Teleologic Blog

« November 2005 | Main | January 2006 »

December 15, 2005

Joe Katzman on Diplomatic Troubles with Britian...

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.net has a long essay in which he slams the U.S. Congress. Congress is putting up such road blocks to cooperation with Britian that the British are seriously talking about pulling out of our F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. This would be bad. We need to work with Britain, not put up annoying laws which make them inferior partners.

His conclusion is worth reading:

Cicero, and others here on Winds, have described the competing ideologies our world faces. Let me offer my take:
• The continental European EU model of top-down transnational socialism insulated from democracy is one. It is doomed by demographics, by the corrosive effects of its inherent unaccountability and inflexibility, and by the emptiness that lies at its heart. What is in question is what will come after, and whether its roots in the Enlightenment, Western Civilization and the dignity of man will prove strong and deep enough to overcome its failures.

• The authoritarian quasi-capitalism of China (which could morph into something either better, or far worse) and Asia is another option, one that will present a rising challenge both geopolitically and ideologically. Can material prosperity be insulated from political freedom? For how long? If so, there are many places where such a model will be attractive - and a resource-hungry colonialism that depends on its export is hardly out of the question.

• There is, of course, the Islamist alternative, which may acquire an ability to destroy that far surapsses their fallen civilization's utter inability to create. It has blended with the detrius of the 20th centry's failed totalitarian experiments, and that truth is now being observed in affiliation and action as well as in theory. In the end, what remains of Islamic civilization will either learn to love the kuffar [unbeliever] as its brother, or its own internal logic will lead to its death - at another's hands, or at its own. The Fascist death-impulse is strong, and intrinsic, but they rarely die alone. It is time for the decent people to choose, and make a stand.

• And don't forget the Anarchy alternative of warring tribes, artificial failed states, and the shadowy criminal organizations that both feed on and depend on them. for the foreseeable future they, too, will be with us. There are a number of plausible scenarios in which al-Qaeda is just the first challenge of its type, the early wave of a trend rather than the last wave of a long civilizational death-spiral.

Against all of these, there is another tradition. One of civic society organized of individuals, and characterized by accountability, flexibility, and the rule of law. It is not a tradition bound by ethnicity, geography, or past historical status - though it has many of its origins in the historical experiences of the British people and blends deeper Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins. James C. Bennett and The Anglosphere Institute call it The Anglosphere, and to the extent that Western civilization and its ideals retain a fighting chance in this world, this is where they reside most firmly.

It's a model that has proven its sustainability, and now it is learning the balance between respect for others, duty to others, and its own self-preservation. It is imperfect. It is also, I believe, the best hope for a world that represents a better future for ALL humankind.

Say it with me, Congressmen: I am a member of a civilization.

Britain is the leader that was, America, the leader that is. And if the USA plays its cards as well as Britain did, another will arise in time and become the leader that will be. Of a culture that values the creativity, exploration, freedom, and dignity of all. Perhaps one day, those values will be held by most of humankind. Perhaps one day, they will even extend beyond. I hope so with all my heart.

Hear hear! Read the whole thing...

Posted by rakhier at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

Why Use Internet Explorer? Use Firefox...

Microsoft announces yet another problem with Internet Explorer. Sigh. Why would any sane person use that program?

Microsoft issued a patch to fix the problem as part of its monthly security bulletin. The problem mainly affects the Windows operating system and Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser.

Computer security experts and Microsoft urged users to download and install the patch available at www.microsoft.com/security.

Microsoft said the vulnerability exists in its Internet Explorer Web browser, which an attacker could exploit to take over a PC by running software code after luring users to malicious Web pages.

Use Firefox. Its fast. Its simple. It doesn't have security holes so dangerous that evil programs can take over your computer.

Posted by rakhier at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

Wikipedia as Accurate as EB in Science articles

What I consider to be one of the great achievements of this decade - The Wikipedia - has been rated just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica, at least in science articles.

