Will the federal economic stimulus work? Ask Oregon.

The feds are planning a huge rebate plan to stimulate the economy. Before counting on it to restore growth, they should consider Oregon's experience. Due to its unique "kicker" program, through which Oregon rebates to taxpayers everything above its estimated revenues whenever that excess is more than 2% for the biennium, the Oregon economy was stimulated late in 2007 by the infusion of some $1.1 billion from the state treasury. In early 2008, we should be seeing the results.

In fact, when the governor first noticed that there was some potential for declining state revenues two weeks ago, he figured it would be in the "low tens of millions" for the biennium. One of the Republican leaders in the state legislature, where Republican support for the kicker is institutionalized, knew why:

Senate Republican Leader Ted Ferrioli of John Day said the $1 billion in “kicker” rebate checks sent out by Oregon late last year probably served as stimulus to the regional economy, offsetting some of the downturn hitting other states.

Two weeks later, the actual revenue forecast that the governor had been hinting at was released and, behold, rather than low tens of millions, it was $183 million. The cash vanished into the pockets of taxpayers with hardly a ripple on the overall economy.

This is roughly what Keynes would have predicted. His point was that when people get nervous, they stop spending. They don't become significantly less nervous when they are given modest amounts of money, so they won't change their spending habits much. If you want stimulus, have the government borrow and spend.

Pretty much nobody is Keynesian these days, although a few claim to be. One economist remarked that ""From an economic stimulus perspective, it will have the short-term effect of increasing spending and there will be the Keynesian multiplier effect." But this isn't a Keynesian multiplier, which results from increased government spending. It's just a multiplier.

The Bush theory has been to never stimulate with spending, only tax reduction. Democrats like the idea of spending, but they ignore the other half of Keynes' strategy, which was to cut back spending when times were good. At the bottom, this is a strategy to make economic gains by consuming without working for the money. It plays well in an election year, but it's lousy economics.

Oregon Budget Crisis -- 2008 meets 2002

Tom Potiowsky, the official Oregon state economist whose "Chinese water torture" method of estimating the declining state revenues six years ago were a staple feature of that crisis, is at it again. Tom is probably a good husband and kind to animals, but his inability to see the big picture meant that the legislature didn't grasp the magnitude of the previous crisis until it was upon them, and that the low-ball estimate of revenues led to a great flushing out of the state's coffers last fall (due to Oregon's kicker law, for those of you from out-of-state). Just as the country was starting to head downhill.

Oregon's economist is required to make public estimates of revenues every couple months or so. As the housing crisis was unfolding, Tom figured late last year that the effect on Oregon would be essentially nothing, despite the large role that forest products plays in the state economy. Now he's estimating that the state will take in $183 million (1.2%)less than expected between now and the end of the biennium on June 30, 2009.

State tax revenues in Oregon are overwhelmingly dependent on income taxes, which in turn are quite volatile. Property taxes are quite stable, sales taxes fairly stable, but income taxes depend on growth in a more leveraged fashion. The current estimate seems in line with the national consensus drop in estimates of GDP. Since income tax receipts are going to be much more volatile than that, this projection is probably still optimistic.

Here's my prediction. In six months, the estimate will be for a 3% fall in the 2007-2009 biennium. There will be some modest belt-tightening but tax receipts had a good head of steam at the outset and the shortfall will be manageable in this biennium.

I don't know when the estimate for 2009-2011 will be first released, but I'm going to guess it will be 5% below what the legislature had pencilled in at the end of the last session. The state's reserves, having been rebuilt modestly since the last recession, will have been wiped out by the shortfall in 2007-2009, and the legislature will again have the job of making serious cuts in services.

Of course, I'm the same guy who said the Republicans would have a contested convention in Minneapolis. I haven't given up hope, but it's a lot less likely than it was two weeks ago. So maybe I'm wrong again.

McCain's Premature Celebration

The news of the death of the Republican nominating process, which has dwindled from four serious candidates plus Ron Paul to two serious candidates plus Ron Paul, may have been premature. After being anointed the nominee-apparent with the withdrawal of Mitt Romney, John McCain now needs to note that he subsequently lost two primaries to Mike Huckabee. This can't be good.

McCain has not been reaching 50% in primaries; in fact, apart from 48% in his home state of Arizona, the 42% in California seems to be about his high point, though I haven't seen a chart of all of them. This is not exactly a dominating performance.

In the end, McCain needs to get more than half the votes in primaries with only one other candidate, and he hasn't been doing that. Until now, voting for Romney meant voting for Romney. Now voting for Romney may mean casting your ballot for Huckabee and keeping the thing open. There's no way Huckabee is going to get the nomination, but if he can get enough to stall McCain, remember that Romney did not withdraw. He "suspended" his campaign.

At this point, the best hope for a convention battle seems to be on the Democratic side, however. Obama and Clinton are coming so close to splitting the elected delegates that the super delegates may have the final say. That would be fun to watch.

I notice Chelsea Clinton popping up from time to time. In many parts of the world, the principal progeny of the leaders would be primed for eventual succession to the mantle of leadership. That's how it would be done in India or Pakistan. Or Massachusetts.

Recycling Asian Money

One of the bright spots in today's gloomy reporting is the following:

"Shares of Bank of China dropped 6.4 percent in Hong Kong after the South China Morning Post newspaper reported that the bank is expected to announce a "significant writedown" in U.S. subprime mortgage securities, citing unidentified sources. In Shanghai, the bank's stock declined 4.1 percent."

At times, I have been depressed at the spectacle of Americans rampantly running through their cash while savvy foreigners wait to pick up the pieces. It's nice to note that Asians haven't become entirely successful in their U.S. investments. They sure weren't in the 1990's, when Japanese invested huge sums in U.S. projects that went bust. Now it's the Chinese, trying to switch some of their cash from staid government debt into higher reward vehicles and getting screwed.

So this is how capitalism recycles cash. They sell us everything from shoes to lampshades and we sell them bad investments. Maybe this will work if they're really slow on the uptake.

Asia Wakes Up and the Party's Over

Bad news from the Asian stock markets this morning (afternoon over there). They apparently are even less impressed with Bush's economic stimulus plan than Americans. It has occurred to them that the years of growing their economies at the expense of American manufacturing (China) or services (India) are coming to an end. All America can think of to do is pump more cash into the pockets of American consumers, so they can buy more things from foreigners with no intention of ever repaying them.

The big economic crashes occur when previous crashes recede far enough into the past that too many people are willing to belief convenient untruths. Such as the notion that it's possible to prosper by pushing pieces of paper around that say that everyone is richer without having produced anything of value.

Or that Keynes only applies during recessions. The other side of Keynes was his assertion that during prosperity, governments should run surpluses to offset their deficits during recessions. That, unfortunately, is politically unpopular, so we get stimulus during recessions and then, under Bush, stimulus during the good times as well. The real deficit, including the off-budget expenses for Iraq and Afghanistan and stealing from Social Security, has been running around half a trillion. During a recession, receipts fall, regular expenses for the economic safety net rise, and to this we are adding $145 billion in stimulus costs. Perhaps a trillion in one year?

Here in Oregon, the checks have been mailed out to refund our "overpayments" during the preceding and unexpectedly prosperous biennium. We dodged one bullet when the PERS recalculation of pension investments was made (I think) on December 31, just before the meltdown got really ugly, but sooner or later we'll be confronted, as we were five or six years ago, with annual state revenue forecasts going south. Our tiny "rainy day fund" is going to last about a year and then we'll be back where we were, cutting class days and getting unwanted attention from Doonesbury. It doesn't say a lot for the collective intelligence of Oregonians.

A Reality Check for Kenya

In the 2.5 weeks of unrest in Kenya, the death toll is now reported to be 612. According to the CIA Factbook for Kenya, the population is 37 million. The birth rate is 39 per thousand annually, so 1.4 million a year or 4,000 per day. Infant mortality is 57 per thousand, so 228.

So this "crisis" is killing as many people in a week as there are babies dying in their mothers' arms from natural causes every day. It's a lot sexier to show violence in the media, but it's a minor problem for a country like Kenya.

The real problem is the mathematical fact that you cannot go on growing at the rate they have without eventually imploding from lack of food. Kenya has gone from 6.4 million in 1950 at rates that are dropping slightly as percentages but not in absolute terms. There isn't going to be any place left to grow enough food. They will overfarm until yields start to fall. There will be mass starvation. When? Who knows, but it will make the current dustup look like a Sunday School picnic.

Oregon will matter to the Republicans at least

Unless John Edwards can start showing better results, the Democrats may have decided their nomination by May when Oregon has its primary. But with Romney's win in Michigan, the Republicans have set themselves on course for a convention showdown in Minneapolis. Romney, in his native state, spending hugely and getting no real participation from Giuliani, "won" with 39% of the vote.

Giuliani's swan dive has probably been too severe for him to reverse, and the new polls from South Carolina and Florida suggest that he can't hold the line in Florida, which was crucial to his strategy. But get this. McCain is leading in Florida with 22% of Republican support.

