Welcome to North Korea. Rule No. 1: Obey all rules.

Monday, December 6th, 2004

In Welcome to North Korea. Rule No. 1: Obey all rules, Steve Knipp describes his trip to North Korea’s Diamond Mountains, a tourism development run by South Korea’s Hyundai:

A Hyundai executive half-jokingly says that his company’s excursions are called ‘Don’t Do It! Tours.’ Cellphones, laptops, telephoto lenses, and powerful binoculars are strictly verboten. Visitors must wear photo ID tags at all times. Photos are forbidden inside the DMZ and in the North. You are not to point at a North Korean, and, in the unlikely event you talk with a resident, you are to avoid any political statements.

Two years ago a South Korean woman reportedly asked a North Korean why President Kim Jong Il was the only fat man in the country, and was detained for several days as a result.

Melodramatic, but effective:

Driving slowly in convoy, we trundled past 12-foot-high barbed wire fences, over small bridges with massive concrete tank traps (each mined with explosive charges), and, finally, past smiling South Korean soldiers standing inside sandbagged guard posts.

Those were the last smiles we were to see for the next 72 hours.

It gets crazier:

Our convoy continued northward through dry, rugged terrain that evokes the landscape seen in old cowboy films. But Hollywood Westerns don’t have armed North Korean soldiers standing at attention every 100 yards, mile after mile, every one holding a red flag. Should anyone decide to sneak his camera up to the bus window, a flag would be raised, and presumably the bus would be halted.

Here’s the real question:

In a nation where the average monthly salary is $47, North Korea earns $50 for every foreigner who visits. Moralists might question the wisdom of giving money to a harsh totalitarian regime. But the UN’s World Tourism Organization endorses the Hyundai program as a way to help reduce poverty in North Korea.

The money goes to a harsh totalitarian regime, but the UN supports the program? The money goes to a harsh totalitarian regime, so naturally the UN supports the program.

Armed robots soon marching to battle?

Saturday, December 4th, 2004

Armed robots soon marching to battle? describes the new armed Talon robot, or SWORDS — Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System — and its armament:

Different weapons can be interchanged on the system — the M16, the 240, 249 or 50-caliber machine guns, or the M202?A1 with a 6mm rocket launcher. Soldiers operate the SWORDS by remote control, from up to 1,000 meters away. In testing, it?s hit bulls eyes from as far as 2,000 meters away, Tordillos said. The only margin of error has been in sighting, he added.

[...]

The system runs off AC power, lithium batteries or Singars rechargeable batteries. The control box weighs about 30 pounds, with two joysticks that control the robot platform and the weapon and a daylight viewable screen.

Thank Goodness for Trade Deficits

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

Thank Goodness for Trade Deficits takes a contrarian look at modern-day mercantilism:

In truth, the problem with trade deficits has nothing to do with the deficits themselves, but instead with the media and political class that continue to misunderstand what they are. The very idea of a trade deficit is a misnomer in that as Irwin points out, ‘If a country is buying more goods and services from the rest of the world than it is selling, the country must also be selling more assets to the world than it is buying.’

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz explained the above concept best in his 1997 book, Libertarianism: A Primer. Boaz noted that he ran up trade deficits with his grocer, dentist, and department store, all of which bought nothing from him. On the other hand, Boaz had a trade surplus with his employer, along with the publisher of his book. His point was that all trade must in the end balance, that we produce in order to consume, and that buyers of goods and services must have produced something of value in order to be buyers.

Taking the David Boaz example and applying it to the U.S. as a country, if our citizens are buying more TVs and DVDs from Japan and China, it can only mean that someone, somewhere is buying something of value possessed by U.S. citizens; giving them the means such that they can afford to be such aggressive consumers.

PRIDE – Rulon Gardner vs Hidehiko Yoshida

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

According to the PRIDE Official Website, Rulon Gardner, the pudgy Greco-Roman wrestler who beat phenom, Alexander Karelin, will be fighting judo gold-medalist, Hidehiko Yoshida, in a mixed-martial arts match (what we used to call no holds barred):

That’s right. Amateur wrestling gold medal winner Gardner’s opponent is none other than judo gold medalist, Hidehiko Yoshida. Yoshida was greeted with huge cheers from the fans as he approached the ring, wearing a white judo uniform.

