Jim Jones

Sunday, July 21st, 2013

The “Reverend” Jim Jones was an avowed Communist who decided to “infiltrate” the church and then went on to form his own People’s Temple:

Religion was the vehicle for Jones to demonstrate his Marxism in the 1950s and initially he did so by organizing things like soup kitchens for the homeless and other charitable works. By the 1970s, the Peoples Temple was running nine residential care homes for the elderly, six organizations for orphaned children and a state-licensed 40-acre ranch for the mentally disabled.

Jesus was a Communist, he taught. Jones himself was the “ultimate socialist” and often hinted that he was a prophesied revolutionary messiah, a reincarnation of Jesus, Gandhi, Father Divine and Lenin!

Jones carefully studied Mao’s moves during the Cultural Revolution and used the same propaganda/mind control techniques that the Chinese Communist Party had perfected, in particular the “we’re the vanguard of a new age” and “us vs. them” aspects of “outcast” group think. Since he was so paranoid himself, this talent came easily to Jim Jones.

When you look at the composition of the followers in the videotape, at first it looks like all of the People’s Temple members were black, but then the camera finds an entire contingent of young white people sitting together who are dressed conservatively. Whenever Jones starts hitting the high notes about socialism, these folks stand up and cheer like Pentecostal apparatchiks.

Nearly 80% of the People’s Temple congregation was comprised of working class blacks. If you examine the format of the service, Jones kept the trappings of “old style religion” that his African-American followers would have felt at home with at the same time they were being politically re-indoctrinated. One of Jones’ standard dramatic tropes was to throw the Bible on the ground and stomp on it, telling his African-American followers that the white man’s version of Christianity was a boot on their necks.

The young white people were the inner circle and had law degrees and other skills that would be useful to a barely disguised flim-flam man like Jones. Some knew how to work the public relations levers or deal with politicians or were good at keeping Jones’ various mail order scams going. Most were Communist “true believers” and felt that they were a part of an exciting social movement. Many of them also acted as de facto social workers, interacting with the State of California on behalf of the poorer members.

And then he convinced his flock to move to Jonestown, Guyana and to drink the Kool-Aid — pardon, Flavor Aid.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

It made sense

Thursday, July 18th, 2013

America was conservative, prosperous, and (superficially) happy, but change came, Fred Reed notes — and it made sense:

As it turned out, there were minor downsides to these sensible policies, but nothing serious. Our children are unattended drug-ridden mall rats, often divorce wreckage, our daughters sexually used at thirteen and growing up hating men, our sons drugged by their teachers and shaped into unhappy transgendered puzzloids. Men avoid marriage because of vindictive feminist courts, the young avoid marriage because of assured divorce. The schools and universities have been enstupidated to hide the failures of particular groups and genders, merit has been superseded by group identity, and here come the Chinese.

But it makes sense.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

Cory Doctorow’s Lunch with the Financial Times

Wednesday, July 17th, 2013

Cory Doctorow has lunch with the Financial Times — or, rather, with economist Tim Harford — and reveals his rather typical, for a writer, economic views:

Science fiction is often a way of exploring issues of contemporary relevance, and Doctorow’s work is no exception. In For the Win (2010), a novel aimed at the “young adult” market, he describes a battle between internationally mobile capital and the attempts of the trade union movement to mobilise “virtual sweatshop” workers across international boundaries. The action moves between India, where anything goes in a deregulated environment, and China, where the state is powerful but allied with the corporations in suppressing workers’ rights. The book manages to explore some complex economics in the context of a well-paced thriller.

Doctorow is clearly fascinated by economic issues, and points out that most science fiction and fantasy economies make no logical sense. The exception, he declares, is when Marxists write science fiction or fantasy. Take the recent Hobbit movie, for example. “How can the goblins have a mine that’s so inefficient?” he laughs, as he pauses from ripping the soft flesh from the marrowbones on his plate with his bare hands.

The porterhouse steak arrives, pre-sliced. It’s very good, charred on the outside but soft and pink beneath the surface. Doctorow has asked for horseradish while I am dipping my steak and chips into béarnaise sauce. The conversation is animated enough to slow our progress, and neither of us raises an eyebrow when a waiter noisily drops something fragile on the other side of the dining room.

So, I ask, if only Marxists get economics right in their novels, does that make Doctorow a Marxist? There’s a tension there, somehow – he’s a successful player in the market economy and fluently speaks the language of business; of profit, marketing reach, margins, and price discrimination. But his political activism seems squarely on the left – pro-labour, pro-equality, pro-rights.

