It's not necessary to actively appease someone to get you into trouble.
It's enough when you cease to act and protect yourself, when you are sufficiently intimidated so that you do not see it possible to do anything.
There are, of course, nuances to this: what happens when one side simply loses the will to go out and continue to spend blood on a daily basis to defend their ways of life, when their opponents are more than happy to be ruthless and literally bloody-minded?
The one side will continue to be aggressive and continue to push to see how far they can go: the other side is just happy to be left alone as much as possible, and as long as someone else is targeted, then they're fine on acquiescing.
Hezbollah's long-term campaign of the destruction of Lebanon is bearing fruit: the Lebanese, it appears, have abandoned their country. Well, not so much their country as such, but much more the idea of their country. They, the Lebanese, continue to live in the past, content to pretend that the last 60 years never happened, and pretend that they don't, as it were, have this funny lump in their breast. They're in a state of denial because they have suffered so very long and heavily for mistakes: but by allowing Hezbollah to effectively negate the rule of law in Lebanon, the Lebanese have lost Lebanon.
It doesn't really exist anymore: Hezbollah has made it impossible for Lebanon to exist, and that's fine with them. They prefer the anarchy and the lack of law, since it means that they can simply intimidate the rest of the population to get their way.
Appeasement becomes a real opportunity when those targeted have things that they want to keep, but aren't willing to do what it takes to protect those things (here in the general sense, not the specific sense). Hence in order to avoid fighting a war, Chamberlain announced "Peace In Our Time" and waved a piece of paper from his hand, thus making war inevitable and more destructive than would have been the case otherwise.
In the case of Lebanon, the fruits of appeasement against Hezbollah has been the dismantling of the Lebanese state, slowly, surely, step by step. It could have been stopped, but only by a concentrated, concerted effort by a state that could not do so: the soul of Lebanon was torn out during the Civil War there, and while it keeps on trying to return, there are simply too many who want to have nothing better than for the state of Lebanon to vanish forever. People like Syria.
Hence appeasement bears bitter fruit: in the attempt to save Lebanon, of keeping civil war once again at bay, Lebanon has been sacrificed to save itself, as it appears that no one is willing to fight for it in the face of that group of bullies and thugs, financed by Iran, that is called Hezbollah.
Hezbollah doesn't want Lebanon: it's not interested in a country. It's much more interested in having a safe place to work from, and chaos is its best friend, allowing it to hide behind civilians, abject poverty and need. That way they can appear, with their Iranian-backed "social services", to be the only alternative, just as for shopkeepers paying the Mafia for protection, you can't count on the police being around to protect you when the thugs work you over.
Hezbollah doesn't want Lebanon: they want lawlessness and chaos, since Hezbollah offers order from chaos and services when everything else fails. Hezbollah only wants the Caliphate: everything else is a waste of time.
Syria doesn't want Lebanon: they want Greater Syria
Iran doesn't want Lebanon: a state means that they would be made responsible for their puppet's behavior, and while the Iranian financing of Hezbollah is an open secret, it's one that the Iranians prefer to remain that way, as it gives them plausible deniability.
And while both the Lebanese and Israel want Lebanon, they don't want it enough. Or more exactly, the Lebanese don't want it enough to start a new civil war (or continue the old one, however you prefer...), and unless the Lebanese want that, the Israelis aren't interested either.
Hence one of the very, very few even moderately successful states in the Middle East is being destroyed.
Hence are harvested the fruits of appeasement.
Montag, Mai 19, 2008
Mittwoch, Mai 14, 2008
This is the face of isolationism...
Isolationism has generally not worked very well for the US. It invariably leads to the development of world trends that just plain suck, and the US then has to go and kick in some heads to get things back to normal.
This is the subtle face of isolationism.
Why subtle?
Because of this line:
Salvation does not lie abroad. It's here at home.
This is the most craven line I've read lately: it's nothing less than an abrogation of responsibility, an abandonment of principal, a bowing to an inevitability that hasn't even happened.
And this is the biggest lie I have seen in a long time:
The truth is that the United States, with rare exceptions, has demonstrated little talent for changing the way others live. We have enjoyed far greater success in making necessary adjustments to our own way of life, preserving and renewing what we value most. Early in the 20th century, Progressives rounded off the rough edges of the Industrial Revolution, deflecting looming threats to social harmony. During the Depression, FDR's New Deal reformed capitalism and thereby saved it. Here lies the real genius of American politics.
This isn't the truth: as a matter of a fact, it's the opposite of the truth.
The US has been the world's greatest instrument for change that the world has ever seen: the ways that others live have been transformed. Germany and Japan, Korea, Iraq, every one in those countries has had their lives fundamentally altered, fundamentally changed. We are constantly re-inventing ourselves, making necessary adjustments: that's what free people do. Progressives today are the leading edge of a reactionary, isolationist movement that embodies the very worst in US politics, the woolly-headed Wilsonians.
The real genius of American politics is the wisdom of the American voter in choosing the right man for the job of President, based more on his leadership abilities and character than on any other aspect of his person. Hence Reagan and the younger Bush. Hence Kennedy.
The real genius of American politics is the wisdom of the American voter: when making a mistake, they learn from it and don't repeat it. Hence Jimmy Carter's single term of office.
This further:
For the United States, the prospect of permanent war now beckons.
Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the "Long War" has been about all of these things and more.
The US did not decide to go to war, anymore than it did so in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. War was brought to us, or was waged against our interests: the decision to take down Iraq was the decision to start putting a stop to state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East, to finish the job begun in 1991.
And it's not so much that Americans are "oddly confused" about its purpose: it's that the pundits and hacks are confused by the fundamental support for the war. The only sentence that makes sense here is that this war is about all of those things: however, the writer is clearly incapable of understanding that there can be more than one cause or more than one effect of any given event, preferring instead the simplistic and naive belief that everything can be reduced to a single causality or a single effect, the sign of a small mind.
Again, for those liberals with reading difficulties (sorry, I repeat myself): the long war here is not the war that the US wages, but rather the war that is waged against the US.
Nothing more, nothing less.
This writer would have you tire of it, would have you be exhausted by it, would have you snivel and crawl back to the safe haven.
The best way to fight this war is to take it to the enemy and destroy their ability to wage war by changing the way that people that they hide behind live.
Anything else is the face of isolationism, a face that refuses to see how the world is, preferring to cut the US off from the rest of the world, preferring to think that the US doesn't need the rest of the world and vice versa.
Gee, that worked soooo well for the US leading up to WW1 and also up to WW2. That worked so well for Korea, for Vietnam, for the decades of the Cold War, where the world was a zero-sum game with the Soviets.
That way lies not madness, but the inevitability of greater conflagration and even greater deaths.
This is the subtle face of isolationism.
Why subtle?
Because of this line:
Salvation does not lie abroad. It's here at home.
This is the most craven line I've read lately: it's nothing less than an abrogation of responsibility, an abandonment of principal, a bowing to an inevitability that hasn't even happened.
And this is the biggest lie I have seen in a long time:
The truth is that the United States, with rare exceptions, has demonstrated little talent for changing the way others live. We have enjoyed far greater success in making necessary adjustments to our own way of life, preserving and renewing what we value most. Early in the 20th century, Progressives rounded off the rough edges of the Industrial Revolution, deflecting looming threats to social harmony. During the Depression, FDR's New Deal reformed capitalism and thereby saved it. Here lies the real genius of American politics.
This isn't the truth: as a matter of a fact, it's the opposite of the truth.
The US has been the world's greatest instrument for change that the world has ever seen: the ways that others live have been transformed. Germany and Japan, Korea, Iraq, every one in those countries has had their lives fundamentally altered, fundamentally changed. We are constantly re-inventing ourselves, making necessary adjustments: that's what free people do. Progressives today are the leading edge of a reactionary, isolationist movement that embodies the very worst in US politics, the woolly-headed Wilsonians.
The real genius of American politics is the wisdom of the American voter in choosing the right man for the job of President, based more on his leadership abilities and character than on any other aspect of his person. Hence Reagan and the younger Bush. Hence Kennedy.
The real genius of American politics is the wisdom of the American voter: when making a mistake, they learn from it and don't repeat it. Hence Jimmy Carter's single term of office.
This further:
For the United States, the prospect of permanent war now beckons.
Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the "Long War" has been about all of these things and more.
The US did not decide to go to war, anymore than it did so in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. War was brought to us, or was waged against our interests: the decision to take down Iraq was the decision to start putting a stop to state-sponsored terrorism in the Middle East, to finish the job begun in 1991.
And it's not so much that Americans are "oddly confused" about its purpose: it's that the pundits and hacks are confused by the fundamental support for the war. The only sentence that makes sense here is that this war is about all of those things: however, the writer is clearly incapable of understanding that there can be more than one cause or more than one effect of any given event, preferring instead the simplistic and naive belief that everything can be reduced to a single causality or a single effect, the sign of a small mind.
Again, for those liberals with reading difficulties (sorry, I repeat myself): the long war here is not the war that the US wages, but rather the war that is waged against the US.
Nothing more, nothing less.
This writer would have you tire of it, would have you be exhausted by it, would have you snivel and crawl back to the safe haven.
The best way to fight this war is to take it to the enemy and destroy their ability to wage war by changing the way that people that they hide behind live.
Anything else is the face of isolationism, a face that refuses to see how the world is, preferring to cut the US off from the rest of the world, preferring to think that the US doesn't need the rest of the world and vice versa.
Gee, that worked soooo well for the US leading up to WW1 and also up to WW2. That worked so well for Korea, for Vietnam, for the decades of the Cold War, where the world was a zero-sum game with the Soviets.
That way lies not madness, but the inevitability of greater conflagration and even greater deaths.
Nice To Know That They Recognize It...
So, how is the campaign of John McCain going to react to this?
According to Terry McAuliffe, the campaign chairman for Clinton:
"Clearly it has been a biased media, no question about it," ... When asked how much of the mainstream media is "in the tank" for Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who leads Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, McAuliffe estimated that about 90 percent of the media favor Obama.
So, what is the role of a "free" press when it becomes completely - 90% - partisan? At which point does reporting become, indirectly, campaigning, and will the press be responsible and actually give John McCain a fair deal in reporting the news (or will their partisanship perhaps backfire and get him elected?), or will they simply ignore him and given wall-to-wall coverage of Obama, the Boy Wonder?
Don't hold your breath waiting for an answer.
And this is the real kicker: something that will probably haunt him for the rest of his life, as it directly contradicts what virtually all Democratic Party people say and feel:
Ouch.
Reality is and will be intruding here: this blog will become more sporadic than it already is.
According to Terry McAuliffe, the campaign chairman for Clinton:
"Clearly it has been a biased media, no question about it," ... When asked how much of the mainstream media is "in the tank" for Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who leads Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, McAuliffe estimated that about 90 percent of the media favor Obama.
Now, McAuliffe just wasn't her campaign chairman, but is a long-term mover in the logistics of the Democratic Party (see here).
McAuliffe added that "every independent study has said that this is the most biased coverage they've ever seen in a presidential campaign."
So, you can imagine all the good press that John McCain is going to get in this election.So, what is the role of a "free" press when it becomes completely - 90% - partisan? At which point does reporting become, indirectly, campaigning, and will the press be responsible and actually give John McCain a fair deal in reporting the news (or will their partisanship perhaps backfire and get him elected?), or will they simply ignore him and given wall-to-wall coverage of Obama, the Boy Wonder?
Don't hold your breath waiting for an answer.
And this is the real kicker: something that will probably haunt him for the rest of his life, as it directly contradicts what virtually all Democratic Party people say and feel:
He also praised Fox News, which is often viewed as a conservative media outlet, as "one of the most responsible in this presidential campaign."
Ouch.
Reality is and will be intruding here: this blog will become more sporadic than it already is.
Dienstag, Mai 06, 2008
An Unspoken Truth...
This is a great article, albeit more than a tad depressing.
Put simply, it's an indictment of how poorly government and NGO attempts to help stem the spread of AIDS have worked, i.e. largely not at all. It is simply politically incorrect to change behavior patterns, even when these behavior patterns - multiple partners at the same time - is largely responsible for the devastating effect that AIDS is having in Africa. NGOs and donors are more interested in PR and helping those that make good reporting than they are in actually doing something about it.
However, the author is missing one additional point, one that is also unspoken.
If diseases, such as AIDS, were to be "properly" addressed and the rates of infection were to slow, what would all those lovely benefactors actually then do?
AIDS prevention is a multi-billion dollar business. Getting people to change their behavior, just to serial partners rather than simultaneous ones, would have an enormous effect on the livelihoods of those involved. A negative impact.
Hence it's better to deal with the symptoms rather than with the cause. The way it looks right now, the AIDS industry will be able to milk the disease for all it is worth until Africa is depopulated. If anything, that is how they can maximize their cash flows.
Interesting that the community that loves to accuse the world's troubles on "big business" and capitalism has become the best example of how unbridled capitalism, uninterested in human welfare except their own, latches on to a society and sucks it dry. They themselves are the true villains of this situation.
That is the unspoken truth of the article above.
Put simply, it's an indictment of how poorly government and NGO attempts to help stem the spread of AIDS have worked, i.e. largely not at all. It is simply politically incorrect to change behavior patterns, even when these behavior patterns - multiple partners at the same time - is largely responsible for the devastating effect that AIDS is having in Africa. NGOs and donors are more interested in PR and helping those that make good reporting than they are in actually doing something about it.
However, the author is missing one additional point, one that is also unspoken.
If diseases, such as AIDS, were to be "properly" addressed and the rates of infection were to slow, what would all those lovely benefactors actually then do?
AIDS prevention is a multi-billion dollar business. Getting people to change their behavior, just to serial partners rather than simultaneous ones, would have an enormous effect on the livelihoods of those involved. A negative impact.
Hence it's better to deal with the symptoms rather than with the cause. The way it looks right now, the AIDS industry will be able to milk the disease for all it is worth until Africa is depopulated. If anything, that is how they can maximize their cash flows.
Interesting that the community that loves to accuse the world's troubles on "big business" and capitalism has become the best example of how unbridled capitalism, uninterested in human welfare except their own, latches on to a society and sucks it dry. They themselves are the true villains of this situation.
That is the unspoken truth of the article above.
Dienstag, April 22, 2008
IFRS, Fair Value Stupidity...and How The Banks Lost $255 Billion
Robert Owen said this: All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer...
The topic today is how well-intentioned changes in accounting practices have created a monster that could devour us all: it's a monster with positive feedback loops, making any crisis much worse than it need be, and perversely also setting the ground for the development of massive bubbles that will implode with severity equal to none.
What is this monster?
IFRS. The International Financial Reporting Standards, the rules for international bookkeeping.
What is the problem?
This (from Wikipedia):
and what is Fair Value?
Fair value is the amount for which an asset could be exchanged, or a liability settled, between knowledgeable, willing parties in an arm's length transaction (IFRS1 App A).....
Now, this all sounds reasonable, but is it?
Hardly.
The key is that receivables and payables, initially valued at what you actually paid for them, are then significantly and constantly revalued.
Not what the company expects to receive for them, as laid out in the contractual agreements signed, but what the company could get for such receivables if they were sold on the market as OTC or exchange instruments.
Most importantly, this effects the valuation of assets, defined as resources controlled by the company and with which the company makes money (in the form of future cash flows).
Now, why is this a problem, and more importantly, how does this form a positive feedback loop that causes any sort of modulation to start excessive swings?
Receivables must always be assessed for the purposes of bookkeeping at their fair market value. No particular need to do this every day or month, but it must be done once a year, at the very least, to determine equity of the company.