We are getting not yet getting any contests in which all candidates are both viable to local voters and committed in terms of money and organization. We've had Romney vs Huckabee in Iowa, Romney vs McCain in New Hampshire and Michigan. Next we'll have McCain versus Huckabee in South Carolina. Florida will have everyone's attention and somebody may get 100% of the delegates available (not all delegates because the RNC has penalized the state for its early timing) for a quarter of the popular vote.

This actually raises another question about Democracy in America. Those states that have winner-take-all formulas will disproportionately award the winners there compared with states like California that will disperse the results through the state. Since Giuliani is well positioned in several of these, he may get to Minneapolis with a large enough bloc to prevent any other candidate winning on the first ballot, but one which he will not be able to build on because of low national poll numbers.

Bringing us back to Oregon. In May, the modest number of delegates available will look a lot more compelling. I wouldn't want to predict a winner, and it may not matter, because the important point is that the second choices of the delegates will not be visible on the ballot and after the first round, that's what will matter.

I think there's only one news organization in Oregon large enough to investigate and report on this, and that's the Oregonian in Portland. I hope they take this issue on and tell us about the real people who will be running for delegates.

America's Financial Chickens Coming Home to Roost

There are moments in bubbles that afterwards everyone wonders why they weren't challenged at the time. From the Tulip Craze to 1929 to the dot.com bubble (remember Pets.Com?), there are strange happenings that seems crazy in retrospect. At this time, the bubble may turn out to be America's economic pre-eminence in the world, and we may wonder in ten years why we thought it wouldn't turn out badly.

For years, we have been shifting our manufacturing overseas, while continuing to import huge quantities of petroleum. The trade deficit should be enough to scare anyone, but the savants of Wall Street assure us that it's just an innocent sidelight to globalization, which clearly benefits the U.S. along with everyone else.

So while China and India build factories, we build bigger and bigger houses. And when they become so large and expensive that we cannot logically afford them, we get creative about mortgages. The only way that anyone could believe that this would work in the long term is by subscribing to the greater fool theory that there will always be someone ready to buy the house for enough money to justify the financing. Mathematically, it couldn't happen forever.

So rather predictably, the subprime (euphemism for junk) mortgage market has gone south and the banks need fresh capital to cover their enormous losses. Bringing us back to the first point. The sovereign funds, for which you should substitute "foreign governments," are coming to the rescue, having enormous reserves of U.S. dollars due to the trade deficit. These are the IOU's with which we've been maintaining our collective lifestyle and they are coming due. When China wanted to buy an American oil company, we were able to balk. We didn't need them. Now, we need foreign capital to keep our big financial institutions healthy and they are never going to be as American again.

It's not going to stop. The trade deficit rose again in November. Not a single presidential candidate of either party will tell the American people that they need an extra dollar or two of taxes on the price of gasoline to save the country (and perhaps Social Security) from ruin. In ten years, we'll wonder why.

Lancet versus Iraq/WHO

The NE Journal of Medicine's article showing results from a joint study by the health ministry of Iraq and the World Health Organization, includes the following:

Mortality from nonviolent causes was significantly higher per 1000 person-years in the post-invasion period (4.92; 95% CI, 4.49 to 5.41) than in the pre-invasion period (3.07; 95% CI, 2.61 to 3.63)

A great deal is being made of the difference between the reported deaths by violence in the two studies. However, note that the Iraq/WHO study concludes that there has been a roughly 60% increase in the non-violent mortality rate. The Lancet article reported a rather small rise. If you compare total "excess deaths," and figure that the extra 1.85 deaths per thousand in a population of 27 million comes to essentially 150,000, you have the new study showing 300,000 excess deaths in three years, compared with the Lancet's 655,000. Lancet calculated a wide confidence range and, when you add the error range of Iraq/WHO, they probably overlap.

A couple of interesting points. If Iraq/WHO is to be believed, their respondents provided evidence of 100,000 more non-violent deaths than did those of the Lancet study. The participation of the ministry of health, which among other things forbade its morgues from revealing the number of bodies they were receiving, is a little suspect. It wouldn't be surprising that their employees would return from the field and report more deaths as non-violent. It also wouldn't surprise me if a few deaths were "lost," although I have no evidence for that.

Second, suppose that it was Lancet in 2006 that had reported 151,000 excess violent deaths and 300,000 excess total deaths. What would have been the response from the Right? Ridicule, of course. Now they have numbers that are more palatable than Lancet's and they embrace them, without mentioning that the new numbers are wildly worse than the estimates made by either President Bush or Iraq Body Count. A reasonable summary would say that by now, in early 2008, some half million to one million more Iraqis have died than if we had not invaded in 2003.

In closing, however, I can't say that I personally lose sleep over Iraqis dying. The CIA World Fact Book on Iraq gives a 2007 estimate of 2.6% annual population growth. In the midst of this war, the average Iraqi woman is giving birth to four babies. Evidently, procreation remains the Iraqi national pastime, and without our assistance in elevating their death rate, they would even sooner reach the saturation point of their land and experience a mass die off. With our help, that day of reckoning has been slightly postponed.

I still don't think it's worth a trillion dollars.

New Iraqi Death Report Roughly Confirms Lancet

I haven't had time to research everything, but one thing stands out in the reporting of the new Iraq/WHO study of deaths since the invasion. The number of people now dying who would not have been dying without the invasion is in the hundreds of thousands, probably in the half million to million range. This is roughly what Lancet said more than a year ago, extrapolated for another eighteen months. It is wildly higher than either what the Bush administration said at the time or Iraq Body Count calculated.

It is also evident that people report statistics, where precision is extremely important, with very loose language. Contrary to the headline in the above-linked article, 151,000 is not the toll. It's where the toll stood, according to this report, through June 2006. We're in January 2008, and the last two years have been very violent. It doesn't even claim to be "all deaths as a result" but just "violent deaths as a result."

The difference between Iraq/WHO and Lancet is not as great as has been reported. Lancet looked primarily at excess mortality and concluded that it was almost entirely due to violence. Iraq/WHO says that it was a lot less violence but that there was 60% or more increase in non-violent deaths. On the back of an envelope, I get a gross number for them that is within the error range for Lancet. The disagreement seems to be primarily why people die.

This will require more analysis and I'll have another post later.

The Surge is Working! Whatever that means.

John McCain seems extremely proud of his position on Iraq. In particular, he is hoping to capitalize on the "success" of the surge. He describes this as saving American lives, which is the most important thing that any policy change in Iraq could achieve.

This seems a little odd, because the greatest number of lives could be saved if we simply packed everyone into military transports and got them out. We presumably have a mission and in warfare, achieving the mission is generally more important than minimizing casualties. Perhaps the problem is that no one can enunciate a mission anymore, at least one that is plausible enough not to provoke snickers.

My personal crystal ball for Iraq is very cloudy right now, but I'm getting ready for one of my outbursts of relative optimism. In the past, I've soon regretted them, but the law of averages says that sooner or later, I'll be right.

My relative optimism is based on the fact that at $100/barrel, there's enough wealth in Iraq's oil reserves to make every corrupt politician in the country rich. Not every Iraqi, but every politician ("corrupt" is redundant). And it may sooner or later occur to them, as a class, that the only obstacle to being rich is being dead, and some accommodation should be reached. I view the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda as being in this vein. The jihadists don't want compromise, and we may have passed the point where the Sunnis view their alliance with them as productive, even as a counterbalance to the Shiites and Americans.

From this understanding there might emerge an Iraq comparable to Saudi Arabia. Wealthy enough to make the guys at the top stinking rich and keep the guys at the bottom from starving. Except for a different combination of politicians, not that much different from where we started. There weren't any WMDs and at the outset, there weren't any terrorists. There also was no democracy and few human rights.

But right now, my optimistic view is that we'll end up, a trillion dollars poorer, with the status quo ante. If McCain seriously has a more attractive outcome in mind, I'd like to hear him. If not, it's not a really strong position from which to run for President.

Mike Huckabee? -- Think George W. Bush

You don't need a really long memory to recognize the pattern. A guy who has served as the governor of a Southern state, talks with this homey Southern accent, talks about being a compassionate conservative (although in 2008 that particular phrase has fallen out of favor). And knows absolutely diddly about world affairs. And doubts evolution.

Only the names have been changed. Huckabee feels good. He is a much more polished speaker than W. and is about as successful at self-deprecation as I can remember any politician being. I would not write him off simply because the big-money Establishment must be deeply unhappy at the thought of a Southern baptist hick leading the Republican ticket. It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon from the 1930s, showing a couple of society dames speaking to each other while a wild-eyed man is haranguing a crowd from a soap box in the background. One of them says, "I never knew people like that could be Republican!"

But Republican he is and the nomination is not inconceivable. Unlikely, because I think W. may have chilled the prospect for Southern evangelical governors for a while, but not inconceivable. We should keep a wary eye open. Just remember how long it took for W. to decide that the best man for veep would be Dick Cheney. The convention wasn't even over before he had sold himself to the Dark Side.

Off to Minneapolis

I'm not sure about the Democrats. With only two true credible candidates at this time, and John Edwards hoping to be a compromise, there is a decent chance that one of them will start pulling away. Caveat: In a couple hundred years, the Democrats have never nominated a woman or a non-white. Racism and sexism may not be fashionable, but they are real and the barrier for either Clinton or Obama may be quite high.

