Teleologic Blog: September 2005 Archives

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September 27, 2005

How American High Tech Companies Support China's Government...

This essay by David Kopel (for the Rocky Mountain News) describes how Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco, and Google are all doing what the Chinese government tells them to do. Fingering people who send e-mail. Filtering out sites that talk about democracy. Sticking to the Chinese government's offical position on Taiwan. Its sickening the way these companies are complicit in the tyranny of Chinese Communist Party and how they don't care one bit that what they are doing is part and parcel to the political repression in China.

Read it in the Extended entry section...

Kopel: U.S. Web firms aid in repression by Dave Kopel
September 24, 2005

Today, many Americans get the news by reading the headlines on the Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft Web portals. Many more Americans learn about current events by using a search engine from one of these companies. In China, however, such behavior can get you thrown in prison - sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. companies that tout their supposed commitment to goodness and freedom.

Last year, assistant editors of Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) held a staff meeting about a memo sent from national Communist Party headquarters ordering journalists how to cover the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square murders, in which peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing were slaughtered by the Red Army.

Reporter Shi Tao wrote a summary of the meeting, and used his Yahoo! e-mail account to send it to the Asia Democracy Foundation, a group in New York State that supports Chinese democracy. The group published the report, anonymously, on the Web site Democracy Forum and their newsletter Democracy News.

The Chinese dictatorship asked Yahoo! to help them find the person who had sent the message. Yahoo!'s subsidiary in Hong Kong complied, and Shi Tao was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org)broke the story on Sept. 6, 2005, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang blandly replied that "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law."

Indeed, Yahoo! is so enthusiastic to comply with "local law" - however tyrannical and unjust - that in 2002 Yahoo! signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry" (www.isc.org.cn/20020417/ca102762.htm). Thus, explains Reporters Without Borders, a Chinese Web user who runs a Yahoo! search query for a controversial topic such as "Taiwan independence" will "retrieve only a limited and approved set of results." If "you try to post a message on the subject in a discussion forum, it never appears online."

Google and Microsoft have also signed the so-called "Responsibility" code. After the Chinese government blocked Google in 2002, Google modified its Chinese search engine. Google maintains on its own servers a cache of various Web content, so a Chinese surfer previously might have been able to find forbidden content by using the Google cache, rather than reading the content directly from a banned Web site.

In June 2005, Microsoft admitted that it had imposed filters on its Chinese weblogs to block "forbidden words" such as "freedom," "democracy" and "demonstration."

Reporters Without Borders also reports that much of the Chinese Internet runs through routers sold by Cisco Systems, which Cisco modified to allow searches for "subversive" key words, for visits to prohibited Web sites, and for the transmission of "dangerous" e-mail. Ethan Guttman's book Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal, supplies details. Cisco admits to having modified the routers for the Chinese government, but accepts no responsibility for how the modifications are employed.

The Rocky Mountain News mentioned the Shi Tao case in a three-paragraph item in the Sept. 7 Business Briefs, and reported more broadly on American complicity in Chinese Internet censorship in an Aug. 15 business story from Bloomberg. The Denver Post has not given the issue serious attention in 2005.

"Don't be evil" is Google's corporate motto. Microsoft defends its corporate interests on a "Freedom to Innovate Network."

But the noble phrases are contradicted by the misuse of freedom, by cooperation with evil, by assisting the technological advancement of what the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society calls "the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world."

The evil behavior of American companies in China directly endangers Americans. First of all, the dictatorship censors news about health problems, such as the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory System (SARS); suppression of the news about an epidemic significantly increases the chance that an epidemic could spread internationally.

More broadly, the censorship impedes democratic reform in China, and deprives the Chinese people of truth about their government's violations of human rights, about ethnic suppression in Tibet, and about Taiwan's right to remain independent. Thus, China suppresses popular opposition to dictatorship and to an invasion of Taiwan, which some observers believe could occur soon, and which would likely lead to war with the United States.

The architecture of repression which the American companies and their Chinese paymasters are creating could easily be exported to regimes in other nations.

A Washington Post editorial (Sept. 18) suggested that the American companies may be violating the 1989 federal law forbidding the sale of "crime control and detection" equipment to China. Unfortunately, the Commerce Department under the Bush, Clinton, and Bush presidencies has often been lax regarding Chinese exports. Perhaps only consumer and shareholder pressure can persuade the American companies to change their evil ways.

Posted by rakhier at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

Why the Islamic Fascists Think They Can Win...

This small essay by Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz blog sums up why I'm trying to teach. Its a reaction to this essay on how the U.S assimilated immigrants to the U.S. in the past.

