January 2007 Archives

I've always thought President James K. Polk was really cool. In addition to all his accomplishments while in office, he also kept his campaign promise not to run for re-election.

When he took office on March 4, 1845, Polk, at 49, became the youngest man to assume the presidency up to his time. According to a story told decades later by George Bancroft, Polk set four clearly defined goals for his administration: the re-establishment of the Independent Treasury System, the reduction of tariffs, acquisition of some or all the Oregon boundary dispute, and the purchase of California from Mexico. Resolved to serve only one term, he accomplished all these objectives in just four years.

In an impressive display of effectiveness, British intelligence and law enforcement agencies have thwarted yet another terror attack on UK soil.

A ninth suspect has been arrested by police investigating an alleged Iraq-style kidnapping and beheading plot in the UK. ...

The target was a British Muslim soldier in his twenties who is now under police protection.

The soldier, who has not been named, has served with UK forces in Afghanistan.

His abduction would have mirrored the kidnappings of the British hostages Ken Bigley and Margaret Hassan by Iraqi insurgents.

The suspects - believed to be of Pakistani origin - were detained under the Terrorism Act after a six-month surveillance operation.

It's not surprising that the UK seems particularly targeted for terror, since there are so many Islamofascists in their midst.

The poll [of British Muslims] conducted on December 4-13 by Populus for the Policy Exchange, an independent think tank, found that 37 percent of the 16-24 age groups would prefer Sharia law, compared to 17 percent of those over 55. There was a nearly identical split between age groups on those who would prefer to send their children to Islamic schools supported by the state.

Thirteen percent of the younger group expressed admiration for organisations such as Al Qaeda that “are prepared to fight the West,” compared to three percent of those over 55.

Munira Mirza, the lead author of the report, attributed the difference to government policies. “The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s which have emphasised difference at the expense of shared national identity and divided people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines,” she wrote.

It appears that most British Muslims are still non-Wahhabi-ized, but the total percentage will only increase as the elders die off and the young, radical Muslims come into their own.

Despite media bashing of the American economy since Bush took office, the numbers continue to show that the American economy is growing strongly.

The economy opened 2006 on a strong note, growing at a 5.6 percent pace, the fastest spurt in 2 1/2 years. But it lost steam during the spring and late summer. It grew at a 2.6 percent pace in the second quarter and then a weaker 2 percent pace in the third quarter. The fourth-quarter's rebound ended the year on a positive note.

For all of 2006, the gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 3.4 percent, an improvement from a 3.2 percent showing in 2005.

That's even more impressive considering the economy was hit by the housing slump. Investment in home building for all of last year was slashed by 4.2 percent, the most in 15 years.

GDP measures the value of all goods and services produced within the United States and is the best barometer of the country's economic standing.

What's more, inflation is low, if not ideal.

Even with the slight improvement, underlying inflation is running higher than the Federal Reserve would like. For all of 2006, core inflation rose by 2.2 percent, up from 2.1 percent in 2005.

And unemployment is at all-time lows (even though official numbers for 2006 haven't been released yet). By every measure, the economy is booming.

I'm generally a realist who dislikes vast government projects motivated by idealism. Why? Because most such projects end up hurting people far more than helping, and often bring about results exactly the opposite of what's intended. Welfare? Encourages dependence on government and discourages work. Spanish-language education for kids who don't speak English? Prevents assimilation. Opening borders for immigrants who just want to work and have a better life? Degrades American culture, hurts poor Americans, and imports crime. Idealistic projects don't have a very good track record, so I'm immediately skeptical of any such motivations.

However, my feelings are different when it comes to space exploration. Sure, it's expensive, but there's no hope of cutting the money out of the government budget entirely; eliminating the space program would just result in moving money into harmful idealistic programs. Unlike most idealistic programs, space exploration doesn't actively harm anyone and it does create valuable spin-offs. What's more, it's widely popular because the idealism of the space program is shared by the vast majority of Americans. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is right in saying that we should do more to push the "real reasons" behind the space program rather than focus merely on the reasons that are acceptable to us realists.

If you ask Burt Rutan why he designed and built Voyager, and why Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager flew it around the world, it wasn't for any money involved, it was because it was one of the last unconquered feats in aviation. If you ask Burt and his backer Paul Allen why they developed a vehicle to win the X-Prize, it wasn't for the money. They spent twice as much as they made.

I think we all know why people do some of these things. They are well-captured in many famous phrases. When Sir George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he said "Because it is there." He didn't say that it was for economic gain.