However, it's looking like a cat fight on the Republican side. The latest national poll shows McCain leading with 22% support. That's among Republicans, who represent about a third of the vote, with the others being Democrats or Independents. So the top Republican today is favored by perhaps 10% of the voters, throwing in a few indies and no Democrats to speak of.

The irrelevance of Iowa is shown by the fact that the top two -- Huckabee and Romney -- are third and fourth in the national polls. The irrelevance of New Hampshire is similar, with the Giuliani and Huckabee being effectively no-shows. Then there's South Carolina, where McCain will fight it out with Huckabee. Eventually, Giuliani will emerge to win the Big States, he hopes. Romney will take Utah and Idaho. Ron Paul will get a delegate somewhere.

It all adds up to too much chaos. In the last half century of American history, there has been no brokered convention. I predict that Republicans will break that tradition in Minneapolis next September. I'd lay a 50:50 bet. Takers?

Iowa to New Hampshire, Most Irrelevant to Second

I have an aunt, a retired school teacher, who once told me that at the end of junior high school, all students should be thrown out, the gates locked, and only those who climbed over the wall to get back in should be taught. Maybe we should do the same with presidential elections. Only those people who will put up with something equivalent to the Iowa Caucuses should have their votes counted.

However, this isn't the case, so the results from the Iowa caucuses are irrelevant. They show the impact of very expensive campaigns in a small, unrepresentative state where only the most dedicated show up at all. If someone were to announce next November that a candidate who was ahead after .3% of the vote was tallied from some outlying corner of the country and most of the polls were still open, was "winning big," we'd all laugh. But the equivalent happens in Iowa in January and pundits are busy reading the tea leaves.

On to New Hampshire. There, the turnout will be a large percentage of a smaller state, equally unrepresentative. If Obama carries NH, they'll all be talking about his momentum, with far less than a percent of the voters heard from cumulatively.

We talk about Hillary being third, but the difference between her and Edwards must be in the range of 2000 votes. Next November, it will top a hundred million. This is absolutely nothing but statistical noise. The difference between her and Obama is hardly anything more. I just wish someone would say, "But let's wait for a state that matters, like California or New York." But that wouldn't be news, I guess.

Oregon will still be important

Those who think that Oregon's May presidential primary will be nothing but a formality should look more closely at the polls. Nobody in either party gets more than about 30% support. With some of the big states abandoning the "winner take all" approach, both nominations may still be in play come May.

In fact, given the chaos on the Republican side, it's conceivable that no one will arrive at their September convention with 51% delegate support. In a brokered convention, it's going to be important what the delegates' second choices are, and that's not going to be on any primary ballot, Oregon's or otherwise. The decision in September may be made by people we have elected for one purpose but about whom we really know nothing.

In parliamentary systems, party leaders are chosen by party activists, not the general electorate. At election time, voters can choose between leaders but they can't pick just anyone. This seems less democratic than the way Americans elect a president, but I'm not so sure.

War? What War?

We are approaching the fifth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. We have stationed so many troops there that we have essentially none left in reserve for any other conflict. The cash cost is around $15 billion per month. On an accrual basis, including the veterans benefits that we'll be shelling our for the next five decades, it is much more.

Yet when I check Google News, I see nothing whatsoever today (December 30) about Iraq. Pakistan, yes. The Patriots' perfect season, yes. Thankfully, nothing about Britney Spears today, but also nothing whatsoever about Iraq. We spend about $300,000 every minute. Every six seconds or so, we squander enough to pay four years of college tuition for some deserving young person of limited means. But it isn't news anymore.

Nationalism would be a step up for Africa

The election results in Kenya are close and violence is breaking out between the supporters of the two candidates, who come from the Kikuyu and Luo tribes, respectively. Homes are being burned down simply because the owner belongs to the wrong tribe.

The idea of nationalism, particularly in an adjective like "nationalistic," conveys a failure to grasp the universal brotherhood of man and is not much in favor in intellectual circles these days. But it should be remembered that nationalism originated as a form of progress, through which men rose above the narrow focus of tribalism and provincialism. William Pfaff has written extensively on nationalism at the most powerful political force in the world today.

Which explains a lot about the problems of Africa today. Nationalism, or even racism, would be very helpful. Kenya has been independent of Britain for four decades now and it's discouraging how little progress has been made in this regard.

We should pay close attention to David Hicks

The Australian David Hicks has been released from jail. He was kept for five years at Guantanamo without charges, a fact which should make us all afraid. He was fortunate enough to have the Australian government, tardily and unenthusiastically, pressure the U.S. to do something, which resulted in his pleading guilty to some vague charges of supporting terrorism, followed by a modest term of imprisonment.

However, the evidence is clear that the US sees nothing wrong with establishing a Gulag into which throws people and keeps them for years without charges. Hicks was evidently small potatoes, a confused young man who made a fool of himself. But note that he was not engaged in action against the US government in any meaningful way. He was captured by the Northern Alliance, not US troops. Besides, the US has never declared war on Afghanistan.

Are the others in Guantanamo like Hicks? Is this a camp full of people who are mostly guilty of deeply disliking the US, as well as Christians and Jews perhaps, in a country where this was fairly normal? I'm afraid we rounded up a lot of people on fairly flimsy evidence and now we don't want to admit that. So we're going to keep them there forever, because the "war" on terrorism is scheduled to last until doomsday.

A government that will do that to them today is one that will do it to us in the future.

Chaos Theory and the 2008 Campaign

Chaos Theory holds that complex non-linear system can arrive at radically different results after extremely similar initial conditions. I have a feeling that the 2008 campaign will show this principle in action. Candidates surge and then fall back based on small factors. Timing is everything. If you surge just in time to do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, you may carry the day. On the other hand, with "leaders" coming around 30%, some other primary at some other time may change things entirely.

Leading us to wonder, why do we elect the president this way? Why would we allow sentiment attaching to these states as historically early to continue giving them such undue importance? When the result just confirms underlying trends, this isn't necessarily bad, but we're coming into a year when the problems may come into focus.

Suppose, for instance, a candidate does well from January through March and becomes the anticipated nominee. However, round about May, he starts saying really odd things about foreign policy and the party faithful start to have second thoughts. Could the nomination be denied in August?

Thankfully, we have Mike Bloomberg to fall back on.

What part of "casus belli" doesn't Iraq understand?

Turkey has bombed Kurdish rebels in Iraq and the Iraqi government is in a snit. First off, they maintain that the bombing was futile, that the Turks spent their time bombing unoccupied places. Right. This is a real country, with a modern army and serious weaponry, and they can't hit anybody?

They go on to blither about how Turkey has interfered in Iraq's internal affairs. When people from inside your country attack the military forces of your neighbor, that's one of the standard, legitimate reasons to go to war. Turkey has not interfered, it has invaded, albeit briefly, and with sufficient reason. They are to be applauded for their restraint.

The Iraqis naturally are loath to describe it as an invasion, having been invaded once and after almost five years remaining occupied. But someone needs to explain clearly to the Iraqi Kurds that they get their three provinces, but nothing from Iran, Turkey, or Syria. Them's the breaks.

A lot of knowledge is also a dangerous thing

Richard Feynman was known for coming into his classes at Cal Tech and remarking to the students something along the lines, "You know, as I came through the parking lot today, I saw a car with the license plate WBX 828. What are the chances that a car with that license plate would be in the parking lot this morning? Must be a million to one against." He was trying to point out the difference between something that was merely unlikely and something significant.

That distinction has apparently been lost on the FBI, which arrested an entirely innocent man in the "Waddling Bandit" case, and in fact won't apologize because they correctly followed their procedures. The procedure, evidently, was to cast their net very widely, looking for people who roughly matched surveillance tapes and a rough profile.

Now the FBI is planning to develop a huge database of biometric information in order to catch criminals and terrorists. This makes me very nervous. I probably closely resemble some criminal. It seems that the FBI is willing to take its best available match and take action and someday it could be me, rather than Brandon Mayfield or Robert Christie. It could be you.

You say Romney's Mormon, I say Huckabee's Baptist

Huckabee's inability to formulate a concise political position with respect to Romney's Mormonism seems to be troubling a lot of commentators. Juan Cole seems particularly exercised over this, comparing Huckabee's views on having a Mormon as president with the rule in Iran that only a Shiite can be president.

Such blather! We could solve the problem by requiring candidates for national office to have no religious beliefs whatsoever, but that wouldn't be popular. The compromise has been to allow private religious beliefs on the understanding that they won't interfere with public policies.

However, the minute you allow Huckabee to run and also to be a Southern Baptist, you must allow him to privately belief that Romney is a heretic. He should have been smart enough to adopt an absolute refusal from the first to answer any questions about any other candidate's religion, but no one should have asked him and his answers should have been stricken from the record.

The reverse is also true. Mormons think that mainstream Christians are in deep do-do themselves. Mainstream Christians, pretty much by definition, think that Joseph Smith didn't get a second set of prophecies through a special revelation from an angel in upstate New York. Southern Baptists may call them heretics, but everyone thinks they're nuts.

