Saturday
(0)
(0)A Normal War
Pundits seem to have very negative opinions about the recent Presidential Directive on legal jurisdiction. So much so I wonder if anyone has actually read the document. I have and I cannot find anything particularly damning. It places captured enemy forces under military rather than civilian law. The directive is carefully targetted at al Qaeda and only non-citizen al Qaeda at that. So why the fuss?
Perhaps the answer lies in history. The directive is quite a normal one for a country at war. It would once have seemed so obvious a need as to be hardly newsworthy. The difficulty is the United States has not fought a normal war, to an end condition of total victory, since World War II. That is over half a century ago. Most of those who would understand the necessity of it are retired or no longer with us.
Make no mistake, this is a war. The al Qaeda are our enemy every bit as much as the Nazi Party of Germany was our enemy. I cannot imagine Himmler and Goering being tried in front of a "normal" court; nor can I imagine bin Laden (assuming the lads who find him constrain themselves from carving him into Purina Pig Chow) being given a New York defense lawyer and allowed to fight a 10 year court battle. He and his people are not just ordinary killers. They are not just ordinary terrorists. They are the founders and leaders of a distributed military force that declared the annihilation of the United States as a religious duty. They have proven their words in deeds.
Given that bin Laden publicly declared war on America in 1996 and has since had his troops carry out military actions against the United States, it behoves us to treat those forces no differently than any other military force in any other war. That means captured soldiers are treated under the Geneva Convention. There is another side however. We will define certain members of al Qaeda not simply as terrorists, but as war criminals writ large. Even if we ignored every other attack by al Qaeda and called them normal military actions, even if we ignored evidence about TWA800; even if we ignored the thousands of African civilians killed and injured by the attacks on US Embassies... we are still left with September the 11th.
There is no doubt, under any sane interpretation, ramming large civilian airliners into giant civilian office towers while faced with a totally unpreperared populace is a war crime of an obscene magnitude.
Because al Qaeda operate as a co-ordinated and trained military force, much of the information we have on them comes via classified means rather than normal public criminal investigations. Criminals and mere terrorists can be tracked down and tried over time; an army must be dealt with differently. We know we cannot catch them all, at least not all at once. It behooves us to not allow yet to be captured enemy forces to learn from our court transcripts.
We simply cannot afford to hand them such valuable intelligence. If they understand our most secret technical means they can more readily avoid them; if they know our channels of information they can act to disrupt or inject false information into them; if they know our informers they will kill them.
A military tribunal is just right. The al Qaeda declared war; therefore they are enemy soldiers. We will try them with reasonable fairness and perhaps somewhat more mercy than they would give were the tables turned. But mark my words: those directly responsible, those directly in the chain of command that extends from the burning rubble of the World Trade Center to the caves of Afghanistan are going to swing at the end of a stout rope. It may take 10 years to round them up; but it will only take a few months to finish the job.
Saturday
...to point out that the 18 US Rangers in Somalia gave a good account of themselves. All honour to them. The fact remains that the point of military action is not to get a favourable kill-ratio but to win. If I wanted to bore you with a list of wars where the losing side killed more than the winners I would start with World War II, go on to World War I, and keep talking for a long, long time.
Not that I'm arguing with the main thrust here! Here's some more forgotten dead people: 5,000 killed by chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein in Halabja.
Saturday
Samizdata slogan of the day:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and thus clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary
- H.L. Mencken
Friday
Julian Manyon sees the devastation wrought by the B-52s, but says that the fall of Kabul is not the end of the struggle. He gives an excellent eyewitness report in The Spectator from the front line in Afghanistan.
I look forward to hearing from all those out there in 'establishment pundit land' who sneered at the effect of the US bombing.
Friday
A Taliban Idyll
by Fred Thornett
*********
Act One, Scene One
*********
Imagine the following. You are looking at the door of a crude mud hut in which an impoverished Afghan peasant and his wives dwell somewhere in the Caves District of Afghanistan in the week after the fall of the last Taliban stronghold.
Enter left, skinny bearded chap with smirk, turban and beard who declaims in Arabic:
"Excuse me, Impoverished Afghan Peasant victim of American Imperialism, I am the
famous Muslim fundament hero, Osama bin Liner. Can my illustrious friends and I
sleep in your barn for the night to hide from the evil agents of the Great Satan?
We will pay you ten thousand of these lovely muslim-green Taliban banknotes for
your help."
Reply in broken Arabic by suddenly smiling Impoverished Afghan Peasant,
"Certainly oh great one. Such an honour! You are most welcome indeed, good sirs!
And I will send you my favourite goat to help your excellencies pass the night in
comfort!! Will your honours partake of some humble, peasant-type refreshments
before you sleep?"
Ushers honoured guests with many flourishes off stage to barn.
*********
Act One, Scene Two.
*********
Impoverished Afghan Peasant in sotto voce‚ to first woman in burqa.
"Get thee hence, Wife Number One, to the public phone box which is conveniently
located only 15 kilometres down the road. Dial the number on this reward leaflet
that by the grace of Allah fell from the sky. Remember to ask for the man with the
$US 5 million reward money!"
Then speaking to next woman in burqa.