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal Nature wrote in an online article published Wednesday.

The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries.

Two weeks ago prominent journalist John Seigenthaler, the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today, revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.

Such errors appear to be the exception rather than the rule, Nature said in Wednesday's article, which the scientific journal said was the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia to Britannica. Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

Of eight "serious errors" the reviewers found -- including misinterpretations of important concepts -- four came from each source, the journal reported.

Given the nature of the Wikipedia, it will have corrected the errors within a day or two of this magazine's publication, while the Britannica might be fixed 5 years from now.

Posted by rakhier at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Searchlight Crusade explains (again) why we are fighting this war...

Its hard to get a better summary of why we are fighting this war than that which is provided by Searchlight Crusade.

Our opponent is not constrained by, indeed, makes no pretense that they are constrained by any consideration of "civilized warfare." They have told us repeatedly, by their actions, that they do not consider civilian targets to be "off limits," indeed, their attacks on civilians, and the number of civilian casualties, greatly outnumber their attacks upon our military and our military casualties.

Furthermore, they have told us repeatedly exactly what their strategic goals are: nothing short of the annihilition of our society and way of life as it exists. This is understandable, as our civilization's great memes are in direct conflict with theirs. Evolving wisdom as opposed to revealed historical wisdom. Individual freedom of religion as opposed to enforced submission to the rule of one particular religion. However recently and imperfectly we may have come to it, respect for women and minorities of all sorts, and participation in our ruling bodies, versus subjugation of women to men, subjugation of others to the dominant religion, heavy ongoing penalties for those outside the favored class of the ruling religion...

I do not fool myself that I can live with allowing the islamic civilization to win this war. They would demand our society make changes that I could not live with. I have two daughters and a wife I love; what the requirements of the society the islamicists would impose upon them I will die before I allow them to take place.

I agree with this. The Islamic-Fascists must be defeated. Its either them, or us. Our civilization stands for everything that they hate. Their ideology is close to a complete list of the things I hate.

Posted by rakhier at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

A real graph of Federal Spending for the last 30 Years...

Its very misleading to compare the size of the Federal Government to ANYTHING unless you account for 2 vital factors:

1) The size of the U.S. Economy (in other words, how big is the U.S. government compared to the economy as a whole)

2) The inflation rate (in other words, compare apples to apples, do not compare apples of today vs. the huge golden apples of the past).

Here is a graph which does those things:

As you can see, Federal Spending isn't really much different from in years past - in the vital important sense of how big is the government in relation to the past and the economy as a whole.

Graph created by Angry Bear using U.S. Congressional Budget Office data.

Posted by rakhier at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

Neo-NeoCon on Morality of Torture...

Good post here by Neo-NeoCon. I especially liked this analysis:

Gearty believes that one cannot make judgments about good or evil while simultaneously maintaining esteem (I think by this he means "respect") for the evildoer. And, since Geary elevates equal esteem for all humanity as the highest good because it underpins human rights, then we cannot make judgments about good and evil.

However, in writing it out that way, I think a basic contradiction becomes glaringly obvious: Geary is himself making such a "good and evil" sort of moral judgment, and that is that the greatest good is to esteem all people on earth equally, and accord them all equal and complete human rights. It's impossible, however, if one follows his logic, to escape the notion that groups with more of a dedication to preserving human rights would be more "good" and less "evil" than those who torture freely. I think this is an illustration of the fact that it's simply impossible to talk about moral decisions without making some sort of moral judgments.

I think this point is correct. You have to stand somewhere. There is no way to talk about the right thing to do, the correct thing to do, without making implicit moral judgements, value statements. It can't be avoided. People who try to avoid them end up saying nothing.