“Marxists and capitalists agree on one thing: they agree that the economy is important. Once we’ve agreed on that we’re arguing over the details,” he says. But no, he’s not a Marxist. “I always missed the explanation of how the state is supposed to wither away.” In his novels and his blogging, the ruthless abuse of state power is just as much of a theme as the grasping amorality of large corporations.

Before long we’re talking about automation, and whether the rise of robots and algorithms is a threat to middle-class jobs. Doctorow’s next book will explore that territory in a suitably dystopian form, and he is keen to pick my brains about how things might play out. We discuss possible scenarios and I recommend an essay by John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. (Within hours he’s found it, read it and tweeted a recommendation.)

Posted in Economics, Media, Policy | No Comments »

Saudi princess keeping slaves

Tuesday, July 16th, 2013

Meshael Alayban, a 42-year-old Saudi princess, was charged Wednesday with one count of felony human trafficking when her Kenyan servant escaped — from their Irvine, California gated community:

Orange County prosecutors allege that Alayban forced the woman to work 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for only $220 a month. Authorities say she was unable to leave because Alayban kept the woman’s passport and documents.

[...]

In addition to the Kenyan woman, police said officers found four other workers being held under similar circumstances at Alayban’s home. No charges have yet been filed in those cases.

Orange County prosecutors identified Alayban as one of the wives of Saudi Prince Abdulrahman bin Nasser bin Abdulaziz al Saud.

Alayban’s attorney, Paul S. Meyer, said there was no physical abuse, no physical restraint and that the complaints were about hours worked and wages paid.

[...]

The servant, whose identity was not released by authorities, began working for the family in Saudi Arabia to help cover her young daughter’s medical care, officials said. The woman was contacted through an agency in Kenya to work for Alayban’s family in Saudi Arabia in March 2012. She was meant to work for two years and be paid $1,600 a month. She was told she’d work eight hours a day, five days a week and that her pay would rise after three months, authorities said.

Irvine police said that when the woman arrived in Saudi Arabia, Alayban took her passport. She accompanied Alayban and her family when they came to Irvine in May. Police said the servant came with four other women from the Philippines working under similar contracts.

She told detectives she was required to work excessive hours and paid only a fraction of the agreed-upon salary. When the woman complained about the working conditions and asked for her passport back so she could leave, Alayban refused to give it to her, police said.

The servant told authorities she was working for various Alayban family members living in four luxury apartments in a development off Jamboree Road, police said. She claimed she was not allowed to leave the complex without a member of the family present.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Mostly Peaceful Protests

Tuesday, July 16th, 2013

Remember, they’re not riots; they’re mostly peaceful protests.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 2 Comments »

Dark Counsel from the Durants

Monday, July 15th, 2013

The third chapter of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History offers some dark counsel on biology and history:

Early in the chapter, the Durants comment insightfully on the concept of group-level natural selection, a controversial topic even today:

[T]he laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive. If some of us seem to escape the strife or the trials it is because our group protects us; but that group itself must meet the tests of survival.

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life — peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in our group — our family, community, club, church, party, “race”, or nation — in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups. Competing groups have the quality of competing individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. Our states, being ourselves multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale… War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition.

A little further on, they address the awkward reality of human variation:

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal; subject to our physical and psychological heredity, and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacities and qualities of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution; identical twins differ in hundreds of ways, and no two peas are alike.

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities; every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. If we knew our fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose combined ability would equal that of all the rest. Life and history do precisely that, with a sublime injustice reminiscent of Calvin’s God.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups. This competition becomes more severe as the destruction of distance intensifies the confrontation of states.

Strong stuff, this, and not the sort of thing you read much of, half a century later. I rather doubt (to put it mildly!) that publishers would be lining up to deliver this sort of frankness in 2013, but in 1965 the Durants were among the world’s pre-eminent public intellectuals.

(Hat tip to Nick B. Steves.)

