Stromata Blog

Morning in Baghdad

Knowing that the world didn’t need my amateur commentary on the election in Iraq and that following the returns minute by minute would lead to sleep deprivation (by contemporary standards, I would be a torture victim!), I spent the weekend watching plays off-Broadway, with no greater access to the news than that provided by the streamers near Times Square. Thus I got the voting story all at once upon my return home, and quite a good story it was, too (better than the plays, though they weren’t a waste of time and money either).

The election held four great risks for the anti-terrorist cause:

1. The Iraqis might sullenly stay home from the polls, showing that they regarded themselves as a people under alien occupation, determined not to collaborate with their oppressors. That was the outcome predicted by the fevered fringe of anti-liberation zealots, as well as by the cynics who think that Arabs prefer tyrannical rule to democracy.

2. Despite their desire to vote, most of the electorate might have been frightened away from the polls by the prospect of violence, thus demonstrating that the terrorists hold a majority of the country in their psychological, if not physical, grasp. That scenario was, it appears, what most of the mainstream media anticipated, and most were candid enough to concede in their headlines and ledes that it had not come to pass.

3. The voters might turn out in force to vote in a religiously intolerant, anti-Western government patterned on the Iranian mullarchy. That danger had already receded before election day, when the major “religious” parties declared that they wouldn’t include clerics on their lists of candidates and rejected the notion of a setting up a theocracy.

4. All might go well on the ground, but the Western media might nonetheless find only bad news to report, à la the false but devastating coverage of the Tet Offensive in 1968, where Walter Cronkite and his echo chamber declared the war “unwinnable” immediately after a smashing victory that tore the heart out of the Viet Cong.

At the moment, it looks like not even the last (and most likely) of those fears came true. Certainly there could be no better proof than the turnout at the polls that al-Zarqawi’s “bitter war against democracy” is a pinprick assault, tragic for those whom the Islamofascists murder but too sporadic and ineffective to intimidate the great mass of the population. It is not too hard for a few hundred thugs, well-furnished with left-over weapons and cash from the Saddam Hussein era, to carry out random killings, particularly when the forces of law and order consist of inexperienced policemen backed up by soldiers who don’t speak the local language. That kind of thuggish “insurgency” cannot, however, win military victories. If it also cannot instill fear, its failure is irredeemable and its demise just a matter of time.

The great hope of the terrorists was always that America would lose either interest or nerve and pull out, effectively leaving the fate of Iraq to the neighboring dictatorships. In the aftermath of January 30th, there are signs, faint but visible, that a portion of anti-war opinion is beginning to look on the Iraqi campaign as an overall success and to prefer nurturing a nascent democracy to scoring points against President Bush. While the other portion will continue to cavil – its new shibboleth seems to be, “The patient got well, but the operation was a failure” – its plaints ring hollower and hollower. When John Kerry says on Meet the Press, “[W]hat the administration does in these next few days will decide the outcome in Iraq, and this is – not maybe – this is the last chance for the President to get it right”, what does he mean? He prefaced that remark by alluding to a speech that he made last April. It’s enlightening to note what he then said was essential (“Here is how we must proceed”) if we were “to build a stable Iraq”.

First and foremost, Senator Kerry wanted “to internationalize the transformation of Iraq, to get more foreign forces on the ground to share to risk and reduce the burden on our own forces. That is the only way to succeed in the mission [emphasis added] while ending the sense of an American occupation.” President Bush didn’t follow that advice (and the vision of “a political coalition of key countries, including the UK, France, Russia and China” was almost certainly unattainable), yet somehow Senator Kerry’s way didn’t turn out to be “the only way”.

Second, the Senator wanted a U.N. High Commissioner, “charged with overseeing elections, the drafting of a constitution and coordinating reconstruction”, to take over the leading role in Iraq from the United States. Somehow, again, the country staggered through without the guidance of such a luminary.

Finally, “We need a massive training effort to build Iraqi security forces that can actually provide security for the Iraqi people. We must accept that the effort to date has failed: it must be rethought and reformed.” And the Kerry version of rethinking and reforming began and ended, as one would have expected, at “partnership with other nations, not just on our own”. But we went ahead, pretty much “on our own”, and the Iraqi police, by all accounts, did a superlative job of keeping terrorists away from the polling places.

It isn’t clear whether Senator Kerry still believes that his prescription is the one and only tonic for Iraqi democracy. If he has a new plan, he didn’t disclose any particulars. What is clear is that defeatism in Iraq has lost its plausibility. If leading Democrats cling to it, they will exile themselves to the political fever swamps. That will be bad for democracy in America – de facto one party systems swiftly tend toward misrule – but good for the prospects of liberal (in the true sense of the word) reform in Baghdad and, indeed, throughout the Middle East.

BTW, on Meet the Press, Senator Kerry referred to his “very clear, four point plan for precisely how we could be successful”. The plan that he described in his speech had three points. I guess that it is fair to say that he had a “secret plan”, or a quarter of one anyway.

Goals and Timetables in Iraq

The Spot Formerly Known as Kerry, normally on the clear-headed side, thinks that “it would be good to have a flexible set of benchmarks” for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, along the lines of “when X goal is achieved, we can reduce the coalition troops in the country by Y number”.

That sounds so reasonable but misses the point of the Iraqi campaign. Our troops are in Iraq as part of a global war. How many remain there for how long depends on how rapidly we make the world unsafe for Islamofascist terrorism. That could require keeping 150,000 men in Iraq indefinitely as a watchdog over Syria, Iran, Saudi-controlled Arabia and the Palestinian pseudo-state. Or unexpectedly favorable political developments in those countries might make it prudent to reduce the American presence to nearly zero. Or, as is most likely, conditions may demand something in between. Setting goals and timetables based solely on the internal situation in one country would be a genuine distraction from the overall conflict.

Naturally the people who prefer to treat terrorism as a trivial nuisance, the Kennedys and Boxers and Kerrys, want to narrow the debate as much as possible. From their point of view, the ideal point-scoring posture is one where they can say, if there is trouble in Iraq, “Bring the troops home; we’re spending too much money and blood”; and, if there isn’t, “Bring the troops home; Iraq doesn’t need them.” Their “solution” remains constant, regardless of what the “problem” may be.

One doesn’t wish to sound uncharitable toward fellow Americans, but I can see no point in conceding any kind of dialogue to the anti-war crowd. Their bad faith and determination to see their country fail are becoming more evident every day. Even if they are United States Senators, they deserve the same silent treatment that we give to cranks in other areas of life. Meanwhile, the rest of the country can discuss how best to achieve victory.

When the World Was Going to End in Ice

Chris Silvey has collected a cento of nostalgic-inducing quotes about the environmental dread of the 1970’s, viz., the coming Ice Age. For example, there was this application of the Precautionary Principle in a book entitled The Cooling, a best seller in 1976:

Suppose we assume, as did weather scientists interviewed by writer Nigel Calder, that the chances of continued cooling and of an Ice Age dawning within a century are one in ten, odds likened by one scientist to Russian roulette. The odds are in our favor, but consider the stakes being wagered: if the cooling continues, we can reasonably calculate that potentially two billion people could starve to death or die of other symptoms of chronic malnutrition by the year 2050. Potentially, we could all die if global famines and embargos on scarce resources, both caused by the cooling, lead to a world war. We simply cannot afford to gamble against this possibility by ignoring it. We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who say we should ignore the evidence and the theories suggesting Earth is entering a period of climatic instability are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored.

The author of that warning has since converted to skepticism about ecological alarmism, but not so the ineffable Paul Ehrlich, who proclaimed on Earth Day 1970, “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

I’m reminded, too, of an account that I heard from Jerry Pournelle of a panel on which he appeared with Jimmy Carter’s National Science Advisor. The latter offered as an objection to underground storage of nuclear waste the near certainty that there would be major glaciation within the not-too-remote future, which would unbury the radioactive detritus – evidently a possibility that people would worry about as mile-high ice sheets descended on their front lawns.

That the Ice Age forecasts were mistaken does not prove, of course, that Global Warming alarms are also wrong. Climatology has presumably progressed during the past quarter century. Unfortunately, it is hard to ascertain whether it has progressed enough to make predictions that can form a prudent basis for massive alterations in human behavior. No less will be required if our actions is to have any noticeable impact on long-term climate trends. We know that drastic cutbacks in energy usage would consign billions of human beings to shorter and harsher lives. We don’t know how much suffering, if any, would be averted by reduced emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases in accordance with the Kyoto Treaty or any other regime. It’s instructive, as a thought experiment, to ponder what might have happened if the world’s governments had acted to avert Global Cooling.

Recognizing, as we must, that there no route leads to absolute, assured safety, isn’t this a case where caution is wiser than precaution?

Wishful Thinking on the Left

Via The Volokh Conspiracy comes the news of a leftist group’s claim that the German government intends to arrest Don Rumsfeld and various other U.S. government officials and try them for human rights violations, should they set foot on German soil. As corroborative detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, the “source” adds that Herr Schröder has steadfastly resisted American pressure to call off the impending prosecutions, leading Secretary Rumsfeld to cancel his planned attendance at a conference in Munich.

This tale is an obvious fabrication, but it certainly tells us a bit about the mentalité (pardon my French) of a certain segment of the anti-war Left. These guys would be happier yet, I’m sure, if they thought that Germany was about to declare war on the United States and send panzers to rescue Saddam Hussein. Without further comment, I leave them to wallow in their delusions.

