11 December 2006, the Monday of tax week

Taxes need to be filed by the 15th here in Costa Rica.  We don't have any tax obligations but our corporations have to file, just the same.  One of the banks (only one of the national banks) has the forms but you have to go wait in line to get them, then pay at the bank.  There are some simplicities in this system, I suppose.

NYTimes headline:

Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan

Islamic militants are flouting a recent peace deal and fortifying alliances with Al Qaeda and foreign fighters, creating a virtual Taliban mini-state.

When will the world learn that the ambassadorial niceties of things like peace treaties and international agreements like the Geneva Conventions work only between civilized states (if then) who can be held responsible for their actions?

I wrote at length yesterday about how the Vietnam war was actually ended, at least on our part, by a peace treaty that would actually have been not all that bad a deal for all concerned, taking all of its factors into consideration, but it didn't work in the end because it wasn't honored...and, really, none of us honored all of the terms of it even from the beginning, but we brought our combat troops home anyhow.  (We cheated because our part of the agreement called for us to take our military equipment with us, but we decided that if we "gave it" to the South Vietnamese then we wouldn't have to take it.)

And even after the North Vietnamese violated the agreement by invading the South, we decided to skip it, we weren't going to go back and hold them to their side of the deal.  We were morally and intellectually dishonest with our Asian allies and decided our guilt, our part of the penalty, would be to feel shame for having "lost" a war.  At least, that's what the media told us happened.  We definitely deserved the shame, because the South Vietnamese paid a much higher penalty.

I keep reading these days about how much of its "moral standing" the US has lost by Bush going back into Iraq in 2003.

What moral standing?  We did not make the North Vietnamese live up to their peace treaty, we sacrificed South Vietnam rather than go back and fight.  We disgraced ourselves by making a contract with terms we weren't willing to enforce.  You don't gain moral standing by abandoning your allies.

After the first phase of the war in Iraq, back in 1991, we made a cease-fire deal with Saddam and brought our troops home.  He promptly violated the agreement, but we once again shamefully did not call him on it.  Instead, we let him slaughter the Shiites and Kurds who thought we would help them, instead we treated them like we did the South Vietnamese...we're outta here, folks.

Neither the first president Bush nor the first president Clinton did anything more than bluster at Saddam the same way we had blustered at North Korea..."you are bad, bad boys!"  What moral standing does that create?

In 2003 we actually went back to Iraq at least in part (you can look it up, folks) because Saddam broke the terms of the cease-fire and we were, this time, going to enforce them.  That part was mentioned repeatedly and pointedly in the Joint Agreement that Congress signed.  Now some wish they had not signed, it seems.

Liberals call that losing your moral high ground, oddly enough...enforcing a signed agreement, that is, not changing your mind after you have signed.   

Now Baker is trying to get us to make the same sort of deal with Syria and Iran, which will have the same consequences.  We'll bring our combat troops home and they will break their word on the agreement.  And we'll let them get away with it, depending on who is president at the time.  Or, maybe, just who controls Congress.

Anybody at all should realize this simple lesson, even an elderly statesman with a God complex, but this morning's headline should rub his nose in the idea.  It won't, though...those noses are impervious, because to them bullshit is the sweet aroma of Diplomacy.

The lesson in life to be learned is: when you make an agreement, a contract, whether in business or in war or in marriage, both sides have to be legally and morally bound to its terms or else a punishment has to be meted out for breaking the agreement.

It's not widely known, but Ahmadinejad has to be sedated in order to get any sleep.  Otherwise he lays awake all night giggling over how stupid Americans are...Good Ol' Charlie Brown falls for the football trick every time!  Not only that, but Lucy always gets away with it unscathed.

If Charlie Brown just one time got up and kicked Lucy's butt good and proper...

Howard Kurtz on 'leaks' and their value:

The reigning assumption of reporters -- that they're not always getting the full story from government officials -- seemed vindicated by twin leaks to the Times, involving the Rumsfeld memo and a classified assessment by national security adviser Stephen Hadley that was critical of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The disclosures also underscored how a single Deep Throat, by slipping someone a piece of paper, can transform coverage of even the most important events. From the Pentagon Papers to the outing of Valerie Plame, this has been a well-trafficked route.

This, of course, makes the obvious assumption that the outing of Valerie Plame was an important event.  Have you noticed how quickly the MSM considered it unimportant after the leaker turned out not to be part of the Bush/Clinton/Rove inner circle?

The Hadley memo -- devastatingly leaked as Bush was about to meet with Maliki in Jordan -- said that "the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.'' A senior administration official told reporters that the memo was merely about "building better capabilities with the Maliki government."

Bush and Vice President Cheney have excoriated news organizations, especially the Times, for publishing national security secrets, but not this time. "I guess it's easier to rally the faithful with a cry of 'national security' than with a complaint that 'this is really embarrassing,' " Times Editor Bill Keller told the New York Observer.

But White House counselor Dan Bartlett says officials are indeed upset: "I haven't seen a more egregious leak in my time in government, timed to influence a very important meeting with a head of state."