What happens when the market for <whatever the asset is> is down sharply? That means that the assets that the company holds must also be revised downward sharply, resulting in a reduction in equity. Given that net profits is equity of the previous year minus equity of today, this means that the usage of fair value leads to a reduction in equity, which must then be written off.
Given the large amount of financial paper held out there, this means that because of IFRS and fair value, and here I am quoting today's Handeslblatt on page 23, banks world-wide have written off no less than 255 billion dollars on value adjustment. The professional organization CFA even says that 55% of responding bankers see the IFRS rules as being responsible for the magnitude of the current problem.
Of course, the IFRS insists that these rules are right and proper, and reflect "reality" better than the old rules, where assets were simply depreciated over time and future receivables discounted to net present value.
The IFRS is wrong, wrong, wrong and did I mention that they are wrong?
If a concern were to be liquidated, then the IFRS interpretation would be correct: however, the IFRS itself says that the fundamental assumption is that when we look at a company, it is always the company as a going concern.
The IFRS interpretation would imply that an investor should "know" the "real" state of the company's finances before making any sort of investment decision, or that the company itself should "know" the "real" state of its receivables, both by acting as if the receivables were to be sold off to realize their current cash value.
That way lies madness.
I cannot underscore this more.
The problem isn't just the current downswing: the real problem will be the next dynamic upswing.
Why?
Because then the companies will revalue their receivables as markets recover and pick up: all of a sudden, companies will report massive increases in profits, vastly improving their equity position, and resulting in a major, major increase in their ... creditworthiness.
Hence companies will be able to increase their borrowings with significantly lower risk premiums.
Which means that the banks will increase their downside risks dramatically when the business cycle turns downward again, forcing them, per IFRS rules, to revalue their assets downwards significantly as the relative risk of the business partner worsens dramatically.
What the IFRS rules really do, in their absurd search for some resemblance of reality, is make it even more difficult for banks and lenders to determine "true" risk: bookkeeping, due to the highly volatile nature of fair value asset revaluation, will make it harder to see the true financial state of the company, as the swings due to asset valuations will overweight these significantly.
This means it will be harder for those who are not financial wizards to actually read a balance statement without being severely misled as to the true profitability of the company.
Now, that is stupidity.
It is what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum: this is the result of not an attempt to make finances more transparent, but rather to satisfy the desires of accountants to give themselves a "better" idea of how the company is doing, and shows how terrible things can happen.
When they don't ask economists how reality actually works. The stupidity of the IFRS and the very, very real damage being done to the economy comes from a fundamental ignorance of how destructive positive feedback loops really are.
If the IFRS simply allowed a secondary valuation of assets, but left straight-line depreciation alone for the purpose of determining profitability, then you'd have at least $255 billion less having been written off. What started out as a sensible internal measure - companies should know if they are facing significant price deterioration for key assets - has become a monster that has the potential for massive destruction.
All in the name of greater transparency. This isn't transparency, it's folly.
But they're accountants. One nasty joke is that economists are only glorified accountants, and I'd even accept that largely, with one caveat: economists are accountants who can actually think.
Sheer and total stupidity, and the destruction of $255 billion.
Even for the US government, that's real money.
The topic today is how well-intentioned changes in accounting practices have created a monster that could devour us all: it's a monster with positive feedback loops, making any crisis much worse than it need be, and perversely also setting the ground for the development of massive bubbles that will implode with severity equal to none.
What is this monster?
IFRS. The International Financial Reporting Standards, the rules for international bookkeeping.
What is the problem?
This (from Wikipedia):
Receivables (debtors) and payables (creditors)
Receivables and payables are recorded initially at fair value (IAS39.43). Subsequent measurement is stated at amortised cost (IAS39.46 and 47). In most cases, trade receivables and trade payables can be stated at the amount expected to be received or paid; however, it is necessary to discount a receivable or payable with a substantial credit period (see for example IAS18.11 for accounting for revenue).
If a receivable has been impaired its carrying amount is written down its recoverable amount (the higher of value in use and its fair value less costs to sell). Value in use is the present value of cash flows expected to be derived from the receivable (IAS36.9 and 59). ...
and what is Fair Value?
Fair value is the amount for which an asset could be exchanged, or a liability settled, between knowledgeable, willing parties in an arm's length transaction (IFRS1 App A).....
Now, this all sounds reasonable, but is it?
Hardly.
The key is that receivables and payables, initially valued at what you actually paid for them, are then significantly and constantly revalued.
Not what the company expects to receive for them, as laid out in the contractual agreements signed, but what the company could get for such receivables if they were sold on the market as OTC or exchange instruments.
Most importantly, this effects the valuation of assets, defined as resources controlled by the company and with which the company makes money (in the form of future cash flows).
Now, why is this a problem, and more importantly, how does this form a positive feedback loop that causes any sort of modulation to start excessive swings?
Receivables must always be assessed for the purposes of bookkeeping at their fair market value. No particular need to do this every day or month, but it must be done once a year, at the very least, to determine equity of the company.
What happens when the market for <whatever the asset is> is down sharply? That means that the assets that the company holds must also be revised downward sharply, resulting in a reduction in equity. Given that net profits is equity of the previous year minus equity of today, this means that the usage of fair value leads to a reduction in equity, which must then be written off.
Given the large amount of financial paper held out there, this means that because of IFRS and fair value, and here I am quoting today's Handeslblatt on page 23, banks world-wide have written off no less than 255 billion dollars on value adjustment. The professional organization CFA even says that 55% of responding bankers see the IFRS rules as being responsible for the magnitude of the current problem.
Of course, the IFRS insists that these rules are right and proper, and reflect "reality" better than the old rules, where assets were simply depreciated over time and future receivables discounted to net present value.
The IFRS is wrong, wrong, wrong and did I mention that they are wrong?
If a concern were to be liquidated, then the IFRS interpretation would be correct: however, the IFRS itself says that the fundamental assumption is that when we look at a company, it is always the company as a going concern.
The IFRS interpretation would imply that an investor should "know" the "real" state of the company's finances before making any sort of investment decision, or that the company itself should "know" the "real" state of its receivables, both by acting as if the receivables were to be sold off to realize their current cash value.
That way lies madness.
I cannot underscore this more.
The problem isn't just the current downswing: the real problem will be the next dynamic upswing.
Why?
Because then the companies will revalue their receivables as markets recover and pick up: all of a sudden, companies will report massive increases in profits, vastly improving their equity position, and resulting in a major, major increase in their ... creditworthiness.
Hence companies will be able to increase their borrowings with significantly lower risk premiums.
Which means that the banks will increase their downside risks dramatically when the business cycle turns downward again, forcing them, per IFRS rules, to revalue their assets downwards significantly as the relative risk of the business partner worsens dramatically.
What the IFRS rules really do, in their absurd search for some resemblance of reality, is make it even more difficult for banks and lenders to determine "true" risk: bookkeeping, due to the highly volatile nature of fair value asset revaluation, will make it harder to see the true financial state of the company, as the swings due to asset valuations will overweight these significantly.
This means it will be harder for those who are not financial wizards to actually read a balance statement without being severely misled as to the true profitability of the company.
Now, that is stupidity.
It is what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum: this is the result of not an attempt to make finances more transparent, but rather to satisfy the desires of accountants to give themselves a "better" idea of how the company is doing, and shows how terrible things can happen.
When they don't ask economists how reality actually works. The stupidity of the IFRS and the very, very real damage being done to the economy comes from a fundamental ignorance of how destructive positive feedback loops really are.
If the IFRS simply allowed a secondary valuation of assets, but left straight-line depreciation alone for the purpose of determining profitability, then you'd have at least $255 billion less having been written off. What started out as a sensible internal measure - companies should know if they are facing significant price deterioration for key assets - has become a monster that has the potential for massive destruction.
All in the name of greater transparency. This isn't transparency, it's folly.
But they're accountants. One nasty joke is that economists are only glorified accountants, and I'd even accept that largely, with one caveat: economists are accountants who can actually think.
Sheer and total stupidity, and the destruction of $255 billion.
Even for the US government, that's real money.
Montag, April 21, 2008
Escalatio, Superiority, Usability, Stupidity ... and Danger
After finally having come up a tad for air, I read this.
I'm not going to go into enormous detail, since that'd put most to sleep.
But the author of this, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, are dangerous fellows.
Not so much because they know so much: that's not what makes them dangerous.
Rather, because they are what is called "owls", dedicated disarmament proponents.
Nuclear strategy and thinking about nuclear strategy has gone way, way downhill from the heyday of the Cold War. Hermann Kahn's "Thinking the Unthinkable" desperately needs to be updated and rewritten for the 21st century, but remains the best work in this area, as does Clausewitz (in my thinking, if you haven't read Clausewitz, then you haven't done your homework...).
There are only two reasons for acquiring nuclear weapons. One is the obvious: to use them in a military conflict when you really, really, but really want to hurt someone, regardless of the price. That's the military side, where nuclear weapons are very, very useful when you want to put a lot of hurt on the greatest number.
But nuclear weapons are and remain also political tools. They serve to intimidate, to scare, to show competence (that your country can build them), and they serve to deter. They are the ultimate threat, one that results in the death of millions and destruction of entire cities when used, hence the problem of believability and survivability.
Believability is that you would actually use them. Given the inclination to paint your opponent in the worst possible, preferably sub-human, colors, the mere possession of nuclear weapons gives credence to the idea that you would use them: after all, they are, despite being very useful militarily, rather a pain to acquire, and aren't the result of any sort of benign accident, but rather must be built (barring the ability to buy them).
So, politicians being what they are, they'll believe their own propaganda and believe that the other side will use them under a set of given circumstances. Knowing that these circumstances are enables you to make your own strategic plans to avoid placing your opponent in such circumstances.
Now, that's not always possible...
Survivability was the underlying principle that led to strategic equilibrium: if you couldn't ensure that the other guys' nukes were destroyed, then you didn't start tossing them. Just one of their arriving really ruins your day as commander-in-chief, and hence if you're gonna have any nukes, you need to have them survivable. Otherwise, if the other guy thinks that he can take them out, and it comes to a push-and-shove situation, he will: just like in the move Aliens, the best option is to nuke them from orbit (i.e. destroy them at no risk to yourself...).
Now, the Cold War is over. The US has reduced its arsenal significantly, but at the same time has applied lessons learned with conventional weapons to nuclear weapons, such as increasing accuracy significantly and improving targeting abilities. This has transformed sub-based missiles, previously the core of deterrence (almost impossible to find and capable of busting lots and lots of cities) into a weapon of relative accuracy. They've also moved the yield way up - quadrupling the yield is the same as making the missile 16 times more accurate - and are now approaching the ability to actually surface-hit the target being aimed at, meaning that you're talking about the ability to take out, literally, any hardened target with a single warhead.
You see, the calculus of deterrence established the fact that it took dozens of warheads to ensure that you could take out a single hardened target. Hence the massive numbers of warheads in the inventory during the Cold War: this has not only been reduced, but has actually not become necessary.
What does this imply for escalation theory (what I call escalatio after Tom Lehrer)?
Two things: one, that this makes planning vastly simpler (one shot, one kill), but that it changes the equations significantly. Under the old rules of deterrence, missile defense was "easily" overwhelmed by a saturation attack, but you also had the warheads to spare. Under the new rules, with few warheads, missile defense becomes paramount, since there is no other way to defend: this is important! Your hardened targets are now easily destroyable - nothing can stand being hit 10 meters away by a surface-detonated 15 kton nuke, let alone a 400+ kt nuke - and either you must deter or you must intercept (the folks up above see a third alternative that simply isn't one: launch on warning, which makes nuclear war random, rather than deliberate. No one is going to seriously switch over to launch-on-warning unless there already is a war going on and they are afraid that there will be an attack on their assets: this would include any sort of non-nuclear attack as well, as the end effect is the same. Basic case of "use it or lose it", but I have yet to see a situation where that would occur out of the blue.
Now, this increase in strategic ability - the ability to reach out and touch someone where it really hurts - under the current conditions reflects the fact that the US has, effectively, created a situation of strategic superiority in any major conflict involving classic use of military force. This, on top of the tactical superiority of US troops, means that under the current circumstances, any major conflict will be shortly resolved in the manner most pleasing to the US, with extraordinarily dire circumstances if someone decides to nonetheless go forward with plans to attack US interests despite this knowledge.
What does this mean for usability? Will it be more likely that the US uses nuclear weapons?
Hardly. The weapons are first and foremost political weapons (and if you don't think that is the case, then you're up against more than 60 years of praxis and theory...), and the actual use of nuclear weapons means one of two things: a) that a President really mucked things up and got the US in a situation where the only real alternative would be a significant strategic defeat and b) that a President really mucked things up by letting an opponent believe that the US lacked the political will to use the weapons. Such are the things of Clancy novels.
The authors ut supra talk about various scenarios as well: given the US ability to take out a relatively small nuclear deterrence force (18 ChiCom missiles, each with a single 4MT warhead) with a very, very degree of certainty, this means that the US can, in all likelihood, prevent the Chinese from, say, attacking Taiwan, because they know that they cannot win in a military conflict, even if it fails to go nuclear. They're worried that this means that the Chinese will start an arms race.
That's stupid.
First of all: if the Chinese were to massively expand their nuclear forces, we're back to the days of the Cold War and all which that implies. Unless they reach technical parity with the US - which is not only conceivable, but even likely - the situation remains as it was during the Cold War, a strategic stalemate.
If they were to gain the same ability as the US, then both the US and China have an incentive to ensure a draw-down, as nuclear weapons then lose importance, rather than gain in importance, since there is no such thing as a hardened target any more, merely targets.
But what is really regrettable is that they don't think that US superiority Is A Good Thing.
I've capitalized that for two reasons.
One, nuclear and hence strategic superiority deters wars. Nothing less, nothing more. If China is convinced that the US would come to the aid of a mass attack on Taiwan, then they won't attack Taiwan, regardless of their desire to integrate Taiwan into Greater China, since the costs would be vastly greater than the benefits. Hence: no war.
Second, if the Chinese leadership believed that the US is a paper tiger and won't go to war over Taiwan, the US can disabuse them of this notion very, very quickly by using highly accurate small-yield weapons that removes the Chinese ability to threaten to destroy LA if US carriers enter the China Sea, meaning that the conflict will be carried out over China, not the US, and that Chinese will die, not Americans.
If you don't see the sense of that for any American government, then I strongly question your reasoning abilities.
Now the authors lack imagination: they see only two paths for the Chinese. Either massively deploy new, mobile weapons and warheads, or shift to launch-on-warning.
That is too short-sighted and not Chinese at all (I won't profess to understand the Chinese government, but I have read The Art of War): if the Chinese know that they can't risk military force, then they will try other means, such as political intrigue leading to a breakdown of any independence movement in Taiwan, or explore non-military solutions to their problems and policy goals.
That is where the authors fail to see that a Pax America doesn't mean an end to conflict, but it does mean an end to wars as we have known them. No country is going to go up against the kind of American military force that took apart the Republic Guard in a matter of hours in the middle of a sandstorm: that way lies destruction.
So if you are opposed to US policies and operations, you go after US interests in other ways: guerrilla war, economic warfare, assassination, covert operations, etc. Which, of course, is what we are currently seeing in the Middle East.
Again: US nuclear and strategic superiority means that no one will challenge the US here: they will challenge the US in many, many other ways, and will ensure that there will be no targets for the US to hit. That is, however, a completely different topic altogether.
What makes these two fellows dangerous is that if the US were to further disarm as they would have it - scrapping the most advanced weapons, rather than the oldest and least useful - this would make war more likely, and not less: it would aid US opponents, reducing US opportunities and tactics, reducing the ability of the US government to take the war to the enemy by using, in their example, 50 low-yield warheads to destroy the Chinese ability to kill 18 US cities with something on the order of 100mn people.