Zarqawi and the Liberals

Do you remember when liberals championed democracy throughout the world. Government of the people, by the people, for the people was the best conceivable arrangement for everyone on Earth. Those who thought that popular sovereignty might require preparation or that there were virtues to traditional forms of governance were purblind reactionaries.

How times have altered! The President of the United States has just proclaimed that “the great of objective of ending tyranny” is the raison d’être of our nation’s foreign policy, American troops are fighting in Iraq against a terrorist chieftain whose slogan is “bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to enact it” – and liberal opinion by and large scoffs at the one while wishing to leave the other unmolested to disrupt forthcoming elections.

Liberals proffer, I realize, excuses for their reluctance to see democratic principles flourish in Iraq: Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD’s, and the United Nations Security Council didn’t authorize his overthrow, and only about 30 countries supported us, and 1,300 American soldiers have been killed, and the war costs a lot of money, and – What it all amounts to is that the violation of Iraqi national sovereignty involved in overthrowing the Ba’athist regime fatally taints any benefit that democracy might confer on the Iraqi people.

There also was a time when liberals regarded the nation-state as an evanescing institution whose pretensions to absolute dominion within its borders were as foolish as they were obsolete. That notion lingered through the Clinton Administration, with its interventions in Haiti and the Balkans; now it is gone. Today the United States Senate heard a chorus of leading Democrats denouncing Condoleezza Rice for excessive zeal in opposition to despotism. Their principal complaint was that she and the Bush Administration failed to extend a presumption of innocence to Saddam Hussein. So what if he was a murderous thug? His position as head of state should, one infers from the rhetoric of Senators Kennedy and Boxer and Dayton and Bayh, have shielded him from attack except upon proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that he directly threatened American soil. Shooting at our aircraft, subsidizing suicide bombers in Israel and murdering Iraqis didn’t count.

The end of the Left’s infatuation with democracy and universal human rights comes at an inopportune time. It would be useful if Americans on both sides of the ideological divide could rally against Islamofascism. Instead, a great many liberals find themselves weighing George W. Bush against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and adopting a stance of judicious neutrality. Some have an obvious motive: They have convinced themselves that the President is a dangerous religious fanatic who is on the verge of throwing dissenters into torture camps as a prelude to imposing theocracy on as much of the world as he and the sinister neoconservatives can conquer. But what about the less demented, who can tell the difference between Bush and Hitler? Why haven’t they emulated conservatives during World War II, who preferred fighting Hitler and Tojo under the leadership of the unbeloved FDR to not fighting them at all? Why do we hear so few sentiments along the lines of, I don’t like Bush, but he’s the enemy of my enemy until the terrorists are crushed?

I don’t have a comprehensive theory, but it seems clear that liberalism has lost touch with the notion of democracy as a moral imperative. During the decades when liberals regularly won elections, majority rule was a virtue in its own right, albeit not the only virtue. Then the electoral tide turned, and the Left grew critical of “majoritarianism”. Not many are as candid as this speaker at an anti-war rally:

Then there was the pooh-poohing of elections — any elections. Former soldier Stan Goff (supposedly of the Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces) spoke at length about the evils of capitalism and declared, “We ain’t never resolved nothing through an election.” This drew loud, sustained applause.

Still, much more moderate leftists than Stan Goff nowadays prefer judges to voters as society’s ultimate decision makers and display their indifference to democratic practice by taking a casual attitude, at best, toward ballot box fraud. If democracy isn’t all that central to American government, why get excited about its absence in Iraq or anywhere else?

It sounds cynical to suggest that liberals have turned against democracy because it hasn’t recently been an instrument for enacting liberal prescriptions. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that, having once had too much faith in “the People” and suffered disillusionment, they now have too little. When the populist medicine failed as a panacea, they threw it out as a poison. The liberal idealists of the 1930’s and 40’s, all of whom would have cheered the introduction of democratic rule in Arab lands, thus may bear a share of the blame if their political descendants foil the experiment and leave the Middle East under the thumb of men like Zarqawi.

A Private Enterprise AFV

When I first saw the Amazon page for the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank, I hastily concluded that it was a very clever hack that had been integrated seamlessly into the Amazon Web site. Maybe it is, but the giveway that I thought that I detected (a phony URL) turned out to be a figment of deteriorating eyesight. If the item is a joke, it is one that the Amazon staff is helping along.

So, for those of you who have $20,000 (plus shipping) to spare, here is what you can get:

The JL421 Badonkadonk is a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank. Designed with versatility in mind, the Donk can transport cargo or a crew of five internally or on the roof, and can be piloted from within the armored shell or from an exposed standing position through the hatch, thanks to special one-way steel mesh armor windows and a control stick that pivots up and down to allow piloting from the standing or seated positions.

There is, however, no mention of armament. Can main guns and missile launchers be found elsewhere on Amazon?

Further Treasure from Herculaneum?

From the Times of London, which has belatedly ceased hiding its Web site behind an impenetrable registration wall, comes the most hopeful story of the new year, and it has nothing to do with contemporary political squabbles.

One of the greatest recent examples of the application of science to the humanities is the decipherment of 1,800 badly scorched scrolls excavated from Herculaneum (destroyed, like Pompeii, in the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.). Over two hundred years after their discovery, they were made legible through a technique that distinguishes the spectral patterns of ancient inks. Thirty thousand pages of ancient writings, almost all from works lost since antiquity, have been recovered in this manner over the past 20 years. The only discouraging side to this amazing story is that most of them are treatises by Epicurean philosophers. Happy as one is to be able to peruse first hand the writings of Philodemos of Gadara, who served as a philosophical ornament to upper class Roman households, most scholars would probably be willing to exchange all of his suave popularizations for a single one of the lost dialogues of Aristotle, not to mention a few of the hundreds of classical tragedies and comedies that are known to us only by title.

According to the Times, a considerable number of scholars now believe that more scrolls are waiting to be found and have begun a drive to renew excavation of the villa where the surviving cache was discovered in 1752. The site was sealed two centuries ago, after everything that appeared worth taking had been removed.

But last week a group of the world’s leading classical scholars gathered in Oxford to demand that the site be reopened. They believe that there is a better-than-evens chance — “quite likely”, is how Robert Fowler, professor of Greek at Bristol University, puts it — that the villa may have possessed at least one other library still to be uncovered. . . .

Most of the work on the Philodemus texts was carried out by the late Professor Marcello Gigante of the University of Naples: a small (despite his surname) and dynamic figure, he gradually became convinced that the 1,800 rolls so far discovered represented perhaps only one half of the books that the villa contained. Certainly it does seem unlikely that Piso [Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (d. c. 44 B.C.), Philodemos’ patron and the probable owner of the site] — an educated man who was joint ruler [sic; the writer means “consul”, of course] of Rome in 58BC — should have confined himself to this one, narrow collection. Or that his heirs, equally highly educated, would not have added to it over the decades.

In the 1990s, on Gigante’s initiative, an abortive attempt was made to reopen the old 18th-century excavations. The project was eventually abandoned when its funding ran out, but not before the archeologists had established that the villa was larger than had been thought.

It seems that it was built on two or possibly three levels, terraced down to the sea. It also appears that slaves were in the act of carrying crates of books to safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption. These lower storeys, with their mosaic floors, frescoes and painted ceilings — clearly an integral part of the house — all lend support to Gigante’s theory that the villa had at least one other library.

Gigante died in November 2001 but his campaign for renewed excavation, far from dying with him, gathered strength. Eight of the world’s leading scholars of ancient history, including professors from Harvard, Oxford and London, wrote to The Times in the spring of 2002 demanding action: “We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined.”

The signatories have now formed a pressure group, The Herculaneum Society, which convened in Oxford last weekend, and moves have begun to raise the $20m (£10.6m) or so needed to dig.

The Friends of the Herculaneum Society accepts donations but unfortunately has yet to discover PayPal.

There is, one must pessimistically observe, a disappointingly high chance that the contents of the “second library”, if it existed at all, may have been destroyed beyond reconstruction or discarded by the original excavators. To the casual eye, the scrolls look like lumps of coal. Many were in fact thrown out before their true nature was realized. Still, the remains of Greek and Latin literature as so fragmentary that, as Professor Fowler puts it, “So long as there is a chance of finding the rest of the library — and everyone admits there is a chance, however strong or weak they rate it — we owe it to the world to dig.”

Update (2/14/05): Cronaca reports that philanthropist David W. Packard has offered funding for renewed excavations of the Villa of the Papyri and provides further speculation (optimistic and pessimistic) on what is likely to be uncovered.

Dynastic Double Standards

Everybody knows that Jeb Bush can’t run for President in 2008, and perhaps not ever, because his doing so would raise the specter of a “Bush Dynasty”, which Americans would find abhorrent. It is interesting, then, to read the political news from Governor Bush’s state, as reported by the invaluable (at a mere $3.95 a month) OpinionJournal Political Diary:

The Florida Democratic Party is showing obvious signs of desperation by floating talk that their candidate for governor next year to succeed Jeb Bush will be the closest thing they have to a political celebrity: Anthony Kennedy Shriver, son of former 1972 vice-presidential nominee Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, as well as the brother of Maria Shriver, California’s first lady. . . .