I've never quite understood how highly religious people can say that they will not let their religious beliefs interfere with their conduct in office. However, there is enough diversity in America that no one can impose religious uniformity, even if they want to. Given that, I don't think anyone--Mormon, Baptist, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, whatever--should discriminate against a political candidate of another faith, merely because he is likely to burn in eternal damnation.

Beer and Ethanol

The price of beer is evidently on the rise, due to increases in the cost of materials such as barley. Farmers are using corn to make ethanol, hence using more barley to feed livestock. The total availability of agricultural grains in America is not going to change much. As Economics 101 tells us, when you have a basically fixed supply and you increase demand, you'll increase the price. Nothing surprising here.

The federal government's interest in ethanol shines a bright light on the perverse way in which politics works in America. We will not mandate higher gas taxes, which would shift people to cars that use less fuel. Instead, we mandate the usage of ethanol in the fuel. Being less efficient than gasoline (otherwise, the mandate wouldn't be needed), the ethanol raises the cost of driving, but not very much. Instead, people are permitted to continue driving inefficient vehicles, while passing the cost along to everyone who drinks beer or eats cornflakes.

I predict that Congress will continue the ethanol mandate, especially since they will need to rescue the investors who have started too many ethanol plants. I also predict that they will not do any of the obvious and effective things.

Hurricane Season 2008

It seems that the Colorado State University experts have put out their predictions for the 2008 hurricane season. It is making headlines. The story also notes that they have been wrong for the past three years. They say there will be seven hurricanes next season. I say there will be six. Why doesn't Reuters come out and interview me?

What we're seeing is that the development of hurricanes depends, as Chaos Theory has shown, on remarkably small variations in conditions that lead to either big storms or fizzles. This is hard to predict at a distance of twelve hours. It is impossible to predict a year in advance. There appear to be some minor correlations with ocean temperatures, which in turn are difficult to predict a year in advance.

The number of tropical storms continues to be above the long term average, which I attribute mostly to better technology. On that basis, we had a slightly more active than usual season in 2007, but as anyone who watched it knows, it was pretty boring. There were in fact far fewer days than normal when there were at least on hurricane active in the North Atlantic.

So to predict a slightly more active than usual season is pretty much to say average with new data gathering. When the weatherman says the chance of rain is 50%, it means he has no clue. Much the same with these "experts."

Lies, damned lies, and AIDS infections

Mark Twain had it right. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. All the more so as statisticians have begun to employ more esoteric calculations to derive results far removed from actual data collection. Controversy surrounding historical global temperatures is due to this.

But I don't understand why today we are having Reuters saying that CDC is not yet saying whether their AIDS infection rate figures will rise, while "activist groups" think there are explosive numbers, "almost 50% higher," that are being held back. The actual numbers are 55K vs 40K, which is 37.5%, but who's counting.

CDC wants to take a long look before releasing the results, since they may have policy impacts. However, those who already know what policy impacts they desire can't wait to see if science supports them. "We hope that this is not yet another instance of the Bush administration's suppression of information that could be damaging to their image, especially in light of the fact that the spike in new infections is, at least in part, likely due to failed policies of the administration, including the promotion of 'abstinence-only' prevention messages and the failure to promote condom use," said Michael Weinstein, president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

This comes under the "have you stopped beating your wife" category. CDC is under attack for not releasing numbers early, and Weinstein already knows not only that the spike is taking place but what is causing it. He weasels in that he hopes it is not so, but clearly his mind is made up.

"Abstinence only" is a policy designed for teenagers. Teenagers are substantially more likely to die in auto accidents than from AIDS and if they are infected, it's extremely unlikely that it's the result of heterosexual sex with peers. When some high school boy and his girl decide to lose their virginity before the prom, it may get her pregnant but it won't give her AIDS. Bush should give up on abstinence only, but for reasons that have nothing to do with AIDS.

HIV, Diarrhea, and Trauma in Poor Countries

A group in Eugene recently celebrated another AIDS awareness day, I don't recall for what reason, which included someone singing "Imagine a world without AIDS." Well, I can't, frankly. We have made it possible for HIV carriers to live long lives, during all of which they will be HIV positive and hence disease vectors. Unless we convinced tens of millions of people to have only safe sex and/or only safe intravenous drug use, we will always have new cases.

Meanwhile, I don't recall the last diarrhea awareness day. Roughly two million children under six die from diarrhea annually, which is also roughly the mortality from AIDS across all age groups. Another enormous source of mortality in developing countries is bone breakage, which takes place with disturbing frequency due to increasing auto traffic, bad roads, and inexperienced drivers.

I don't know exactly what the per capita cost of providing clean drinking water would be, but that's a readily available solution to most of the diarrhea epidemic. Kiwanis in the Pacific Northwest supports a program through which severe injuries can be repaired with a steel rod and surgery at a total cost of $100 per patient. These people go on to live productive lives without further cost.

HIV/AIDS is a diagnosis which leads either to death or a lifetime of drug treatment. Expensive drugs, even with subsidies, and the survivor remains a vector. The obvious choice would be to provide palliative care, let them die, and focus on the low-cost and effective use of money for the greatest benefit.

But that would be rational and there's nothing rational about our methods of doing good.

Run, run, the seas are rising

Bob Doppelt, a local Eugene environmentalist, wrote in today's Register Guard that global warming will bring incredible pain to Lane County, which we should begin to mitigate now. The odd thing is that his final points, that we cannot cure global warming but there can be no real cure unless we all do our part, is plainly false. Lane County is insignificant in this situation. If we reduced our countial (what's the adjective for county?) carbon footprint to zero, it would have no impact and we'd go right on getting warmer. Conversely, nobody is India or China will change a policy because of what Lane County does, and those folks are actually important.

However, it was amusing as usual to listen to the fright mongering about the rising oceans. Due to the projected 4.6-foot increase, we in Florence should be concerned that the waves will begin washing away our sand.

First, let's take a deep breath and consider the past 20 millenia. Since the end of the last Ice Age, the oceans have risen tremendously. The old seashore lies far beneath the waves. Yet, in case no one has noticed, we have a lot of sand here.

The reason is simply that the Pacific carries a great deal of energy eastward which is dissipates on the coastline. Some of that energy drives sand upwards, against the natural tendency of gravity to send it downward. It isn't a smooth process and stormy seas are net removers, but summer restores sand to the beaches. If you move the beach higher by a foot, the sand will be delivered a foot higher as well.

However, neither the coastline nor the sea level is completely fixed, never has been, never will be, and anyone living next to it deals with that. The rate of change of the ocean is relatively insignificant. The same UN report which underlies the hysteria also provides contradictory graphs of actual history. For instance, in the 60 years after WW II, the oceans rose more quickly for the first 25 years than the next 35. Unfortunately for the climate warmers, the rise was more quickly in the first 25 and during that time, global temperatures fell.

Meanwhile, people along coasts are always insecure about where the ocean meets land, except for a few places where they sit comfortably on basalt. Anyone who builds so close to the shore that a few inches rise will be important during the lifetime of a structure, is nuts. Otherwise, the next builder will start a few inches higher. Hardly the greatest global crisis of the century.

America is driven by fear of litigation

America has come to believe that safety is normal and natural, and anything that in retrospect entailed danger and led to a bad outcome, is a tort. Lawyers keep telling us that this makes life better. It doesn't look like it to me.

In our local Kiwanis club, our meetings are held about a mile from the high school, where an affiliated Key Club operates. One of the members of the Key Club wants to come to the meeting this Wednesday. We need to transport her.

But here's the kicker. Kiwanis International advises each Kiwanis Club that at no time should one Kiwanis member be alone with one youth in any activity relating to Kiwanis. The includes bringing someone to a meeting. So we can't just send one member over to the high school to make the trip, for about two minutes in broad daylight. We need to get two people. If we can do it, fine. Otherwise, I guess it won't happen.

Having the two clubs interact is a positive thing, but we are so afraid of litigation that we are raise barriers that will inevitably lead to less of it. If Kiwanis ran a summer camp with a swimming pool, the insurance liability would be enormous, because some kid might be injured. The same kid, not going to camp, might be injured in his backyard pool, but then there would be no one to sue.

Some people, entrusted with the care of youth through churches, nonprofits, and so forth, have used their positions abusively, but they represent a tiny fraction of the total. Most abuse is in the home. When we insist that all organized alternatives to home activities be perfect, we ensure that there will be less of it and that kids will be at greater risk for more hours. For some reason, we can't fix this.

Perhaps it has something to do with the enormous contribution which trial lawyers make to political campaigns.

Can a seven-year-old blaspheme?

From a BBC blog comes this:

Speaking as a father I do not feel this was a well thought out plan by the teacher. However, I feel that she has done nothing wrong. The children themselves should be punished for having chosen the name of our great Prophet for a lowly bear. The teacher was misguided, whereas the children were malicious. They must be brought to answer for their blasphemy.
Abdullah Al-Zawawi, Sudan

and also this:

The children voted as well. They should lock them up too, as a lesson to anybody who insults Prophet Muhammad.
K K Djibouto, Sudan

I don't think you need to be irrationally anti-muslim to point out that there are no other religions on earth where adherents believe that non-believers, acting in private, should be criminalized for words they speak. Or that seven-year-olds should be punished for their inadequate understanding of theology. The first gentleman distances himself from the mob, but both align themselves with the second view. The first gives his full name and evidently doesn't feel embarrassed to tell the entire world.