"Wife Number Two, carry in our finest food and drink to our honoured guests."
First woman in burqa, clutching reward handbill, exits stage left.
Second woman in burqa, carrying stew pot and jug, exits stage right.
*********
Final Act
*********
Impoverished Afghan Peasant speaking in broken Arabic as he enters barn.
"And is your excellency's aged mutton curry to your liking? Would any of the noble
gentlemen like fancy another jam jar of yak ghee? Perhaps you would like to sleep
late in the morning. Do not worry, good sirs, I shall stand at the entrance and
keep a close watch for the agents of the Great Satan. All will be well. You can
trust me, for I am true follower of the great Mullah Omar. Er, that is the five
million dollar Mullah himself currently over there in the corner using the goat, is
it not? And is not the other noble Koranic scholar the Second in Command of El
Qaeda, the honourable Egyptian, Wadi el Plug?"
Grunts of affirmation from the honoured guests and the goat.
Impoverished Afghan Peasant grins.
"Allah Akhbar indeed."
Impoverished Afghan Peasant departs left to stand outside barn door rubbing his hands and prancing with mounting glee for five hours until the thwack, thwack, thwack of the approaching helicopters gradually becomes louder and the lights fade to the sound of Osama bin Liner screeching in Arabic over the sounds of machine gun fire.
"I told you we should not have trusted anyone who kept comparing our faces with
the satanic images on the poster he had pinned on his mantelpiece!"
Friday
What Dale writes is quite correct but it is just another manifestation of American 'liberal' media racism. When eighteen US Army Rangers dies that is horrifying because eighteen American lives are valuable. As Somali lives are irrelevent, who gives a damn if one thousand Somali irregulars got smoked? The important fact was that here was a chance to dwell on the negative aspects, namely American deaths. Regardless of the fact the US soldiers gave a fine account of themselves before being overwhelmed, why not just use this as an excuse to point out the US military are the bad guys yet again?
Whilst I do think the whole mission to Somalia was a noble but naive mistake from the outset, is it too much to expect the US media to realise it was actually a far from ignoble episode in US military history? I guess so.
Another example of US 'liberal' media racism was the reporting of the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa. It as widely reported that twelve Americans died and almost as an afterthought, oh yes, about 300 or so Africans were killed plus nearly 4000 wounded. This need to be repeated again and again to people across the world who claim Al Qaeda only want to kill Americans.
Similarly as commented on by Opinionated Bastard (now is that a great name for a blog or what?), once it became clear most of the people on Flight 587 which crashed in Rockaway were not from the USA, media interest tailed off rapidly (no pun intended):
This is infuriating because the passengers on Flight 587 were almost entirely from the Dominican Republic. We get 'round the clock coverage of whatever civilian casualties may or may not have actually happened in Afghanistan, but when poor folks in our own hemisphere are suffering, it's shuffled off to the back page.
I guess those people just did not count for much.
Friday
50 to 1 The negative reporting from services like CNN can be quite insidious at times. The following quote is a good example:
Atef is believed to be responsible for supervising the training of operatives. Prosecutors say he provided military training and assistance in 1993 to Somali tribes who violently opposed the United Nations' intervention in Somalia's civil unrest. In an October 1993 battle, Somali tribesmen killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers.
The statement is accurate. It is what is left unsaid that makes one wonder where they are coming from. The Somali "tribesmen" who surrounded the US Army squads took over 1000 casualties for their trouble. A nearly 50 to 1 casualty ratio. Doesn't sound at all like the Somali lads won when you put it that way, now does it? In fact, I have a better description of the battle.
The Great Somali Turkey Shoot.
Friday
Events in Afghanistan bring to mind a large container truck suddenly tipping over and spilling its load across a busy highway in front of traffic moving in both directions. As we see the situation shift not by the day but by the hour, it is important that people look not just at Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Kabul and Khandahar, but also at nuclear Pakistan: what happens in Islamabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Quetta will certainly end up being far more important in the long run.
For weeks since the US bombing started, the Islamic political parties in Pakistan have been whipping up sentiment with a world view that pits Islam against the godless foreigner. Large numbers of young Pakistanis heard the call for jihad against the United States and were urged to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the defence of Islam. Thousands streamed across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan seething with religious zeal to take up arms against the hated infidel.
The secular General Musharraf looked on uneasy as the streets swelled with crowds incited by his political enemies and has also been forced to keep looking over his shoulder at his own intelligence service, the ISI, who have always been the Taliban's primary patron.
And then, the container truck unexpectedly tips over, scattering its cargo of... jack-in-the-boxes.
Weakened by the USAF/USN airstrikes far more than the ignorant and willfully pessimistic western pundits would have had us believe, the Taliban suddenly starts to collapse. Like dominos, town after town falls to the various anti-Taliban forces.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, we have learned that the Afghan Taliban forces took all the available motor vehicles and retreated as Abdul Rashid Dostam's forces enveloped the city, leaving about 600 newly arrived pro-Taliban Pakistanis to face Dostam's soldiers alone. The school in which they made their last stand is now a twisted ruin and at least 400 Pakistanis were wiped out in the bitter fighting.
