Sunday, July 31, 2005

The Daily Mantra:  Computer Games

Computer games are great, but if you’re forgetting to breathe, it’s time to take a break.

Saturday, July 30, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary:  “Level”

level

something that too many modern cookie-cutter homes aren’t

something that all D&D players desperately want their character to gain, rather than lose

Friday, July 29, 2005

Site updates

A while back, I restricted all comments to registered readers only because I was getting hammered by comment spam.  However, now that it looks like I’m starting to get more readers from a larger variety of sites, I’ve changed the process somewhat.

Non-registered readers may now post comments, but all comments are moderated.  This way I can still delete spam if it comes in, but non-members can now post comments too.  In addition, I’ve made membership a little easier.  It’s still not automatic (it’ll require self-activation by a person), but it no longer needs my approval.  If spam occurs again, I’ll revert back to the massive security option, but for now, I’ll leave it as is.

Finally, some people complained that self-activation via email didn’t work, and I debugged the problem.  It’s working now, so anyone who actually wants to be a member here can be now, and relatively painlessly.

The Management

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

The Moderate Voice

Joe Gandelman runs one of the most regularly read websites for political moderates that there is on the web, The Moderate Voice.  Yesterday I discovered that The New York Times online has a section called the Times Navigator, which is basically a huge list of online resources for journalists and readers to get more information and do research into the news.  One of these is Blogs 101, a list of blogs on a variety of topics that are intended to give a feel of how blogs work.

Unfortunately, the Politics and Government blogs are all liberal or conservative in their political leanings - there are no moderate voices represented.  I’d like to change that.  Take a look at The Moderate Voice, and if you think it worthy, please write to Rich Meislin, the person who maintains the Times Navigator and ask that he add The Moderate Voice to his list of political blogs.

Thanks.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

The Micro-Pundit:  Are we at War?

I have a question.  Are we at war, or aren’t we?  We have soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan killing and dying on the President’s orders, so in that sense we are at war.  Bush II says we’re at war, and when the President says so, his authority gives his words more weight than, say, mine.  But in almost every way I can think of, we’re not at war.  Engaged in a dangerous conflict, yes, not actually at war.

How have we, as U.S. citizens, been asked to sacrifice for the so-called war on terror?  We’ve been asked to give up some civil liberties in the pursuit of “homeland security,” but that’s pretty much it.  Cutting our per-capita gasoline consumption would dramatically reduce the profits of nations like Saudi Arabia, nations that have been shown to bankroll Islamist terrorism.  Reducing the flood of money going into terrorist bank accounts would probably have a dramatic effect on the conflict.  Instead, Congress has refused to even consider raising fuel efficiency standards, and the IRS still gives a tax credit for the purchase of large trucks and SUVs purchased by small businesses, making gas consumption MORE attractive, not less.

We’re running a huge budget deficit that is partly the result of our continuing military actions abroad, yet the President and Congress have not asked the American people to pay the higher taxes required to make war.  Not only that, but taxes have actually dropped dramatically since the supposed war started.

Perhaps most damning in many respects is the fact that we have not been asked to sacrifice ourselves, our children, our husbands, or our wives to the war effort.  Our professional, all-volunteer military (read “mercenary army composed of the undereducated and the poor") has not yet been supplemented with draftees, something that is all but inevitable in a real war.  Instead, our government is requiring year-long tours of duty in a combat zone with six months or less R&R before being redeployed to another combat zone.  This tactic is gradually killing military preparedness, driving the most experienced soldiers out of the military altogether, and making recruitment more and more difficult for the Army, the various National Guards, and the Reserves.

If the United States is truly at war, we should behave as if we are.  Instead we’re cutting our own throats economically and militarily, and we’re bankrolling the very enemies we’re in conflict with.  We cannot continue to destroy ourselves this way.  Unfortunately, I have little confidence that the federal government can change this suicidal course.  It will take the people realizing that they’ve been led astray by idealogues and idiots before a new course out of this conflict may be charted.

For a couple of interesting and related editorials on this issue, click here and here.

[crossposted to The 5th Estate]

Monday, July 25, 2005

The Daily Mantra:  Invoking Bacchus

Invoking Bacchus, intentionally or not, is not a wise move before opening a couple of bottles of nice red wine.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

The Daily Mantra:  Water

Whenever you see a baby dumping water out of a cup over their head, or pouring it on the floor, or dribbling it down their front out of their mouth, remember:  there’s a reason you only put water in a cup when the baby’s learning how to drink from a standard cup.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

The Miscreant’s Dictionary:  “Kryptonite”

kryptonite

something so dangerous or repulsive to an individual or demographic that they will flee it rather than fight against it

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Bombing Mecca

Today’s Denver Post reported on some rather incendiary statements made by Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo last Friday (Story).  Congresscritter Tancredo (R-Littleton) was talking on radio station WFLA in Orlando, Florida with host Pat Campbell when he said, in response to a hypothetical question about how the U.S. should respond to nuclear terrorism:

Well, what if you said something like ‘If this happens in the United States and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims.’ You could take out their holy sites.

Cambell then asked “You’re talking about bombing Mecca?” to which Tancredo replied “yeah” and called the bombing of Muslim holy sites the “ultimate response” to the “ultimate threat.”