This lack of cultural confidence become apparent when the UK, and to a lesser extent the USA, were faced by the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism. The Islamic radical looks around him in a country like England and sees people who do not respect their own way of life and are apologetic about it. The Islamic radical correctly senses weakness and has contempt for people who do not respect their own country, civilization or way of life. He sees the firmness of his own will and faith, and he discounts his material disadvantages, which he is not necessarily wrong to do. A small number of people with absolute conviction and willing to risk all for a cause can work seeming miracles. Mohammad's followers came out of nowhere and overran the world, and their descendants never forget it. Closer to our own time, they recall that a superpower invaded Afghanistan, but that mujahideen from around the Muslim Umma rallied to its defense, and the Soviet Union is no more. The soft, comfort-seeking West seems like a much easier target. And like the Soviet Union, it no longer believes in the principles that supposedly animate it. To the outside observer looking at our depraved entertainment products and listening to the self-loathing on the mainstream news, the West must seem to be an animated corpse that will crumble into a putrescent heap if it is struck hard enough.

Weakness in any sphere invites attack, and the realm of cultural confidence and identity is no exception. Morale is more important than arms, and a country that starts out believing it does not really deserve to survive is already beaten. That may be overstating the case for the UK in 2005. However, a country that tries to wage a struggle where many of its most powerful and influential people believe that the moral right resides with their enemies is far weaker than it will appear if you try to add up the tangible assets each side brings to the fray.

Fortunately, the academic and educational and media communities, while still very powerful, are weakening. They are being stripped of their quasi-monopoly positions by advancing technology. A more complete, more affirmative and truer version of Anglo-American freedom can be formulated and disseminated via the new media, the home-schooling movement, and other means. The United States and the rest of the Anglosphere are magnets for immigrants. These people have experienced alternative arrangements up-close. They are likely to see and understand what is good about these communities. All we need to do is regain this understanding ourselves, and make it available for those who want to learn. This will be a difficult challenge in the years ahead. I anticipate that it will be successful, but nothing is inevitable.

I think this is a very good analysis of the problem. We are suffering from a crisis of moral to a real degree. Academia is filled with people who think the U.S. is the source of all the evil in the world today. Most serious writers spend their books talking about how bad current Western life is. In Hollywood is it a mark of honor to be anti-U.S.

The Islamic fascists look at this in the same way that Hitler and his brown-shirt fascists looked at Wiemar Germany. From their perspective they saw the Weimar republic as corrupt, ineffective, and uncertain in their own minds about whether they deserved to rule the country.

Posted by rakhier at 01:12 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2005

Mark Helprin's Critique of the U.S. War

Helprin, one of my favorite modern authors, has a devestating critique of the current American war. This long post in Chester's Blog contains a number of selections from Helprin's recent essays. His most recent essay is called Let Us Count the Ways To Win the War on Terrorism. Here he talks about what America could do if it wanted to:

In the Second World War, we spent as much as 38.5% of GNP (in 1945), and at the peak had twelve million soldiers under arms, almost 10% of the population. This is a far cry from the situation now. Were we to replicate the same levels of effort, we would be spending not $400 billion but $4.235 trillion. We would not have 2.7 million in uniform (including reserves), but 30 million. I am not advocating any such thing. As pressing as our needs may be, we are not engaged in war against a major power, and the intensity of engagement in World War II is far and above what is necessary. I point it out to show what we can do, and what actually we have done, if we concert our will, especially because during World War II it was much more difficult to apportion 29% of the nation's output to defense (the average for the period 1942-1946) than it would be now, because we have so much more wealth per capita than we did then, coming out of the Depression. To relinquish almost a full third of income is much harder for a nation with barely enough to get by than it is for one that lives in an age of material excess.

He says the current U.S. Forces in Iraq are not doing what they should be doing, namely acting as a threat to the other Arab government to find and supress the terrorists in their countries:

the 140,000 American troops struggling to pacify Iraq would be a much more effective instrument were they remounted, re-formed, and re-instilled with the mission for which they were forged into an army—to win battles against other armies. Working from the existing network of developed bases in northern Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, reinforced until doubled in number, safe from demoralizing attrition, able to exercise and train, supported fully by air and sea power, they would be equidistant from Damascus, Riyadh, and Baghdad, each of which they could reach en masse and despite opposition in two or three days to bring down any regime that did not suppress the terrorism in its purview. These capitals are the center of gravity of the Middle East and, perforce, of the terrorist enterprise. To control the center without continuous occupation of populated areas would confer immense direct, strategical, and psychological advantage, and would as well provide a secure base for dealing with enemy migration to outlying areas, an established pattern that will recur.