The Miami New Times, an alternative newspaper, says local Democrats make no pretense that Mr. Shriver, who has never held office, would be anything more than an gamble that the fading charisma of the Kennedy family would somehow rescue them from continued political impotence. “It’s not hard to see the 39-year-old Shriver’s appeal. He has his family's trademark cheekbones, white picket-fence teeth, and tall, commanding presence,” the paper gushed. It also noted he currently runs a high-profile mentoring organization for young people and that his wife was born in Cuba, an important calling card in courting the Hispanic vote.

Mr. Shriver isn’t dismissing any of the speculation. “I don't want to rule out anything,” he told the New Times. “It’s obviously a great opportunity to serve in a really important job. . . . When you talk to Arnold [Schwarzenegger] about why he ran, he really felt that at that point in California, it would make an enormous difference if he was the guy who took that job.” Given that it’s not hard to convince a member of the extensive Kennedy clan to run for office, Mr. Shriver sure sounds like a man who is talking himself into becoming a candidate.

Now there is a dynastic candidate for you: a guy whom no one would tout for anything higher than state assemblyman, were it not for his genealogy. Of course he’s hardly the only Kennedy kinsman without visible qualifications to seek elective office. Governor Schwarzenegger was the odd man out; he was probably hurt more than helped by the family ties. Otherwise, the descendants of Joe Kennedy represent the bad side of family influence: candidates running on the strength of somebody else’s charisma. (Luckily, the voters catch on to most of them after observing them in action for a term or two.)

It’s hard to see the same factor at work on behalf of the Bushes. Senator Prescott Bush was moderately successful in Connecticut politics (twice elected to the Senate in big GOP years after losing two earlier bids), but one doubts that he had many admirers in Texas, where his son entered politics. George H. W. Bush, in turn, was hardly the most popular politician in his adopted state (remember how he performed against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primary?), was elected President in the Reagan afterglow and lost for reelection. Outside of Yale Club lounges, there is no legion of GHWB fans to swoon over any candidate who carries his genes.

George W. and Jeb started their political careers with a well-known surname but not an especially popular one. To attribute their elections to the governorships of two major states to a Republican version of the Kennedy cult is so ludicrous an idea that only the mainstream American media could entertain it. Just as ludicrous as the notion that Anthony Kennedy Shriver ought to be a serious contender for governor of Florida.

Not Drinking Is Good for You, Too

When I expressed my solidarity with the President by retiring from drinking on January 20, 2001, several friends were concerned about the health risks involved. As evidence mounts that a glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away more efficaciously than a bushel of apples, it becomes clear that teetotalers have adopted a risky lifestyle that threatens to raise their insurance rates, steepen their declining years and delight any greedy next of kin.

Naturally, I have occasional doubts about the prudence of defying sound medical advice out of motives that may strike many people as arbitrary or even absurd. Nonetheless, in the darkest days of November 2000, when it seemed almost certain that the Florida Supreme Court was going to override the voters of Florida and hand the Presidency to Al Gore, I vowed that, should George W. Bush be inaugurated, I would abstain from alcohol, except for communion wine and Mory’s cups (which barely qualify as alcoholic, unless ginger ale is ale in more than name), for the duration of his Presidency. Regardless of the peril to my personal well-being, I feel bound by that oath, which may, for all I know, have played some minuscule role in keeping a raving moonbat out of the White House.

Hence, it is a great relief to read this item in the current issue of New Scientist:

Some cancers are caused by heterocyclic amines, DNA-damaging chemicals found in cooked meat and fish. When Sakae Arimoto-Kobayashi's team at Okayama University in Japan fed these chemicals to mice, the DNA damage to their liver, lungs and kidneys was reduced by up to 85% if the mice drank non-alcoholic beer instead of water. [emphasis added]

While the real stuff will probably turn out to be more effective yet, I now look forward to four more years with greater personal equanimity.

Social Security: What Is a “Crisis”?

At the risk of sounding Clintonian, I think that the dispute over whether Social Security is in a state of “crisis” can be rescued from sterility by closer attention to the meaning of words.

“Crisis” is vulgarly used as a synonym for “imminent peril”. By that standard, the current financial state of the Social Security system is not a “crisis”, for it collects substantially more in taxes than it pays out in benefits, and may never deserve that moniker. At least, the burden imposed by a steadily increasing ratio of retired to active workers may not reach the point where the latter cannot fulfill the promises made to the former. Taxes will have to rise, or other expenditures be cut, but a moderate optimist can forecast, without being absurd, that Social Security obligations will not “bankrupt America”. Well, not as fast as they will bankrupt the European Union and Japan. One could say that there is no crisis so long as we can look forward to being the last cripple standing.

The real meaning of “crisis” is, however, the moment when a decision must be made. Munich was a crisis, because the English and French governments had to choose the path that they would follow in confronting Nazi aggression. The panzers were only on the outskirts of Prague, not Paris. But, when they reached Paris, the situation was past being a crisis; it was the consequence of the democracies’ failure at the moment of crisis to judge wisely.

In that sense, saying that Social Security is “in crisis” is not hyperbolic. Reform – the substitution of private savings for public liabilities – is a generation-long process, one that will grow more daunting as the population ages and the transitional generation grows smaller in relation to the retirees who rely on it for support. The window for fashioning a structure that will serve the real needs of the elderly, rather than simply mimic the state of the art in retirement plan design c. 1930, is closing rapidly.

Suppose that, way back in 1953, when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, they had enacted Social Security reforms along the lines that President Bush now seeks, channeling younger workers’ payroll taxes into private accounts while maintaining promised benefits for those who were nearing retirement. From the 1950's through roughly the 1970's, Social Security would have needed supplementary funds to offset the taxes retained by their payers. In hindsight, it is a safe presumption that the government would have run a bigger deficit. In the long run, the additional borrowing would have been insignificant: the increase in on-budget liabilities would have been matched by a decrease in off-budget Social Security obligations. In the short run, there would have been more than zero impact, but it would have been a mere blip in budgetary math. By now Social Security would be predominantly a capital accumulation program, and liberals would doubtless be claiming it as their own invention, just as they now claim to have been in the forefront of fighting the Cold War.

As demography grows less favorable, switching from the system cobbled together on an emergency basis in 1935 to anything else will become steadily more difficult. What could have been done almost painlessly in the 1950’s will take a palpable effort in the 2000’s. By the 2020’s, the transition may well be too onerous too undertake. Inaction will have led to an irreversible decision: that a major part of the retirement income of most Americans will forever depend upon the willingness (and ability) of the next generation to support them.

Self-sufficiency for senior citizens ought to be among the most uncontroversial of aspirations. The reactionary liberals who murmur “no crisis” are not themselves ready to renounce it. In time, though, their resistance to reform can make it impossible to achieve.

Private Pensions: A Failure of Imagination

Less noticed than the Bush Administration’s still forming Social Security proposals are its ideas for private sector pension reform. What the two have most in common is that both have drawn ferocious denunciations. It’s not just that the President wants to “destroy Social Security”. According to Alan Reuther, legislative director for the United Auto Workers, he also backs measures that “would have a devastating impact on the retirement income security of millions of workers and retirees and would undermine the entire defined benefit pension system”.

For me there is a lot of dejà vu here. I can remember the same Mr. Reuther hyperventilating the same hyperbole during the runup to passage of the Single Employer Pension Plan Amendments Act of 1987. (I was policy director at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and must confess to having played a role in devising SEPPAA.) Actually, the rhetorical rerun isn’t surprising when one reads the Administration’s jejune “Fact Sheet”. Save for updated statistics, it follows the 1987 pattern. These words could have been written then:

Although the PBGC will be able to pay benefits for some years to come, large and rising deficits undermine the long run financial solvency of the pension insurance system. Underfunding in the pension system must be corrected to protect worker benefits and to ensure taxpayers don’t risk paying for broken promises.

The remedies are likewise similar, administered in stronger doses: tighter minimum funding standards, plus higher PBGC premiums, particularly companies with weak balance sheets and large unfunded pension liabilities. Added to the mix is one new element: mandatory limitations on the benefits that can be provided by severely underfunded plans.

Though the fact sheet is rather sketchy, the Administration has been circulating a PowerPoint presentation that fills in high-level details. In outline, the key concepts are these:

1. A new method of valuing plan liabilities would be prescribed, with two key innovations. First, the valuation interest rate would depend on the age of the covered work force; as the percentage of participants near retirement age increased, the rate would go down. Second, plans whose sponsors’ credit ratings were below investment grade would have to use conservative assumptions about when participants would retire and what form of benefits they would elect. Both of these changes would increase the value of liabilities, and hence minimum funding requirements, for plans that cover relatively old work forces or are maintained by financially weak employers.

2. In place of the present funding methods, unfunded liabilities, as defined by the new standard, would have to be amortized over a “reasonable”, but brief, period. The Fact Sheet suggests seven years; the PowerPoint offers no specific number. On the other side of the ledger, the maximum deductible contribution would be increased to the amount needed to bring assets to 130 percent of the value of liabilities, a major liberalization of current law.

3. Sponsors of underfunded plans would lose some of their freedom to set benefit levels, with the constraints growing steadily more drastic as the funded status and employer credit worthiness declined. The restrictions would escalate: first limits on benefit increases, then a prohibition against the distribution of benefits in lump sum form, lastly cessation of benefit accrual.

4. The flat rate PBGC premium would be raised immediately from $19 to $30 per participant and thereafter indexed to reflect wage growth. The variable rate premium for underfunded plans would be set by the PBGC rather than by statute, meaning that it would almost certainly rise steeply from the current level of $9 per $1,000 of unfunded liability.