Defense Tech: Shoot to Protect

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

Shoot to Protect describes a new anti-RPG device:

In another few years, Hummers’ roofs could be covered with a dozen tubes, each filled with a foot-long mini-rocket called the FCLAS — short for Full Spectrum Active Protection Close-In Shield.

Every FCLAS would have a pair of radio-frequency sensors inside. One in the nose would detect incoming RPGs and fire off a counterstrike. A second sensor, in the rocket’s side, would go off when the RPG comes within range. The FCLAS would then detonate, letting loose a hail of explosive fragments, destroying the grenade in the process. The whole attack and response would take no more than a few seconds.

I think I can see a downside:

“And we have to make sure that if someone throws a rock, or a bird flies by, that it doesn’t go off.”

In From the Cold: He Was a Communist For Dutch Intelligence

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

In From the Cold: He Was a Communist For Dutch Intelligence tells a crazy tale:

As secretary-general of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, Chris Petersen traveled the globe during the Cold War, wowing Communist leaders with his revolutionary zeal and anticapitalist diatribes.

“I could make speeches for hours and you would think that Mao Tse-tung himself had been my teacher,” recalls the now-retired party chief.

The Chinese Communist Party was so impressed, it regularly gave the ranting Dutchman the full red-carpet treatment in Beijing: banquets in the Great Hall of the People, an audience with Mao, envelopes stuffed with cash and tributes in the People’s Daily. Albania’s Communists were also big fans.

Now, with communism all but dead, the Dutchman has decided to come clean: Both he and his party were a sham.

He says he was never a Maoist but an opera-loving math teacher moonlighting for Dutch intelligence. His name, his politics and his party, he says, all were concocted in a plot to penetrate militant Marxist subculture.

Tough Assignment: Teaching Evolution to Fundamentalists

Friday, December 3rd, 2004

Tough Assignment: Teaching Evolution to Fundamentalists describes a Sisyphean task:

Professional danger comes in many flavors, and while Richard Colling doesn’t jump into forest fires or test experimental jets for a living, he does do the academic’s equivalent: He teaches biology and evolution at a fundamentalist Christian college.

A frightening stat:

According to a Gallup poll released last month, only one-third of Americans regard Darwin’s theory of evolution as well supported by empirical evidence; 45% believe God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.

If we take the Deist concept of a clockwork universe far enough, we get Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker:

“What the designer designed is the random-design process,” or Darwinian evolution, Prof. Colling says. “God devised these natural laws, and uses evolution to accomplish his goals.” God is not in there with a divine screwdriver and spare parts every time a new species or a wondrous biological structure appears.

Unlike those who see evolution as an assault on faith, Prof. Colling finds it strengthens his own. “A God who can harness the laws of randomness and chaos, and create beauty and wonder and all of these marvelous structures, is a lot more creative than fundamentalists give him credit for,” he told me. Creating the laws of physics and chemistry that, over the eons, coaxed life from nonliving molecules is something he finds just as awe inspiring as the idea that God instantly and supernaturally created life from nonlife.

Of course, you’re not supposed to believe there’s really a watchmaker out there, once you see that random processes can produce seemingly “intelligent” designs…

Yahoo! News – Headless Bodies Found at Mysterious Mexico Pyramid

Thursday, December 2nd, 2004

Yahoo! News – Headless Bodies Found at Mysterious Mexico Pyramid:

The discovery of a tomb filled with decapitated bodies suggests Mexico’s 2,000 year-old ‘Pyramid of the Moon’ may have been the site of horrifically gory sacrifices, archeologists said on Thursday.

The tomb at Teotihuacan, the first major city built in the Americas, whose origins are one of history’s great mysteries, also held the bound carcasses of eagles, dogs and other animals.

[...]