Here is his proposed strategy for dealing with Iran:

But were the open and bleeding flank in Iraq closed, the center safely held, and the American military properly supplied, rebuilt, and rejuvenated, the sure way to strip Iran of its nuclear potential would be clear: issuance of an ultimatum stating that we will not allow a terrorist state, the legislature of which chants like a robot for our demise, to possess nuclear weapons; clearing the Gulf of Iranian naval and coastal defense forces; cutting corridors across Iran free of effective anti-aircraft capability; surging carriers to the Gulf and expeditionary air forces to Saudi Arabia; readying long-range heavy bombers in this country and Guam; setting up an unparalleled search and rescue capability. If then our conditions were unmet, we could destroy every nuclear, ballistic-missile, military research, and military technical facility in Iran, with the promise that were the prohibited activities to resume and/or relocate we would destroy completely the economic infrastructure of the country, something we could do in a matter of days and refresh indefinitely, with nary a boot on the ground. That is the large-scale option, necessary only if for some reason the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities could not, as is likely, be accomplished by stealth bombers and cruise missiles. The almost complete paralysis of its economy, should it be called for, could be achieved with the same instruments plus naval gunfire and blockade.

This is a workable plan and its one I agree with. Iran can not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Period.

Needless to say, Helprin's ideas are not being followed. Will the U.S. win anyways? Or will we be struck with a far more serious terrorist attack?

Posted by rakhier at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

Judge Roberts...

I did not hear much of Judge Robert's confirmation hearings. It strikes me that this is so much political theater. The truth is that if a person so clearly unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice as Clarence Thomas can be confirmed, then a man much more qualified will certainly be confirmed. Judge Roberts is one of those people who is a great nominee for the Supreme Court. Smart, top of his class, all the right background, and, most importantly, he hasn't been a Judge very long so his paper trail is short and non-controversial. Baring some smoking gun (or smoking pot), Robert's confirmation is a foregone conclusion.

This short comment by a member of the Volokh Conspiracy is a good critique of the Senatorial comments.

I am struck, watching the hearings, at the complete disconnect between the criticisms of many of those opposing Judge Roberts and a cogent view of the role of the courts. It seems that many of the criticisms are policy based — x or y rulings would lead to bad RESULTS — and make no reference whatsoever regarding whether such results are in fact the correct interpretation of the law (or the Constitution). Judge Roberts's repeated point was that he was committed to the law, and not to a political agenda, yet most of the criticism seems to be that he lacks a particular favored agenda on things like civil rights, the environment, etc. But certainly the critics cannot have it both ways, pissing and moaning that he might reject a substantive conclusion that they favor, yet demand that he not bring his personal views into the judging process. Unless they think that he will misinterpret the law in a way that follows his allegedly retrograde views and opposes their more "enlightened" views, it seems that their criticism should be about the laws as written, or the Constitution itself, and not about the jurist who interprets them faithfully. Demanding a Justice that would distort the laws to serve a particular end, be it civil rights, the environment, or what have you, is basically demanding a jurist who would be dishonest and violate his oath of office. Judge Roberts has naturally refused to be goaded into such silliness. The fact that folks like Kennedy and Schumer and Durbin keep settting that up as the test for their willingness to support him is appalling and speaks to the bankruptcy of their philosophies of government. (Not to be biased, several Republicans also seem to fall into the same exact trap regarding abortion, flag-burning, and the pledge of allegiance. They seem to think that the fact that they do not LIKE the results of various cases has something to do with whether they were rightly decided under the laws and the Constitution, and seem to think that their strong emotions on such issues should have some influence on Judge Roberts's future rulings. They are, of course, mistaken and equally suspect in their philosophies of government.)

In any event, I think Roberts comes out of this looking like the consumate jurist who knows precisely where his duties and loyalties must lie — to the law and the Constitution. Most of his critics come off looking like they are pandering to folks who don't know about or don't care about the proper functioning of the courts, and most of the Senators just come off looking ridiculous. It is particularly ironic to hear the demands of Senators (most notably Specter) that they not be treated like children when they seem so intent on acting like children. If they had the slightest inclination to follow the Constitution on their own accord, and to take seriously the limitations on their powers, they would not need to be rebuked quite so often and perhaps when the Court was forced to overturn some piece of legislation they would get more slack for an honest disagreement or mistake rather than whacked on the wrist for making a power grab.

Indeed. The Senators attack the results of the law without asking if the law was decieded wrongly.

Posted by rakhier at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

Neo-NeoCon writes about 9/11

I have an essay in my mind which talks about my thoughts when 9/11 happened. In the meantime, her essay is wonderful. Read it all.