What is most striking about these proposals is not their specific content but their narrow focus. The PBGC used to be a minor factor in the defined benefit pension plan universe; now it is the black hole at the center. Absent are any ideas for encouraging the growth of defined benefit plans, easing administrative burdens or otherwise addressing widely recognized problems. Suppose that all plans miraculously achieved full funding tomorrow. Does anyone fantasize that employers would rush to start new ones or reverse the trend toward the predominance of 401(k) and other individual account plans? Policymakers, including those in the Bush Administration, routinely praise defined benefit plans as a cornerstone of retirement policy and bemoan their stagnation. If those opinions are sincere, it is time to think about what can be done to spark a DB revival, not merely about how to keep the remaining plans from turning into burdens on the PBGC. A new Hewitt Associates survey finds the half of large employers are contemplating eliminating defined benefit coverage either for new hires or for all employees. Stricter funding standards and higher PBGC premiums won’t change their minds.

Within its perimeters, the Administration proposal is like a frontal assault on a World War I trench, expending disproportionate effort for uncertain gains. At the present moment, pension plan funding is at an historically low ebb. At the end of 2004, according to a Towers Perrin study, the Fortune 100’s plans were only 88 percent funded on average. Yet just a few years ago, the same plans were substantially overfunded, by about 20 percent at the end of 1999 and 2000. In fact, surpluses rather than deficits have been the norm for non-collectively bargained plans for at least the past quarter-century. When I was at the PBGC, the hottest policy disputes stemmed from companies’ efforts to claw back overfunding.

The unsatisfactory status quo is not the product of some abrupt employer impulse to eviscerate their plans. The chief culprit is the anomalous behavior of interest rates during the past several years. Very low rates lead to high valuations of benefits and an appearance of financial distress. For the great majority of plans, however, the distress is largely illusory. Benefits don’t have to purchased today at unfavorable prices. They will be paid out over a span of decades, and a reversion to more typical market conditions would quickly restore the surpluses that existed in the recent past. The disease that worries the PBGC – poor funding and an imminent risk of termination stemming from employer bankruptcy – afflicts only a small minority of plans. Some of those, particularly in the airline and steel industries, have extremely severe infections, but (i) they are too far gone to be helped by the proposed antibiotic and (ii) it isn’t at all obvious that the rest of the population needs to be cured.

That is not to say that nothing ought to be done. In fact, the UAW’s objections illustrate why the PBGC’s existing structure is unsound. The key reason that Mr. Reuther has never liked strict funding standards is that, blunt instruments though they be, they reduce the moral hazard associated with pension insurance. An employer can’t as readily pay wages in the form of pension improvements, with the confidence that, if it proves unable to pay for them, the PBGC’s premium payers, i. e., the country’s other private defined benefit plans, will have to foot the bill.

The only way to make the moral hazard go away completely would be to abolish the PBGC, an idea that wouldn’t be able to must 20 votes in Congress. Realistically mitigating it requires a more subtle approach than massing the artillery. I’ve previously offered by own indirect approach to PBGC solvency, which, if not a panacea, would, I think, materially improve the agency’s long-term prospects.

On Social Security, the Bush Administration has displayed daring, imagination and an appreciation of the issues that lie at the core of retirement policy. Would it be overly demanding to ask that those qualities be applied to the private sector, too?

CPE for Moonbats

It’s no doubt reassuring to the public that most states require doctors and lawyers to complete a specified number of hours of “continuing professional education” each year, ostensibly to keep their skills up to date. That sense of reassurance might fade, though, if laymen paid attention to what kind of courses are available to meet the CPE requirement. In Washington State, Sound Politics reports, Bush-hating psychiatrists can get six hours of credit for “Politics, Justice, and Psyche: LIVING WITH THE AMERICAN ELECTION of 2004”, designed for “Professionals in Psychotherapy, Medicine, Law, Education and Religion” who are “Struggling to contain personal feelings oscillating from outrage to sorrow” over President Bush’s reelection.

The combination of left-wing psychological fragility and unintelligently designed CPE standards created this opportunity for purveyors of psychobabble. It’s far from the only example of CPE with a tenuous relationship to professional skills. A while ago, I noted that lawyers in Tennessee could get 14 hours of credit last year for listening to promoters of Shakespearean authorship theories.

There ought to be a mini-scandal here. Right now, so far as I can discern, CPE is largely a racket that does little good for either public or professionals. Perhaps it can be turned into a useful exercise, though I’m rather dubious. If not, it ought to be seen for what it is – a tax on medical and legal services for the benefit of low quality educators – and abolished.

And You Think There Are Too Many Hugo Categories?

Via David Langford’s Runcible Ansible, we learn that the Dog Writers Association of America 2004 Writing Competition has not only 52 regular categories, ranging from “Newspaper: feature or news story” to “Book: under 100 pages”, but also a bevy of “Special Awards”, one of which is for “the Best In Show chosen from all of the winners of the individual categories”. Arf! Arf!

The Iraqi Campaign’s “Black Legend”

The anti-Iraqi crowd (“anti-Iraqi” strikes me a neutral descriptive adjective for those who object to the policy of fighting terrorism against rank-and-file Iraqis, just as “anti-black” would suit someone who opposed doing anything to stop old-time Southern lynchings) is puffed with pleasure that the Iraqi Survey Group has wound up its search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq without turning up any stockpiles left over from the Ba’athist regime. That proves, they and their media facilitators repeat endlessly, that the principal reason for overthrowing Saddam Hussein has been proven to be a “lie”, “fraud”, “invention”, “deception”, pick your pejorative. Instapundit has a roundup of opinions on the other side, many of which, while sensible, sound a bit defensive. WMD’s are on their way, it appears, to becoming the Black Legend of the Iraqi campaign. Before the legend turns into a substitute for history, let’s subject it to examination.

The best starting point is the last set of facts on which every rational observer agrees: Ba’athist Iraq built chemical weapons, used them against both Iran and internal dissidents, and still had large stocks on hand after the Gulf War of 1991. Those weapons did not spontaneously self-destruct. If the ISG finds no sign of their presence in Iraq today, there are only a few possible explanations:

1. Saddam Hussein destroyed them without letting the rest of the world know what he was doing. (To establish that “Bush lied”, one must add that the U.S. government had unique knowledge of the true state of affairs but covered up Saddam’s innocence in order to preserve the case of military action.)

2. They were moved to other countries at some point before the Coalition took control of Iraq.

3. They were hidden within the country, and the ISG failed to locate them.

Anti-Iraqi commentators like to pretend that the first is the only scenario worth considering and have made an effort to devise believable rationales for such bizarre conduct by the Iraqi tyrant. In this they resemble pre-Copernican astronomers elaborating epicycles sosein ta phainomena without having to abandon the essence of their theory. Either of the alternatives has the Ockhamite virtue of requiring no convoluted analysis of why Saddam acted against his own prima facie interests.

The kerfuffle over the missing explosives at al-QaaQaa, a focus of media attention during the last week of the Presidential campaign, left much unresolved but did demonstrate that it was entirely possible for pro-Ba’athist holdouts to transport hundreds of tons of contraband out of reach of the Coalition even after the fall of Baghdad. That fact, not merely undisputed by the anti-Iraqis but emphasized (when they saw it as useful to an anti-Bush narrative), shows that the removal of WMD’s to safe havens, either abroad or somewhere within Iraq’s California-sized land mass, is not some wild speculation. What happened at al-QaaQaa could have happened more than once. Indeed, why wouldn’t Saddam Hussein have taken steps to keep his arsenal out of Coalition hands?

The assumption behind the ISG’s modus operandi was that Saddam kept his WMD’s intact, planning to use them against hostile troops. Its surveys establish pretty clearly that, although there are signs that Saddam himself thought that he had a deployable arsenal, such was not the case. Whoever was making decisions for the Ba’athist regime during its final days realized that chemical and biological agents are useless against an army with U.S.-caliber training and technology. Perhaps the Ba’athist higher-ups were subtle enough to figure out also that launching futile WMD barrages would inflame American opinion, while the weapons’ absence from the scene would enhance the credibility of anti-war elements.

Whatever the details, the ISG’s report does not tell us what happened to the weapons that existed in 1991. Treating it as support for a malign interpretation of American policy is idiotarianism distilled to its essence.

The balance of probabilities is that our leaders were right to believe that Iraq retained its WMD capabilities. That being the case, it would have been irresponsible folly to leave Saddam Hussein in power.

The reason for concern about the Iraqi weapons was, of course, that the Ba’athists were avowed and vehement foes of the United States and its allies. After 9/11, celebratory murals appeared all over Iraq. The danger that an antagonistic tyrant with a long record of vicious conduct would furnish chemical, biological or, for all we knew at the time, nuclear materials to terrorists operating in the West was too palpable to be disregarded. It was a danger against which United Nations sanctions would have been no reliable deterrent even if they had been vigorously enforced rather than in an escalating state of disrepair. Those points are all made in the ISG’s Final Report, issued last September. Oddly enough, anti-Iraqi commentators tend to ignore what the ISG said there; they pay attention only to what suits their purposes.