Of the 12 human bodies found, 10 were decapitated and then tossed, rather than arranged, on one side of the burial site. The two other bodies were richly ornamented with beads and a necklace made of imitation human jaws.

You have to love some of those details. A necklace made of imitation human jaws?

The Killing of Peter McWilliams

Thursday, December 2nd, 2004

The Killing of Peter McWilliams is a sad, sad story:

McWilliams, a Californian, a computer genius and a poet, had been suffering from AIDS and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma since 1996. And under California’s Proposition 215, which passed in 1996 and legalized marijuana for medical purposes in the state, he used pot to suppress nausea and keep down his food and medication.

In what many consider to have been a politically motivated prosecution — McWilliams was a popular author and medical-marijuana activist whose book, “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do,” argued fervently against the criminalization of consensual acts — McWilliams’ home was raided by federal agents in 1997, and he was charged as a drug kingpin with conspiracy to sell marijuana.

A federal judge ruled that McWilliams could not rest his defense on his illness or on Proposition 215, which made his actions legal in his state, because federal drug laws superseded California’s. McWilliams pled guilty to avoid a 10-year mandatory-minimum prison sentence.

While out on bail and awaiting sentencing, prohibited from using medical marijuana, McWilliams died. He was found dead in his bathroom in Los Angeles at age 50. He choked to death on his own vomit — unable to keep down his medication.

The entire text of Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do is available on-line.

The Frivolity of Evil

Thursday, December 2nd, 2004

Theodore Dalrymple is retiring from medical practice. In The Frivolity of Evil he remarks on what he learned treating prisoners and the poor — that even without tyranny, widespread evil can flourish:

My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed?
[...]
No doubt my previous experiences fostered my preoccupation with this problem. My mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and though she spoke very little of her life before she came to Britain, the mere fact that there was much of which she did not speak gave evil a ghostly presence in our household.

Later, I spent several years touring the world, often in places where atrocity had recently been, or still was being, committed. In Central America, I witnessed civil war fought between guerrilla groups intent on imposing totalitarian tyranny on their societies, opposed by armies that didn’t scruple to resort to massacre. In Equatorial Guinea, the current dictator was the nephew and henchman of the last dictator, who had killed or driven into exile a third of the population, executing every last person who wore glasses or possessed a page of printed matter for being a disaffected or potentially disaffected intellectual. In Liberia, I visited a church in which more than 600 people had taken refuge and been slaughtered, possibly by the president himself (soon to be videotaped being tortured to death). The outlines of the bodies were still visible on the dried blood on the floor, and the long mound of the mass grave began only a few yards from the entrance. In North Korea I saw the acme of tyranny, millions of people in terrorized, abject obeisance to a personality cult whose object, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, made the Sun King look like the personification of modesty.
[...]
From the vantage point of one six-bedded hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just described and 5,000 victims of it: nearly 1 percent of the population of my city — or a higher percentage, if one considers the age-specificity of the behavior.

Is it just his personal experience?

And when my mother asks me whether I am not in danger of letting my personal experience embitter me or cause me to look at the world through bile-colored spectacles, I ask her why she thinks that she, in common with all old people in Britain today, feels the need to be indoors by sundown or face the consequences, and why this should be the case in a country that within living memory was law-abiding and safe? Did she not herself tell me that, as a young woman during the blackouts in the Blitz, she felt perfectly safe, at least from the depredations of her fellow citizens, walking home in the pitch dark, and that it never occurred to her that she might be the victim of a crime, whereas nowadays she has only to put her nose out of her door at dusk for her to think of nothing else? Is it not true that her purse has been stolen twice in the last two years, in broad daylight, and is it not true that statistics — however manipulated by governments to put the best possible gloss upon them — bear out the accuracy of the conclusions that I have drawn from my personal experience? In 1921, the year of my mother’s birth, there was one crime recorded for every 370 inhabitants of England and Wales; 80 years later, it was one for every ten inhabitants. There has been a 12-fold increase since 1941 and an even greater increase in crimes of violence. So while personal experience is hardly a complete guide to social reality, the historical data certainly back up my impressions.