Posted by rakhier at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2005

Why Some New Orlean's Residents Acted Badly...

First, its an established fact that the Governor of Louisiana prevented the Red Cross from making humanitarian deliveries to the Superdome. See the Red Cross's web page on this issue here.

Second, its a reasonably well founded statement that the vast majority of the people who stayed in New Orleans, despite requests and orders to leave town, were the poorest people of New Orleans. This essay suggests their bad behavior during and following the hurricane only makes sense with this knowledge.

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?...

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them�this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The truth is, in all societies you find an underclass. Look at the Cockneys in the east end of London. Look at the Dalits of India. Look at the Gypsies of Europe. Look at the Burakumin of Japan. I could go on. Clearly, New Orleans had such a society, and they reacted to the disaster differently from what an average American would expect. Where normal Americans see a breakdown in law and order as a problem that needs to be fixed, the underclass sees it as an opportunity. While one can see this is a big problem, there are no easy solutions to this problem. It is an old problem. It is wide spread. And there are good reasons why it still exists even in America.

Does the existance of this group in the (now flooded) low areas of New Orleans explain why the levees were built only to withstand a class 3 hurricane? Was this an unstated part of the cost-benefit analysis from the 1960s?

Posted by rakhier at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2005

No New Oil Refineries Built in 30 Years in the US... NIMBY

According to this essay, no new oil refineries have been built in the US since 1976. 30 years. We have 149 remaining active refineries and that is not enough.

NIMBY and environmentalist action has prevented all activity on this front for a very long time. There hasn't been a new nuclear power plant built for almost as long.

Posted by rakhier at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2005

When can the Federal Government Act?

This from the Washington Post (as quoted in Power Line)

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

This explains why the President needed the Governor's approval:

John Armor, a First Amendment lawyer and one of my favorite writers, told me, "Federal law prevents the President from sending in the National Guard until the Governor gives the order. It is little known, but the Commanding General of the National Guard in every state reports to the Governor, not the President, until the Governor says otherwise. U.S. military units (regular Army, not the Guard) cannot be used because of the Posse Comitatus law, until the Guard has been authorized.

Posted by rakhier at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

Some funny WoW comics...

Here are some funny World of Warcraft comics.

Some armor doesn't look effective.

The Devilsaur is not your friend.

Where do you put some of this stuff?

Well, a matching suit of armor, for once.

(If you don't play World of Warcraft, these are not likely to seem so funny.)

BTW: Here is an article in the New York Times about WoW and its dominant position in the game world (700 million dollars per YEAR in subscriber fees!) (In the Extended section)

Conqueror in a War of Virtual Worlds
By SETH SCHIESEL - Published: September 6, 2005 - New York Times

Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment wanted to make a big splash in the video game world back in March when it introduced Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer online game based on the once-hot film franchise. The game made a big splash all right, like a belly flop.

Over its first three months the game signed up fewer than 50,000 subscribers, a pittance, so in June Warner cut bait and agreed to sell the game to Sony. Last month Matrix Online was downsized from nine virtual "realms" to three, because users were having a hard time finding one another in the game's vast digital ghost town.

The troubles of Matrix Online were partly of Warner's own making; many players and critics agree that the game is a mediocre experience. But the online market used to make room for mediocre games. Now, the broader phenomenon is that so many contenders, including Matrix Online, simply cannot stand up to the overwhelming popularity of online gaming's new leviathan: World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif.

With its finely polished, subtly humorous rendition of fantasy gaming - complete with mages, orcs, dragons and demons - World of Warcraft has become such a runaway success that it is now prompting a debate about whether it is helping the overall industry by bringing millions of new players into subscription-based online gaming or hurting the sector by diverting so many dollars and players from other titles.

"World of Warcraft is completely owning the online game space right now," said Chris Kramer, a spokesman for Sony Online Entertainment, buyer of Matrix Online and one of Blizzard's chief rivals. "Look, Matrix Online is good, but it's like being in the early 90's and trying to put a fighting game up against Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter; it's just not going to happen. There are a lot of other online games that are just sucking wind right now because so many people are playing WOW."

Mr. Kramer is in a position to know. Last November, his company released EverQuest II, sequel to the previous champion of massively multiplayer games. Such games, also known as M.M.O.'s, allow hundreds or thousands of players to simultaneously explore vast virtual worlds stocked with quests, monsters and treasure. Players sometimes cooperate to take on epic tasks, like killing a huge computer-controlled dragon, and sometimes fight one another in what is known as player-versus-player combat.

