¤

I object only to the execution of persons securely in State custody, simply because I do not want the State to have the power of exacting an irrevocable penalty. Although I am not a conservative, I should mention that opposition to the death penalty on similar grounds -- that no justice system made up of human beings can ever be good enough to carry out the ultimate penalty -- exists among religious conservatives, and even among some elected ones, in this country, but they are generally afraid to speak out.

I am aware that what I advocate is, among other things, potentially more expensive than the alternative. For precedent I point to the positive right of the accused to a "speedy and public trial" under the Sixth Amendment. This undoubtedly costs more than letting suspects pile up in jail for months or years at a time and then trying them in batches, but it protects us all.

[ 20020222 ]

 
Very Pretty Pictures

Here's an absolutely stunning gallery of images from Terra MODIS. Warning: high-speed connection recommended.

[ 20020221 ]

 
Dead Man Walking?

Over on The Daily Dose is a reference to a Salon article about Joseph Amrine. A quick search finds this site (the Public Interest Litigation Clinic is a local KC outfit), which contains much of the same detail and includes information about how to contact Gov. Holden.

Letters should be respectful and emphasize that getting the wrong guy means that the right guy got away. Unfortunately, Amrine, who probably did nothing worse than the check-kiting that got him in jail in the first place, was the subject of one of those breathtakingly tasteless Benetton ads a few years back. Will trendy European opposition to the death penalty result in an innocent man being executed out of spite?

 
Who Ever Saw A Dead Social Worker?

Over on Fevered Rants, drag racer Alex del Castillo ranteth thusly (emphasis added):

Now, there are problems with extrapolating from rapid advances in one area (the post from which I have quoted really is mostly about drag racing) to many others -- some bulk technologies (as opposed to molecular, ie nanotechnology) are a whole lot more "scalable" than others. And the management (and worker) styles characteristic of the GI generation account for much of the disparity between its accomplishments and those of the Silent generation (read this book for the explanation). But these are quibbles.

What would have stuck in my craw until, oh, just about five months and nine days ago, is the notion that the military can avoid NASA-type inefficiencies. One of my earliest political memories is of this charming incident, which had the effect of convincing me that the grown-ups didn't know what they were doing and might easily get us all killed. Followed in short order as it was by Tet (10 days later), the MLK assassination (less than 3 months later), and the RFK assassination (a couple of months after that), with horrendous casualty figures being reported on the TV news every week, 1968 was easily, in a purely public sense, the toughest year for the US since WWII, including the year just past. In the end it was redeemed by this, but I digress.

And there are still plenty of $600 hammers out there and what not. But were the US military of 2002 to take on the US military of 1968, the results would be, well, a lot like the Gulf War, or what we're seeing in Afghanistan. Nor is this entirely a matter of technological differences; there have been enormous doctrinal improvements as well. I don't imagine we'll be building a bunch of "firebases" in southwest Asia.

There was another disaster in progress in 1968, one which did not begin to abate for another quarter century, and is not yet over. I submit that its veterans have learned relatively little. Of course, plenty of people died, or led terribly distorted lives, as a result of the "Great Society," but those people weren't the "troops," they were their clients. Like the infantrymen used to say during the Civil War, who ever saw a dead cavalryman?

Negative feedback loops make all the difference. The American military was humiliated in Vietnam, and as a result, it learned a lot. The American welfare state caused immense damage at home, and learned very little.

 
Because It Can Become Good (II)

After my earlier post on this topic (for which the Bible Browser links seem to be working again), I received a substantial letter from reader Richard Carr, and have decided to make an exception to my usual policy of not merely repeating something someone else has written (I will, however, have a few comments after quoting his letter):

Certainly a great part of the American difference is the result of the Founders' (very British) preference for empiricism vs the French Revolutionists' belief that they could redesign society at will; this is addressed wonderfully well in Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Ironically, in not aiming directly at homeostasis -- to use a biological rather than an engineering analogy -- the US may have achieved it, at least in ways which most readily facilitate internal peace and the pursuit of individual happiness. A few years back, an article in American Heritage (I think) reviewed the enormous changes in the labor market which have occurred in the West since 1900 -- when, for example, half the working population of the UK was domestic servants, and half of American workers were farmers -- and noted that all the subsequent transitions, greater than those of the previous several millenia, were achieved with almost no bloodshed.

The juxtaposition of external vs internal threats put me in mind of Generations, which remains my favorite work of American history more than a decade after its publication. Without reproducing its cyclical hypothesis here, I believe the model presented by Strauss and Howe to be both descriptive and predictive, while still very much hoping that our present conflict ends far more decisively than did the first World War.