Dalrymple blames the welfare state for much of the behavior he sees — mothers throwing out their kids to appease a new boyfriend, men abandoning their children’s mothers, etc.:

The state, guided by the apparently generous and humane philosophy that no child, whatever its origins, should suffer deprivation, gives assistance to any child, or rather the mother of any child, once it has come into being. In matters of public housing, it is actually advantageous for a mother to put herself at a disadvantage, to be a single mother, without support from the fathers of the children and dependent on the state for income. She is then a priority; she won’t pay local taxes, rent, or utility bills.

As for the men, the state absolves them of all responsibility for their children. The state is now father to the child. The biological father is therefore free to use whatever income he has as pocket money, for entertainment and little treats. He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demanding, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn’t get his own way. The violence escalates and becomes a habit. A spoiled brat becomes an evil tyrant.

WSJ.com – Touting Freedom, Bikers Take Aim At Helmet Laws

Wednesday, December 1st, 2004

WSJ.com – Touting Freedom, Bikers Take Aim At Helmet Laws argues that “the statistical case for helmet laws seems solid, according to analysis of government figures”:

In each state that recently repealed its mandatory helmet law, motorcycle deaths have more than doubled, sometimes in as short a span as three years. Motorcycle use has also increased, although not as much. To account for increased use, The Wall Street Journal looked at the change in motorcycle fatalities per 10,000 registered motorcycles.

In the six years since Texas repealed its law in 1997, the annual rate has jumped nearly 30%, to an average 10.95 deaths per 10,000 registered motorcycles, compared with an average of 8.46 deaths for the two years prior to the repeal. In Kentucky, the average rate has jumped to 9.9 in the five years since its 1998 repeal, up 55% compared with the average for the two years before.

In Florida, in the three years since repeal, the rate is up 21%, to 8.94, compared with the two-year average prior to the repeal.

I’d argue that the statistical case for helmet use seems solid, according to analysis of government figures — assuming you value safety over the wind in your hair. Still, those stats don’t totally account for increased motorcycle use, just ownership. If wearing a helmet is unpleasant (particularly in the hot summer months), then we’d expect to see bike owners riding more when helmets aren’t mandatory — more riding per registered motorcycle.

Landscape Architects: Deer Are Designing Future Look of Forests

Wednesday, December 1st, 2004

From Landscape Architects: Deer Are Designing Future Look of Forests:

It’s deer-hunting season across the land — a time when Americans are reminded that bountiful whitetails have their costs. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said earlier this month that animal-vehicle crashes, mostly involving deer, killed more than 200 people last year and caused an estimated $1 billion-plus in property damage. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says deer cause more than $400 million in yearly crop damage, not including home gardens and ornamental shrubbery.

But below the radar of most people, whitetails have been eating their way toward a more lasting legacy: They are wreaking ecological havoc in forests across the nation. They have become de facto forest managers, determining today what many forests will look like 100 years from now, say forest experts.

‘Deer have stopped the regeneration of our forests in many areas,’ says Peter Pinchot, a Yale-educated director of the 1,400-acre Milford Experimental Forest on the Poconos Plateau in Pennsylvania. That means little trees aren’t growing up to eventually replace big trees.

A little history:

Gary Alt, Pennsylvania’s chief deer biologist, says that allowing deer to multiply beyond the point where forests can replenish themselves, “has been the biggest mistake in the history of wildlife management.” He calls it “malpractice.”

Ironically, it was Mr. Pinchot’s grandfather, Gifford Pinchot, who helped bring back whitetail deer a century ago. As the first director of the U.S. Forest Service, he helped pioneer a conservation movement to save forests and restore species of birds and animals all but wiped out by commercial hunters. When he took over the job in 1898, the whitetail population was no more than 500,000 nationwide.

Pennsylvania had fewer than 600 deer. Restocking began in 1906 with deer brought in by rail from Wisconsin, Michigan and West Virginia. With hunting restrictions, the herd grew back quickly. By 1917, Pennsylvania was the too-many-deer poster boy. Hunters loved it. Foresters hated it. Today, Pennsylvania has an estimated 1.6 million whitetails.