But November was the same month that World of Warcraft hit the shelves. In a subscriber-based multiplayer online game, the customer buys the game's software for perhaps $30 to $50, and then pays a monthly fee of usually around $15. (There are also many games that are sold at retail but then are free to play online.)

Since November, World of Warcraft has signed up more than four million subscribers worldwide, making for an annual revenue stream of more than $700 million. About a million of those subscribers are in the United States (with more than half a million copies sold this year) and another 1.5 million are in China, where the game was introduced just three months ago. By contrast, EverQuest II now has between 450,000 and 500,000 subscribers worldwide, with about 80 percent in the United States.

Just a year ago, numbers like that would have classed EverQuest II as a big hit. The original EverQuest topped out at around a half-million players, and many, if not most, game executives came to believe that the pool of people willing to pay $15 a month to play a video game had been exhausted. The conventional wisdom in the industry then was that there could not possibly be more than a million people who would pay to play a massively multiplayer online game.

Now, World of Warcraft has shattered earlier assumptions about the potential size of the market.

"For many years the gaming industry has been struggling to find a way to get Internet gaming into the mainstream," said Jeff Green, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World, one of the top computer game magazines. "These kinds of games have had hundreds of thousands of players, which are not small numbers, but until World of Warcraft came along no one has been able to get the kind of mainstream numbers that everyone has wanted, which is millions of players."

Or as put by another Blizzard rival, Richard Garriott, an executive producer at NCsoft and one of the fathers of computer role-playing games: "Every year someone writes a big article about how the M.M.O. business has reached a new plateau and won't get any bigger. And then every year we seem to grow 100 percent. World of Warcraft is just the next big step in that process."

Worldwide, about the only subscriber-based multiplayer online games that can compare to World of Warcraft are Lineage and Lineage II, from NCsoft. Each game claims about 1.8 million subscribers, but in both cases the vast majority of players are in South Korea, where Internet gaming has become practically a national pastime.

World of Warcraft has taken off in many countries because Blizzard has made a game that is easy for casual players to understand and feel successful in, while including enough depth to engross serious gamers, who may play a game like World of Warcraft for 30 hours a week or more. Previously, many massively multiplayer games had seemed to pride themselves on their difficulty and arcane control schemes.

"The emphasis has clearly been on removing all sorts of barriers of entry," Ville Lehtonen, a 25-year-old Finn who runs Ascent, one of Word of Warcraft's elite player organizations, or guilds, said via e-mail. "The low-end game is a great triumph of usability - everything is aesthetically pleasing and easy to learn, making the experience a very positive one. Also the ease of leveling guaranteed that people didn't get frustrated too easily. These effects combined to lure in the so-called casual crowds in huge masses."

It is much the same formula that Blizzard has used with its other major properties: the action-role playing Diablo series and the Starcraft and Warcraft strategy franchises.

"This is what Blizzard always does," said Mr. Green, of Computer Gaming World. "They have an innate genius at taking these genres that are considered hard-core geek property and repolishing them so they are accessible to the mainstream. To do that without losing their geek cred is an incredible achievement."

Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, which is controlled by Vivendi Universal Games, estimated that about a quarter of the game's players are women, up from fewer than 10 percent on previous Blizzard games. "I think we've introduced a number of people to online gaming who didn't realize that they would even enjoy it, and so I think that's good for the industry," he said.

Some of Blizzard's biggest rivals seem to agree.

"World of Warcraft is absolutely expanding the market, and that's a positive for us because we don't want this to just be a niche market," said Mike Crouch, an NCsoft spokesman. NCsoft has at least three new massively multiplayer games on the way including City of Villains, a superhero-themed sequel to last year's City of Heroes that is scheduled for release this fall. "World of Warcraft is great, but people eventually move on and we will have the catalog for them to move on to."

But there is also trepidation.

"If you're only playing WOW and you're paying every single month, what does that mean for all of the other Internet games out there that are trying to get your $10 or $12 or $15 a month?" Mr. Green said. "WOW is now the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I think it also applies to the single-player games. If some kid is paying $15 a month on top of the initial $50 investment and is devoting so many hours a week to it, are they really going to go out and buy the next Need for Speed or whatever? There is a real fear that this game, with its incredible time investment, will really cut into game-buying across the industry."

In any case, as in years past, there are those who believe that paid online gaming is all a fad anyway.

"I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month," said Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm. "World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers."

"It may continue to grow in China," Mr. Pachter added, "but not in Europe or the U.S. We don't need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn't work in the U.S. It just doesn't make any sense."

Posted by rakhier at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

Hugh Hewitt asks: Why does anyone think the Federal Government can intervene?

Hugh Hewitt asks some good questions:

Where does it reside?

Is there a federal "police power?"