In Kunduz, accounts suggest most of the Afghan Taliban forces have either defected or bailed out of the town prior to it being completely surrounded. What is left are largely Chechens, Chinese Muslims and Pakistani fighters. They are clearly doomed.
And so, it is interesting to note that the streets of Pakistan are surprisingly subdued. Far from 'Islam' rising up against the United States and its anti-Taliban friends in Afghanistan, city after city is filled with cheering throngs and America is saluted by the very people who lived through the bombing for contributing to the Taliban's misfortunes. Hundreds and possibly thousands of young Pakistanis are already dead, killed not as Islamic holy warriors but as hated foreigners by Afghans who have had it up to 'here' with the interference of its neighbours.
So as the Islamic politicians of Pakistan survey how in the matter of eight days the entire situation in Afghanistan has turned upside down, the families and friends of the dead Pakistani boys who listened and then marched to their deaths across the Khyber pass are going to start asking 'why?' When people start to figure out the answer, I don't think the forces of Islamo-fascism are going to like what happens next. It must be slowly dawning on the more secular forces in Pakistan that their Islamist political enemies are starting to look very exposed indeed.
For the west, nuclear armed Pakistan is far more important in the long run than that 'Mad Max' nation called Afghanistan.
Yes, the leitmotif for Afghanistan and Pakistan really is a jack-in-the-box. You heard it here first.
Friday
Samizdata slogan of the day
When bad men combine, the good must associate else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle
-Edmund Burke
Friday
Lawrence of America I recommend that everyone immediately read this item from the Fletcher Conference, Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. It is a brilliant piece in and of itself. On top of that it supplies text from several Special Forces dispatches. This is our first taste of the real story. And what a story it is.
From Wolfowitz's words you will gain insight on what the war on the ground must be like. I cannot help but find myself liking and respecting these Northern Afghan people whose personality peaks through the dispatches. It is the stuff movies are made of. Our forces have not just been fighting side by side with the Afghans, they have been fighting side by side on horseback. Horses and sabers, tanks and satellites and batwinged black stealth bombers and lasers all mixed together like something out of a Space Opera. We are truly entering strange and interesting times.
Retief does not seem quite so fictional tonight.
Thursday
Miracles Do Happen After a nightmare of some three months duration, Peter Bunch and Diana Thomas (Australia), Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer (USA), Georg Taubmann, Katrin Jelinek, Margrit Stebner and Silke Durrkopf (Germany) are safe. Personally I did not have hope that any, let alone all of them would live through the war. I am ecstatic to be so absolutely and totally wrong.
Although it was American Special Forces who extracted them, according to CNN it was the Northern Alliance who rescued them:
Taubmann said the eight were freed from the prison by anti-Taliban forces. "The Massood people came, and others from the alliance, and broke into the prison and just opened the doors ... We were really scared, and then the alliance people came in ... and we were free and we got out of prison and we walked through the city and the people came out of their houses and hugged us and greeted us, and they were all clapping ..
We should note that far from hating them for being citizens of western coalition nations, the people of Ghazni were happy to see them safe and out of the hands of the hated Taliban. Far from gaining the enmity of the people of Afghanistan as many in the media would lead you to believe, they see us a friends taking common cause with them. We have both suffered terribly from the Taliban and their al Qaeda friends. The Afghans even more so than us.
I think if Afghans are the least bit angry at us, it is over one question only:
"What took you guys so long?"
Thursday
Carla's Tea Party Carla Howell is near a breakthrough in Massachusetts that will go down in history as the Second Boston Tea Party. Her "Initiative to End the Income Tax in Massachusetts" has now succeeded in collecting and delivering 101,139 signatures to the various town clerks for certification. This is a wide enough margin to ensure success even if the Clerks were hostile to the measure. They need only pickup the certified lists from those 351 Town Clerks on December 3rd and deliver them all to the State House by December 5th. Words cannot express the gratitude owed to her and her team.
This initiative to abolish the Massachussetts state income tax will appear on the ballot in 2002. It will generate an enormous amount of national publicity. How could anyone ignore such chutzpah? That people would actually dare to not just roll back, not just cap, but to actually abolish a major tax?
We might actually win this one. It is a possibility. Very few citizens actually want to pay taxes. Hardly anyone ever votes for a politician who says they want to raise taxes. But until now, no one has ever had the opportunity to directly vote on it, to "Just Say No" to taxation.
Carla and her team have done a magnificent job. She is once again proving herself to be the most effective local libertarians in our entire quarter century history as a political party. But they need help. These things do not pay for themselves. If you want to help her to fight the good fight, you should make a donation now and as often as you can afford to.
Win, Lose or Draw, we can make this the turning point. The point at which the growth of the State is not just slowed but actually reversed.
It is up to you.
Thursday
Three cheers for Capital One
On the sometimes inspired, sometimes misguided but always interesting anti-state.com site, there is an very interesting article about a major credit card company electing to use private binding arbitration rather than the coercive and clumsy state legal system to resolve disputes.
An interest development and, I suspect, an sign of things to come.
Thursday
Postmodern outlook objectively smashed
Herbert London, another voice of critical rationality, points out the self-destructive absurdity of post-modern 'thought' in his short but on-target article.