Human nature is a great constant. Every new generation must be taught to resist its darker impulses. That imperfect human beings can nonetheless comprise a society which moves in the direction of greater fairness, compassion, and security, while maintaining freedom and increasing wealth, is the great example which America presents to the world.

In short, Richard, thanks for an excellent letter.

[ 20020220 ]

 
You Think UWB is Cool? Try UBL

Scientists Build Ultra Broadband Laser, says Reuters:

I picked that quote out because it gives the bandwidth. Meanwhile, in New broadband laser-on-a-chip, UPI says:

They're not kidding. A few years back I built a spreadsheet based on pp 6-15 of this book, which includes some fairly hairy formulas and arcane terminology (eg, "transmitter modulation loss," "received signal-to-noise spectral density ratio in the data channel," etc). The bandwidth of the new laser is over 2 million times that of a VHF-TV channel (12.5 THz vs 6 MHz); plugging some numbers into my spreadsheet finds that its channel capacity is greater by a factor of 8 million. A cable modem or DSL line providing, say, a 2 Mbps downlink, could be replaced by a UBL/fiber line at 160 Tbps.

One hundred sixty trillion bits per second is nearly 13,000 channels of full-motion (30 fps), full-color (24 bit-planes, the ubiquitous "16.7 million colors") video 1 radian across at the resolution limit of 20/20 vision (about 43 seconds of arc) -- that is, 4800H x 3600V. That should hold us for a while.

[ 20020219 ]

 
Yet Another Clarification

Perusal of further correspondence suggests that I need an editor, because several people seem to think I'm suggesting that bloggers be paid to read e-mail. So, trying again, here goes:

My idea is that bloggers be paid to respond with a personal e-mail rather than simply be paid to blog, which is more or less the current model.

Example: I become wildly popular (you may have to exercise some willing suspension of disbelief here) and start getting 100 e-mails a day. I put one of those tip-jar things on Arcturus. If you want me to send you a little note saying that I read what you sent and thought it [was brilliant/kept me from falling asleep/stunk on ice] and that it reminded me of [some amazingly prescient thing from Postrel or Reynolds/the droning of a large insect/the ravings of a lunatic] and to [keep up the good work/have a nice day/don't ever write me again], you tip me:

And if you don't tip me, I don't write back.

Most of us can read at, say, 250 words per minute. But most of us can't type faster than about one-tenth that, and compose grammatically correct and comprehensible verbiage even slower. That's the bottleneck. So, as Spinal Tap sang, gimme some money.

Please note that no such policy is in effect on Arcturus yet; I merely reserve the right to be incredibly dilatory in my individual responses.

 
Caveat Emptor

Needless to say, after Reynolds linked to it, I got quite a few responses to the proposal below (but not near enough to make a living off responding to them, heh-heh). I should clarify its purpose: to pay for the beleaugered blogger's time.

Try to imagine answering a hundred e-mails after a full day of work and with household chores and/or pet- (or child-) care tasks to do, or any sort of appointment to keep in the evening. More to the point, try to imagine doing it with a spousal unit with a master's degree in economics wondering why you're glued to the PC. For a variety of reasons, making such activities pay for themselves starts seeming like a real good idea.

It is not intended to pay for the blog itself or to turn the blog into some kind of classified ad -- I pay you, you quote (or permalink to) me -- though such things could result.

There remains the non-trivial question of authentication. Over on The Daily Dose, Orchid pointed to a Technology Timeline from British Telecom which, albeit something of a grab bag of not-particularly-internally-consistent predictions, many of which will be obviated by nanotech, has its interesting moments. One such occurs on page 5: "People have some virtual friends but don't know which ones - 2007."

I think there will be a virtual blogger well before 2007 -- quite possibly by the end of 2002. A blog that does nothing but create hyperlinks to various news items and say things on the level of "this is cool" need be no more complex, conceptually, than Eliza. A blog more articulate than 90% of the blogs in existence wouldn't take much more coding than that.

It's a short step, if it's another step at all, from a virtual blogger to an auto-responder that uses a blogger's writing style to compose e-mails that don't sound like form letters.

I leave it to my fellow blog-readers to begin working out methods of verifying that those nice notes (or nastygrams) you've been collecting from überbloggers are for real.

[ 20020218 ]

 
An Entirely Serious Proposal Regarding Blogging, Payment, and E-Mail

Background: A while back, Virginia Postrel wrote (look for BLOGGERS & PUNDITGATE, THE HIDDEN CONNECTION) ...

