmine, who planned to be a virgin until marriage, learned in the halls of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx that Alberto was "messing around."

She raged, she wept and she broke up with him. He apologized, he cried and she took him back. Then she suggested they cut school and have sex — "to keep him," she explained tearfully.

It could have been one of the oldest stories in the book, except for the real-life ending: Alberto said no.

Though he is just one teenager — short and freckled, with close-cropped kinky hair, a Hispanic surname and an electric smile — his personal decision speaks to the underlying causes of an extraordinary demographic shift.

The teenage pregnancy rate in America, which rose sharply between 1986 and 1991 to huge public alarm, has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States. And though pregnancy prevention efforts have long focused almost exclusively on girls, it is boys whose behavior shows the most startling changes.

More than half of all male high school students reported in 2001 that they were virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990. Among the sexually active, condom use has soared to 65 percent, and nearly 73 percent among black male students. The trends are similar, if less pronounced, for female students, who remain slightly less likely than boys to report that they have had sex. Nowhere are the changes more surprising than in poor minority neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx, which a decade ago were seen as centers of a national epidemic of teenage pregnancy.

Researchers often sum up the findings in one tidy phrase: "less sex, more contraception." But there is nothing simple about their puzzlement over the reasons.

"The default position is 'Yahoo, let's have sex,' " said Sarah Brown, director of the private, nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "It takes some motivation in a highly sexualized culture for teenagers not to have sex. To use contraception takes a lot of motivation."

"I think there's something very profound going on. I don't think anybody understands in depth this change in teen culture."

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

In 1995, half of 15- to 19-year-old males reported having received oral sex, according to the National Survey of Adolescent Males, up from 44 percent in 1988. The steepest increase by far was among black teenagers, to 57 percent, from 25 percent in 1988; the prevalence among white teenagers, in contrast, was unchanged at 50 percent. Blacks of both sexes between 15 and 17 also showed the steepest decrease in sexual intercourse: a 28 percent decline from 1991 to 2001, according to a recent analysis by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Demographers point out that American teenage-pregnancy rates are still 2 to 10 times higher than those in other Western countries, which have had the same pattern of spike and fall since AIDS erupted. But better contraceptive practices and delays in first intercourse have contributed about equally to a 35 percent decline in birth rates among 15- to 17-year-olds in the United States, and to an even more impressive 46 percent decline among non-Hispanic blacks that age, according to the C.D.C. analysis of several studies. (emphases added)

The picture is a mixed one, but it does give some support to both those who advocate abstinence education and those who want to see greater contraceptive use. I have no religious or moral hangups about such matters myself, and I think condoms ought to be freely available to those intent on having sex, but I've never been able to wrap my head around the reasoning that said "teenagers can't be expected to resist sexual temptation" either. We aren't mere creatures of instinct, after all, and a rational young person can come to the conclusion that sex, whatever its pleasures, ought to be delayed until its consequences can be fully handled. There really is no such thing as completely safe sex, and one won't go blind or insane from abstaining during the teenage years.

While we're at it, I also can't help noting that the statistical data on sexual practices by race also contravenes the expectations of those who like to make "blacks" out as sex-crazed brutes incapable of controlling their lusts. Apart from the stupidity of expecting that what holds true in the particular African-American context must be true of all people of African descent around the world, assuming that differences between groups must stem from supposedly "innate" causes is an all-too convenient excuse for writing others off as hopelessly inferior. To give another illustration of the dangers of an over-eagerness to find "genetic" explanations for all group disparities, a few decades ago one might have had "researchers" proposing that African-Americans had an "innately" higher propensity to smoke than their white co-citizens, and they'd have been able to brandish an army of statistics in "support" of their claims; as it turns out, today African-American teenagers are the least likely of all groups to engage in regular cigarette smoking.

Too Tall to Spy

It seems like MI5 is climbing on the heightist bandwagon, if this article is to be believed.

When it comes to spying for Britain, small is beautiful. New guidelines by MI5, the security service, state that men seeking work as field agents should not be taller than 5ft 11in so that they can "blend in to the background" more easily.

The rules, set out in a new application form sent to would-be officers, mean that all five actors who played James Bond, including Pierce Brosnan, the film's present star, would be rejected. A similar height limit will apply to women, who must be 5ft 8in or less. MI5's chief, Eliza Manningham-Buller, is 5ft 8in.

The new application form says: "You should be able to blend into the background. We are looking for average height, build, appearance. Applicants would ideally be no taller than 5ft 11in for men and 5ft 8in for women."

This would rule out even James Bond - the prize asset of MI6, the intelligence service. Although 007's height is not specified, all the actors who have played him tower above 5ft 11in. Sean Connery is 6ft 1in, George Lazenby is 6ft 2in and Roger Moore is 6ft. Timothy Dalton is 6ft 2in, while Pierce Brosnan is 6ft.

A Whitehall official defended the policy. "They do have tall people in the building, but it would be ridiculous to send a surveillance officer into a dangerous situation who stood out like a sore thumb."

The official added that tall, or short, people would not be banned from joining the service, but would not be able to become field agents.

By God, sir! All my James Bond fantasies gone down the drain.

More than Meets the Eye

Eric Rescorla of Educated Guesswork makes a post about an issue that perturbed me greatly when I first learnt about it while studying biology:

For example, one type of pseudohermaphrodite looks like a normal woman. Indeed, "she" conforms to the male ideal of female pulchritude even more closely than does the average real woman because "her" breasts are well developed and "her " legs are long and graceful. Hence cases have turned up repeatedly of beautiful women fashion models not realizing that they are actually men with a single mutant gene until genetically tested as adults.

Since this type of pseudohermaphrodite looks like a normal girl baby at birth and undergoes externally normal development and puberty, the problem isn't even likely to be recognized until the adolescent "girl" consults a doctor over failure to begin menstruating. At that point, the doctor discovers a simple reason for that failure: the patient has no uterus, fallopian tubes, or upper vagina. Instead, the vagina ends blindly after two inches. Further examination reveals testes that secrete normal testosterone, are programmed by a normal Y chromosome, and are abnormal only for being buried in the groin or labia. In other words, the beautiful model is an otherwise normal male who happens to have a genetically determined biochemical block in his ability to respond to testosterone.

That block turns out to be in the cell receptor that would normally bind testosterone and dihydrotestosterone, thereby enabling those androgens to trigger the further development steps of the normal male. Since the Y chromosome is normal, the testes themselves form normally and produce normal Mullerian inhibiting hormone, which acts as in any man to forestall development of the uterus and fallopian tubes. However, development of the usual male machinery to respond to testosterone is interruped. Hence development of the remaining bipotential embryonic sex organs follows the female channel by default: female rather than male external genitalia, and atrophy of the Wolffian ducts and hence of potential male internal genitalia. In fact, since the testes and adrenal glands secrete small amounts of estrogen that would normally be overridden by androgen receptors, the complete lack of these receptors in functional form (they are present in small numbers in normal women) makes the male pseudohermaphrodite appear externally superfeminine.

It's rather surprising to think that people who are genetically men might actually make for the most beautiful women, isn't it? I have to admit it's something I'm always wondering about whenever I see an exceptionally tall and beautiful woman - could she be a pseudohermaphrodite too? I suspect that the occurrence of pseudohermaphroditism is far too low for me to ever have actually seen anyone who has it though. Still, I think this goes to show that the usual assumption that great physical beauty and high reproductive fitness are equivalent doesn't always hold up under scrutiny.