"This argument is mere subterfuge for the central postmodernist view that we don't know what we mean when universal terms are used. In the September 11 attacks, I maintain Americans were not the least bit confused about terminology. We saw the face of evil; it did not require an interpreter."
Yes, it really is that simple.
Thursday
The fact that Bill Ayers was a Weather Underground member 30 years ago does not affect his right to express any view whatsoever. The Opinion Journal got it very wrong this time by coming out behind those who would prefer he just go away. True, his book and his expressed views are inappropriate and tasteless and bound to get a lot of people angy. That is not the issue.
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States does not make exceptions for taste, timing or disagreeableness of content. So I think the Mary Ellen Keating from Barnes and Noble was spot on when she said:
Granted, we live in troubled times. The reprehensible acts of the terrorists were designed to promote fear, divisiveness, even hatred among fellow Americans. We cannot let them win. Removing Mr. Ayers' book from our shelves or canceling a previously scheduled appearance is out of the question. To do so would be to give in to our fears, and ultimately to validate the position of our enemies.
If Mr. Ayers seems to be promoting blowing up buildings as a means of change, then we are free to stand outside with signs and express dissent. We are free to not buy his book. Those who feel so inclined are free to complain to Barnes and Noble (as some have done) and to take their business elsewhere if they so chose.
But from where I sit, Mary Ellen has a better understanding of what a free country is about than do the complainers. As I have said before, "A flag you can not burn is not worth fighting for".
That is the difference between us and 'them'.
Thursday
For media establishment pundits ranging from lowly tabloid hacks all the way up to the Brahmins of academic political correctness, the world seems to be a much more intellectually hostile place since September 11 2001. Previously unchallenged opinions about the way the world works are now being judged under the harsh light of reality cast by two burning skyscrapers in New York.
One of the good things to come out of the horrors of that day is that the western world, or at least the dynamic Anglosphere part of it, is undergoing a most astonishing intellectual 'shake out'. The system is in a state of flux and it is unclear what the zeitgeist is going to feel like when it all starts to settle down again. One thing is for sure, it will be different.
Former prince of the statist 'left' Christopher Hitchens is a striking example of this process. Whilst always articulate and insightful, it seems he is also possessed of a critically rational mind capable of simply jettisoning the demonstrably false when the evidence deems that the correct thing to do. One only has to read his devastating carve-up of former fellow travellers like Noam Chomsky to see just how far he has come. In his article in the Guardian called "Ha ha ha to the pacifists" he pours scorn on those who would side with the vilest regimes in the world and claim moral superiority.
Of course people do not like being proved wrong, and they like others pointing out their cock-ups even less. Last night I was listening to pundit-lite Michael Brunson on the TV reviewing the early editions of the British newspapers. At one point he became almost apoplectic with a double page spread in the print version of The Sun (a low-brow tabloid) titled 'Shame of the Traitors'. This article quotes the Guardian, New Statesman, the Independent, the Mirror, members of Parliament, members of the European 'Parliament' and sundry others. All made dire predictions about the war, questioned the morality of it and scorned its progress.
So was Michael Brunson angry that the pundits had got it so wrong? Hell no! He was outraged that a lowly tabloid like The Sun had questioned the motivation of people making clearly ridiculous unsupported claims to the point they could be described as giving 'aid and comfort to the enemy'. He said "I fail to see the point of this whole article" and "Why should they criticize people for saying that they believe?".
To give you some idea of what the people whose 'honour' Michael Brunson was defending were actually writing:
"Opposition leaders about to quit battle against Taliban. US blunders leave key fighters disillusioned. Key Afghan opposition commanders are on the verge of abandoning the fight against the Taliban because their confidence in US military strategy has collapsed. Insurgents are no longer willing to infiltrate eastern Taliban-controlled Afghanistan because they believe American blunders are destroying the opportunity to spread revolt against the Islamist regime."
Rory Carroll, the Guardian, November 9: the day Mazar-i-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance! This 'news' is either Taliban propaganda, astonishingly bad reporting or simply made up to suit Rory Carroll's anti-Americanism. Take your pick.
"If the Northern Alliance does take Kabul on, the battle is likely to be very bloody. The recent successes of the Northern Alliance are unsurprising but it will take more than carpet bombing to win southern Afghanistan."
Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian, November 13: The recent successes are... unsurprising? I guess Norton-Taylor was not reading the Guardian on November 9 beacuse if he had, he should have been utterly astonished that the Northern Alliance was winning! Moreover in reality Kabul fell with a whimper, not a roar.
"The message we want to get out is simple - stop the bombing...Recognize that bombing pleases one person above all others - Osama bin Laden."
Tam Dalyell, Labour Member of Parliament, November 1: so if the Taliban and Al Qaeda were asked "would you like the bombing to continue or stop?"... presumably Tam Dayell would have us believe that they would say "Continue, we would like some more of that invigorating bombing please".
Judging from Michael Brunson's remarks, it seems that being correct is not a very important part of a pundit's job. However what is really important is not to point out the stupidity of other pundits or, even worse, that a great chunk of what they said was proved by events to be completely incorrect. That simply is not cricket!