We know these reasons, and tonight I will call them "Real Reasons". Real Reasons are intuitive and compelling to all of us, but they're not immediately logical. They're exactly the opposite of Acceptable Reasons, which are eminently logical but neither intuitive nor emotionally compelling. The Real Reasons we do things like exploring space involve competitiveness, curiosity and monument building. So let's talk about them. ...

Real Reasons are old fashioned. How many of us grew up reading Tom Swift, or Jack Armstrong, All American Boy? Or other similar books stories? Not great literature, for sure, but they exemplified many of the values I think we like to see in people: inventiveness, competitiveness, boldness, and a sense of good feeling about what it was to be an American, in very simplistic ways but ones which hit close to home.

I don't agree with every nuance of what the Administrator says, but he's right in arguing that exploration for it's own sake is a worthy endeavor that almost everyone understands intuitively.

Stereotypes and prejudice are essential for daily living. For better or worse it's impossible to take the time and energy to get to know everyone personally and to fairly determine their true merit; stereotypes are shortcuts that allow us to function. Even though stereotypes are somewhat inaccurate when applied to individuals, they're often more right than many of us would want to admit.

This critical realization undermines (what I presume to be) the purpose of behind an article denouncing stereotypes of atheists as "uncaring" by Austin Cline.

Anti-atheist bigotry isn't just widespread, it's also very fundamental to how bigots view the world around them. By this I mean that when someone is bigoted against atheists, they are unable to grant any real sympathy or consideration to atheists: they refuse to accept that atheists can be kind, moral, decent, civil human beings. Atheists are barely even human from such perspectives and it really drives home just how destructive religious theism can be.

Of course, the article is immediately silly because the author denounces stereotypes of atheists by leaning on stereotypes of Christians in the very first paragraph. So it goes! I'll be the first to admit that stereotypes of Christians have some basis in reality, and it's transparently clear to most people that stereotypes of atheists aren't completely vacuous either. The author, however, completely obfuscates the matter by drawing nonsensical parallels, imagining the reaction if the "anti-atheist bigotry" he perceived were instead aimed elsewhere:

Imagine if they had said:

You can't be Jewish because the ability to care for others' feelings isn't Jew trait.

You can't be Catholic because the ability to care for others' feelings isn't a Catholic trait.

You can't be liberal because the ability to care for others' feelings isn't a liberal trait.

You can't be black because the ability to care for others' feelings isn't a black trait.

However, being (racially) Jewish or black is completely different from being atheist, Catholic, or liberal. Skin color has little or no inherent effect on behavior, but religion and philosophy are determinitive. If someone were to say, for instance, "Wow, you're sure nice for a Nazi!" no one would complain that Nazi-ism was irrelevant to niceness. Is this "bigotry"? Not in the pejorative sense.

Atheists have a reputation for being condescending, arrogant, smug, closed-minded, intolerant, irritable, and pretentious. This reputation is based on the words and actions of many of the most prominent atheists (cf. the South Park episodes where Cartman travels through time to get a Wii). It's not surprising that a person who doesn't know many atheists (perhaps the "bigoted" teacher in the article) would think that most atheists fit that stereotype.

By refusing to concede (or even consider!) that the widely-held stereotypes of atheists have a basis in reality, the author actually reinforces those stereotypes. I, personally, find life's little ironies such as this to be eminently amusing.

Glenn Reynolds linked to year-old ode to suburbia and to a recent article in the Washington Post reporting five myths about suburbia. Both good reads that touch on points I made better long ago: mass transit projects are really just job programs for union workers that require massive subsidies to operate, mass transit is more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and living in the suburbs is better for you.

A quote in Reynolds' piece gives a good perspective on what our elite are really thinking.

Sprawl isn't recent, says Bruegmann. Rich people have always wanted to sprawl:

"Ancient, medieval, and early modern literature is filled with stories of the elegant life of a privileged aristocracy living for large parts of the year in villas and hunting lodges at the periphery of large cities. . . . High density, from the time of Babylon until recently, was the great urban evil, and many of the wealthiest or most powerful citizens found ways to escape it at least temporarily."

Sprawl didn't become a problem until the wealthy and powerful were joined by the hoi polloi. Thanks to greater wealth and improvements in transportation, they were able to move from teeming tenements to less-urban settings. Once this started to happen -- before the automobile hit the scene, and beginning outside the United States -- social critics began to complain that sprawl was ruining pristine landscapes, and destroying the charm of urban life. (Ironically, as Bruegmann also points out, some of the very aspects of sprawl criticized by earlier generations -- like the miles of brick terrace row houses built in South London during the 19th century -- are now regarded as quaintly charming: "Most urban change, no matter how wrenching for one generation, tends to be the accepted norm of the next and the cherished heritage of the one after that.")