In the real world in which we live--rather than the lofty world of the London School of Economics in which Gearty seems to live, and where I'm sure no one ever does anything unethical--moral choices are usually between the lesser of two evils (or, as I've written before, the least crazy of several competing crazinesses). Failure to make such choices between relative goods/evils would make us into moral monsters of another sort, trapped in a rigid rules-bound way of thinking that would lead almost inevitably to tragic consequences.

Yes. We often have to face choices where all the decisions we make are bad and will hurt people. We still have to choose. Even not choosing is a choice that will hurt or kill. The old high-school stand-by of "I only want to leave other people alone" doesn't work when your choices are death for some vs. death for others.

Posted by rakhier at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

The CIA Now Leaks News...

This essay from Powerline Blog points out a very serious problem: people in the CIA are leaking information which is damaging U.S. national security and harming the current administration. This hasn't happened before and it shouldn't be happening now.

The Telegraph reports on the increasingly weird foreign policy crisis in which the White House finds itself. The CIA set up a system of rendition, whereby terrorist suspects are turned over to certain foreign governments. The CIA also established a network of secret detention centers in several countries, including some in Europe.

Having taken these prudent anti-terrorist measures, the CIA--or some within the agency, apparently including most of its leadership--then attempted to damage the Bush administration, while also destroying the effectiveness of their agency's own programs, by leaking the existence of the secret European prisons to the Washington Post. (I wrote about this aspect of the CIA's war against President Bush here.) This has caused a foreign policy crisis for the administration, which is now in the position of trying to defend the very agency that stabbed it in the back. The Telegraph reports:

Intelligence gleaned by the CIA had saved European as well as American lives, Condoleezza Rice said yesterday in a riposte to critics of America's approach to the fight against terrorism.

Speaking before her departure for a tricky four-day visit to Europe, the secretary of state gave Washington's first detailed defence of the CIA since a transatlantic row broke out last month over its alleged use of secret prisons in eastern Europe.

[L]ast month's report in the Washington Post that the CIA had held detainees in a network of Soviet-era prisons rekindled many of the old animosities. A flood of new information has followed, disclosing the extent of the CIA's use of European airspace and airports for unmarked flights in recent years.

Washington has been on the defensive over the issue for several weeks.

So the CIA established policies that it knew would be controversial and would damage American interests if revealed, and then leaked the existence of those policies to the Washington Post for the purpose of damaging the Bush administration. And now the administration is trying to defend the CIA. Why, I wonder?

Presumably the administration thinks there are good people within the CIA who are trying to serve the nation's interests. No doubt there are some. But, given the torrent of anti-administration leaks that the agency has generated for the past three years, without a single CIA employee being punished for leaking anti-Bush classified information to the Washington Post or the New York Times, isn't it obvious that pretty much the entire leadership of the CIA is behind the agency's war against President Bush? And if that's the case, why does the administration believe that it can successfully defend an agency that would rather expose its own secrets to embarrass the administration, than defend itself?

As I've said before, the CIA is an agency in deep crisis. It is not at all clear that its survival is in the national interest.

Hear hear.

Posted by rakhier at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

Howard Dean says the U.S. has lost - does he speak for the Democratic Party in 2005?

Howard Dean said "I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

His proposal: pull out, redeploy more troops to Afghanistan "where they like us".

As Tom Bevan said on his RCP Blog

Dean hit all the highlights: Comparison to Vietnam. Check. Call for immediate withdrawal. Check. Bush lied. Check. Comparison to Watergate. Check.

In all seriousness, Howard Dean is not some yahoo, he's the national voice of the Democratic party and his comments - saying Iraq is unwinnable and calling for the immediate withdrawal of 80,000 troops less than two weeks before Iraq goes to the polls - unquestionably furthers the perception that Democrats are the party of cut and run. This is a horrendous political mistake and it puts even more pressure on Democrats like Clinton, Biden, et al to respond to the question: Does Howard Dean speak for your party?

I'd like to know that too. Because if this is the position of the Democratic Party, then I'm gone. I've stuck with the party since 1992 but this is the straw that breaks the camels back for me.

