A Military Growth Industry

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Back in 1998, Robert Kaplan was noting that Special Forces were already a military growth industry:

The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry H. Shelton, comes from the Special Operations Forces. In 1996 U.S. Special Forces were responsible for 2,325 missions in 167 countries involving 20,642 people — only nine per operation, on average.

These quiet professionals are low-key and discreet and vital for fighting small wars against criminal syndicates:

Considering that the threat posed by Russian mafias and Russian nuclear terrorists is now greater than that posed by Russian tanks and infantry, the military usefulness of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will depend more on the integration of Special Forces within NATO’s largely conventional command than on the integration of the Czech Republic and other former Eastern-bloc states.

Then there are the gas and oil pipelines soon to be built through unstable tribal lands around the Caspian Sea, which will need protection; mounting problems with drug cartels; a predicted upsurge in the kidnapping of rich and politically prominent people and their children; the increase in climatic catastrophe, now that human beings are inhabiting flood- and earthquake-prone regions to an unprecedented extent; and worldwide rapid-fire urbanization. All these augment the importance of lean and mobile military units that conflate the traditional categories of police officers, commandos, emergency-relief specialists, diplomats, and, of course, intelligence officers.

Modern Special Forces soldiers bear little resemblance to Vietnam-era Green Berets:

The Vietnam-era men, most of them in their fifties, looked thuggish: guys without necks and occasionally with tattoos, guys you would not want to meet in the dark. The rest of the auditorium resembled a group of graduate students who happened to be in excellent physical shape.

Posted in Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

We’re not all out of the Malthusian Trap

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Malthusian alarmists like Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) were wrong about the world as a whole, but population growth is still a problem in places where a large share of income is derived from fixed assets:

In 2008 remittances were 18.7% of Haiti’s GDP. In comparison foreign aid before the catastrophe was 10.4% of GDP. Agriculture is 28% of Haiti’s GDP. These 3 sources of income are a combined 57% of Haiti’s GDP.

They have one thing in common: they have a low (but not zero) marginal product of labor. Having more people will not make these sources of income go up proportionally.

Why would remittances not be affected by the number of people? The reason is that other countries limit Haitian immigration. According to Gallop about half of Haiti’s population would emigrate if it could, one of the highest in the world. They have not emigrated because other countries limit how many Haitians they want to absorb.

Foreign aid is somewhat responsive to population, but far from proportional. Small poor countries tend to get more aid per capita.

More workers in agriculture certainly have some value, but again given how many people there are already in agriculture (two thirds of the labor force) more workers will not add much value. The scarce land limits the value of more labor.

Haiti’s per capita GDP would be 43% higher if today’s aid and remittances were shared on their 1960 population instead of their current population (assuming it aid and remittances were same, but ignoring agriculture).

The idea of population control has been discredited in rich countries — for good reason:

The reason is that with our institutions, wealth is produced by labor. More mouths also mean more hands, so per capita income is generally not related to population size. Since more people produce more ideas, growth may even increase with population size for rich countries.

But that’s not true everywhere:

The most obvious case where more people reduces the average standard of living is Saudi Arabia.

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

A model of the history of human misery

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Razib Khan shares his model of the history of human misery, which addresses the truism of modern cultural anthropology that the move from hunting and gathering to farming was a big mistake:

There’s plenty of evidence that farming supports many more people per unit of land, so in pure demographic terms hunter-gathering was bound to be doomed. They didn’t have the weight of numbers. But why did the initial farmers transition from being hunter-gatherers to farmers in the first place? Because I think that farming was initially the rational individual choice, and led to more potential wealth and reproductive fitness. Remember, there’s a big difference between existing in a state of land surplus and one of labor surplus. American farmers were among the healthiest and most fertile human populations which had ever lived before the modern era. Pioneers had huge families, and continued to push out to the frontier. This was not the lot of Russian serfs or Irish potato farmers. But eventually frontiers close, and Malthusian logic kicks in. The population eventually has nowhere to go, and the surplus of land disappears. At this point you reach a “stationary state,” where a peasant society oscillates around its equilibrium population.