And higher up the established media food chain, no wonder they really hate people like Christopher Hitchens, as he cannot be dismissed as a mere hack for some boorish English tabloid... not only is he making the doves of the 'left' and ostriches of the 'right' look extremely bad, he is an apostate who has been attacking Sauron Chomsky himself. Hitchens is actually calling himself a libertarian these days. As Bob Dylan sang: Oh the times, they are a’ changin'
Thursday
Samizdata slogan of the day:
Never blame malice for what can be adequately blamed on stupidity
-R. Feynman
Wednesday
On crime, cookies and dirty pictures
(a number of articles from various issues of the JPM Daily Tech)
Europeans adopt first cyber-crime treaty
The 43-nation Council of Europe adopted a non-binding treaty on cyber-crime, Reuters reported yesterday. It is the first international treaty on criminal offenses committed over the Internet. The treaty criminalizes activities, such as fraud and child pornography committed on the Web. It also sets up global policing procedures for conducting computer searches, intercepting e-mails, and extraditing criminal suspects. The treaty has to be ratified by individual states and its provisions incorporated into national law.
Score one for the good guys...
On the flip side, for the US readers this implies that Uncle Sam can dip into your cookie jar anytime he wants something to snack on, that pesky Fourth Amendment not withstanding.
Europe moves to protect data privacy, votes to ban cookies
The European Parliament snubbed a request by President Bush to allow authorities more access to Europeans' private data, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Voting on a bill governing communications privacy issues, the Parliament overwhelmingly supported the European Union's status quo, which bans the routine collection of data such as telephone and Internet-activity logs for any purpose other than billing. It also voted to ban Web-site operators from placing files on people's computers without permission and commercial operators in general from sending unsolicited faxes and mobile-phone messages. It stopped short of banning spam.
This one could probably be subtitled as "I'm gonna break your metal face" is simply an expression of liberty and equality.
BattleBots see women and men competing equally in engineering
BattleBots are robots that attempt to destroy each other in tournaments. In BattleBots, women are full participants in designing, building, operating, and repairing the aggressive hunks of metal, Wired News reported yesterday. In the U.S. BattleBot tournaments are broadcast on Comedy Central.
At the latest BattleBot tournament, the first all-women's collegiate team from the University of Tulsa competed in the superheavyweight division with their spinner bot, Hurricane. The Tulsa team, made up of about 15 engineering students, designed Hurricane in January and put it together over the summer. The Tulsa team plans to tour local schools with Hurricane to encourage kids to pursue math and science.
JPM DailyTech Editor's comment: Unlike boxing or other sports where the sexes are divided, in BattleBots women and men compete against each other directly. At least, their robots do. BattleBots can weigh up to 350 pounds. No individual is picking one up, so brawn isn't an asset. Women still are a distinct minority in these tournaments, but at least the playing field in this sport is level.
BattleBot tournaments are set in a fight format, but they are really challenges of engineering design and manufacturing skill. They are similar to stock car races, which are a test of engineering, but also a test of driver skill, physical strength, and stamina. In BattleBot competitions, which last only a few minutes, the driver's outside the ring controlling the vehicle through a remote control device. No crash helmets needed.
And now, three for the drooling techno-philes in the audience (and you know who you are...) to whom the words "More! More! Faster! Faster!" mean something entirely different.
Intel funnels PC advances into motherboard
Intel displayed its next generation motherboard, code named Hannacroix, at this week's Comdex show, CNET News reported yesterday. It's a vehicle to demonstrate many technologies Intel hopes to see in future PCs, including the faster version two of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) connections, Serial ATA connections to hard drives, six-speaker audio, and 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless networking.
With Hannacroix, Intel decided to support both USB 2.0 and Firewire, two dueling standards for connecting devices such as digital cameras, MP3 players, network cards, and hard disks. USB 2.0 is much faster than the current version of USB, which is best for devices with low data-transfer demands, such as mice or keyboards. Microsoft initially snubbed USB 2.0 in Windows XP but later announced support.
JPM Tech Daily Editor's comment: The new motherboard design is all about speed and connectivity. Addressing performance bottlenecks will help move the PC upscale into server and mainframe markets. Intel isn't sure whether USB or Firewire will dominate external connections, so it's supporting both standards. It's not sure whether 802.11b or Bluetooth will become the wireless communication standard, so it's supporting both.
Inside the computer, Intel is addressing another major communications bottleneck, the hard drive. Although processors, hard drives, and other components have increased in speed and performance, the conduits that connect these parts have not. This has resulted in the equivalent of traffic jams inside computers. Serial ATA will effectively double the bandwidth between disk drives and other PC components. It will also allow drives to communicate independently with the CPU. Most visibly, Serial ATA will get rid of the wide ribbon cables, an artifact of the original PC designs, which now impede airflow inside a computer.
IBM to build second Blue Gene supercomputer
IBM will build a supercomputer that is smaller and 15 times speedier than the current fastest computer, Reuters reported today. The new computer will be used for everything from weather modeling, to studying genomics data, and running commercial database applications. It is the second computer planned as part of an expanding five-year, $100 million project called Blue Gene that IBM began in 1999 with the intention of studying proteins. Blue Gene/L is expected to be completed in 2004, and will have a processing speed of 200 teraflops, or 200 trillion calculations per second.
