Stromata Blog

Briefly Noted

■ Long ago Michael Kinsley was my favorite liberal columnist, because he was always witty and usually well-informed. (Curse of the Giant Muffins and Other Washington Maladies remains one of my favorite book titles.) I grew disillusioned in 1986. James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for Economics that year, and Mr. Kinsley responded with a withering attack on “public choice” economics – based, by his own admission, on a single article in the New York Times. A man who thought himself competent to criticize one of our era’s great economists, without bothering to read a word of his writings, could not be regarded as anything better than a clown. As the years went by, and I read less and less Kinsley, that impression was confirmed: In the interest of liberalism, he seemed to have deliberately turned himself into a know-nothing. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” is a slogan with broader applicability than the United Negro College Fund.

An hour ago, however, I had a delightful surprise. I was looking at Andrew Coyne’s blog, expecting to find depressing news from Canada (useful for countering any euphoria from the referendum in France) and found an excerpt from a marvelous, old-time-Kinsley op-ed. It’s so funny that I’m not going to quote a line. Right now, stop whatever else you’re doing, and follow this link.

■ On a more serious topic, but also with so many gems that one hesitates to quote, is David Warren’s “Oh Canada” (the depressant that I was searching for), which captures the reasons why everybody on this continent should worry about what is happening on its northern periphery:

A friend referred usefully to the “Montypythonization” of Canadian politics, perhaps a happier expression than my own, “Zimbabwefication”. It was somehow suitable that everything finally turned on the defection of the bird-brained Belinda Stronach, without whose feckless ambition, some of the farce might have remained concealed. It was as if God wanted everyone with eyes to see just what our ruling order is made of. . . .

Things are hardly yet as bad here as they have become in Zimbabwe – but only because we started from a better position, and Robert Mugabe has had more time than Messrs Chretién and Martin. I don’t think this is rhetorical excess. I do not think, after so much more than a century of unfailing constitutional government, that people fully appreciate how little of our safety and prosperity depends on the writing and enforcement of laws, and how much on unspoken habits of mind and behaviour, without which the laws can have no effect. . . .

We find the entire country is being held together by the bubblegum and string of Liberal Party impostures. And the rogues’ final argument is: “You must vote for us, or else it will fall apart!” And that may be close to the true situation. It helps to explain why so many Canadians, outwardly in their right minds, would consider voting for the Grits again. . . .

Take away everything that has rotted, and the whole pathetic system will collapse. They may be right, that the Conservatives are unprepared for the huge task of renovation; that they can only do what the Liberals have done (and as Mulroney did), but with even less skill. They can only run wildly about, trying to buy off all the losers and whiners and frauds, at a constantly escalating price. They do not understand that the Liberals can no longer hold things together, either. They can hold power, but only in Ontario, and by direct purchase of the poorest regions elsewhere. Quebec, and the West, will openly rebel. And Ontario, as our premier now affirms, has tired of paying for all this nonsense. A kind of default separatism is growing, even here.

Is it time for Americans to begin pondering what form our future relationship with Canada west of Ontario will take? Statehood would be too sharp a break from tradition, I imagine, but Puerto Rico offers a precedent for bringing a very different society into the American fold without forcing it to sacrifice its character.

■ I once knew a fellow so militantly opposed to tobacco that he always asked for a table in the smoking section at restaurants, on the theory that he thereby deprived some foul group of smokers of the means to indulge their vile habit. He had nothing, though, on one Dennis Dagless of Cromer, England, who, the Daily Telegraph reports, was found by police to have a stash of “more than 150,000 cigarettes, 1,000 cigars and about 80lb of tobacco in his home”. According to his ex-girlfriend, he doesn’t smoke. The dull-witted authorities have convicted him of smuggling, but isn’t it obvious that he was just doing his bit to keep the filthy weed from being consumed?

Something New Under the Shakespearean Sun

Judged purely by the volume of publications, the theory that somebody, anybody except Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the real “Shakespeare” would appear to be in a flourishing state, opposed only feebly by the traditional opinion. Hardly a year passes without two or three (usually fat) anti-Stratfordian books flopping off the press. Responses from the pro-Stratford side are far rarer. In the past half-century there has been little beyond William and Elizabeth Friedman’s specialized The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (1957), Milward W. Martin’s lawyerly but amateur Was Shakespeare Shakespeare? (1965) and Irvin Leigh Matus’ erudite but unfocused Shakespeare, In Fact (1994). All three are out of print, while a search of Amazon’s virtual bookshelves will uncover a score of readily available tomes touting this or that pretender to the Shakespearean throne.

I’m therefore happy to note the publication of a new debunking of the skeptics, The Case for Shakespeare by Scott McCrea, optimistically subtitled “The End of the Authorship Controversy”. It won’t bring the matter to an end, of course, because the hard core of anti-Stratfordians have faith less shakable than a South Tennessee snake handler’s, coupled with an ingrained certainty that a vast academic conspiracy devotes a moiety competent of its waking hours to covering up the undeniable facts about the infamous “Stratford man”. Nonetheless, Mr. McCrea has written a first-rate introduction for those who wonder whether there might not be a dram of truth lodged in the fantasies of the anti-Stratfordian controversialists. He shows, beyond reasonable, if not all imaginable, doubt, that there isn’t. The book has a few motes for nitpickers to find, but, take it all for all, it is presents a sharply argued, entertainingly written case.

What’s more, while most of what Mr. McCrea marshals is familiar to those who follow the “controversy”, he introduces one new line of argument, directed at the favorite “alternative Shakespeare”, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (or “Oxenford”, as he customarily styled himself).

My wife, who is from the Midwest, pronounces Mary, merry, and marry all in the same way and would rhyme them all with hairy, while I, being from New York, would rhyme hairy only with Mary, because I pronounce the other words differently. . . . Perhaps, like midwesterners and New Yorkers, Oxford and the Author [of the works attributed to Shakespeare] rhymed words in different ways. . . .

So I began to study Oxford’s verse [the 20 poems known to be certainly or probably from the earl’s pen]. To be honest, I had little hope of success. Most of the rhymes in de Vere’s extant poetry are commonplace, so there was little chance that they would not be found in the Author’s immense and varied Canon. . . .

On the bright side, the small quantity of Oxford’s verse would be an ally. Because I’m comparing something small (fewer than 250 rhyme pairs) to something large (all of the Author’s rhymes), finding just one discrepancy would be significant. It would mean that Oxford saw a rhyme where the Author did not and was therefore, most likely, a different person.

In the event, he found not one, but five rhyming patterns that diverge widely from Shakespeare’s:

1. Was:case and (in a poem probably but not certainly by Oxenford) face:glasse: “This was not unusual at the time. In the sixteenth century, ace and ass were homonyms for many speakers. Yet in all the Author’s plays and poems, there is only one instance of a word that is rhymed with face rhyming with a word that is rhymed with glass”. And that instance (The Comedy of Errors, III.i.45-46) is rendered doubtful by an irregularity in the meter. In the standard printing, place rhymes with ass, but the line sounds better if the rhyme word is face and ass caps an unrhymed trimeter.

2. Shows:lose: A pattern often found in poets of the day (“Spenser commonly rhymed ‘lose’ with ‘expose’, ‘dispose’, ‘rose’, and so forth”) but not in Shakespeare. The Player King’s stilted speech in Hamlet (III.ii.194-95) furnishes the only instance.

3. head:had (in another probable poem): A workable rhyme in some Elizabethan dialects but entirely unparalleled in the Author’s corpus.

4. Greef:stryfe: “The Author never rhymes strife with anything but life and wife (and, by extension, knife – which he rhymes with the other two). Grief he rhymes with brief, chief, relief, and thief.”

5. Proves:love and flames:dame: “One thing that definitely never occurred to the Author was to rhyme a word that ended with an ‘s’ with a word that did not. Yet Oxford, in 368 lines (not counting the possible lines), does this twice.”

Mr. McCrea’s conclusion seems unarguable:

Singulars:plurals, was:case, grief:strife – Oxford and the Author rhymed words differently. And probably they pronounced words differently, too. Without question, and with a certainty Oxfordians would find good enough when applied to any other candidate, we can conclude: There are two different poets. Unless he altered the way he rhymed words, the Earl of Oxford did not write the poetry of William Shakespeare.

An Older Memorial Day

This weekend marks not just the U.S. Memorial Day but also (if one non-pedantically ignores calendrical changes) the anniversary of the end of the Roman Empire, whose capital Constantinople fell to the Turks on May 29, 1453. Moderns call it the “Byzantine Empire” and have turned “byzantine” into a pejorative, showing how little our civilization understands its forebears. Through the twists and turns of history, Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologos, who died fighting for his patria, was the direct successor the Augustus and presided over a polity into whose duration one could fit seven American republics.

That the Empire did not endure was the result of a series of contingencies: the exhausting Persian War that left it too weak to turn back the initial Islamic surge in the 7th Century, treason at Manzikert in 1071, above all the treacherous Fourth Crusade, in which fellow Christians seized the capital and fatally wounded Christendom at a moment when Islam might have been driven back from its Levantine conquests. There’s no way to know what the world would look like today had one or more of those disasters been averted. If I may speculate, it seems more than possible that Islam, confronted by an impenetrable barrier, would have turned inward and developed the nascent civilization hinted at by figures like Firdausi, Averroes, ibn-Khaldun and Farid al-Din Attar. Instead, it had no strong reason not to live by the sword. When the sword proved ineffectual against the maxim gun, it turned inward in a pathological fashion, giving rise to the distorted ideologies that plague it to this day.

Leaving aside might-have-beens, “Byzantium” deserves our respectful remembrance. George Ostrogorsky, in the concluding pages of his classic History of the Byzantine State, summarized why:

Byzantium fell in 1453, but her spirit remained. Her faith, her culture and her conception of political life lived on and their influence was felt, not only in those lands which had once been Byzantine, but beyond the old frontiers of the Empire, acting as a stimulus to the civilization and political development of European nations. The Christian religion in its specifically Greek form as the personification of Byzantine spirituality and the antithesis of Roman Catholicism was regarded as a holy of holies both by the Greeks and by the southern and eastern Slavs. During the centuries of Turkish rule the Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbians regarded the Orthodox faith as the expression of their spiritual and national individuality, and it was indeed the Orthodox Church which preserved the people of the Balkans from being engulfed in the Turkish deluge and so made possible their national revival in the nineteenth century. Orthodoxy was also the spiritual standard beneath which the Russian countries found their unity and the realm of Moscow became a great power. . . .

The influence of Byzantine culture was even more penetrating and affected both East and West. It was not so marked in Roman and Germanic countries as in the Slav lands, but all the same, the cultural contribution of Byzantium to the West is by no means negligible. The Byzantine State was the instrument by means of which Greco-Roman antiquity survived through the ages, and for this reason Byzantium was the donor, the West the recipient. This was particularly true at the time of the renaissance, where there was such passionate interest in classical civilization and the West found that it could satisfy its longing to explore the treasures of antiquity from Byzantine sources. Byzantium had preserved the heritage of the ancient world and in so doing had fulfilled its mission in world history. It had saved from destruction Roman law, Greek literature, philosophy and learning, so that this priceless heritage could be passed on to the peoples of western Europe who were now ready to receive it.

Too many, alas, are now ready to toss it aside. May the rest of us recall with gratitude the heroes who kept civilization alive through an age of turmoil and darkness.