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | No Comments »

War Song for the Army of the Rhine

Sunday, July 14th, 2013

Today is the day to sing the War Song for the Army of the Rhine:

On 25 April 1792, the mayor of Strasbourg requested his guest Rouget de Lisle compose a song “that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland that is under threat”.[1] That evening, Rouget de Lisle wrote Chant de guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin[2] and dedicated the song to Marshal Nicolas Luckner, a Bavarian in French service from Cham.[3] The melody soon became the rallying call to the French Revolution and was adopted as La Marseillaise after the melody was first sung on the streets by volunteers (fédérés in French) from Marseille by the end of May. These fédérés were making their entrance into the city of Paris on 30 July 1792 after a young volunteer from Montpellier called François Mireur had sung it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille, and the troops adopted it as the marching song of the National Guard of Marseille.[2] A newly graduated medical doctor, Mireur later became a general under Napoléon Bonaparte and died in Egypt at age 28.

The song’s lyrics reflect the invasion of France by foreign armies (from Prussia and Austria) that were underway when it was written. Strasbourg itself was attacked just a few days later. The invading forces were repulsed from France following their defeat in the Battle of Valmy.

The Convention accepted it as the French national anthem in a decree passed on 14 July 1795, making it France’s first anthem.[4] It later lost this status under Napoleon I, and the song was banned outright by Louis XVIII and Charles X, only being re-instated briefly after the July Revolution of 1830.[5] During Napoleon I’s reign, Veillons au Salut de l’Empire was the unofficial anthem of the regime, and in Napoleon III’s reign, it was Partant pour la Syrie. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “La Marseillaise” was recognised as the anthem of the international revolutionary movement; as such, it was adopted by the Paris Commune in 1871. Eight years later, in 1879, it was restored as France’s national anthem, and has remained so ever since.

Only the first verse gets much play these days:

Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Children of the Fatherland, let’s go,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
The day of glory has arrived!
Contre nous de la tyrannie,
Tyranny is against us,
L’étendard sanglant est levé,
The bloody banner is raised,
L’étendard sanglant est levé !
The bloody banner is raised!
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
In the countryside do you hear
Mugir ces féroces soldats ?
The roar of these ferocious soldiers?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras
They come into your arms
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes !
To kill your sons, your companions!

Aux armes, citoyens,
To arms, citizens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Form your battalions,
Marchons, marchons!
Let us march, let us march!
Qu’un sang impur
So that an impure blood
Abreuve nos sillons !
Will water our furrows!

A note on translation: we don’t have a good English word for égorger, which means to slit the throat [of] or, less literally, to butcher. La gorge is the throat.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

For Our Comrades

Sunday, July 14th, 2013

After the bazooka’s first successful demonstration, the new weapon went immediately into production — but not for our American troops:

A week later General Marshall and members of the Soviet and British military delegations witnessed a second demonstration held at Camp Simms in Washington D.C. The Soviets were so impressed that they asked Marshall to supply them with bazookas immediately even though the weapon was still being improved. Marshall issued verbal orders that 5,000 of the rocket launchers, along with necessary quantities of rockets and practice ammunition, be produced for lend-lease purposes within a month. The General Electric plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, learned on 20 May that it had to build the weapons as soon as possible. The company completed the initial batch of bazookas by 24 June and shipped them to the Soviet Union shortly afterwards.

The M1 rocket launcher first saw action with US troops in November, 1942, in North Africa:

Both the rocket and the launcher had to undergo a number of improvements to make the combination a more potent weapon. In late 1943, the Army introduced the M9 version of the bazooka with a more powerful rocket — the M6A3. The Germans, based on their battle experience against Soviet tanks, were already fielding thicker and better-designed armor on new panzer models. To further counter shaped-charge warheads, they also devised additional measures that could be added to old and new tanks alike, including armored skirts that prematurely detonated incoming rockets. As a result, bazooka teams were forced to target less well-protected — and more difficult to hit — areas of enemy armored vehicles, such as tracks, suspension, or the rear engine compartment.

The Germans, who had captured copies of the early model bazooka in Russia, borrowed from Uhl’s and Skinner’s original design to produce their own 8.8-cm. rocket launcher. The German Panzerfaust — with a larger, more powerful warhead — had significantly greater armor penetration. The Americans, in turn, captured copies of the enemy rocket launcher and began designing a larger version of the M9, later designated the M20 Super Bazooka, in late 1944. However, the M20 did not see active service before World War II ended.

Posted in Policy, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Why Does the Lack of Traffic Rules Work in England, but Not in Haiti?

Thursday, July 11th, 2013

There are numerous examples of small European towns that have done away with signal lights and traffic signs and now traffic flows better, transit times have decreased, and roadways have became less dangerous for pedestrians and vehicle passengers alike:

The absence of conventional rules improved outcomes.