Nanowires may help detect pathogens
Scientists have created transistors out of tiny crystal nanowires less than a millionth of an inch wide and several thousandths of an inch long, The New York Times reported today. Dr. Charles M. Lieber, who led the Harvard chemistry team that built the nanowires said that they might make good sensors for proteins, DNA, and other biological molecules. Among other things, that could aid the development of devices to detect pathogens like anthrax, he said.
Wednesday
Why arbitrage is not a zero sum game
or Fred Bastiat gets all warm, loving and huggy with Natalie...
Arbitrage itself is not a zero sum game as the buying/selling of both sides of the arbitrage adds liquidity to the market, which adds value to the market itself by making trades easier for all participants and reducing volatility.
As for 'arbitraging' sovereign services, anything which reduces the distortions of the state by reducing the power of the state to do, well, much of anything, is hardly a 'zero-sum-game'. Allowing the market to actually work better adds value that would otherwise be lost to the state. Government by its nature destroys wealth by using force to allocate resources, thus removing the ability of those resources to flow where they otherwise would have been employed with profit.
Frederic Bastiat wrote in 1850 about 'that which is seen, and that which is not seen', in which he explains how we can see how the state allocates resources which it has appropriated and we can see how it results in supposed productive activity. But what we do not see is what those resources would have done if allocated by the market if the state had not appropriated them. If the resources could have be used to create what the government wants at a profit, then why have the government do it at all? If the resources could not have been employed to create it at a profit, then clearly the actions of the government result in wealth destruction.
So I would contend anything people can do to keep the means of production out of the hands of the state, far from producing a zero sum game, actually adds to the total sum of wealth by allowing those means to engage in genuine wealth creation.
Capitalism, when warm, loving and huggy... or cold, bad tempered and grumpy, is a splendid thing because it creates wealth whilst not actually giving a damn. It is rather like the way the wind can move a sail ship forward if the ship is sailed correctly or sink it if the ship is sailed poorly. On the other tentacle, government, even when warm, loving and huggy, makes us all poorer, rather like a dreaded in-law who comes to visit and just will not go away again.
As for my glee at the idea of driving the tax men of several nations into a confused state of mental collapse, now that is a metacontext thing. It's just the way I see the world.
Wednesday
...is not so completely wonderful as all that. As I understand it arbitrage is a zero sum game. As I never tire of pointing out - um, no, as I'm sick and tired of pointing out but keep doing it anyway - the wider world of laissez faire is a win-win game. Warm. Loving. Huggy. Capitalism. It's a metacontext thing, Perry, like in your opening essay.
Wednesday
Samizdata slogan of the day:
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
-William Pitt (1783)
Sadly we don't hear British prime ministers echoing those sentiments these days
Tuesday
Arbitrage is a wonderful thing... it can also lead to an interesting world view
Arbitrage is an artful way to make money. When two (or more) items have a historical range of price relationship between them, temporary changes in these relationships provide an opportunity for profit. Often the relationships between the two different products is obscure, very indirect and sometimes quite counterintuitive. Yet many an arbitrageur (or just 'arb' as they are often known) has grown slowly and unflamboyantly wealthy, not in the high drama the great bull or bear markets, but just by watching relative price movements in products as diverse and seemingly unrelated as soybean oil and pork belly futures.
The same approach can be taken in other areas of endeavour too.
Globalization has brought many interesting and exciting things in its wake, not to mention hitherto unprecedented prosperity to more people on the planet than ever before. Capital is now almost totally fungible at the push of a button and this has had the effect of creating an interesting market. The sovereign law market.
I wrote about the most glaring example of this yesterday. States like to pass laws that say what their subject populations can and cannot say, write or publish. Yet now, people who wish to publish views that their local laws say are illegal have merely to host them on a server in some other country and viola! The 'illegal' views are on display for anyone who wishes to read them and there is not a damn thing the state can do about it. Information too is now fungible: if you can't publish a dead tree pamphlet, a website will do just fine.
Which brings us again to laws. It use to matter very little in a nation what the laws were in some other country. But in this era of downloadable virtualized products, excellent communications, cosmopolitan entrepreneurship, ubiquitous spoken English and mobile capital, there is increasingly little reason why a business should be set up in a place which chooses to slather on tax and regulatory burdens. We are entering an era of the arbitrage of laws. Are the employment laws better in the Philippines or India? India eh? Ok, lets relocate our call centre from Los Angeles to India. What about corporate taxes? Ok, move the company's brass plate to the British Virgin Islands. Where are the best programmers? Prague? Ok, lets outsource to a Czech codehaus...they even have the best beer there. Where will our data be safe? USA? Ok, I know a nice server farm in Fresno...yes, they have their own power generators...etc.
Rather than 'investing' a business in a single 'national' economy, the sovereign law arbitrageur modularizes and virtualizes and invests wherever their particular needs are best met by the state for that aspect of their business. No longer does he have to take a one-size fits all/one nation fits all approach. Analogous to arbitrage, this approach does not yield the big bucks won or lost by hitching one's fortunes to a single state...yet by simply opting out of unreasonable laws by moving modularized companies to where they are best looked after (i.e. left the hell alone), capital is allowed to work more effectively.