We have not lost this war. In fact I think we are winning the war. The world is better off now in 2005 than it was in 2003 when Saddam was in power.

A reasonably solid understanding of U.S. History shows that we always get to a nasty phase towards the end of a war when the temptation to cut and run becomes strong. Leadership is about knowing these sorts of things and seeing what is best for America - victory.

We haven't lost 25,000 soldiers, we have lost less than 2,000 dead soldiers in Iraq over 2 years. Our population is 300,000 million. We are the richest country in the world, we can afford this war (I'm sorry to be so cold blooded about this but this is a war. Our casuality rate is both historically low and is sustainable.) If we continue losing 800 soliders a year in Iraq, we can stay there for the next 50 years and still come out ahead.

Posted by rakhier at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

Iran - Is War Inevitable?

This essay at the Officer's Club is strongly pesimistic on the topic of a peaceful resolution to Iran's nuclear program.

Time is running out in the Iran versus West spat. The crisis is beginning to snowball, and its number of moving parts are increasing exponentially.

Today marked a suprising announcement from the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Muhammad El Baradei, as he confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran was only "months away" from developing a nuclear bomb. The announcement is surprising because the IAEA has long tried to "keep the peace" between Israel, the U.S. and Iran. El Baradei's announcement will escalate the crisis.

Also today, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (widely expected to replace Ariel Sharon as head of the Likud Party in elections next month) asserted that he would "not hesitate" to strike Iran as Prime Minister.

The point has not been lost on the Iranians, who just announced that they are purchasing sophisticated surface-to-air missiles from Russia.

Logic dictates that Israel would strike before the Iranians had a functional bomb, to assure that any Iranian retaliation would be non-nuclear. Military resolution of the crisis is looming...

His analysis is good and really if the Isralies honestly said to us "to preserve the survival of Israel we have to attack Iran's nuclear installations" we would likely go with them.

On the other side is this comment:

I am just as hawkish as the next guy, but there are certain realities that we need to accept. The United States has already decided that it can live with a nuclear Iran. The Israelis will learn to live with it, as well. As distasteful an idea as that is, it is the fact of the matter.

Macho talk of a military strike on Iran's infrastructure usually fades away once genuine logistical considerations are put on the table. And short-sighted attack proponents spend little time discussing actual consequences of such a move. Have people forgotten that the Islamic Republic's army would make Iraq their live-fire range following a Western attack?

I respect the Israelis' military competence and survival insticts. They can be squirrelly when they need to be. But even this is too much for them - and they know it. This is no Osirak and operations in Iran are not the same as operations in Lebanon. Respect Israeli wisdom along with their martial prowess.

The Iranian AND Israeli saber-rattling is purely for domestic consumption and cooler heads in DC know that. Nuclear weapons would give the mullahs the sense of security they have always lacked. The United States will not attack a nuclear state unless its own existence is at risk and the mullahs know that. Don't look now, but the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction is back in vogue!

I personally don't trust the current leadership of Iran. Theocracies are a deeply flawed system of government and Iran's is just as bad as previous theocracies. Corrupt, incompotent, paranoid, and each leader "holier than thou".

That said, Iran is geographically stronger than Iraq ever was. The Iranian population is large and capable of being unified (i.e. the majority are Persian with their own language, culture, and religion). Potentially Iran is a mid-level state, however the mis-management of the mullahs over the last 20 years has hurt them.

Iran would not be a country I'd like to attack (Syria is far weaker and more inviting). Given that a military strike against Iran is a matter of choice for us at this time, I don't think we will make that choice. Until the Iranians force us (or the Israelis) to attack them, I don't see us doing it within the next year.

Posted by rakhier at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2005

Google's Future as Seen by Cringely...

Robert Cringely has a post in which he explains how Google is poised to take over the Internet. I don't fully understand how what he is talking about is any sort of "take over" but it does make for intersting reading...

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.