I suspect that new farming populations which slam up against the Malthusian limit suffered even more misery than their descendants. This is because I believe that their demographic explosion had outrun their biological and cultural capacity to respond to the consequences of the changes wrought upon their environment. First and foremost, disease. During the expansionary phase densities would have risen, and infectious diseases would have begun to take hold. But only during the stationary state would they become truly endemic as populations become less physiologically fit due to nutritional deficiencies. The initial generations of farmers who reached the stationary state would have been ravaged by epidemics, to which they’d only slowly develop immunological responses (slowly on a human historical scale, though fast on a evolutionary one). This is even evident in relatively recent historical period; Italians developed biological and cultural adaptations to the emergence of malaria after the fall of Rome (in terms of culture, there was a shift toward settlement in higher locations).

But there would be more to adapt to than disease. Diet would be a major issue. During the expansionary phase it seems plausible that farmers could supplement their cereal based diet with wild game. But once they hit the stationary phase they would face the trade-off between quantity and quality in terms of their foodstuffs. Hunter-gathering is relatively inefficient, and can’t extract as many calories per unit out of an acre (at least an order of magnitude less), but the diet tends to be relatively balanced, rich in micronutrients, and often fats and protein as well. The initial shock to the physiology would be great, but over time adaptations would emerge to buffer farmers somewhat from the ill effects of their deficiencies. This is one hypothesis for the emergence of light skin, as a way to synthesize vitamin D endogenously, as well as greater production of enzymes such as amylase and persistence of lactase, which break down nutrients which dominate the diet of agriculturalists.

Once societies reached a stationary state it would take great shocks to push them to a position where becoming hunter-gatherers again might be an option. A population drop of 50%, not uncommon due to plague or political collapse, would still not be low enough so that the remaining individuals would be able to subsist upon game and non-cultivated plant material. Additionally the ecology would surely have been radically altered so that many of the large game animals which might have been the ideal sources of sustenance in the past would be locally extinct. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the highland Maya city-states seems to have resulted in lower population densities and reduced social complexity, but in both regions agriculture remained dominant. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the Mississippian societies might have experienced die offs on the order of 90% due to contact with Spanish explorers, and later ethnography by European settlers suggests much simpler tribal societies than what the Spaniards had encountered. Though these tribal groupings, such as the Creeks, still knew how to farm, it seems that judging from the conflicts which emerged due to European encroachment on hunting grounds that this population drop was great enough to allow for a greater reversion to the pre-agricultural lifestyle than was able to occur elsewhere. But then the pre-Columbian exchange and the exposure of native populations to the 10,000 years of Eurasian pathogen evolution was to some extent a sui generis event.

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

Neofusionist God of Justice

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Neofusionist, who (a) has lost faith in Google’s blog-hosting, and (b) has lost faith in democracy — and thus is no longer a fusionist — has decided to move his blog and re-dub it, and himself, as Foseti:

When I started this blog, I still believed in democracy — I no longer do. A new fusionism seems superfluous at this point, so the blog needs a new name. I’ll turn 30 in the next year as well, perhaps that’s also worth a change.

I started blogging mostly to keep track of my reading, but lately I’ve seen my blogging pop up in other places. I was honored to be linked to by Mangan and Isegoria and I was happy to get a few comments from C. Van Carter.

The new blog is named after the old Norse god of justice, truth and peace. I couldn’t find a god of justice, truth and order, so peace will have to do.

My first thought was, of course, Ooh, he mentioned me! My second thought was, Wait, isn’t Tyr the Norse god of justice? Yes, but Forseti is the Norse god of peaceful justice:

Forseti was considered the wisest and most eloquent of gods of Asgard. In contrast to his fellow god Tyr, who presided over the bloody affairs of carnal law, Forseti presided over disputes resolved by mediation. He sat in his hall, dispensing justice to those who sought it, and was said to be able to always provide a solution that all parties considered fair. Like his father Baldr, he was a gentle god and favored peace so all judged by him could live in safety as long as they upheld his sentence. Forseti was so respected that only the most solemn oaths were uttered in his name.