It's difficult for me to imagine how a newspaper editor like Keller, who is in full cry against the administration's culpability for American troops dying in Iraq due to malfeasance, could consider publishing an item which in any way damaged the tenuous relationship between the two heads of government as being anything less than likely to result in the death of American troops.

If outing Valerie Plame could be considered in any way risky to her well-being, certainly anything that would cause problems between Bush and Maliki obviously would result in a situation which would endanger the lives of American troops in the field.

Going back to Occam's Razor, it's a lot easier to figure out why Keller publishes leaks potentially injurious to national security--at least to American lives such as Plame, et al--if you conclude that he doesn't really care about injury to them as much as he does causing it to the administration.

While many leakers do their thing for policy reasons, they may also act out of pettiness, revenge or the ego trip of manipulating the media. Since the Times offered no clues about the sources' motivation, we can only speculate. But leaks, at least those that don't truly jeopardize national security, can be an important safety valve in a system where public pronouncements are carefully calibrated to reveal almost nothing. And journalists, of course, lap them up.

The question being: have the journalists enough wisdom and maturity to recognize when they really are jeopardizing national security, or not.  So for the evidence would appear to be that they do not.  They'll publish anything in search of personal aggrandizement.

This is almost sad, because I think that people like Kos probably sincerely believe what they say.

"We can spend 2007 either pushing impeachment . . . or we can use it educating the American people about what a Democratic government would look like -- passing meaningful legislation that would improve their lives like the minimum wage, health care reform, ethics reform, stem cell research funding, policies that help families and the middle class."

Except, what do all of those things really mean?

For instance, do families and the middle class really depend on the minimum wage?  Isn't this one of those typical Democrat issues that makes you feel good about yourself but doesn't really do much for the American people as a whole, and especially the middle class?  It's a fight that produces a lot of enthusiasm because Republicans are dumb enough to oppose it, for some reason. 

Ditto the stem cell research funding thing.  The government funds plenty of stem cell research already, the only question being debated here has to do with new lines of fetal stem cells and whether the federal government really should be in the business of paying for research for which the big pharmaceutical companies will profit.  What does health care reform mean?  Socialized medicine, the government pays for all health care out of your taxes?  Or employers pay the whole tab for employees?

As for ethics reform, when the with Democrats attempting to promote an unindicted Abscam co-conspirator, an impeached federal judge, and have just reelected a guy who keeps his cash money in his freezer instead of his bank, good luck.

I'm partisan to at least the extent of noting that you can look at a list of Republicans who got in ethics trouble recently and note that all of them are gone, they're outta here, but the Democrats are not only getting reelected but being put up for promotion.  You'd think even Kos might notice something like that...

Democrats (and even Republicans) running on a campaign platform of "ethics reform" are also just like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.  The voters always fall for it.

From the Science section of the Washington Post:

That piece of "junk" went on to become the most celebrated find from the shipwreck; it is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Research has shown that the wheel was part of a device so sophisticated that its complexity would not be matched for a thousand years -- it was also the world's first known analog computer.

The device is so famous that an international conference organized in Athens a couple of weeks ago had only one subject: the Antikythera Mechanism.

Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth that it implies, tell us how the ancients grappled with ideas about determinism and human destiny?

What does it tell us about their views about the minimum wage, and health care...?

Building it would have been expensive and required the interaction of astronomers, engineers, intellectuals and craftspeople.

Or perhaps the crew of a wrecked and stranded spacecraft, bored out of their minds but lacking the technology to actually make the necessary repairs, doing it as a way to pass the time?

(Imagine a future historian encountering philosophy texts written in our time -- and an aircraft engine. The books would tell that researcher what a few scholars were thinking today, but the engine would give them a far better window into how technology influenced our everyday lives.) Charette said it was unlikely that the device was used by practitioners of astrology, then still in its infancy. More likely, he said, it was bound for a mantelpiece in some rich Roman's home.

Let me see, now, is the author making the comparison between the aircraft engine, something to show how technology influenced their daily lives, or a philosophy text?  I seem to have lost the thread, here...

Why was the technology that went into the device lost?

"The time this was built, the jackboot of Rome was coming through," Edmunds said. "The Romans were good at town planning and sanitation but were not known for their interest in science."

Aha, of course.  No matter that the Romans were among the first and finest engineers, they were jackboots, conquerors, unlike, say, the peaceful Greeks, who sat around and studied philosophy and science...

Okay, ed, you can move that guy up to the Politics section now.

Iran today opened a conference that it said would examine whether the Holocaust took place, claiming the meeting was an opportunity to discuss the World War II genocide in an atmosphere free of what it termed Western taboos.

What a great idea!  This means that in the future we will be welcome to have conferences held which will be free of Eastern taboos.

What's that?  Huh?  Oh, it's like the Black Caucus, they can do it but we can't?  I, uh, see, I guess...

John Fund says Nancy is having even more ethics problems than the several prominent characters we already know about (Murtha, Hastings, Jefferson, Mollohan) as she tackles the, what shall we call it...the DeLay vacation trip problem?