After reading the above, I jokingly wrote to Virginia that she should take the donation box, or whatever it should be called, off of her site but charge people for a personal e-mail. Having not heard back from her, I'm beginning to suspect that she took me seriously and is implementing just such a policy.

I have never given Virginia a cent for reading "The Scene" (and I'm grown-up enough to know that buying "The Future and Its Enemies," subscribing to Reason for 20 years, and paying to attend some kind of Reason Foundation shindig in Dallas in the mid-'90s don't count). Nor have I given Glenn Reynolds even the tiniest contribution for reading "InstaPundit."

And they're the best of the lot. (As far as I'm concerned, they're national treasures -- I literally feel good about living in the same country as Virginia and Glenn.) But no matter how good their stuff is, it's "easily replicable content." (I've made a few vague attempts at "paying" for it by submitting what I hope are sufficiently clever ideas. Try that, and you'll discover that Virginia's still an editor at heart; she's set the bar pretty high.) What's "scarce and unreplicable" is a personal communication from them, even one in disagreement or anger.

They get hundreds of e-mails a day, and other bloggers, eg "Sgt Stryker," are beginning to experience this phenomenon as well. Bandwidth may be going up all the time, but the days aren't getting any longer, folks.

I therefore suggest the following:

First of all, the rest of us, the ünterbloggers and readers, should start respecting other people's time. Don't expect much of a response from somebody who's getting three-digit numbers of e-mails every day, even if you've known them for a while and they don't think you're nuts.

For the überbloggers, I suggest an explicit policy of no pay, no e-mail. Gimme 50 cents in the old PayPal bucket and you get a one-liner (thanks to She Who Must Be Obeyed for a typically firm proposal). A couple of bucks gets you a paragraph, or maybe a favorable mention in the blog itself for a few thousand people to read. Something really substantial gets you a permalink.

Now, since my gimmick in Arcturus seems to be math, let's work up some price points. What's your time worth? Say you want to make twice the median household income in half the time, that is, 4x the equivalent hourly rate; that would be, very roughly, $80/hr, or $1.30/min. How fast can you write? An 80-character line of text at 5-6 bytes per word is 13-16 words. One of those per minute works out to close to 10 cents/word. So my prices above might actually be a little low.

Hey, if Thomas Kincade can charge people $50 to have their picture taken with him ...

Me, I get about three e-mails a week. Even if this works, I won't be quitting the day job any time soon.

 
"Music of Our Time, But for All Time"

We attended this concert Saturday night, two years almost to the day from another concert of Arvo Pärt's music in the same venue.

Amen.

[ 20020217 ]

 
Because It Can Become Good

Over on The Edge of England's Sword, Iain Murray refs this depressing article from The Spectator, in which we learn that quite a few of the clergy in the C of E seem to have adopted the "let's-kill-'em-and-take-their-stuff" interpretation of Romans 11:17-24, all in the name of progressive politics, of course.

The endurance of certain politically-correct memes, such as the idea that Palestinians are always the oppressed and Israel always the oppressor, is one thing; it can be written off to simple-mindedness. But when European Christians, whose continent was the scene of genocide in the previous century, begin signing on to an ideology worthy of the Middle Ages, something much worse is happening. And the contrast with America, where the popular attitude toward Israel is based on something quite different, could not be more stark.

Of course, there is abundant historical precedent for this sort of thing; most European Jews ended up living in the East because the West had expelled them. But the question is insistent: why didn't Western Europeans learn anything from the events of 60 years ago?

And why did Americans learn? What kept us from falling into the hateful habits of centuries past? Why didn't we inherit the same poisonous attitudes? It's no good saying we're "better," or more literate, or less violent. We've got probably the highest percentage of (to coin a phrase) observably observant Christians on the planet. Per capita Bible ownership in this country is at least 1, suggesting that any textually transmitted memes which induce deadly anti-Semitism should express themselves as often here as anywhere else. But they don't.

(Digression: My mention of "textually transmitted memes" is by way of avoiding a virtual kick in the pants from David Zviel, a college friend who lives in Israel now. Said kick would come in the form of reminding me of Rosemary Ruether's "Faith and Fratricide," which ascribes the Holocaust to Romans chapters 9 through 11. Perhaps a necessary condition, but I do not think it a sufficient one; there are other ways of propagating anti-Semitism, ways which must have predominated for over a thousand years prior to Gutenberg. The printing press, which engendered Protestantism and incidentally saved the Talmud from eradication, can make it difficult for us to imagine life without the book [or the Book]. On a more positive note, I once heard a pastor ask: "What would your relationship with God be like if you couldn't read?" -- exactly the situation of the great majority of believers throughout history. To this day, the Eastern church makes powerful use of [admittedly somewhat stylized] visual imagery; many icons are intended to tell a story.)

