Category Archives: Current Affairs

Liberty Is Security

In this age where every terrorist action seems to be met by politicians and the public rushing to clamp down on the liberty of people who had nothing to do with it, my mantra is Benjamin Franklin’s comment:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Well, recent research demonstrates old Ben was more right than that statement would indicate:

One method to attenuate [suicide bombers], then, is to target dangerous groups that influence individuals, such as Al ­Qaeda. Another method, says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered that “countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn suicide terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.” Let freedom ring!

— Murdercide Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers By Michael Shermer, Scientific American January 2006.

Not only does curtailing civil liberties not assist much in the short term with catching terrorists, in the long term it actually breeds terrorists. After all, terrorism isn’t about religion, or poverty, or even nationalism: it is about politics. The politics of civil liberties.

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Another Voice Within the Islamic World

Often I wonder why what mostly appears in the press from the Muslim world appears to be either business as usual (the hajj is starting now) or the latest threat from some extremist or other, or of course the press’s favorite angle on either of those (hotel collapses during hajj or terrorists kill x people). All those things are legitimate news, and I’m glad that ordinary things do go on as usual. But where are the voices opposing the extremists?

Here’s one, from Iran. Former president Mohammed Khatami says:

Since the aggressive voice within the Islamic world is very loud today, and the poser circles in the west, too, try to further aggrandize it, we need to clarify that there is another voice within the Islamic world," Khatami was quoted as saying.

"In order to clarify which version of Islam we are talking about, there is no need to represent a nation, or a government, but we need to clarify that our voice is clearly heard in the Islamic world and accepted," he said.

— Iran’s Khatami calls for "another voice" in Islamic world (Xinhua) Updated: 2006-01-07 09:22

For that matter, why does this story only seem to be carried on two Chinese news agencies and a couple of middle eastern ones? Does the western press have no interest in a reasonable  voice from the middle east? Maybe it’s too busy carrying the latest not-so-reasonable diatribe from the current president of Iran and ex-president Khatami’s reasonable voice doesn’t fit the current press template for Iran; I don’t know. 

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Peace Breaks Out, and Nobody Notices

The world is an increasingly dangerous place, so we have to use extraordinary means in extraordinary times, right? Wrong, according to a recent report:

The Human Security Report, an independent study funded by five countries and published by Oxford University Press, draws on a wide range of little publicized scholarly data, plus specially commissioned research to present a portrait of global security that is sharply at odds with conventional wisdom. The report reveals that after five decades of inexorable increase, the number of armed conflicts started to fall worldwide in the early 1990s. The decline has continued.

By 2003, there were 40 percent fewer conflicts than in 1992. The deadliest conflicts — those with 1,000 or more battle-deaths — fell by some 80 percent. The number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians also dropped by 80 percent, while core human rights abuses have declined in five out of six regions of the developing world since the mid-1990s. International terrorism is the only type of political violence that has increased. Although the death toll has jumped sharply over the past three years, terrorists kill only a fraction of the number who die in wars.

Peace on Earth? Increasingly, Yes. By Andrew Mack, Washington Post, Wednesday, December 28, 2005; Page A21

We wouldn’t know this by what’s generally reported in the media, whose motto remains, if it bleeds, it leads. So what happened?

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Historical Externalities

While it may seem that in times of unusual external threats that it is necessary to take extroadinary measures to protect democracy, it’s also possible to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.

Torture’s Long Shadow, By Vladimir Bukovsky Washington Post Sunday, December 18, 2005; Page B01

The above is an externality that I don’t recall seeing mentioned anywhere else. The writer has direct personal experience with this effect. There’s more.

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Eating Earthquake Pie

What happens when a government does not protect its own people, or bring them relief after a natural disaster destroys their homes and kills many of them? Here are some examples:
In Egypt, the years after the [1992] Cairo earthquake saw the largely non-violent Muslim Brotherhood take over key parts of civil society, and a vicious war between radical militants and state security services.
— Why Musharraf had to eat humble pie Islamic religious groups will quickly take advantage of government shortcomings, warns Jason Burke Sunday October 16, 2005 The Observer
The Observer article does not mention that it was the previous suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian state that had radicalized Sayyid Qutb, making him one of the historical strategists of the current jihadists, and executed him, making him a martyr to their cause. The article makes the point that such religious organizations, especially radical ones, are less likely to be corrupt than are government agencies, and thus often take advantage of a natural disaster and succeeding failure of the government to help in order gain the confidence of the people for the religious organization. This is especially possible when the government has harrassed traditional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), often considered too liberal by the powers that be, until such NGOs are ineffective. Radical religious organizations can then step in and pick up the slack. Continue reading →

Killer ‘Cane

Reader John C. Griffin recommends the book Killer ‘Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 by Robert Mykle. This was Hurricane #4 of the Atlantic Hurricane Season of 1928, a Category 5 hurricane, with max wind speeds of 140 miles per hour (mph). When it came ashore in Florida on 16 September, it was still a cat 4 with winds of 135 mph. 2,500 people died. Continue reading →

Decentralizing Energy

This isn’t about the Internet, but it is about a scale-free network: oil production. The big problem with oil isn’t that it’s currently expensive, or that current sources are running short. The problem isn’t even that the U.S. gets most of its oil from the middle east: it doesn’t; the U.S. imports only a fraction of its oil, and only a fraction of that comes from the middle east. (One of the main interests of the U.S. in the middle east and other oil producing areas is to police them so that no other country decides it must develop the capability to do so.) The problem is that too much oil comes from too few suppilers, starting with Saudi Arabia and working down.

So why consider running out of oil a problem? Why not consider it an opportunity? An opportunity to shift to other and more distributed energy sources, thus removing the need to militarize the Middle-East.

Here’s a detailed proposal to do just that, funded partly by Pentagon money, and written by people who have been making practical improvements in energy efficiency for companies large and small for many years: Winning the Oil Endgame, Rocky Mountain Institute; 309 pages; $40.

Amory Lovins proposes doing it not by abandoning suburbia, rather by using profit and market to drive efficiency and shifts in energy production and delivery.

The Economist said about the book:

“Given that America consumes a quarter of the world’s oil but has barely 3% of its proven reserves, it will never be energy-independent until the day it stops using oil altogether.

“How to get there? Amory Lovins has some sharp and sensible ideas. In “Winning the Oil Endgame”, a new book funded partly by America’s Defence Department, this sparky guru sketches out the mix of market-based policies that he thinks will lead to a good life after oil.

“First, he argues, America must double the efficiency of its use of oil, through such advances as lighter vehicles. Then, he argues for a big increase in the use of advanced “biofuels”, made from home-grown crops, that can replace petrol. Finally, he shows how the country can greatly increase efficiency in its use of natural gas, so freeing up a lot of gas to make hydrogen. That matters, for hydrogen fuel can be used to power cars that have clean “fuel cells” instead of dirty petrol engines. It would end the century-long reign of the internal-combustion engine fuelled by petrol, ushering in the hydrogen age.

“And because hydrogen can be made by anybody, anywhere, from windmills or nuclear power or natural gas, there will never be a supplier cartel like OPEC—nor suspicions of “blood for hydrogen”. What then will the conspiracy theorists do?”

In the near term there will no doubt be military actions. In the long run, apparently even the Pentagon thinks we can solve the real problem.

-jsq