We now know, thanks to UNSCAM revelations, that Saddam was more dangerous than we realized. Enriched by liberal rake-offs from funds that were supposed to purchase food and medicine, he had billions of dollars at his disposal, some of which he spent openly on rewards for the families of suicide bombers. Covert financing for other terrorists was well within his means. In the alternative universe favored by our anti-Iraqi elitists, America would have done nothing to interfere.

A discouragingly large segment of the “Bush LIED!” demographic have passed beyond reason to blind, intransigent faith. It didn’t really matter what the Iraqi Survey Group found; no mass of data will ever weigh enough in certain minds to overbalance the supreme certainty that action against murderous tyrants is a fundamental breach of morality. The cleverest tactic for the White House, I begin to think, would be to spread rumors that Saddam Hussein was secretly a born-again Christian who disapproved of abortion and lobbied for the Federal Marriage Amendment. That might convince the Left that he deserved no further toleration!

Hugo Nomination Plug

Hugo nominating ballots arrived last week with InterAction’s Progress Report 3. I feel my wonted annual frustration. Hardly ever do I get around to reading a reasonable cross-section of the year’s science fiction crop during the year in which it is published, which renders my nomination picks rather haphazard. I’m perennially embarrassed by thoughts of how the Hugo Administrator must snicker as he peruses my list and murmurs, “Another fakefan.”

Well, fakefan or not, I may as well take such opportunity as I have to lobby for someone whom I nominate every year and whose name never reaches the ballot, though he often comes close: John Hertz for Best Fan Writer.

The principal outlet for John’s fan writing is Vanamonde, a both-sides-of-one-sheet zine that he has published weekly for over eleven years. It isn’t available on-line, as the author is one of Fandom’s last determined hold-outs against electronic publishing, not out of Luddism but because he believes that the new tools are generally used to do badly what can be done well with paper and ink.

Writing two pages a week may not sound strenuous, not even if one writes them every week, but Vanamonde’s are of the lapidary quality that might lead one to assume that, like Horace’s, they have been set aside for years and presented to the world only incessant polishing.

The zine’s regular venue is APA-L, the long-enduring APAzine of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Association. The format follows a set pattern four issues out of five: one or two very brief, tightly packed observations, reflections or witticisms, followed by responses to points raised by other APA contributors, intermingled with interesting quotations and the occasional third party cartoon. Fifth issues consist chiefly of excerpts from letters of comment.

Samples, picked from the issues that lie closest to my keyboard (bracketed inserts in original):

You touch on a virtuoso point of theater, and of the different strengths of stage and print. A novelist can depict a man who lacks self-confidence but is so heroic he emerges as a leader and hides his diffidence from his crew – as C. S. Forester did with Horatio Hornblower [10 novels, most of an 11th, 1937-1966]. Live portrayal of such a man is hard: one must convey to an audience that there are things one isn’t showing. In film the team of an excellent actor and an excellent director ought to have it easier, but films often duck. The Elizabethan stage had soliloquies, and speeches aside: curiously it was less earnest about realism than we are; in our freedom we take art most seriously; indeed huge effort since the 20th Century has been devoted to smashing rules; why did they need smashing?

In free fall one could, as in your Jack Harness cover, wear puffs or sparkles, like outriggers, floating on two-foot threads straight out from one’s body at the neck, waist, and calves, maybe for a fashion statement. They wouldn’t droop but might tangle in things.

Dinner in Downey for Len Moffatt’s 80th birthday. We were forbidden to bear gifts, which I dodged by drawing from my pocket and blowing up a suitably lettered balloon. It was, if I may say so, a handsome dark green, and according to rule was bigger than his head. “What rule is that?” “I just now made it up.” Len remarked that he and Weird Tales both began in 1923; so also, an elaborate gag observed, had the Milky Way candy bar, an early example of the sweetness of science fiction. I proposed his health in a limerick revealing how hard it was to rhyme Moffatt (I did just manage “quaff it”). He sang about flying saucers. At my end of a long table, the children’s corner, June’s No. 1 son Bob Konigsberg reported on vinifying, Connor Freff Cochran told industrial tales, and Ed Green admitted HEROWism [Torcon III made him chairman of the Hugo Eligibility for the Rest of the World committee – not its real name – on work not first published in English] and described the blasting-cap diet. Forry Ackerman having expressed some hope of attending, we saved him a seat, though by the time I had to leave, when the night was young, he had not yet escaped the celebration of his 87th across town.

When I first read Heinlein’s Between Planets (1951), wire recorders had already gone away, and I ignorant of them supposed its micro-wire recording was some futuristic technology Heinlein had wholly imagined.

Reverse Bowdlerization is as fascinating, or tiresome, as the other direction. A while ago when a rash of Jane Austen films was under way I saw a newspaper piece by a man involved with them who explained that Austen was repressed. He proposed to liberate her by putting into the films all the sexual matter she had omitted. Shakespeare immediately came to my mind. He, a great artist working in a day not hers or ours, put sex in. She, another great artist, left it out. We laugh at people who would cut it from his work. Shouldn’t we laugh just as loud at people who would add it to hers?

In fandom we don’t do much to initiate people. Likewise our policy is not “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent.” If someone shows up we tend to take his welcome for granted. If he finds his way perhaps nothing more will ever be done about it. If he waits to be shown the ropes, or tested or passed, he may wait long. I often quote the late great Bill Rotsler, on a “So This is Your First Con” panel with me, “What if all those other people are as shy as you?” We do prize wit. Note that wit can be sharpened, never mind the mundane folly – or worse, oppression – that would make it a Magic Power of Special People Over There, beyond the reach of “the rest of us”; also it isn’t really the highest or greatest good, nor do we really think it is, ask anyone who has put on cons, or club work-parties; nor is it really a business of snide put-down, as people learn who find we tire of them. This taking for granted is paradoxically hard on newcomers, aggravated in recent years by our @#%€! complacency.

Also scattered through Vanamonde are arresting quotes from a remarkably wide range of others, such as “Bigotry does not mean believing that people who differ from you are wrong; it means assuming that they are either knaves or fools” (Frank Sheed, 1954) and this, from Sir Henry Sidney, Queen Elizabeth I’s viceroy in Wales, to his son, the poet Philip Sidney:

Give yourself to be merry, for you degenerate from your father if you find not yourself most able in wit and body and to do anything when you be most merry: but let your mirth be ever void of all scurrility and biting words to any man.

Nor must I omit to quote one of John’s tanka:

Glitter for many
In a season of good will.
Finding gleams to bring,
Though some dishes must stay closed,
Shines abroad what good one can.

More frequently he does the better known haiku:

Why the autumn Moon
Is bigger, silverier,
Maybe the clouds know.

Reaching through the fence
Across my path, or I yours,
Bougainvillea?

And one that I have recited to myself at cons:

Why am I awake?
This work could be done later.
But look! There’s the Sun!

I’m sure that John (no e-address, for the same reason that he doesn’t pub in HTML) will be delighted to send a few exemplar issues to anyone who writes him at 236 South Coronado Street, No. 409, Los Angeles, California 90057.

In repayment for your attention to this unpaid unpolitical advertisement, I will give serious consideration to any potential Hugo nominees conveyed to me via comments or otherwise. Members of Noreascon Four, last year’s World Science Fiction Convention, and all members of InterAction as of January 31, 2005, are eligible to submit nominations, which are due no later than midnight GMT, March 11, 2005.

Corruption in the Blogosphere!

With all of the chatter about bloggers taking payola from politicians, something that C. S. Lewis wrote in the course of an argument with Marxist academic J. B. S. Haldane is worth attending to:

My fears of such a tyranny [socialist central planning] will seem to the Professor either insincere or pusillanimous. For him the danger is all in the opposite direction, in the chaotic selfishness of individualism. I must try to explain why I fear more the disciplined cruelty of some ideological oligarchy. The Professor has his own explanation of this; he thinks that I am unconsciously motivated by the fact that I “stand to lose by social change”. And indeed it would be hard for me to welcome a change which might well consign me to a concentration camp. I might add that it would likewise be easy for the Professor to welcome a change which might place him in the highest rank of an omnicompetent oligarchy. That is why the motive game is so uninteresting. Each side can go on playing ad nauseam, but when all the mud has been flung every man’s views still remain to be considered on their merits.

The leftists who were paid by Howard Dean’s campaign in the expectation of favorable coverage and the conservatives whom John Thune’s Senatorial campaign subsidized are in the business of presenting arguments for particular ideological viewpoints. They had plenty of motives for supporting their preferred candidates, and the mere fact of their choices was uninteresting. Does anybody but (perhaps) his mother care whom Markos “Screw ’em” Zuniga favors for any office, except to the extent that he can present reasons (or what pass for reasons in the strange Daily Kos universe) why others ought to agree with him?

There is, of course, a distinction between purveyors of opinion, who stand and fall by the logic and evidence that they adduce, and reporters of news, whose role is to provide information. Readers are rarely in a position to check whether the newspaper account of an event accurately reflects the facts. They either trust or don’t trust the reporter, and judgments about his credibility depend a great deal on perceptions of his motives.

That is why political bias (or, as CBS prefers the characterize it, gross incompetence) at a television network is an important issue and the Dean campaign’s generosity to a couple of anti-American zealots isn’t.

Does it suddenly occur to you that my real motive for holding news media and bloggers to different standards may be that I hope, like Professor Bainbridge and Iowahawk, to start collecting bundles of cash from the White House? Or am I, as Loony Left site Democrats.com “discovered” long ago, already a front for greedy corporate interests? Ah, but that would be telling. Who am I to unearth the dark secrets of the blogosphere?