And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.

This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.

Interesting...

Posted by rakhier at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

A Vaccine against Nicotine

This is quite surprising. FuturePundit has a story about a vaccine trial which shows promise in reducing people's desire for nicotine.

A University of Minnesota study indicates that the nicotine vaccine NicVax, which is now being tested in humans, appears safe, well-tolerated, and a potentially effective method for helping smokers kick the habit.

Dorothy Hatsukami, Ph.D., director of the University of Minnesota Cancer Center's Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center (TTURC), is the lead author on this study. The 38-week study included 68 active smokers who were randomly assigned to receive one of three different doses of the vaccine or a placebo. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

"The vaccine works by producing antibodies that specifically bind to nicotine and thereby prevent much of the nicotine from entering the brain," Hatsukami said. "This process potentially reduces the pleasurable effects from smoking and reduces the addiction to nicotine."

This would be a wonderful development as smoking is a terrible habit and nicotine is a utterly worthless drug.

Posted by rakhier at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

Twins have a lower than expected IQ...

A very thorough study has shown that twins have a lower than expected IQ when you account for lots of the other factors:

Social and economic circumstances do not explain why twins have significantly lower IQ in childhood than single-born children, according to a study in this week's BMJ.

Researchers studied 9,832 single-born children and 236 twins born in Aberdeen, Scotland between 1950 and 1956, using a previous child development survey as a base. They also gathered further information on mother's age at delivery, birth weight, at what stage of the child's gestation they were born, their father's occupational social class, and information on other siblings.

They found that at age seven, the average IQ score for twins was 5.3 points lower than that for single-born children of the same family, and 6.0 points lower at age nine.

The study also showed that taking into account factors such as the child's sex, mother's age, and number of older siblings made little difference to the IQ gap.

Despite advances in recent years in obstetric practice and neonatal care, the authors argue that the likely explanation is because some twins have a shorter length of time in the womb than other children and are prone to impaired fetal growth.

As FuturePundit says, this result makes sense. He also says something that I've long belived "I also wonder if the use of drugs to prolong pregnancy could raise average IQ. If pregnancies could be stretched out a few extra weeks would the resulting babies grow up to be smarter?"

Sadly, the number of twins being born is going up, due to several factors, amoung them: increasing age of having a first child and use of fertility drugs by older women. I also think twins are real nightmare to raise, the parents are constantly frazzeled in the first year or two of the twins life.

Posted by rakhier at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)

Greg Benford and Mike Rose...

Greg Benford (one of the three killer-B's) has a new blog along with Michael Rose. Here is an exerpt from their essay on the future

Life at the start of the 21st Century is messy. People want the freedom to consume what they like, to sell their services at the highest price they can get, to say what they like in private, and to brandish their opinions on the internet. Regardless of the fascinations and fashions of religious fanatics, academics, journalists, or commercial writers, the lives of ordinary people have pursued similar goals throughout history. Most people want a happy family life, material comfort, and the opportunity to do what they like...

Aristotle is [the] progenitor of the opposition to collectivism... [but] the clearest, and historically most important, expression of this tradition came out of the Scottish Enlightenment: David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, among others. This tradition emphasizes indirect effects, the futility of government attempts to control markets and international trade, the value of enterprise, and the limits to the benign effects of concerted action.

This tradition had its most visible success with James Madison's Constitution for the new American republic, the vastly successful state that replaced the loose confederation of colonies who started the American rebellion against the English Crown. Madison was perhaps the greatest practical student of the Scottish Enlightenment, and certainly the person who most effectively set about implementing its precepts...

We wish to recruit new adherents. Our agenda is simply the view that solutions to political and cultural difficulties can be found in the deliberate cultivation of the empirical, individualistic, skeptical Western tradition.

Put another way: We wish to drive a stake through the heart of the dominant cultural traditions of piety, correctness, ideology, and faith. Then we would like to dance on their graves.

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)