Can the federal government order the evacuation of a city when state and local officials have not done so?

Who has first call on a state's national guard?

Who controls a city's police department?

Can a federal official order a police department to deploy in strength to specific points within a city such as the Supredome or the Convention Center?

Can a federal official commandeer a city's supply of school busses, city busses, and city personnel?

For starters, the police power resides in the states. There is no general federal police power...

For the federal government to act in the face of a natural disaster, it's help must be requested and its guidance accepted by the state and local officials.

"States are accorded wide latitude in the regulation of their local economies under their police powers," the Supreme Court wrote in the 1976 case of New Orleans v. Dukes, and that wide latitude extends to every aspect of disaster planning (or non-planning.)

Every effort to blame Bush (or laughably Secretary Rice) is simply demagoguery...

One can argue that our system of government doesn't work well when local authorities are either corrupt or incompotent. Which is true. But the alternative of Federal control is, in my opinion, worse. Not to mention the fact that you would have to change the Constitution in order to give Federal control.

My father argues that what you could do is have Federal inspections of various state institutions, a Federal "guideline" for things like flood control for major urban areas, and then publish the results. What he hopes is that news papers would pick up the results and alert the citizens with headlines like: New Orleans levees fail Federal inspections for the 5th time in a row. This seems reasonable to me. Certainly a lot of people knew that New Orlean's levees weren't likely to protect the city in the face of a class 4 hurricane. And yet they did not fix the system. Well they paid the price of their complacency this time.

Posted by rakhier at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

Mark Steyn suggests some aspects of American Government don't work very well...

Mark Steyn's comment on response and planning for levee breaks in New Oreleans left something to be desired...

The nation's taxpayers will now be asked to rebuild New Orleans. The rationale for doing so is that it is a great city of national significance. Fine. But, if it's of national significance, what have all the homeland security task forces been doing these last four years? Why is the defense of the city still left to a system of levees each with its own individual administrative regime? If it's of national significance, why did the porkmeisters of the national legislature and national executive branch slash a request by the Army Corps of Engineers for $105 million for additional flood protection measures there down to just over $40 million, at the same time they approved a $230 million bridge to an uninhabited Alaskan island? Given that the transport infrastructure's already in place, maybe it makes more sense to rebuild New Orleans in Alaska.

One thing that became clear two or three months after "the day that everything changed" is that nothing changed -- that huge swathes of the political culture in America remain committed to a bargain that stiffs the people at every level, a system of lavish funding of pseudo-action. You could have done as the anti-war left wanted and re-allocated every dollar spent in Iraq to Louisiana. Or you could have done as some of the rest of us want and re-allocated every buck spent on, say, subsidizing Ted Turner's and Sam Donaldson's play-farming activities. But, in either case, I'll bet Louisiana's kleptocrat public service would have pocketed the dough and carried on as usual -- and, come the big day, the state would still have flopped out, and New Orleans' foul-mouthed mayor would still be ranting about why it was all everybody's else fault.

Those levees broke; they failed. And you think about Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and you wonder what's waiting to fail there. The assumption was that after 9/11, big towns and small took stock and identified their weak points. That's what they told us they were doing, and that's what they were getting big bucks to do. But in New Orleans no one had a plan that addressed levee failure, and no one had a plan for the large percentage of vehicleless citizens who'd be unable to evacuate, and no one had a plan to deal with widespread looting. Given that all these local factors are widely known -- New Orleans is a below-sea-level city with high crime and a low rate of automobile ownership -- it makes you wonder how the city would cope with something truly surprising -- like, say, a biological attack.

Well, I agree. It turns out the City of New Orleans disaster plan was litterly "you are on your own". This according to a news report published July 25, 2005 (a full month and a half before the flooding of New Orleans).

You're responsible for your safety... we don't have the transportation [to get you out of town]".

Some plan. Basically, in the event of a flood that fills the city, you are all going to drown. Local government at its finest.

Posted by rakhier at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2005

Helicopter Parents...

Nice article about Helicopter Parents that always seem to hover over their college student children. Lots of good comments in the comment section.

Main points: Parents are lot more involved in their children's lives after the age of 18. Colleges seem to have pathetic teachers and near-useless administrations.

Posted by rakhier at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

Who to Blame...

Lots of people are blaming FEMA, the President, and the Federal Government for the disaster which New Orleans has turned into. Here are some, rather more rational comments - (culled from Power Line Blog)

Dr. David Caskey writes from Louisiana:

A lot is going on down here that is not in the news. First, our esteemed governor and the mayor of NO are both idiots. This is the real reason for problems. Second, the NO police force is second only to the mafia in corruption and much of the looting and theft are coming from them as well as their lassitude in doing their job. Third, all Louisiana communities need clothes of any kind. See if your local Salvation Army will send to the shelters throughout the state and blog to give any clothes to the [Salvation] Army. You notice I did not say the Red Cross, they do not have a sizable presence here and are only fishing for money like after 9/11.