I’m assuming it’s sometimes spelled without the r.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Memetic Weapons

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare, Eric S. Raymond says:

Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet.

The Soviets, on the other hand, were masters of the game:

They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

Raymond lists the Soviets’ memetic weapons:

  • There is no truth, only competing agendas.

  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

The true measure of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda at all:

It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Moscow’s stray dogs

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Moscow’s stray dogs number in the tens of thousands — the current best guess is 35,000, or 84 stray dogs per square mile — and they fall into four basic categories:

Those that remain most comfortable with people Poyarkov calls “guard dogs”. Their territories tend to be garages, warehouses, hospitals and other fenced-in institutions, and they develop ties to the security guards from whom they receive food and whom they regard as masters. I’ve seen them in my neighbourhood near the front gate to the Central Clinical Hospital for Civil Aviation. When I pass on the other side with my dog they cross the street towards us, barking loudly.

“The second stage of becoming wild is where the dog is socialised to people in general, but not personally,” says Poyarkov. “These are the beggars and they are excellent psychologists.” He gives as an example a dog that appears to be dozing as throngs of people walk past, but who rears his head when an easy target comes into view: “The dog will come to a little old lady, start smiling and wagging his tail, and sure enough, he’ll get food.” These dogs not only smell who is carrying something tasty, but sense who will stop and feed them.

The beggars live in relatively small packs and are subordinate to leaders. If a dog is intelligent but occupies a low rank and does not get enough to eat, he will separate from the pack frequently to look for food. If he sees other dogs begging, he will watch and learn.

The third group comprises dogs that are somewhat socialised to people, but whose social interaction is directed almost exclusively towards other strays. Their main strategy for acquiring food is gathering scraps from the streets and the many open rubbish bins. During the Soviet period, the pickings were slim, which limited their population (as did a government policy of catching and killing them). But as Russia began to prosper in the post-Soviet years, official efforts to cull them fell away and, at the same time, many more choice offerings appeared in the bins. The strays flourished.

The last of Poyarkov’s groups are the wild dogs. “There are dogs living in the city that are not socialised to people. They know people, but view them as dangerous. Their range is extremely broad, and they are predators. They catch mice, rats and the occasional cat. They live in the city, but as a rule near industrial complexes, or in wooded parks. They are nocturnal and walk about when there are fewer people on the streets.”

But there’s also a fifth category of stray dog, the metro dog:

There is one special sub-group of strays that stands apart from the rest: Moscow’s metro dogs. “The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their biological clocks.”

The metro dog also has uncannily good instincts about people, happily greeting kindly passers by, but slinking down the furthest escalator to avoid the intolerant older women who oversee the metro’s electronic turnstiles. “Right outside this metro,” says Neuronov, gesturing toward Frunzenskaya station, a short distance from the park where we were speaking, “a black dog sleeps on a mat. He’s called Malish. And this is what I saw one day: a bowl of freshly ground beef set before him, and slowly, and ever so lazily, he scooped it up with his tongue while lying down.”

Russians haven’t adopted the practice of sterilizing their pets, so the supply of new strays is never-ending — but at an equilibrium:

One Russian, noting that my male Ridgeback is neutered, exclaimed: “Now, why would you want to cripple a dog in that way?” Even though the city budget allocated more than $30m to build 15 animal shelters last year, that is not nearly enough to accommodate the strays. Still, there is pressure from some quarters to return to the practice of catching and culling them. Poyarkov believes this would be dangerous. While the goal, he acknowledges, “is to do away with dogs who carry rabies, tapeworms, toxoplasmosis and other infections, what actually happens is that infected dogs and other animals outside Moscow will come into the city because the biological barrier maintained by the population of strays in Moscow is turned upside down. The environment becomes chaotic and unpredictable and the epidemiological situation worsens.”

(Hat tip to Razib Khan.)

