Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

• Someone takes Samizdata's advice: "When the state watches you, dare to stare back."
• Lithuania chooses privatization, bucking Western influences toward the opposite direction.
• Remembering the advent of flight.
• Al Gore's risky election scheme failed.
• Trent Lott resigned as Senate Majority Leader.
• All is secure, thanks to the men and women in uniform - at least one of whom crossed over from the Red Army.
• The Anglosphere and Protestant Europe shine the path of freedom.
• The People's Republic of China lifts the blocks on Internet access to Blogger-hosted sites. (I do not know if that policy has changed.)
• McDonalds survives mcfrivolous mclawsuit.
• Robin Page overcomes British tyranny.
• Much of Europe supports US in the War on Terror.
• Blogger enters politics - in Iran.
• Private citizens wage war on terror through the courts.
• Orrin Hatch displays a little courage.
• Remembering John Glenn's orbital flight.
• The Supreme Court rules 8-1 that antiabortion protesting does not equate racketeering.
• Remembering the legacy of the late Fred Rogers.
• Elie Wiesel opposes the Axis of Weasel.
• At least one Lithuanian prefers US statehood over EU membership.
• Estonia's Concordia University survives a financial crisis, its troubles largely due to alleged larcenous activities of its rector and vice rector.
• Artifact from unpleasant historical period in Dallas, Texas survives.
• America does not look like the United Nations.
• My LASIK surgery was successful.
• British troops and Iraqis enjoy peaceful soccer match.
• Iraqis celebrate their liberation.
• On May 1, high holy day of international Communism, the Henderson Prize for the Advancement of Liberty honors those whose efforts made Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution possible.
• Texas does not look like California.
• Christi Todd Whitman resigns as EPA director.
• Remembering the legacy of Bob Hope - here and here.
• America does not look like Pakistan.
• The Volokhs remember their family's flight from the Soviet Union.
• The anti-theocratic protests in Iran continue.
• Remembering the legacy of Tex Schramm.
• Remembering Apollo 11.
• Lance Armstrong is victorious!
• "60 Minutes" fires Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. (If only Mike Wallace would get the axe...)
• GE and Pratt & Whitney pursue advances in aviation technology that could make air travel cheaper and faster for us.
• Remembering one of the greatest speeches in American history.
• Alabama voters tell Governor Bob Riley "Let our people's wallets go."
• The Second Amendment advances in the State of Missouri.
• The Los Angeles Times subjected to customer feedback.
• Schwarzenegger is victorious!
• America does not look like Europe, and Florida does not look like California.
• The economy is getting better and better
• I am not in charge of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing :-)
• Ann Coulter action figure!
• Blogger David Trowbridge gets married.
• Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson understands patriotism and humility.
• Gerhard Schroeder subjected to citizen feedback.
• Iraq is getting better.

Memo to the Taiwanese government: we have lots of nuclear secrets that would benefit your nation. Go and steal them from the Chinese.

Labels: Humor

These words (in all caps) are recorded on the historical marker that sits on the north wall of the former Texas School Box Depository that now houses the Sixth Floor Museum and, among other things, offices for at least some of the Dallas County Commissioners. If you look at the marker, you'll see that someone has taken an abrasive to the word "allegedly," making it somewhat brighter than the rest of the text.

Contrast to the four freedoms cited in the mission statement of the Henderson Prize for the Advancement of Liberty:

Many would state, within reason, that the rights to life and physical safety are already implied, being a necessary condition for the stated freedoms. The first two of FDR's freedoms are subsets of ideological liberty. Missing are the rights to property and "choice and pursuit of [peaceable] personal interests." Instead, Roosevelt champions freedoms from "want" and "fear" - that is, the "rights" to welfare redistribution and international arms control (the latter of which tends to draw support from domestic arms control hawks). Robert Byrd got the Gun Grabber medal. Surprise?

Byrd's website reports the other four honorees:

Update: I doubt that many of the holders of the Freedom From Fear medal were nominated because of their support for arms control. It's more likely that they were people who impressed the institute with the way they addressed the fears and/or paranoias of the day. Judging by Byrd's acceptance speech, the paranoia du jour is the supposed rapid erosion of speech rights:

Still, the Gun Grabber Prize moniker fits, because it reflects FDR's naive presuppositions about what threatens peace. Note that his "Four Freedoms" speech was delivered eleven months and one day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese leaders didn't attack because they had guns; they made guns because they wanted to attack. They attacked us because we were in the way of their imperialistic plans, and because they had no regard for the lives of those on whom they wished to make war. It's attitudes, not implements, that threaten the peace.

What exactly did Coxe say about gun rights? In A Critical Guide to the Second Amendment, Glenn Reynolds provides this direct quote (emphasis in original):

I cannot find a direct quote of Madison's reply to Coxe, but I can find what Madison wrote in Federalist No. 46 (emphasis added):

Madison speaks of Americans having a right lacked by most Europeans. Not "being armed by their state governments." It says "being armed," plain and simple. He clearly used "the militia" synonymously with "the number able to bear arms" (about one fourth of the population by his estimate, if you do the math) when he calculates his hypothetical standing army vs. militia steel cage match.