“If Gifford Pinchot could see what deer have done to our forests, he’d roll over in his grave,” says Bryon P. Shissler, a wildlife biologist in Pennsylvania who consults on deer issues.

Nationally, whitetail population estimates range from 20 million to 33 million — more than when Columbus arrived five centuries ago, wildlife historians believe. That’s way too many deer to allow forests to regain their health and diversity, says Peter Pinchot.

This is so true:

Deer love exurbs, where forest meets garden, with no predators and delicious ornamental shrubbery.

“They know where the safety zone is,” says Mr. Pinchot. Some studies show that in deep forest, coyotes and bears kill half the fawns, he says. But man has long been the deer’s chief predator. With exurban sprawl, a big threat now is likely to be the family SUV.

WSJ.com – A Lesson for Social Security: Many Mismanage Their 401(k)s

Wednesday, December 1st, 2004

WSJ.com – A Lesson for Social Security: Many Mismanage Their 401(k)s describes the evolution of retirement accounts:

Traditionally companies offered ‘defined benefit’ pensions, paying out a specific sum each month to retirees from a money stash managed by professionals that the company had built up over the years. But that approach was risky for companies: If their investments did badly, they might fall short of the money needed to pay pensions. The 401(k) accounts, so named because of a section in the Internal Revenue Code permitting them, became popular because the risk is entirely with employees. If their investments do badly, that is their problem.

Concern that employees need more guidance has led to one major rule change by the Labor Department, which regulates 401(k) plans. In December 2001, the department gave the green light for investment companies to hire independent advisory firms to manage 401(k) accounts for individual investors. That was the spur for the managed-account plans now offered at Magnetek, J.C. Penney and Alcoa. For the service, 401(k) account holders pay annual fees that generally range from 0.25% to 0.6% of assets. This comes on top of the fees charged by the stock and bond funds in the 401(k) account.

Merrill Lynch rolled out its managed-account 401(k) plans in October 2002. It says 23 companies have signed on and nearly one-fifth of their eligible workers have opted to turn over all of their investment decision-making. In October, Vanguard introduced its managed-account program with Financial Engines, a Palo Alto, Calif., company founded by Nobel Prize-winning economist William F. Sharpe. Vanguard has already signed up 12 companies.

Employees tend to make very bad investment decisions, even when they have every incentive to learn the basics of investment. Some examples:

Yet in 2003, 38% of 401(k) accounts held by workers in their 20s had no money in stock funds and another 22% had 50% or less, according to a study by the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute and the Investment Company Institute, the mutual-fund industry’s lobbying arm. Meanwhile, 13% of workers in their 60s were exposing themselves to high risk by putting more than 90% of their money in stocks.

[...]

Until a few years ago, some employees “would just allocate evenly across the board through all the funds or be all in cash — and these are people in their 20s who shouldn’t be investing like that,” says David Reiland, chief financial officer. “My guess is that about 75% of people were probably just doing it without any real financial analysis.”

[...]

Yet the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s study conducted with the mutual-fund industry found that 53% of 401(k) accounts have more than 10% of their assets in company stock. Just over 10% of accounts had more than 90% of their assets in company stock.

At Penney, 38% of the $3.6 billion in the 401(k) plan was invested in J.C. Penney stock and another 38% was sitting in a conservative interest-bearing account as of the beginning of 2004. Just 24% of the money was invested in stock or bond funds.

[...]

The 44-year-old says she knows how important the money in her 401(k) account will be when it is time to retire. “I want to make sure I’m doing the right thing,” she says. But asked how much of her 401(k) account is invested in stock funds and how much in bond funds, Ms. Scholze confesses she doesn’t know the difference. “The folks who do this sort of [401(k)] education tend to speak at a higher level,” she says.

What Would Darwin Say About AIDS?