That'd be a better situation?
To quote the authors ut supra: reducing US superiority would weaken ...
... U.S. coercive leverage in crises involving nuclear-armed adversaries, and they would leave future presidents who find themselves in dire circumstances with few palatable counterforce options—meaning options that wouldn't kill millions of civilians. On the other hand, these steps might avert an arms race with China and prevent a dangerous spiraling of events during a crisis.
That is an academic trade-off at best and sheer stupidity at worst.
Giving up the concrete abilities of preventing any sort of war for the mere possibility of avoiding an arms race with China and preventing a war during a crisis is a demonstrably bad idea.
They're not trying to think the unthinkable, but rather arguing for the inarguable.
I'm not going to go into enormous detail, since that'd put most to sleep.
But the author of this, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, are dangerous fellows.
Not so much because they know so much: that's not what makes them dangerous.
Rather, because they are what is called "owls", dedicated disarmament proponents.
Nuclear strategy and thinking about nuclear strategy has gone way, way downhill from the heyday of the Cold War. Hermann Kahn's "Thinking the Unthinkable" desperately needs to be updated and rewritten for the 21st century, but remains the best work in this area, as does Clausewitz (in my thinking, if you haven't read Clausewitz, then you haven't done your homework...).
There are only two reasons for acquiring nuclear weapons. One is the obvious: to use them in a military conflict when you really, really, but really want to hurt someone, regardless of the price. That's the military side, where nuclear weapons are very, very useful when you want to put a lot of hurt on the greatest number.
But nuclear weapons are and remain also political tools. They serve to intimidate, to scare, to show competence (that your country can build them), and they serve to deter. They are the ultimate threat, one that results in the death of millions and destruction of entire cities when used, hence the problem of believability and survivability.
Believability is that you would actually use them. Given the inclination to paint your opponent in the worst possible, preferably sub-human, colors, the mere possession of nuclear weapons gives credence to the idea that you would use them: after all, they are, despite being very useful militarily, rather a pain to acquire, and aren't the result of any sort of benign accident, but rather must be built (barring the ability to buy them).
So, politicians being what they are, they'll believe their own propaganda and believe that the other side will use them under a set of given circumstances. Knowing that these circumstances are enables you to make your own strategic plans to avoid placing your opponent in such circumstances.
Now, that's not always possible...
Survivability was the underlying principle that led to strategic equilibrium: if you couldn't ensure that the other guys' nukes were destroyed, then you didn't start tossing them. Just one of their arriving really ruins your day as commander-in-chief, and hence if you're gonna have any nukes, you need to have them survivable. Otherwise, if the other guy thinks that he can take them out, and it comes to a push-and-shove situation, he will: just like in the move Aliens, the best option is to nuke them from orbit (i.e. destroy them at no risk to yourself...).
Now, the Cold War is over. The US has reduced its arsenal significantly, but at the same time has applied lessons learned with conventional weapons to nuclear weapons, such as increasing accuracy significantly and improving targeting abilities. This has transformed sub-based missiles, previously the core of deterrence (almost impossible to find and capable of busting lots and lots of cities) into a weapon of relative accuracy. They've also moved the yield way up - quadrupling the yield is the same as making the missile 16 times more accurate - and are now approaching the ability to actually surface-hit the target being aimed at, meaning that you're talking about the ability to take out, literally, any hardened target with a single warhead.
You see, the calculus of deterrence established the fact that it took dozens of warheads to ensure that you could take out a single hardened target. Hence the massive numbers of warheads in the inventory during the Cold War: this has not only been reduced, but has actually not become necessary.
What does this imply for escalation theory (what I call escalatio after Tom Lehrer)?
Two things: one, that this makes planning vastly simpler (one shot, one kill), but that it changes the equations significantly. Under the old rules of deterrence, missile defense was "easily" overwhelmed by a saturation attack, but you also had the warheads to spare. Under the new rules, with few warheads, missile defense becomes paramount, since there is no other way to defend: this is important! Your hardened targets are now easily destroyable - nothing can stand being hit 10 meters away by a surface-detonated 15 kton nuke, let alone a 400+ kt nuke - and either you must deter or you must intercept (the folks up above see a third alternative that simply isn't one: launch on warning, which makes nuclear war random, rather than deliberate. No one is going to seriously switch over to launch-on-warning unless there already is a war going on and they are afraid that there will be an attack on their assets: this would include any sort of non-nuclear attack as well, as the end effect is the same. Basic case of "use it or lose it", but I have yet to see a situation where that would occur out of the blue.
Now, this increase in strategic ability - the ability to reach out and touch someone where it really hurts - under the current conditions reflects the fact that the US has, effectively, created a situation of strategic superiority in any major conflict involving classic use of military force. This, on top of the tactical superiority of US troops, means that under the current circumstances, any major conflict will be shortly resolved in the manner most pleasing to the US, with extraordinarily dire circumstances if someone decides to nonetheless go forward with plans to attack US interests despite this knowledge.
What does this mean for usability? Will it be more likely that the US uses nuclear weapons?
Hardly. The weapons are first and foremost political weapons (and if you don't think that is the case, then you're up against more than 60 years of praxis and theory...), and the actual use of nuclear weapons means one of two things: a) that a President really mucked things up and got the US in a situation where the only real alternative would be a significant strategic defeat and b) that a President really mucked things up by letting an opponent believe that the US lacked the political will to use the weapons. Such are the things of Clancy novels.
The authors ut supra talk about various scenarios as well: given the US ability to take out a relatively small nuclear deterrence force (18 ChiCom missiles, each with a single 4MT warhead) with a very, very degree of certainty, this means that the US can, in all likelihood, prevent the Chinese from, say, attacking Taiwan, because they know that they cannot win in a military conflict, even if it fails to go nuclear. They're worried that this means that the Chinese will start an arms race.
That's stupid.
First of all: if the Chinese were to massively expand their nuclear forces, we're back to the days of the Cold War and all which that implies. Unless they reach technical parity with the US - which is not only conceivable, but even likely - the situation remains as it was during the Cold War, a strategic stalemate.
If they were to gain the same ability as the US, then both the US and China have an incentive to ensure a draw-down, as nuclear weapons then lose importance, rather than gain in importance, since there is no such thing as a hardened target any more, merely targets.
But what is really regrettable is that they don't think that US superiority Is A Good Thing.
I've capitalized that for two reasons.
One, nuclear and hence strategic superiority deters wars. Nothing less, nothing more. If China is convinced that the US would come to the aid of a mass attack on Taiwan, then they won't attack Taiwan, regardless of their desire to integrate Taiwan into Greater China, since the costs would be vastly greater than the benefits. Hence: no war.
Second, if the Chinese leadership believed that the US is a paper tiger and won't go to war over Taiwan, the US can disabuse them of this notion very, very quickly by using highly accurate small-yield weapons that removes the Chinese ability to threaten to destroy LA if US carriers enter the China Sea, meaning that the conflict will be carried out over China, not the US, and that Chinese will die, not Americans.
If you don't see the sense of that for any American government, then I strongly question your reasoning abilities.
Now the authors lack imagination: they see only two paths for the Chinese. Either massively deploy new, mobile weapons and warheads, or shift to launch-on-warning.
That is too short-sighted and not Chinese at all (I won't profess to understand the Chinese government, but I have read The Art of War): if the Chinese know that they can't risk military force, then they will try other means, such as political intrigue leading to a breakdown of any independence movement in Taiwan, or explore non-military solutions to their problems and policy goals.
That is where the authors fail to see that a Pax America doesn't mean an end to conflict, but it does mean an end to wars as we have known them. No country is going to go up against the kind of American military force that took apart the Republic Guard in a matter of hours in the middle of a sandstorm: that way lies destruction.
So if you are opposed to US policies and operations, you go after US interests in other ways: guerrilla war, economic warfare, assassination, covert operations, etc. Which, of course, is what we are currently seeing in the Middle East.
Again: US nuclear and strategic superiority means that no one will challenge the US here: they will challenge the US in many, many other ways, and will ensure that there will be no targets for the US to hit. That is, however, a completely different topic altogether.
What makes these two fellows dangerous is that if the US were to further disarm as they would have it - scrapping the most advanced weapons, rather than the oldest and least useful - this would make war more likely, and not less: it would aid US opponents, reducing US opportunities and tactics, reducing the ability of the US government to take the war to the enemy by using, in their example, 50 low-yield warheads to destroy the Chinese ability to kill 18 US cities with something on the order of 100mn people.
That'd be a better situation?
To quote the authors ut supra: reducing US superiority would weaken ...
... U.S. coercive leverage in crises involving nuclear-armed adversaries, and they would leave future presidents who find themselves in dire circumstances with few palatable counterforce options—meaning options that wouldn't kill millions of civilians. On the other hand, these steps might avert an arms race with China and prevent a dangerous spiraling of events during a crisis.
That is an academic trade-off at best and sheer stupidity at worst.
Giving up the concrete abilities of preventing any sort of war for the mere possibility of avoiding an arms race with China and preventing a war during a crisis is a demonstrably bad idea.
They're not trying to think the unthinkable, but rather arguing for the inarguable.
Sonntag, April 20, 2008
Market Transparency, Inefficiency and Limitations...
I'm what the foto industry calls "advanced amateur", which means that a) I've got some money and b) I actually bother to read manuals. I used to have my own darkroom, still own a rather expensive Pentax 67 system, and have gone through a couple of digital cameras trying to figure out which one I really want and can justify spending a chunk of money on.
One of the premier makers, of course, is Nikon. Now, Nikon lost me as a customer by insisting that I cough up money for something that was their fault, but I think I'm objective enough not to be snarky about them. I've used their cameras in the past, and they are excellent: you don't get to their status by building junk (of course, the camera I bought my daughter for Christmas from Nikon a few years ago doesn't work either, but that's another story. Their Pro stuff is top-notch).
Now, the web makes markets transparent: you can be in Germany and find out what something costs in the US, for instance, very simply, and you can quickly find all sorts of objective and subjective reviews across the board for virtually any item you want to buy. That's a good thing, informs the consumer, and an informed consumer is the economist's best friend, since they tend to make rational decisions. That's why manufacturers aren't too keen on them, usually, since rational thought and advertising expenditures usually show a negative correlation.
Nikon has a new model out, the D3. Lovely camera, people who have them rave about them.
But let's look at list prices.
In the US: $4999
In the UK: 3399 Pounds Sterling
In the EU: €5180
That gives me...a dollar exchange rate of just a tad less than $1.04 for 1 €, roughly 68 pence gets you one dollar, and the pound is worth roughly €1.52.
And this resembles current exchange rates of ... roughly $1.60 per €, around 50 pence gets you a dollar, and the Pound is ca €1.26.
So, either Nikon is deliberately pricing low in the US, or it is making money hand and foot in the UK and within the EU.
The real story is that it is doing both.
Nikon has a leverage that distorts the true market. If the market were completely efficient, then no one would buy a camera in Europe: they'd buy one in the US, paying more than €2000 less or a discount of no less than 37%.
Now, normally the camera would also be discounted, but in this case - new and desireable - there are little or no discounts available (even online at the best NYC camera stores, B+H and Adorama), but even so: a 37% discount.
Normally, no one would buy their camera in the UK or London.
Unfortunately for the consumer, Nikon can distort its market. The usual justification is that the cost of doing business in Europe is higher, and I will give them that: but 37%? Okay, you do have your VAT driving prices up for the consumer as well, and let's drop 20% of the price right there: that still leaves us with a 17% difference.
It is not 17% more expensive to operate in Europe than it is in the US - remember, we have already factored out VAT - and the question then arises: how does Nikon get away with this?
It's simple: consumer preferences and market fragmentation.
While I'd be comfortable dropping that much money online and having it sent to me, there are plenty of consumers who prefer to go to camera stores and buy brick-and-mortar. Given that photography is both a relatively expensive and a relatively technical hobby, many prefer to have a good working relationship with such a store to get advice, and are willing to pay for it in the form of paying retail. That's fine, that would probabyl explain most of the voluntary decision to go with a high-cost retail channel purchase.
But the rest are screwed: Nikon - and this is nothing unique among international manufacturers - has successfully fragmented what should be a monolithic market. How do they do this?
By controlling the retail channels, via delivery of product and by guarantee limitations. Again, this is nothing new: what is new is that it is now easily visible and that the web allows us to see it in action.
Nikon - and others - control their retail channels very carefully: while they have high-volume discounters who move lots of equipment, their "true" customers, the high-value customers, are the classic photo-shop retail outlets, largely privately owned, with a couple of larger operations that may have shops in a dozen cities or less. This is where folks pay retail and where the highest profit margins are found: if anything, this retail channel is, for Nikon, more profitable than discount channels, despite the larger volume of business.
Delivery is, of course, critical to the retailers: if you don't have the equipment to sell, you can't sell it. Manufacturers police, as it were, these channels to prevent price competition: drop prices too much and you will no longer receive deliveries, and Nikon may refuse to sell to you at all. This is what stops major sales outlets in the US, for instance, in selling more than a handful of cameras to Europeans; if they were to undermine Nikon's price politics in the EU, they'd no longer have equipment to sell. At the prices we're talking about, it would behoove someone wanting to spend that much money to get on a plane, fly to New York, buy the camera, bring it back, pay duty, and they'd still be less expensive than buying it from the corner camera store.
How does Nikon deal with these folks? Simple: warranties. Buy the camera in New York, and you'll have to send it to the US to have work done on it. For a disposable item, not a problem, but for a $5000 camera? Too much risk.
So, I'll end here: you've seen how markets can be transparent, how they can become inefficient for consumers (but very efficient for sellers), and there are always limitations to markets that reflect unique structures and developments.
And I use Olympus equipment, have done so since 1973.
One of the premier makers, of course, is Nikon. Now, Nikon lost me as a customer by insisting that I cough up money for something that was their fault, but I think I'm objective enough not to be snarky about them. I've used their cameras in the past, and they are excellent: you don't get to their status by building junk (of course, the camera I bought my daughter for Christmas from Nikon a few years ago doesn't work either, but that's another story. Their Pro stuff is top-notch).
Now, the web makes markets transparent: you can be in Germany and find out what something costs in the US, for instance, very simply, and you can quickly find all sorts of objective and subjective reviews across the board for virtually any item you want to buy. That's a good thing, informs the consumer, and an informed consumer is the economist's best friend, since they tend to make rational decisions. That's why manufacturers aren't too keen on them, usually, since rational thought and advertising expenditures usually show a negative correlation.
Nikon has a new model out, the D3. Lovely camera, people who have them rave about them.
But let's look at list prices.
In the US: $4999
In the UK: 3399 Pounds Sterling
In the EU: €5180
That gives me...a dollar exchange rate of just a tad less than $1.04 for 1 €, roughly 68 pence gets you one dollar, and the pound is worth roughly €1.52.
And this resembles current exchange rates of ... roughly $1.60 per €, around 50 pence gets you a dollar, and the Pound is ca €1.26.
So, either Nikon is deliberately pricing low in the US, or it is making money hand and foot in the UK and within the EU.
The real story is that it is doing both.
Nikon has a leverage that distorts the true market. If the market were completely efficient, then no one would buy a camera in Europe: they'd buy one in the US, paying more than €2000 less or a discount of no less than 37%.
Now, normally the camera would also be discounted, but in this case - new and desireable - there are little or no discounts available (even online at the best NYC camera stores, B+H and Adorama), but even so: a 37% discount.
Normally, no one would buy their camera in the UK or London.