Consider her pledge to make a ban on lobbyists or any outside group that employs them from arranging or funding congressional travel a top priority in the new Congress. Many of these so-called "fact-finding missions" are dressed-up junkets featuring golf outings and stays in sunny climes.

For Ms. Pelosi the pressure will be on to narrowly craft any rules changes. After all, all 10 of the top congressional recipients of privately-funded travel since 2000 are Democrats.

I'm still laughing at the people who bought her "party of corruption" line about the Republicans.  But, hey, maybe she even believes it...the Democrats think things are just fine when they do them:

It also won't be easy to get a strict ban by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the incoming chairman of the House Ethics Committee. Based on the number of trips taken, she is the No. 1 traveler in the House, logging in at 74 trips since 2000, an average of almost one a month. Her journeys have included a 2005 Las Vegas conference paid for by the United Steelworkers and a speech in Barbados earlier this year sponsored by the National Bar Association.

"I make no apologies for the trips that I have taken," Rep. Jones said in a statement.

Tom DeLay says he's coming back as a Democrat.

I am tickled by these two American Spectator quotes from Christopher Orlet:

Columnist Ilana Mercer was apparently dead serious when she wrote that "Saddam's reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people. What a shame it's too late to dust Saddam off, give him a sponge bath, and beg him to restore law and order to Iraq. Secretly, that's what anyone with a head and a heart would want."

Ms. Mercer was only repeating what knuckleheads like radio host Michael Savage have been saying. Mr. Savage recently told his audience of mouth-breathers that "we should bring back Saddam, a Sunni, because he knows how to control the Shia....You can laugh all you want. He knew how to control them; he knew how to keep these maniacs under control. And he was also a counterbalance to Iran."

Why I'm amused is that both have interesting grains of truth.  Mercer recognizes that the Iraqis are a fractious people except for when they were under Saddam's control, which effectively gets Bush off of the hook for causing the violence in Iraq now because actually they're just back to normal...oh, my, did I just say that? she may be gasping now.

And Savage is telling the truth about Saddam knowing how to control the Shia...he killed about 300,000 of them who wanted to speak up, creating a peaceful silence from at least that many. 

Even funnier, he's right about the counterbalance to Iran...in fact, that was the reason why, under the advice of REALISTS like James Baker, we supported Saddam part of the time.

Like they used to say in the good old days of Baker/Kissinger Realpolitik foreign policy, sure he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch!

Clinton apparently thought that was also true of Yassir-Nossir Arafat, who was invited to the White House more times during the Clinton administration than any other foreign leader.

About Saddam, Jonathan Chait in the New Republic said:

Yes, I know. Saddam is a psychotic mass murderer. Under his rule, Iraqis were shot, tortured and lived in constant fear. Bringing the dictator back would sound cruel if it weren't for the fact that all those things are also happening now, probably on a wider scale.

Note the cute use of the word "probably" to get him off of the hook, since the charge won't stand up under careful scrutiny and he knows it.

Take just my favorite war crime location, the place I call Abu Grabu prison.  Saddam used it; we used it.  Compare the number of dismemberings and deaths under the two regimes.  Go ahead, take your time.  And, okay, if you prefer not to believe any of the reports of the rape rooms and the guys being fed alive to the dogs or the shredders by Saddam and his two sons, whose names you probably have also disremembered, I still think the comparison is going to be a bit lop-sided.

I can even manage some empathy at times for people who get mad at Bush, but the word should mean anger, not insanity.

Another couple of good lines in American Spectator by Patrick Michaels:

Consider what's going on in North American cities. They warm up, with or without global warming, thanks to all their concrete and blacktop. As cities have warmed in recent decades, heat-related mortality has dropped significantly. Why? Because heat waves became common, and people learned how to live with them. Our hottest cities have the lowest numbers of heat-related deaths. The only major city in which they are increasing is chilly Seattle, and, as it continues to warm, mortality will drop.


There's also a big factor called human adaptability.  I spent quite some years living in the Mojave Desert before the invention of refrigerated air conditioning, we used swamp coolers in my Dad's house right up until he moved here to live in Costa Rica with us, and you just live your life differently there than you do in a colder location.  The people who die are those who are suddenly faced with an unexpected situation without time to adapt...like a heat wave in Seattle, which doesn't come along very often (I lived there a short time, too).

Aren't we just moving heat-related death to more northern cities with global warming? No. The world tends to run out of cities north of 60 degrees of latitude. It's not an accident that almost all of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border.

This is the other interesting thing...don't you think there are a lot of people who would actually like to be living further north if only the climate became a trifle more hospitable?  People who equate global warming with "all bad all the time" just aren't thinking clearly

.Nor will such technology exist for the foreseeable future. Sure, governments can "encourage" us to buy hybrid cars. But the beaters we trade in simply move down the economic chain. Net emissions rise.

I can tell you that every old bus that ever got retired in North America is still hard at work here in rural Costa Rica.