The future is dispersed, virtual, anational and the bits send each other e-mail in English...even when one bit is in Calcutta and the other in Prague and they are talking about a client in New York. Of course an added bonus is driving the theft enforcement arm of several states utterly crazy trying to figure out not just how to tax you but just who the hell 'you' actually are!
The future is closer than you might think.
Tuesday
Crack Suicide Squad Reality very often outdoes imagination. Tom Clancy said in a September interview that he could never have sold a story whose plot depended upon 19 suicidal, homicidal maniacs working as a team. Black humour on the net in both verbal and cartoon form soon toyed with the concept of training camps for bin Laden's crack suicide squads. They posed the weighty question: "How can they have a final exam?"
With the assistance of CNN's crack reporting squads, we now know the answer:
Northern Alliance commanders said pockets of Taliban fighters continued to fight, some taking shelter in bombed-out buildings, while other Taliban trapped behind the opposition advance were blowing themselves up with hand grenades and land mines, rather than surrendering.
I guess they passed.
Tuesday
Samizdata slogan of the day:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Monday
An article in Wired reports a victory against the 'forces of darkness' with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don't. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.
"If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States," Stephane Lilti told Reuters. "This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists ... for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system's decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer."
Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system's decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about 'the extreme left'. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.
What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words... sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world's refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.
As Sinead O'Connor put it in a song:
Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they've got a severe case
of the 'Emperor's new clothes'
So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free...the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.
And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us... fuck you
Monday
From Asia Times
From German literature Nobel laureate Guenter Grass to Swedish bestselling mystery novel author Henning Mankell, from conscience-stricken German social democrats to politically clueless French socialists, it's all clear as daylight: The arrogant new imperialist Americans brought September 11 upon themselves; now they are arrogantly and callously bombing the hell out of one of the world's poorest nations, ignorantly flailing about rogue-elephant style, crushing friend and foe, presumed-guilty and innocent alike. Here's how Mankell, speaking for - ahh so many of his co-thinkers - put it: "My first thought was, oh what a horrible story. But the next thought was: I'm not surprised ... I've seen it coming. The gap between rich and poor for many years has been growing ever larger. The poor have nothing to lose. The United States, I'm afraid, has acted arrogantly in many respects ... We have to solve the problem of poverty. We have to tackle the AIDS problem. And we must strengthen the emancipation of women ..."
There are variations to the theme: The Palestinians must be given their own state; globalism must be reined in; the root causes of terrorism must be addressed; indiscriminate bombing of a poverty-stricken country will only reinforce terrorist sentiments and support; terror as such is an abstraction - fighting it an impossible dilemma.
There are truths and truisms in the war critics' and opponents' complaints and laments. But for the better part of the less left-sophisticated populace of Western and Asian nations alike (us included), such sophistry holds little water. Mass murder was committed on September 11; 5,000 people died. There is simply no way that can or will be excused or "explained" away. To the political misfortune of leftists, greens, anti-globalists, what have you, overwhelming popular majorities want justice to be done and punishment exacted. And to their greater political misfortune, that popular sentiment will prove not merely a temporary reaction but is here to stay, it is making a profound impact on the fortunes of political leaders, and it will soon make large impacts at ballot boxes.
In the US, that's an open and shut case. Question the manner in which President George W Bush expresses himself; but make no mistake about the support for his policies and leadership team and the confidence Americans have in the way conservatives from New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have conducted themselves and conducted policy over the past two months. The very notion that they are conservatives and hence might only represent the views of one portion of the political spectrum has disappeared. What they have said and done is seen as right and just and simply representing common sense. Most of those once to the left of them have joined them. The 50:50 Bush-Gore political divide of a year ago is no more.
Similarly in Europe, there has been a political seachange. Conservative French President Jacques Chirac who politically had his back against the wall earlier this year has made a dramatic comeback. Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin has barely been heard from. Conservative German social-democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder enjoys the highest approval ratings of his three-year tenure; leftist critics in his own party and the Greens have found no voice or cause to oppose him. The once unimaginable, that a leading Green Party politician, parliamentary defense expert Angelika Beer, now regards the deployment of ground forces in Afghanistan as necessary, now causes barely a political ripple. The center-right government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, shaky at home and once seen as a potential political menace Europe-wide, is firmly entrenched in power.
In Asia, the issue of Islam, that nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia and, of course, Pakistan have large Muslim majorities, tends to blur political perspectives. But radical Islamism, while politically noisy, is in fact on the retreat and seen as a threat to be combatted, not appeased. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made it a point to stop over in Turkey on his way to Europe and the US and the point will not be lost on his political friends and foes: Musharraf, educated in Turkey early in his life, has always regarded Turkish secularizer and modernizer Kemal Ataturk as the historical figure to emulate.
The global political landscape has changed vastly since September 11 and is continuing to change rapidly. It will now remain to be seen to what extent and how fast new political allegiances and strategic alliances will be able to transform openings and opportunities for construction and implementation of more rational political and economic policies into permanent realities. But for the first time since the end of the Cold War, that chance now realistically exists. The US, main target of the terrorists and their leftists sympathizers and "explainers", will play a lead role in this transformation. However, the political constellations world-wide are now such that much of the US agenda has broad-based support rather than being seen as an imposition. Loose talk of a "new imperialism" is off the mark; it crucially ignores new realities and political forces.