Garry Wills seems to think it's all a hoax, though. Maybe the First Amendment was a hoax, too. Let's require all paid journalists to register with and supply the names of all sources to the National Security Agency, and limit the number of newspapers that can carry a single writer's syndicated columns.

Anderson continues with a condemnation of the negative attitudes toward British and American citizens across the globe, and asks for input on changing them. Send email or post to the "Changing Views" conference in the chat room.

My first suggestion is to get past the language barrier. Near the end of his statement, Anderson threw in this, evidently aiming to clarify the concerns voiced in the controversial interview:

Some of the current arguments hover around misconceptions about the definition of "patriotism." Anderson nails that issue. But he does not fully comprehend "nationalism." We don't use that word a lot in everyday speech; it mainly pops up in news stories about "nationalist" factions doing this or that. Nationalism in and of itself is morally neutral; it is fierce support for a nation's sovereignty, or for a region's quest to secede from a country to become its own nation. What separates the different types of nationalists is what they wish to accomplish with their sovereignty. Some are patriots; others are protectionists, isolationists, triumphalists, or buccaneers.

The key problem behind grass-roots international tensions is that people from different countries don't get to know each other. What are the barriers to this? In some countries, especially in the Muslim and Communist worlds, the greatest barrier is the absence of free press. Such countries also tend to lack tourist trade, denying locals the opportunity to have first-hand experience with foreigners other than dictator huggers like Edward Asner and Noam Chomsky. Trade in general opens up doors, as does the Internet, through its chatrooms, blogs, and such.

Update: The text of this post has been blogged over at Sasha's.

Update: I sent the following email to Ian Anderson:

I watched The Towering Inferno for the very first time last night. Found the DVD at the Wal-Mart bargain bin. One of the jokes at the time of its release was that they used the water from 1972's The Poseidon Adventure to put out the fire.

In that quip at the end of the film, Steve McQueen's character suggests that firefighters of 1974 knew something about making skyscrapers fire-unfriendly that skyscrapers by and large were ignoring. I think he's blowing smoke. Fire departments would never stay silent over such an issue, and a press obsessed with safety issues would never miss such a story. To my memory, no such stories arose during the decade of the birth of the Consumer Products Safety Commission and the EPA.

Instead of "what did they know and when did they know it," we should be asking about what we know today. Are we doing everything we can for skyscraper fire safety? Break this down into two categories: preventing and fighting fires. Starting with the defense, the obvious answers are: flame-retardant building materials, detection systems, and automatic fire extinguishing systems - and, of course, electrical systems that aren't overloaded or improperly insulated. We already have smoke detectors, which didn't exist in 1974 if the film is to be believed. We also have sprinkler systems, and other early-stage fire suppression systems; they are generally set to go off automatically, but there's probably some areas where it would be wiser to rig them to be set remotely at the security section. Walls and ceilings can (and usually are) sprayed with flame-retardant coatings and, when possible, made from materials less flammable than wood. In that spirit, I don't know if any skyscrapers like the one in Towering Inferno use natural gas, but for the record it's a bad idea.

Firefighting offense wrestles with getting firefighters into and tenants out of the building and getting water (or other substances) to the fire. The obvious problem of skyscrapers, illustrated and magnified vividly in the 9/11 WTC attack, is that most of the building is too far away from the exits and out of reach of fire trucks. (Back to the issue of defense, the WTC lacked sufficient structural insulation to survive fire fed by mass quantities of airliner fuel.) In Towering Inferno, to rescue the people in the penthouse our heroes rigged something resembling a crude ski lift between the burning building and one across the street. Fire departments could employ similar contraptions - and like real ski lifts they could have more than one "car" to expedite evacuation. Simpler would be portable winches for lowering people to the ground (or at least to a lower floor) out a window. I wouldn't recommend bungee cords or parachutes.

The real toughie is the actual firefighting. The problem with skyscraper fires is that firefighters are heavily dependent on water sources within the building. Sometimes - the WTC being an extreme example - the only hoses near the fire are in the fire. Helicopters have been put to work, but they can carry only so much water. I've got three suggestions. First, maybe fire departments could use the ski lift and winch ideas for getting firefighters to upper-story fires more quickly. Second, if they can send robots into volcanos, maybe they can design firefighting robots to go into areas too hot or too small for human access. Third, they could base their firefighting choppers on a larger model.

Both the Chi-towners and The Austrians recognize war as inherently destructive to the economy, while the others entertain some variant of the broken window fallacy. The Austrians support war for solely defensive purposes. So do I, but assuming a definition of "defensive" that pertains to both direct and indirect threats, the latter not being the sort of thing that Austrians support. Just geopolitical war must consider the degree of criminal threat to the US and/or allies and the weight of crimes already committed by the target nation's government to its own people and/or those of other nations.