The concept of a “shared space” — an area without traditional traffic signs, signals, or regulations that’s intended to be used by both cars and pedestrians — underpins many such traffic reforms. Humans don’t normally need formal rules to figure out how to navigate a crowded sidewalk, the logic goes, and isn’t everyone driving a car really just a pedestrian wrapped in a 3,000-pound potentially-lethal steel box? Backers of the Poynton intersection project near Manchester, England, note that “pedestrians in the shared-space scenario, when there are no lights to dictate behavior, are seen as fellow road-users rather than obstacles in the way of the next light.”

One of the first and staunchest shared-space evangelists was, obviously, Dutch. Hans Monderman “recognised that increasing control and regulation by the state reduced individual and collective responsibility,” The Guardian noted in its 2008 obituary, “and he initiated a fresh understanding of the relationship between streets, traffic and civility.” I have no clue whether Monderman traveled to Haiti during his time on earth, but I’d bet good money that he never sat in a Port-au-Prince traffic jam.

So, why does the lack of traffic rules work in England, but not in Haiti?

In Haiti, there is no meaningful enforcement of any set of traffic rules. Virtually all road space could be called “shared” — pedestrians, motorcycles, and four-wheel vehicles use the same space everywhere; only the largest intersections have traffic lights; there are no crosswalks and almost no stop signs. Instead of following a rulebook, drivers rely on local, informal norms.

Traffic in Port-au-Prince is horrifying. People do not yield to each other and spontaneously fall into an efficient order, as in England’s Poynton. In Haitian transit, people approach shared space as if they’re homesteaders on an Oklahoma land run. It’s every-man-for-himself, where every man is trying to grab every centimeter of available road space before someone else does. Instead of a free-flowing circle, a roundabout becomes an immobile tangle of tap-taps, traffic jams radiating in all directions.

There is a clear set of norms that people follow, it’s just that the norms are awful. They lead to anything but convenient transit times and low levels of accidents, and they make driving in the country much more dangerous than it could be.

One maxim seems to govern all else when it comes to traffic in Haiti: might is right. Semi-trucks and buses rule, SUVs and cars come next, and none of the above respect the thousands of motorcycles zipping along Haitian roads. At the bottom of the traffic hierarchy in Haiti are pedestrians, who play human Frogger every time they cross the street.

It’s completely normal — and pretty much expected — for cars to pull out in front of moving traffic, for vehicles to pull a U-turn wherever and whenever they please, and for drivers to ignore their surroundings in a way that would make someone who learned to drive in the United States have a mild heart attack upon riding away from the airport for the first time. The day-long gridlock is so awful and so regular that a song called Blokis — traffic jam — recently became the biggest hit on Haitian radio.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 3 Comments »

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

Tuesday, July 9th, 2013

Handle just finished reading William J. Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice which includes this chart of murder rate versus black population percentage:

Murder Rate and Black Population

The friendly professor, Handle explains, spends the first half of the book trying to explain it away, and the second half of the book proposing policies that fly in direct contradiction to it.

Addendum: The Amazon preview did not include the figure, but it did include this table:

Murder Rate and Black Population Table

Posted in Crime, Policy | 2 Comments »

Ethnic policy in ancient Japan

Tuesday, July 9th, 2013

Japanese history is fascinating, Spandrell says, because of how short it is:

The Japanese imperial house is the oldest of the world, dating to around 500 AD. But the funny thing is that the imperial house was the first historical polity to arise in Japan ever. That’s right, Japanese history starts after the Roman Empire fell. Actually the first evidences of agriculture only date to around 300 BC, i.e. after Alexander the Great. For some reason farmers only came to Japan 7000 years after they began farming next door in China. 7000 years to finally round up the courage to cross the Tsushima strait.

Before farming, Japan had the Jomon culture, a fairly sophisticated hunter-gatherer culture known for their pottery and semi-sedentary lifestyle. Oldest pottery in the world actually. It seems Japan was so full of food that hunters could just stay in a place and hunt (mostly fish) their food from home. The Jomon had their fun for around 10,000 years until rice farmers came over from Korea and brought agriculture and metallurgy with them in 300 BC. The Yayoi culture they are called. These farmers moved eastward, and slowly built their own megalithic civilization, with massive tombs at all.