Further reading: Dionysios Hatzopoulos, “The Fall of Constantinople, 1453” (with a translation of the poem, “Death and Resurrection of Constantinos Palaeologus” by Odysseas Elytis)
Ralph Vickers, “The Siege of Constantinople”

Vive le “Non”!

Unless the exit polls are severely wrong – not by a couple-of-point Ohio-sized margin but as they (perhaps) were in Venezuela – French voters have rejected the draft European Union Constitution. As Mark Steyn observed in advance, that setback will merely prove to the EU elites that the masses are desperately in need of enlightened instruction in what their own interests consist of, so I anticipate that some version of the same bureaucratic blueprint will in the end be forced upon a reluctant continent. For the moment, though, one can hope that the trend toward a European super-state has been halted.

What I have against a Europe-wide polity is not the potential “threat” to American supremacy. The adoption of the d’Estaing charter would in fact give solid assurance that the EU will never be a world class power, for it would entrench a dirigiste welfare state that will never be able to afford guns and will lag further and further behind in producing butter. (I mean the latter metaphorically; agricultural subsidies will ensure an unending surplus of literal butter.)

An unarmed, sclerotic Europe is not, however, in anybody’s best interests. As it ossifies, it will become more hostile to the United States (because failing states always look for successful ones to blame), less able to keep order within its own sphere of interest and more inclined to appease the militant elements in its Moslem population. Moreover, as a democracy-in-name-only, it will lack the instruments for peaceful revival. Give the eurocrats 50 years and the only road to a strong, pro-Western Europe will be one carved by a man on a white horse. I much fear, though, that he will be a man on a white camel.

Assuming that the French electorate’s “non” isn’t overridden by its political masters, there may be some short-term negative consequences. The Left will probably take power in France after the next elections and will plunge ahead with M. Chirac’s project of squeezing the last vestiges of liberty out of the nation’s economy. On the other hand, the rest of the EU nations will remain relatively free to experiment with liberal (in the Old World sense) solutions to their problems. They may even – I know that I’m being optimistic – come to realize that hitlerizing George W. Bush is not a coherent foreign policy. In the long run, those countries that choose the path of freedom will have a chance of matching American prosperity individually and American power collectively. From a purely American nationalist point of view, that might not be so wonderful an outcome, but the world will be better off for it.

In any case, let us celebrate for a moment. For my part, I shall read an issue of Vae Victis (the world’s best wargaming magazine, regardless of its origin) and revert to calling “chips” “French fries”.

Illegal Aliens of a Different Breed

A hidden premise of almost all discussion of immigration policy is that illegal immigrants come from the south-of-the-border underclass, an uneducated, shiftless proletariat whose preference for living in squalor enables it to underbid American workers. Maybe there is a scintilla of truth in that picture, but, as Fay Crevoshay, a Mexican citizen living legally in San Diego, observes, there are immigration scofflaws from the middle and upper classes, too (via Nixatron Blog-Times).

Since 2001, a wave of Mexican illegal immigrants with light skin, who drive Mercedes and Navigators, buy homes in Coronado, La Jolla and Del Mar, has been steadily arriving. They don’t come for vacations, like they used to. Instead, they come to stay, looking for security and peace of mind.

“We all have family or close friends that have been kidnapped, we waited to see if police could do something, but they themselves are part of the problem, so we left,” says Pepe, who arrived here two years ago with his wife and three children ages 5 to 11.

The older generation stays behind in Mexico, tending to the family business, but sends the kids to safety.

“It’s very hard to move, we were happy in Mexico, but it’s impossible to have peace of mind there today. You need to hire bodyguards; restaurants have security men with watchdogs at the entrance. You are afraid to take the kids to the park. How can one live like that? We are prisoners in our own city … very sad,” says Angelica, who arrived four years ago with husband and kids. . . .

These immigrants send their children to private schools and use private doctors. They are educated people, they bring in capital and are patrons of the arts. They spend lavishly at restaurants, theaters and the ballet.

I doubt that even the screechiest closed-border restrictionist can come up with a plausible objection to these interlopers, who place no burden on the American welfare system, are unlikely to fall into lives of crime, and have no interest in influencing U.S. politics. Why should the Immigration and Naturalization Service devote resources to tracking them down?

This is far from the only instance of immigration restrictions that comport with no rational policy that I can discern. Last month the Wall Street Journal ran an enlightening piece, “Rules Restricting Canadian Loggers Backfire on Maine” (4/25/05, p. A1; link for subscribers only), describing how the arbitrary cap on seasonal work visas “has led to a shortage of loggers, a supply crisis at sawmills and a profit squeeze at pulp mills as printers shop for lower-cost paper on other continents”

Between the deep north woods and Fenway Park, Maine’s timber industry creates work for at least 25,000 Americans. A mere 760 Canadians fell a third of its trees. When Canadian loggers were banished from the woods a year ago, the impact was immediate and measurable: The price of wood went up. In 2002, a cord of Maine pulpwood – the equivalent of 128 square feet – cost $57. In 2004, the same cord cost $78.

“That’s the highest price we’ve seen in a decade,” says Peter Barynin, an economist with Resource Information Systems Inc., a forest-products consulting firm based in Bedford, Mass. Other causes contributed: higher demand, environmental issues, wet weather. But in 2004, Mr. Barynin says, the chief cause of high prices was “a labor shortage.”

Perhaps restrictionists regard such consequences as forgivable side effects of a policy with logical underpinnings. I find it hard, however, to see what that logic might be.

Feeling Heavy?

My knowledge of the three volumes of The Science of Discworld is negligible. It consists, in fact, of having heard one paragraph (on page 191 of SoD III) read aloud, but that paragraph was so remarkable that I feel called upon to comment.

In a context that isn’t important for present purposes, the authors inform their readers that the observable universe (which they call a “Hubble volume”) contains 10^118 protons. That number caught my attention, for I had always thought that a google was too big a number to be practicable for counting anything, and here was a countable set that dwarfed a google by a quintillion to one.

Thanks to a miracle of modern technology, I had enough reference material at hand – even when traveling beyond the reach of the Internet – to check the mass of a proton: ≈10^(-27) kilograms. The total mass of protons in the universe is, then, 10^91 kg., a mere billionth of a google but still a lot.

Since the radius of a “Hubble volume” is roughly 10 billion light years, that 10^91 kg. is spread over about 4×10^30 cubic light years, giving a universal average density of 2.5×10^60 kg./cubic light-year, give or take a bit. Those quantities are beyond my comprehension, so let’s reduce them to a quotidian scale. A handy calculator tells me that a cubic light year equals 2×10^38 cubic miles, which translates into 5×10^52 cubic inches. Hence, if the Discworld scientists are to be believed, each cubic inch in the universe has, on average, a mass of 50 million kilograms, that is, somewhat over 50,000 tons. And that’s just the protons. Neutrons, electrons and oodles of less familiar stuff ought to at least double the figure.

That is truly remarkable information. When I find myself dragging during the day, I shall remember it.

What? You say that I shouldn’t believe everything I read? Not even everything by soi disant scientists? Tush, such unnecessary incredulity. Besides, I feel far too dense to think about it.

Who’s Deluding Whom?

Having been a few thousand feet above sea level for the past few days, without access to any news but what could be gleaned from the headlines of day-old Tacoma News-Tribunes (I wasn’t going to pay for a paper that regards King County as international news and the Eastern Hemisphere as intergalactic), I came in on the Great Filibuster Compromise midway through the commentary. My first impulse was to dismiss with maximum scorn any arrangement mediated by Kleagle Byrd and Blowhard McCain, an impulse shared by, e. g., Hugh Hewitt and Power Line. On the other hand, sensible folk like David Frum, James Taranto and Stephen Bainbridge had good words for it, and the NRO Corner has turned into a flurry of rhetorical fisticuffs.

Now that I’ve digested as many pros and cons as I have stomach for, my inclination is to wait and see. As a permanent arrangement, the Kleagle-Blowhard Contract (hereinafter “KBC”) would indeed be he abject wimp-out that its right-wing critics allege. It introduces, for the first time in Senate history, the principle that filibusters are a proper means of defeating a judicial nomination. (Let’s never forget that the “ancient tradition” that the Kleagle so ardently defends goes back all of two years. The Republic somehow scraped by for two centuries before that without this supposedly essential safeguard of minority rights.) The Democratic concession that the technique should be employed only in “extraordinary circumstances” is meaningless blather. Everybody’s life and opinions contain at least one element that can be ginned up to the “extraordinary” level. In return for blather, the Republican KBC signatories commit themselves not to vote for an explicit rule against judicial filibusters. In short, the text of the KBC – read as an “originalist” jurist would read it – retains the worst features of the status quo ante.

Before whole-heartedly joining the critical chorus, however, one must note that the KBC regime is, by its own terms, not permanent. On its face, it expires with the current Congress. Moreover, statements by the parties involved already make it obvious that their agreement is a verbal formula, not a meeting of minds. Of the seven filibustered nominations, the Democrats promised to vote for cloture on three, reserved the right to decide whether the “extraordinary” escape clause should be invoked on two, and left the other two unmentioned. The general assumption on the Right is that only favored three will make it through and that the vagueness about the remaining four was designed to make the deal look better, in the very short run, for McCain and his ancillaries. On the Left there appears to be an equal and opposite fear (to which pro-KBC conservatives cling): that reserving the right to filibuster was just a way for the Kleagle Kronies to save face before allowing all seven nominees at issue to proceed to up-or-down votes.

It’s fair to say, I think, that most of the parties to the KBC signed in bad faith but with the presumption that their opposite numbers were sincere. The Democrats intend to back filibusters whenever PFAW and its ilk demand them, the Republicans to vote for a ban on the practice if the Democrats don’t voluntarily cease. (I except Kleagle and Blowhard themselves, whose brains are too drenched in surplus self-esteem to think beyond the next photo op.) In other words, the dispute remains where it was last week, and the “please everybody” moderates remain in a pickle. Once Judges Owen, Brown and Pryor are confirmed, the Other Four won’t go away. There are only three possible outcomes:

1. The Democratic KBCer’s back down and vote for cloture, effectively conceding the illegitimacy of the judicial filibuster.

2. The Republicans back down, denying the GOP leadership the votes to convert two centuries of precedent into an enforceable rule, and filibustering judges becomes part of the conventional political arsenal.

3. Neither side budges, and the judicial filibuster is formally eliminated, to the accompaniment of much media angst and many re-showings of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Not being a cock-eyed optimist, I’ll bet on the second result if Ladbrooke’s opens this issue to wagers. While awaiting the event, I see no point in let the prospect of just censures elevate my mountain-calmed blood pressure.

Awa’ to the Hills

Now for a few days in the mountains, at a site to which the Internet has not yet penetrated, where the only television remains focused on ESPN, the newspapers are a couple of days old, and even telephones are a rationed luxury. A good place to lose touch with the ebb and flow of events while regaining perspective.

Among the other virtues of this retreat is that I shall almost certainly hear none of the depressing news from Canada. It is one thing to read that democracy is being aborted in Uzbekistan, another to see it murdered north of our own border.

“Murder” is an extreme word, and it remains possible that the corpse will revivify, yet no other word really fits. The foundation of the parliamentary system is that the government must have the confidence of a majority of the popular house. If it does not, it must resign or call new elections, serving only as a caretaker until a government with majority backing succeeds it.