Two of the questions deserve special notice. One asks, "Do markets create and sustain monopolies and what should be done about it?" This portion of the Chicago answer is right on target:

After that, two red flags arise. First, the Chicagoans support regulation against "predatory behavior" without offering a clear definition for "predatory." Second, and more important, is the assertion that "some goods lend themselves to being best provided by monopolies, e.g. courts and defense." The logical conclusion is that private arbitration and private arms ownership have no place in the marketplace. The sheer cost of military hardware causes many to consider that only the government can provide most national defense. The fallacy is in the assumption that if the government must actually operate the armies and navies its pays for. I don't generate the electricity I pay for - somebody else does that for me. Various aspects of military defense could be subcontracted out to firms.

The other question is, "What are the economic implications of national defense?" The Chicago answer is this:

The Chicagoans understand that commerce cannot thrive in an atmosphere saturated with assault, murder, theft, and vandalism. The problem is their assumption that the State must provide all the deterrents. I have one bone to pick with the Austrians: as a "guarded geopoliticalist," I don't support their ideal that governments refrain from having any say at all in how the military is used, leaving those decisions to the subcontractors.

One more thing: on the issue of unions, I recognize that they're labor's counterparts to Kenneth Lay.

1. Mel Gibson
2. Fidel Castro

Who is the subject of Anti-Defamation league Protests? (Hint: not B.)

What did he do wrong? Anderson didn't insult the President. He didn't say good things about Saddam. He didn't send encouragement to the insurgent forces in Iraq.

He thinks the American flag proliferation is being overdone, and believes that this gives the impression of an air of "nationalism." Anderson, like many of his fellow Europeans, perceives the word in its jingoistic "our country is great, to hell with yours" sense. They're not used to seeing the mass proliferation of national symbols in free countries (except for the seas of Union Jacks at Who concerts). They see "nationalism" in the Balkans and fighting in the Balkans and assume there's a connection.

In many other instances, nationalism is synonymous with true patriotism. Ask anyone in the Baltics who remembers Soviet rule. Ask those who resist assimilation into the European Union collective. This sort of nationalism is rooted in the preservation of individual liberty and separation of powers.

Ian Anderson didn't make assumptions about anybody's intentions, and unlike Judy Davis he knows the real definition of "patriotism." He's concerned about appearances. I've got some news: the people who get bad impressions from those appearances were already ill-disposed toward Americans even before the flags stated popping up. They don't take the effort to try to get to know us.

This response raises two questions. First, does Tomorrow have any evidence that any warbloggers fit that profile, drawing some weird equivalency between shooting thugs in Mosul and writing posts about it? Where are the transcripts of blog posts recording such claims? Where are the videotaped sessions of Tomorrow performing Vulcan mind-melds on pundit bloggers, revealing their true intentions?

Second, is Tomorrow aware that there are plenty of sound reasons to passionately support a war without wanting to participate directly in one? Our military is not so desperately understaffed as it was at the oubreak of WWII that we need hundreds of thousands of troops in a few weeks to make sure the country still exists a couple of years from now. There's lots of interesting career fields out there, and if there's enough people to take care of a military operation, there's no reason why droves of people should abandon their avocational dreams to join a just war.

Some war hawks have no business enlisting in the military simply because they're too old, and some - like yours truly - have a disqualifying health or physiological issue. In 1993 I applied to enlist in the United States Navy. At my age - 32.5 years at the time - I was still young enough for the cryptography and intelligence officer programs. (The cutoff age was 35.) I failed the physical, ultimately because of hammertoes, or something like it. (The toes bend downward at the first joint, the left big toe only slightly, and all bend upward at the second joint.) The condition, abetted by mildly-higher-than-average arches, puts extra pressure on the foreward part of the foot. Standing still for long periods of time without considerable pain is an impossibility in normal shoes; athletic shoes improve the task somewhat, but unfortunately the contract for making combat boots does not go to Nike, Adidas, or Converse.

If the Navy ever changes its mind and decides it needs a 43-year-old junior officer, I have lots of character witnesses I can submit to the security clearance team. Some of them are even Americans :-)

• Nat Hentoff and Texas sodomy laws (hasn't that issue already been settled?)
• nikolaos karanikos (sorry, wrong blog)
• sexology weblog (definitely the wrong blog)
• alan boortz (no relation)
• free sexy dominated girls arab (Allah will not be pleased)
• +misting +robots +liberals +democrats (now there's a fun idea...)
• "music downloading is good" (RIAA will not be pleased)
• israeli socialized medicine (just proves that no country is perfect)

Let's do some more math. Assume that each grave represents a separate incident, and that all occurred under Saddam's regime, which lasted 30 years:

268 ÷ 30 = 8.93 mass killings annually (those associated with mass graves) **
300,000 ÷ 30 = 10,000 bodies interred in mass graves annually
10,000 ÷ 8.93 = 1,119 bodies (rounded down) per mass grave

**It's not likely that a mass killing will not be accompanied by a telltale mass grave, but I don't put it past genocidal regimes to find other ways of disposing of the evidence.

Update: Jay Manifold has further analysis.

Update: On the topic of other ways of disposing of the evidence, I just remembered about Saddam's imaginative use of industrial-grade plastic shredders. Ouch.