Unfortunately for the consumer, Nikon can distort its market. The usual justification is that the cost of doing business in Europe is higher, and I will give them that: but 37%? Okay, you do have your VAT driving prices up for the consumer as well, and let's drop 20% of the price right there: that still leaves us with a 17% difference.
It is not 17% more expensive to operate in Europe than it is in the US - remember, we have already factored out VAT - and the question then arises: how does Nikon get away with this?
It's simple: consumer preferences and market fragmentation.
While I'd be comfortable dropping that much money online and having it sent to me, there are plenty of consumers who prefer to go to camera stores and buy brick-and-mortar. Given that photography is both a relatively expensive and a relatively technical hobby, many prefer to have a good working relationship with such a store to get advice, and are willing to pay for it in the form of paying retail. That's fine, that would probabyl explain most of the voluntary decision to go with a high-cost retail channel purchase.
But the rest are screwed: Nikon - and this is nothing unique among international manufacturers - has successfully fragmented what should be a monolithic market. How do they do this?
By controlling the retail channels, via delivery of product and by guarantee limitations. Again, this is nothing new: what is new is that it is now easily visible and that the web allows us to see it in action.
Nikon - and others - control their retail channels very carefully: while they have high-volume discounters who move lots of equipment, their "true" customers, the high-value customers, are the classic photo-shop retail outlets, largely privately owned, with a couple of larger operations that may have shops in a dozen cities or less. This is where folks pay retail and where the highest profit margins are found: if anything, this retail channel is, for Nikon, more profitable than discount channels, despite the larger volume of business.
Delivery is, of course, critical to the retailers: if you don't have the equipment to sell, you can't sell it. Manufacturers police, as it were, these channels to prevent price competition: drop prices too much and you will no longer receive deliveries, and Nikon may refuse to sell to you at all. This is what stops major sales outlets in the US, for instance, in selling more than a handful of cameras to Europeans; if they were to undermine Nikon's price politics in the EU, they'd no longer have equipment to sell. At the prices we're talking about, it would behoove someone wanting to spend that much money to get on a plane, fly to New York, buy the camera, bring it back, pay duty, and they'd still be less expensive than buying it from the corner camera store.
How does Nikon deal with these folks? Simple: warranties. Buy the camera in New York, and you'll have to send it to the US to have work done on it. For a disposable item, not a problem, but for a $5000 camera? Too much risk.
So, I'll end here: you've seen how markets can be transparent, how they can become inefficient for consumers (but very efficient for sellers), and there are always limitations to markets that reflect unique structures and developments.
And I use Olympus equipment, have done so since 1973.
Donnerstag, April 17, 2008
Wiki and the Truth...
This is/was an interesting read on Wikipedia and accuracy.
One of the big problems with the environmental movement is that they are so completely convinced that they are right that they are almost incapable of recognizing legitimate criticism, preferring to stick to their dogma and hiding behind "peer review, peer review" mantra, ignoring the problem of peer review corruption (where peer review becomes meaningless because all in the peer group have a vested interest in maintaining a fiction: don't pretend it doesn't happen).
Peer review corruption is a problem, not merely in this specific case, but for science in general (see this), and while there isn't that much that can be done by those outside of the peer group - which in and of itself is also a problem when, for instance, a peer group fails to spot abuse of statistical methods because there is no professional statistician available within the peer group - there is a case for making the peer review process more transparent and positive.
But the real problem that can be seen in the first link here, to the article on how a Wikipedia author actively refuses to correct something wrong because it would be politically damaging.
To quote a Wikipedia admin involved:
Most of the controversy is contrived to further a political, ideological agenda; I don't see any reason we should help them by perpetuating it.
I dare say that a significant amount of work on anthropogenic global warming fits exactly this description as well: we have seen that Mann et al created data to fit their conclusions by using algorithms that always reported similar results, even fed with random numbers and who, to date, have refused to publish their methodologies; we've seen that there is a systemic upwards bias of reporting stations due to urbanization of the recording stations over time; there is a continuing and ongoing problem with extreme statistical malfeasance when using proxies and creating unitary temperature time series over time; further, that critical voices within the IPCC have been effectively silenced and ignored from day one.
If environmentalists want to receive massive funding for their pet projects based on anthropogenic global warming theories, then they must provide analysis that is at least as believable as the pre-war intelligence research on Iraqi attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Up to now they have failed to do so.
One of the big problems with the environmental movement is that they are so completely convinced that they are right that they are almost incapable of recognizing legitimate criticism, preferring to stick to their dogma and hiding behind "peer review, peer review" mantra, ignoring the problem of peer review corruption (where peer review becomes meaningless because all in the peer group have a vested interest in maintaining a fiction: don't pretend it doesn't happen).
Peer review corruption is a problem, not merely in this specific case, but for science in general (see this), and while there isn't that much that can be done by those outside of the peer group - which in and of itself is also a problem when, for instance, a peer group fails to spot abuse of statistical methods because there is no professional statistician available within the peer group - there is a case for making the peer review process more transparent and positive.
But the real problem that can be seen in the first link here, to the article on how a Wikipedia author actively refuses to correct something wrong because it would be politically damaging.
To quote a Wikipedia admin involved:
Most of the controversy is contrived to further a political, ideological agenda; I don't see any reason we should help them by perpetuating it.
I dare say that a significant amount of work on anthropogenic global warming fits exactly this description as well: we have seen that Mann et al created data to fit their conclusions by using algorithms that always reported similar results, even fed with random numbers and who, to date, have refused to publish their methodologies; we've seen that there is a systemic upwards bias of reporting stations due to urbanization of the recording stations over time; there is a continuing and ongoing problem with extreme statistical malfeasance when using proxies and creating unitary temperature time series over time; further, that critical voices within the IPCC have been effectively silenced and ignored from day one.
If environmentalists want to receive massive funding for their pet projects based on anthropogenic global warming theories, then they must provide analysis that is at least as believable as the pre-war intelligence research on Iraqi attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Up to now they have failed to do so.
Dienstag, April 08, 2008
On Strategy...A Simple Reminder
Been offline the last few days, as reality intruded...as it does every once in a while.
This is for your consideration, a simple reminder of the problems we are facing in the next election cycle. You can download it at the link, I've taken the liberty to quote it here.
Lt. Col. Nathan Freier (that's him here) has written an insightful and relevant opinion editorial from the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College that I think bears greater reading. I'm going to comment on it as well, but this is not a fisking: it is an anti-fisking.
An honest survey of post-Cold War national security policy exhibits a dangerous
strategy deficit. The word "strategy" is overused. The concept, too, is poorly applied. It
is many things to contemporary policymakers except, well—strategy. In the current
environment, strategic communications and strategy have become synonymous.
Here lies the crux: strategy has ceased to be strategy, but rather has become degraded and largely meaningless. Let me expound on that: everyone "knows" what strategy is all about, but because they don't really understand the difference between the two - strategic communications (in the broadest sense) and strategy itself - people confuse the two.
Strategic communications is the carefully crafted but overly general and widely
consumable articulation of key political messages—"assure, deter, dissuade, defeat";
"as they stand up, we'll stand down"; "clear, hold, build"; "phased strategic
redeployment"; etc, etc, etc. It is strategy by façade versus strategy through effective,
deliberate investment of intellectual, temporal, material, and human capital in pursuit
of well-defined outcomes.
Bingo, bingo, bingo: it is what for me is a recurring theme on this blog, that of the confusion between reality and rhetoric, of the problem of modern-day sophists and the culture of deception.
Let's look at his definition of strategy to understand the difference: effective, deliberate investment of intellectual, temporal, material and human capital in pursuit of well-defined outcomes.
This is in contrast to his definition of strategic communications: the articulation of key political messages.
So what is the difference? It's the difference of walking the walk and talking the talk, to put it in a popular phrase. Strategy is laying out the goal and how to get there: strategic communications is about saying what you want.
So far, so good.
Real strategy is the reasoned determination of specific, minimum essential objectives, rationalized with suitable ways to achieve them and the necessary means for success. No careful observer of executive decisionmaking since the end of the Cold War believes the latter high bar to be the norm.
Ouch. Of course not: strategy today is the realm of the amateur. It is, has been, and under the US constitution will remain the perogative of the President of the United States to determine strategy. The senior military should be the ones who listen and understand the President, but form the strategy based on broad goals. They have, however, been usurped by what I am going to cruelly call "wannabes", those that want to be the great strategists, but lack, more often than not, even the roughest idea of military strategy. I think this trend started back with Carter and his "outsiders": he came, after all, to Washington as a deliberate outsider, and promptly alienated his professionals by bringing in politically astute but inept people.
This didn't start with Carter: it's been, in many ways, the hallmark of US presidents since, roughly, the immediate post-revolutionary war period. It's just that during and after Vietnam - where the President (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all, if to a varying degree) got his strategic advice from the professional military - it was possible to place the blame for what was, fundamentally, a political defeat at the feet of the military and not only get away with this, but actually further your career by doing so. Having military officers move up into political assignments - Gen. Haig under Nixon - was also a professional error for the entire officer corps, in my (admittedly non-military) opinion: by becoming a bad politician, he helped tarnish the reputation of the US officer corps, reducing the reputation of that group in the eyes of political pundits and hence the public.
A fundamental component of strategy development is rational risk assessment. Risk—viewed as the likelihood of hazard in pursuit of objectives or the likelihood and consequences of failure—injects realism into strategy. Risk calculation offers decisionmakers the opportunity to see that both action and inaction engender costs—lives, money, time, freedom of action, political flexibility, loss of opportunities, etc. Costs accumulate.
Now this I like: professionally, I do risk analysis for industrial development, and it is used by clients for portfolio management (and internally we manage more money than I can even understand...).
Costs do accumulate. Let me take that risk analysis one step further: risk has everything to do with uncertainty. In Rumsfeld's words, they're all the factors: the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. The first two you can quantify and account for: the third is, per definitio, unknown. But establishing a risk framework can help enormously in exploring that realm: especially if you have a framework, a model, of known interdependencies and known relationships. If you find something not behaving according to these two, you have discovered that you now know an unknown...
When unaccounted for in decisionmaking, costs quickly and unexpectedly become excessive. Rational risk assessment also allows for the judicious consideration of the prospects and price of failure. Clearly, accounting for both the possibility of failure and the certainty of real cost forces decisionmakers to deliberately consider alternative courses of action. The contemporary temptation to mistake strategic communications for strategy short-circuits the aforementioned process. Rhetoric vice realism defines strategic outcomes. Once embedded in the public narrative of presidents, cabinet secretaries, and sympathetic pundits, these outcomes are not only absolute and nonnegotiable, but also, at the same time, excessively imprecise and
unachievable.
This is fundamentally true in terms of portfolio analysis: it behooves you to get out of high risk and low reward situations, unless you have a specific reason for being there (which of course changes it from high risk/low reward to high risk/high reward).
Identifying risks doesn't prohibit specific policy choices. Rather, it frames them in an
appropriate context. Without prudent evaluation of risk, the nation hazards embarking
down blind alleys with little thoughtful consideration for "Plan B." The conduct of the
Iraq War has been a clinic in this regard. The Iraq War proceeded in the absence of a
governing grand strategy and persistently fails to live up to expectations as a result.
Ouch. But so true: one of the major complaints that can be made against the left in modern America is a constantly shifting set of expectations as what is acceptable. When the US destroyed the government of Iraq during that brief conflict, the military reached its objectives and Bush claimed, properly so, "Mission Accomplished". It's just that this was not the only mission, and that the mission changed as that happened, one from destroying an organized military force to one of learning how to rebuild a country not merely damaged from a brief conflict, but one that had been repeatedly abused and was, effectively, a failed state even before the conflict began.
This is sadly unexceptional in recent American history. It is no accident that American
activism in the post-Cold War era has demonstrated limited enduring success. Intervention
in Somalia, peacekeeping in the Balkans, "Dual Containment," the domestic
response to September 11, 2001 (9/11), the War on Terrorism, confronting the "Axis of
Evil," stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, and even Gulf Coast reconstruction all exhibit
one common feature. Each is marked by some significant disappointment or
indeterminacy. The form of each originated less from holistic strategic net and risk
assessment than from political instinct or impulse; and all—though individually either
essential or noble—proceeded without rational consideration of strategic context,
course, and risk.
Perhaps it is the policy of the United States to not have a strategic policy, just as it has been the policy of the United States not to have an industrial policy. But that is the rhetoric: the reality is much, much different.
The United States has pursued "strategy by exception" for 17 years.
To put it slightly differently: the United States has had no real, effective strategy since the collapse of Soviet Socialism. We defined ourselves too much as the opponents of the system, and while Bush 41 talked of a "New World Order" that could have developed into a new strategic mission for the United States, he lost that election and we got Clinton instead, the master of rhetoric and sophistry, the man who had absolutely no clue of the difference between Strategy and strategic communications, despite being quite good at the latter.
Seemingly awash in confidence and resources, American politicos persistently mistake raw capacity for infallibility. Yet, the secure maintenance of American position often benefits
more from careful calculation and premeditation than brashness. The latter, however, is
far more common. Today, there is no real strategy in effect befitting the security of a
singular superpower in an "all-hazards" environment. There is only the façade of
strategy—strategic communications without substance.
It's not so much awash in confidence and resources, but the simple fact that we won the Cold War. We didn't exhaust ourselves doing so, but the problem was that when you have made your career defeating someone, and win, then what do you do? The political pundits and politicians of the day started spending the Peace Dividend - which existed only in their feverish dreams - almost immediately without even thinking about the future. The end of the Cold War meant that the world wasn't safer (OK, the threat of global thermonuclear war was gone, but that was part of the game that was then over), but rather more dangerous. The West and the Soviets had played their power games in the Third World, fueling and dampening conflicts there as desired, but having the money dry up in the wake of the Soviet collapse didn't mean the conflicts were gone, but rather that they were now free from interference.
To re-iterate: the end of the Cold War meant that the world exchanged one danger, one risk, for another, but one that the politicians and pundits ignored entirely, as their focus was on the Great Game as well. Just because the West won the Cold War doesn't, didn't and never will mean that conflicts of all types cease and that a golden era will break out: but that is exactly what the pundits and politicians preached, greedy to get their hands on resources to buy votes.
There is no strategy visible in US politics today.
To be sure, presidents fulfill their legal obligation to articulate the National Security
Strategy on a semi-regular basis. Likewise, the president and individual executive
departments make periodic vision statements in functional areas of responsibility like
National Defense, the War in Iraq, Terrorism, Cyber Security, etc. All, however, are
heavy on themes and messages and light on detail. None can purport to involve the
detailed articulation of achievable, minimum essential ends, the balanced adjudication
of ways and means, and a thorough analysis of the risks associated with action and/or
inaction. Yet, meeting this high standard is critical to securing the national interest in an
era of extreme peril, enormous opportunity, and finite resources.
Bingo. Vision statements are exactly that: visions. These can be the vision of the City On The Hill, or they can be visions from the wrong kind of mushrooms. The leftist rhetoric of how the military prolonged the Cold War by inventing threats appeared to have been vindicated, since the Soviets were shown to be a paper tiger (which the left had, to a certain extent, claimed all along), but this is ignoring the fact that you have to have a real tiger to find out if the other side is real or made of paper.
When their party is in power, partisan gadflies will argue there is more to national
strategy than meets the public eye—strategic communications is simply the icing on a
larger, more carefully prepared national security cake. They should know better. There
is a saying in government—"policy isn't made, it accumulates." The same is true for
strategy. To the extent more substance exists, it is buried under a blizzard of
memoranda and PowerPoint presentations across dozens of government agencies.
None of it exists with the benefit of high-level integration. Today, national strategy is
not the product of reason and grand deliberation. Rather, it results from the incremental,
issue-specific accumulation of small decisions. Few of these decisions can claim origins
in a detailed, risk-informed strategic design. Thus, the second- and third-order
implications of each individual decision lie unconsidered and the prospects of failure or
excessive cost are consistently unaddressed.