By 700 AD you had a modern kingdom, with writing, a Chinese style bureaucracy, international trade, overseas expeditionary armies and everything you can think of. They Yamato court based itself in the central plains on what’s today Osaka/Kyoto, and even had the balls of calling themselves Heavenly Emperor and tell the Chinese behemoth they expected equal treatment. The actual territorial reach of the Yamato court wasn’t that big though. They had reached the Kanto plains (where Tokyo is today), but had some trouble expanding further north. If you check Google Map’s Terrain layer you can see that the terrain north of Tokyo isn’t very inviting. And it’s cold too. But there was something else.

Someone else actually. Remember those Jomon guys? Well they didn’t just disappear. While the Yayoi farmers mostly took over and replaced the Jomon culture in the West of the country, the eastern Jomon had one thousand years to learn some tricks to defend themselves. They had adopted horses, and became experienced horse-archers. They also learned some horticulture, and even to work metal. By the time the Yamato court armies reached the Northeast, they had a fierce enemy to deal with.

The imperial documents call these people Emishi, or sometimes just “hairy people”, for their long beards and body hair. Time after time they sent armies to go out to get these people to stop raiding their farming villages. These battles more often than not ended up in failure, the Emishi having the home turf advantage, and being quite adept at ambushing and hit-and-run tactics. Once in a while though, some Emishi tribe would surrender to Yamato armies, and swear allegiance to the emperor in Kyoto.

What’d they do with these people? They couldn’t be left in their place to go on raiding farming villages, so the merciful imperial court had the great idea of rounding up these savage tribes and settling them West, in the Yamato heartland. They were settled in good land, put under the care of the local sheriff, and given free food and clothing, and exempted from taxes until they learned to fend for themselves. That is correct, enemy combatants were put on welfare.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

These surrendered Emishi were called Fushuu (prisoners). As you can probably guess, they didn’t just became productive farmers and renounce welfare in a generation. They mostly hang around, keeping as much of their culture as they could, and causing trouble to everyone around them. You can imagine that local officials weren’t very amused with their new subjects. As it happens, civil order was declining too, the Yamato court’s hold on power started to loosen, taxes started to be collected through tax farmers, etc. You get the idea. Peasants were having trouble and complaining too much. The old centralized armies were disbanded after decades of peace, so local officials had to take care of civil order in their domains. They had to raise troops though. Then it struck them: what about these Emishi prisoners? They are fit, adept horse archers, go on practicing their craft all day. They’d make very fine soldiers. And so the Barbarian tribes became the official police force of Japan.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Japanese government was using foreign barbarians to screw with their own people more than a thousand years ago. Why would they do that? Because the court didn’t give a shit. Emishi tribal leaders stayed in the imperial capital, hang out with the Yamato nobles, and used their government-given riches and patronage to meddle with their old kin in the Northeast, which had grown a taste for Yamato culture, eventually taking Yamato names. The Emishi nobles got Yamato peasants to farm for them, and their tax-exempt status as “allies” of the court made them very rich. They also traded in fur, horses and gold, with little official oversight.

So you have the Emishi having a blast inside and outside of the borders. What happened then? Peace and prosperity? Hah. The “prisoners” became internal bandits preying on trade caravans from the provinces to the capital, and soon afterwards started rioting against the court. The second half of the 9th century was plagued with Emishi riots, which threatened to destroy the polity. Finally in 897 the court had had enough, and ordered that the Emishi were rounded up and deported back to their homeland in the Northeast.

The rioting stopped, but the Emishi did leave a long lasting influence in Japanese military history. The Yamato learned horseback archery from them, and the Emishi sword eventually evolved in the world-famous Katana.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Larry Ellison’s Fantasy Island

Monday, July 8th, 2013

The real mystery of Larry Ellison’s Fantasy Island is how it took this long for Larry Ellison to buy his own island:

It had been his far-fetched dream since he was in his 20s, when he first flew over one of the smallest of Hawaii’s inhabited islands in a Cessna 172 and was captivated by the thousands of acres of pineapple fields.

In June 2012, Mr. Ellison, the co-founder and chief executive of technology giant Oracle, ORCL -2.61% bought Lanai for $300 million from American businessman David Murdock. Now he owns nearly everything on the island, including many of the candy-colored plantation-style homes and apartments, one of the two grocery stores, the two Four Seasons hotels and golf courses, the community center and pool, water company, movie theater, half the roads and some 88,000 acres of land. (2% of the island is owned by the government or by longtime Lanai families.)