Prime Minister Martin has altered those rules and thus, by his sole decree, given Canada a new, unprecedented form of government, one in which only an intermittent majority is needed to retain the reins of power and, in the interludes, the minority administration is free to utilize the full resources of government to regain its position. Mr. Martin needed only a week after losing his majority to buy a new one. A future P.M. might need a little more time. The effective principle now is that the ministers must retain only their own confidence, not that of the House. From there the descent from elections to plebiscites is an easy one.

What is most truly appalling, however, is not the discarding of Westminster rules but the indifference of the Canadian political class to the Liberal Party’s massive corruption. The news emanating from the Gomery inquiry ought to have been a shock on the order of Watergate, leading to the swift desertion of the P.M. by legislators unwilling to be tainted by acquiescence in scandal at the once-in-a-century level. Instead, the Liberals and the New Democrats (the latter used to call itself the “party of conscience”) closed ranks to defend the kleptocracy. The government crisis turned into an occasion for extracting cash and policy concessions in return for votes. When the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was tape recorded offering a plum appointment in exchange for an abstention on the budget vote, he was quite unashamed, and there was no outbreak of fury among the media elite.

However much ordinary citizens may be outraged by blatant corruption, it is evident that it doesn’t particularly bother 50 percent of the Canadian House of Commons. The other 50 percent may not deserve a lot of credit either; the Conservatives and Bloc Quebeçois have promised not to undo any of the spending commitments made by the non-majority government. They seem to lack confidence that the voters will throw the rascals out unless assured of the payoffs that the rascals offered. So one side rallies behind corruption, while the other lacks the courage to reject it.

Canadians are, I imagine, too “civilized” to fill the streets in protest against the Liberal usurpation. There won’t be a Maple Leaf Revolution to go with the Orange and Cedar varieties. Protest may in any case be premature. Possibly the eventual Gomery report will prod the consciences of a few of Mr. Martin’s current allies, the government will concede an election, and the outcome will convince the next generation of politicians that honesty and adherence to constitutional principles are the best policies. That isn’t the way that I would bet at the moment, but hope is not extinguished.

We’ll see how matters stand when I get back in touch with the world.

Further reading: David Frum, “For Martin and Stronach, It’s Lose-Lose”
Mark Steyn, “A Constitutional Coup”
Andrew Coyne, “Proof There Are No More Rules”
David Warren, “Belinda Stronach”

Shakespeare and Stevens

Todd Zywicki and Stephen Bainbridge have taken note of what the former calls the “idiosyncratic” and the latter the “bizarre” opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens in Granholm v. Heald (the alcohol-by-mail case). To quote Professor Bainbridge’s startlingly blunt assessment (lawyers are usually much more, er, tactful when writing about sitting members of the Supreme Court),

Stevens’ opinion is so far removed from ordinary legal analysis as to be laughable, were it not for the fact that as the second-most senior member of the Court he wields enormous power over all of us. One can but assume that he’s now completely past it.

Professor Zywicki says nothing quite so succinct, but his views of Justice Stevens’ rationality are so little disguised that The Pragmatist labels him “intemperate” and laments,

It is saddening that Professor Zywicki seems to have so little respect for the Justice. I am not quite sure what has provoked this. But this incivility seems not only uncharitable but also incomprehensible. The views as to alcohol (as far as they are divergent from ours) of the writers, proposers, and ratifiers of the 21st Amendment certainly seem relevant to understanding it; and it is commonplace to, e.g., make reference to early judicial opinions on constitutional provisions to support an interpretation of them. Professor Zywicki is not criticizing Justice Stevens's opinion. He's attacking Justice Stevens. (And Professor Bainbridge, on his blog, has done so openly in response.) I am dismayed.

While I’m inclined to agree with Justice Stevens’ conclusion – that the 21st Amendment gives states broader authority over the distribution of alcohol within their borders than the majority allows – I also must concur with the Zywicki-Bainbridge view of the quality of his opinion. There is a sound argument buried inside, but it is overlaid with nonsense. I’m not, however, very surprised.

One of my hobbies is the so-called “controversy” over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Thus I encountered, two years ago, evidence that Justice Stevens is capable of peculiar trains of thought.

Bob Grumman, a minimalist poet and pro-Stratfordian controversialist, has called attention to a letter from Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to Paul Streitz, author of Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I. His Honor’s note, on Court letterhead and dated July 1, 2002, reads:

Thank you for sending me a copy of “Oxford”, a most interesting and impressive piece of work. Although I learned a great deal from it, and find your central thesis fascinating, it seems unlikely to me that so many people have been mistaken about the date of Edward de Vere’s birth. You do, however, provide strong additional evidence supporting the Oxfordian position on the authorship issue.

Sincerely,
John Paul Stevens

Justice Stevens’ Oxfordianism is a well-known fact, and everyone, especially a judge, is entitled to a harmless eccentricity. This letter points, however, to something for which “eccentricity” may not be le mot juste. Mr. Streitz’s opus is, in fact, quite a lunatic production. Here is the author's own summary of its thesis [reproduced without alteration]:

1. Oxford was born in Cheshunt, England, 1548. He was the son of Elizabeth tudor and her stepfather, Thomas Seymour.

2. Oxford married Anne Cecil because her father changed the laws of England to make him the legal heir to the throne.

3. Oxford had a child with his mother.

4. Oxford did not die in 1604, but either was abducted or disappeared to the Isle of Man to write the King James Bible.

He opines that his work “does clear the way for removing the Windsors off the throne, because there is a direct line from Elizabeth to present day”. Perhaps he hopes that Englishmen disgusted by royal scandals will convert to his views.

What I said back then seems pertinent now:

A recurring and constitutionally insoluble problem afflicting our highest court is that of easing out members whose mental faculties are no longer adequate for the performance of their duties. I am far from saying that a single letter, which may, I suppose, be mere politeness to a madman, is proof of incompetence. Nonetheless, I shall from now on read Justice Stevens' opinions with an extra measure of care and skepticism.

Or maybe two extra measures.

Does Zarqawi Dream of Exploding Sheep?

As Americans grow forgetful of the war they are in, events coalesce to remind us that our future depends less on whether judges can be filibustered than on the advance or decline of Islamofascist terrorism. The past fortnight in Iraq has been unusually bloody, as the enemy turns its attention more relentlessly to the softest targets it can find: random shoppers and untrained volunteer soldiers. The New York Times has begun to wonder whether any purpose drives the killing. The “insurgents”, it observes, have no spokesmen, no specific demands, no program. Instead of striving to win hearts and minds, they seem intent on generating support for the forces of order.

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains. . . .

Dafydd ab Hugh, guest blogging at PowerLine, draws the conclusion that the appearance is the reality: Zarqawi and his co-conspirators are “serial spree killers” whose goal is mayhem for its own sake.

[T]he best historical precedents are the Aztecs, who turned mere human sacrifice into an art form by killing more and more and more people until they literally may have slaughtered an end to their own empire. Their intent was not to achieve some political goal; they already ruled. Rather, they developed the theological notion that the more people they butchered, the more pleased their bloody gods would be.

With that gloss, the Iraq “insurgency” comes suddenly into crystal-clear focus, like the beginning of the TV show the Outer Limits: the killers in Iraq have no political goal. That is not the point.

The point is to kill. They have invented a whole new kind of murder... they are serial spree killers. [ellipsis in original]

Leaving the mystery of motivation hanging for a moment, let us turn to the Big Story of the past several days. Newsweek has apologized for reporting as confirmed fact an anonymous, implausible claim that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrated a copy of the Koran. At least 16 people died in riots that followed in Afghanistan, and there are credible reports that the imaginary atrocity has been a great propaganda bonus for holdout Taliban rebels. So far, the consequences in Iraq and elsewhere in the Moslem world appear to be minimal, but that is just good luck. Newsweek lit a fire in a dry forest. It has retracted the story, though its initial climbdown was grudging, undermined by the recitation of other tales of alleged American atrocities. Many of its most prominent competitors have refused to take the later retraction seriously. They insist that there is nothing unbelievable about the original report, that it fits what is “known” about American military misconduct.

Back now to Iraq. Try to see the world through terror master Zarqawi’s eyes.

He is not an Iraqi himself and is not leading Iraqis. Evidence continues to accumulate that his forces consist primarily of Saudis and other foreigners. It is reasonable to infer that who rules in Iraq is not his main interest. In any case, he has stated openly that he does not believe in selecting rulers in accordance with “the evil principle of democracy”. He has no reason, then, to care whether the common folk of Iraq admire or detest him.

What is important about Iraq, from his point of view, is that the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime demonstrated shockingly the power of the infidel West and sparked demands for democratic reform throughout the House of Islam. Some Westerners fear that Moslem electorates, given the opportunity, would vote Zarqawi look-alikes in to power. Paradoxically, gaining political power that way, in the wake of an onrush of democratic sentiment, would be a defeat for the Islamofascists. No democratic government can commit itself for long to the policies of anti-Western jihad, cultural retrogression and economic misery that are the essence of the contemporary fascist cause. Hence, an elected Islamofascist administration would quickly have to undertake the task of crushing democratic sentiment, leaving itself exposed to the same resistance that run-of-the-mill Near Eastern authoritarians are now encountering. Democracy is a treacherous foundation for tyranny, especially for a tyranny that intends to wage protracted war against militarily superior foes.

If we put aside that hypothesis that Zarqawi is a mere psychopath, the outline of a strategy underlying his seeming irrationality becomes visible. American success touched off enthusiasm for the idea of democratic governance; American defeat would chill the enthusiasts. The terrorists can’t inflict anything worse than flesh wounds on the U.S. presence in Iraq, so a direct military victory is impossible. On the other hand, they can optimitically infer, from reading American journalists and listening to American politicians, that flesh wounds will be enough to trigger a collapse of the enemy home front and unstoppable demands for extrication from the Mesopotamian “quagmire”.

If that hope seems overblown, Zarqawi can point to Newsweek as a confirmation. It would be very easy, to one looking for signs of crumbling giaour will, to see the “Koran desecration” report as less negligence than subversion, an act by covert friends to rouse Moslem fury against the Great Satan. The subsequent backtracking can then be viewed the way that open friends like the Daily Kossacks characterize it, as a grudging concession to government pressure. That the government is not able to stifle all dissent is shown by the continued endorsement of the discredited tale by other media elements.

In terms of political dynamics (not moral stature), the journalists who trumpet distortions of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are Zarqawi’s equivalent of the samizdat writers in Cold War Russia. We believed, when we read the furtive publications that emerged from under the rubble, that many, perhaps most of those who lived under communist rule thirsted for freedom. President Reagan inferred that the Soviet colossus rested on shallow foundations and that steady pressure would topple it.

Similarly, it would be rational – incorrect, I think, but rational – for Zarqawi to conclude that contemporary America is riddled with antipathy to fighting for democracy in Iraq or elsewhere. By keeping up a visible resistance, he can wear down our willingness to fight, and spectacular acts of terrorism, however pointless in a narrow strategic sense, are an easy way to maintain high visibility, particularly for a combatant that can win no victories on the battlefield.

So Zarqawi’s dream, I suggest, runs on these lines: Deaths in Iraq will encourage what he thinks of as his allies in the West to agitate more fiercely for American withdrawal from Iraq. American defeat will stifle pro-democratic rumblings in the Islamic world and boost the prestige of resolute anti-Westerners. The force that “won” in Iraq, its power augmented by new recruits and its enemies’ fears, will move on to overthrow “reactionary” regimes elsewhere. Iraq will probably be left to dissolve; a lone liberal government, demoralized by abandonment, is not likely to survive long. After a decent interval, a revivified caliphate can sweep up the pieces.