______________________________________________________________
David comments:
I must confess that, after reading this, I had mixed emotions; I wavered between ecstatically happy and delirious with glee. Apart from the overwhelming satisfaction of the anti-everything mob getting it's comeuppance there is the added delicious irony that the coup de grace has been delivered by one of their own - for what is Bin Laden except a student marxist with a 'schmatter' on his bonce? And to think of all the years we've spent arguing passionately the case for freedom and individuality...But who cares? We've won. Let the bells peal and pretty girls dance in the streets for we can declare Victory over Communism. Let's get demobbed and beat our swords into nails which we can use to hammer into the coffins of the woodstockers, the flat-earthers and the 68 generation (who cares if they're still breathing?)
But, lo soft and wait. Is this victory? Have we won? I mean, really. Look around you, comrades, for another better armed, better trained and better fed foe stalks the earth in search of tribunes to humble. I'm talking about the big NWO corporatist bugga-boo that lived and breathed fire long before Bin Laden popped his fat-lips over the parapet of history. The bugga-boo said that civil-liberties + tax havens = drugs. Now the bugga-boo says that civil-liberties + tax havens = terrorism and won't there be oh so many crinkley mouths when this is proven, tragically, to be right?
Victory it may be but it is a victory of sorts; victory after a fashion. This is not Virginia in 1776, it is Poland in 1945
Alright, I dramatize. But on this rattling train of years those of us who have 'Galt's Gulch' stamped as the destination on our tickets have always known that it lies at the very end of the line. Maybe. Next stop, Singapore?
Monday
Airbus Down Jim Bennett contacted me with an obvious correction: the DC-10 had 3 engines, not 4. Two on wing pylons and one on the empennage However he still agrees that it was a more stable configuration as one engine was near the centerline.
Yet another example of insta-correction brought to you by the magic of the global Internet...
Monday
Airbus Down There is not a lot of information to go on yet on the crash in Queens. That said, I am just as capable of making a fool of myself as the next pundit, so I will proceed to do so.
My instructor once told me, "What is the most dangerous part of a flight? Takeoff. The runway is behind you." What was true of a single engine Cessna is biblical for a heavy multiengine transport. Losing an engine on takeoff means a loss of power just when you need it the most. You are trying to climb out in a high angle noise-abatement attitude. Suddenly you don't have the power to sustain that and you are heading for a stall. Even worse, you have an asynchronous thrust and a torque that even full opposing rudder might not be able to counteract. This is especially true for a plane with two very powerful wing pylon mounted engines. When one engine stops running, your airplane wants to stop climbing and do a wingover. That's probably what happened at O'Hare a decade or more ago when a DC-10 did just that. A DC-10 has 4 engines so one would think it might have been able to recover. But there is yet a third problem in a case like today.
Engines do fall off airplanes from time to time. Pylons are designed to break away in the worst case. But that only helps in a more normal failure, not a catastrophic failure. There is every chance that at the very instant your airplane wants to do a wingover and head straight for the ground, you will have lost all or most of your hydraulics on one side. Airplanes that size are controlled by hydraulics; the hydraulic pressure is supplied by a smaller jet engine called an Auxiliary Power Unit. I'm sure you've heard of APU's on the space shuttle. Well, airliners have them too. They supply the high pressure required to move ailerons and such. If you lose pressure, you can't control the airplane. There is redundancy, but if you've just lost a big chunk of aeroplane... you are toast.
It's doubtful even a computer fly-by-wire system could have dealt with it. You can fly an airplane with control surfaces and no power or with power and no control surfaces. But if you've lost both?
This all begs the real question. Was it or wasn't it? There was certainly no terrorist inside the airplane. Believe me, there is no button that says "Jettison Engine". If reports of fire on one side during takeoff were true, then it is either a terrible accident or sabotage before the takeoff. If the problems did not show until the aircraft was off the runway, it is either a engine fault, ingestion of a Pterosaur-sized avian, sabotage... or a Stinger up the exhaust pipe.
I'm sure that someone in high places will know very soon. Personally I think it was an accident. We'll know soon enough. The signs of a Stinger induced failure should be rather unmistakeable if present.
Monday
Samizdata slogan of the day:
It is a measure of the incoherence of Marxist analysis that fascism is regarded as 'late capitalism' when in reality late capitalism, when we get there, will clearly have resulted in libertarianism
-Perry de Havilland
Sunday
You know you are a superpower when...
An interesting article by Saritha Prabhu, who give an nice perspective on what the war against terrorism actually means to 'the man in the street' in The Tennessean.
Living in an affluent western society it is easy to forget that for most of the rest of the world, when a war suddenly comes snarling across your border it is not something you only get 'feel' by watching the BBC or CNN.
Sunday
For a libertarian angle on the Harry Potter phenomenon, check out Natalie's blog and look for the article "Harry Potter and the Libertarian Subtext". Most entertaining.
Sunday
