Samuel Alito -- Worth a fight?

I'm torn on this one. Alito is on record supporting legislation that requires a woman to inform her husband if she wants an abortion. The logic is other worldly, much as it was when the Supreme Court ruled a century ago in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" facilities should not be viewed as reflecting badly on Negroes. Such a view was simply a misconception in the minds of non-whites.

By that reasoning, we could suppose that there's no real harm in expecting a woman to tell her husband that she wants an abortion. In some fantasy world, that may be true. In fact, many husbands were not educated at Princeton and Yale and would beat the crap out of their wives if they heard such a suggestion. Either a woman has a right to privacy and control of her body during the first trimester, or she doesn't. If she doesn't, then Roe v. Wade starts to look like a dead letter.

Of even greater concern to me, as a resident of Oregon, is the prospect of the court overturning Oregon's Right to Die legislation. You can argue that a woman who "needs" an abortion does so as a result of her own decision sometime earlier. You can't say the same about someone who is wasting away from colon cancer. There is no innocent third party. It's a straightforward question of whether the federal government can interfere in his end-of-life decision.

Alito deserves to a hearing. I'm going to be much more interested in his views on other privacy issues than just abortion.

Progress on the Iraqi Constitution - Square Zero

The constitution has passed. What exactly has been demonstrated? The Kurds want out and if you give them a constitution that confirms what Peter Galbraith says has already happened, namely that they're out, they will be happy. We've always known that.

The Kurds insisted on a provision that prevented an arab coalition against their interests before the constitution writing process even began. The only reason why the Shiites wanted strong central government was to exercise control over Kurdish resources. Without Kurdish resources, strong central government means simply sharing the remainder, the arab patrimony, with the Sunnis. With the Kurds having set the precedent, the Shiites now see regionalism as the facade behind which to grab the maximum possible portion of what the Kurds didn't take.

So naturally, the Kurds and Shiites support the new constitution. Naturally, the Sunni arabs reject it. The vote seems to have been massively along sectarian lines, possibly at the 90% level or more. It certainly appears that the last-minute effort to obtain support from Sunni leaders was wasted, except from the standpoint of the those who got well paid for participating in the charade.

The details of intra-faction politics have not been resolved, since the constitution is generally vague and platitudinous. Whether the Shiites will govern themselves with secular or theocratic rule is unclear, although it's ominous that the Iranians are so happy.

For the Sunnis, this is now a full-fledged farce. Participate in the parliamentary elections, we say. They know they're being given a knife and told to join a gunfight. They know that the more the Shiites become accustomed to operating the levers of power, the bleaker their prospects become. Time is not on their side.

As a practical matter, political compromise only occurs when both sides want something from the other. The political calculus put in place by this constitution leaves the Sunnis with nothing to bargain with, hence no realistic motivation to give peace a chance. These are not fools. The insurgency is an assertion of Sunni vital interests and it isn't going to slow down to let the current version of democracy work.

Florida and Pakistan

Wilma will probably prove to have been a significant event in Cancun, when the skies finally clear and we get a look, but the impact in Florida will be minimal despite a tense and extremely well reported week of anticipation. Nevertheless, Homeland Security's FEMA division is scurrying everywhere to prove they're on the job this time.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, winter approaches and hundreds of thousands are homeless. We have responded but others have done more and for the world's largest economy, it hasn't been much of an effort.

The security of the homeland would become much easier if the image of the United States as a self-absorbed bully could be replaced with something positive. The Pakistan earthquake gave our country an opportunity to make that country less receptive to Osama's message of hate, but we seem to be letting it slip away. Higher priorities, it seems.

Juan Cole should reflect on Harriet Miers

One of the more telling remarks I heard about Harriet Miers was, as best I can recall, "Harriet Miers is Bush's personal lawyer. You don't nominate your personal accountant to succeed Alan Greenspan." Analogous remarks could be made about quoting your wife in an internationally respected blog.

Juan Cole, in his generally insightful blog, refers occasionally to the opinions that his wife expresses to him. These he believes to be keen and insightful. The record is spotty at best, and today's jewel isn't like to improve it.

"Shahin M. Cole observed today, 'Partition is the consequence of failed colonialism.' "

Leaving aside the logical question, has there been successful colonialism and by whose measure, I wonder what this means. Given her origins, she is probably referring to the India/Pakistan partition. However, that was followed by the Pakistan/Bangladesh partition a few years later. Few people regard the East/West problems in Pakistan as colonialism.

Peaceful partitions have included Norway/Sweden a century ago and Czecho/Slovakia more recently. Are either of these the fruit of colonialization? Yugoslavia has broken up violently, but to describe what went before under Tito as colonialism is to stretch the word beyond recognition.