There may well be elements of sadistic depravity in the upper Islamofascist echelons. The intentional infliction of terror requires a degree of personality disorder. It is a comforting delusion, however, to think that the Zarqawis of the world are simply irrational. Ample grounds exist for a rational belief that murdering civilians in Iraq will lead to the ultimate demise of the Christian West.

A PBGC/UAL Correction

Like many other people who follow pension matters, I have assumed that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s assumption of $6.6 billion in United Airlines pension liabilities will aggravate the $23.3 billion deficit reported as of September 30, 2004, bringing the total to $30 billion. A fact sheet from the American Academy of Actuaries points out that such is not the case.

The PBGC includes, in their deficit, certain probable terminations (i.e., companies for which PBGC anticipates taking over pension plans in the near future). In its 2004 annual report, the PBGC included $16.9 billion for certain probable terminations, which included United Airlines’ unfunded guaranteed benefits. Therefore, despite some reports to the contrary, PBGC’s deficit does not increase with United’s termination. In fact, the $1.5 billion in securities from UAL could decrease the PBGC deficit.

We should also bear in mind a fact that the Academy doesn’t mention: that the PBGC uses rather conservative assumptions to value its liabilities. If its investment results are better than assumed, as they generally have been in the past, the actual liability may turn out to be considerably less than currently reported.

There’s no denying that the PBGC’s financial condition and the moral hazard that pension insurance creates for the economy are serious problems, as I have discussed elsewhere. We shouldn’t, however, exaggerate their magnitude.

The Academy offers one other interesting tidbit: A third of the benefits promised by the UAL plans ($3.2 billion out of $9.8 billion total liabilities) are not covered by PBGC guarantees. While I don’t have statistics at hand, that’s a much higher percentage than in a typical plan. (When I was at the PBGC, non-guaranteed benefits ran in the range of ten percent.) To a large extent, then, UAL has been paying its employees with unfunded pension promises. Since those promises aren’t insured, they can’t be attributed to moral hazard. The explanation also isn’t likely to be employer deviousness or worker stupidity. No work force in the world has paid closer attention to pensions than the airlines’. It makes more sense to seek an explanation based on economic rationality.

Ever since they were deregulated, the airlines have been running a high risk/high reward business. They now seem to have come a cropper, but it’s easy to picture the opposite outcome. If 9/11 had not occurred, and if oil prices had peaked a few dollars a barrel below their present level, the media would be full of complaints about unconscionable airline profits. Offering employees a lavish pension plan while not setting aside cash to fund it was a way of giving them a quasi-equity stake in the success of the enterprise. The workers (or, to be precise, their union representatives) accepted this offer instead of taking current compensation of equivalent risk-adjusted present value. When we talk about what UAL pensioners have lost, we should think in terms of the (probably small) paycheck increments that they could have had, not the profits that they hoped to earn if the airline business proved to be a bonanza.

Schröder of the North?

Except for Captain Ed, who seems well on his way to becoming a leading Canadian blogger, most of the U.S. has shown only mild interest in what is happening north of our border. In case you’re among the indifferent, the short version is that the Liberal government no longer has a majority in the House of Commons, has suffered regular defeats in Parliamentary votes and refuses to resign. It says that it will step down if its budget is defeated next Thursday (the day after a Conservative M.P. undergoes surgery for cancer; two other opposition lawmakers are also gravely ill). Meanwhile, it has been promising vast sums of money to special interests all over the country, despite the constitutional principle that a government without a Parliamentary mandate is no more than a caretaker and cannot commit its successor to anything.

The odds are that no last-minute shenanigans will be able to save Prime Minister Paul Martin from defeat, which means that Canada will have a new election soon under circumstances, viz., a scandal that makes Teapot Dome look like a tea party, that are far from propitious for his party. What kind of campaign will that lead to?

If Mr. Martin were a statesman of any degree, he would accept the necessity of losing. The Liberal Party will not be fit to govern a democratic nation until it cleanses itself of criminal elements, and a period in the minority offers the only real opportunity for purgation. It is glaringly obvious from his spending spree, however, that Mr. Martin intends to cling to power in whatever way he can. (A coup is happily out of the picture, because the enfeebled Canadian military couldn’t pull one off if it would.) Trying to bribe the entire electorate with public funds seems to be the current strategy, but it is a dicey one. Voters may decide that the benefits to themselves aren’t worth the price of paying off everybody else, or they may thank the Liberals for the promised subventions, then kick them out anyway, on the theory that the Conservatives will find themselves unable to repudiate more than a small fraction of the largesse.

It won’t surprise me, then, if the beleaguered P.M. turns to the Gerhard Schröder tactic: denouncing the United States for all that is wrong with the world. If anti-Americanism worked for a tottering governing party in Germany, and has so far been the chief bulwark of its corrupt and sclerotic French sibling, perhaps it will also succeed in Canada.

Canadian disdain for us Americans is a fine old tradition, but it has never been the main prop of a major party’s platform. Should the Liberals take that road and win the election, their country will start down the road toward Latin American-style politics, in which finding gringos to blame for one’s failings is a higher priority than dealing with real problems. Such success would also highlight an important point about anti-American agitation in general: Its principal impetus is not what America does but what suits the convenience of political elites elsewhere. Demonizing the U.S. is a way to profit from nationalistic envy and pride. At the same time, it is a relatively safe course of action, for it is nearly impossible, short of actually attacking us, to provoke American enmity. Delisting “french fries” from the menu at the Congressional restaurant counts as a severe reaction to relentless opposition to American interests. Canada has far less to fear.

At least, it has less to fear from America. It has a great deal to fear from retaining a government of kleptocrats.

A New Frontier in Spam

The SF site BowieTreks has discovered a new and apparently burgeoning form of spam.

I just checked the most recent list of Recently Updated Blogs on Typepad, and found eight of the ten entries to be what I think of as bogus blogs, such as [link to bogus blog omitted]. These blogs consist of a list of links which lead to a list of ads for the topic in the blog title. All eight of these blogs were created today, none have any About information, so there is no way to tell who is creating them. They all look exactly alike, as if they were created by a software program from a form. These bogus blogs are proliferating like rabbits and clogging the Updated blogs list. They use bandwidth and other resources that could be used for legitimate blogs, and use our time when we click on them, thinking they might be a legitimate, interesting blog. Does this bother anyone else???

*sigh* Typepad has begun automating defenses against comment spam; about two-thirds of the on-line casino promotions that try to sneak into my comments sections now don’t make it through the gateway, saving me the trouble of deleting them manually. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the spammers would just invent a new tactic. */sigh*

A Three-Fifths Rule for Judges?

Orin Kerr asked yesterday for arguments for and against the proposition that, leaving aside the current partisan controversy, requiring a three-fifths Senate majority for confirmation of judges is a good idea.

My instinctive, conservative response is that it is not. For over 200 years, judicial nominations have been confirmed by a simple majority of Senators voting. Until recently, this tradition was so firmly entrenched that it didn’t have to be a formal rule. Despite the theoretical possibility of a filibuster, numerous highly controversial appointments with less than three-fifths backing have not been blocked. The most famous recent instance is Clarence Thomas. Some of us also remember J. Harvie Wilkinson, confirmed with 58 votes in 1984 for the Fourth Circuit after several of his opponents voted in favor of cloture, and Daniel Manion, confirmed for a Seventh Circuit seat in 1986 by a 48-46 margin. Five Carter and Clinton appointees to Courts of Appeals also received fewer than 60 Senate votes.

However much one may wish to quibble about the aberrant case of Abe Fortas, who withdrew from contention after a test vote of cloture showed that he lacked the support of a majority of Senators, there is no reasonable doubt that a three-fifths requirement for judges has never been part of our unwritten Constitution. Presidents have not made nominations with an eye toward the need for a supermajority, and opponents of particular nominees have not aimed to win over two-fifths-plus-one rather than a majority of their colleagues.

The results of this de facto rule have hardly been disastrous. For all the recent criticism of some judges’ political aggressiveness (we had a new high in Nebraska today), the American federal judiciary is, by any reasonable standard, among the best in the world. Citizens take their cases to court without fear that justice will be for sale and with confidence that their evidence will be impartially heard. Half of all litigants are of necessity disappointed. Many of the losers complain, not always wrongly, that the judges misread the law; they don’t complain that they couldn’t afford to match their adversaries’ bribes. That is not the rule throughout the world.

One reason, in fact, why judges have been able to usurp authority from the elected branches of government is the high esteem in which they are held. The average citizen accords a prima facie presumption of correctness to court decisions, even to ones that he would prefer had gone the other way. He has less confidence in the high-mindedness and integrity of the men whom he elects to office.

It is hard to believe that judges would enjoy such repute if the procedure for choosing them were in need of fundamental reform. If the rules are now going to be altered, there ought to be some clear gain from doing so. Otherwise, in the words of the 2nd Viscount Falkland (1609-1643) (not Burke or Disraeli, as you might mislearn by googling the quote), “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

What are the benefits hoped for from a three-fifths rule? The only one that I have heard is that it would force Presidents to nominate only moderate jurists, acceptable to both ends of the political spectrum. That might be a worthy consideration if the business of the judiciary were primarily political, but it isn’t. Take a hundred appellate cases (or 500 from the district courts) at random, and a batch that has as many as three with political content will be an outlier (either that, or your definition of “political” is too broad for your own good).

The political cases are the most publicized and may be individually the most important, but, in the aggregate, they are of minuscule consequence compared to a judge’s real job: construing statutes, interpreting contracts, ascertaining facts, determining which legal principles to apply to them, and doing all else that is needed to adjudicate quotidian personal, commercial and criminal litigation. The qualities needed for that work have little to do with ideology. I wouldn’t want Lawrence Tribe to decide the meaning of the Ninth Amendment; I’d be delighted to have him preside over an ERISA case.

A supermajority requirement is unlikely to weed out nominees who lack the intellect, temperament or character to sit on the bench, because Senators are not in a particularly good position to evaluate those qualities. In any event, there is no sign that we need a tighter filter for them. The predictable outcome of upping the bar for confirmation is that more nominees will draw opposition, and those who are attacked will almost always be those who have expressed strong opinions on issues of public policy. Given that first-rate lawyers tend to be opinionated, the pool of potential judges will shrink, perhaps dramatically, certainly in numbers and very likely in quality. The seven judges to whom Senate Democrats currently threaten to apply their three-fifths standard are, after all, a pretty distinguished collection of legal talent, not a bunch of ward heelers who passed the Bar on the third try.

One possible outcome, then, is a bias toward mediocrity, which may be fine if one’s highest priority is to keep judges from handing down anti-democratic edicts but is less good if it is important to see that complex statutes are rationally applied to controverted facts. There is a sense in which Harry Reid is doing what Tom DeLay is accused of, namely, trying to transform judges into second-rate time-servers.

The way to avoid mediocrity, to bring candidates of the Right and the Left back into the eligible pool, is horse trading: Presidents may find it necessary to make deals under which they will be given untrammeled discretion to pick some proportion of judges, on the condition that the Senate opposition gets to name the rest. The appointment power would then effectively be divided. Maybe that system would have virtues, but a preference for political moderates would not be one of them. Effectively, confirmation would then require less than a majority of the Senate, which would open the way for “extremists” (that is, men whose views are sufficiently bizarre that a majority of the Senate would reject them, which is not necessarily an indicium of genuine extremism) and, for that matter, well-connected hacks.