From John Galvin:

1: The levees were only built for a Cat 3, at most most. No gat a Cat 4 storm and the levees failed, as would be expected. See US News article of 7/18/05 Despite all the fancy words, a levee is just a big, thick reinforced concrete wall. Why couldn’t the state of Louisiana use its hefty oil and gas revenues to build better walls around it’s most important city?

2: As soon as the flood water came, New Orleans gov’t simply melted down. There was, and is, NO working chain of command. There was no plan to evacuate people who did not have cars. There was no provision for food, water, sanitary items, etc at either the Superdome or Convention Center. Compare NO gov’t in the flood to NYC gov’t on 9/11. compare NO to San Francisco or LA wheh they have the wholly expected earthquakes. Compare NO to Florida just 1 year ago, with 3 major hurricanes.

3. The state of Louisiana had NO plan for a flood in NO either. We saw their governor talking about “trying to come up with a plan for this” and “trying to come up with a plan for that” You don’t “try to come up with a plan” AFTER a FORSEEN disaster.

All this would be understandable if something unexpected like an earthquake hit NO. But a hurricane and rising waters?

From Jim Ouly:

Once the storm has passed we can move in and start rescue operations. We make sure we have the ability to operate for at least 72 hours on our own without having to rely on any of the surrounding communuties, county, or state.

I bring this up because I saw a lot of ambulances, police cars, and fire equipment flooded in the Katrina footage. It will be interesting to see what the NO preplanning was since their director of emergency response is all over the tv blaming Bush. We went through Frances (cat 4) and three weeks later Jeanne (cat 3) last year and I think Palm Beach County and Jeb Bush did a pretty good job. It's up to local and state people to tell the feds what they need and to run the emergency command centers, not just throw their arms up in the air and start blaming everyone else.

The truth is: we have a system of government which is designed to give as much power as possible to the local authorities. Above the local government stands the State governments. Now States in the United States are essentially independent nations. They each have their own constitutions and their own set of laws. There is a great deal the Federal Government simply CAN NOT do. To blame the Federal Government for a failure to

(a) Make sure that New Orleans was protected from a Class 4 Hurricane is wrong. This is NOT the Federal Government's job. Its up to the people of New Orleans and (if they won't do it) the State of Louisiana to solve this sort of problem. The Federal Government does not mandate how cities should deal with potential disasters. Is there a Federal Standard for earthquake safety in building design? No there is not for very good reasons: some states need to worry about earthquakes and some do not.

(b) Make sure the city of New Orleans could evacuate its population in a fast and efficient maner. Again: this is NOT the job of the Federal Government. States are responsible for internal issues like fire, flood, police, and power. The Federal Government does not deal with this. Its NOT its job. The Feds don't evacuate people, the Feds don't run bus services.

Really, this is basic U.S. Government behavior here. This is the way the system was designed. Sure I can see why the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana would like to shift the responsibility to someone else, but it really is their problem. The city of New Orleans and the state have had 90 years to deal with possibility of New Orleans flooding. The fact that they burried their heads in the sand and refused to plan for a Cat 4 Hurricane is no one's fault but theirs.

Update

Writer Cicero on Winds of Change.net makes the observation that for the last 4 years, the Federal Government has said "we can do more to help in the case of a disaster caused by terrorists". Hence the Department of Homeland Security. Hence the massive budget increase for emergencies. Is it not fair to ask if this Federal spending and re-organization has all been a waste of time and money and effort? The destruction of New Orleans is comperable to a terrorist attack on a major U.S. city. Isn't this the sort of thing the Feds ARE responsible for handling?

The answer is: This is not what the Department of Homeland Security has been focused on for the last 3 years. Hurricanes have been hitting the U.S. ever since we gained a Gulf Coast. In theory, we know how to deal with them. What is new, what no one knows how to deal with is a "dirty bomb", an attack using biological weapons, or a suitcase nuke hand delivered to the downtown of a major city. These new threats are what the Feds are trying to help cities deal with.

Realistically, the creation of a new Federal Department with a budget and a whole array of previously independent agencies, is not going to do very much good. Certainly not in three years, perhaps not in 20 years. The Department of Homeland Security is just a public band-aid and something to make the terrorists think we are stronger than we really are. The real plan for dealing with Islamic terrorists is the Iraq operation. Fighting Al Qaeda in Sunni Triangle as opposed to in Times Square.