Ireland has been partitioned, but this is the result of highly successful colonialization of the northern counties by Protestants over a period of several centuries. Colonialism failed in Vietnam and there is no longer partition.

When your wife says something to you over breakfast, the remark may appear profound but before you publish, it's probably wise to get an outside opinion.

I'm in Oregon. Why should I pay for Wilma?

If Wilma follows the path that I'm seeing on my computer this morning, it will squeeze through the Cuba/Yucatan gap intact and enter the Gulf of Mexico as a Cat 3 hurricane. Right now, they've got it following the Florida Keys lengthwise to the mainland, but little dots on a map four days out are pretty hypothetical.

Not so hypothetical is that if it reaches the Gulf, it pretty much has to hit the U.S. mainland somewhere. It will cause billions in damages. Congress will agree to pay for much of it, including aid for private individuals who decided of their own free will to live along the Gulf.

Hurricanes along the Gulf and the Atlantic seaboard are predictable. They happen every year. We can't say where they will hit, but they will hit. This is why God invented insurance. The idea is that people share their risk with others who have a similar risk.

But instead, hurricane damage is something the federal government keeps paying for. I'm in Oregon, where we don't get hurricane damage. Ever. Why are my taxes going for this? It pisses me off. Wilma is just one more example.

Renewable Energy and the Long Term Trend

The many critics of Bjorn Lomborg tend to focus on specifics where educated opinions differ. However, not much attention is paid to his grand theme, which is that a market-driven economy will solve the problem of fossil fuel depletion by advancing the technology, and afterwards the production, of renewable energy.

This is the fact that makes Lomborg tend toward the lower estimates of global warming's impact over the next century. Estimating such a complex outcome over such a long period is less science then clairvoyance anyway, but the that doesn't seem to prevent the media from reporting someone's estimate that we're going to be, say, 1.7 to 4.8 degrees warmer and the seas will be 11 to 26 inches higher, and so forth. When actually, anything on the temperature past 10 years is based on murky assumptions and ocean levels are more problematic yet.

I'm completely in agreement with Lomborg on technology. So much so that I probably wouldn't have devoted as much effort to debunking the catastrophic costs imputed to global warming. He has done some service by pointing out the exaggerations involved, but I'm feel pretty strongly that, forget the economics, the climate scenario is hard to believe.

First off, the atmosphere recycles CO2. Mechanisms such as photosynthesis and absorption by the oceans operate at increasing rates as the concentration rises, so a long term increase along the historical straight line requires not just a continued high consumption of fossil fuels but a steadily increasing usage.

This is extraordinarily unlikely for two reasons. Although we are nowhere near running out of fossil fuels, we are running short on cheap sources that are easy to convert with acceptable environmental costs. High prices are bringing new sources online, such as tar sands in Alberta, but these are going to put a very high floor under future prices. Prices are going to affect consumption patterns, perhaps not over the space of a month, but over years for sure.

That floor is also going to change the alternative energy equation in a big way. In the past, R&D on alternative sources required government subsidies. The payoff looked way too distant. Now the big energy companies, who used to be big oil companies, see the economics in a new light and are beginning to push hard. The worldwide pool of available engineering graduates is enormous. Put a few hundred thousand of them on this problem and you'll see results in a hurry.

Which will tip the balance between fossil and renewable energy sources, which will rapidly curtail and then reverse the rate of release of CO2, which will stop global warming. QED.

Straining to be optimistic

If there is one positive in Iraq, it's the existence of great potential wealth. Before Saddam got into a war with Iran, Iraq was rich, secular, and if you weren't on Saddam's enemies list, not a bad place to live. More so if you were a Sunni arab, but not bad overall.

What it will take is for the Shiites and especially the Kurds to conclude that there will be enough more wealth in a peaceful Iraq that it can be shared with the Sunnis. The task of the Sunnis is to convince them, through violence, that it's more profitable to share. The insurgency is not irrational. Mao expressed it when he said, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

The fly in the ointment is that the Kurds may be so disaffected from Iraq that they are not prepared to do anything to preserve it. They may relish the prospect of retaking Kirkuk and whacking a few Baathist remnants in the process. Furthermore, if they have their own army, police, laws, and oil revenues, as the new constitutions guarantees them, the Sunnis may not believe a word they say even if they sound conciliatory.

It's hard to see why it would happen now if it didn't happen during the summer, but the Kurds might say to the Sunnis, "We didn't really mean that part in the constitution about Kirkuk being Kurdish. Let's split it." From there, who knows where it might go. That's as optimistic as I can get.