I've noticed that satisfying most complaints by environmentalists and leftists would require preventing the poor from rising above their station and enjoying the lifestyle of the wealthy. Whether those poor are the unfortunate fellows who live near rain forests and must therefore preserve them for our aesthetic pleasure, or the poor trapped in inner city slums who long for a yard of their own, self-styled "progressives" demand that everyone else persist as they are to protect the delicate, mythical, "balance".

Just as I wrote earlier about how government regulation strangles medicine, government regulation also strangles the legal profession by constructing high and arbitrary barriers to entry, mandating foolish education methods, and artificially restricting supply for the benefit of the existing suppliers.

The recent arrest of Anderson Kill & Olick paralegal Brian Valery for practicing law without a license raises a number of questions about how the ersatz Fordham graduate could have gotten away with representing corporate clients in complex litigation--without ever having gone to law school. The more salient question, however, is: Would it have mattered if he had?

Legal education has been taking a beating recently. This month the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching issued a report criticizing the Socratic case method that dominates law-school teaching. According to the report, it does little to prepare lawyers to work with real clients or to resolve morally complex issues. Several months ago Harvard Law School announced a reform of its first-year curriculum to require classes in "problem solving," among other things. There appears to be an emerging consensus that although law schools may teach students how to "think like a lawyer," they don't really teach them how to be a lawyer.

The article focuses mostly on the shortcomings of law schools, but remember that law schools have to teach students to pass the Bar Exams, which are given authority by the various state governments. This accreditation system prevents alternative legal education methods from competing in the marketplace and dooms us to legal mediocrity.

In the good old days, of course, lawyers didn't think they could learn the law through a series of hypotheticals. Instead, like most of the Founding Fathers, they apprenticed themselves to practitioners and learned the skills they needed by doing. The case method was invented in the late 1800s by Christopher Columbus Langdell, the dean of Harvard Law School. (Harvard Law wasn't even founded until 1817.) Formal licensing requirements followed, and soon the state bars imposed exams upon the newly graduated that reinforced the notion that being a lawyer meant memorizing definitions and rules. Along the way, few bothered to ask if clients were actually well-served by a lawyer who knew the difference between assault and battery but couldn't negotiate a plea bargain for someone who had committed either. ...

Law is not brain surgery. It is a skill that can be acquired through practice and repetition. This is perhaps the most interesting lesson from Brian Valery, the over-ambitious paralegal: He fooled those around him who ought to have known best. In the late 1990s, I litigated against another paralegal who later pleaded no contest to five criminal misdemeanor charges of unlicensed law practice. What struck me about him at the time was how good he was at his job. He blustered, bluffed, threatened and cajoled with the best of them. He knew the law and argued it capably. But then again, he learned his trade the old-fashioned way: He practiced it.

Government accreditation and licensing schemes try to guarantee that consumers aren't tricked by unqualified lawyers (and doctors, etc.), but because the schemes aren't subject to competitive forces it quickly becomes apparent that they aren't the best possible solutions.

Consider software engineers: there are plenty of great engineers who learned their trade by doing, many of whom do not have a college degree. Applicants without diplomas face a higher hurdle with most employers than do college graduates, and it doesn't require government licensing to ensure that unqualified engineers are kept out. There are plenty of engineers with college degrees who aren't good for anything. Market forces and private licensing and accreditation can handle the situation more efficiently and nimbly than can the blunt hammer of government.

I've considered this idea before, but I can understand why making it work would be pretty difficult: robots that build houses out of concrete.

The first prototype — a watertight shell of a two-storey house built in 24 hours without a single builder on site — will be erected in California before April.

A rival design, being pioneered in the East Midlands, with £1.2m of government funding, will include sunken baths, fireplaces and cornices. There are even plans for robots to supplant painters and decorators by spraying colourful frescoes at an affordable price.

By building almost an entire house from just two materials — concrete and gypsum — the robots will eliminate the need for dozens of traditional components, including floorboards, wooden window frames and possibly even wallpaper. It may eventually be possible to use specially treated gypsum instead of glass window panes.

Engineers on both projects say the robots will not only cut costs and avoid human delays but liberate the normal family homes from the conventional designs of pitched roofs, right-angled walls and rectangular windows.