Posted in Animals, Policy | No Comments »

Governments are determined not by what liberal humanists wish

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Governments are determined not by what liberal humanists wish but rather by what business people and others require, Robert Kaplan says:

Burma, too, may be destined for a hybrid regime, despite the deification of the opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi by Western journalists. While the United States calls for democracy in and economic sanctions against Burma, those with more immediate clout — that is, Burma’s Asian neighbors, and especially corporate-oligarchic militaries like Thailand’s — show no compunction about increasing trade links with Burma’s junta. Aung San Suu Kyi may one day bear the title of leader of Burma, but only with the tacit approval of a co-governing military. Otherwise Burma will not be stable.

A rule of thumb is that governments are determined not by what liberal humanists wish but rather by what business people and others require. Various democratic revolutions failed in Europe in 1848 because what the intellectuals wanted was not what the emerging middle classes wanted. For quite a few parts of today’s world, which have at best only the beginnings of a middle class, the Europe of the mid nineteenth century provides a closer comparison than the Europe of the late twentieth century. In fact, for the poorest countries where we now recommend democracy, Cromwell’s England may provide the best comparison.

From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan | No Comments »

Giant, Sophisticated, Disposable

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Growing up, I had always assumed that spy satellites were chock-full of sophisticated electronics — including, of course, television cameras. This probably was true by the time I was aware of spy satellites, but the first spy satellites carried Kodak film, which they had to return to earth from orbit. They were giant, sophisticated, disposable cameras, produced by something called the Corona project:

When the Corona satellites were launched the CIA used a “cover” story. They called the Corona satellites the “Discoverer” program and claimed it was an experimental program to develop and test satellite subsystems and explore environmental conditions in space. The film recovery capsule was described as a “biomedical capsule” for the recovery of biological specimens sent into space as an early test of how humans would react to manned spaceflight.

The Corona project was run like a startup — a small team, minimum bureaucracy, focussed on a goal and tightly integrated with customer needs. Starting in February 1959, only 12 months after the program began the Air Force launched the first Corona reconnaissance satellite from the military’s secret spaceport on the California coast at Vandenberg Air Force Base. But the first 13 missions were failures. Yet the program was deemed so important to national security the CIA and the Air Force persevered. And when the first images were received they transformed technical intelligence forever. Objects as small as 6 feet (some claim 3 feet) could be seen from space over millions of miles of a formally closed country.
[...]
While Corona had a number of technological breakthroughs, including the first photoreconnaissance satellite, the first recovery of an object from space, etc. it was Corona imagery in 1961 that told the intelligence community and the new Kennedy administration that the “missile gap” (the supposed Soviet lead in ICBMs) was illusory. By fall of 1961 Soviet Union had a total of six deployed ICBMs — we had ten times as many. In truth, it was the U.S. that had the lead in missiles.

Corona was just the beginning. Overhead reconnaissance would become an integral part of the U.S. intelligence community. Hidden in plain sight, Lockheed and the U.S. intelligence community were just getting started in Silicon Valley.

Posted in Steve Blank, Technology, War | 1 Comment »

Adult Supervision

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Charles Sykes has a few things to say about adult supervision:

The Duke of Wellington once said (perhaps apocryphally) that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” — reflecting his view that competitive sports shape a nation’s character.

At this point we had better hope that’s not true about America, unless we plan on going to war against an enemy who also values non-competitive, risk-free, self-esteem-building play activities for its young.

(Hat tip to Neofusionist.)

Posted in Education, War | No Comments »

Why Haiti Is So Hopeless

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Haiti’s Malthusian poverty is the default state of mankind, Steve Sailer notes, but getting fed and looked after by 10,000 foreign charitable organizations is not.

Why is Haiti so poor?, commentators ask, but for a country with an African culture — and Haiti does have an African culture; they killed off the white population early — Haiti isn’t particularly poor:

22 sub-Saharan African countries have lower per capita GDPs than Haiti’s $1,300, with Zimbabwe last at $200.

Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) looks at the natural experiment that split Hispaniola into Haiti and the Dominican Republic:

One of these [social and political differences] involves the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in its overseas empire. The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was itself in economic and political to decline.