All in all, I can see no clear, or even plausible, reason to change the status quo. It will be unfortunate if the strong measure of the “nuclear option” is necessary to prevent Senator Reid and his cronies from effecting a revolution, but a whiff of grapeshot now is better than a weakened judiciary later.

Does CBS Have Redeeming Social Value?

Last Monday CBS News showed Ken Starr, a hero to much of the Right, saying, in apparent response to a question about Senator Frist’s plan to prohibit filibusters of judicial nominees, that it would be “radical, radical departure from our history and our traditions, and it amounts to an assault on the judicial branch of government”. When I saw that quote, I was surprised by its vehemence but not by the sentiment. Many conservatives regard the filibuster as an important safeguard of limited government, and some fear that barring it for nominations of judges will lead ineluctably to its total demise.

Now we learn that Judge Starr did not, by his own account, take that position at all.

I sat on Saturday with Gloria Borger for 20 minutes approximately, had a wide ranging, on-camera discussion. In the piece that I have now seen, and which I gather has been lavishly quoted, CBS employed two snippets. The “radical departure from our history” snippet was specifically addressed to the practice of invoking judicial philosophy as a grounds for voting against a qualified nominee of integrity and experience. I said in sharp language that that practice was wrong. [emphasis added]

So, unless Judge Starr is lying as bold-facedly as Bill Clinton ever did, CBS News attached his answer to a different question in order to attribute to him a position that he does not hold. Perhaps there is an innocent explanation, though I can’t think of one off-hand. It certainly looks like the network of Rathergate fame has again engaged in forgery to promote the Democratic Party’s side of an important national debate. If that isn’t the case, it should release the complete, unedited interview, so that we can see for ourselves what Judge Starr said.

Assuming that matters are as they appear to be, this incident exudes the arrogance of power. Did CBS think that it could claim Ken Starr as a filibuster supporter without his noticing? Surely not. It must, then, have assumed that it could lie without consequences, that the denial would never overtake the falsehood.

I can think of no reason why anyone who values honesty should ever again watch a minute of CBS. Delendum est!

Saving the Prairie Dog, The Missing Draft

Today’s environmental anecdote comes from the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription-only but practically free at $3.95 a month). Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton recently had a session with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial staff, from which this fascinating tale emerged:

The science used to justify listing a species as endangered isn’t always devoid of politics. Ms. Norton mentioned the example of the prairie dog. Colonies of these ground squirrels are common in nearly a dozen states. Ms. Norton noted that there’s even a colony across the street from her Colorado home.

Nonetheless, the Fish and Wildlife Service was on the brink of listing black-tailed prairie dogs as “endangered” a few years ago after receiving “scientific” studies detailing how a major epidemic could wipe out the population. It was a classic case of Ph.Ds versus “letters from farmers,” she told us. Colorado officials made their own survey and found seven times the number of black-tailed prairie dogs that federal wildlife scientists had counted in their state. It became clear that the push to list prairie dogs was just a backdoor way to regulate ranchers by officials inside the Fish and Wildlife Service. Politicians from both parties stepped forward to protest the attempted coup, including Republican Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and Democratic then-Sen. Tom Daschle. Last summer the Interior Department nixed the idea of listing the ubiquitous prairie dog. “Politics” had triumphed over “science,” and rightly so.

What next? Will the Australian counterpart to the Fish and Wildlife Service try to protect the endangered rabbit?

Also noteworthy from the same issue:

President Bush recently completed his first 100 days in office since reelection, and while he’s exerted his power in many ways during this time, Americans should take note of what he hasn’t done: imposed a draft. MTV, various rock stars and other fashionably hip celebrities who did much to trumpet draft fears ought to pay attention because it raises a poignant question: How many young people were defrauded out of their votes last November by artfully stoked fears of military conscription?

I know a 21-year-old who said that fear of the draft was his main reason for voting for John Kerry. He would very likely have voted for the haughty, French-looking Senator from Massachusetts who, by the way, promised 101 days ago to release his military records in any case, but I hope that, when the next election comes around, he and other youths will remember 2004 and be prudently skeptical of MTV’s next big scare, whatever it may be.

Baby Black Hole

Space.com reports that astronomers early this morning photographed what they believe was the birth, 2.2 billion years ago, of a black hole. The parents were two neutron stars, neither of which survived the happy occasion.

A faint visible-light flash moments after a high-energy gamma-ray burst likely heralds the merger of two dense neutron stars to create a relatively low-mass black hole, said Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It is the first time an optical counterpart to a very short-duration gamma-ray burst has ever been detected. . . .

Gehrels said the burst occurred just after midnight East Coast time. It was detected by NASA's orbiting Swift telescope. Swift automatically repositioned itself within 50 seconds to image the same patch of sky in X-rays. It just barely caught an X-ray afterglow. . . . The X-ray counterpart was barely detectable and only observed for a few minutes.

An email was sent out to astronomers worldwide, and large observatories then tracked to the location and spotted a faint visible-light afterglow. . . .

Steinn Sigurdsson, a Penn State University researcher who is excited about the observations but was not involved in them, explained what theorists think happened:

Over a long time period, at least a hundred million years and perhaps billions of years, the two neutron stars spiraled toward each other. Neutron stars themselves are very dense objects, collapsed stellar remnants.

“A fraction of a second before contact, the lower mass neutron star is disrupted and forms a neutrino driven accretion disk around the higher mass neutron star,” Sigurdsson told SPACE.com. “It implodes under the weight and forms a maximally spinning low-mass black hole.” . . .

The gamma ray burst signals the formation of a superheated jet of gas being shot out from the chaotic region around the newly formed black hole at a significant fraction of light-speed, Sigurdsson said.

For the moment, the infant is known only as “GRB050509b”, the designation of its gamma ray burst. I wish it well but won’t be visiting any time soon.

Death Wish in Ulster

Among the worst of the many unhappy results of the U.K. election was the surge in support for Ian Paisley’s bigoted Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP all but eliminated the Ulster Unionists, whose leader David Trimble now has no seat in Parliament to go with his Nobel Peace Prize. The UUP retained one of the 11 Protestant-majority constituencies in Northern Ireland. The DUP won nine. A near-even split between the two parties allowed the Roman Catholic-based Social Democratic Labour Party to gain one. [Northern Ireland returns]

What makes that dismal outcome worse is the fact that Ulster’s Roman Catholic community did what it could to justify Protestant militancy. In the run-up to the vote, the Irish Republican Army and its Sinn Fein political arm engaged in a series of misdeeds. Professor Bainbridge has a handy list, so let me just quote:

1. Both British and Irish police have concluded that the IRA was responsible for robbing over 25 million pounds (over US $50 million) from Northern Bank. (Link)
2. Both Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and "Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell have alleged that senior members of Sinn Fein had prior knowledge of" the robbery plans. (Link)
3. The murder of Robert McCartney by IRA thugs in a bar brawl (Link), with two Sinn Fein political candidates present in the bar at the time, neither of whom talked to the police (Link).
4. The IRA’s refusal to identify to the police those who were responsible for McCartney's murder, which was compounded by the IRA's astonishing offer to shoot (and presumably kill) those responsible. (Link)
5. The ongoing failure of witnesses to come forward to the police, apparently as a result either of the code of silence and/or IRA intimidation. (Link)
6. Money laundering of the proceeds of the IRA's criminal empire on a vast scale. (Link)

Did actions like these disgust moderate Roman Catholics and lead them to repudiate Sinn Fein at the polls in favor of the anti-violence SDLP? Hardly. Sinn Fein improved its showing, from 21.7 to 24.3 percent of the Northern Irish vote (the SDLP declined from 20.9 to 17.5 percent), and now holds five of the seven Catholic-majority seats.

No one, I trust, can suspect this blog of animus against Roman Catholics, and I would like to believe that the Catholic minority in Ulster are innocent victims of Orangist thuggery. It is hard to keep up that belief, however, when an apparent majority of Catholic voters opt for what is, to be blunt, the political voice of a terrorist movement. If those voters want a civil war, they are choosing the right way to get it. That their choice is a rational or prudent one is impossible to accept.

Procurement Follies, Parliamentary Croggle, Anti-Trek Politics

■ I brunched this morning with a friend who works for a conservative think tank. He specializes in national security issues, particularly relations with mainland China. Last week he was on a panel at a seminar on military procurement. One of the other panelists was a Department of Defense official.

According to my friend, the DoD fellow said that the Iraqi government wants its army to continue using Soviet-style equipment, presumably because it has a large “installed base” of weaponry provided by the ex-USSR. Therefore, the U.S. is looking for suppliers (we’ll be paying to upgrade and replace what is left over from the Ba’athist era) and has decided to give the order to Red China, because it is the cheapest source.

Romania is also willing and able to meet Iraq’s needs but has higher price tags. My friend asked whether this wasn’t a case of “procurement wise, strategy foolish”, given that Romania is an ally that supported liberating Iraq while Red China is a strategic competitor that did what it could to block the effort. He was told that DoD Procurement has no instructions to worry about such matters; its sole objective is to acquire goods at the lowest possible price.

Our funds are not unlimited, of course, but is it prudent to give the world’s last significant communist power an entrée into the Middle East, an entrée that carries no cost but even comes with a profit attached?

■ Recently I introduced a friend to the quondam BBC mini-series, By the Sword Divided, not because she is interested in the English Civil War (she claimed not to have known that England had a civil war) but because she owns a player that can handle Region 2 DVD’s.

To my mild surprise, she liked the show and mentioned it to a couple of her English pixel-pals, both women with at least a normal British education. One, in fact, is attending Oxford. Both assured her that the series, one character in which is elected to Parliament in the pre-war period, wasn’t historically accurate, because, they said, Oliver Cromwell founded Parliament.

No wonder the Labour Party has been doing so well lately.

■ While I didn’t agree with Orson Scott Card’s Star Trek obituary, his dislike of the multi-series was based on arguable aesthetic grounds. Frank Ahrens’ gloating “The End of a Space Odyssey” in today’s Washington Post displays the political motives behind many a leftist’s anti-Trek sentiments. The payoff, after many paragraphs of snide reflections on the show’s various incarnations, comes near the end:

Also working against “Trek” may be our different attitude toward space. The Cold War, which moved us to the moon, is long over. The Columbia and Challenger shuttle explosions still resonate. President Bush has said the United States should send people to Mars, but why?

The “Trek” franchise appealed to the exploratory curiosity of mankind. Once upright, we set out across the next mountain range; later, we set sail on the oceans. Space is the logical extension. Except it’s not. Space is not a good place for humans. The more we know about it, and the more lives we lose to it, the better Earth seems.

Needless to say, people like Frank Ahrens never regarded Cold War rivalry as a good reason for doing anything. He now hopes that the notion of “boldly going where no man has gone before” will fade away, to be replaced by contentment with the timid, secular welfare state.

Anyone, incidentally, who thinks that setting out across the next mountain range wasn’t a life-endangering enterprise has never read Kipling’s “The Explorer”. A few stanzas:

So I went, worn out of patience; never told my nearest neighbours –
Stole away with pack and ponies – left 'em drinking in the town;
And the faith that moveth mountains didn’t seem to help my labours
As I faced the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down.