“The architectural options will explode,” predicted Dr Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who will soon unleash his $1.5m (£940,000) robot. “We will be able to build curves and domes as easily as straight walls. ...

The researchers in Los Angeles claim their robot will be able to build the shell of a house in 24 hours. “Compared to a conventional house, the speed of construction will be increased 200-fold and the building costs will be reduced to a fifth of what they are today,” said Khoshnevis.

In addition to being faster and cheaper, the houses will probably also be far more durable than wood-frame structures, except against earthquakes.

Four Massachusettsians die in a submerged car boat -- no word yet on Senator Ted Kennedy's whereabouts at the time of the incident.

Not being hugely confident in President Bush's plan to "surge" troops into Iraq for a short period of time, I'm surprised to read that terrorist leaders are already fleeing to Iran ahead of the news... despite talking tough just days ago.

DEATH SQUAD leaders have fled Baghdad to evade capture or killing by American and Iraqi forces before the start of the troop “surge” and security crackdown in the capital.

A former senior Iraqi minister said most of the leaders loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American cleric, had gone into hiding in Iran.

Of course every turn of events must be portrayed as a setback for America and President Bush.

The flight from Baghdad could impede American plans to target the leaders of death squads. An extra 17,000 US troops are being sent to Baghdad as part of the surge in forces promised by President George W Bush.

No problem, we don't mind going to Iran to get them.

Here's something really shocking about the upcoming IPCC climate report.

As noted in a prior post, only IPCC insiders have access to the WG1 Report between the Feb 2, 2007 release of the Summary for Policy-Makers and the scheduled publication of the WG1 Report in May 2007. To my knowledge, such a procedure is unprecedented in public commission reporting.

In searching for an explanation of this astonishing procedure, here’s what IPCC procedures (section 4) say about Technical Report acceptance:

Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter.

So the purpose of the three-month delay between the publication of the Summary for Policy-Makers and the release of the actual WG1 is to enable them to make any “necessary” adjustments to the technical report to match the policy summary. Unbelievable.

When your science is questionable it's always best to write the conclusion first so you can make sure you reach it.

(HT: Clayton Cramer, who elaborates on why anthropogenic global warming is a religion and not science at all.)

Charles Murray finished his three-part series about intelligence and education last Thursday while I was on vacation, but here is his final article: a discussion on how the smart kids should be educated.

In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements--medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia--the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs over 120. Evidence about who enters occupations where the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy large proportions of positions in the upper reaches of corporate America and the senior ranks of government. People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.

Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence. ...

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

If you're intrigued by why the education of these smart kids matters, I'll point you once again to La Griffe du Lion's Smart Fraction Theory in which La Griffe applies some statistical analysis to the question: how many smart people do we need for society to function?

An article about media job cuts completely misses the upside.

CHICAGO, Jan. 25 (UPI) -- U.S. media job cuts surged 88 percent in 2006 from the previous year, a downsizing trend expected to continue this year, a survey said Thursday.

The media industry slashed 17,809 jobs last year, a nearly two-fold increase from the 9,453 cuts in 2005, outplacement consultancy Challenger Gray & Christmas said. ...

"These organizations will continue to make adjustments as their focus shifts from print to electronic," Chief Executive John Challenger said. "Until they can figure out a way to make as much money from their online services as they are losing from the print side, it is going to be an uphill battle."

Thanks to the internet and globalization, media companies are now able to do a lot more work with a lot fewer people. This pushes revenue down, and eventually the unneeded jobs are eliminated. These cuts are actually good for our economy. It's doubtful that online media services will ever generate as much revenue as old media services did -- but they won't need as much gross revenue because their expenses will be much less. These job reductions are the manifestation of increased efficiency within the media industry.

Contrary to the hyperbolic claims by pro-illegal-immigrant activists that reducing illegal immigration would require concentration-camp-style round-ups and mass deportations, it looks like simply stepping up traditional enforcement and deportation processes might be enough to do the trick.

TAR HEEL — The 21 Smithfield Packing Co. employees arrested by immigration officials while they worked Wednesday are in the process of being deported.

The 20 men and one woman arrested were moved Thursday from the Mecklenburg County Jail to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., nearly 700 miles from Tar Heel.

Meanwhile, church officials within the region’s Hispanic community and spokespeople with the United Food & Commercial Workers union said the workers’ families didn’t know where they were and other immigrant workers were terrified of more arrests.

Production at the plant was substantially diminished Thursday as workers stayed away.