Instead, this is arguably the best country in the world in which to be Jewish. And for people who don't think so, there's money available to help Jews from all over the world "make aliyah" and settle in Israel -- money donated by American evangelical Christians! I am in receipt (thanks to the aforementioned Dave) of an astonishing article in the Fri 14 Dec 01 edition of the Jerusalem Post (pp B5, B7) headlined "On Wings Of Faith" which details the extent of such operations, notably the International Christian Embassy.

It is certainly true that such activities are motivated by a set of eschatological memes of dubious merit which cannot be traced far back in historical Christianity -- perhaps no farther than the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1915 -- and which didn't really take off until after the Six-Day War. Israelis could be readily excused for wondering how long this phase of Semitophilia in American Christianity will last. But it's happening, and it's happening, by the way, in the richest and most powerful nation in history.

Were all this in aid of merely another dreary authoritarian regime, its moral significance would be limited indeed. The Israeli polity, however, stands head and shoulders above every other in the region (and probably every country other than the US from which Jews are immigrating); as the Spectator article noted, "Israeli Arabs have the vote, are members of the Knesset and one is even a supreme court judge." I am no more comfortable than anyone else with strong-arm police tactics or the use of eminent domain to separate people from their property -- because as a libertarian, I oppose such things everywhere. I would be an idiot to single out Israel for criticism on those grounds. Moral-equivalency (or -inferiority) arguments are especially foolish in a situation where the opposition consists of communists and gangsters.

So we find ourselves doing a good thing, a thing without precedent in two thousand years, a thing in sharp contrast with the attitudes of our closest cultural relatives. I'd be going way too far if I said I knew exactly why we get it right when so many others don't. But that it can happen here is enormously important. It suggests that America has, to borrow a phrase from myself, "an ability to apply selective pressures to memes" that somehow nudges them in a benign direction. Or, to answer a much earlier question, America is good because it can become good.

[ 20020215 ]

 
Causes of the Late Unpleasantness

Beauty of Gray has a nice piece on the Secession Resolutions. As many Confederate soldiers were saying long before the end, it was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. Thanks to Alex for the link.

 
Postmodernism in Washington

-- state, that is. From Effort to Rename Highway Draws Fire:

 
Afghans Address Flight Delays

I would never suggest that Americans adopt this approach to encouraging change in our excellent Federalized air travel security system:

But Norman Mineta might want to be careful about who he mixes with. ;)

[ 20020214 ]

 
Memento Mori

This will be my only post today, as it is the first anniversary of my father's death.

Perhaps the greatest common circumstance I shared with my father is that neither of us was a firstborn. Later-born children often find rebellion natural, and it seems to me that the great challenge is to direct that inclination into a constructive path. I believe that my father had a deeply intuitive understanding of this. I once lent him my copy of one of my favorite science-fiction novels, one with a great deal of political content -- much of which he was unlikely to approve. It is one of my most cherished memories that a few weeks later, that book came back with one sentence underlined: "Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a reality I expect to achieve."

But he did achieve it. In the spring of 1993 my father was diagnosed with colon cancer, and the circumstances of the diagnosis were such that we immediately realized that he had been suffering from this dread disease for two years. Nonetheless, it was completely treated with surgery alone, and subsequent discomfort and inconvenience were minimal. From that time on, my father held to an enviable level of emotional sobriety, a stability which had often eluded him earlier in life.

Before it arrived, I associated 2001 with the eponymous film, my favorite movie ever. Now it will always mark the end of one era and, as we may hope, the beginning of another. For me the exact measurement of the old era is 7/26/1926 - 2/14/2001, the span of my father's life on Earth. When I eulogized him at the memorial service in Springfield on the 24th of February, I chose to concentrate on the betterment of the human condition during his lifetime. I touched only lightly on his own condition, but the last years of my father's life were good beyond hope. I went from wondering how I could screw up as much as he did to doubting that I will ever set as fine an example. In the end, the life he lived made his passing, and his absence, far easier to bear.

[ 20020213 ]

 
What I Don't Like

In What We're Fighting For, the authors mention some things that they don't like about the US. While my policy for Arcturus implies keeping things on the positive side, I'm not wearing the proverbial rose-colored glasses. So in accordance with my standard for judging a sociopolitical system, here's what I don't like about this place: