Unsightly Mental Blemishes

The Yemen war may be coming to an end, according to Maysaa Shuja al-Deen of AL Monitor‘s Gulf Pulse:

As soon as Saudi Arabia declared the end of Operation Decisive Storm on April 21, all parties to the Saudi war, the Houthis and former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, jointly declared victory on the same day, in a war where no one achieved gains, and joint losses were the name of the game.

A fight to a draw?  Despite the destruction of the Houthi’s and Saleh’s air power,

the Houthis and Saleh’s forces were able to further expand, given their internal organization; Saleh’s forces were once part of the regular army forces while Houthi forces are composed of soldiers who receive fixed salaries.

Did Saudi Arabia’s proxy opponent, Iran, profit from this war?

Iran did not earn anything in the war in Yemen. It has lost all of its alliances in the non-sectarian Yemen. The network of alliances it has built in Taiz and the south has completely collapsed. Chief among these is the alliance in the south with prominent southern leader Ali Salim al-Beidh, who announced his support for Operation Decisive Storm in line with the position of the southerners, albeit at the expense of his ally Iran. Iran now has to settle for one party, the Houthis, who will remain its ally, despite all of its expansion attempts.

But Saudi Arabia still scrapes up a few pennies:

… Saudi Arabia succeeded with the passing of UN Resolution 2216, which was issued in favor of its military intervention. Saudi Arabia was able to neutralize Russia and bring down its project, which aimed at seeking equality between the Houthis and Saleh on the one hand, and the Saudi-supported military forces on the other. …

Saudi Arabia enjoyed wide international political support, as seen when a US warship stopped an Iranian ship loaded with weapons near the coast of Yemen on April 20. Russia also stopped opposing the Saudi strikes. This means that the world recognizes Yemen as a region under Saudi Arabia’s influence and believes that Iran is not entitled to manipulate it, especially since it supports a militia, not the authorities of a country, as is the case in Syria.

A microcosm of war: even if you can identify the winners, they’ve lost nearly as much as the losers.  Asharq Al-Awsat‘s Tariq Alhomayed has a more definite opinion:

So, who were the Houthis and Saleh seeking to target with all these arms and missiles? What would have happened if Riyadh did not take action at this time? It is clear that these arms were being amassed in order to attack Saudi Arabia, which has always had only the best intentions for Yemen—otherwise why else would Saudi Arabia and its allies have waited for so long before militarily intervening to deal with this threat? Therefore, the biggest achievement of Operation Decisive Storm is that it neutralized a great threat not just to Saudi Arabia but also one the rest of the Gulf region, destroying Iran’s stranglehold on Yemen. This also sent a decisive message to Tehran and its followers that Saudi Arabia is more than prepared to respond to any provocation and preserve its security and defend itself.

The paper’s editor-in-chief, Salman Aldosary, has much the same opinion:

Operation Decisive Storm has achieved one success after another, whether militarily, politically or diplomatically, and is now approaching the end of its military operation once it achieves all of its projected objectives—and without the need for adopting a boisterous or disrespectful attitude. This marks the difference between Saudi policies, which are based on facts, and those of Iran, which rely on conspiracies, devious machinations and ostentatious displays of power.

Neither mentions the Pakistani refusal to join the ground war at the behest of the Saudis, though.

The editor-in-chief of Al Arabiya English lauds the efforts of the Saudis:

Having been a victim of several atrocious terrorist attacks itself, Saudi Arabia has always been a key ally in the war against terror and has been relentlessly pursuing al-Qaeda and ISIS militants in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. However, while Yemen’s proximity as well as the despicable crimes committed by Houthis against innocent Sunni men, women and children were all factors that led to the Saudi decision to use force, one needs to remember that Saudi Arabia and its allies are waging this war in the name of humanity, civilization and on behalf of the whole world.

After all this blame on Iran’s ambitions, Stephen Lendman at Real Independent News & Film places the blame directly on the USA:

Yemen is in the eye of the storm. Washington planned and  orchestrated ongoing war on an entire population.

Its using Saudi Arabia, other regional rogue states, and extremist takfiri mercenaries to do its killing and dying.

It’s systematically destroying an entire nation to tighten its regional chokehold.

Will millions of Yemenis die, sustain disabling injuries and/or lose all future hope before things end?

No nation in world history caused more harm to more people over a longer duration than America.

None operate more ruthlessly. None more callously ignore human lives and welfare.

And how did the Saudi public feel about this war?  Back on April 21, AL Monitor, after registering caveats, attempted to assess Saudi public opinion via statements from various prominent figures.  Typical was this:

Meanwhile, Abdallah al-Maliki, a researcher and writer close to the Islamic Enlightenment current, expressed his support for Operation Decisive Storm March 26 on Twitter. He stated: “The war led by the kingdom is fair and attempts to deter Iranian expansion in the region.” He wondered, “What are Arabs doing as another Arab capital falls into the hands of Iran — after Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut?”

OpenDemocracy reports that Sudanese factions appear to support the war:

Sudan’s decision to join Operation Decisive Storm with Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Gulf countries to fight Yemeni Houthi rebels comes as no surprise. …

Considering Sudan’s history, the government is neither concerned with human rights nor the protection of civilians in Yemen or elsewhere. However, what is surprising is the opposition parties’ overt support for Sudan’s participation in Operation Decisive Storm. …

Major opposition parties in Sudan boycotted the elections that took place earlier this month, because they are refusing to give the regime legitimacy. However, representatives of National Umma Party (NUP), Sudanese Communist Party and Sudanese Baath Party support the government’s decision to join Operation Decisive Storm.

What does it all mean?  Perhaps simply that truth never wins out in war’s time; only in the assessment of historians who have no stake in the game.

Ian Morris, in NewScientist (18 Apr 2015) “Morality is rooted in the way societies get their energy” (paywall) (print: “The unexpected origin of human values”) and in his new book Foragers, farmers and fossil fuels: How human values evolve (Princeton University Press), suggests that energy requirements of culture dictate the human values that prevail:

I call the first of the three systems foraging values, because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily by hunting and gathering wild plants. For tens of thousand of years, everyone on Earth lived this way, but now barely one person in a million does so. …

No two modern foraging bands are identical, but virtually all agree that a fair world is one where everyone is treated more or less the same. No one should be much richer than anyone else or much more politically powerful; and men and women should have roughly equal freedom to do what they think best. Upstarts who subvert these values will be cut down to size with mockery, ostracism and even violence. …

The second moral system, which I call farming values because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily with domesticated plants and animals, could not be more different. … Virtually all these groups operated on the principle that a fair society was not one where all were treated more or less the same; rather, it was one where different individuals were treated differently. Some were wiser and more virtuous than others, and deserved to be rich and powerful. It was right to own slaves, for women to defer to men and everyone to defer to rulers who had been chosen by the gods – or actually were gods – because people who were male, free and royal were better than people who were not. Hierarchy was fair.

The third moral system is once again wildly different. I call this fossil-fuel values, because it is associated with societies that augment the energy they can extract from living plants and animals with that from fossilised plants, by burning coal and oil to power machines.

Fossil-fuel society began in Britain around AD 1800 and spread rapidly around the world. As it did so, farming values simply collapsed. Opinion pollsters tell us that by the 2010s, huge majorities – varying only slightly with age, sex, religion and nationality – were insisting that political, economic and gender inequalities are bad. Steep hierarchies, say fossil fuellers, are not fair, and people who disagree seem as immoral as democrats, socialists and feminists would have done 1000 years ago.

Interesting, but what does this have to do with energy?

Foragers captured very little energy from the world – typically, no more than 5000 kilocalories per person per day, to use as food or fuel – and they had to live in tiny bands, usually less than 10 people strong. This made it impossible to create steep political, wealth or gender hierarchies; which, in turn, meant that those who interpreted fairness as treating everyone roughly the same tended to do well, while those whose idea of fairness was treating people differently did not. …

The upside of farming, though, was that it unleashed a flood of energy: by my calculations, the amount of energy used per person roughly doubled between 10,000 BC and 4000 BC, to reach 10,000 kilocalories a day (see “Energy-hungry humanity” graph below). By 1 BC it had risen to 30,000 kilocalories a day. As this happened, farmers turned much of the extra energy into more of their own kind. In 10,000 BC, there were no farmers on Earth, but there were about 5 million foragers; by 1 BC, there were 250 million peasants, who had driven the few surviving foragers on to lands the farmers did not want. …

The industrial revolution increased energy capture even more dramatically. Around AD 1700, the average north-west European used about 32,000 kilocalories a day, but by 1900 this had nearly tripled, to 92,000. Today, the average American burns through 230,000 kilocalories a day. Once again, we turned a flood of energy into more of ourselves. In 1800, there were 1 billion humans. Today, there are 7 billion of us.

The remarkable thing about this energy surge, however, was that rather than pushing the farming world toward even steeper hierarchies, it did just the opposite. Today, 60 per cent of the world’s population live in democracies, and in almost all of these places women can vote and economic inequality has tumbled.

So he suggests that values are shaped by energy requirements; that energy availability enables better reproduction; but that there is not any kind of correlation between energy requirements and, to put it baldly, slavery.  He uses the Gini coefficient, which measures (roughly) inequality in a group, to measure our misuse of each other.  Since this is a pay article, I shan’t copy his chart, but the average values for the three society types are .25 for foragers, .48 for farming societies, and for today’s fossil-fuel society, as he calls us?

By the 1970s, the average Gini coefficient for income equality (after tax) in the nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was just 0.26.

While I’m wary of apples and oranges, it is a fascinating analysis.  Finding good data over time doesn’t appear to be easy.  The OECD, mentioned above, provides this 2013 data:

indicating Gini moving up for the OECD as a group over the years.

Reluctantly leaving the fascinating question of whether the Gini coefficient implies slavery, unrestrained greed, or something else, we can return to the primary question of how energy availability (vs requirements) changes the human value system.  In the beginning, we must acknowledge that a value system cannot be disconnected from group, or even species survival; indeed, value systems have evolved as a survival mechanism.  Foragers, while being fairly egalitarian, are also fragile, with low reproductive potential.  The farming value system requires – coerces – nearly everyone to give up their autonomy in order to lower the fragility value.  But a nuance missing from the paper – but perhaps not the book, which I’ve neither purchased nor read – is whether the energy consumed by the farming group, for some given individual in the hierarchy, includes the energy, at least in some part, of those below him in the hierarchy, or if it’s only a personal consumption.  I think it’s clear that fossil fuel, and the power systems it enables, replaces the slave labor that used to be employed on the farms; the value system of the farm evolves in order to justify the farm because the farm’s output enables the survival of the group.  Thus, from Morris:

Here the anthropology of modern peasant societies partly comes to the rescue. What the downtrodden disagree with, ethnographers find, is not hierarchy as such, but their own place in it, or the suspicion that their so-called “betters” are not living up to their moral obligations. Resisting specific husbands, masters or lords who are abusing their authority is right and proper; resisting authority itself is not. And we find similar attitudes even in texts from now-vanished farming societies. “The Tsar is good, but the boyars [local elites] are bad,” a typical Russian peasant saying went; rebellion was justified if its goal was to let the tsar know that his agents were failing him, but not if it intended to challenge the divinely appointed tsar himself.

So this illuminates, to some degree, the fascinating anachronism that is much of modern religion: it evolved to support the farming era, when nearly everyone was involved with farming and energy came from the human back; now that it is unneeded, it continues on but carries a burden of irrationalism which leaves us with such amazement that many still believe it just because it’s so unbelievable.

And, finally, the fossil fuel value system can safely move back toward autonomy and equality without sacrificing group survival, or so would go the theory – although how nuclear war impacts the theory may be a discussion for another day.

SCOTUS recently ruled for the defendants in this case.  The issue?  From SCOTUSBlog:

Whether a rule of judicial conduct that prohibits
candidates for judicial office from personally solicit-
ing campaign funds violates the First Amendment.

WSJ:

The ruling marks a turning point in the contentious national debate over how state judges should be chosen, a disagreement that goes back to the founding of the nation.

Writing for the court’s majority in a 5-4 opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said judges aren’t politicians even if they have to win votes to join or stay on the bench. The case produced a rare alignment, with Justice Roberts splitting with his four fellow conservatives and joining the court’s four liberal justices in supporting fundraising restrictions.

The American Constitution Society’s President Caroline Fredrickson had a somewhat insipid statement:

“This ruling recognizes the corrosive effect money has had in judicial elections and helps to restore the image of state courts as fair and impartial.  The Court’s decision will help stem the trend of politicization that has been occurring in the state courts.”

At Philadelphia’s Citified, an anonymous writer (sponsored by Adam Bonin), prior to the decision, declares for what he hopes is a more professional approach:

Alternatively, just end the partisan judicial election process altogether. For years, Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts has led the fight to bring merit selection to our state’s judiciary, so that our judges could be considered, nominated, and confirmed, rather than elected. Merit selection promises to bring a more professional, qualified bench, and potentially solves more problems beyond the fundraising issues.

Merit selection would restore some dignity to this process while, admittedly, giving me a lot less to do this time of year. It’s worth pursuing.

The important link is broken, so here’s Pennsylvanians for Modern Courts.  Merit selection:

Merit Selection is the judicial selection system that best ensures that qualified individuals will reach the bench without the problematic influence of money on the selection process. Merit selection uses an independent bipartisan citizens nominating commission composed of men and women from across the Commonwealth, non-lawyers and lawyers, from diverse occupational, racial and ethnic backgrounds. Anyone meeting the required criteria may apply to the commission to be considered for a judicial vacancy.

I must admit to being less than enthused, partially on compositional grounds.

First, the first sentence really requires at least a few paragraphs to back up an assertion which is not obviously true, and therefore should not be mixed into the rest of the paragraph under examination, which is devoted to the “how” of Merit Selection.  In fact, I suggest the methodology of Merit Selection be first explained, and then exposition concerning its superiority over other methods follows it so that readers can follow the logic for the assertion.  The above paragraph is not persuasive.

Second, the last sentence should be stricken.  I had to read it several times before i understood they were switching the focus of the paragraph from the makeup of the committee to who would be eligible to be a judge.  2a, which “required criteria,” a phrase I find questionable in itself, apply?

Third, “independent bipartisan” sounds great until you take a moment to think about what you just read.  First, “independent” can (and usually will) be taken to mean “not part of any political party,” which is jarring once you realize that “bipartisan” definitely implies that the members of the commission are either members of, or are, at the very least, strongly inclined towards, one political party or another.  I search for an alternative meaning of “independent”, but the best I can do is suggest members who are not tied to the power structure of the party, but are merely members in good standing, and I think that is dubious.

Fourth, if they REALLY mean bipartisan, then why bother?  They’ve returned to voting for judges using ideological criteria.  They can HOPE their committee members are really looking for the best, but the process is highly vulnerable to members with an ideological bent, and I do believe the committee will become packed with ideologues – because those will be the people who will take the time to serve on the committee.  (Standard rant: Most politically interested people just do NOT understand that the average Joe & Jane want to work their jobs, take care of the kids, and drink their beer or (for the younger set) play their video games.  Politics is an unpleasant occupation if you’re not temperamentally suited for it.)  Think of who runs the parties: ideologues.  These are the folks who have developed an interest in politics, and definitely have a strong point of view that rarely brooks compromise, and often values ideological commitment over reality.  They’re the ones willing to devote the time to run the parties, developing extreme positions, etc; the same will happen with the committee.

As an engineer, I would prefer some objective criteria for rating the candidates.  However, as a citizen, I would have to agree with the methodology used to rate the candidates, and in the absence of any such system, and given the fact that I may fall under the jurisdiction of these judges, I may have to fall back to the question of whether voting for judges is better than gubernatorial appointment.

Naturally, I must disclose at this point that I’ve never researched judicial candidates here in Minnesota, where we do vote on them.  I doubt the overwhelming majority of voters do.

So what are the options?

We could imitate the Federal approach and have state judges nominated by the governor and then face legislative inquisition.  This is, again, a political process prone to corruption, but can be mitigated by making their positions permanent, as Alexander Hamilton points out in Federalist Paper 78:

According to the plan of the convention, all judges who may be appointed by the United States are to hold their offices during good behavior; which is conformable to the most approved of the State constitutions and among the rest, to that of this State. Its propriety having been drawn into question by the adversaries of that plan, is no light symptom of the rage for objection, which disorders their imaginations and judgments. The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. In a monarchy it is an excellent barrier to the despotism of the prince; in a republic it is a no less excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body. And it is the best expedient which can be devised in any government, to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.

However, this does not address the possibilities of legislative deadlock, such as we experience at the national level at the present time.  While I think this method works well when both parties believe in governance, rather than winning a game, it’s an unstable system – it takes only one party behaving childishly to cause the system to choke up..

There is direct gubernatorial appointment, legislative appointments, elections, etc.  Truthfully, none are really appetizing.

(h/t vis a vis the SCOTUS decision: Adam B @ The Daily Kos)

Sometimes you just have to goggle at what’s out there.  Here’s Fundraising Success Mag, which annually looks at the best fund-raising campaigns.  From the 2014 judging:

Campaign of the Year
(Also Gold Award — Multichannel, $10 million and over)
Heal Children, Heal Detroit 2013 Year-End Multichannel Appeal
The Children’s Center
(Submitted by The Children’s Center)

The Numbers
Recipients: 4,157
Response rate: 4.2 percent
Total cost: $9,932
Income generated: $90,287
Average gift: $520
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.11

I can usually predict the ultimate Campaign of the Year winners by the number of gasps and “wows” I hear as the judges mull over particular entries — as well as the amount of furious note-scribbling going on. When I heard one of our judges say, “This gives me chills,” followed by a round of hearty agreement, I suspected we had a winner. And the final judging bore out my suspicions.

The campaign at hand was The Children’s Center’s Heal Children, Heal Detroit multichannel appeal. Powerful imagery of children that balances their beauty and potential with the seriousness of their situation is just the start of the long line of winning elements in this campaign.

Beyond the numbers is the wonderfully consistent messaging that seamlessly carries through the many touchpoints involved.

Makes me wonder about their audience.  Organizations considering doing fund-raising and looking for pointers, partners, and processes?

Ever wonder how a family as big as the House of Saud (15,000 members) works out problems?  Bruce Reidel of the Brookings Institute covers some recent maneuverings for AL Monitor:

Without warning, [King] Salman removed the sitting crown prince, Muqrin, his half brother, and promoted the third in line, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, his nephew, to number two. Salman made his own son, Mohammed bin Salman, the new number three despite a lack of experience as a senior policymaker. Muqrin has since publicly proclaimed his allegiance to the new team, but without providing any explanation for his removal. …

What happened with Prince Muqrin is a key question. As the son of a Yemeni slave girl, he was always a bit of a black sheep in the family, but his competence was never in question. According to the royal palace, Muqrin had asked to be replaced, but no reason was given. No crown prince has ever relinquished the position in the history of the modern kingdom, which was founded in 1902. When Salman took the throne, the press trumpeted Muqrin as his heir, and there were no signs that he was less than eager to be the next in line. Posters showed Salman, Muqrin and Nayef smiling, a happy triumvirate poised to rule the kingdom for decades to come.

Earlier discussion of Iran’s problems in the area bordering Afghanistan here.  Now it appears Iran’s decision to be self-sufficient in agriculture may result in self-inflicted harm, according to Bijan Khajehpour in AL Monitor:

[Issa] Kalantari addressed a group of experts and reporters April 25 to highlight the various aspects of the ongoing disaster. He charged the country’s politicians with being in denial of the true dimensions of the water crisis and outlined some of the key issues:

• Iran’s self-inflicted water shortage stems from its exploiting 97% of its surface waters. The international benchmark for surface water use is 40%, which by comparison points to the magnitude of water mismanagement in Iran.

• The push for agricultural self-sufficiency in the past led to over-consumption of water reserves, which in turn undermined development. According to Kalantari, a number of political stakeholders dismissed sustainable development as a Western concept lacking utility in Iran.

The suggestion that self-sufficiency is threatened does not couple well with the current sanctions regime, not so much because food is currently targeted – but because it becomes another exposure for Iran.  This may be another motivation for Iran to consummate the previously announced deal framework, as even the most efficient government can manage only so many emergencies simultaneously.

… is at least partially fulfilled by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  CommonBlog reports:

 ALEC boasts that a third of all state legislators in the US are members, introducing around 1,000 ALEC bills every year.

Which leads to an interesting question: what is appropriate and inappropriate for such an organization to do?  They craft bills and deliver them to legislators nation-wide, naturally (or is it?) with their own interests at heart.

Yet here is one of those conundrums of democracy – the legislators cannot be experts at everything.  No doubt, these bills help legislators accomplish legitimate tasks, but it’s certainly worrisome when this happens:

When Florida Rep. Rachel Burgin (R- 56) introduced a bill in November calling on the federal government to reduce taxes for corporations (HM 685), she made an embarrassing mistake. Rep. Burgin was introducing a bill she had received from the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.  A bill written by the Tax Foundation, corporate members of ALEC’s ‘Tax and Fiscal Policy task force” and a group founded and funded by major corporate interests, including the billionaire Koch brothers.

All ALEC model resolutions contain a boilerplate paragraph, describing ALEC’s adherence to free market principles and limited government.  When legislators introduce one of ALEC’s bills, they normally remove this paragraph. Sometimes (but only sometimes) legislators will make some slight alterations to anALEC model bill,perhaps to include something specific to them or to their state. Rep. Burgin didn’t do that.  Instead she introduced a bill that was the same as the model word-for-word, forgetting even to remove the paragraph naming ALEC and describing its principles.

So it’s disturbing to think these are introduced with, at best, cosmetic alterations; one hopes they are modified during the usual rough and tumble of the legislative sessions.

Back in 2013, Molly Jackman reported on ALEC successes, failures, and causes for Brookings:

My findings are threefold.  First, ALEC model bills are, word-for-word, introduced in our state legislatures at a non-trivial rate.  Second, they have a good chance – better than most legislation – of being enacted into law.  Finally, the bills that pass are most often linked to controversial social and economic issues.  In the end, I argue that this is not good for ALEC, its corporate partners, or for the democratic process.

A lot of good information here, although this is somewhat suspect:

Of the 132 ALEC model bills introduced, 12 were enacted.  One additional bill passed the New Hampshire legislature only to be vetoed by the governor.  Now, a success rate of 9% may not seem high upon first glance.  However, consider the fact that, in the 112^th session of the U.S. Congress, less than 2% of introduced bills passed.  That means that bills based on ALEC policies have a survival rate nearly 5 times that of the average bill in Congress.

Not really, as many bills are introduced in Congress as symbolic measures, or in an attempt to stir up the base of one party or the other.  For example, the House GOP attempted to abolish the ACA several times (while other votes related to the ACA have to do with defunding, modifications, etc, and perhaps not all these fail).  Attempting precise math on imprecise mathematical entities, yada yada yada.

But to return to the question in hand, how do we craft good law that is conducive to the common good?  I think this is a harder question than is generally recognized.  Should a liberal counterpart be created?  No?  Should the liberal legislators then have to craft each of their bills by hand?

Perhaps we just try to make too much law.  But human society is complex and has many impacts, both inside and outside – and these often need to be moderated simply because humans are too self-interested.

A 2012 article on NJ.com accusing Governor Christie’s of using ALEC bills is here, where it notes:

There is nothing illegal in what ALEC does or in using its bills, but critics say New Jersey officials are handing off a cardinal duty — do your own work — to a national group with unique ties to the business world. If they’re relying on templates, critics add, state officials should publicly acknowledge any work that they do not do themselves and the source of any proposals that aren’t their own, especially when that source has an agenda.

Christie’s spokesman denies the allegations.

Legislators should listen to advocates for both sides of an issue in most cases, although personally I feel an advocate for, say, homeopathy should just be tossed out on his ear.

So…. a bunch of amateur lawmakers, often full to the brim with ideology, making laws – either with their own clumsy hands, or those whose self-interest may not align with society’s.  An example from a 2002 Mother Jones article:

Not surprisingly, many of the bills benefit the companies that helped write them. Consider ALEC’s “Environmental Audit Privilege,” a measure that relieves companies of legal responsibility for their own pollution. The bill got its start in 1992, when Colorado regulators fined the Coors Brewing Company for smog-inducing air emissions at several plants. ALEC was quick to respond, drafting a measure to prevent firms from being fined if they report environmental violations at their facilities, and to keep such disclosures secret. Coors is a corporate member of ALEC, and company executive Allan Auger is a past chairman of the group, to which the Coors family’s Castle Rock Foundation is also a donor. Last year, Kentucky and Oregon passed audit-privilege laws like the one drawn up by ALEC.

A site devoted to unmasking ALEC’s fell intentions is ALEC Exposed.

UPDATE: Here’s an interactive map so you can see which member of your legislator is also an ALEC member.

(h/t WePartyPatriots @ The Daily Kos)

With regard to this post, a Facebook correspondent remarks,

I don’t understand how that law’s directive that a person cannot even talk to their lawyer can be constitutional.

Nor do I.  As an engineer I like stable systems with predictable behaviors.  In the area of campaign finances I’ve seen proposals for public financing come and go; restrictions on financing gradually eroded, until predictions on the size of your war-chest just to play in the next Presidential election have reached $2 billion.  People are upset on both sides of the aisle (i.e., system instability), but there doesn’t seem to be a way to modify the system acceptable to courts and candidates.  Perhaps this is a continuous rupture in the side of American-style democracy…

Alternate conclusion: when you’re the pre-eminent nation in the world, the scramble to the very top of the pyramid results in surreal landscapes.

Keith Laumer wrote a series of short stories centered around the development and consequences of artificially intelligent tanks, named Bolos; Cordwainer Smith also briefly addressed the issue in “War No. 81-Q”, in which countries settled differences of opinion by fighting wars using autonomous weapons where no one gets hurt.  We’re now beginning to creep up on this science fiction concept, and some folks at the United Nations are trying to prevent it, namely the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.  They held a meeting a few weeks ago, where Matthew Bolton delivered a few remarks:

A preemptive ban would honor the Marten’s Clause, following the guidance of the principle of humanity and the dictates of public conscience in developing new law.  The delegation of violence to a machine – whether lethal or less lethal – is a violation of human dignity. Last month, a Model UN conference of 2,500 undergraduate students from around the world – meeting in the UN General Assembly Room in New York – were commended by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for passing resolutions calling for a ban on autonomous weapons systems. ICRAC urges states to follow this ethical leadership shown by the world’s youth, as well as Nobel Laureates, clergy and faith-based organizations, concerned scientists, ethicists and the civil society Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

I notice their Mission Statement has been updated to remove “tele-operated” weapons, since drones fit into that category and it’s poor politics to annoy the leading country that just happens to use them.  Here’s their latest:

Declared July 2014, updating the Original Mission Statement in light of ICRAC’s 2009 call to commence a discussion about robot arms control having been heard.

Given the rapid pace of development of military robotics and the pressing dangers that these pose to peace and international security and to civilians in conflict, we call upon the international community for a legally binding treaty to prohibit the development, testing, production and use of autonomous weapon systems in all circumstances.

Machines should not be delegated with the decision to kill or use violent force.

Further we call upon the international community to urgently commence deliberations and discussions on:

• Limitations, regulation and transparency for remotely controlled unmanned systems.
• A ban on new kinds of unmanned nuclear weapons delivery systems.
• A prohibition on robotic space weapons.

 

I confess I haven’t gone through their resources section, so perhaps they’ve solved the problem of rogue states – wish I had the time to do so.  Unlike nuclear weapons and their testing, there are no tell-tale signals that can be monitored from orbit or on the ground, only inadvertent leaks by workers who realize their project may be unethical.  Further, the development of AI for peaceful missions necessarily will contribute to the development of autonomous weapon systems.  Hardware requirements should be met, I would imagine, in large part by systems developed for the harsh environment of outer space – hardening against radiation and that sort of thing.  And safeguarding computers against the mechanical problems of warfare has been going on for a very long time.  Frankly, it seems like a lot of technology is coming right together.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is here.

(h/t NewScientist 18 April 2015 “Rein in the bots“, p. 7)

… dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism…

I will say her comments section are far more civilized than most.  Maybe that blog is diligently edited….

Here’s a cool art installation by French artist Julien Salaud. Cave art. String art. See more here.

Lawyerly concerns can be a little obscure.  Consider this taste of a Twitter exchange on The Volokh Conspiracy:

Last week in a Dorf on Law blog post, Michael Dorf was objecting to the anti-commandeering doctrine of New York v. United States and Printz v. United States. In it he said this:

I’ll begin by saying that I don’t like the anti-commandeering doctrine in any context. It strikes me that the dissenters were right in New York and Printz. Congress had the power to “commandeer” under the Articles of Confederation; nothing in the Constitution expressly forbids that means to Congress; in general the Constitution gave Congress more, not fewer, powers than Congress enjoyed under the Articles; and therefore, in my view if Congress is regulating in the area of one of its enumerated powers, then measures that commandeer the states are (absent some other problem) necessary and proper to the exercise of that power.

Turns out commandeering refers to compelling state officers to perform duties specified in Federal legislation, or so I take from the Printz v United States link, above:

The Government cites the World War I selective draft law that authorized the President “to utilize the service of any or all departments and any or all officers or agents of the United States and of the several States, Territories, and the District of Columbia, and subdivisions thereof, in the execution of this Act,” and made any person who refused to comply with the President’s directions guilty of a misdemeanor. Act of May 18, 1917, ch. 15, §6, 40 Stat. 80-81 (emphasis added). However, it is far from clear that the authorization “to utilize the service” of state officers was an authorization to compel the service of state officers; and the misdemeanor provision surely applied only to refusal to comply with the President’s authorized directions, which might not have included directions to officers of States whose governors had not volunteered their services. It is interesting that in implementing the Act President Wilson did not commandeer the services of state officers, but instead requested the assistance of the States’ governors …

The Articles of Confederation refer to the United States of America, version 0, if I may be colloquial in the matter.  It appears that Dorf (a professor at Cornell) wishes that commandeering be legal, and cites the Articles of Confederation and suggests the Constitution should then inherit the commandeering capability.

Now, I’ve not had even a scant minute of legal training, I’m just a simple minded software engineer.  In other words,

I just do logic.

So, to me, once I knew commandeering wasn’t really addressed in the Constitution, the only relevant question then becomes, Is the Constitution an extension of the Articles of Confederacy, or a replacement?  My understanding, given the content of the Constitution, is that it’s a replacement.

Of course, given the legal profession’s adherence to precedent, then we have to ask if some court at a sufficiently high level has authorized commandeering, and of course I don’t know and don’t even know how to do the research.

But I did find the whole subject fascinating.

NewScientist (11 April 2015) reports on analysis of tweets issued from within ISIS held territories (paywall):

Documents include a new curriculum for the University of Mosul in Syria, which cancels all lessons in philosophy, English or French literature and tourism. Another account operated by ISIS administration in Iraq issues strict new rules about issues as prosaic as how waste should be disposed of: a 5000 dinar fine (£3) is to be levied for throwing litter from a car; a 25000 dinar fine is imposed on fly tippers.

Other tweeted documents are more surprising. One details a vaccination timetable for children. This suggests IS is a more modern group than the Taliban, says [Aymenn] Al-Tamimi. The Taliban banned vaccinations in Helmand province in Afghanistan last year over fears of spying.

Leading to this conclusion concerning ISIS:

For Al-Tamimi, these attempts to provide a governmental framework help ISIS control its territory, and might explain its dominance over other groups in Syria. “It’s a lot more complicated, much more developed,” he says. “The model we see brings a sense of order rather than civil war, that’s why you don’t really have any local rivals.”

There is nothing magical about most forms of government; it boils down to how peaceful of an environment do they offer, followed by questions concerning social advancement and freedom.  Some systems naturally do not offer these social goods as well as others.  Whoever is leading ISIS seems to understand that conquering is not enough, you have to give those conquered a reason to appreciate your presence.

Finally, we have to decide how to counter such a strategy.  It may not be enough to use airstrikes; it may not even be enough to bring forth convincing evidence of their barbarity, as those who welcome them may be so tribalistic as to either not believe, or no care.  So what’s the next step?

Continuing this discussion, The Pew Research Center has updated poll numbers regarding marijuana use:

A slim majority (53%) of Americans say the drug should be made legal, compared with 44% who want it to be illegal. Opinions have changed drastically since 1969, when Gallup first asked the question and found that just 12% favored legalizing marijuana use. Much of the change in opinion has occurred over the past few years — support rose 11 points between 2010 and 2013 (although it has remained relatively unchanged since then).

There is much more to this article, as PRC breaks down the numbers by cohort and heritage.

This, and by extension the War on Drugs, may become a major issue in the upcoming election.  A simple question at a debate: do you support legalization of marijuana?  It may become one of the pivotal questions of the election, particularly if news organizations choose to publicize important figures concerning incarceration of marijuana users and distributors.  Data on arrests through 2012 is available on DrugWarFacts.org:

Year –	Marijuana % of Total Drug Arrests	Marijuana Manufacturing & Sale % of Total Drug Arrests	Marijuana Possession % of Total Drug Arrests
2012	48.3%	<5.9%	42.4%

US Arrests As Reported By FBI UCR Program
Year	Total Arrests	Total Drug Arrests	Total Marijuana Arrests	Marijuana Trafficking/Sale Arrests	Marijuana Possession Arrests	Total Violent Crime Arrests	Total Property Crime Arrests
2012	12,196,959	1,552,432	749,825	91,593	658,231	521,196	1,646,212

Or about 6% of arrests are pot related in 2012, if I do my math right.

A Facebook correspondent responds to this post:

I worry less about the languages used than how they are used. Devices like DSL modems, routers, home automation, car automation, etc. are all made as quickly and cheaply as possible, providing few or no avenues for updates or security patches, and few motivations to create really secure code in the first place.

Hmmmm.  I bought a Netgear router last October and have already received notification of an available update – perhaps Netgear is high end?

But more importantly, I recall, decades ago (as, I’m sure, does my correspondent) the decision by Microsoft Corp to absolutely not provide any warranty on their software – and the accompanying uproar.  But I do not believe Microsoft ever changed its stance.  I confess not having read a software “warranty” in years – because I do not buy commercial software.  Do they remain the same?  Perhaps citizens should sue over every bug that causes them a loss…. I suppose open source software producers think themselves protected by their open source licenses.  I’ve certainly lost hours due to bugs in the open source / free software I use (Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, VirtualBox…..).

And then free online software, such as WordPress used on this blog, has already cost me some time and some enamel off my teeth.

I suppose so long as the consequences of bugs for the producers of the software is not devastating, little will be done about it beyond lip service – as you say in your last line.  But once the motivation there, it’s not just a matter of telling the programmers to have a bit of grit and make it better.  The tools have to be there, and I’m afeared an IDE or two (sorry, I’m an unrepentant vi programmer), or some hackers brand new language, just isn’t going to cut it.  I think the profession will have to take a step up and learn more, as a group, about formal methods and which languages are accessible (yep, that’s the word I mean to use) to such methods.

Think Mapquest or its successors is neat?  NewScientist‘s Hal Hodson (11 April 2015) reports (paywall) on the next generation:

For a few days last summer, a handful of students walked through a park behind the University of Hannover in Germany. Each walked solo, but followed the same route as the others: made the same turns, walked the same distance. This was odd, because none of them knew where they were going.

Instead, their steps were steered from a phone 10 paces behind them, which sent signals via bluetooth to electrodes attached to their legs. These stimulated the students’ muscles, guiding their steps without any conscious effort.

It sounds great until someone hacks into the system and takes you for the walk of a lifetime.  I’m seeing a lovely sight-seeing tour of Venice, ending with an involuntary and fatal dive into the drink as your mortal enemy – or some kid with a root kit – takes over for just a moment.

Acceptance may be the biggest problem, although it is possible that the rise of wearable computing might help. Pfeiffer says the electrode’s current causes a tingling sensation that diminishes the more someone uses the system. Volunteers said they were comfortable with the system taking control of their leg muscles, but only if they felt they could take control back.

One of the students compared the feeling to cruise control in a car, where the driver can take control back when they want it. “Changes in direction happened subconsciously,” said another.

No doubt acceptance will be an issue with autonomic cars as well.  And yet, it may turn out the next generation – meaning those who are just being born now – will not mind cars that drive themselves, and assisted walking that require no more direction than “take the tourist route” or “get me to the train station”.

Still, the inventors see this as useful for disasters:

The system could also be used to direct crowds, not just individuals. “Imagine visitors to a large sports stadium or theatre being guided to their place, or being evacuated from the stadium in the most efficient way in the case of an emergency,” the team write in a paper that will be presented at the CHI conference in Seoul, South Korea, next week.

Obergefell v. Hodges will be heard by the SCOTUS on Tuesday, and basically asks the question, courtesy of The Jurist,

The petition for writ of certiorari [PDF] in Obergefell features two questions presented, broadly asking: whether the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex; and whether the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

Previously stated view here.  World Religion News summarizes religious reaction:

Over 7,500 pages have been submitted for the cases that are to be held this month. Obergefell v. Hodges alone has the highest number of filings seen since the 2012 Affordable Care Act case. The briefs were submitted by those who were for it, as well as those against it. Among the many groups to submit briefs, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops sent in a statement discouraging same-sex marriage and promoting traditional marriage.

The largest brief was from the President of the House of Deputies of the Episcopal Church. It was signed by many different groups, including the Union for Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Many religious groups in support of same-sex marriage said that not all views speak for all religions, adding that thousands of historic Christian leaders have views that challenge the old opinions of homosexuality. Others emphasize the number of Americans who feel their faith compels them to accept others, including LGBT citizens. Many republicans wrote that “the marriage bans challenged here target gay and lesbian couples, and their families, for injurious governmental treatment.”

The Cato Institute, a noted libertarian think tank, sides with the homosexual couples:

Cato has accordingly filed what will almost certainly be our final brief on this issue. Joining with noted originalist scholar (and Federalist Society co-founder) Steven Calabresi and Yale law professor William Eskridge—one of the leading experts on American legal history—we urge the Court to reverse the Sixth Circuit’s decision and finally fulfill the Constitution’s promise of equal protection under law to millions of gay Americans and their children. We argue that the lower court’s ruling was inconsistent with the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The fact that the provision’s ratifiers didn’t automatically or explicitly understand that it would eventually require states to recognize same-sex marriages is irrelevant; all that matters is what it meant in 1868 for a state to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” As our brief shows, this language was based on similar language in state constitutions and was widely (and properly) understood as prohibiting the states from passing what’s known as “caste” legislation—laws that create “second-class” citizens with inferior legal rights.

Alliance Defending Freedom, on the other hand, states

Alliance Defending Freedom and the Alabama Attorney General’s Office filed one of those briefs on behalf of the state of Alabama. That brief, filed in Obergefell v. Hodges, explains the rationality of man-woman marriage laws and highlights the significant flaws with, and troublesome implications of accepting, baseless arguments claiming that those laws are constitutionally irrational.

“Marriage between a man and a woman is a universal good that diverse cultures and faiths have honored throughout the history of Western Civilization,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Jim Campbell. “How we treat marriage has societal consequences. The wisest course, as these briefs demonstrate, is for the court to resist demands to prematurely end the national debate over the future of marriage.”

Over at Slate, Judith Schaeffer looks back at John Roberts confirmation hearings, rather than staring at her tea leaves:

A Facebook correspondent writes in response to this:

I’m not sure the health impact has been proven one way or the other, but the supply demand issue is interesting given the demand for non medical use would theoretically still exist.

Colorado legalized for recreational usage, but I think the key here is that production is also legal – if limited.  Because production is local, you’d think prices would be lower than Mexican imported, but in this article The Cannabist republished from the Associated Press detailing a row over production regulation, this is not alway true:

When the market opened to all adults over 21 in January, those production caps stayed in place as regulators feared a market flooded with more pot than they could regulate. But the result has been a pot market so limited that marijuana can sell for nearly $500 an ounce, far more expensive than black-market prices. Those prices don’t include taxes that can exceed 30 percent in some jurisdictions.

Colorado’s marijuana market is opening to new growers in October, prompting a need for production caps that aren’t tied to a medical-marijuana patient count. The state won’t necessarily produce more pot. Instead, commercial growers will need to prove they’re selling 85 percent of their inventory before getting permission to add plants.

In a sense, we’re seeing the age old story of capitalism and opening markets – those who benefit are not necessarily in favor of them!

But smaller pot growers lined up to complain that the rules amount to state-sanctioned protections for industry veterans.

A major chafing point is a proposal to allow indoor warehouses to grow twice as many plants as greenhouses, 3,600 versus 1,800.

Colorado’s medical pot growers were required to use energy-intense closed warehouses using grow lights. Now the state allows greenhouses and even limited outdoor growing, depending on local zoning. Many argued the state should be encouraging marijuana production that uses less energy. Large marijuana warehouses sometimes have five-figure monthly power bills.

If production is tightly regulated, then prices will remain high and outstate sources may hang on.  But if regulation is relaxed and the market is flooded by local production, then the outstate sources may give up and turn to other crops, legal or otherwise.  That would be a standard economic outcome.

In an interview with Ex-Interpol agent Marc Goodman, NewScientist‘s Douglas Heaven discovers that the upcoming ‘Internet of Everything’ means everything can be hacked (paywall):

You’re implying that every connected device is a target. Why do you think that?
No one has ever built a computer system that could not be hacked. We are rushing full speed ahead to put every possible device online and they’re all insecure. We should pause for a moment. If somebody hacks my television, do I care? But all of the world’s critical services are run by computers and we’re seeing these computers increasingly come under attack. People have always struggled for power. Now, if you control the code, you control the world.

Does that include connected technology like CCTV security cameras?
The tools we have to protect us can be subverted and that security used against us. It’s what I call the judo model of cyber security – using your opponent’s weight against them. You really can’t have any faith that when you set up 300 cameras on a street in London, or wherever, that the government is the only one watching.

Nor can anyone trust what they see on screens. We’ve all received phishing emails that appear to be from our bank. That was taken to the next level with the Stuxnet malware attack in Iran in 2010. Nuclear engineers in a control room were staring at screens that showed the status of uranium-enrichment centrifuges. The screens said everything was fine but the centrifuges were actually spinning out of control. Somebody had inserted a hack in between what was really going on and what was being presented on the screens. We are becoming increasingly disconnected from physical reality in this way.

I’ve often felt that computers are best considered to be multipliers.  Someone who holds up a bank only gets what is – at best – in the bank’s branch at that time.  If they’re real thrill seekers, they take hostages and make a bit more – or get shot in the process.

Computer hackers can do much, much better, and generally from the safety of their office.

For the professional software engineer, the future may hold some interesting questions:

• Does your favorite programming language make it easy or hard to write code vulnerable to hacking?  (Hint: If it’s C, it’s probably really, really easy.)
• Does your favorite language easy to evaluate for correctness?  Most are not; the languages in the functional paradigm are reputedly a little more easily evaluated, but I haven’t seen it done on – yet – on production level code.  If you know of examples, let me know.
• Does  your language let you program computers – or express solutions?
• Have you ever taken a class specifically oriented towards writing secure code?

This is not to imply that all – or even most – vulnerabilities are the fault of programmers; some are hardware, some are social.  But a significant fraction of them are a result of using insecure programming languages, and future languages should be designed with that in mind.  I am not an expert in security (I’m more a jack of a few trades – don’t ask me about numerical analysis, either), but I used to read comp.risks, and I hear things.

FOR EVERYONE – I can’t help but pose the obvious question: if the Internet went away, how would it affect YOU?

Generally, I find the Daily Kos posts to be too shrill and partisan for my taste, which may be why I read their spam – a take on the fever-pitch on the political left.  But this post concerning the effects of just a few states beginning to legalize marijuana is really just lovely, and as well as appealing to the hippy wing of the political left, it should also appeal to the honest libertarian wing of the political right (this I say from 25-30 years of reading REASON Magazine – dunno what REASON says these days, though).  Its gist is that villages in Mexico that had been growing pot for decades have stopped because of the economics – it’s just not worth it.

As far back as I can recall, foreign political leaders have reiterated that American entreaties, threats, and other types of messages requesting them to stop would be better met by reducing demand, rather than stopping supply.  Not that they didn’t try – the Americans have been especially active in South America, supplying military aid in attempts to interdict supplies.  Since this was a politically motivated process, empty successes were proclaimed – tons of this or that captured and burned.  Meanwhile, the supplies kept coming, by “mule” and even by rude submarines, and the interdiction efforts didn’t result in cessation of supply, but (economics majors, hold your breaths) … rising prices.

And did the consumers of the drugs then work harder to make the money to buy the drugs?  Well, I’m sure some did – but the general consensus is that a lot of them turned to crime to finance their habits.

And all this over a drug which apparently has no direct negative impact on physical health (unlike, say, alcohol).  Andrew Sullivan’s Dish blog followed this issue extensively here; their conclusion was that studies indicated no harm except maybe, possibly to teenage users who, to borrow a term, over-imbibed.

Now, a new study out from the University College of London provides even stronger evidence that the Duke findings were flawed. The study draws on a considerably larger sample of adolescents than the Duke research – 2,612 children born in the Bristol area of the U.K. in 1991 and 1992. Researchers examined children’s IQ scores at age 8 and again at age 15, and found “no relationship between cannabis use and lower IQ at age 15,” when confounding factors – alcohol use, cigarette use, maternal education, and others – were taken into account. Even heavy marijuana use wasn’t associated with IQ.

Of course, this isn’t the entire issue; the use of marijuana, the thought goes, may lead to less desirable behaviors.  From the same Washington Post report:

In a press release accompanying the study, lead author Claire Mokrysz noted that “this is a potentially important public health message- the belief that cannabis is particularly harmful may detract focus from and awareness of other potentially harmful behaviours.” Reviewer Guy Goodwin of Oxford University agreed: “the current focus on the alleged harms of cannabis may be obscuring the fact that its use is often correlated with that of other even more freely available drugs and possibly lifestyle factors. These may be as or more important than cannabis itself.”

This is a key point. Many skeptics of legalization in the United States  focus on the potential harms of marijuana use alone. But marijuana use is just one of many behaviors that can possibly affect life outcomes. In many cases these other behaviors are likely to play a much larger role in determining a person’s trajectory through life.

It also partly explains why even as we’ve seen increasingly permissive laws regulating marijuana use in the past decade, there has been no corresponding uptick in negative outcomes.

In all fairness, other studies may indicate changes to how the brain is wired; here is a Boston Globe news report on this subject:

Young adults who occasionally smoke marijuana show abnormalities in two key areas of their brain related to emotion, motivation, and decision making, raising concerns that they could be damaging their developing minds at a critical time, according to a new study by Boston researchers.

Meanwhile, being sent to jail for marijuana use, or intent to distribute, isn’t a negative outcome?  This may be the key point in the “War on Drugs” – Americans can be very stubborn, and attempting to direct their lives is, along with being UnAmerican, also futile, expensive, and wastes lives that might have been otherwise highly productive.

The knock-on effects of marijuana legalization include simplifying, to a great extent, the job of policemen; elimination of a large number of prison beds (and perhaps the elimination of the private prison companies); the lessening of fear amongst a substantial portion of the American citizenry; and possibly greater productivity for those folks who find medicinal marijuana helps them cope with chronic pain and other illnesses.

I contacted Senator Amy Klobuchar to discover her current plans on the drug front, but received a disappointing form letter in return:

As you may know, although 15 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws permitting the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, a federal law known as the Controlled Substances Act continues to prohibit the use of marijuana in the United States.  In October 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder released a formal set of guidelines for states that have enacted laws authorizing the medical use of marijuana.  The new guidelines direct attorneys to refrain from focusing their investigative and prosecutorial resources on patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws on medical marijuana, but reiterates that federal prosecutors will continue to fully prosecute illegal drug trafficking  and related activities.

Congress has determined that marijuana is a dangerous drug, and the illegal distribution and sale of marijuana is a serious crime.  Commercial enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana for profit continue to be an enforcement priority for the Department of Justice.  Please know that I will keep your comments in mind should any relevant legislation come before the Senate for consideration.

There are a few theories out there; these are of interest as the local (Minnesota) Somali community suffered the arrest of several young men who stand accused of attempting to fly to Syria to join ISIS. sky.com publishes an interview with a man who fought in Bosnia:

In Birmingham, we met Shahid Butt, who travelled abroad to fight in the 1990s, prompted by the realisation that Muslim civilians were suffering in Bosnia.

He says a similar sense of compassion drives many young Muslims to the Middle East, where the conflict in Syria – known to have already displaced more than nine million people – has inspired a strong desire to help fellow Muslims.

“I believe the media has mis-portrayed the whole situation. Anybody who goes to Syria is a mad, crazy, warmongering, bloodthirsty person,” said Mr Butt. “This is wrong.”

The wrong portrayal of larger numbers of Muslims travelling to help as part of the terrorist threat is itself increasing the risk of radicalisation, says rapper Kash ‘The B.A.D.’ Choudhary.

Aljazeera suggests it’s an educational problem:

Rich Nielsen of Harvard University recently published a study in which he found that the main factors driving radicalism were not poverty or ideology of teachers. Rather, it was the poor quality of academic and educational networks. Based on his research, Nielsen found clerics with the best academic networks had a 2-3 percent chance of becoming self-styled jihadists, as opposed to a 50 percent chance for those who were badly networked. This is an interesting finding given that under a traditional Islamic education paradigm, students study the same texts with different teachers in order to get different perspectives. Interestingly, they’re also warned against the blind following of a single scholar.

Afua Hirsch talks about his documentary:

I’ve been talking to young Muslims for a documentary on the root causes of extremism, and it’s clear there are a series of common complaints. Primarily, even though David Cameron may have said the killers of David Haines “are not Muslims, they are monsters”, young Muslims still have a profound and consistent sense of being demonised by society, and as creating a source of fear.

Further, many people still fail to distinguish between the different motivations for Brits travelling to the Middle East. It struck me how many young Muslims want to travel to Syria to help with the desperate humanitarian situation, or to join rebels trying to bring down President Assad – a goal that until recently was in line with Britain’s own foreign policy. However, the people I spoke to fully expected to be welcomed back to the UK by being arrested, slapped with a TPim and stripped of their passport.

For a passionate teenager, watching the suffering in Syria and believing that they are barred from contributing because of double standards driven by Islamophobia can create extreme feelings of alienation. And for those who are converted to extremism, there are usually other factors: contact with a seductive and effective hate preacher, indifference towards or a desire for violence, a sense of purposelessness – in some cases the same factors that attract young people to criminal gangs.

The Washington Post gives this opinion:

This is not a problem of religion. This is not a problem of immigration. And, despite British Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion, the root of the problem is not even the “poisonous” political ideology of fundamental Islam. The root problem – where ideological extremism flourishes – is alienation. Disaffected, second- and third-generation immigrant youth are seeking alternative communities of belonging that conflict with a free society. To this problem, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Muslim youth are born into British society and socialized in British schools, or naturalized after years of residence and integration, but endure frustrating barriers to socioeconomic mobility and face discrimination as members of an ethnic minority. And though a majority identify as British, a 2006 Pew survey shows how British Muslims maintain attitudes of disaffection and alienation more than Muslims in other European countries. Opportunistic imams can then mobilize a minority of impressionable youth toward a fundamental practice of religion. In fact, former Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells directly attributes the threat from British-born Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq to not dealing with their radicalization in the U.K.

Now Kamaldeep Bhui publishes an opinion article in NewScientist (11 April 2015) (paywall) approaching the issue from the mental health viewpoint:

Research in the US following the 9/11 attacks suggested that having sympathies for terrorist acts and violent protest is a sign that people are susceptible to future radicalising influences. We took that as our starting point and assessed these kinds of sympathies in men and women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin living in the UK.

We found that these views were uncommon – they were held by just 2.5 per cent of our sample – and were unrelated to poverty, political engagement, or experience of discrimination and adversity. However, we did find a correlation between extremist sympathies and being young, in full-time education, relative social isolation, and having a tendency towards depressive symptoms.

In contrast, we found that being born outside the UK, general ill health or having large social networks were all associated with moderate views. We also found that women were as likely as men to hold extreme sympathies, although the association with depression was stronger in men. Frequency of religious worship and attending a place of worship were not correlated with extremist leanings.

Social isolation and depressed, and so a willingness to fall in line with anything that gives them a sense of purpose.  Not to mention young men can be prone to considering combat to be attractive.  It may not be flattering, but it does make some sense.

And you thought the Black Death was a plague of the past.  Not so, at least for North American Black-Tailed Prairie Dogs (paywall):

Though the plague bacteria, Yersinia pestis, now rarely infects people in North America, it’s been responsible for the deaths of many black-tailed prairie dogs. This is a problem for the grasslands, where many other species rely on prairie dogs to survive. Predators eat them, animals make homes in their burrows and grass growth is shaped by them (Conservation Biology, doi.org/3cj).

(NewScientist 11 April 2015)

The things you learn on the Internet.  At the Volokh Conspiracy Ilya Somin reports on a case in front of SCOTUS regarding the raisin crop:

Things did not go well for the federal government in today’s oral argument in Horne v. US Department of Agriculture, the raisin takings case. Nearly all of the justices were highly skeptical of the government’s claim that forcible confiscation of large quantities of raisins somehow does not qualify as a taking of private property that requires “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment. The forced transfer is part of a 1937 program that requires farmers to turn over a large portion of their raisin crop to the government so as to artificially reduce the amount of raisins on the market, and thereby increase the price. Essentially, the scheme is a government-enforced cartel under which producers restrict production so as to inflate prices.

It can be quite a jolt when you realize how far the United States is from a real free market.  It would be interesting to know exactly which program, and its breadth.

But, of course, the real question is this: should there be a real free market in food?  It should be well-known that the government regularly buys up excess corn; and, back in the 90s, the GOP briefly attempted to eliminate the agricultural subsidies.  The Economist provides a quick light-weight summary here:

To this day, to be treated as a farmer in America doesn’t necessarily require you to grow any crops. According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011 Uncle Sam paid some $3m in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6m was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year. Such payments explain why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, is promoting a rule to attempt to crack down on payments to non-farming folk. But with crop prices now falling, taxpayers are braced to be fleeced again.

American farm subsidies are egregiously expensive, harvesting $20 billion a year from taxpayers’ pockets. Most of the money goes to big, rich farmers producing staple commodities such as corn and soyabeans in states such as Iowa.

The conservatives tend to maintain a skepticism about ag subsidies which I sometimes agree with and sometimes believe is rooted in an ignorance of how people might behave in the face of food shortages.  The Cato Institute provides this debate from 2007 on the subject of ag subsidies and how the dismantling of New Zealand’s subsidies impacted the country.  Daniel T. Griswold asserts the conservative case:

There is no dismissing the New Zealand experience. The government largely dismantled its farm programs and none of the consequences Bob predicts came true. Its citizens did not suffer any shortages or disruptions of food supplies. Productivity of New Zealand farms accelerated after reform and they now compete successfully in global markets, especially as dairy and livestock producers.

In contrast, the output and income of America’s most supported crops have lagged behind the performance of non-supported products that compete in free and open markets. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cash receipts for the most supported crops, including corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, sugar beats, and sugar cane, rose an unimpressive 14 percent from 1980 to 2005. Meanwhile, cash receipts for non-supported crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and greenhouse products, soared by 186 percent. Subsidized farmers are selling out their future competitiveness in the market for the sake of federal handouts.

Bob Young provides the opposition:

The New Zealand and Australia cases are held up to us on a fairly regular basis. Australia has had, and continues to have, support programs for their producers. They are now in the middle of providing disaster assistance to their producers — assistance their producers certainly need. They also operated their wheat market under a single-buyer/single-seller framework up until the very recent past. New Zealand made the jump they did when their entire economy and government were on the brink of bankruptcy. They undertook massive government reforms that cut across literally every agency. Dan might be willing to entertain such an idea, but I’m not so sure that we as a nation are ready to make that leap.

Finally, Dan talks about the farm programs as producing environmental degradation. In part because of the rules a producer must operate under to be eligible to participate in farm programs, and in part because farmers are the best day-to-day environmental stewards in this country, the average erosion rate from an acre of farmland has dropped from 7.2 tons in 1982 to 4.7 tons in 2001. Wetland protection has increased sharply and wildlife habitat has expanded significantly. Even on those disgusting corn acres — the acres that provide the feed for our livestock and are helping with our nation’s energy supply — the nitrogen used to produce a bushel of corn fell from 1.3 pounds in 1983 to 0.94 pounds in 2006.

In 2013, Bloomberg Business joined in:

A Depression-era program intended to save American farmers from ruin has grown into a 21st-century crutch enabling affluent growers and financial institutions to thrive at taxpayer expense.

Federal crop insurance encourages farmers to gamble on risky plantings in a program that has been marred by fraud and that illustrates why government spending is so difficult to control.

And the cost is increasing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture last year spent about $14 billion insuring farmers against the loss of crop or income, almost seven times more than in fiscal 2000, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The Bloomberg article is quite long and indicates the implementation of our current ag subsidies is making everyone unhappy:

With new farm legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, largely over Republican demands for deeper cuts in food stamp spending, the cost of crop insurance is drawing fire from both ends of the political spectrum.

The Environmental Working Group says the insurance encourages farmers to make riskier plantings, secure in the knowledge they will be paid even if the crops fail. The free-market Club for Growth, meanwhile, derides the program as a government handout for millionaire farmers.

Then there’s this gem:

“We shouldn’t look at crop insurance as the least evil policy,” says Josh Sewell, senior policy analyst with Washington-based research group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It’s not like our choice is to send checks one way or send checks another way. We could just not send checks.”

As many have said before me, common sense is neither.  My observation over the years has been that if the name of a group includes “taxpayers”, then it’s a bunch of guys who are only concerned about their wallets.

While I’m sure that such a wart on what we like to think of as a free market is hard to integrate with the market – and can lead to fraud, as many engineers would consider this an instability in the system – I don’t think they really make the case for eliminating ag subsidies, only reforming them (and on that, no opinion).  On the conservative side there seems to an assumption that this is about economics, not about assuring the food is available on a regular basis.

So how much food do we produce?  The EPA has this page:

In round numbers, U.S. farmers produce about $ 143 billion worth of crops and about $153 billion worth of livestock each year.

And what about California, recently the subject of water rationing?  Richard Cornett at Western Farm Press, in 2013, gives his thoughts:

So a loss of California ag production would hit hard consumers’ wallets and their diets would become less balanced.This is because our state produces a sizable majority of American fruits, vegetables and nuts; 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots and the list goes on and on. A lot of this is due to our soil and climate. No other state, or even a combination of states, can match California’s output per acre.

Lemon yields, for example, are more than 50 percent higher than neighboring states. California spinach yield per acre is 60 percent higher than the national average.  Without California, supply of these products in our country and abroad would dip, and in the first few years, a few might be nearly impossible to find.  Orchard-based products specifically, such as nuts and some fruits, would take many years to spring back.

Soon, the effect on consumer prices would become attention-grabbing. Rising prices would force Americans to alter their diets. Grains are locked in a complicated price-dependent relationship with fresh fruits, vegetables and meats. When the price of produce increases, people eat more grain. When the price of grain rises, people eat more fruits and vegetables. (In fact, in some parts of the world, wheat and rice are the only “Giffen goods” – a product in which decreasing prices lead to decreasing demand.)  Young people and the poor in America, more than others, eat less fresh fruit when prices rise.

In some respect, I hope the ag subsidies act to spread farming out, rather than concentrating it.

NewScientist‘s Penny Sarchet reports on the recent Kasane Conference on The Illegal Wildlife Trade (11 April 2015 print “Consumers starting to reject ivory“) (paywall) held in Botswana where a change in the use of such things as ivory and rhino horn has been identified:

But the demand for wildlife parts is increasingly coming from the luxury goods market, rather than traditional medicine.

“Fundamentally it’s about luxury items and greed,” says Roberts. For example, where bear bile and gall bladders were once used for medicine, they are now added to luxury cosmetics. “Traditional medicine practitioners are becoming less important in the consumption of wildlife parts, and it’s transferring more to the big businessmen,” he says.

The phrase “less important” is relative, of course; if consumption by one audience grows while the other holds steady, or increases but more slowly, then the latter appears smaller while fundamentally, it’s growing.  This report does not clarify that point.  And since “traditional medicine” (TM) has a non-rational basis, it’s difficult to accurately deduce if TM practicioners would be able to substitute non-threatened wild life parts (say, deer horn) for those of threatened animals, unlike rationally based practices, where the emphasis is on efficacy rather than tradition, so if the substitution works, then all is well.

Back to the conference.  Speakers at the conference feel they’re beginning to make headway:

According to [Adam Roberts of Born Free USA], the demand for ivory seems to be falling. Each year the Chinese government releases a portion of its stockpile of ivory for legal use, but only 80 per cent of the most recent allocation has been taken up.

At least publicly, my perceptions of efforts in this arena have been prevention of harvesting.  But now the call is changing:

At a conference in Botswana last month, delegations from 32 countries called for a better understanding of the market forces that drive the illegal wildlife trade. It’s a big improvement on a similar declaration issued last year, which failed to discuss how to reduce demand for products like rhino horn.

It seems like common sense, but also an enormous effort.

The IFAW itself felt the last year has not gone so well, though:

While highlighting some important progress in the fight against illegal wildlife trade, a high-level government meeting in Botswana will most likely be remembered by the broken promises of almost half of the countries who just 13 months ago committed themselves to a global effort to end the scourge.

“It is appalling that countries like Chad, Cameroon and Democratic Republic of Congo, with elephant populations under extreme threat from poaching for their ivory, can’t show any headway whatsoever in slowing the slaughter,” said Jason Bell, Director of the IFAW Elephant Programme.

“In Garamba National Park in the DRC, 30 elephants were killed in the week running up to this conference, and 68 have been killed in the park in the past two months alone.”

(Update: Title change)