Furthermore, when asked about his comments inflaming terrorists, Tancredo said “You’ve got people telling us they’re going to bomb our cities and kill however many millions of people that they can.  You’re telling me there’s something more hostile than that?”

Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what I’m about to say.

Unlike the pacifism espoused in the Bible, the Koran permits Muslims to make war on their enemies when they are threatened.  Islamists like Osama bin Laden have been preaching that Western civilization is attacking Islam in a partially successful attempt justify their terrorism and claim an undeserved religious mantle for their immoral harapa masquerading as jihad.

What would happen if, in response to a terrorist attack, we reduced Islam’s most holy site, the city of Mecca, to rubble?  First off, we’d have proven the Islamists right who say that there is a civilizational war going on.  And we’d probably have alienated the vast majority of the 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide

Try the following hypothetical scenario on for size.  Let’s say that 25% of the approximately 6 million Muslims living in the United States decided to join the ranks of terrorists and start wreaking havoc all over the U.S.  That means we’d have about 1.5 million terrorists attacking soft and hard targets all over the country.  Schools, malls, concerts, anywhere that people gathered could be a target.  Government buildings would be attacked regularly, as would symbolic structures and critical infrastructure like the Pentagon or the Golden Gate Bridge.  How bad could that be?  Well, let’s do a little math and see.

The Iraqis estimate that the 25 attacks per day in Iraq are being performed by between 20,000 and 30,000 terrorists, and the estimated number of dead is somewhere between 26 and 45 civilian deaths per day (averaged).  If we assume 25,000 terrorists kill between 26 and 45 people per day, reduce this number by half to estimate the difference in the security situations in the U.S. vs. Iraq, then 1.5 million terrorists would kill between 780 and 1350 people in the U.S. EVERY DAY.  To put that into perspective, if 1.5 million Muslims turned into terrorists in response to our bombing Mecca, they’d kill an average of 2-3 9/11’s worth of people, or 100-175 London transit bombings, every week.  This works out to between 40,000 and 70,000 dead per year.

The human cost would be horrifying enough, but what about the economic damage?  The economic cost to the economy of the 9/11 attacks are estimate to be $27 billion immediate and direct costs, $30 to $58 billion in insurance costs, $5 to $10 billion in lost wages for the dead, plus miscellaneous costs, for a total of between $62 and $100 billion.  If, as this link says, the total yearly economy of the U.S. is about $100 trillion, then the damage of 9/11 was only 0.06% to 0.1% of the economy, almost a drop in the bucket.  Early estimates of the economic costs of the London transit bombings range between 2 and 3 billion English pounds, or $3.5 to $5.2 billion.

Now, if we take 2 to 3 9/11-style economic attacks per week, that adds up to between $125 and $300 billion economic damage EVERY WEEK, and between 6% and 15% losses to the U.S. economy over a year.  If we were hit by 100-175 London transit bombings every week, the economic damage would actually be much worse, ranging between $350 and $900 billion every week, or between 18% and 47% of the U.S. total economy in a year.

(NOTE: this analysis ignores the $61 billion earned every month in exports that we’d almost certainly lose by becoming a pariah state that no-one would trade with.  It also doesn’t try to estimate the costs of losing access to Middle Easten oil, the cost of securing new oil resources, any possible external wars that are triggered in the fallout of a bombing, etc.  Compared to the effects of direct terrorism, these other losses would be a drop in the bucket except for the loss of oil, which might literally shut down the country permanently.)

To be fair, the damage would never reach these thresholds in either deaths or in economic damage.  The citizens of the United States would demand that the President declare a state of emergency, martial law, and the expulsion of ALL Muslims before it would be permitted to get this bad.  I suspect that, faced with hundreds or thousands of terrorist attacks every day across the nation, Americans wouldn’t be able to throw away their civil liberties and Constitutional rights fast enough.  Thus the United States as we know it, imperfect and wart-covered though it may be, would be effectively destroyed from within.

I don’t really know if this scenario is really plausible or not.  I think it is, but I’m only applying logic and what I know of the history of religious conflicts to this question, rather than claiming any deep understanding of the actual politics involved.  But if it’s at all plausible, then it’s dangerously irresponsible to even suggest that bombing Muslim holy sites would be a viable response to nuclear terrorism on the United States.  Bombing Muslim holy sites is quite literally the worst thing we could do.  And any U.S. government representative who would advocate such a course of action under any circumstances really shouldn’t be permitted to remain a U.S. government representative, especially not one who sits on the House International Relations Committee and the Subcommittee on International Terrorism.

For additional perspectives on this issues, here are a few additional links I’ve found:

Tancredo clarifies ‘ultimate response’ This article is a conservative take on Tancredo’s comments.

U.S. Congressmen says USA could “take out” Islamic holy sites This is Russia’s take on the issue, from Pravda.

US Congressman: US Can Take Out Islamic Holy Sites Like Mecca This is an article from an Iranian news outlet.  Yes, this has already been broadcast into the Muslim world.

Turkish official condemns Tancredo’s remarks Turkey is arguably the most modern and “western” of all Muslim nations, and if they think Tancredo’s comments needed condemning, then we should listen to them.

[Crossposted to The 5th Estate]

Sunday, July 17, 2005

The Daily Mantra:  Another Harry Potter

If you want to read the new Harry Potter novel first, be sure to volunteer to go get it at midnight.