To repeat an earlier point, Islam is a self-insulting religion. It shouldn't worry about the impact of infidels on Mohammed's good name.

Muted Muslim Outrage about Mo, The Teddy Bear

We are told that muslim leaders from Britain are trying to win the release of Gillian Gibbons from the Sudanese jail where she has been imprisoned for insulting Islam. A nice gesture, probably as much defensive as anything, since shall we say there hasn't been a lot of support for Sudan in the UK over this. It's making Islam look stupid in civilized countries and British muslims know it.

But where are the voices from Arab countries? Nothing from Egypt, where they are probably afraid of the Islamists in their midst. Nothing from Saudi, where they probably agree. Complete silence from the "secular Shiites" in Iraq, or the Palestinians, or the Syrians, or ...

In fact, the only Muslim voices getting much play in the news are those of Britons. Probably this is because Muslims there think they have no choice, while those elsewhere are afraid of the imams who seriously think Sharia law is appropriate in Sudan and wouldn't mind having it everywhere.

Christianity has had a violent and intolerant past, as has Judaism much farther back, and there are certainly preachers still with us that I wouldn't like to see control the levers of governmental power. There are doubtless tolerant Muslims. In India, the ones I've met seem all to fall in that category. The problem for Westerners is that the ones who aren't control far more of the religious power in Islam than in Christianity and they also control governments, which is not the case with Christians.

That said, Bill O'Reilly and his ilk go far overboard in warning about the threat of militant Islam. There has never been a year when America's toll from Islamic terrorism has come close to the loss of life in auto accidents, and except in 2001, it has never reached the number who die from lightning strikes. The cost of the 9/11 attack is minuscule compared with the expense we've endured since then in response to it.

The lesson of Mo the Teddy should be that while Gilliam Gibbons can soon leave, almost all Sudanese are stuck there. Thankfully, the problems of Islam are almost entirely inflicted on Muslims in Muslim countries. And secondarily, on the rest of us by people who don't understand that.

Mohamed, Jesus and Moses

People are remarking that "we," presumably Westerners, do not name our children Moses or Jesus. Of course, that's wrong. It's certainly not as common a name as John, but a good number of kids enter life as Jesus, particularly Hispanics, and some are named Moses. But so what?

Muslims are entitled to consider Mohamed an acceptable name for their children, but not for their pets. What they don't seem to understand is that their views on names for people and inanimate objects are their own and should not, in a modern society, be forced on nonbelievers, especially foreigners. Especially invited foreigners, considering that Sudan requires some $2 billion annually just to feed its population.

A population that is growing at around 2% annually. According to the CIA, the average Sudanese woman gives birth to nearly five children. Fortunately, one in ten dies in infancy, but that isn't enough to hold back the population. Since domestic agriculture is precarious and vulnerable to droughts and other natural pressures, it's only a matter of time before there is a Sudanese "humanitarian crisis" as happens regularly in Ethiopia. It is inevitable that more people will sooner or later die by famine there than will ever die in the Darfur conflict.

The Saudis have enough cash for their top prince to order an Airbus A380 for himself. The Sudanese authorities want to maintain Sharia law and apply it to everyone. It seems to me that they should be getting their aid from people who agree, like the Arabs.

Sudan Shows Islam is Most Arrogant Religion

The case against a British teacher in Sudan, charged with insulting Islam by allowing her 7-year-old students to choose "Mohammed" as a name for the class teddy bear, demonstrates clearly that Islam is in a class by itself in terms of arrogance. In civilized countries, criminal laws are generally clear and not philosophical. In Sudan, a foreigner, teaching at a school attended largely by foreigners, is expected to understand the nuances of Muslim religious sensitivity or face the prospect of 40 lashes.

This is not to say that some religions aren't theoretically more arrogant. It would be hard to top Judaism, which asserts that God specifically picked their tribe out of all the people in the world, but Jews don't seem inclined to emphasize the racist streak. And Hinduism, where higher castes figure they are superior to many of their co-religionists and not necessarily to foreigners of similar position, which seems odd.

However, the general trend in most religions today seems to be a growing tolerance. If that trend is taking place in Islam, it's keeping a low profile. And much as Juan Cole would like us to believe that Islamic voices oppose situations like Gillian Gibbons', I haven't heard any expressions of outrage from them.

Islam is a religion from the Dark Ages, largely unaffected by the last thirteen centuries. We're told that we must respect all of the world's "great" religions. I'm hard pressed to understand why.

Nothing to say about Iraq

We're getting into a period where the Surge is being touted as a success and Iraq is fading from the public consciousness. I have never been especially wedded to my specific predictions, although some of them look decently prescient. However, I've had one core prediction that I'm prepared to stick with. This isn't going to turn out well.

For it to turn out well, the United States needs to complete its mission and be able to walk away without chaos ensuing. The fact that we can tamp down violence while stationing more troops that we can possibly maintain without a major upgrade of our defense establishment proves nothing. The theory at the outset was that we would buy the Iraqis some quiet time during which they could reconcile. Nothing like that is happening. Certainly, Iraqis have lost their affection for Al Qaeda, which gives some basis for hope. But otherwise, the best description of politics in Iraq is paralysis.

So without knowing specifics, I continue to believe that the end will not justify the means. Particularly as the means have entailed more and more costs. Probably a million or so dead, millions displaced, a trillion dollars either spent or now committed, as in future VA costs. The current success consists of somewhat fewer people dying, with the economy, the political establishment, and Iraqi society in shambles and making no progress. I don't feel any need to defend my five years of pessimism.

Utah Cop and Taser

There's evidently a video going around showing a Utah cop tasering someone who had been pulled over for speeding. The gist is that the guy got tasered for speeding.

Wrong. He got tasered for not complying with the officer's instructions. The officer was evidently on single patrol. They were in the middle of nowhere. There's a rule which everyone should be made to memorize. If you want to debate, do it in court. Don't challenge the police officer on the scene.

I don't want to be a cop, but I'm glad other people do. It's a dangerous world out there and cops are the ones who stand between us and a lot of the craziness. Sometimes, they aren't ideal human beings, but to repeat a point I just made, I don't want to be one. The people who want to sit on review panels don't want to be cops. They just want to criticize cops. As Jack Nicholson said in "A Few Good Men," we want these people doing what they do.

This is a job where you spend almost all your time dealing with people who are doing things they shouldn't and know it. Occasionally, the circumstances may be in dispute but an arrest scene is not the time or place.

We had a cop in nearby Springfield who tracked down a kid who had stolen a truck. Middle of the night, deserted area. The kid wouldn't get out of the truck and eventually the cop shot him. Family, despite a general aura of criminality, got a lot of sympathy. Not from me. Do what the cop says. If you're not happy sort it out later. But do what the cop says. If you even create the appearance of a possibility of a threat, be prepared for violence. And no sympathy.

Hydro-Quebec and Northeast Heating Oil

Maybe we can't make the United States entirely energy independent, but we certainly should be able to do it for North America as a whole. Canadians have lots of extra energy, from the tar sands in Alberta to trillions of gallons of water flowing downhill in northern Quebec and Labrador. These are people we can deal with. They don't flog rape victims, for example.

We should make a deal with Hydro-Quebec, the provincial electric power utility. We have people who need to be heated up during the winter, and Hydro's electricity could do that. Hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers are freezing their asses every winter, and we have Florida. There's a deal here to be made. It still leaves open what the Northeast would do to earn its part of the arrangement, maybe sending lots of lobsters to Florida. Anyway, it makes more sense than buying more petroleum products from Venezuela.

Barbarism in Saudi Arabia

Saudi courts have condemned a victim of a gang rape to 200 lashes and six months in jail for having met a man without having a male relative present. I'm a little dubious about the lashes, since 200 serious lashes is a death sentence, but it's clearly still the kind of ruling one would expect from people whose judicial, ethical, and consequently governmental systems are based on the mores of 7th century desert nomads.

This would be just a quaint, a reminder that there's still a world out there that we would rather not encounter, except that we depend completely on these people to stay afloat. In oil, that is. We cannot afford to say what we feel publicly, although we're quick to condemn the regimes in Iran and Burma.

Our dependence on imports, both the manufactured ones which overseas employers produce with exploited workers and petroleum from countries we really don't trust, is making America weak. We can't really criticize the Saudis because we need their oil. We can't criticize the Chinese because we need everything and we owe them a trillion dollars.

Free trade is an abyss. As someone put it, it involves spreading wealth around the world until every worker has what a Pakistani bricklayer considers a decent income.

Urban Renewal in Eugene Oregon

Folks in Eugene desperately want to revive their moribund downtown. Ain't gonna happen. A proposal on the last ballot to fund redevelopment through an expanded urban renewal district went down to crushing defeat. Conservatives mistrust city government, rightly. Progressives mistrust any proposal under which anyone makes a profit, which is inevitable if you bring in private developers. Disparate groups like the Eugene Chamber of Commerce and leftwing mayor Kitty Piercy supported it, to no avail.