For the first time, Mr. Ellison has publicly detailed his ambitious and costly plans for the 141-square-mile island. They include building an ultraluxury hotel on the pristine, white-sand beach facing Molokai and Maui and returning commercial agriculture to the clear-cut acres. He also plans to endow a sustainability laboratory that will help make the island “the first economically viable 100%-green community.” And one of his biggest tasks: winning over the island’s small, but wary, local population, one whose economic future is heavily dependent on his decisions.

Posted in Business, Policy, Urbanism | 2 Comments »

Secular Apocalypses

Sunday, July 7th, 2013

Rory Miller normally discusses violence, but he recently had an epiphany:

Want to share it, but really not sure I want to draw this much fire. Background: I don’t get religion. I see it all around me, I’ve read and studied, but on a deep level, I don’t get the ‘why.’ Whatever need drives people to believe that there is a plan is just absent in my psyche. Whether I imagine a world with or without gods, neither feels different to me.

I have a couple of friends who can be described as born-again atheists. They are just as fundamentalist, loud and angry as the most vitriolic born-again Christian or Muslim convert. I have several friends who self-describe as secular humanists. Most are areligious, a few antireligious.

The epiphany. Listening in on the debate over GMO labeling, it occurred to me that this was a religion demanding that their food be labeled “Not Halal” or “Not Kosher.” It wasn’t a scientific or health concern. There hasn’t been an unmodified food crop since we figured out cross-pollination and selective breeding; and there is no such thing as an inorganic cucumber. And to actually revert to pre-industrial farming practices and plants as they occur in the wild would mean mass starvation, which isn’t healthy. The labels are merely the stamp of approval of a large, powerful, growing and evangelical religion.

So I started looking a little closer. Is there a doctrine that flies in the face of science? Sure. Lots. Some that flies in the face of simple observation. The horrible book I just read goes out of the way to praise the egalitarian and peaceful natures of simple foraging peoples. But in the case studies he mentions, if you look at the numbers their murder rate is astronomical. Only two murders in a population seems small. But in a population of 2000? That’s twenty times the murder rate in the US. One of the ‘peaceful’ groups had more executions per capita than Texas could dream… not counting the babies left to freeze to death, especially girls.

Egalitarian? When a population has almost no material possession, it’s kind of disingenuous to marvel about equality of those possessions. And when there are only two jobs (hunting and gathering) and which one you will get is decided entirely by gender with no exceptions… but, hey. You can pretend to call it equality. I believe apartheid, separate but equal, is the modern term.

But the doctrine requires you to portray these societies as having the values that the doctrine espouses—egalitarianism, peacefulness, sexual freedom (even if the writer notes that cheating wives are sometimes murdered he marvels at the sexual freedom) and living at one with nature (author states that survival is easy even in the harshest conditions if one has the skills, then says that being cast out of the tribe is a death sentence due to starvation).

There are even prophets of the apocalypse. The world will end if we don’t follow the dogma.
The world will end. From Rachelle Carson’s “Silent Spring” to global warming, how many apocalypses (what is the plural of apocalypse?) do you remember?

We laugh at the Mayan calendar and the 5/5/2005 prophecies. Nuts sitting in bunkers. But how many times has the end of the world been declared by the secular? Hmmmm. Just the ones that I remember:

  • Ice age in the ‘70’s
  • Hole in the ozone layer (remember that all animals are supposed to be blind by now)
  • Acid rain
  • No possibility that any oil would be left by 2020 at the latest
  • Mass starvation unless ZPG was achieved world-wide by 1990 at the latest
  • Nuclear holocaust statistically unavoidable
  • Y2K computer bug
  • SARS, avian flu and nile virus
  • And, of course, the killer bees

Note, I’m not debating what’s real and what isn’t. I’m marveling that so many people who reject the idea of a vengeful god seem to have a need to create one. But they call it nature and insist the dogma is science. Like some cults we could mention. What fascinates me is that the pattern echoes even in the details.

The interesting thing about this, is that the prophets preach that the solution is in the doctrine. Case in point is that what we needed to do in the seventies to stave off the ice age (quit driving cars so much, quit putting hydrocarbons in the atmosphere) is the exact same thing the current prophets say we need to do to prevent global warming.