This is the triumph of the sophist, the victory of the Cult of Deception: burying reality and wrapping its ghost in a tissue of rhetoric.
We are where we are in the world. Blame the strategy deficit. As America's
ambitious and influential gather for another cycle of national debate and political
renewal, it would serve them well to rebalance the relationship between what is truly
strategy and what is rhetoric without substance. The former is elemental to securing the
nation's position and interests. The latter is a clear path to unmet expectations, excessive
cost, and failure.
At this point, I'll become clearly partisan and say that the only candidate that can even understand this problem is John McCain. And a President Obama would make Carter look like a senior statesman in comparison.
This is for your consideration, a simple reminder of the problems we are facing in the next election cycle. You can download it at the link, I've taken the liberty to quote it here.
Lt. Col. Nathan Freier (that's him here) has written an insightful and relevant opinion editorial from the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College that I think bears greater reading. I'm going to comment on it as well, but this is not a fisking: it is an anti-fisking.
An honest survey of post-Cold War national security policy exhibits a dangerous
strategy deficit. The word "strategy" is overused. The concept, too, is poorly applied. It
is many things to contemporary policymakers except, well—strategy. In the current
environment, strategic communications and strategy have become synonymous.
Here lies the crux: strategy has ceased to be strategy, but rather has become degraded and largely meaningless. Let me expound on that: everyone "knows" what strategy is all about, but because they don't really understand the difference between the two - strategic communications (in the broadest sense) and strategy itself - people confuse the two.
Strategic communications is the carefully crafted but overly general and widely
consumable articulation of key political messages—"assure, deter, dissuade, defeat";
"as they stand up, we'll stand down"; "clear, hold, build"; "phased strategic
redeployment"; etc, etc, etc. It is strategy by façade versus strategy through effective,
deliberate investment of intellectual, temporal, material, and human capital in pursuit
of well-defined outcomes.
Bingo, bingo, bingo: it is what for me is a recurring theme on this blog, that of the confusion between reality and rhetoric, of the problem of modern-day sophists and the culture of deception.
Let's look at his definition of strategy to understand the difference: effective, deliberate investment of intellectual, temporal, material and human capital in pursuit of well-defined outcomes.
This is in contrast to his definition of strategic communications: the articulation of key political messages.
So what is the difference? It's the difference of walking the walk and talking the talk, to put it in a popular phrase. Strategy is laying out the goal and how to get there: strategic communications is about saying what you want.
So far, so good.
Real strategy is the reasoned determination of specific, minimum essential objectives, rationalized with suitable ways to achieve them and the necessary means for success. No careful observer of executive decisionmaking since the end of the Cold War believes the latter high bar to be the norm.
Ouch. Of course not: strategy today is the realm of the amateur. It is, has been, and under the US constitution will remain the perogative of the President of the United States to determine strategy. The senior military should be the ones who listen and understand the President, but form the strategy based on broad goals. They have, however, been usurped by what I am going to cruelly call "wannabes", those that want to be the great strategists, but lack, more often than not, even the roughest idea of military strategy. I think this trend started back with Carter and his "outsiders": he came, after all, to Washington as a deliberate outsider, and promptly alienated his professionals by bringing in politically astute but inept people.
This didn't start with Carter: it's been, in many ways, the hallmark of US presidents since, roughly, the immediate post-revolutionary war period. It's just that during and after Vietnam - where the President (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all, if to a varying degree) got his strategic advice from the professional military - it was possible to place the blame for what was, fundamentally, a political defeat at the feet of the military and not only get away with this, but actually further your career by doing so. Having military officers move up into political assignments - Gen. Haig under Nixon - was also a professional error for the entire officer corps, in my (admittedly non-military) opinion: by becoming a bad politician, he helped tarnish the reputation of the US officer corps, reducing the reputation of that group in the eyes of political pundits and hence the public.
A fundamental component of strategy development is rational risk assessment. Risk—viewed as the likelihood of hazard in pursuit of objectives or the likelihood and consequences of failure—injects realism into strategy. Risk calculation offers decisionmakers the opportunity to see that both action and inaction engender costs—lives, money, time, freedom of action, political flexibility, loss of opportunities, etc. Costs accumulate.
Now this I like: professionally, I do risk analysis for industrial development, and it is used by clients for portfolio management (and internally we manage more money than I can even understand...).
Costs do accumulate. Let me take that risk analysis one step further: risk has everything to do with uncertainty. In Rumsfeld's words, they're all the factors: the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. The first two you can quantify and account for: the third is, per definitio, unknown. But establishing a risk framework can help enormously in exploring that realm: especially if you have a framework, a model, of known interdependencies and known relationships. If you find something not behaving according to these two, you have discovered that you now know an unknown...
When unaccounted for in decisionmaking, costs quickly and unexpectedly become excessive. Rational risk assessment also allows for the judicious consideration of the prospects and price of failure. Clearly, accounting for both the possibility of failure and the certainty of real cost forces decisionmakers to deliberately consider alternative courses of action. The contemporary temptation to mistake strategic communications for strategy short-circuits the aforementioned process. Rhetoric vice realism defines strategic outcomes. Once embedded in the public narrative of presidents, cabinet secretaries, and sympathetic pundits, these outcomes are not only absolute and nonnegotiable, but also, at the same time, excessively imprecise and
unachievable.
This is fundamentally true in terms of portfolio analysis: it behooves you to get out of high risk and low reward situations, unless you have a specific reason for being there (which of course changes it from high risk/low reward to high risk/high reward).
Identifying risks doesn't prohibit specific policy choices. Rather, it frames them in an
appropriate context. Without prudent evaluation of risk, the nation hazards embarking
down blind alleys with little thoughtful consideration for "Plan B." The conduct of the
Iraq War has been a clinic in this regard. The Iraq War proceeded in the absence of a
governing grand strategy and persistently fails to live up to expectations as a result.
Ouch. But so true: one of the major complaints that can be made against the left in modern America is a constantly shifting set of expectations as what is acceptable. When the US destroyed the government of Iraq during that brief conflict, the military reached its objectives and Bush claimed, properly so, "Mission Accomplished". It's just that this was not the only mission, and that the mission changed as that happened, one from destroying an organized military force to one of learning how to rebuild a country not merely damaged from a brief conflict, but one that had been repeatedly abused and was, effectively, a failed state even before the conflict began.
This is sadly unexceptional in recent American history. It is no accident that American
activism in the post-Cold War era has demonstrated limited enduring success. Intervention
in Somalia, peacekeeping in the Balkans, "Dual Containment," the domestic
response to September 11, 2001 (9/11), the War on Terrorism, confronting the "Axis of
Evil," stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, and even Gulf Coast reconstruction all exhibit
one common feature. Each is marked by some significant disappointment or
indeterminacy. The form of each originated less from holistic strategic net and risk
assessment than from political instinct or impulse; and all—though individually either
essential or noble—proceeded without rational consideration of strategic context,
course, and risk.
Perhaps it is the policy of the United States to not have a strategic policy, just as it has been the policy of the United States not to have an industrial policy. But that is the rhetoric: the reality is much, much different.
The United States has pursued "strategy by exception" for 17 years.
To put it slightly differently: the United States has had no real, effective strategy since the collapse of Soviet Socialism. We defined ourselves too much as the opponents of the system, and while Bush 41 talked of a "New World Order" that could have developed into a new strategic mission for the United States, he lost that election and we got Clinton instead, the master of rhetoric and sophistry, the man who had absolutely no clue of the difference between Strategy and strategic communications, despite being quite good at the latter.
Seemingly awash in confidence and resources, American politicos persistently mistake raw capacity for infallibility. Yet, the secure maintenance of American position often benefits
more from careful calculation and premeditation than brashness. The latter, however, is
far more common. Today, there is no real strategy in effect befitting the security of a
singular superpower in an "all-hazards" environment. There is only the façade of
strategy—strategic communications without substance.
It's not so much awash in confidence and resources, but the simple fact that we won the Cold War. We didn't exhaust ourselves doing so, but the problem was that when you have made your career defeating someone, and win, then what do you do? The political pundits and politicians of the day started spending the Peace Dividend - which existed only in their feverish dreams - almost immediately without even thinking about the future. The end of the Cold War meant that the world wasn't safer (OK, the threat of global thermonuclear war was gone, but that was part of the game that was then over), but rather more dangerous. The West and the Soviets had played their power games in the Third World, fueling and dampening conflicts there as desired, but having the money dry up in the wake of the Soviet collapse didn't mean the conflicts were gone, but rather that they were now free from interference.
To re-iterate: the end of the Cold War meant that the world exchanged one danger, one risk, for another, but one that the politicians and pundits ignored entirely, as their focus was on the Great Game as well. Just because the West won the Cold War doesn't, didn't and never will mean that conflicts of all types cease and that a golden era will break out: but that is exactly what the pundits and politicians preached, greedy to get their hands on resources to buy votes.
There is no strategy visible in US politics today.
To be sure, presidents fulfill their legal obligation to articulate the National Security
Strategy on a semi-regular basis. Likewise, the president and individual executive
departments make periodic vision statements in functional areas of responsibility like
National Defense, the War in Iraq, Terrorism, Cyber Security, etc. All, however, are
heavy on themes and messages and light on detail. None can purport to involve the
detailed articulation of achievable, minimum essential ends, the balanced adjudication
of ways and means, and a thorough analysis of the risks associated with action and/or
inaction. Yet, meeting this high standard is critical to securing the national interest in an
era of extreme peril, enormous opportunity, and finite resources.
Bingo. Vision statements are exactly that: visions. These can be the vision of the City On The Hill, or they can be visions from the wrong kind of mushrooms. The leftist rhetoric of how the military prolonged the Cold War by inventing threats appeared to have been vindicated, since the Soviets were shown to be a paper tiger (which the left had, to a certain extent, claimed all along), but this is ignoring the fact that you have to have a real tiger to find out if the other side is real or made of paper.
When their party is in power, partisan gadflies will argue there is more to national
strategy than meets the public eye—strategic communications is simply the icing on a
larger, more carefully prepared national security cake. They should know better. There
is a saying in government—"policy isn't made, it accumulates." The same is true for
strategy. To the extent more substance exists, it is buried under a blizzard of
memoranda and PowerPoint presentations across dozens of government agencies.
None of it exists with the benefit of high-level integration. Today, national strategy is
not the product of reason and grand deliberation. Rather, it results from the incremental,
issue-specific accumulation of small decisions. Few of these decisions can claim origins
in a detailed, risk-informed strategic design. Thus, the second- and third-order
implications of each individual decision lie unconsidered and the prospects of failure or
excessive cost are consistently unaddressed.
This is the triumph of the sophist, the victory of the Cult of Deception: burying reality and wrapping its ghost in a tissue of rhetoric.
We are where we are in the world. Blame the strategy deficit. As America's
ambitious and influential gather for another cycle of national debate and political
renewal, it would serve them well to rebalance the relationship between what is truly
strategy and what is rhetoric without substance. The former is elemental to securing the
nation's position and interests. The latter is a clear path to unmet expectations, excessive
cost, and failure.
At this point, I'll become clearly partisan and say that the only candidate that can even understand this problem is John McCain. And a President Obama would make Carter look like a senior statesman in comparison.
Dienstag, März 25, 2008
The Truly Opressed...
Read the following and tell me what country we are talking about:
There is a country, with over 1400 years of history, with a unique culture, religion and ethnic blends. Over 1 million of its inhabitants have been killed by the country occupying it; the culture is being systematically obliterated; of the 6200 religious buildings, 6000 have been destroyed. There is no freedom of the press and the world knows virtually nothing about this repression.
Palestine? Zimbabwe? South Africa? Venezuela? Cuba?
Of course not. If it was about these countries, you'd be reading about it all the time in the papers.
It's Tibet.
Read this and try to understand: the government of China is not your friend. There are seven reasons why no one seems to care.
And every day the killing continues. But hey, as long as you can get cheap DVD players and throw-away consumer goods, what does that matter?
There is a country, with over 1400 years of history, with a unique culture, religion and ethnic blends. Over 1 million of its inhabitants have been killed by the country occupying it; the culture is being systematically obliterated; of the 6200 religious buildings, 6000 have been destroyed. There is no freedom of the press and the world knows virtually nothing about this repression.
Palestine? Zimbabwe? South Africa? Venezuela? Cuba?
Of course not. If it was about these countries, you'd be reading about it all the time in the papers.
It's Tibet.
Read this and try to understand: the government of China is not your friend. There are seven reasons why no one seems to care.
And every day the killing continues. But hey, as long as you can get cheap DVD players and throw-away consumer goods, what does that matter?
Montag, März 24, 2008
On Moral Cowardice...
I've just had the great fortune of seeing the first two episodes of HBO's John Adams.
I also went out and bought both Night Watch and Day Watch, two Russian films that deserve wider spread recognition.
The topic this evening is not what the left thinks moral cowardice is all about: according to Talking Points, moral cowardice is thus:
A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.
To put it bluntly: balderdash.
That isn't moral cowardice: what is described is hypocrisy. Cowardice is not a lack of courage: it is, for the coward, a positive feature, rather than a negative.
A moral coward is someone who, when they are face with a conflict in which only violence can resolve the situation, chose the path of appeasement, of abjectly surrendering their principles for the sake of non-violence: those that would decry that there are times when good can only triumph through the necessary evil of force. Force, the taking up of arms, the declaration of war, the fight, is not in and of itself an evil thing: if done for the good, it is recognized as something unavoidable.
This is not to say that the ends justify the means: it is, however, to say that conflicts between men cannot always be resolved by appeal to the sweet nature of reason.
Dickinson, John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, as portrayed in HBO's John Adams series, is a moral coward: he wants to appease the Crown, to petition the Crown for redress to their grievances, and indeed chooses not to be present when the critical vote is made to declare independence. His Quaker religion forbids him anything else: yet if those who would end our freedoms by force of arms can know that all they need to do is take up arms secure in the knowledge that appeasement is, for us, vastly superior to conflict, then this will bring about war, rather than prevent it. The appeasers of that day searched high and low for reasons that conflict should not happen.
One of the key lines in the Day Watch (Russian title: Дневно́й дозо́р or Dnevnio Dozor) is (I'm paraphrasing since the original was in Russian and I can only, at this point, go by the subtitles):
"The difference between Night and Day is that Night can lie and distort and manipulate, because we (the Dark) are always the bad guys. Light always loses because they have to say the truth."
Without going into great detail, both films show what happens when the good guys (the Light) are lied to and misled by the the Dark, resulting in principles being broken: a man is willing to sacrifice a child's life in an induced miscarriage (i.e. abortion) when he is not told that it is his own, in order to keep his wife, who has left him and told him that the child is not his. This turns him into a monster of his own doing: first at the end of the second film, when he can answer "No" when he first answered "what the heck, yes", is the impossible situation that he finds himself in turned around and eliminated from even occurring.
Moral cowardice is refusing to make the choice. Refer the problem to committee, put it off for a while, we're not ready for a war, perhaps the King will see reason.
I've known moral cowards: they're the ones who would appease in order to avoid having to go to war. Anything is better than war: what they fail to realize is that when the bad guys realize this, then war becomes more likely, since if you are willing to use violence readily to achieve your goals, and yet are faced by those who are manifestly incapable of having the will to defend themselves, you are being invited to make war.
Were that human nature was that of sweet reason. More the pity that it isn't...
I also went out and bought both Night Watch and Day Watch, two Russian films that deserve wider spread recognition.