March by march I puzzled through ’em, turning flanks and dodging shoulders,
Hurried on in hope of water, headed back for lack of grass;
Till I camped above the tree-line – drifted snow and naked boulders –
Felt free air astir to windward – knew I’d stumbled on the Pass.

Thought to name it for the finder: but that night the Norther found me –
Froze and killed the plains-bred ponies; so I called the camp Despair
(It’s the Railway Gap to-day, though). Then my Whisper waked to hound me:
“Something lost behind the Ranges. Over yonder! Go you there!”

Then I knew, the while I doubted – knew His Hand was certain o’er me.
Still – it might be self-delusion – scores of better men had died –
I could reach the township living, but. . . He knows what terror tore me. . .
But I didn’t. . . but I didn’t. I went down the other side.

Sailing to the New World wasn’t so safe either: The death rate on Atlantic crossings in the 16th Century was, as I recall, well over fifty percent. Once upon a time, science fiction writers expected similar dauntlessness from space pioneers. Here is how Robert A. Heinlein, in his classic tale “The Green Hills of Earth”, imagined the psyche of that generation:

The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the Company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went further than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the 200th floor of the Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.

James T. Kirk wasn’t quite that bold, but one can see why effete, safety first-and-last liberals prefer that he be retired from popular culture.

Eleutheria and Bavarokratia

I don’t believe that it is celebrated in Greece, where March 25th, the anniversary of the outbreak of the anti-Ottoman revolt of 1821, is regarded as Independence Day, but today marks the 173rd anniversary of formal Greek independence. On May 7, 1832, the Ottoman Empire agreed, at the Conference of London, to recognize Greece as a separate nation and give up efforts to reconquer its lost province. The Battle of Navarino (October 20, 1827) had made that outcome inevitable, but the Turks took their time about acceding to it.

The next year, a 17-year-old Bavarian prince, Otto of Wittelsbach, became King of Greece, inaugurating what is remembered as the “Bavarokratia”. It would not be far-fetched to say that his 29-year reign, ended by a coup in 1862, laid the foundations for all that is wrong with the Greek polity today: parliamentary manipulation, nationalistic designs beyond the country’s resources, cynical appeals to religion by irreligious politicians and military intervention in civil affairs, among other evils. Someone (I’d look it up but have a plane to catch) once penned a fantasia in which Lord Byron survived his wounds at Missolonghi and eventually became King instead of Otto. It’s hard to imagine Byron as a ruler, yet Greece might have been better served by some such eccentric choice.

Addendum: Joseph T. Major saves me the trouble of searching with the information that “If Byron Had Become King of Greece” was written by Harold Nicholson and first published in J. C. Squire’s anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses Into Imaginary History (1931). Having lamented the lack of wargames on Latin American topics, let me also call attention to another gem from the same collection, H. A. L. Fisher’s “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America”, which, had it really happened, would have ensured a steady stream of games on the Emperor’s South American campaigns.

A New Hope?

John Hiscock of the Daily Telegraph stirs up almost dead embers of hope with the headline, “Star Wars Comes to Violent End in Masterful Climax”. Could it be true? Has the momentum of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones been reversed, a feat that one would have thought scarcely consistent with the laws of physics?

The fans who have been camping out for weeks in front of cinemas across America will not be disappointed. Lucas has created an eminently satisfying, albeit surprisingly violent, final instalment that brings the story back full circle to the first film.

It contains all the ingredients that fans have come to expect: aerial dog-fights, swirling light-sabres, Jedi battles, evil droids – and it packs an emotional wallop. . . .

Now, with Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Lucas has come up with a masterly conclusion to the complex tale of treachery, heroism and intrigue, although it is considerably darker than anything previously seen in the Skywalker soap [sic] opera. . . .

There is no surprise in the fate of Anakin Skywalker because it has been well documented in previous films that he goes over to the Dark Side and becomes the evil Darth Vader; but there is subtlety and unexpected poignancy in how this is achieved – through the insidious treachery of Chancellor Palpatine, marvellously played by Ian McDiarmid.

Faced with a choice between losing the love of his life, Senator Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman), and giving up his soul to gain the power to save her, Anakin sacrifices his character, his integrity and his very being for love.

Despite George Lucas’ own flirtation with the Dark Side (hint: one of the villains is “Nute Gunray”), I would rather have the pleasure of seeing a good movie than the satisfaction of watching an overblown ego get deflated. Hence, I’m crossing my fingers (figuratively – I can’t actually type with them crossed) that the Telegraph has better luck with its movie picks than it did with yesterday’s election returns.

The Literal Nanny State

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) has introduced a bill to grant a tax credit for “qualified breastfeeding promotion and support expenditures” (via Tax Analysts, which isn’t linkable). The idea, I suppose, is to get the government out of people’s bedrooms and into their nurseries.

Addendum: I didn’t notice at the time, but this is Stromata Blog’s 500th post. I’d meant to write a long, introspective analysis of the Grand Philosophy and Historical Meta-Significance of Blogging for this occasion. Having missed the opportunity, I guess I’ll have to wait for Post Number 1,000.

Britannia in Stasis

Looked at on its own, Labour’s election victory is one that would please any Prime Minister. As I write, 625 of the 628 seats outside of Northern Ireland (where the major parties have a negligible presence) have been called, and the Labourites have won 354, versus 197 Conservative, 62 Liberal Democrat, 6 Scottish Nationalist, 3 Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) and 3 independents (including, alas, the loathsome George Galloway, who, based on the Casement precedent, ought to be hanged for treason). Overall, Labour will enjoy more than a 60-seat overall margin in the next Parliament, which is very solid by historical standards.

All of the commentary will focus not on what Labour got but on what it didn’t get: the same landslide majority as in 2001. It has lost about 47 seats, leading to an instant consensus that Tony Blair suffered a defeat. The big questions for rumination are the defeat’s dimensions and cause. On the answers depends the length of Mr. Blair’s third term in office. Everybody “knows” that he will step down at some point, to be succeeded by the unspeakable Gordon Brown. If the pundits decide that Labour did well, that transition will take place three or four years hence; that it failed, within one or two. Since the majority of the pundits dislike Mr. Blair and dote on his anointed successor, their conclusion is preordained; it’s just a matter of judicious selection of supporting facts.

Hence, large effects will hang on guesses about the reasons for a minute movement of voters. Omitting Northern Ireland, Labour won 41.7 percent of the vote in 2001, 36.2 percent (according to the latest Sky News tally this time. The Conservatives rose from 32.4 to 33.2 percent, the LibDems from 18.7 to 22.5. Those numbers suggest that electoral opinion hasn’t shifted much in the past four years. The simplest way to look at it is that about 13 percent of the 2001 Labour vote switched this time, with 70 percent of those moving left (to the Liberal Democrats) and 30 percent right (to the Conservatives, who then gave up some of their own right flank to the UKIP and the British National Party). Some of that loss can be attributed to the war in Iraq, some to the Blair government’s abridgement of traditional civil liberties, much to regression to the mean: Labour’s 2001 vote share was an historical peak; one would expect some of those who voted Labour for the first time not to repeat.

My own, inexpert view is that voters’ opinions changed little because they were offered a choice of three status quo parties. The policy differences separating Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy were, let us say, nuanced. A Prime Minister Howard wouldn’t have cut taxes and public spending 30 percent, nor a Prime Minister Kennedy have renounced Britain’s alliance with America. If the Tories had four years ago started getting ready to run on neo-Thatcherite principles, it would have been a very different election – perhaps a disaster for the Right, but victory would have been possible. Instead, with a timid platform and opportunistic lunging after the anti-war vote, the Conservatives were essentially fighting to keep what they had and make marginal gains by picking up handfuls of votes in marginal constituencies. That goal they attained, but it wasn’t much of a goal.

The stasis of the outgoing Parliament’s term seems to me unlikely to persist. The forthcoming change in Conservative Party leadership won’t make a difference, of course; Michael Howard was probably bolder than any foreseeable successor. What will unsettle the voters is the drive for adoption of the European Union’s constitution, coupled with the predictable impacts of the gradual but steady increases in taxes, spending, crime, officially sponsored libertinism and police intrusiveness. Five years from now, Britain will either be a province of New Europe, with a post-democratic administration, hedonistic citizenry and entrenched criminal underclass, or it will be in the midst of a revolt against those tendencies. I suppose that smart money would bet on the former. Still, hope is not yet extinguished.

Addendum: Daniel Johnson summarizes all that was wrong with Michael Howard as a party leader:

It is a myth that Howard relaunched the Tories with new policies that were attractive to the electorate. What he did was to strip out any policies that might have appealed to the kind of liberal middle class voters who defected to Tony Blair in 1997. As a result, by the time those voters were ready to look again at the alternatives to Blairite “New Labour” in 2005, Howard had ensured that the Tories had nothing to offer them. . . .

[H]e promised to match Labour’s spending plans and was reluctant to commit himself to lower taxes. He refused to talk about Europe at all, and sacked any of his colleagues who dared to hint at a smaller state. His big themes were supposed to be crime and immigration. But few voters believed that the Tories would do better at crime than Labour, and the anti-immigration policies alienated as many voters as they attracted.

But Howard’s biggest mistake was to suppose that he could destroy Tony Blair’s position by questioning his integrity. Even worse, Howard retreated from the staunchly pro-American and pro-war foreign policy to which Duncan Smith had adhered . . . .

If he cannot now be king (by the next election he will be nearly 70), he has set his heart on being the kingmaker. And because he knows that the “Notting Hill Tories” (a liberal, privileged coterie whom he has sedulously promoted) are unlikely to be chosen by the party members, he wants to restore the exclusive right to elect the leader to the parliamentary party. This was the system that overthrew Margaret Thatcher in 1990, an act of matricide from which the party has never quite recovered.

In another post, Mr. Johnson depressingly observes that the Conservatives still have a smaller presence in Parliament than Labour did when it was at its Thatcher Era low in 1983.

The WordPerfect Insurgency

Any proposition that Randy Barnett, Glenn Reynolds, Res Ipsa Loquitur and I all agree on must be true. As the Knoxville Blogfather says, “I'll give up WordPerfect when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.”

Counselor Barnett expatiates on the evils of that other word processing program:

Word reformats paragraphs and everything else as it wishes and it is sometimes next to impossible to trick it into keeping it to the format you prefer. I assume that someone somewhere knows how to make all this work, but I have been word processing since I paid $4500 for an NBI standalone word processor in 1981, and word processing programs are simply not supposed to be that hard to figure out and control.

In contrast, WordPerfect is an amazingly elegant and transparent way to write.

That it is, particularly because it’s possible to look at the formatting codes and change them as easily as one rewrites texts. The latest version of Word, for the first time ever, lets you view the codes but makes it no simpler than before to alter them (that is, not simple at all, unless you think exactly like Bill Gates).

Mr. Barnett does concede that Word is superior at tracking changes, a useful feature when several writers work on the same document. I rarely use it and recall that it used to be a WordPerfect weakness, but it seems to work just fine in WordPerfect 12. In fact, it tops Word by allowing selective incorporation of a reviewer’s suggestions. In Word, they are part of the document and can only be undone by deleting them and typing the original words back in.

Being owned by a Canadian company, WordPerfect has, I suppose, no chance of overtaking a Microsoft product, no matter how great it qualitative superiority. Besides, every secretary administrative assistant in the universe has been trained on Word, and trying to switch them over would cause a huge temporary drop in paperwork throughput, perhaps leading to – hmm, maybe that’s another reason to raise high the WordPerfect banner.