Hence France could and did invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island.

France also imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain. As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbour during colonial times — and it still has a somewhat larger population today. But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic so that Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double its neighbour’s population density.

The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side. In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid-mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.

Diamond actually has more to say on that point, but probably nothing The Guardian wants to print. Sailer explains:

In Collapse, Diamond praised the D.R.’s old megalomaniacal dictator Rafael Trujillo (1891–1961) for stealing much of the forestland and exploiting it cautiously in a rational manner. Dominican kleptocracy helped avoid the tragedy of the commons that contributed to the ecological ruin of Haiti, where the common folk chop down all trees for cooking fuel.

Diamond cautiously points out another advantage:

A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic — with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry — was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contri buted to the country’s development. The people of the Dominican Republic even chose to resume their status as a Spanish colony from 1812 to 1821 and its president chose to make his country a protectorate of Spain from 1861 to 1865.

Apparently Trujillo was the only national leader to recruit Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Who knew?

Only outside charity and emigration, Sailer says, keep Haiti from starvation — which leads him to suggest a modest proposal:

One obvious step that could help Haiti in the long run has, unfortunately, dropped almost into the realm of the unmentionable these days: increased funding of population control efforts. (Full disclosure: I’m a Catholic).

Third World birth control used to be a fashionable progressive cause. When I was a kid, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, made about 20 guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The Rockefellers and George H.W. Bush were strong advocates of the need for Third Worlders to reduce their fertility.

But today, it’s hard to find much on Google about Haiti and contraceptives. According to a 2001 World Health Organization report: “Among sexually active women, 13% used a modern method of contraception and 4% relied on traditional methods”.

And the other 83 percent?

It appears that Haitian women now wisely want to reduce the number of children they have — Haiti’s total fertility rate is said to be down to 3.8 babies per lifetime, the same as Saudi Arabia’s. But Haitians need to bring their fertility down to European below-replacement rates for a couple of generations to allow the land to recover — and the people, hopefully, improve their “human capital”.

Let’s make long lasting Depo Provera contraceptive injections free to Haitian women.

Anyone got any better ideas?

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Policy Vampires

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Every spring, the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky runs a policy simulation designed to illustrate the difficulty of operating an organization in the context of asymmetric and limited information, and every fall Professor Robert Farley runs his own two-hour mini-simulation to give students a sense of how the larger simulation will play out:

In my first year, I did zombies; the year after was the aftermath of Independence Day, and last year I asked our 35 first-year graduate students to develop a strategy for containing or killing Godzilla.

This year it was vampires:

Each group was tasked with developing an organizational response to the imminent public declaration of the existence of vampires. I gave each group a few general questions, then set them lose.

CIA and DoD each received a bit of additional information. CIA had been aware of the existence of vampires essentially from the point of its founding, as had most major foreign intelligence organizations. The CIA even employed vampiric agents from time to time; a CIA vampire killed Salvador Allende.

DoD’s relationship was even longer and more extensive. In its previous incarnations as the Departments of War and Navy, the US military had employed vampires since the Civil War. In World War II, an entire brigade sized unit was created, although it was mainly concerned with responding to the activities of German and Japanese vampires. I also indicated that many analysts believed that Osama Bin Laden was a vampire, and that Al Qaeda seemed comfortable with the use of vampiric agents.

Here’s what his Department of Justice group came up with:

  • Prioritize vampire-specific policies. When crafting initial vampire policy, reducing risk to humans must take precedence over the granting of equal protection to vampires.
  • Define vampire’s legal status. If the President desires full vampire inclusion in the human population, they must be granted equal protection under the law.
  • Review U.S. laws to make them species neutral, as far as possible.
  • Strengthen criminal statutes that address crimes likely to be associated with vampire behavior, including feeding and conversion. Also, create human-on-vampire hate crimes.
  • Amnesty for past crimes and legal food supply based on self-identification within a specified time frame.
  • Create and fund a new interagency entity headed by the Department of Justice to deal with vampire registration, identification and criminal enforcement, and distribution of vampire food.
  • Liaise with Interpol regarding transnational vampire threats.