The topic this evening is not what the left thinks moral cowardice is all about: according to Talking Points, moral cowardice is thus:
A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.
To put it bluntly: balderdash.
That isn't moral cowardice: what is described is hypocrisy. Cowardice is not a lack of courage: it is, for the coward, a positive feature, rather than a negative.
A moral coward is someone who, when they are face with a conflict in which only violence can resolve the situation, chose the path of appeasement, of abjectly surrendering their principles for the sake of non-violence: those that would decry that there are times when good can only triumph through the necessary evil of force. Force, the taking up of arms, the declaration of war, the fight, is not in and of itself an evil thing: if done for the good, it is recognized as something unavoidable.
This is not to say that the ends justify the means: it is, however, to say that conflicts between men cannot always be resolved by appeal to the sweet nature of reason.
Dickinson, John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, as portrayed in HBO's John Adams series, is a moral coward: he wants to appease the Crown, to petition the Crown for redress to their grievances, and indeed chooses not to be present when the critical vote is made to declare independence. His Quaker religion forbids him anything else: yet if those who would end our freedoms by force of arms can know that all they need to do is take up arms secure in the knowledge that appeasement is, for us, vastly superior to conflict, then this will bring about war, rather than prevent it. The appeasers of that day searched high and low for reasons that conflict should not happen.
One of the key lines in the Day Watch (Russian title: Дневно́й дозо́р or Dnevnio Dozor) is (I'm paraphrasing since the original was in Russian and I can only, at this point, go by the subtitles):
"The difference between Night and Day is that Night can lie and distort and manipulate, because we (the Dark) are always the bad guys. Light always loses because they have to say the truth."
Without going into great detail, both films show what happens when the good guys (the Light) are lied to and misled by the the Dark, resulting in principles being broken: a man is willing to sacrifice a child's life in an induced miscarriage (i.e. abortion) when he is not told that it is his own, in order to keep his wife, who has left him and told him that the child is not his. This turns him into a monster of his own doing: first at the end of the second film, when he can answer "No" when he first answered "what the heck, yes", is the impossible situation that he finds himself in turned around and eliminated from even occurring.
Moral cowardice is refusing to make the choice. Refer the problem to committee, put it off for a while, we're not ready for a war, perhaps the King will see reason.
I've known moral cowards: they're the ones who would appease in order to avoid having to go to war. Anything is better than war: what they fail to realize is that when the bad guys realize this, then war becomes more likely, since if you are willing to use violence readily to achieve your goals, and yet are faced by those who are manifestly incapable of having the will to defend themselves, you are being invited to make war.
Were that human nature was that of sweet reason. More the pity that it isn't...
Sonntag, März 23, 2008
Ouch...
This has got to hurt.
:-)
Not only is the earth not warming - global temperatures have fallen since 1998 or, if you prefer, they have stabilized since 2002 - but data on some of the fundamental model mechanisms in use to estimate the development of global climate has turned out to contradict these models entirely.
In other words, the models postulate one thing, but data collected via NASA's Aqua satellite since 2002 shows that this effect has, in the parlance of the trade, a different sign. In other words, the models are wrong.
Models are always wrong. They can be useful. In this case, if they are showing the opposite effect of reality, then the models are not useful.
And given the abuse of the model results by the global warming fetishists, the models are downright dangerous.
I enjoy saying "Told ya so". It'll be interesting to see if there is literally anything in the MSM about this.
I sincerely doubt it.
:-)
Not only is the earth not warming - global temperatures have fallen since 1998 or, if you prefer, they have stabilized since 2002 - but data on some of the fundamental model mechanisms in use to estimate the development of global climate has turned out to contradict these models entirely.
In other words, the models postulate one thing, but data collected via NASA's Aqua satellite since 2002 shows that this effect has, in the parlance of the trade, a different sign. In other words, the models are wrong.
Models are always wrong. They can be useful. In this case, if they are showing the opposite effect of reality, then the models are not useful.
And given the abuse of the model results by the global warming fetishists, the models are downright dangerous.
I enjoy saying "Told ya so". It'll be interesting to see if there is literally anything in the MSM about this.
I sincerely doubt it.
Donnerstag, März 20, 2008
True Imperialism & Tibet...
The Chinese don't understand what is going on in Tibet.
After all, the Chinese say, we came in, liberated them from their backwards, feudal parasites that were repressing them, denying them the their true historical development. We took their children and educated them, and we built roads and railroads so that they could partake in the glorious path of socialist development. How ungrateful the bastards are! They are obviously being agitated from outside, by counter-revolutionary forces, exemplified by that murderer and tyrant in red robes, the Dali Lama (stage sound effects: hisssssssssss, boooo).
After all, so say the Chinese, the Tibetans were prevented from developing properly, trapped in ignorance and poverty by a repressive religious regime, parasitical and obsessed with maintaining its power over the means of production. These parasites taxed their peasants and forced them to follow arcane and incomprehensible rituals that reduced their productivity and denied them the fruits of their labors.
The liberation of Tibet was a glorious service of the selfless and sacrificing Chinese people, who gave their lives in order to liberate their Tibetan brothers. After all, Tibet always belonged to China and it would have been an unbearable crime against the path of communist development, as laid out by the great, wide and glorious leader, Mao Zedong, to not have liberated the repressed masses in Tibet.
And now this is the thanks? It is inconceivable that the path of socialist development be turned around: no liberated people can ever want to return to their sordid, repressed path in order to be exploited by such ruthless parasites like the Dali Lama (hisssssssssssss, booooo).
For that reason it must be outside interference from those lackey reactionaries that scurry in the darkness and serve the Dali Lama (hissssssssssss, boooooo).
Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?
The Chinese are indeed clueless to their own nature: so long steeped in their own Maoist rhetoric, they cannot see the beam in their own eye.
The Chinese perceive themselves to be the perennial victims of foreign interference: that the political incursion, economic exploitation and military aggression of the West undermined the glory of China, humiliating China and making worthless its historical achievements. This is, to a large extent, the basis for how China views the external world. This is in stark contrast to the other major thread in Chinese thinking, of the innate and unique history of the Central Kingdom and the amassed wisdom of millenia of experience with problems. China can overcome its victim status first when the world recognizes the Central Kingdom for what it is: the center of the universe. Until this happens, China will remain a victim.
And they are, fundamentally, afraid of Tibet: scoff what you may, there are more Tibetans living outside of Tibet than in Tibet. Tibetans are characterized not merely as a ethnic group that has adapted to life at very high altitudes, but also in their religious beliefs. Tibet is spoken as far east as Sichuan; not only do the Tibetans form the majority in Tibet, but also in Qinghai Province and a good half of Sichuan Province as well.
What China does not realize, are not capable of realizing, is that they were wrong to have invaded Tibet and to have forced the Dali Lama into exile. They were wrong to think that the Tibetan culture was backwards and not worthy: Tibetan culture is uniquely adapted to life at high altitudes, and while there are always exceptions to the rule, Tibetans were largely content with their simple life, intense spiritualism and support of their religion, given the largely barren and inhospitable regions where they live.
It is the Chinese who are, here, the true imperialists, incapable of recognizing their attempt to destroy and recreate the Tibetans in their own image. This can be traced back to the classic Central Kingdom arrogance towards anyone not Han: it is the greatest weakness of modern China as well.
After all, the Chinese say, we came in, liberated them from their backwards, feudal parasites that were repressing them, denying them the their true historical development. We took their children and educated them, and we built roads and railroads so that they could partake in the glorious path of socialist development. How ungrateful the bastards are! They are obviously being agitated from outside, by counter-revolutionary forces, exemplified by that murderer and tyrant in red robes, the Dali Lama (stage sound effects: hisssssssssss, boooo).
After all, so say the Chinese, the Tibetans were prevented from developing properly, trapped in ignorance and poverty by a repressive religious regime, parasitical and obsessed with maintaining its power over the means of production. These parasites taxed their peasants and forced them to follow arcane and incomprehensible rituals that reduced their productivity and denied them the fruits of their labors.
The liberation of Tibet was a glorious service of the selfless and sacrificing Chinese people, who gave their lives in order to liberate their Tibetan brothers. After all, Tibet always belonged to China and it would have been an unbearable crime against the path of communist development, as laid out by the great, wide and glorious leader, Mao Zedong, to not have liberated the repressed masses in Tibet.
And now this is the thanks? It is inconceivable that the path of socialist development be turned around: no liberated people can ever want to return to their sordid, repressed path in order to be exploited by such ruthless parasites like the Dali Lama (hisssssssssssss, booooo).
For that reason it must be outside interference from those lackey reactionaries that scurry in the darkness and serve the Dali Lama (hissssssssssss, boooooo).
Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?
The Chinese are indeed clueless to their own nature: so long steeped in their own Maoist rhetoric, they cannot see the beam in their own eye.
The Chinese perceive themselves to be the perennial victims of foreign interference: that the political incursion, economic exploitation and military aggression of the West undermined the glory of China, humiliating China and making worthless its historical achievements. This is, to a large extent, the basis for how China views the external world. This is in stark contrast to the other major thread in Chinese thinking, of the innate and unique history of the Central Kingdom and the amassed wisdom of millenia of experience with problems. China can overcome its victim status first when the world recognizes the Central Kingdom for what it is: the center of the universe. Until this happens, China will remain a victim.
Talk about your insecurity complex. The way that China has reacted to the riots in Tibet is also classic passive-aggressive behavior: it's not our fault, it's always your fault. See what YOU made ME do?
And they are, fundamentally, afraid of Tibet: scoff what you may, there are more Tibetans living outside of Tibet than in Tibet. Tibetans are characterized not merely as a ethnic group that has adapted to life at very high altitudes, but also in their religious beliefs. Tibet is spoken as far east as Sichuan; not only do the Tibetans form the majority in Tibet, but also in Qinghai Province and a good half of Sichuan Province as well.
What China does not realize, are not capable of realizing, is that they were wrong to have invaded Tibet and to have forced the Dali Lama into exile. They were wrong to think that the Tibetan culture was backwards and not worthy: Tibetan culture is uniquely adapted to life at high altitudes, and while there are always exceptions to the rule, Tibetans were largely content with their simple life, intense spiritualism and support of their religion, given the largely barren and inhospitable regions where they live.
It is the Chinese who are, here, the true imperialists, incapable of recognizing their attempt to destroy and recreate the Tibetans in their own image. This can be traced back to the classic Central Kingdom arrogance towards anyone not Han: it is the greatest weakness of modern China as well.
Mittwoch, März 19, 2008
Five Years On...
It's been five years since the US implemented the UN Security Council decision that Iraq was in substantial and serious violation of no less than 17 UN Security Council Resolutions (678, 686, 687, 688, 707, 715, 949, 1051, 1060, 1115, 1134, 1137, 1154, 1194, 1205, 1284, 1441), with the last one - 1441 - being the most serious.
Let us remember 1441: it stated that Iraq was in material breach of Resolution 687, the cease-fire after Kuwait. The key word is material breach: this means:
...any failure to perform that permits the other party to the contract to either compel performance, or collect damages because of the breach.
This is a legal concept, and given the impossibility of collecting damages, it compels performance.
The US compelled performance. It took a war to do so: a war fought to minimize deaths on the other side, a war brought to a quick and almost bloodless conclusion. That is the war that deserved the infamous "Mission Accomplished".
Up front, the true heroes of this story are first and foremost the men and women who have served their country. They deserve our respect and admiration, and I thank them, deeply, for their service. And for those who would immediately ask why I am not there: I did not qualify for service, both at the time when I would have been inducted (yes, I am that old) and the time I would have volunteered.
I'm not going to argue with the left about their fantasies regarding why the Iraq war happened. They chose to ignore the facts and instead argue an interpretation of the facts that does not, frankly, meet even the simplest test of empirical verification (in other words, if you actually read what President Bush actually said at the time, you must realize how little the fantasies of the left have to do with empirical reality).
Let's, instead, revisit the time that the decision was made: we now know that both France and Russia were desperately seeking, behind the scenes, to avoid having the severe corruption of key decision makers in their governments from being known (Food for Oil program). We now know that within the UN, no one expected President Bush to actually believe in the UN, thinking instead that he'd be forced to back away, weakening the US position in the Middle East severely, which was, after all, the goal of countries like France, Russia and China. This was a time of naked power politics, swathed in diplomacy, but barely understood by outside observers at that time.
President Bush, to his permanent credit, denied them the destruction of the UN as a functioning body; he did the right thing, for the right reasons, and that is what is so completely and totally unpalatable to the left. He has been vilified, but that is par for the course: history will show him to be correct, especially if his successor follows up and completes his task.
I am utterly convinced that President Bush actually saved the UN from ruining itself by implementing UN resolution 1441: if he had backed down, the UN would have been exposed as being just as worthless as the League of Nations turned out to be, and while there remain massive problems with the UN, the idea that the UN can still play a meaningful role was saved by President Bush.
What has been achieved?
First and most fundamentally, Iraq is in compliance with Security Council Resolutions.
Second, Iraq has been transformed from a repressed dictatorship based on blood and terror to a democratic state, federalist, complete with completely normal inadequacies and problems.
Third, the US has stood up to Arab terrorism, faced it down and, at the end of the day, destroyed it, with the Iraqi people, in Iraq. If you do not understand the symbolism that this has, then you do not understand much about the Middle East. This far, far outweighs the negative symbolism of Abu Ghraib and the imagined triumph of Al Qaeda when it beheads innocents and sets bombs to blow American soldiers up. The way that Al Qaeda fought war led directly to their failure against the US.
Fourth, while Iraq has a long, long way to go before it can be considered peaceful and US troops can be withdrawn, there is progress being made in exactly this direction.
Fifth, this has been done with extraordinary restraint and at a minimal cost.
Now, I can well imagine those who wonder at some of these statements. Well you might: you don't understand the bigger picture, consumed as you are with small things.
I say that this has been done with extraordinary restraint. There have been, unfortunately, exceptions to this, and the Iraqis have understood, far better than the left ever will be able to, that while the US is not perfect, it has acted with civility and respect where it could have done exactly the opposite. It would have been simplicity itself to have used massive air power to flatten Fallujah and kill everyone in that town; we did not do so. Nor did we ever even contemplate it.
Minimal cost, you say? Hundreds of billions of dollars, close to 4000 dead and close to 30,000 wounded?
If you understand the big picture, yes.
I honor the dead by insisting that they did not die in vain and that their deaths will not be in vain. Their deaths must not, may not be in vain: that would be the cruelest and most dishonorable thing that a US administration could ever do to those who serve this country. The current administration refuses to do so: it could well be that another does. That is our way of government: when fools are elected, they can behave as fools. The honor of the sacrifice is not changed by this, and history is not kind to those who do so.
The same is true for the wounded.
If you have any idea of the sheer size and vitality of the US economy, the money we have spent, while not trivial, is minimal. Even the maximum amounts that partisan thinkers have come up with - $3 trillion - remains, in comparison, relatively low. It sounds like a lot, but when you look past the headlines, as it spread out over decades, the relative amount becomes, well, relative. $3 trillion in the face of $100+ trillion is minimal ($100+ trillion being the size of GDP over the same time period as the $3 trillion cost).
Little went as planned. But if you understand anything of human history, of wars and conflicts, little in war ever goes as planned. You have contingency plans for everything, but these plans aren't blueprints for what to do, but rather guidelines for possibilities. Rumsfeld's litany of "known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns" was absolutely correct: those who call Iraq a fiasco, a disaster, a blunder, a debacle, all do not understand what really happens during wartime, or are too partisan or too lazy to understand the bigger picture.