I'm glad I don't live in Eugene (I'm in Florence 65 miles away). It's not a good situation. If the construction was just wood and would rot away in a few years, I'd say let it rot, but the city, county and federal governments are concentrated there, plus some more infrastructure like the convention center (and its dependent Hilton) and the new library.

What's missing is private enterprise and the question has to be asked, why would it ever return? It costs more to build downtown, parking sucks, and the people on the streets there do not represent a good potential market. The measure on the ballot was quite large and many people spoke in favor of smaller, incremental redevelopments. Unfortunately, this overlooks the simple fact that a small change in downtown means it is still repulsive.

Eugene's downtown will continue to decline. The voters of Springfield, however, voted in favor of more urban renewal for their downtow. The relative fortunes of these twin cities will be interesting to watch over the next decade.

Mass Transit for Florence Oregon

It's hard to think of anything more foolish than bringing "mass transit" to Florence, but we already have it in the form of the "Rhody Express" (Florence is famous for rhododendrons) and the idea of tying us to Eugene via Lane Transit is being bruited. I can only explain this as a knee-jerk reaction to the notion of mass transit.

Mass transit requires a mass. Florence has a population under 10,000, which doesn't cut it. The Rhody Express runs for a few hours a day, shuttling a handful of people between a handful of locations in a loop. I don't know if they bother to collect fares and it wouldn't make a material difference. If the grants on which it operates dry up, it will vanish without a trace.

Disregarding this experience, people in Eugene and Florence are making noises about including us in LTD and running buses on the roughly 130 mile round trip between somewhere in Florence and downtown Eugene. If we paid the substantial payroll tax that funds LTD, about 1/150 of earnings, it might earn us four trips daily, five at most. This isn't enough for anyone to use regularly. Gaps would be about three hours and there wouldn't be evening services.

A few dozen people would benefit from a tax of more than a half million dollars a year, imposed on thousands of workers. Why? You have to ask what the social contract is. We all need roads, fire protection and police, so we all pay. But intercity buses? It doesn't reduce pollution, it doesn't reduce congestion, and it doesn't make it possible to live in Florence without personal transportation. Why should a worker making $40,000 a year pay $250 for a service that is of no personal benefit?

The only thing I can think is that progressives feel a need to support any program that is labelled "mass transit," even if it isn't. The Register-Guard supports it because the RG favors all increases in taxes and government activity. Fortunately, there won't be enough others and this will die a quiet death.

Bjorn Lomborg as pariah

I just read an article by someone at the Voice of San Diego Web site, blaming the wildfires on global warming. Nobody disagrees about global warming anymore, he announces, except a few like Bjorn Lomborg, who says the global warming doesn't matter.

I think the reason take so many potshots at Lomborg is that he apostasized. The people at Fox News have always been right wing on all subjects, but Lomborg was once a fairly mainstream environmentalist. He developed doubts, and religions take a much harder line on people who leave the flock than those who never subscribe to their beliefs.

Put very simply, Lomborg doubts that the trend is as well documented as people would like us to believe, but more importantly, we can't do diddly about it. Those who say we must respond seem to avoid the question of whether we can. Since China and India have both indicated that they will take no action that slows their efforts to bring their populations out of poverty, the likelihood that real agreement can be reached is zero. And, as Lomborg further points out, if everything in Kyoto were implemented, we would merely delay slightly the doom which is predicted.

In actuality, modern engineering will solve almost all the problems that realistically may result from global warming (which does not include large proportions of species dying off). In fact, this solution, which will take place, will cost a fraction of what the "solution," actually just a delay, that the global warming worriers propose.

While the US cannot make a major impact on global warming trends, it can through its own policies take itself out of the fossil fuel dependence that is sapping its economy and putting it into an increasingly fragile military situation. This we can do. It won't stop wildfires, which are due primarily to other factors, and we may still get a few degrees warmer. But we won't owe our souls to the Chinese and the Saudis. That's an objective worthwhile on its own.

Headlines are always the worst climate case story

I had hoped that the Christian Science Monitor would be the exception to the rule, but the corruption of journalism in pursuit of global warming headlines seem to affect them just as much. They picked up the AP story on the "ecodisaster" of Katrina and subheaded it The hurricane destroyed or damaged about 320 million trees across the South. The story then states that the 100 million metric tons of greenhouse gases produced by all this stuff rotting exceeds the amount by which forests across America take in carbon in the course of a year.

The comparison with annual carbon uptake by all forests seems a stretch. The hundred megaton figure is within shouting distance of estimates of CO2 from forest fires, which surely destroy a small percentage of the trees in the country or we wouldn't have a forest industry.

But the main point, regarding the quality of journalism, is that in the second half of the article, the authors note that respectable forestry people, living in the area, think the figures are grossly inflated. Experts at the Mississippi Institute for Forest Inventory conducted a scientific survey, taking random samples of woodlots, and concluded that the loss was perhaps a fifth of what the UNH and Tulane research showed from satellite imagery. Most of us would tend to believe what people can see up close rather than computer estimates based on images from hundreds of miles away.

CSM, unfortunately, chose to use the higher figure and present it as authoritative in the subhead. In a perfect world, everyone would read the whole article and could form their own opinions, but in practice, many readers don't get past the head and subhead, or at most the first paragraph or two. So when those create a completely unbalanced picture, it is very misleading. I had hoped for more from this newspaper.

Climate Change will make the end of the world even worse

Mencken once said that no man ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public. It looks as though newspapers have a new twist on that. No newspaper ever lost circulation underestimating the willingness of the American public to be frightened.

The International Herald Tribune has an article that reports that "many" feel that the UN pronouncements on global warming see the impact as too mild. In a world with more than six billion people, it's not hard to find "many" people supporting any position whatsoever. This is a fairly low threshold to make something qualify as newsworthy.

The head of the UN, Mr. Ban, is described as hitting various climate change hot spots, including place in Chile where children wear protective clothing to shield them from UV radiation that gets through the hole in the ozone layer.

Wait a minute. The ozone layer is way up there. It is being affected by certain manmade chemicals, which have been banned by the industrial nations and largely eliminated. Due to the long lag time, the layer will continue to suffer and will not completely recover for another half century. But it isn't climate and it has absolutely nothing to do with CO2.

Having reported that the UN may have underplayed the danger, the reporters might have shown why they said this. Like a quote that said that the situation was worse than reported. I've looked it over and there seems to be nothing. The report says things are bad. People have commented that things are bad. Nowhere does it show that anyone says it's worse than in the report.

So here's the state of journalism in the world today. When reporting on global warming, it is OK not only to report finding that the world is doomed, but to say that some unnamed people think it's even more doomed, and to make that unsupported claim the headline.

Drought in Australia

The International Herald Tribune is reporting that "many" people in Australia fear that the current drought is the result of global warming and the good old days, when it was easy to raise cows to produce milk (the point of the article) are past.

Droughts come and go. Judging from what I see on the Weather Channel, the drought that's affecting Atlanta looks like it may go away soon, just as the drought in Texas turned into waterlogging this year.

I'd like to make a prediction. The drought in Australia will go away as well. You heard it from me. I don't understand why the wire services never come to ask my opinions.

Gravity more than Global Warming

The UN report on global warming made the front page of the Register Guard here in Lane County, Oregon, today. As expected, all moderation was stripped away and the main point was that catastrophe is now unavoidable. Even if we stop putting carbon into the atmosphere, we've done so much already that we're doomed to suffer. The only question will be, how much.

Actually, I saw very little in the actual report to support panic. In fact, the charts look much less frightening. Take the rise in the level of the ocean. The article suggests that 4.6 feet is realistic. The chart of historical worldwide changes in sea level shows changes in the 100-150 range, but it uses millimeters as the scale. There are 25 millimeters to an inch. The scary numbers are a little less frightening when you realize that.

Even more pertinent, the chart shows a long process of rising seas over a century and a half. Specifically, it shows that in the 25 years from 1945 to 1970, the oceans rose. And from 1970 to 2005, they rose again by about the same amount. The only problem is that the former period of 25 years saw overall global cooling. The rise during 25 years of cooling was as great as in the subsequent 35 years of warming. It makes a person wonder about the warming-rising nexus.

This was another AP report, probably taken by the R-G without editing, so a lot of my criticism is of AP. It was the same with the earlier report on how Bangkok was threatened by rising sea level, due to global warming. In reality, Bangkok is sinking many times faster than the water around it is rising. AP barely mentions that, deep inside the story.

Everyone should understand a basic fact of physics. What tectonic and volcanic activity moves upwards, gravity tends to pull back downwards. Since gravity affects everything, more places are likely to be going downward than upward. This is particularly true in deltas, which is why Dacca, Bangkok, and New Orleans have problems. Human activity tends to cause marshy land to sink under the best of circumstances, and the tendency to pump water from the readily available underlying aquifer just makes it worse.