Posted in Games, Policy | No Comments »

Singapore and South Africa shred our democratic certainties

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Singapore and South Africa shred our democratic certainties, Robert Kaplan contends. Singapore’s success is frightening, he says, yet it must be acknowledged:

Lee Kuan Yew’s offensive neo-authoritarianism, in which the state has evolved into a corporation that is paternalistic, meritocratic, and decidedly undemocratic, has forged prosperity from abject poverty. A survey of business executives and economists by the World Economic Forum ranked Singapore No. 1 among the fifty-three most advanced countries appearing on an index of global competitiveness. What is good for business executives is often good for the average citizen: per capita wealth in Singapore is nearly equal to that in Canada, the nation that ranks No. 1 in the world on the United Nations’ Human Development Index.

When Lee took over Singapore, more than thirty years ago, it was a mosquito-ridden bog filled with slum quarters that frequently lacked both plumbing and electricity. Doesn’t liberation from filth and privation count as a human right? Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of international trade at Harvard, writes that “good government” means relative safety from corruption, from breach of contract, from property expropriation, and from bureaucratic inefficiency. Singapore’s reputation in these regards is unsurpassed. If Singapore’s 2.8 million citizens ever demand democracy, they will just prove the assertion that prosperous middle classes arise under authoritarian regimes before gaining the confidence to dislodge their benefactors.

Meanwhile, democratic South Africa has become one of the most violent places on earth, outside of outright war zones:

The murder rate is six times that in the United States, five times that in Russia. There are ten private-security guards for every policeman. The currency has substantially declined, educated people continue to flee, and international drug cartels have made the country a new transshipment center. Real unemployment is about 33 percent, and is probably much higher among youths. Jobs cannot be created without the cooperation of foreign investors, but assuaging their fear could require the kind of union-busting and police actions that democracy will not permit.

From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan | No Comments »

Science project prompts school evacuation

Monday, January 18th, 2010

A tech magnet school, holding a science fair, was evacuated, because an 11-year-old student showed up with his project, an empty bottle with wires and other electrical components attached:

Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.

The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.

Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.

When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student’s backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.

A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.

Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device.

Both the student and his parents were “very cooperative” with authorities, Luque said. He said fire officials also went to the student’s home and checked the garage to make sure items there were neither harmful nor explosive.

“There was nothing hazardous at the house,” Luque said.

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.

The student violated school policies by bringing a home-made motion-detector to school as part of the science fair?

Posted in Education, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Monday, January 18th, 2010

The premise of James Cameron’s Avatar — a wheel-chair-bound man controlling a genetically engineered creature — comes from Poul Anderson’s classic novella, Call Me Joe, while the trite story of a white messiah going native comes from any number of movies, Dances with Wolves most notably. What I did not realize was that the names of the lush planet and its inhabitants both come from a Russian science-fiction series, The World of Noon:

Cinema audiences in Russia have been quick to point out that Avatar has elements in common with The World of Noon, or Noon Universe, a cycle of 10 bestselling science fiction novels written by the Strugatskys in the mid-1960s.

It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora — the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.

And while there are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids — the Na’vi in Cameron’s epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys’ novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.

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Nikola Tesla Is Back in Tech Fashion

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Nikola Tesla is back in tech fashion, the Wall Street Journal reports:

When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors, they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Kudos to Daniel Michaels for not mentioning the hair band as an early example of Teslamania:

An early hint was “Tesla Girls,” a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film “The Prestige,” alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as “more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way.”

By the way, that image of Tesla is of David Bowie playing Tesla.

The beauty of Tesla is that he wrote little down, and most of what he did write down was destroyed, so you can start from some of his boasts and assume he understood just about everything well before its time:

His papers suggest he stumbled upon — but didn’t pursue — lasers and X-rays, years before their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through the upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would end all wars.
[...]
Tesla’s more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado.

Unlike Edison, who died in 1931 with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left few completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his legacy but added to the air of mystery surrounding him.

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