This is really what few seem to understand. Iraq, back then, was viewed as a secular state, repressed but relatively intact, ready to be freed and take its place amongst the nations of the world. Instead, Iraqis, after the war, made it clear that they really lived in a failed state, one that had long ceased to function as anything besides the plaything of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party. It became the deadly playground of its neighbors, having long lost its own sovereignty.,The killing started not because of any innate hatreds, but because enough Iraqis, prodded and manipulated by their neighbors, who were acting out of their own self-interest, found it politically and personally suitable to begin killing their neighbors. It will end, as it appears to be doing so, when those people are killed and enough Iraqis decide that this is not how they wish to live. That is reality.
It is easy to call the last five years a failure, a mistake, a folly, a debacle, an error, to declare it to have been utter stupidity, the sign of bankrupt policy and to call it "Bush's war".
It is nonetheless wrong to do so. The hard part of Iraq is understanding why the US is there: to break the Arab cycle of failure, destitution, delusion, and incompetence that leads back to failure. To claim that Arabs lack a democracy gene is deeply racist and fundamentally ignorant of Arab history and culture. The goal, instead, is to help Iraq become a civilized state once again, one that will be capable of great things, given the natural riches of the country, coupled with a rich historical tradition capable of greatness.
All I expect to hear from the left is unthinking, dogmatic, knee-jerk reflex, polemic and lacking any semblance of understanding and comprehension, deeply reactionary and fundamentally disappointing. You'd think that unionists would leap at the idea of introducing unions to the unorganized workers of Iraq; that those enamored of "free" health care would jump at the chance to help a country organize it. But instead all that is visible is the shame of the left today: their idea that the US dare not be successful in Iraq.
It's been only five years. History will tell us in 50 years how it went. Anything else is folly.
Let us remember 1441: it stated that Iraq was in material breach of Resolution 687, the cease-fire after Kuwait. The key word is material breach: this means:
...any failure to perform that permits the other party to the contract to either compel performance, or collect damages because of the breach.
This is a legal concept, and given the impossibility of collecting damages, it compels performance.
The US compelled performance. It took a war to do so: a war fought to minimize deaths on the other side, a war brought to a quick and almost bloodless conclusion. That is the war that deserved the infamous "Mission Accomplished".
Up front, the true heroes of this story are first and foremost the men and women who have served their country. They deserve our respect and admiration, and I thank them, deeply, for their service. And for those who would immediately ask why I am not there: I did not qualify for service, both at the time when I would have been inducted (yes, I am that old) and the time I would have volunteered.
I'm not going to argue with the left about their fantasies regarding why the Iraq war happened. They chose to ignore the facts and instead argue an interpretation of the facts that does not, frankly, meet even the simplest test of empirical verification (in other words, if you actually read what President Bush actually said at the time, you must realize how little the fantasies of the left have to do with empirical reality).
Let's, instead, revisit the time that the decision was made: we now know that both France and Russia were desperately seeking, behind the scenes, to avoid having the severe corruption of key decision makers in their governments from being known (Food for Oil program). We now know that within the UN, no one expected President Bush to actually believe in the UN, thinking instead that he'd be forced to back away, weakening the US position in the Middle East severely, which was, after all, the goal of countries like France, Russia and China. This was a time of naked power politics, swathed in diplomacy, but barely understood by outside observers at that time.
President Bush, to his permanent credit, denied them the destruction of the UN as a functioning body; he did the right thing, for the right reasons, and that is what is so completely and totally unpalatable to the left. He has been vilified, but that is par for the course: history will show him to be correct, especially if his successor follows up and completes his task.
I am utterly convinced that President Bush actually saved the UN from ruining itself by implementing UN resolution 1441: if he had backed down, the UN would have been exposed as being just as worthless as the League of Nations turned out to be, and while there remain massive problems with the UN, the idea that the UN can still play a meaningful role was saved by President Bush.
What has been achieved?
First and most fundamentally, Iraq is in compliance with Security Council Resolutions.
Second, Iraq has been transformed from a repressed dictatorship based on blood and terror to a democratic state, federalist, complete with completely normal inadequacies and problems.
Third, the US has stood up to Arab terrorism, faced it down and, at the end of the day, destroyed it, with the Iraqi people, in Iraq. If you do not understand the symbolism that this has, then you do not understand much about the Middle East. This far, far outweighs the negative symbolism of Abu Ghraib and the imagined triumph of Al Qaeda when it beheads innocents and sets bombs to blow American soldiers up. The way that Al Qaeda fought war led directly to their failure against the US.
Fourth, while Iraq has a long, long way to go before it can be considered peaceful and US troops can be withdrawn, there is progress being made in exactly this direction.
Fifth, this has been done with extraordinary restraint and at a minimal cost.
Now, I can well imagine those who wonder at some of these statements. Well you might: you don't understand the bigger picture, consumed as you are with small things.
I say that this has been done with extraordinary restraint. There have been, unfortunately, exceptions to this, and the Iraqis have understood, far better than the left ever will be able to, that while the US is not perfect, it has acted with civility and respect where it could have done exactly the opposite. It would have been simplicity itself to have used massive air power to flatten Fallujah and kill everyone in that town; we did not do so. Nor did we ever even contemplate it.
Minimal cost, you say? Hundreds of billions of dollars, close to 4000 dead and close to 30,000 wounded?
If you understand the big picture, yes.
I honor the dead by insisting that they did not die in vain and that their deaths will not be in vain. Their deaths must not, may not be in vain: that would be the cruelest and most dishonorable thing that a US administration could ever do to those who serve this country. The current administration refuses to do so: it could well be that another does. That is our way of government: when fools are elected, they can behave as fools. The honor of the sacrifice is not changed by this, and history is not kind to those who do so.
The same is true for the wounded.
If you have any idea of the sheer size and vitality of the US economy, the money we have spent, while not trivial, is minimal. Even the maximum amounts that partisan thinkers have come up with - $3 trillion - remains, in comparison, relatively low. It sounds like a lot, but when you look past the headlines, as it spread out over decades, the relative amount becomes, well, relative. $3 trillion in the face of $100+ trillion is minimal ($100+ trillion being the size of GDP over the same time period as the $3 trillion cost).
Little went as planned. But if you understand anything of human history, of wars and conflicts, little in war ever goes as planned. You have contingency plans for everything, but these plans aren't blueprints for what to do, but rather guidelines for possibilities. Rumsfeld's litany of "known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns" was absolutely correct: those who call Iraq a fiasco, a disaster, a blunder, a debacle, all do not understand what really happens during wartime, or are too partisan or too lazy to understand the bigger picture.
This is really what few seem to understand. Iraq, back then, was viewed as a secular state, repressed but relatively intact, ready to be freed and take its place amongst the nations of the world. Instead, Iraqis, after the war, made it clear that they really lived in a failed state, one that had long ceased to function as anything besides the plaything of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party. It became the deadly playground of its neighbors, having long lost its own sovereignty.,The killing started not because of any innate hatreds, but because enough Iraqis, prodded and manipulated by their neighbors, who were acting out of their own self-interest, found it politically and personally suitable to begin killing their neighbors. It will end, as it appears to be doing so, when those people are killed and enough Iraqis decide that this is not how they wish to live. That is reality.
It is easy to call the last five years a failure, a mistake, a folly, a debacle, an error, to declare it to have been utter stupidity, the sign of bankrupt policy and to call it "Bush's war".
It is nonetheless wrong to do so. The hard part of Iraq is understanding why the US is there: to break the Arab cycle of failure, destitution, delusion, and incompetence that leads back to failure. To claim that Arabs lack a democracy gene is deeply racist and fundamentally ignorant of Arab history and culture. The goal, instead, is to help Iraq become a civilized state once again, one that will be capable of great things, given the natural riches of the country, coupled with a rich historical tradition capable of greatness.
All I expect to hear from the left is unthinking, dogmatic, knee-jerk reflex, polemic and lacking any semblance of understanding and comprehension, deeply reactionary and fundamentally disappointing. You'd think that unionists would leap at the idea of introducing unions to the unorganized workers of Iraq; that those enamored of "free" health care would jump at the chance to help a country organize it. But instead all that is visible is the shame of the left today: their idea that the US dare not be successful in Iraq.
It's been only five years. History will tell us in 50 years how it went. Anything else is folly.
Dienstag, März 18, 2008
Keeping the Government Out Of Markets...and Putting the Blame Where It Belongs for Sub-Prime
We're all seeing all sorts of articles about the current credit crisis. But I have yet to see many that really analyze the roots of the problem.
The root of the problem is government interference in markets.
Now, when the government intervenes, it screws things up.
The sub-prime crisis is to a large degree the logical follow-up to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which basically said that if banks wanted preferential credit conditions with the Fed (refinancing rates) - critical to remaining competitive - then they must make loans to borrowers that did not, under normal conditions, qualify for a mortgage according to the conditions that banking prudence would require.
Basically, the banks are tested to see if they are, in effect, cherry-picking their customers and lending only to the wealthy: if this was so, they were found in non-compliance, which affected their deposit requirements, which, as we all know, is the fundamental leverage the Fed has over the banks.
This meant that the banks were, by law, required to make loans to customers that would not normally have qualified, or, more exactly, who would have qualified only for rather expensive loans, either through a risk premium (front-loading) or higher interest rates. This is the birth of the sub-primes. The banks fought against this, back when, but lost to the activists and their Democrat supporters.
The CRA was tightened in 1995 under Clinton to ensure that the banks "properly" serviced their community, i.e. their geographic area, and didn't redline distressed economic districts to avoid making bad loans. How did they check this?
Why, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which gathered the data that activists (hi, ACORN, that's you) then used to argue that the banks were, in fact, discriminating against minorities and lower-income communities. This dated from 1975, which preceded the CRA from 1977/1995.
The problem that you see here is simple: the banks haven't been making, strictly speaking, straight-forward mortgages, based on purely the numbers, since the late 1970s. This underscores how political pressure distorts the market: it created the sub-prime market as such. Previously, the banks didn't make the loans without proper risk premiums: they were then required by law to make the loans without the proper risk premiums, and in doing so, created the hole that became the sub-prime swamp.
To re-iterate: a significant part, the basis, of the current financial crisis was an intervention, politically motivated, to abrogate financial common-sense and the rules of economics. The banks didn't create subprimes: the CRA did. The banks, interested in keeping their refinancing costs down as much as possible, gave loans to people who didn't qualify, resulting, by the late 1990s, with banks having substantial portfolios of sub-prime loans.
Because the government wanted them to. Not just wanted: it required them to. Why?
Because liberal lobby groups felt it was unfair that poor people and minorities weren't able to buy a house at the same rate that rich people and WASPs were able to. They pushed through the laws, against the advice of the banks.
Where things really started going wrong was when the banks, interested in cleaning their books of the subprime loans - and they were interested because these loans were risky, but without the proper risk premium - found that new financial instruments allowed them to bundle the loans and get them off their balance sheets. You can't blame the banks for this: they were carrying only partially covered risks without any chance of reducing their liability otherwise.
Once the risk became uncoupled, the banks were happy to make the loans, especially with what I call Stupid Money. Investors who thought they were acquiring low-risk investments (gee, thanks, S&P, Moody, etc), when, in fact, they were acquiring structured investments with significant risks that were downplayed in order to sell the damn things.
There's more to be said about the risk side of business, and stay tuned for that.
The place to put the blame for the current financial crisis and the sub-prime mess is with politically motivated intervention in free markets. For the goal of preventing red-lining of districts and minorities as being poor risks - which they are, sorry - the liberal intervention required banks to amass significant portfolios of sub-prime mortgages, poor performers without the proper risk premium.
That is why you keep government out of markets. They only end up screwing things up royally.
The root of the problem is government interference in markets.
Now, when the government intervenes, it screws things up.
The sub-prime crisis is to a large degree the logical follow-up to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which basically said that if banks wanted preferential credit conditions with the Fed (refinancing rates) - critical to remaining competitive - then they must make loans to borrowers that did not, under normal conditions, qualify for a mortgage according to the conditions that banking prudence would require.
Basically, the banks are tested to see if they are, in effect, cherry-picking their customers and lending only to the wealthy: if this was so, they were found in non-compliance, which affected their deposit requirements, which, as we all know, is the fundamental leverage the Fed has over the banks.
This meant that the banks were, by law, required to make loans to customers that would not normally have qualified, or, more exactly, who would have qualified only for rather expensive loans, either through a risk premium (front-loading) or higher interest rates. This is the birth of the sub-primes. The banks fought against this, back when, but lost to the activists and their Democrat supporters.
The CRA was tightened in 1995 under Clinton to ensure that the banks "properly" serviced their community, i.e. their geographic area, and didn't redline distressed economic districts to avoid making bad loans. How did they check this?
Why, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which gathered the data that activists (hi, ACORN, that's you) then used to argue that the banks were, in fact, discriminating against minorities and lower-income communities. This dated from 1975, which preceded the CRA from 1977/1995.
The problem that you see here is simple: the banks haven't been making, strictly speaking, straight-forward mortgages, based on purely the numbers, since the late 1970s. This underscores how political pressure distorts the market: it created the sub-prime market as such. Previously, the banks didn't make the loans without proper risk premiums: they were then required by law to make the loans without the proper risk premiums, and in doing so, created the hole that became the sub-prime swamp.
To re-iterate: a significant part, the basis, of the current financial crisis was an intervention, politically motivated, to abrogate financial common-sense and the rules of economics. The banks didn't create subprimes: the CRA did. The banks, interested in keeping their refinancing costs down as much as possible, gave loans to people who didn't qualify, resulting, by the late 1990s, with banks having substantial portfolios of sub-prime loans.
Because the government wanted them to. Not just wanted: it required them to. Why?
Because liberal lobby groups felt it was unfair that poor people and minorities weren't able to buy a house at the same rate that rich people and WASPs were able to. They pushed through the laws, against the advice of the banks.
Where things really started going wrong was when the banks, interested in cleaning their books of the subprime loans - and they were interested because these loans were risky, but without the proper risk premium - found that new financial instruments allowed them to bundle the loans and get them off their balance sheets. You can't blame the banks for this: they were carrying only partially covered risks without any chance of reducing their liability otherwise.
Once the risk became uncoupled, the banks were happy to make the loans, especially with what I call Stupid Money. Investors who thought they were acquiring low-risk investments (gee, thanks, S&P, Moody, etc), when, in fact, they were acquiring structured investments with significant risks that were downplayed in order to sell the damn things.
There's more to be said about the risk side of business, and stay tuned for that.
The place to put the blame for the current financial crisis and the sub-prime mess is with politically motivated intervention in free markets. For the goal of preventing red-lining of districts and minorities as being poor risks - which they are, sorry - the liberal intervention required banks to amass significant portfolios of sub-prime mortgages, poor performers without the proper risk premium.
That is why you keep government out of markets. They only end up screwing things up royally.
Exactly My Point...
As faithful readers will know, I'm not a fan of the global warming scene.
Why?
Because the "experts" demand that we act based on model results. But they're not really even experts: they're politicals who have hijacked the movement to further their own means (yes, the Watermelons are back).
The climate modelers don't think that their models should be used for this purpose (link to original here):
We all seem to agree that our state-of-the-art models aren't satisfactory representations of climate on Earth--at least not to the degree required to make decisions with them. We also agree that people are concerned with climate change and eager to incorporate information about future changes in their decision making, and we're conscious of the need to relate our research agenda and findings to real-world demands. Finally, there's consensus that we cannot look at climate forecasts--in particular, probabilistic forecasts--the same way we view weather predictions, and none of us would sell climate-model output, either at face value or after statistical analysis, as a reliable representation of the complete range of possible futures.
These are the first words of truth that I have ever heard from the people actually involved in the modelling work: we've seen the duplicity and falsehood from Mann on the Hockey Stick, and increasingly we're finding that the original, primary data for temperatures is either heavily compromised or has been severely modified with no explanations or documentation, since it otherwise shows a rather different picture.