We are going to have problems with coastal cities during the next century. We will have most of the problems whether we have global warming or not. We will meet and defeat all of them by improved engineering. We will run out of petroleum at reasonable cost, and we will replace it with new sources. We will not be wiped out by tropical diseases. Trust Yankee ingenuity. Or maybe Hindi.

The right plan even if the wrong reasons

I'm torn between wanting to criticize speculation by scientists and supporting the same public policies that they advocate. The UN has issued a warning about the consequences of manmade climate change. I think they're exaggerating the consequences but America should still take exactly the steps they suggest.

The report predicts that more people will die from heat. It ignores the offsetting decline in deaths from cold. Food production in Africa is predicted to decline, but the manmade problem in Africa is not climate, it's unscientific farming practices. We are warned against the rising oceans, but in fact they are going up at about an inch per decade.

But after disagreeing about these points, I fully support making America less dependent on fossil fuels. We have a limited supply of them and we are forced increasingly to buy from overseas. These leads to two unsustainable trends. Economically, we are destroying the greenback as the international reserve currency, and militarily, we are becoming dependent on people with different national interests. We owe the Chinese a trillion dollars already.

I can't understand why there is so much policy debate. Even people who disagree about the science should come to the same conclusions about policies. America needs to go Green for its national survival.

Ku Klux Klan redux

I've had a long comment published to an old post I made in January about the analogy between the Sunnis in Iraq and southern Whites in the Reconstruction South. I'm not really sure what it meant, except that the situation was quite complicated in the American South.

But I wasn't really concerned with Reconstruction, which is pretty much a done deal. I was observing that in a fight without American interference, the outnumbered Sunnis are likely to do pretty well against the Shiites, having the greater tradition of military leadership. That is still the point, but the situation is changing. The American South was more likely the old Iraq, with Whites and Blacks living in close proximity. Iraq has largely been converted into ethnic neighborhoods. The decline in civilian deaths is largely due to the completion of this process.

Leaving the question, what does the US military presence now achieve? Juan Cole has long argued that we are obliged to keep some military presence to prevent the outbreak of large scale civil war operations. I've noted that the action was taking place on a micro scale anyway. But perhaps the micro phrase is past and now the question really is, can we prevent a standard civil war between identifiable military groups by keeping our own troops on the ground?

Maybe we can. And anyone who thinks it's a good use of 200 billion a year is free to use that as an excuse for staying. Something like 15% of the population is now displaced and there is no indication that a political solution will ever get Iraq back to normal. Maybe we can do this forever. Any takers?

The once almight dollar

The dollar is being propped up, believe it or not, by the Chinese yuan. Although the Chinese run a positive balance of trade with virtually everyone on the planet, they have currency that, due to its close connection with the greenback, is actually depreciating in relation to the really strong currencies like the Euro and the Canadian petro loonie.

The artificial tie between the greenback and the yuan has been pulling the yuan down and eventually the connection will be broken. When it does, the dollar will drop further. Probably a lot further. We have no option except to import oil at whatever the producers choose to charge and we have eliminated so much manufacturing capacity that we have little choice except to buy Chinese. American commodity farmers and Boeing will benefit, but it will take an enormous growth in those areas to offset the increasingly expensive imports.

There will be serious inflation. A central bank can prevent inflation through monetary policy only if there is something close to foreign exchange equilibrium, but that is lacking. The Fed cannot lower interest rates without sinking the dollar completely. Inflation will result from import substitution, not cost-push.

Sarkozy and Stahl

The headlines say that Sarkozy lost his temper and ended his interview with Leslie Stahl after she kept asking about his marriage. I don't know where the "temper" part comes in. The video clip shows that she asked him again after he said he wouldn't answer. Sensing that he was dealing with a tactless dolt, he gave up and left.

The French have a more sensible view of private and public lives than we do in America. I applaud President Sarkozy for telling Stahl that he had better things to do with his time. I wish the headlines had been "Stahl proves that she isn't ready to interview international leaders."

For half a trillion, we could be energy self-sufficient

I'm tired of hearing how it's naive to think that America could become energy self-sufficient. It's just money. At the outset of World War II, the physics of nuclear chain reactions were only hazily understood. At the end, we had a bomb with explosive power orders of magnitude greater than anything theretofore known. How did we get it? By expending money at a rate never before contemplated on physics research and the production of fissile material. At its peak, the Manhattan Project was comparable in size to the pre-war domestic automobile industry.

It cost billions of dollars at a time when a billion dollars was a lot of money. The country spent the money because it felt that it was necessary to win a war. We are now in a self-proclaimed war against terrorism, in addition to two "hot" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The people we are fighting only have enough money to fight us because we consume so much oil. Otherwise, oil would be $25/barrel and a lot of Arab countries would be barely staying afloat economically. If we didn't need their oil, we wouldn't care who ran their countries. If we weren't in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda would really not much care about America. The Saudi royal family would have to pay cash for their next 747 because their credit wouldn't be good, but otherwise everyone would be happy.

I guess this doesn't quite apply to Afghanistan, but there it's a different product -- heroin. We can't stamp out heroin use. We've been trying for two or three generations with little success. So let's give it up. Legalize it, tax it, use the proceeds to provide treatment for those who want it and let the others have enough that they can shoot up till they die. And stop funding the Taliban with the money that our addicts steal in order to support their habits.

Turks, Armenians, Stupidity and Hypocrisy

It looks like we're going ahead and branding the Turkish suppression of Armenians during World War I as genocide. I'm trying to figure out why we're doing this. It's not as though Congress is required to pass judgment on every outrage in history. This goes back nearly a century. Why stop? What about Genghis Khan?

More to the point, why is America criticizing the Turks for ancient history when we're pretty comfortable owning all the land that once was populated by Indians. We're quick to judge the Ottoman Empire but slow to hold the US Army to account.

But even if we supposed that it was generally a good idea for the US Congress to establish who had or had not committed genocide in history, is this the time to tick off the Turks? We have damned few allies in the region. The Israelis naturally side with us because we pay them to and they wouldn't survive otherwise. The oil producers are people we wouldn't be seen in public with if it weren't for their money and oil.

All in all, we aren't going to do much better than the Turks. Is this some kind of death wish? Congress is controlled by Democrats so we can't lay this one at the feet of George W. Bush.

Mark Twain once began a piece with, "Suppose I were a Congressman. Suppose I were an idiot. Ah, but I repeat myself."

Weekly Unemployment Claims

Today's headline: Jobless claims rise more than expected. Last week's headline: Jobless claims unexpectedly fall.

There are thing about which we cannot be certain with absolute precision. Then there are things like the weekly jobless claims, where the noise in the weekly statistics exceeds the trend by a factor of ten. In truth, there is hardly any trend.

But every week, there's the "expected" value. It is derived by asking a lot of economists what they think the number will be and averaging the answers. It reminds me of an old, politically incorrect joke. Nobody has ever seen the emperor of China. How do you calculate the length of the emperor of China's beard? Answer, you ask 100 Chinamen how long they think the beard is and take the average.

So every week, the news services calculate the average of a few dozen opinions from people who don't know, and compare it with a government report that contains no statistically significant information. They then always have a headline, because the two are never the same. OK, it's possible that due to some fluke they would match, so there would be a headline, "Economists finally get one right."

It's much the same thing when the Weather Channel broadcasts some ninny breathless announcing that the high temperature in Des Moines today will be 12 degrees "higher than it should be."

Public education would be well served by taking an hour a week for two weeks for each graduating high school senior and explaining the uses and misuses of statistics and probability. Not the formulas, just the rough principles. It would be really useful.

Here's a pop quiz. If you have a room with 35 randomly selected people, what are the odds that you'll have two of them with the same birthday? Day and month, not year. email me with your guess and I'll explain it to you. You're almost certain to be far wrong. Statistically speaking.

If you like Iraq and Aghanistan, you'll love Darfur

A few days ago, a rebel group in Darfur (not the rebel group since there are several) overran an African Union peacekeeping camp, immediately killing ten and taking others who have not been found and are probably dead. Later, the Sudanese government forces retook the camp and, in a show of solidarity with UA, looted it.

We decided to bring economic revival and political freedom to Afghanistan, after rooting out its old government. President Karzai is now ready to talk to Mullah Omar of the Taliban to end the escalating violence.

We decided to bring economic revival and political freedom to Iraq, after rooting out its old government. We're going to have troops there for ten years and anyone who thinks we'll leave a democracy in place deserves a drug test.

People keep telling us that if we have any moral fiber at all, we'll rush to the help of the defenseless souls in Darfur, in order to ...

Exactly what?

The only plus for Darfur is that it is already in the midst of a civil war, so we couldn't be accused of having started one. It's pretty cold comfort.

Saddam and Pol Pot is a bad analogy

I recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Register Guard, Eugene, Oregon's local rag, commenting that I was personally not happy that Saddam was gone, not because he wasn't a terrible man, but that the consequences of Iraq being run by a terrible man were not as bad as having him removed have been.

Someone in Eugene bravely sent me an anonymous envelope, containing a clipping about Pol Pot and his murderous regime in Cambodia. The comment was, "Here's another one you can ad [sic] to your list of those who kept the 'lid' on."