Inoculation Against the Algore Syndrome

No matter how solid the proof that the number of illegal ballots cast in the Washington State gubernatorial election vastly exceeded Christine Gregoire’s margin of “victory”, the odds are against a court-ordered re-vote. Judges don’t rush to overturn elections. Most likely, the State Supreme Court will find a way to construe the pertinent laws very narrowly and will dismiss the Republican challenge. What happens after that?

According to one poll, 62 percent of Washingtonians, including 45 percent of Democrats, favor doing the election over again. Outraged Republicans will be tempted to combine those numbers with their own anger and adopt “Governor Fraudatoire” as their primary political target. Venting in that fashion will be emotionally satisfying. Politically, however, it would be pointless and self-defeating.

Let’s not forget that the leaders of the Democratic Party, in the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential race, proclaimed that public rejection of the Supreme Court’s alleged “selection” of George W. Bush as President would fuel future victories for their party. How did that strategy work? Here is Byron York’s appraisal, written the day after the 2002 elections:

One of the major themes of last night’s vote count was the complete failure of the “Florida anger” strategy as a motivating force for Democrats. It didn’t work in Florida, and it didn’t work around the country.

In February 2001, in a Washington hotel ballroom, Terry McAuliffe, the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, gave a speech that worked a crowd of party workers into a near-frenzy. “We will transform the anger about Florida into energy about politics,” McAuliffe said, his voice rising to a shout. “We will prove there is victory after denial, democracy after Florida, Daschle after Lott, Gephardt after Hastert, and justice after the United States Supreme Court. We will give the American people a Congress they can be proud of, and we will show George Bush the door in 2004!”

The anger in the room that day bordered on the irrational. And so did McAuliffe’s strategy. Driven by his own and his top aides’ frustration over Florida, McAuliffe made defeating Jeb Bush his party’s number one goal. Doing that, he believed, would have a “devastating” effect on George W. Bush and help Democrats win the White House two years from now. Just last Sunday, McAuliffe flatly predicted that Jeb Bush would lose and said, “We are going to win Florida, which is going to set us up very nicely for 2004.”

Well, not quite. Screaming about the supposed unfairness of the last election isn’t a sufficient reason for anyone to vote for you in this one. Taking the McAuliffe road in Washington State will almost certainly lead to the same sort of failure.

If we want good to come out of this evil, it is important to see this year’s election mismanagement not as a partisan windfall but as an opportunity for fundamental reform directed toward minimizing the risk of future fraud. (I’ve already offered my own suggestions for concrete improvements.) If Democrats resist cleaning up the process, that is, if they act like their party has a vested interest in fraud, that will be a legitimate issue in 2006 and 2008.

My hope, naturally, is that everybody will embrace ending shady election practices as essential to preventing American democracy from degenerating to a Third World level. My expectations are less rosy. The common impression, which has empirical data to confirm it, is that Democrats benefit disproportionately from election illegalities. It’s hard to deny that –

Democratic leaders behave as if they believe more Democrats commit vote fraud. Nearly always, when the two parties split on election rules, the Republicans want more checks on fraud and the Democrats want less. The infamous 1993 “Motor Voter” Act, which did so much to make fraud easier was opposed almost entirely by Republicans and had been vetoed by the first President Bush. I don’t say that all supporters of the legislation . . . knew that it would make vote fraud easier, but some of them did. Like the anonymous liberal activists, they see some fraud as a reasonable price for getting more representation for the victim groups they identify with.

It is telling, I think, that there is one group, military voters, for which Democrats tend to prefer tougher rules and the Republicans easier rules. Military voters generally back Republicans, at least in recent years. That Democratic leaders prefer rules that make cheating easier (for everyone except military voters) is understandable if they think they gain from the cheating, but hard to explain otherwise.

So we can expect at least some Democrats (and the media outlets that parrot them) to throw roadblocks in the way of reform. Naturally, they won’t argue candidly, like the “liberal activists” cited in the post linked above, that stealing votes is a legitimate way to empower the downtrodden. Instead, we can expect misdirection, beginning with amnesia about what happened in King County last year. Look forward to plenty of puff pieces on Christine Gregoire’s rise from poverty – the first member of her family to attend college, etc. – accompanied by credulous repetition of her incredible assertion that the Washington vote count was “a model to the rest of the nation and the world at large about how an election system, as close as this one is, can be done with the highest of quality”, indeed, “an inspiration”. We’ll be told that the votes were counted three times, not that heavily Democratic King County had nearly 2,000 more votes than voters [note update] and numerous other irregularities (too many to list here but chronicled at Sound Politics. Even less likely is an analysis of whether the final, manual recount was in fact more accurate than the preceding machine counts that gave the nod to Republican Dino Rossi.

Also predictable is a burst of equivalence: So funny things happened in King County; what about Florida in 2000, huh? The quick answer is that we favor honest elections everywhere. If Democrats believe that Washington and Florida represent two sides of the same dirty coin, that just shows that reform is a neutral idea, not a GOP plot.

The longer answer is that the central problem in the Florida count (leaving aside fictitious claims of “vote suppression” and the supposed inability of Democrats in Palm Beach County to comprehend a ballot designed by a Democratic official) was the difficulty of counting punch card ballots with sufficient precision to resolve an extremely tight contest, a problem compounded by the effects of handling (the infamous “hanging chads”). The proper corrective measure is better technology, which the state has been working to install.

Fundamental to Washington’s debacle are systemic problems, not imperfect technology. Most significant is the fact that 70 percent of the votes last year were cast by mail. However convenient that may be, mail-in ballots carry no assurance of secrecy and facilitate mischief of all types. There’s no way to be sure that what is marked on the paper represents the free choice of an eligible citizen rather than the product of intimidation, bribery, forgery or other fraud. Moreover, the wide distribution of unmarked ballots (they are mailed to over a million households) makes it easier for any dishonest election worker to obtain the raw materials for manufacturing votes.

What went wrong in each state was different, and different solutions are called for. It makes sense to try to solve both. Certain liberals, I fear, would rather deal with neither.

If Christine Gregoire retains her office, let’s congratulate her – and work to see that no office holder will have to labor under the same taint in the future.

Educratic Propaganda, Paid for by Us

No doubt there is a right-wing blogger somewhere who is dying in the last ditch for the credibility of Armstrong Williams, but he hasn’t come to my attention. The unanimous chorus from this side of the blogosphere has chanted condemnations. I have just a few notes of my own to add.

First and most important, indignation over Mr. Williams’ acceptance of a quarter million dollars for promoting the No Child Left Behind Act should be matched with outrage at the Department of Education bureaucrats who decided that giving money to a talk show host in return for interviews on his program and favorable mentions in his syndicated column was a wise use of tax dollars. Even if there were nothing ethically problematic about the exercise, it was a patent waste of resources. Talk shows need sympatico guests to fill their air time; the purpose of opinion columns is to tell the world what the writer thinks about public issues. Why pay for what is being given away by the bushel?

Asking that question exposes the very likely motive for this sorry affair. The NCLB Act was one of President Bush’s excursions into liberalism, written with the cooperation of Teddy Kennedy and vastly expanding federal authority in the area of education. The only quarrel that liberals had with it during the election campaign, aside from its congenital defect of having been fathered by George W. Bush, was that not enough was being spent on programs of dubious efficacy. In brief, NCLB was not an initiative for which there was a great deal of enthusiasm among conservatives. (For a sobering assessment by two experts who are not unsympathetic to the act’s methods and goals but doubt that it can do much good in its present form, vide Chester E. Finn, Jr. & Frederick Hess, “On Leaving No Child Behind”.)

So it looks as if the Educrats found a conservative who didn’t share the Right’s generally negative attitude and “encouraged” him to praise NCLB, apparently in hopes of attracting support from his right-of-center audience. To Mr. Williams, whose day job is running a PR firm, it must have seemed like a plum contract: saying nice things about what he regarded as a deserving measure. Had he followed PR rules and disclosed his client, there would be no reason to criticize him. Of course, if he had closed a column with, “The preceding explanation of why the No Child Left Behind Act is an outstanding success was brought to you in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education”, the DoE might have felt that it wasn’t getting its money’s worth.

The Department of Education insists that the arrangement with Mr. Williams was legal, which may be the case, but it was stupid. The other party, to his credit, was quick to repent: “My judgment was not the best. I wouldn’t do it again, and I learned from it.” He followed up with An Apology to Readers on his Web site. Though the meae culpae, meae maximae culpae will not be humble enough for some, he at least shows far more sense of contrition than Dan Rather.

Various leftist bloggers view all this as a scandal outranking Mr. Rather’s retailing of clumsy forgeries as “news”. Certainly the Williams incident proves that the Right is not immaculate. It also demonstrates that it holds its own to higher standards than seem to prevail among its adversaries.

Bias or Idiocy?

A moiety of the blogosphere is up in arms over the failure of CBS’s internal report on the Dan Rather scandal to blame political bias for the network’s readiness to pass off obvious forgeries as genuine documents. It is, indeed, hard not to boggle when the investigators conclude that there is no “basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias”. In noteworthy contrast, as Power Line observes, they casually assumed that criticism of CBS was informed by right-wing prejudice.