But it gets better (from the same source):
Do we believe that today's models can provide decision-relevant probabilities at a resolution of tens of square kilometers for the year 2060--or even 2020 for that matter? No. But that does not suggest we believe there is no value in climate modeling. Since the climate is changing, we can no longer comfortably base our decisions on past observations. Therefore, we must incorporate insights from our models as the best guide for the future. But to accept a naive realist interpretation of model behaviors cast as a Bayesian probability distribution is, as mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead surmised, to mistake an abstract concept for concrete reality.
Until we can establish a reasonable level of internal consistency and empirical adequacy, declining to interpret model-based probabilities as decision-relevant probabilities isn't high skepticism, but scientific common sense.
In other words, the models run the danger of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies: to "incorporate insights" means nothing less than to bias the models to a set result. This is, bluntly, unprofessional. But the basic thrust of this is correct: too often is an abstract concept mistaken to be concrete reality: you can see this best in the dogmatic belief in model results as being an accurate representation of the future.
As someone with 20 years' experience as an industrial forecaster, who regularly forecasts out to 2040, and in some cases 2150, I can only underline this: a forecast is a picture of a possible future, based on what is known today, and can only be done professionally when the forecaster knows his own biases and removes them from the forecast. You do this by rigorously testing the statistics and carefully analyzing the interdependencies of your model for reality: to "incorporate insights" is to introduce biases into the models that is, at the end of the day, wishful thinking (wishful thinking here understood as "how can I get research grants").
Now, companies, those with business plans, use forecasts to determine where they should be investing and developing business. The critical use of a forecast is to constantly review these decisions and to change them when conditions change. The problem I have with the global warming fanatics is that they don't want to do this: there is no incrementalism to the process, but rather the incessant and constant demand to drink the Kool-Aide, forever committing to the process. That is, bluntly, really bad economics, and something that none of the folks involved bother to address (and waving the chimera of eco-jobs doesn't count: the economic dislocations that are called for are massive and cannot be compensated for: the global warming folks want the majority of people to be poor and have their consumption habits firmly under control).
And finally:
Yet demands from policy makers for scientific-looking probability distributions for regional climate changes are mounting, and while there are a number of ways to provide them, all, in my opinion, are equally unverifiable. Therefore, while it is seductive to attempt to corner our ignorance with the seeming certainty of 95-percent confidence intervals, the comfort it gives is likely to be an illusion.
The problem is that the climatology has been, to a large degree, hijacked by "policy makers" with the willing collusion of many involved, not the least due to the promise of major research money and, to a lesser but also critical degree, the desire to be the leveraging force behind policy making: climatology, or better what has usurped the science, is eager to be primary amongst those making the calls and deciding, politically and economically, how the planet is run.
Why? Because no one runs the planet now. For some that idea is an abomination: for others, like me, it's the right and proper order of things that there is no right and proper order. As one of the commentors ut supra said (non-quoted here): the Earth is an uncontrolled experiment.
They think that they know better how it will turn out.
What galling hubris...
Why?
Because the "experts" demand that we act based on model results. But they're not really even experts: they're politicals who have hijacked the movement to further their own means (yes, the Watermelons are back).
The climate modelers don't think that their models should be used for this purpose (link to original here):
We all seem to agree that our state-of-the-art models aren't satisfactory representations of climate on Earth--at least not to the degree required to make decisions with them. We also agree that people are concerned with climate change and eager to incorporate information about future changes in their decision making, and we're conscious of the need to relate our research agenda and findings to real-world demands. Finally, there's consensus that we cannot look at climate forecasts--in particular, probabilistic forecasts--the same way we view weather predictions, and none of us would sell climate-model output, either at face value or after statistical analysis, as a reliable representation of the complete range of possible futures.
These are the first words of truth that I have ever heard from the people actually involved in the modelling work: we've seen the duplicity and falsehood from Mann on the Hockey Stick, and increasingly we're finding that the original, primary data for temperatures is either heavily compromised or has been severely modified with no explanations or documentation, since it otherwise shows a rather different picture.
But it gets better (from the same source):
Do we believe that today's models can provide decision-relevant probabilities at a resolution of tens of square kilometers for the year 2060--or even 2020 for that matter? No. But that does not suggest we believe there is no value in climate modeling. Since the climate is changing, we can no longer comfortably base our decisions on past observations. Therefore, we must incorporate insights from our models as the best guide for the future. But to accept a naive realist interpretation of model behaviors cast as a Bayesian probability distribution is, as mathematician and philosopher Alfred Whitehead surmised, to mistake an abstract concept for concrete reality.
Until we can establish a reasonable level of internal consistency and empirical adequacy, declining to interpret model-based probabilities as decision-relevant probabilities isn't high skepticism, but scientific common sense.
In other words, the models run the danger of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies: to "incorporate insights" means nothing less than to bias the models to a set result. This is, bluntly, unprofessional. But the basic thrust of this is correct: too often is an abstract concept mistaken to be concrete reality: you can see this best in the dogmatic belief in model results as being an accurate representation of the future.
As someone with 20 years' experience as an industrial forecaster, who regularly forecasts out to 2040, and in some cases 2150, I can only underline this: a forecast is a picture of a possible future, based on what is known today, and can only be done professionally when the forecaster knows his own biases and removes them from the forecast. You do this by rigorously testing the statistics and carefully analyzing the interdependencies of your model for reality: to "incorporate insights" is to introduce biases into the models that is, at the end of the day, wishful thinking (wishful thinking here understood as "how can I get research grants").
Now, companies, those with business plans, use forecasts to determine where they should be investing and developing business. The critical use of a forecast is to constantly review these decisions and to change them when conditions change. The problem I have with the global warming fanatics is that they don't want to do this: there is no incrementalism to the process, but rather the incessant and constant demand to drink the Kool-Aide, forever committing to the process. That is, bluntly, really bad economics, and something that none of the folks involved bother to address (and waving the chimera of eco-jobs doesn't count: the economic dislocations that are called for are massive and cannot be compensated for: the global warming folks want the majority of people to be poor and have their consumption habits firmly under control).
And finally:
Yet demands from policy makers for scientific-looking probability distributions for regional climate changes are mounting, and while there are a number of ways to provide them, all, in my opinion, are equally unverifiable. Therefore, while it is seductive to attempt to corner our ignorance with the seeming certainty of 95-percent confidence intervals, the comfort it gives is likely to be an illusion.
The problem is that the climatology has been, to a large degree, hijacked by "policy makers" with the willing collusion of many involved, not the least due to the promise of major research money and, to a lesser but also critical degree, the desire to be the leveraging force behind policy making: climatology, or better what has usurped the science, is eager to be primary amongst those making the calls and deciding, politically and economically, how the planet is run.
Why? Because no one runs the planet now. For some that idea is an abomination: for others, like me, it's the right and proper order of things that there is no right and proper order. As one of the commentors ut supra said (non-quoted here): the Earth is an uncontrolled experiment.
They think that they know better how it will turn out.
What galling hubris...
Samstag, März 15, 2008
Understanding How The Stock Market Works...
Hat tip to Sense of Events: I expanded on it slightly...
Once upon a time in a jungle village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.
The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them.
The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.
Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so small that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 ! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. 'Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.'
The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant again, and in their desperation tried selling the monkey to each other, with some buying in the hope that the man or his assistant would reappear. Others tried keeping the monkeys but saw them die; others just gave up and let the monkeys free. Others went out and started killing monkeys out of rage that they had lost so much.
Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works.
Once upon a time in a jungle village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.
The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them.
The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.
Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so small that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 ! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. 'Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.'
The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant again, and in their desperation tried selling the monkey to each other, with some buying in the hope that the man or his assistant would reappear. Others tried keeping the monkeys but saw them die; others just gave up and let the monkeys free. Others went out and started killing monkeys out of rage that they had lost so much.
Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works.
Donnerstag, März 13, 2008
A Voice Of Reason...
Václav Klaus is one of the most dangerous challenges to the hysteria of global warming: he's an economist.
He recently made some comments that are worth repeating here.
Key quotes:
Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical – the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.
While the "science" - in quotes because no one actually publishes their model as such, just the results, and as someone who has been forecasting industrial activity for more than 20 years, I have to see the models (and sorry, peer review here is a joke if all the peers have the same financial interests - of global warming eludes me, the politics of it does not.
I've mentioned the watermelons before: green on the outside, red inside.
And what drives those behind the scenes?
The insurmountable problem as I see it lies in the political populism of its exponents and in their unwillingness to listen to arguments. They – in spite of their public roles – maximize their own private utility function where utility is not any public good but their own private good – power, prestige, carrier, income, etc. It is difficult to motivate them differently.
Bingo. They're not in it for the science: it's a way to power.
And it's all about control:
I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries.
...
What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.
One might think that history doesn't repeat itself: what we are seeing is the rebirth of the idea that you can plan out the economy and manipulate it to meet your political needs (which is what the massive reductions in CO2 output would imply: you can't do this via market means, hence the government will intervene and, where necessary, require the changes: this is a planned economy on the installment plan...).
The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong, in their own ability to assembly all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office (CCCRO) equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility to give adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions and in the non-existence of an incentive problem (and the resulting compliance or non-compliance of those who are supposed to follow these instructions).
We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. Now it concerns the whole mankind, not just the citizens of one particular country. To discuss this means to look at the canonically structured theoretical discussion about socialism (or communism) and to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
Bingo.
Of course, the global warming hysterics don't care about your freedom: let's save the world! Everyone living today must make great sacrifices for the greater good of tomorrow, so that our grandchildren may live in perfection.
Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it.
He recently made some comments that are worth repeating here.
Key quotes:
Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical – the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.
While the "science" - in quotes because no one actually publishes their model as such, just the results, and as someone who has been forecasting industrial activity for more than 20 years, I have to see the models (and sorry, peer review here is a joke if all the peers have the same financial interests - of global warming eludes me, the politics of it does not.
I've mentioned the watermelons before: green on the outside, red inside.
And what drives those behind the scenes?
The insurmountable problem as I see it lies in the political populism of its exponents and in their unwillingness to listen to arguments. They – in spite of their public roles – maximize their own private utility function where utility is not any public good but their own private good – power, prestige, carrier, income, etc. It is difficult to motivate them differently.
Bingo. They're not in it for the science: it's a way to power.
And it's all about control:
I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries.
...
What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project.
One might think that history doesn't repeat itself: what we are seeing is the rebirth of the idea that you can plan out the economy and manipulate it to meet your political needs (which is what the massive reductions in CO2 output would imply: you can't do this via market means, hence the government will intervene and, where necessary, require the changes: this is a planned economy on the installment plan...).
The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong, in their own ability to assembly all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office (CCCRO) equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility to give adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions and in the non-existence of an incentive problem (and the resulting compliance or non-compliance of those who are supposed to follow these instructions).
We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. Now it concerns the whole mankind, not just the citizens of one particular country. To discuss this means to look at the canonically structured theoretical discussion about socialism (or communism) and to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
Bingo.
Of course, the global warming hysterics don't care about your freedom: let's save the world! Everyone living today must make great sacrifices for the greater good of tomorrow, so that our grandchildren may live in perfection.
Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it.
Mittwoch, März 12, 2008
David Mamet Grows Up...and What Does Star Trek Have To Do With It?
One of the sites I peruse briefly almost every day is my old favorite free rag, the Village Voice. As a native New Yorker, this remains, for me, the best channel back to the petty politics and absurd priorities of borough meetings of the greatest city on Earth.
David Mamet seems to have finally grown up. He usually blogs over at the Huffington Post, that gaggle of left-wing opportunists.
But in this article in the Village Voice he describes how he has finally grown up. Of course, he doesn't say that, but rather:
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
And he's got reasons:
By Jove, I think he's got it:
...a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
Hey, everyone should be, at some point in their lives, a liberal. It's a good thing. It's a warm and fuzzy feeling, and it's nice to think that people are fundamentally good everywhere and at all times, and by gosh, we need the government to run things for us.
But it is also good to grow up and realize that this is the real world, that you can't have that pie-in-the-sky or, more importantly, that if you give people a utopia, they will do their best to ruin it. They will spend their time finding out how to exploit the system: if you want a utopia, find another set of sentient beings.
Over the last several weeks I've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my wife. What has struck me more and more with each episode is that the Federation is an impossible political system, and those that hold the Federation in contempt for those aspects that the Federation finds so hugely important are generally the best characters.
There are those who characterize the Federation as being fascist; those who see the Federation as being imperialistic, in the Marxist sense; or that it is, actually, a kind of Marxist utopia. Fundamentally, though, if the Federation actually existed, it would more likely be deeply corrupt and decadent, which may or may not be appealing to the reader.
The point I'm trying to make is that just as Star Trek's Federation is a non-viable form of government that requires a different species to actually work, so is liberalism: it's a nice story. But just like escapist literature, it's not reality.
So let's quote William Shatner, the indomitable Captain James Tiberius Kirk, the epitome of the imperialist aspect of Star Trek, on Saturday Night Live:
You know before I answer any more questions, there's something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and some of you have come hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say, get a life. Will you, people? I mean for crying out loud, it's just a TV show. I mean look at you. You've turned an enjoyable little job that I did as lark into a colossal waste of time. I - I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves? You (points to member of studio audience) must be almost 30, have you ever kissed a girl?
So, kudos to David Mamet for getting out of his parents' basement and starting to live in the Real World.
How many liberals have stayed that way when they actually have to meet a payroll?
Only those who were rich to begin with or for whom money has no meaning.
David Mamet seems to have finally grown up. He usually blogs over at the Huffington Post, that gaggle of left-wing opportunists.
But in this article in the Village Voice he describes how he has finally grown up. Of course, he doesn't say that, but rather:
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
And he's got reasons:
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
By Jove, I think he's got it:
...a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
Hey, everyone should be, at some point in their lives, a liberal. It's a good thing. It's a warm and fuzzy feeling, and it's nice to think that people are fundamentally good everywhere and at all times, and by gosh, we need the government to run things for us.
But it is also good to grow up and realize that this is the real world, that you can't have that pie-in-the-sky or, more importantly, that if you give people a utopia, they will do their best to ruin it. They will spend their time finding out how to exploit the system: if you want a utopia, find another set of sentient beings.
Over the last several weeks I've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my wife. What has struck me more and more with each episode is that the Federation is an impossible political system, and those that hold the Federation in contempt for those aspects that the Federation finds so hugely important are generally the best characters.
There are those who characterize the Federation as being fascist; those who see the Federation as being imperialistic, in the Marxist sense; or that it is, actually, a kind of Marxist utopia. Fundamentally, though, if the Federation actually existed, it would more likely be deeply corrupt and decadent, which may or may not be appealing to the reader.
The point I'm trying to make is that just as Star Trek's Federation is a non-viable form of government that requires a different species to actually work, so is liberalism: it's a nice story. But just like escapist literature, it's not reality.
So let's quote William Shatner, the indomitable Captain James Tiberius Kirk, the epitome of the imperialist aspect of Star Trek, on Saturday Night Live:
You know before I answer any more questions, there's something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and some of you have come hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say, get a life. Will you, people? I mean for crying out loud, it's just a TV show. I mean look at you. You've turned an enjoyable little job that I did as lark into a colossal waste of time. I - I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves? You (points to member of studio audience) must be almost 30, have you ever kissed a girl?
So, kudos to David Mamet for getting out of his parents' basement and starting to live in the Real World.
How many liberals have stayed that way when they actually have to meet a payroll?
Only those who were rich to begin with or for whom money has no meaning.
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