The Big Blank on the Wargaming Map

Today brings not only the dismal U.K. election (yes, the Tories are doing well as I write, but they don’t deserve – and won’t achieve – victory, while an unexpectedly close result will lead only to the faster accession of the unspeakable Gordon Brown) but also Cinco de Mayo, the great Mexican holiday. Technically it celebrates the victory of Mexican Republican forces over invading French troops at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, an event of very little intrinsic significance. The French resumed their advance later in the year, captured Mexico City in June 1863, and installed the Austrian Archduke Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. After that followed a four year civil war, which Maximilian lost only after U.S. pressure compelled Napoleon III to withdraw from the conflict.

That Cinco de Mayo eclipses the actual Mexican Independence Day (September 15, 1810) is rather as if the United States celebrated the Battle of Bunker Hill instead of the Fourth of July. Well, that is as it may be. What I want to note here is that Cinco de Mayo was just one incident in the tumultuous, fascinating military history of Latin America, almost all of which has been ignored by Anglophone wargamers. I am aware of only four games in English dealing with any battle or campaign south of the border the didn’t involve gringos: Caseros 1852: The Fate of Argentina (Simulations Workshop, 1998, on the battle the ousted the Argentinian dictator Ortiz de Rosas), the forthcoming Cactus Throne (slated for publication in Against the Odds #15, the war of Emperor Maximilian) and two games on the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, 1932-35, one from Game Designers Workshop (1973), the other published in Command #12 (1991).

Perhaps the thriving Spanish wargame industry has been more attentive, but I have seen only a magazine game, Libertadores (Soldados y Estrategia #10 (2003)), which recreates eight battles from the Wars of Liberation (1810-1824) using elementary rules and oddly designed counters.

The wargaming map has been filled in over the years with coverage of many an obscure conflict, yet here is a gigantic blank: We cannot refight the continent-wide struggle for Latin American independence or the heroically stupid War of the Triple Alliance or any of the numerous other military landmarks in the history of the southern half of our hemisphere. Were it not for the oft-proven axiom that norteamericanos will do anything for Latin America except pay attention to it, one would be astonished.

The Media Prism and the FRC

When conservatives make stupid statements, they ought to be criticized. Indeed, one reason why right-wing discourse these days is by and large less irrational than its left-wing counterpart is that conservative stupidities draw repeated denunciations, whereas friendly media let liberal absurdities sink into obscurity. Conservatives are thus encouraged to be careful and thoughtful in their utterances, and liberals to be reckless.

So it is fine with me that New Scientist should draw attention to Family Research Council analyst Bridget Maher’s indefensible opposition to vaccinating women against a virus that causes cervical cancer:

“Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex,” Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.

What is not so fine is the magazine’s remarkable extrapolation from the personal opinion of one relatively low level figure to an assertion that, “In the US, . . . religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination”. Miss Maher’s employer has nothing on its Web site about HPV vaccination. Its discussions of HPV center around the limited ability of condoms to prevent its transmission, which is one of the organization’s arguments for emphasizing abstinence in sex education programs. If the FRC is “gearing up to oppose vaccination”, it isn’t doing much to lay the groundwork for its campaign.

The power of this generalization from tenuous evidence is shown by Eugene Volokh’s response, titled “Family Research Council Opposing Vaccination”. Professor Volokh presents sound reasons why Miss Maher is wrong; it doesn’t occur to him to question New Scientist’s innuendo that she speaks for anybody but herself on this matter. Having quoted her, he continues, “This strikes me as a pretty wrongheaded attitude on the Family Research Council’s part [emphasis added].” In his concluding paragraph, he wants to know “how far the Family Research Council would take this”. “Would the FRC urge that people not be offered treatment for” venereal disease in order to make premarital sex less attractive?

The FRC can speak for itself, but to date it hasn’t urged any such nonsense. Yet casual readers of Professor Volokh’s post – now excerpted for the right-of-center masses by Instapundit – will be left with the impression that a well-known group with explicit Christian roots advocates a “theocratic” policy of inflicting cancer on women as a punishment for promiscuity. If it really does, it deserves rhetorical brickbats, but let’s not convict it on such scanty evidence. The broader moral is that many mainstream reporters bring to their work the presumption that conservatives in general, and conservative Christians in particular, hold outrageous views. Readers need to exercise the skepticism that journalists have put aside. Otherwise, they will unconsciously see the world through a sharply left-distorted prism.

Update, 5/6/05: Worth noting is what a commenter on another post said about New Scientist:

I subscribed to New Scientist a year ago and I greatly regret it. It is horrendously sensationalistic and because of that basically unreliable. I’m not saying it’s always or even mostly wrong, just that far too often it focuses on the most exciting possible interpretation of things and if you take what you read there at face value, you’ll be misled.

A massive Christian-led campaign against cancer vaccinations is, of course, far more exciting than one think tank employee’s eccentric opinion.

Is Star Trek Obsolete?

Orson Scott Card says “no”: it was never worth watching in the first place (via Professor Bainbridge):

So they’ve gone and killed “Star Trek.” And it’s about time.

They tried it before, remember. The network flushed William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy down into the great septic tank of broadcast waste, from which no traveler…. No, wait, let’s get this right: from which rotting ideas and aging actors return with depressing regularity.

Now, I’m not the world’s most avid defender of the Star Trek franchise. In fact, I stopped watching midway through the first episode of The Next Generation, at the point where the Enterprise goes into Battle Stations mode by jettisoning the pod containing the women and children’s quarters. Right there, I knew that this would be a series where the writers were inventing rather than imagining. I’m told that quality picked up as time went by. Maybe so, but I remain a fan only of The Original Series and a Laodicaean fan at that. Mr. Card can’t be accused of any such lukewarm attitude:

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance.

Which was a shame, because science fiction writing was incredibly fertile at the time, with writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg and Larry Niven, Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke creating so many different kinds of excellent science fiction that no one reader could keep track of it all. . . .

Here’s what I think: Most people weren’t reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren’t reading at all. So when they saw “Star Trek,” primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.

A plausible analysis, Orson, but utterly ahistorical. If anybody was reading the “so many different kinds of excellent science fiction” of the 1960’s, it was the hard-core fen who attend World Science Fiction Conventions. They were bestowing Hugo Awards on writers like Heinlein and Ellison and Aldiss and Niven and Silverberg, and Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke was the acknowledged grandmaster triumvirate.

At the 1966 Worldcon Gene Roddenberry, known till then only for an unsuccessful cop show, showed the pilot of his new SF television series to this audience and received a reception that I have heard described by an eyewitness as “rapturous”. During the three years that Star Trek ran, it had a devoted trufan following, and some of its “grade school” scripts came from the pens of figures of the “science fiction revolution”: Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Jerome Bixby.

I’m not surprised that someone who calls those posturing, post-modernist bores Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (what a waste of a great title) “the two finest science fiction films of all time” thinks that Star Trek: TOS “was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad”. De gustibus non disputandum est. Still, let’s get history right. If Star Trek appealed to non-readers getting “their first glimpse of science fiction”, it also won a following among the SF intelligentsia. Its time may now be past, but it did have a time.

Addendum: In a comment on Trufen.net, Dr. Gafia (rich brown) gives more detail about the original Star Trek’s writers:

The problem with Card’s comments (besides the ones others have provided here) is that the first three seasons of Star Trek had numerous episodes written by names that would be familiar to any science fiction reader.

Starting with one of the writers Card mentions, Harlan Ellison (“City on the Edge of Forever”). But also including George Clayton Johnson (“The Man Trap”), Richard Matheson (“The Enemy Within”), David Gerrold (“The Trouble with Tribbles”), Norman Spinrad (“The Doomsday Machine”), Jerry Sohl (“The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Whom Gods Destroy”), Theodore Sturgeon (“Shore Leave,” “Amok Time”), Robert Bloch (“What Little Girls Are Made Of,” “Catspaw,” “A Wolf in the Fold”) and Jerome Bixby (“Mirror, Mirror,” “By Any Other Name,” “Day of the Dove,” “Requiem for Metheselah”).

Pelosi Who?

Little Green Footballs and Rightmarch.com are indignant at what looks like an open-and-shut case of political bias at Google Ads. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has an ad on Google that reads –

The Truth about Tom DeLay
Learn about DeLay’s many scandals
and help us clean up the House!

RightMarch, a conservative group that I had never heard of before (and hence do not necessarily endorse), wanted to give the other side, so it submitted –

The Truth about Nancy Pelosi
Learn about Pelosi’s many scandals
and help us clean up the House!

Google refused to run that text, on the ground that, “Google policy does not permit ad text that advocates against an individual, group or organization.”

It certainly looks like a left-leaning double standard is at work here, but let’s remember not to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by cluelessness. The policy cited by Google presumably doesn’t apply to political ads. If it did, the company would be sacrificing a lot of potential revenue. That is why the anti-DeLay ad was accepted. It seems likely to me that the Google clerk who received RightMarch’s ad simply had no idea that Nancy Pelosi is a political figure. He probably reckoned that this was a personal vendetta; e. g., Nancy’s ex-boyfriend, furious at her infidelities and slovenly housekeeping, wanted to denounce her to the world. The name “Pelosi” simply rang no bells.

As, in a rational world, it shouldn’t.

Open Borders Are Safe Borders

Last week Arnold Schwarzenegger uttered favorable words about the “Minuteman Project”, private citizens – President Bush calls them “vigilantes” – who have begun patrolling the California-Mexico border to turn back illegal entrants. It is a sign of the oddities of the immigration issue that libertarian Glenn Reynolds reacted positively to those remarks and traditionalist Stephen Bainbridge negatively.

Governor Schwarzenegger isn’t a “close the borders” nativist of the Mark Krikorian stamp. He advocates enactment of a guest-worker program along the lines that the President has proposed. That nuance is unlikely to get much notice, especially within a Republican Party where arguments about immigration are growing steadily shriller and less analytical.

Not ignored in the turmoil, but strangely misperceived, is the question that ought to be of central importance in the middle of the War on Terror: What immigration regime will do the best job of keeping enemies out of our country and of limiting their effectiveness if they do slip it? The anti-immigration faction has seized on national security as if it self-evidently mandated restricting the number of people coming into the U.S. That is, I think, almost opposite to the reality. Properly implemented, an “open door” policy will make us more secure than thousands more Border Patrol agents and a hundred Minuteman Projects.

At the present time, it is relatively easy for ill-intentioned foreigners to enter the United States and remain here undetected. What makes it easy is the existence of a major support network for illegal aliens, enterprises that supply clandestine transportation, phony identification documents and advice on eluding the clutches of the INS. This infrastructure wasn’t built to support terrorism, but it can be adapted to that role. Tearing it down through police methods would be extremely difficult. Not only is it firmly established, but it provides services that are useful to American employers as well as to would-be employees. As experience with “alien roundups” has demonstrated, public support for harsh measures to stem illegal entrants is largely theoretical. In practice, hardly anybody wants the aliens in his own neighborhood deported, just those who work across town.

Let’s imagine an alternative to the current system. Suppose that anyone who wished to enter the U.S. could obtain an identity card from the nearest American consulate. Applicants would be fingerprinted, have DNA samples taken and be checked against a database of undesirables. They would also be warned that their ID’s carry no eligibility for welfare benefits. Holders would, however, be allowed to apply for state driver’s licenses and to work for anyone who would hire them. If they became destitute, the U.S. government would give them a free meal, a change of clothing and transportation back home.