Almost every report commissioned by an institution in trouble has some implicit ne plus ultra line. In this instance, that was evidently the question of whether CBS is an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Messrs. Thornburgh and Boccardi knew, I suspect, that the price of getting their report released to the public in full, rather (no pun intended) than being presented in selected excerpts, was a declaration that the phony 60 Minutes II segment involved only bad judgement by underlings. Like an accounting firm caught in an auditing blunder, CBS’s management hopes to fire the engagement partner and selected staff, while declaring that the incident says nothing about the overall quality of its procedures.

Hmm, that doesn’t always work, does it? Or so my colleagues who used to work at Arthur Andersen inform me.

But let’s take the report at its word. If CBS’s failure to subject fictitious documents to so much as minimal scrutiny sprang purely from competitive pressures, doesn’t that suggest that the network’s news operation is fundamentally incompetent and untrustworthy? Only a relatively small fraction of the news has a strong partisan angle; “myopic zeal” to get a story out before one’s competitors can infect anything – not just accounts of a politician’s past but also stories about tsunamis and lawsuits and corporate transactions and baseball teams.

If the staff at CBS News thinks in a politically skewed fashion, that is a problem; if it is incapable of thinking at all, one wonders why the public should bother paying attention to whatever it “reports” on any topic. Just as I place more credence in the New York Times, for all of its one-sidedness, than in politically disinterested supermarket tabloids, I shall in the future consider CBS as the place to go for impartially reported nonsense. Apparently that is how Mr. Moonves wants me to think of his organization, and I am happy to comply.

Addendum: I see that Rathergate.com made a related point earlier this evening:

The Memogate report concluded that former Producer Mary Mapes misled her co-workers, misled her sources, and misled supervisors.

So if there is no political bias at CBS, like Dick Thornburgh and Lou Boccardi conclude, why should we conclude that this news story was the first that Mapes fudged?

Investigations into bad journalism at The New York Times (Jayson Blair) and USA Today (Jack Kelley) examined all of the stories written by said authors and uncovered a litany of errors and falsehoods.

CBS’ substantial credibility issue is not over yet. It needs to pull together a team of reporters to pick apart her other stories, contact her sources and determine what other falsehoods she has foisted on us.

For those who are interested, the Spot Formerly Known As Kerry has reprinted Miss Mapes’ apologia. It looks like she aims to become a heroine of the Loony Left à la Cynthia McKinney. Any bets on how long before she starts blaming Zionist neo-cons for her plight?

Further Reflections on the Disaster in South Asia

But as I laughed at those passengers to heaven,
A great big wave came and washed me overboard,
And as I sank and I hollered, “Someone, save me!”,
That’s the moment I woke up. Thank the Lord.

Nicely Nicely Johnson, while not a sophisticated theologian, had an insight into theodicy in that stanza, one that came to mind today when my priest read from the pulpit a message from Archbishop Demetrios (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America) calling for prayers for the victims of the South Asian tsnami and contributions to the International Orthodox Christian Charities’ Asian Relief Fund.

Suppose, I reflected, that I were in the midst of an overwhelming natural disaster. I would pray for rescue, of course. What if the Lord responded directly to my plea? Would it not be reasonable for Him to ask, “Thomas, what have you done that I should alter the laws of nature for the sake of extending your life by a handful of years?” What persuasive response could I give?

Like Nicely Nicely, I woke up from that musing. In Guys and Dolls, he remained a mobster, and doubtless I shall remain a sinner.

If we Christians truly accepted our Faith as a description of reality, catastrophes would lead not just to an immediate outpouring of gifts for the stricken but also to a realization that our constant carping at the disappointments of life is absurd. God made a good universe, but its good things have sharp edges. The very crowding of persons and phenomena that gives us such delight makes collisions unavoidable. God could micromanage the cosmos, guarding us from every scrape and allowing our mortal lives to continue indefinitely. I strongly suspect that an environment like that would eventually become hideous to us, and we would beg for release.

The alternative, alas, is the possibility of premature and painful death. God may, for His own reasons, ward us from imminent harm, but we have no right to expect safety. We certainly cannot claim it as our just deserts if we ourselves relegate God to a corner of our lives and rarely do that little within our power to ward off harm that threatens others.

I am not saying that, if we led better lives, we would deserve physical comfort. Great saints have died horribly, and Our Savior did not expire in a peaceful bed. Nor do I assert that recognizing that comfort and safety are not our due will make us insouciant in the face of danger and pain. Events like the sudden death of hundreds of thousands of people submerge our intellects, and we would be less than human if we were not appalled. Nonetheless, we should not give up thinking. We live among roses. Let’s not despair because there are also thorns.

Not So Good in Redmond

Now and then my faith in Microsoft, never robust, takes a downward swing. Seldom, though, have I been so disheartened as I am by a series of e-mails republished by Bjørn Stærk (currently on semi-hiatus from his blog and definitely missed). Bjørn works as a computer programmer in Norway. The story begins with one of those incidents that never ought to occur:

A few days ago I tried to download a file from microsoft.com. Nothing important, just a code example that might be useful to a possibility I was exploring at work. So when my company’s firewall refused to let me download the file because it contained a virus, I wasn’t horribly disappointed. But, being a good internet citizen, I decided to let Microsoft know that they were offering an infected file for download. This is something they want to know about, I thought. And how hard can it be? Just send off an e-mail to the abuse department, and some smart person will forward it the right way.

Well, he found out how hard it could be, receiving a succession of increasingly clue-free responses, each from a different exotically named denizen of the Microsoft Help Desk. There is no sign that anybody in Redmond or its overseas adjuncts picked up on the fact that, according to reliable anti-virus software, Microsoft was distributing a virus. If the alert was accurate, that is a word-shakingly serious problem. If it wasn’t, it is still a problem, because it’s unlikely that Bjørn’s employer is the only one whose firewall will give the same response.

Presumably the problem, whichever it is, is soluble – unless no one at Microsoft is equipped to recognize its existence.

An Insidious Consequence of Global Warming

Although Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich is usually too self-consciously clever for my taste, she did produce the likely-to-be-immortal Kurt Vonnegut commencement address (“Wear sunscreen”). Today’s offering, “Our Winters Have Gone Soft, and So Are We”, isn’t nearly as funny, but it is as true as “Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.”

Early this week, with a little snow in the forecast, the former hog butchers to the world started twittering as if we lived in Tucson. . . .

. . . our little patch of global warming has turned us into winter weaklings. We’ve had so little snow for so long that former Olympic shovelers have been reduced to amateurs, their winter muscle atrophied, their winter gumption gone. . . .

Way back in the last century, kiddos, winter was so nasty that a mayor got elected because the previous mayor couldn’t clear the snow. Winter was once so bad that not only did it snow up to your ears, it sometimes stayed up there until May.

Winter in Chicago used to be boot camp, kids. Now it’s a spa.

Temperatures prance around in the 50s. Snow blows in to get us all excited, then zooms out faster than a gigolo. That’s not winter, kids. That’s Charlotte.

It’s certainly not Christmas Eve 1983. The wind chill factor that night was 100 below, and I had a party to go to. The newscasts warned me not to expose any bare skin to the weather, so I covered my face with the only protection available, a Wookie mask left over from Halloween. Nowadays I hardly ever need ear muffs.

When I lived for several years in Northern Virginia, I made fun of the way that the locals panicked at every feathery dusting of snow. Then I came back to Chicago and have watched the locals here devolve in the same direction. As Miss Schmich says,

Snow, snow, scary snow was coming! Batten down the parking spots!

Shortly before the scary, scary snow started falling, I heard a woman in the supermarket line tell the clerk she was there to stock up on provisions before the snow hit. Oh please. That's what they do in Atlanta. In Orlando. In cities that have the winter muscle tone of squids.

It’s all a consequence of Global Warming, I presume. Yes, overall, I think that warming trends are great. I don’t really want to dig out the Wookie mask again. But it is sad to see 21st Century Chicagoans unable to cope with a bit of winter.

Asymmetrical Warfare and Abu Ghraib

The latent premise in the castigation of Alberto Gonzales is laughing-out-loud absurd: that confidential White House memoranda have a tangible impact on the conduct of low-level soldiers. Does anyone seriously imagine that the guards at Abu Ghraib would have acted differently had Judge Gonzales insisted that terrorists in Iraq are entitled to every jot and tittle of the protection of every Geneva Convention (a proposition that, incidentally, the Democrats’ expert legal witnesses at today’s hearings rejected)? The culprits among the guards were sadists and perverts, laxly supervised; the problem was their character and their superiors’ blasé assumption, charming in its innocence, that former civilian prison personnel can all be counted on to act decently and professionally. These were not upright citizens corrupted by rarified debates on the scope of international treaties.

It goes without saying that mistreatment of prisoners should be punished, as should the command failures that made it possible for a bad situation to metastasize. Still, it is obvious that those who rage so loudly about Abu Ghraib don’t really believe that adherence to a fastidious interpretation of the laws of war is a central issue in Iraq. If they did, they would weigh American misdeeds against those of the enemy. We photograph captives in embarrassing postures. They behead them. Neither is admirable, but, unless one denies the existence of shades of gray, it isn’t hard to figure out which is less horrific.

Those who care about how prisons are run in Iraq can only hope that the terrorists will be obliterated swiftly. A democratic Iraqi government will certainly be more humane toward its enemies than a resurrected Ba’athist regime. If recriminations over Abu Ghraib lead to the victory of the latter, will Senators Schumer, Leahy, Levin and Kennedy regard that as a triumph for Geneva?