“There are hundreds of immigrant families who will have to decide, ‘Do I show up to work (Friday) and risk being arrested by immigration?’” said Eduardo Pena, a spokesman for the union, which became an unofficial hub of information for workers Thursday, he said.

It's good that they're scared, because they're breaking the law. If these minor actions are enough to destabilize the security of illegal immigrants, maybe they'll leave and take their families with them. Even if each illegal worker only faces a 1% chance of deportation per year, that's probably significant enough that they wouldn't bring their families over the border with them. Ratchet the percentage high enough and people will figure that it's too much trouble to sneak into the country just to get sent back once they get settled, so they won't.

I just wanted to quote a snippet from Michael Crichton's critique of global warming "science" that deals with the popular acceptance of "scientific consensus".

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.

Examples follow, but plenty should be obvious to even the casual thinker. As I listed in my earlier post about "scientific consensus": Copernicus, Galileo, the Wright Brothers, Newton, Einstein, etc.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Just a quick review of Children of Men, which I saw last weekend in Los Angeles. Despite the promising premise, the movie itself was terrible: bleak and pointless. The MacGuffin is the first pregnant women on earth in 20 years, and the movie is basically a relay race to get her to the "Human Project".

First: bleak. The future sucks, and based on the news clippings scattered throughout the background of the sets it's all Bush's fault. It seems that invading Iraq led to a nuclear war (with who?) that pretty much threw the entire world into chaos and somehow sterilized all of humanity. England is the last holdout of civilization, and the government is chock full of fascist murderers who spend most of the movie gruesomely and casually killing all the major characters. The rebels are just as bad, and they account for several wanton on-screen murders, but it was honestly hard to tell the difference between the two factions after a while. Aside from all this, if the movie were merely bleak it would have been forgivable.

Second: pointless. If you're going to write a dark, depressing movie, at least give it a purpose. Children of Men had none, and explicitly so. There was no character development, unless getting casually, randomly executed counts as "development". What's more, I can barely count all the things the movie never tells us that would have given some depth to the story:

• Why is humanity sterile? If it's just radiation poisoning, there should be other signs.
• Why hasn't anyone tried cloning?
• How did the "heroine" of the story get pregnant? The movie explicitly refuses to explain her situation by having the woman tell us that there's no way to know who the father is (she's a prostitute) or why she's fertile.
• Who is the "Human Project"? What's their purpose? How will having a pregnant woman help them attain it?
• Why does the UK government put illegal immigrants into concentration camps? It the whole world is in chaos, why not just ship the immigrants back over the English Channel and be done with them? England must have access to the outside world, or where would they get their oil?
• Why does the pregnant woman need to be kept away from the government? Sure, they're fascist, but they really do what to cure humanity and they have a ton of resources. Everyone on the planet wants to restore human fertility, so is the pregnant woman kept out of the government's clutches just so that they can't claim credit?
• Why is the reaction of every person who sees the baby "oh wow that's amazing! Ok, I guess I'll just return to my normal life now"? If it were really the first baby in 20 years do you really think anyone would let the baby out of their sight?

And so forth. Honestly, the whole movie was full of holes and had no more purpose than if the good guys were trying to get the last donut at Krispy Kreme to the police station before the captain's coffee got cold. Other than the inherent sense of the importance of the first baby in 20 years, there was no explanation of how the story started or what would happen after it ended. If you really want to see gruesome, purposeless violence then go rent Faces of Death.

If someone asks around the office to see if anyone wants their old bicycle, is it ok for you to take it and sell it? Doing so would certainly go against the giver's expectations, but would they be justified in their feeling of betrayal? Even if several people wanted the bicycle and he chose to give it to you?

Everyone knows how cool titanium is, so why is plain old steel still so popular? Because titanium can cost more than $40 per pound while steel is closer to $1 per pound. Fortunately Donald Sadoway from MIT has founded a company called Avanti Metal that is planning to use a new process that will drastically reduce the cost of refining titanium.

Now a startup, Avanti Metal, using technology developed at MIT, hopes to commercialize a process that drastically reduces the cost of producing titanium, making more of it available for large, lighter-weight airplanes. The process, developed by MIT chemist Donald Sadoway, applies an environmentally benign, direct electrolysis method to make the metal.

Titanium is naturally abundant. But processing titanium oxide found in the ground to make a usable metal is slow and produces toxic waste. "The price of titanium has gone through the roof," says Corby Anderson, director of the Center for Advanced Mineral and Metallurgical Processing at the University of Montana. "It's double what it was this time