That is a better deal than alien smugglers can offer. Their industry would wither in a trice, with no clientele but people on the “undesirables” list. The Border Patrol would have a real chance of seriously hampering their operations. Meanwhile, the government would know the identities of, and possess fingerprint and DNA data for, virtually every non-citizen within our borders. That is clearly not an attractive scenario for aliens who wish to carry out mischief.

While it wouldn’t be a guaranteed preventative, this form of “open borders” is less risky than trying to turn back the tide of willing workers seeking willing employers. And because reducing terrorist risks ought to be a high priority right now, it would be a desirable policy even if an influx of newcomers from Mexico and other lands had economic or cultural drawbacks. Sacrificing a small quantity of opulence for the sake of a large increment in safety isn’t a bad bargain, and I worry more about another 9/11 than about whether Spanish will become the official language of Arizona several decades from now.

Not that I believe that either of those hypotheticals will come to pass. Freeing up markets never damaged an economy yet, and why do we fear that immigrants’ children will stick to Spanish when all the rest of the world is learning to speak English? If we were to give freedom a chance in the realm of immigration, we would almost certainly discover that the elaborate apparatus of control makes no one better off and that its perpetuation from generation to generation is more a matter of superstition than expediency.

The Perils of the PBGC

Since the financial plight of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is in the news these days, I suppose that, as a PBGC alumnus (director of policy and regulations, 1984-87), I ought to weigh in. A good starting point is Dartmouth economist Andrew Samwick’s diagnosis and proposed cure:

Pension insurance – not the idea but its implementation, and certainly not the dedicated people who work at the PBGC – is a complete joke. There are three problems with the PBGC’s setup:

1) The premium amounts are too low. On average, companies do not pay enough to cover the risk to which they expose the PBGC.

2) The premium formula is inadequately linked to underfunding. Pension sponsors whose plans are underfunded do pay slightly more in premiums than pension sponsors whose plans are fully funded, but the amount of additional premiums does not adequately compensate the PBGC for the added risk of a claim.

3) The premium formula is unrelated to the PBGC's risk exposure – the portfolio allocation between stocks and bonds and the bankruptcy risk of the company. . . .

With PBGC insurance, the company has an incentive to invest in a portfolio heavily weighted toward stocks. If the stocks do well, the company can cut back on future contributions. If the stocks do poorly, then in some cases, the company can terminate the plan and leave the liability with the PBGC. Classic moral hazard. When the economy goes through a period of weak stock market returns (so the pension fund’s assets fall in value) and low interest rates (so the present value of the future liabilities rise in value), we get tremendous underfunding. And the laws governing minimum pension contributions don't require pension sponsors to make up the difference quickly enough.

What to do? Impose a levy on each DB pension plan sponsor that is proportional to the current value of all past PBGC premiums paid for current participants. Impose the levy based on 2004 data, so there is no rush to the exit. The levy should be enough to put the PBGC at a zero balance position. Then retire the PBGC and allow companies to obtain pension insurance privately if they so desire. For current sponsors, pass a law that moves pension participants’ claims in bankruptcy ahead of all unsecured creditors. If this means that fewer firms offer DB pensions, then so be it. Unhealthy companies – like United – ought not to be making promises to pay beneficiaries decades into the future.

Professor Samwick’s view of the roots of the PBGC’s problems is the same as the PBGC staff’s back when the insurance program was reformed in 1987. At its inception in 1975, the PBGC charged a flat premium that bore no relationship to exposure or risk of loss. As the initial rate was only a dollar per participant per year, trying to apply insurance rate-setting principles would have been fiddly. Nor was that low number pulled out of thin air. It was based on a Department of Labor study of participant losses in plan terminations in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. One reason why Congress enacted pension insurance, brushing aside “moral hazard” objections, was that it looked like an inexpensive fix for a small-bore problem.

Now it is thirty years later, and moral hazard has proven to be more than a theoretical concept. Had Congress anticipated that premium revenue would rise from $30 million to $1.46 billion a year, without any significant increase in the number of workers covered by insured plans, and that the program would nonetheless find itself nearly $30 billion in the red, the whole idea would have been aborted.

The original program carried even more moral hazard than the present one. What the PBGC provided was not insurance but a put option against the federal government: A company could rid itself of its pension liabilities by paying the PBGC the present value of guaranteed benefits. Since not all benefits were guaranteed, that was prima facie an attractive proposition: Paying x dollars relieved x+y dollars of liability.

That this system was not catastrophically abused was due primarily to three factors: (i) good luck (economic circumstances were such that pension overfunding was a much bigger issue than underfunding throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s); (ii) the assumptions used to value liabilities, which were more conservative than most companies would use for internal projections (so that the cost of exercising the put option was artificially high); and (iii) the PBGC’s inhospitable attitude toward companies that terminated plans in conditions short of extreme financial distress. Still, it was obvious by the early 1980’s that the existing structure was unsound. The reforms that the PBGC wanted then sound like Professor Samwick’s in several respects: Among them were higher premiums to eliminate the existing deficit, a change from a flat-rate premium to one related to risk, and an eventual shift to private pension insurance.

The package that Congress was willing to enact was less radical. Premiums were increased and based partly on underfunding (9/10ths of one percent of unfunded vested benefits), though without regard to the likelihood that claims would arise (i. e., the employer’s financial condition), and companies were effectively forbidden to terminate underfunded plans (and thus impose costs on the PBGC) unless they were in bankruptcy. The put option was thus replaced by a program of bankruptcy insurance.

The obvious flaw in a company’s buying insurance against its own insolvency is that paying the premiums deprives it of capital and increases the probability that the undesired event will come to pass. That dilemma is compounded if premiums escalate with financial weakness. Naturally, as Professor Samwick observes, premiums that compensated the PBGC for the full risk that it bore were politically impossible. It was also impossible to charge healthy plan sponsors the amount needed to cover claims likely to arise from weaker companies’ plans. If that had been possible, it in any case wouldn’t have been a wonderful idea: Making profitable firms pay the debts of those that fail is a classic perverse incentive.

So I’m not at all sure that I agree with Professor Samwick that the weakness of pension insurance is “not the idea but its implementation”. In anything like its present form, implementation is unfeasible, which suggests that the idea isn’t a sound one. Certainly, there is no real prospect of private alternatives. The PBGC’s staff and its outside advisory committee devoted quite a bit of effort to trying to devise a privatization scheme in 1985 and 1986. We could never surmount the hurdle of formulating a product that companies would voluntarily buy or insurers willingly underwrite.

Professor Samwick’s proposal is dramatic: Zero out the PBGC by imposing a one-time levy on current plan sponsors to fund the current deficit; accept no new claims from plans that terminate in the future; give pension claims priority over other unsecured creditors in bankruptcy; and leave pension insurance to the private market.

As a realistic political scenario, that is about what one expects from an academic economist. The deficit-closure levy would be nearly $1,000 a participant, an intolerable imposition, though it could be reduced a bit by valuing the PBGC’s liabilities on a less conservative basis. United Airlines’ competitors would denounce the unfairness of letting one company escape liabilities that the rest of the industry must continue to bear. Critics would rightly point out that secured claims take almost all of the assets available in most business bankruptcies, leaving only pennies on the dollar for unsecured debts. Private pension insurance is no more attractive to carriers or plan sponsors in 2005 than it was in 1987.

The Bush Administration’s proposal, which I have described elsewhere, would raise premiums sufficiently to eliminate the PBGC’s deficit over a period of years, but its principal feature is severe tightening of minimum funding standards. It would come very near to mandating that plans be fully funded for accrued benefits at all times, which would make contributions extremely volatile. All commentators expect a regime like that to discourage companies from maintaining defined benefit pension plans, and the Administration doesn’t seem to disagree. For all practical purposes it has given up on this form of retirement plan and is looking only for a PBCG exit strategy.

Now, it may be that traditional pension plans have no niche in the current marketplace environment. On the other hand, it may not be coincidental that their decline follows a significant expansion of government regulation, beginning in a modest way with ERISA in 1974, then accelerating with the Retirement Equity Act of 1984, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the deluge of legislation in the 1990’s. Regulation of individual account plans has increased, too, but beginning from a lower base and to a far lesser extent. If, as I have suggested before, pension plans were subject to less federal micromanagement, they might spring back to life. If they didn’t, we would at least know that genuine market forces rather than government intrusions were responsible for their demise.

A pension plan revival would give the PBGC a larger base of premium payers and ease the amortization of its deficit. I don’t deny that the moral hazard posed by pension insurance would remain worrisome. Fundamental reform or disastrous collapse are the PBGC’s only possible long-run fates. While we wait to see which will occur, I suggest that we do what we can to make the short run less bleak.

Christos Aneste! Alethos Aneste!

Today the Orthodox Church celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Christ is risen from the dead
by death trampling down death
and bestowing life on those in the tombs!

Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch:

In the midst of this abundance of blood shedding, there appears the leader and giver of life, Who was murdered by humanity, trumpeting to all that murderous acts are not signs of success; He heralds that resurrection and judgment awaits us all, and that life is stronger than death, and that the ones who build their edifices upon the death of their fellow human beings labor in vain. Our resurrected Lord Jesus Christ confirmed through His Resurrection His message that He is the way, the truth and the life. Also, He confirmed that God did not create death, nor does He takes pleasure in the loss of life (Wisd. Sol. 1, 13). For while God created everything to last eternally, death entered the world as a result of the impiety of people. The love of God, though, not being able to tolerate the predominance of death over human beings comes to the rescue of humanity and remedies the ills of human sin.

Demetrios, Archbishop of America (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America):

Through His mercy revealed to us on the Cross, we have been offered a new manner of living. By His Resurrection we have been shown the way of rebirth, renewal, and restoration to the true and eternal life that God created us to live. By receiving Christ into our lives through the Holy Sacraments of the Church and through our daily commitment to His divine will, we are given an unfading hope of glory, of the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God, of a new heaven and a new earth that is completely filled with the life and light of our Lord.

This hope that springs from the presence of the Risen Christ within us directs us to live each and every day preparing to receive "an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading" (I Peter 1:4).

Herman, Archbishop of Washington and Metropolitan of All America and Canada (Orthodox Church in America):

Central to our faith are the words of Saint Paul: “If Christ is not risen, our preaching is in vain and your faith is also in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Having desired to reconcile all creation to its Creator, the only-begotten Son of God took on our human flesh. He entered human history, time, and space, as one of us. He came not to be served but, rather, to serve. And in so doing, He revealed that God “is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32), the God Who desired the renewal and transformation of His people and all creation with such intensity that He was willing to die, that life might reign. By His death and resurrection, He led us into a new promised land, one in which there is no sickness, sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting. It is this reality that we proclaim in that simple, yet profound, expression of faith, “Christ is risen! Indeed, He is risen!”

From the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom:

If any man is devout and loves God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast! If any man is a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord. If any has labored long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense. If any has worked from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If any has come at the third hour, let him with thankfulness keep the feast. If any has arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings; because he shall in nowise be deprived because of it. If any has delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near, fearing nothing. And if any has tarried even until the eleventh hour, let him, also, be not alarmed at his tardiness. For the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first. . . .

O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown! Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is risen, and life reigns! Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.