Andrew Sullivan and the Atrophy of Logic

According to Andrew Sullivan's Blog, we had to invade Iraq because (a) they had a lot of immoral people who would have worked with the jihadists if it suited them and (b) everybody agreed. We must stay the course because(c) if we leave, the jihadists will have a base from which to operate.

Mr. Sullivan views anyone who trusted Saddam and his sons as naive. I guess I'm naive in not worrying that Mr. Sullivan would, if it suited his purposes, combine forces with the dictators of Myanmar to overthrow American democracy. Actually, I don't lose any sleep over this prospect, not because I have any great faith in Mr. Sullivan, since I don't know him from Adam, but because I can't conceive of the situation where aligning with Myanmar would suit his purposes. So, naive fool that I am, I sleep well at night.

Perhaps I was similarly naive about Saddam and his crowd, but since Bin Laden appears to be a religious fanatic and Saddam's sons were dissolute playboys, the common cause which they might have made seems pretty hard to discern. And, of course, there isn't the slightest evidence that they ever tried.

It's not technically true that everyone thought we needed to invade Iraq eventually. Most Europeans did not, and in particular the people who were in Iraq looking industriously for WMDs and finding none, thought it might be a good idea to develop at least an iota of concrete evidence first.

However, it may be true that almost the entirety of the American political establishment backed invading Iraq. This is not quite the same thing as a logical demonstration of truth. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed the U.S. Senate 98-2. However, the more telling point is that essentially all the responsible people who spoke in favor, did so because they believed the fiction of Iraqi WMDs. Nobody at the time, and no one now with any decent respect for facts, put forward stopping Al Qaeda as the reason.

Nevertheless, even if we were lied to at the outset, if today we face the prospect of an emboldened and empowered enemy, we might be forced to stay in Iraq. However, the post-US Iraq/Al Qaeda connection is only a little less tenuous than Sullivan/Mynamar.

In the first place, the Sunni arabs have just 20% of the population and a still lower percentage of the oil, which is the only valuable thing Iraq has. If somehow they manage to "win" the ensuing civil war, about the best they can hope for is 20% of the pie. If no war, they have millions of acre of stinking desert. If war, they may get a modest reward but they will exhaust themselves in the battle. In neither case is it plausible to present them as a springboard for radical Islam.

For the second point, refer to (a) above. The Baathists are secular. Al Qaeda is Wahabist. Oil and water. They may hold together to face a common enemy, but not afterwards.

Iraq is not going to be a pleasant place after the U.S. leaves. I don't want to be there. More generally, I have never wanted, and never will, want to be there. But at the end of the day, it's their problem. Our problem is that we're paying for this with money we're borrowing from the Chinese. That is an actual problem that we will someday need to confront.

The Arkansas Baby Machine

You read about people protesting hospitals that permit abortions. What about the hospital in Arkansas that facilitates that woman's plan to flood Arkansas with her progeny? 16 babies, for Christ's sake! If everyone was that irresponsible, in two generations we'd have half a trillion people. Minus a few hundred billion who would have starved.

Where's a good abortionist when you need one? People used to get lynched in Arkansas for a lot less than this.

The Worst Iraq Election Outcome

I've been wondering which would be worse, a defeat of the Iraq constitution, starting the process all over, or a narrow win with the Sunni arabs voting mostly against. I have never really considered the idea that it would pass because all three major groups would feel satisfied with it.

Now another option seems to be emerging, which is Sunni support based on everyone pretending that it will be progress to adopt a constitution that will be renegotiated in January. If possible, this seems worse.

The Kurds have no interest in a successful Iraq, but they aren't anxious for a failed one either. They have most of what they want and can afford to wait. The motivations of the arabs, either Sunni or Shiite, is murkier, but one should remember that the decision to "compromise" was made by the power brokers behind closed doors. Their motivation may be a lot simpler. Money.

This is a part of the world where the phrase "corrupt politician" is largely redundant. Following our overt occupation government, Puppet Government 1 now seems to have viewed its mission as looting the treasury. It has been replaced by Puppet Government 2, which has doled out ministries to the various factions. A ministry is a license to steal. It seems plausible that powerful political elements prefer a continuation of the status quo to an unpredictable resolution.

So what are they stealing from whom? Some from Iraqis, but certainly billions of dollars from American taxpayers. We may be doing some of it consciously. We spent a ton of money backing Chalabi before the invasion. We are probably paying off "tame" Sunnis now, although it is doubtless called reconstruction.

I wish I were a better person and that my motivation was deep concern for the plight of Iraqis, but they were badly off under Saddam, they are badly off now, and they will probably be badly off when this degenerates into civil war. I'm more concerned about the half trillion dollars this is likely to cost. I know the official cost is still far less, but I'm working on the assumption that many costs are being hidden, or just deferred like maintenance or repair, or yet-to-come like VA medical care.

