| Friday,
August 22, 2oo3 I have two problems with updating this page.
One is the physical arrangement, and that's my fault. I don't have to be
working on a kitchen counter with the keyboard too high, and in fact the
COMPAQ Tablet PC keyboard and screen are good enough for most work, and the
FrontPage editor is all right.
The other is the Crusoe Chip in the Tablet PC, and that's mostly an
exercise in learning patience. Things DO work. But they take a long time
and the progress reporting in Outlook is AWFUL, and when you are at the
end of a thin pipe and there's a spam attack things can take an hour that
you expect to be only a few minutes. I also found out how to use mail2web
to delete a bunch of stuff before I have to suck it down this pipe. That
makes it a lot easier. It's still an exercise in patience, but I am
learning: even though Outlook is a pig and the Crusoe chip is slow and
when Outlook is hauling stuff in it eats all the cycles, if you have faith
and pay no attention to the progress messages, eventually it gets all your
mail and sends what you wrote.
So have a book to read while you wait...
I see Israel has ended the Road Map. Now I am not fixing blame and
don't shoot the messenger: but the Road Map is dead with the latest
Israeli attacks on Palestinian political leaders. When you kill the people
you are negotiating with, soon enough there will be no one willing to step
forward and say they are in charge, and if you can't find anyone to talk
to it is hard to make peace.
Which leaves the US in a dilemma since we put some American prestige
into trying to settle the Israel problem. The difficulty is this: with
Israel's more or less democracy, there are veto groups who have
diametrically opposed goals. Some of those in Sharon's party won't be
happy until the Palestinians are deported to Jordan and Syria, all of
them, and all of the old Holy Land is Jewish. Some of those won't include
pre-West Bank Arabs who are citizens of Israel in the deportations, but
some will, and I don't know how much power those latter have; but there
are enough in the faction that wants and Arab-free Holy Land to insist on
massive retaliations -- Israel not only killed the Hamas leader but the
Army demolished a number of Arab middle class businesses as a
demonstration of what kind of reprisals they can take -- and the reprisals
are pretty certain to open the terror attacks again. More, by casting
middle class into poverty they send educated people into despair, and
probably furnish a new generation of suicide bombers.
On the other side there are Israeli factions powerful enough to have a
veto who will simply not stand for deportation of all the Palestinians.
This leaves any government of Israel in a precarious position.
On the Palestinian side politics are not democratic, so it's harder to
describe the political factions, but I know enough Christian Arabs to have
some appreciation of their view, which is roughly "Because the Jews were
treated horribly in Germany and elsewhere doesn't give them the right to
come over here and take our land and keep us from having a country of our
own." There was a time when Israel could have made real allies of the
Christian Arabs and thus driven a wedge into the racial solidarity of the
Arab world, but they worked hard at rejecting that possibility, treating
the Christians as potential enemies rather than potential friends. Most
Christian Arabs, at least those I know, now would reject alliance with
Jews against Moslems even though this wasn't true 25 years ago.
As far as I can see, there are Palestinian factions that won't be happy
until Isreal is pushed into the sea, even though the vast majority of
Arabs Christian and Muslim would be satisfied with a state of their own
and defined boundaries. The extremists won't make peace, and the moderates
are more afraid of them than they are of the Israelis. Unfortunately,
Israel's attempts to reverse this fear preference loses Israel all hope of
attracting moderates, and loses support for Israel in the Western world.
John McCarthy, who knows the situation at least as well as I do, thinks
the only hope is for Israel to hang on, try for less but hold on, and hope
things change over time. I agree that's probably the only thing that can
work, if anything can. I once thought that a stable border defensible
would moderate the attacks, but the settlers have made such a border
impossible: you can't build a fence that includes most of the settlements
and defines a defensible border, and the fence itself will generate more
suicide bombers who are deprived of hope.
I expect Israel will hang on, with more and more severe actions, as the
Palestinians get increasingly desperate; and I the end game doesn't look
to be in sight.
On Iraq: we need more soldiers with more skills and we don't have them
other than reservists, and the reservists don't want to go and have
political friends. Sending in a volunteer army is one thing. Getting the
volunteers to re-enlist is another. Extending their enlistments without
asking them is yet one more. And sending in Reservists who thought they
were to be part of defense of the realm is political dynamite.
Winning wars is glamorous. Occupation duty with a trooper a day fed to
a meat grinder is less so. As things stand, Bush won't win re-election and
the incoming President will bring the army home. Of course if it's Gephart
he will also double the budget and spend so much on domestic stuff, and
raise taxes so high, that a foreign war may be the only way to bail him
out of trouble. The old axiom was that the Republicans are the party of
Depression, the Democrats are the party of War, and the Republicans are
the tax collectors for Democrat spending schemes: the Democrats buy votes
with public money and the Republicans come in to clean up the economic
mess and pay for it, whereupon the Democrats reap the benefits.
Bush needs 4 million bbl/day of oil out of Iraq, and fast, and he may
not get it. He also needs to cut back on the casualties. A trooper a day
isn't all that many -- Marines in Iraq are probably safer than on the
highways around Camp Pendleton and a black infantryman is definitely safer
in Iraq than a lad his age would be in Central LA -- but we don't think
that way in the US. And the troops are muttering about not re-enlisting,
and enlistments were way up but that trend seems to be slowing and may
have halted.
Pacification of Iraq will take client states. It may be the UN can be
talked into providing some. But that's dangerous too since the UN and its
bureaucrats are terribly expensive, and their record of nation building is
very poor.
Welcome to the world of empire on the cheap, empire backed into with
good republican intentions.
How long until we have Elagabulus?
I have said this elsewhere and often but it bears saying again.
Efficiency is the enemy of reliability.
Optimizing for efficiency always discounts the effects of infrequent
events and improbable events. Unfortunately some events are really
uncertain: assassinations, terrorist attacks on the power grid, that sort
of thing. You can't factor those events into the market because you don't
have any estimate of their probability.
Multiple redundancies are the only defense against improbable events.
Those are redundant and cannot be done by the market because the only way
to make money from preparing for an improbable event is to "gouge" and
"exploit" when the disaster happens, and any company that tries that will
be out of business and its investment lost.
Preparing for disaster is a matter of insurance, and that means as wide
a base as possible for contributions. Which mean everyone, usually, which
means the public purse. Of course the incentive then is to prepare for
everything and build enormous bureaucracies that themselves cause
disasters. So it goes.
When it comes to energy the regulated public utility model isn't
wonderful, but if you don't build in imbecilities like the old Federal
preference for "public owned utilities" over "Private (but still
regulated) utilities" it can work pretty well. Better than the patchwork
system with periodic interference to punish "gouging" that we seem to have
now. Or so I am inclined to believe. I am willing to listen to arguments.
================
I have no way to test the authenticity of this:
Subject: Inside the resistance?
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/15/1060936052309.html
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