Aside from furnishing abundant propaganda sound bites for al-Jazeera, the unbalanced reaction to Abu Ghraib is leading the forces of liberty (for that is what our side is, notwithstanding PFC Lyndie England) to add disadvantageous flourishes to an already asymmetrical war.

Consider: If a terrorist in Iraq is caught, he is detained under sanitary conditions, with adequate food and a minimum of physical or mental suffering. If an Iraqi citizen cooperates with the authorities in tracking down terrorists and is caught, he is tortured, then beheaded or shot. What is the balance of incentives?

We can never eliminate this imbalance in the enemy’s favor, because public opinion, very rightly, would not tolerate symmetry. An American soldier who beheaded a terrorist caught in the act would be imprisoned, perhaps executed for murder. I don’t advocate changing that policy, but we are under no obligation to trumpet our humanity to foes who see it only as symbolic of weakness and who draw courage from the limited downside to their hostile activities. Those who use the Abu Ghraib abuses as weapons in domestic political conflicts should consider how much good they want to do for Abu Musab Zarqawi for the sake of harming George W. Bush?

In re Reid v. Thomas

The eminent legal scholar and Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has opined that Justice Clarence Thomas should not be elevated to the position of Chief Justice, because he is “an embarrassment” to the Supreme Court. It’s not that the only black Justice is a conservative, mind you; Senator Reid’s denigration rests on a neutral criterion: “I think that his opinions are poorly written.”

Pressed for an example of a inferior writing, the Senator singled out a routine reversal of a Ninth Circuit decision, Hillside Dairy Inc. v. Lyons (2003). The Left Coast Loony Circuit had upheld California’s attempts to compel out-of-state producers to abide by its milk price-fixing scheme. A unanimous Supreme Court vacated and remanded. Justice Thomas wrote a one paragraph concurring opinion in which he dissented from one part of the majority opinion. Those few sentences drew this dispraise from Senator Reid (transcription errors corrected):

In that case you had a dissent written by Scalia and a dissent written by Thomas. [It’s] like looking at an eighth-grade dissertation compared to somebody who just graduated from Harvard.

Scalia’s is well reasoned. He doesn’t want to turn stare decisis precedent on its head. That’s what Thomas wants to do. So yes, I think he has written a very poor opinion there and he’s written other opinions that are not very good.

Except that, as James Taranto noted yesterday, Justice Scalia didn’t write an opinion in Hillside Dairy. Influential lawblogger Eugene Volokh has asked the Senator’s office to explain. I imagine that an intern in Reno is right now frantically searching Lexis for a Thomas opinion that can be substituted as the centerpiece of the attack. (He might try the uncharacteristically off-the-point dissent in General Dynamics Land Systems, Inc. v. Cline.)

Hallucinating a Scalia opinion is not Senator Reid’s only mistake. Brief though it is, the Hillside Dairy concurrence illustrates one of the reasons why Mr. Thomas is a first rate judge: When his legal analysis clashes with his political opinions, he follows the former.

The substantive question on which he differed from the majority was the impact of the Commerce Clause on the states’ regulatory powers. Supreme Court precedent holds that Congress’ authority to regulate interstate commerce almost completely excludes state regulation, so that the Commerce Clause rather than the Import-Export Clause is the true guarantor of free movement of goods and services in the national market. The leading cases espousing this position were handed down by what are now viewed as right wing, laissez-faire Courts zealous to restrain state legislatures from interfering with freedom of contract. They have long been popular with conservatives and libertarians. I’d be extremely surprised if Justice Thomas didn’t share that agreement with the doctrine’s results. Nevertheless, he (and Justice Scalia, equally spurning stare decisis) have argued that the Court’s view of Congress’ “dormant commerce power” is unsupported by the text of the Constitution and ought to be abandoned. When was the last time that a liberal Justice put judicial principle above political preference?

My own evaluation of Justice Thomas’ work is based primarily on his opinions in ERISA and employee benefits cases, the area of law in which I practice. It is a good test of jurisprudential acumen, for no member of the Court has much ERISA expertise. Ability to make sense when venturing into unfamiliar legal terrain is a vital skill for Justices, who are the final arbiters of all statutory and common law but cannot possibly possess antecedent mastery of the whole.

By this criterion, Justice Thomas is one of the Court’s best jurists. His ERISA opinions are, with rare exceptions, clear, pithy and accurately reasoned. I particularly recommend for perusal his majority opinions in Hughes Aircraft Co. v. Jacobson (1999), which swept away years of confusion about the meaning of ERISA’s exclusive purpose rule, Egelhoff v. Egelhoff (2001), which strengthened and clarified ERISA’s prohibition against state interference with employee benefit plan administration, and Aetna Health Inc. v. Davila (2004), which reduced the murkiness of the Court’s conflicting rulings on the scope of ERISA preemption, his dissents in John Hancock Mutual Life Ins. Co. v. Harris Trust & Savings Bank (1993) and Varity Corporation v. Howe (1996), and his concurrence in Raymond B. Yates, M.D., P.C. Profit Sharing Plan v. Hendon (2004), where he catches a fellow Justice in egregious circular reasoning and displays his talent for close reading of the statutory text. I don’t think that any fair observer, including one who disagreed with Justice Thomas’ conclusions, can deny that he argues well and writes forcefully. The contrast with many of his colleagues’ blurry, meandering forays into employee benefits law is striking.

Whether Senator Reid has ever read a Thomas opinion is doubtful. The natural stance for a hostile commentator who was acquainted with the Justice’s oeuvre would run along the lines of “well-written nonsense” (the sort of thing that people like me say about people like Michael Kinsley). The Democratic leader simply assumes his target’s semi-literacy.

It isn’t hard to figure out why he does that. Years of “affirmative action” have ingrained in many minds the presumption that any black man who holds a position that requires high intellectual ability isn’t genuinely qualified; he must be the beneficiary of racial preference. Unfortunately, the presumption is occasionally correct. This is not one of those occasions. While Clarence Thomas’ résumé may have been thinner than most Court nominees’, his record demonstrates that the first President Bush chose him for his ability rather than his skin color. He deserves better than what Jim Geraghty sharply characterizes as “the hard bigotry of impossible expectations”.

Update (1/20/05): Apparently never having heard the maxim about holes and stopping digging, Senator Reid has compounded his offense with a new round of highly dubious statements about Justice Thomas. Eugene Volokh has details.

Michael Mason, R.I.P.

Word has just come of the death of Los Angeles science fiction fan Michael Mason, 42. His body was found in his apartment after friends told local authorities that he had not been seen for several days. Aside from that, no information is yet available about the time or cause of death. He was, like many fans, a trifle overweight but seemed to be in normal health when I saw him last month at SMOFCon.

Active in fandom since his teens, when he began attending conventions in order to add to his book collection, Michael chaired Loscon 30 (2003), the last Loscon at the Burbank Airport Hilton. Hour 25 interviewed him during the con. He worked in virtually every Loscon department over the years, was three times vice chairman and co-headed programming in 2004. He was also active in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, where he served on the board of directors, was head librarian and coordinated the annual LASFS Christmas party.

About Michael’s private life I know nothing at all. I do know that he was an enjoyable conversationalist, very knowledgeable about SF literature and an energetic party giver. He was not well known outside the L.A. area, but all of fandom, whether it knows it or not, will miss him.

Frank Kelly Freas (1922-2005), R.I.P.

Maybe Kelly Freas, who died yesterday just before dawn, was not the greatest science fiction artist ever. But that’s not the way to bet. It would be hard to find another to match his longevity, craftsmanship, cleverness and versatility. Born in New York and raised his Canada, he studied engineering and medicine before finding his métier as an artist. With the U.S. Air Force in World War II, he decorated the noses of warplanes with “seductive sirens”. After the war, he worked as an illustrator and photographer. His first SF sale was the cover of the November 1950 issue of Weird Tales, which greatly impressed John W. Campbell, Jr. Kelly soon became an Astounding regular and was the most popular SF magazine artist throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. At the same time he became known to different segments of the public through his long association with Mad Magazine and his work as a NASA mission artist. Many of his NASA posters are now on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

His paintings and pen-and-ink drawings ran the gamut from deeply poignant to wildly whimsical. In the words of his long-time friend and disciple, artist Larry Stewart, “The most distinctive element in Kelly’s work is the incredible dynamism and life that he puts into every image. . . . Looking at any of the many works of this singular artist, you are mesmerized by the pulse of life – the feeling that this isn’t just a picture, that it has a life of its own.”

Two of the most noteworthy aspects of Kelly’s art, in my amateur opinion, were his ability to fill a picture with ingenious details that do not distract from the principal theme and his mastery of light, reflected light in particular. Those skills that are all too rare among even the most talented science fiction and fantasy artists.

Kelly received too many awards to enumerate, including ten Best Professional Artist Hugo Awards. He was the only person to be Artist Guest of Honor at two World Science Fiction Conventions (Chicon IV in 1982 and Torcon III in 2003). Despite declining health, he remained active until the very end of his life. Illustrative of both the span and the distinction of his career was his nomination for the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, 49 years after his first Hugo victory.

Examples of his work can be found on his Web site and in several collections: Frank Kelly Freas (1957), Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction (1977), Frank Kelly Freas: A Separate Star (1984) and Frank Kelly Freas: As He Sees It (2000). There is also a Kelly Freas Art and Gift Store on eBay.