Illogical thinking like that can, well, get you elected President of the United States. The analogue to Saddam in Cambodia is not Pol Pot, who came to power as the result of America's being unwilling to leave well enough alone, but Prince Sihanouk. Sihanouk headed a "neutral" regime that was too accommodating to North Vietnam for our tastes, so we ignored their neutrality and dragged them into the conflict. Sihanouk eventually lost control and was replace by Pol Pot.

Pol Pot is the analogue of someone yet to come to power in Iraq. Not a good analogue, because Pol Pot did control what everyone agreed was Cambodia, and it's unlikely that anyone will ever again assert overarching control of the old Iraq. There may not be anyone at all. This could be the Congo with oil.

Hurricane Activity

It is human nature to report research results that benefit you in the future. In the travel industry, there are prominent "research" organizations that consistently that every state agency in America runs highly effective advertising campaigns. They then get lavish checks from the people about whom they make these comments. Not surprisingly, they are always asked to do followup "research" which produces the same results.

So we might ask whether it's surprising that research by climatologists shows dramatic consequences to climate change. First, let me say that I have no doubt that CO2 is increasing. I'm willing to accept tentatively that it is causing an increase in average global temperature, although I'd be more comfortable if I saw an explanation for global cooling in the quarter century after WWII when CO2 was also increasing.

But there aren't going to be any conferences to attend or research budgets to spend just because we're getting a little warmer. The trend in American populations has been steadily towards warmer climates over the past half century. It's what people want in the place they call home. They aren't likely to panic if they face the prospect of a little more summer heat and less winter snow.

So research is stretched to devise consequences. We are constantly hearing about rising sea levels. The actual change in the average level has been trivial, less than the height of waves on the calmest day imaginable on the ocean. Here on the Oregon Coast, parts of the coastline are rising and others falling. Anybody who builds a structure next to the ocean on the assumption that nothing will change for 100 years is a fool. In actuality, the shoreline shifts and people rebuild a few years farther inland.

Then we have hurricanes. Those who have pointed out that we got warmer and then Katrina happened, from which they deduce that we got warmer and therefore Katrina happened, ignore the Butterfly Effect, which in its classic form says that a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and months later the pattern of Atlantic hurricanes changes.

The research that purports to show the increase in hurricane activity, which must be linked to global warming, fails many times as science. The first is that the trend itself shows up only over a period when sampling improved. They claim that this is a minor factor, but that's an assumption that can't be tested. They claim a causal relationship that can't be tested. I can hypothesize a variety of causes and provided my independent variable grows steadily over time, it will do just as well.

The "science" is that increased heat energy in the water will lead to increased hurricane activity. Sounds reasonable to me, but there doesn't seem to be a very good correlation. Last season we supposed to be hyperactive and although CO2 continued to rise, it was a medium season. This year, we were supposed to have a medium season. The hurricane guru for Wunderground predicted in late June that the odds of a named storm in the first half of July was 70%. We're about to finish the entire month of July without one. The last named storm was around June 1. I wonder what the last sixty-day period during hurricane season was when no named storms developed.

There are many reasons why hurricanes form. And don't form. However, a hundred people like me can say that no clear pattern has emerged and nobody will notice. One "research" result showing a connection, however, and it's a headline. People prefer to get headlines. We should all keep that in mind.

Gaza down the tubes

There's a book called "Collapse," or something like that, which explains why certain societies collapse. The author has a list of reasons, including wars and environmental problems. One of them is that at some point there are simply too many people to be supported by the resources available. I think Gaza is getting there.

It's an area that in 1948 supported about 100,000 people. It now has about 1.5 million and they are still breeding like rabbits. That's about 10 times what we have here on the Oregon Coast, with a tiny fraction of the land and no resources.

The world has no record of letting that many people die since World War II except in Africa, but nobody wants a lot of disaffected Palestinian refugees in their country and Hamas is likely to continue the Koranic theory of women-as-breeding-stock. Is it possible for an area to become human "black hole," which collapses upon itself and from which nothing escapes?

Fatah is corrupt and ineffective, but perhaps not unusually so by Arab standards. They may get control of the West Bank and Israel may actually decide to cut a deal just because they aren't Hamas. But Gaza? It's like Scientology with its own country. I have a really bad feeling about this.

Bong Hits for the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is being described as more conservative than in the past. I think a better description is fascist. A conservative court would have deep reservations about the role of government in guiding individual actions into "proper" channels. This one seems ready to leap right in.

The kid in Alaska was penalized for displaying the phrase "Bong Hits for Jesus," which his school administration interpreted as advocating drug use. He did it on his own time, outside the school. The school is a government agency with a semi-monopoly on a vital service. There is a lot of coercion involved in making students show up in the first place.

There is no common English usage that leads from "Bong Hits for Jesus" to advocacy of anything. It doesn't make sense, as the kid pointed out. One would think that for words to show a specific intent, they would need to show some intent unambiguously, but apparently not in Alaska. It is not a sentence. It isn't even an intelligible phrase. There is no history of this student otherwise advocating drug use. The phrase does not match sentences or phrases used by others who are advocating drug use.

All we have is that some school administrator chose to assign a meaning to words, used outside the school, to which they then ascribe an intent on the basis of which they impose a punishment. This is scary stuff and certainly not something that a small-government advocating conservative should find appealing.

Democracy as Panacea

I'm working on a visitor guide to the Oregon Dunes, so yesterday morning I was having breakfast in a Reedsport cafe. A number of Reedsport's senior citizens were enjoying breakfast at the same time and I couldn't help overhearing the conversation. It covered Iraq, and if Bush expects to hold the support of generally conservative old geezers, I think he may have trouble. They were not happy about Iraq.

Then the conversation turned to politics. "Did you hear that Obama announced that he's running for President?" "No, who's Obama." "He's this black guy. He's in Congress. I don't know if it's the Senate or the House, but he's there. Looks like he's figured out that the problem is graft and corruption. And he's only 35!"

Based the opinions of such people, we will run a primary process that determines two candidates, between whom the contest will be settled by who has the best media consultants and the most money to buy advertising. This is democracy. It's what we're trying to give the Iraqis. It's what the UN was trying to give a tribe of pygmies in the Congo, helping them vote for the next government, when the pygmies clearly did not understand either (a) what a government was or (b) what the Congo was.

Democracy is a concept that Americans are in love with. We think it's indispensable to an advanced society, although Singapore does rather well without one. I think it's more an inevitable condition, when enough people gain such a high opinion of themselves that they feel that they must be allowed to participate in decisions. In most advanced society, this works better than any alternatives. In places like Iraq and Congo, it's a dangerous fairytale.

Pre-War Iraq Intelligence

The current controversy over the quality, sources, and purposes of the pre-war "intelligence" that wrongly linked Iraq and al-Qaeda does nothing to change my original assessment. The United States spends thirty or forty billion dollars a year on spying. A portion of this is used to prevent criminal acts, and I consider it police work rather than espionage. It is the latter that I regard as useless.

Advances in research are made by professionals, mostly working in universities, due to the process of peer review and an insistence on replicability. This is the basis for quality assurance. A single piece of research is checked for such things as inappropriate research methods or simple errors in analysis, and all research is regarded as no more than a piece of the puzzle. The puzzle, whatever it is, is gradually solved to the satisfaction of the participants by an accumulation of evidence from assorted sources. Or not. Sometimes, as we so often see in medical studies, initial studies are refuted or at least modified by later ones.

The problems of espionage are the subject of congressional hearings, closed or open, and the consensus always is that there has been some structural flaw which can be fixed by a better structure. This is not and never has been true. The problem is that espionage relies explicitly on special knowledge, from sources that cannot be verified through processes that cannot be replicated. Its quality can therefore never be relied on.

That's the problem. Not whether on any particular day, the espionage turns out to be correct, but that a nation like the United States cannot have public debates about issues when the "facts" are private. I argued at the outset of the war that the rationale was wrong for reasons that the White House could have determined for perhaps $29,999,999,999 less by buying a copy of the International Herald Tribune and reading what William Pfaff was saying. They could save a dollar more than that now by going online and checking with Juan Cole, who gets most of the information by himself going online and checking Arab newspapers and blogs.

One of my favorite lines goes "... an oxymoron, like Catholic education or military intelligence." The latter is a play on the two meanings of intelligence. The United States puts faith in the definition I've been discussing, analysis drawn from secretly obtained information. The second meaning is the ability to draw from many sources, assimilate the data, and be smart about drawing conclusions. If the United States had shown more of the latter kind of intelligence, we wouldn't be in the quagmire that we now find ourselves in.

I was just checking Google to see if any of my earlier posts showed up, and I discovered that looking for "Charles Krauthammer" and "predictable" yielded my post of four days ago, along with with many more than I had anticipated. Predictable seems to be a word that people associate frequently with the man, and that he uses himself.

There was a particularly interesting article from Charles himself, discussing reparations for African-Americans. He proposed, not entirely seriously, to trade off a payment of $440 billion to African-American families for the terminaton of affirmative action. He commented that although a steep price, it represented only a thirteenth of the projected ten-year federal surplus.

That was in April, 2001, before W. had worked his magic on the federal budget. Less than six years, but it seems so long ago.