When historians discuss this in the future, I predict they will arrive at a figure around a half trillion and will note that there were lots of better ways to spend it.

Intelligent Design - What are scientists afraid of?

Many will read this title as rhetorical. For creationists, the answer is already known. Scientists are afraid that their theories will be shown to be shallow and unconvincing.

For me, this is a serious, literal question. I count myself in the community of lay scientists, people with enough scientific training to be able to follow discussions at Scientific American levels and an inclination to favor the scientific method. If I were a biology teacher, I don't think I'd feel threatened by a comparison between evolution and Intelligent Design, which I capitalize because He is clearly the author, whether mentioned or not.

It's a "hearts and minds" issue. Evolution is a theory that is consistent with the methods of modern science, due to which we have put a man on the moon, created cell phones with pictures, and cracked the genetic code of the 1918 influenza virus. Intelligent Design is the product of the sort of minds that have successfully bent spoons if you don't look too closely and can find images of the Virgin Mary in cumulus clouds.

Bring them on, I say. You aren't going to persuade everyone. Objective evidence doesn't always work, or there wouldn't be millions of people who believe that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. Hardly anyone who deeply believes in biblical creation is going to change his mind even when shown the achievements of science and the ineffectualness of religion.

But a few might, and on the other side of the coin, I can't imagine anyone who has not been previously been inculcated with Christianity finding religion as the result of a classroom discussion. There is a perpetual battle for the intellects of young people and it may as well be joined in the biology classroom as anywhere else. Science is more likely to get a fair hearing then than at any later time. Let's make the case when the playing field is as level as it's ever going to get.

AIDS in Developing Countries -- Let them die quietly

People have been giving Bill Bennett enormous grief over his hypothetical argument, posed as a logical construct merely to refute it, that the nation's crime rate could be reduced by aborting black babies. That he never for an instant endorsed the argument hasn't save him.

So it is only with the secure knowledge that not a millionth as many people will ever note this proposal that I suggest a policy that on the surface is as comparably racist, heartless, and many other adjectives. In the developing countries, people who develop AIDS should be given a place to die in as much peace as possible. Attempts to prolong their lives are a waste of resources.

Too many people think that health care in developing countries is somehow analogous to what happens in the United States. Not so. In the U.S., we attempt to save everybody who gets sick or is injured, no matter how pointless the attempt. We keep Teri Schiavo alive in a vegetative state for years. By comparison with much of what we do, treatment for HIV is almost rational, although an aggressive anti-smoking campaign with the same amount of money would probably save more lives. But I'm not trying to discuss American healthcare priorities.

In developing countries, it's much clearer. As long as there is no prospect of actually curing the infection, keeping an HIV-positive person alive will require a lifetime of medication. Meanwhile, millions of people are living in unhygienic conditions with no access to health care. Compared with the low tech solutions such as sanitation and simple medical procedures, the cost to save an HIV life is probably a thousand times as expensive. Until we've exhausted the low-hanging-fruit options, we should be ignoring HIV treatment.

That's not the same as HIV prevention. We should be shipping out billions of free condoms with instruction manuals attached, and paying no attention to the moralists who think we should restrict our approaches to abstinence. Actually, that would be a good idea in this country as well.

Disturbing Trends

Three disturbing but unsurprising news items have appeared recently. The number of independently combat-ready Iraqi batallions is down to one, the Shiites are trying to rewrite the rules for constitutional approval in their favor, and Kurds are starting to grumble about the Shiite leadership.

People say that Iraqis need to start defending themselves but they already have. Effective Iraqi fighting forces exist, just none belonging to our puppet national government. Kurds have the Peshmerga, Shiites have militias, and Sunnis arabs have the insurgency. None of them intend to fight for American goals not aligned with their own.

The Kurdish goal is to separate, de facto if not de jure. Should the Shiites renege on constitutional guarantees to the Kurds, the latter will completely split, taking much of Iraq's oil with them. The Shiites want a patina of legitimacy on their new power, for which they will endure American meddling until after the elections. They have no intention of letting Sunni arabs have a veto over that outcome. Their attempt to rewrite the election rules in their favor has backfired, but it should leave no doubt in anyone's mind that the Shiites consider constitutional protections a necessary evil leading to their ascendancy.

Sunni arabs know that and, not wanting to be stuck in a million acres of useless desert, are going to fight for two essential things: some oil, for which they will defend Kirkuk, and half of Baghdad. Both of these will probably entail civil war, since the Kurds and Shiites respectively are unlikely to accommodate them.

I'd suggest that we pull out, but politically that's not an option. Not even a half trillion dollars will buy us an outcome that we like, but there's nothing to do except watch it unfold.