Wednesday, December 1st, 2004

What Would Darwin Say About AIDS? makes the case that wishful thinking and political piety won’t cure AIDS; “a full understanding of Darwinian selection is the key to a full response to AIDS, and to a fully responsive public-health system”:

According to Gallup, only a third of Americans, in 2004, accept Darwinian evolution; a full 45 percent agree with the statement that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

Writing about disease as a phenomenon, author David Quammen observes that “the dynamics” of microbes within human populations, “can only be understood in terms of evolution.” Quammen continues, “The capacity for quick change among disease-causing microbes is what makes them so dangerous to large numbers of people and so difficult and expensive to treat.” That is, “By natural selection they acquire resistance to drugs that should kill them. They evolve. There’s no better or immediate evidence supporting the Darwinian theory than this process.” And so penicillin, for example, became available in 1943 to fight staphylococcus aureus infections, and yet resistant strains of staph were observed as early as 1947.

The same Darwinian evolution occurs in viruses: “Some viruses evolve quickly, some slowly. Among the fastest is HIV, because its method of replicating itself involves a high rate of mutation, and those mutations allow the virus to assume new forms.” That is, like penicillin before it, all the AIDS medications, now and in the future, are subject to being OBE — Overtaken By Epidemic.

If people don’t understand this evolutionary reality, they will make the mistake of thinking that AIDS can be “cured.” The plain fact is that many illnesses mankind once thought it was rid of, such as malaria and tuberculosis, have made big comebacks, even in prosperous societies. True eradication comes when the virus is extirpated from the natural environment, as has been the case with smallpox, where only a few samples exist, locked away frozen in vaults.

In the meantime, efforts to medicate AIDS on the cheap have boomeranged, contributing to accelerated evolution of the viral enemy. The use of substandard generic drugs around the world has strengthened the AIDS strain, in ways that Darwin anticipated, by weeding out the weaker pathogens, giving more room to the stronger.

In summary:

The message can be put simply: Learn or Die.

My young brother-in-law thought I was joking (in poor taste) when I told him about the last AIDS “cure” mentioned here:

Many African men refuse to believe that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. They eschew condoms. And they adhere to certain popular folkways that can be fatal. For instance, some men believe they can be cured of AIDS by drinking a certain medicinal tea or, even more insidious, by having sex with a virgin.

Bugs in the belfry

Wednesday, December 1st, 2004

Bugs in the belfry tries to answer whether Nietzsche was already demented when he wrote his last few works:

In 1888, a sickly Nietzsche wrote the tracts ‘Twilight of the Idols,’ ‘The Antichrist,’ ‘Ecce Homo,’ and ‘The Case of Wagner’ in a burst of productivity. But the following January in Turin, he flung his arms around the neck of a horse being flogged, collapsed in the piazza, and swiftly descended into a raving dementia brought on — as records of a young Nietzsche’s treatment for syphilis 30 years earlier would appear to indicate — by paresis. So was Nietzsche suffering, as many have argued, from incipient paresis when he wrote ‘Twilight of the Idols,’ et al? [...] Or did the philosopher go mad from some other cause all of a sudden, in the space of a single day, as others prefer to believe?

A microbiologist by the name of Margulis believes that the spirochete Treponema pallidum, the lively, corkscrew-shaped bacterium that causes syphilis, can lay dormant for years before reviving explosively:

But is it possible for paresis to appear overnight, instead of slowly? Margulis believes it is, and as evidence points to studies of microbial mat samples taken from Eel Pond in Woods Hole and kept in a jar in a UMass-Amherst lab. Although no typical spirochetes were found in these samples, Margulis recounts, when food and water known to support spirochete activity were added to some samples, spirochetes that could only have been been lying dormant suddenly awoke from their slumber. Extrapolating from these experiments, Margulis argues that inactive Treponema pallidum spirochetes had been hiding out in Nietzsche’s tissues ever since his syphilis treatment some 30 years earlier.”

But on January 3, 1889 in Turin,” Margulis concludes, channeling Vincent Price, “armies of revived spirochetes munched on his brain tissue. The consequence was the descent of Nietzsche the genius into Nietzsche the madman in less than one day.”