And there is even an inquisition for those who commit heresy. A news commentator had to recant for saying that there was doubt about global warming. The word ‘recant’ was actually used. The Oregon State Meteorologist (who appeared to be of the opinion that the temperature was rising but the cause was probably complex) feared for his job.

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

Can Recycling Be Wrong, When It Feels So Right?

Saturday, July 6th, 2013

Mike Munger — the EconTalk regular — was asked to keynote an “Australia Recycles” conference years ago:

We scrap cars because they are valuable metal.  The leftover rice and chicken go into the fridge, for tomorrow’s casserole.  And toilet paper…well, we throw it away, after using it.

I focused on glass, especially the kind of green glass used for wine bottles.  Glass is heavy and inert.  That means it’s expensive to cart around and handle, in addition to the problems of breaking and cutting workers. Glass is harmless in a landfill and breaks down into something very like the sand it came from.

The commodity that glass can be ground into, called “cullet,” just isn’t very valuable.  Mixed cullet, even from glass that looks similar, turns a dull black; sorting to avoid mixing takes time. Recyclists seem to believe that everything should be conserved, except time, the one resource we can’t make more of.

The alternative to recycling green glass is to use virgin materials — sand — and add the chemical compounds and color required.  A cubic yard of mixed cullet can actually be much more expensive to convert into usable glass than a cubic yard of sand, depending on conditions.  That means that “recycling,” when you add on the fuel costs and pollution impact of collecting small quantities of the stuff from neighborhoods, actually uses more energy, and wastes more resources, than using virgin materials.

There are exceptions.  If disposal costs are high and there is actual demand for the cullet, then green glass is highly recyclable.  The best example is northern California, with valuable land, a large population, and lots of manufacturers eager to put new wine in recycled bottles.

Still, given the costs and lack of demand in most areas, opportunities for environmentally responsible recycling of green glass are rare.  As a result, hundreds of municipalities across the United States have tried to suspend their glass recycling programs.[1]  Interestingly, in some of these (including my home town of Raleigh, North Carolina) there were legal or political barriers that forced the resumption of curbside glass collection.  Citizens voted to force the city to pick up the glass in those plastic bins, because they don’t like to throw the glass away.  The glass is picked up, trucked to the recycling facility, and either bagged or boxed and then shipped, in a different truck, to the landfill.  In effect, citizens are paying the city extra to throw away the glass, so that they can pretend it’s being recycled.[2]

As I was going through my presentation, I was surprised at the reaction of the audience of the conference.  They weren’t angry; they were bored.  When I finished, a man stood up and gave what seemed to be the response of the entire audience, given their nods and smiles:  “Look, professor, we all know this.  Everyone knows that there are problems with green glass.  We all understand that there is no market for cullet.  But it doesn’t matter.  The main thing is to get people in the habit of recycling, because it’s the right thing to do.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, since everyone in attendance made their living from selling recycling equipment to cities and local governments.  But let’s be fair: no one in that room was cynical.  No one thought this was fraud the way I did.  Recycling gives people a chance to express their concern about the environment, and concern about the environment is good.  Sure, sometimes the actual effect on the environment is harmful, as in the case of green glass, but that’s a small price to pay for developing the right habits of mind.  I wasn’t wrong, I just didn’t understand their objectives.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

How the Army actually does business

Saturday, July 6th, 2013

A longtime high-level Pentagon intelligence analyst walked Robert Draper of the New Republic through the reasons why the government does a lousy job producing military intelligence tools:

An ambitious Army intelligence commander might want to impress his superiors by coming up with some new way of graphing intel. The procurers at the Pentagon go through the motions of ordering up the visionary new graphing software, secure in the knowledge that the commander will soon be promoted and out of their hair. The idea gets kicked over to some government agency’s development shop, which issues a design contract to one of the big defense contractors within the military-industrial complex that has developed a tight relationship with the Pentagon and has “no incentive to deliver something on time and on cost,” said the veteran analyst. At no point would anyone second-guess the ambitious commander. The agency bureaucrats were, he told me, “amateurs, essentially, who are incentivized to make their customers, the government requester, happy — to the point where they engineer things that won’t work. They accept everything as a requirement, and they judge every requirement to be equal. You say to them, ‘I want something with a bell that’ll go off whenever something interesting comes up.’ So they spent five million dollars on that, and no one asks, ‘Why the $#@! would you want a bell?’”

Really, that sounds like most IT projects in industry, too.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 1 Comment »

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