I'm sorry that the City of New Orleans has been destroyed. I'm sorry that the people there are going to suffer because of failures in planning which reach back 90 years in time. But I'm not sorry we live in the U.S. where all laws and all solutions DO NOT COME from Washington D.C. If you want an example of a country where 99% of the laws and regulations come from the capital, look at France.

Posted by rakhier at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

Rebuilding New Orleans...

This essay from City Journel questions if the city of New Orleans can be rebuilt. It is, sad to say, a poorly run city with a crime rate 10 times the national average and a nearly useless civil administration.

This writer talks about why New Orleans had no back-up for its levee system:

Regarding the levee system in New Orleans, one cannot truly understand how lucky the city was just have the system that was in place without understanding the truly Byzantine structure of New Orleans politics, which requires separate governing boards for each levee that is built.

Rather one agency that is in charge of flood prevention, there are scores. Building in redundancies would have required more boards, which would have lessened the political power of those on the existing boards. I seriously doubt that even now, after this catastrophe, that we in Louisiana will see this system change because the structure is mandated by the Louisiana Constitution. Any change requires not just statewide approval, but must also be approved by a majority of voter in Orleans Parish. Given how many local politicians whose fiefdoms would disappear, that will not happen, and so we will see this disaster occur again."

There is good reason to question, as Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has done, whether all of New Orleans should be rebuilt the way it used to be. "There are "some real tough questions to ask," Mr. Hastert said in an interview on Wednesday with The Daily Herald of Arlington, Ill. "How do you go about rebuilding this city? What precautions do you take?".

For a starting point, how is this: no rebuilding in places that are under sea level? And yes, this is a big problem.

Posted by rakhier at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

2005 - An Historic Year

The year 2005 just entered the history books - because of the flooding of New Orleans by the huricane Katrina.

This is a natural disaster on the scale of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Almost 100 years later another large American city is rendered uninhabitable by a natural disaster and the effects on the city will be felt for decades to come. The Wikipedia article is a remarkable and up-to-date source of information on the subject. Anyone who doubts the value of the Wikipedia should end them now.

Comments: first, this is a major tragedy for the hundreds of thousands of people who used to live in New Orleans. The majority of houses in the city are flooded and thus, destroyed. With 80% of the city under water, this really does mean 80% of the housing (if not more) will have to be torn down.

Most of the multi-story buildings are located on what passes for high ground in the area and have not suffered from flooding. You can see an elevation map of New Orleans here. The historic tourist destinations (i.e. the French Quarter) are built on the high ground as well. But the vast residential areas are sunk.

The future of the city.

The gamble which was made 90 years ago to drain large sections of swamp near the old city and keep the water out with huge pumps (mostly of work of A. Baldwin Wood) has proved to be a bad bet. What were the odds of a powerful hurricane hitting New Orleans? Over a 100 year period, at least two major hurricanes have passed over New Orleans.

Several factors worked together to make this disaster. 1) Over the 90 years of pumping, the city has sunk deeper below sea level as ground water has been taken out. New Orleans is not built on bed rock. 2) Marshlands down river of the city have been shrinking for decades, due in part to levees which keep the silt from flowing into the Gulf. 3) The Gulf of Mexico frequently has hurricanes pass into and over it.

Note: I don't have a solution. While the simplest choice would be to abandon New Orleans and relocate the town, that isn't going to happen. Bigger, stronger levees and dikes? Emergency water control systems on Lake Pontchartrain like what was installed in London and in Venice?

My prediction is that New Orleans will rebuild. While many people will give up on the city and move out forever, many more will stay and new people will come to the city, drawn by cheap houses and jobs. The hope is that in the next decades the city and state will come up with better solutions to the problem of keeping the water out of New Orleans the next time a Class 4 or 5 hurricane passes over The Big Easy.

Update
This is a dire essay which predicts at least 40,000 deaths. The writer also argues that nine cities have been destroyed: New Orleans, population 1.2 million, Slidell, pop. 26,000, Bay St. Louis/Waveland pop. 12,000, Long Beach, pop. 17,000, Gulfport, pop. 71,000, Biloxi, pop. 50,000, Ocean Springs, pop. 17,000, Psacagoula/Moss Point/Gautier, pop. 42,000, and Mobile, pop. 198,000.

Is Mobile destroyed? Moss Point? Biloxi?

Further Update

The writer is unduly alarmist. Mobile is not destroyed and the death toll outside New Orleans is not likely to go over 500. I have no idea what the death toll will be inside New Orleans though.

Posted by rakhier at 08:55 AM | Comments (0)